Massively.com interviews Star Wars Galaxies producer Lorin Jameson

In the wake of the Chapter 9 publish for Star Wars Galaxies, we had the chance to pass a few questions to the game's producer. Lorin "Deadmeat" Jameson has been with the project for some time, weathering the storms as they've come and gone. Today we have his responses, looking back at the impetus for the new Chapter and Update system of patches and ahead to future plans.

Read on below the cut for Mr. Jameson's take on the success of the Exar Kun instance, hints at a new expertise subsystem on level with the Beast Master, and hope for a better future in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. "We have fixed a number of long-standing issues and have added some dynamite new systems and a slew of new content. It is our intention to continue this trend and I expect to be saying the same thing about 2008 in mid-2009. We know we have a lot of work to do to meet our players' expectations for Star Wars Galaxies, but it is a fun challenge to have and we are lucky to have such a committed and loyal fan base."



Massively.com Interview with Lorin Jameson

How do you feel the player response has been to the Exar Kun instance?

Lorin Jameson: The reaction has been great so far. There is no doubt that this is the most challenging heroic encounter we have released to-date and it sets a very high visual bar. Players won't simply be able to go in and just blast away. Rather, you will really need to think about the encounter and come up with tactical strategies to win.

Now that you've had the chance to offer your first content update, after moving to the "Game Update" vs. "Chapter" system, do you feel like the concept has 'delivered'? Were you able to get what you wanted out of the Chapter despite working on the game updates as well?

LJ: The chapter and Game Updates alternating strategy has actually been going well for us. It is definitely a trickier process to manage from a production standpoint, but the ability to keep new and exciting game-play content and improvements coming at a constant rate definitely outweighs the challenges. In some respects I believe we have upped the quality and quantity of game-play enhancements overall with this new approach and we plan on keeping this system for a while.

The Storyteller system is almost unique in MMOs, and you've made great strides supporting it. Where did the idea for the blueprints come from? Can we expect more feature additions to the Storyteller system like this in the future?

LJ: A player had posted a 'battle arena' that he had constructed from storyteller parts which was just amazing. There were so many pieces used in interesting ways that it boggled my mind. When I spoke with the designers about the possibility of adding something like the arena to the game as a pre-made item, they said, "Why not just give the players a system to save what they have already made?" It always works best to give the players tools and let them [the players] be much more creative over time rather than limiting them to one item or option. We hope to add more elements to the Storyteller system with each new Chapter.

With the addition of the Exar Kun and Star Destroyer encounters, what lessons do you think the designers have taken away? Without giving anything away, is there anything we can expect to see in future instances?

LJ: With each new heroic encounter, we have increased the level of sophistication. With Exar Kun we added a lot of dynamic behavior and divergent gameplay based on strategy. There are a couple of interesting puzzles in that heroic encounter that really force the player to think about what they are doing and understand what they are seeing when an NPC's behavior changes. In the future, we are hoping to add some even bigger encounters that have multiple 'viewpoints.'

You've indicated a connection between the collections and other new content, and how that is enhanced by the tools you're using. Can you broadly talk about what tools improvements you've made that allow this?

LJ: The collection system itself is relatively straightforward and data driven, which makes adding new collections fairly easy compared to systems of the past. Having the collection system in place allows us to use different methods in addition to questing to allow players to earn rewards and get interesting loot in the game. Players are also recognized server-wide for completing many of these new collections first.

The game was not originally designed for themepark-like content, so adding new quests, etc. has always been a challenge. We still custom script most content in the game.

The idea of server merges has been on the table but not in the plans for some time. In response to player discussion of the population issue, the next Chapter Update will have a number of advanced search functions. Can you give us a few more details about what that will entail? Do you see this as a stopgap measure? Are there a set of criteria in the works that will give you a firm idea of when server merges are a must?

LJ: We are very sensitive to the population issues that exist on a few of the servers. It is our hope that this new community search interface will help players who are actively out looking to find groups as well as helping to facilitate players finding others that share similar interests in-game. The new search mechanism works server-wide and will allow players to more precisely pinpoint what they are looking for with respect to player groups and shared interests in-game.

