Archief - Question-Time voor devs Jumpgate Evolution

TTH: So, first question (and the question that’s probably on everyone’s mind) – even though you’re not gonna talk dates today (sorry to disappoint anyone), can you just talk a little bit about where you’re at in the development process – you guys seem to be playing it pretty close to the vest, just taking your time on things, making sure things are going smoothly & perfectly before you jump, let everyone jump into beta. But maybe if you just talk a little bit about where you’re at in the development process?

JGE: Well, we’re somewhere between the beginning and the end. ((laughs…Khatie says “So mean…&#8221) Honestly speaking… where we are really is we have most of the core features finished; we’re still kind of heavy in production, working on content – all those kinds of things. But obviously as we go into testing, which we have been doing more recently, you know, issues come up and we address those & those reveal other problems that have to do with – some of them are easy some of them are hard & so we just keep working thru that until… we feel that the game is ready to do. So in essence, our primary goal hasn’t changed, which is: don’t release the game until its ready. I understand that people get restless because they want it to be ready sooner than, maybe, it will be. ((laughter)) I know I’m one of those people, but that’s kind of how it works.

TTH: So it’s pretty important to you to have the game pretty much ready before you let people into open beta and so forth.

JGE: Yeah, I mean it’s just one of those things where I feel like if you don’t do that you get punished very badly when you release & I don’t really want that.

TTH: Fair enough. Hermann, I think it was in the making of the Jumpgate video you released a little while back… you talked about the Han Solo appeal of the game. I was excited to see when you were doing the most recent press release, the different ship types, we could see that under the Cargo heading there was a little bit mention about smuggling in JGE. I was wondering if you could just talk about that side of the game. What will players be able to do besides dogfights and that sort of thing? (and fights with capital ships and hive ships etc.)

JGE: Right, so combat is certainly the sort of key, driving motivator as it is a space action game. But there are a lot of support rules that we’ve got sort of built out. On the one hand you have things like mining & manufacturing,… we engage, as everyone knows, in lots of speculation – the people here like in marketing & so on probably don’t like how open I am with speculating ((talking thru grin)) so that’s one of those things, right, where… you kind of feel like you want to be able to take stuff from “here” to “here” and feel like you’re doing stuff that you’re not supposed to do. The Jumpgate – any kind of sci-fi universe kind of gives you sort of a natural desire to do that. The original game had Hyperial -- we’re making Hyperial kind of more “piratey” in the game, & so there’s more opportunities to have missions that involve that kind of activity to give you a kind of flavor in the game. Now whether that becomes an official mechanic where I’m actually going & stealing something & moving it somewhere else for some profit, that actually gets into game design issues & so you have to be careful when you cross those kinds of boundries. That’s where those ideas sort of came from.

TTH: Ok. Looking forward to E3, & we know PvP is going to be the centerpiece of what you guys are doing with your E3 presence this year. That’s early next month. Can you just kind of paint in broad strokes how PvP will be applied in JGE? Will it be more like a sovereignty control of space kind of idea that we’ll see in a game like EVE or it more of a lobbing instance kind of multiplayer scenario combat kind of thing?

JGE: Right now it’s both. I’m surprised it was as much of a controversial issue as it was. Basically it really is, *really* fun. We just did like a two hour PvP test today for what we’re going to show at E3. It’s basically this really cool, like, interior map where you fly around and right now we have lights & heavies in there & they fly really differently & have different kinds of weapons & stuff; it’s really cool. And then you go to these focal points that you take over – you hold them and you get points & whoever gets to 100 pt.’s wins & so that’s kind of traditional instance & it reminds me a lot of the way that I felt when I was playing Descent. You know, you’re really in these tunnels maneuvering around & flight becomes an important part of the game, whereas when you’re in open space it’s harder to sort of compress people & make the flight important, & so that’s really brought flight back to the forefront. Tuning the dynamics of the different ships becomes very important. So those are a blast – we have a lot of fun playing that. Another instance map is the 3 Carrier Map, that I think we’ve talked about, right? Each side has this massive ship. You can take down the other person’s ship. I think today we got something like 150 bots in there & it was just crazy. You just see ships everywhere & they’re all fighting – it’s really awesome. So that’s that side… and then I’d say about a week ago we started doing testing on the sort of “public” PvP; you basically capture these points and they turn into stations ((installations?)) that your team now controls, and then you defend that point from other people who try to come and take it back. The scale of fighting is what I think is so cool. You have like these comparatively little ships & there are these huge installations that you’re kind of fighting over, & that reveals, then, on your map, so there’s this idea of conquest of space – that you take over the different sectors by controlling these installation points which was a really cool thing to do in the original game.

