Now that NCAA Football 10 is in stores, we thought it'd be a good time to set up a game with the devs night. For those of you not familiar with this type of event, you will have the opportunity to play a game of NCAA Football 10 with members of the dev team along with members of the EA SPORTS Community and Live Production teams.

The event will take place on Thursday, July 23, 2009 from 5-9pm EDT on the XBOX 360 and will feature several members of our team including:

- Russ Kiniry (EASPORTS RussK) - NCAA Football 10 Designer

- Ben Haumiller (EASPORTS BenH) - NCAA Football 10 Designer

- Larry Richart (EASPORTS LarryR) - NCAA Football 10 Associate Designer

- Greg Heddlesten (EASPORTS GregH) - NCAA Football 10 Associate Designer

- Mike Scantlebury (EASPORTS MikeS) - NCAA Football 10 Assistant Producer

- Will Kinsler (Raczilla) - EA SPORTS Community Manager

- Justin Dewiel (Dewiel) - EA SPORTS Community Manager

- Eric Gray (Emantx) - EA SPORTS Broadcast Producer

- Rob Thompson (SAMamboking) - EA SPORTS Broadcast Host

- Jason Thompson (PrimetimeSA) - EA SPORTS Broadcast Host

*Please note that each team member's gamertag is noted in parenthesis above.

While we'd like to play a game against everyone, we realize that we are only going to play against some of you during the event so we are encouraging everyone to play games against each other and upload the highlights to beta.easports.com for the rest of the community to see. We will be creating a thread in the NCAA Football forums around the event for everyone to interact as well. On our end, we plan on recording and posting a few of the games we play on the site along with a recap article so that everyone can take part in the event. This is your chance to be the first EA SPORTS Community member to beat an EA SPORTS employee in NCAA Football 10. Don't miss out!

Good luck and make sure you are online and ready to go on Thursday July 23, 2009 at 5pm EDT. For those of you planning on participating, let us know and if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below as well!

NCAA Football 10 community day is taking place today at the EA SPORTS Tiburon studio .  Seven hardcore NCAA Football community fans are playing early builds of NCAA Football 10 and giving their unfiltered feedback to the dev team.  We've been following the event throughout the course of the day here on the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.

It's now past midnight and the community attendees are still going strong playing NCAA Football 10 and giving their feedback to the dev team.  Here are some thoughts from one tired community manager here inside EA Tiburon.

We'll be here until our community guys completely wipe themselves out with exhaustion playing NCAA Football 10.  This will be our last blog post for the night, but I'll continue to post updates on Twitter for those of you following there.  If you've missed any of today's coverage, click here for a quick look at everything we've posted from NCAA Football 10 community day.

Thanks for following us today!

-raczilla

NCAA Football 10 community day is taking place at the EA SPORTS Tiburon studio on Friday, March 20th.  We'll be following the event throughout the course of the day, and throughout this week.  Click here for more information on the event, including a preview of what you'll see here on the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.

With our new approach to this year's NCAA Football 10 Community Day, I sat down with NCAA Football 10 producer Ben Haumiller to share our thoughts about past events, how we choose attendees to come to a community event, and what you can expect to see here on the Inside EA SPORTS Blog tomorrow.  See all of that and more in the videos below.

-raczilla

If you've been following the online community for EA SPORTS titles over the last few years, you're probably familiar with the concept of a community event.  Recently on the Inside Blog we've featured coverage of both a Wii community event at our EA SPORTS Season Opener and our Fight NIght Round 4 Community Day.  This Friday, March 20th, we'll be hosting our NCAA Football 10 community day here at the Tiburon studio where the game is currently in development.  I'd like to share with you some of the history of community days and why this event will be different, and why it will be a great improvement over what we've done in the past.

A brief history of EA SPORTS community events

Before coming to work for EA SPORTS I worked on a Madden NFL and NCAA Football fan site called Madden Nation.  I was fortunate enough to be one of the first community leaders to attend the early EA SPORTS events which started back with the '05 football products.  Back then a community day meant coming out to the studio and playing the finished product a couple of weeks before the game shipped.  This served a couple of different purposes.  It was a reward for some of the biggest community contributors but was also a way for us to get some information about the games to people who visited our sites.  We all felt like this was a great step by EA SPORTS to reach out to fans and for a couple of years this was the model for these kinds of events.

I came to EA Tiburon in the fall of 2006 and was fortunate enough a few months later to organize the first ever community event for NCAA Football.  The big feedback coming out of that event was that our attendees loved the opportunity to check out the game, but that they'd love to visit us earlier in the year when they could give us some feedback while the title was still in development.  Since then it's been our priority to move community day events earlier in the year.  This product cycle I'm happy to report that all of our community events are at a point in development where our attendees' feedback can help make sure our games are tuned to the liking of the community.

What's on tap for NCAA Football 10 community day?

On Friday when our community day attendees come to the Tiburon studio, they'll spend the day going through the features of NCAA Football 10 and giving the development team direct feedback on the game.  In fact, we're so early in the year that our attendees won't be able to talk about most of what they will see and won't have detailed previews of the game immediately after community day wraps up.  Instead of using the community day as a means of getting news out about the game, we've shifted 100% of the focus toward making sure our attendees can help impact the quality of the product.

Why tell you about the event if you won't hear a lot about the game features?  Good question.  Even though we're not quite ready to open the floodgates of information and tell you everything about NCAA Football 10, we do want you to know that we're taking a lot of care in developing the game.  We are taking the quality of our games to new heights by involving the community early on.  You've seen some examples of this with our producer involvement on the forums and here on the Inside EA SPORTS Blog and this Friday's NCAA Football 10 Community Day is another step towards making sure we involve the community every step of the way.  And while you may not learn all of the NCAA 10 features this Friday, you will get an inside look at the community day. 

What kind of coverage can you expect to see on the Inside EA SPORTS Blog?

We're going to keep you up to date through the week and during the event on Friday.  Here's what you will find this week on the Inside Blog:

Wednesday

Bios of our community day attendees and their backgrounds with the NCAA Football series.

Thursday

A video sharing our vision for NCAA Football 10 community day and what we hope to accomplish.

Friday

- Pictures and video on the blog, live from the community day event

- Live community day coverage on my Twitter feed. 

I hope you'll follow the event here on the blog as well as our official event discussion thread on the EA SPORTS NCAA Football 10 forums. 

-raczilla