Our goal is to help players on the lower population servers by actively identifying the issues and challenges they face and presenting ways to remove obstacles to increased game-play satisfaction. We are looking at a number of ways to help mitigate these population issues. With a game like SWG, which has player housing and cities along with server unique resources, it is difficult to use a standard merge approach without causing a lot of controversy and inconvenience. Quite honestly I want to avoid that by adding positive, experience-enhancing systems to the game that address the challenges by offering positive solutions in a way that adds something for everyone.

The collection system continues to see development and additions through this Chapter release. Can we expect to see new collections in every Chapter? Do you have any sense of what 'types' of collections we might see in the future?

LJ: I think it is safe to say that there will probably be new collections included with each Chapter, although perhaps not as many as we have added lately. I am truly amazed at the variety of unique types of collections our team has designed and implemented in the recent chapters. It is our hope that we can continue to come up with innovative and fun new collections as we move forward in the upcoming chapters.

We found the Rattletrap ITV collection really interesting, in that the item itself is a major break with Star Wars Galaxies' original thinking. The collection was very simple, essentially making this item available to every character. What philosophy or development goal did you have in mind with this collection? Do you see other 'quality of life' improvements being released to the players this way in the future?

LJ: In the past, instant travel vehicles have only been available as a premium with the purchase of one of our retail products, and it has been a touchy subject that such a useful item was only available as a value-added bonus with the purchase of a compilation pack or digital download bundle. We wanted to eliminate the perceived inequity but at the same time we did not want to undermine the value of the premium items. We set the instant travel vehicle up as a collection reward because we get feedback from our players that they get more enjoyment and value and have more fun from earning items as a reward than to just have it handed to them.

Recently there was a reference by a player on the boards to the concept of a "Droid Commander", with the official response from your team being that it's on the table for later this year. Would this be something similar to the Beast training system, only with droids? Can you elaborate on what it might include and when we might see it?

LJ: We have wanted to revisit the droid system and add Droid Commander to the game since last year. While not exactly like Beast Master, since building droids would still be the responsibility of droid engineers, it would share some aspects. Like Beast Master it will involve choices. To be a powerful Droid Commander you will have to sacrifice expertise in your profession. But also as with Beast Master, a high-level Droid Commander will have a lot of powerful options.

Moving into the middle of the year now, how do you feel SWG is compared to April of 2007? What do you hope you can say about the game in April of 2009?

LJ: I think the game has shown tremendous improvement in the past year as we have added new enhancements, collections, heroic adventures and upgrades. We have fixed a number of long-standing issues and have added some dynamite new systems and a slew of new content. It is our intention to continue this trend and I expect to be saying the same thing about 2008 in mid-2009. We know we have a lot of work to do to meet our players' expectations for Star Wars Galaxies, but it is a fun challenge to have and we are lucky to have such a committed and loyal fan base.

Many thanks for your time, sir.


Source : massively.com

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Solofication of Massive Multiplayer RPGs

Once upon a time there was a MMORPG called Everquest, and it forced players to group to progress. For most classes you could only solo the newbie zones, and starting from about level 10 or so you would discover that the lowest level mob that still gave experience points to you was already too hard for you to kill alone.
But a few classes could use special tactics to solo anyway, druid were kiting mobs after them, and necromancers were fear kiting mobs away from them. (I played a quad kiting druid.) And it turned out that soloing was popular: far more people played druids or necromancers than playing any other class.

So every new generation of free MMORPGs made soloing easier and easier, because that was what the customer wanted, until we arrived at World of Warcraft, where every single class is basically expected to solo all the way up to the level cap. There are differences in the speed at which the different classes and talent trees can solo, but even least soloable class can kill mobs and do quests of his own level. And soloing is still popular, with classes that solo faster being played more than classes that solo slower.

