Cryptic used City of Heroes’ message boards to recruit potential Beta testers for Champions Online: fact.

Am I outraged? Not really. Am I saddened? Yes, as a community professional, I’d hope a company wouldn’t need to stoop to this sort of thing. (Does Cryptic or Atari not have any money to, y’know, push the Beta through marketing and PR?) Would I do it myself, in the same position? Well… I would go after players of a rival game, certainly. That’s standard practice these days. It’s the methods employed here that are short-sighted at best, and downright stupid at worst.

I doubt there was much of a masterplan; I’d be surprised if it “Let’s go use the official CoH boards to recruit!” was suggested at any point as a serious strategy (and we’ll probably never know if it was). More likely, Cryptic employees were given a number of Beta invites to hand out, and some of them gave those to players of City of Heroes that they either knew personally, or knew by reputation. It’s easy to see how that might have gotten out of control.

That, however, is the issue: control. If you’re going to give employees (or anyone, really) Beta invites to a game, as a Community Manager (assuming they were in charge, and some quotes suggest they weren’t) then you have to set guidelines for who those keys should be given to (in the first instance) and how they should be given. Yes, these are just going to be guidelines, and there’s nothing to stop people from ignoring them. But then you can legitimately kick their butts when they do so.

If you don’t do that – well, you’re just not paying that much attention to what can go wrong…. and in my experience, anticipating disaster is a large part of the job of community management. Sure, we’re not clairvoyant, but this was a Galactus-sized PR disaster waiting to happen. You gotta watch out for those.

The future revealed – well, the short-term future anyway.

Thanks to the contacts of the man in the photo above, and my own (ahem) smooth talking, James Spafford and I will be working part-time for Eurogamer.net for the next six weeks or so, helping to promote and then ultimately run the first ever Eurogamer Expo.

What’s the Eurogamer Expo? Well, only the best gaming event you’ll see this year… c’mon, what d’you expect me to say? Happening on October 28th and 29th, as part of the London Games Festival, Eurogamer is taking over the Old Truman Brewery off Brick Lane in London. There, loads of top publishers will be showing off dozens of games, and on top of that, Eurogamer’s serious older brother will be upstairs at the Gamesindustry.biz Career Fair.

So whether you want to play some games or just get into the games industry (and if you want to do one, why wouldn’t you want to do the other?) there’s something for you here.

Oh: and a tank. No really. I wouldn’t lie to you.

Want to know more? Better, want to buy a ticket right now? Good move, as they’re already starting to disappear and there’s only 2,000 available per day – get yourself over to the registration page! Tickets are only a paltry fiver, and better yet, all the cash is going to GamesAid, the UK videogames charity.

More info to come, naturally (you’ll get bored of me talking about it) but for now, I need to go relax. It’s been a long first day with plenty to take onboard!!

PS Before you ask: no, NCsoft Europe is not exhibiting there.

Just a quick one here. First things first: man, Judge Dredd does not age well as a film (it’s on TV as I type). Although I still do think the costumes are… kinda good, at times. Screw it, it’s an excuse for a picture of Stallone:

Wait: did I say the costumes looked… good..?

Second: Saturday’s looking good, unlike that codpiece. We’ve got a couple of potential venues, all in easy walking distance of Brighton station. Also, we’re going to investigate the possibility of an all-nighter at a gaming cafe, which could negate the need for people to get a hotel, assuming you can stay awake… we should know more on that tomorrow.

Third: Quite a few ‘things’ have landed in my lap in the last 24 hours. All pretty positive. I don’t want to say much more for fear of jinxing, but hey, perhaps your positive thoughts have done some good!

Fourth and finally: Last day is officially Thursday. Signed my papers and got confirmation of voluntary redundancy today, so come early October I’ll have my money… and then will promptly not spend any of it.

Plenty to keep me busy between now and then though – oh yes. Stay tuned.

