WA Baltimore Interview Transcripts

[Avien]

Interview with Jeff Skalski & Gabe Amatangelo

Frank: So most of the questions you actually answered during the presentation. There was this one question about how often it was supposed to change and you said something like twice per night.

Jeff: Yeah, that's our goal.

Frank: So that's your goal. Are you thinking that for the servers with a kind of population imbalance, you are going to have an issue with the handicaps?

Gabe: I think a good way to understand it is by understanding the scope we are talking about. We are talking about three zone controls and the amount of player kills within the zones, right? So, if one realm is dominating, and they have all the zones and they go into the Land of the Dead, then they sort of open up some room for a repass. Within the same time, people are killing players all the time. So it's just a matter of time for them to fill up that meter. And the meter doesn't reset, they eventually get there. And then they have it for 30 minutes, uninterrupted. And for these 30 minutes, we watch the difference of the other group catching up, of the other realm catching up. So it's almost like you have one person on a server and you have a billion on the other side, the one person is eventually going to get control. Of course this is a dramatic example. The way the system works, they eventually get control. Coupled with that is what Jeff talked about earlier, the handicap system. There are handicap points, so if someone is for two nights, they don't have it and no matter what they don't get it, then we start giving more points for what they do. So it's like we're making sure that on average, you look at the scope of a week and on average it's flipping two or three times every night within that. But because of how the handicap system works, it might be more like one night it's four times and the next night it's once, you know what I'm saying? So an average of like two times a night.

Jeff: That's where we're going. And if we find out and test that, you know, we want it to flip more or to flip less, we'll just balance the numbers if it came to cater to that decision.

Frank: So how long do you think it is goint to take for people to sort of figure out all some of the traps and tribulations? What have you seen in your testing so far?

Gabe: Okay, so to figure out the entire pyramind dungeon crawl, you have 8 boss fight, various different traps. Each of the traps is going to take, the first time they go in there, maybe take an hour to figure out how to get past. And then you're going to have those people, *snaps fingers*, they're going to get past it just like that once they figure it out. Same thing with the boss fights. The boss fights are going to take x amount of wipes, and it's gradient, it's like the first one is easier than the next and then the next and it gets, it's a bit more terrifying, a little bit more skill-based, a little bit more action and motion based as well. So how long as it that going to take? I mean, that varies so greatly, it's impossible to say.

Jeff: I found that it is not as long as you may think it would take. A couple failed attempts and you trying to figure out what you really need to do. I don't think the learning curve is going to be so high and so great that it's going to be too challening to players. Especially the Necropolis of Zandri, getting through that content and then of course, once one person figures it out, then it spreads.

Gabe: Then it's on Warhammer Alliance.

Frank: We'll try. We'll have it up there.

Gabe: So one more point. But, given that, people learning and that they have this little sense of eventually getting there, there's also just people who are so damn good and they do it fast and they do it right and they never die we give out special titles for them.

Frank: So they get their achievements.

Gabe & Jeff: Yes, yes.

Frank: So let's talk a little bit of turkey on the ward system. I got a tease on it, uh, 1.15 in the morning, we were shouting, it was really loud...

Gabe: You mean last night?

Frank: Yeah, he was like "the ward system is gonna be great, it's awesome" and so now our community definitely wants details. So this is sort of a two-part: so first, what did you see in the community feedback that spurred on this change. Even though the community knows exactly what feedback they've given, it's good to hear it straight from you.

Gabe: Yeah I know the fact that it restricts you to a specific item is just not fun. People like to customize their characters how they want them, like to minmax how they want, it's part of the MMO experience. So we're restricting it to one specific set for specific content. It's something we never wanted to do. We've wanted to give this up for a long time and we're really excited it's coming up in time with Tomb Kings, actually. So it's basically that it's a property on your character you do your unlocks by getting the piece or the alternate unlocks where you kill the boss x number of times you get that piece, you get that ward but it's on you, it's in your Tome of Knowledge, it's on the player. You could be naked and you'd still have that ward wherever you are.

Jeff: It's also important to call out the fact that you can still get the ward awarded and unlocked in your Tome of Knowledge from armour as well as from PvE content like Gabe said and from RvR content. So you can actually get all the wards you need by just doing RvR.

Gabe: By accomplishing different fields of tasks outside of getting the armour but also by getting the armour.

Jeff: And you may never get that loot roll in your favour and you can still collect wards.

Gabe: Hey, we've got tokens for that. Especially with the Tomb Kings dungeon.

Jeff: Yeah, we have the RvR token system which is out and we're going to be expanding on that and adjusting the rates of that as we kinda see how the tokens are kinda coming into the game and players are collecting rewards.

Gabe: And another huge thing while we're on this topic of fixes if you will, or updates or frankly getting out what the original design was for the dungeon crawling is the lockouts. Now, you know you have people with no lockouts who join people with lockouts. And people who have less lockouts join people with these lockouts. So if I've killed bosses 1 through 4, somebody who has killed bosses 1 and 2 can join. If I've killed no bosses, I can join that group as well.

Frank: Yeah because our folks have toured through all sorts of good ideas about imperative lockout timers and trying to make sure that if this one person couldn't make it everyone else could do something, how to make that happen.

Jeff: Exactly.

Gabe: You know, I'm a player and I raid every week, twice a week and it's the same thing. If somebody doesn't show up I'm like argh.

Jeff: And what I love is your guild doesn't even know who you are.

Gabe: Oh no, I play incognito. Totally.

Jeff: So when Lands of the Dead gets out, and he goes out with his guild, he's just going to be sitting in the back going "I don't know what to do!"

Frank: And then suddenly he'll be like *whoop, whoop, whoop*, just like that!

Gabe: I'm playing in a guild, you want me to do this? Okay, I'll do this.

Jeff: He let's them to all the hard work.

Frank: It could be your guild, and it could be your server.

Gabe: Exactly, and it's funny too. Sometimes, theyre like "how did you get on this" and I'm like "well I think I did this" and then they go "well if you do this it bugs out" and I'm like that's so cool, hold on *makes hitting motion*.

Jeff: And then he's like, fixing it. And they're like "hey, we used to be able to do this last night, why is not working tonight"? "Well I don't know!"

Gabe: Or "you can't get the whole loot this time, it's crazy!"

Frank: "That's amazing, you must have done something!"

Gabe: You never know! Be careful!

Jeff: Careful what you say in Vent. We actually listen all the time!




Part 2:

Frank: Let's talk a little bit about how stability is going to factor into it. Because when it comes to environmental hazards, things were you need to have the slight bit of twitch to deal with. How are you guys paying attention to how the existing coders working right now in order to make that happen?

Gabe: Exactly. So, it was interesting, because when we approached these traps, we wanted some new tech to ensure that everyone saw where the pendulum was swinging. And we do have a tech and you see it, it syncs up with your client, you see it on your client. Granted, some people with poor performing machines will want to turn down the other stuff when they're going through the pendulum--they're just going through the pendulum: turned down effects, turned down the other things. When you get to the pendulum, you see where it's at the whole time. It's like you're able to go through with that twitch. Now of course lag and disconnects, there's only so much we can do, like spikes and latency. But yeah, so there's a lot of new tech, new systems they've gone through and they've been testing for anything and we had more testing, like I was saying earlier. We had more testing like per "content capita" if you will, than anything else for the Tomb Kings expansions. So we're really excited about that.

