Warhammer Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

The statue of Nagash, which you can see come to life in the LotD Q&A video.

Ten Ton Hammer: Gathering quests, delivery tasks, that kind of thing?

Mark Davis: Resource gathering, monsters that are low enough level, that sort of thing, or time-based things - have to do it in a certain amount of time. But it's mostly object interaction so it's not difficult. But in stage 2, there's the possibility for what we call a "panic stage" to happen. You're used to doing stage 2 and progressing to stage 3, but what could happen in stage 2 is that you're repairing that airship and suddenly a fire breaks out in the fuel pumps. And now, 'What do we do now? This is not part of the formula!" You've got to run to the water pumps and start putting the fire out. You have 60 seconds to do it. If you can do it in 60 seconds, you resume stage 2. Maybe next time, it's not a fire but an explosion. It can be a number of different things that happen. It adds some panic, it breaks people up and gets them in the game a little more.

Overall, our PQs out in the world, we don't touch with live events. But since you asked, I can tell you something about what we're doing with Public Quests. Now that the population's settled up in tier four, we're learning that maybe those counters in stage one maybe weren't the best idea. 175, maybe not such a good idea. We're actually going through the game right now and lowering all those stage ones, all tiers, all pairings, across the board. We're thinking in the neighborhood of 30-50 on stage ones. Stage two, stage three stay the same. Easy, hard, those variables stay exactly the same.

If you look at the Land of the Dead, all of those conditions are thirty at a minimum, unless there's a case where you need to do something like interact with these ten objects. It makes the PQ a lot more fun to run over and over again. Some of these cinematic endings to these stages are great, but when you're faced with 175 monsters, I don't care how avid of a player you are, you see that number, it's a lot. It's a deterrent. PQs are meant to be fun, that's what we want.

Ten Ton Hammer: Yalyss had a few questions about server populations and merges. Any news on this or character transfers?

Mark Davis: All I can say is that I know we're talking about it, but I have no idea of the decisions that have been made on when and how we'll do it. But we are considering it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Adraema asks if Mythic had plans to bring European and International players into the fold for exclusive event items and collectible items from events like this, and whether Europeans can be included on test server and live events?

Ushabti, one of the toughest dungeon bosses you'll encounter.

Bob Mull, Community Relations Director: That's a very timely question, actually. I just returned from visiting GOA in Dublin last week, and that was one of the subjects we talked about and just the general perception that Europeans are somehow a second class Mythic citizens, so to speak. That's not it at all. That's not what we want people to believe, and it's not true from our perspective. The European audience is as important as the Taiwanese audience is as important as the Russian audience. Customers are customers and they should all be treated equally.

It's safe to say that [non-NAs] don't get quite the same level, maybe, as you said. Particularly when it comes to, like, we'll do a PTS [public test server event] and we'll give out rewards, or events like Baltimore Games Day and give out collectibles. It's one of the things we're talking about - how do we get better in sync, with Tomb Kings in particular. It's not a matter of whether Europe is second class or not, it's a matter of two corporations working together. It's a matter of - hey, we need to test something quickly, and Mythic can do that in a very rapid way because we have all the resources right here and GOA does not. So how do we set up a process by which we take a little more time, we give GOA the time they need to understand what we're doing, so the players are the beneficiaries.

So the public testing for 1.3, the Tomb Kings stuff, we're working very closely with GOA to try to match that on both sides as a starting point. The forums is another place - we're working with them to get our developers joining the discussion on their forums as well. It's that kind of transparency, where their players feel like they can talk to a Mark Davis, Gabe Amatangelo, Jeff Skalski, or an Adam Gershowitz in a forum discussion thread on a particular topic. That topic might be something like 'we're looking at class balance for white lion' or whatever it might be and they get feedback that they can take back to development and these players get to be more a part of how the game is developed over time.

It needs to be much better than it is now. I hear them, I love going to Europe and meeting players. As a player and a community guy, I cringe every time I hear that the perception is that Mythic doesn't care about them. And we want to change.

Ten Ton Hammer: So there is a possibility of more exclusive items for European players as well?