Folks,

DAoC was supposed to announce the features in its fall expansion a few months ago. For the previous expansions the press releases arrived around March/April, if I remember correctly. This time the first delay arrived with the E3 because Mythic wanted to hype Warhammer instead of letting it compete for the attention with DAoC. Like if it could have been a risk. My suspect is that they just didn’t want to be easily identified with the title of “DAoC makers” and instead appear, at least to those who aren’t knee deep in the mmorpg industry, as the new kids on the block.

(After all Mythic is only interested in those who never heard of it, or those who played DAoC so long ago that they don’t remember anymore why they left and just have sweet memories of it. The current players who learnt who the real and recent Mythic really is? Those are not important. Firstly because if they swallowed DAoC so long, they are probably going to buy Warhammer even after all the bitching, secondly because relating to them would be actually have to face the *merit* of what was being done. And not just the fluffy, sweet memories or the hype for the future. Those are players that will be harder to seduce and that are a potential danger to the image of the company. Those have memories.)

Then they said that the announce would arrive in June, then the sellout to EA was announced, then it was July and every other week of July:

First, please, let me say that I too am a little frustrated. Every time I ask, the answer is a very confident-sounding “Within the week! Don’t fret!” About three weeks ago, I started making little mewling noises, and pointing out that maybe saying that Every. Single. Week was starting to sound, you know, stupid.

Now it’s August but it still seems that this expansion is so secret and special that it still cannot be announced.

I’m hearing the announcement will be next week, but I no longer expect you to read that with a straight face, and that’s cool, I understand.

In the meantime lots of details leaked anyway. In an interview they said there was going to be a new race (minotaur) shared by all the three realms, and a new class (mauler). Then there were even rumors about a deal with Vivox (same as those working with Eve-Online) to offer voice chat support and use DAoC as a test bed for Warhammer, who is also supposed to have voice chat.

When people made you wait for something for so long, then expectations rise. I mean, there must be a reason why the features in an expansion are so precious that they cannot be disclosed with the players of the game’s community for MONTHS. It’s not like people really care about DAoC, it’s not like there will be earth shattering innovations. In fact it’s Sanya herself to anticipate the cold shower:

I CAN tell you that you shouldn’t be getting all psyched about the announcement, which is really aimed at people who don’t read the Herald.

Like if people who don’t read the Herald give a shit about DAoC’s next expansion.

Players shouldn’t be getting psyched because most of the features are already known? Maybe people shouldn’t be getting psyched just because this expansion has really nothing to say.

On the Vault I was already commenting:

I suspect that the delay is due to an agreement that needs to be finalized.

My suspect is that they are going to offer voice chat in the expansion as a test bed for Warhammer, waiting to receive confirmation from Vivox and finalize the details so that they can make the proper announce.

There will be hardly something else in the expansion beside that, the new class and race, and some redundant PvE stuff to keep the content team busy.

Oh, and probably that supid idea of instanced PvP.

Hmm. Instanced PvP (what a terrible idea for DAoC), Minotaur… Labyrinth.

The guess about the voice chat is just my very own speculation, so it’s quite possible that there’s no truth about it (beside that Vivox really contacted Mythic). Sanya gave also more hints, since the press release about the expansion is going to be deluding anyway:

we flashed up small sections of larger concept art – weird mechanical things. At another event, we put up a big piece of concept art, this one a kind of bloody, skinned thing with horns. This concept art is pretty effectively foreshadowing what we’re going to put in the press release.

Again, I’m sorry about the lack of expansion information to date. It is totally killing me, because I’ve SEEN what they’re building!

Ohh, I’m so THRILLED! Uhm… No, I’m not.

DAoC was driven to the ground a while ago and this expansion is another useless, superfluous stretch. I guess that the concept art she refers is about the PvE portion of the game. DAoC has shown in the past GREAT art and locations, always destroyed in potential by very bad game design and execution. That concept art doesn’t do anything for me, but that DAoC’s next expansion still has pretty art isn’t really a feature that could impress. It was the same for previous expansions, and it didn’t really help.

Again what I wonder is where the game designers are gone, what’s the vision for the game? Is there anyone at home beside polls and devs who are waiting to be promoted to Warhammer?

It seems not, and for a very valid reason:

“We need to coordinate this with EA.” Most recently, the delay was over something really good for us all, in the long term – we are staffing up the Camelot team by TEN more positions. That’s awesome news for the expansion pack we’ve been building for months, but it did mean we should hold off on the expansion announcement, since adding back some previously-cut features was viable.

