Massively^™

When the interviewer frowned at our resumes with raiding experience as a category, accepting the job may not have been a good idea. As each day goes by, smashing gnomes over the head, podding miners, or living a life of drunken combat all remain daydreams as we waste away in the cubicle. Luckily, there is hope! Gax Technologies of Second Life will be affording players a chance to find a real world job so that visiting the Stonefire Tavern for an ale might be a viable lunch break option.

The best part of job hunting through Gax Technologies' Working Worlds Career Fair is that you do not need to get up, put on a tie, and drive through traffic that rivals Jita on a good day. Just take a double shot of soda, grab your laptop, fire up Second Life, and start job searching! The employers will be logging in for the virtual career fair so that you can easily meet and greet some of the top employers from Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Check it out and be sure to find the perfect job that allows you to work hard and play harder.

Linden Lab is looking for Web developers at all of their offices, particularly at Brighton, Mountain View, and Seattle, as well as remote (telecommute) staff for Operations from all over the world, though particularly from Singapore and Australia.

If you're interested in working for Linden Lab and can pony-up with the sort of strong skills they're looking for, you should check out their job pages. From what we've been told, Linden Lab pays below market-rates for staff, but prefers top-class people who love their work and would rather have job-satisfaction.

Ten years ago, the idea of putting something like being an officer in a hardcore raiding guild on your resume would have been laughable. When trying to sell yourself to a prospective employer, you want to put your best foot forward. The last thing you'd want them to know is that you spend upwards of 20 hours per week frittering your time away on something as silly as a videogame. Businesses want employees who are punctual, intelligent, analytical, and driven -- problem solvers and team players. What's funny, however, is that those are exactly the same qualities which a guild looks for in its raiders. Good luck trying to explain that to a non-gamer, though.

Fortunately, gaming is slowly becoming a mainstream activity. As the generation of gamers that pioneered the online gaming craze begin to climb into their 30s and 40s, a younger generation of gamers is just starting to graduate from college and enter the mainstream workforce for the first time. Unlike their older peers, these young men and women face a business world where their boss is as likely to enjoy playing World of Warcraft in his free time as golf. For the first time, it's possible that your hiring manager might actually view your dedication to your guild as a reason to hire you, rather than a reason to dismiss you. Does that mean that it's time to start putting your MMOG experience on your resume?

Looking to get a job in the MMO industry? Two developers have posted to their community sites in the last few days to say that they are looking for more to join their ranks, and perhaps one of these jobs has your name on it. Flying Lab Software, of Pirates of the Burning Sea fame, have advertised two positions for a Game Programmer and a Senior Graphics Programmer to work at their offices in Seattle. If this is up your alley, visit the jobs section of their website and go from there.

On the other hand, if you want something a little more entry-level, Sony Online Entertainment are in need of some playtesters for EverQuest and/or EverQuest II. The job description asks that you have achieved a high level in the aforementioned games, among other things. It's well known that being a playtester is an excellent foot-in-the-door to get to where you really dream of being in a game developing company, so go chase that dream!

We haven't heard terribly much from Zenimax Online over the past few months. The company, the online off-shoot of Zenimax Media and corporate cousin of highly-lauded development house Bethesda Softworks, has been tight-lipped since they told the media to get off their lawn back in November. Of course, that didn't stop us from including the purely speculative Elder Scrolls MMO as #5 in our Top 10 MIA MMOs of 2007.

But times, they are a-changing. Word has it that Zenimax Online will be moving to a new 40,000 square foot facility in Huntsville, MD in anticipation of scaling up the development process on their as-yet-unnamed MMO project. Naturally, they're also going to need some new blood to make use of all that office space, so they've posted a bunch of positions for hire. East coast development houses are pretty rare these days, so if you're in the area you might want to get on that ASAP.

Linden Lab put out a renewed call today for Production Operations developers and systems engineers in Australia, Singapore, the United States, and United Kingdom. It is hardly surprising considering the numerous difficulties during the day on the Second Life grid.

Some of it seems to be related to the new code rollouts, some to configuration oversights, some to network problems, some to general failures to scale. Whatever the causes, Linden Lab is looking for staff to help identify and correct failures quickly, around-the-world, around-the-clock.

We're not sure if these constitute additional staff, or if they're replacements for engineers who have been killed-in-action by the amassed telepathic ire of Second Life users.

In a search lasting nearly 12 months, Linden Lab has finally hired a Communications Manager. Linden Lab originally announced the search for a Second Life Resident Communications Manager in early May 2007, but the blog posting announcing the position was silently removed some months later.

You would hardly know the position had been filled, if you weren't reading closely.

The second episode of the Drone Bay podcast directed listeners to check out a website called EVE Careers, a sort of Monster.com or Career Builder for players of EVE Online. There are sections where both pilots and corporations (EVE's equivalent to player guilds) can post ads to connect with one another.

As the hosts of the Drone Bay noted, one of the big challenges for new players in EVE (and even experienced players, in certain circumstances) is finding a good corp to join. While it's possible to get by on your own to some extent in EVE, you'll be missing out on ... well, pretty much everything interesting about the game if you aren't part of one. EVE Careers presently has an almost 70-page list of corporations for you to check out, making it one of your best bets if you've been going it alone.

CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson told the New York Times a while back that EVE is different from other games like World of Warcraft because it's not just a game, it's a society -- at least, to a greater extent than WoW-types are. With its quarterly economic reports from the CCP Fed, its Council for Stellar Management, and now this player-run job board website, that's tough to argue with, even though there are forums for guild-finding in other games as well.

