Yesterday, I was back at the office early afternoon for the first meeting of the new Ragnarok Midgard Congress. Thanks to the efforts of GM Cassiel and new RO Community Manager GM Anael, who organized the meet at the Chow King meeting area just below our Pacific Star office. Thanks to everyone who attended. Almost all the servers were represented.

In the good-ol’-days, you’ll remember that we used to form regular Midgard Congress meetings while I still working with the old GMs like Phage and Huggybear. Now, with the new Ragnarok team, one of our first agreements is to go back to the basics – to talk to our players and get to know their real sentiments about the game.

Goals of the RO Midgard Congress

There are several goals of this new community program. First and foremost is to set up a group that will ultimately be the “voice of the community”. Of course, leaders will be assigned to the position where they will represent their constituents, the actual members of their servers.

Like a real political congress, there will be a minority and majority position for the RO Midgard Congress so that everyone will be represented. Once this is done, the actual work just begins. Here are some of the goals that we outlined during the meeting.

• Voice of the people – the congress will be the voice of the people since server players will be well represented in the group.
• Feedback – we want to get valuable feedback so we could improve upon our events, processes and systems. All this in the name of better customer service. Service that is really due to YOU, our dear players
• Cascade information - from time to time, we will share our plans and major projects with the group BEFORE actually implementing them. Obviously, we value your feedback and opinions on how we can make things better. One of the first discussions in the new congress was the upcoming server merge. But that’s a really looong topic and is worthy of a separate post.
• Community Empowerment – in the coming months, we will empower the leaders and the members of the community to populate the RO website with information, user generated content and submissions as well as help them recruit more guild members.

What’s Cooking for RO?

In the last quarter of 2008, here’s what you can expect for RO

• Road to Live – this is the grand finals for RPC 2008 to be held this October 4 at the SM Mall of Asia. More information about this event is here.
• RWC 2008 championships at LIVE 2008 - of course, the grand finale! Mark your calendars! October 18 and 19
• Demise of Morroc – aka Satan Morroc. This is Episode 18 to be patched very soon. We will be putting up an official trailer video at the RO site soon and we’ll be posting a lot about the new features of this great episode including a special site for Demise. I also explained this to the attendees of yesterday’s congress and they’re free to tell their members about it. Don’t worry, more about Episode 18 on the RO site and of course, here at my blog.
• Server Merge – We’ve got both official and unofficial threads about this on the boards and, with your help, we’ll make this happen with vast improvements and loads of fun.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

More details about stuff soon.

In the meantime, check out the Ragnarok site for the latest news and developments about your favorite game.

Rok On!