Gaffer

I too want to say, great thread

-jg

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We have NOT announced ANY date for CoV.

Until you see it on our website, take any date with a grain of salt. Actually, a huge handful.

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What he said. There's nowhere for it to be pushed back -from-. Since COV is in many ways a Whole New Game, it takes a long while. If we were brighter, we'd have done another smaller content expansion to keep folks happy (and have a new box on the retail shelves) coming out maybe 6-9 months after last April's launch, but we're not that bright and we keep giving our content away for free.

We're discussing the possibility of doing some pay-fer content (i.e. an expansion pack) in addition to our usual big-[censored] free updates and COV, but we're hella busy as it is, so we'll see. The retailers would love us if we did, and we like happy retailers (and money) - but we don't want to cut back on the Free Stuff in any case.

-jg

Just for the record, making risk=reward is definitely one of our goals - we're trying to add spice and reward to bring people to the harder/underutilized zones.

One of the trickinesses of having a largely "loot free" game is trying to make rewards interesting for such things - obviously if characters are motivated largely by XP+influence as the major rewards it makes things a bit tougher for the designers - many players tend to go and do whatever the easiest source of XP is and ignore most everything else. And we like the lack of loot, generally.

But I know Jack & co are thinking on the issue, in any case.

-jg

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i think states ability to toy with us is one of his benefits. He gets a crappy dental plan but every few hours he gets to make our heads spin in weird circles.

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It was part of his contract, sorry.

-jg

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Response time suffered back when Issue 2 hit, but it looks to be back to fast-and-helpful these days.

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That's very perceptive. Our GMs are staffed up to have decent response during the frenetic times (generally just after an Issue launch or other big (or popular/unpopular) change) and this is part of why they're really quick off peak. That's aided by the fact that COH has the lowest average customer call rate per user I know of in the industry, specially for it's young age. Either we have good, simple design or the smartest users, take yer pick.

Good eye.

-jg

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Congrats to a certain Gaffer on his promotion to VP of Product Development!!! Hopefully this doesn't mean we'll be missing your presence on these boards. You've been a great line of information from the veritable "Powers That Be" at NCsoft, and I think I speak for a half dozen or so of us that really appreciate that. Thanks!

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Thankee Actually happened a few months ago, we hadn't gotten around to announcing it...so no change today.

-jg

...I'm completely blown away by the costume contest entries. IMO the line about "but they're all so good, it's so tough to pick a winner" is BS - usually, everyone knows who the winner is way in advance after looking through everything once. Not this time - and it's so obvious so much time/effort/energy went into so many of those costumes that I'm really impressed. And somewhat scared. And glad I'm not judging this time around, there are a LOT of top-caliber entrants - I'd never have expected so many. Really good attention to detail on some of those costumes, too - if we go through the contest and you think no one noticed the small stuff, yer probably wrong...at least I did, and I'm a suit.

Anyhow, just a shout out to the entrants - I've looked at every costume picture, and think about half outright must be in the running to win (and most of the rest are pretty damn amusing in their own right just on sheer spunk) I hope your non-COH friends weren't too confused by your Halloween costumes, either "Well, you see, there's this game, and I'm this blue faced guy with red horns and a cape..."

Anyways, just a completely honest "holy hot damn that's amazing" on my part.

-jg

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Let's just hope I3 is tested a LOT more than I2 was before official release.

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Issue 3 is in internal test already. QA reports suggest that it is already better than sucktastic. Your mileage may vary.

-jg

Exact billing is still TBD (COV is a while off). However, it will -not- be $15 a month for COH and another $15 for COV if you're playing both.

It'd be nice to charge a bit more per month for the COH+COV combo (like the $15+$5 mentioned above) but in practice, if you can only play one character (regardless of it being a hero or villlain) online at a time...but it'd be tough to justify. Our bandwidth or support costs wouldn't go up as long as it's still one player with both games enabled...though it'd be nice to financially support the extra content development needed to be increasing the content of both COH and COV. And we like money. The question is, would we not really just be incentivizing most players to turn off whatever game they were not playing for most of the month...which would be a) annoying to users and b) not make us more money - not exactly win-win.

However, the exact model is TBD - or, if it's decided, I haven't heard the final decision. Thoughts welcome.

-jg

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Gaffer, I don't understand why this has to all be done as one HUGE update.

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Because while source code is easy to version control (i.e. you can set a marker which will give you two distinct copies of the source, one with the current build and the other with Issue 2, and change them independently) data in the database and the client wad files is much harder to keep in sync - especially with different source versions. And of course don't forget that some changes may require changes to stored character or world state (SGs, etc.) data, either adding new info, changing the structure of existing info, or more.

And we have internal versions separate from the external versions, so it's not a simple "live and test" branches in any case.

The short form is it's non-trivial to put some bug fixes up on live and test, especially when there are data changes. Cryptic does try to when possible.

As a side note, we are experimenting with trying to get more changes out in between the "big *** updates" which currently are on a 2 or 3 month schedule. Cause that's a long time to wait...on the other hand, we get better press coverage by having big cool updates like Capes+new zones+power fixes+new content all at once, which means more players which is good.

This is the least intelligible dev post I've ever made. If you can't wade through the above: "CROSS-VERSION BUG FIXES HARD. BIG UPDATES MAYBE GOOD" and ignore the rest.

-jg

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Remember though that some people are out just for personal gain and whine until people take notice.
I think the devs know what the're doing on this game though.

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Many won't believe this, but most balancing (or not fixing of claimed imbalances) is based on datamining as opposed to volume of complaints, or so claim the balance folks when I talk to them.

Board posts/complaints do make folks run different queries on the actual live data however to see if there is fire with the smoke, so it's well worth posting if you see something that appears off.

-jg

Just for the record, we're really happy with the COH community - it's one of the best, most positive, communities of the games we play, with a far higher level of intelligent, well-thought-out posts than average - no BS. People are passionate (of course) and not every post is positive (by any stretch) or on-target but all in all we like it, warts n' all. We need the feedback to make the game better, both positive and negative, and our time on the boards is well-spent.

Yes, we all know the average industry bar is low (heheh) but I actively like visiting our boards.

-jg

"it's ready when it's ready" isn't blowing smoke - as soon as the majority of the bugs are worked out, we'll put it live. Opinions range here from later this week (v. optimistic) to a few weeks - the bugs are being fixed in large droves, but we'll see.

Those opinions are all overridden by the reality of "we'll prop it when the bugs are fixed".

-jg

I'm guessing about 1-3 days after a stable build goes up on TC.

-jg