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SWG's Community Manager on in-game events
Perhaps you can remember a time when the developers of MMOs were directly involved in player events -- either running them or just attending player-run events. In our interview with him on Massively Speaking, Richard Garriott mentioned a couple of times about hanging out with players as Lord British in Ultima Online. If you recall, Star Wars Galaxies had a whole team, lead by Jason "Pex" Ryan, that was completely devoted to creating and facilitating player events. It may seem that these days are fading with the scripted events common in more recent releases. Lydia "Zatozia" Pope, the newly appointed Community Manager of SWG, hopes to change that. Zatozia has been with Sony Online Entertainment since May of 1999 when her department was still known as Verant. Under the customer service banner, she ran Historical Events for EverQuest. These were live GM-run events that were used to transition EQ from expansion to expansion. She was also a member of the Stormhammer Legends EQ server team, which specialized in GM-run events and storylines specifically for that server. Zatozia is now the Community Relations Manager for Star Wars Galaxies, and we were able to speak with her about her personal plans for the title as well as how the SWG community is affecting other SOE titles. Click over the break to catch the full interview.
SWG gets a Galactic Senate, we get Community Managers?
I know what you're thinking over there. You don't care about Star Wars Galaxies. Maybe you played it for a while, caught up in the release hype -- or maybe you were too smart to get caught up in the hype in the first place. But either way, it's hard to see how SWG has many subscribers these days -- though they obviously have at least enough to keep the game running. However, despite the game's flaws, its recent implementation of a player-run Galactic Senate is an interesting idea. The senate is comprised of 32 players, nominated by the player-base, but selected, in the end, by Sony Online Entertainment's community team, so it's not a completely democratic process.And what can a senator do? They get to vote on "legislation" proposed by the SOE community team and can "request a redress of issues by the development team." Very nice -- and an interesting implementation of direct player interaction with the development team. In World of Warcraft, I suppose the system does work similarly -- enough reasonable player complaints on on the forums will get the attention of the CMs who will be able to bring up issues with the developers. And with SOE selecting the senators, they may have no more overall influence than our own forum posters.
