Interview von der GamesCom Teil III

Alles hat mal ein Ende und so gilt dies auch für die Post-Trilogie meines Interviews mit Carrie Gouskos und Andy Belford auf der GamesCom. Diesmal geht es unter anderem um Zahlungsoptionen, den Ladebildschirm-Tipp-Wettbewerb und die armen Schwarzorks, die wieder die größten sein wollen.

Stellt sicher das ihr auch den ersten und den zweiten Teil der Mitschrift lest, bevor ihr euch ans Ende wagt!

Erdknuffel: As you’ve maybe already recognized, the Germans do not use credit cards as widely as American folks do, the majority of German players paid their subscriptions by a direct-debit system. Now with Mythic, that’s only possible through third party providers by buying a gametime card over the EA store. Are there any plans to expand the provided payment methods in the future?

Carrie: Yes, we have several different phases of additional payment options that we’re working through right now. One that’s probably coming very soon and another one that’s probably coming by around the end of the year. So we’re working towards that.

Andy: What we’re working on as far as the service, what we want to provide to our customers: It’s not tied in any way with Star Wars. We are Warhammer, they are Star Wars. We are one happy BioWare family, but while we are all the same studio and we definitely share experience and knowledge. I mean between the two studios we have over 30 years of experience in making video games, but we don’t want the WAR community to feel like it’s all about Star Wars. We’re working on a completely separate schedule.

Erdknuffel: Goldspam is a serious problem. What procedures does Mythic take to keep the advice chat clean from ads like that?

Carrie: A lot of it goes of behind the scenes that we don’t talk about, because we don’t want Goldspammers to know what we’re doing. We’re constantly doing things at the backend to kind of thwart them, but there’s a feature we’re putting into the game. It’s done right now, but it didn’t make it into 1.3.6 so it will probably get put into a maintenance patch, we hope and basically it is a new right click option in chat. So if you see a Goldspammer you can report them as a Goldspammer. What that does is, it flags their name as reported as a Goldspammer and then when a certain number have been triggered it floats them to a CSR automatically instead of having to go into the help menu and the other thing that it does is that it ignores them for you. So the problem we have with Goldspammers actually is that for most players it’s easier to ignore them than it is to report them. The players just ignore them. We used to have people sitting in the advice channel but now we have every CSR focusing on the tickets and so if nobody reports them they’re going to deal with all the other tickets instead and because it’s so difficult for people to report them, they just ignore them. It’s no point. So now what we are doing is a different thing. It’s just as easy as ignore them; it will ignore them and will automatically report them on your behalf. So that’s what’s coming up.

Erdknuffel: What do you think about the German / French blogger community? Are there any plans on having a Blogger Invasion with some of them as well?

Andy: If we had more forewarning that we would be coming to GamesCom I actually would have tried to set some big event up for the bloggers. Unfortunately we had literally 3 weeks forewarning that we’re coming to GamesCom. So 3 weeks time to arrange all of our international press interviews, to arrange what we could with the blogging community and to arrange the fan meet up and to get my passport and things like that. So needless to say it just unfortunately wasn’t in the cards this time. But that being said, we’re hoping to do a Blogger Invasion or something with the Europeans at some point but that’s not solid in concrete.

Erdknuffel: What happened to the loading tooltips?

Carrie: The loading tooltips that have been submitted before the switch over were not saved for posterity unfortunately. So we’re going to hold another one for the European players. You have to remember your loading tooltip and submit it again to us.

Erdknuffel: Guilds are an important part of the game. After implementing the exotic mounts, the 60 % guild mounts are not as important as they were in the past anymore. Are you planning on bringing more incentives for guilds into the game?

Carrie: Yes but I don’t think that it is in the near term. We should probably do another pass on them, but it is probably not going to be a part of the RvR pack. What we do have are the guild banners, that problem should be resolved in the future.

Erdknuffel: Will we see more available mounts?

Carrie: Yes!

Andy: Mounts are cool, we like mounts!

Erdknuffel: Maybe something like Juggernauts?

Carrie: Well, I don’t know.

Erdknuffel: But nothing that looks like a Barbie Horse?

Carrie: I don’t think so, no. We got some cool mounts that we’re working on and nothing that looks like a Barbie horse!

Erdknuffel: In the game, there are several addons which grant the user an advantage over players, who don’t use them. Do you think that this is a problem and if so, what do you do to work against it?

Carrie: One of the early philosophies we had with the UI was that we wanted to make sure that it’s customizable enough that everyone who wouldn’t download third party mods wouldn’t be so far behind. There are so many things you can do in the game and people always are coming up with creative and clever mods. There are definitely a few mods that we have that I think people consider kind of necessary like State of the Realm is one and in some cases we go and say that’s maybe a case where our game is maybe too confusing or too complicated. I like those mods, because there is a person, who came up with something that is really helpful, but that not gives the player an advantage. Now if you take the other side of that: There are some mods like the autofocus mod, which we broke because that was an unfair advantage to people who use it over people who not. We generally try to look at them in maybe 3 different ways. One: That’s a cool mod but it shouldn’t be necessary and we should probably fix our game to not make them necessary like the autoroll mod early on because we put the functionality into the game so you can set your settings like need, great or pass and it does that automatically for you. That’s an example for a great mod where we thought: “We should have had this, let’s put it into the game.” And then: “That’s a great mod but we don’t have time to put it into the game and there’s a modder doing it. Yay for the modders.” and “That’s a bad mod let’s break it.”

Andy: Another example for a mod that we’re going to take a very close look at is NerfedButtons.

Erdknuffel: Do you have any plans on making the Black Orc da biggest Orc again?

Andy: Well if it’s up to me: yeah, because that’s something I’m constantly bugging these guys about. So Carrie, the community really wants for the Black Orc to be the biggest Orc, because it matches the lore.

Carrie: I think we can look into that.

Ich hoffe euch hat das Interview gefallen. Von der GamesCom habe ich übrigens noch ein paar Item-Codes, die ich hier im Blog in nächster Zeit verlosen werde!

Verwandte Artikel:

1. Interview von der GamesCom Teil I
2. Interview von der GamesCom Teil II
3. PTS Stresstest Teil 2