Interview Jeremy Gaffney WildStar Executive Producer by WarLegend.net

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• Page 1 – Interview en Français
• Page 2 – Interview in English [you are here]

Jeremy Gaffney WildStar Dev Team and denpxc from WarLegend.net in Paris

This interview was made in audio and transcribed as best as we could, we tried to be as accurate as possible so sorry for the grammatical mistakes you might notice. If you spot anything feel free to mail us on contact@warlegend.net :)

[General questions]

• WarLegend.net: Is the game going to be released before 2014?

Jeremy Gaffney: It Depends on the beta. The beta is going to show us, when will the game be ready. We’d like it to be in 2013 but my boss would like it to be next week. It has got to be perfect. We are doing our best.

• WarLegend.net: Will the game be released in both U.S. and Europe?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes , and then you will have Korea, and China, and eventually Russia.

• WarLegend.net: How many languages will be ready for the launch?

Jeremy Gaffney: Certainly English, French and German. we’ll look at other languages to see what the critical mass is. Localization is tricky because we have so much custom voice and stuff like that. We’ll debate it.

• WarLegend.net: Will the skills in PvE and PvP will always be the same ?

Jeremy Gaffney: They’re mostly the same. The two things that have variances are taunting and crowd control.

• WarLegend.net: What kind of impact should you expect from housing? Will crafting be very important?

Jeremy Gaffney: Very important is kind of a short form. You get your house early on. A lot of the reward has been tied to housing. The kind of pattern that we want is that you wake up in your house and you have extra “rest” XP. So, we are incenting people to logoff in their house. With new daily quests that pop out. Not only daily quest : there is a chance every day that a quest will pop up: “Oh, look there’s Minotaur, I’m a head mage, I get to kill him and get an achievement” or whatever. I’ll look in my garden, and there’s rare spawns that have popped off from the things that I’ve planted yesterday. Cool, so I get my rare seeds, I replant some. Then I go off to an adventure, and come back to the house in the night. I collect things that have popped up during the day. Now I logoff ready for invest the seeds that I might have founds while adventuring. I come back the next day and I re-harvest all that stuff. 

• For raiding, you can get portals to the big raid; you can get buff statues that do long-term buffs. So that you can have people in your guild to equip their houses, temporarily in this sort of full-time buffing stations and raiding stations. This is the area where we prep up before we go meet them and go fight.
• The second form is war plots which is housing built to kill. That is 40 vs. 40, build a war plot; build a whole town, effectively a giant death fortress. Go capture, raid bosses. Pin them down on your fortress and then fly them over to go attack the other fortress while you are all running through mid-field, and go try to destroy enemy’s stuff as much as possible, while doing all those various PvP objectives. That’s kind of housing on steroids. Some of what goes into the housing, goes into rewards that you can get through housing. If you go on a raid, if you defeat a boss in a particularly interesting fashion, usually per boss, that’s how you capture it and tie it back to the PvP system as well.

• WarLegend.net: Do you get a trophy that you can put in your house when you kill a boss?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yeah, trophies are all over the place. If you see a rare spawn and you kill it, you’ll get a head for it, and you can put it on your wall. There’s also trade skills wich are generating whole tons of stuff for housing. We have thousands and thousands of housing assets in from an early stage. You can build a second floor for you house, or a stairway, or a jump puzzle. Some of them are just for fun. Some are socializing-type things. Some we haven’t revealed yet, like a giant piano that you can put up when you’re having a party and everything jump around and play tunes on it, there’s a record button, and so you can record songs and stuff. There’s quest things where you get hurled up into big vortex and then you have to grab as many crystals as you can on the way down. Housing is cool. We’ve dumped a lot of assets into it.

• WarLegend.net: What’s the played time expected by devs to reach the level cap for a normal player ?

Jeremy Gaffney: We define normal players as being semi-casual like 10, 15 hours a week. Play time varies because of “rest” XP. We give daily quests and weekly quests. Not to have them to be repetitive while you level up. If you have a weekly quest, or just a high amount of rest XP, that means it catches casuals up with the hardcore a little bit. Right now it’s about two hundred hours on the current trajectory to reach level cap. That’s a little bit too high and we’re tuning it to be about a hundred and fifty hours.

