State of The Game - Mark Jacobs

[MarkJacobs]

Such a commotion.  So, let me clear up a few points:

Haemish - I never said all our players were WoW or ex-WoW players.  What my point was, and still is, that part of what I believe is going on in the game are due to the different expectations of different groups of players.  Not all WoW players played DAoC/SB and not all DAoC/SB players play WoW.  As much as you might not want to believe that, some players might actually prefer to play in scenarios versus open RvR even if we raise the rewards from open RvR substantially.  And I drew a possible correlation with that approach to players being used to playing in WoW versus DAoC.  So, tone down the drama a bit okay?  I'm a lot of things but not stupid enough to call all our players ex-WoW players because I know they are not.  Like I said in one of my posts in regards to potentially different needs/wants of different players is that we have two choices, believe that all players want the same thing from a game or believe that there are different communities of players within a game.  And I was saying to Schild, I choose to believe the second option and *prepare* to take steps in case I am right.  

All - As I've said a number of times, we will be making changes to open RvR in order to encourage players to participate in it but we won't be gutting scenarios in order to do so.  In terms of a no/tiered scenario server, as I've also said before, I want all options to be on the table just in case the prevailing attitude of "Buff it and they will come" is wrong.  Again, I refuse to stick my head in the sand and expect that one approach will work for everybody.  That would be akin to a "silver bullet" approach and my favorite phrase regarding SBs is that they are good for one thing, killing werewolves.  Other than that, I prefer not to believe in them.

BTW, like our fix for the mail system?  Seems to be working great now.

Mark

[chargerrich]

Exceptional...

Now can you comment on the PvE grind post 20?

Any increase on the horizon? Hopefully on the magnitude of 200-300%. And if so, any time line?


Thank you.

[trias_e]

This is concerning whether people are leveling at the 'correct speed' or not.  Does this take into account means of XP accumulation?  It seems that only those who are AE grinding PvE content or doing scenarios nonstop are getting optimal XP.  If these people are leveling as expected, then the rest of your game is far too slow.

Another point:  The industry has been going straight in one direction in this department.  From EQ's insane requirements to DAOC having a brutal PvE grind, to WoW with a 240 hour playtime to max level over 60 levels.  WAR should continue that trend, perhaps lowering this requirement to 120-150 hours.  I feel there will be reluctance here, as people will outlevel your large amount of content without doing most of it.  I reply:  Your PvE experiment from T1-T3 didn't work.  It's time to let it go and focus on making awesome end game PQs instead.  PQs are a great idea.  Just not for the purposes of leveling up in your game, unfortunately.  They will work much better when a large amount of the playerbase gets into T4, and you can fully populate them.  Again though, focus on quality over quantity.  Make em a bit more interesting and difficult as opposed to time-consuming as well, eh? 

One final issue with the leveling speed as you pointed our Mark is that you only have 40 levels instead of 60, which makes each level take goddamn forever.  I think what you did in DAOC might work here.  Consider some sort of mini-dinging perhaps?  I realize adding 9 more talent points to your system wouldn't probably be a great idea due to balance issues, but perhaps add 5 more talent points at 30.5/32.5/34.5/36.5/38.5, and add some new tactics (this can be a bit of love for your classes you were talking about earlier) at 31.5/33.5/35.5/37.5/39.5.  Combine this with making T3 significantly faster, giving up on getting more mileage your 1-39 PvE content and focusing on RvR, and I think you have a solid/at least better model for player retention.

[schild]

30-40 is just a cockblock to the end game. They shouldn't be looking at ways to make it less painful other than lessening the EXP requirements by a shitton post 20. Once again, I reiterate, 1-40 should've gone balls-out fast and been nothing more than a tutorial. Were I running this game, I'd want everyone at 40 within 48 hours played - particularly with how hugemongous the T4 zones are.

[Ingmar]

Mark -

Let me just add to the chorus saying an additional server type won't help anything. The only new server type that really succeeded in DAOC was the classic "No TOA/buffbots" server, and there hasn't been a TOA-scale misstep that needs to be corrected here.