Jeff: A lot of the more intense, action RPG kind of experience that we're introducing happen in some of the instances. So the performance in the instances is definitely a lot higher than in the open world. We've been paying a lot of attention to it and really looking at it and are really curious to see to how many people flood into the Land of the Dead at one time and putting in measures to make sure that, you know, we don't have five hundred people sitting at the expedition site. We wanted to get them out into the zone, but it's a completely different experience compared to how we had to put a population cap onto the fortresses because they're a small piece of content. This is a full zone the size of Reikland, so, you know, get the players out there, spread them around, PQs are spread all around the place, there's instanced lairs, instances too.

Gabe: And the whole glyph system to like go over here if you want to do this to get this piece or this guy.

Jeff: And then the fact you purge your enemies, so when they die they have to respawn completely out if they don't hold control, otherwise they'd have to get rezzed. So all this should help. We feel pretty good.

Gabe: Yeah, we have the knobs in place.

Jeff: Yeah, we're just waiting.

Frank: Where do you guys go from here? I mean, once this comes out and obviously you guys have been very busy dealing with everything that's going to be coming from there, but where are you going to go from here in terms of the next sort of big thing? I mean, have you even started thinking about that, conceptually?

Gabe: Yeah, we have been thinking about it, we have plans. It's all about the green light. We have a lot of stuff. I mean, Warhammer is such a rich world, there is so much to draw from and it inspires different ideas, different gameplay dynamics.

Jeff: There is a lot of directions we can go. I mean, there's so many other armies and places in the whole world that we haven't been to yet. If you just look at the Land of the Dead, the whole theme of Tomb Kings, this is just one of seven Tomb Kings, so there's just so much we can do.

Gabe: And of course these kings are against eachother so we can play all kinds of angles with it.

[Avien]

Interview with Mark Davis

Frank: So I have a few questions from our community. One of them is: Other than the one-time only live events such as content releases like the Knight and the Black Guard and the Slayer and the Choppa, can we expect a regular schedule of Live Events in WAR's second year?

Mark: So we have plans to bring back all those recurrent seasonal events: Nights of Murder, Keg End, those we've already seen. We have plans to bring those back. The only time these are going to be dropped is when we, say, have a free live expansion coming up. In that case we would hijack that particular event and replace it with a one-time only event like Bitter Rivals.

Frank: Do you expect those recurrent seasonal events to have the same elements, are you going to build on them?

Mark: That's exactly what we're going to do. They'll be similar with many of the things we did last year, maybe the exact same things. We'll do them again but you won't have to do them all over again. It won't be like, if you were included in this, you can't do anything. Night of Murder is one of my favorites. We actually have plans to bring that back. Keg End, we'll bring back. And we will build upon it, add new rewards, have new tasks you can do, just build upon them every year.

Frank: Sounds good. So obviously, one of the things that have been really, really awesome and popular is All-Tier-Nordenwatch. It was really exciting on all levels. One of our community players has asked if you do plan on taking into account Tiers 1 to 3. At least for awhile, the majority of players are in Tier 4. And they had a pretty easy time doing the necessary tasks - this guy, however, was in tiers 1-3 and he said he had some difficulty So are you going to take all tiers into consideration as you deal with these?

Mark: That's one of our main goals and you want to make sure everybody can enjoy all of them. We look at those lower tiers very strong to make sure that their experience is as long as the Tier 4 experience.

Frank: Let's talk about stuff you've been doing for Land of the Dead. Take me behind the scenes, tell me a little bit about the organization, which teams specifically you're working with and how you really build that hype for those elements.

Mark: At Live Events, we get in everybody's business. We talk to the UI, we talk to the Realm versus Realm team, because we always love those Open RvR PQs and the scenarios so we have to work with those guys to make sure what we're doing fits nicely. Of course we worked with the Land of the Dead. We had to work closely with it and it was great to see them working on that. These development cycles last two or three months; rightfully so because we integrate the whole RvR team, the Warhammer team as a whole.

Frank: What have you learned from the weekend of Nordenwatch?

Mark: We learned that high-end rewards are not the end all, be all of the live event. But sometimes, you know what, a great scenario is a great scenario and people love to do those. We are going to do more of them. We actually have several with Nordenwatch already built-in. We are going to do more scenario-based ones. We have some PvE ones as well and Open RvR plans as well. WWe are going to do more of those, they're immensely popular.

Frank: Sometimes you see something in a Live Event, and it's really great and really awesome. And the immediate question that person asks is: Are we going to see any of it in the live game, permanently? Things like, for example, Reikland Factory? You know, all the other stuff with the RvR influence rewards, things like that.

Mark: I don't think it's any surprise that RvR influence made it into the game that could have been virtually the result of live events. We do try out certain things, Open RvR PQs for example. Something we had done before but did in a live event. Live events rock because they are on limited time. If you had a Live Event running every day, it wouldn't be as exciting. So for some of the things we do that are very exciting, the temptation is, of course, to put them into the game, having them all the time. Then they start to lose some of their luster. So our plans are to keep live events limited, keep them exciting and to keep you wanting to come back and try them over and over and over again. So some of those favorites--Reikland Factory scenarios, Twisting Tower--they may find themselves back in the game at some point, but I kinda like them where they are, on limited time. Reikland Factory, for example, is coming back with Rise of the Tomb Kings, our next Live Event so players can enjoy going through it again. I'm not really answering your question. Some features do get in the game permanently, we found an item that really works and tthat is great, and we implement them into the game as a whole. That can happen. But largely we'd like to keep those for Live Events and bring them back.

Frank: What's your criteria for coming up with some of the tasks that you do for Live Events. There's a lot that just basically span the scope of the entire game, from kill this many mobs to do this quest to do just this task and be done with it. When you sit down and actually do a Live Event, what are the criteria you use in determining what kind of tasks you are setting?

Mark: The very first thing we did was to up their criteria. Now we've broken a rule. We break our own rules occasionally, as the case may warrant it. The guidelines, if you will: we want it to be done by any career, by any level, by any tier, that's key. We don't want Live Events to be just for level 40s or just for level 1 guys. And everybody should be able to complete these. They should be for the most part soloable. We don't want you to have a task you're gonna need to get a warband to get it done. Some of our tasks skirt those lines of solo-ing. Sometimes you may need to be out in open RvR with other people in order to keep the keep lord or capture a scenario; obviously you can't do it all by yourself. We're also trying to make sure that they can be done in 30 minutes, more or less, per task so you don't have to spend something like 6 hours on an individual task. For all of them, we look for roughly two or three nights of casual gameplay. That's sometimes hard to do, sometimes it works perfectly. It can be hard to do in a game as big as Warhammer. We can't know how people are going to play, how action-packed RvR is going to be on a specific server or specific tier.

Part 2:

Frank: Yeah, I mean, that's the greatest challenge I think when it comes to the tasks. This last event definitely put that in the limelight. You had a certain set of tasks and you set it out in one area and you watched it all happen. And in some places where your placement was, for example Tier 3 outside of the Destruction warcamp or T4 outside the Order warcamp. Those are the kind of things where I think you're going to have a bit of a challenge to not hit that six hour mark. Because I know a lot of people who were going "oh god, my faction is totally getting dominatec across all tiers, I can't get anything done". How do you you try to balance that or even try to begin to work on the dynamic nature of some of the RvR content?

Mark: So, we have an uphill battle on a lot of things. First of all, you know, we're all players. And we've all played on all these different tiers. So when we make our decision, I wish it was as easy as saying "What is the best thing? What is the best thing we can do here?". For example that Tier 3 depot for the Badlands - not the best place. In retrospect, we should have moved it to a different location. But our locations are not as easy as saying "here's the middle of the zone, we should place it there". It's based on lots of factors. One is how close it is to the battlefield objective, keep, or warcamp. And we cannot overlap those things. We have certain rules from the RvR team that say "you have to do it this way" because we don't want to interfere with the whole campaign. Which makes our job even more difficult. That's not necessarily an excuse. That's a lesson we learned from the Badlands. We will not do that, taking an objective and putting it next to a warcamp because that was just bad all around. Every event that we have, we have a sort of "post-mortem", where we analyze all this information coming from the community, coming from our internal play tests.

