Questions by Cody %26quot;Micajah%26quot; Bye (Managing Editor) and Garrett Fuller (Industry Relations)
Answers by Mark Jacobs, CEO/VP of Mythic Entertainment
Few names in the massively multiplayer online gaming industry hold as much clout as the often quoted Mark Jacobs. Having been a part of the online gaming industry since the early 1980s, Mark has been a fundamental factor in the gradual evolution of massively multiplayer online gaming. With the release of Mythic Entertainment's latest MMORPG, Warhammer Online, it looks like Mark has again played a fundamental role in the evolution of MMO gaming. But with any MMOG, the work isn't done when the game is released, and the Ten Ton Hammer staff sat down with Mark to discuss the future of Warhammer and his thoughts on their initial launch. We hope you enjoy the discussion!
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Ten Ton Hammer: What's your general sense of how the launch went? We're past the first weekend and into the first real week; how do you think things went?
Jacobs attests that WAR had the smoothest launch in MMO history.
Mark Jacobs: I think it was the smoothest launch in MMO history. For six days there were no crashes. No real emergency patches. No downtime. Not only did the entire game not crash, but no servers even crashed. So for the first six days, things were fabulous. Of course that evening we had two crashes and then two more after that, but that's the only real blemish on the record.
But when you have 55 servers up, that's some pretty good up-time.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are you dealing with game balance? Obviously you had plenty of testing in beta, but now you're seeing it in full speed. How are you dealing with the class balances, faction balances, etc.?
Mark: It's about what we expected. We got a lot of it right. The beta testers told us a lot, but they didn't tell us everything. They never do. So, we have our strike teams looking at everything - the reports, the metrics - and we're going to balance things. No MMO ever comes out fully balanced.
I think we're certainly in better shape than where we were with Camelot. Are we perfect? No. I'd be hard pressed to think of any MMO, especially one that's PvP geared that is, within sixty days, didn't have some major balancing adjustments to the game. Hopefully we won't be making major adjustments, but we're certainly going to be balancing things.
When you have 55 servers and they're busy almost all day every day, you get a lot more data than when you do during beta.
Ten Ton Hammer: In regards to RvR balance, when you look at scenarios versus open world RvR, it seems like the instant gratification for scenarios is very high. Are you offering some sort of similar reward system for open world RvR? It seems like players are drawn to the scenarios, and the open RvR has been a bit lesser populated.
Mark: That's the way it will be in the beginning. Whether they're coming from WoW or LOTRO or Camelot, right now scenarios are very quick and easy ways to level and get gear. We knew that people would be drawn to that. However, we expect them to start to move over to the open RvR once they get past the first couple tiers.
In terms of loot and all that, we certainly are going to provide a lot of encouragement to people to get involved with open RvR.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are you planing on handling gold farmers in WAR? You crafted a fantastic blog about this subject very recently, and I totally agree with your sentiments. But you must have some larger schemes in mind than just players reporting to the CSRs. Do you have something larger in mind for these gold seller scum bags?
Mark: I sure do. (pauses)
Ten Ton Hammer: Can you comment on that?
Mark: (very cryptically) Nope.
Ten Ton Hammer: (laughs) Alright.
Mark: One step at a time. Certainly you know and anyone who has been around me for any period of time knows that I can't stand these guys. I have no use for them. I think they're helping to undermine MMO gaming, and as somebody who has been making online games since the dawn of time, I have no use for somebody who wants to help destroy what has taken over two decades to build up. And that's what these guys are doing.
You can pretty much expect that this is just the first shot. This is the easiest. We're hoping to discourage them. Discouragement is good; it takes less time, less effort, and less cost. But we ain't stopping here.
Ten Ton Hammer: How did you end up creating a game that has combined really meaningful PvP with some really quality PvE experiences? A number of games have tried to blend the two in the past, but few have reached such an outstanding level of PvP gaming that your studio has attained. What kind of tricks and secrets did you use to come up with this formula?
Mark: A lot of hard work. A lot of willingness to take feedback from other people. One of the things I talk about in many of my interviews is that I don't think that I'm the world's greatest game designer. I don't think that I'm a genius. I think that I'm a pretty good game designer. One trait that I try to spread among as many people as I can in the company is that you have to be willing to listen. Nobody is right all of the time. Nobody is perfect. Just as I can take criticism when one of my ideas is bad or something we do as a company is dumb. I think that a great designer has to be willing to listen to other voices and go 'yeah you are right I wasn't thinking.' Whether it is how we are trying to mix PvE and RvR, or things like the tome or the quests.
