Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ed: One of the things we’ve been working on is the tenth anniversary stuff that’s coming up soon, and unfortunately that’s all I can say. I can tell you that we had a lot of fun putting this stuff in. It was a chance to do some really special things that I’m hoping will be very enjoyable.

Smed accepts the SOE Day Proclamation.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is the team doing anything special? Going out to dinner, anything?

Ed: We’re having a cookout.

Ten Ton Hammer: I love SOE cookouts, the Block Party is my favorite thing about San Diego ComicCon, ignoble glutton that I am.

Taina: So, much like the Block Party [at ComicCon each year], we’re doing it in the parking lot. It’s SOE Day in the city of San Diego, so we’re celebrating that.

Ten Ton Hammer: And will John Smedley get the key to the city?

Taina: He’s already accepted the proclamation, so all we have to do is get to that day, celebrate, play EQ.

Ed: We actually had that ceremony last Monday [March 9th, 2009].

Ten Ton Hammer: Shifting topics, just from a very cursory look at the official EQ forums, it seems like fans are concerned about the amount of bugs and exploits in the game. Is there anything you can say to help allay those concerns?

Ed: It’s really kind of tough to deal with exploits that get brought up on our forums. Our internal policy is obviously to find them, find the cause, and fix them as soon as we can. But when people start bringing it up on the forums, there’s kind of a catch-22: if we acknowledge it, we’re obviously encouraging people to mess with it until we can get it fixed. If we ignore it, people say that we’re ignoring them or worse, we’re encouraging it due to favoritism to guilds, all that fun conspiracy theory stuff. So it’s really a tough kind of thing to deal with. The important thing is that we find them and fix them as fast as we can, but it’s never fast enough and there’s always something else that we could fix.

Ten Ton Hammer: There’s a lot more players than there are developers.

Ed: Yea, that too. Dave Rickey, one of the developers on Dark Age of Camelot, had a great line: “The first hour something is released, it will be played more man hours that were put into developing it.” There’s a lot of stuff that we don’t really anticipate, it happens. So for now, /bugs and private messages are the best way to go. And please be detailed - telling us that “x is broken” doesn’t really give us anything to go on. Be as detailed as you can, do it in a private way, and we can fix it a lot faster when that happens.

Ten Ton Hammer: There was another point of confusion in the forums about the extent of the EQ team’s involvement with Free Realms, can you speak to that at all?

Ed: I don’t believe I’m able to.

A Firiona Photomosaic? We say, "Why not?"

Taina: I can say that many of our developers have been a part of a bunch of the different games that we’ve developed. People that were on the EQ team might have gone to the Free Realms team and vice versa. I myself came from the San Diego studio and now I’m in the Seattle studio. There’s definitely that cross-pollination between the development teams and beyond that- even today, we’re doing the Free Realms play test. Every single studio, every single department - development, finance, sales, marketing - we’re all playing Free Realms right now. We’re all encouraged highly to submit feedback, bugs, etc.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’d be silly of you not to take advantage of your many studios and personnel. Finally, though we’re all looking forward to the upcoming announcements, is there anything else that you wanted to share with the community at this point?

Ed: It’s amazing to think of where I was ten years ago, when I knew people made games, but I didn’t really think of it as a career option. I got my dream job. No one that I’ve met at this company would rather be doing anything else - this is something that we all love. If we won the lottery, we’d make our own company to make games. It’s a great job. Even on the worst days, when people are on the forums calling us morons, it’s still a great job and it’s still fun to come in and make cool stuff for people to do.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s always a pleasure to talk to you guys, thanks for taking time for us!