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Exclusive Champions Online Launch Interview - Page 2

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Posted August 31st, 2009 by Sardu


Ten Ton Hammer: And as you mentioned, a lot of players might not key into the idea that during the closed beta there simply weren’t the same numbers of concurrent users to allow you to get the right kind of data.

Bill Roper: Yea, and there were a lot of things we were able to get data on like load testing, finding bugs and getting feedback on powers – the closed beta was awesome for that. With the open beta it’s a matter of sheer numbers of players, and even using bots won’t find certain things. When you get that many live players on, it always makes things crop up that you didn’t even know might happen.

Another great example is the PvP queue server. We got people in, it was fine and we had people playing it and having a good time, but literally on the first day of open beta we had 1,000 people queue for PvP. We were like, “wow, that many people are excited to check out PvP” and this was with low level characters even. That’s when we found that there was actually a bug in the queuing software where it was basically stacking queues wrong.

The best way to describe it would be that it was doing it vertically instead of horizontally. Basically one match would have to fill and launch before the next one could fill and launch which made for these really, really, really long queues. Think of going to a concert but they only had one door open, forcing everyone to get in through that one door as opposed to opening up 5 doors. There are still a lot of people trying to get in, but at least they can go in through 5 different entrances instead. That was something that we never saw with our earlier concurrencies simply because we never had that number of people queuing up to play PvP, so you just wouldn’t notice it. When there are only a few people standing in line you don’t notice it, but then suddenly 1,000 people show up and you realize you need to open up more doors.

So we just checked that and fixed it, but that’s another example of how you don’t see that kind of stuff happen until something like this occurs.

Champions 02

Ten Ton Hammer: How has the open beta been otherwise from your perspective?

Bill Roper: It’s been great! We’re running our end of beta event – that’s actually running until about 5PM today – where we’ve got some giant Mega-Destroids cruising around Millennium City. We even have what we call Dev Suits, so if you see something that’s called a Cryptonaut that’s actually one of us. So it’s been pretty fun. I think players really like kicking down the devs.

So that’ll get wrapped up today and probably around the last hour or so things are going to get crazy. In fact, I need to go make my special character for 4 o’clock in just a bit here.

Ten Ton Hammer: There’s been some really solid feedback from the beta so far; I’ve been able to see some of the genuine impact it’s had on gameplay improvements over the past number of months. How integral do you feel player feedback is moving forward after launch?

Bill Roper: Easily as much as it was in beta, and once you go live it becomes even more important. There was a time basically during the beta where we decided that we needed to start treating everything like it’s live, and we’re actually servicing the game as though we’d launched. I think what you’ve seen through the beta – for us – it was also kind of a beta for how we’re treating our players moving forward.

So we’ll maintain a lot of responsiveness, we’ll keep track of what player concerns are and what they really want. I think it’s a back and forth. There have definitely been ideas that have come from the forums or have been inspired by discussions that we’ve seen. A lot of times too, one of the things that we have to do is not necessarily take the solution offered by players, but try to discern what the real issue is behind it. A lot of players don’t make games and they don’t necessarily know all the numbers behind everything, so they’ll say things like, “all you need to do is this and it’ll fix it!” A lot of times you can’t look at the “this” to fix it, instead you have to take a look at what is it that they want fixed, and how can we address that. But that feedback is something that’s essential and will continue to be a part of our plans and desires moving forward.

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