{"id":1584,"date":"2006-12-25T19:38:56","date_gmt":"2006-12-26T02:38:56","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-12-25T20:16:05","modified_gmt":"2006-12-26T03:16:05","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/node\/1584\/","title":{"rendered":"I like to think I&#8217;m a bit like Raph(&#8216;s pale shade)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s something I noticed with the launch of Areae, but also in other cases: Raph was all over the forums within seconds. Discussing the name, teasing and even answering back to some harsh comments that systematically come up when his name appears on a &#8220;gaming&#8221; board (that is where he has the most obstinate antagonists).<\/p>\n<p>And it looked like he loved all that.<\/p>\n<p>From an interview <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stratics.com\/content\/exclusives\/general\/raph_koster.php\">at Stratics<\/a>, where he demonstrates again that we can only aspire to become very pale, miserable imitations:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Really, it&#8217;s about touching players, and all of us being in a community. Today, it&#8217;s all so big that it can be hard to do.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>His way of dealing with the revelation of Areae is something I noticed because it&#8217;s exactly how I deal with things, or how I would deal with them.<\/p>\n<p>I cannot understand other devs and designers who go along doing their thing completely isolated. You have to beg to have your feedback considered, and it&#8217;s crazy.<\/p>\n<p>I always thought that if I ever actually designed something, something under my responsibility, then I would be all over the boards when that part is revealed. I would refresh every forum I know every thirty seconds to read possible feedback about what I did, to see if it works, to see if the players liked it or not, to discover its flaws. I would BEG to get as much feedback as possible and then I would be there answering the questions and already figuring out what is going to be the next step. What needs fixing, what needs more work, how I can tweak things so they can better match the intended purpose.<\/p>\n<p>You can be sure that within hours I would have already a very good and exhaustive picture of the whole situation and already laid down a plan about the next move. If there&#8217;s a problem you could be sure that it would be promptly acknowledged and that I&#8217;d do my very best to find a better solution.<\/p>\n<p>I consider the &#8220;evaluation&#8221; like the most important part of the job. And not just because it&#8217;s the outcome of your efforts, but because it represents the next starting point. Reiterations. You learn from what you did and that&#8217;s the basis of what you&#8217;ll do next.<\/p>\n<p>I really don&#8217;t know how I could do *without* that. If there&#8217;s something I&#8217;m working on, then I&#8217;d be all over that. Because the answer of the players, positive or negative is everything that feeds what I&#8217;m doing, that suggests me ideas, that gives me a good perception of how things are. I&#8217;d be anxious of seeing how players react to what I&#8217;m doing, to see if my ideas are confirmed.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s also the kind of &#8220;communication&#8221; that I think is indispensable. I just cannot imagine things in another way. It&#8217;s <i>natural<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Well, Raph has always excelled on this front.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>And today, there&#8217;s this whole cloud about whether SWG interacted with the community, but I really think we had a very special connection to players in the development days.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And it&#8217;s true. I was only able to peek in during the final weeks, but there was definitely something special.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s always something special when Raph is involved. I just hope the different focus of Areae won&#8217;t make the discussions lose the &#8220;heath&#8221; that is typical when we deal with worlds that we are really passionate about. From a meanie comment on FoH:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Well, you have to be happy that he&#8217;s off screwing up his own thing, instead of screwing up things we care about.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But it&#8217;s exactly when he screws things we care about that I like him the most :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s something I noticed with the launch of Areae, but also in other cases: Raph was all over the forums within seconds. Discussing the name, teasing and even answering back to some harsh comments that systematically come up when his name appears on a &#8220;gaming&#8221; board (that is where he has the most obstinate antagonists). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}