CO: Bill Roper interview

Post-Open Beta, with Ten Ton Hammer:

On tweaking the XP curve.

You do have to really kick over hard in one direction. That’s what we recently did with experience. We knew that players are grossly outstripping content, to the point where players were able to basically skip entire zones, so it was really broken. We decided to swing hard in the other direction so it’s like now there isn’t enough content for levels, so we really made a big adjustment but we could tell we were close. From there we know we can go back in the other direction and ease off of those changes.

The goal is so that players are definitely above the par. We like people being above the curve so it’s not like you have to complete every shred of mission content to be able to hit level cap. It’s OK if somebody skips missions or doesn’t find some of the discovery missions and things like that – they should still be able to level without having to grind.

I noticed the change, but didn’t feel particular one way or the other.

And a note I hadn’t realized about a particularly annoying foe during the big event at the end of Open Beta.

We’re running our end of beta event – that’s actually running until about 5PM today – where we’ve got some giant Mega-Destroids cruising around Millennium City. We even have what we call Dev Suits, so if you see something that’s called a Cryptonaut that’s actually one of us. So it’s been pretty fun. I think players really like kicking down the devs.

Yeah, Cryptonaut(s) was really obnoxious — and fast and hard to draw a bead on. I think we got a couple of them down at times, between Mega-Destroid spawns. Though Margie (as Runt) had a few problems at one point.

On the upcoming event:

We’ve already got an event planned for the end of October…

Ten Ton Hammer: Would that be the mysterious “Blood Moon” I just saw mentioned…

Bill Roper: In my latest state of the game discussion? *laughter* Yea, I did put that in there. We’ll be putting something official up on the site about that hopefully by launch. One of the things we really want to be able to do is communicate to players, so even if they get the game on day one they’ll already know we’re working on the next content that they’ll be getting. I think that’s a really important thing to put out there. I know that as a player of MMOs I like knowing not only that devs are working on something, but that they’re working on something they can tell me about.

So we’ve been getting some concept assets over to the marketing team so they can put together some pages that can get put up hopefully by the time the game goes live on the 1st. And that will talk about the Blood Moon event and what players are going to be getting. So that will be the first big free update that we do.

Cool.

And the sort of answer I was hoping to hear about Crafting:

I don’t know that I’d necessarily say that it’s essential. You certainly could go through the entire game without crafting or getting an item that was crafted, but I think the way crafting helps the most and can become an essential component is if you’re doing really interesting hybrid builds. All the crafting schools have different stats they focus on, so at the high end they tend to focus on a trio of stats. So you’ll find high end items that care about three different stats predominantly.

The reason I bring that up is that when you really get into some more advanced mechanics of character building, you’ll notice that at the basic level there two main stats that each power set cares about which you can then take a look at when you start mixing and matching. For example I made a character that was a mix of Might and Darkness. Might cares about Strength and Constitution, and Darkness cares about Constitution and Endurance. So by mixing the two I end up with three main stats that I’ll care about, and crafting is the place where I’ll have the best chance of getting items that focus on all three.

I could more than likely find some random, algorithmically generated items that could fall off of an enemy, but with crafting I can pick a school or specialization that specifically cares about those three stats. So if I’m getting into that advanced gameplay of creating characters focused on certain stats or characteristics, crafting is the best place to go to specifically get items that cover that end of things.

[…] Overall I think crafting is not a requirement, but it’s cool to do and you can make some really specialized stuff. I think that for players that get more into the mechanics of the system that can become something that will really augment their character well.

So it’s a benefit, but not critical. Good to know.

As to putting off crafting until later, some more interesting comments.

There are two ways that you’re gaining skill points in crafting. One of the ways – if you want to use sort of a generic MMO term – is by finding resource nodes. In other words there are things you can find out in the world to investigate, but you gain the vast majority of skill points by deconstructing items.

The way our crafting system is designed, there is Research and Development. Research is actually taking things apart and looking at what they’re made of. With most fantasy MMO crafting you’re making a mountain of short swords before you can go up to the next level to make cutlasses or whatever. We wanted to make it so that the vast majority of your points come from tearing things apart to see how it works, so that you’re learning from the way it was constructed.

Which makes in-game sense.

We do a double duty with that, where if you have an item upgrade that can be taken apart, when you deconstruct those to do development you not only gain points from that in terms of learning how it was made but it will also give you the component parts that you can then use to make other items. You do get a little bit of skill from making things, but the system is definitely not designed to focus on that as the way you’ll be gaining levels.

So as a high level player, any items that are dropping for me are going to be a lot faster for me to skill up on, or I can always go to the marketplace and buy a bunch of cheap items from other players to deconstruct. Or it would also be really easy for me to fly, Superspeed or Superjump around the lower level zones and get resources.

Having done a lot of crafting in other MMOs, I find it’s not – I don’t know if “grindy” is the right term – but I don’t have to do a ton of travel. Using WoW as an example, if I decide to take mining I’ve got to go and start looking for copper in the newbie zones even if I’m level 50. That was the only thing that frustrated me actually about making a Death Knight. I wanted to start crafting but I realized I’d either have to buy all the stuff or I’d have to go and find all of it. So for something like herbalism you have to go find wild flowers and pick them to gain levels, and you really can’t do anything else to achieve that. It was like, “I’m starting at level 65, I can’t believe I have to do this” you know?

[…] The cool thing with our system is the fact that you’re basically just deconstructing stuff that’s really simple to go out and get. So I think it’s a really nice system; it’s definitely very different. You can make specific items, or you can even make algorithmically generated items where you’re basically deciding on certain parameters and telling the system that you want it to care about three specific things and it can make you a random item. Then there are also blueprints for exact items that you can get

Also good to know. Running around and farming equipment/materials is not my idea of a good time. What I’ve seen of the Crafting system thus far make it seem like I can spend as much or little time as I’m interested in it.