Nevrax Announces the Addition of Industry Veteran to Production Team

[lawrence]

Just a quick message to our german and french players browsing these forums:

Let me just assure you that you won't be missing out on any important information here. We will be translating any important statements from Jessica for you guys and make them available over on the french and german message boards.

[raynes]

Thanks for the kinds words, folks. As you can imagine, I'm up to my eyeballs right now, but I'll take some time in the next day or two to answer some of the questions here.

In the meantime, the pie is in the corner.

Thank you ahead of time for answering our questions.

[nonne]

Welcome Jessica and like the rest said already hope you will enjoy SoR as much as we all do..

[micrix]

Turns out the column she wrote pre Turbine/AC is still on the web if anyones interested. http://www.skotos.net/articles/bth.html

She also has a book listed on amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592730000/026-9357818-6887656

ok buying it might be a little too keen but theres a brief synopsis of her work.

http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_44.shtml

This woman seems to have humor. I think its perfect. Welcome Jessica

[vinnyq]

lol.

This is probably wrong, how we keep diggin stuff up about her and posting links to her old articles, but I think they're really good!

So here's another one:

Bonk! Bonk! On the Head, Bonk! Bonk!

That was written on July 31, 2001, but there're still so many aspects (some of it experienced here in the SoR universe), that I think it's defn worth a read if you're interested in the whole mmorpg industry thing.

p.s. edit to add: note how she wrote about open communication to the players because we're "paying customers" bit. *winkwinknudgenudge*

also like to add that Nevrax has done a supreme part so far (relatively) at the customer support and keeping players end, we just like more more more, just a tad, pretty please? It's the "missing content" and "delay of patches" that keep some of us in bunches.

eh ... might as well throw another question at her while I am at it.

question to Jessica: What is it about Saga of Ryzom that draws your interest to the Nevrax team as the next foray of your extensive career in the online game industry? (I have done my research).

[micrix]

lol.

This is probably wrong, how we keep diggin stuff up about her and posting links to her old articles, but I think they're really good!

They are intended to be public. I can not see any wrong. The best way to get to know someone...

question to Jessica: What is it about Saga of Ryzom that draws your interest to the Nevrax team as the next foray of your extensive career in the online game industry? (I have done my research).

Isnt it obvios ?

[vinnyq]

Isnt it obvios ?

to you and me maybe, but I like to hear it from her.

And thanks for the straight answers, Jessica. I love your style and wit.

Fyi ... I am going over your archived 1997 BTH articles right now and it's bringing back a lot of nostalgias and insightful stuffs. I also jumped over to the AC2 forum a bit to see what people said about you and saw your goodbyes thread. Hope you don't mind.

[xenofur]

since you actually showed that you would really answer tough questions and also explain things(which is a completely novel concept on these forums ) i have a question i'd like to see answered as well:
the topics is bugs
first off: as far as nevrax seems to see it, bugs do not exist unless they affect 95% or so of the server pop. to me this seems to be a quite arrogant attitude, are you perhaps able to explain on that?
furthermore it seems like even the csr staff doesn't have any way of checking that kind of stuff, my friends and me have submitted many bugs via support tickets and almost every time the only answer we got was: "this could be a bug, we'll send it to the developers and they'll have a look at it" which was until now and to our knowledge never followed up in any way.
players are still confused about parts of the game and not able to determine wether it works as intended or if something is a bug. we have asked for a bug database since before the release of this game only to be met with utter silence. one player(who has since left the game) has even created a bug database( http://www.atysbugs.tk/ ), which sadly failed.
my question here is: can we get a database with bugs that is accessible to players? read-only would be completely fine. if not, could you explain why not?

p.s.: exploits would be an argument that would be valid in most cases, but not here, hard exploits(item duping) are usually fixed within two or less days and other exploits(cliffing, dragging bosses out of their lair to pick them off on their own, abusing merchants to transport items) have been widely known and happily used for months now, some even accepted as features, without any intervention on nevrax' side whatsoever.

[Jessica Mulligan]

This is probably wrong, how we keep diggin stuff up about her and posting links to her old articles, but I think they're really good!

There are a lot more where that came from; I wrote that column for 6 years, .

leh ... might as well throw another question at her while I am at it.

question to Jessica: What is it about Saga of Ryzom that draws your interest to the Nevrax team as the next foray of your extensive career in the online game industry? (I have done my research).

See the Q&A posted elsewhere. Lots of interesting possibilities here...

[Jessica Mulligan]

since you actually showed that you would really answer tough questions and also explain things(which is a completely novel concept on these forums ) i have a question i'd like to see answered as well:
the topics is bugs

first off: as far as nevrax seems to see it, bugs do not exist unless they affect 95% or so of the server pop. to me this seems to be a quite arrogant attitude, are you perhaps able to explain on that?

As with every other development team, bugs have to be prioritized for fixing and testing. Naturally, the most harmful ones go to the top of the list, which means less pressing bugs get pushed down the list.

What usually happens over time, then, is that you get a stack of low priority bugs that you have a hard time getting around to, because there always seems to be more pressing issues that need attention. So even though it may seem like a bug you reported headed off into the aether somewhere, it is still on the list. For obvious reasons, we just plain don't have the time to notify everyone who files a bug report of the resulting follow-up.

Or, to put it another way: We could do it, if you're willing to accept that I would have to use scarce resources to do so and less other work would get done because of it. No offense, but I choose to use those man-hours on other work, .

furthermore it seems like even the csr staff doesn't have any way of checking that kind of stuff, my friends and me have submitted many bugs via support tickets and almost every time the only answer we got was: "this could be a bug, we'll send it to the developers and they'll have a look at it" which was until now and to our knowledge never followed up in any way.
players are still confused about parts of the game and not able to determine wether it works as intended or if something is a bug. we have asked for a bug database since before the release of this game only to be met with utter silence. one player(who has since left the game) has even created a bug database( http://www.atysbugs.tk/ ), which sadly failed.
my question here is: can we get a database with bugs that is accessible to players? read-only would be completely fine. if not, could you explain why not?

While it is not necessarily a bad idea, again: Do you want me taking other work hours for this right now, resources that could go to fixing bugs? Keeping something like this running and current would be a full-time job for someone. I suppose I could shift someone from game dev or coding to do it...