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

Bob Mull: That's one of the things that we want them to start matching us and going ahead. It's just a matter of resources. Their community team is aware of this as well, and we're working with them to figure out the best way to do this. We like to give our prizes and stuff, but we don't want to do it to the detriment of other players or to create a perceived bias.

Ten Ton Hammer: Yalyss asks about population caps on fortress fights. Are you happy with where these are at?

Jeff Skalski, RvR Lead: I'm not. Quite honestly, that was one of those things where we designed our game thinking players would do one thing and they're not doing at all what we expected. We thought for sure that a group of people would hit the fortresses and then a group of people would immediately start working on the next pairing. What's happening is that as soon as that fortress goes contested, it's like a magnet - everyone wants to go. Whether that's because of the loot, whether that's because it's one step closer to cracking open the city, it's really drawing all the players, which of course causes server crashes. Because if you put 600 people in a small area like that, and you're going to crash your server. So we had to put pop caps on.

The concept of purges and RvR combat within dungeons, is central to the Land of the Dead experience.

Unfortunately if you don't do that, you have to instance them. We went back and forth between the two systems, and we decided not to instance them. And the reason we decided not to instance them, we felt that they were such a big landmark that for me to be in one fortress siege and you guys to be in another,for you guys to win - you take down the fortress lord with three minutes left on the clock - and my side loses. Then to say 'that's a wash, guys, we didn't take the fortress,' and you're like, 'But we just won!' And it resets the pairing, it's now back in Praag, that's kind tough. So we put in a pop cap, first come first served.

And that's not to say that it's perfect, because it's not. If there's anything that I could fix or improve on the system, it's when I die and can't get a rez, I spawn at a warcamp and now I lost my spot. I hate that. I want to see it where you can respawn and not lose your spot. So to figure out a way to respawn near the fortress inside that invisible imaginary bubble - would be good. Now, of course, that's a tough thing to do. We didn't do it right away because you're going to have players constantly funneling in, it's going to make it really hard to attack or defend that fortress. So we're discussing how to do that.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there a chance that these population caps could be increased?

Jeff Skalski: We can increase and decrease them like that, but they're at where they're at based on performance. The fortresses funnel players to such a small area, as it was originally designed, so we have to be really careful with how big that population cap is, because players are going to funnel. Now if we go back to the fortresses and decide to spend time on redesigning the fortresses to maybe have players capture multiple objectives, then yea, we can dial it up because we're going to spread the players out. So it's all part of a limitation with the hardware. It's one of those things that we have ideas how to do that, but we have to look at everything else that's going on and ask if that's more important or is fixing the main city PQ more important, or is letting players come back and defend their city in the captured state. So it's a balance.