The real answer is though; we don’t have an exact objective in mind. Obviously it’s going to be a lot. We don’t like the: “Oh, here you level for twenty hours, and then you are capped. What we want to make sure is that it is actually fun as you level up. We don’t like grinding. In some cultures grinding is critical like in the Korean culture. If your game doesn’t have a grind in it, then the people feel it’s too easy and there’s no pride in being the top level. But then you do the same kind of thing in the European market and it’s like: “I have enough grinding, screw that!” Our goal is really to make sure that you don’t lack of challenge on the way. So that you don’t feel like you’re seeing a lot of repetitive stuff. We do a high amount of variation, because what we want is to take each environment and try to have interesting things in each zone.

• WarLegend.net: Do you think playing in a group could be more effective than playing solo?

Jeremy Gaffney: We’re actually working on that right now. There are changes coming up where we’re trying to make it slightly more effective to play in a group. The fact is that 60% to 65% percent of people want to play solo because when you don’t have a game that forces you to group that’s how the breakdown tends to be. That’s in our market, it’s different in Asia. Anyway, it should be viable to level up solo and it should also be viable to level up in a group. I believe the lowest level dungeon in the game is twelve. If not, there’s a scattering of them over time. You can do group PvE from a pretty early level. You can also pop into the battlegrounds at very early level and level up from the battlegrounds, if you want.

• WarLegend.net: Can you level up in PvP?

Jeremy Gaffney: You can level in PvP… Some people want to. Usually what we try to do with your house is we incent you to play every day, so we are like: “Hey, here’s an extra bonus for doing PvE (or PvP), here’s an extra bonus for doing dungeons, here’s an extra bonus for adventures…” but we haven’t talked about adventures yet. You have another variant of dungeons. Your optimal path for leveling is going, hopefully, to be different on a daily basis, so that you are incented to try different areas of it. Otherwise people tend to do what’s the most efficient and they’ll do it monotonically, and they may burn themselves out, or bore themselves out just because they’re doing the most efficient thing all the time. Or they’ll choose their favorite every time and never try any of the other paths. It’s good to have a little bit of incentive variance. You can always choose to do just whatever the thing that you like the most. But, if the rewards for the other stuff kind of vary up on a daily basis, or a weekly basis, it’s kind of good to encourage that. I’ve played EverQuest for a long time in dungeon. In EverQuest the optimal way to play it was: “Burn your way down to a boss, and then you just sit and break the camp that sets the boss fight, and then you just kill the same boss over and over again.” At one point, my group and I were like: “You know what? We’ll just play the dungeon the way that they’ve designed it.” You fight from boss to boss to boss and all that stuff. We cleared the dungeon, playing it like what’s now WoW instance. From room to room, and clearing every room… We had a blast! We had a great time! But the next day we sat down on the camp to kill the same freaking boss over and over again trying to get our flowing black robe or beaded sash or whatever the hell, because it was efficient. Even that we knew that we would have more fun playing the other way, we did the efficient thing. So, we always tried to make sure fun and efficiency tying up whenever we can.

• WarLegend.net: Will it be possible to level with friends who are higher levels, or lower levels ?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yeah. Even with a big level difference. I worked on the side-kicking system in City of Heroes. Auto-level up to the same level. In PvP, we will auto-level everybody up to the top level, so that you are not getting the instant crits and all that kind of stuff. All the things that normally come with hand-fighting someone who is higher level or lower level to me.

• WarLegend.net: Will everyone be in the same division in battlegrounds or will there be different division ?

Jeremy Gaffney: We’ve done a couple of divisions already, and I don’t know how it’s going to fall in the end. We’ll just have to see what feels good. We put it in a thirty level band, so everybody from one to thirty was on the same band. We set that up in the last patch. I think the latest patch, if I remember correctly, is one to ten band and then a ten through thirty band. That felt better for me in the internal testing. But it’s whatever feels good in the test, so I don’t guarantee what that will be like that at launch. It’s whatever the beta says it will be.