[Via Drone Bay]

Brand new toys for the Jobs (classes) of Final Fantasy XI headline the newest update to this still extremely popular title. New spells are available for White and Black Mages, Summoners have a new ability that lets them siphon mana from their creature, and even the steadfast Warrior class gets a 'retaliation' ability.

The newest classes added in Wings of the Goddess are getting a number of tweaks, too. Dancers will see abilities usable more often, and Scholars are subject to a host of changes aimed at making it more viable across the board. These changes include: tweaks to the max number of charges for the "Stratagems" ability, adjustment to the time required to regain a charge, new abilities, new job traits, increased access to both White and Black magic, major overhauls to the "-storm" variety of spells, a reduction in the mana cost for spells cast while using "Accession" or "Manifestation", and even new status icons for Scholar abilities.

The official patch notes are well worth checking out, as a host of other updates have been made to the game. Crafting changes, new emotes, updates to events like Campaign Ops and the Chocobo circuit, new quests in WotG areas, and even further improvements to the Fellowship system - one of the coolest things about modern FFXI.

Linden Lab's hungry for staff. They've got thirty-three different classes of position open that they're hiring for (we don't recall ever seeing so many at once). That would make quite an influx right there.

Linden Lab will have people at Barcamp Brighton, in the UK on the 15th and 16th (Saturday and Sunday), so if you're looking to meet, greet, press flesh and have a chance to show off your charm, poise and overall coolness with a view to landing a job at the Lab (they have an office in Brighton), this is your chance to strut your stuff.

Is it our collective imagination or is GDC (the games developer's conference, upcoming in San Francisco) becoming more like E3, with parties, media, announcements and demos? We wonder how long it will take before developers need another conference to swap information, algorithms and techniques so they can leave the marketers to drive GDC over a cliff.

That said, you can still find actual developers at GDC. No, really. There are still useful talks and panels and companies looking for talent. Linden Lab are a regular at GDC (although when we asked who will be there, and what talks or sessions they'd be running, they didn't give us an answer). Linden Lab are also having a hiring party. If you read their blog though, you wouldn't know about it.

If you live and breathe gaming and are looking for some experience in the games industry, then you'll probably want to note that Sony Online Entertainment is currently looking to fill a number of intern positions. SOE is responsible for a whole swag of MMOs, including EverQuest, EverQuest II, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and Star Wars Galaxies, and some experience with them would likely be a valuable asset for further work in the industry, if not with SOE themselves.

They say that an internship with them would stretch 9 weeks, is a part time and paid position, and each intern will have a mentor to help them develop during the program. Taking a look at the drop-down menu on the SOE Career Opportunities page shows that quite a range of internships are available, from working with the community, to programming and developing, to art and even QA. Pretty much all of SOE's internships are based in San Diego, but it looks like there may be a couple for Seattle and Denver as well.

As we mentioned a few days ago, the gang at Dungeon Runners is looking for a few good dungeon builders. Turns out, NCsoft in general is looking for some new blood in their Austin (TX) office as well as their two offices in California.

Aside from the DR jobs in Austin, there's an interesting hybrid position NCsoft calls the Minigame Designer-Programmer now open. they also need an Associate Community Coordinator for Lineage II, and a Web Production Manager. The QA department needs an experienced tester and some folks in Tech Support.

Want to work for Raph Koster?

If you have some object-oriented programming experience and a "familiarity with game and user-interface design," you may apply for a job as a Content Designer at Areae. If hired, you'll provide the MetaPlace community with game content as well as support and documentation for the MetaPlace toolset. Plus, you'll get to be one of Master Koster's Padawan learners.

For those who are unfamiliar with Koster or MetaPlace, Koster was the lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He also worked on some other SOE projects, and wrote the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Now, he's helming the Areae project MetaPlace, which is a platform on which users can create their own online games and virtual worlds.

[Via Raph Koster]

Insert jokes about study groups; pen is mightier than the sword; and dance/scholar is a stripper at university. What exactly am I referencing to? The two jobs (classes) to be released alongside Final Fantasy XI's upcoming Wings of the Goddess expansion scheduled to launch on November the 20th. Play Online recently announced the Scholar with a nifty back-story (worth reading for any Final Fantasy XI player); the second job revealed thus far, the first being the Dancer. I guess there is a third class rumored, always some rumor going around and I've seen Geomancer bandied about.

For those hardcore Final Fantasy players, you may remember the Scholar originally appeared in Final Fantasy III, at their initial inception their primary objective was to scan enemies and I forget what else, hey it's been awhile since I played it. I believe it wasn't until another Final Fantasy game where they could use White and Black magic. In Final Fantasy XI, Scholars will be able to cast some curative, White Magic, and some offensive, Black Magic. Scholars use Grimoires when engaging in battle because they got book smarts. Under the effect of White Grimoire, cast time and mp usage is reduced, and abilities for the White Grimoire are activated. Under the effect of Black Grimoire, cast time is increased, and MP usage is slightly increased. Changing between the two schools is instantaneous; a similar comparison to how the switch between the two schools might be better visualized for non-Final Fantasy XI players if they think of each one as a different stance.

Does scholar equal mandatory leveling as a mage sub job? So what level will your scholar be 37 or 75?

[Thanks, Xan!]