Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta Difficulty vs Final stretch of the development

Well, I just posted you a job blurb from Rare (you know, now forced to churn MS titles out like candy), and I'll let a man with more experience than I tell you some wisdom:

If I have learned anything from writing Indie games for a living for fifteen years (and there are plenty who would say that I haven't), it is that it is usually a bad idea for creators to visit online forums discussing them and their work. It doesn't lead to happy ends.

Jeff Vogel - three reasons creators should never read the forums

I'd also urge you to actually read this excellent long piece via Polygon - Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry.

"A lot of developers just sit and make their games," he said. "Not everyone is Jonathan Blow, who is willing to engage. The vast majority don't, so they're almost constantly surprised when something happens.

Stephen Toulouse, 6 years @ Xbox live policy & enforcement.

After Dragon Age 2 came out in 2011, Hepler told Polygon, many of the people involved in the game's development received angry emails, abusive forum posts and petitions calling for them to be fired. About that time, someone dug up an old interview Hepler participated in six years earlier. In the interview Hepler mentioned that her least favorite part of working in the game industry was playing through games and combat. Some of the interview was put in the official forums as evidence that Hepler was to blame for changes in the game's combat. The forum post was removed and Hepler went on maternity leave. But then the following February someone created a forum post resurfacing the interview and called Hepler the "cancer" that was destroying BioWare.

Hepler was lead dialogue on DA2 / ME2.

Or even...

Josh Olin, the community and eSports manager at Evolve developer Turtle Rock Studios, is no longer with the company in the wake of a series of remarks related to vilified Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

Olin, a former community manager at Treyarch Studios (Call of Duty: Black Ops) and Riot Games (League of Legends), said on Twitter on Wednesday...

http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/1/567...anager-josh-olin-twitter-donald-sterling

Admittedly, that's an outside issue leading to a firing, but the common rule is that you don't use company headed Twitter / social media accounts to post anything.

Pro-tip: major AAA studios have strict guidelines on public interaction, that's why community managers / PR exists. I can tell you for a fact that 2K games, Ubisoft, and Bioware all allow only carefully vetted public interaction from the dev team.

But, as ever... a single line, unsupported by any "fact" other than "new hip studios do it" [note: they don't, esp. in the growth industry that is social media games a la Zynga] will suffice our brave young game developer!


I'm out - continue the fantasy!





Take a look @ Larian's public posting ~ you'll note a community manager, a QA manager and Forktong posting. The person(s) doing content or coding the fixes that are being reported in bug threads... perhaps not so much, they're probably crunching

Please do continue though, I'm sure you know how workflow works at an AAA studio.