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.
We should pitch in and send the team something, geeky of course. I agree with your post, under Dstahl it has got a lot better. If you’re up for sending the team something lets work something out.
I had Astronaught Ice Cream in mind, is cheap. Sorry meant to put that in first post.
I like that idea, I wonder how we go about finding who/where to send it to. If not ice cream, maybe send everyone Riker beards?
Where do they sell Riker beards? That’s pretty funny.
Hey, I’d be up for pitching something in, if possible. It’s really amazing to see how the STO team has turned the game around.
Anything you had in mind mmogamerchick? I thought the space ice cream would be “spacey” feel to it and it is cheap on thinkgeek.com. The beards are an amazing idea, but I wasn’t very successful in a search for places that sell such a thing.
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