Goblin Squad Member
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I think I got all the questions and answers laid out in the right order. Please let me know as quickly as possible if you notice something that needs to be fixed.
Here's the link to the original site: Pathfinder Online Q&A With Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey.
Ryan,
Question 1: Can you give us a run down on the venture company/chartered company/party structure?
Question 2: Do you expect chartered/venture companies to be available at the start of EE?
Question 3: What is the current GW thinking on divine powers and how they will be active in PFO? In particular, what is the current lore behind the Marks of Pharasma (if you can speak to that at this time)?
Question 4: Do you have a name for the first NPC settlement at the start of EE?
Question 5: How soon will Inns appear in EE?
Will CC's Storage will be available for EE?
@Harad Navar:
1: Parties are ad hoc groups that form for temporary objectives. Venture Companies are persistent entities that have a history and likely will have attributes like a reputation score, possibly a logo or sigil, and probably the ability to send and receive communication (mail).
2: I honestly don't know if they'll be ready for Day One of Early Enrollment. They'll certainly be implemented before Open Enrollment begins.
3: We have not yet talked much about how we'll weave the lore of the Golarian pantheon into our game, but we will closer to the start of play.
4: No.
5: There's a good chance there will be inns on the first day of Early Enrollment.
6: Too soon to say.
RyanD
Hi Ryan -
1. What are you most excited about, concerning making Pathfinder Online?
2. Why was making a game in the risky MMORPG genre your first choice?
&
3. Will Goblins be a playable race or at least a "limited playable" race in some way, ever?
Thanks for the chance to ask some question.
@MumboJumbo:
1. I love creating games and building successful communities. I find it to be the rewarding intersection of many of my largest interests.
2: I have been interested in working in the MMO field for a very long time. When I was hired at CCP, that was a huge opportunity to make the leap from the tabletop to the digital realm, and CCP is at the very cutting edge of where digital entertainment is going.
CCP believes, and I believe, that we are at the start of a new hundred-year industry. It is like being in Hollywood in the early years of the 20th Century. The companies that succeeded then are still here today, huge global entertainment power-houses like Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Disney, Warner Bros., etc. I am confident that history is going to repeat itself, and the companies that are successful at creating long term, self-sustaining virtual worlds will drive a new era of similar development.
Believing that, working on MMOs is the most exciting thing I can imagine doing, so that's why I do it. :)
3: I think yes almost certainly. When, unknown. How, unknown.
I am very excited about the pathfinder online project and have been following for some time now. In view of the fact that it is a sandbox, my question is very simple:
In what situations will instancing be used, if at all?Thanks alot Ryan!
@superconductin:
I can't really say. There are times when instancing is likely going to be the right solution to a problem, and times when it won't. A lot of that will be driven by how we Crowdforge various features into the game. Instancing is a load-balancing technique, and a population density management tool. When we need them, instancing will be one of the ways we do that.
Can a CE low rep player get high level training from a high rep settlement if he/she can convince the settlement or buy them off?
@Amsi
The design of the game punishes you for acting in anti-social ways purely to the detriment of the community. Those kinds of actions push your character towards Chaotic Evil. Chaotic Evil characters will find that the Settlements that they can access tend to have lower quality and less powerful character development options and facilities.
If you could "talk your way" out of that problem, then people would just play CE characters without making meaningful choices, and that system would cease to be useful.
So no.
I missed the original kickstarter. Are there any options at this time through PayPal to become a backer? Thanks
We are going to have an ongoing crowdfunding mechanism using Paizo's website. The work to enable that is ongoing, but won't be done until sometime after GenCon. When it's ready, you'll be able to back the project much like you could on Kickstarter, except that some of the Rewards will have changed, some will be missing, and we'll take your payment immediately instead of waiting for some timer to end.
