Bad interview with Jeff Hickman.
Where he says how they “talked about all this stuff” for two years without coming out with anything at all. Pretty clever.
Everyone with a minimal experience with MMOs knows how the concept of PQs is flawed without an adaptable system. Everyone knows that low level zones WILL have serious population issues. Moreover just everyone can experience those problems simply by logging in and playing: things are working correctly on a MINORITY of the cases. That is on high/full populated servers during prime time. If you’re lucky.
That’s NOT how you design a game. You don’t design it so it’s fun only “sometimes”, or only if picked the right server, or only if you play at a set hour.
Two years that you work on the concept of Public Quests and open RvR. Outside the idea itself, the implementation is deeply flawed. And it required two years of talking and figuring out.
“What we found,” he continued, “in Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online (these are games that are old, old, old games) there are still people in the low level areas. New people, people re-rolling, people coming through the game, so for months and years to come, we will have a constant stream of players rolling and going up through the ranks. What you’ll find is that you go into an area and there’ll be some people there… multiple people generally, doing PQs. Yes, some of the time you’re going to run into a PQ and there won’t be anyone there. Run to another one.”
That goes without commenting as it’s pure bullshit.
Outside the comments about DAoC that right now has a bazillion of clustered servers that together don’t make 1/5 of what is required to make a single server playable, it’s false that “some of the time” you run into a PQ and find it empty (and let’s not even talk about open RvR). It’s true that MOST OF THE TIMES it happens. If you’re lucky you find a couple of players to farm the first two phases and then get slaughtered at the last. Or that you find a decent group somewhere deep in the zone through Open Parties. But sometimes to rarely. And we are two weeks from launch and things can ONLY get worse.
In the meantime Mark Jacobs talks about open RvR being essential for the success of the game, as well as population balance. And that they’ll approach this with baby steps, because they don’t want to overreact.
Nothing really wrong with being careful, but I’m not sure if the players will be still there when you’re done with the talking and considering. Especially when it took two years to come out with… no solution.
The rest of the interview isn’t better, especially when he says that players aren’t participating in open RvR because they don’t know the best loot is there. Huh? Maybe that’s why Blizzard put raids only at the level cap? When you are leveling up you do not care where the best shiny piece of loot is. You care about moving up as faster as possible, and gear isn’t a problem there. That’s why it’s becoming “Scenarios Online” and not Warhammer.
Jeff told me that in the end, this really comes down to players not yet having discovered en masse that these things exist (in fact, knowing this, it actually somewhat addresses the issue of fewer people participating in open world RvR thinking that the rewards aren’t great enough).
If the players have not yet discovered “en masse that these things exist”, it’s because you’ve done a crappy work directing them.
Don’t put the blame on your players if you are bad at game design.
P.S.
Who the fuck wrote that interview? By way of answering this question, Jeff told me… What the fuck?