Games Day Chicago - Interview with Martin Smith

[PhoenixRed]

At Games Day Chicago, Warhammer Alliance had a chance to catch a couple of folks from the Mythic team for some interviews time. Martin Smith is a developer for the Dungeons and Encounters team and he's been the main driver behind quite a few of things that you're familiar with in WAR, and most recently some of the new content from Land of the Dead.

We thought it would be a good idea to catch Martin on his thoughts about the game from his perspective and some of the challenges associated with his work at Mythic. Thanks Martin for the informative interview!


First, tell the community out there a little bit about yourself and your role at Mythic.

Hi everyone! My name is Martin Smith, and I am a developer for the Dungeons and Encounters team—the team that designs and develops most of the end-game PvE content in the game. I’ve worked on Land of the Dead, Lost Vale, Sigmar’s Crypts, Bloodwrought Enclave, and the King Fights.


I hear you were a player before you were part of the development team. How does that perspective help when designing boss encounters?

I was a long-time Dark Age of Camelot player before I applied at Mythic. I was a VNboards forum warrior, and at the time I was highly critical of Mythic and posted much to that effect. On a dare, I came down to the Mythic studio to take some pictures and ended up getting a tour and some swag. So, I decided to apply and got a job in Customer Service, working my way up to where I am now. It was really interesting being on the other side of the fence, especially being in Customer Service shortly after the launch of Trials of Atlantis. People can say a lot of nasty stuff over the internet, but I’ve grown a thick skin and learned how to handle criticism. In all honesty, if my stuff is broken, or not fun or whatever, that’s my responsibility and I need to be able to take the criticism and fix it or make it better. I can’t crawl up into a ball and cry about how a player is complaining about something I did.

But specifically for being a dev, you really have to be a player first, and you have to play the game to know what players want. It really is mandatory that you play the game you’re working on. Sure, you can read forums and bug reports about what’s going on, but that’s nothing compared to being in the game and seeing it happen right in front of your eyes—seeing it happen to the character that you’ve worked on for so long. Because if you don’t even know what you want out of the game, then how are you supposed to have any grasp on what the masses want? For example, when you design a fight and you think “Man it would be really awesome to throw this 10-second silence on the healer of a group. That would really make it tough and you’d have to plan around that.” But then you think to yourself as a player, “Man that time I got silenced for X seconds by some boss was super annoying and I rage quit when we wiped. “

So, you have to take your personal experience with different fights and mechanics and try and craft something that is challenging, but is not tedious and annoying. Plus, being a dev playing the game can help you spot issues really quickly. When Gabe and I are playing WAR and we notice something off here or there with an encounter, we write it down and investigate the next day at work, and see if something needs to be fixed. Even just being in a guild or on voice chat, you hear people talking about this or that and as a dev you have the power to address some of those concerns.

So yeah, being a player is really super important. When you’re not playing, it can be easy to overlook players’ concerns and feedback. Everything might look right on paper, and you’re certain that everything is correct, but playing it and experiencing it can show that what’s on paper isn’t always right or fun.


LotD has been out for a little while now. Tell us specifically which items you worked on.

Well, our team designed all the content in LotD. We all had our hands in the design of everything, but the specific things I was given final design and implementation responsibly were: The Library of Zandri, The Tombs of the Bitter Wind, The Forbidden Vaults, The Hall of Awakening, and the Chamber of the Vulture Lord. I also did all the traps in the dungeon and various other things.


High Priest Herakh is an encounter in LotD that has been the most challenging for players so far. Tell us a bit about your thought process in designing such an encounter.

High Priest Herakh is three different fights: the Sepulcher of Swords, the Ossuary of the Anointed, and the Hall of Awakening. When we were doing early design for the boss fights in the dungeon, we wanted to incorporate the whole embalming process since that is a big part of the Tomb Kings lore. We tried to find ways to fit it into just one Public Quest, but that didn’t work out so we decided to break it up into three separate fights to symbolize three stages of the embalming process: Inspection/Selection, Embalming, and Re-animation. We also wanted to have the same boss throughout the three different fights, and he would utilize the same base abilities. That way, each fight would have its own flare. The first had Refracted Darkness and the teleportation mechanic. The second had the washing mechanic, and the third the addition of the Champions. We tried to balance the different mechanics with his base abilities so each fight had a compelling and different feel to it, and I think we accomplished that.


Tell me a bit about how you handle user feedback. Community Coordinators like Jess and Andy do a lot of data mining from posts, but once the feedback crosses your desk, what does it typically look like? Where do you go from there? Cite an example from your recent work where you follow this.