PayPal may be a trickier problem. PayPal requires that the good or service paid for is transmitted to the buyer in a relatively short period of time. While I know that many people are taking PayPal for crowdfunded projects, we're in a bit of a bind because Paizo does a huge business with PayPal and we cannot jeopardize their ability to use it by breaking a PayPal rule for Goblinworks. Needless to say, this is something we're working on figuring out.
1. Is there anything you can tell us about item storage, particularly in terms of gathering/crafting structures and settlements?
Follow up:
Do you intend for directly raiding player settlements and gathering camps to be profitable?
2. Will there be a system similar to the "Class Skills" of Pathfinder in PFO?
3. Will there be a system similar to the "traits" found in the Pathfinder table-top?
@AndiusMeuridia
1: There will be storage. :)
It will almost certainly work like storage does in EVE Online. It will be local to some in-game location, and to access it you'll have to go to that location. It will likely have some kind of access control system so you can allow multiple people or groups different levels of access to it.
We do expect people to raid harvesting operations to steal the fruits of others labor. And to intercept those fruits when being transported from point to point.
It's less clear what we'll do about items in storage in permanent structures like Settlements, Forts, Watchtowers, Inns and Hideouts. There are so many downsides to allowing someone to "steal" from those kinds of storage locations that I suspect we'll not try to implement that kind of security risk. But there are certainly thematic and roleplaying upsides to the idea of burglars so I can't rule it out as an impossibility.
2 & 3: We have a whole Dev Blog about how we're implementing Skills, Attributes and Roles (similar to, but not identical to, Classes) in Pathfinder Online. You can read it here: Your Pathfinder Online Character
RyanD
Few more.
1- I am curious about the world itself and how changeable it will be. I do know that player-created structures can be vulnerable. Basically how adaptable, reactive, moldable, destructable will the world be?
2- Could you also please shed some light about the NPC interaction and how that will be (free-form dialogue or select a choice from options?)
3- In terms of questing, I have always been a fan of leaving things mysterious, in other words not making the next task or objective obvious, and allowing the player to discover things on his/her own. What system will PFO have?
Thanks again, appreciate it!
@ superconductin:
Before I answer I should provide some background on our game development strategy.
We are committed to a process of long term, continuous incremental improvement. So the meta-rule for Pathfinder Online is that everything starts very simple, and then over time, becomes more complex. The rate of that complexification, and the directions it takes will be a factor of Crowdforging - the tightly coupled feedback and decision input made by the community in conjunction with the developers. So it is literally impossible to say with precision what when and how a given system will be iterated into any given configuration.
1: The initial system will be a standard building which will appear in a standard location when you construct it. Over time, we see possibilities for user-selected options, more dynamic locations, and modular unit assemblies. But not for a long while.
2: As little as possible. We want the focus to be on players interacting with players. So NPCs will likely be vending machines, not characters. To the extent that and NPC is character it will likely appear more in background lore than in an interactive state. The fewer dialog trees the better, IMO.
3: Formal quests where an NPC tells you to go do something for some reward will be modeled on the Agents of EVE Online. There will be a short list of mad-lib style assignments you can request and get paid for competing. The point of those things is to act as a faucet to allow us to inject Coin and potentially resources into the game, and potentially to drive some over-arching narrative plotlines.
We expect that players will be requesting other players to do all sorts of things for player-driven reasons, and those activities will be more rich and more interesting than anything we could design a repeatable script to do.
RyanD
Ryan, what will Early Enrollment look like in regards to the following...
Will there be actual settlements or just placeholders?
Is settlement warfare still the gate of transition from EE to OE?
What mechanics (besides combat) are expected to be functional when EE begins?
In the latest blog, Little Black Backpack, there was a great deal of information that made the crafting crowd happy.
What will crafting look like in early enrollment?
If the turn-over rate for items in the economy is too slow or too fast, how soon can we expect you, the developers, to manipulate the system in EE?
How often can we expect these revisions to take place?
How far into EE can we expect to test out things like Siege Warfare mechanics, caravans, formation combat?
