Joe Ludwig’s recent blog entry caught my eye. He recounted how it all happened when lots of people were laid off at Sierra, when he was working on Middle-Earth Online. I guess mass laid off and business closing is still the same deal as 10-20 years ago. Somewhat depressing, yet, it’s all business. I for one am glad The Lord of the Rings Online is doing well so I still have a job! 
CCP posted an extremely detailed re-count of their internal affairs investigation about accusations of corruptions and wrongdoings in their organization. This is very interesting. Top tier EVE Online players are among the hardest core of all hardcore PvP players, and they are most organized since the game greatly promotes such. There was an organized attack occured over the three-day weekend on their forums, Slashdot, Digg and Wikipedia about these accusations.
Finally, we have an XPlanner installation working on Linux. We are starting a new sprint, so I thought, hey I should try this. I happily entered data into XPlanner, putting in our story estimates, and then putting in our task estimates. Little do I know in current version of XPlanner, there’s no disjoint unit for story estimates and task estimates. As soon as you enter in tasks, their estimates are totalled and override the story one. This is really bad for us as it provides no way to track story points.
This is posted on the Blizzard forums by Eyonix:
As many of you know, the latest content patch, along with many great new content additions, contains technical counter-measures designed to combat in-game gold spamming. Our efforts to reduce in-game abuse and create a fun, safe environment for everyone are never-ending.
With that said, we felt that it was important to share with the community just how serious we are in our efforts to combat this type of abuse. Blizzard has filed a federal lawsuit against the operators of Peons4hire, a popular gold-selling organization which many of you have no doubt seen advertised. As part of the lawsuit, the operators of Peons4hire have been asked to immediately cease all in-game spamming efforts by all entities and websites under their control.
If this organization refuses to act accordingly, further legal action will be taken. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of this topic.
Came across two great entries today in the blogsphere. Don’t have much time to respond to them unforutnately, but would like to point them out at least in case you are interested, and me for responding to them later:
MMOGNation: Why EQ2 Is Still The Underdog
Eating Bees: Why does it take so long to answer simple questions?
And a previous entry from yesterday, and I am in the process of writing a response to:
Read a very heart-warming story today about Blizzard and the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America working together to grant a terminally illed child his wish of designing something in World of Warcraft. His wish was granted and many goodies were showered, including a quest written by him, NPC voiced by him and a custom weapon. Read the whole story at OCRegister, which links to the original story of the journey to Blizzard.
Very clearly in response to the recent outburst from Tseric, Sanya Weathers, most recently and formerly of EA Mythic, dishes it out like it is. It gives good perspective on what being a community person is all about. Great read I like these two parts the best:
The secret to making friends out of board warriors, and lasting for more than eight months on the front line, is sincerity. If you can fake sincerity, you belong on the publishing side of the business. You can’t fake it as a community manager. You have to like the people you’re dealing with or you’ll burn out. You have to BE one of the people you’re supporting or you’ll burn out. (And you need support from the company that employs you or you’ll burn out publicly, but that’s another rant.) I never went to a player or press gathering where I didn’t feel like I’d come home. If you don’t feel that buzz? If you don’t see your friends in the people who traveled miles just to talk to you? Get out. You don’t have what it takes.
If you genuinely care about your customers, both developer and player, you will make the right decisions, none of which involve going postal in public.
And from one of my OCR friends, who exclaimed “sooooo true” at this line:
The real frustrations for a real community person will never have to do with the players.
We haven’t been using ScrumWorks Basic much anymore. Some people don’t like the reports from it and the work of going into making your own makes it not worth it to some. We also haven’t had the time and resources to invest into make new interfaces via the SOAP API. ScrumWorks Pro has a lot of things that we want to have, but unfortunately at $249 per seat per year, that’s a bit too steep for us.
We started looking at XPlanner. It’s open source so it’s free, but documentation is minimal. With us not being a Java house, we are having some trouble setting it up. From a features standpoint, it looks decent. If only we can get it up and running. One of these days, I might just write one myself in PHP
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