• WarLegend.net: Is there some specific new content teams like in Guild Wars 2 with their Live world teams adding content every 2 weeks ?

Jeremy Gaffney: We went out and we learned from them. We did a workshop last week to get their learning on all that kind of stuff. We want to make sure we are patching, minimally, monthly. We’d love to wrap that up to about two-week basis. Right now we do a big update in the beta every six weeks, and that’s between 30 and 70 pages of patch notes. Actually, there are about 90 internal pages of patches, but in public there are 30, 50, somewhere in that range. That’s a lot of stuff to happen on that kind of a frequency of basis. But that’s what all the markets are going to be competing. In China right now it’s this big fest of how fast the company is going to be. You see League of Legends right now. Their success is based on large part on this new stuff to do every three weeks. Guild Wars 2 is pushing that forward. The rumor has it that Blizzard’s going to be pushing that too. It’s where the market is moving.

• WarLegend.net: Will there be competitions on the game? For PvP or PvE?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yeah, no firm plans, but in general yes. For both PvP and PvE. PvE in particular. What we’re looking to do is actually have an automated competition system with that same variance I’ve mentioned, where a hay of a minefield and all that stuff. In the raids what we want to do is randomize as many environmental hazards: body guards, boss types, as possible. Randomization sucks if you are good, if you are elite. You’d rather be grand master at chess, because you never loose, there is no variance, no dice involved. Dice help newbies. Any idiot might win at poker tournament, because they might just get lucky. Statistically unlikely, but they just might get lucky. But randomization is good for variations. What we want to do for raids is vary up as much as we can: “Hey, this week hell mouth is the environmental hazard, so it’s going to damage you, if you are going to stand in your normal area.” Or you can lure the boss into it and do damage to him: “Oh, there’s a healing fountain over here. Oh, there’s a minefield on the floor. There are pit spikes. There are random minion spawns that will happen during the fight.” Then you vary up the body guards: “Oh, this week it’s three healers. Oh crap, it’s going to be a pain in the ass. Oh, there are three melees, we can take them down.” The key for that is that it means there will be some differences in difficulty on a week-to-week basis. What we do is we tie some of the most epic loot, or even legendary loot to who did it the best this week. The fastest… Not the first. The first means you’ve woke up early and fought it at 3 AM. Who did it the best ? Epic loot drops based on that ? You’re competing with the other guilds on a weekly basis to be the people that can actually do this configuration of the raid the best. All of those random elements are the same for every guild who is doing the raid this week. And it works out well, because if you have a new guild, and you’re like: “Oh, man. We can only go up to like the third boss. But this time the third boss has all melee body guards, and there’s a hell mouth, so even though you can drag the boss in that. Ok, we might actually be able to beat it this week.” There’s the variance of it that’s not just go on the WoWWiki or whatever and you find out: “Oh, here’s the synchronized swim dance. Stand in this corner. Lure the boss over here. Get in the 39%. Now cast your…” It’s much better, if you have to think through the fight because you have to know this pattern: “…But this time we are smart, because there is a thing over here. Because there is another aggressive mob who will fight the boss in the room. This time we’ll lure him over and try to get this guys fighting, and have to deal with that in real-time, because if we just do our synchronized swim pattern, we might beat the boss, but we won’t be fast.” That kind of stuff should be pretty interesting. It’s effectively a weekly ladder system. Instead of being like: “Yay, we’re server first —” we have that too. Some of the raids will be tough enough that it will take people time just to beat it once. Once the code is cracked, as it were, it’s not permanently. The code changes every damn week. We’ll see. We have our first couple of fights and raids working with that, and it looks like it will be pretty damn cool.

• WarLegend.net: Do you plan to follow the WoW road with one expansion every year?