Only Sanya could sell this as a good thing. As I wrote in many occasions, a high churn rate in the dev team is only a recipe for failure. Good games only come out of consolidated dev teams who learnt how to work together and developed competence, experience and synergy. Not from a bunch of guys thrown together at random just because the company is in the middle of a big shift. And I really wonder what the fuck there is to coordinate about a press release whose features were all announced and about which noone gives a darn thing.

What is sure is that noone cares about what Mythic is doing on DAoC beside those players still subscribed. What is even more sure is that the feature list on this expansion appeals noone if not, again, those same players (and the instanced PvP may well be a death kiss even to the little worth that was left in the PvP, as Catacombs task dungeons were the death kiss to the game’s PvE side). DAoC was driven to the ground, the original team gone and I strongly doubt that all those fresh guys coming from QA and CS will be able to refill the company of its leaked value and ambition.

Maybe it will happen and they will even do a better work. Excuse me if I’m skeptical. In fact I believe they are just being used as disposable fuel. To burn and leave by the road when this deal with EA will start to show its rotten fruits.

Why the secrecy? Why the delay? This really is bad form on Mythic’s end. They have NOTHING to lose if they were to tell us all their plans for the expansion right now. Really, what negative could come from just letting the people who are funding the expansion in on what it might possibly contain?

You really want to know? Because they have nothing to show. And because they know it.

So, think whatever you want. But there just isn’t another one on the internet who can write so much about a useless expansion that isn’t still even announced.

I want a cookie.

One of the minor but constant problems in DAoC is that the test server has always had extremely low population, which doesn’t help Mythic to test the patches thoroughly. In the years they tried many times to encourage the players to play there and there were guys like Uriel who transformed this problem in some sort of personal crusade. But the results are rather poor and Pendragon is still not so useful as it should and could.

A while ago Mythic decided to encourage the players through special events, prizes and by hinting that they were going to listen feedback only from those who actively tested the changes before venting off. I think I participated to one of the first events, a few months before the launch of “New Frontiers”. I don’t remember exactly how it worked or what we were supposed to “test”, but it was in the form of a simple PvP siege to a keep with one realm defending and two trying to get in. It was kind of fun. DAoC’s “real” PvP is always plagued by specialized groups and arranged 8vs8 encounters or the alternative of *extremely long* downtimes while you sit at a keep waiting for leaders to decide what to do next. Having a “directed” experience with a set goal and all players focusing on it was fun, with no downtimes or dicking around.

Then the server crashed. But, again, it was some of the best fun I had in the game. And it crashed because we were a lot of players involved in a rather massive fight. Things that don’t happen often anymore, sadly.

Recently I’ve seen Mythic promoting every kind of awkward events, like “naked races”, and I really wonder what they are trying to test like that.

The problem of the “test server” and convincing people to play there is a general one afflicting every game. And it’s for this reason that it’s kind of interesting to see WoW’s test servers with the exact opposite problem. Queques going constantly above 5k. More than five thousands of players *waiting* to test, with another 3500 stuffed in. Plus all those who tried to get in but didn’t bother to persist.

Of course this is partly due to the scale of things. WoW has like more than 200k of contemporary users, while DAoC is today around 11k. But this isn’t the only reason. Months ago the patches were more interesting (like the addition of the Battlegrounds) but the test servers were relatively empty.

When things changed? When Blizzard started not only to allow server transfers (Mythic does this too), but when they also added premade characters at max level and even fully equipped, epics included. The test servers became suddenly “true” test environments. People started to flock there to test new talents builds and classes that they didn’t bother to level up, even raid content to be prepared when the patches will arrive on the live servers.

Now let’s see things nowadays. Mythic is going to add a new Battleground (Cathal Valley), with a 45 – 49 level range. Well, I’m interested in this. It’s Emain. The layout of the zone should be exactly as Emain in the “old frontier”. It should be a relatively small zone where the PvP could be quite intense instead of excessively slow as it is now on the “New Frontiers”. So I’d gladly test this, without the need for “events” or other oddities to motivate me. But I cannot. You are a fool if you think that I’m going to create a new character to level up to 45 and equip it just to test a BG. I cannot transfer my characters there either because they are at level 50. I cannot de-level to get in the BG, which is capped at 49.