Frank: Great. So tell me some oe the things, the really precise, specific elements that you'd like to hear from the community when actually giving feedback to help that post-mortem process.

Mark: We hear plenty of things why they didn't like the live event, we'd like to hear the things they really liked about the live event. Everybody likes to focus on what they didn't like about the live event, and we get tons of that feedback. We hear all that. We want to hear what they enjoy the most. Did it feel right? How long did it take you to do that kinda thing? Would you like to see more of that kinda thing? I'd like to hear some of the positive reactions that people had from the live events. And ideas they got for future live events, something that we haven't tried before or haven't even thought of. We as developers sometimes can't see the forest for the trees because we're in the middle of all the elements, the code and the technical details. I'd be glad to hear what ideas have for live events.

Frank: Where are you going from here in terms of live events? You've played around with certain mechanics, you've done a lot of things a lot of things over these past six or seven months. What are you going to do going forward, especially after Lands of the Dead comes out?

Mark: We have plans for the future. Some of them are events that people have not seen before, some are events that they have. If I'm talking cryptically, it's because I'm not allowed to tell you about the next live event. We do have a big one planned for the summer and I will tell you that we are pushing the envelope - the next live event has something that we have never done before, that as far as I know, no game has ever done before in level of uniqueness that we are adding. We are going ot keep pushing that envelope, keep putting out live events and build around that, whether that is something specific about the event itself, or what we can offer in terms of live events.

[Avien]

Interview with Robert Mull

Frank: I'm here with Robert Mull from Mythic. Just for the people who haven't gotten a chance to see your posts or know you, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Robert: As you just said, I'm Robert Mull, the Director of Community Relations for Mythic. I oversee James and Jessica and Andy on Warhammer Online, our staff for Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online. So it keeps me busy and I also work with the community teams for Warhammer in Europe, in Russia, in Taiwan now, so there's a large scope of things, there's a lot of organization. At the end of the day, it's still all about community, though.

Frank: Tell me a little bit about what's the biggest challenge for you, being responsible for so many community teams in so many different countries.

Robert: How do I put this. It's the Holy Grail of getting everybody to feel like they are all part of a big family equally. We fight timezones, we fight language barriers, we fight just the coordination of different companies trying to share information and do things in sync. And all those little things raise obstacles that we have to figure out.

Frank: Let's talk a little bit about these obstacles. I mean, for a long time now, there has been a sentiment among the European community that perhaps they're not receiving the same level of service as the American players are receiving. Things like offers and promotions not being valid for European players, things like Europeans getting things a little bit later than the North American players and things like that.

Robert: Chopper/Slayer heads for instance.

Frank: Exactly. Those are two just most recent things. What have you done recently to sort of understand that feedback that's coming from the European community and how are you working with the GOA team to address those kinds of challenges?

Robert: Well, first of all let me say that I hear the European audience and I understand that there is definitely the perception that they are second class citizens, so to speak. Which is not the truth. Europe is as important to us as North America, as Taiwan, as Russia. I mean, if you're playing our game, you're important to us. What we have to do is a better job of conveying that to players. There needs to be a better job of that in Europe. With that in mind, I recently came back from Dublin where I met the GOA community team and GOA marketing and a number of people just about how we can do this job better. It's things like the public test server. Do we have it up and players able to give feedback in North America, then does Europe have that same opportunity? If the public test server is up, is there a thread with our developers in it where they can give feedback and developers can answer questions. It's not about the appearance of being equal, it's about actually being an equal citizen, so to speak. That's what we're working towards, to make sure that happens and it's not about, it's not a matter of whether Europe or somebody, that we perceive them as being second class, it's really about corporations working together and those are just normal problems that we have there of synchronising information flow and everything else. We're really trying, with the community side, to improve how get contact to them in a general sense. You think about 1.2 or the upcoming 1.3. Just patchnotes for instance. These can be 40 to 60 page documents and making sure that we get them all finalised and written for the community, hand it off to translate it into 4 other languages plus Russia, plus Taiwan, there's a lot of work there. And players aren't really aware of that. But if you keep that in mind and think about how do we get codes into GOA's systems so they can award them or public test servers that go off at the same time when we all have the same information. It's a lot of coordination and we haven't been doing a great job in some regards to that and that shows, but we're getting better and our goal is to get better yet. So like I said, I just came back from GOA in Dublin and it was a great trip and I always love going to Ireland. The community team over there is great. We talk to them frequently. When I say frequently, there is a phone call meeting every week plus all the emails and all the other phone calls, the other meetings. We share all the information, we've been planning out content, how we can both kind of pool for our respective communities and push content out so that we have Europeans talking about how they play the game, we have North Americans talking about how they play the game. We're putting that together so both audiences can read about that. But the end goal is really, and what the players really want is if we're giving out, like today, the Slayer and Choppa codes and the White Dwarf beards and whatever that happens to be, that Europeans should be getting that too. And so that was one of the big discussion we had, that GOA is working towards getting that in place so they can start giving them out as well. It really is not so much a "we don't give it to 'em, we don't want 'em to have it", it's just the mechanics of account systems and different things like that. It's unfortunately all the mundane pieces you're least likely to think about but that happen every day in the count.

Frank: What are the main things that Nic and Magnus, the two probably most prominent Community Coordinators over at GOA have told as the North American person about how the European community feels about them, how they fell about the game, what are the significant things that you see and do you see any differences between that feedback and what you're seeing in North America?

Robert: Sometimes there's little, interesting differences, a lot of the time it's very much the same. I was there right after 1.2.1, so I heard all the same wonderful things and wonderful feedback from their players as we get here. The same kind of things that we need to execute when we release patches that have few if any bugs. And I was ordered to tell them how we were going to change things to avoid 1.2.1 type patches. Andmore informationmay surely come in on this, but how, for instance, in 1.3 we're doing a much more robust test cycle from internally to core testers and with the public, and GOA is going to match us in that. And get more feedback and do more testing and just organize the testing so we get the high peak numbers that cause some of these issues we see. Because sometimes we can do good testing, but for instance, some of them were egregiousissues we saw with 1.2.1 where we didn't happen to reach peak numbers on the server. But we can do load balancing and testing in that environment, it's hard to simulate 300 players on 300 players in a fortress area, fighting. And all the things players do, they go in and out and abilities firing off and everything like that. So I heard a lot about 1.2.1 and that's kind of a similar thing. In the sense of what we hear here, it was very much the same. They want stable patches, they want us to focus on bugs that have been existing. And we hear them on that. Then, there's usually some interesting other things and it's not just GOA, it's Russia too, how different nationalities and areas sometimes have some interesting little differences. Russians, for instance, tend to be a bit more hardcore, they want to - I've heard different things from the community - but they want to hold keeps forever. That just wasn't how we designed keeps. But that kind of feedback gets us thinking: what could you do. And I'm not saying we're gonna do it so you can own keeps, that doesn't really fit Tier 4. Taking keeps is a means to the end that is city capture. All that feedback though, even when we're talking about "oh no, we can't do that" gets us thinking about different things and it gets incorporated into other discussions and it takes us down different roads and that's always good.