This has all evolved from both internal and external feedback, and that's the secret sauce. I mean, I've spoken out before against the idea of the Vision, as opposed to a vision. You know a small 'v' versus a capital 'V'. When you have a small 'v' that's a good thing. That's the initial vision for a game. That's what I did with Warhammer. But I don't have the vision with a capital 'V', that's when bad things happen.
Ten Ton Hammer: (laughs)
Mark: It's true! Thats when bad things happen in almost every field - and it doesn't matter if you are making games, making movies, television, or writing books - when you are so caught up in that Vision that you have. When you are the only one who can be right. Sometimes absolute greatness ensues but its easier the less complicated things are. I've yet to see an MMO that has that kind of Vision, where you can tell that it is some one man's, one woman's Vision, truly succeed. WoW is not that kind of vision. Its the vision of a lot of very talented people at Blizzard who did their job and did it very well. And so if you are looking for the secret sauce that's where it is. Hard work and a willingness to listen.
According to Jacobs, Vision with a capital 'V' almost always leads to trouble.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are you planning to equalize server populations? I know that's been the thing that's.....
Mark: Always! That's always going to come up. That's always going to be a pain in the butt. I mean one of the things that we did already that no one else has done was the server clone idea. I can't believe that it took so long for anyone to think of it. Now, I'm glad I was the one who thought of it!
But we are going to take other steps as well. I've already announced that we're going to have free character transfers if the servers don't even out over the next week or so. What's funny is that if you look back at WoW's launch, people had horrendous queues. While people weren't very understanding, they were more understanding.
After two days - just two days - people are going %26quot;Oh my god! What are you going to do about the server queues!? It's an epic fail!%26quot; I'm like - it's been two days! Two days since we launched! Then the population started evening out some more, and they're going to continue to even out. We're going to wait before we do anything drastic, like people putting in transfers. It doesn't really make the problem better, necessarily.
It's pretty humorous, really. If you go back four years and compare the two games, we have far less problems than Blizzard had in terms of their queuing. And yet, we get blown out of proportion. We're going to do whatever we need to do.
In terms of ongoing balance, it's important for people to understand that just because you're outnumbered on a server, doesn't mean that the other guys are going to win. That's the beauty of this; you can have Destruction have 20% more people than you, but in scenarios you can still kick their butt. Even in open RvR; if you go back to the Camelot days, how many times did the underpowered realm - in terms of numbers - win? It was all the time! For a lot of the people that are always complaining about their being more Destruction people, it just means that you get into a scenario faster. And for those Destruction people complaining about their not being enough Order players, within 24 hours, people should have moved to a different server.
It's not like people can go %26quot;Oh my god, it took us six months to get our characters to level gazillion and now I need to move because there's nobody online to play with.%26quot; When we tell people that this is what we're going to do and we have plenty of servers up, and they choose to go to the crowded server....
Y'know we put warning after awrning up telling people not to choose the crowded servers, and yet I get to watch a board that shows how many people are logging in and creating characters and new people keep going to the crowded servers. So what can we do, right? If we shut of character creation there, then the guilds will get pissed. So we can't do that. If we give people a bonus for growing to the less crowded servers, then the guilds still bitch because we gave a (hypothetical) 10% leveling bonus if they would move to that server.
Since we're not past week one of our initial launch, we're not going to overreact. We learned our lesson from the years of DAOC.
Ten Ton Hammer: So no server mergers in the near future?
Mark: Oh god no! The funniest bit was that when this stuff first started, people told us that we needed to merge servers. It was Friday. And so I'm keeping track of how many servers are mid to high population levels. I even told people on the Vault about it.
The next day, four more servers had moved from low pop to mid pop. I just want to tell people that this will keep happening and to just be patient. We opened extra servers than we would normally, because we wanted people to have those option. We listened to our community.
When we did our first launch with the CE and the SE, people were asking us to open a few extra servers because of large guilds or alliances. So we did. And of course people started complaining.
But it really doesn't matter. We opened with far fewer servers than what we will need to contain all the sales that we're going to get over the next month. We know - or at least we hope - what our numbers will be, and since we have plenty of servers to handle that, I'll think we'll be just fine.
Ten Ton Hammer: So do you think you came out with the right amount of servers?