Well, I get bugs and general feedback. If it’s a bug, it goes into our tracker and then it is assigned to me. General feedback I usually get in an e-mail saying, “This is a top issue being reported by players. Can you please take a look?” With bugs, it’s pretty much fix the bug and get it hotfixed. Then there are bugs that QA cannot reproduce and I have to dig around to see if it’s scripting related or if there is some bigger underlying issue. High Priest Herakh enraging after three jar phases is a good example. A guy in QA (James Wilson, who rocks btw) and I spent hours and hours trying to reproduce it and we never could, even on a live server. But players kept reporting it, so I ended up just changing around the way the enrage mechanic worked, had it tested and pushed up to live, and players reported that fixed it. Everything that is sent my way gets investigated, and if I find any problems they get fixed. The timing of those fixes, of course, depends on my current work-load and severity of the issue.


Gabe Amatangelo is the Dungeons and Encounters Lead. What overall direction has he told you and the other members of the D and E team to follow, both for LotD and for WAR in general?

I’ve been working with Gabe for quite awhile now. Generally speaking, it would be to always think about the player’s experience when building an encounter, focus on fun for every player type, use what is unique to Warhammer when you can, and design within our means. In LotD, some of the specific direction were things like ensure each career-type has a role in every encounter, ensure no one specific career is required to complete a group encounter, focus on execution, play through your encounters, etc.

While some of these might seem straightforward at first glance, in Warhammer some of them have been quite challenging. For example, all of the careers and abilities in WAR are built up to function in PvP, so we have to work within that system to make the fights fun and challenging. The never-ending AP pool is the hardest thing to work with; since almost all other games have a finite system, we have to do a lot of things differently. This is why, in the LotD, we wanted to focus more on execution rather than straight up numbers for a lot of the fights. You see that in the 8th boss—he doesn’t deal the most damage of any fight, but really if you mess up, you’re toast.


The 8th boss of LotD is by all impressions meant to be an “epic” encounter. No encounter is without its fair share of bugs, though. Give me a couple of examples of tweaks you’ve had to do to this encounter so far, with the videos and footage of the kills, what have you been observing about how players treat it? It is as you expected and if not, why?

Well as I’m sure anyone that has done the boss can tell you, he would reset at a specific point in the fight. That had to get fixed, but other than that I haven’t really had to make any changes to the fight. I’ve only seen the one video, what, of the German guild? It pretty much played out like I expected, except for that poor Shaman being sucked into the casket over and over—he might want to try standing somewhere else. I’d like to get some more feedback from people that have completed it to see how it is playing out for others. Not a lot has been posted on the forums about the fight that I’ve seen. But I really get a kick out of seeing videos and descriptions of stuff I’ve done. It really brings me a lot of satisfaction to see players enjoying content… or cursing my name.


As a designer of certain encounters, tell me what players can do to personally help you the most in understanding their concerns, issues, and problems with what you’ve done? What are some specific examples you’ve seen so far that have helped you in this way?

I personally take a portion of my day every single day and even on the weekends to read the boards. I read the PVE Discussion board on WHA, and on our own boards I read the Dungeons and Lairs and Bug Reports forum. I don’t really have enough time to view much else, so I generally stick to those. When LotD launched, I was in there looking and waiting for issues to pop up and would try to address them as quickly as possible. So if you post something in one of those forums, I’m going to read it. I can’t guarantee that I’m going to be able to change everything, but true bugs are going to get fixed. One of the problems with some of the posts that get posted is there are things that just say, “Oh, he’s too hard!” or “Oh, he hits too hard!” or “He resets!” I need details—why is he too hard? What gear are you using? What potions/buffs did you have? What was your group makeup, etc. But yeah, I’m familiar with all the dungeons, all of LotD, and the Tomb of the Vulture Lord, so anything on those I’ll pick out and try to get addressed quickly.


I’d love to hear your personal opinion about your addition of value to the overall game. Some players look at Dungeons and Encounters and wonder about how something traditionally PvE-focused contributes meaningfully to an RvR-focused game. I’m sure Gabe has his own way of answering this question, but as someone in the trenches, what’s your perspective on how you add to the WAR experience?

