Jonathan Hanna Interview

Massive Gamer Magazine had the chance to chat with Jonathan Hanna, who you may remember from his various MMO positions over the years, including Ultima Online community coordinator, Ultima X: Odyssey lead designer, and The Lord of the Rings Online community relations director.

Massive Gamer: What was the first mistake you made? What was your first big achievement?

Hanna: The first mistake I ever made was I left out a couple of things in the second patch notes I wrote. This was a huge update and it took me over a week to compile the design documents into the notes to post for the players. I missed a couple parts and it went unnoticed until the update went live. One of changes was a nerf and the players all assumed we had stealthed it in. We hadn’t, I just messed up. It was a really good lesson about player perceptions.

The thing in Community Relations that I am probably most proud of is helping to turn around the Lord of the Rings Online community. When I first got to Turbine the Community Manager (Meghan Rodberg) had only been there a few months and had started to clean up the community, but it had been mismanaged for a while before she got there. It wasn’t growing anywhere near as much as it needed to and a lot of it was related to newcomers not feeling very welcome by a faction of the veteran players. The community was made up of a lot of hardcore Tolkien fans but as the marketing effort ramped up, a lot of casual fans (mostly people who had only seen the movies but never read the books) and people who just like MMOGs in general started showing up. The groups were having trouble co-existing. Starting a post about how cool you thought it was that the Elves came to the aid of Helm’s Deep was taking your life in your own hands!

So Meghan and I spent a few months changing policies, working with people to help them understand that not everyone saw Tolkien’s works the same way they did, and helping people be more patient with newcomers. We even wound up banning some pretty high profile people who just wouldn’t let go of the old ways. That part wasn’t fun, and we probably gave them more chances than we should have, but in the end the community started to grow and it’s probably one of the most mature MMOG communities you can find these days. Most of that now is a credit to Meghan and her team, but I’m proud of the part I played in it.