Someone’s not happy with Mythic’s policy on developers posting under their real names.
There is a post there made by Mark Jacobs. Some of you may not know who he is. He’s the guy who used to own Mythic and with the buy-out he turned into a “VP” at EA. He said some things that really bothered me. First off he said
We will always speak directly to the community as ourselves (no aliases, no jolly pirate nicknames, etc.)
Now this has been part of UO culture since it was borne. We are talking… Lord British himself. Everyone who knows anything about UO knows this. But alas! They have taken our dev teams monikers out of the credits. I guess Mark Jacobs finds our dev teams “jolly pirate” nicknames unimportant. Well here’s one UO player who has played long enough to know it’s part of the game itself.
Most of you would think that if the developers posting as “Scott” instead of “Lum” was the worst problem you had with your MMO, you’re doing fairly well. But if you don’t think jolly pirate names are serious business, think again!
This is NOT about Kingdom Reborn. This is about Mythic kidnapping. Really I (and anyone else I talk to about this) feel that Mythic has kidnapped our game and I don’t know if we will be able to get it back. There is no ransom.
In other news, Stratics is still around, I’m not in the DAOC credits any more (under either my real name or my jolly pirate nickname), and UO’s web site has more jolly pirate names than you can shake an EA executive at.
#1 by Scott Hartsman on June 29th, 2007
Hahaha – Yes, I did catch that in the original post.
I was addressing the direction that the thread took, which contained a number of references to the relative value of aliases in general, in which there were a number of mentions of forum posts. No offense to the newsworthiness of the original post, but the followup discussion was the interesting part here.
It is an interesting distinction, though. Credits have built in ambiguity. A developer who wants to remain anonymous on the forums might well not care if their name is one of a giant group in which individual tasks aren’t easily differentiated. You can’t say which designer of a list of 30 nerfed your class.
That said, if someone opted out, absolutely, I’d allow it. Granted, that has yet to happen – With credits, some who have been reluctant to share real names on forums have only gone as far as wanting their kids’ names excluded from Special Thanks sections, while leaving their own names grouped in with others.
And of course people get a chance to opt out! I can only speak for my neck of the woods, but we generally pass the final draft to the full team before it goes to print, to make sure that (among other things) everything’s right. That’s when objections to credits content have generally been raised in the past, and we’ve made changes as needed.
- Scott
#2 by Walter Yarbrough on June 29th, 2007
We’re on the same page, Scott (Hartsman).
The discussion about aliases on messageboards is a different animal. Carry on, folks.
#3 by Beth "Flutter" Taccia on July 9th, 2007
Just found this. Flutter here. Wish I knew this was here.
Get in touch with me you jolly pirate.
There’s more than just some names on a credit screen at stake here.
Walter Yarbrough feel free to PM me via Stratics for my email if you can’t find it too.
If it was just about a name in quotes I would have posted quite differently.
They’re slitting the throat of this game in a very slow and meticulous way.