Part 2

Robert: So even when the feedback isn't something we'd add on, it's still good feedback if you catch my drift on that. As long as it's constructive. And that's the thing, even on our forums: as long as people are constructive in their feedback, you can be as critical as you want. As long as you're constructive. If you're having the same kind of conversation you'd have with me sitting down like this, then you can say "I don't like this, I don't like this because x, y and z and I like doing this", then that's all fair game on our forums. What we don't want is ranting and flaming and OMG and all caps. If you want to be heard and you want to have discussion with the devs, then you have to be the kinda person they want to talk to and that doesn't mean a yes-man, it means an articulate adult.

Frank: So let's talk about some of the complaints that I think I've heard from Europeans. One of them is that when they see something on the North American side and then it's different in Europe, there's sort of a disparity there. We talk right down to some of the basics, like a website. The GOA website is flash, the Mythic site, the North American site is not. The billing system in North America seems okay, the GOA billing system seems to have some issues with automatic billing that we've seen before. Where do you, as a person that has to bridge these two regions, how do you handle that kind of thing where somebody who is obviously your partner, but they still have to do some things in a certain way because they are localized in a certain area where they have certain limitations. How do you balance that, but still give the service to the players that they need?

Robert: I would certainly say we're partners, so we don't really dictate things to each other. We're partners, so we work with each other. And for different market and different marketing teams, they have different goals...things like the website, we offer how we see things, then they come back with what they want to do. Sometimes we're on the same ground, sometimes we do things differently. The website is a good example of where as partners, we sometimes kinda go different routes. We're quick to offer advice to each other and point out where there is issues and that goes both ways. When my team sees something in the European communities complaining about, we convey all that to GOA and if GOA sees something, they watch our backs and let us know. That's always a struggle though, as you can imagine. When you have two companies talking to each other, there's decisions that seem simple to the outsider, but because of different company-internal goals and methodologies and processes are much more complex than you'd think.

Frank: So it's the whole idea of the mundane and the -

Robert: Yeah, I hate to rely on that, but I mean while I was at Wizards what I saw sometimes too was that it would be an issue of something might happen and something gets delayed. We just tell the players "Oh, this has been delayed" and the players might read something into that like "oh, they're gonna cancel this", "oh this is gonna happen". People frequently forget that it's usually mundane reasons. It's because someone is outside of the office this week and this guy hasn't signed it, but he's sick and you know, it's the mundane kinda delays that happen that affect us much more than these Machiavellian tendencies that people tend to attribute to us at times. No one's out there plotting other than to plot the mighty plots striving to make customers happy. I'll counter-balance what I just said though with - in the end, with player perception. If people think we're not doing a good job, if people think it's because we're not communicating well that's...for instance, everyone plays Order at Mythic, I hear that a lot. Of course at launch everybody in Order thought they played Destruction is what I heard. But that comes out of a player perception about Order appearing to be overpowered, or Destruction. So that has a root somewhere that we have to pay attention to. Even if what they are saying may not be correct, we need to pay attention to what they're actually saying. And look and see "why do they say that," "why do they think that." We know it's not because everybody plays one side at work. It's like, me and James for instance, frequently beat each other, we run into each other a lot. On one server, I'm Order and he's Destruction and we know who each other is, so it's like, if we see each other in combat, then we beeline each other. It's even more fun when we can blindside each other. So in my team, we try to mix up what we play. Just so that we don't have blind spots. I mean, Andy loves to play the hard-to-play classes that people complain about, just so he can see "is this a legitimate thing or is it a ... is it a finesse class, is it a skill class you have to be on top of." So yeah, perception is everything. Where we can't fix things to fix perception, we need to educate players to gain perception. I think I've wandered a bit on this question.

Frank: No, that's fine. I think all of this is very encouraging, hopefully, to the European audience. But I think that results are probably going to get you what you're looking for. I don't suppose you can tell us any kind of timeline or anything like that, on some of the things you might be doing? Perhaps an update that might actually say to your European customers "Hey you know, we'll have these issues and these issues addressed by that time"?

Robert: In terms of PTS for instance, you're going to see a lot more sync between us and GOA starting with 1.3, I think. We're sharing them all our rewards stuff so they can match them. We actually have interesting stuff there that's not the same old things so I'm hoping it'll be much easier for us to make sure that everyone gets a share. And the same with developer discussions and stuff we're working on for this upcoming phase that if we have Adam Gershowitz talking about C&C over here, we can fire off a developer schedule for the other side. That'd only be in English, unfortunately, because we can't put a chip in Gershowitz's head to make him speak four other languages. If I could, I would consider it, although Adam wouldn't like it. It's a starting point really, and that's just the perfect example of the problems we face. We can get our developers talking, but our developers aren't fluent in Italian and French and German and Spanish. Maybe one of those, but maybe not great. And certainly not fluent in the sense of gaming terminology. I think in the short term of 1.3, which is in testing, it's just around on that, you'll start to see something of those changes. And I think that's the starting point. My hope is that we just do small, incremental gains and players start to see that. It's exactly what you said, it's that if we execute well, even if it's small gains, players will see that we're trying and they'll see the successes and they'll see the change. And that's what we'll have to demonstrate. If we can't follow through on that, it doesn't matter what we say. It really is about managing expectations to a certain degree but to follow through is everything nevertheless. We can say Europe's support is gonna be improved, but if we don't follow through, it doesn't mean anything.

[Ariwyn-WHA]

Frank: Andy, we're very familiar with one another since the podcast, so I thought I could ask some questions and specifically focus on communities and blogs and contributions like that. So tell me some of the things when you're actually rolling around reading more blogs or reading community posts that fans have made, what are sort of the hotbutton things you start when you're actually looking at those kinds of posts?

Andy: Honestly, I read all the blogs that I can. It doesn't really matter about the content or what's in it, the blogs are an insight into the everyday player, it's a peek into their head, how they're experiencing the game, what they're saying about it. There's nothing in particular that is going to make one single blog jump out at me. Any blog, any Warhammer blog is an excellent thing.

Frank: What are some of the things you'd maybe like to see players do when they're actually making blog posts or contributions or things like that? Or do you prefer that the parameter just be wide open to see what basically the players come up with.

Andy: Blogging in general...until recently, blogging in general was always a peek into your own personal experiences and I really like to see the personal experiences, like I said, what the players are actually experiencing, moreso than I like the news story or the exposé. I'd rather like to see the personal experiences moreso than anything. But of course you should have some nice screenshots and graphics are always great, you know, to coordinate with that.

Frank: Bob tells me you're a bit of a masochist, that you like playing the classes that people say just don't work. So I take it community feedback has pretty much been huge in trying to make you in trying to make you make a determination about what class you're playing at some time to -

Andy: Absolutely. The players are complaining that one class is under-performing and they don't feel like...I want to know what the players are saying. I want to know what they're talking about. And so, let's say for example that, you know, the White Lion community has been pretty vocal about their displeasure in some things and has been asking us to make changes, so one of the first things I did when I really started digging into that was actually I made a White Lion and I leveled it to 40 already. So I play that character in PvE and RvR content and I feel like I've been getting a very good grasp on it. One of my recent projects now has been to level a Black Guard to 40 and a Zealot as well, so I'm definitely playing around with those classes.

Frank: Great. Awesome. You're in control of the core tester program, you work with the core testers a lot.

Andy: I work very closely with the core testers.

Frank: What are some of the highlights, you think, of the core tester program that the individuals involved in it have given you so far in terms of feedback?

Andy: Well, I can't really discuss -

Frank: Specifics, no, but I'm talking in general.

