Here are your commandments SOE

[Duhulk]

Yall do some of these, but there's a few yall really need to work on.

Taken from Managing An Online Game Post-Launch by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky

Always be 100% honest in all communications you choose to make with your players. Don't "hide" nerfs or anything that will be seen by the players as taking away capabilities or features from them. The players will discover them and feel betrayed. Discuss any takeaway, or any change that could be perceived as a takeaway, openly and at length before it is actually installed in the game.

Never promise a feature or create an action item you can't deliver or which hasn't been 100% cleared for addition to the game by the live team.

Never promise or even speculate about game mechanics, features, or anything without discussing it with your own people first.

Enforce a policy of an integrated, "single official voice," so that only designated community relations individuals may post freely on the web or in a chat and others may post only with prior approval or by following the rules and guidelines that community relations sets down and under their supervision.

Ensure that the live team producer and head of community relations review all official postings and communications before they are made available to the public.

Keep the player base continually informed of what the live development team is currently working on by means of the web and message boards.

Never promise a "due date" for a fix, feature, or other content until it has been thoroughly tested and is scheduled for a specific patch.

Insulate your developers from nonofficial communications with the players.Knowing when to come down on development team members for breaking the "single voice" rule is a key-and they will break it; you can bank on that. Developers love to communicate with players because the players make a point of conferring the status of gods on them. It is an almost irresistible temptation for them to get out there and bask in the glow. What they don't realize is that the players are playing them, in hopes of gaining favors down the road. This is one of the toughest problems the community relations team will face in the live phase of the game because developers love to gab with the players.

Know when to sit on the marketing/public relations folks and keep them from getting too far out in front of development's actual feature additions and other content enhancement efforts.

Remember: You can't win an argument with a paying customer. Even when you win on points, you lose in the court of public opinion. The lesson to be learned is not to argue. When you have something to say, say it and don't get drawn into a long argument about the supposed merits.

[Darkmyst]

Know when to sit on the marketing/public relations folks and keep them from getting too far out in front of development's actual feature additions and other content enhancement efforts.

A noble idea but in 20+ years of working in the world I've found that it's impractical for the simple reason that the marketing bozos control the purse strings. Marketing has the most shekels. No one can slay your career faster than the marketing person with connections that you just pissed off.

[Duhulk]

Absor Smash

[Heales]

If SoEA had a clue in the first place about basic rules for PR and communication, much could have been better.

Funny thing is that it seems like SoE (recently) actually has hired someone with at least basic PR skills, but it is all too late now.

It costs a bunch to get a customer, it costs little to keep a customer, and it costs a fortune to get a "lost" customer back.

[Northerner]

Sure, some noble sentiments from Jessica Mulligan (Executive Producer - AC2 Live Team). Ah, the sweet irony.

[Metranon]

of course hindsight is always 20/20

[Dr. Funkenstein]

Insulate your developers from nonofficial communications with the players.Knowing when to come down on development team members for breaking the "single voice" rule is a key-and they will break it; you can bank on that. Developers love to communicate with players because the players make a point of conferring the status of gods on them. It is an almost irresistible temptation for them to get out there and bask in the glow. What they don't realize is that the players are playing them, in hopes of gaining favors down the road. This is one of the toughest problems the community relations team will face in the live phase of the game because developers love to gab with the players.

AC2 may have failed because every developer was pissed off with their executive producer over this paragraph.

The problem with giving players direct access to the ears of developers isn't the developer's irresistable need to feed their egos. The problem is that players, as evident by the old official Everquest forums, tend to blow minor issues out of proportion and create an environment of extreme negativity that can make an entire development department truly believe that all the work they've put into the project is pure, unadulterated shit. Day after day of seeing people completely pissed about every decision you make every day wears on anybody.

[Warrik]

Go visit The Mythic Bitch at the Developer Boards. Otherwise known as the nerf boards.

AC2 may have failed because every developer was pissed off with their executive producer over this paragraph.

No. AC2 failed cause it was a barren world, with no content and piss poor server pops making the emptiness of "rebuilding Dereth" stand out like a complete eyesore.

