Ryan Dancey's page

We attended PaizoCon last weekend and during the show we presented a number of Pathfinder Online panels to the attendees. We recorded 4 of them for distribution:

The Goblinworks 2015 Annual Update

The Economics of Pathfinder Online

The Pathfinder Online Art Review

PvE and Escalations in Pathfinder Online

There's a tremendous amount of content in those panels and I'd be happy to try to answer any questions anyone may have although I may have to punt and ask that you shift some specific questions to the forums at goblinworks.com where my team can try to answer in more detail.

And if you'd like to try Pathfinder Online free for 15 days, email customer.support@goblinworks.com and I'll be happy to issue you a trial invite.

RyanD

There's no functional difference between an "RTS engine" and an "over the shoulder" engine. They effectively use the same technology and the same art pipeline.

You save some money because you can make less detailed models, but you gain a lot of costs because you have to spend a lot of time trying to make small graphics look cool, and distinct enough to be understood by the player. The only place where this really applies (both savings and cost) is in character models. The models for structures, vegetation, etc. remain about the same level of cost & complexity regardless.

No money is saved on the environment because you have to make a huge world in either scenario.

A substantial cost is added in UI and visual effects (VFX). In an RTS environment you don't get the simple feedback loop of seeing your character act and being able to respond. Instead the game needs a lot of visual indications and audio indications that the user's input has been received and is being processed. Plus in the RTS world you need to be able to group and issue group commands, set waypoints, etc. all of which requires a lot of extremely complex programming, to say nothing of the level of graphic design required.

And then in the end you are taking the risk that the so-far nonexistent RTS "MMO" market is big enough to support a game that has to iterate from an MVP to some final state nobody has ever seen before, vs. the proven "over-the-shoulder" MMO market that is 2 million people in size (or larger) and where the evolutionary roadmap from MVP to something more sophisticated is intuitively understood by most of the players - they already know what the final destination looks like and they don't have to try and imagine it.

Summary: You don't save any money, you don't use less complex tools, you don't need less talented people, and you take a huge risk that nobody understands what you're trying to do and that the market you're addressing doesn't exist.

@AvenaOats - some constructive feedback.

I think you have interesting things to say.

I am not reading them. Your posts are too long and lack pithiness. If you could condense your points to a few sentances you would have a wider audience, at least wider by one.

I am as guilty if this problem as anyone so I recognize a fellow member of the excessive verbosity tribe. A boss I once had told me that if he had to scroll to read my email, he deleted it. Changed my style to accomodate. Reccomend you consider the same.

I wanted to address the OP's original issue with crashing a lot.

If you are not on a Mac, you should not be crashing a lot. Those problems have mostly been addressed.

If you wish you can run DXDIAG.EXE and paste the output text (not an attachment) and email it to customer.support@goblinworks.com and I'd be happy to take a look and make any suggestions that seem useful.

What we really need in the short term is just a way to /mute a character and then people won't have to see offensive content while we moderate the problem. No eta though.

Players we've just posted a new video full of in-game footage of groups engaged in massively multiplayer activities.

See the video and read the blog post here!

When we go to China, the undead will have to be replaced. But it is pretty easy to imagine doing that because when we are ready to go to China we will have a huge library of monsters so not using the skeleton model will be harmless.

Not a lot to say about this. We are not responsible for deals made between third parties, and we don't issue refunds for cases like this. Buyer/Seller Beware.

I think the biggest missed opportunity here was for BWG to make an example of themselves in a positive way rather than a negative way. The negative way was to quit the game.

The positive way would have been to go to the community and say:

Here is what we want to do. Here is what happened to us. Here is what we did.

Here are our characters, and the Feats we have slotted.

How can we do better?

Where should we operate?

What tactics should we be using?

How should we respond to a similar event?

Then they could learn from their experience and get better and have more fun. Because there was a lot of learning to do for them, and they could have had more fun.

The thing that really makes me sad is that I know there are things they could have done, and I know people would have been eager to help.

The plan (eta: in 2015; more precision as we get more visibility on other tasks):

Your Settlement will have to be allied with another Settlement to use its trainers.

