Hey there, TERA Fans! Today, TERA Hispano has posted
a great interview with Patrick Wyatt of En Masse Entertainment that's certainly worth checking out. Among other things, it's got good information on Digital River's contract with En Masse.
Great job as always,
TERA Hispano! Enjoy!
TERAHispano: Welcome back to TERAHispano, Pat! Nice to talk with you again! How is everything at the moment in the En Masse camp?
Patrick Wyatt: Thank you Nestor, I’m glad to have the chance to chat with you again. We continue to make a great deal of progress toward publishing TERA, working closely with the developers in Seoul to change the game for Western markets based on feedback from players who participated in our two Focus Group Tests. Our publishing team in Seattle continues to grow as we build a team capable of supporting the influx of players at launch, especially given TERA’s scope. We have also been busy showing TERA at trade shows like Comic-Con in San Diego and Gamescom in Cologne, and we’re getting ready to show fans even more at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle in early September. It’s a team effort to get a game ready for launch, and something that cannot be rushed, as we refuse to sacrifice quality. We’re taking our time to get this right because we can only launch the game once.
TERAHispano: Let´s talk first about recent TERA news. The TERA development team announced a partnership with Frogster Interactive to publish TERA in Europe. Would you mind telling us why Frogster was chosen as the game’s operator? Why not control North America and Europe from En Masse?
Patrick Wyatt: When we initially formed En Masse Entertainment we considered the possibility of running TERA across all Western markets. But when you’re building a new company, it makes more sense to do a few things well than to overreach by trying to do everything at once. Consequently, it made sense for Bluehole Studio, the developer of TERA, to identify a partner in Europe who’d complement what we’re doing here in North America, particularly given the strong connection between the two markets. Operating massively multiplayer games requires the coordination of many different disciplines, including marketing, public relations, and community to operations, support, and platform services. There aren’t many companies who have the experience to handle all of those tasks. By picking a partner with extensive experience running online games and firsthand knowledge of the European markets, we’re in a better position to give players the great experience they deserve.
TERAHispano: Do Europeans have anything to be afraid about with this partnership with Frogster?
Patrick Wyatt: Bluehole searched extensively for a partner that would be able to provide a high quality of service to European players, and Frogster has the capability to handle all of the operational issues for a large-scale game like TERA. It’s challenging to run online games, but with each experience, smart publishers apply what they’ve learned to ensure they are meeting or exceeding people’s expectations.
Frogster and En Masse Entertainment are committed to ensuring that fans get what they want, and a great example of this is our agreement not to restrict players to their local regions—there won’t be any “region-locks” or “IP blocking” in North America or Europe. While I expect that most gamers will elect to play on game servers in their local area, some gamers will choose to play across regions in order to play with their friends in other countries. This speaks to the confidence that En Masse and Frogster have in providing a high level of support to our players.
TERAHispano: And more recently En Masse signed an E-Commerce agreement with Digital River. Would you mind telling us why?
Patrick Wyatt: People have become familiar with purchasing games and other products online; it’s so simple from a consumer standpoint that players often don’t think about how it works. Behind the scenes, online ecommerce is quite complicated: you may have heard of the double-billing problems that plagued Warhammer players earlier this year; many players were charged over $500 for a month of service, and one unfortunate soul was billed $1390! By partnering with a company that’s been handling ecommerce for 16 years, we’re getting a rock-solid billing solution, and one that offers features that players have come to expect. Players want to easily find what they’re looking for in the storefront, they want more payment options than just credit cards, they want the ability to review their transaction history, and they want a system that’s always available when they need it. From our standpoint, we want a solution that enables us to provide great customer support and minimizes the risk of payment fraud. And finally, it would be a tragedy if we were to launch a highly anticipated game like TERA and have the billing system fall down, something that has happened at too many other companies. That’s why we’ve selected a billing provider that is capable of handling the massive load that will be generated during TERA’s launch and thereafter.
TERAHispano: "Digital River has the global e-commerce experience, and powerful online and in-game features that we demand for our flagship product." Could you reveal anything about those "in-game features"?
Patrick Wyatt: When you pick a billing provider, it’s not like dating; it’s a marriage, and I don’t mean a Las Vegas wedding with the potential for a quickie divorce. The complexity of switching billing providers is cost-prohibitive, so we’ve chosen a company that’s flexible enough to cover all of our future needs, even if we don’t know what they are yet. For that we need mechanisms to allow players to interact with our billing and account system from within the game. Beyond that, we’d like to be in a position to publish future games with the appropriate business model for those games; if gamers expect micro-transaction games, then we’ll be in a position to deliver what they want. In the dynamic world of MMOs, it’s about being prepared to meet the evolving demands of players, and Digital River will help to ensure that we are ready.
TERAHispano: In the Digital River press release there was a statement that had many confused: "...Digital River will manage in-game commerce..." What does this really mean?
Patrick Wyatt: When the announcement was made it did cause a bit of agitation after an article on Massively.com speculated that TERA would require both subscription payments and micro-transaction purchases. Brian Knox, TERA’s senior producer at En Masse, responded to the issue in detail (www.massively.com/2010/08/13/en-masses-r...culation-tera-is-not), but let me address this question head-on: TERA is not a micro-transaction game; it’s not designed for a micro-transaction economy, and we don’t intend to change that.
TERAHispano: Lag is an important thing for users. What plans do you have to reduce ping/lag issues?