Well, first of all, I don’t directly make the decision of what gets put into the game—that all comes from the producers. They have the plan and it’s my job to put that plan into action, from the trenches as you said. It’s a tough question, but I really think it’s about options. Some people might not want to RvR every single night, or they might want to hang out with their guild and just do something on their own, or they might only have an hour or two that night to play. Having the options there is a good thing. But as I’m sure you know, it’s a fine line that we walk with PvE vs. RvR content. But as I said, those decisions come down from producers—I just tell monsters where to stand. I know, personally, that I really enjoy running dungeons because it gives me a chance to hop on voice chat with my friends and do something where we only need rely on ourselves and have a good time doing it with the chance to get something out of it.


Tell me a funny story regarding Dungeons and Encounters. Anything come to mind?

I can’t really think of a funny story, but I get a kick of running dungeons I’ve designed. It’s really interesting to see how people completely blow your mind with tactics you never thought of. Oh, and having to pretend I have no idea how to do the dungeon. “Uh yeah, I’ve never done this fight. Can you run though it for me?” Oh, and I really love placeholder text on our internal server. Since I get a writer to come back and make sure it all fits the lore, I put in temporary placeholder text—generally leet speak. High Priest Herakh had some text on the Hall of Awakening that would broadcast to the whole zone something along the lines of, “ZOMG YOU GUYS AGAIN! I’M GETTING REAL TIRED OF THIS CRAP! NOW I’M GONNA, LIKE, RAISE THESE GUYS AND THEY’RE GONNA, LIKE, OWN YOU AND STUFF! BUT ONLY TWO AT A TIME!” and when he was building up his bomb attack he’d say, “I’MA CHARGIN MAH LASER!” And so, whenever we’d be testing, he’d spam that to everyone for a good laugh. Oh, and if you ever read what Zaar says in Lost Vale when he puts someone in the cage, that may or may not have originally been placeholder that we decided to leave in for live.

[PhoenixRed]

Just to get ahead of some potential commentary, we asked questions focused on Martin's job within the company to get the best and most informative answers. We're working with Mythic on an ongoing basis to get interviews about aspects that are both focused and not focused on in the WAR design, for everyone's benefit.

So rest assured - we're looking to get word about everything, especially the hot button issues, that are affecting WAR.

[Optimus Prime-WHA]

I’MA CHARGIN MAH LASER...Axe!

[Shakrah]

Like many times previously, it strikes me that the actual people behind the game seem genuine and actually nice, while the game decisions come out right as the other opposite impression.

Based on his personal experience, I wonder if M.Smith arranges some informal focus groups with average gamers (i.e. non-forumers - non-hate/fanboys), it could help improve the rollout and sequencing of their decisions.

2 cents suggestion.

[PhoenixRed]

Originally Posted by Shakrah

Based on his personal experience, I wonder if M.Smith arranges some informal focus groups with average gamers (i.e. non-forumers - non-hate/fanboys), it could help improve the rollout and sequencing of their decisions.

2 cents suggestion.

I think as they play, incognito under normal game accounts, that this is done on an informal basis. For example - in Baltimore Gabe told me a story about how his guild found an exploit in an encounter. Like the others he expressed bewilderment, but then fixed the bug in the code to go out in the hotfix the next day. The next time, it didn't work.

There are a lot of people who say Mythic doesn't play their own game. That's honestly quite false. If wrong or bad decisions are being made, it isn't because they aren't playing.

[Shakrah]

Originally Posted by PhoenixRed

There are a lot of people who say Mythic doesn't play their own game. That's honestly quite false. If wrong or bad decisions are being made, it isn't because they aren't playing.

I woudl not suggest they dont play the game. As a marketer myself, this would not work as a testbed for 2 reasons.

-first linked to you, the observer, if I drive the car I built, however neutral I try to be, I look for things I know that can go wrong, and will focus on their impact (the exploit bit in the interview for example)

-second, this time linked to the players themselves, what you might find fun time and again (in this case for example the LotD "traps"), actually would not even register with your public

A game feeling however is one thing, the other, which they cant judge is "would I pay for that", and "would I spend 8 hours straight for this" (examples).

The suggestion of an informal "chat" (by opposite to a forum for example where posturing is part and parcel) with maybe an anonymous random selection of guys on conf call (example) could help them understand the "mind process".

Once again, this suggestion comes from the obvious dissonance between interviews (this one/Garaa/Siber...) and how the game/they come out as, which is crucial to the direction the playerbase will go.

At least, that's the way I feel.

[Kxine]

I don't mind the personal questions, it can be neat to get to know someone.

But I was disappointed you didn't ask the major hot button topic about PvE Encounters: Loot drops. I have guild members that have been running cities & LV for 5+ months and are still waiting on a piece of gear to drop. That's rediculously silly and a complete waste of time. It isn't fun for players. A witch hunter, bright wizard, and archmage in the same group killed N'Kari everyweek for 5 months and not 1 of them got their chestpiece in that time. Two months later, The group has swapped around a little, we still clear N'Kari every week and the WH still doesn't have it.