Andy: The great thing about the core tester program is the close level of interaction that those players have with the developers. Our developers are already pretty outgoing towards the community, they already spend a lot of time on the forums. They already respond in public. But they have an even better level of interaction with the players. They are able to really propose new ideas, new changes possibly. They just bounce those ideas of the players and get some really good feedback. We get a very broad spectrum of players as well. We have players who are playing in the lower tiers and the mid tiers and we have players, obviously, who are 40, who have experienced content from the very lowest tier of Tier 4 content all the way up to Lost Vale and the city sieges. We get a lot of great feedback from those players.

Frank: Great. I think one of the problems with a program like that is perhaps this sort of caste system it might create. So the select group of players that have this level of access and then everybody else. So what are the things that you have been trying to do sort of balance that? "Yeah of course core testers get this access and they provide this feedback" while still allowing everybody else to feel like they're contributing meaningfully to the developers and their dialogue about the game?

Andy: Part of it is actually getting the developers out on the public forums - not the core boards, but the actual public forums. Getting them out there to post and interact with the community, to talk the community. Things like we did with the Archmage and Shaman roadmap when Adam went out and basically posted their plans over the next three patch cycles for those two careers. It's things like that, we continue to do those and continue to build upon that to increase the level of communication between the community and evolve the more broad player base with the development cycle.

Frank: Speaking specifically about Combat & Careers, any kind of idea about doing something similar to the Team Lead program in Dark Age of Camelot where you had focused players that had these classes and they were the ones who gave the feedback or do you feel that the core tester program in general mostly meets that needs? I mean, Combat & Careers is a huge part of player feedback, but questions that I have right now, poor Nate's getting like a whole ton of them, but I think is there any kind of...do you feel that there might be some kind of way to integrate more Combat & Careers feedback through any kind of dedicated program?

Andy: To be honest with you, the Team Lead program was a great program for Dark Age, it was a really good program for Dark Age. And it actually resulted in some people landing at working at Mythic who are still there to this day. We have more than a few developers who actually started off as Team Leads. However...it was good for Dark Age, Warhammer is a completely different beast. Because of our involvement on the forums, we already have a high level of communication between the player and the dev for the specific careers. We also gather a lot of feedback already. And our core testers - we don't just focus on somebody who plays a lot of hours just like that, we focus on players who are making good posts, making smart, intelligent posts and conducting themselves in a ... I don't want to say professional, in an intellectual manner when it comes to their career specifically. And we go out into our forums and that's one of the first places we go and actually identify possible core testers.

__________________________________________

Part 2:

Andy: So in a way, you can draw a correlation between the Team Lead programme and the core testers, but just think of the core testers as maybe Team Leads who focus on more than just Combat & Careers. They focus on Combat & Careers, on RvR, on PvE, on items, on everything. I mean, it's all-encompassing. And it gives givesa much broader view in focusing on the entire game rather than just a small area.

Frank: Right. Awesome. Obviously, we've got an international community of players, so how have you sort of...have you kept your eye on the international community, the European, Russian markets and things like that? And Bob, we just actually did an interview about their plans specifically, but what have you found when you've actually gone looking around at what the European players have actually been giving feedback for and do you find there is a disparity between feedback, that european players have these priorities and north American players have another set or are they kind of the same?

Andy: Players in general all have the same kind of priorities. I mean, obviously, server stability, client stability, things like that or universal issues. Balance concerns are universal issues. That being said, each community has its own way of communicating. We are very lucky that we have a very open line of communication with GOA and their community team. And they give us regular reports and they give us their information that we pass along to our dev team. You said Bob already talked to you about that?

Frank: Yeah, he already did. He did.

Andy: Yeah, I'll leave it to that since I don't know exactly what he said. I don't want to step on his toes there.

Frank: No, absolutely. Let me ask you a question on new social media. Twitter, facebook, viral marketing, all of that stuff. We've seen some of that from you in terms of Night of Murder for example, the packages that were sent to blogs and things like that, the Twitter Warherald feed, which folks should follow because you never know what might happen on there. How was really the process of sort of selling that as a marketing thing in terms of ...because they're really community tools. I think they're community tools that have a sense of immediacy that actually stretches beyond things like posting on the Herald or posting a press release or even posting on forums. How do you see these new social media tools figuring into your strategy looking forward with communicating with the community?

Andy: Well, here's the thing: the term "community" has changed so much in the last five years. I mean, when you talked about community before, it was just, you know, the forums. That was it, you know. It was go into the message boards, talk to people on the message boards, things like that. These days everybody e-communicates so quickly it's kind of a no-brainer to take advantage of things like Twitter, Facebook, you know, Gamer DNA, all those kinds of things. It's just really important that we're out there, that we're on the cutting edge. We're e-communicating all this stuff, because you know what? To not do so just depraves our players of another outlet to get that information. Or to interact with our developers. Things like that. You'll notice on the Warherald, we're following, the Warherald itself follows developers from the studio, Josh, Paul, James Nichols, Jess Folsom, myself, and Jeff Skalski I believe. And as more developers make twitter feeds, we're going to start adding them on. So it's another way to pick up and kinda see what goes on. I will give this disclaimer about the personal twitter feeds of the developers: they're not always game-related with everything they say.

Frank: *laughs* I know, I think we know that.

Andy: If you've checked out Josh's twitter you know that! Josh always has some interesting stuff to put up in there. But you know, it's kind of another great way to step across that threshold, that wall that's there between the developers and the players because when it comes down to it, we're just, we're people too. More importantly, we're gamers too. And so why not give an extra outlet to humanize us and to help players relate to what we're doing.

[Ariwyn-WHA]

Frank: Josh and Paul, thank you for sitting down with me.

Josh: Our pleasure.

Paul: We didn't realise there was so many people on the Curse crew!

Frank: There are!

Paul: There's eight of you behind this camera!

Frank: That's right.

Josh: It's a shell of journalists.

Paul: I believe that.

Frank: I'd like to start off with a few questions, some of them are coming from our community.

Josh: No. We reserve the right to force those men to answer that. *points off-screen to Jeff Skalski and Gabe Amatangelo*

Frank: So let me start by asking ... I'd like to take your temperature with regards to the current state of the game. So looking back at the months since release what have been, in your opinion, your best victories? And what about things that didn't go so well?

Josh: Generally speaking, if you look at the kind of state of the industry at the moment, state of the economy worldwide, we've been very, very ... touched almost is sort of a better word than happy, by the fact that people have been making a sort of commitment to our product and have chosen to spend their money with us for month after month since release. Our subscriptions...we're very happy with the numbers we've got internally. People have been really enthusiastic about the changes we've been making. We learned a great deal - we hope, very quickly - from the point after launch until now, we've been making consistent improvements in areas that we felt down on a little bit. So things like the initial implementation of Open Field RvR. When we were in beta, we were happy with it. Got it out into the wild, we became unhappy. Sort of the curse of live development is that you can test and test and test and test and you get things out into the wild and there are more people playing and lots of unexpected things come up. So we've tried to be very open when we are making changes, why we are making changes. And philosophically, we're going to continue down that path.

I would say the thing that we're not happy with...probably server stability is one of the things we've been continuously looking at, going "it needs to be better". We've made major improvements...some of them are already rolled in, some of them are coming very soon, but that's actually effectively past number 1. We had a meeting yesterday where the heads of our studio stood up and said, literally, "Job 1 is stabilizing the client, stabilizing the servers". We want people to know that that is an absolute commitment. We really are working our engineers nonstop to help address those.