Just fix the quality of life issues first and some of the other stuff will naturally fall in line. I may be in the minority opinion here but the issue isn't really a problem with the core gameplay, it is more a question of adjusting some knobs for that part to adjust things like what affects zone control, balancing scenario xp rate between scenarios, or what the reward levels are to incentivize people to participate. What really IMO makes people dissatisfied is the stuff that gets in the way of getting to the core fun:

- Way too much grind for the level side of things - if you have to repeat content to level in 2008 you are doing it wrong, and WAR has this issue in spades. You should be able to level doing each PQ once, each quest once, each scenario once, then move on to the next chapter. Even in CoH I can level without repeating missions, and that game is grindy as hell. Doing it the way WAR is now really screws with your storylines and immersion for people who care about that, too.

- Population imbalance. I have to say that after my experience in DAOC on Igraine/Midgard (one of the smallest realm sides in the game), my single biggest disappointment with WAR is that you seem to have launched with a "we'll see if it is a problem and fix it later" philosophy, despite this being the biggest problem DAOC had. There needs to be something done here, and quickly, and it can't just be things like leveling incentives that take months to pay off. The solutions need to be ones that accept that population imbalance is largely permanent and people generally aren't going to move. NPC help, survivability buffs for the lower populated side in RVR, there are a lot of things you can do here but if you take the approach of actually trying to even out real player population you are not going to succeed.

- Solo/duo leveling options. Perhaps scale PQ difficulty by how many people are participating in them when you reach end points - if you hit the end of phase 2 and there's only 2 people there, then spawn the boss as a champion instead, or whatever. Forcing grouping to get any kind of decent leveling rate narrows your audience. In a post-WoW world, far fewer players are willing to tolerate the equivalent of fin groups or redcaps from DAOC.

- Guild xp system punishing you for letting rarely-played characters be in your guild etc. Alt guilds are stupid. Don't make us use these.

- Crafting being overly complicated and annoying You tried a little bit to fix this with seed drop rates but came at it wrong - the problem wasn't how much they dropped, the problem was there are far, far too many different kinds that didn't stack with each other. Get rid of all the adjectives like 'wispy/hairy/horny beardweed seed' and just have beardweed seeds. Same for potions while you're at it. If an initiate's healing potion heals 300, and a healing potion heals 300, then nothing is being added to the game by having those names being different other than making it so they don't stack. That is an irritant, and when you put enough irritants together you lose players just as much or more than you do from Big Issues.

- All the various performance/graphics type problems

EDIT:

How could I forget this one:

- Mechanical Transparency. Expose and document exactly how all the stats work, what the combat mechanics are, how things scale, etc., etc., etc. When I ready an item I need to know what it actually does for me in order to make an educated decision about whether or not I should use it.

[trias_e]

30-40 is just a cockblock to the end game. They shouldn't be looking at ways to make it less painful other than lessening the EXP requirements by a shitton post 20. Once again, I reiterate, 1-40 should've gone balls-out fast and been nothing more than a tutorial. Were I running this game, I'd want everyone at 40 within 48 hours played - particularly with how hugemongous the T4 zones are.

Two possible responses to that:

Either A)  Mythic is of the old school 'relate/care about your character due to time commitment issues' mindset (which is something I can sympathize with...but not in the 1-39 section of this game.  Do this from RR40-80 IMO.  In other words I mostly agree with you.)

or B)  They aren't ready for the entire population to be in the endgame yet.

A) is going to take some convincing.  B) is just a fact of life that you can't avoid.  People were saying that no game has ever failed due to leveling speed being too high...and then the 80's in AoC all quit complaining about the lack of endgame content.  In other words, yes, you can level too quickly.  If the two options are rushing to end game where things aren't ready yet, and having a grind, the grind is undoubtedly a better player retention model.  The best mode of course is getting people to a great endgame quickly, or making your entire game just so many shades of awesome that the endgame doesn't matter.

[Arthur_Parker]

Adding a class to the Dwarves and NOT making it the Slayer would be the height of stupidity. Slayers are congealed bits of awesome sauce gravy on a bed of awesome lettuce with awesome bits sprinkled all over. The lore really doesn't have a lot of good dwarf classes other than Slayers.

Yeah but from memory I believe slayers don't wear armour (so boring to equip) and the sole intention of a slayer is to die in battle.  I can't see how they would get it past GW approval without killing every slayer automatically at RR50 or something.

[Kirth]

The potion thing is amazingly annoying.