All gear drops need to be moved to a repairable archetype system and reduce the frequency of the drops.

We wanted to focus more on execution rather than straight up numbers for a lot of the fights.

+

when you design a fight and you think “Man it would be really awesome to throw this 10-second silence on the healer of a group. That would really make it tough and you’d have to plan around that.” But then you think to yourself as a player, “Man that time I got silenced for X seconds by some boss was super annoying and I rage quit when we wiped. “

So, you have to take your personal experience with different fights and mechanics and try and craft something that is challenging, but is not tedious and annoying.

I really wish I believed him when he said that. He might have that intention, but that is not how the game plays out.

Examples:
1- Gorak the Ancient. This boss was on farm, they recently changed him. He can now two shot the tank from full hp in less than a second, outside of the initial hit after pull or ranged. The tank can not predict or react to this, neither can the healers. That's not fun and shouldn't happen. Ranged phase damage is through the roof, and if you're a WH in full greater wards, after your 5 second detaunt wears off you can be crit for 7200 o_O. 1 shot - not Fun.

2- N'Kari. This fight used to follow a pattern. Now things overlap and run on different timers.
- Healer is tossed and N'Kari starts channeling the dot at the same time
- Healer detaunts
- Healer starts a group heal
- Meanwhile DPS is about to drop a book, but a purple circle drops under them so they have to move first.
- Healer lands in a purple circle
- Healer dies
- Healer's chance of living = 0%

This has happened to me more than once. And then we have a 7 minute run back to the fight if no one can get out or if self-rez is on cooldown. How this guy could think that taking 7 minutes to run back would be fun and not frustrating is another thing I just don't understand.

ensure no one specific career is required to complete a group encounter,

1 Specific career may not be required, but certain classes are discouraged because of the high DPS requirements of the TotVL fights.

IE - Boss 3 in TotVL is a numbers fight. Our group was a full DP 2/2/2.
We ran KotBS main tanking, SM DPS tanking, Max Bal + 200 ranged power SW, maxed Str + 150 melee power slayer, Lifetapping AM, RP Healer.
We kited him around the room to minimize bombs, and only had a couple. And the best we could do was 24% hp. These encounters are designed around the highest DPS classes, require high gear levels, and therefore strictly limit the amount of choices you have.

This boss is also buggy. It doesn't matter how good your execution is he gets caught on ledges, ignores melee hits and continues channeling his dot, ignores taunts and goes after other players. This is not a fun fight unless you stack the group.

I could continue, but I'll stop there as many of these things have been asked for for months/weeks. If he really cares he can send me a PM and I'll break it down for him boss by boss.

[Gaarawarr]

Originally Posted by Shakrah

The suggestion of an informal "chat" (by opposite to a forum for example where posturing is part and parcel) with maybe an anonymous random selection of guys on conf call (example) could help them understand the "mind process".

Once again, this suggestion comes from the obvious dissonance between interviews (this one/Garaa/Siber...) and how the game/they come out as, which is crucial to the direction the playerbase will go.

At least, that's the way I feel.

Well, they have discussions like this with the Core Tester and, despite what people think, the CT group is very, very critical of the things the Devs roll out. Quite frankly, even to the most critical, some things just genuinely feel fun to the majority of us during testing, but then become not-fun on Live due to various, untestable reasons.

[PhoenixRed]

Originally Posted by Kxine

I don't mind the personal questions, it can be neat to get to know someone.

But I was disappointed you didn't ask the major hot button topic about PvE Encounters: Loot drops.

As far as I know he doesn't specifically work on that, though it was in an original list I had to cull for relevance.

[Kovaks]

Originally Posted by Kxine

I don't mind the personal questions, it can be neat to get to know someone.

But I was disappointed you didn't ask the major hot button topic about PvE Encounters: Loot drops.

They don't ask because they don't share the pain most players are feeling when in the game. When the interviewer cant relate to the player base you get questions that don't really relate to how the players are feeling. He even scratched the "HotTopic" question off the list over an assumption that the Mythic employee might not be able to answer the question.

These last few recent interviews remind me of Mythic themselves. A lot of "yea yea we get it" but then turn around and do something completely opposite.

I understand not wanting to hurt some guys feeling or self esteem... but if you can't ask the real questions why even bother. I really don't care what the guy eats for breakfast or what color panties he puts on before he goes to work.

