With Friday's announcement we know there have been many questions floating around. We've been spending the weekend reading your feedback and questions on these changes and have compiled an FAQ to address many of them.
We will also be posting an FAQ on the changes to Cities as well that will give you more insight in the the mechanics behind the new Campaign system and how we made our decisions.
Click here for the original article discussing these changes @ MMORPG.com
Combat and Careers
What was the reason behind your final career choices?
It wasn’t an easy decision, all of the Careers in WAR are very dear to us. They all have the potential to be interesting and exciting and we invested a lot of work in creating them. However when it comes down to it we weren’t happy with the quality level across all twenty-four; some of the careers were only good, but not GREAT. Because we were spreading our focus across so many places, we found that there were a lot more rough edges then we’d like, and our Beta testers supported this observation.
We looked hard at the issue and decided it was best to focus on the best of the best and work on improving all aspects of the careers that remained. This included generating more abilities, art, and better User interface polish etc.
When did you realize you had to make this decision?
The decision to drop careers was not one we made lightly. Over the course of beta, we sat down and gathered all of the feedback and took a long hard look at how we could turn great feedback into GREAT careers. One of the differences between our development process for WAR versus DAoC is the amount and quality of the tools we have to gather feedback from our Beta community. Whether it was reading the feedback on our internal forums, from player surveys or the amount of time people played these careers, we had a plethora of data at our disposal.
We realized that pulling a Career is risky business so we wanted to be sure that we were yanking them for the right reason and the game balance did not suffer for it. In addition we need to know whether the careers we focused on were better received then their counterparts. We did not want to finalize the decision until we were confident in the results of the initial focus period.
After that, we worked hard on polishing the remaining careers and working closely with our testers. We found that focusing down on a smaller set of careers was the correct choice because players really enjoyed the updates and improvements to the careers that we focused on.
What did you gain by reducing the number of Careers available?
We gained a lot more time to polish and expand the remaining careers in the game. In short, we were able to go back and add in many of the types of things that our Beta players enjoyed and asked for more of, such as:
Larger amounts of Career-specific items and equipment with unique artwork
Increasing the number and depth of abilities per Career
We also targeted our polish efforts on some of our weaker areas, such as:
- Smoother, more engaging animation
- Greater variety of Visual Effects.
How did you choose the final careers to be released?
It wasn’t easy let me tell you; we put a lot of time and effort into all of our careers and many of those that didn’t make the grade had spent a good amount of time in production already. However, when push came to shove, we evaluated each career based on the following criteria:
- BETA Feedback on the Career & how it played
- How anticipated was the Career by the community?
- How removing certain Careers would impact the game balance
- Quality and Quantity of Artwork remaining to be created
- Parity between races
How does this affect the balance of the game?
The balance of the game is not dramatically affected by the loss of the four Careers. The Choppa and Hammerer were two sides of the same coin, and since their role and play style was similar, cutting them both at the same time ensured that the balance issues from having one and not the other were resolved.
The decision to drop the Knight (Order’s Aura Tank) and the Blackguard (Destruction’s Hatred Tank) was trickier. In the end, we wound up redistributing certain abilities to other Careers in order to create the balance that had originally been provided by these tanks. The one downside is the fact that this play style only exists in one of the three pairings.
In the end, we wound up with the following overall distribution:
- 10 Close Combat Careers
- 10 Ranged Careers
Since you cut some Careers that share a “Playstyle” with the launch Careers does this mean the ones you’re releasing will be less polished?
Absolutely not! The Ironbreaker and Chosen will not suffer from losing their “Play style” equivalents. Remember, “Gameplay” was only one of the major factors we used to decide what should stay and what should go.
Both the Knight and the Black Guard played fairly well, and were anticipated by the community. However, they still needed a tremendous amount of production, iteration and polish time with no guarantee that in the end, they would come out exactly the way we hoped. By removing them, along with the Choppa and the Hammerer we were better able to polish the remaining Careers.
I loved career XXXX! Now it’s gone, QQ!?
We understand that many players were excited about these careers, but our dedication to do what was right for the product and ensure that we were shipping a GREAT game won out. As developers, sometimes we have to make difficult calls in order to make WAR the best RvR MMO on the market.
Are these careers gone forever? Will you be releasing them later?
Right now the team is 100% focused on the final goal of shipping WAR with the twenty balanced careers so that are all fun, balanced and interesting to play at launch. That is the most important thing that we can focus on now. With twenty careers and our Mastery system, players of WAR will have more career and customization options than just about any other MMO in the market today. We will continue to evaluate the careers and what they can add to the game post launch. Nothing is set in stone as they say.
PunkBuster
What is PunkBuster?
PunkBuster is an
industry leading software package that assists us in catching
hackers, exploiters and cheaters. It is fully integrated into the
game client itself and helps to stop cheaters in their tracks.
Why are you doing
this?
Our goal is to create a fair and enjoyable environment for everyone in WAR. As an RvR-centric game, it is of paramount importance for players in WAR to know that the other players that they are fighting against do not have an advantage over them simply because they are more technically-savvy and willing to cheat. The history of MMOs is replete with examples of people hacking, exploiting and cheating to gain an advantage over other players and/or the game itself. Over the years in DAoC, we fought a long-battle with those type of people and we have no doubt that now, seven years later, there are more people looking to cheat than ever before as both the audience and reach of these games have expanded. We have shown our commitment to fighting and preventing this type of behavior in DAoC and now with the addition of Punkbuster, we are increasing that commitment in terms of both time and money.
How does it work?
PunkBuster in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning simply looks for anything suspicious that might be indicative of a player attempting to cheat or use exploits. It reports this information to Customer Support, who will then decide after a full investigation whether or not someone is breaking the rules. The most important thing to know is that it cannot do anything automatically and is only there to help our Customer Support create a more enjoyable game environment. It is also important to note that Punkbuster is just one of the tools in our arsenal to use against cheaters. We will continue to do what we do with DAoC and not just rely on Punkbuster. Our plan is that most people will never even know it's there!
How does PunkBuster
stay up to date?
Regular updates will go live via the in game patcher. You don't need to do anything except start up the game like you normally would and everything will stay up to date for you.
Will there be
Punkbuster enabled servers and non-enabled servers like in some FPS
games?
No, all of our servers
will use Punkbuster.
Is there any chance
that Mythic will decide not to use Punkbuster?
Yes. While our plans are now to use Punkbuster at launch, we will spend the remaining time left in our Beta test looking very closely at how Punkbuster works within WAR. This is the first time that Punkbuster has been used by an MMO company and we want to be sure that it will not have a negative effect on a player’s ability to enjoy our game. If we find that we need some additional time to ensure that players are not negatively affected by Punkbuster, we will remove it and only activate it when it is ready to go and not before.
