troy-hewitt
Latest
WildStar Community Director Troy Hewitt announces departure from Carbine
It's a sad day for the WildStar community. Carbine's Community Director Troy "Aether" Hewitt announced today in a post on the WildStar site that he is stepping down from his position and leaving the studio. He confides in the community the reason for his departure: "Without going into too much detail, recent tragedies in my family require that I return home to be closer to my family [...] It was a decision I can only define as agonizing, but in the end, my family needs me." While this may be disheartening news for many fans, Hewitt is confident that he leaves the community in capable hands. In addition to the North American and European community teams, Hewitt specifically mentions three "forever friends of [his] and industry leaders in their craft" that will be taking care of the community in his absence: Carbine's new VP of Brand, Mona Hamilton; Director of Interactive Marketing, Christophe Bahamed; and new PR Manager, Michael Shelling. In closing, Hewitt tells fans, "While this is goodbye for now, I guarantee you that we'll be playing WildStar together on launch day."
WildStar's devs break all the things in the latest stress test
If you participated in WildStar's first stress test, aka The Stressening, or hope to jump in with its sequel, The Stress Continues, then this week's WildStar Wednesday is for you. Carbine Studios community director Troy Hewitt, live producer Craig Turner, and senior community manager David Bass penned the latest blog entry to discuss how the stress tests are going and what, exactly, the team managed to break this go-round, starting with instances capping improperly and names being distorted. (This last bit is probably a blessing for those testers running around named Legolas and Tyrion Lannister. You know I'm right.) Bass specifically addresses the challenges of herding gamers who are "used to the usual 'STRESS TEST WEEKEND WOOOOOO!' hype," which is, you know, pretty much all of us. "The problem," he wrote, "was that we needed to do an actual stress test... one where we kept adding more and more players until something broke so that we could see where our weaknesses were." Like Bass, we're sure the "promise of a future beta invite" soothed any grumpiness.
Slap a rocket on a pig: WildStar's modding and PGC community
At January's WildStar press event, I had the opportunity to chat with several of Carbine's developers about something near and dear to my heart: modding. During my personal demo, Jeremy Gaffney remarked offhandedly -- twice! -- that people don't really want to play the UI; they want to play the game. I know that he's right about some people, and I'm glad game developers are devoting resources toward designing a seamless blend of UI and gameplay that makes actually healing party members as fun or more fun than playing Grid-style healer whackamole. But whackamole or not, I do want to play the UI. I want to tinker. Fortunately, WildStar intends to accommodate me in a huge way. Read on for the scoop on WildStar's planned modding tools, player councils, and player-generated content.
WildStar Wednesday talks turkey about core testers
What is a core tester? Despite what you might think, it's not someone who tests your central muscles for overall wear and endurance. No, it's an elite group of testers that WildStar is employing to check out features that aren't ready for more public consumption, things lacking little bits of polish like "textures" or "fully functional mechanics." It's a group that Carbine Studios freely admits to copying from ArenaNet, and it's also the subject of the most recent WildStar Wednesday penned by community director Troy Hewitt. Hewitt explains that core testers are meant to be people clearly passionate about the game who are willing to sit through long lists of known issues to test features very early in the development process. The goal is to get outside feedback from an early point to see if some major idea needs a major overhaul now instead of after much of development has been finished. For more information on the testing process and some information about getting noticed by the WildStar team for this elite group, check out the full article.
WildStar's Senior Community Manager focuses on fun
Hot on the heels of yesterday's interview with WildStar's Jeremy Gaffney, we sat down with another Carbine Studios rep: David Bass, the game's new Senior Community Manager. We stopped David from running around the studio like a madman for 15 minutes, forcing him to let us in on the secrets of why WildStar and Carbine Studios are worth watching. Granted, he couldn't tell us everything -- there has to be a bit of mystery, right? But David did reveal his in-depth plans for the WildStar community and what will set this community apart from any other MMO community you've seen.