The materials to make say 20 strength potions might be taking up 4 or 5 slots in my inventory, and after burning through those materials I can end up having more space taken up because I've randomly created potions of varying level requirements, stat buff amount and duration. each one a separate stack. I would be nice to have an option to "re-mix" a potion to funnel a useless one ( 60 str for 5 minutes ) to the more useful (60 str for 1 hour), maybe by combining multiple low duration ones you can get one of increased duration.

[Kirth]

Of the two remaining originally planned careers, the Dwarf Hammerer and Greenskin Choppa, one is set to return to the game at a later date, but the other will be replaced by an as-yet unknown class.

I'm kind of surprised they don't put in the Dwarf Slayer, personally. Order needs a naked mohawk DPS class to counteract Marauders!

The loading screen description of Khadrin Valley(dwarf T4 chap15+) pretty much lays the groundwork for a slayer class.

[Terrorsauce]

Fixed Mail system?  You mean taking 1 minute to open a letter instead of 10?  Great fix...

I dont even think Vanguard had mail system troubles lol.  Thats a new one...

[Evildrider]

How fast do you really want to level?  I've been making a level a day about since I really started questing in the 30-40 range.. this is only broken up by hours of Open RvR.

The quest rewards are average like 10-13k for most of the stuff I'm completing, let alone the xp you are getting from mobs.  If you wanna Scenario to 40.. umm that's no fun, I've pretty much given up on scenarios.  I may do 1-2 a day, and only if we havent been doing BO's and Keeps.  I do agree that Open RvR still needs more XP incentive.  I mean 4300 xp for taking a t4 keep?  At least make that like 7500-10000 or something.  And maybe give like 2500 or something for capping B.O.'s.

My biggest problem now is that I really don't want to run Bastion's Stairs and Sigmar's Crypts til my fucking eyes fall out of my head for good loot.  However you will need these items when you start heading towards taking the Inevitable City, for the wards they give.

[squirrel]

BTW, like our fix for the mail system?  Seems to be working great now.

Mark

Yes is much better now. You're at 1/125 on your PQ :P

[Khaldun]

Haemish is insulting skilled masturbation.

[Terrorsauce]

I have a challenge for anyone that works at Mythic, or anyone else who wants to try it.  I did this because im anti-scenario and wanted to see if it was actually possible to do effecively.  

Heres the challenge:  Make a level 1 character on an Open RvR server.  No questing.  No scenarios.  No killing NPC's unless you *must.*  Only level off of world rvr.  Lets see how long it takes you.  I made a level 1 Dwarf engi and ran all the way to Dwarf/Greenskin Chapter 2 and began.  Took me almost a month to hit level 15.  

You can go from 1-9 easily in one night doing scenarios.  So thats the challenge.  Only try to level off of world rvr as ive done for the last month.  Ive loged off feeling frustrated, and even robbed of exp.  Spending 3 hours World RvRing only to get a little more than 1 yellow???  Something is wrong.   Then the big 50% bonus for killing a player in World RvR came.  Thought it was awesome until i found out it only worked in RvR lakes.  

The only difference between an RvR lake and anywhere else on an Open server is that one place has pvp and the other has some useless battle objectives or keeps that noone cares about.  How can you make an Open Server with pvp anywhere but not include the 50% bonus everywhere as well?

So theres the challenge.  Do it and see what kind of state of the game your really in.  Because youll soon find as i did, its not very fun.

[HaemishM]

Haemish - I never said all our players were WoW or ex-WoW players.  What my point was, and still is, that part of what I believe is going on in the game are due to the different expectations of different groups of players.  Not all WoW players played DAoC/SB and not all DAoC/SB players play WoW.  As much as you might not want to believe that, some players might actually prefer to play in scenarios versus open RvR even if we raise the rewards from open RvR substantially.  And I drew a possible correlation with that approach to players being used to playing in WoW versus DAoC.  So, tone down the drama a bit okay?  I'm a lot of things but not stupid enough to call all our players ex-WoW players because I know they are not.  Like I said in one of my posts in regards to potentially different needs/wants of different players is that we have two choices, believe that all players want the same thing from a game or believe that there are different communities of players within a game.  And I was saying to Schild, I choose to believe the second option and *prepare* to take steps in case I am right.

