Kirin's Commentary: 2012

And what gives me the idea that I have anything of worth to say? Aka what’s my CV, what have I done for the MMOG UI community?

As I mentioned, I’ve been a part of this community for 10+ years now. I started when SOE (formerly Verant Interactive) first introduced the ability for users to customize their interface in EverQuest back in 2002. Since then I have helped found and run eight different sites covering nine games. I don’t work for any of the game companies, but I do work with all of them. Over the years I’ve built a sterling reputation with them. Not only do I have great relationships with the public relations and customer relations departments for each of the game companies, but I also have close working relationships directly with the UI development teams themselves as well. I frequently act as a liaison between the game company’s UI Dev team and the UI community. This allows the Dev team to have a focused point of contact with which to disseminate information to the user and author community as well as getting feedback, bug reports, feature requests, etc., but without having the team being deluged with emails from everyone and their dog. This allows them to concentrate on their job rather than having to monitor forums or spend all their time answering emails, etc. I have also had game companies contact me directly to ask if we will open a site for their upcoming game. My name is in the credits for a couple expansions for one game and I have a gear set named for me in another.

I helped a publishing company find authors to write addon programming books for them and I’ve been named in the credits for a couple of those books. I have also assisted a number of post-graduate students with information and interviews for use in their Masters and Doctoral dissertations and theses.

I set up and run irc channels dedicated specifically for the UI authors of the different games. Authors from across the globe are welcome to (and do) join these channels, sharing coding practices, learning from one another, assisting each other with mod debugging and testing, or just plain hanging out, kicking back and relaxing with like-minded people. Sometimes we even get some of the UI devs from the game companies joining the channels as well. I also frequently set up in-game guilds for the same purposes. These guilds become especially useful during expansion betas and on test realms, giving authors the chance to help each other with making sure their addons are functional whenever a content patch or expansion comes out.

I helped formulate the ethics, morals and standards for all of our sites and ensure that they are enforced. I’m in charge of our community managers. I deal with all of the non-user-contributed content on our sites - I post all of our news, user guides and FAQs. I structure and maintain our download and forum categories, moderate the forums, verify and approve files uploaded to the sites, answer emails and private messages, and maintain our presence on the social networking sites (Google+, Twitter, Facebook). I’m also in charge of all of the contests on our sites; coming up with the ideas of what to run in the way of contests, procuring prizes, selecting winners and awarding the prizes.

Whenever I go to a [gaming] convention, I set up activities for the UI community above and beyond the ones being run by the game companies. I’ve set up restaurant arrangements for community dinners that we’ve hosted, gotten group hotel rates for our users, hosted parties, and helped design and procure ‘swag’ to give to the community at the conventions.

I maintain our presence on the official sites as well as within the greater community for each game. Over the years I have helped answer questions and provide information on other community sites, helped administer their IRC channels, and even helped with the hosting of other sites. Some of the other sites that I have helped out with in one way or another include GoBerserker, CT Mods, Wowace, Sha’kahr, Minion, WoW UI Designer, EQ2Maps, WowCompares, SidlWidl, Minion, WCRadio and WoWWiki.

Our sites aren't simply places for authors to upload addons and users to download them, they are communities. A lot of our members become more than just users, they become friends. My partner and I are constantly working on improving our sites for those communities. I help him on the design and layout of the sites by providing feedback on existing features and proposed updates, making suggestions for changes and by helping find or create the needed graphics. We have added many features to our sites for users over the years – RSS feeds; favourites lists; email notifications; multiple ways for users to converse with the authors; user guides; FAQs; technical help on how to use addons; robust forums and more. For authors we are always adding new tools to make their hobby of customizing the UIs easier – creating author portals that give the authors their own little mini sites on the main site, including bug reporting and tracking, feature requests and tracking, author created news and FAQs, etc.; adding SVN and Git repositories for version control; setting up wikis; making it easy for authors to put up donation requests and more. I’m always talking with our users and authors to find ways to make our sites better, then talking with my staff to figure out ways we can implement those improvements.