Your Settlement will have to have built "support" structures (which are smaller and you can have more of them than full on Training structures) for Feats that your Settlement cannot train to enable characters to use those Feats - without a support structure, use defaults back to what NPC Settlements can support. (Yes, you will need support structures for your allied trainers.)

Some Holdings will have training & support functions but they will not be as good as Settlements. Characters who are members of NPC Settlements may have Holding options that are better than NPC Settlements, but still not as good as PC Settlement membership. Holding training & support will be much more limited than Settlements.

Possible iterations (no eta and even potential to be Crowdforged):

Allowing non-aligned characters to train at your Settlement for a fee of some kind.

Allowing some Company members who are not members of your Settlement or an allied Settlement to train at your Settlement with or without a fee of some kind.

Having different levels of training available for Allies vs. Settlement members.

Players, Early Enrollment 4.2 is scheduled to deploy this morning (Wednesday 25 February) and you will need to patch your client before you will be able to play. The new patching files will become available after the server comes on-line at approximately 10:00am (Pacific).

Well it sounds like the developers are going to learn a few interesting things about unplanned interdependencies. :)

Lee says there should not have been any change to any Towers from yesterday unless someone captured them when their PVP window was open.

Players, I've posted a thread to talk about the new blog on the goblinworks.com forums!

@Dan - good question. I circulated it.

We are not allowing players to delete and re-make Destinys Twin characters. If we did it for one person we'd have to do it for everyone and suddenly that snowballs totally out of control.

You'll have the ability to change all the visual aspects of your character. We'll have some system with various paid & free options to change other things like names and races. So you'll be able to re-customize your character's visuals at some point in the future.

Oh, you mean this article where I said:

"Full disclosure: I am heading a development project for an MMORPG that will feature subscriptions and microtransactions. We’ll begin with subscriptions only, and transition to microtransactions as soon as it makes sense to do so. The game we are developing is primarily a sandbox style game and our budget assumes we spend less than $10 million before we reach positive cash-flow from operations. I was the former CMO at CCP, but left before they designed and implemented their MTX program."

Yeah, I stand by that.

We made a post to discuss some conditions that were impacting the display on the Subscription page, and how we'll handle new player activity until EE v3.0 is deployed.

Base Camps, Campfires and Small Holdings will impact Power regen. But they aren't being deployed for EE3. You are seeing the tip pf a very big iceberg.

I really don't get this complaint that the game we're making is different than the game we talked about during the Kickstarters. From my perspective, you'd have a very hard time slipping a playing card through the crack between what we discussed, and what we've built so far.

Do you have a specific issue that you think we've changed course on?

Players, it's time to publish an official policy on this topic.

It is not ok to engage in PvP in NPC Settlements. That means Kindleburn, Marchmont, Ossian's Crossing, and Rathglen. You can gank away in Rotter's Hole. :)

I'm imposing this limit because the Thornguard AI is not strong enough yet to provide adequate defenses to the NPC Settlements and the new players that are inhabiting them. Until we have added enough tech to make the Thornguard able to intercede swiftly in PvP actions in NPC Settlements, we have to have a policy against it.

If you are in an NPC Settlement and you are attacked, please note the name of the character who attacked you and email customer.support@goblinworks.com with that information.

The only exception to this rule is that it is always OK to attack any character with a red name.

Thanks for everyone's understanding.

Hey everyone - spreading the word in every way possible.

This is the last week to earn Backdated XP in the first month of Early Enrollment in Pathfinder Online. If you have an Early Enrollment account, this is a tremendous perk. Characters earn XP in realtime, so the first character created on an account in the month of January will FOREVER have the Max possible XP.

If you have Early Enrollment access, be sure you make a character to take advantage of this perk.

If you have Explorer or Open Enrollment you can upgrade your account via the goblinworks.com/shop.

If you're playing Pathfinder Online be sure to remind your friends about this perk too. After it expires, characters will start with just 1,000XP.

I said "Hey Mike?"

Mike said "huh. That's not supposed to be in there."

It's a prop from the Tech Demo.

There were apparently some miscommunications on our end regarding Guardheim.

