I haven’t played a SOE game in four years… But I can and do read and follow the online gaming industry as a hobby and have do so for the last ten years.

For some people online gaming is a phase. For others of us it’s a life long hobby and for others it’s a career. Many of us here are now in our forties and we’ve been playing online games since the 80’s. Ah, Baron Realms Elite… Good times.

I don’t want to derail this thread (I swear I had nothing to do with the other posters quoting my sub numbers) but as far as LotRO subs are concerned, it is, at the very least, *informed* speculation. LotRO publicly stated they were the 2nd largest MMO developed in North America, using reported data (i.e. mine) for the other MMOs. That basically meant they were ignoring RuneScape, Dofus, etc. and saying that after WoW, they were bigger than EQ, EQ II, CoH, etc. This means they had at that time at least 200K subs. Having also access to their box sales figures, I can tell you they can’t have 500K subs. So it’s reasonable to say with 90% confidence that they had 200K to 300K subs, and I always err on the side of caution in my reporting, so 200K it is.

If the purpose of playing the game you work on is to make sure you have your finger on the pulse of the game, wouldn’t it make MORE sense to not let people know you work for the company? That way you can get a sense of how people play and what they think without worrying about people filtering themselves.

Fact is, even if you as a developer act in a 100% appropriate way all the time, employees being part of a guild that also includes non-employees can (and usually does) give the impression of favoritism. While that may not be true or fair, imo, that outweighs the benefits of telling people who you are, which again I can’t think of any. I’m curious, those who do think it’s a good idea, what are the benefits in your mind?

I absolutely agree that devs should play their own game, the more the better. But unless you’re logged in as a GM or in some other official capacity (in which case you aren’t playing) keep your identity to yourself. You’ll probably gain more useful information about the state of the game if people don’t know who you are.

@Moorgard: I do agree 100% with the comments on your blog about the community manager owning the message though. It’s something I’ve been saying since I started on UO way back. There has to be one consistent voice and all too often there isn’t.

Unfortunately, there are so many stories of SOE mishandling things and treating their large MMOs like small sandbox MUD with admin’s doing as they please, it’s a joke.

The problem is time and again from Brad’s double standard to the current silliness, everyone who is a long time gamer knows SOE doesn’t police or seem to even care about ithe integrity of their games.

I’m not saying there aren’t dangers, but I still disagree with you. Hell, every single post a dev makes on a public board has some degree of risk associated with it. Being successful at any kind of customer interaction means never forgetting who you are and what your responsibilities are–and never letting the players forget it, either. The fact that some people haven’t been very good at maintaining such perspective doesn’t mean you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Wouldn’t sane, normal people not subscribe to services that are run shoddly? Why stick around for years? Heck, I love Warcraft and even I take a breaks for a few months between major content releases.

Outing devs who actively exploit their positions by knowing more information than anyone else does is Fine. Emailing a supervisor may be a good starting point, but the players should be allowed to know when something’s rigged.

As much as people hate WoW’s instance heavy design for the whole lack of major spawn camping, it is a nod in it’s direction that even if another guild is playing with a stacked deck it doesn’t really hurt you.