DAW: Geko and Heretic

In my Developer Appreciation Week posts, I’ve gone from thanking developers in general to a specific team, and today I wanted to thank two specific developers from Cryptic who work on Star Trek Online.

First, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Al Rivera, aka Captain Geko. Last year was a pretty rough year for STO and I was pretty down on the game in January. Then Podcast UGC had an epic two and a half hour interview with Geko which gave me some much needed hope for the future of the game. It also marked a renewal of the transparency and community engagement that have been trademarks of Cryptic over the last two years which had both faded during the last third of 2011 while the F2P conversion was taking place.

Which brings me to my second thank you. Geoff Tuffli, aka Heretic, is in my opinion the gold standard for dev-player communication. He’s been the driving force behind the excellent Duty Officer system, and he’s done an absolutely incredible job in engaging with the player-base both through the forums and via in-game channels.

While I have a lot of respect for the entire team, given what they’ve gone through in the last year with the Atari to Perfect World transfer and then the F2P launch, I think Geko and Heretic deserve special recognition. Thanks so much for all your hard work guys.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.