TTH: Very cool. Well, we look forward to seeing more of that at E3 next month. At this point, I’m going to go ahead & let you guys start typing in your questions. So Hermann, hearkening back to Auto Assault, and hopefully enough time has passed that we can talk about that game, hehe – there was a real kind of identity with your chassis in that game. You kind of felt an affinity for the vehicle that you had and kind of leveled up with, & you kept attaching bits to it as you leveled & it looked cooler & cooler and, you know, different paint schemes. How customize-able will the ships be in JGE? Are we gonna be able to… are we going to grow out of them fairly quickly? Or will we just kind of keep adding to it?

JGE: There are lots of different things you can do to modify your ship, and we’re actually, actively working on more ways to do that. The idea was… backing up a sec -- you were talking about Auto Assault, right -- it was the same kind of problem where you identify with a vehicle. People say that’s really hard to do because people don’t identify with vehicles necessarily… and so we try to, without making the crazy thing of making a 3D character that’s running around that implies even more dev time and more resources & so on. We’ve tried to create more of an identity in the game, but with regard to your ship, what we’ve done is: we decided it would be better to make it more like a collection aspect. In the original game you could only have one ship at a time, and that has lots of limits. So now, instead, you have a hanger & you can own a bunch of different ships from different categories. You can switch between them as you see fit – as you more or less unlock them. Now it becomes a game of collecting all the different kinds of ships. Now what we can do is, in terms of variety, we can make tons of heavy fighters & light fighters… scout vessels & bombers & things like that. Cargo ships, miners… & then we can give them different kinds of advantages, so, you could make one miner that has, maybe, a larger cargo space… maybe this one has heavier armor to defend itself while it’s out there mining in dangerous areas, and so we can really make tons and tons of ships that each have different personalities. If we want to we could also (and we’ve done some of this, right&#8230 make very different ships for, say, you might get a reward for lots of missions with Solrain, & you can get this type of ship – it looks different than all the other ones, you know? As we’ve gone forward, we’ve realized that what’s really cool is when ships look radically different. You want a really different looking profile; you very different looking colors & everything else, as opposed to trying to make them look identifiable, which makes everything look the same. The customization is going to come largely from this collection aspect of getting lots of different ships. And then its up to the players to sort of configure the equipment, right? Which lasers & missiles & so on you want. One of the things that we’re sensitive about, and it’s something that I think is kind of a problem with a lot of MMO’s, is that it’s cool to see all the other equipment on you character, of course, but then you run into this weird problem where, like, the aesthetics may not be in line with the functionality. So you’re gonna use this awesome cape, let’s say, because the cape gives you the protection that you want? But you have this cape that you don’t like the way it looks. There are games that have solved that kind of problem, and so with more of a collection aspect maybe we can mitigate some of that.

TTH: Okay. Very cool. So, Ruben, do you have our first question? / Alright, so I’ve got a question from Scalding, who says that, “The economy will remain healthy because players will always be upgrading. This means that new equipment will need to come out across all levels, and furthermore all new equipment must be qualitatively better than previously available. How do you intend to do this by maintaining a game where skill is the deciding factor, rather than equipment?”

