Fan Faire 2007
Day 1, Wednesday

The Star Wars Galaxies team arrived in Las Vegas and took the first available shuttles over to the Rio All-Suites Hotel. I’d been to Las Vegas before, but never really got much of a chance to check out the bright lights and gambling until now. The Rio, if you’ve ever seen it, is a huge 51 story arcology-like structure with loud colors and bristling with lights. We checked in early afternoon in the huge marble lobby on the ground level of the Rio and made our way past the bustle of the casino towards our respective hotel rooms to offload our baggage. Hunger struck, as it does, and a handful of the Austin developers and SWG community folk made our way to the lauded Carnival World Buffet.

They say Las Vegas is the City of Sin, and after eating at that buffet, I’m inclined to agree. The buffet featured in no small way, pretty much any food you could have imagined or desired. It was a magnificent thing to behold, and words fail me. After stuffing myself silly, I was fortunate enough to have some free time before being due for a meet and greet, so I played my hand at some video poker and didn’t do that bad. The meet and greet at the IBar was a lot of fun, and I got to shake hands and make early acquaintances with some of the Influencers of the SWG community, like Yivvits and MoyaWookiee.

Before long, Alan “Brenlo” Crosby passed out a handful of tickets to go see magician Lance Burton at the Monte Carlo. We headed over and had a grand time watching the Master Magician with the Kentucky accent make things levitate and vanish a few dozen different ways. Piling back into the taxi after the show, we were all invited up to Brenlo’s room for drinks to top the evening off. Alan, or “Crosbers” as I like to call him, introduced me to the glorious wonder of the “Appletini” and I schmoozed it up with the folks in attendance. After a few hours of this, I retired to my room, which by the way I might add was very luxurious, but looked like it had been decorated by a schizophrenic circus clown. Mardis gras pastels + 70’s retro furniture? A hit and a miss, Rio.

Day 2, Thursday

Awoke at 8:00 a.m. and seriously considered the merits of sobriety.

Luckily, a hearty breakfast was there to greet the team and community influencers at the Influencer Summit on the third floor in the Roses Room. We ate our fill and after introductions began the days’ work of getting to know the Influencers, what their biggest concerns are and how SOE as an organization could work on to improve overall. The feedback that I got out of the Influencers at this summit was probably the most valuable I received the whole time I was at Fan Faire. Having everyone just sit in a room and have their say was really kind of cathartic and good, I felt. For my first time, I got a lot of value out of it that I wasn’t really expecting.

After a few more hours of in-depth discussions with the Influencers, we were dismissed for the day, and folks went off to gamble or explore.

The VooDoo Lounge on the 51st floor of the Rio was open air, and the site of the Welcome Reception for the Fan Faire attendees. The reception was definitely a schmooze-worthy fest of hand-shaking and “OMG that’s YOU on the forums?” The view was spectacular, and I could see all the way to the end of Las Vegas in all four cardinal directions. The glamorous nature of working in the game industry rarely strikes me, but this was really very fancy and quite impressive.

I met Sabrehawk from WarCry, two new players from Chilastra, a handful of players from Bloodfin and Bria, and a great number of other SWG players. I had a long talk with Clobber from Bloodfin about the state of the game and perceptions, and met up again with Player of the Year Kordell later on. After enjoying a little too much all that the VooDoo Lounge Bar had to offer, I decided to hightail it to the elevator and call it a night.

Day 3, Friday

“Korah! Matah! Korahhhh! Rahtahmahhh!” - my cell phone goes off rousing me from a fitful sleep. On the line is EM Stock, Senior Community Manager at the Austin studio asking me to come down and help with Pex’s live event. I jump into my Sith robe and scamper downstairs to the convention center where I’m greeted by members of the 501st, other members of the SWG team, and Jason “Pex” Ryan. Pex quickly explains the gist of the game I’m to host with Qui-Gon as Padawan training. The basic objective is to keep a single balloon in the air for 30 seconds, using nothing but thin plastic lightsabers. We did this for squads of 10, split into 5, and it was quite the aerobic workout!

Slightly dead from strenuous Jedi calisthenics, I made my way to the art panel. The room was packed, as most SWG panels would turn out to be, so I found a cozy spot near the door. After an unforgiving snapshot or two by Sabrehawk (and Firestar, I think) I settled in for “Bringing Star Wars to Life” by Alex Allen, our Lead Artist on SWG at the Austin studio. A lot of questions the players asked were interface/targeting related, with a heavy focus on requesting new content. The upcoming gardens and plants artwork got a lot of attention, and we got some great kudos on adding furniture color customization in-game. After taking a bunch of questions, Alex gave out some beautiful concept art pieces to the players.

Directly after the art session, there was “What’s Your Story?” with Jason Ryan and Mark Halash, which was a great panel with a lot of audience feedback. Many players requested expansions to the existing Storyteller system, and all present expressed interest in seeing more live events take place in-game. It was interesting to see how excited live events made the players. After attending this panel, my opinion on live events actually shifted a little as a result of the responses from the players. Not only do live events add to the immersion level of a game, but also to the tolerance level of the players. Many of the players who claimed to have experienced a live event in-game at one point seemed to have a stronger loyalty, or stickiness to the game.

Next, I headed over to “The ENT Session”, all about Entertainers N’ Traders with Thomas “Blixtev” Blair, Lead Designer on Star Wars Galaxies. Dances took the top focus, with a greater emphasis on needs-based economics for traders coming in close second. I did my best impersonation of an Elder Jedi Usher as Blixtev responded to each of the trader sub-classes and entertainers in kind. Even though this was my first real Fan Faire, I’ve really grown to appreciate watching Thomas Blair respond to players. He’s really one of those rare breeds of designers that totally “gets it”. The ENT Session went well, with a lot of great suggestions going down for consideration. We all headed off for the next session entitled, “We’ve Got Plenty of Space…So What Should We Do With It?”

