Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interviews
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I asked Carrie how players have been receiving the city changes in the ongoing beta test of 1.3.5, and she explained that most of the feedback revolved around some typical issues, bugs and general confusion mainly, the latter of which highlighted what Carrie admitted as one of Mythic's general weaknesses when implementing things into the game, and that is improperly explaining features to their players. They've worked to address all the aforementioned feedback, but the team's key realizations so far has been that they had tuned the sieges improperly, discovering from feedback and playtesting that things were skewed way too much towards the defenders. This turned out to be a huge issues, as due to the way rewards are given out in the new system (to both winners and losers) players could simply allow their cities to be sacked in order to sit back and defend. As a result, Mythic has tweaked the sieges to give invaders a bit of an edge, which should encourage players to stay on the offensive and attack their opposing realm's city.
And a quickie from the latter:
The MMO Gamer: Now, you and I have only met once before, way back at Games Day LA in 2007.
WAR had just entered beta then, and I recall that basically everything was coming up roses: The game was looking great, it had a very rabid fanbase. I can attest to just how rabid, when I said something slightly negative about it in an article later on.
The game had a huge buildup, a huge following, then it launched, and.
What happened?
Carrie Gouskos: There are a couple ways to answer that.
Pre-launch, I think we did a very good job about getting people excited about the game. We had a huge license, and we had a lot of unique personalities on the development team that were really infectiously excited about the game.
We thought we were doing a lot of really neat stuff, and wanted to share that with everyone. I don't think internally actually, I know internally, nobody here was going (Oh, we're going to beat WoW!) or any of that. There was none of that kind of gauging.
But it was like, (We're going to have a successful MMO. We're going to be awesome, and have so many players!) all of that stuff. We had a lot of expectations, and we launched to that kind of hype.
I think the problem was, to some degree, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed.
I actually think that we have a large game, with a lot of people playing who are excited about it. But you can see how many servers we opened with, all of that, and people try to do the numbers game, guessing how many players we have now.
The fact of the matter is that we came out huge, and there were problems. So I think that was a little bit of a buzz kill for the development team, and to some degree our players, as well.
We've been spending all this time since trying to refine the game, and get it to a state that we think, (This is what people are looking for, this is what they want.)
If you asked me personally how I feel about it, I loved the features in our game at launch, but I do think obviously there are things that I look at and say, (God, I wish I had fixed that! Or I wish I'd done that!) You can do that all day long.
So the goal since then has been to do all those things that we wanted to do, and to grow with our players, and instead of trying to make the game we think players are going to like, make the game that players are going to enjoy, because they're the ones sitting here telling us, and we're listening to them.
We've been maybe more quiet in the past six months, because we've been hunkering down and going, (Okay, what is it that's going to satisfy the players' needs, make them come back, and make them happy?)
I think we've accomplished that. I don't want to say that in the tone of like (rah-rah,) I do feel like we're down to business at this point, and we've done a lot of things to the game that has pacified some of the dissatisfaction at launch, and I'm very happy with the players, and their interactions with us.
