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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.
