Another interview with Scott Hartsman

[Akaran_D]

http://eq2.crgaming.com/viewarticle.asp?Article=7760

I'd copy and paste the article, but for some reason, I can't do it.

[miir]

INTERVIEW WITH SR PRODUCER SCOTT HARTSMAN
Hi Scott, first of all I'd like to say congratulations on your promotion to Senior Producer.

Thanks. It’s been an interesting couple of months.

I couldn’t be happier to continue serving both the players of EQ2 and the amazing team of people who pour everything they have into the game, day in and day out.


Are there any specific areas of the game you would like to change now that you are the Senior Producer?

Now there’s a loaded question. I really don’t see this new role as being about the things that I want to change. Personally, I want the game to be extremely fun from moment to moment, month to month, and year to year, enjoyable by groups of one to raids of 24, accessible to people who have 30 minutes or 12 hours, and playable in a manner that has as few restrictions on what people can do as possible.

This team is full of people who share many of those same values. They have great ideas as to how we can get the game to where it needs to be, and everyone has consistently proven extremely willing to listen to feedback from others who play the game. My role is helping them make that happen in any way I can.

We have what I think is a pretty great game at its core, and we have a direction we want to take it. We want to continue providing fun and challenging group and raid experiences, while expanding the game into being a whole lot more rewarding for those who choose to play in units smaller than a full group.

At the same time, we’re also working on ways to be a lot more “permissive.” It’s a strange word to use, but we’re spending a lot of time re-examining our launch systems, trying to find ways to let people do more things in the world, in the ways they want to do them.

Hmm. That sounds kind of abstract, so I’ll use a couple examples from changes that are in the process of going live right now.

People weren’t particularly fond of the level and minimum-group size limiters on instanced zones, and we weren’t too thrilled with the restrictive feeling in practice either. Our designers went back and looked at them and realized that it just makes more sense in most cases to let the content in the zones themselves act as the gate, as opposed to an artificial limiter outside. “If you can survive in this zone, you obviously deserve to be here.” Much more permissive than “Sorry, you must bring three friends with you.”

Also, for the majority of quests, we’ve gotten rid of the need to defeat an entire encounter before getting quest credit from any of its members. If you’re a solo guy running around the world needing to kill a gnoll, and you happen to see an encounter of five gnolls, you should really be able to kill one of them and have it count for your quest. After all, the quest asked you to kill a gnoll. You killed a gnoll. The “must kill whole encounter” restriction is really just not proving necessary, so we’re removing it.

What it comes down to is that it’s the easiest thing in the world to make a system that says “No, you can’t do that.”

It’s on us to find ways to be able to make (or modify) systems to say, “Hey, I bet that would be kind of fun – Let’s see if there’s a way we can make it work...”

I’m not saying that these are examples of brain surgery here – But they are clear examples of not being afraid to listen to feedback, clearly diverge from what had been theorized before, and rapidly make changes that are the best for the game by being more fun for everyone.

I can’t even begin to describe how great it is to be a part of a team where that kind of questioning our own assumptions is completely normal, and quickly altering course where it makes sense is par for the course.


You recently added 8 new instanced dungeons. Do you plan to do things like this on a regular basis or would most future dungeons come in the form of adventure packs and expansions?

We absolutely plan on keeping the live game interesting, with new instances, events, systems, and new content and quests made available in in the world.

As you mentioned, the last two updates have focused on adding instances – First there were the eight group instances, then in the update going live right now, the eight solo and small group instances, and now the four new raids as well.

For the foreseeable future, we have every plan of keeping the live game the focus of our development, while having separate subteams working on adventure packs and expansions, which will add the new stories and larger collections of themed areas, NPCs, and quests that we all enjoy playing through.

On some servers, items like Stiletto's Orders price at over 2 platinum or very basic artisan books cost 10g (compared to 5g for a level 30 artisan book) - do you feel the player economy / rarity of items is about where you want it or is there tweaking that needs to be done?

I think there are two issues in play here – One is the state of the economy as a whole, the other is the availability of certain items of different levels. I’ll hit them in that order.

For the economy as a whole, there is a whole lot of tweaking that’s going on right now, and “tweaking” is something of an understatement.

Bluntly, most of what we’re addressing now with the economy are things that we wish we’d have been able to handle during Beta, but weren’t able to act on soon enough. I’m not going to make any excuses for it – It’s a place where we definitely tripped.

Before the changes that we’ve recently made, the all-servers-wide EQ2 economy was based around “Some Artisan professions manufacturing interim items and selling them to NPC merchants for a significant profit.”

Manufacture and sale of interim items was such a huge portion of the incoming money that nothing else really even registered, and it had all kinds of inflationary side effects, leaving some people being able to afford high end housing, while others had no viable means of buying basic sustenance, without first contributing to the problem of the rich getting richer.

