Being a Persistent World Developer is a very challenging role; the number of simultaneous hats you have to wear is mind boggling. You have to be a post-graduate with a degree in English, because lord knows there are those that will knit pick every “your” instead of “you’re” or dangling participle. Heck, I don’t even know what a participle is! You must have programming skills on the level of a Microsoft engineer combined with the negotiation skills of the Secretary of State. Now toss in a dash of marketing expertise and a splash of high level project management. That is the starting requirements for a PW Developer; which doesn’t even include a bit of creativity and a whole lot of dedication to a project that will never return anything other than the occasional “thank you” and some sense of self-accomplishment.
But all of you know that already, you have already tasted the Kool-aid and you liked it. Now what Warcry and their staff is trying to do is a great thing but more importantly, what can we do for each other that will help us all reach the level of success we want to reach and do it with as few frustrations as possible. I think there are a number of simple ideas that we can put forward that will benefit us all.
- Your scripts and systems are not government secrets, why are they treated that way? We all want an enjoyable and innovative experience for the players. We all have ideas and more important scripts and systems that help achieve that. I would like to see a more open atmosphere in regards to sharing scripts and even working together to enhance all those systems. I am not a programmer by trade but I have some pretty nice systems in place that I am more than willing to share with others.
[li]I would like to see a more united front shown on the official forums. Like it or not but there is a whole sect of PW-haters and bashers out there that get their jollies out of belittling our work. The developers read those forums and form opinions about us, the PW developers, based on what they read. Accumulate a little data about how we really impact the NWN community, and I think the perception of some people can be changed.
[li]The game developers (Bioware in the past and Obsidian in the future) largely humor us. They underestimate the impact of Persistent Worlds on their sales by a huge margin; they look at bad marketing research and make bad decisions. What I would like to see is someone acting as a liaison from a consortium of Persistent Worlds. It’s one thing when we meekly ask for a product improvement on the boards, it is another when we go directly to them and ask for something. Especially when we can say “I am with the PW community, representing 30 PWs with a combined total of 400,000 unique CD log-ins and 12 million hits on our websites.”
Now if I were King, the above is where I would start. Unfortunately, I am not the king or so the nice man in the white coat keeps telling me.