The person who is the leader of the Guild that won this Settlement in the Land Rush has not been in contact with us and we were asked to assign someone else to lead the Settlement in that person's absence.

Our policy is not to do this. We respect the right of the people who won the Settlements in the Land Rush to decide when they're ready to start playing the game. Right now only 4-5 of them have been essentially running silent, out of 33 Settlements, so there's plenty of options for players to connect with in-game.

Until we decide that it is necessary for the health of the game to recycle unused Settlements and run a promotion to assign new leaders, we are not reassigning Settlements unless the people who control them ask us to do so.

So we have deactivated the Guardheim Settlement in the database, and Inguard is no longer the leading Company for that Settlement.

I want to stress that this was an internal communication and policy decision by Goblinworks, and that no one did anything wrong in this matter. If anyone has any questions please feel free to email me directly at ryan@goblinworks.com and I'll be happy to answer your questions.

I just want to chime in to ay that no messages were deleted for any purpose. We closed a thread as a housekeeping task, that thread had comments, once closed the comments are apparently no longer available. Nothing more. We don't consider the abilty to get 12 starter quest packs a day per account by sacrificing all XP earned by that account as an exploit. There is nothing in them that should break the economy even if thousands are harvested. I think Lee is going to change the implements to be lower-powered versions in EE3, and we are going to keep an eye on everything else and see if a problem develops.

I don't want people being attacked in NPC Settlements, and we are going to have to write some policies about that if it becomes a continuous problem.

I wanted something other than a corpse. Not only do I think that having dead bodies lying around is pretty gross, but there are some cultural sensitivities I want to respect about touching the dead. "Husks" aren't corpses.

We are going to try to reproduce some of the confitions seen in that video. At this time we don't think anything is happening other than that the game is not performing as expected in all cases. Nothing I saw in that video suggests hacks or cheating - it suggets that the programmers and the gme designers need to look carefully at some details of the movement and condition system.

If we detrmine there is an actual, reproducible bug that impacts play, we will describe it and tell players not to exploit it until we get it fixed.

We are investigating the case of a Company that leads a Settlement applying to join another Settlement. Since I am not sure what would happen in that case and it's possible that the result would be very bad, please don't do this until we determine what the outcome would be.

We determined that there were a number of client-side caches and memory structures that were not being cleared correctly when logged in to the same account twice. Rather than spending time trying to figure out those problems we blocked the ability to log in twice to the same client.

To be very clear: We are not in the process of re-assigning Settlements.

I was informed today that as of EE2, there will be a change.

All Settlements, PC and NPC, will have the same basic training capability sans Towers.

Towers will increment that ability for PC Settlements.

Discussion thread and link to the new blog!

If you logged in for the first time on the last day of the first month, you'd get backdated XP to the start of Early Enrollment, and your first month of game time would expire 30 days after your first login. So yes, if you time it right, you could get effectively 2 months -1 day of XP for 1 month's game time.

Oh, we're not going to touch this with an 11' pole. :) You damn dirty apes. :)

Please don't advise new players to skip the tutorials. Playing the tutorials will help new players learn how the game works. Don't assume that it's all perfectly clear to all players. We need to emphasize to new players that they need to use the Tutorials and the New Player Guide to understand the game. That will help us grow the community of players and help new players find their way quickly. Thanks!

We have no desire to see people unable to participate in their Settlement and if there people having that problem the best recourse is to email customer.support@goblinworks.com.

"why do guards attack the people from the lands they guard?"

1: They work for Thornkeep, not you. Thornkeep wants Crusaders to move through the area with minimum problems. They think a flow of Crusaders is the root of their economic engine. The Thornguard don't like low rep people, because they might cause problems for Crusaders, regardless of where they sleep at night. :)

2: There is a real risk of sudden and painful disruption if a faction splits off from the rest of the group and turns on their former comrades before they can be removed from the institutional infrastructure. The risk includes mass rage-quits from the game and a sudden loss of business for Goblinworks. Since we don't have the tech yet to let you choose your own level of risk, we want to ensure that until you do, the Thornguard don't descriminate between targets based on Company or Settlement affiliation.