Is there any chance we can get an "official but subject to change" map similar to the unofficial ones our friend Harad Navar continuously updates? (We still love you Harad!)
As always, Ryan, we appreciate you taking time to appease the masses, hopefully we aren't too hard on you!-Areks
-Thane Blade of Pax Aeternum
@Areks-PaxAeternum:
Some background for readers perhaps not as current on the plans as others.
Early Enrollment is our term for when we begin monetizing the game. It will begin in the 3rd Quarter of 2014. Early Enrollment is designed to enable us to commence play with a very small, very constrained game environment, and for the community to help prioritize and select features for implementation and iteration as they engage with the game. In order to avoid putting a million players into a desert of content, we are going to cap the number of new player accounts that can be created each month during Early Enrollment to 4,500 (or so), which, given expected attrition rates, will allow us to slowly grow the player population in a manner consistent with our ability to deploy new content (new territory, new character options, new monsters, magic items, spells, and character abilities, etc.)Settlements in Early Enrollment:
There will not be player-created Settlements when Early Enrollment begins. Sometime during Early Enrollment, there will be Settlements controlled by players via the Guild Rush Leaderboard (a promotion we started during the Kickstarter, and will expand on in much more detail sometime next year). The point where we have enough systems implemented, and a robust enough economy, and a large enough player population to enable us to allow territorial control will be the point where player-created Settlements will enter the game. This will also likely mark the transition from Early Enrollment to Open Enrollment, where we remove the artificial limits on the rate new accounts can be created.
There will be some kind of civilized area in the game when Early Enrollment begins. It will not be one of the 3 major NPC Settlements we've described for the Crusader Road - it will be more like a neutral trading fort in the wilderness where everyone keeps a wary eye on each other, and a hand on their daggers. Throughout Early Enrollment we'll be adding more territory and more complex constructions, and that includes potentially reaching one or more of the three big NPC Settlements.Game Mechanics in Early Enrollment:
You'll be able to create a character. That character will gain XP in realtime and apply them to buy skills. You'll be able to earn "merit badges" (proof of doing something meaningful in the game), and the combination of XP, merit badges and the skill system will enable you to unlock a variety of character abilities.
There will be a lightweight economy consisting of some harvestable resources, some intermediate components crafted from those resources, and some finished goods crafted from those components.
There will be some monsters to fight, and some reasons to fight them, and some worthwhile loot to receive when you kill them.
There will be a combat system that will give you some options as to what to do when so that your player skill will have an effect on the outcome of a combat. You'll be able to choose targets, choose actions, and to move around in combat. There will be consumables used in combat, and some system for replenishing them.
There will be sufficient territory so that players will have a sense of being "out there, alone in the wilderness" if they choose, or "in the thick of it, surrounded by other characters" if they choose that.Economic Activity:
It's crucial to the entire game. It's more crucial than the monsters. So we'll be laser focused on it, paying attention to it every day, and tweaking it continuously as a part of Crowdforging.Complex Game Sysetms
I suspect that we will not begin testing Mass Combat until close to the end of Early Enrollment, sometime in 2015. But bits and pieces of it may come into the game earlier even if the ability to fight as an army against another army is not ready. Some of the base mechanics, like forming a unit and acting with cohesion have applications beyond siege warfare.
Caravans and mass transport of goods is going to be something I expect will be implemented in the mid-term of Early Enrollment. People are going to get tired of making mule characters very quickly and I expect the Crowdforging consensus will be to move on caravan mechanics quickly.The Map
Yes. When, I don't know, but we are gong to do that.
RyanD
Hi Ryan, I have two fairly simple questions:
1. Will there be a fast travel method in game such as the "recall" and "gate travel" spell in Ultima Online? If so will these abilities be available to all players?
2. Can any player regardless of class/skill wear any type of armor/weapon? If so what will be the penalties say a Wizard decides to equip a full set of heavy armor?