They’re performances of the winning entries for Set the Stage, the competition that we ran to get players to write scripts for the Aion and Guild Wars characters to perform. (The scripts were reworked by me to become suitable for performance, but these two are quite similar to the original material, with many lines remaining intact. You can download my script drafts for all six final entries at the official Aion and Guild Wars sites.)

The sound quality is not excellent – source was basically the speakers on the stand, which had to compete with everything around – so I’ve embedded the ‘normal’ and English subtitled versions. (There are also French and German versions of each – see below.)

As I said before, these stage performances were probably what I was most proud of achieving during Games Convention. Trust me; there were some obstacles to overcome! However, I personally feel the performances were excellent, given the lack of rehearsal time we had and the environment they were performing in, and I’m very proud to present them to you.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity – ‘Captive’ by Will Carpenter

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Subtitled in English

French subtitled version | German subtitled version

Guild Wars – ‘No Beautiful Day’ by Melanie Lauterbach

Script performance draft by Stephen Reid

Subtitled in English

When I originally started writing these, I thought I’d be finished in this part. Clearly I can’t count: at a rate of two episodes per part, with eleven episodes to talk about, I won’t be finished until part six.

The fact that I can’t do simple division won’t be a surprise to my mother, but it is a continuing source of disappointment to my secondary school maths teacher, Mr Chenery. Sorry, sir.

Episode 9: One More Thing

This was always supposed to be the second-to-last episode, and on the release schedule (believe it or not, I did have one) was supposed to go live on the Monday before Games Convention started. However, due to other episodes taking waaaaay longer than I hoped to finish (I’m looking at YOU, Episode 8!) I realised if I didn’t bump the release of this and Episode 10 up a bit just to fill the gap, there was no way I’d be able to finish Episode 11 and release it pre-GC. Hence, we lost a bit of impact with the central gag.

Said gag being, obviously, “Oh noes, we’ve only gone and forgotten the game we’re demo’ing” (nudge nudge, wink wink). In case you’re wondering, no, Martin wasn’t responsible for making sure Aion was on our demo PCs… that’s IT’s job, amongst others. Nor indeed do we use DVD burners to make installers for the PCs. In fact, it’s all done with magic.

This was a pretty easy shoot, especially considering it has a grand total of two shots in it (Medium two-shot; single close-up). We did it all after work one night, which again meant that Martin had to run around shouting in an empty office, but by this point people were used to it.

Martin’s close-up acting was fun, but was something of a pain to edit – not because of anything he did, but because of background people in the shot during his close-up. I only realised on editing that there were two people standing at the other end of the office behind his head; so to eliminate them from ‘continuity’, short of doing a George Lucas-style digital removal, I had to cut very carefully away from him as he half-exited frame. I really like being able to cut on a frame-to-frame basis, but man, sometimes it’s a pain. Of course you guys never notice it either – it should, rightfully, be seamless if it works.

I should mention how good Jörg was in the ‘unflashy’ role too; he improvised his little “Uh-oh” at the end, which a lot of people enjoyed. A great straight man, which is why of course he was cast in Episode 10…

Episode 10: Subliminal Messaging

The idea for this episode was thrown together fast after Martin and I saw the stand renders, and heard they were supposed to be ‘top secret’ until very close to GC. We immediately decided it’d be cool to do a video where we were lamenting that we couldn’t show fans the renders, but that they were great, and if only we had some way… so the script was practically written right then.

This was shot directly after Episode 9 – we just upped and moved into our staff room, Monkey Ranch, and set up. Shooting it was easy-peasy, except for sound issues – the vending machine you can see in the background, plus the coffee machine that you can’t see, both intermittently decided to make noises that would probably have appeared on the soundtrack. (I have to guess at that myself, because we can’t monitor sound on our camcorder. I know, crappy.)

Anyway, apart from that it was all easy. I loved Martin and Jörg’s ending stuff – especially Martin’s voice after I suggested it should be more “Scooby Doo like” (by which I meant ‘more cheesy’ not ‘more like a cartoon dog’). In fact I liked it so much, I decided to film it right there and then, deliberately framing it to look like it was ‘behind the scenes’. Something I came back to… or will come back to… ah, this timeline stuff confuses me.