Of course we want to build a realy robust and complex security model with all sorts of dials and sliders for you all to fiddle with seeking the "perfect" mixture of risk and security. It is just a matter if time, not intent.

btw: I would say the latter part of this thread is "Crowdforging for real". :)

Based on the anticipated workload that I see for the team over the rest of Q1 it is unlikely that we'd invest time in building tech for what should be a feature that gets removed relatively quickly. I would rather attack this problem with GM commands and GM actions than have the team work on code or graphics or mechanics for what should be a very short-term problem.

The NPCs Settlements need to have a functioning economy for starter gear (at least). If new players hit the game, try to play, can't make progress, and quit from frustration, they'll never migrate to PC Settlements.

We are having some lengthy conversations this morning about helping to get the economy bootstrapped in the NPC Settlements.... :)

That's not how money works. It doesn't have value because you might spend it on something. It has value because someone will give you something in exchange for it.

Money is a proxy for barter. Instead of barter which is terribly inefficient and doesn't have a good signalling mechansim, currency means that you can exchange your labor for a unit of account that is flexible, and exchange the unit of accont for whatever it is you want to buy and seller can quickly adjust the terms of the sale based on a clearing price.

The economy did not function in Alpha because there was no persistence and therefore no value in anything.

The economy will function now that there is a real value in people's labor. There are people in Help every day asking where to go and buy stuff. We will get the auction house tuned up and that will help people use it, and once they start to use it it will kick the coin economy into gear.

Seems the Feat advancement sheets have been changed again since my last build of this character. Not surprising. Every time I take my eye off this stuff it gets changed. :)

I quickly rebuilt my spreadsheet but I (obviously) didn't check this in game. If I get time next week I'll build this in-game to verify.

Base Attack Bonus 3
Bow Weapon Proficiency
Clustered Shots 3
Deadly Aim 3
Distant Shot 3
Distracting Shot 3
Escape 1
Hit Points 6
Light Blade Weapon Proficiency 1
Light Melee Attack Bonus 2
Multi-Shot 3
Perception 5
Point Blank Shot 3
Power 8
Precise Shot 3
Quick Shot 3
Ranged Attack Bonus 3
Reflex Bonus 4
Rogue Kit Implement Proficiency 1
Running Shot 3
Snap Shot 3
Stealth 8
Swashbuckler 1
Swashbuckler 2
Thwack 1
Toughness 1

As computed that's 18.7 days of XP. Dex bonus of 1.029.

No attacks but Shortbow Feats.

I don't think that having a substantial number of days pass between earning Role ranks is important, no. In fact, the time is going to get longer and longer the more Ranks you pursue. It isn't a problem because you're getting to increase a large number of Feats during that period - you're not just sitting there doing nothing.

We have been talking a lot about how to formalize some aspects of the Crowdforging process. What we really want is a very widespread participation in such tools so that the input is not just coming from a segment of the player population.

One thing we are pretty sure we're going to attempt is putting survey questions on the login screen. Every player will therefore see them and have a chance to respond and since there's nothing else to do but wait, we think a lot of folks will read and vote. You'd only see each question once so you couldn't disproportionately weight the results by logging in a bunch.

Figuring out exactly what kinds of questions go into that process will also need some work. We like Ideascale as a way to harvest good questions but we also have a lot of either/or tradeoff questions of our own that we need to formulate.

We also have been talking about how we're going to build a product backlog - basically the list of things that we could work on. That is harder than it sounds because some things are bug fixes, some things are polish to existing features, some things are iterations on existing features, some things are new content for existing features, some things are all new features. For example if we put "Dungeons" on the same list as "Fix the duration of the condition icons on the combat UI" the difference in scope between those things is so great that they're really incomparable.

It is also hard to get Crowdforger feedback on technical matters. We can't educate the community enough about MMO project workloads and our unique toolchain to enable them to give us usable feedback about a lot of the "under the hood" things that we're working on that optimize and improve the game. Without sending thousands of people to Goblinworks University we cannot Crowdforge those kinds of tasks. But we have to do those tasks and they have either/or impacts on the kinds of things we can Crowdforge so we need to figure out how to give some visibility to the community about them.