The point is: are the players “not testing” because they don’t want to, or just because the testing environment offered is simply not appropriate?

Blizzard learnt this. They give you premade characters ready for the use and people liked this because they could finally “test”. For their own interest and the game. So I wonder. Why it isn’t reasonable to ask for a test environment where I can make characters and set their level manually, test skills, get all kind of equimpement from a “dispenser” without the need to farm for money, infinite respecs and all the rest?

If one game like WoW, where the character progress and discovery is the WHOLE game, doesn’t worry about spoiling the fun by offering premade characters, then I wonder why DAoC couldn’t do that and more. With a game where the fun is actually *crippled* by the mindless progression that the “Catacombs” expansion managed to stupidify beyond belief.

I’d be glad if I had the possibility to level up manually a character to 49, outfit it with decent equipment, spec it properly and running a few minutes later right in the new BG to have some fun. And maybe respec or try another class if I want to.

But there’s more to this. Developing such a system now would mean eating a significant amount of programming resources to a game whose support is being slowly eroded. Is this worth doing just to support a test server?

Not at all. Or maybe it is.

When the new Battleground will be patched on the live servers, I won’t be able to play there again. I wish I could, but the same problem on the test server applies here. I’m not going to endure to level another character and equip it up to level 45 and above just to step in the new Battleground. The grind is unsustainable even if leveling is absurdly fast nowadays. But it’s just excessively dumb and I don’t have access to dedicate powelevellers like the 90% of those who still play the game. I won’t bother even if I would have an interest to play.

And here’s the “revolutionary” idea, that could also excuse the work I suggested above on the test server: what about allowing the characters to “de-level” temporarily and access all the Battlegrounds in the game, from the first to the last, instead of getting locked in the current one only?

The implications of this simple idea shouldn’t be underestimated and the result could justify the use of those scarce resurces that the game still has. It is something similar to what I suggested for Warhammer and I think it’s something worth experimenting since it could have a strong, positive impact on both games.

I think it’s time to dare for DAoC. Which doesn’t mean about risking to ruin even what is left, but about pushing it closer to its real potential. This idea is just about giving the players a choice they don’t have currently. A change of rules that could be simpler and cheaper to implement but with a stronger impact since it’s about changing and streamlining structures more than adding tons of new content. Improving the accessibility for new and veteran players more than alienating those few who are left. I think the game needs an impulse, a push. And I think this idea could be a very good start.

I’ll return on this to explain better.

What I wrote here below about the “bolts” was a complete misunderstanding on my side.

They aren’t talking about crossbows (who still suck, btw) but the spell “bolts”, like fireballs and such.

Ugh.

As anticipated, this year Mythic brought only Warhammer to the show (E3) and left DAoC behind. That the great majority of the resources were moved to the new project is undeniable and obvious. I just wish they would openly admit it and plan the future of both games accordingly, instead of continuing to answer with half-lies and badly concealed resignation.

The trend is also obvious (a year ago they had the launch of the classic servers to invert the progressive downward trend, this year nothing will stop it). No, it’s not the game being old. It’s just the commitment being shifted to Warhammer, with DAoC obviously suffering from a conservative development that just aims to continue to push it forward till it lasts.

DAoC is already dead, and it started to die when Mythic began working on Imperator. I could try to analyze the game design and development to point out where things aren’t working and how they could improve, but at this point it’s just pointless (as it always was) so I’ll avoid to waste my time mourning.

Instead I’m still interesting to write a few words about the upcoming stuff. Despite the absence from the E3, some details were still leaked about the upcoming expansion:

What they would say is that the new expansion, which will be officially announced soon, has one new race and one new class. Anyone, from any realm, can unlock the class on an account by account basis and then make characters using it. The race comes free with the expansion.

They plan to launch the expansion on their 5 year anniversary later this year.

The official announce is expected for June but the expectations about the announce are really low, I think. This expansion will hardly have “something to say”. Nor it will add much to the game.

For all things that could be tried in an expansion they just decided to go with something rabidly innovative: one new race and one new class. After the huge creative effort to produce that idea they couldn’t be bothered with all the balance problems that could arise, so the wonderful solution: we’ll make the race and class available to all three realms so that there’s only the bare minimum to balance and we’ll avoid all the complaints.

Instead on the forums people are complaining because they see this as lazy work. A demonstration that not much can be expected for this game if not what’s barely necessary as an excuse to kick it forward foe a few more months while Warhammer is being worked on.