Those were two simple episodes, easily shot, easily completed. Editing Episode 10 was a little trickier than I imagined – doing the ‘subliminal’ stuff in particular was fiddly – but it didn’t take too long. The problem that became apparent later was the scheduling.

Originally this would have gone out right after Episode 9, which itself was supposed to debut on the Monday of GC week; so the first gag would have been “Ooops, we almost forgot the Aion demo” followed swiftly by a tease of the stand. Unfortunately, things changed, and our PR department decided to release all the renders before the show began. That meant when Episode 10 debuted, the gag was sort of null and void, as anyone who wanted to could find the renders. Luckily for us, no-one seemed to complain too loud. Not even you, loyal reader, so ta for that.

By the time both of these were shot and in one case edited, Episode 11 was still far off in the future – along with other episodes beyond it. Could I manage to shoot everything I’d scripted?

Kind of a redundant question, now. But hey, read along and find out next time in Part 6.

Episode 5: Looking forward to…

 This was supposed to be an easy episode. In fact, it was supposed to be the throwaway, edited quickly, filler episode between other episodes – hell, it was practically supposed to be a clip show. (Hmm. Could I do a clip show? Very possibly….)

Brief was simple; loads of people who are going to the Games Convention telling us what they’re most looking forward to. In one word. Or one sentence. Or one paragraph just please don’t monopolise the camera as there are others who need to be part of this thing thank you.

So I gave the camera to Spaff and off he went. On his first pass, when I downloaded the footage, I couldn’t help but notice something.

“Why… is Volker on the toilet?”

“He’s just sitting on it. He’s not really.. you know.”

Sure enough, he wasn’t. He was sitting, but not sh… you get the idea. But hey, that would make for good comedy, so bless ‘im, in he went to the rough cut.

First pass wasn’t enough though. Too many people rambling on camera, not enough good answers. So off Spaff went again, looking for more people; amazingly he didn’t even film everyone who’s going to GC (not even close). I knew I had enough material for a decent roundup though, so I started to cut.

I wanted a kind of upbeat, jangly, country style of track to go underneath the visuals; don’t ask me why. I just figured some brooding piece wouldn’t work, and I didn’t want some overused advert track that we’d all recognise. The track popped into my head near instantly – Western Skies, by Canadian country-rock group Blue Rodeo. I knew it had the right beginning, and a number of pauses that’d make editing to it quite easy.

Oh, how wrong I was. The problem with editing to a music track is that the beats start to obsess you. You think you’re cutting to them – but you aren’t, not always. Are you cutting to the beginning of the drum beat, when the stick hits the skin, or the end, when the sound sort of… reaches you? These things can drive you a little crazy.

After a few hours of work, however, I at least had what I thought was a serviceable beginning. I just knew this wasn’t a quick-and-easy filler project any more, though.

Luckily, I got saved by Marek. Having given us a pure comedy answer to work around (“Leipzig…? What?”) I started to build around that, and got inspired to add in the back-and-forth between the subtitles and what people were saying. When I noticed Jörg’s comedy eyebrows, that helped even more suddenly I had plenty to work with, and cutting it was just a matter of time.

With that done, it was on to the next one. Which wasn’t actually the next one. But just to ease confusion, let’s talk about the next one anyway…

Episode 6: Costume Competition Auditions

This was about where things started to get crazy. I mean, Episode 4 had been longer than the others, but this one was downright ambitious by comparison. We had props, we had costumes, we had a rap planned. I had no idea what I was walking into with this episode… although it got much, much worse later.

We shot this on a Wednesday, edited it on a Thursday and released on Friday, which is a crazy schedule, and just proof of how much I wanted it to happen. The original impetus to do this episode was Martin’s, who even came up with a script involving Solid Snake, Hiro and the Bling Gnome… James and I read it over though, and decided we could beef it up a bit. As we’d done a sort-of audition thing with Setting the Stage, we decided to go all-out with episode 6.