Jeremy Gaffney: Well, WoW has been releasing one every two years. Rumors says that they want to release one every year… Issue you are going to see with the games that are doing frequent patches right now, is that frequent patches aren’t newsworthy. It’s really hard getting press around them. Frequent patches help the user base you already have, but you’re not going to sell another box to a person that is like: “Yeah! I want to a play game with a patch every two weeks.” No, you are going to play the game, whether it’s fun or not. It’s a bonus, if there’s a patch every two weeks. It’s good for retention, but not good for acquisition. Simultaneously, if you do a big patch, maybe add new class, race or subsystem or something like that. That’s more newsworthy. What you’ll see is people going to frequently patch with small stuff. Probably once every three months — here we’re going to have big stuff, big class returning and that kind of thing. Doing an expansion back as often as possible. EQ had an expansion every six months or so. That was really cool for them. That replaced their patch schedule. What that did was constantly put new boxes on the retailer shelf. That’s the way to get the users in. If you’re up on Steam… Everything that’s Steam-worthy, that’ll get new users in. People see it, there’s a change you’ll actually get new users for the game. I think having semi-frequent patches as well as a yearly expansion pack as well as infrequent patches… That’s probably a model that most people settle to, if they can. But it’s a matter of dev team quality of managing all that stuff, this is non-trivial. Riot offices and their entire team is 400 people doing nothing but making sure a new freaking champion comes out three weeks later. It is an insane amount of organization to do that. Behind the scenes in Guild Wars 2, there are maybe 19 sub-teams, all working on stuff that goes into the next patch. This week three teams have stuff ending up in the next patch. It is a huge amount of coordination to do that. Not every developer can be able to do it. We may be able to do it because we’re awesome. In the market, many people are going to move over to that model. Long answer to a “Are you going to have an expansion a year?”  Usually you say it’s going to be a year, and now it’s 18 months. We’ll see.

• WarLegend.net: Are all classes hybrids ? Do you have a trinity system ?

Jeremy Gaffney : On the Trinity system all classes have at least two roles. Pretty much everybody can DPS because, in general, if you make a non-DPS class with no ability to DPS, it’s going to be gimped during just basic solo leveling solo. If you have no DPS roles you are going to be advancing slower, and it’s very hard to get around that. In general the characters can DPS. There’s a scale, some are better, some are worse, but there is a role you can put yourself in or there’s a spec you can do, or gear set you can put on, to have a viable sort of DPS spec. We try to vary up the fights. Especially on the high-end raiding and that kind of thing, so that on the per-fight basis, different classes may or may not shine in terms of who can do the most DPS as opposed to: it is always mages, or it is always rogues. Because when you are doing very high-end PvP or PvE, you don’t care about being the second best. Being the second most viable in a row means you are useless. In PvP specifically, a lot of it is grab and control that has a huge amount of variance and PvP. Making sure we’re going to have the right mix of teleport spells and grab control releases and grab control spells themselves and all that kind of stuff is the other part of it. We do limited action set which means that you have a suite of 30, 40 abilities and then you choose 10, 12 you are taking into battle. Some of those are based on you path, some of those are based on your class. We’ve tried to not have a lot of PvP-only or PvE-only abilities. But some are, because with limited action set you know you can have you PvP suite or PvE suite. All of that is viable.

[PvE]

• WarLegend.net: How many factions ?

Jeremy Gaffney: Two-faction system. Exyle and Dominion.

• WarLegend.net: How many zones in the game currently ?

Jeremy Gaffney: Currently, twenty-four.

• WarLegend.net: How many levels per zone can we expect?

Jeremy Gaffney: Depends on the zone line.

• WarLegend.net: Main quest line?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes. You have to be careful to follow the quests. There’s a crap-ton of quests. There’s an issue that some people are over-completionist and doing every quest in the area. Some people fast-travel through the area. It’s very hard to make areas work for both. You can avoid the main quest line, if you want but there’s usually a quest line or two that directs you through the area, and then we put lots of content along the path of the main quest line, and then some content off the main path.

• WarLegend.net: High-end raid outdoor bosses?

Jeremy Gaffney: I’d like to say yes, but we haven’t done any yet.

• WarLegend.net: Dungeons and raid size?

Jeremy Gaffney: Dungeon size is five men; raid size is 20 or 40.

• WarLegend.net: Falling damage?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes.