If you play World of Warcraft and follow the UI customization community to any degree, then the chances are you know about authors always getting beta invites whenever a new expansion is being tested. All authors, every beta, guaranteed. During the testing for the first WoW expansion (Burning Crusade), I was able to talk to the good folks at Blizzard and show them how giving me an unlimited number of beta keys for authors would actually be in their best interest. I was able to point out that the more addons that were ready to go when the expansion went live would lead to a lot fewer (inaccurate) error reports that their GMs and Customer Support department would have to deal with. They agreed. In an unprecedented arrangement, we worked together to get every single legitimate addon author into the beta testing. That agreement has been in place between us ever since. (Yes, I know they now do it with some other sites as well, but I was the one that set it up originally.) I’ve subsequently been able to point to it and the benefit it gave to Blizzard when talking to some of the other game companies and have convinced them to follow suit.

I’m proud of the trust we’ve built up over the years with our users, authors and the game companies. With a million registered users, and an exponentially higher number that aren’t registered (since you don’t need to register to download from us), we’ve never had a single user have any of their game accounts hacked as a consequence of using our sites or anything downloaded from them. That’s a lot of trust placed in us, in me, trust earned by a lot of hard work over a lot of years.

I work at home. That sounds like a really sweet deal, right? I mean, I get to set my own hours, I can stay up all night and sleep all day if I want to, if I have to go and do some errands I can go whenever I feel like it, when my daughter was in school I could tailor my schedule around hers and if she needed me for something I could stop everything at the drop of the hat and go take care of her. What that also means, though, is that if I am awake and I have internet access, I am at work. Even being generous to myself, and suggesting that I spend 10 hours away from the computer for sleep, meals, etc., it still leave 14 hours in the day. Multiply that by 7 days a week and that’s almost 100 hours at work per week. Every week. Now multiply it by the 54 weeks in a year, and the 10 years that I have been doing this. That works out to almost 53 thousand hours I have put into the community. And that’s basing the numbers on those 100-hour weeks. Well, those 100-hour weeks are the quiet ones. They are the weeks when there is nothing big going on. No expansions or content patches for any of the games. No contests going on on any of our sites. When there hasn’t been some sort of ‘drama’ occurring. Just your average every day week. On weeks that are busy, I put in a lot more time than that. There have been times when I’ve been up for 36 hours straight, then slept for a couple hours (2-4) then back up for another 36 for an entire week during a major expansion for one of the games, making sure our sites stay up and running, answering questions and providing information on multiple forums (including ones not my own) about when addons are updated, etc. At any given time I am in 15 or more IRC channels (between our own and other community channels), have 20 plus web browser tabs open, am logged into five different IM programs, and am getting feeds from FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

I think that more or less covers it, at least everything that I’m allowed to talk about. End of background, on to actual rants.

I’ve been debating doing this for ages now and finally decided that it is time. As it says in the ‘about me’ section, I do not work for any of the game companies. In these posts I am not speaking for my company. That’s why I’m not using either of the names that everyone knows me by (my real life name or my usual online name). Not because I’m trying to hide who I am, but to make it absolutely crystal clear that I am speaking completely for myself here, expressing my own personal opinion about things.

For 10 years now I’ve always very carefully tried not to say anything that might possibly upset people, tried to avoid getting into ‘political’ discussions. I’ve attempted to keep my opinion about various topics out of how I run things. I like to think that I’ve done a pretty good job of walking that fine line between upholding our rules yet still trying to allow people to express their feelings when they don’t agree with each other and/or with various situations or policies. Trying to remain ‘neutral’ and ‘professional’ can be hard some days, though.

All of that said, I’ve decide that it’s time to finally post about some of these things, on a personal level. This is me giving myself permission to have, and voice, an opinion (since I’m the only one who ever said I couldn’t).

I may not work for the game companies, but I have been around here for 10 plus years now. Maybe I flatter myself, but I would like to think that I have some knowledge and that perhaps something I say might actually be worth reading.

There probably won’t be many posts put up here. And the chances are that the ones that are posted will fall under the category of ‘rants’, since I have to feel pretty passionate about something before I’ll actually comment on it. There aren’t going to be a lot of pretty pictures up here. There’s likely going to be nothing more than massive walls of text alternating with extended periods of time during which there’s nothing posted at all. You've been warned. ;)

Yeah, so … here goes, I guess. :)

Kirin's Commentary

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Who the hell am I?

Friday, September 21, 2012

Just what community is ‘this community'?

Sunday, September 16, 2012

So, here goes