It’s unclear if the long delayed rework of the tradeskills will be part of this expansion or if it will come staggered through the live patches. What we know is that both the expansion and the bigger changes on the tradeskills will arrive this fall. And that these changes won’t be anything groundbreaking.

From my point of view another new class is ALREADY WAY TOO MUCH. They aren’t lazy there, just stupid. I really don’t know who feels the need for another class. At this point I really wonder if it’s the case that Mythic wastes even more resources on this sort of stuff. I don’t think the players are asking this, nor I think it will help the game.

You don’t have any good idea for the expansion that is viable with the resources you have available? Ok, don’t do one. There’s so much to do, if the group is small better organize it to make some worthwhile, precise changes on the core points instead of wasting them on stuff that adds nothing and even risks to fuck up the game even more.

Or maybe NOT doing a patch would be already too innovative for Mythic?

Anyway, with the upcoming patch (1.84) they are also focusing on the bolts:

They also plan to focus in on bolts. There is a lot of talk about them and Mythic worries they’re not being used as intended and are having a detrimental effect on RvR. As it finally reached the top of their balance heap, they’re thinking of changing it so bolts only fail when cast on someone already involved in hand-to-hand melee combat. They want them to be an opening gambit, a long range RvR strike. They’re not supposed to be used close up. However, some view them as too hard to use and, as such, refinements must be made.

This is more interesting because I’m going to watch how they’ll solve this, and then I’ll mock them because I can already see the lame direction where they are moving.

It’s true that right now the crossbows are unusable and worthless. The controls are horribly designed. To fire a bolt you need to press the appropriate hotkey, stand completely still for 5 seconds or so (loading the crossbow) and then you’ll be able to fire the bolt, still if you don’t move. On top of this the bolts can miss like a normal arrow. It’s quite obvious that these controls are clunky and it’s really hard to find a situation where the crossbow is worth using. So yes, there’s a problem.

From the few words I quoted, Mythic is looking into the mechanic. Their goals are:
– make them an “opening gambit”, reducing the miss rate
– avoid them being used in melee

Now those two goals hint to a lame solution that they used on the fireballs. An absurd mechanic that I’m sure everyone who played DAoC still remembers and that just MAKES NO SENSE: if you fire a fireball at a target not engaged in combat, the fireball hits and deals damage. If the fireball is fired at a target engaged in combat, it misses.

I don’t know. That’s really a stupid mechanic for a fireball. It’s already deluding the fact that a FIREBALL doesn’t do AOE damage as in every other game that makes sense. You know, the single-target typical magic attack is not a fireball, but the magic arrow. On top of this there’s the fact that you have to check if your target is in combat or not, or the fireball will be uneffective.

It’s rather obvious how stupid and not consistent this mechanic is. It’s just BAD DESIGN all around. It doesn’t make sense, it’s counterintuitive and genre breaking. It has all the possible flaws all at once. What happens now? That they are going to “fix” the bolts (another broken mechanic on its own, as explained) by porting to them the way the fireballs work.

Great plan there.

And I’m writing this because these changes are still being designed. I’m putting my hands forward here and we’ll see how they’ll change this.

Now here’s my point of view.

There are bows and crossbows. There must be some traits that differentiate them and the VERY FIRST THING you have to consider when you design the implementation of these objects in the game is about identifying those traits so that you can replicate them in the game.

Roughly:
– a bow shoots faster but it is less precise
– a crossbow has long reload times but it’s much more precise

Here we have already a basic mechanic that can be easily ported to any game, DAoC included. Not only. It is also consistent with those two goals that Mythic defined above. The crossbows should be more precise (so more probability to hit than a bow) but slow to load (so not really usable if you are in melee).

See? It’s not that complicated. What is left to do is to examine how the crossbows work in the current game (described above) and plan the concrete changes. Which are just two rather trivial modifications to the current system:

1- Preload. The possibility to load a bolt on the crossbow and keep it readied to be fired at any moment and till the character keeps the crossbow equipped.
2- Change the to-hit mechanic. Flat rate 95% “to hit” if the character is standing still when the bolt is being fired, progressively reduced with the running speed down to a minimum of 50%.

That’s all.

Those two simple changes achieve prefectly the goals that Mythic set. They are balanced in the game and are also consistent mechanics with how a crossbow is supposed to work and how people expect it to work in a game. Without the need of the lame solution that makes the bolt miss if your target is engaged in melee.