• WarLegend.net: Dynamic daily or weekly dungeons?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes, but I’ll give more detail later. I can’t give a short answer on that.

• WarLegend.net: Weekly quest?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes.

• WarLegend.net: Raid content available at launch?

Jeremy Gaffney: As much as we can cram in, but we have to do at least two raids that are substantial. Not three-room raids but big raids.

• WarLegend.net: Can you give us some infos about items drops management ?

Jeremy Gaffney: A lot of our items are tunable, so we not just drop items, but we drop items that you could scavenge bits out to sort of completely tune your item. You end up wanting many sub-things that you either destroy or convert into the major thing, or you can try to collect the full sets and stuff.

• WarLegend.net: How many people on one server?

Jeremy Gaffney: Peak concurrency we had to date was 1,900. Our servers are running at about 10% capacity. That doesn’t mean we’ll have 19,000 per server. If you’re running at full capacity, you’re seeing lag all over the place, because some things will be falling behind. We’re aiming to somewhere in 3,000 to 7,000 kind of range. The feeling that the world is populated is more important than density itself. If people are at their houses a lot, they’re being pulled out of the open world. People are in dungeons, battlegrounds, war plots or arenas. We need the maximum concurrency to make sure that all the area is still full while you do that. But testing will tell us exactly what that is. We can flag anything that’s being instanced or not. Generally we like a non-instanced open world, because it feels weird when your open world is fully instanced. We reserve the right to, on launch day, instance a main continent briefly, or something like that.

[PvP]

• WarLegend.net: Do you have Open world PvP?

Jeremy Gaffney: We do have open world pvp. I think the best way to do open world, personally, is to do a three-faction system. We’re doing two-faction system, and so I think it’s very tough to make sure your faction imbalances are fixed. Other than rewarding you for loosing, it’s very hard to balance the faction: “Hey! This faction is losing! Let’s give them more benefits. Well, what do we get for having won?” A good open world, PvP design is like Darkness Falls and Dark Age of Camelot. It’s like three factions, one wins, and so they go get the dungeon and there’s a big PvP fight in the dungeon, and it goes back-and-forth and they’ve cleared the dungeon now. Those PvP-ers are now not in the open world, and so now that faction starts, maybe, loosing but they’re happy because they are in the dungeon. That’s a great design. It’s very hard to mirror that. Having said that, we do open world PvP. What we’ll do at gamescom is pretty cool. We have like a level 27 area, and we’ll let people actually opt-in for PvP or not, if they want on the show floor. A gank fest will ensue. It’s a really cool area. There’s a big zombie infestation going on where there’s little squid guys that attach themselves to your head and mind-control you, and so there’s this big squid-zombie infestation happening.

• WarLegend.net: Do you have massive battlegrounds?

Jeremy Gaffney: Our version of massive battleground is really war plots. 40 vs. 40, destructible environments stuff, build your base… Our plans are based in making that stuff very hardcore. War plots are a hardcore thing. Your average newbie guild will not get 40 people together and invest into a war plot, and go do their raiding necessary to get the best war plot items, and go do the war plot fights necessary to get the really best war plot items. Ain’t gonna happen. It has to be a hardcore guild thing. Our temptation is to do stuff like add thing where you can bet stuff on your battles.

• WarLegend.net: Does character size or race size have anything to do with hitboxes?

Jeremy Gaffney: Currently, all races and characters have the same hitboxes.

• WarLegend.net: Any queue system for Battlegrounds and War plots ?

Jeremy Gaffney: We’ll see what’s fun or not. Yes for pugs, for sure. I don’t know yet about organized like war plots.

• WarLegend.net: Is it possible to kill steal ? Or corpse camp ?

Jeremy Gaffney: There is a shared tagging system for almost everything. There’s not much benefit to spawn camping or kill steal. For PvP we do the usual intelligence, I cannot say more right now because we are tweaking this quite often at the moment.

• WarLegend.net: Can we expect original content for hardcore gamers?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes, we’re trying for them.

• WarLegend.net: Will you add more PvP modes later on?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yeah, probably. You don’t want to fragment your PvP-ers, group vs. group or dungeon stuff too much, so I worry that having too much content you’re going to fragment everybody.