My point wasn't that every player is an ex-WoW player, it's that you are saying the people who love scenarios are all ex-WoW players. That's a bad logical trap to fall into. I love scenarios. Really I do, but it has nothing to do with me playing WoW previously. Had I never played WoW, I'd still love scenarios. Don't silo your players into ex-WoW, ex-DAoC, ex-Anything, even if you know what those terms really mean because it makes it sound like you are only focused on old solutions and other games. Making the mistake of thinking those who love scenarios are ex-WoW players will lead you think of "What did WoW do?"

Of course there are different sub-communities in this game, and there always will be. But that doesn't have anything to do with the previous games played so much as what the player wants. And more importantly, YOU and the team needs to figure out what it is YOU want this game to reward, because you cannot please all of those sub-communities. Therein lies madness and ruin. What do you want your players doing the most of? If it's RVR (and it should be, because that's going to be your main point of difference with every other game out there - no one does RVR like Mythic does except Mythic), then you better damn sure start funneling people into RVR in every way possible. Use the carrot AND use the stick. What both schild and I are telling you is that if you try to focus players into anything other than RVR, you will lose. WoW does PVE better at all levels. Period. That will be an objective fact for the majority of players out there. The more focus you put on your PVE, the more you will lose. You have an asston of PVE content, and most of it really isn't great - WoW's is better. There's no shame in admitting that.

On battlegrounds (WoW) vs. Scenarios (WAR), it's a tossup. The WoW objective-based play is better, but the rewards and ease of use of WAR scenarios is a big positive. That will change, because WoW is about to add in the ease of use that WAR has. So again, on sport PVP, you will likely do no better than hold your on - and that's not even taking into account WoW's arena stuff. Any continued focus on the sport PVP as something other than training for RVR is wrong-headed. As others have said, why are there no scenarios that train you in the art of sieging? That was one of the absolute brilliant parts of DAoC's battlegrounds - they were mini-RVR training grounds and they were FUN. Murderball? WTF?

If you put WAR against any MMOG on the market today, hands down it's main point of difference is the Open RVR/Keep-taking. The only other game that has that is DAoC. Ok, maybe AOC has it, but it's reached its critical mass and failed. There are other games for PVE. There are other games for Sport PVP. NOBODY has your market dominance or experience with RVR mechanics. So focus on that. If you never add another bit of PVE content (or at least not for the next 6 months, or even to the first expansion) and focus exclusively on RVR, you'll be doing yourself and your company a favor. Trying to please all those subcommunities is FOOLHARDY. You'll never do it. This is why I have always said niche games are the way to go. Build your game and your budget to fit that one thing you can do better than anyone else and that's RVR. If you make that the best it can be, even at the cost of those other subcommunities, you win. You'll be profitable. Maybe you won't crack a million subs, maybe you won't make Blizzard treat you with anything other than contempt (fuck them and who cares), but you will succeed.

In other words, you should have taken Mr. Blizzard's comments and responded with a "Heh." That's it. One word. "Heh." Nerd slapfights do no good other than to build page views for the publications where the slapfights take place. Oh and ups the retard quotient around here. Damnit, schild, as soon as Mark spoke up in this thread, you should have dropped some AdSense on this thread alone. Just the flood of Vaultards alone would have paid for a month of the servers.  

Also, one other bitch, since this seems to be the bitch at Mark thread: I'm level 22. Been doing quests in the Empire area. Every quest I've finished since about midway through Ch. 12 (which was about midway through 21) that has given me any good items has rewarded me with items that are level 23. It also looks like I'm running out of quests in this area. Itemization/leveling curve is le fucked.

[Paelos]

I would agree that you should be at the appropriate level by the time you finish your particular PQ chapter town in order to use the rewards you get. However, I found that at 24 I was well ahead of that curve, and I was being forced into the next level that was way over my head. That, and I still couldn't use the items I'd just earned in the last PQ.

So I went abroad into the other lands and just started questing at the beginning of whatever Tier I was in at that time. I did this at rank 17, and again later at rank 22. I don't believe the xp gain on quests is correct if your players have to venture into other racial zones to get things done. Also, I'll say it again, MURDERBALL ISN'T A SCENARIO. It has no objective beyond smashing faces. It doesn't matter if you like it or not, because it's the easiest place to gain rewards, so people flock there. If I want a real scenario I have to wait over half an hour as opposed to 3 minutes.

