A New Challenger Approaches!

[Fass]

Congratulations Andy! Great to have you on the CM team and good to see you on the forums. I look forward to seeing what you guys have in store for the community.

And we are looking forward to see what you have up your sleeves.

[Unutterable]

Congratulations Andy! Great to have you on the CM team and good to see you on the forums. I look forward to seeing what you guys have in store for the community.

Can YOU take me to GM island?

[Khaletohep]

you guys

Who's the other half (or even more) of that plural?

Btw.: Thread not stickied, though of more relevance in the future than a certain goodbye thread.

[Fass]

Can YOU take me to GM island?

Sure, here is a virtual tour of it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a7OQZB-Y3E

[SciIti]

Hey, welcome aboard Andy ..
Don't let them kill you, okay ?
It's Conan age .. Hyborian players are a dangerous lot. (especially Derketo's followers)

[zeuss]

Who's the other half (or even more) of that plural?

Btw.: Thread not stickied, though of more relevance in the future than a certain goodbye thread.

Exactly my thought.

I hope Odonoptera continue on making a good job, like he was doing a good job as a GM, aoc deserve a community manager that involves with this game aswell and not only secret world since so far the absence is irritative to say the least...

So welcome Odonoptera

[Slith]

Congratulations Andy! Great to have you on the CM team and good to see you on the forums. I look forward to seeing what you guys have in store for the community.

me too. After 7 years there better be something. I could count on my two hands what has happened CM wise during 2008-2015.

I think the problem is that CMs don't know a thing about AOC and are not interested to get into it whatsoever. AOC boards is a place where CM post patch notes and an odd letter put together in when-I-feel-like-it manner and consisting of dated information.

Odonoptera might be a single exception to that rule for what is very close to a decade of negligence and incompetence.

When I posted this review http://aochideout.blogspot.com/2014/...view-2014.html certain CM was offended yet somehow managed to do even less in 2015

so making this post constructive:

What I would be doing if I was a community manager?
- short DEV chats
- posting screenies of some work in progress
- posting artwork for some future content/content in progress
- QA sessions with the devs
- special events in game (we had like ONE, deer hunting event back in 2009 I think)
- more activity in MMO media (articles, interviews). Its super hard to find any news about AOC on sites like massively.com
- organizing contests (stories writting, artwork painting, fastest dungeon run etc.)
- writing articles on Conan and Hyboria to make people understand the setting better and to expose them to the works of REH
- AOC official podcast (even 20 minutes a month would be awesome),

and I could keep going (its just stuff on top of my head).

What I don't want to see:
- another community manager doing nothing but re-posting stuff like dev letters
- another community manager showing up just to write snappy response to why he doesn't care about players being angry (hello Famine!)
- another community manager writing "Hello everyone I am new" post and then disapearing for months on end,
- another community manager doing his work in a way that players are not sure what his job really is.

[elsunga]

It's good to see finally someone from FC with active attitude here. I used to be long time player of TSW, but I burned out somehow. So I came back to AOC and honestly, this game would deserve much more love from devs. I know how difficult situation and limited resources FC has, but sometimes better attitude and communication would help a lot. As a TSW player I felt devs love game and they is a strong bond between them and community. It doesn't mean there are no problems but I have always felt that even situation is not ideal devs love their game and value TSW community. But honestly this is something what is missing in AoC. I would love to see this positive attitude from TSW back in AoC again.

And AoC would deserve this as even it is older game it is damn good - and especially Khitai, Dragonspine and Turan stuff. I felt quite sad when I moved from TSW but it looks like I find "new"game I really enjoy.

[Willd]

Greetings! This is GM Odonoptera. Do you have a moment to speak about your peti--

Wait, hold on.

I guess old habits die hard! Hey, everybody--I’m Andy “Odonoptera” Benditt, and I’m equal parts humbled, thrilled, and terrified to have the opportunity to work with Sezmra and Tomium as part of the Community team.

I’ve spoken to many of you in my time as a Game Master, so I’d like to share a few things about myself to help break the ice:

First and foremost, I’ve been working with Funcom since April 2012, and have been involved with online gaming communities since the days of direct-dialing a friend’s modem for a quick 1v1, or hopping on Kali to get my TDM fix on.

I’ve also helped moderate for dedicated server communities in the past, and have been an officer in successful raiding guilds for other titles.

On the side and in the past, I’ve been an assistant director for a local non-profit outfit, dabbled in performance arts, and even rang up Mr. Stephen Colbert himself at one point back during my retail days. I also enjoy drawing and painting through traditional and digital mediums, and I’m frequently out and about in town.

If I run into any local players, please, don’t hurt me!

That’s about all from me, folks. If you have any questions for me, ask away either here or on Twitter: @Odonoptera

I’ll answer what I can

Cheers!

Gz with new role in AOC man☺ what country are you from😊?