Patrick Wyatt: I’m happy to say that TERA’s bold new action combat system plays very nicely even when the servers are located thousands of miles away. I first experienced TERA while playing on a computer in Los Angeles connected to a game server 6000 miles away in Korea, and I was impressed at the responsiveness of the game. You don’t have to take my word for it; ask anyone from Europe who participated in the Focus Group Tests about their experience with game-lag. When we built the first Western servers for TERA, we selected a QA datacenter just a few miles from our offices in Seattle, which meant that European players who joined our Focus Group Tests were playing on servers over 5000 miles away. Based on the forum posts, polls, and informal surveys from those events, we didn’t see lag problems.
That being said, there’s more we can do to ensure that lag won’t be a problem. Selecting the right location to host game servers, and choosing which bandwidth-providers to send the “bits” is critical to ensuring a great MMO play experience! While it’s possible to buy cheap bandwidth, players can tell the difference when they see excessive total-ping-time or ping-time-variability. We’re going with tier 1 bandwidth providers even though they cost more than tier 2 (or … shiver … tier 3) providers because it makes a difference.
TERAHispano: Last time you told us you won’t use GameGuard. Are there other security mechanisms to prevent chat-spam for TERA?
Patrick Wyatt: Having seen firsthand the types of tech-support problems that intrusive, client-based, anti-hacking technologies like GameGuard cause, there’s no way we’re going to cause that kind of grief for TERA players. The top hackers in the world know how to bypass anything that’s done by the game client, so we don’t believe that this is the right approach.
We anticipate that TERA will receive a mature game-rating, but that doesn’t mean that harassment and chat abuse are tolerable behaviors—games receive their ratings based on content, not because there are too many ass-hats in the game. Virtually every MMO has a problem with chat spam and chat griefing, but just because the problem exists elsewhere doesn’t mean that we can leave it at that. To handle chat abuse problems we have to use a solution that integrates technology-based chat-filtering systems with human-moderated chat management. We need a system that filters the most obvious chat problems, alerts our staff to questionable cases, allows players to report problems easily, and most importantly, provides us the ability to deal with these violations immediately. When harassment, chat spam, phishing, and other chat abuse issues mingle with regular game/tech/billing support issues, it takes too long for the abuse problems to get solved, and that ruins what can otherwise be a great gaming experience. In almost all cases, chat-abuse issues can be dealt with quickly once a GM has a chance to look at the problem, so we’re going to have a team that’s dedicated exclusively to chat-abuse. Our goal is to solve these issues in just a few minutes so that the problems don’t escalate and ruin the game environment.
TERAHispano: Some users consider that griefing could be avoided with in-game GMs. Are you considering something like that for TERA?
Patrick Wyatt: In-game GMs aren’t as efficient at solving problems as GMs that have full-screen, dedicated support tools to detect and correct problems. We will have customer service agents available 24/7 for all support issues: game, tech, billing, and chat. Players will be able to get in touch with our support team using whatever method they’d like—by phone, Web-based chat, Web-based support email, and in-game reports—so we believe players' problems will be dealt with expeditiously.
TERAHispano: After the release of Aion users waited (me included) 6 - 8 hours to log into the game. Will we be affected with something like this in the TERA launching?
Patrick Wyatt: Waiting in a queue for hours is no fun, so we’ve come up with some ideas that we think will help. Queues form because gamers play more hours during their first month of a game than at any other time. Games are designed so that the world doesn’t feel too crowded (or too empty) when gamers are playing a typical number of hours per month. So while a game that’s been on the market for several months might have 20–30 percent of its users playing at peak-time, at the game’s launch that number might be closer to 50–60 percent, and that’s when queuing occurs—the server is full. Simply adding more game worlds doesn’t solve the problem, because when play-patterns return to typical levels several months after launch, worlds can suddenly feel empty. This is the problem that all open-world games face, but we have some solutions!
TERA is fundamentally an open-world game, though it does have some instanced dungeons because players enjoy them. In the crowded open areas, we’ll split players into separate “channels” of the world during launch so that the game world won’t be too crowded—we’ve got to give the monsters a reasonable chance of surviving, right? But don't worry—you’ll be able to freely switch between the channels so you can stick together with your friends! After launch, we’ll remove channels in areas that aren’t overcrowded so that everyone can play together again.
We’ll also give players no-fee character transfers between game worlds for the first several months until the crowding situation stabilizes. If the game world where you and your friends would like to play is overcrowded, you can switch to a less busy one for the evening’s gaming session. When things settle down post-launch, you and your friends may then transfer your characters back to your preferred game world—again, for no fee—so you can play with your guildmates and larger circle of friends.
TERAHispano: Some users think "private servers" are a real support for original games. For example DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) is a WOW mod and it gave rise to League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. Would you mind telling us your own opinion concerning this particular given example?
Patrick Wyatt: I personally love game mods; I played Counter-Strike for years, regularly more than 40 hours a week! But I think there’s a clear difference between game mods, which are extensions to a game legally created using tools built by the game’s development team, and private servers, frequently run by criminals to make money, which is a form of software piracy. Software piracy has been extensively debated elsewhere, so I won’t attempt to make a case here; instead I’ll just say that if you enjoy playing a game, you should do the right thing.
TERAHispano: Some South American users tell us that maybe TERA game in their cities will not be able to buy some months after its release date.
Patrick Wyatt: I’m happy to say that players in South America will be able to purchase the game on TERA’s North American and European websites and join TERA players in those territories on launch day.
Gamers will be able to purchase the game digitally and with physical media, both through traditional & online retailers.
TERAHispano: This is all for the moment Pat, thanks a lot for your time! Any last lines for TERAHispano Spanish community?
Patrick Wyatt: As always, it’s a pleasure to chat with you. Thanks for creating a great site for TERA gamers, and I look forward to seeing you and all your readers in the game!
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