[Venkman]

I have a challenge for anyone that works at Mythic, or anyone else who wants to try it. 

Better for them to first tell us how they think leveling should work. The world currently seems like they wanted people doing PvE to get gear to do PQs to get better gear to do RvR. But it's not laid out that way. The way things are structured right now, players are leveling up on quest grinds while waiting for the next Scenario. Given that, what is the leveling speed?

Haemish -

Crap. Now we're going to have people abusing the font size function... 

Seriously guys. 2001 called. It wants its hyperbole back.

[Zetor]

This thread is awesome on about 7 different levels.

BTW, like our fix for the mail system?  Seems to be working great now.

Mark

I see the server has finally been upgraded to a 486 and its 14k modem upgraded to ISDN! But seriously, it's a lot better now.

Now add an "open all mails" function, an "automatically get attachment when opening a mail" setting, and an "automatically delete mail after taking attachment" setting and it'll all be gravy. :p

[Steel*Faith]

sup

[Aurelius]

thou

[waylander]

Schild you have 2 new mouthbreathers that need to go.

[fuser]

Thread on Warhammer Alliance

Hmm,
 
In the future, hopefully late this fall, we'll begin syndicating all developer posts, regardless of where they post. What this means, is that if a developer posts at Bobs Sellout Palace, we're going to have that post added to our forums, easily found in our devtracker. Over time we'll search out and begin to syndicate developer posts from wherever they are posting on a regular basis. Those developer posts will then in turn be resyndicated via our developer post RSS feed generator, so other fansites can take those developer posts and post them at their fansites.

This ensures that no matter where a developer posts, you'll be able to find the information either here at Warhammer Alliance, or any side that chooses to reproduce the developer posts from our DevRSS feed.
 

I wonder how much CPU time + bandwidth is their digging going to eat up on "Bobs Sellout Palace", because in theory places like SA have always had issues with searching. Curious, Schild WHA contact you about this as a proprietor?

Taking the high road while making plans to implement dev stalking tracking via RSS.  Inter forum drama is da best, greetings to all Warhammer Alliance readers, please make sure to fully read this f13 thread, before posting.

There will be drama  

[Nebu]

Since I'm one of them feeble 'carebear' types who wants the games I play to appeal to as many playstyles as possible

Carebear or no, you need to realize that when games try to appeal to everyone, they risk losing appeal to anyone.  Mythic does PvP well... we'd all like to see that nurtured.  Want PvE, play WoW.  They do it best.

Steel*Faith: Less leg humping and more point making, please.  

[Righ]

Now add an "open all mails" function, an "automatically get attachment when opening a mail" setting, and an "automatically delete mail after taking attachment" setting and it'll all be gravy. :p

If you grab QuickMailTool from Curse, you'll have something similar:

/qm take inbox
/qm delete inbox

It even has buttons now if you don't like typing stuff on the command line.

[Aurelius]

Since I'm one of them feeble 'carebear' types who wants the games I play to appeal to as many playstyles as possible

Carebear or no, you need to realize that when games try to appeal to everyone, they risk losing appeal to anyone.  Mythic does PvP well... we'd all like to see that nurtured.  Want PvE, play WoW.  They do it best.

And should never be challenged?

[Ard]

I finally get off my ass after a few years of lurking, and it's to respond to Haemish and not to stalk a dev... what the hell is wrong with me...

Adding a class to the Dwarves and NOT making it the Slayer would be the height of stupidity. Slayers are congealed bits of awesome sauce gravy on a bed of awesome lettuce with awesome bits sprinkled all over. The lore really doesn't have a lot of good dwarf classes other than Slayers.

The biggest issue here, isn't that they didn't announce the Slayer.  It really seems like, if they were going to go with that, they would have said so, because it would have been, optimistically thinking here, a big win population wise for Order.  Same with verifying the Choppa still being around for destruction, since it wouldn't be a population push there, since most of that crowd went for the Black Ork, for now at least.  This reeks of misdirection for all the wrong reasons, and I hope I'm very wrong on this.   It really seems like there should be no reason for not confirming the classes otherwise.

[Nebu]

And should never be challenged?

