EverQuest Online Adventures Interview, Part Two

RPG Vault has posted the second installment of their EverQuest Online Adventures interview with SOE associate producer Leah Ruben.

Q: What’s distinctive about EverQuest Online Adventures’ community and its personality? And what do you focus on to maintain your relationship with it?

A: I love this community. They are some of the most helpful, respectful, quirky-cool people I’ve ever met in my life. Though it’s sometimes frustrating from a design perspective to have your crafty riddles and story twists exposed so quickly, kind players looking to help others out-post spoiler walkthroughs quickly, and don’t hold back. Every Fan Faire has been a blast… meeting up with members of the community, and we have the tradition of putting in a quest that’s crafted right there at the event – which has been a favorite panel of our attendees.

From my end, I do my best to give everyone the utmost respect back – working more than full-time hours driving the design direction and production aspect of EQOA while trying to maintain other hobbies (that elusive “having a life” people speak of) only lets me play casually nowadays. There are some people who play for hours and hours a day. Besides being a bit envious of their extended playtime *wink*, I also really value their opinions. Though I’ve played at least one character of each race and one of each class to around level 15 to 20 in the last five years, I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert at judging what feels right for a 60th level Transmuter. I have the numbers, sure, but it takes more than balancing a math equation to make things fun.

We’re also very big on communication. Weekly, we give a forum update on what were working on and our progress, as well as answering a lot of frequently asked questions. While, of course, there are things that we can’t disclose or talk about candidly (just like any game, or even any business out there), we try to be as honest and informative as possible. I’ve found that even if people don’t like your answer to their question, they feel better having it answered.