The script was pretty much a mish-mash of different ideas thrown in by just about everyone, including some that came together during the shoot, and others during the edit. The basic structure and many of the lines were mine, including The Shark (You gotta love continuity gags), Jörg’s desire to wear the Ghost Widow outfit, GenericHero235 and the Bling Gnome doing a rap – although full credit to James, he can rhyme and I can’t, so he handled the lyrics. (Well, with the possible exception of ‘street’ and ‘excrete’, which was mine.)

One thing I will say about the script is that it has – to date, considering we’re not finished yet – my favourite line of the entire series, which is The Shark’s aborted origin, “Born of fish and man…”. It helps that Martin’s delivery of it reduced me to helpless, take-destroying laughter on more than one occasion. You’ll hear that on the (eventual) Blooper Reel.

As you’ll see, we ended up remarkably close to the written word. Feel free to read along:

Download: Quest for GC Episode 6 script

As normal, we shot out of sequence for this, starting off with filming all of the audition stuff. It was a fast shoot in a timeslot in the middle of the day, taking over a much-needed meeting room, so we were against the clock on it. Jörg came in first, doing his bit in a bath towel (somehow, we forgot the furry cape; the towel was funnier) and then, after a few fluffs, his Ghost Widow piece. Honestly, beyond that I can’t remember the order we shot in, so here’s just a few thoughts from each bit.

Martin, as The Shark, had been thinking about how to do this for a while and was raring to go when we filmed. The ‘helmet’ he wore was brilliantly constructed by Chris that morning, and probably sold the gag more than I ever expected. I started laughing the minute I saw Martin walk into frame with it on. Then when he did the lines, I literally had to stop filming I was laughing so hard. More than one take spoiled there….

Alex actually suggested the “But I do have a knife” line, which was better than my original; he’s always up for terrible Australian gags, it seems.

Loic also had loads of ideas for his GenericHero235 thing, but most involved props (and time) we didn’t have, so all we ended up doing was his entrance, which was priceless. He did the jump you see in the final film on the first take, and the framing (by accident) was so perfect, I didn’t see any need to do it again. Unfortunately, he then took about ten takes to get his lines right, so that balanced things out….

The Orange Box isn’t a reference to Valve. It’s actually the real writing and design seen on the infamous boxes in Metal Gear Solid, which is of course what we were referring to in the ‘exclamation point’ shot. Tom Kiss made the box, which actually only started with three (of, I guess, five) sides, but was subtly positioned so you couldn’t see the missing sides. Oh, and that’s Tom’s eyes, too. By the time you read this you’ll have seen Tom front and centre in Episode 8.

Volker, of course, stole the show as the Bling Gnome. We came up with a lot of stuff on the day for him; walking in on his knees, taking the microphone, even the entrance. A lot more got added in the edit which wasn’t in the script, either. To make the rap work we had Volker do the audio a few times, and then shot lots of ‘coverage’ of him doing lines which I then cut together. The only problem was, he kept forgetting what the lyrics were, which we covered (a bit) by having him hold the microphone in front of his face.

As for James and I, we were of course consummate professionals, getting everything in one take… ahem… well, I’ll save some surprises for the blooper reel. As you’ll see from the script, us dancing at the end wasn’t scripted – I wouldn’t script myself to dance!

Post-production on this was a nightmare, although in comparison to later episodes it was almost easy. I actually got all the footage into Final Cut Express that day, as I recall, and started to hack away. What I figured out early on was that (a) I was going to need music and (b) that Volker’s rap was going to be near-impossible to edit.

By Thursday morning I had a workable Bling Gnome rap, basically made up of the few takes I could actually match in speed and recognisable lip movements, and with plenty of gaps between. Thank God for our dancing stuff, which I could easily slip in-between. By the end of that edit I had a lot more respect for music video editors; so much footage must be shot just so that you can get that fast-cutting style. I also found that stupid transitions can cover up some sins, too….

