Why arena fails for spectators

I stand by my glowing review just a post away: yes, arena was a good idea and a clever use of the small resources the team has. Granted 1v1 on a flat arena ends up exactly how I predicted (everyone just blows all cool downs and hope for the best) but that was always the bane of duels and at very least people are doing more pvp which is always good. The only thing that I wasn't able to test on TL were queue and spectating and both of those things turned out to be horrible. 

Let's start with spectating in general: you can't select the fighters in the arena so you can't see their HP bars, names, spells being casted and even some of the particles.

When spectating duels you are just looking at two characters duking it out with a very vague idea who is winning and who is using what. You might not even be aware who is fighting because you can't see the names. Correct me if I am wrong but huge part of watching the duels is paying attention to HP bars since there is nothing more exciting than seeing the fight ending up with someone under 10% of HP. You can forget about that with arena.

When it comes to PVE it's even worst: all you see is a player face tanking some nameless pet. You can't see the particles on the floor that pet is casting, you can't see HP bars. Basically is as boring as watching the paint dry.

Here is my main grudge: since the arena is shared between PVPers and PVEers (can't imagine why) when I come in for some duels I have to endure (aka spectate) 3-4 fights of people face tanking their pet cat or whatever. Then I have my duel and then we are back to cat fights. At this point I am like fuck it and doing mini or logging off. So I am estimating I will be rank 4 with Gladiators factions in 2020. So if you are wondering: is arena content the lord and savior of Hyboria? Nope.

Pit Master's Arena

The arena is now on TL.

Here is the post from TL forums:

Funcom Official Feedback Thread: Pit Master's Arena
This is the official feedback thread for the Pit Master's Arena! This new area allows players to challenge their pets, as well as other players, in head to head combat.

The entrance to the Pit Master's Arena can be found in the Fields of the Dead. For convenience, we've added a door to the Testlive Lobby that will take players right to this entrance.

Once inside, players will find a vendor named Ciaran the Kennel Master, who offers a couple of things to assist with testing:

* Mark of the Pit Master: This can be purchased and consumed to increase your faction rank with the Pit Master's Arena
* One Metric Ton of Pets: Purchasing and consuming this will temporarily increase your inventory, and give you a large number of pets. Please be aware that the inventory increase is temporary, and this will not assist in meeting the requirements to learn all of the pets. We strongly recommend that you learn all of the pets you are able to, and discard the rest before changing zones.

For the purposes of allowing everyone to test without needing to wait for others to finish, we have temporarily set this playfield up to spawn a new instance for each player that enters. If you wish to test the PvP battles, please use the Instance Selector near the minimap to join another players instance.

We look forward to hearing your feedback, and please let us know about any issues you encounter.

Happy Testing!
Last edited by Erelon; 03-18-2016 at 08:47 PM.

So how is the arena? Exquisite. Like I mentioned here AOC cannot afford to make bad content. In the case of arena Funcom took previously rather bland feature (non combat pets) and turned it into fun and engaging content. I can see myself collecting more pets because of the Pit.

So the Pit is in Cimmeria and you have to enter the instance to use all the feature. It doesn't work like PvP queue where you just sign up and wait.

You talk to NPC to get quest or to queue up.

The main idea behind arena is not only to fight but also to spectate. With how fun are different are the fights with each pet I bet everyone will want to see how player going against a very rare pet. Also I would laugh my ass off watching some scrub getting manhandled by Pleasurable Company pet or.... the kitten (yes you can fight it too!). Watching PVP is entertaining in an obvious way.   

There is no story behind the Pit on TL but I do hope we will get a nice chain of quests leading up to the the arena.

Of course we get more achievements. I was surprised to see no pet reward since in  this context it would been perfect.

In order to buy rewards you need to gain rep with the factions. I love factions!

PVE Arena

Getting right to the point: when you are teleported into the arena you will have 30 seconds to summon a pet that you intend to fight. At first you will be able only to summon white and green pets but after hitting higher ranks your options will expand.

Here is the breakdown (thanks to tapwater TL forum user):

Faction Rank 0 - Fight in Sparring pits only:

Common and Uncommon pets can be summoned.

Faction Rank 1 - Fight in Sparring pits only:

Common, Uncommon and Rare pets can be summoned.

Faction Rank 2 - Fight in both Sparring pits and the Main Arena - Sparring pits provide no faction gain: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic pets can be summoned.

Faction Rank 3 - Fight in both Sparring pits and the Main Arena - Sparring pits provide no faction gain:Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and Legendary pets can be summoned.

Of course just bashing pets into oblivion would make for a horrible content so each pet is in fact a mini-boss. This means that pets will use special skills: there will be AOE that you have to avoid, CC to break or mechanics to figure out. Legendary and epic pets are obviously hardest, but even fighting with a green pet can have interesting and challenging. This NOTHING like the fights you are having with mobs in solo PVE.

Assassin throwing bombs at me. Better move out.

This pet will keep summoing guards until you kill him.

To sum it up: its done right, I can see myself indulging in this content on a daily basis. 

PVP Arena

I didn't have anyone to test it but it seems straight forward: you queue up and go for the kill. Now OBVIOUSLY a group arena would be a better choice. With the differences in classes and gear I imagine solo arena will turn into this experience:



And I can safely say we want something closer to this:


Now for my blasphemous prophecy: you can't just queue up and keep fighting with pets and players. Since there is a single arena you will have to wait for others to finish their fights before you can have another go. I can honestly see queues getting very long on Crom and people actually going to Fury because less population = less queue time. Go Fury!

I think Funcom has a good thing going with Arena but group option cannot come fast enough!

