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

Ten Ton Hammer: One of our premium members, Mordon, asks a number of questions about server hardware and network throughput. You're not a systems guy, but I'm guessing that as the RvR guy, you bump your head against hardware limitations more than anyone else here. Is Mythic making improvements to the hardware so that maybe at some future date these population caps could be increased without impacting performance?

Land of the Dead PQs and dungeons are built to minimize performance issues while maximizing fun.

Jeff Skalski: The answer to that is yes. We have a dedicated group of engineers who just focus on - if there's a crash, why did it happen? Was it because of an ability fired off? Did 300, 400, 500 players come to one spot and do something? Their inbox is flooded every morning with reports from all these players and they have to sift through it and decide - this happened 100 times and this happened twice, let's tackle the thing that happened 100 times first. And then: performance goes hand in hand with that. How can we get rid of the hitchy-ness. There's times that it's like a death by a thousand cuts - it's not one thing, your performance is getting hit from all these angles. There's not this one almighty answer that we fix and everyone's going to run at 60 FPS. So it's taking those cuts away. If you rewind time and look at what the game was when we launched and what it is today, it's night and day. I know a lot of players don't see it like that becuase you might still have a crash now and then, but I think we tend to forget how often it happened back in the beginning. We've done so much to improve it. And we're actively working on it. I just saw a preview of a fix we have for some of the chunkiness you see, where you can be running at 45 FPS and it slows down just for a few seconds and then goes back up to 45 FPS. Trying to take some of that hitchy-ness out, always working on it.

And maybe over time we address the population caps. But sometimes we intentionally don't. An example would be city instances - we initially set it to 48. Our original intention was not to have it 48 on 48, Our original intention was to make it 96 on 96. But when we had it 96 on 96, it was pure chaos in the streets of Altdorf, and not in a good way. And that was because of how the play space was built. At that point you can't go, well, let's rebuild Altdorf to make it work, let's take Praag and make that kind of an Altdorf. I understand that way of thinking, but Altdorf was built as a living city for a reason, and we wanted players to fight in those streets. We probably could raise it past 48 from a performance perspective, but we don't want to. There's no need to.

Combat and Careers Lead Nate Levy also addressed VasDrakken's questions about expanding the tank's role in RvR. You can find his answers in our Future of Combat and Careers article. Thanks to Paul Barnett, Josh Drescher, Mark Davis, Jeff Skalski, and Bob Mull for taking time to answer our VIP questions at Baltimore Games Day 2009.