The panel was intended to draw on community feedback about updates for space and piloting that might make a good chapter publish. Hosted by Producer Lorin Jameson and Designer Travis Hicks, this was a mostly open-ended panel that plumbed the depth of possibility where space is concerned.

Customizable ships, integrating Galactic Civil War land and space combat, enhancing missions, and expanded pobs were just some of the things discussed. There were a lot of good thoughts, and I’m sure we came away with a fresh perspective on what new stuff folks want for space.

After all the Galaxies panels on Friday, there was a big Community Address by John Smedley that was pretty awesome. He showed movies of the new games SOE would be releasing in the future, including Gods and Heroes, Pirates of the Burning Sea, The Agency and Free Realms. Then, he showed visuals of upcoming updates to games like EQ and EQII and they even heaped a bunch of praise on the recent additions made to Star Wars Galaxies. Smedley thanked the Galaxies players in attendance over and over again for their patience and for sticking with us. It was nice to have the game and players recognized in this fashion.

The big new product announcement Smedley made was a digital card game that can be played in or outside of EQ and EQII called “Legends of Norrath.” In fact, it can be played across the two products so at anytime an EQII player can challenge an EQ player to a game. The beta for it will be starting soon and people seem excited about it because the loot drops that it will give you in-game are pretty sweet.

Finally that evening, there was a pool party at the hotel for everyone attending Fan Faire, and was just chock-full of awesome people. There was a live karaoke band and so all of us were the entertainment! Sabrehawk sung (badly) and Brenlo also took the stage. By the time I’d finally had enough to drink to even consider singing Loveshack by the B52’s, they had shut down the festivities. Good luck on my part, I think. From what I understand, what happens in Vegas, stays on the Internet FOREVER. The party itself was schmoozetacular, with the gang from Naritus and Bloodfin making the most ruckus. I drank my first $6.00 bottle of water and had a glorious time. Before retiring for the evening, I stopped by the roulette table and actually won once or twice!

Day 4, Saturday

I totally slept in Saturday morning. I moseyed downstairs and hobnobbed in the Legends Lounge with fellow SWG devs until the first SWG panel started. I had a quick lunch of General Tso’s chicken at Sao Paulo Café and then headed over to the panel entitled “Let’s Not Fight About Combat” with Blixtev. I really wasn’t surprised to find this panel to be a bit rowdier than the others, but there was a great emphasis on interface and targeting from the players (and not just Yivvits). I wrangled the microphone during this, and tried to keep things as on topic as possible. Lots of good ideas about the GCW and combat, animation speeds again and mines were touched on. I think the designers came away with some very valuable insights from this panel, as did the players.

My next stop was a community relations panel on podcasting, featuring some prominent podcasting fan celebs. Pertinent, as I’d be interested in learning how to do it for the future. I came away with a lot of good advice from this session. I had no idea that those guys cut out the “Umm”s and the “Uhh”s. No wonder they sound so professional! [Best Sean Connery Accent] - I’m on to you Trebek! Thish guy readsh from a card!

The biggest SWG panel of the entire event was The SWG Gathering, with all the developers, John Smedley, and LucasArts in a two hour Q&A fest. We showed off a little raw footage of the upcoming heroic encounters that are planned for Chapter 7. There were lots of little straggler questions that weren’t covered earlier in the day through various panels, and the specifics were answered mostly by Blixtev, but also DeadMeat and Tunso.

All in all though, the session went great, and the lack of shouting, bloodshed or angst is surely a testament to how far SWG has come. Players in attendance also won some uber-phat lewtz from LucasArts through a raffle and also by answering Star Wars trivia questions correctly. There was about an hour or so until the big dinner banquet always thrown the last evening of Fan Faire, so I made haste up to my room for a quick cat-nap and caught an episode of Futurama (the one with the Smell-o-Scope).

The banquet was enormous, and after finally getting situated, the hot dogs and hamburgers were tasty and delectable, as was the slow-churned ice-cream and mini-cheesecakes.

Brenlo MC’ed the banquet masterfully, and the in-game wedding went off without a hitch, if you’ll pardon the pun. Did I not mention that there was an EQII couple who decided that they wanted to tie the knot live (as well as in-game) at the Fan Faire banquet? It was a quite a spectacle and the best part of it was that Darth Vader himself and two stormtroopers led the happy couple down the aisle! People were clapping and yelling their heads off. During the in-game portion of the wedding, I giggled a little when I heard the Bria table shout “We can actually SIT on chairs in our game! Hah!” at the guests assembled in-game in EverQuest II.

For a chance at winning prizes, Jordano from Naritus got up on stage and showed everything but the full monty, proving how truly hardcore SWG players can be, and the Bria folk busted out with the worm. The SWG message to the rest of the Sony family that night? “You got served.” After some pics, raucous mixing and move-bustin’, I turned in for the evening, a tired and sore community monkey.

Aftermath

So here we are, post-Fan Faire. With a metric ton of stuff to catch up on, and a renewed mandate from the players to keep forging forward, we’ll be sorting through feedback for a few days as things get back into the swing of things. It was fantastic to have met so many SWG players in person and get their input directly. It was wonderful to be able to put a face to a name with so many folks.

I am eagerly looking forward to the next Fan Faire, and I hope it will be as fun, productive and memorable as this last one was.
-GP