Okay, so first off, my own background with the game.
Early on in the game's lifecycle there was a problem with the account servers. My own personal account got caught up in it; if I tried to log in, the game would crash. So I ended up playing on my wife's account because she lost interest in the game fairly quickly.
So this meant my in-game name was Mrs. Moonbunny (MrsMoonbunny on the forums). I went ahead and followed through with the character design my wife wanted to pursue, collecting the equipment necessary to do a Sailor Moon cosplay.
I ended up never getting past about level 17, because I got distracted from the main gameplay by exploration. I heard about the possibility of a way to break out of bounds, and I started searching. I ended up being one of the leading explorers of the game, and when the moderators started cracking down on "glitching" they talked to me about it. The conclusion was that the staff at the time didn't so much care about our little group exploring the game world because we were behaving ourselves, but they didn't want discussion of game exploits on the forums and they didn't want us to share our information around because they didn't want to deal with the support requests if kids got themselves stuck out of bounds or, worse, got their account stuck in a crash loop because they saved somewhere unstable.
So I started the FusionFall Explorers website with a forum hidden from public view. With the help of Viva Alecto (
Mandie LeScum) and others, we screened applicants to make sure that we weren't spreading information to people who didn't already know it. Viva and I also helped out as citizen moderators on the official game forums, helping answer questions about the game, cautioning new users about the rules, and when possible even providing technical support for other players.
For our efforts in helping the community, we were invited into a newly-formed Player Advisory Council, where the forum staff would solicit feedback about the game and various community issues. They served as the liaisons between us as representatives of the player base and the South Korea-based development team Grigon that was honestly pretty out of touch. (It was in part thanks to our efforts and feedback that we got features like the Croc Pot and even going so far as to rebalance the XP system to avoid the stupidly tedious stereotypical Korean MMORPG grind that most FusionFall players didn't want to deal with.)
Espy, since you used to play, what was your in-game name and/or your forum name?