BEST EMBRACE OF DEMOCRACY, FLAWED AS IT IS: EVE ONLINE This year CCP of Iceland (another potential finance joke sidestepped) invited the more than 200,000 players of Eve Online to vote for nine representatives from around the world to convey their concerns and suggestions about the game to the company. That alone was innovative. Then the company flew them to Iceland to sit down for a few days with the game’s developers. The company has committed to repeating the process about every six months, which makes this an idea that ought to spread beyond the game world. Maybe Microsoft should allow Windows users to vote for an officially recognized gripe committee. Maybe the airlines could have their chief executives sit down with an elected panel of frequent flyers twice a year. Hey, who says games can’t make the world a better place?
Woh, really? They actually asked their players what they wanted out of their game, in a serious manner not the usual “vote if you’d like beam weapons to be a) love pink b) radiation blue” and then decide the players didn’t know what they were talking about and go with ‘love pink’ anyway. That’s insane.
I imagine if Sony had done that with the Star Wars Galaxies game they wouldn’t have had to basically restart the game from scratch 2 or 3 years into it (and that was after 4 years of beta testing). Three years (7 if you count the very start of the game) in they finally got the “hey where’s the fucking JEDI this is Star FUCKING Wars?” message. At least the new Star Wars MMO is doin that right, even if the Jedi are wimps in it (a light saber should never take more than one or two hits to kill anything, and should carve off body parts in the process).