You're kidding me right? Really? Seriously? This is like some sort of spam email? Kind of like telling me they can grow my wang huge...
Or not. I guess it's serious. Which, in some ways, is good. Becuase yes. A new, *gasp* MMOG. I nearly thought with all of the failed projects we’d seen in the last year, that the genre was going to be abandoned for a few years altogether. But, thankfully enough, I’ve been happily proven wrong once more by a fiendish email. Of course, I think the one that tells me they can grow my wang huge is more likely to live up to its promises.
I’m being mean though, with no reason whatsoever. I haven’t even deigned to give this game a real chance. Of course, the reason for this is that one look at their website confirmed my thought that they don’t know what they’re doing.
Why don’t they have a FAQ? Why isn’t their website set up better? Do they know what they’re up against? Do they care? Have they projected properly? Etc.
It’s a bit strange that such a very simple concept has managed to evade so many of the great minds in this industry. That concept is, your internet presence greatly defines your market presence. How well you stand up in the fairly bitter tongued world of the internet, and how well you manage a community of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) that you will never meet, greatly reflects your overall capability to run one of these games.
Now, I’ll admit, I have a long memory, and I’d be the first to get all nostalgic and misty eyed about the hijinks of past MMOG communities. Also, on top of that, if you’re really a bastard, the accusation that most of the people in charge in the past didn’t have a clue how to deal with ‘communities’. Mass bannings. Nerfings. General all round scandals. Alchemy...
Thing is, as soon as you say that, you're reading too much into what I'm saying. I never said they were always loved, or the opposite thereof, hated. I just said that they had a strong online presence. And they did. The developers really worked their projects hard. They browsed message boards. Talked to people. Put themselves out there.
Presence.
Ultima Online had presence, whether or not you even played the game. Asheron’s Call had presence. Those people were just mired in it, and you saw that so well reflected in the surrounding communities. You saw developers of basically every game stopping by at Lum’s site when it was around. They responded (when they deemed it appropriate) to community babble. Beyond that, like it or hate it, they also interacted with their inner communities (game related specific messageboards/communities).
Hell, at times, it was nearly like you couldn’t post a general pointless bitch, just to vent a bit, without having one of them read it and possibly even be offended.
Presence.
Those people, their games. They had presence. Presence pre-release, presence post release.
Does Risk Your Life have a presence? What about Face of Mankind? Matrix Online? Dark and Light? Saga of Ryzom? Wish? Etc.
No. I’m not entirely sure why they don’t. Maybe they don’t see the importance of that presence before the game is released. Maybe they think their platform will stand entirely on its own. Maybe…
All I know is this. Sony Online has managed to have presence (just check out the official/unofficial EQII boards if you don’t believe it, or hell, the Galaxies boards). World of Warcraft. Vanguard. They near ooze with the stuff. Sony has been shoving EQII down the throats of everybody for a good two years now. Sigil Games Online was working on their community building before Vanguard was even announced. And even Blizzard, who in the past has had a very dedicated fanbase but little community management, has shown a surprising level of skill in handling their online presence and dealing with whatever people could throw at them.
Now, if you notice here, I don’t suggest that having a good presence, and good community management is hand in hand with people liking you. Personally, I think people necessarily liking you is a lot less important than the presence you’ll probably generate with people disliking you.
So that’s sort of moot. I’m just more aware of games that totally lack any ‘self’. When you go to their website, you feel like you’re being fed a cheez-whiz advertisement or something. You kind of go, look at some lifeless screenshots, smack your mouth a few times as you try to purge the distaste from your tongue, and never look back.
Now, maybe those games can really take off and charge head first into a top spot on the MMOG subscription charts. And vice versa, a game that seemed to have ‘some’ presence (ala Asheron’s Call 2) can still fail miserably.
Those sorts of things will always be somewhat unpredictable on a very base level. At the same time, we can make a very vague, unsubstantiated comment, which is, games with a stronger online presence, and better community management tend to be more successful in the long run. Just look at Dark Age of Camelot? Or hell, even Shadowbane (when it was first released, I believe I remember sub numbers near 80k+ subs). The games that really pushed themselves, were out there amongst the gamers themselves, and the gamer communities, both good and bad tended to have far stronger game launches than those that didn’t (EVE anybody?).
Anyways, check out Risk Your Life if you want. Maybe you can tell me something interesting about it. If nothing else, you can go get yourself some cheez-whiz afterwards in an attempt to alleviate your sudden case of mung mouth.
Oh, last but not least, Sigil is doing some kick ass community stuff again. Despite my claim as the anti-community manager, it seems I’m invited. Guess I’ll have some more time to harass the dev team, and, of course, get arrested attempting to steal some of Keith Parkinson’s art, all the while screaming at AI/pathing goddess Amanda Poe to let me have her love child (seriously, if you spent any time playing EQoA you would feel the same way).