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solothores
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VGN source thread: http://vnboards.ign.com/message.asp?topic=58249949&replies=57
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I'm going to go ahead and post the first part of this missive on our visit to Mythic. There's some controversial stuff in here, but take it with a grain of salt. While I tried to be as faithful to what was said as possible, keep in mind that this is filtered through my own experiences, predjudices, and perspective on things. I know there will be flame wars over this, and I'm sure people who were there will disagree. But here it is, for what it's worth.
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I've been meaning to write this since Friday night, but am only now getting the time. Here's my take on our visit to Mythic.
Friday afternoon, we had some confusion and difficulty getting everyone to Mythic, but in the end, we were successful. Both Sanya and Julie met us in the lobby and ushered us up to a second floor conference room, which Sanya told us actually cost Mythic money to rent for the afternoon. I was a bit shocked that they were willing to do that, but quite flattered by it. Apparently, and this was verified by our tour, they didn't have a conference room in their areas that was sufficiently large to hold all 30 of us, as it ended up being.
The plan was that Sanya would take us on tours in groups of four. In the meantime, the rest would have an opportunity to sit and talk to various developers about the game and to ask them any questions we had.
The Devs we had a chance to speak to were Julie, Matt Firor, Lance, who heads up the Art department, Mackey, and Spike, who heads up tradeskills mostly.
Julie started as a CSR and now is community relations, as most of you know. That means that she is the primary person who deals with various board forums, as well as the scheduling and coordination of events like ours. She did say that she specifically was responsible for the VN boards, and interfacing with them.
Matt Firor is, of course, the producer of the game. He is pretty much top dog on Camelot, as most of the Mythic people seem to refer to it. He gave us an overview of some of the things that are coming in ToA, and alluded that they are beginning work on the next retail expansion, after ToA. I missed much of this because it was time for our tour pretty early, so any input on this would be welcome.
Apparently during the time I was on my tour, Matt discussed plans, in the next expansion, to do a complete redesign of the character models. Facility will be made available for different body types (Portly Friars! and more customization of characters in the next retail expansion.
One thing I remember him specifically mentioning that there is a 95% chance that ToA will have Battle Groups in it. NO GAURANTEES. These are "groups of groups" that will *AT LEAST* be able to share a chat channel. Their primary purpose is for coordination of tactical combat between groups. They will have their own chat channel apart from CG. It was as yet not decided whether they might share experience or RP's.
ToA will, as most know already, be skinnable.
Before I forget, apparently Mythic has recently hired a new interface developer who has gone through a lot of the long-time wishlist items (he was credited with the bindable slot keys) and programming them into the interface. They have high hopes that he'll be able to add a great deal to the interface.
We brought to Matt Firor's attention the difficulty of selecting Necro pets for heals. Neither binded keys nor selecting names helps.
Cascia of Sanctesere called while we were talking with Matt Firor. She said they need to do more with Theurgists, and Deg repeated it to everyone. We all, including Matt, laughed very very hard at her request.
It is not under discussion to add more character slots. Matt says there is not much call for it. Whenever they increase character slots, people immediately fill them, which means they're gauranteed to double their space utilization. Characters are stored in a flat file (design decision for performance reasons).
The entire budget for the game was $4.2 million dollars, and Oracle wanted $995,000 of that for licensing fees.
Each server is comprised of a Linux cluster of 6 systems. The sixth was added for ToA. There is no particular correlation between one box and a particular purpose; the entire game is spread across all servers. They were originally Dual-P3's, but many of them have been upgraded to Dual-P4's. It doesn't take much to run these servers, apparently. I remember Matt mentioning that the hard cap on servers is 3500 simultaneously.
At least one server was, for about six months, running on a desktop box, a P4 1.6Ghz systems, Matt seemed to recall. They called the servers (around four of them), the "gimp servers". The mysterious messages you heard last year about them changing hardware on some of the servers was them removing them from desktops and putting them on servers finally.
The decision not to add classes to ToA was driven by ease of implementation and less balance ramifications. It seemed that balance was high on their priority list of things to get right.
Merlin is the most populated server in terms of players and average use. Merlin was the first upgraded from Dell P3's to Dell P4's. Guinevere is second. Each server uses RAID arrays. Matt was an Oracle DBA for years before he came to Mythic. The account database is MySQL, but the character database is a flat file.
