Perhaps you can remember a time when the developers of MMOs were directly involved in player events -- either running them or just attending player-run events. In our interview with him on Massively Speaking, Richard Garriott mentioned a couple of times about hanging out with players as Lord British in Ultima Online. If you recall, Star Wars Galaxies had a whole team, lead by Jason "Pex" Ryan, that was completely devoted to creating and facilitating player events. It may seem that these days are fading with the scripted events common in more recent releases. Lydia "Zatozia" Pope, the newly appointed Community Manager of SWG, hopes to change that.
Zatozia has been with Sony Online Entertainment since May of 1999 when her department was still known as Verant. Under the customer service banner, she ran Historical Events for EverQuest. These were live GM-run events that were used to transition EQ from expansion to expansion. She was also a member of the Stormhammer Legends EQ server team, which specialized in GM-run events and storylines specifically for that server.
Zatozia is now the Community Relations Manager for Star Wars Galaxies, and we were able to speak with her about her personal plans for the title as well as how the SWG community is affecting other SOE titles. Click over the break to catch the full interview.
Massively: You're currently on Galaxies. How would you say that community differs from EQ or EQ2 or others you've worked with in the past?
Lydia "Zatozia" Pope: The community for Star Wars Galaxies is very highly active. It's probably one of our most active communities. They do a lot of live events themselves. They run a lot of player-run events. They are constantly submitting videos, artwork, event recaps, and things like that. That's something that our EverQuest community does, but generally, Star Wars is the top-ranked for that for our games. They are so active. Because we have the Senate, the Senate helps everyone become active. The Galactic Senate is even more active than it was in the past. They rotate every six months. They do weekly recaps that the development team and the community team look at to base what the state of the game is. I use that information for our reports.
[In] our other games, where we have community leaders, we don't get that in-depth with the feedback. Because of how active the Star Wars community is, we can get that from them. We're actually modeling the Galactic Senate... we are looking to change some of our other games over to that system because it works really well.
Why do you think that is? Do you have an opinion as far as that's concerned? Why do you think the Galaxies community is more active or at least more vocal than the other communities?
"We're actually modeling the Galactic Senate ... because it works really well."
One of the reasons I think it does work is because Star Wars has a lot of player areas in the game like player housing and the guild halls. EverQuest didn't have that until after awhile. It has a lot of social areas within the game itself. That alone is something that allows people to communicate better with each other. So, they are seeing each other more often.
One of the biggest things players do in Star Wars Galaxies is have those parties. They have a variety of animations they can do like dancing and special effects with their dancing. There are a lot of areas in the game that allow people to do a lot of social activities.
You mention the more vocal population. Massively has an IRC channel that we hang out in with readers. And they all know that I play Star Wars Galaxies. I play on Starsider, so there's always people there. They are always asking, "What is the population like?" I say that it's like how it's always been: It's huge. That's because I'm on Starsider. How would you say, in general, the population is? And what kinds of things are you looking to do to make, maybe, other servers more active or to increase the population or at least the activity of the population?
We don't give out population numbers. I think each of the servers has its own spurts of when there is a bigger population on at the time. We actually see big jumps when players run their own events. That is something I'm trying to do -- facilitate those events more. We have the calendar on the website. We are trying to teach people -- me and the events senator -- more about how to submit their own events, what type of events they can run (for people who aren't used to running elaborate events as some people are), [and] doing event recaps (showing how their events went). A lot of times you'll hear people talking about an event they had, but you don't see any screenshots. You don't see any feedback about the event afterward.
As you could see at the party on Friday, people like to get rewards for doing events. So, that's something I'm working with the development team on -- working on some new badges to use for events. So even if we weren't able to attend an event, the event promoter can submit a list of people who either won a challenge or won some type of activity at the event. We can just go in and flag them for that badge. I am working with the development team on a whole new system of badges that are specifically designed for community events.
That's really nice.
When we did our event on Friday, a lot of people already had the Live Event badge. It's an older badge, but that's the one I had available to give. So I was like, "Well, I have another one I can give." So Teesquared and I were scrambling try to figure out, "How do we give this one out?" We had it planned for [another event]. There were other ones that were more specific that didn't fit that need. So from there, we [said], "We really need to get some new badges for people because they really wanted that."
One of the other things I'm working on is running my own events. The community team -- not just for Star Wars Galaxies, but for all our games -- are setting up schedules for monthly events. For some games there may even be weekly events. Like Free Realms, they do an event every week. We are scheduling events that the community team can run. At the next event, you will see more than just me on the community team. There will be other people on the community team attenting the event as well. That will help people see that there are other people on the server. A lot of time people just don't know that they're there [because] they are so spread out. It gives people a little gathering activity to participate in. Hopefully we will get some player-run events to do the same type of thing.
If I could reiterate here, what you plan is to give event planners the ability to -- not give out the badges themselves -- but give you a list so then you can give out the badges for specific events?
