As I've said at the start of this round, I'm going to be working on coding until next round, and next round I'm expecting to tick off a few of the major "design directions" things that are actually dead-certs (remember some of them are just "ideals" or "ideas for inspiration", but some of them will be going in directly as I listed them).
In my 7 years of running Bushtarion (this is a long time, and a long lifespan for a game), I've found that I can either work on two things "properly";
* Making a shiny happy face on the forums and IRC every day posting in every thread and saying to the world "Hey look, I'm here, and I'm ready to hold your hand!" and everyone cheers until they find out features aren't ready for the next round and it's all "Lazy Azzer". "Community Management" - this is not what the aim of my life was and is frankly somthing you all know I'm crap at. I'm rubbish at wrapping things up in pretty words, "management speak", telling everyone how wonderful they all are and general customer service. I've never been able to bring myself to be able to communicate with people other than as a "person to person" footing rather than a "I'm a professional company you're my loyal customer" footing - I just suck at it and can't do it
* Get my head down and work on coding (this is what I consider my job, what I enjoy, and what I'm good at) and actually get things done a lot quicker (atm I'm working on both my big epic RPG project again, as I told people I would start working on again in a big way some time back, trying to make a final big push on completing that over the next 4 months or so, and dedicating days to Bushtarion coding in-between too), and just grit my teeth and endure all the guys and girls who need my hand-holding (see above point) to prevent them being all "Omg Azzer's abandoned us" (something I've seen and most of us have seen voiced loudly and doomsdayishly on these forums whenever I disappear for these coding patches which I seem to do like this every couple of years - I
do need breaks from the constant "Oh woe is me everything is terrible" posts and really
need to just get back to my roots of coding rather than community-ing at times - because those posts get you down no matter how many positive "I love the game thanks for keeping it free and advert and sponsorless all these years and enduring all the crap you can get like the persistant death threats from certain banned people" messages you get)
All this experience over time has also been making me think I need to adjust people's perspective of how this game and myself operate - and get somebody new in to the team on a more official basis. I need a "Community Manager" - an official "spokesperson" who can do all that talky talky stuff and has a direct, regular, private contact with me to keep me afoot of all goings on (tbh I already have that aspect of things from certain helpful people
), but that I can then relay information back to and they can post up in nice tied up community style speak, and that can deal with the "community related" tasks like bannings, locks, etc.
I know for a fact that after my years of experience with Bushtarion, this is exactly how I'm going to run the RPG (and I have 2 people already lined up to help run it full time from the community side so I can do the coding and take a backseat from the community, as you'll find 90% of developers of games do), but I'm going to run it like that from day 1 so people don't have this expectation of having me posting on the forums and doing all the "one-man-band" stuff all the time (and thus no disappointment when I disappear to do the coding) - I have a feeling that the community on Bushtarion got so used to having this personal "hands on" approach from me that they won't be able to handle/accept a "Community manager/representative" figure in my place "publically" - but it's something I think I'd like to do. People don't like me being a crap "community manager", but they don't like me not showing my face either.
I don't know any people that say they actually like how I communicate with people (outside of a personal nature). And one of the largest criticisms really about me is either my hodge-podge nature of community managing, my "Oh grow up you big baby" type messages to people I can't be bothered with etc. - so I don't think people would miss anything by me taking a more permanent back seat and sticking to the code
as long as we actually had an active and willing "community manager" who does talk to me all the time and is motivated enough to take on quite a lot of responsibility (ability to lock accounts in sure cases, doesn't play the game in any involved manner, doesn't get involved in "friend/social groups" so can remain unbiased in decisions) and pass messages back to you guys regularly.
Anyway I am still "here" - just sitting under the engine of Bushtarion atm rather than driving in the front seat. Or something.