JGE: Well, I mean, it is the deciding factor, assuming that people have similar equipment. A lot of FPS’s are going down this road, right, where you basically have kind of like – you get progressively more powerful with your character, but it’s still a skill based game. That’s not, kind of, a new concept. As far as the economy goes, I’ve been reading a lot of stuff where people are like, “Well, if there’s no item destruction, how can you possibly have a balanced economy… “. You know, you have to take stuff out of the game somehow, that is true, however my point back is that the reason the real economy works is because new stuff gets poured into the top, not because stuff breaks. I don’t buy a new TV because my old TV broke; I buy a new TV because my friends all bought new TV’s and having a new TV is cooler than my old TV. Now, eventually my old TV does break. And so it turns out that the real economy works based on driving consumer demand by having new, cooler stuff come out. And it turns out MMO’s work really the same way, right? Even games like EVE that have item destruction, huge amounts of resources go into building that new, cool stuff that comes out with the next patch because that’s what everyone wants. Why do they want it? Because it’s new & more powerful. It’s kind of an inescapable thing that you have to keep pouring new stuff in, otherwise people are going to leave. And so I think it’s a perfectly valid thing. Now, you have to do things that prevent, you know, infinite recycling. That’s where the sort of Item Binding technology in MMO’s came from. You need to be able to say, “I have the Super Laser of Death” or whatever – I can’t just give that to all my buddies & it recycles infinitely. So you have to have… you can’t let people trade certain things. That’s how you create value around the item, right? That’s just kind of the way it works. It’s a bit artificial, but oh well.

TTH: Hehe, okay, DarkHorse asks, “Can you elaborate on the mining system? Are the nodes going to be easy to find or will it be more like an Easter egg hunt?

JGE: Umm… it’s a little bit of both. I mean, it’s a scaling thing. So in the beginning, the common nodes are everywhere & you can just go & mine common nodes all day long, and then as you go up they get rarer and rarer. Then, of course, you want to do stuff, like put them in areas that are dangerous. You can be the safe miner & go mine the common stuff or you can try to go to more dangerous areas and, you know, mine the other kind of stuff. The mining system, the way we designed it, is very flexible. We can define arbitrary #’s of nodes that carry arbitrary %’s of things. We could say, “Oh, there’s new type of node & it has these 4 rare materials and they only drop, you know, 1% of the time” or whatever, and then you need 50 of them to build this one item. And so, that creates a high-end sort of manufacturing curve I think you need, to appease the sort of people who are *really* dedicated crafters so they feel like crafting, so they’re rewarded for their diligence. But at the same time you don’t want the person at the very beginning to have to spend six hours to build some basic gun. By controlling the rarity in a dynamic way like that, we’re able to sort of accommodate both of those people. I know people here already – Mike spent a couple of days mining already for some reason, hahaha, even though it’s an internal server & we wipe characters all the time.

TTH: Okay, I’ve got a question from Straker who asks, “Will we be able to craft modified versions of weaponry & shielding, for example: to give a weapon extra range, or lose some range for a damage boost?”

JGE: There’s nothing right now specifically planned around that. Again, this is where there’ll be five thousand comments on the message board… it’s how far to you go with an item in a skill-based game. You have to constantly balance that, and so the minute you get to things that are sort of unpredictable like that, you can potentially cross that barrier and turn the game too much into a new game. So right now, for example, if you craft/manufacture a gun, each gun that is manufactured is the same. Now, we have done some stuff to try to make manufacturing more interesting so that you can sort of, like, rarely get something that’s more powerful, like a Crit System for manufacturing, if you will, but those will also be the same, so there won’t be this thing of like, “Well *my* gun that I manufactured can shoot a little bit further than your gun, but yours can be a little bit more powerful than my gun…” – you know what you’re gonna get.
TTH: Okay, Science is asking, “What kind of restrictions will be placed on character names? Will they be allowed to use special characters such as underscores, spaces, Unicode symbols, & punctuation?”

JGE: Right now I think it’s just straight, regular characters. I think we’ve deliberately blocked all the random, special characters. You know, I mean, to me it’s sort of like, I hate that you wind up doing that stuff as a developer because I like people to be creative, but people wind up doing all kinds of stuff to try to break your system that way, so most games have gone to that method, at least in names. Maybe for things like the equivalent of guilds or whatever we could allow for all kinds of stuff, because it just doesn’t matter as much. Yes, including underscores.

TTH: Okay I’ve got a question from PhoenixGSU, “Previously it was stated that we could obtain custom paint schemes from certain missions & whatnot. Would it be possible to add our own emblems or insignia to our ships?”

