Feldon Thursday’s Game Update 62 introduces new social media features called EQ2 Share. Players have already had the ability to post Youtube videos from inside EQ2 for several months now. With the new features, players can also post Achievements, text updates, and now screenshots directly to Facebook or Twitter from within EQ2.
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:
Good news!
You can now take screenshots of the game and have them posted to Facebook or Twitter without leaving the game! So show off the really cool armor you just found or the particularly evil-looking boss mob that your group just trounced!
Here’s how you do it. First of all, pull up your Character window. Look for the “EQII Share” option. Once you see that, enable whichever of the Facebook/Twitter feeds that you desire. When you toggle these on, you’ll have to log into Facebook and/or Twitter to verify your credentials, but after you do that, you’re set up!
NOTE: When you activate EQII Share, all your characters are activated, but you can turn off the share for any individual characters you want to hide from view.
Anyway, once you’re done with that, it’s as easy as either clicking the “Send an Update” button, or you can use any of the slash commands we provided already to activate this window. (/facebook, /twitter, and /share all do the same thing now.)
When you do that, you’ll see a dialog pop up. It automatically takes a screenshot of whatever you’re looking at, but you can decide to not include the screen by unclicking the “Include Screenshot” option. Include any text you want in the text box, and hit “Share” when you’re done.
Voila! Your screenshot and text are now broadcast out to your feed or profile. Cool, eh?
and:
A few extra useful details:
If you type the following commands, it will do some pre-populating of the Share window, depending on what you type.
/share – brings up EQII Share window with all active social sites selected
/faceboook – brings up EQII Share window with only facebook selected
/twitter, /tweet – brings up EQII Share window with only twitter selectedAll commands also support /share and msg will be pre populated into the update text box.
SmokeJumper also had some comments about EQ2’s population since Thursday’s transition to Free-to-Play, as well as a bit about advertising:
My personal prediction is that we won’t see a giant surge (like DCUO did), but that we’ll see a regular and steady growth over time as word gets out more and more, plus we’re doing some steady marketing starting next week (no, not TV ads. Actually much better advertising for the audience we’re trying to attract. Lots of ‘net stuff. YouTube ad spends, online banners, SEO searches, lots and lots of little things.
Plus if we do our job right, you’ll be having enough fun that you’ll tell your friends to stop dragging their heels and come play. Honestly, one word from you guys is worth more than a super bowl ad.
What we’re trying to do right now is knock all the barriers down. We just did that with the business model. Now we attack the game itself and start polishing and improving, revealing the hidden features and making things more fun and interesting.
All those complaints/suggestions you’ve ever had about features? Those are all getting dusted off and re-examined. We’re going to do a LOT of improvement on existing features, and we’re going to be focusing on making content that’s the absolute best that we can create.
That’s our mission for this next year. This is the best MMORPG on the planet. This year, we’re going to make people admit it.
Fixing the existing problems in EQ2 especially in heroic and raid content, and the largely unused Dungeon Finder is a priority for us, but we were a bit concerned by this comment:
But hoo boy do we have a lot of stuff on our plates right now.
We’re hoping that for the next few months, in addition to the work being done on Game Update 63 to bring more Velious dungeons and raids to light, we’ll also see the EQ2 team take a breather and “come back around and address outstanding issues” as SmokeJumper has indicated in recent Webcasts.
A few weeks before Age of Discovery/Game Update 62, in fact, Gninja had this update:
[Itemization] has not dropped off the radar. In fact we have still been fixing things however we have not been able to push things to live as fixes were being included with expansion check ins. You should see a good number of items that were bugged getting fixed when the expansion launches.
I think Gninja must have just had his message backwards. It probably should have read:
You should see a good number of items that were fixed getting bugged when the expansion launches.
Gninja is pretty good about things. I dont want to sound like a fanboy, but he is one of the Devs that I actually like.
I laughed so hard at this my eyes watered. I hope someone like the social networking idea, I am just too old an cynical to care.
“Plus if we do our job right, you’ll be having enough fun that you’ll tell your friends to stop dragging their heels and come play. Honestly, one word from you guys is worth more than a super bowl ad.”
Does SJ really believe word of mouth advertising by itself is better then a full advertising campaign to bring in new subscribers?
Also, where is the new news he alluded to in the producers letter?
I want to be a fanboi, but he is making it tough!
Word of mouth is what is keeping most people AWAY from EQ2 and ANY SOE game.
I love this honestly. I don’t so much care about sharing, as being able to save a ‘memory’ while playing EQ2, sending to my FB wall and letting me remember an awesome snapshot in time is great!
well I think that for once SJ is on the right track and to disgruntled yes word of mouth advertising will make or break you in any business. the FB, twitter, and other social media is not only a way for us to share but also our way of word of mouth ads. The more we do that the more ppl start to see EQ2 around.
So I am excited to see what is next and what is around the corner to make EQ2’s word of mouth ads better than the ads they have been getting from us.
A lot of us say to our friends “It’s a fun game, but…..” and I hope that SJ means what he says and removes that “but” from our ads 🙂
So what happens with the disgruntled folks who don’t like whats up, and those use facebook and twitter to tell their friends negative stuff about the game. Word of mouth works both ways.
Word of mouth advertising does work, I agree. It works if the consumer is really excited about the product. I can’t remember my master’s marketing class, but it was something like: 1 angry/unhappy consumer will tell 11 people about their experience and it takes 7 really happy consumers to tell 1 person. I franktly do not know how this applies to the MMO world since the consumption lasts for months/years.
Anyway, I think it’s a fair statement that word of mouth advertising will not increase market share substantially when you player base is estatic about the direction. After this crappy expac (some will say “it’s the bestest ever(!), but the majority is unimpressed), I find it insulting to think word of mouth is the only advertising they are counting on. It hasn’t worked up until now.
I hope I am wrong. But, if my guild’s raid attendance is any indication, this game is slowly taking on water…it’s sinking.
Who really needs that ???