Just as a side comment: the fact that we continue to do additional content has to do with the fact that if you take an artist and tell them to try and work on the server code, bad things will happen because he is no server coder. Now if you take a content developer, who writes quests for a living and tell him to work on the server code, he would make it worse as well because he is not a coder. Our engineers are working on things like server stability, client stability, our artists and other developers are continuing to develop content. It's one of the benefits of having a big, broad studio that has multiple sorts of facets and functions. But I assure of you we're not sort of surreptitiously designing new crazy features and ignoring some of the more glaring, obvious things that need initial addressing.

But overall, we're very, very happy with where the game is, we're very, very happy with the trajectory we're on, looking forward to continuing to develop new content for years and years to come and we're really thankful and happy for everyone that has given us a chance and everybody who keeps playing Warhammer. *turns to Paul* How was that?

Paul: Long.

Josh: Long? Here's the short, peppy version.

Paul: Happy! Happy that Games Workshop liked the fact that we hit the Warhammer world, happy that EA has a MMO out and shown that it practically commits to that, happy that we've been able to share our knowledge and wisdom and learned from all the other EA studios, visited the studios of Dice and Bioware and things like that, we're very, very happy. Happy with the quality of our Collector's Edition, happy with the amount of updates we've got out, with the spirit and commitment for what we have managed to show. Happy with the improvements that we've done based on ingame metrics, telemetry or forums, happy we got our own internal forums set up, people can talk to us. Happy with our communication, happy with the attitude and morale of the internal studio in getting the work done and committing to make the game as good as it could be. Unhappy with how long it has taken us to get into new territories, took us a while to get to Russia. Unhappy with some of our performance issues, but we've dealt with that. Unhappy with the speed it has taken us to get out to Asia as well, Josh and I have been out there and visited -

Josh: Seventy-three separate times.

Paul: And what we've been dealing with there is the truth of the matter, which is you need to make sure your game is right for the market you're taking it to so, we're unhappy with that. Unhappy with the amount of free time we have, that everyone at the studio has, but we really do work very hard, many, many, many hours, whether it's traveling or coding, art design, or coming to show up at Games Day today on the weekend. Unhappy with -

Josh: Gimme a happy!

Paul: --weather! The weather over here is still a bit winter-y. But then you go back into happy again! Happy with Land of the Dead expansion, it's awesome, it's clever, it's game changing, it's new, it's exciting. Happy with digital downloads, happy with our trial version, happy that we've got a smaller client to work on, happy where our studio is focused and where it is going, happy to have Ace of Cakes here at Games Day.

Frank: That's amazing. That cake is awesome.

Paul: Ace of Cakes Chef Duff is here. It's interesting watching the hobby bug, skill, commitment, imagination to make cakes here with people who have the Warhammer hobby bug with collecting, painting miniatures or who will be the hobby bug of playing our MMO. Happy to be part of the industry that brings wonderment and joy, and that isn't actually full of darkness. Happy to work with Josh.

Josh: That was your short answer to my long one.

Frank: Wow. I can't wait for the next question.

______________________________________

Part 2


Frank: So let's talk about Land of the Dead for a second. It's the first truly new content in WAR because missing careers were supposed to be in release, but were -

Josh: I'm going to cut you off right now and address that misnomer or misrepresentation. There were no missing careers. We removed things from the game that we felt were detrimental to the game. When a filmmaker makes a movie and he looks at the footage that he's recorded and he goes "you know what, that shot just doesn't work" or "it made sense in the screenplay, but when we put it in, it's too long, the flow's off, the movie is too long, this character we don't actually need", people won't go "you've stolen valuable content from my movie!" You know, JJ Abrams I'm sure has a bunch of extra Spock footage that he didn't put in the movie and nobody is banging on his door going "You made me pay ten dollars, I know you've got 15 extra minutes of Spock and I want it now!"

Now, we obviously wanted from number angles, one of them being balance, one of them being sort of aesthetic, to add things back in, but we were never going to put things into the game that we thought weren't great for the game. The Hammerer is a good example for that. We never got to a place where we were happy with the Hammerer. We weren't going to just put the Hammerer in because at one point we put a slide up that said "There will be Hammerers in the game". It's the right thing to do, it's the only way to conduct yourself professionally. You never try to drive in your design according to commitments you have made in passing in marketing presentation.

So the game launched the way we wanted it to be according to the things we had developed. The things that we have expanded since that time, 4 careers that we've added to the game, they are additions. They're not things that we removed or were taken away or missing from the game. They are additions to the game that fit with a much larger understanding of where we want to go and it will always be that way. Any content that we add or don't add to the game, it will always be because it's the right choice in our mind for the kind of product we're trying to build. You may now ask the second question.

Frank: *laughs* You've been reading our forums.

Paul: Back to that. There's a rabid desire to take information from us. And to say "what're you doing, what're you doing" and when you're starting out, the ideas were sketchy, they were loose, they were done with a lot of affection and thought, they were done with a lot of good intentions. But we have to base with the reality of how these games get built, there are release dates you've set, there are performances tech. What you can do as far as making it fun and interesting...our entire career system was revamped dramatically from 256 careers to 24. We don't hear people going "where are the other two hundred and gnh careers?" only because no one bothers to pay attention to it. They grab on to things that we said with a good heart, with with the best of intentions, and as we came to the reality of making the game, we have to make practical considerations. I always looked at it like making good on our promises not so much as we wanted to bulk out our careers the way we wanted to, they way we had always imagined it. And we've achieved it. We've achieved it by swapping out some of the careers. Like the Slayer is in, but the Slayer was in really early on, then removed. And then he was brought back in rather than the Hammerer.

Josh: You can actually follow one of our posters.

Paul: The poster changes!

Josh: We had a poster that was Slayer and Choppa. And then it was Hammerer and Choppa. And now we've got the Slayer and the Choppa posters back. And that's just the right thing to do, aesthetically it's the right thing to do, creatively, you don't just put in something because it was on a poster.

Paul: What we have done though, is produce the stuff as fast as we could, balanced as best as we could at no cost other than the subscriptions that currently exist. And for people who have yet to subscribe, they just go in and get the careers anyway. So we made a lot of good content. Tons of it. Land of the Dead is just the next slice of significant, game-changing improving content.

Frank: That's actually the question I was going to ask eventually. With Land of the Dead having all this unique, innovating sort of things, where do you see it in terms of your plan going forward, like here you built on the RvR system and built on the dungeon system by adding these environmental cues and all that other stuff with the purging system going back to DAoC with the Darkness Falls stuff. Where do you see this right now in terms of where you're going a few months down the line in terms of how you've been evolved.

Josh: There's two things - a few months down the line is probably the wrong scope to be looking toward. As we look at the life cycle of the product, this sort of represents two directions. One, we're going back to our previous experience and taking things that we know work and bringing them into this generation of MMOs. And we're also looking at other parts of the Tomb Kings content as sort of the avant-garde of where we want to go in terms of how players are going to interact with our game in the future. So a lot of the stuff you'll see...it's almost like platform-style gaming, you know. Instead of the game playing on rails, where you can literally kind of play it with one finger and navigate that way, actually you're gonna need to be interacting with the world a lot more aggressively. Jumping through different things. And it's not sort of jumping and grabbing like it would be a Prince of Persia Online, but adding in the sense of actually "I'm moving in this world" in a way that feels more natural to me. In a way that actually feels like these things have weight and significance, blades are flying back and forth, they're not just static. You can walk directly under the big, crazy spinning Orc blade in the Orc starting areas and it doesn't chop your head off. In this area, we actually think that having blades chop you in half when you run in front of them is probably the right way to go. On the one hand, it's bringing things out of the past, lessons that we've learned, from products that we've made in the past, games that we've loved from elsewhere, and then it's trying to push MMOs into a direction that we think would be exciting and engaging. And I think that we're trying to incorporate an almost console-y feel into some of the content. It's something you'll definitely see or hear from us in the future.