One of the main goals of the most recent live update was to make sure that adventurers and artisans both had the potential to participate in the economy on more equal footings, with flows of coin coming in from sane sources and exiting the economy via expected methods, with no subset of people being granted the ability to control an entire economy. This should allow more people to participate in the economic parts of the game, by buying and selling things for more reasonable values.

The second issue is one of drop equality – There are definitely some items that are more valuable than what they likely should be, due solely to their rarity. In cases where the “basics” end up valued more highly than what should ostensibly be “rares”, those are generally treated as bugs when we find them and drop rates and positions are tweaked accordingly. Expect more of that kind of clean up in the future.


You recently changed much of the desirable equipment in the game to be Attuneable. Could you explain the reasoning for this?

Sure. This all follows along the lines of the economy question. We want to have a stable game economy that won’t go stale in the long term. Since we were already in the process of a fairly profound economic change, it made sense to include this as a part of it.

In any game that has valuable items, you need to decide on how you want to handle them over time.

a) You can choose to let them circulate forever, being passed down through an infinite number of characters, never being removed. It’s short-term fun in passing things around between characters forever, then selling it off later. No argument there. However, letting that happen ends up hurting replayability for existing players, and also hurts the people who decide to pick up the game any time after its first few months of being live.

It causes item rewards to have a value that declines continuously based on how long people have been able to get the given item. Relative to how many characters are created, it doesn’t take long for the game markets to be saturated with a given item. This constantly forces the value (expressed in player-to-player trading prices) lower and lower until there’s no longer any value attached to them at all.

I’d much rather go back into a dungeon that I haven’t been to in months, get a rare drop, and be excited about it because drop still has value. Since the market hasn’t been flooded with that drop being passed down infinitely, people will still want it.

So, then it’s just a matter of figuring out how to retain value on specific items, in the long term.

b) You can choose to do that by treating all items as breakable commodities that need to be replaced constantly. In a game that is going to have any kind of rarity value placed on items at all, permanent loss of individual items is just not acceptable and crosses way over the line of “not fun.” So that’s just right out. EQ2 isn’t an “items as common commodities” game. If it were, this might work.

So, now it’s a matter of finding a happy medium somewhere between those two extremes.

c) Which brings us to having valuable items able to circulate freely through the economy for a time, but once they’re actually used by someone, they remain attached to that character forever. In other words, Attunement of items that are greater than merchant quality.

This satisfies both the needs of the long term economy, and the ability to not have to treat items as things that you’re always needing to find replacements because they’re beyond repair.

If we were ever going to do this, we viewed right now as about the last time in which we could make this kind of change.

For the two people who stayed awake long enough to get to this part of the answer, here’s a simpler way of explaining part of it with an EQ analogy:

“How much was the 30,000th Ykesha that ever dropped in Guk worth on your server? How excited would you have been to be down there looting it?”

Probably not much, since the item was practically a giveaway since every Ykesha that had ever existed was still in circulation.

That kind of economy works well for EQ which is primarily adventure-based, but EQ2’s mixed economy of adventurers and artisans wouldn’t be able to survive long term with one part of it (adventure and quest loot) in a constantly depressed state.

Will future expansions focus on adding content to the end-game for those at the highest level to have new things to do - or - is it likely to be more of an even distribution with just as much new content for lower level players as the end-game players?
Expansions will be targeted at wherever the largest “bubble” of character levels exists. Due purely to the timing of expansions, that bubble tends to be at (or approaching) the high end, so it’s natural for an expansion to add on to whatever the current “end” of the game is at the time. That way it adds a natural extension to the game’s progression as well as serves the largest number of people.

That way, whether you’re at the top or not you’ll either have something new and cool to do that day, or you’ll have something else to look forward to.


Could you comment on the changes to solo'ing and small groups along with where you feel the balance should lie in terms of how much faster a group should get experience than someone solo'ing?

I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can assign a number to and say, “That’s the mark. If soloists are advancing at rate X when compared to those who group, that’s where we need to be and everything falls into place.”

I think it comes down to what the soloist is thinking. What they think depends on everything from their own versatility, to the population of the world, to the availability of viable targets, to the rate at which they’re able to defeat their opponents, to the price they pay when they fail, to the number of times they fall while trying it, to the amount of experience they get per kill. And so on.

The base unit of “fun” needs to be “solo person, brand new to the game, doesn’t know anyone, runs around and does quests, kills stuff, gets rewarded, can walk away satisfied.”

Yet, when that same soloist sees a group just tearing it up, completing more impressive HO’s, killing things faster, yielding more chances at good loot, having an overall higher survival rate, and a having better ability to recover from failures, they need to think.. “Hmm. That looks kinda fun. I’d like to do some of that too.”

That’s what we need to make happen, more than aiming for a particular number.

For the pure “amount of experience gained” component, we were definitely coming in under an amount that felt even vaguely satisfying and have already nearly doubled it once.