Mark: I think we did come out with a couple too few for the CE, and I think we did come out with the right amount for the first week with the SE. What other people have to realize is that if we put too few servers on and a problem happens at two in the morning, we're not going to be able to do anything about that. The people that give you the high sign to put up more servers may not be there at two or three in the morning. Now the CSRs are there and we do have people watching, But these servers are delicate, it's almost a feel thing.
It's not like we're just watching the numbers and trying to make a decision when to move people over. We really prefer to have a few extra servers now and wait and see what happens over the next week. It hasn't even been a week yet since we went on sale.
Ten Ton Hammer: Are there any plans for reducing scenario wait time? Some players have been getting anxious with how long it's taking one faction compared to the other to get into a RvR scenario.
Mark: This is another thing that involves server population and people that are willing to jump into those RvR scenarios. If you can't seem to get into the RvR scenario, that's why we have open world RvR.
But if one side wants to do open RvR and the other side doesn't, that's going to be a problem. That's a problem with any game, not just WAR. It could be something that happens on the WoW PvP servers or the Camelot servers. If guys don't want to RvR, then they have to sort it out among themselves. You can't force people to RvR. You can't force 'em to PvE.
These things will sort themselves out once we have the transfers going, then people can make the choice if they want to stay on their server or not. They might look at the servers and discover that one is a bit more PvE oriented, so they'll move to that server. But activating anything now, that's just going to make the problem worse.
So will the Orc Choppa be coming back into the game in the next four months? We'll have to wait and see.
Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think there will ever be a time where you tell players what tendency a server has? Maybe put %26quot;RvR Scenarios%26quot; or %26quot;PvE%26quot; or %26quot;Open World RvR%26quot; in parenthesis beside the server name?
Mark: Oh absolutely! If we see that something is going on regularly, that this particular server is really into RvRing, then we would absolutely do something. whether it's flagging or allowing free transfers off those servers. We would tell players that %26quot;Sorry guys, no one is RvRing on your server. Why don't you move to another one?%26quot; I have no problem with that. We want people to be happy.
Ten Ton Hammer: The pace of the game is really fascinating; it is not boring. Every time I sit down and play, there's always something to do. Was it your philosophy to give players so many options that they'll never be bored?
Mark: That's one of the keys to the design of this game. I wanted to cut out time sinks whenever possible. It should be really intense. What I'm hoping is that people will settle into a natural rhythm after awhile where they might start up a separate character and take things a little slower. Part of the thing with time sinks is that it gives people time to talk and start to build a community. Now I think people will begin to start that community due to all the action that's going on, and you'll see all the guilds in the scenarios and then in the open RvR.
I wanted a game where I wasn't spending a ton of time waiting or healing or riding on this thing to go to this other place. That all makes the game feel more grindy. I would get annoyed when I couldn't do some things or I'd have to wait for things. Our pacing is absolutely on purpose.
Ten Ton Hammer: What can you tell us about the future? What's coming down the pipe?
Mark: I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that one of the things we are looking at is bug fixes. That is a priority item for us.
On a decidedly different track, over the next four months we're looking at bringing back some of those classes that we cut or some of the other content that was cut. Or giving players some additional things that they want and have been asking for.
That said, we're not making the game more PvE. We're not talking about that. But I did sit down with Rob and I have a list of 21 items on my board. Out of those 21 items, I have nine things that I consider to be hot button items from the players perspective. This is taken from my experience and what I've seen on the forums. Out of that nine, we'll probably be able to get to six or seven that will go in fairly quickly.
Then there are the changes that need to come in because I didn't want to have any point in the game where the player can say that they'd rather stick a hot poker in their eye than do that again. There are a couple of things that are on that list for WAR. And I just go, %26quot;How the heck did this not get fixed before we launched?%26quot; The answer is frankly that we thought it was fixed but it somehow made it in. These are the things that can get really annoying to the player over time.
A perfect example would be like when you get booted or want to switch toons and you get stuck in the server queue again. We thought it was fixed, but we're going to go in and fix it again. To me, that's something that's really important to fix right away. That's not a balance issue. Nobody is going to be pissed off about us fixing this dumb bug. That's one of the things that I really want to do over the next thirty days; get a whole bunch of these annoyances or bugs out of the way and then get ready for a couple big content patches.
Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for your time, and it's always great talking with you Mark!
Mark: Thank you very much!