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April 26, 2001
EA: Comments from Leilo
The following was recently posted to the Team Comments page on the Ultima Online Web site:Comments from Leilo
Greetings!
I’d like to take the time today to talk about the various ways we communicate information from Ultima Online, and why we communicate in the ways we do. There are three major ways we handle communications: Site Announcements, Message Board posts, and Comments from the Team.Site Announcements
In closing, I also want to take a moment to welcome Cynthe to the Ultima Online Community team. Many of you know Cynthe from the hours she invested in supporting the UWOO community, and she’s rolled up her sleeves and jumped right in to UO. Cynthe will be handling the major content editing and writing duties for this site as well as keeping our website content up-to-date, helping organize new site additions, and much more. Cynthe and Melantus will continue to be the core of our UO Community Relations team, and I think you’ll find they have some exciting and useful plans for the future of UO Community Relations.
Our most ‘official’ method of communication is through the various announcements we post to the UO site. These range from game updates, to service announcements, to shard announcements, to policy changes. OCR works with the various teams within the company to sort out information for these announcements and come up with as concise as possible an explanation of the information you need to know. While sometimes the announcements are templates (explaining why every time you see a client patch announcement, they always read the same way), most of the time we write up announcements from scratch to address the current issue. The announcements are then approved by producers, managers, and those directly involved to be sure we’ve covered the appropriate information, and then are published to the website, sent to a list of fansite operators, and if extremely important, published to the login server message. While this method helps us be absolutely certain that the correct information is being posted, it also requires a bit of a time lag - explaining why situations arise from time to time where you may be aware of an issue before we’ve posted on it.
Message Board Posts
From time to time, you’ll see ‘red names’ posting on the UO.com message boards with questions, comments, or suggestions. These UO staff members have gone through a training program to help them answer your questions and concerns in the most effective way to help you. Message board posts are generally written ‘on-the-fly’, and because of that, the atmosphere of our message boards is relatively casual. As a rule, we try never to make important announcements only on our boards, but because of casual conversation, occasionally items may slip through. If this does happen, we’ll always try to clarify as quickly as possible.
Comments from the Team
The Comments from the Team section of the website was designed to provide you with a closer look at the people who contribute to UO from all of the various service areas. We keep the editing to a minimum, and the topics open - if one team member wants to write a bio, another talk about his experiences as a player, a third theorize on game design, or a fourth share a story of her trip to Tibet, that is their decision. (Though we’d likely talk her out of the Tibet stories.) Much like an editorial in your local paper, the Comments from the Team are the thoughts and ideas of the people behind-the-scenes, and as such are probably the least ‘official’ news we’ll ever publish. Does that mean they won’t have substance? Of course not. It does mean that much like all of you are a huge, diverse community with different ideas and goals and thoughts, so are the people writing these comments - and in this section, you may not always find us informational, useful, or even interesting… but you will always find the ‘real’ us - or at least the PG-rated versions.
Susan “Leilo” Kath
Manager, Community Services
Posted by Keith at April 26, 2001 11:46 AM