During our time at the Game Developers Conference, we stopped by Trion Worlds' office and talked with Senior Community Manager Cindy "Abigale" Bowens about Rift's launch.

During our time at the Game Developers Conference, we had the opportunity to swing by the Trion Worlds studio in Redwood City, CA and speak with Senior Community Manager Cindy "Abigale" Bowens about the recent launch of Rift. We talked about the responsibilties of the community team, and Bowens hinted that an MVP program may be coming to the official forums in the future. She also suggests that a large Fan Faire-style event may be held for Rift fans someday if there's enough interest from the community.

Keep reading after the jump for our interview with Cindy Bowens. Also, be sure to check out our interview with Producer Adam Gershowitz from the same visit to the studio.

ZAM: What was the head start and launch like from the community side of things?

Cindy Bowens: Really exciting. The head start was the first chance to really get to see things come alive. For me as a player, it was a lot of fun. It was the first chance I had to really get in and enjoy the game because all this time we've been really busy. As I've played, I kind of tried not to get too into it during beta. I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to watch movie previews because I want to be surprised. I don't normally play betas because of that. Even this time, I played some but I tried not to get too involved because I wanted to enjoy it at launch. So head start was really the first time that I got to enjoy it, too. It was so much fun to see the whole world come alive and see how everything actually worked. You read it on paper and you hear the discussion about it and you see a little bit of testing here and there, but to see it all come together and everybody having so much fun was fantastic.

The thing that got me most excited was seeing the community evolve inside the game. My job is handling community outside the game, but seeing how people came together for the rifts and grouping was great. It seems like lately as I've played MMOs over the years, you kind of hook up with your friends. If you don't have your friends, you kind of solo. There haven't been many reasons to find new groups. I really love our join function and the way you're able to jump into a group and take down the mobs you need, and then you can jump out if you want. I've made some new friends, so it's been a lot of fun. It had been a long time since I'd seen chat fill up like that with comments like, “hey, this is going on over here, we need more people! Everybody come over here to help take down this boss!” It was really exciting.

ZAM: Rift picked up a lot of fans and players in a seemingly short amount of time. From your perspective on the community team, how have your responsibilities changed over the past few months?

Bowens: Well, it's for real now (laughs). Up until head start, it was a lot of theorycrafting. “You need to do A, B and C to make this game successful.” It was interesting. We listened to a lot of ideas and there was a lot of feedback that was considered. But now all of a sudden it's real and out there. People are giving us a lot of great feedback. We've already fixed a number of bugs and issues and things that pop up. That's one of the coolest things about this team that I've seen in the feedback from the community. They really appreciate the fact that there's a fast turnaround on their feedback. Now we really have things we can respond to. Up until the point of having a live game, we couldn't say a whole lot. We couldn't address real concerns. Now that it's all out there, we can talk about it, we can explain things, we can say, “here's why we did this and here's why we didn't do that.” There is a lot of feedback coming in about what people would like to see going forward. I know Scott [Hartsman] is going to have a lot to share about things to come.

And of course there are now class balance discussions, which I find kind of funny. After being in this industry for so many years and playing MMOs for so many years, you read the forums and it seems like everyone thinks all the other classes need to be nerfed (laughs). We're seeing a lot of that, not that we don't pay attention to it. Some things are valid. We have a whole team now reading those forums and passing on that feedback. The developers spend a lot of time coming onto the forums and reading and answering questions.

ZAM: Speaking of your team, I know you have a new addition. Can you give us an overview of your current team?

Bowens: We have several members on our team now. We concentrate on multiple areas. We have our moderation group that's led by a lead moderator, and they handle all the moderation on the forums from bad posts to moving threads and getting things organized. They've had their hands very full in the last week or two.

Then we have community management, which is under James “Elrar” Nichols, who recently joined the team. He's responsible for the communication between the team and the players, so he's on the forums constantly and is always sending important threads and issues to the team. And he's responsible for coordinating messages to go back. He does a lot of posting on updates, what's being looked into, fixes, that sort of thing. That role's going to keep getting bigger and bigger for him.

Then we have Erick “Zann” Adams, who is primarily responsible for our social networks. He's the one that everyone sees on Facebook and Twitter. He also does a lot of work with the fansites and getting that coordinated. We haven't had as much time to devote to working with fansites as we would have liked, so now that we're getting more staff that's something we're really going to concentrate on. He's helping with that.

We also have Amanda “Amary” Fry, who is primarily responsible for patch notes and taking care of server downtimes. When you say it, it sounds like it's not a big deal, but she goes through hundreds of e-mails every day to pull out all the fixes and everything that's coming up in patches so that she gets it all mapped out. She's the one who's always on standby for when the servers go down and announces when they're coming back up.

We have a good, solid team. Everyone has a lot of experience and has done these sorts of things before. We're gelling together really well.

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