EverQuest: The Serpent’s Spine Interview, Part Two

RPG Vault has kicked up the second portion of their EverQuest: The Serpent’s Spine interview, once again quizzing Sony Online’s David Ford about the upcoming expansion pack.

Q: Which aspects of The Serpent’s Spine were most influenced by community feedback? What kind tends to be most helpful, and how much do you actively solicit it, particularly from the silent majority?

A: I think the overall direction of the expansion was influenced by a lot of community feedback and our sense of what the game needed right now. We felt that what EverQuest really needed was a new starting point, a location for new and old players to meet together and experience great content.

All feedback is helpful, but some, of course, is more so. Players who use our message boards to post well reasoned and calm descriptions of the parts of the game they feel strongly about, positively or negatively, are a great resource for us to find out what we’re doing right and wrong. Our beta process is the place where feedback on an expansion is sought, and I think that our beta testers generally do a really good job of communicating with us so we have a good dialogue. I think the in-beta communication has been steadily increasing through the past few expansions, and I’m looking forward to a very productive beta cycle for The Serpent’s Spine. I have a few ideas already for how to get everyone involved in testing and tuning the portions of the content I’ll be responsible for perfecting over the next few months.

As to the silent majority, just speaking for myself, I often seek feedback pretty silently. I try to be in-game on my play account as often as I can, and hopefully, I’ll be online for at least an hour or so most days, even if I’m doing nothing other than watching the text scroll by. The chat channels can be an excellent source to find out what the average EverQuest player is doing and talking about, and I’ve definitely made fixes and changes based on what I’ve run into or talked about in-game on my play account.