Interview with Andy "Odonoptera" Benditt

Andy used to be "that guy you petition when /stuck doesn't work" and now he pretty much runs the show at Funcom (or at least community managment). Going from humble GM to an evil genius took some balls, and A LOT of solved petitions. I have sit with Odonoptera on the GM Island (yes it's real!) to talk about his glorious work .

What is it like to be full time GM? Lets say you get to the office, grab your coffee and what is next? What is a "typical" day in a life of GM?

The actual process of being a GM is actually rather simple; you grab your coffee, you sit down, log in to your workstation, and simply press a literal "get next ticket" button.  The next ticket in line is then assigned to you, and thus starts the shift!  This could either be one of our in-game petitions for Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, The Secret World, or LEGO Minifigures Online, or it would be an e-mail ticket that has to do with billing or account issues.  All of our in-game petitions can range from raid misloot issues to general questions, to harassment reports, and bug reports.  All of our GMs handle everything across every game.  

What was your single most surreal experience as GM? Perhaps some player weirded you out or the game did something totally unexpected? 

I'll confess that the zaniest moments in my time as a GM (that I'm able to talk about) were not from Age of Conan, but rather from Anarchy Online and The Secret World.  Since you run an AoC site, I'm not sure what I can really say that could be relevant for this questionnaire.  If it doesn't matter, there was a time in The Secret World where I nearly screwed up a new raid boss encounter by accidentally placing a minimum health cap on the boss.  That was pretty nuts; my GM in TSW is mortal and can take damage (unlike in AoC and AO), so I intended to protect myself while observing a report about the boss and simply had the boss targeted instead of myself.  My head nearly exploded while this was happening, although I did eventually manage to run a command that killed the boss and gave everybody in the raid credit for the run.  So, not the end of the world--I did report myself to my manager immediately, and we sorted things out after that.  

GM powers. Everyone loves them. What exacly can you do as GM?

A simpler question to answer would have been "what CAN'T you do as a GM?" :)  

GMs have access to special commands that can affect a number of stats, attributes, and settings.  We can spawn any creature or boss, generate any item or token, teleport to any zone, or even change the time of day. With great power comes great responsibility, though--some of the commands we have access to can cause problems, so we never perform anything on players that could be considered unsafe or against the intended design of the game.  I've broken my skills and abilities on my own GM character on more than one occasion (to the point where I can't even sprint) and while it's not difficult to fix, that could cause a lot of unhappiness if that were to affect a paying customer! 

With being GM you can pretty much do anything in Hyboria. Have that ruined the game for you in some way? I mean it must be demotivating to work towards anything in AOC when you can just summon that legendary sword with few key strokes. 

It's true that being a GM 'demystifies' the game's content--As I said above, I am able to transport myself to any raid zone without needing any requirements for anything, or grant myself the cream of the crop as far as gear goes.  On the other hand, spawning all that crazy gear on myself and then smacking target dummies makes me want to put in the work to get that stuff on a real character, if for nothing else but to show off a bit!

When it comes to GMing how deep is your knowledge about the game? Do you have a very technical knowledge or do you have a lot of AOC playtime under your belt?

I won't speak for anybody else, but my own personal knowledge about the game primarily came from GMing over the years.  I haven't played a ton of AoC recreationally, although I do have my own private incognito account that I hop on from time to time to see what's up, which is especially helpful to do in order to scope out the tone of chat without attracting attention.  Now that I'm working with the community aspect of AoC rather than strictly service, I've been playing a lot more on my own.

GM Island. The stuff that myths are made of. Is it real? Do GMs really hang out there?

There is indeed a playfield literally named "GM Island", yes.  GMs 'hang out' there in the sense that it's the default location we return to when we're done assisting a player or need to remove ourselves from a zone.

Your transition from GM to CM was rather unexpected. How exacly that happened and why?

Out of curiosity, 'unexpected' in what way?  I've been interested in doing Community work for quite some time and had brought it up on more than one occasion.  An opening showed itself, I applied, interviewed, and was fortunate and grateful to have been offered the position.  Really, it's like any other transition you'd expect in a workplace:  you work hard at your task, get to know people, show interest in something, and see what happens!

1 year in review - 2015

Yet another Hyborian year has passed and it is time for my savage review. When you look at the list of things that were promised in 2013/2014 it will be pretty obvious that most of the stuff did not get delivered. On another hand ..... Oh snap! Did I just copy/paste intro to last year's edition? 

"Ya you did, also you have been slacking on posts as of late".

 Well shut up, voice in my head, I am back to my blogging routine and OBVIOUSLY I will be back on meds soon enough.

Let me start over: 

Yet another year has passed without the promised crafting revamp. Really, guys? I mean REALLY?

"Now you are just grumpily ranting"

DAMN IT! Ok, lets just dive in:

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

Apart from some unmentionable community managers being angry with me for the 2014 review pretty much NOTHING changed. If anything the monthly letters (in 2015 written by Sezmra) got progressively shorter and less substantial. In the end Tomium made a thread that pretty much said "Ok guys, tell us how to do our jobs as CMs" and asked for a feedback. Apparently it was pretty unsuccess attempt because the thread got deleted and both CMs quited Funcom. AOC is now under new CM management and he already has proven himself capable of turning things around. But that, my loyal readers, is for 2016 review.

EVENTS

The first event was the anniversary/adventure pack called Shadows of Vanaheim which was a disaster by all means. Just read the review. On the up side Matt 'Cirith Gorgor” Bennett  in the interview I did with him pretty much said "we fucked up, this won't happen again" which was very honest and very professional of him.

