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

On the heels of Global Agenda's first weekend closed beta test session, dubbed CBT 1a, we caught up with Executive Producer Todd Harris for a debriefing. After an update on what was tested, how the beta test weekend went, and the kinds of feedback received, what followed was a surprisingly in-depth discussion about the role of player vs. environment (PvE) play in Global Agenda, a game more known for the depth of its player-vs-player (PvP) side. We finished up with how feedback from CBT 1a went so far as to alter the course of Global Agenda's development, albeit slightly, heading into CBT 1b later this month.

Ten Ton Hammer: So this episode is all about beta feedback you’ve been getting from the first closed beta weekend. How did CBT 1a go?

Todd Harris: It went really, really well. We turned on the servers early just to give the folks a nice surprise and then went through late Sunday night and it really met or exceeded all of our expectations. We’re really pleased with how it turned out.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of feedback have you been getting? Has the 1-20 game turned out to be pretty much what you expected in actual playtesting?

Todd: Yea. As you said, the goal of this really around bringing brand new players to the game, having them go through levels one through twenty, and having them test out whether the progression itself is fun, whether combat at the lower levels is fun (since we’ve been doing our testing at the higher levels primarily up until now), and to test the function of some of our economy systems: loot drops, crafting, auction house. Those were really new systems, as we talked about last time. Fourth, we wanted to test server operations, GM tools... all the things that come into play when you let in a thousand people all at once. So really - very early scalability testing.

Functional testing of Global Agenda's economic systems was part of CBT 1a. The result? All systems go.

On all those points, we got really good feedback - a lot of positive comments, in terms of fun of the combat, character progression, economy. Again, it was more of a functional test for us; we’re going to be modifying many of the particulars as far as loot drop percentages, crafting recipes, some of the pricing involved with items. Getting those balanced wasn’t the focus at this point; it was just to see that these systems were functional. And they were. We had folks crafting items for loot and putting them on the auction house and bidding on them, so that was exciting to see.

Also, there were some really good lessons learned on the server infrastructure side. On Friday night, when we let in a bunch of people at once, we did have to do some server tuning. Things were a little hairy on the first night; I think everyone expected that with the first day, and I think it was a smart move on our part to start the beta on Friday when we had all hands here in the office to respond really quickly during the day and into the night.

Once the tuning was done, we had a really good experience on Saturday and Sunday, so much so that on Sunday we actually added in our alpha group just to get more volume on the server to make sure we’d resolved any issues. And that went really well.

Ten Ton Hammer: Where were your suspicions confirmed? Were there any big surprises from CBT1a?

Todd: I would say that the things we kind of expected were confirmed were: a) PvP is indeed fun at all levels, b) these graphics are really cool, it’s a cool sci-fi look but it’s not the typical post-apocalyptic look. People liked the clean style and progression. All those things were things that we were expecting and were confirmed.

Things that were maybe pleasant surprises were the really positive response to group PvE, specifically. We knew people were going to love the PvP because we’ve been testing that ourselves for some time. The PvE is newer for us because we worked backwards from the devices that were balanced for PvP and then adopted the PvE systems around that. And as you guys know, we just introduced that fairly recently at E3. We had a lot of the building blocks in place over the past 4 years but we put it together for missions around the E3 timeframe. Since people really responded well to group PvE, that’s where we’re going to be working on more content in the short term.