So I titled this post because it was the first full day of our summit, but I will have to mention that SOE had us flown out yesterday and had a really nice welcome reception for all of the community folks that were invited, in which Val and I got extremely drunk and talked our asses off about how PvP sucks now and all the things we love about EQ2. Val also got a lot of drunken video which you may or may not be seeing in the future Let me go ahead and preface this post by saying no there is no awesome news we can report yet. There are some realy cool things coming in 2007 for EQ2, but due to confidentiality we aren’t able to report a lot yet. Hopefully soon.

The majority of today was spent in discussion with the community management and marketing team over what’s going good with communication with the players and fan websites, what’s not going good and in that same sense what can they improve upon. Some great discussions were had, with a lot of talk with ideas for offering players better commuication with the games they play, and better ways for fansites (like this one for example) to bring better info to the public. The talks were great and hopefully we were all able to give the SOE team some good ideas for the future.

A side note: How cool is it that the makers of a game listen and get ideas from the community on what they can be doing better? One of the best things about this summit is that not all of the people invited are huge fans of SOE, so you’ve got a good mix of lovers and haters in the group. In addition, you’ve got most of the major games represented, from Eq1, Eq2, SWG, and even a Matrix person or two.

One of the best things about events like this summit is the opportunity to talk with people from other fansites. We made fast friends with Coyote from TenTonHammer and Kendricke from WarCry. Also, of course we had plenty to talk about with Brent and Brenden from VirginWorlds. They should have plenty of content coming from this summit as well.

Dev’s have been really readily available for us to talk to at this summit too. Not only has the entire community staff been on hand, but we’ve had most of the development staff on hand to address our questions and concerns. Smed (SOE Ceo) and others were able to join us for some of our sessions today, and they were very interested in player concerns. What was so cool about meeting some of the SOE exec’s is how they genuinely love games. We had a ton of conversations on current and upcoming games, and although I’m sure many of you think that the leadership at SOE are corporate pigs, I’m here to report to you that they are all very cool people who are passionate about the PC gaming world and all of SOE’s games. Hell I consider myself a pretty avid gamer but these guys put me to shame with their knowledge of the world of not only MMO’s but the gaming world in general.

Other dev’s of note I got a chance to talk to tonight were Vhalen, the EQ2 loremaster, and Saavedra, one of the guys on the development team that creates a lot of the in-game content we know and love. Very cool to hear stories of how Vhalen came up with the names for some of the main EQ2 NPC’s in the game, and to talk with Saavedra on item creation, uber loots, and even some tips for what zones give the best xp in the game. Oh how I wish I could share…..

All this being said a great first day to our summit. Tomorrow we visit the SOE headquarters where I hope I will have much more to report.