The team totally redeemed itself with state of the art Halloween event The Shambling Plague. That event was so good that I will actually post a late review soon enough. 

ACHIEVEMENTS, TREASURES, RARE BOSSES, PANORAMAS, TITLES

This update was nothing short of a miracle. Pretty much gave Hyboria a second life and brought the game a little closer to modern MMO standards. I now spend my time in the game going from zone to zone doing all the quests for the achievements and snatching up those treasures along with panoramas. I am doing this mainly for the story and  I have found some real GEMS when it comes to quests that I have missed leveling up back 2008. Being now well versed in the black arts (and by that I mean having good knowledge of REH's Conan) I can really appreciate the creativity that went into the creation on some of the quests. My only wish is that achievements update went on top of another, more substantial update because achieves are great side dish, but fail a little as a main course.

RAIDS

Biggest surprise of 2015 was The Palace of Cetris going live. No one, I mean NO ONE expected the team to actually finish the T6 raid and go live with it. Of course T6 being top tier raiding is pretty much open to few Crom guilds but that is supposed to change with new Raid Finder system. 

So as you can see not much has happened during 2015 but what went live was of great quality (except Shadows of Vanaheim which is just shamefull). If you are into PVE then 2015 has a lot to offer. 

Interview with Alex Tornberg - painting Hyboria with a brush..

Please tell us a bit about yourself and the work you did for Funcom.

I’m a concept artist and art director from Sweden. I started out working in the games industry as a Concept Artist in 2005 and in 2006 I joined Funcom working on Age of Conan. I spent 5 years working there. When I started out I designed mostly characters, armors and weapons but after a while I started doing environments and architecture as well. I worked as the Assistant Art Director on the Rise of the Godslayer where I had a big part in setting the style and art direction of playfields like Pai Kang and Gateway to Khitai as well as overseeing the art production of other playfields and content. I also spent a couple of days creating all the tattoo textures for Rise of the godslayer and I did a lot of the tattoos in Hyborian Adventures as well.

After I left Funcom I worked as an Art Director for an Electronic Arts studio for a while. Nowadays I work as a freelancer mostly for movies and TV, but I’ve done some work on games as well like for example on Path of Exile.

Please do tell us how the concept artist participates in the development. For most of the gamers concept art are just pretty pictures that we drool over druing the long wait for the game's release.

What was your role exacly and how your typical day working for Funcom was looking like?

A concept artist is the person who visualizes the art directors vision through sketches and illustrations. Every asset and every building in a fantasy game needs to be designed, every location needs sketches that sets the mood of the area. So on a game like AoC there a lot of work for a concept artist. We had somewhere between 4-6 concept artist working the game during the time I was there, but nowadays big fantasy games like that would probably have around 10-15 concept artists working on them. A lot of the work isn’t the type of illustrations you drool over though, there’s a lot of rough sketches or painting over screenshots from the game to show the environment artists how it is supposed to look and so on.

A normal work day would probably be something like this. I come in around 9 and have a coffee with the guys. After that I would look through my task list and see what concepts where a priority to finish first and then start drawing and painting. As I was the Assistant Art Director and Lead of the Concept Art team I would get interrupted routinely during the day for regular meetings and reviews or just questions or requests from other departments, I would also have to prioritize the work for the rest of the concept art team for every milestone. Then I’d head home sometime after six in the evening, depending on the workload at the moment

How are you collaborating with other developers and writers? Is your art something that others create around (hence the words „concept art”) or is it more of a team effort where for example writer tells you about the main story line and you are trying to get the tone and the mood of that story into the concept art?

On RotGS we worked very closely with Joel Bylos who was the Lead Designer then. The Concept Art team was working on the expansion before anybody else than Joel was really working on it. So there was a lot of brainstorming and sketching without any real story connected to them, some made it in others didn’t. We had a really great Concept Art team on that expansion. Stian Dahlslett as the Art Director, we had Grant Regan and Torstein Norstrand who had been working on AoC for years already, some great new guys in Ville Kinnunen and Per Haagensen and I was the Lead Concept Artist, and then Didrik came back and helped out with the final touches of the game. Both Grant and Ville are Howard fanatics. It was really a joy to work with these guys and probably the best team I’ve worked with.

Joel was really great with using the Concept Art team to help out on RotGS, we usually worked very close with the World Builders and Level Designers. Sitting next to them at times when the playfields or levels were built giving advice directly to them or doing quick paintovers showing how we envisioned the look and feel, probably the best team work I’ve seen during my years in the industry.

What does your creative process look like? Are you flipping through Conan comics? Are you taking the inspiration from real world architecture?

Most of the inspirations comes from the real world, it’s really the only way to get a fantasy setting to feel believable even though you try to get some of that old comic stuff in at times. Then you just let your design sense take over and you do your own twist on it. Didrik had a really great vision for AoC and how to get inspired by history but not copy it and the Art Bible he set up for AoC was comprehensive, detailing out each culture and what fitted them and not. It’s quite complex really, creating a good fantasy setting. You can mix stuff from different timelines, but you have to be wary so you don’t make it feel unrealistic. Howard could be really crazy and mixing stuff from the 19th century in some stories with things from ancient Rome in others for example, his stories didn’t always make sense in a historic fashion. So you really had to think about what can we use in AoC and what would just feel out of place.

So when I was designing some building or artifact I would first make a design board with photos from different things I thought would work for that. Then I would get inspired by that and design something new from it.

Robert E.Howard wrote some very vivid descriptions of buildings in Hyboria, were you using those descriptions for inspiration?

