Antipwn

On Wednesday 9th March, voting will begin for the 6th session of the Council of Stellar Management, the player advocacy council in Eve Online. Members of the council play a central role in working with CCP (the developers of Eve Online) to prioritise fixes, to act as a focus group for new suggestions and to carry the voice of the community into the development halls.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows my background that I am extremely interested in this system, both as a keen player of Eve Online and also as an industry professional who has worked in community and evangelises for community involvement in games design. For the last two sessions, I’ve been an alternate – a stand-in delegate who is allowed to take part in the discussions, is privy to the internal workings but doesn’t get to raise proposals directly nor to travel to Reykjavik for the regular developer summits (as it happens I was at the last summit but only because a full delegate couldn’t make the trip).

This time around, I am pitching for a third term and hopefully as a full delegate. If you are an Eve player with an account over 30 days old I would appreciate your vote for Helen Highwater, my main character in the game.

In late August, I was invited to speak at the CMC conference in Leipzig. I gave a talk about how community managers could add their unique perspective to the decision making structures of their current gig or, alternatively how that experience could be translated across to other gigs in the industry. Obviously I was using my own experience of going from community to games design as a template. The CMC site has now updated with the video of all the different sessions so you can now download and view all the talks including mine for a small fee. The talks can be downloaded from the ‘Store’ section of the website while the synopses are in the ‘Conference’ section.

I thought I had got out of the business of needing to attend games conventions but, over a year after I hung up my flameproof suit, I’ve been tapped to speak at the Community Manager Conference in Leipzig. This is held as a part of the annual Games Convention so if any of you reading this are going to be there on July 9th, drop me a line below.

My talk is going to be all about how community experience can be an asset in other areas of the games industry – either for community managers who want to move on to new roles or those who simply want to expand the scope of their current position. This is something I feel pretty qualified to talk about as I’ve worn quite a few hats over the past few years and ‘community’ has been at the core of nearly all of them. In fact, in my current role as a games designer I’m mostly responsible for creating social and retention systems. These are clearly areas where a strong understanding of player dynamics are essential.

Plenty of notable CMs will be there too, I’ll be in such august company as Donna Prior, Jörg Koonen, Sean Kaupinnen, Martin Rabl and a former colleague of mine, Fabien Alexandre. This is the first event of its kind in Europe and hopefully will become a fixture in the industry calendar – there’s certainly been a lot of lively discussion on the main CM industry forum and it looks as though Two Pi Team who are organising it intend to build on it for the future. For me it will be a nice change to be at the GC without needing to be on my feet for 14 hours a day and to be able to wander round and chat without feeling guilty.

There’s also a strong possibility that a Warmachine game between myself and Donna Prior may happen at the event. Should such a titanic struggle come to pass then it will of course be properly chronicled over on my other blog.

Voting for the fifth Council of Stellar Management went live today. This is a player advocacy group that has been established by CCP to work with the dev teams in Eve online. The remit is to raise visibility of player issues and to help prioritise them in the dev schedule. I was an alternate in the last CSM which meant that I could take part in the closed debates and vote if a full delegate was absent but I couldn’t bring issues forwards myself. I’m running again as a candidate for CSM 5 and those of you with active Eve Online accounts can vote for me by following this link.

You’ll find my official campaign thread on the Eve forums here and my general campaign site is here.

Vote early, vote often and tell your friends. Voting is open from today through to the 19th of May.

Thank you for your support.

Firstly I’m going to start out by sending some props to Randolph Carter of Grinding to Valhalla. His mission is to interview as many MMO bloggers as possible and, last Friday he featured me. Many thanks to him for that and I found it all too easy to get lost in the archives of his site.

I was playing Aion over the weekend in the closed beta preview event. For what it’s worth I thought it was a very pretty game with a lot of promise (I only managed to get to level 10 and out of the newbie area so I never saw any of the higher level gameplay or any PvP). I felt that it was a very traditional MMO (in the context of a genre that’s still only a decade or so old) and that – flying aside – it didn’t seem to advance the genre at all. This seems to be a game that (graphical aspects aside) could have been designed ten years ago. I will almost certainly play it some more in the open beta and commercial release but I’m not sure how long the prettiness alone will keep me interested.

A lot of people have predicted that Aion will kill various other titles. The more excitable ones are saying it will kill WoW, others are saying that Aion’s release will be the deathblow for WAR. That got me thinking about ‘gamekillers’ and, to date I don’t think we’ve seen one. I remember working on DAoC when WoW was gearing up for release and the common wisdom held that WoW would kill our game. That didn’t happen and, if WoW can’t kill a game then I don’t think anything can. WoW didn’t even kill EQII which had the double misfortune of launching the week before WoW and of not being very good at launch. Even that one-two punch didn’t deliver a deathblow to the game and now, while EQII may not have been as huge as perhaps Sony hoped, there’s no doubt that it’s a very solid game that’s been turned around into a successful product.

Aion will certainly bleed some subscribers out of existing games and will take a chunk of the market share but I’m not going to predict any closures as a result.

So Cuppycake asked a question that she thought would be controversial, namely ‘Are games designers who blog worth reading?’ Not particularly surprisingly (except to Ms Baribeau apparently), the answer was a resounding ‘depends’.

Now clearly I have a horse in this race as a games designer who blogs and so you should definitely be listening to me. It’s posited that there are 3 kinds of design blog (Scott Jennings adds a fourth in the comments):

1. Ivory tower theoreticians
2. Enthusiastic amateurs
3. Guys who know what they’re doing and show a good example

(Scott’s fourth category was ‘Guys who know what they’re doing but prefer to spew bile becasue it’s more entertaining than playing nicely”).

For what it’s worth the blogs I read regularly are all linked in the sidebar to the right and the vast majority of them are in category 3 with a few of Lum’s category 4s for the slow news days and you should read them too.

Once you’ve visited here of course.

Two updates in three days? Surely the End Times are upon us!

I’ve been toying with the idea for a while and I finally decided that I’d launch a separate blog for my wargaming and miniature painting exploits. If you’re interested in that kind of thing then head on over to Stormy Teacups where you can keep up with my adventures at German and international wargaming tournaments as well as see my collection of painted miniatures grow very slowly indeed (unlike my collection of unpainted miniatures which grows at an alarming rate…).

I’ll still be updating this with all the clockwork regularity that you’ve come to expect but I figure splitting the wargames stuff off from the video games industry waffle was a good move. Comments and feedback are much appreciated on either site!