And as soloing was what the customer wanted, some unknown developer at Blizzard came up with a brilliant idea: What if PvP could be made soloable too? That sounded crazy, because by definition you need at least 2 players for PvP, and if you wanted more than just duels you needed large groups on both sides of a battle. But that unknown dev realized that it wasn't necessary to have players actually form pre-arranged groups to do PvP. It wasn't absolutely necessary for players to cooperate in PvP. Sure, a group that cooperated would beat a group that didn't, but you could very well create a balanced battle between two groups as long as both of them were equally unorganized. And thus battlegrounds were born, and once Blizzard tweaked the PvP reward system they were extremely popular. And the majority of people basically solo battlegrounds, that is queue up for them alone, and then do whatever they want once inside. I call that pseudo-solo. This goes so far that people actually complain if they end up against an organized group. I don't know if that unknown developer switched from Blizzard to EA Mythic, or whether EA Mythic had their own developer realizing that this solofication strategy could be applied to PvE raid content as well. Because what they did was they invented the "public quest". Which works basically like a battleground, just for PvE instead of PvP. People just join, without arranging groups, everyone does what he thinks is best, while a few frustrated players try to shout orders and are generally ignored. Pseudo-solo large group PvE content, where everyone gets rewarded, I'm sure people will love it. Soloing is what the customers want. But a free MMORPG has a large and diverse base of customers, and not all of them prefer solo play. As early as Everquest some people noticed that a group is stronger than the sums of its parts. The larger the group, and the better it is coordinated, the greater the challenges it can overcome. Moving from open world to instanced content, developers were able to limit how many players could attack a specific challenge. But they couldn't prevent players from organizing themselves better and better, training each encounter for hours and hours, until even a large raid group moved with a coordination that would make the bolshoi ballet green from envy. And thus an arms race evolved, on the other side of the MMORPG from the solo content, a race in which developers would design harder and harder challenges, and raiders would again and again prove that these challenges could be beaten with perfect coordination. To understand that arms race, Blizzard hired one of Everquest's top raiders as lead designer, and consequently spent a lot of development effort on designing ultra-hard raid content.
There were clearly *some* customers that wanted this, and not solo content. And while the number of top raiders wasn't large, they were deemed to be influence leaders, the kind of people that other players looked up to, and also the kind of players who were most likely to post a lot of comments on game forums or other places of the internet. And it worked! While the number of players actually experiencing the highest level of raid content is still tiny, the desire to be a raider is certainly far more wide-spread.

The problem is that these two parts of the game are drifting further and further apart in World of Warcraft and the MMORPG genre in general. Soloing becomes easier and easier, the need to group during leveling up has been nearly completely removed, elite mobs turned into soloable non-elites, and the rewards for pseudo-solo PvP have been much increased. It is now possible to go from level 1 to level 70 and full epic gear in World of Warcraft without ever joining a group once. And the classes who are best at soloing fast or best at PvP are the most popular and most played. Meanwhile raiding remains hard, because that is the very reason of being for it, and even harder raid content as added to the end with every content patch. But to overcome these challenges, people need to learn how to play rpg games in a coordinated way. And the mix of classes, talents, and gear required for raiding is very different from what is most popular and easy to achieve in the soloing part of the game. Slowly but surely the two modes of gameplay drift so far apart that cracks begin to appear, threatening the whole model. From a raider's point of view the leveling game now fails to fulfil it's function of getting people ready to raid. Sure, they might be level 70 and have epic gear, but they might still be totally useless for a raid: they have not even the most basic training of how to play their class in a group, and they are of the wrong class, wrong spec, and wearing gear with the wrong bonuses to succeed in raids. If the 40 people in an average Alterac Valley group decided to kick out the 15 least suitable among them and take the remaining 25 to any one of the 25-man raid dungeons, they would not be able to get past the trash mobs. The average player who soloed up to 70, invested some effort in PvP to get epic gear, and now wants to raid, will find himself rejected and laughed at by the top raiding guilds on his server. He'll complain about them being elitist, but in fact it is game design that created the gap between average player and raider. The solofication of MMORPGs creates a large number of characters who simply aren't viable for the top end raid game.
What needs to be done is to rethink the concept of solofication. Why is soloing popular? A part of it is due to Real Life ® contraints, if you solo you can play in smaller bits and bites, group play needs longer periods. But another part of it is just a Skinner box: people like soloing because the game teaches them that soloing is the easiest way to advance. So even if they would have the time for a group, they rather keep on playing solo, because setting up a group is so not worth it. Assembling the group is made complicated by a bad LFG system in WoW. Doing quests that aren't marked a group quests in a group is often bringing less experience points per hour than soloing them. And WoW's concept of teaching players how to group is equivalent of throwing them into deep water to teach him how to swim: some people learn it that way, but many get hurt and frustrated in the process.
Solofication not only opens up a gap to end game raid content, it also moves MMORPGs in a direction where they become vulnerable to competition from single-player games. When I recently asked whether people would play a single-player version of WoW without monthly fees, I was surprised of how many people would prefer such a game over an online MMORPG with monthly fees.
If game design minimizes your interaction with other players, then why pay $15 a month for that interaction?