We’re currently evaluating whether or not to increase it again in the 30+ range, but wanted to see how the first round of changes actually played out before adjusting a second time. We should know more in time for the next major update.

We’ve added a new /consider system for evaluating opponents that reflects the new standard. What used to be called “solo” is now normal. It’s the new baseline. What used to be called “group” is now called out as “Heroic.” It’s what you fight when you’re going above and beyond the call.

We’ve added a pretty healthy number of creatures to the world over the past two updates that reflect this new baseline of future content, and those will continue to be added to the world over future updates.

These aren’t in yet, but over the next updates, expect entire new sets of custom items to end up showing up on this new NPC population that continues to go in. (These items should start showing up on Test server within the next week or so.)

Essentially, we’re trying to make sure that we follow through on these statements we’ve been making regarding improving the game, by continuing to follow through and demonstrating a visible improvement in every update.


Do you feel it was a mistake not explaining vitality and its effect to players as opposed to letting them 'discover' it on their own?

Absolutely. There was never any malicious intent behind it – Far from it. The core idea was to give people who played less a boost to help keep groups of friends who played different amounts, closer together in level. The game is less fun when your friends outlevel you. That was about mitigating some of those bad side effects.

At the time, we felt it was most important that people were actually getting the bonus, and less so that they knew how it was all working behind the scenes. That was the mistake.

Now, the idea behind adding the display is that nothing that impacts your character should really ever be a mystery to you. It just doesn’t need to be – there’s not a whole lot of gameplay value in it.

The world and the stories can be mysteries that you’re able to unravel by learning the lore, talking to NPCs, and doing quests, but your own progression and abilities should be things you can understand as easily as possible.

Another enhancement we’ve made in remaining consistent here is the much more detailed descriptions for all spells and abilities that can affect your character.

The original idea of using prose to describe what a spell or art was doing just didn’t play out very well. Aside from the fact that people really should be able to know exactly what it is their own spells and arts are doing for them at each level, with the addition of Traits, Traditions, and the like, people needed to be able to make more informed choices regarding these permanent, character-altering decisions, which is why a free respec came along with the update that added these detailed descriptions.

Will we ever see guild houses? That is to say, houses that belong to a guild rather than one of its members who gives everyone access.

Possibly – We get into some sticky issues there with respect to who “owns” all of the things placed and stored in the house, given the nature of account hacking and the other kinds of account security compromises that occur on a daily basis in all online games.

I’d like to think that we’ll be able to find a way to add guild housing in a way that doesn’t suffer from those weaknesses, yet is still something that people think is cool.


In your Producer's Letter, you mention you're planning to add more quests and dungeons available to smaller groups or solo players. Could you tell us a little about them and how they will differ from dungeons full groups have been encountering?

Thanks for reminding me – It’s about time I posted a follow-up to that first letter. We’ve made some pretty good first steps on the promises in that letter as of the time of our latest major update. We still have a lot more work to do, but it’s all progressing really well.

For instances that are available to small groups and solo players, we’ve done a couple things.

• Addition: The first one, as you mentioned above, were the new instances that have been populated specifically with soloists and small groups in mind. These 8 instances spread across three overland zones have both Heroic (group) and smaller versions. When you zone in to one, they now let you choose which type of the zone you’d like to play in. If you want to try the Heroic version with a nearly full group, go for it. If you want to try the solo version, you can choose that at the time of zoning in.

The difference is primarily in terms of how they’re populated. Populating for one or two people is a lot different – Both the layout and encounter size and strength of NPCs inside have to be done differently based on who the audience is.


• Accessibility: The second one has to do with the removal of many entry restrictions from existing instances. By letting smaller groups enter these, they now at least have a chance to try it and see without having to find “four to six people.” If you can manage it with two or three – Go to it, we’ll wish you the best of luck in there, and we congratulate you if you can pull it off.

Similar to what’s going on with the Instances, there are parallels going on with Quests as well. You’ll probably be able to see the similarities in method pretty easily.

• Addition: We’ve started by adding dozens of new quests aimed specifically at soloists. This is an effort that you can expect to see us continue over the coming updates, and one of the places we have the most work yet to do.

• Accessibility: By removing “you must kill the entire encounter before you get credit for progressing on this quest” as a universal requirement, a certain number of quests that were previously the exclusive domain of full groups now become something that smaller groups can finish. As with the example in the earlier question, it then becomes possible for one or two people to take out a single gnoll in a group where it wouldn’t have been possible for them to take on a full-group gnoll encounter.

It’s still beneficial to group on these, but the important part is that the choice is no longer: “Thou shalt group…or don’t do your quests.” That’s really not much of a choice.

Thanks a lot for letting us take a chunk out of your very busy schedule. I'm looking forward to seeing all the things you have in store for EverQuest II.