@Canan -
We have several ideas for Fast Travel, and we haven't decided which to implement yet. We need to ensure that people are not just teleporting all over the map; we want you to have to physically travel from point to point. But we also understand the tedium of doing that over and over and over again, especially in safe areas where there is little risk of ambush. So there are conflicting game design needs that we need to balance.
No, I do not think any character regardless of ability will be able to equip and use any item. You will probably need to have some character ability to unlock the option to use most gear. And because of our Keyword system, even if you can equip a given piece of gear, you may not be able to get maximum use out of it unless you have the requisite character abilities that enable the use of those keywords.
Thanks Ryan.
How can I raise my reputation back up if it gets real low if I decide to vo cleanse the world of evil doers?
@Amsi:
The issue of reputation and alignment "recovery" is a big one. There are obvious paths that lead to easily abusable/exploitable systems, and we need to avoid them. My best guess at this point is that it will be a combination of realtime passing, plus some in-game activities that must be completed, plus potentially some kind of ritual conducted by characters with divine aspects to them. But I'm just guessing.
Thanks for the answers, Ryan.
1. Speaking of crowdfunding, could you elaborate any more on crowdforging and the possible ways or forms you see this taking and any classic egs that might really excite players about this process you have come up with?
2. I'm massively impressed with Goblin Works design blogs posted WEEKLY. How much of this do you think you'll be able to fit into Early Enrollment and when do you think you'll have implemented 100% of all the design ideas by, if things go successfully, seeing as it's quite ambitious in it's vision and detail?
3. What's the biggest challenge with getting out the message about this game you can foresee or already have witnessed, so far?
@MumboJumbo:
Crowdforging will have a bunch of different processes.
Sometimes we'll come to the community and say "we can do A, B or C. The votes of the community will determine what we work on next".
Sometimes we'll present the community with a list of things and say "here's what we're going to work on in the next increment. Prioritize these things from want it first to want it last" and the community's input will guide the planned prioritization.
We will likely have some form of player council like the EVE Online Council of Stellar Management that will be a representative body for the players to channel their suggestions and feedback through that will meet with the developers regularly and be a conduit for those ideas.
Over time we'll probably add all sorts of other ways for people to make their ideas known and their opinions felt.
In terms of the stuff we're writing about in the blogs I am sure that there are parts we'll still be waiting to begin implementation of 5 years from now or longer. Having a grand vision is a way of ensuring that we give ourselves motivation to continue to strive to make the game bigger, better, and more compelling.
The biggest challenge we are going to have is overcoming the institutional knowledge of the MMO community that small games from first time publishers typically fail, and getting people to invest in our ideas for how we can overcome the traps that have caught so many of our peers. And the best way we know of to achieve that is to have as close, open and transparent a dialog with the community as we can, so that everyone sees what we're doing, how, why, and when. Keeping people's expectations framed realistically is a big part of that.
RyanD
1. What are the biggest technical challenges to making Pathfinder Online; the biggest design challenges and the biggest world-building challenges (art, lore, graphics and character customization etc) and biggest marketing challenges? What sort of player would really like Pathfinder Online?
2. If you're really up for a challenge: What's your definition of a sandbox mmorpg? (I'm not sure if that qualifies as a joke question tbh!).
@MumboJumbo:
The biggest challenge we have is scalability. We know that one trap a lot of MMOs fall into is that they fail to scale. When you put 100 players in a space, they lag out or crash. When you run 100,000 transactions through the market, the database queries grind to a halt. When you try to manage thousands of persistent connections, the game can't handle the load and people can't log in. When you have hundreds of people simultaneously creating accounts, the billing system fails. When you deploy a patch, the host for the new code is overwhelmed and can't keep up with demand, etc.
These are the known problems. And we'll deal with them as best we can. The scary things are the unknown problems that will be unique to Pathfinder Online, the scalability issues we won't find until we implement a system and it fails spectacularly. The knowledge that there will be such problems is one reason we're taking the "velvet rope" approach to Early Enrollment.