I asked why they decided never to go back and change what was a primary/secondary/tertiary stat for certain classes (Friars, Paladins). Matt responded that they had tried to do that with bards but that 100% of the feedback they received was negative about the decision, so they've decided not to try that again.
Matt wants to do some new things with RvR, like canyons, rivers, underwater combat, and bridges. They're hoping to do that in Frontiers.
Lance, the art director, didn't get much of a chance to talk. Everyone was grilling Matt for most of his time. He did say that they plan to develop some other armor shapes so that the HUGE helms on paladins, for instance, would seem more appropriately sized because people's shoulders would be bigger while wearing plate. Pretty much all armor now is form-fitting, which restricts them somewhat.
It was then turned over to Mike Lescault (Mackey) and Spike Alexander (Spike). Spike was apparently network operations initially, but the network is so stable that it runs itself now, so he moved on to being a developer. Degalos went to high school with Spike, actually. Mackey apparently does some International relations work for Mythic as well as being the Balance Producer and running the TL program. Spike did some interface work for ToA, designed the Master Level Abilities, and has run tradeskills for the last couple years.
BIG DISCLAIMER:
Mackey is pretty opinionated, that becomes very clear quickly. Keep in mind that he is not omnipotent, and his changes do need to be approved, presumably by either Copper or Matt Firor. In many cases below he was giving HIS OPINION on things, not the official "Mythic line", mostly because, of course, there is no official decision as yet.
Thence commenced a long discussion about tradeskill quests. Spike apparently had the idea of tradeskill quests shortly after release, but it took was a while before Copper assigned the quest team to develop it. There will be tradeskill quest for every 00 level. That is, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000. Most of the quests are in the 85-90% done as far as implementing the next quests. They've been very busy with ToA so far. So what we've seen so far is just the beginning of the quest progression. It's very possible that one of the tradeskill quest items will be a single-shot gauranteed masterpiece, nonrepeatable.
Mackey said that the 1.67 patch will be the "Oh my god, we broke this in ToA, here's the fix".
Mackey said he *REALLY* wanted a curveball balance question. Since we hit on buffbots and savages, I'm not sure what else he wanted, but he kept harping on that. Dude does not shrink from any question, I'll tell you that. I asked what his methodology was for balance. His primary source of information about balance is from player feedback and TL feedback. He's primarily concerned with what happens when the characters are played, especially in RvR. "I can take anyone in this room, and all of them will have diametrically opposed views. No matter what, no one agrees about anything ever." People within Mythic disagree on balance, much less in the community. There are 39 classes, and nearly 200 different templates. It's very very hard to keep all that straight. He tries to get a quick idea of what the player sees through the eyes of the character for each of those 200 templates. Mackey has the very difficult job of trying to see the whole picture. "It's very hard, it takes a lot of guesswork."
I followed up by asking what kind of statistical analysis they do to help with balance. Spike said that Georgia whipped up a very powerful program that will query the character database for all kinds of information. What's interesting has been that players, including TL's, have been far off on what they thought the overall game was. They seem especially interested in templates and how people spec so they can understand the particular needs, frustrations, and difficulties of classes and templates. They especially watch how specializatiosn change as a result of changes in the game. For instance, when they nerfed VP, they watched how many wizards had VP before the nerf and how many had it afterwards.
Mackey - "You can gather all the stats in the world, but in the end what matters is what happens in game, what happens to people playing? And there's never going to be any substitute for that?"
Mackey has over 1000 design changes he wants to make. They're lucky if they can squeeze in 5-6 per patch. Mackey compared it to Congress; whenever anyone wants to make a change, Mackey will come on with a "rider change" for "while you're at it making this [ToA] relevant change, can we change this at the same time?" He was very pleased with 1.65. He'll be happy in the future if he can get 1/4 of what he got into 1.65 into future patches.
Mythicites will play the game, including from the Mythic facility, like on their lunch breaks or after hours. Mythic employees will stop by Mackey's office and give their input on various things. Everyone has an opinion on balance, but Mackey is trying hard to take it from a big-picture perspective.
One of the Hibs asked about Savages. According to Mackey, Savages got off easy. Mackey wanted to nerf them much harder. "They need more nerfing."
(More will be forthcoming. I didn't even have a chance to write up about our tour.)
Also, I do have more pics, but those can wait until I finish my brain dump from Mythic.
Addition:
Matt also stated they they currently are debating wiping clean the entire RA slate and redoing them for Frontiers. He admitted that it was poorly done, and they regret implementing it in the way that they did.
