PQW.net: Hi Steve,
Thanks for taking some of your time to answer our questions. To start off, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Steve Hessel: Great to talk to you today! I'm Steve Hessel, Splash Damage's Community Relations Manager. Most people probably know me by my nickname 'badman' and from my occasional dev blog ramblings over at the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Community Site.

Before Splash Damage, I worked for Ritual Entertainment and headed up the community efforts for a number of their titles, including Heavy Metal FAKK2, Star Trek Elite Force II, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and SiN Episodes.


PQW.net: You are Community Relations Manager at Splash Damage, what exactly does that mean? What is part of your field of activities? And what do you do all day long except of being cool?

Steve Hessel: As Community Relations Manager, I'm basically the link between the online community out there and the development team here at Splash Damage. For Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, this includes management and maintenance of the ETQW Community Site and the official forums, as well as laising with our fan sites, tournament organizers, and so on. I also try to keep the community informed on what's going on with ETQW updates and issues via the official developer blog.

There's also a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, such as planning and coordinating online marketing with our partners (including Activision), working on various marketing materials and assets, and so on.


PQW.net: For many people this sounds like a dream job - is it? How did you actually become the Community Relations Manager at SD?

Steve Hessel: It's definitely a fantastic gig! I know it sounds incredibly cliché, but Splash Damage really is a great place to work and every day brings with it new challenges and opportunities. I can't remember ever getting up in the morning and not looking forward to going into the office.

As for how this all came about, I actually first met the Splash Damage guys at QuakeCon 2005 when I was still working for Ritual. If I remember correctly, the guys were out there to do a QUAKE Wars presentation, and we all got together for a few drinks in the hotel bar the night before.

In late '06, both Splash Damage and Activision came to me with their plans for the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Community Site – they were looking for somebody to put the whole thing together and get it up and going. After I finished the site, Splash Damage made me an offer to join the company full-time and the rest, as they say, is history.


PQW.net: The official community page is actually bursting at the seams. With the huge amount of news and information, which is unusual for an official page, many webmaster used to call it a "fan site-killer" due to missing visitors! In comparison to earlier times there are almost no reasons anymore why someone should visit a fan page. What is your opinion on that and do you think that this expression is justified? How do Splash Damage, Activision and id Software comment this point?

Steve Hessel: The problem with most official sites is that the visitor doesn't get very much out of them beyond screenshots and a few sets of Flash buttons – they're really just a sales pitch. So when we initially conceived the ETQW Community Site, we wanted it to be a straightforward line of communication from the development team to the players. On top of that, it was our hope that the site would be an easy to find and use portal to the entire ETQW community.

The idea was that you would be able to go to the site and find out about the latest events and cool activities going on on our various fan sites. There would also be a comprehensive list of all the ETQW fan pages out there, so those looking for a local community or wanting to read about the game in their language would be able to easily find sites in their territory.

I think overall we've succeeded in all of these areas – there are little things here and there that we probably could have done a better job with (for example, gamers frequently wonder why they can't log into the site with their ETQW player account), but I'm very satisfied with what we managed to do.

As for it cannibalizing our fan sites, I don't think that's quite true. We've got a lot of fan sites that are doing some amazing things that we could never do on the Community Site. The extensive player, server and statistics tracking over at SplatterLadder is a good example. They basically looked at all the tools and feeds we provide through the game and our stats site and they went above and beyond anything that we do on our official site. There are also a lot of competition-centric sites such as Quake Wars League that keep the clan scene alive and kicking with tournaments, leagues, and other events.

So if anything, the Community Site inspires people to go “What can we do to make our site stand out and offer something that nobody else has done?” and it results in more cool stuff for the ETQW community.


PQW.net: The SDK has just been released, what are you expecting of the community concerning mods and maps? Is there anything that you are especially looking forward to?

Steve Hessel: The ETQW SDK is a very comprehensive package, so the possibilities for user-created content are fairly limitless. Along with our documentation and tutorials in the Splash Damage Editing Wiki, the community should have a fantastic platform for building new maps and all kinds of different mods for the game. We're also planning to put out a few example mods, so the community can take a look at them to see how they work and how they were put together.

There are tons of mods and new maps being worked on in the community at the moment, which is really great to see. One of the many projects we've had our eyes on here at the office is Wheels of War, which looks to be shaping up great.


PQW.net: On the official forums and on our page there have been a lot of discussions about the ranked servers and stats problems. Did you as a Community Manager expect this to happen? In comparison to the pure technical problems people seem very often just to cry because of their stats and why they are not able to create their own ranked servers on root servers.

Steve Hessel: We were aware that the concept of Ranked Servers was a fairly new one and might not sit well with everyone. I think the vast majority of our players is having a great time out there and our statistics website is getting a great deal of traffic, which certainly validates that people like to be able to track personalized statistics for them and their friends.

As for limiting Ranked Servers to Game Server Providers, there were a number of reasons for that. The biggest concern for us was to ensure that the integrity of the statistics; when people look at the statistics site and compare their profile to another player, they can be sure that those statistics were collected fairly and using the same ground rules. The same goes for our achievements and global ranks – with the Ranked structure, we can make sure that people attain them fairly. There are a few games not using this kind of secure environment and they're all having problems in these areas.


PQW.net: If you have so much to do with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars the whole day, do you still enjoy playing the game in the evening (for example the community fraggin on our servers) or is it more like part of the job?

Steve Hessel: We do a lot of play-testing here at the office while working on new game updates, so all of us get regular ETQW workouts. On top of that, quite a few of us play the game on public servers fairly regularly – it's pretty funny to see just how hard people try to knife you out there. Makes it a bit easier for us, I suppose. :)

The game has now been on the market for a while. Has your job calmed down or has it shifted to other topics?

The immediate launch craziness has passed and for the moment the ETQW side of my job is a bit less busy. Once we get closer to the launch of the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 versions, that's more than likely going to change.

I do have a few other things going here at Splash Damage, including the long overdue redesign of the Splash Damage website (which we actually launched the other day) and planning for our next game, so there's never a shortage of work for me.


PQW.net: When you aren't playing ET:QW, what else do you play? What are your favorite games right now and which ones did fascinate you the most in the past?

Steve Hessel: The only other PC title that I'm playing at the moment is Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. It's a change of pace from the frantic FPS craziness of ETQW and Ed Stern (our Senior Game Designer) and I tend to play CoH pretty regularly during our lunch breaks.

Apart from that most of my gaming time is spent on the Xbox 360 – there were a lot of good titles there this past holiday season and I managed to romp through Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, Project Gotham Racing 4, Mass Effect, and Guitar Hero 3 (which I still fire up on almost a nightly basis). I also just started playing Burnout Paradise, which is quite a lot of fun.


PQW.net: Finally, what has been the question that you were asked the most in the past days and months?

Steve Hessel: „When is <insert ETQW item of your choosing> coming out?“


PQW.net: Thank you very much for answering our questions and taking care about the community. In our opinion you are doing a great job with the official page and the whole community work.

Steve Hessel: Thanks for the interview and keep up the great work at PQW.net!