Last night I started in on a post about the hiring of former-IGE’er Dave Christensen by SOE. He’s apparently been freelancing for them for about six months, and the company has now hired him to assist them in developing markets outside of North America. I started the post, but then canned it after a paragraph or two. I stopped, examined my feelings, and thought “Don’t they have the right to hire whoever they want?” “Just because he worked for IGE, I shouldn’t read into that, should I?”

Lum, as per usual, says the right thing:

Whether or not Mr. Christensen is a valuable asset to SOE’s Asian expansion, or whether or not the “secondary market” is a valid part of MMOGs are both arguable (and the latter certainly has been, for years), but this somewhat mind-boggling fact remains: SOE is advertising, via a press release, the valuable work done by IGE, a company which for years has acted directly in counter to their own interests, and in so doing grants them yet another thin veneer of respectability. I’m not sure what the definition of “corporate responsibility” is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.

I couldn’t put my finger on what about this rubbed me so raw, but that’s it on the nose: hiring Christensen (who may be a very capable and affable fellow, to be sure) spits in the face of the players who deliberately avoid participating in secondary currency markets. The Station Exchange is one thing, and we can argue talk all day long about the propriety of a company engaging in that kind of business with their customers. But, to shake hand with the devil? John Smedley himself said, in our interview for Gamasutra,

There is rampant farming in these games (yes, ours included). I believe we should work to include some element of this in some games, but do a better job of cracking down on it in a big way. I have personally had it affect my gameplay and I think it’s very negative.

That’s a great line to put up in an interview about a touchy subject, but it doesn’t appear that Mr. Smedley’s personal opinions were involved with the business decisions of the company he helms. I understand the demands of market reality, but certainly somebody over there had to understand what this hiring would look like to the gaming community.

SOE has been slammed many, many times over the years for moves seen as crass or ill-conceived. My personal favorite bit of stupidity was the ‘Search for Antonia Bayle’ contest that saw the selection of a model for their press events. A low-brow media grab that infantilizes their male players and sexualizes their female players. Completely awesome.

The Sony parent company has been slammed a lot in the last year as well, but the MMOG community is a lot smaller (despite WoW) than the gaming community at large. And, unlike the average gamer, we remember. Folks pissed at company Z for releasing a title too early or with a stupid media stunt forgive everything as soon as Z’s newest hottest title comes out. Conversely, I have friends who are still pissed about EverQuest class nerfs from 2001. Personally, I can recall every change that’s been made to the Paladin class in every single World of Warcraft patch so far.

It’s a different animal, because your average gamer doesn’t associate as closely as MMOG players do with their avatar. For a lot of long term gamers, your Massive avatar becomes a buddy, a close friend. For some gamers, they are the avatar. Nerfing their avatar’s skills is like make the player less powerful, and that’s a hard thing to forget. Moreover, nerfs and gameplay changes can fundamentally impact how you interact with your friends in a Massively multiplayer game. If you can’t play your role effectively in the group anymore … well, thanks for all the fish. That hurts. That hurts a lot.

To bring this back together, this applies directly to the hiring of an ex-IGE staffer. SOE players look at this move, and remember back to all the times they were frustrated by farmers camping a spawn. They remember back to the time that crappy game design made them think about going outside the bounds of what they considered moral, just so they could play with their friends. And it makes them upset. Some of them will be angry. Witness Heartless’s closing statement on Christensen’s hiring:

This hiring speaks volumes about the business politics of SOE and their money first mentality. This strongly supports my opinion that SOE just wants your money. Everything they can charge you for; they will. They don’t give a damn about you as a player, and I doubt they ever will.

In as plain a terms as I can make them, this is my own closing statement on this issue:

SOE, please wake the hell up. You’ve got to just cut this crap out. I don’t care if Christensen is a supra-genius with the ability to juggle rabbits while filing taxes; you are the leaders of a huge community of people. Unlike with SCEA or Nintendo, whose ‘community’ is really only around for whatever you’ve done for them lately, your players are in this for the long haul. You still have people playing EverQuest for crap’s sake! You just released your thirteenth expansion to that game!

By hiring a man who ‘drove the company’s relationships with the massively multiplayer publishing community’ to represent you in other countries, you are saying to those players that the last 8 years don’t mean anything to you. You’re telling your players that it’s alright to purchase your way through the content that they (with tooth and nail) clawed out of Norrath’s belly. You are telling your players that their accomplishments are meaningless, because they can be purchased.

You have to understand, SOE, that stating those kinds of things can lead to unpleasant questions. Statements like that lead to thoughts like “Why am I playing this if it is meaningless?” and “Do they deserve my money if they think I’m wasting my time?”

The answer to the latter question, in light of your decision to diminish the works of your players, would seem to be: No. SOE does not deserve your money.