Yeah, absolutely. Though we tried to bring some sanity into it. Howard could be really descriptive about certain details and didn’t really bother with the big picture at times. But it was always a pleasure trying create something from the inspiration of Howards writing, I always took a pleasure in trying to get the details in there. Like for example purple minarets in Paikang, though they turned into purple roofed pagodas.

Tell us a bit about creating the art for Khitai expansion in general. There are hardly any descriptions of Khitai in REH books and very few Conan comics so Funcom had to create whole country from scratch.

Doing Khitai was a business decision. We had heard rumors from management that the next expansion was going east. We all hoped to be doing Turan, Shem or something like that, maybe basing the work on the Tower of the elephant. It felt like the most logical thing to do. But upper management wanted to break into the asian market. Around the time we started the work on Khitai our Art Director, Didrik Tollefsen, got the chance to work as a consultant on the Conan movie that was in the works at the time, that ended up being the horrible one with Karl Drogo as Conan, and left for that. Just after that the subscription numbers on AoC was starting to drop really  fast due to the lack of  quality content on later levels, so our director Gaute resigned from Funcom. Craig Morrison took over the management of AoC and Stian Dahlslett came in as Art Director, both of them had been working on Anarchy Online prior to that and I was promoted to Assistant Art Director and Lead Concept Artist. So the production of Rise of the Godslayer or Road to Khitai as it was called back then got off to a really rocky start. But it ended up being one of the smoothes productions in the history of Funcom.

That being said, Khitai is easily my least favourite region we designed for AoC. Our Khitai is very much based on ancient China, if you travel to the Forbidden City in Beijing and walk around there you will feel like you’re walking around in some city in Khitai, and a lot of the temple ruins were based on Khmer ruins. The clothing and armor designs have a much more modern feeling than that we had done earlier, and we have things like wolf mounts and tiger mounts which belongs in the high fantasy type of setting we tried to avoid with AoC. The quality of the art is a lot better in RotGS though, but all in all when we did Khitai it never really felt like we we’re doing a setting in the Hyborian Age. But I think it did turn out looking really good anyway and Joel managed to get a nice twist to the story which felt very in line with Howards writing.

House of Crom is  the most unique area in Age of Conan when it comes to the visuals. Tell us more about your ideas and inspirations that went into HOC.

Directly after the concept art team had finished work on Hyborian Adventures we started working on dungeons for upcoming patches, this was around March-April 2008. The first one we did was an Acheronian Dungeon in Thunder River, which was later named Xibaluku. When that was finished we moved over to a dungeon that had been in the works ever since the project had started back in 2004-2005, House of Crom. This was a mammoth of a dungeon, the size of it was like a whole playfield of it’s own. There was a lot of old design documents to build upon and I think the dungeon was supposed to be released around the same time as Ymir’s Pass, so it was sort of tied into that.

We had hinted a lot of atlantean designs throughout the Cimmerian playfields but House of Crom was where we really got the chance to explore that. The Atlantean design was an expansion of what Ron Cobb, the production designer of the film Conan the Barbrian (1982), had developed for the movie. Mixing historic designs from both the Mayan and Norse cultures it made for a really compelling and unique look. We really took off with that and visualized an enormous underground city that had been frozen for centuries. It had lots of secret rooms and interesting puzzles for the players to solve. We we’re going for an Indiana Jones sort of feeling with a lot of adventure and booby traps. We also used the connection between Howard and Lovecraft for this dungeon and had a giant squid like creature designed to be the final boss.

Last but not least: the Dark Cathedral. It was supposed to be a map for PVP minigames and even after 7 years of games release people are still asking about it (more info: http://www.katsbits.com/articles/age-of-conan/making-hyborian-adventures.php). Could you possibly tell us what was that map all about?

I think this was supposed to be a Capture the flag type of map. This was done during the end of the production of Hyborian Adventures. There was a lot of dungeons that just was created without any proper art direction then, it was sort of like the wild west. The concept art team got these handed to us to try and salvage them. Me and another concept artist, Fred Rambaud, got the job of trying and fix these. I was handed Dark Cathedral and 2 or 3 more dungeons to work on. Dark Catherdral was supposed to be something Aquilionian, but the geometry the level designer had used for it wasn’t really close to how  the Art Bible said Aquilonian architecture should look, he had just made up his own stuff. It had lots of rounded arches for example, which was a big no no. It couldn’t really be salvaged without too much rework but I tried my best. I think most us was quite happy that these never was released.

All images are property of Funcom.

photo of Alex Tornberg by Shashank Uchil (http://512x512.com/)

65.000 kills - season finale (on Crom)