Almost noone gives a shit about the state of PvE in WAR beyond the fact that it takes too long for the xp it gives.  PvE in WAR serves no other purpose than to take people to the endgame and occasionally provide them with better gear to do so.  If it is a matter of resource allocation, spending time on PvE beyond increasing itemization and xp gains would be a waste.

[schild]

Sorry guys, I went to lunch.

[amiable]

The biggest issue here, isn't that they didn't announce the Slayer.  It really seems like, if they were going to go with that, they would have said so, because it would have been, optimistically thinking here, a big win population wise for Order.  Same with verifying the Choppa still being around for destruction, since it wouldn't be a population push there, since most of that crowd went for the Black Ork, for now at least.  This reeks of misdirection for all the wrong reasons, and I hope I'm very wrong on this.   It really seems like there should be no reason for not confirming the classes otherwise.

I think you may be reading too much into this.  I suspect they announced the Knight first because Order desperately needs folks to roll tanks, and the current ones aren't very appealing for aesthetic reasons.

[Micow]

I don't know how many of you have made it into Tier 4 yet, but you may not be aware of the potential issues regarding zone capture. As you know from the earlier tiers, there's no way of seeing how many VP's you're earning towards zone control. Last night on my server (Monolith), we took every keep, objective, and won every scenario in dragonwake from 8pm until about 3am. The realm control pin stayed at about 75%. I logged on this morning only to find out Destruction has taken everything back at some point between 3am and 11am. While that is frustrating, it's not nearly as frustrating as the realm control pin moving only to 75% when we owned everything for a good 7 hours. What else were we supposed to do? Farm PQ's and do quests for VP's?

[Nebu]

I still stick with what I said in beta... you don't need more or new order classes.  You just need to make the existing order classes look cool.  If I don't want to play a dwarf or a gay elf, I'm stuck with a genero-human as a choice.  That's not much of an option.  Have I mentioned that I really am getting sick of fucking elves?  If I'm going to be stuck playing an elf in a game due to lore at least make the elf look cool.  Is that so much to ask?  A MAN WEARING A DRESS (or a nightgown) ISN'T COOL!  

[Ingmar]

I still stick with what I said in beta... you don't need more or new order classes.  You just need to make the existing order classes look cool.  If I don't want to play a dwarf or a gay elf, I'm stuck with a genero-human as a choice.  That's not much of an option.  Have I mentioned that I really am getting sick of fucking elves?  If I'm going to be stuck playing an elf in a game due to lore at least make the elf look cool.  Is that so much to ask?  A MAN WEARING A DRESS (or a nightgown) ISN'T COOL!  

Minority opinion again, I know, but I quite like the way the swordmasters look/move overall. The white lion Heidi dresses are what need to change (and the jumper/overalls thing on the shadow warrior doesn't work for me either.)

[Hayduke]

The mail system seems to work great, but primetime will be the real test.  Still the fix is appreciated.

[Sjofn]

I still stick with what I said in beta... you don't need more or new order classes.  You just need to make the existing order classes look cool.  If I don't want to play a dwarf or a gay elf, I'm stuck with a genero-human as a choice.  That's not much of an option.  Have I mentioned that I really am getting sick of fucking elves?  If I'm going to be stuck playing an elf in a game due to lore at least make the elf look cool.  Is that so much to ask?  A MAN WEARING A DRESS (or a nightgown) ISN'T COOL!  

I think your complaint in this particular case needs to be directed at GW instead of Mythic. That said, I actually like the elves. :(

[Ard]

I think you may be reading too much into this.  I suspect they announced the Knight first because Order desperately needs folks to roll tanks, and the current ones aren't very appealing for aesthetic reasons.

The way I read that one is that they already had the base mechanics down for the two missing tank classes.  They just didn't have time to finish and polish all the classes, and those were the only two safe ones to take out, given there were hard armor healers for those two races (and yes, I know, they still can't really tank, but that was the logic as far as I could tell).

The tanks were always due back in.

The Choppa and the Hammerer though, were yanked because they were too much like other DPS.  Both the Choppa and the Slayer are extremely iconic though, the Hammerer, not so much.  They're both really representative of their races as a whole, and are the sorts of things that draw people to picking a side.  If they were to announce it, I'm of the opinion that it'd be a large enough draw to at least get people playing something else on Order and get established in a guild until such a time as it's released.

But then, I'm also not exactly the best at differentiating my head from my ass.