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.

Ten Ton Hammer: The GM staff that you have on hand for the first stage of closed beta; can you talk a little bit about how they’ve been getting ready for closed beta?

Stew: They’ve been busy. Even our first stage of closed beta is, in relative terms, still a fairly small population. So we’re talking about roughly a thousand new players plus a thousand or so carryovers from our alpha program. So our staff isn’t huge on that side; we do have CMs, we actually brought on someone to take on a GM-specific role last January. So we’ve had someone getting fully up to speed, getting ingrained in the community, making sure they know the ins and outs of the game, since then.

We have some pretty nice tools that the developers have made for the GMs; not only in-game tools but also a website that’s only accessible inside the studio that’s just absolutely remarkable in terms of what you can do with it. For example: what should the statistics on this weapon be, when should people be leveling.? All of those sorts of things are data driven inside of our dev process, so there’s a website that provides a lot of that information plus shows a lot of the game in real time. So I can use our set of tools to see that you’re playing the game, see exactly where you are, all of those types of things. It’s an area that we’ve been staffing for, plus I think the developers have done a great job of anticipating what our needs will be.

Ten Ton Hammer: So would you say that the GM staff’s chief function so far has been the balancing angle, making sure weapons are doing the right amount of damage, that sort of thing?

Stew: At this stage a lot of what we’ve used our GMs for is to be an education point, honestly. In early stages of development, we haven’t had all of the mechanics in place, obviously, in terms of educating the players on what comes next. So a lot of it’s been kind of help in navigation to what’s ready to test, what’s not ready to test. We’ve had a couple folks playing that role to get more deeply ingrained in the community as well - understand what players’ issues are and be a voice back to us and say ‘Hey, an uprising is brewing in the community around xyz, and xyz might be a balance issue.

But on balance issues, to be perfectly honest, we listen to the feedback from our community but we’re pretty empirical on our choices there. We tend to rely much more on the statistics coming out of our gameplay rather than what people might be saying. What sometimes happens is that we have very good testers that do a very empirical study around things, and we’ll tend to listen to that kind of feedback. But balance is something we see in the numbers. Our tools give us some really cool analytics that come out of the gameplay right now.

Ten Ton Hammer: With these empirical studies and broader feedback, do you ever feel like you’re wrestling with players’ perceptions about how the game is, rather than what you’ve actually designed?

Stew: Absolutely. I don’t know if I would make a claim that we wrestle more than any other game, but I think that one of the things that makes our game stand out is that we’ve been very meticulous around the idea that there are “countermeasures” - if the robotics class has “x”, recon class should have a countermeasure for how to play x. What we see at times even through the alpha is that we release a change and there’s a day or two of “OMG, I can’t believe you did that!” And then if you just let it rest, the community finds that there are more than suitable counters. It just that you had to learn what the new countermeasures are, and you have to play well as a team.

So far, GMs have been tasked with guiding players and being player advocates to the dev team.

We focus a lot of our internal testing on balancing. What we’re really trying to say is: when a player runs this tactic or equips these devices, is there a suitable counter to it, what level of teamwork is required, and is it realistic to expect that from our playerbase.

Ten Ton Hammer: Let’s talk a little bit about the unsung heroes of game development, the systems engineers. Can you talk at all about efforts to reduce lag and ping? Maybe it’s early to be talking about that kind of thing - is it something that you’ve had to address.

Stew: We’ve done a number of things in that area. Just from a systems and infrastructure standpoint, the basic mechanics of getting the servers up and running and efficiently engineered with all the right alerting so you know when there are problems, that’s a big job in and of itself, before you try to make it perform well. What we’ve done as of last February was form a partnership with Internap Network Services. Additionally, we have on-staff personnel dedicated to getting the infrastructure right.

What Internap has brought to the table - and we now have operations up in two of their data centers, one in North America, one in Europe - is a thrilling amount of network bandwidth and low latency. There’s always work to be done, things to tune, but I think we’ve been very happy from that side. We’ve made great progress even in the last two to three months in terms of getting additional infrastructure in place that we feel will help us scale our operations around the managing of operations around the servers more efficiently.

The place where we know we still have work to do, where we have some folks diligently working on now that a substantial amount of the feature set has gotten into testing, is on server side optimization. Our development staff is starting to spend a lot of time on client side optimization - making sure that we’re only using the CPU cycles and RAM that we need to, and keeping a very smooth player experience. I think on all those angles we still have work to do, but the good news is we have folks that are quite good on both the development side and the network side, so I’ve been pleased with the progress so far.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s great to hear that optimization is getting some good attention this early in the testing process. I know it’s a busy week there and we wish you all kinds of luck with the first stage of Global Agenda closed beta testing.

Stew: Thanks a lot!