 While this wasn't really posted on the blog some of you that follow me on twitter/facebook know that I have moved to Crom about a month or so and also joined one of the most renown raiding guilds in AOC's history: Destiny. Upon my arrival to Crom I had to kiss my name goodbye and rebrand my assassin as "Sliith". That  was a pisser but such is a prices for moving to a different server (on top of 20 EURO price tag). I have had nothing but positive experience with Destiny folks and they were kind enough to offer me spot on their T5 raiding team. The vibe was great and the raid team was as skilled as you can get so T5 boss killing was, as expected from any established raiding guild, a farm. Yet somehow I couldn't really get into raiding mindset and with each raid I felt more and more like I am doing a chore rather than enjoying a privilege of  T5 access. While epiphany of "shit, I might not be into raiding after all" was neither sudden nor really an epiphany it became painfully evident that I have zero business changing out on Crom for PVE reasons. Looking back at my raiding experience so far it's pretty obvious that whenever I was really doing any regular raids it was in order to get PVE gear for PVP. It was at that time when PVE weapons were superior to PVP weapons and it was common for people to raid T4 (or at least farm cloud) in order to get them weaps. I am very much a min/maxer kind of guy so I will grab an upgrade to my character if I can. Also it's not like I need an edge over other players but I hate being at disadvantage and that was the case with PVE weapons at that time: those were just so much better.  In my humble opinion raiding as a whole just went to shit-town on Fury. Of course pure PVPers dropping from raiding all of sudden had a snowball effect with more and more people leaving for Crom. Since there is nothing in PVE that I would really want being at PVE server discouraged me more and more from logging on. I quickly realized that I am missing a vital part of AOC: open world pvp. It's not like open world pvp is all that wide spread on Fury, but I like the idea of it: at any given moment you might get jumped (aka ganked). For me removing that feeling/idea by transferring to Crom has made AOC experience bland and tasteless, it was no longer brutal Hyboria but rather some kind of la la land. This isn't a jab at Crom players, its just my honest assessment of what I like in AOC and what it felt like to lose it. Of course "the grass is greener on the other side" was also a factor in my server transfer. Crom, at least in my mind, was a shiny beacon of evermore good stuff. More players. More content. More activities. That turned out to be a lie (or to be more frank: I was delusional about it). Crom has more PVE activity for sure, but that is it. It is NOT Fury server II with everything better. It's just different and that doesn't translate into "its just better". Prime example? World Bosses. I am not a huge fan of thing content, but at least on Fury you had to group up into a raid and then mind the gankers trying to strip your out of your boss rewards. That was part of the fun. On Crom? You just wack the boss into oblivion and the excitement lies in rushing into another instance to tackle another boss and doing it before the said instance gets filled with people.
Minigames on Crom are just about the same like on Fury. So if you are like me and you like: PVP as main activity, soloing achievements (quests, panoramas, treasures) and doing occasional dungeon run then Crom has nothing to offer you. If anything the experience will be worsts on Crom, at least I found that true for me.

 So I have buckled up, ponied up another 20 EURO and went back to Fury where I have re-claimed name "Slith" and my spot in Clan of The Free City guild. In effect, if it wasn't for 40 EURO billed to my credit card, no one could have ever suspected that at one point I have walked  the lush PVE fields of Crom server.

But this episode was supposed to be about 65.000 kills mark. So yeah, that's a thing now. I have heard a rumor that some were around 67 k the kill counter restarts to 0. Is it true? Well, I am about to find out soon enough.

Welcome back Fury, I missed you. 

Deconstructing hyboria - interview analysis

After talking to Cirith in recent interview I feel like doing some post-mortem on it and giving you my piece of mind on the shape and the direction that Hyboria is taking.

Dungeon/Raid finder vs Crafting revamp: I haven't actually seen anyone being absolutely appalled by the development decision of giving D/R finder a priority over the long over-due crafting revamp. What is D/R finder? Its a sign up system that works pretty much like a minigame queue: you just pick dungeon/raid, select your role (deeps, heals, tank) sign up and wait to be teleported with your newly found group into the dungeon (at least I assume THAT'S what it is). It's a MMO industry standard that both AOC and TSW need to adhere to remain viable and somewhat current. Of course since it's in World of Warcraft it is pretty much in every game. I have had my taste of it when dabbled with WoW and I liked it. Current, very very dated model of just spamming LFG chat with "LF KK run, exp/gear/perks" is not only super old, but also a major content-wall that keeps new players form experiencing all the dungeons that are out there (hell, I still need to do a lot of dungeons). Besides I don't think crafting revamp would be all that successful since AOC stats system is all fucked. Current model rewards stacking very few select stats (crit and combat/magic rating) and I am pretty sure crafting revamp would result in either cranking out only sub par items that were only usable to modestly geared characters or an arms race in which people would create items en mass in order to hit that perfect stack of crit/combat/magic rating that would go beyond the T4 budget stats wise. Both scenarios would be a let down. AOC team needs to make a spot on decision for the content just like they did with achievements. Pouring resources into crafting and not having it be anything less than the second coming of Jesus would be a proverbial nail in AOC coffin (and them nails just keep on coming as prophesied by forum posters...since 2008).

When it comes to Tales of Hyboria which are new adventure packs its no secret that I am less than enthustastic about it's first installment. I really didn't want to ask questions like "how come Shadows of Vanaheim aka Shadows of Cimmeria Reloaded suck?"and to my surprise I got a reply exactly to that unasked question. SOV was a rushed and overpriced content. What I was afraid of seeing is something straight out of American Psycho where main character commits heinous crimes and gets away with it for no apparent reason. I am not against Tales of Hyboria per se, hell if its done right then bring it on! The interview gave me hope for the future that we won't see another blunder like SOV. And I have to agree that with AOC being strapped for cash (Khitai sized expansion is out of the question) the only way that we can see those cool locations pulled straight out of the lore are bite-sized adventures like SOV (I mean not like that, but also like that). I would love to see Aquilonia and Nemedia go at each other throats (Border Range in Wild Lands could be used for that) with Conan joining the battle along with the players (get that lazy bastard of out that castle!). What else? Well obviously Hyperborea is overdue! Just fix price..and quality..and replayability..and story and I am all over that next adventure pack!

