For those who don't know me, I'm Cynthe, Community Manager for Origin in Austin, Texas. Quite often we post Comments from the Team and other announcements on the UO.com web site, aimed towards the UO community as a whole. However, this time I want to take the opportunity to do something a little bit different and direct this update to our large and active UO community in Japan!

First, we want to thank all of you for all your great feedback. Your comments are forwarded to us regularly by our Japanese community team, and they give us great insight into what the main topics of discussion are on the Japanese message boards and fansites. We also send representatives to Japan from time to time to learn more about the Japanese players and the studio, which helps to keep our commitment to the staff at EA Japan and our Japanese player community strong. As a matter of fact, in the month of May, I had the chance personally to visit Japan for the first time and meet with the OCR, Marketing, and Support teams at EA Japan, as well as a few Japanese fansite operators. On my trip, I learned a lot about how our studio there works, and spent a lot of time brainstorming ways to improve communication between OSI in Austin and our players in Japan. Of course, I also got very lost trying to figure out the Tokyo train system and found myself eating a lot of things I couldn't recognize, but those are other stories!

One of the first things that came up was the fact that while most of our Japanese players know that we have a dedicated team in Japan reading their message board posts and fansites, they don't have any real way to tell that the information is being passed back to Austin. So right now, let me assure you that we do indeed get that information from our OCR folks at EA Japan! Not only do we receive a weekly report listing out the major issues that were seen on the biggest message boards and fansites, but we also receive a general summary of the concerns and an overall rating of how the Japanese community is reacting to those issues. We also receive other things, such as lists of game ideas from the Japanese players, screenshots from some of the bigger events, results from polls run on Japanese UO sites, and information about new fansite openings.

Another major result of talks with the EA Japan OCR group and some of the fansite operators was a commitment to including Japanese fansites in our interview schedule. For those who haven't followed our interview processes too closely, we rotate interviews across a list of eligible fan sites, offering opportunities for them to send us questions for the dev team through email, which we then answer and send back as an exclusive interview. Most of the sites have been English websites, but with translation help from the EA Japan team, we look forward to offering this same kind of opportunity to eligible Japanese fansites as well (with English translations for our players over here in the States too, of course).

There were quite a few other things that came from these meetings, but that's enough for one post - we'll see you in UO!

Amy "Cynthe" Sage
Community Manager
Origin Systems