EverQuest II Interview

TenTonHammer has conducted an interview with Sony Online’s Steve Kramer, asking the designer about the day-to-day duties he performs to make the MMORPG a better game. A snip:

Q: Obviously you get a lot of feedback from players via the forums and bug reporting system- some constructive, mostly spiteful. How is the useful feedback sorted out and disseminated to the dev team? Have you gotten used to the occasional negativity from the stank-bots, especially when going through the official forums, or does it still sting?

A: The majority of the developers on EverQuest II read the forums on a daily basis. While you may not see a thousand posts from some of us, we are definitely monitoring the feedback given in our respective areas of expertise. All of the /bug and /feedback reports are compiled on a daily basis and readily available to all team members to go through, and our community manager also compiles a list of hot topics that gets sent to the team.

Negativity? What negativity?! It seems that every game forum goes through the same rollercoaster of anger and praise that our forums go through. I went through a bit of shell shock when we first opened our forums to the public, because I’ve never had every word I write so thoroughly scrutinized and dissected to this degree before. Writing a post can sometimes be downright intimidating depending on what the subject matter is. Our players are very passionate about EverQuest II and it definitely shows on the forums! We have made quite a few changes to the game based on the feedback we received in the forums and it is my hope that our players recognize that we are as passionate about EverQuest II as they are.