I am bummed out by two things: both PvP additions and progression systems are probably years away. I mean placing them on a the development timeline next to "sometime after crafting revamp" is pretty much saying "it will be ready when Moses comes back". Solo arena, when and if its ready, won't fill any need that solo group pvp minigames are not already providing (those are providing mostly misery for all involved). I don't see good things in AOC pvp and onslaught of people coming from Fury to Crom (yours truly included) only show that PvPers are in "abandon all hope" mode.
Well, at least we will get that one server tech soon enough, eh? *wink* (and if you don't get my wink I will be blunt: everyone will eventually transfer to Crom and two remaining pvp servers will be an empty shells).

So we all just might as well jump with both feets into raiding because this is where AOC will be at for the years to come.

Interview with Matt 'Cirith Gorgor” Bennett - July of 2015

CirithGorgor joined me at The Hideout for a second time to talk all things Hyboria. 

CirithGorgor brings his no nonsense approach on few major issues... but I will let you be the judge of that.

1/ Lets start with proverbial elephant in the room: with Joel Bylos stepping down as Game Director who is in charge of AOC? Who makes the high level decisions about priorities and content? And most importantly: this "directorless" state is permanent or are we in some sort of transition?

So, since I rejoined the team around 3 years ago now, setting the direction of the game in terms of content and system releases had always been a 3-way thing between me, the producer and the former director. Now of course that is a 2-way thing between me and the producer, for me that is the direction of anything related to my sphere of influence, specifically content and the majority of the game systems, while the producer is more involved with setting the direction on a business model side.

So really not much has changed except there is nobody with the title game director, “setting the direction of the game” is part of my job description. I know as there are no formal 'game director letters' it might seem from a player perspective that there is no direction, but I simply don't have time for these as they are more time consuming than you might think (I have done a few in the past as you may know) and I believe my time is better spent on developing said content instead, so rather I pass on information on what I have been doing to Sezmra and she takes it from there.

Is this likely to change, no, and I don't think it needs to, the only thing I possibly see changing is myself being more influential on the business side of things too, which is something we have talked about internally.

2/ Crafting update. There is no way around asking about it since it’s in the development for 3 years now. Is there a major setback that makes the update too complicated? Is it less of a priority than, shall we say Cetriss? This is the only time I will ask about release timeframe: is there one?

So the crafting update was started at a time when the team was much, much larger than it is right now and it was possible for there to be a focus on multiple systems/areas of content at the same time. This has not been the case for a while now and realistically we can only work on 1 thing at a time, before moving on to focusing on something else.

Crafting requires code work, quite a lot of code work, before it is final and this is at an absolute premium even more so as it is shared across the live team. Now the next task for the code team will be to add dungeon/raid finder system which will be usable for both AoC and TSW. I know people will say that the crafting system should be the priority, but here I will strongly disagree, a dungeon finder with linked systems and rewards for daily dungeons/raids I believe is more important to the long term longevity of the game. Bringing more people together into social situations where guilds can form/recruit and allowing more players to access our dungeons and raids which I believe stand up there with the absolute best in any MMO. This is a feature which is overdue and creates a lot of opportunities for the game and it is rightfully a top priority.

However, once this system is in place the current plan is then to move the code resources to finishing the crafting system. After the code is finished it will allow the final few steps to be completed on the content side, such as the placement of new resource nodes and the removal of the old quest based crafting.

However, one of the biggest problems with this revamp is that it has been promised and hinted at for so long and those promises have never turned into reality due to numerous complications, cuts and factors both controllable and uncontrollable. Therefore I do not want to promise anything in regards to crafting and will not give a date for this feature as it is ultimately outside of my control (specialization).

3/ Achievement system is without doubt very successful, but very inconsistent when it comes to rewards: first points milestones grant exciting stuff like runes and pets and then its all about titles & unlocks. Is there a plan to include more said rewards or the system encourages getting achievements for the sake of achieving stuff? Will the system be expanded in some way in the future or will it be just adding volume (more of already existing achievements types as we get more content).

This is the way the rewards for the system were designed. The utility items are set to lower ranks (which still require some work and dedication to the game) but which are perceived as 'achievable' by anyone, be that a 7 year veteran or someone rolling their first character. The worst thing to do with this sort of system would be to hide all the useful rewards away so that only a minority of the player base will get them and so a new player looks at the system and says forget it. This is also why the utility rewards are tied into points rather than specific achievements, so that players are not forced to play the game a certain way.

This is therefore why pure vanity (titles, mounts etc...) are set to higher achievement point ranks or much harder achievements/meta-achievements, there is a visual confirmation of your accomplishment but beyond that it’s there for the sake of being an 'achievement'.

Is there the potential for adding more rewards, yes of course, but utility rewards will follow the direction of 'being achievable by anyone' and not heavily gated. Possible exceptions here might be a reward which is only useful in end game raids or dungeons and in this case there is the possibility of tying it into more restrictive criteria, but for now that remains a possibility with no design beyond that and such rewards are more likely to be tied directly to that gated content directly.

The system will be expanded in volume, of course; when any new content or system release comes out it will have relevant achievements made, so there will be new things on each major patch. There will be a whole new sub section added along with the arenas for example.

Something we have also been looking into is linking the achievement system with the dungeon/raid finder which is in the works. This would allow us to not only offer daily dungeons but also the potential for daily achievements, such as completing the Adept trial timer for a given dungeon on a given day, repeating a certain solo dungeon or quest, or additional daily pvp goals.

Whether these sorts of things would be rewarded with achievement points or some other existing or new reward is too early to say.

4/ Lets talk PvP: while pvp got some much needed focus in recent times it still doesn't provide any means of progression as new content just gives XP to get to pvp lvl 10 faster. PvP Tier 4 gear got mentioned in one of the letters, is it still on the table? What about grouping with friends for minigames? Minigames are most popular pvp content and it's a solo experience that you can't enjoy with friends, are there plans to change/adjust that (much requested ability to be able to sign up with 2-3 people). What about that minigame that was supposed to come along with Dragon Spine? It was supposed to be tied in some way to the DS content, do you have any new info on it?