With those changes the crossbow will REALLY become an “opening gambit” for the tank classes, because they would be able to load the bolt and then fire it later. At the same time the long reload times (cannot reload if you are interrupted) would make it impossible to use a crossbow if the character is engaged in melee. Which is what makes sense in a situation like that.

Take this as another design challenge.

Want to bet that Mythic’s solution will be much worse than mine? I even gave them the advantage of the forewarning ;)

EDIT: I later discovered to have misunderstood the whole thing. Mythic isn’t talking about crossbows but about fireballs (and that quote from mmorpg.com tricked me with its mistakes).

If, as announced, they remove the in-combat check on the fireballs/bolts, then it is all good. It should have been like this from the very beginning and I passed a full year arguing with Therrik (former Wizzy TL) about this.

If it’s too overpowering just rise the recast timers and add a minimum range. I expect to hear complaints from the players, though.

No surprises. DAoC follows a quite predictable schedule since it is repeated each year with minimal changes, so we are at the moment of the year when the first details about the upcoming expansion start to be disclosed and the moment when I start to be deluded.

Well, we don’t have much right now:

A note for Camelot fans who cringe at having to read all this: Dark Age of Camelot is great, doing fine, they’re working on an expansion, and they plan on working with you to keep making the game better, more exciting, and more fun to play. There’s a new quest system in the works, a new race and class coming, and most importantly, a new form of RvR gameplay. And their producer said outright, flat out, that Camelot is their flagship product and they plan to keep improving it for years. You guys will have plenty to play for years to come.

Now DAoC is an odd game because each time they announce an expansion you aren’t there starting to marvel and counting days. Instead you just hope they don’t fuck everything up and it’s exactly where my mind goes when I think to “a new form of RvR”. Instanced, I’d add.

I’m not sure my account will survive till the expansion. There are rumors, somewhat confirmed by an in-game survey, that Mythic is thinking about experimenting with voice chat services. If it is going to be a feature for Warhammer they could start to test it in DAoC, probably offering it as a “feature” bundled with the expansion.

As I often wrote I hate the voice chat and DAoC has been one of the very few games where it is not necessary and not even so widespread outside the ganking groups (which I despise as well). You could always say, “so don’t use it”. The point is that when you support it directly, it becomes mandatory for everyone. So you have to swallow it. And this is only the tip of the iceberg since Mythic keeps moving the game in directions I don’t like.

I already log in rarely, and when I do I never manage to get a group. So not only my motivation is very low (and my faith in Mythic below the ground), but I cannot play even when I want. Instanced RvR and voice chat are good enough reasons to quit.

They keep trying something else while what they have already is still crippled despite having still a good potentail. I’d like to see significant changes to the current RvR, not another lame implementation of ideas leeched from WoW.

On the servers the players are decreasing (even if this is the time of the year when every game tends to lose some activity), confirming what I was thinking: it’s not with the class changes that you keep people or attract new players. Class changes and balance tweaks are a “given”. They don’t “add value” to a game nor increase its appeal. Put in a simple way, they are “jumps in the place”. They don’t move forward nor backwards if they don’t go totally wrong. I repeat that DAoC needs to “wake up” its playerbase and start to be more aggressive toward the competition. The game has qualities that need to be brought up, but I think they are destined to remain dormant forever.

A new class? Yawn. A new race? Yawn. A new quest system? *rise eyebrow* It will be surely some automated shit. I bet. With every new expansion they don’t add a new piece. They remove it, and right now DAoC has not much left. PvE is completely dead. RvR is next on the list (and already progressing well).

I think at the core there’s one main issue. Mythic isn’t anymore able to “tune in” with the desire of the players. To suggest them something they want to hear and to play. So the disaffection. This is a broken record for me. But I continue to believe that leeching the “new” Warhammer community is a trick that won’t last long. The problem is at Mythic, it isn’t in DAoC.

Every expansion is a chance and now they are losing the train. But, hey, it was at arm’s range.

After one week trying, I was finally able to join a group in DAoC. We still sit and wait for the majority of the time and I got less than 2k or RPs in total, but at least it was something.

The problems I see are still the same. From a side the RvR should be made more alive, because right now the game is extremely specialized into 8vs8 groups and nothing else. From the other the game needs some value in the PvE side because the shameless use of the instances dumbed everything down to an unacceptable level. A game with just PvP cannot survive and the success lies in the blend between the two.

