EQII's New Producer Brings 20 Years Experience

ZAM:  The last two producers made public commitments to increased communications with the players.  They've been using the forums, dev chats, and the various other tools that SOE Community provides.  Are you going to renew this commitment?

Dave:  I have been extremely active in the forums from my previous games.  I will probably be at least somewhat active in this one.  We do already have Community Managers and stuff, so probably a lot of times I'll work through them.  I'll be honest, sometimes it doesn't work out so well for me.  I'll be going in there and trying to explain stuff  and lets just say that not everybody's rational on the forums.  Sometimes I feel like I'm not really being productive for the project when I go in there.  But I will definitely go in there from time to time, I do like to participate in back-and-forth with the players.  And I will stay in those conversations as long as they stay productive.  But if they turn into flame bait then I'll just quietly go to a different thread. 

I love talking to the players because even when somebody is completely “flame on,” and they look like they're completely insane and they don't know what they're talking about, the fact of the matter is they're extremely emotional about something and something really really upset them.  And if you pick apart at the posts carefully enough you can almost always find the underlying reason and that reason is always legitimate.  So it's just a matter of having a really thick skin getting into the forums and trying to figure out exactly what's going on. 

But there's also the other trick that forums are only a certain percentage of our user base.  So you take all the feedback you can from the forums but you also try to find out other information through data mining and polls and user labs all kinds of different things you can do.  And then you have to take all of that stuff together and create your real decisions from it.

I'm also a big fan of teasing the hell out of the players (laughs), we'll see whether or not they like that.  I dribble information out until we're really really 100% sure that it's going to come out, and then I'll start telling people about it.

ZAM: I have to ask because I'd be doing our readers a disservice if I didn't:  What's the theme of the next EQII expansion, and can you give us an ETA?

Dave:  I know what it is, I've read the design docs; no, I can't talk about it right now.   I saw the scope of what they're trying to do, I think they're being extremely ambitious, which is great because passion is what games are all about.  But I want to make sure that a large chunk of it is actually doable before I start talking about it publicly.  Because there's nothing that anybody hates more than saying something's going to come out and then saying it's not later on.  I will say this:  if we do what's being planned people are going to go nuts, they're really going to like it (laughs).  I won't tease you too much, but I will say that wow, yeah, it's going to be extraordinarily loved.

ZAM:  We look forward to hearing more about it.  Thanks very much for your time!