Currently with the resources assigned to the project we are focusing on one thing at a time.

Yes T4 PvP gear is still something we want to do, but there are a number of challenges. Progression in PvP is a double edged sword. Players want to progress so they have a reason to compete, I get that, but at the same time any vertical progression increases the gap between entry level PvP and the top of the progression pyramid. What I would like to do is for T4 to become horizontal, by giving more utility through set bonuses or new abilities but that is not a simple thing to achieve. Sure I could throw out a new vertical progression set in not too long, but that would not be the best thing to do for the game.

As I mentioned before, I don't like to make any promises that I know I can not deliver myself if I have to. Changes to the mini-game signup up are 100% locked to the code base, and I am not a coder, therefore it comes down to prioritizing those code changes against all other code tasks.

There are pending tasks for looking into the sign up system when it comes to the small scale team arena which has been previously talked about. The team version can't work the same way as the solo one due to there simply being too many variable conditions to handle inside a script. When this signup system is looked at for the team arena that would be a great time to also look into making any changes to the minigame signup system. Whether or not any such changes are simple or not will become apparent at that time.

As for a minigame set in Dragon's Spine, this is something which was promised along time ago, by a team which has considerably more resources available than now. If a new pvp map is added the setting could be Dragon's Spine, but it’s equally likely to be an Acheronian ruin a Khitan temple or somewhere in the Northern wilds.

5/ AAs and new weapon types for existing archetypes sound very exciting: will it be a major shift in the way we are playing the game or is it more of a cosmetic thing where, for example, assassin will perform same combos only with swords? Will new AAs be tied to some new content or will it work like AAs we already have? A lot of people are fully unlocked AAs on more than one character and are getting more free AA points daily (there is no AA points cap) won't they be able to just buy ALL new AAs on the day they are launched?

This was hinted at in one of the previous letters I believe, but the current design (which is still subject to potential change) is to require both the use of AA points (existing ones) and also utilize new systems and content as they are released. So for an example if we were adding a new combo for the assassin, you would first need to add the combo to your AA tree. Think of this part like a drop or a vendor item (similar to the upgraded combos which came which Khitai) except instead of instantly getting the combo a-la Khitai this would then add it to your AA tree as something you can spend your AA points on.

The logic behind this is that we still want AA points to be relevant and not punish players who capped them out long ago; however, we don't want everyone to just instantly have everything the second any additions go live without having to massively inflate the price and completely shut out new players from the system. This is still very much a work in progress and I don't see it happening until some time after the crafting revamp.

The current design has progression going in three ways. Firstly, new weapon types and spell schools are intended to add new ways to play the class, e.g. adding a Javelin to Guardians, throwing axes to the Barbarian, 1 handed blunts for the Bear Shaman or opening up melee to a Priest of Mitra with a blunt/shield combo or unholy spells to a ToS with a dagger/trinket combo, I'm still talking very high level here though so don't quote any of this as the guaranteed additions. Secondly, we want to add horizontal options to existing play styles such as an additional soldier stance for guarding a pvp objective, more options to replace those slotted general perks which could be a bit more interesting (like a big boost to critigation at the expense of damage) , or making slotting for different situations a bit more common.

Then finally upgrading existing abilities with significantly higher resource costs (this element is likely to be limited to PvE).

Obviously these changes are pretty ambitious and will take quite a while to implement.

6/ Palace of Cetriss will have two modes, can you elaborate more on that? Where are you putting Palace on the "gear check" scale: will fully geared character with Khitai epic be able to contribute to the raid group in a manfully way or will full T4 or even T5 be required for "hard mode" version of T6? What about T6 gear? Will we see already existing "Dragon Spine" designs or will we get totally new models? Will T6 gear have same set bonuses like T5 or will we get something totally new?

Lets talk balance first, the regular (hard mode) version of Palace of Cetriss will have its earlier encounters initially balanced around the T4 range, where I would expect that at least for DPS and Healing purposes you ought to be able to at least be useful in Khitai epics too. The Palace encounters at least for the T6 progression version does have a lot of raid wide damage by design, so survivability should be a consideration. The later encounters will be balanced to be tougher though (bosses 4-6), as you would expect, and if you are not in the best gear at this point you are likely to struggle.

Though if you are not in one of the top progression guilds don't be too disheartened at that. It is really important to me that when we make new content it reaches the maximum number of players, that's how we can justify spending the right amount of time and resources on it. Therefore a few changes will be coming in. Firstly, there are going to be balance changes made to all raids in T3, T3.5 and T4. These changes are intended to make these instances much more Pick Up Group friendly and overall much more forgiving. That does mean certain mechanics are being removed, but I only see this as a positive thing in order to open them up to more players. I stand by the belief that our raid encounters are as good as or better than those in any MMO out there and the more people who can enjoy that the better the game population will be. The consequence of this is that more and more players will be geared to the point where they can attempt progress within T5 (which will likely see some balance changes of its own at a later date) and T6.

Secondly, as you mentioned, we are looking at adding a more casual version of Palace of Cetriss, so that we really can bring the story and encounters to as many players as possible.

So the main question is how are we going to do that? I've already mentioned earlier the fact that we are working on a dungeon/raid finder system, and my goal is to bring Palace of Cetriss' more casual mode into that system for its launch. This is likely to be a little while after release of the Hard Mode, giving progression raids opportunity to compete for world firsts etc...