WildStar's Troy Hewitt talks about the game's design philosophy
It's likely to be a while longer before anyone gets to lay hands on WildStar's beta, much less the finished game, but there's still a lot to look forward to. A recent interview with producer Troy Hewitt might help salve a bit of that anticipation as Hewitt discusses the game's design philosophy and content systems. As he explains, Carbine Studios embraced the idea that players should be allowed to play how they want, when they want, and with whomever they want. This extends to the game's content at multiple levels; Hewitt explains that solo and group content shouldn't be at odds, that even people who prefer to level and play solo are still enjoying the fact that they experience a persistent world with other players. There's also a lot of talk about players crafting their own stories as they explore the game world, something augmented by the game's split between different player types. Take a look at the full interview if you're following the game avidly, as there are plenty of interesting tidbits -- even if you might have preferred a release date.
News article sparks debate among Community Managers
An article at GamePro caused a bit of a stir in the gaming industry yesterday, sparking discussion on a topic covered at this year's PAX East -- namely, that of the history of Community Managers and what their jobs entail. Now, there is a fair amount of background to AJ Glasser's article that we won't delve into, because the comment that many readers focused on was this one: "Before Xbox Live's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb -- who holds the ambiguous title director of programming for Xbox Live -- community managers were mostly forum moderators, people whose job entailed monitoring message boards and weeding out trolls. " Not so, said many current CMs. Familiar names such as Daeke and Aether began popping up in the comments section of the article, contending that Community Managers were much more than forum mods before Major Nelson came on the scene. The conversation began in the article's comments section and continued via Twitter with quite a few people in the industry lining up to join the debate. The discussion offers several varying opinions and is definitely worth following if you've got an interest in the role of community management.
Be heard this week with EQII and PotBS IRC chats
Stratics is going to play host to some more "House of Commons" IRC chats later in the week, for both EverQuest II and Pirates of the Burning Sea, giving fans a chance to pose some questions to the teams behind these two games. On Wednesday the 18th at 5PM PDT/8PM EDT, the PotBS chat will take place, and will feature producer Joe Ludwig, lead game designer Kevin Maginn, lead world designer Cory Herndon, community relations director Troy Hewitt and community specialist Tom Atkinson-Edwards. Full details on how to join in on this chat can be found here.The EQII chat will take place a day later, on Thursday the 19th at the same time slot of 5PM PDT/8PM EDT. Representing the game in the chat will be Josh Kriegshauser and Greg Spence from EQII Engineering; Kyle Vallee, designer of "Runneye: The Gathering"; Nathan McCall, designer of the Void Storm quest series; and Tiffany Spence and Aaron Bisnett from the community relations team. You can find out how to join this chat at this page, and don't forget that we here at Massively will be speaking to the EQII team this week as well, so you can also drop any questions you might have in today's Daily Grind for us to bring to them.
ION 08: Getting the most out of user generated content
One might rightfully acuse the term "user generated content" of being a rather dry way to describe what is really a fascinating trend in media: the opportunity for "users" to contribute their own creations and have them incorporated into traditionally heavily produced "content." By nature interactive, the games industry is taking notice of the power of UGC, and in a panel yesterday at ION 08 we had the chance to listen to Flying Lab's Troy Hewitt and Linden Lab's Rob Lanphier talk about how user content has been working in Pirates of the Burning Sea and Second Life. Attorney Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University School of Law was on hand to discuss some of the legal issues surrounding UGC, and the panel was moderated by Scott Warner, owner and leader of the intellectual property and technology group at firm Garvey Schubert Barer. Scott: Troy, do you want to start us off by talking about how user content has been working in Pirates? Troy: Sure. As some of you may know, we just launched PotBS earlier this year. We have a system in the game where players can create flags and sails for their ships. There's a mechanism to distribute your work and they can actually create and sell their designs as well. Players can also create and model their own ships, and other people in game will be able to use those ships. We have 30 ships now in the game made by players, and these were actually done by only 13 people; so it's a small group of dedicated people creating these ships. With the flags and sails, about 20% of our player base is creating them and a much larger percentage actually use them.
