Hey Star Sonatians! This is the first of hopefully a fun series of posts from your dev team where we answer your questions about the dev team, certain policies, etc. If you want to ask us a question for it to get answered in next week’s post toss it over to this topic.
This week’s questions were directed to me, Bageese AKA Marty by the player Starwyrm.
1. Hours of SS played weekly?
I don’t really “play” Star Sonata anymore, unlike the rest of the dev team who are very active in game. The reason being is that I am responsible for making some really tough decisions that directly affect the players, where other devs create cool stuff and you see it much later than when they made it. I don’t play actively because I don’t want to develop biases towards or against any groups of players, so I can be as impartial and fair as possible. However I often enjoy making new characters and trying out the nexus or exploring around, but I don’t play on my main character much aside from little bouts of dging or dueling in colo. So in direct answer to your question, on my main I might play an hour a week (duel me in colo!), whereas I play on alts for maybe 5 hours a week. Before I became community manager I think I played 20-30 hours a week.
2. What recent content have you at least influenced?
Jeff called me the planner at one point in my SS career. While I don’t directly influence content, I like to make sure the dev team has larger goals in mind and we’re working towards those goals. I LOVE organization and action based on being organized. In late 2012 we had a lot of unhappy players calling out some specific issues that we were not addressing, Jey, SI and I organized a meeting that all developers were invited to where we addressed specific concerns that the players were unhappy about. We’ve been continuing this trend of large team meetings every 3-4 months since. A lot of what I influence is more like game code oriented stuff, like PVP, BVB, economy, etc. Content isn’t really my forte. I DID redesign Sol at one point and used fancy math to make all the planets actually have distances reflective of their actual distances in our Solar System. That was fun.
I tend to be a big voice on Solo Berserker game play, and a supporter of all classes having a solo role and a squad role. I love talking about that one time as a zerker where I fought a 10 man squad solo… no one died of course, but I held my own… 
People couldn’t decide if I was a sniper or an SD and then freaked out when I multi fired five weapons… Good times. My setup is horribly outdated, so if you’re in entry level t21 gear, toss me a pm and we’ll duel in colo! Or you could toss me a pm anyways and most likely annihilate me.
3. What is your position on the dev team and what does that involve?
My official title is “Community Manager” or “Community Admin.” In the dev team we don’t have an overall hierarchy. Jeff, Jey and I would be the “admins” or the decision makers in regards to major issues, with Jeff being content, Jey being server, and me being player affairs. Basically we make the final call and have the most access, but a lot of decisions are made by the team as a whole with discussion furthering progress.
Above I said I’m a community manager, and then I am the decision maker in regards to player affairs. So I like to say that I work on everything that’s not actually making the game. I am in charge of the moderation team and with developer, player, and moderation team feedback, I edit and create the rules of the game. Any time someone gets a ban, or a mute longer than two hours, I am the one directly behind it most of the time.
I am also responsible for the customer service and quality assurance teams and setting policies regarding their operation. I currently oversee five AMAZING volunteers that help on the forums, support tickets, and general feedback for developers. I am also the primary responder on all tickets not related to bugs, with assistance from Jey, Blue Dwarf, and SI depending on the nature of the ticket. Support tickets currently take up about 25-50% of my current work schedule, and I do anything from assistance with account recovery, to billing issues, refunds on slaves, gear depending on the issue, combing through activity logs, etc.
Working with Jeff, I also am trying to direct our marketing, and while marketing an indie game is incredibly challenging it’s also a ton of fun. The trick of marketing an indie game is to figure out how to promote your game without spending any or spending little money, since that money would best be served improving the game. I’ve been researching conventions to attend for indie games, youtubers to contact, and marketing strategies. With WinterWind, The Vert, and The Suit’s amazing assistance I was able to put together the 2013 survey that I’m using to figure out who plays Star Sonata currently so our advertising going forward is targeting the right people.
And finally, I’m responsible for overseeing player relations, whether this be mending relationships with players that haven’t had an ideal experience, social media management, and events. I try to be fairly active on the forums, reading and scouring topics to find what sorts of things are plaguing the community so I can highlight those in meetings with developers. I try to be the bridge between the Dev world and the Player world explaining to Devs why they need to change, implement, or improve something, and explaining to the players why something can’t happen (bonus points if you caught my subtle reference in that sentence).
So to conclude this exceptionally wordy post, I do a lot of little and different things, instead of focusing on one major task.
Discuss in the Forum