There's really no world building challenges. The Golarion campaign setting is awesome. We have a team of great people on staff who love creating stories and have decades of experience doing that so I have no worries about our ability to fill the world with cool stuff.
The marketing challenge begins with overcoming player skepticism as I already addressed. By Open Enrollment we'll have the same challenge EVE Online has: generating enough new player account creations monthly to offset churn and show growth.
Here is my definition of a sandbox MMO:
The primary mode of the game is players meaningfully interacting with other players in a persistent environment where their actions have a lasting and visible effect on the experience of the other players of the game.
First and foremost Ryan I would like to say thank you for the project ya'll have undertaken. While I never really played tabletop I grew up on D&D comp games like Pool of Radiance, Champions of Krynn,and Curse of the Azure Bonds back in the 8bit color graphic glory. After Neverwinter's utter disappointment I am finding PFO more and more intriguing and might be the MMO I've been waiting for. The more I read of your blogs, an in progress task, the more I am loving that ya'll envision. I just hope ya'll can pull it off.
My questions:
1. For those who didn't back PFO will we have a chance in the near future and also will there be chances to get into EE?
1a. If yes, is there an ETA of said opportunity?
2. PFO takes a completely different take on a Pathfinder/D&D iteration into the digital gaming world and seems to be more inline with a fantasy style EVE MMO than a Pathfinder/D&D MMO. For those like me who love the D&D IP who are frustrated with the limitations and disappointment with DDO and Neverwitner due to limitations and who never cared too much for PvP centric games due to ganking and frustration of losing everything, what would you say to em? People who want to play as their battle cleric, or beserking barbarian, or scholary mage who want the freedom of exploration with no boundries.
3. What use will alts play in PFO? Should we expect similar function as in EVE?
4. Horses.... will there be complexity and usefulness outside just getting from point A to polint B, something besides A. Buy Mount, B. Buy mount training, C. Use said mount. Will there be a variety each has it's pros n cons, will there be skills associated with mounts? Will we be able to harvest, train, sell mounts? Am a horse lover n rider so this is a special place in my heart.
5. Will there be uber elite gear that one can face roll through everything like WoW's raid gear where any non-idiot will thread in order to prevent loss like a +5 Vorpal longsword or something where one will not leave home without it or will we see a more consumable methodology of gear will be rountinely needing replacement or loss similar to EVE where players craft and supply the majority of gear?
6. Will there safeguards to prevent spying? In EVE there is a code one typically provides when applying to a corp so a background check can be done. With games like EVE one always has to be suspicous of any new comer and numerous incidents like the recent super carrier loss occur. Will tools be available to spot potential spies who rely vital info to a groups enemy?
Well guess that's it for now. More to follow likely.
@furbans:
1: Yes, you'll be able to back the project prior to Early Enrollment. One of my earlier responses in this thread covers that topic.
2: Pathfinder Online is not a single-player or small-group experience. The center of the game world is "my shared community" and the bigger that community is, the more "powerful" you will be in the game. Working within that framework you will have a lot of options to play characters that are similar to, or at your option very different from the characters on the tabletop world. But at every stage, you'll be meaningfully interacting with other human beings and some of those interactions will involve conflict and combat not of your choosing. Some folks love the idea of that kind of game and some don't, and I don't judge either as being right or wrong.
3: Yes, I think there will be oodles of Alts. Its an inescapable function of the fact that it is impossible to assert the link between a character and any given human.
4: As with all systems, mounts will start simple and then become more complex over time. There's a nearly infinite fractal space that can be explored by Crowdforging what you do with mounts and we'll have to wait and see if that is something the community wants to do.
5: No there will be no "I win" gear. There will be high-end gear that will be better than low end gear, and there will be highly trained and accomplished characters who can use it to great effect. But our goal is a flat enough power curve where a mob of low level, moderately equipped characters could beat a highly evolved, expensively equipped opponent.
