Age of Conan at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: With the 1.05 update, Craig made a call to arms on the official AoC forums to recruit guilds to aid in testing the raid encounters for the update. What has been improved with the raids as a result and what can players expect to experience when they hit these raid targets once the update goes live?

Erling: I hope you have some time, he likes talking about this subject! Seriously, though, it’s great for us to have such a dedicated community that is willing to step in and help us make these updates a reality. It’s one of the great things about working on an MMO; having a test server where players can follow  the development of an update and provide feedback throughout the process makes it a lot easier for us as developers to make sure we get the best possible result.

Craig: The main point of getting that important extra testing was to ensure that the raid gameplay worked with the new RPG system. Each subsequent round of testing has allowed us to make sure the new system works with the existing mechanics.  We went through four stages of testing with the player community.  I explained this at length to our community during the testing, with some good discussions, but I thought it’s worth sharing here for your readers as well! It was an interesting process (of course those following Conan closely may have read some of this already!)

The First Stage - Finding the Conversion Errors

The first stage was to get through all the raids and see where the new system made them simply impossible. The system has scaled some things up and some things down, moved from invulnerabilities to protections etc etc and that meant that some of the Boss spells and abilities were simply too powerful or completely redundant after the automatic conversion.

Alongside the testing, the team went through each and every raid boss spell and ability and checked the scaling and the new outputs. Having guilds testing the encounters at the same time helped tremendously. For example, testing with Vistrix meant that immediately the team had a list of changes easily identified from the very first tests. So even though the players wiped completely (and were of course a little frustrated by that) it allowed the team to identify exactly which spells and / or abilities were the culprits (in the case of Vistrix it was a debuff that was still using an old calculation rather than a new one that was then reducing the players effective level by 20 rather than 2!). Each of the bosses was then worked through in exactly the same manner, testing and re-testing the numbers until the numbers came within the ballpark ranges of the new system and we had weeded out the remnants of the old calculations.

Stage Two - Encounter Mechanics

Once the most glaring imbalances and errors had been worked out the next stage was to assess the existing encounter mechanics and where those might need to be adjusted. Which of the bosses spells and abilities might need re-balancing, or which of the players abilities may need tweaking with raid content in mind.

This was a more straightforward stage and involved running through the encounters watching how players reacted to the abilities in the new system, which leads to an important point...

New Systems vs Existing Mechanics

There are not really any new mechanics being introduced with the raids in 1.05, but the RPG system changes do have an impact on the existing mechanics. Part of the entire reason for the systems changes is to provide a more robust back-bone with more potentially interesting mechanics for us to build our encounters on. The lack of differentiation between levels and the relative slim power scale in the original system meant that a lot of the mechanics that had already been designed and implemented were almost inconsequential to players in many cases. The system changes allow those mechanics to function as they were originally intended.

A Case in Point

So what exactly does that mean in practice? Let me give you a specific example that illustrates the point. The Champion of the Honorguard encounter is one that demonstrates this quite well and has been a good 'litmus test' for some of the balance testing.

When we first started the organized raid tests, this encounter was giving players far more problems than it should have. Raids were clearly struggling with a difference between the live environment and the new 1.05 build. (This of course was true with a few of the raids at the start of the testing but I'll follow this one through as a good example).

So we followed a few raids through, and then had the systems and raid developers sit in on a run through. What we found was a great example of the difference between the builds. The Champion of the Honorguard has a spell that basically does more damage in an AoE attack the more players are around. He has always had this ability; it's not new and was part of the original design. The problem for raiders was that on live, players were able to completely mitigate this damage with healing and protections even when they were all bunched up around him (which was then a valid tactic in the old build to keep everyone in team healing range). In the new system however the new scale of damage and HP levels meant that this spell had an increased effect. This meant that in order to succeed in this encounter with the new system the players had to adopt a strategy of spreading out a little more, as was the actual original design intention.

Once the raiders realized this, they were able to complete the encounter much more easily. It wasn't a new consideration; it was just a consideration that had been inconsequential with the original system (since it could be completely mitigated). What we have now is the scenario where the original design implementation is actually playing out better and providing a more interesting encounter.

Yes, it does mean the encounter can be argued to be 'harder', at the very least 'different' and all that without any actual changes to the mechanics of the encounter itself. The team hadn't given the boss any new abilities, spells or tricks, but the new more robust system means that his existing abilities are coming into play more and have to be considered by the players.

Stage Three - Getting the Numbers Right

Tied to this of course is actually tweaking, adjusting and balancing the spells, abilities and attacks themselves. The team have been following and watching the raids, measuring damage output, healing and the timing of both the players and the bosses. This has allowed the team to tweak the numbers down to a level where we try and get the raids to that pivotal point between being challenging and being improbable (or even impossible in worst cases!) We generally tweak downwards because we knew we were starting them off too high in the first builds, it's easier for us to tweak down towards an acceptable level than it is to tweak upwards)

Stage Four - Bringing It All Together

Lastly we worked on some more balance testing and making sure that we tweaked things after the previous pass and made sure all the encounters were possible with the new system.
We will also be continuing to watch raids closely now that the update has gone live!