SWG's Community Manager on in-game events part 2

Massively: You mentioned at the party on Friday that this month is the Month of Events contest. Tell me what that's about.

Lydia "Zatozia" Pope: In the past, they've had an event month. I don't remember if they've had it with a particular theme, but what we're going to start doing is themed months. So, this month, October, is the Galactic Moon Festival event month. Players who run an event based on that theme will submit it to the calendar system. We'll put it up on the calendar, then they will do recaps. So, basically, at the end of the month, we will have a series that is based on the Galactic Moon Festival. We will have those as a full recap. It is kind of encouraging people to run events based on whatever theme we pick for that month.

I noticed that both you and Teesquared showed up at the event on Friday. I assume that you are planning on attending other events. How would someone go about getting you guys to notice and attend an event?

We attended the first one because it was the first event. As long as we know about [other events], we will try our best to attend. But because there are going to be so many events run, we can't guarantee that we will be able to attend every one. As long as people send details, we are going to try to attend as many as we can. I am going to send the information about the events that take place to our community team. We are going to try to see if we can get at least one person to show at those events. One of the things we are trying to do is promote the player events. They will get a better turn-out if we are there, but I think by giving the promoters the chance to give out badges as rewards, that's going to help out a little bit with that aspect. I think sometimes that is really what players want us to do — give out rewards for it. We are at least going to try to do that part of it. Because we have so many games, it's going to be difficult to attend every single event.

If this works out, for future ones we will have guidelines like: If you have an event at this time on this day, then you will have a chance for somebody to show up for it. This is not what's going to happen, but let's just say that like every Friday at five o'clock, if you have you event scheduled for five o'clock, somebody from the team will show up for it. We are going to see how this month works, and if we find out that we are not able to show up at as many that we would like to show up at, then we will set times scheduled for it. It will be first come, first served for whoever signs up for that time slot. I think in the future that's going to work. For right now, we are just going to see how well it works. When Jason Ryan was here, that's what he did. He was able to pop in for 15 minutes then leave, so he was able to attend multiple events in one day. I don't want to say it's new, but because it's newer for the current status of the team, we couldn't set that up for this particular time period. Depending on how well this goes, we can switch over to it.

Along the same lines of getting the devs involved in events, what are you looking for in player events?

Something that's really well thought out as to what is going to take place during the event. For example, if people are having a party in a cantina — there was this session where people were dancing, and they had a particular dance that people do. Another example would be, if somebody used the Chronicles System to run events. Pretty much, if they put a lot of detail into their event, it is going to be one to make us say, "Hey, we want to see how well this one works." If it's something we see that people are really getting into doing, we may make additional changes to help facilitate that more.

So, these events are a great way to communicate to the development team saying, "This is what we like to do," then possibly some changes to the game can come out of it?

Oh, definitely. Just from our event on Friday, Teesquared and I had a conversation about what we want to do. You know, we had our server issue there. We have already started working on making it better for the next event.

What are your specific plans for events, not necessarily just for this month but maybe for life day and other events in the future?

At the end of this month, I am going to have a Halloween party. Going along with the Galactic Moon Festival, I have a masquerade ball. The masquerade ball is going to take place in my building. The party is going to be on October 26th. I haven't picked a server yet because I'm going to try to see if I can get it copied to all the servers. We will have a special badge for people that show up. We will have badgess for people who show up in particular types of costumes [or] who do certain activities. I have hopes to run my own Chronicles mission in there. We will see how that works. The Chronicles Senator has volunteered to help me with it.

I'm making some little changes on how we highlight players. Right now, we have the Galactic Showcase and the Galactic Couture. I'm looking to expand that so we can highlight more combat players, some Player Associations, and player cities. So it's not just somebody's house that's decorated. I'm thinking about how I can break that down and which days of the week it's going to go up.

I have an event coming up for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure exactly what to call that event because Star Wars doesn't exactly have a name for Thanksgiving. But it will be an in-game event.

Lona used to call it Pharple Day, and then have it on Lok.

There you go. I may have to steal that from her, then. And I'm going to have one during Life Day as well.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I'm so glad the Star Wars Galaxies community welcomed me so much. It's always scary when we switch games — how the community's going to react. Thankfully the Star Wars Galaxies community was very, very friendly to me when I joined. It made my job easier.

That is all I had. It was awesome talking to you.

I'm glad to talk to you, too.