6: Way too early to tell. I'm unclear how well EVE's security system actually works. Most of the large Alliances have moved beyond it, from what I can tell, because people who want to be spies create alt accounts on alt IP addresses from obfuscated geographical locations and can forge/duplicate the documents needed to establish the bona fides of their fake personas.
RyanD
Ryan,
Could you talk a little bit about how you see the balance between individual combat power vs. leadership/combat multipliers? I'm very interested in what our options are for unit leadership in Mass Combat, so what might be some of the trade-offs between those roles might be?
-Mbando
@wmmarcellino:
We haven't talked a lot about mass combat yet because most of that design is still in the most basic concepting stage.
What we want is a mechanic where you form into a unit, and if everyone in the unit is acting coherently, the unit is vastly more powerful and more protected than the same group of characters just standing around acting individually. But we also don't want characters forced into those units in order to do many of the common pursuits in the game; you should not have to be in an army to go down a hole and fight orcs to get their stuff and power up.
Within that basic outline is the implication of officers and leadership, and the ability to control and command units of units, siege weapons, special forces, healers, and exotic things like giants, elementals and dragons. The how and when of such things will be a factor of the community's desires as we Crowdforge.
RyanD
Will settlement territory (claimed hexes other than the ones surrounding the settlement) mesh with the others owned by settlements in the same kingdom?
And will we have to place a watchtower or fortress in every hex we wish to claim or will there be a seperate claiming system in place for settlements to claim more hexes?
@Areks-PaxAeternum:
A kingdom is a social structure, not a physical structure. Settlements will bind themselves together in many different ways. Sometimes they'll be in close physical proximity and sometimes they won't.
There will be a mechanism to assert control over a hex, and that mechanism will almost certainly involve structures, and defense of same. Exact mechanics are still being debated.
Some of mmorpg-players biggest concerns recently and specifically, have to do with the changes in monetization methods of online games and the rise of F2P in mmorpgs with a cash shop, which Pathfinder Online will also have for eg Goblin Works blog:
Can you say with complete confidence that Pathfinder Online will avoid P2W in eg convenience goods or any other aspects of negative impact of monetization on the game experience for players aka "Coercive Monetization"?You'll use Skymetal Bits to purchase four kinds of things:
Enhancements to your account: Things like having multiple characters, paying for skill training, and other premium services
Convenience consumables: Things that your characters might want to use in–game in lieu of relying on always having specialist characters with you while you adventure, or as a way to recover from an encounter that goes horribly awry
I am often asked about the monetization of the game. Here's what I tell people.
Our goal is to earn money from everyone who is playing the game regularly. And we think the best way to do that is a combination of an ala carte microtransaction system, and an all-you-can-eat buffet subscription. Sometimes people with subscriptions will engage in microtransaction purchases as well.
Our cash store is going to be built around the idea that you mostly pay for experiences; bling for your character, mounts and structures, or access to prepackaged content of a more "theme park" nature. We'll provide some convenience items as well because it's foolish not to do so. And there will be stuff in the cash store for people who have a lot of money and want to give it to us that the average player won't be able or willing to afford.
What we are not going to do is create a system where failure to purchase certain things means that you'll be crippled or meaningfully less effective than the average subscriber. If you choose to use microtransactions exclusively, and you spend less than the equivalent of a monthly subscription, you will be less powerful than the average subscriber. But if you're a subscriber, or someone spending about as much money as a subscriber, you will not feel disempowered vs. those who are willing to pour money into the cash shop. They will just have cooler hats and mounts with more sparkle.
RyanD
Will there be contracts in EE?
@Areks-PaxAeternum: There almost have to be contracts in Early Enrollment, and very early in Early Enrollment. If we fail to implement a contract system, players will create one themselves ad hoc and then we'll be faced with trying to manage a game system beyond our control and that would suck.
1. If questing is supposed to look like missions from EVE where will the quest givers be found?
2. Will players owned settlements be able to have quest givers from friendly factions?
-Andius Meuridiar, Grand Master of The Empyrean Order
@AndiusMeuridiar:
The base case is you go to an NPC controlled structure and find someone with a "!" over their heads.
