The good – The TLs were the perfect appeasement to the community. They were players, and many of us were pretty noble and attentive when it came to our task of interfacing the dev team and the players.

There were definite drawbacks though. I think the higher ups really didnt understand how useful we were, and then after a while, some less than noble people got into the program, and the TL boards themselves became so much noise and “coffee club” that the DEVs just ended up writing us off completely.

I don’t know if lightning could ever strike twice with a design like that though. You have to have the right people on both sides.

Even if the TL system isn’t the best, it seemed that way to me.

As a Thane I and living on Pendragon I saw many things that just drove me nuts both because they were broken, or didn’t seem to fit with “my” idea of what the class was. Before I was a TL I loved the thought, forget reality… the thought that I could post a comment that I had, and show them where in the game I tested it, and know that my class/realm/what ever TL would read that and take what I said in to consideration.

If I made my argument well, and my proof seemed solid, I just might see a bit of it show up in the TL report. Did we see the TL reports go in, and the next patch all the Major concerns are addressed? HELL NO, they would still be working on the first Patch today if they tried to do that. Instead we saw what our TLs felt were important, and then later we might see notes addressing it on the Web (from Sanya) or better in a patch note! And then there was still the NO as an answer\’e2\’80\’a6 That was a common response to many of the things we asked for..

When I became a TL I discovered that there was in fighting between the TLs and often what one person would see as reasonable would set off half of the others as they saw the ‘and now I’m UBER’ in the idea. So you ended up with 4 or 5 TLs saying Good, 4 or 5 saying BAD and the Poor Dev who was responsible for us (that week) having to deal with that and still decide if the game needed the change. I view the TL system like the Electoral College, you’ve got the same problems as if you had counted all the people 1 by 1, but instead there is a manageable size group so you can at least listen and decide what is best.

Oh and Sanya, that reference might have been when we had one TL doing I think it was housing/magic/and one Class. Sadly I can’t remember most of the names from back then It wasn’t because we were falling like fly’s, but because he had a good working relationship with the Dev’s and the time and was willing to put the effort in to supporting them. Although the turn over tended to be quiet for months and 3 or 4 would retire at the same time, for different reasons, We also seemed to always find people who wanted to join the program and try and improve the game.

Back around to Blizzard, they are basically SOL… They have burnt through the well they were new because of server issues, they shouldn’t have had. They burnt through the Well its better then SONY for online support, as they have not enough GMs, and most of the ones I’ve communicated with have the personality of an OLD Pizza Box Lid, and only know how to deal with the situation by selecting and pasting in what looks like the platitude that will get them on to the next issue…. WOW is the demonstration that there is BILLIONS to be made in the market, but in two or three years I think its going to be the joke that EQ is today.

Good Luck & Good Hunting
Pakka

Joe sez: “There are exceptions of course, which is why you see technically brilliant games like the entire quake/doom series. “

I expected the same kind of thing coming to work on the Doom3 tech and was very, very disappointed. There are points of the engine that are quite good but overall it is quite poor. This is not to say that I don’t understand why it is the way it is, just that it wasn’t what I expected from my id idolizing fanboi days (and believe me when I say that maintaining and extending the thing is a goddamn nightmare).

/end derail

Somewhat back on topic: the only people who have any RIGHT to say what a game is or isn’t is the devs. The players can and should feel free to make suggestions but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to be sane, meaningful, feasible, or even polite. Players who feel that they have a right to the inner workings of the game development process should take that as a challenge to get into the industry and see what it’s like from the inside (hint: the grass is not always greener).

I would personally lean towards transparency but I also understand how that can go awry. Anything you say as a dev will be a) completely ignored as it suits the given argument, b) written in stone as it suits the given argument, c) conjectured about to prove something as it suits the given argument, or d) completely misunderstood/rehashed/requoted in and out of context as it suits the given argument. Astute readers might notice a common trend in that last sentence. Sometimes saying nothing at all is the least of evils even if your players don’t understand.

Luckily for me, the folks who hung around at the UI boards on the Pendragon forums were a pretty reasonable bunch.

We seem to get away with dog food consumption, because our handles are seen relatively frequently in-game and our players know that they both play alongside us and against us on a fairly even basis.

I don’t know that we’d have survived as long without eating the dog food. Our player’s most erzatzt of inclinations tend to vaporize somewhat when they see us on their side of the gun.

Then again, it could be argued that our take on PR is a throw back to the “WarBirds” days that mark our game’s origins; or one of many indicators that we never really quite shifted gear out of MP all the way up to MMO.

don’t work on MMOGs. Sorry, but look at how awful every single MMOG has been from a technical standpoint. Almost all game programmers are picked up fresh out of school, and go straight into slavery learning how to program wrong from the previous generation (who graduated 3 years earlier) of incompetant programmers.

There are exceptions of course, which is why you see technically brilliant games like the entire quake/doom series. But given the current cash cow mentality about MMOGs, those exceptions tend not to be in the MMOG world.