Massively^™

It's been a great week on the west coast, for the second annual MMO-centric Seattle conference. Now called ION, everything we've heard has indicated that this week's event was a tremendous success. Massively was there in force, and below you'll find the ins and outs of the sessions and meetups we attended.

	Focusing on the community manager One of the strengths of MMOs are their communities. The stronger a community around an MMO is the more likely that game is to last into the foreseeable future.
	State of online games keynote Globalization is one of the session tracks here at ION 08, as befitting an industry seeking the holy grail of a truly global marketplace for online games. Tuesday's keynote was delivered by Won II Suh of Neowiz, a Korean online games company with 20 titles currently supported or in development by 1000 employees across 8 regions around the world.
	John Smedley keynote shows off Free Realms and The Agency When you think of Sony Online Entertainment, what comes to mind? I'm sure that Everquest, Everquest 2, Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside are some of the titles which most people think about. From what I've recently seen in John Smedley's keynote at ION 08 that's all going to be changing in the near future.
	SOE Seattle studio tour Our mission: infiltrate SOE's Seattle studio, obtain intel on The Agency, regale the awesomely hyperactive lead designer Hal Milton with questions from left field.
	MMOs and the television content model (SGW) Joseph Ybarra, SVP of strategic operations at Firesky, the publishing subsidiary of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, presented a session today at ION 08 about the Stargate Worlds production model that borrows heavily from Hollywood and TV models.

You really have to admire the work that MMO community management teams do. Not only are they the front line of defense against player angst and rage in moments of crisis, but they're also the spin-doctors and craftsmen who take tiny tidbits of information and turn them into news. Take the Tabula Rasa community team for instance. It's pretty clear that Destination Games is plunking away at the 1.4 patch, trying to ready it up for public consumption on the PTR sometime in the next two weeks. They've already dropped the big news about Sanctus Grotto on Friday, and we figured that was all we'd get to preview of 1.4 before the patch notes came out. But oh no! On a slow news day, they've revealed two new nuggets of information to keep us coming back.

They've announced that they're changing the way ammo works for Machine Guns, Leech Guns, Polarity Guns, and Propellant Guns so that they can now take lower quality ammunition. This is going to mean big monetary savings for players that have, until now, been largely left to bankruptcy by their boom-sticks. Spies and Guardians, the game's two melee classes, have enjoyed an unfair advantage in this respect, as their weapons don't have prohibitive maintenance costs comparable to ammo. It's nothing as big as an end-game instance, but it's still worth noting.

And in a completely unrelated note, they're also putting in /sit and /laydown emotes. Cool, I guess?