The next step was pasting over some cracks with music. Luckily, Chris is a huge music fan (and a composer, to boot) so he slapped together some clever cues that play under Martin and Loic’s respective entrances, and really helped to sell the gags I think.

There’s actually quite a lot of clever editing in this one too, although you wouldn’t/shouldn’t know it. That’s kind of the point. But I know it’s there, and I’m proud of it.

Six episodes down. Potentially, eight to go. Did I make it? Right now even I don’t know….

A few links ‘n’ things I thought you might be interested in….

Couple of Aion previews

Pre-Leipzig we gave an exclusive Aion preview to PCGZine, who visited the office and got loads of ‘stuff’ from us that they’ve put together into a six-page preview. In case you didn’t know, they’re a PDF-based online magazine, so you don’t even have to go to the shops to read it.

Anyway, you can grab the PDF file right here and have a peruse. It’s supposed to be ‘interactive’ with rollover videos and stuff, which might work in Acrobat, but I’ll tell you right now doesn’t work on a Mac.

If you’d prefer a preview that isn’t in PDF format, you might enjoy this look at Aion from The Escapist, who aren’t generally known for their hyperbole. They like what they saw at the recent press preview in San Francisco, which is all good news.

The things fans do…

We spent a lot of our time during GC on our feet, but we never made the commitment to distance that a few of our more dedicated Aion fansites did. A number of them banded together to basically walk the length and breadth of Leipzig (as in, the town) and get pictures of every Aion billboard we had there.

Apart from being proof that yeah, we spent a bit of money on the game’s promotion, it also proves undeniably that our fans are mad, crazy people who we love to bits. See the photographic proof of this true ‘Quest for GC’ in this Flickr set.

Yep, that’ll be Martin with a shark tank, as presented to him by a fan during the show. (Our Marketing Manager, Mirko, is on the right.) That’ll be a direct reference to my dialogue, then….

Last but not least – AionSource‘s t-shirt of GC, featuring fan art based on The Shark, as modelled by Martin, constructed by Chris, and conceived by me in Episode 6.

Fan-made merch. Love it.

In the heady rush of content from Games Convention, you may have missed that we slung out four new episodes of the Official NCE podcast. All of them were recorded live off stage, so you’ll find that there’s German and English in there (translations from the crowd to the stage, and then back).

As well as myself yabbering about getting into games, we also have the Aion community team, Izzy and Mike from ArenaNet and Tom Potter from Destination Games to listen to. Pretty good line-up really. You can listen to all four of ‘em online, subscribe, get the MP3s etc all right here.

Credit goes out to Chris for editing these at real short notice.

I said five podcasts though… and the fifth is a new kid on the block. John AKA Shuttler of TabulaCast fame, along with his co-host Matt, have moved on from talking about Tabula Rasa to talking about everything superhero – whether it’s comics, movies or indeed City of Heroes. I expect we gave ‘em something to talk about yesterday.

Anyway their new ‘cast is called Limited Edition, although confusingly the site’s at yellowspandex.com (and yes, I get the reference). You can grab episode 1 right here, and subscribe through the usual methods.

It’s weird, because I didn’t realise this before. It just hit me.

The coolest thing that came out of GC, for me – and that I had a large part in making happen, which really is part of what makes it so cool – was to let four people give great performances.

Twice after performing a ‘Set the Stage’ piece, our actresses came off buzzing with happiness. High-fiving. Punching the air. Doing the sort of thing you do when you hit a home-run, or a hole in one, or scored a perfect on some game.

The fact that I helped that to happen is brilliant. It might have been an odd audience and strange circumstances, but they got to feel it, even if just for a moment.

Now: sleep. In fact I may be asleep already.

Stacks of MOO boxes

More MOO cards

Stacks and stacks and stacks

Cards being sorted

Saturday cards, lined up