MMOG Industry Community Vet Speaks Out

Sanya Weathers, known for many years as Tweety, was the Community Manager for Dark Age of Camelot essentially since that game's launch. Known throughout the games industry as truthful, caring, and innovative, she almost created the position of Community Manager out of whole cloth. Many elements of Massively Multiplayer communities we take for granted today originated at Mythic in Sanya's hands. Now doing work freelance, she has time to blog about her experiences keeping Massive gamers happy. It is entitled Eating Bees, after a Penny Arcade strip on the subject of forum management. So far she has two posts up, one looking at what professionalism looks like in the position, and a hilarious fictional day in the life for a CM. "Bob forwards Gertrude's email to Jake, a programmer. Jake is not the one who coded the original element on which Gertrude's system is based. THAT guy, Wayne, is somewhere in the Caribbean coked up along with a bunch of strippers, where he has been ever since he cashed his FunFactory stock options, opened his own studio, and sold THAT one to MegaCorp for millions of dollars. Wayne was also a self-taught genius who adhered to no known coding formalities and whose comments were in haiku. Since Wayne left, approximately two dozen programmers of various levels of ability have added layers of complexity. Jake is very young and enthusiastic, but his joy at finally being in the gaming industry is starting to dim from coping with a ten year old pile of what is called "spaghetti code.""

Comments

Inherited code

[bobo mahoney]

I thought that I had it bad when I was handed a project written by another company. The problem is that it is written in C# and I have never seen C# before. Gotta love other peoples crap code.

Re:Inherited code

[thegrassyknowl]

It is my experience that anyone who recommends C# writes crap code, but that is my experience.

Re:Inherited code

[snowgirl]

My inherited code is in Perl... now, while I know Perl, and I was already good at Perl before hand... you really have to realize that this is PERL we're talking about.

You know, that language where when filtering against a list of files, you can just build one gigantic regular expression, and then just match against it.

I rewrote that piece of code to use a hash like any sensible programmer would...