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

The last few days leading up to a major MMOG launch is an exciting time for the developers and fans alike, and Champions Online is no exception. Ten Ton Hammer recently had the opportunity to sit down with Bill Roper to discuss the end of the open beta, the importance of player feedback and what kind of content updates players can look forward to once the game officially launches on September 1st, including a sneak peak at the Blood Moon event coming this October (Hellgate London fans may recognize the name Blood Moon from the infamous “Not a Fit Night Out” achievement).

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Ten Ton Hammer: How are things at Cryptic on the last few days before the official launch?

Bill Roper: Things are good – we’re wrapping up the beta and trying to push for some last minute fixes. It’s been really good especially from the standpoint that we’ll have a lot of stuff based on the things we’ve done this week since the open beta started – there’s been lots of good feedback. We’re finding lots of bugs that we couldn’t find without having the concurrencies of 10 or 15 thousand people. You test a lot of stuff with bots but then once you get live players on it always causes aberrant behavior.

And then there’s some balance related things too. We weren’t really able, even in the closed beta, to get significant statistical numbers at different level ranges, such as being able to look at the XP curves. We knew it wasn’t right but when we got all the people on in open beta that was when it became apparent that it was really broken.

Whenever you do testing and you make changes, you tend to swing the wheel far over for course corrections. I think that’s one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that you have to do that. People will ask, “why not make just little changes?” If you think about sailing a ship it’s kind of like you’re going really far to starboard, so you need to swing the wheel hard to port to make a big course correction. Then you can say, OK we went too far, let’s move it back over.

Ten Ton Hammer: Hitting those two extremes seems like it would be the most helpful for data collection at this point too.

Bill Roper: Yep, and it is. You do have to really kick over hard in one direction. That’s what we recently did with experience. We knew that players are grossly outstripping content, to the point where players were able to basically skip entire zones, so it was really broken. We decided to swing hard in the other direction so it’s like now there isn’t enough content for levels, so we really made a big adjustment but we could tell we were close. From there we know we can go back in the other direction and ease off of those changes.

The goal is so that players are definitely above the par. We like people being above the curve so it’s not like you have to complete every shred of mission content to be able to hit level cap. It’s OK if somebody skips missions or doesn’t find some of the discovery missions and things like that – they should still be able to level without having to grind.

It definitely caused a big panic and furor with some people in the forums, so we had to explain that this was just a course correction. Amongst a few people in every game that I’ve ever worked on they love to ring that panic gong where it’s like, “it’s the end of the world!” It seems like that happens in every game ever made. I think the thing that’s interesting about MMOs is that you see it happen; even single player games do that, but it’s all done internally. You’ll make a big change like that and it gets kicked out to your internal test group and QA people, and you’ll get the same panicked feedback from your QA guys, so that even happens internally and you’ll have to let them know, “don’t worry, we’ll fix it.” In the MMO space you’re doing that, but for a lot of people.

But you really have to do that tuning, or move that dial one way or the other before you can fine tune it.