I think that it is time for the pendulum to swing back towards MMORPGs being more about groups again. Not enforced grouping, nobody wants that. But to a situation where even during the leveling process forming a group would actually be easy and the incentives would encourage it. Where people would learn to cooperate, because it would be to their advantage, and where due to that cooperation they would make more friends and develop stronger social bonds. Where players would arrive at the end game and already know how to play well in a group. Where playing a "support class" like tank or healer was a reasonable choice, and not a niche way for raiders to gimp themselves for the rest of the game. Where MMORPGs would be massively multiplayer again, and not massively singleplayer in parallel, as they are now. Here's hoping.

Source : tobolds.blogspot.com

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Warhammer Online's High Elf Swordmaster Class

Hey everyone, remember Warhammer Online? That one MMO that's supposed to come out later this year? Okay, step away from the Conan beta and listen up, because we have some news on the Warhammer front concerning the Swordmaster.

According to a recent MMORPG.com interview with EA Mythic's Adam Gershowitz, the Swordmaster of Hoeth is the High Elf's entry into the tanking profession. It uses a flurry of swordplay to deflect the blows of its enemies as opposed to simply using heavy armor, like most tanks. As with the other classes in WAR, the Swordmaster has three mastery paths that are variations of differing playstyles:

* Path of Vaul - Includes combos that draw aggro while still increasing your defense. This path caters to situations with multiple foes.
* Path of Khaine - This path is for your area attack combos, introducing more of an offensive twist for the more aggressive tanks.
* Path of Hoeth - This is the tank path that utilizes magical abilities to aid in both defense and offense.

Source : massively.com

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Virtual Worlds Help In Addiction Therapy

Virtual worlds are all too often spoken of as something you're in danger of becoming addicted to. We've all heard the stories of inertia, bloat, pallor and unemptied cat trays. But Professor Patrick Bordnick, associate of the University of Houston, is using VR to help treat addictions in the course of therapy.

As Professor Bordnick points out, imagination alone isn't a particularly powerful tool to recreate the situations in which a recovering addict learns to say 'no': 'As a therapist, I can tell you to pretend my office is a bar, and I can ask you to close your eyes and imagine the environment, but you'll know that it's not real'.


Rather than ask the patient to visualise a bar stocked with alcohol or a party where cigarettes are on offer, Bordnick uses a VR helmet along with other components such as olfactory stimulation and actor participation to create a highly plausible and immersive environment. Although the patient consciously knows he is taking part in a VR simulation, the immersion has proven sufficient to build intense cravings, just as if the focus of the addiction had really been present.

By supplying an enviroment that is realistic enough to stimulate cravings but remains controlled and safe, Bordnick can gradually train patients in the use of coping skills. As those skills will have been developed in the face of a close analogue of the real thing, the patient is much better equipped to contend with the challenge of the real-world situation. Source : massively.com

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