Could those people appear in a player-controlled structure? Yes, of course they could. There's a part of the Inn system we promised the Kickstarter backers that implies a friendly NPC resident ("Norm!").
Could those NPCs be scripted, player-controlled state machines with variable dialog trees, variable multi-part, branched, persistent questing trees? Yes, of course. Will they? Only Crowdforging will tell.
1. In the PvE blog it was mentioned wandering monsters of the likes of dragons or demonic demons and how the community will need to band together to take down. Will there be a system to prevent a zerging tactic or will the stats of the mob remain static. With no fast travel I suppose that will prevent a zerging tactic from ever happening or the liklihood very small. Will the number of people taking down a boss like mob ever affect the mob's stats, like how GW2 has a scaling mechanic based in active participants?
2. Will quests delve into the lore at all? In EVE the agent system was extremely bland and too much there was a exact same mission spread across the universe. Will there be stories at all in these quests or will these story like quests be restricted to modules? Can you ellaborate on the modules that was mentioned in one of the blogs?
3. Can you provide details on the game's music? Will their be pieces posted for you followers to listen to, who is creating the music, what quality can we expect? And if you are making a quality music can you please make a jukebox feature like in EVE?
4. Will the game be a tab targeting or aim style soft targeting combat?
@furbans:
There will be wandering monsters that a solo player or a small group can overcome and they will be relatively common. And there will be substantial, really powerful creatures that occasionally threaten a hex that will require a lot of characters to overcome. The exact mechanics of the latter are only the most hazy of concepts right now.
We are not going to spend time or money on much development of narrative stories told through quests. So they'll be bland. It's very possible that over the very long run, you'll see us do some storytelling and some overarching narrative development, but that's a back-burner project compared to the need to get systems implemented and iterated as fast as possible.
We haven't done any work on music yet. It will be one of the last things we work on prior to Early Enrollment.
You'll use tab targeting or something similar.
RyanD
I really appreciate the answers, Ryan. A couple of last questions:
1. The other major problem or concern in mmorpgs is the quality of the community and the player experience as a consequence. Because Pathfinder Online will incorporate PvP openly, to enhance gameplay (risk/reward) and combat (skill & teamwork), how do you square that circle of players being able to enjoy better gameplay as well as a better social experience?
2. Is the Pit Fighter Tool still due for late 2013?
3. Finally, what are some of your personal favourite game systems, of any kind, mmorpgs and otherwise?
@MumboJumbo:
The community is the key to the whole venture. If it is allowed to become toxic, we'll be sunk. So protecting the integrity of the community is key to our long term plans.
Against that objective comes the anonymous a#%@!%@s of teh interwebz. Can we successfully ward our community from their misbehavior? I think we can. Our approach is multi-layered: game mechanics, game masters, community managers, and of course, our selective enforcement power to separate individuals from the game and the community if they prove to be unwilling or unable to be good citizens. There is no single magic bullet. All of these things must be deployed in parallel and in a mixture and matrix to fight the barbarians at our gates.
The Community will be its own best defense. If we develop standards of behavior generally intolerant of a~$~@!&rly, the number of such will be constrained.
TBH I have not focused much on the Pit Fighter tool; I suspect we'll have to update and revisit that plan before the end of the year.
Ryan's Personal Game System Favorites:
I am a dedicated poker player. So I know from a#!!~%~s. But there's a lot of knowledge in the poker world about how to run highly competitive, very conflict-prone events in ways that keep the level of misbehavior to a minimum, and so I want to learn from that. Poker itself is one of the richest, most compelling game experiences ever and demonstrates that you can get nearly infinite replayability from a very small selection of components and systems if you harness the human element to the game at a fundamental level.
I really liked the idea in City of Heroes that you could Sidekick a lower-level character to be an effective and useful add-on to a group of higher level characters.
