Where has that rusty old droid been?

[Borg]

Kevin "Q-3P0" O'Hara's Letter to the Community

Where has that rusty old droid been?

Hey folks, I'm Q-3PO from the forums. As many of you remember, I was the community guy for over three years during pre-release, beta and early release (see 2001 Team Comments). Over the years, I've been gaining more responsibilities on the team and it became apparent that we needed to hire someone specifically to talk with the community on a daily basis. So now that Thunderheart is front and center (or the most visible target depending on your point of view ), you may wonder what old Q has been up to. Sure I drop by the forums a couple times a week for Tuesday Tips or to promote some feature, but I also wear a lot of different hats behind the scenes.

Before I get into what I do now, let me take a moment to tell you about what I did before SWG. I entered the computer industry in 1995 after spending five fun but frantic years in the film industry (yes I did work on Army of Darkness - look me up at the Internet Movie Database if you are interested). At 3DO, I was the head writer and events guy for Meridian 59. It was a thrill to be on what many consider the first graphical MMO. From there I worked on a number of titles including F-16, MiG-29, Armor Fist 3, Delta Force 1-3, and my personal favorite, Tachyon: The Fringe (where I got to work with Bruce Campbell again, but this time telling him what to say ). In December of 2000, I was brought on the Star Wars Galaxies team as the Community Relations Manager.

I am still heavily involved in community. I work to make sure the website gets regular updates, the newsletter gets out on time, the community team has what they need to get their jobs done and that we provide some goods for our loyal fansites from time to time. The job is much more management of resources than directly communicating with the community nowadays (I mentioned we specifically hired TH to do that, right?). Beyond that I've been working on the Fan Fest and other PR style events.

I can say that we had one of the best pre-launch MMO communities out there and we are now starting to have one of the best post-launch MMO communities. The designers are working closely with TH (who is working closely with the player correspondents, who are working closely with YOU) to address the top player issues as fast as they can. The community pipeline has been fairly effective in getting feedback to the players about the four stages of each publish (In Concept, In Development, In Testing and In Live). This gives you the chance to preview our publishes before they go live. All in all the ship is sailing in the right direction and with the Space Expansion on the horizon, things are only going to get better.

When I'm not in Community Management mode, I'm the Associate Producer on the project. My main role there is ensuring that we have good internal communication between the Austin office developers, the San Diego based team, LucasArts, QA, CS, and even some external partners that we work with. The Community Manager for the internal community, if you will. It can be quite a challenge to coordinate all of those factors. I'm not going to take complete credit for that, but I am very busy with meetings and emails keeping all parties on the same page.

One of the big looming tasks is, of course, the Space Expansion. I need to work closely with LucasArts marketing department to put together an information release plan for our website. We want to make sure that the press doesn't get all of the juicy tid-bits. This also involves setting up the Beta program for the expansion. I can let you know now that we will have a couple stages of beta later this year for the Space Expansion. Preference will be given to players who attend Fan Fest and then to our veteran community (with special preference for those who regularly help us on Test Center). Eventually we will let more people into it, including some people who have never played SWG, but our first slots will be for our most avid supporters.

My third role is to assist the Events Team as needed. Although I'm technically Pex's boss, I'll often take orders from him on what server to run an event on. He's been working hard to create broader appeal events that hit all servers at various times. I'm here to work with him so his requested tools get placed in the publish schedule and to help brainstorm (or troubleshoot) new events. We got some cool things coming up for the Events Team; we just require some patience because often there are higher priority tasks on the designers' plates.

When there is time left in the day, I may open up the Bug Database and search for some easy to find and fix text bugs. I'm certainly no programmer, but it doesn't take much skill to open the text tool and change "%ST" to "%PT" or "it's" to "its". It just takes time to locate the file that they are stored in (sort of like doing a puzzle one piece at a time). No sense in a designer spending time on low priority polish bugs when they can be dealing with the important issues of the community. Since text bugs annoy me, I've taken it upon myself to fix a few now and then.

I think the thing I like most about my job is that there is no "typical" day. Other than some reoccurring meetings, my task list frequently changes. The only standard is I'm always looking for ways to support the community's needs.

Live the saga!

Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara

Community Relations Manager/Associate Producer

Sony Online Entertainment