I appreciate your anticipation for this Woodsman but keep in mind we're getting to know Jeff ourselves. So far I personally have reason to feel confidence but then I say that imagining the eye rolls that 'she drank da koolaide'
I may not have interacted with him on Twitter, but like anybody who has followed him on Twitter since he took over UO, it's been easy to get to know him pretty well - the games he likes, his influences, etc. He seems like a gamer's gamer and somebody I'd probably have a beer with and talk about games he's worked on or played.
But I'm more interested in UO. You say you personally have reason to feel confidence, but unless you are privy to information the rest of us are not, what we've seen from him publicly in regards to UO is absolutely nothing new. Even the resurrection tokens, the only truly new thing announced under his tenure, are just pulling together tokens that already exist.
If you all are privy to information that the rest of us are not, well don't be surprised that we don't have as good of a view of him as UO's producer, or BioWare's plans for UO. He can change that of course, if he would talk about UO and the actual plans for it.
This is hopefully a relationship we build with mutual respect with Jeff and the community. We want to address the concerns, and we are the first to recognize what we read on the forums here, but we also would like to start out with an actual conversation with Jeff.
People have been having conversations with him on Twitter about UO. Please say you all are not going to spend the next several weeks or months in a heavily watered down dialogue that has been put through the EA PR machine time and time again.
Even though we haven't learned much about UO plans from him on Twitter, at least with Twitter, it's not filtered through the EA PR machine time.
Mutual respect means talking to us, the customers, about actual plans for UO, not marketing spin or producer's letters that sound like they were written by Cal and put through the same PR shredder that Cal had to suffer through, or producer's letters that are just a rehash of what Cal had announced last year.
I'm going to quote the same article I quoted earlier:
Apparently UO’s future is too secret for us to know about.
I'm in a couple of betas of MMORPGs that won't be out until later this year. In both games, they are constantly talking to us on the forums about the questions we post, telling us their plans, telling us things that they are going to have to push back to after the releases, etc., what their first expansions are going to be, what they are learning from us, etc. Unlike UO, these games have very valid concerns for keeping their future plans secret, since they haven't launched yet, and since 2012-2013 is going to be a huge two year period for RPGs and MMORPGs. But they are constantly engaging us about their future plans, as are the dozens of MMORPGs in production.
And then I come back to UO and it's like Area 51 or Fort Knox.