[Khaletohep]

The few fansites , esp. Cynara's and Slith's sites and Kentarii's AoC>TV, still alive for AoC should give a few hints about what a CM could do, e. g. interviews with former and current developers, introductions to new content and so on.

With new content being rare, making existing content enjoyable for more players is important. This can be done with simple tools available to customer service/marketing/whatever CMs are a part of:
- A very welcome thing would be a contest or other event getting people to write guides for classes, dungeons, raids and so on and post them here. Cynara more or less handles that thing as a one person show, and some raid groups - such as Blutlinie Croms - have done so for raid content (which conflicts with Cynara's guild's policies, I gather). Getting more of that stuff and getting it here would be in Funcom's interest, I assume.
- Maybe even give incentives for people to act as "tour guides", leading new players through dungeons and raids.
- Similar things can be done for PvP - every once in a while, a player organizes pvp noobs (disclaimer: I consider myself a PvP noob, so don't be insulted, fellow nooblings) to play "noob games" via the tournament system, which fixes the horribly broken matchmaking system and allows better class balancing.

What can be done to encourage people to do such stuff?
- Use words. By that I mean asking, not insulting or threatening, what apparently deserves mentioning with Funcom's current track record.
- Hand out token rewards like forum titles, Funcom points, social gear, pets and so on.
- Edit by Anzu: You should have known better.
- Enable picture posting in the dungeon, raid and class forums. It currently isn't, whereas in General, it is enabled, although posting pictures here in General is of limited use and can more or less only be used for creative, internet style insulting, such as this:

Edit by Anzu: Insults are not allowed.

Also, rethink of how you translate patch notes. At least the German translations have moved from "non-idiomatic" to "outright silly". Some examples from the 4.7 patch notes:

- "Boten haben beim Spawnen jetzt einen signifikanten Fallen-Effekt."
This translates back into English as: "Messengers now have a significant trap effect when they spawn."
"Snare" was translated as "trap". Small difference, but makes it completely unintelligible without translating it back into English and guessing at what was meant. A better term would have been "Verlangsamen" as in "Slow". Slow and snare are more or less synonymous in the English version, but not in the German one.

- "Die Menge an globalem Müll wurde verringert."
This is supposed to be mean "the amount of global trash was reduced", and even is literally correct, but has a completely different meaning. "Trash (mobs)" has no German translation, but is used as a loan word. Translating it is about as useful as translating "General Motors" into "Herr General Motors" or "Generelle Motoren". People either don't understand that or take it a joke.
The sentence currently means: "The amount of garbage was reduced globally." As Germany as a whole is somewhat interested in protecting the environment, that is nice to hear, but a.) probably untrue and b.) not really what was meant to be said.

- "Es wurde ein Problem mit den Katakomben behoben, durch den das Licht natürlicher war als vorgesehen." This is meant to translate "Resolved an issue with The Catacombs that allowed more natural lighting than intended.", but says something completely different, and obviously nonsensical.
The English version says that there was too much natural light (and the area was darkened), the German version says that the light was too natural (and now changed to looking less natural).
The mistake is in the "more" referring to the "lights", not the "natural", whereas in the German version, was merged with "natural" into a comparative of "natural" ("more natural"). This stinks of machine translation from a mile away.

- "In "Die Katakomben, Nacht" müssen Spieler jetzt aufstiegsbereit sein, damit sie die Katakomben betreten können."
The original to this is worded: "The Catacombs Night now requires players to be ready to advance before they can enter."
The "aufstiegsbereit" is meant to translate "ready to advance", and can be a fitting translation in some cases, but not in this context. The "aufstiegsbereit" German sentence reads like "ready to advance a level" or "ready to mount a horse" or "ready to climb a mountain". The mistake is small and probably difficult to understand for a non-native speaker, but it's outright hilarious.
An additional comical effect is produced by "aufstieg" meaning something like "getting up", whereas going to an underground catacomb obviously means "going down". If the Sphinx from Mystery Man had written those patch notes, the wording might fit ("To go forward, you sometimes have to go backwards.", "If you go a stairwell up, you have to be prepared to go it back down again."), but... well, he didn't.

To give a frame of reference: I laughed at, but understood the first two example sentences, as the mistakes are somewhat obvious, similar to ordering a "fried frenchmen" at McDonalds. The last two, I had to look up in the English version, because the mistakes made are too stupid to be made by a human translator at least somewhat fluent in German.
Remember that players that use zee Dscherman as a main language make up a significant amount of your customer base. Also, Bavarians usually don't speak German, but at least are able to read it, so this applies to them, too.

I don't know enough French to give a good opinion on the French translations, but I expect that the quality achieved there is similar and worth a look.

Stuff like this can be funny - a fellow player was so kind as to read us the German version of the patch notes in Teamspeak during a raid. We laughed our behinds off on some cases, but as a whole, it just doesn't give a professional impression. A above average 6th grader could probably done a better job or at least corrected the mistakes done here, and seeing this with a commercial product is somewhat dubious.

Edit by Anzu: Moderation is not a topic for the forums.