Gaereth said:
A huge opportunity was presented for the player base to help the design team with something they didn"t understand and ended up breaking. Moorgard was in a unique position where he COULD have facilitated that interaction via his relationship with the designers.
Though I run the risk of sounding like a braggart, I know that my work on Mobhunter (and the relationships I developed even before I worked for SOE) resulted in a lot of positive changes to the game. I wrote about plenty of stuff that I saw as being wrong with the game, and in many cases action was taken. I know now, having worked on the other side of the business, that in many cases those changes would have been made without my input. But it"s nice to know I had an impact even as nothing more than a vocal player. I"m proud of that.
As for the monk nerf (and this is really the last I want to keep beating this horse), it would be incorrect to say that I simply believed what Scott or anybody at SOE told me. I
playedthe game every single day, from soloing to grouping to raids. As I said, I saw little impact from the mitigation change, and so that"s what I wrote at the time. That wasn"t based on faith in anybody or anything--it was based on what I experienced in the game as a player. I stand by that.
If you think that means I failed the player base, so be it. You can argue that I, as someone with a website that had SOE"s attention at the time, had a responsibility to represent other players, but that responsibility did not in any way include championing causes that I did not personally believe in. Had I seen some crippling effects from the mitigation changes myself, I would have been on the front lines screaming about it. I didn"t. To say that I did would have been dishonest at the time, and it would be dishonest to say it now. It"s fine that you didn"t agree with my opinion, but please don"t assume I said what I did for any reason other than that I believed it to be true. If you want to prove otherwise, then yes, you do have to link to actual evidence of that.
J Capozzi said:
Then you have those people with the unenviable job of PR spokesperson. They"re usually hired because they"ve earned the respect of the player base and are articulate. But once onboard, they"re generally not given much respect by the dev team (or even disliked by team members before they were hired), and that"s not a good situation to be in.
Even if the dev team isn"t hostile to the PR spokesperson, the new guy may not know who to turn to for the correct (or as close to correct as possible) answers. And if he does get answers to questions, they can often be filtered through several layers of interpretation. Not hard to see howgarbage inturns intogarbage outin that situation....
Long story short, blaming a single PR person like Moorgard (or Absor, or Abashi, or Tweety, or...) for some things is simply making them a scapegoat.
Though I appreciate your intent, your post is based on experiences learned in a bygone era.
The title "community manager" is as meaningless as "game designer." It can mean any number of things, and in fact can be something entirely different depending on the company you work for and even the team you"re on.
I was hired by John Blakely, and he never once wanted me to be just a PR spokesperson. I was a lead on the EQ2 team, involved in every major decision-making process to the same extent as any other team lead. I had access to every person on the team, and if I wanted a question answered I knew exactly where to go. And believe me, I took full advantage of that access and worked hard to prove myself worthy of Blakely"s trust. That I earned his respect, and the respect of my coworkers on the EQ2 team, means a lot to me.
Frankly, this isn"t the norm in the industry. It was even a different approach at SOE at the time, because those who came before me on other teams weren"t given the same degree of freedom and respect that I (and Blackguard after me) was given. Trust me, I had many conversations with Abashi and Absor about the experiences they had, and they were enormously helpful in my ability to take a different path.
The only way a community manager can be truly effective is if they are, in fact, every bit as much a developer as anyone else on the team. The benefit to players via that relationship is enormous, because a good community manager is the best advocate for player issues and opinions. Likewise, a good community manager doesn"t just act as a fall guy for the dev team, but as a conduit to communicate the reason that design decisions are made. While the delicate balance achieved by a good community manager isn"t always fully appreciated, there are those who get it and understand the effort it takes to do it right.
But yeah, sometimes a community manager gets stuck between Scylla and Charybdes. No matter how hard you work to avoid it, sometimes you face the no-win scenario and have to take the fall for something that you weren"t personally responsible for (and yeah, I lived through some of that). Those days suck, but they are made up for by the times when you get to play the hero and soak in the appreciation of the players. The amount of kindness I was shown by the players, both in person and via the boards, means more to me than I could every truly express.
So whatever mistakes I made as community manager, I take full responsibility for them and would never take the "scapegoat" defense. Neither Blackguard nor I could ever say that we were not taken seriously or didn"t have a chance to make a difference. We weren"t right all the time, but we worked our asses off every single day. I"m very proud of the work that both of us did on the EQ2 team, and hopefully we proved worthy of the trust that Blakely, Hartsman, and everybody else placed in us.
The thing I can promise you is that the community team at GMG is going to be integral to the process of making the game great. I wouldn"t have accepted the position in Curt"s madhouse if it was going to be any other way.
