On 01/07/2003 while waiting patiently for the demo patch :) I made a new thread on the official RVS boards that generated some informative remarks from Pope and UBI rYo:
The following questions were asked in a forum post on the official US/Canada RVS site on 01/07/2003:
1. Of the 4 forum moderators listed for RVS (Geiger, Witness, Ickabod, and Pope), how many of you are actual UBI employees and how many are actually volunteers?
From Pope:
1. Geiger and Volkan are the two Community Directors that I know of. They are UBI employees, and they oversee the forums. UBI_rYo, who posts here occasionally, is a tester of some kind, though I believe he has said that he doesn't test for RvS. He does not have mod powers. Wormstomper is also an UBI employee, and his sig says that he does tech support. He has mod powers on the RSE boards, but not here.
Myself, Witness, and Ickabod are all community moderators. We are not employed by UBI. We have all been longtime members of the RSE/UBI gaming community -- Witness and myself have been here since the demo days of the original Rainbow Six, all the way back to the summer of '98. We played almost exclusively on the IP circuit, posting games in an IP folder and joining via IP connections. We both ended up leading very successful squads, and Witness's {TAC} still thrives to this day. Ickabod also played back in those days on the IP circuit, under a different name, and came back to the boards for GR, I believe. Witness also runs the Rumble, a major gaming ladder.
Wit has been a mod since before GR was released, and myself and Icky were added to the mod team some months after that.
From UBI rYo:
1 - I believe Pope is the only UbiSoft employee out, the others are volunteers.
2. If any of you are volunteers and not actual UBI employees, do you get your hands on anything before the general public does for testing/evaluation purposes?
From Pope:
2. We don't get squat. Maybe I can still hope that someday... :)
From UBI rYo:
2 - No they do not get any special previews or anything, nobody does except for the UbiSoft workers
3. There have been dozens of screen shots indicating servers that are running the new map and game modes. What constitutes the testers for these things? Are they all UBI employees?
From Pope:
3. I do not know this for certain, but I would assume that they are UBI employees.
From UBI rYo:
3 - All the Raven Shield testing team are UbiSoft employees from the Montreal office, I believe there is close to 40-50 testers that work on most of the games we have here. I think about 20 of them are currently appointed to the Raven Shield testing. Although I am not one of those testers myself, I still do test the new game but I'm not on the direct team. I'm among the Ubi.com team of testers, those working on the GameService and GS moderator.
4. It appears that changes are being made in the patch based upon many of the sentiments expressed in these forums. Where does UBI generally take the "pulse" of the community from: the forums, IRC, the feedback link, the polls, or a mixture of all of the above?
From Pope:
4. Your guess is as good as mine. I assume that they took feedback from the feedback line they established, and I know there were told of the polls in the demo forum. Further than that, I don't have any more information.
From UBI rYo:
4 - We take the "pulse" of the community from many different places: feedback emails, these forums (hence the reason I am here , polls, IRC and probably even feedback over the phone. We do our best to do what the community wants but theirs always thousands of different opinions because it's thousands of people involved, but we do what we can to please as much as people while trying to keep the "soul" of our products if you can let me use this expression.
5. Is UBI actually developing this title, or is it overseeing contracted work done by a third party other than Red Storm?
From Pope:
5. I believe it is UBIsoft's Montreal development team. Whether that includes any third parties is beyond my knowledge.
From UBI rYo:
5 - 100% of the Raven Shield development team is located in Montreal, yes some other people from the other UbiSoft offices around the world have been involved but the dev team is all here, no third-party (except maybe for the soundtrack but even their we have most of it being done here in the Sound Studios I believe).
Follow up statement from UBI rYo:
Red Storm is now UBI you are right but no their team hasn't been developing the game at all, although they have been giving tips to the UBI Montreal dev team. They are still related to the dev team but not developing it in itself.
I'd have to double check on that but yes I think this is the first of the Tom Clancy line not being developed by Red Storm (with Splinter Cell of course )
Recovered on 1/4/14 from web.archive.org.
