Blue Kae

I wanted to wrap up my Developer Appreciation Week posts by sending a heart felt thanks to Markus “Notch” Persson and the rest of the team at Mojang: Daniel Frisk, Daniel Kaplan, Jakob Porser, Jens Bergensten, Junkboy, Carl Manneh, and Tobias Mollstam.

Notch started out developing Minecraft as a one-man shop. Like most developers he was not too concerned about the business aspects of things and very open about his sales and what he was working on. When Minecraft’s popularity exploded, he didn’t change that. He started a company and hired a small staff to help. This is the point where Notch could easily have pulled back from the community but hasn’t.

The entire Mojang team is on Twitter, check out Daniel Kaplan’s Mojang list to see the public company discussions. Notch still keeps up on his blog, although he did have to turn off comments (no loss there given some of the commenters that I read), and the stats page is still ticking off registered users and sales. He’s shown up on Reddit a few times, and is active with the Minecraft player community on Twitter. Just last week, I highlighted some posts from Jens about wolves, and several recent features like beds and cake have come about from interactions with the player community.

As much as I enjoy playing Minecraft, seeing how Markus has handled his success has been nearly as interesting. Go watch the twenty minute short documentary if you want to see what I mean.

Thanks Notch!

Today’s appreciation goes out to the entire Star Trek Online team at Cryptic Studios.

Of all of the MMOs I’ve played, past and present, I can’t think of any that hold a candle to Daniel Stahl’s team when it comes to communication and engagement with the community and transparency into the development process. The amount of engagement by the designers and developers has truly been impressive, and has been a major part of the growing success of the game.

Every month there’s an Ask Cryptic post answering community questions. There’s the Executive Producer’s Engineering Report where we get a detailed look at what issues are in testing, what’s being investigated, what’s in development, and what’s in the design stages. There’s a deployment calendar showing launch windows for new content and features.

Beyond the regular structured feedback, there are a dozen posts nearly every weekday from the team. Some of that is from the Community Management team, but there’s a lot more activity from the designers and developers than I’ve seen for any other game I’ve played. There are usually daily posts from Stahl, Gozer, Heretic, Zeronius Rex, Mapolis, and Captain Logan, not to mention the community wranglers Wishstone and Stormshade.

Even outside of the company’s own communication channels, the STO team has been very generous with their time doing interviews with many of the podcasts dedicated to the game.

So, I huge thank you’s to the entire team for all of the work they’ve into the game and for all of the time and energy they’ve invested with the player community. I for one am very very grateful.

Thanks Trion!

I want to kick of Developer Appreciation Week by thanking all of the programmers, artists, and designers at Trion that worked their butts off for the last few years to bring us Rift. Thanks to all of you for showing gamers what happens when a developer get’s enough time and money to do things right. I hope you’re all enjoying some time off, kicking back with a beer or three, and recharging those mental batteries.

Author’s Note: So…. communication… um yeah.  I should, may, probably will get back to my theme tomorrow, but it ain’t happening tonight. See I thought I had an idea that I wanted to use regarding Trion and Rift, but as I sat down tonight and started working I realized that what I actually wanted to say wasn’t what I thought I was going to say yesterday. I got a little frustrated and thought about skipping it altogether, but that’s stupid and goes a bit against the spirit of what this week’s about. Instead, I decided to just go with it.

Before I start with my Developer Appreciation Week posts tomorrow, I wanted to mention this year’s theme: communication.

In my opinion, it’s one of the things that makes a good game great, and it’s not something that a lot of developers excel at. So I think it’s important to highlight some developers (I have three in mind) that have impressed me with their ability to communicate and respond to players.

For more on DAW check out Scary’s site.

Just a reminder for other bloggers out there that Scarybooster’s Developer Appreciation Week starts Monday. If you’re curious about what I did last year check out the daw tag, especially the summary post with links to other bloggers.

Just wanted to collect some links to posts I’ve seen for Developer Appreciation Week (which  I’m hoping is the first annual one).

• Anjin’s thank you to Arena.net.
• Yeebo’s on SOE, innovation and risk.
• MMo Gamerchick’s appreciation to all the studios whose games she’s enjoyed.
• Smashie’s tribute to Shigeru Miyamoto.
• Syp shows his artistic side.
• Ysharros points out that we shouldn’t need a specific week for dev appreciation.
• And best for last: Scarybooster, who came up with the idea in the first place and has been doing a whole week of posts.

Hope I didn’t miss anyone, feel free to email or twitter me a link or just leave it in the comments and I’ll add it to the list.

New links:

• Tesh’s view from the developer’s side of things.
• Rowan’s thanks to Cryptic and Blizzard.

“MMO forums: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

Okay, so that’s not quite how Obi Wan cautioned Luke, but it’s no less accurate. Of course that makes this thread all the more impressive. It is a 46 post, 5 page, (as of this writing) thread started by a community member asking the devs to post a surprising fact about themselves. Quite a few of the Cryptic staff have posted and nearly all the player posts are on topic and respectful. There’s one person asking about a problem but the they were very apologetic about derailing the thread, most surprisingly no one followed up to troll them for it.

So my thanks and today’s DAD go to the Cryptic Studios staff (community and dev), for their follow through on their promises of better communication with the community. It’s made the last two months of Champions Online much more enjoyable.

If you haven’t already, go checkout Scarybooster’s Developer Appreciation Week posts, and if you’re doing any yourself please send me and Scary a link.

For Developer Appreciation Week, I’d like to thank Allan “Orion” Maki, Senior Game Designer from Turbine.

I’ve enjoyed Lord of the Rings Online since it was released in 2007 and have always been impressed by the level of detail from the books that Turbine was able to include in the world. Yet, the game had some rough edges in the earlier zones that don’t exist in the later content (looking at you Lonelands).

This brings me to why I’m singling Allan out specifically, he’s done a lot of work to redesign and polish up the early game experience in Middle-earth. Most recently was a revamp of the Lonelands, which are much much improved, and making the Volume 1 epic quest line solo-able. Even better though, was the way he went about the epic quest change. Orion didn’t just nerf the quest line so that it is solo only. He implemented a character buff called Inspired Greatness that scales based on the size of the fellowship. It’s always a good thing to more options for completing quests, and this buff allows players to solo if they want or duo or still go with a full fellowship.

Head over to Orion’s My Lotro page and leave him a thank you if you’ve enjoyed any of the updated zones of the Volume 1 quest change.

If you haven’t already, go checkout Scarybooster’s DAW posts he’s doing a full week of them.

Scarybooster had an excellent post yesterday where he thanked game developers for all their hard work and made an effort to look on the positive side of MMOs. Today, he had an even better idea and declared next week is Developer Appreciation Week. To join in, just pick a day and post something that a developer has done that you enjoyed.