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

Stew Chisam, VP of Game Operations at Hi-Rez Studios, has a big job: to “put Global Agenda out there where people can play it, and make sure they’re having fun.” That includes everything from the servers to the website to player support and event management plus much more, and it's not made simpler by the fact that Global Agenda will be one of the fastest paced, most ambitious titles released this year. Stew graciously took some time to answer our questions about his various roles as Global Agenda headed into a very hectic closed beta weekend last week.

Ten Ton Hammer: First off, I wanted to ask you about Global Agenda’s website presence. What will you have for players on the website? Are you planning to do lots of scoreboarding, social networking, agency (guild) management, that kind of thing?

Stew Chisam:- What we have in place today for beta is some pretty good access to your stats as a player. You can see who’s in what agency and alliance and access the stats of different players that you have access to. On a stats level, you can really drill down into individual missions and see your stats as well as see aggregated statistics on a player and an agency level, and even do some very light agency management.

In terms of where we’ll take it, we have a ton of idea. We think there’s a lot of great things we could do with the territory control system along those lines, so really we have a lot of ideas, we have a dedicated staff that works on that area of the site. We’re staying pretty light in terms of what we’ll have at launch, partly just to see what all we can fit into the schedule, but I think we can say that we see it as an important part of where we want to take the game.

Players will be able to track their own stats, but Hi-Rez won't divulge agency secrets with its website scoreboards.

The great thing to me about the website is that it’s very easy to evolve over time. Hopefully at launch you’ll see it as pretty good, and a year or two years after launch it’ll just keep getting better and better.

Ten Ton Hammer: You mentioned individual and per-agency stats. Will you also be able to see how your agency numbers stack up against other agencies?

Stew: We haven’t decided exactly what we’ll show yet. Our beta users will see an early take on what we’re thinking, but we have certainly laid the infrastructure to be able to do that when we find what really makes sense to display. One of the downsides with displaying lots of stats is that you don’t want to give an undue advantage to another agency. At this point, I would say we haven’t decided exactly what the content will be, but we have done a lot of good work to make sure that from a technical architectural standpoint, we have the components in place to do a lot, assuming we decide its right for the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Speaking of undue advantage, a big thing for both MMOs and online shooters is preventing cheats, whether that’s bots, hacks, or exploits. I don’t think I’ve heard anything from Hi-Rez regarding your plans on this front, but no doubt it’s something you’re thinking of.

Stew: That’s probably an area we’re not quite ready to talk about yet. We’re in some conversations... but what we have done is build an in-house anti-cheat system that is not where we’d like it yet, honestly, not that we necessarily expect it to be, at this stage of development. But it’s pretty good, and there’s a lot of time on the schedule between now and launch for that area. That said, we haven’t made any specific announcements on third-party usage.

Ten Ton Hammer: A lot of games have talked about some kind of real-time update system, where the game sends a text message to your phone updating you on in-game events. It seems like the campaign side of Global Agenda would be a perfect candidate for something like that. Is something like that under consideration?

Stew: That’s another area where I’m not ready to talk about specifics, but hopefully in the next month or two we will be. We’ll certainly say it’s something we’ve looked at.