In the first case (making the RvR pivot some more around the keeps and sieges, the actual RvR) my idea on the open PvP model could be easily adapted to achieve the same goals:

What about rewarding more RPs the more you fight closer to a keep?

Think to it like a ‘gravity center’, toward which people are attracted.

It would also help casual players to find groups more easily since not the whole game would be based on 8vs8 specialized, closed groups.

This idea could work for a very simple reason:
If they reward A LOT more RPs for conquering towers and keeps, we could arrive at a scenario where the realms AVOID each other to keep farming RPs while fighting just the guards (since long sieges would be an useless delay that both sides would like to avoid).

Instead if the keeps are transformed into gravity centers that multiply the RPs the closer you are, the points would still come from the “direct kills”, so promoting the actual PvP instead of players vs guards.

The idea is to use the keeps and towers as “gravity centers”, or “hot spots”. Conceiving the PvP activity as a weight that needs to be attracted toward the keeps, working as a “focus”. A “rubber band” that keeps trying to pull you back through the incentive to the RPs. So that fighting around and inside the keeps would become more desirable than how it is right now.

This could work, it could make the RvR more accessible for the casual players, make the groups a little more varied and less specialized. There would be some minor problems to adapt other parts of the game that were planned on different premises (like Agramon) but nothing that it is impossible to solve.

The point is to “valorize” that unique RvR model that DAoC can offer. This model is less about specialized 8vs8 and more about the broader level of sieges and keeps warfare. The strategy would be about making this part more desirable, since right now it’s the worst way to get RPs.

Other minor things that I would like to see fixed/adjusted:
– The emote spam. It shouldn’t be too hard to add a 10 seconds cooldown to each emote to prevent excessive spam. It would also make the animations more smooth instead of having them overlapping unrealistically. Ther same for the sound emotes.
– The jump code. This needs to be completely rewritten from scratch. Right now there’s just the “lag-jumping” with people flying to the sky and then rubberbanding back to the ground. You could see a player on a horse jumping in the place and fly six meters in the air. This is a problem that is in the game since release and that is also related to the z-axis movement that looks horrible even underwater. It should be fixed once for all.
– The horses. Make the model tilt accordingly to the inclination of the terrain. DAoC has already the code to do this, it just needs to be applied to the players mounts.
– Boats. This is the most badly impemented system in the whole game. The controls to use and move the boats are terrible, the movement is always jerky and the rubberbanding a constant (along with players falling in the water or ‘ghosting’ everywhere). The idea would be to rewrite the controls so that the movement is “twitch”. You apply the exact same scheme of the movement of a car. With simple acceleration routines, reverse gear and reduced turning rates. It would be enough to make the situation much better.

About The PvE I have some ideas, I have already explained a few. It’s hard to wrap everything up because the PvE side needs to be heavily reorganized and this approach wouldn’t work well with all the different expanasions, plus the one in development (that I’m dreading). I’m quite sure that Mythic isn’t going to fix anything so that they can push a new model right into Warhammer.

I was sleeping, then I woke up and I remembered that there were two things I forgot to write:

1- DAoC needs a lead designer. I don’t care who he is or from where he comes. I don’t care if he is hired from outside or recycled within Mythic but there’s the need for one. One person. One that fills just that role. I don’t care if the position is already somewhat covered by a producer or a content lead. DAoC need someone that does just that. Someone that is responsible for the whole game, that follows and studies it, that is fully, exclusively committed to it and nothing else, that plans and directs both the expansion and the live patches. Someone responsible of a “vision” and where the game goes in the long term, not just from month to month. Someone accountable for the game, who has the duty to understand the game, its weaknesses, its strengths. Someone that keeps track of every element in the game, its systems and revise, reconsider them and decide what new ideas should go in. Someone that talks with the community and dialogues constantly with it, someone whose duty is EXCLUSIVELY this one. Not to write quests, not to write code, not to produce. Just live and breathe game design full time and in the name of this single game. That and only that. Not a group of guys, just one. A pure lead designer. Someone committed and accountable of what the game is and will be. Someone at the wheel who has the duty to understand what is going on and that is responsible of his decisions.

2- No, the Herald Feedback doesn’t work. Using the Herald Feedback is like digging an hole in the ground, put your face into it and talk. Have you seen “In the Mood for Love” of Wong Kar-Wai? It’s the same thing, like telling a secret that will never be told.