If you’ve been around the MMORPG genre a while, you start to realize that specific developer names pop up again and again. Some of them are super famous, like your Richard Garriotts, your Mark Jacobses, your John Smedleys. Others, not so much.
Personally, there are some designers and artists and thinkers in the field I bet most MMO players have never heard of but who keep my attention because of stuff they’ve done that I’d like to see again: Thomas Blair, Kristen Koster, Daniel Dociu, and Emily Taylor all pop immediately to mind as people who turn out to have been responsible for some MMO ideas and visuals that I absolutely love.
But that memory works both ways: There’s also a handful of MMO personalities that serve as immediate turn-offs when attached to games, simply because I dislike what they did so very much. (And a couple more who have a long track record of wrecking my favorite MMOs one after another.)
Do you follow the work of specific MMO developers? To the point that you would blindly play a game they worked on? Whose work should we be paying more attention to?