The Events Senator and I are going to work on some guidelines, so it's not just one person saying, "I'm going to run an event," without actually running the event. We will have guidelines, and we will definitely have to have a recap of what took place during the event, screenshots of the event, and everything. And we may even have it to where particular people have to be involved in the event, so that we can see that the event did take place. On the community team, we are not going to be able to attend every event that players run because they run a lot of events. We want to leave it to the promoter who does have all the guidelines. They will get a badge for running the event, and -- we're still working on the details on it -- but maybe if someone did something outstanding at their event we can give them a badge for it.
Massively: You mentioned at the party on Friday that this month is the Month of Events contest. Tell me what that's about.
Lydia "Zatozia" Pope: In the past, they've had an event month. I don't remember if they've had it with a particular theme, but what we're going to start doing is themed months. So, this month, October, is the Galactic Moon Festival event month. Players who run an event based on that theme will submit it to the calendar system. We'll put it up on the calendar, then they will do recaps. So, basically, at the end of the month, we will have a series that is based on the Galactic Moon Festival. We will have those as a full recap. It is kind of encouraging people to run events based on whatever theme we pick for that month.
I noticed that both you and Teesquared showed up at the event on Friday. I assume that you are planning on attending other events. How would someone go about getting you guys to notice and attend an event?
We attended the first one because it was the first event. As long as we know about [other events], we will try our best to attend. But because there are going to be so many events run, we can't guarantee that we will be able to attend every one. As long as people send details, we are going to try to attend as many as we can. I am going to send the information about the events that take place to our community team. We are going to try to see if we can get at least one person to show at those events. One of the things we are trying to do is promote the player events. They will get a better turn-out if we are there, but I think by giving the promoters the chance to give out badges as rewards, that's going to help out a little bit with that aspect. I think sometimes that is really what players want us to do -- give out rewards for it. We are at least going to try to do that part of it. Because we have so many games, it's going to be difficult to attend every single event.
If this works out, for future ones we will have guidelines like: If you have an event at this time on this day, then you will have a chance for somebody to show up for it. This is not what's going to happen, but let's just say that like every Friday at five o'clock, if you have you event scheduled for five o'clock, somebody from the team will show up for it. We are going to see how this month works, and if we find out that we are not able to show up at as many that we would like to show up at, then we will set times scheduled for it. It will be first come, first served for whoever signs up for that time slot. I think in the future that's going to work. For right now, we are just going to see how well it works. When Jason Ryan was here, that's what he did. He was able to pop in for 15 minutes then leave, so he was able to attend multiple events in one day. I don't want to say it's new, but because it's newer for the current status of the team, we couldn't set that up for this particular time period. Depending on how well this goes, we can switch over to it.
Along the same lines of getting the devs involved in events, what are you looking for in player events?
Something that's really well thought out as to what is going to take place during the event. For example, if people are having a party in a cantina -- there was this session where people were dancing, and they had a particular dance that people do. Another example would be, if somebody used the Chronicles System to run events. Pretty much, if they put a lot of detail into their event, it is going to be one to make us say, "Hey, we want to see how well this one works." If it's something we see that people are really getting into doing, we may make additional changes to help facilitate that more.
So, these events are a great way to communicate to the development team saying, "This is what we like to do," then possibly some changes to the game can come out of it?
Oh, definitely. Just from our event on Friday, Teesquared and I had a conversation about what we want to do. You know, we had our server issue there. We have already started working on making it better for the next event.
What are your specific plans for events, not necessarily just for this month but maybe for life day and other events in the future?
At the end of this month, I am going to have a Halloween party. Going along with the Galactic Moon Festival, I have a masquerade ball. The masquerade ball is going to take place in my building. The party is going to be on October 26th. I haven't picked a server yet because I'm going to try to see if I can get it copied to all the servers. We will have a special badge for people that show up. We will have badgess for people who show up in particular types of costumes [or] who do certain activities. I have hopes to run my own Chronicles mission in there. We will see how that works. The Chronicles Senator has volunteered to help me with it.
I'm making some little changes on how we highlight players. Right now, we have the Galactic Showcase and the Galactic Couture. I'm looking to expand that so we can highlight more combat players, some Player Associations, and player cities. So it's not just somebody's house that's decorated. I'm thinking about how I can break that down and which days of the week it's going to go up.
I have an event coming up for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure exactly what to call that event because Star Wars doesn't exactly have a name for Thanksgiving. But it will be an in-game event.
Lona used to call it Pharple Day, and then have it on Lok.
There you go. I may have to steal that from her, then. And I'm going to have one during Life Day as well.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I'm so glad the Star Wars Galaxies community welcomed me so much. It's always scary when we switch games -- how the community's going to react. Thankfully the Star Wars Galaxies community was very, very friendly to me when I joined. It made my job easier.