[Iannis]

right there is the joy of Specialization within classes. One nerf can assfuck all your xp grinding...

i seriously hated those little damn shadowblades though. TEHY R DESRV NERF

[Northerner]

.. and a lack of decent access leads to me quitting my Shaman back when VI insisted Alchemy (and lower level buffs prior to that) were WAI. A middle ground is a tough place to find.

My small point was that Jessica is speaking out of her ass and until she backs words with actions, I question her credibility to the point of ridicule. Are the points salient? Sure. Now let's see someone actually implement them and we can discuss the good and bad of it.

[Rani]

The "single official voice" idea going to the extremes suggested in the post(aka barring developers from even talking to people) is IMO bullshit.

Its impractical and in reality it just means there will be NO communication with the playerbase, because developers arent going to bother to communicate through a puppet.

Absor is EQs "single official voice" and just look how much good he does. Nothing really.

SOE feeble attempts at communicating with the players means that every now and then some brainac will come up with a new idea like.. Producers letters. And there will be zero followup on it.

Just like the new "Updates" section on the website.. what a joke.. there is more information coming out on their test-server patch messages than on that website.. Presumably because developers have direct access to person writing the testserver patch messages, whereas with the "updates" section on the web they have to jump through hoops and talk to puppets to get it updated.

[Arbuste]

Remember: You can't win an argument with a paying customer. Even when you win on points, you lose in the court of public opinion. The lesson to be learned is not to argue. When you have something to say, say it and don't get drawn into a long argument about the supposed merits.

I think it's safe to say that Verant/SOE have not respected these guidelines in the past. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of SOE fans (alongside with a lot of haters.)

People can write guidelines which came out of their ass, but only the future can tell if a company can screw their paying customers again and again, and still hold them and attract them to their next products.
I think (fear) that it's possible.

[XXGoshing]

Damn... if only SoE followed those, how much better would Everquest be?

[Szlia]

"Keep the player base continually informed of what the live development team is currently working on by means of the web and message boards. "

Amen to that!

The dev should even share their priority list too.

About the "speaking of one voice" part, it does not mean you must have a sock pupet, it means the different people that do speak must defend the company's position and represent the company's voice, even if they personaly do not agree with it. Autority with a united front. The swiss governement works that way btw, and so do the officers of many EQ guilds afaik.

[Lister]

My small point was that Jessica is speaking out of her ass and until she backs words with actions, I question her credibility to the point of ridicule.

Sure, some noble sentiments from Jessica Mulligan (Executive Producer - AC2 Live Team). Ah, the sweet irony.

Jessica Mulligan is the current executive producer of AC2 -- the one they brought in two months after they released the game and realized that their steaming pile wasn't going to make it to profitability unless they changed something.

She worked on the Neverwinter Nights game on AOL, Ultima Online during its heyday, and she's one of the people responsible for turning Anarchy Online around after their horrible launch.

Go pick up this book if you're at all interested in the genre from a professional level -- it's good good stuff. The first game that actually manages to be built this way is going to shock everyone.

Even if you don't buy it, be sure to head to the back and read Damion Schubert's timeline of Meridian 59, which is absolutely hilarious...

"In a round of layoffs, I am forced to fire my own brother. We rehire him a month later."

"The infamous GuideWozzle episode: A player volunteer guide goes crazy. He goes to the ghost room and uses a bug to spawn several ghosts (by far the hardest monsters in the game). He then marches down the who list, teleporting players into the room one at a time. They have enough time to say 'WTF' before being mowed down like weeds before a weed whacker. I teleport into a room filled with hundreds of corpses. I ban GuideWozzle. The last two people teleported into the room (who were saved by my intervention) immediately begin looting the corpses of all the other players."

"The entirety of server 109 gets bored and raids server 108. They don't player-kill. Instead, they all choose names starting with clone, as in "clone1", "clone2", "clone3", and so forth. They all use the same player model and they only speak in binary. One person, The Master, does all the talking for the group. Server 108 freaks the hell out. They blame us. We try to explain that we're not that smart."

"In another round of layoffs, I am forced to fire my own brother. We rehire him two months later."