[Andy_Mythic]

Originally Posted by PhoenixRed

As far as I know he doesn't specifically work on that, though it was in an original list I had to cull for relevance.

To clarify, I believe Martin would have little to do with itemization and the introduction of loot into the game via monster drop. All he would do is to implement the loot table that would be predetermined by the Player Systems team.

In other words, Frank was correct in culling that question from his list.

[Raskold]

Enlightening, thank you. Especially towards the end

edit: It would be nice to see some of this place-holder text

[Tarian]

Firstly - what a genuinely bloody nice sounding bloke. Informative interview.

Secondly, I feel there's a LOT you can read between the lines of that post. I'm not going to push the point because it might be nothing, but in my job, if senior management was doing things I didn't entirely agree with, and I wanted to express that but remain professional in an interview, I would have chosen some of my words in the same way that he seems to have.

What I've really found interesting though was talking about the replication of errors.

Now this might be wild tinfoil hat conspiracy theorism, but I've had a suspicion for a while now that the metrics relating to gameplay are a little patchy. I suspect that is, in part, why balancing the game has been so hard. I know programming these encounters is a deeply complex issue; however, if the game had clean code and provided decent reportable data and metrics, and the "guys in the trenches" are as capable and familiar with the game as they seem to be, I can't see how what is clearly a number of bugs can't be reproduced or detected. This would also go some way to explaining why with every fix, stuff that's totally untouched and unrelated suddenly bugs out.

[PhoenixRed]

Originally Posted by Kovaks

They don't ask because they don't share the pain most players are feeling when in the game. When the interviewer cant relate to the player base you get questions that don't really relate to how the players are feeling. He even scratched the "HotTopic" question off the list over an assumption that the Mythic employee might not be able to answer the question.

These last few recent interviews remind me of Mythic themselves. A lot of "yea yea we get it" but then turn around and do something completely opposite.

I understand not wanting to hurt some guys feeling or self esteem... but if you can't ask the real questions why even bother. I really don't care what the guy eats for breakfast or what color panties he puts on before he goes to work.

You'd be false in your assumption that we don't understand the players' pain. Perhaps you haven't been reading, but we've been critical of Mythic plenty of times and we understand what the community is going through. Just because we can express it something that isn't angry ranting doesn't mean we "don't get it" or "don't relate". Perhaps you should review my last few Warhammer Alliance Hotplates, the Podcast, or anything else where we've provided balanced feedback about the game.

There's a difference between softballing an interview and asking the questions someone is best suited to answer. To make this fruit, asking an apple why they're an orange is nice, but you don't get any meaningful answer out of it. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't bother asking an apple about things an apple would know about to get more context about why orange is why it is. I disagree with not bothering unless we're going to be able to ask the "big questions". If you have a developer in front of you, and you can ask some questions, why not do that just to get info, any info, that might be helpful? You work with what you have. In Baltimore, we had access to many aspects of the developer team and got a lot of face time, so we asked the "real" questions - questions, the community submitted, I might add. Here, we had a single Dungeons and Encounters person, but we got a lot of non-dungeons related questions despite trying to be clear about what questions to ask. So we asked Dungeons questions, which by the way, were not mostly personal queries (3 of the questions I'd consider "personal" in nature, the rest are informational).

All this being said, we're working to acquire interviews on an ongoing basis, and I hear that the last few haven't been directly related to core issues (since the LotD one, rather) so keep an eye out. Honestly, you can believe we don't care about the community's opinion if you want, but it would be a grave, erroneous mistake. The evidence, and the fact that we've taken time out to negotiate, secure, execute, and transcribe these interviews and all of the content you see here on the site say otherwise. That's all I can say about that.

[Tarian]

Well, since Phoenix has directly addressed it, I feel justified in expanding on my point....

Well, first of all, I don’t directly make the decision of what gets put into the game—that all comes from the producers. They have the plan and it’s my job to put that plan into action, from the trenches as you said. It’s a tough question, but I really think it’s about options. Some people might not want to RvR every single night, or they might want to hang out with their guild and just do something on their own, or they might only have an hour or two that night to play. Having the options there is a good thing. But as I’m sure you know, it’s a fine line that we walk with PvE vs. RvR content. But as I said, those decisions come down from producers—I just tell monsters where to stand.

I don't think it's a coincidence the answer was phrased so precisely.

To me, this illustrates that he's not the guy who can address the laundry list of issues he's so clearly aware of. He is, however, a guy who can illustrate some interesting and informative points about the areas he can control. And the interview manages this well.