I'm playing a lot of League of Legends and I appreciate the depth of character archetypes they've been able to create from some simple game mechanics and gear selection.
The way that WoW teaches you how to use its UI and understand its basic game systems is brilliant. The first 20 levels of the Draenei race in WoW are a master class tutorial on how to teach someone how to play an MMO without making them feel like they're reading a manual.
I am learning to play the guitar with Ubisoft's Rocksmith, which is a "real guitar" version of Guitar Hero. I was entranced with Guitar Hero the first time I saw it and immediately recognized its potential. Another game that melted user interface with clever mechanics to make something very engaging from very simple bits. Doing it with a real guitar is infinitely more satisfying, but I don't know if I would have attempted it without mastering Guitar Hero first.
The quest log of Warhammer Online is an aspirational-level goal for Pathfinder Online. I'd love to get to something that rich and useful someday.
Public quests from Warhammer, Rift and Guild Wars 2, plus Incursions from EVE are definitively better ways to engage a lot of people in a shared world in a common goal than anything that came before. That's why they're proliferating.
The first time I rode down into Mexico in Red Dead Redemption, with the soundtrack rising to a heroic creshendo was one of the greatest moments I've ever experienced in a video game. At the end of that game, tracking down my father's killer and murdering him in cold blood was another.
I could probably write a book on what I like about tabletop RPGs, especially D&D / Pathfinder. And I liked Magic: The Gathering so much I ended up doing my own CCG (Legend of the Five Rings) and then working on six more CCGs before I left that field. Way too much for this format. :)
RyanD
Ok folks, I think that's enough Q&A for one day. :) Thanks for dropping by and asking so many great questions! If you asked something and didn't get a reply, please ping me directly (ryan.dancey@goblinworks.com) and I'll be happy to answer if I can!
Thanks to MMORPG for hosting, and let's keep this dialog going, either here or on the Paizo.com Pathfinder Online forums!
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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Some things that stick out:
- In some way, at some point, Goblins will be a playable Race.
- Early Enrollment will not include any of the 3 NPC Settlements, but will instead be in something like a neutral trading fort in the wilderness.
- I want to be on the player council :)
- It sounds like the Pit Fighter tool might not be available "in Fall of 2013" after all :(
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Goblin Squad Member
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Early Enrollment will not include any of the 3 NPC Settlements, but will instead be in something like a neutral trading fort in the wilderness.
I'm picturing this EE start point being wiped in an escalation at some point, when the 3 NPC settlements open. A guy can dream, right?
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Goblin Squad Member
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2nd Pass, Nihimon: All appears to match up 100%.
Tons of info, but this was a very good statement:
The biggest challenge we are going to have is overcoming the institutional knowledge of the MMO community that small games from first time publishers typically fail, and getting people to invest in our ideas for how we can overcome the traps that have caught so many of our peers. And the best way we know of to achieve that is to have as close, open and transparent a dialog with the community as we can, so that everyone sees what we're doing, how, why, and when. Keeping people's expectations framed realistically is a big part of that.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Please for the love if all that is holy. Introduce the player council 2-3 years after the game has released. Otherwise it will consist of players who have the most popular opinion where the game should be headed rather then players who have a good understanding of the game and know what changes would cause. And while those two are not mutually exclusive, when the two clash they clash HARD!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think a diverse group of players could produce usable input even in the early days, although there will be less content from which to form an opinion. But just waiting to wait is not necessarily a good idea. If there is a good reason for a council in the early days, so be it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think a diverse group of players could produce usable input even in the early days, although there will be less content from which to form an opinion. But just waiting to wait is not necessarily a good idea. If there is a good reason for a council in the early days, so be it.
Diversity would be great! I hope GoblinWorks chooses its player council with an eye toward a true cross-section of its playerbase. Not just the most vocal forumgoers; not just the most knowledgeable, or best PvPers, or strongest roleplayers; not just members of established charter companies.