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

Just as an example, we came up with the stealth mechanic for recon, and stealth is something that can be pretty tricky to get right in a PvP game. Our approach was to have that work well and feel good for the recon player but not be too overpowered. We’ve done thousands and thousands of PvP maps to confirm that mechanic and make sure it works well, so now it’s easier for us to have AI opponents that - now that the way that devices works is a given - adapt to that in a way that’s fun.

Towards your question about games having PvP and PvE and having one not feel tacked-on, I think it is a challenge. At least for us, starting with weapon balance for PvP (since we knew that would be a big part of the game) and then adapting the enemies to that has turned out well.

Ten Ton Hammer: So it really sounds like nothing occurred over CBT 1a that didn’t validate everything you thought about class and item balance in the high level game, so that’s really good news.

Todd: Yea it is, and for folks that might be interested in how we look at feedback from beta, and since I’m in the thick of it now, I’ll share with you the things that we’re looking at. There are four main categories of things: one is forums. We do have very active forums, you see where people have passion, but sometimes that can be a vocal minority and not necessarily representative. So we do look there to see where people have passion, but that’s not our only source.

Additional PvE content moved up the list for CBT 1b.

Number two is surveys. For this round, we did a pretty comprehensive email survey that went to all of our players, and that certainly gives us a representative sample across the whole playerbase. Third, as developers play alongside the players - sometimes with Hi-Rez on their name, sometimes under aliases - they’ll gather feedback. That way they’re playing in matches with folks, we can see what people are commenting on in the chat and able to see the really candid feedback that you don’t get even in an anonymous survey. Fourth, we look at all the persistent stats that we track. Obviously there we can see trends, so things that may not be apparent in a single match show up here, so class balance, item balance, kill ratio, and things like that are tracked here. And across all of those, we were very pleased with what we saw.

To me, one of the main metrics that we look at on the survey is whether or not a player would recommend this game to a friend. Even just after this three day activity, the surveys we’ve gotten back are over 85% saying they’d recommend Global Agenda to a friend. Then the vast majority of the other 10-15% are kind of in the “I need to play more to make a decision” category. “Would not recommend” is really low, under 2%. So that was above what I was expecting from the group and was really encouraging. Obviously we’ll work hard to keep those folks happy and even increase that number as we move forward.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk about any areas that you’re specifically working on as a result of the feedback you received?

Todd: For one thing, as far as our next phase, we’ll have a follow-up phase of testing around character progression - some of the higher levels that the community didn’t get to this time. That’ll be before the end of August, but we want to give ourselves time to work on the feedback items and some of the other items that were already in the queue, and give the closed beta testers time to rest up for another marathon weekend.

From now till then, there’s a hundred little things, but the big things would be some additional group PvE content. People really did enjoy that, so we want to expose a little bit more of that content. Some more polish around the new player introduction. As I mentioned we were very focused on the mechanics there - what order things unlocked, the speed that things unlock and that sort of thing - so just additional polish around grabbing folks in that first hour. That means additional art and music and really just polish items around those missions - really expose people to the world, story, and context. Then we will be continuing to work on the campaign, which won’t be introduced for testing in that next phase - that won’t come until CBT 2 - but that’s a big focus for us as well.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks again for your time, Todd!