[Ariwyn-WHA]

Frank: So we've got Nate Levy here, from Combat and Careers. Perhaps the most thankless job in the entire company.

Nate: Everybody loves us.

Jeff: *comes in from the side* We at RvR love C&C! *hugs Nate, goes off again*

Frank: Awwww. Team building. So nice. So the first thing I want to ask about is class imbalance. It seems like some kind of wild button stereotype, something you have trouble keeping under control. So tell me a couple of things you do to try and keep the classes fairly balanced and that kind of thing where it's just "oh my god, we made this change and this class is now crazy". What are some of the things you do to sort of minimize that?

Nate: One of the things we do, which is a very strong tool for us, we can pull everything off the servers. We can, we do pull numbers every week on what abilities do people use, hof often do they use them, how much damage do they do, what tactics do they use, what morale do they use? And as we're making our decisions, we can go and say "well, people on the forums and through feedback and through our community are telling us this, this and this, but we see numbers that say this, this and this. If we do this, what is the impact of that going to be? And we can kind of look ahead and go "well, if we make this change that everybody says they want, but what we see in our number is it's the number one damage ability in the entire game, we probably shouldn't go and give it more damage". So we can use a lot of the data to our advantage and we kind of do a little merging of what is the community feedback, what's our number feedback. We put those together, see what shakes out as ringing true and god down that route.

Frank: Some people in the community feel like you don't communicate enough, mostly in terms of providing regular updates in terms of what you're working on. The Archmage/Shaman roadmap, for example, was a good step forward, at least in my opinion about communitcating with the players about specifically what you have planned for classes. Do you feel the same way - or if you don't -

Nate: I actually feel that we communicate quite a lot with the players, but a lot of it is through the community team, it's not us directly. Part of that is pretty simple, it's an hour that we spend posting on the forums is an hour that we're not spending doing balance. We have a fantastic community team that gets a lot of feedback to us. That's something people may not realize: everything they say, it all gets back to us. Myself and the senior career designer have a running sitdown every week with the community team guy and go "okay, what does the communty think, what's the feedback, what's going on right now, what's the current hot potato, what do we need to know". And we're in constant back and forth with them. As the developers, we don't put out as much from us on the forums, partially because there's only so many hours to a day and we need to be doing balance work.

Frank: Adam Gershowitz has also mentioned that it's a very polarizing presence to have a Combat & Careers person...

Nate: Because as soon as a developer or lead or something shows up on a thread, everybody flocks the thread and it goes off track very, very, very quickly. That's why everybody has to get their issues out. We do also have our core testers, which are a small subset of testers which we actually do work much more directly with. And there is quite a lot of direct back and forth between myself and the designers and the core testers. They do get a lot of the plans beforehand and we do a lot of the philosophic "hey, what do you think about that" with them. And it's much, much more manageable to do that when it's a small group. If we'd try to do that thing large scale with the entire playerbase, that would get so out of control that no one would ever get anything done. I think we actually do a considerable amount of player communication but a lot of it is through the community channels and then we get tons of community communication to us. It's a little unfortunate that at times they don't see that their communication comes to us, but -

Frank: But this is what interviews like this are for.

Nate: Absolutely!

Frank: Video evidence. Alright, so let's get into some specifics. Those are the majority of the questions I have to ask. AoE skills and abilites are supposedly a significantly higher value than single target skills for a lot of careers. Was this skill focus accidental or intentional or if that isn't the case, why?

Nate: It's not necessarily that AoEs are higher damage than single targets. In some cases that might be, but overall, very broadly speaking, AoEs are just too good right now.

Frank: Wow, straight from the mouth.

Nate: Everybody knows that, it's not like it's a big secret. You do a scenario, get burned down by five people spamming AoEs. None of them were trageting you, they were all just spamming AoEs and you got caught and you died. It's pretty self-evident that AoEs are too good. Especially when it is just against one or two targets. You really should be using single target stuff against one guy. So we're moving a little in general, just towards how can we make AoE still useful, still productive. If you're fighting eight guys, yeah, you want to be AoEing them. But if it's 1on1, why would you use AoEs? You'll see some changes into that direction coming in 1.3 of just damping down AoEs just a little bit, pushing up single target a little bit. And it doesn't take much, it's only little touches. You'll also see a few changes - you'll see more when the patchnotes come out, but you'll see some changes to the way stats work and how stats contribute to abilities, they will help balance that out. Because right now there are things like a career that has a low damage AoE but piles on a 100 stat and is doing massive damage with their AoE. That's something else we are looking at, okay, how can we make that still productive, you still want your stat, but keep it reasonable.

Frank: Based on that, do the developers plan to review the effective resists and the difficulty in raising resists - like the butchering resist talisman, and high diminishing return are making resists nearly impossible to be raised to hardcap levels and this gives certain classes a high advantage.

Nate: Well, resists should be difficult to be raised to hardcap, that's why there's a hardcap. We really don't want people running around with capped armour, capped resists, capped everything all the time, because really at that point, what's the point? Everybody has everything all the time. We want it to be that if you decide you want this resist, you have to work towards it. You'll get it, you'll cap it out, but you have to make a sacrifice for it, you have to choose "do I really want to get my spirit resist through the roof". I have to accept that my strength is going to go down for it because I'm putting everything I have into it. There should be a tradeoff for it, you shouldn't be able to get everything for free.

Frank: Great. A large part of the tank userbase feels that "we're something of a PvE anachronysm stuck in a PVP world". Interesting. Does Comabt & Careers have any plans to update the archetype as a whole? Like adding incentive to play sword and board or adding utility or reorganising Crowd Control around the tank archetype. That's a comment I see a lot.

Nate: Crowd Control is kind of a general thing that comes up for everybody. Whether you have it or you don't have it, you' ve seen someone complain about it. Crowd Control is one of those things that we really are very, very cautious at doing small changes to because it's so pervasive throughout the game and it affects so many people in so many ways. We're a little lower key on Crowd Control changes in the make. For tanks though, we do very strongly try to give them roles in RvR. That's why they have thing like Hold the Line, where you can set up a wall of tanks in front, they can deliver a pack of people into the combat that otherwise couldn't get there. That's why tanks have things like Taunt that works in RvR, where when you taunt somebody and they choose to ignore you and not fight, you're probably going to wreck them. It's not like PvE, where you hit Taunt and he immediately runs at you, but it's similar. You're the tank, you should be the guy that you want them to come after. You taunt them, that guy thinks "Crap. I really better go and hit that tank" even if only a couple of times, otherwise I'm in trouble. So we do think they were all originally developed like that.

Frank: Let's see here. Oooh, this is a long one. I know balance is an issue, but from my point of view - not mine, but the poster's - it doesn't look like it's being taken seriously. It seems a lot of the mechanics favour Order - that's something I want to hear an answer about - the biggest example I can think of is Ironbreaker vs. Black Guard. Ironbreakers get Grudge easily, they're rewarded for hoarding it. Black Guards have to perform abilites to gain it and they have to spend it to gain benefits. The fact that IBs gain Grudge by guarding and having their damage increased again without doing anything is very contrary to the Black Guard. So that's one example - he was going to use a Sorc vs. Bright Wizard example, but I think that's enough.

