Interview mit Mark Jacobs

Warhammeralliance wrote:

WA: With the latest release of information it's obvious to anyone following the game the folks at Mythic are pushing for some revamped RvR. I got curious when Mark mentioned a couple of possible server rule-sets in one of his posts posts, I asked him to explain the rule sets that they're tinkering around with.

Mark: The first one we're calling just Open RvR. In that ruleset, other than killing newbies, if you can see an enemy, you can kill an enemy. It is not consentual. They do not have to flag themselves. They do not have to do anything other than sit there and be a target for you. You can go out and happily slaughter Stunties wherever you can find them. Disembowel Dark Elfs, and do other nasty things to Greenskins. So that's number one.

Mark: Number 2. Right now called the Core Ruleset. That one is the rule-set where similar to the open ruleset, you cannot kill newbies, cause that's just wrong. Then within the PvE protected zones, or areas, or chapters, we're going to use different things to describe them. The moment an enemy enters into them, that enemy is flagged for RvR. You cannot unflag yourself. The moment you cross into the PvE zone you become a target for anything that is attuned to that realm. If you want to engage in PvP you can with other players, but there it does have to be consentual. Within the RvR areas you cannot unflag yourself, you are always flagged. Within the neutral area, we're talking about that. Will it be safe, will it not be safe. That's one the things we've got to look at. The thing is when you are PvEing in a protected zone, it is always consentual. A neutral area for example might be when you have to cross to a PvE area but both sides use it. It's not for hunting, maybe it's a bridge, maybe it's a road. But that's what we're looking at. it might be consentual it might not. The takeaway is, safe PvE, consentual PvP, and no flagging in RvR areas.

Mark:The third one we're going to do, is an RP server. We had them in Camelot and we'll have them here. This will be a standard ruleset for now. However during the during beta we will be doing more polls, more posting and take the temperature of the players and if there is a lot of support for an Open RvR RP rule-set or there isn't as much support for core rule-set RP server, we'll make the appropriate changes. We want to give the players what they want, not what they all want. There are some players as you know who want an FFA server. Right now that's not in our plans. But maybe a year down the road, if players really wanted it, if there was support there and we could make ruleset adjustments to make it work, we would consider it.

WA: Now I just have to point out that during the games development there has been be a change from a single server ruleset way of thinking, to the current varied server ruleset plan. So I asked about what brought the change about.

Mark: When we looked at the ruleset and we look at the core rule-set and we looked at the feedback from the beta players, we had a choice. We want open field RvR, we want people to feel that they can PvE in this game, but we also did not want to remove the immersiveness. We didn't want people who play Greenskins to walk into High Elf areas, or fart around the opposing realm and have situations where nothing could be done about that. So we look at the way areas are designed and we looked at the ruleset and said, boy, how can we do this. This is not going to be as much fun for me, this is not what I wanted to see, we looked and looked and said this is the best thing we can do and that's what we did.

WA: Now with the October newsletter came a small little video that talked a little about City Siege. In the video it had a sign-up list for a 50 verses 50 City Siege. This video unfortunately left people wondering if that was instanced scenarios that was being discussed, was it open RvR limited to 50, so I asked mark about City siege and what it's going to mean in WAR.

Mark: City Sieges is going to be a mixture of live non-instanced and instanced. There will only be one version of the city that you'll be able to attack. So that isn't going to be instanced in that sense. There will only be one. Sorta like highlander.

Mark: Now in terms of a cap for scenarios, what we're constantly looking at, is improving the framerate of the game. One of the things we don't want to have happen, is have terrible framerate. So that's not a thing with 25v25, but in terms of 100vs100, or 500vs500 that is a cap. In terms of some of the scenarios, part of the problems we've seen with Camelot and other games, if you make the requirements for scenarios, or anything, battlegrounds, battlefield, too great. What happens? Well obviously it's harder to get together. It's harder to get it all organized and we don't want that either. So we have a couple things going on. What we want to make sure is that the player shave the best experience. That they're not sitting in queues all night or that they're waiting for 100 people to show up, cause if they don't get that 100 the thing can't launch.

WA: Cross server Queuing was discussed last August and in the community it was a hotly debated topic. The answer at the time was that it was under discussion still with no real answer. Here we are now a few months later I thought to bring up the topic again and see if anything had changed.

Mark: Originally, we had thought we'd be able to get cross server queuing in for release, then it kind of got pushed back. It's something that with the extra time, I don't want to promise that we're going to do. It's something that we're going to look at. Cross server queuing has advantages obviously. We did it before. But whether it's the best way to go at launch, or whether we'll have time to get it done at launch, I don't know. I haven't even gone down that path yet. We have to make sure that we have everything in that we planned to have in before release before we start including things we didn't plan to have in.

WA: Speaking of things that are planned, crafting was a topic that till now really hasn't been talked about at all. Now I didn't get the details that we all wanted but I did get Mark to budge on the topic and tell us his vision for crafting.

Mark: Here is my thinking on crafting. I don't like recipe based systems. If it's just pure recipes, it usually means a lot of hunting and pecking for the player, or it means a lot of confusion. I wanted in this crafting system to design something that was more imaginative, more interesting for the player. Was absolutely geared to WAR, So that's what we've done. And that's what we're working on. This is going to be a more open ended crafting system than other games. It's going to allow for more experimentation by the player than other games. And it's going to allow for more interesting results.