• WarLegend.net: Any e-sport management team to run events?

Mélanie Corolleur: We do have an event team which is located in the U.S. who manages these big shows. But for smaller-scale events that’s going to be taken by the community. Jeremy Gaffney: We’ll probably do some before launch as well. I am leery of marketing that is like an e-sport game, because all that stuff that we are going to support and the spectator mode, and the things necessary to do that. We’re a huge MMO, so I don’t know that it’s as compelling to watch as League of Legends battle, or StarCraft battle. It should be. There are the right components there with the war plots and stuff.

[Technical]

• WarLegend.net: What is the minimal configuration system specs?

Jeremy Gaffney: We’re aiming the launch into China at some point, so we end up with very low-end system specs. Right now everything is slider-based. You can set the levels you want.

• WarLegend.net: Can we expect the game to be quite fast ?

Jeremy Gaffney: It should be quite fast, and the PC should be to. The reason that you go to a stylized system, the reason that so many games have a stylized, cartoon style, anime style or a Pixar movie style look is because it still looks good on a low-end machine. The quality of animation still comes through, the quality of silhouette and shapes come through. Everything except for texture detail and high-end effect still looks good even though on a low setting, or look good four years from now. Make very, very high-end everything and it runs on limited machines now, but looks like crap six months later. Until something like Crysis — the next thing comes out. Part of the reason that we stylize graphics, and why most of the games do stylized graphics, is because they run better on low-end system specs, or look better on the low-end system specs. WoW still looks decent. They’ve done a graphics upgrade or two, but they still look decent later, because of the quality of the textures, quality of the color, style, silhouette and animation were all very good for them. WarLegend.net: The thing that made people unhappy in Guild Wars 2 was that in World vs. World, with many people, the game was a pretty slow — around 25-35 FPS. I run on a very good PC, but it was the same. Not really adaptive to the configuration. Will it be better with WildStar? Jeremy Gaffney: It already is better with WildStar, but we’ll see how we go at launch day. Maybe we’ll screw something up. ArenaNet usually gets that kind of stuff right, so I’m actually surprised to hear about that. I haven’t done much of that in Guild Wars 2. We have a mix in the office of high-end and low-end PC purchased for that reason.

[Events and Website]

• WarLegend.net: Which events are you attending? (Where we can play the game)

Jeremy Gaffney: We’re in gamescom this year. We’re getting in PAX in the U.S. We’re getting in GameSpot show where a user-facing event is now. Comic-Con, of course. We basically have a reveal scheduled for the entire sweep this year. We have like a crap-ton of stuff for reveal. We have new classes coming up. We got features; we’ll start doing deep diving into other game systems. We really have a load of stuff in the hopper. We have a ton of zones we haven’t shown. Also, we’ll be extending the beta. We loved doing the Arkship events. The ability to put people under NDA and show them stuff that’s deep in the development is awesome, because getting feedback on that is critical. We think we’re real smart and all that, but it turns out that people can correct you when going off in goofy directions. Also, at any given Arkship, we’ll show the build that we’ll be revealing publicly at the next event. That way we get some feedback on it in advance. I can give all the awesome answers in the world, but if you get in the game and the game it sucks, or it feels like crap… Game play has to be king. Because that’s what’s going to actually make the game succeed or fail down the road. It’s also where we trying to do as many beta rounds as possible. Our peak concurrency, we got about 1900 people all running around the world at the same time — which we need to do more of that. It’s good and all, but we need tens of thousands over time. That’s our concurrent count out of ten thousand or so accounts.

• WarLegend.net: What’s your plan regarding the website of WildStar?

Jeremy Gaffney: We have a bunch of plans. I don’t like to talk about plans because it’s like actually doing stuff and then showing it. We do have some planned integration for ladders, just playing raids and all that kind of stuff. Until we have it working though, I consider that vaporware until we see it. We don’t have it working yet. We’ll see. We like the concept of providing API, so that people can see our data, and that kind of stuff, directly. We’re not like a very obscuring group. We try just to be open about that kind of stuff.

