Sanya and Lum on Mythic Endeavors

heartless_ writes "Gamergod.com has part one of an interview with Scott Jennings and Sanya Weathers of Mythic Entertainment. The interview covers Darkness Rising, Dark Ages of Camelots' Realm vs Realm system, and the Korean gaming culture. Scott Jennings elaborated on the Korean gaming culture a bit: 'It is more of a technological thing. It is also kind of a cultural thing that in Korea, the cyber cafes are really seen as kind of skuzzy, not to put to fine a point on it, but they're very much like the back alley skid row bars we would go to here in the States. They are very much smoky elements that you do not want your kids to go to, that kind of thing.'"

Comments

Stop and Analyze

[Depris]

I think we should all take a moment and analyze a few of these responses:

Scott: So we gave our most loyal customers the ability to destroy everyone else in the game.

Thats a very angry statement. Where is all this deep rooted hatred coming from? Why must we be violent to each other just to have a good time. Terrible message and I'd be ashamed to promote such activities.

On a personal note I'm not surprised to hear something like this coming out of Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings. It's just another MMOG scandal and another in a long list of recent controversies surronding SJ. The e3 Shadowbane vice bust when the California arrested the wolfpac gang for being the pimps that they are. Second hand reports claim SJ was standing naked next to two midget twin interns and a jr programmer named larry. Bending over and rubbing sour ketchup all over them.

Yet he has the nerve.... to say that gaming cafe's in Korea is bad. PFFFT. I'll tell you go find a picture of Scott Jennings then compare it to a photo of a cool slick yuppie korean gaming cafe and tell me who you'd trust.

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Depris]

no pun intended on comparing Scott Jennings (relation to Kenneth? the jeopardy wiz mormon?) to a building. *laughs evily*

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Quarters]

Scott: So we gave our most loyal customers the ability to destroy everyone else in the game.

Before stopping and analyzing how about reading and comprehending? He was making a facitious comment about how the only bug encountered during the launch of the latest expansion pack had to do with veteran titles shown above long-time players causing new players' (e.g. no veteran title) clients to crash. A bug they fixed the first evening the expansion pack was available.

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Jeff(GamerGod.com)]

As a point of clarification from the guy that gave the interview, I have to say Quarters got it mostly right. He was just commenting on the bug and the irony of giving their loyal customers a "god weapon" by mistake.

Re:Stop and Analyze

[Scott_Jennings]

Wow. I was at an E3 vice bust? Was I conscious? I miss all the fun.

DAOC: Marketing Massive PvP

[Yst]

Unfortunately, DAOC faces a serious problem in retaining and gaining new users at present. And I'm not sure that's it's a curable problem. I use the word "unfortunately", because I genuinely believe it's a good game in its own way. It has a niche (realm and siege warfare) which there has been little attempt to fill otherwise (Shadowbane was generally regarded as a failure). And I don't want to see it die. But I'm not sure what can be done with it to keep it at stable subscription levels as it stands.

The problem with DAOC is that its triumph is its endgame. Its problem is precisely the opposite of WoW's. DAOC's RvR really has yet to be beaten by any competitor at what it does: large scale, cooperative, faction-based warfare that people can actually care about (or used to).

But there's a big problem with DAOC's focus from a new player perspective, and that is that playing DAOC today does not mean getting to see the best parts of the game in the short term. The battlegrounds mean access to a miniaturised version of RvR at fairly early levels, but the game's genuine strength is not something available to anyone who hasn't invested hundreds of hours in the game already.

And increasingly, as is probably inevitable, the path to RvR is a very, very long one for new players, as the game ages, as new content is added and as the level of experience presumed of participants grows. And while DAOC PvE isn't bad (it was certainly fine for its time, when it came out, and Darkness Falls was a high point), it can't really claim to compete with WoW in the present in that department, even by the accounts of DAOC's greatest supporters. DAOC's angle is a serious difficulty for it in the marketplace right now. "Play DAOC, and maybe a year from now you'll get to see the aspects of the game that really make it worth playing, once you've played all the lousy parts" is a hard sell. I wish DAOC the best, but I don't know what can be done for it to remedy its peculiar problem.

Re:DAOC: Marketing Massive PvP

[Reapy]

That is exactly why I finally quit daoc. I played very heavily around release time. I unfortunatly ended up trying all the realms, and sometimes starting new characters when a friend would start playing.

The result is I ended up with a bunch of mid to high level characters scattered throughout, and I couldn't participate in any rvr (and actually enjoy it).

On release, I was like 10 levels off the upper curve of the players. So at the start you really could go out and rvr around level 20. But by the time I got up in level, so would everybody else, and the slide just over took me, and then my buddy decided he wanted to play on another realm, and then it was all over.

Anyway, I just threw in the towel, I didn't want to grind forever just so I could play the aspect of the game that I joined it for. After a few months of playing and not being able to get out there and really try it out without getting ganked in 2 seconds, it was time to move on.

I read this and thought about what it would be like to go see all the new stuff they've added to a game I really enjoyed in the past. Then I thought about going from 1 - whatever the max level is now and it put the idea far far far away from me.

Re:DAOC: Marketing Massive PvP

[Somatic]

I have a list of things I hate about DAoC (literally... I made it earlier this week), but those things you mention are actually very low on it. That sounded worse than I meant it: I meant, those areas have been improved a lot, I think-- improved to the point where they don't bug me as much anymore. They've done a lot of things in the past couple years that have made it easier to start playing DAoC.

• Classic Servers: In the Trials of Atlantis expansion, they introduced items that had to be levelled themselves to gain power. It increased the grind a lot, and turned a lot of people off of DAoC (including me). I am just not going to spend that much time to be able to compete. So, they introduced classic servers: servers where the Trials of Atlantis expansion doesn't exist.

  The result? The single most popular server is now a classic server. I play on it. I wouldn't have been able to come back to DAoC if classic servers didn't exist. That was one hugely smart move by Mythic. As a note, I wished for classic servers in Everquest for years, but SoE never did it. If they had, I'd probably still be playing EQ.

• Free Expansions: I wasn't about to buy 4 expansions just so I could try DAoC again, so I was happy when I found out that the majority of the expansions are now free (ok, one was free in the first place, but I digress). That's another thing where, if Mythic hadn't done it, I wouldn't have come back to the game.

• Easier Levelling: Catacombs made levelling 10 times faster, which is nice. It came at a price, though, because people don't level in the frontiers like they used to, so that aspect of the game has mostly vanished (Darkness Falls could be considered frontier levelling, but it isn't really, for a bunch of reasons). I always hated the "easier levelling" expansions in EQ, because I didn't think they were appropriate for the world, but in DAoC, it was appropriate.

All in all, there are still many things about the game that I can't stand. Many. A whole article worth. My point here, though, was that I think the areas of gaining new players and keeping them is where DAoC has improved the most.