EQ2 Guide Winter Summit '08  

Winter Summit '08

I love to travel.  I especially love to travel when it involves going back home to sunny SoCal.  I grew up in Orange County before my temporary exile to the heathen backwaters of Texas, and I eagerly look forward to any reprieve.  Needless to say that I was rivaling hummingbirds for hyper when it came time to board my plane for San Diego.  I was very glad that Radar had another kidney and half of his soul left for me to sign away with the mother of all NDAs...  No way was I going to miss this trip!

I was met at the airport and conveyed to, what was widely agreed to be the trendiest hotel on the face of the planet, by Grimwell.  My room wasn't quite ready yet, Coyote's theory was that they were doing "coolness checks" and that's quite possible.  While I waited for my room, I watched poor Ashlanne scramble around trying to figure out how to rescue the poor stranded Dallas folks.

Trendy it may have been, but good lord was it a comfy hotel.  Even the chairs in the lobby were soft and snuggly.  Of course that could also have been jet lag coupled with being up since before the butt crack of dawn...  Either way, my only thought as soon as I got my room was to shower and take a nap so that I could stay at the first night's mixer past 9pm.  Alas, the nap was not to be.  So the quest for coffee began.  I thought to myself:  Well, here I am in San Diego with a bunch of gamer geeks, surely someone has already scoped out the nearest coffee shop.  I'm often wrong, and this was no exception.  No one knew where the closest Starbucks or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was to be found.  WOE!!!

Ashlanne was kind enough to Google on her phone and hunt one up.  We got our bearings and figured out generally where it should be.  I even stopped and asked the groovy doorman guy just to be safe.  Then off I toddled to find myself some caffiene.  Eventually I was successful and got back to the mixer where I was met with much jealousy and cries of "Why didn't you SAY you were going???"  Oops.

Friday was whale watching.  It was spiffy and all kinds of fun.  I got to sit in on a few very interesting conversations about game design theory and practice amongst other things.  But I'm sure that's the least of what people are wanting to know.

Saturday was the meat of the trip.  This Summit was different from the original developer roundtables.  We weren't there to discuss game specific issues (which saddened me, but hopefully they'll bring those back, because I've got a list) but rather to discuss Community issues as a whole across games.

General

Unfortunately I can't get into as much detail on this as I'd like, a lot of it is under NDA until further notice.  What I can say is that we talked a good deal about the direction of Community building and reaching out to the player base.  I think some really good suggestions were made and that they'll be ultimately beneficial.

We also spoke with some of the Customer Service team.  Brasse did an excellent recap of this.  What it boils down to is that they're working hard to improve the level of customer service and reduce the inevitable double-u-tee-eff moments people get when their tickets come back with a canned response and nothing actually relating to the petition sent in.  It will be nice to see those changes implemented!

They also discussed with us, at length, the issue of farmers, botters, and plat sellers.  A large part of CS's day is spent tracking down sellers and rooting out all of their contacts.  So when someone is reported for spamming, they aren't instantly done away with.  Their logs are examined to see who else they're interacting with and getting as many people associated with that account as possible.  Thousands of plat spammers and farmers are banned each week.  It was a mixed sort of blessing really.  Gratifying to know how much they really do about plat sellers but disheartening to know how many there always are with which to deal.

Free Realms

We got a look at one of the new games SOE has in development.  Free Realms is aimed at tween/teen aged players.  Fortunately the game won't be confined to the target audience, or I'd have been throwing things in protest!

The game will release with two playable races, humans and fairies.  You can create your character using a flash based interface on the Free Realms website while the game downloads in the background.  While the actual game itself isn't web based, you will be able to access a wide range of the functionality through your browser, allowing you to affect your character even while not logged in. 

Since the target audience is so young, there won't be the traditional forums that most of us hang out on to get our fixes while we're at work.  Instead they're looking for a Yahoo Answers sort of format for questions and help.  The in game chat interface will be strictly limited to further try and safeguard younger players.  As a parent, I was impressed with the lengths they are going to to try and keep kids safe.  While the chat interface is designed to resemble IM programs, the chat itself is reminiscent of Toon Town Online where most of it is pre-scripted and you choose from options listed.

Everything is very fantasy oriented and visual.  I was put strongly in mind of movies from my childhood like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.  It also conjured up memories of Fraggle Rock, which was one of my all time favourite shows.

The game centers around making everything as fun as possible.  Quests are in the form of mini games within the larger game itself.  I asked if one would be able to play the mini games from the web without being logged in.  Not that I wanted to know if I could play at work or anything...  It seems that indeed one will be able to do so.  They're looking to make the game as fully integrated as possible with the website.

I've got to say that I'm looking forward to this game like I do every Sanrio Surprise store I find.  That isn't to say that it's strictly girlie or anything like that.  There are plenty of elements for both genders and it's flawlessly integrated, blurring the line between "girl things" and "boy things" very well.  Hopefully I'll be able to use this to entice my son away from WoW...

There is so much to talk about with Free Realms that I could go on for days about it.  So I'll just say that it's completely on my list of games to play.

The Agency

While I'd love to gush about this game until everyone was annoyed with me...  I can't.  Everything we saw was under the NDA.  In fact, even if I weren't concerned with that, I couldn't tell you anything because they had these guys do the Paycheck memory erase thingie to us as soon as the presentation was over.

The only thing I remember about it is that it looks really freaking cool and I'll be frantically trying to win the lottery between now and release so that I have the time to play all of these!

I love that I had this opportunity.  It was definitely a first for me and something in which I'm happy to be included.  I would have hoped for more sessions and question answering than we got.  Likewise, as I said before I'd have wished most heartily for game specific time with the dev teams.  As it was, I made good use of my time at the mixers and picked some brains as well as kicking a few shins.  Overall I think this particular format of Summit has an invaluable use, but I still really want to see SOE giving some love back to player face time with the dev team. 

While not all of my questions were answered or addressed as fully as I would have liked, I do have the opportunity now to pursue these matters.  At the same time I learned a lot more about how things work within the Community team and how much everyone has to juggle to make things run (relatively!) smoothly.  Their job isn't easy, by any means, they all work hard at it, and I've an all new appreciation for just how much they have to go through on a daily basis.

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