Lastly we have a very broad development plan that we want to stick to until we convince ourselves that it's the wrong plan. That is the plan that takes us from where we are right now to the point of having fully developed Settlements and territorial warfare. A deviation from that very broad plan would require us to rethink literally everything we're doing. One of our tasks in the 1st quarter of 2015 is to try and provide some visibility to the community on that broad plan so people have a sense of what we're trying to build. That will help prune ideas that are good, but out of scope for the game we're trying to build.

We kept an eye on these shenanigans. It was pretty awesome to see all the interaction and the huge number of involved characters - especially if you were at the FUBAR'd stress tests in November. The vast improvement in the server over the past 6 weeks is due to some herculean efforts by our staff - they went waaaaaay beyond the call. But it really seemed like their worked paid off.

We're taking lots of notes and are really interested in your feedback. This is how the game gets Crowdforged! Real players in the real game live, without guardrails. :)

Foci

Acoyte's Battle Focus:
Tier 1 Battle Focus; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Battle (+1), Blessed (+2), War (+3)

Disciple's Battle Focus
Tier 2 Battle Focus; grants keywords at all upgrades: Masterwork; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Battle (+1), Blessed (+2), War (+3)

Priest's Battle Focus
Tier 3 Battle Focus; grants keywords at all upgrades: Avatar, Masterwork; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Battle (+1), Blessed (+2), War (+3)

Acolyte's Elemental Focus
Tier 1 Elemental Focus; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Elemental (+1), Blessed (+2), Planar (+3)

Disciple's Elemental Focus
Tier 2 Elemental Focus; grants keywords at all upgrades: Masterwork; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Elemental (+1), Blessed (+2), Planar (+3)

Priest's Elemental Focus
Tier 3 Elemental Focus; grants keywords at all upgrades: Avatar, Masterwork; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Elemental (+1), Blessed (+2), Planar (+3)

Acolyte's Occult Focus
Tier 1 Occult Focus; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Occult (+1), Blessed (+2), Enigmatic (+3)

Disciple's Occult Focus
Tier 2 Occult Focus; grants keywords at all upgrades: Masterwork; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Occult (+1), Blessed (+2), Enigmatic (+3)

Priest's Occult Focus
Tier 3 Occult Focus; grants keywords at all upgrades: Avatar, Masterwork; grants keywords based on upgrade: Divine (+0), Occult (+1), Blessed (+2), Enigmatic (+3)

Orisons

Strength Surge
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Agile Feet
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Dispelling Touch
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Bleeding Touch
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Battle Rage
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Destructive Smite
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Razing Smite
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Resistance
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Fire Bolt
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Guidance
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Icicle
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Virtue
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Bless
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Holy Lance
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Lightning Arc
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Minor Cure
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Augur
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Defending Weapon
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Dazing Touch
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Doom
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Inspiring Word
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Liberation
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Bane
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Touch of Darkness
Keywords: Divine/Occult/Blessed/Masterwork/Enigmatic/Avatar, Artifact

Agile Feet
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Resistance
Keywords: Divine/Battle/Blessed/Masterwork/War/Avatar, Artifact

Virtue
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Minor Cure
Keywords: Divine/Elemental/Blessed/Masterwork/Planar/Avatar, Artifact

Just FYI - disconnecting from the internet does not log you out automatically. There is supposed to be a cooldown timer before the server disconnects you but it's not instantaneous. We don't want people intentionally disconnecting to avoid PVP.

There's a known bug that causes a character to remain logged in permanently if you attempt to log in another character on the same account while a previous character is already logged in.

So if you disconnect, then log in again with a different character before the system disconnects you, your first character is going to sit in game vulnerable to whatever happens until you log back in to that character, or daily downtime, whichever comes first.

Yes

We are going to keep an eye on them, and if there's no activity we will recycle them and put them into a future promotion.

With friends and rivals it really shines, even in this basic state. I have yet to hear a single player say the game is not fun since EE began.

Holy smokes that makes me feel awesome!