Nate: They are probably the most extreme cases where it plays differently. Almost everything else is exactly identical. They actually work very, very different for them, though, it's really not an advantage one way or the other. For the Ironbreaker, if his Oath Friend is getting wailed on by a ton of people, he's going to power up very quickly. But for the Black Guard, he just has to go in and fight and he is going to power up quickly by himself. For the Ironbreaker for example, once his Oathfriend dies, he has to react quickly, put it on someone else, hopefully that person gets attacked. If he's the only person being attacked, it's a little harder for him and if he's trying to be very, very defensive he's going to be burning a lot of his grudge. The Black Guard has a little easier of a time getting at it solo.

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Part 2:

Nate: The Ironbreaker has a little easier of a time going at it grouped. That's really the most extreme example, everything else really is pretty darn even. And I honestly can't even say that it favours one or the other. Now if you ask any solo Ironbreaker if they'd like to gain Grudge as fast as a Black Guard can run off and gain hatred, they'll say "of course we would love to!".

Frank: Right. With the addition of Choppas and Slayers that can do massive damage and wear medium armour, and the pick lock ability and, obviously, the reduction in damage that have happened to Witch Elfs and Witch Hunters, what do you consider the current role of the Witch Elf and the Witch Hunter?

Nate: The Witch Elf and Witch Hunter are still, as the lightest armored DPS, they should still be the most impacting DPS. Because they have the most to risk. The Choppa and the Slayer kind of swing a little bit back and forth, if they are all the way to berserk, they do a lot of damage, but their armour and their resists go the levels below Witch Hunter and Witch Elf. So the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf have some advantage there in that they never really paid that price for their damage, they just have it. Obviously, they also have the stealthing bonus that no one else has, which can be put to pretty good use as long as think about it when you do it. One of the things that we do want to do, like I was talking before about Aoe vs single target stuff, the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf are obviously almost entirely single target damage. They want to come out on someone in the backline, focus on them and burn them down. So in general, as part of our move towards AoEs are a little too good, single target is not good enough, that's apparently going to buff the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf a little bit and bring the Choppa/Slayer down a little bit because one of their paths, a third of their abilities, are AoE. So that's all going to come down a little bit. The Witch Hunter/Witch Elf should be very effective ambush attackers.

Frank: Great. A lot of the answers you're giving me, and I think a lot of the players know them, I'm just goin to challenge you a little bit and say that perception is everything. So at least in my personal opinion, a lot of the point of view in this questions has been "I'm feeling this pain and I'm seeing this issue" and obviously you have explained some of the way the mechanics work, but what do you think you might be able to supply to players in order tu help them understand a little bit better about the whole global view of how class balance works.

Nate: Especially purely from a player's perspective, it's very, very difficult for anybody to think outside of what they are seeing and they're experiencing and feeling. If you're just playing your one character, and you're losing all the time you're obviously going to feel like your character is underpowered. It may very well be the case that standing 10 feet away is someone of your same career who's doing extraordinarily well, they feel "wow, I'm on top of the world". It's very, very difficult to address perceptive issues with mechanical changes. We try to keep our eye on, from the top down, very high level, how is everything working together. When we see that the entire community is all very vocal about one issue, we go and do the research and we see "is this really broken, is this really underpowered", and sometiems we find out that numbers show "well, this really is not doing enough damage" or "hey, we went to test this and we found out there is this bug, we should get that taken care of".

Frank: Do you think that metrics and numbers might actually help a little bit even though not everyone's a theory crafter, but perhaps they might want to know "this is the result of our test" or anything. How do you have to balance that, though?

Nate: It's honestly not as much use solely on a personal basis because if you have your issues that you personally feel good or bad about, be that as it may, and you see numbers for anything, the numbers don't matter because you know all your experiences. The numbers are more of a kind of supplemental tool for us. How can we put numbers to the players' concerns. We know there's this concern, we know there's this kind of emotional feedback about it, but how can we really quantify and see what's actual?

Frank: As far as trying to glean the best kind of feedback from the players in terms of Combat & Careers, what are some of the callouts that you would like the community to convey to you or the community team so they can best gahter feedback. Because I think that players will put down anecdotal accounts, some of them will crunch numbers, an dother people would just go off and rant off at you. But what are the things that people can do as players to be able to convey their concers properly? Are there really one or two or three things someone can do?

Nate: In general, the most useful feedback is specific feedback. If someone gives us feedback of "my career sucks" - okay. What about your career sucks? You know, if someone says "wow, I really think this and this and this feel underpowered, they don't seem like they do enough damage and this other guy with similar stuff is doing better than me" then that at least gives us something to look at. What is it about this, why is this underperforming?

Frank: How many people are on your team actually, I'm just curious?

Nate: A decent handful of four or five directly under me on the team, to make balances changes.

Frank: Wow. How do you keep sane in this kind of environment where changes can happen, you can have this one small change here and it has these massive implications. Sometimes you don't see them until the live patch. How do you kind of keep yourself grounded?

Nate: A lot of is it - I play too. When patch day goes up, I see the impact just as much as everybody else. A lot of it is just keeping in mind "if I do this, how will this also affect players" and to think about it as a player. "We really could give Witch Elfs and Witch Hunters a one-shot instant kill on a one-second cooldown" but then you think about it and go "it's just not the best thing to do". That's the kind of thing where, if you look at it just purely mechanically, you say "well sure it's insta-kill, but realistically, that's 10 DPS overall, that's no bigger DPS over the long term". But then you kinda switch your brain over to "and on aptch day I log in and go wow, this sticks".

Frank: I'm not sure how much you can talk about 1.3, but what are some of the things that you think you've been spending the most work or ressources on as you approach the next sort of major patch?

Nate: 1.3 has been a lot about large scale balance. So most of the ressources we have put towards have been on this general, broad-scope, gamewide "let's make lots of little nudges, a little nudge here, a little nudge there" on a larger scope let's see if we can get everything that we can addressed.

Frank: Great. In terms of the way that you've been putting patches out, some folks have said that these huge, giant patches, 55 pages of patch notes and things like that. Sometimes, if you don't have the right testing cycle, they tend to create more problems than they solve. Do you agree or understand that maybe patches need to be taken in smaller increments or do you still favour this whole chunk?

Nate: A lot of it is back and forth on what we're acutally doing. For example, let's say that all the tanks have a problem we need to fix. We can fix one this month, one the next month, one the month after that and the guy at the end of the chain is going tt be feeling pretty crappy. Because everyone else is getting fixed and he's like "when are you getting to me, guys? when are you getting to me, guys?" And there it would be better to do all at once. But at the same time, we can't just save everything up and save it and save it and save it or else we will never get done. So what we're doing is we're trying to hit the fine point of balance between how much can we do all at once and at the same time, how can we keep everything sane.

Frank: Are you happy with your current patching cycle time? From the time that you begin work on the next patch to PTS testing and finally releasing? There's some stuff about players feeling that the test period isn't long enough but I don't know what other factors get in to that in terms of the normal huge development timeline you're following.

Nate: No no, it's always nice to have a longer test period. But you also have to remember that we are working some couple of months ahead. So some of the things we work on now might not be seen until three or four months down on the read. So if we have a very, very long test period, PTS testing, we can get all the feedback from that testing but it's not necessarily going to get changed during the course of that test because we're working ahead. And oyu also kind of shoot yourself in the foot by having people say "now we have played and tested for two months and we gave all that feedback and you didn't act on a single thing of it". It's kind of hard for us to say "yeah yeah we know but it's going to be in the next patch, we took your feedback and we worked it into that". At that point it's also a little harder to say "we heard you, but we didn't do anything right then". So that's kind of another balancing act, but the longer we can test, the better feedback we can get, the more feedback we can get but we also don't want to go to long. Otherwise people get itchy about "when?"