Developers say things. But sometimes they say things that make you stop and go, “WTF?!” In recent interviews at the Guild Summit George Zoeller and Daniel Erickson said the following:
Georg Zoeller: (Source) We’re also hoping that by giving people access to the combat log, they actually get a better sense. Look at sithwarrior.com, for example. They say a lot of theories that are just plain wrong, and to be fair, how would you know better?
Daniel Erickson: (Source) They want to surface a huge amount of the information for the game. They want to be a place that you can trust the source, that they can feed stuff out so we have a standardization so people know where things are going there. I think the long term plan is sort of to be the one stop resource for all of your questions and anything that you actually want to know or need to find out how you’re going to figure out about The Old Republic.
There are some very interesting things you can take away from these quotes when looking at them together:
- Dev’s actively research and monitor player theory crafting of their game.
- They have plans to centralize the game community so players can come to them for game information.
- They are aware of respected sources having incorrect information and don’t always inform the player base.
Players have more free time than game companies do. It’s why Mod’s for other MMO’s out there can be so amazing and why every major game ends up with a few select websites which host the best guides and theory crafting available. So with that in mind, what is BioWare thinking?
They obviously have some kind of goal to be the source of the most reliable player information in the future. But at the same time they will never be able to invest the man hours into perfecting something like that to the same degree that forums, fansites, and players would.
Team Fortress 2 is a great example of where a game company properly utilized their player base by having players create in game hat artwork, which was then implemented in the game. Minimal resources spent by the company, yet amazing rewards went to the player community.
What do you guys think? Should they be holding this information to themselves or sharing it more freely? Do you even think they can pull something like this off? Do you want to see them spending resources on this when players would do it for them, and perhaps better? Leave a comment below!
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