The raid finder will offer more casual and forgiving mechanics, but of course the loot will not be quite as good. My goal will also be to bring T3 – T4 into the raid finder at the same time as Palace of Cetriss, so that all players can experience the climaxes of our main storylines.

Gear: are we going to have 12 or more completely unique armor sets? Unfortunately we do not currently have the resources for that, 12 completely unique gear sets each comprising of 8 pieces really do take a lot of time and effort to produce. Will there be new and interesting looking gear appropriate for the Dragon's Spines primal location? Yes for sure. There will be 4 new base styles of armor (as there are in the dungeons of Dragon's Spine, though not the same visuals), there will then be between 2 to 4 color variations of each of those base styles, offering some difference between shared armor styles.

For set bonuses, if I evaluate honestly the set bonuses from T5, then they achieved some of their goals but fell short on others. They offer different and more interesting ways in which character progression is offered and potential trade offs which give meaningful choices and avoiding a major impact on PvP. However, they were extremely time consuming and difficult to set up and balance.

We do want to keep set bonuses but realistically with efficiency being very important they can't be sustained in the same fashion. A more likely outcome will be more generic set bonuses which will set characters up for T7 by adding and accumulating new PvE stats like armor and spell penetration, tenacity and perhaps critigation chance. The goal will still be to offer some meaningful choices on some gear slots. T6 gear, unlike T5, is going to see an increase to the stat budget, but with PvP consequences coming as part of those set bonuses too.

Weapons and accessories will probably see their own mini set bonuses like in T5 too, with some of these accessories coming from the final Dragon's Spine dungeon, more on that later.

7/Servers: is the company dead set on keeping 3 rule sets (pvp, pve and rage) or will Rage be folded as some point due to lack of population?

If I were able to make the decision right now, yes I would merge Rage into Fury (likewise enable those transfers). It’s not a positive thing for a new player to start on a server with a very low population like this.

However, this isn't a decision I can make, but I hope this will be the outcome at some point.

8/ Notification system would be a much welcomed addition to rather clunky text based messages for things like PvP events. Is this something you are still in active development or is it pushed further down the line?

With the resources to work on only one thing at a time it is hard to prioritize this, for now it is pushed back. New features like the Palace of Cetriss, the dungeon finder and solo arenas will take priority as they add new content.

9/Adventure pack was rather surprising addition as there were no hints that the company is working on it. Are the more coming in the future? Will those packs have same structure meaning: existing zones re-worked as new instances? Could you give us more information about planned release schedule? Is it something we will see regularly or will it be a once in a while thing?

I do stand by the fact that I believe the concept of 'Tales of Hyboria' or scenarios, are a good addition to the game. There is a whole Hyborian world available out there and opening more of that up can only be a good thing. The short scenario style means the development cycle is fairly short ensuring it does not push back other important features too much.

However, while I think certain things went well; there are others which were disappointing and need to change if we go down this route again.

Firstly, we need to spend more time on the side quests to add more variety to the gameplay and not just sending players to different parts of the zone.

Secondly, new assets need to be used. This doesn't mean a whole zone full of architecture not seen elsewhere in the game, that's unrealistic for any game, but key features should be unique and indicative of the culture where they are located. Indoor locations are more likely to see reuse, though I’d like to be able to spend a bit more time decorating the interiors in a different way, which unfortunately I was not able to do in Vanaheim.

Thirdly, the price of the standard release needs to be adjusted or combined into a subscription offer.

Lastly, a larger amount of development time needs to be set asides for polish and bug finding/fixing. For Shadows of Vanaheim, we were racing against a fixed deadline (which itself was a mistake), which meant that there wasn't enough time left after everything was functional to polish the content to the extent it deserves.

This is an honest assessment of how I feel this release went, but what I do want to emphasize is that we are aware of what went wrong, what players didn't like and which design goals fell short and if we do introduce another Tale of Hyboria then we will focus on correcting these mistakes.

Currently we haven't started any development on another scenario, but there are a few story ideas we have floating around, including, tracing Conan and Belit's steps in the jungles of Kush/The Black Kingdoms, venturing into the city of ghouls on the Zingaran border, delving into the depths of the under city of Messantia or raiding the abandoned desert city of Ababenzzar in Shem.

We would certainly be interested in hearing from players what areas of Hyboria they would like to be able to visit too though.

10/ the Slithering Chaos is the last dungeon in the Dragon Spine series: is it still on the table or are the two separate modes for Cetriss filling that need for a content update for everyone?

Yeah, it’s still on the cards, and I appreciate that it can be frustrating not hearing any updates on it. Slithering Chaos is still unfortunately blocked due to animation dependencies though. Yes I have seen the video which was leaked showing certain animations functional, but a few animations working for the sake of a portfolio video is not the same thing as having all animations functional in a combat environment. I would like to have this dungeon complete shortly after the dungeon finder is made available and if necessary the encounters will be redesigned to accommodate the animations which are functional as a last resort. The boss is pretty epic for this location so it is not going to be cut.

One thing worth mentioning is that the Slithering Chaos has always been designed with a slightly modified reuse of the Sepulcher of the Wyrm location. You didn’t think your actions in there were without consequence did you?

There is also a distinct possibility of several more unchained dungeons being added to our existing dungeon pool. The most obvious one here is the Onyx Chambers which will receive a complete overhaul (hence its absence from the achievement system), but this is likely to be combined with another smaller dungeon, such as Toirdealbach's Tomb, or the Crow's Nest.

/bow 

thank you CirithGorgor for taking the time to update the community on key stuff!