Kody: My name is Kevin Van Ness, and I’m the Content and Community Manager for the entire Curse Network; many will be more familiar with my nickname “Kody,” which I go by on each of our websites. At Curse in general my duties include overseeing the content on a variety of our network websites, including Warhammer Alliance, World of Raids, AionSource, Curse.com, CurseForge, and AoCSource. This includes working directly with each of those websites’ managers.

Kody: Let’s see... I got started in the genre with EverQuest back in 2000. While most companies frown on account sharing, this is actually how I got into the game; I was watching a roommate (at the time) play the game, and became very intrigued by it. After a while of watching, he asked if I wanted to play it when he was at work – so I did, and quickly became hooked. A month or two later I bought my own copy of the game, and ended up playing EverQuest for close to four years.

I’ve also had stints in Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, Final Fantasy XI, EverQuest II, Tabula Rasa, EVE Online, Lineage 2, World of Warcraft, and of course, Age of Conan.

Kody: To say that the Conan story didn’t play a factor in deciding to purchase the game would be lying – I’ve always thought it would fit fantastically in the MMO genre. That said, I quickly fell in love with the combat system in May ’07 when I participated in my first Hands On event for the game. Even though it’s gone through two or three iterations since then, it’s still one of my favorite things about the game.

I also have to say that the voice-overs are incredibly well done, and rank up there with my favorites amongst the game’s features.

Kody: The number of people involved in a fan site is typically rather small from my experience. That said, even with a small fan site you really do want to make sure you listen heavily to the community’s needs. Obviously you also have to weigh in the factor of time constraints, and whether or not a request fits into the role of the website or not. An example would be requests to add new forums... you have to always keep in mind that while each specific member of the community may want to see different forums, more is not always a good thing.

In terms of the time that’s gone into creating AoCSource, the website’s design itself took quite a while, but luckily we have a very talented graphics designer who created a template style that we can use across a multitude of game fan sites. This template was actually derived from World of Raids, and then modified to fit the theme and needs of other games. AionSource.com also uses the template, and it’s likely we’ll use it for any future fan sites as well.

Kody: The reaction has been interesting, to say the least. We tried something very different with AoCSource, based on a number of requests from the community: uncensored PvP Discussion and PvP Server forums. Not surprisingly, the community has proven overall to keep things mature, and some of the discussions that have come from no censorship on the forums have been great.

The goal behind no censorship was to harness the competitive nature of the PvP community, and allow it to flourish without being constrained by unneeded moderation.

Kody: I think Sanya Weathers has been a great voice of reason behind the debate of official forums versus unofficial forums, and I agree with her in many cases. What it boils down to inevitably is whether or not the game needs official forums or not: in World of Warcraft’s case, Blizzard obviously feels the game needs official forums.

On the other hand, Dark Age of Camelot was very successful without any official forums, and it looks as if EA Mythic will continue on this route with Warhammer Online.

One advantage of unofficial forums is that developers can interact with the community and not have as much accountability for what they say as they would on an official forum. If you look at the World of Warcraft forums, typically when a developer posts they’re held to their exact word; if they make a mistake in what they say they’re thrown to the jackals and eaten alive. Meanwhile, when you come across a developer post on unofficial forums, the community is very appreciative to see interaction, especially on important issues in the game.

Some great examples of unofficial forums are the old Vault Network during Dark Age of Camelot’s peak, Warhammer Alliance now and the developer activity there, and the Elitist Jerks World of Warcraft guild forums – a place where World of Warcraft developers visit occasionally and post in response to player feedback and questions.

Hopefully with AoCSource we can support our community now and in the future. It’s certainly our goal to make sure there’s a home for the gamer, whether it’s Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Aion: Tower of Eternity, or any other MMO.

Kody: As I mentioned earlier, prior to my essay about official versus unofficial, the choice was primarily due to community requests and feedback on what they felt other websites did wrong. Several guild leaders of well-known, historical PvP guilds were adamant about there being limited moderation on the PvP forums, including no censorship.

So far, it’s worked out well – we’ve only had to moderate a single post since the forums launched in late April, and no bannings due to inappropriate content. I don’t really see this changing for the foreseeable future (or at all), as we’ve introduced a plug-in that allows users to enable the censorship for themselves if they so choose.

Kody: As mentioned earlier, both websites were a derivative of the World of Raids design; we felt World of Raids looked fairly kickass, so we decided to adopt that general layout as our fan site template from here out. For those curious, credit for World of Raids’ design goes to an excellent designer by the name of Justin Uyemura.

Kody: It’s honestly hard to give any details about plans for the future other than to say we’ll be offering everything it takes to make sure our community has the best resources and tools available to them. AoCSource is just one piece of the puzzle with regards to Age of Conan; we have a lot of plans for the near-term, as well as long term across the entire network to support the game and its growing community. The Age of Conan Armory will of course be a big player in that, as well Curse.com’s file hosting, but AoCSource is where we plan to foster the actual community for the game.

You can expect to see a lot of syndication on AoCSource between the Conan Armory and Curse.com; video embedding, database tooltips, file embedding, etc.

Kody: So... can “both” count as an answer? I obviously have a number of friends from my years of gaming, and of course with that comes the fact that none of them can fully decide on a ruleset for everyone. That rings true with Age of Conan as well, so I’ve created characters on both PvE and PvP servers. Me personally, I’m a very competitive player, and this game just screams PvP for the competitive, passionate gamer.

So yeah, deep down inside I’m definitely more interested in PvP; there’s just something you can’t replicate in PvE about the rush you get from fighting other players (and in my case, owning ;)).