Planetside 2 - The Wiki
The Syndicate and SOE's relationship is one of our oldest ones. Smed and his team have been core, strategic partners of ours for years. That relationship has grown in scope and size over the years and in the case of Planetside 2 went beyond just testing and consulting. Those activites did occur but in addition to them, we were retained to write the strategy guide for Planetside 2.

The chosen format for the guide was going to be a wiki. There were several reasons for that but the chief one being: A printed book (while looking cool on a shelf) is obselete before the game even goes live. Games change rapidly and the nature of the publishing process is such that the content of the book was created 6-8 weeks before the game went live. In the online gaming space especially, that is a lifetime given how much gets finalized and changed in the final 2 months before launch and how much changes right after launch.

A second reason for a wiki is that while The Syndicate wrote the wiki and maintained it after launch, the whole community could have a role in adding and changing content. The power of crowd-sourcing content from massive numbers of smart, passionate fans is an awesome thing.

The Syndicate assembled a large team who made up the first non-SOE personnel to play PS2. That team had writers, editors, layout and graphics personnel as well as testers/consultants. That team worked for several months to create the launch wiki and then maintained the wiki after launch.

The wiki project marked the next step in the evolution of our relationship with SOE.