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

Ten Ton Hammer: How do players level up? Is it just shooting other players in PvP, or is it actually winning the PvP matches that they're in?

Casey: We have two systems. We have an experience system and a reputation system. The experience system is more typical to an MMO. Regardless of how good you are, as long as you're active and doing things you can always find a way to gain experience and therefore gain levels.

"Of course this is a safe part of town, Tommy!"

But the reputation system is more of a gauge of how good you are at the game. So that's in relation to your win-loss percentage, all that kind of fun stuff. But experience, we give it to you just about everywhere. You can be doing easy mode PvE if you're really horrible at shooting, you can still be gaining levels and hit the level cap without too much trouble.

Ten Ton Hammer: If a player earns a high reputation, what do they unlock?

Casey: We'll have leader boards that will revolve on a monthly basis. So everything can be pulled up on the leader board in the game or you can pull it up on our social networking site. We'll have stats that go on that. You’ll have gang reputation and individual reputation. And then we're able to reward gang and individuals that get the top slots with in game items or even potentially a partner for marketing branded items we can send to people in real life.

Ten Ton Hammer: So the leader boards aren't necessarily going to be updated every week, they'll be updated every month?

Casey: Yup. We do have a really cool gang tournament system that we're borrowing some of the stuff from league matches in FPSes. We'll have lots of different customized leader boards so we can do it for just your gang on your gang profile for the social networking site. You can see what your gang is doing, the people on your friends list, all that kind of stuff. So there's different ways to get to the top.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you going to have like a WoW armory sort of page where it shows your character and then it lists the achievements that you have and maybe your individual level and experience level and that sort of thing?

Casey: Yep, yep. We'll have all that stuff. That'll be on the player profile page and with the gang profile page you can click through to the individual player profile pages, set up friends. The gang profile pages are pretty robust, basically guild sites. You have closed forums, shout boxes so you can kind of talk trash with a rival gang by going to their shout boxes. You can set gang hierarchy, who the lieutenants are, all that kind of stuff, all through the website.

Ten Ton Hammer: You kind of touched on it a little bit already, but what kinds of options, tools, and features do gang leaders have with their gang? Like in a lot of MMOs they might a tax for every kill that a player gets or something like that? Is that some stuff that's going to be implemented into the game or are the gangs in CrimeCraft a little looser and a little bit more mobile?

Casey: You set the structure. You can set the access to the gang vault. We have tier one, tier two... all the typical stuff that you find in an MMO for the most part. We're trying to leverage some stuff to have player generated stuff to give gang leaders the tools to give really kind of cool in game content that they can have their gang go out and do. We're also doing everything we can in all different ways to promote gang rivalries, so it'll be gang leaders talking to other gang leaders to set up rivalries and that kind of thing.

Ten Ton Hammer: So the gangs in CrimeCraft aren't going to be like a lot of the guilds in WoW that are always focused on raiding and that sort of thing? Rivalry is kind of your "raiding" in CrimeCraft?

Casey: Right. That's part of it, but there are also gang missions that can be coordinated where your gang leader would be trying to coordinate the troops to do certain things. Maybe your gang mission is to kill X number of people in a certain gameplay mode. The order goes out, "Hey everybody, let's play this on this date." That kind of thing. So we have things that we build-in to reward people for getting together and communicating by planning play sessions and that sort of thing.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk about the gang mission a little bit more? Does the gang leader just get a gang mission from an NPC or something like that and that's the next thing the gang needs to do? They have to go kill 200 people in Capture the Flag?

Casey: Right. It's essentially the same system we have for individual players; it's just kind of expanded upon for the gangs.

Ten Ton Hammer: Ok. So it's just a little bit bigger and the guild wins something rather than the player wins something?

Casey: Yeah, that's right.