Diverse Community or Not Everyone is a Prior Brad's Games Playe

• Posted by SojournerEo February 22, 2014 - Filed in Other - #diverse PBGP EverQuest Vanguard Community Audience  - 3,842 views

  Folks, I just wanted to address something that will take a little bit of work for a good portion of the community. 

   

  BLUF: Please stop assuming everyone has played EQ, EQ2, or Vanguard. 

  For reference, I'm using a made-up acronym to describe people who have played Brad's game before: PBGP = Prior Brad's Games Player(s)

   

  Why I'm concerned:

  I am not stating that everyone is guilty of this, but it's already happening enough to cause a bit of frustration on my end, and I'm thoroughly excited about this game. If there are casual observers attempting to get into the community or understand Pantheon, the PBGP "lexicon" and/or assumptions, they will be quickly turned off and likely spend little time getting to know Pantheon or the community. 

   

  I see many topics, polls, blogs, questions, and more that assume the reader is familiar with any of Brad's prior games. This simply isn't the case, and other than the difficulty of trying to understand what is being discussed, there is a bit of an isolation that's beginning to develop. I very much hope that this community will be a "Pantheon Community", not a "Prior Brad's Game Player" community. I completely understand that a large portion (if not vast majority) of the player base will be of the PBGP nature (forgive the acronym), however, I fear that if this continues, there will be a lot of younger MMO players (or older folks like me without PBGP status) who will automatically be excluded from the conversations because of a lack of shared experiences. This could ultimately hurt the community and the success of the game.

   

  It's akin to the standard maxim of communication: Understand your audience. In other words, don't make the audience work hard to connect with you on a fundamental level of understanding. Personally, I am finding it difficult to understand many conversations with all the terminology and assumptions that we are all PBGP's. 

   

  So I'm asking a couple things of everyone: 

  1. Please don't use PBGP "shorthand" to discuss game ideas without explaining what those ideas are (or, at minimum, add a link to give people a reference).

  2. Don't assume all of your readers are PBGP's.

  3. Remember to think outside the box, and think about this game and the community outside of the boundaries of Prior Brad's Games.

   

  Thanks for reading!

  eolith (not a PBGP ;) )