• WarLegend.net: What are your plans about the forums ?

Mélanie Corolleur: We’ll have forums for all the language stuff that the game will be localized for: French, German and English. And obviously the greatest thing would be to be active on those. But that doesn’t mean we won’t go to external fan sites as well, because they are quite important. We’ll try to be everywhere as much as possible. Jeremy Gaffney: We have a new head of web for French website. Also, in the U.S. Two days ago. He is about to do a major overhaul of all that kind of stuff.

[GameMasters, Customer Service and Localization]

• WarLegend.net: What’s the status of the localization of the game?

Jeremy Gaffney: Game is fully localizable. We are gearing up in terms of starting to get big patches going in for that. I don’t think that we’ll have the zone localized for gamescom this year. It’ll be in English this year, so we suck… But it’s just juggling all the different things. We have so much content that it’s a little tricky to do it all. But everything is tokenized. The trickiest thing for us is that we tried to do very high personality, and now we’ve tried to have videos that are funny and that kind of thing. Translating funny is freaking hard. We prefer not to be idiots. Mélanie Corolleur: And as everything it’s still work-in-progress, so it wouldn’t make sense to start localizing before we know what’s funny until you implement it in the game. Jeremy Gaffney: Yeah, that’s exactly it. We can localize it, but then we were going to change it based on the feedback from the show.

• WarLegend.net: Who’s doing the localization ?

Jeremy Gaffney : We have internal services which do a couple of those things, and then we also use contract services as well. Quality is really the key. Even as important as localization is, Q&A has to make sure we don’t look like an idiot in other languages.

• WarLegend.net: GameMaster 24/7?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yes.

• WarLegend.net: Will you run GM events on servers?

Jeremy Gaffney: We may do some. I worked for Origin on UO 2. They had a really big GM event team, and it was huge. They had literally about a hundred people running around doing GM events. When we ran numbers at one point. We found out that 1.5% of people had ever seen a single GM event. For like a hundred person staff. The effect of it was so minimal. There’s a good argument for it. If you scale it well. EQ and CoH used to flip the switch, and have like an alien invasion spawn and then GMs run around and pop down a bunch of monsters and that kind of stuff. If you automate that, you can do it right, but it’s tough to do it. We do more automated events. We had an event where we can turn the switch on and the thing happens, then leave it in the library, so if we want to do it again later. We definitely do holiday events and all that kind of stuff. We definitely patch things in every few weeks.

[Gold Farmers]

• WarLegend.net: How do you think you will fight gold farmers ?

Jeremy Gaffney: We have a soul-bound economy. Once you have a soul-bound item — an item is bound to your person — you can’t, in general, take anything from that, and then turn it into something that you can sell in the auction house or convert directly into gold. You can sell the item after they’re bound, but it gives you currency that is also bound to your character. WarLegend.net: So you think currency will be more important than gold ? Jeremy Gaffney: We tried to make them equally important but the real key there is having an economy where once something becomes attached to your character it’s going to remain. Example: you can convert the armor you’ve worn into enchanting materials, but it can only be used for enchanting your own character. You cannot convert into tool pieces from your legendary sword or whatever. Because otherwise you get all your best crap sold and then you have a naked character, and then you quit or you do an item restore, which is a big pain in the ass for everyone concerned. We do all the basic security stuff, everybody has done MMOs before.

• WarLegend.net: Do you think we will be able to ask a GM to verify someone or will there be a report system?

Jeremy Gaffney: Yeah, absolutely. All the basics: report system, we do bot detection, hack detection, we scan the logs… There are some very easy queries you do: “Who gained the most gold pieces per hour over the last day?” GMs go and check out every single person in the top ten that made large amount of gold pieces per day, confirming they are a real character. Even though anybody is farming or botting, they are less efficient then it is to actually play the game. By constantly scanning the top few people per server and making sure that they are legitimate. You don’t care what they’re doing as long as they are not a bot.

The end. Thanks to Jeremy Gaffney, Mélanie Corolleur and Akli Amichi!

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• Page 1 – Interview en Français
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