JGE: Not right now, although, one of the things I want to do is, if anyone’s played, I think it was Forza 2 that started doing this, is let people paint pretty much whatever they want. That would be, for me, the perfect dream. It’s just one of those things where, like hehe, if people are upset because we keep saying the game’s coming out soon, adding a feature like that makes soon a lot longer, haha, and so it’s just one of those things that… I always felt like, in Auto Assault we let people do primary & secondary colors, and it was okay but it really wasn’t all that awesome, and so if we do a lot of ship customization, I’d rather make it go all the way and make it as cool as like a Forza type of system, as opposed to kind of saying, “Yeah you can paint your ship one of these 18 colors,” so that we can put “Ship Painting” on the side of the box, but it’s not really all that satisfying.

TTH: Okay, Sepomat asks about Wild Bill’s mapping & exploration thread http://us.jumpgateevolution.com/foru...ead.php?t=1268 which I imagine a lot of people here have some familiarity with, “Will players be able to add new sectors to the game by their actions, if not at launch, maybe later, after release?”

JGE: Yeah, I mean, I think that stuff is really interesting – it depends on how you want to do it. There’s full player-made content, right, which is like, I make a sector and you can fly thru it which is really cool, but it’s a logistical nightmare, just from a development point of view. Now there’s other stuff, like well, this sector’s locked & once you do all these activities it opens it up, which I think is a really cool idea…
The downside of it that if your game has more than one shard, you immediately get into this weird problem of on this shard the area is open and on this one it isn’t, and so now you get all these people yelling at you that on this shard they can’t get to that stuff but those guys can, and that’s unfair, and you get these kinds of confusing problems, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe you say, well, that opens up – in order to open it up you need to do all of these other things & if people don’t cooperate & do that then too bad? I also suspect that whenever you do things like that, people do it a lot faster than developers think. I’m amazed at how often we’ll do stuff, & we’ll be like, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna put this thing in there and it’s going to take forever for people to do,” and then like 2 days later they’ve got it beat, you know? It’s just amazing… how good people are at exploiting the systems that you’ve created in ways that you didn’t intend.

TTH: Beebs ((Beach? Apologies to inquirer)) has a question, “Will there be a kind of consumables that boost your stats & power for a certain period of time?” (ITS GODDAMN BIBJE )

JGE: It depends what you mean. There are things like, right now there are… people know what these things are, right, they’re the Flash Fires, & you can bind them to keys and you have them on your ship, you fire them & they give you a boost of speed which is different from the traveling boost – the traveling boost only works when you’re not in combat; you can’t fire while you’re doing it. This is a specific combat boost. We’ve talked about doing similar things like shield boost, maybe armor repairs, things like that. What there isn’t, and I want to be specific about this, is there’s not like a +10 to accuracy buff. Right, like when it comes to aiming it has to maintain skill. And so as far as we can go with it without breaking that part of it, we’ll probably explore more systems like that.

TTH: Okay, JumpgateFan asks, “Can someone become Emperor for the Octavius race? If so, how is he or she selected?” -- & someone else had a related question about the real-time PvP scoreboard, if you could speak to those two things.

JGE: Voted for Emperor no, but that’s a very cool idea. I’m a big fan of the whole endgame sort of political diplomacy systems; we don’t have anything like that right now, but yeah that’s a great idea. I think you’d have to maybe tier it out more, so you have like somebody at the top and then there are, say, advisors or something that get voted on by these groups… maybe in order to be able to vote you have to do these certain activities. That sounds like a great endgame type of mechanic, you know, and then work out how people get advantages from it. I’m sure we could talk forever about that kind of thing. What was the other question, sorry ?
TTH: About real time scoreboarding. Who’s the top PvP player, that sort of thing.
JGE: Oh, ok, I see. In terms of that, we have the stats for open PvP player kills, & that would include like the battle for space type of scenario, which are public areas. I saw some questions about that earlier so I want to clear that up a little bit. The beacon control – that is public space. That’s not instance at all. If you go there you see what’s there. There’s no version 1,2,3,4,5… there’s one control of the beacon @ any given time, & there’s only one beacon in that area, period. That’s completely separate from the sort of battlespace scenarios which have nothing to do with beacon control. The stats on those are also separate & I think that’s very important because people feel very strongly about the areas of the game they really want to achieve in, & so there’s people – they’re just going to sit in battlespace & fight & fight & fight. So it’s very easy for us to create a leader board for that, we can create a leader board for taking over beacons, there’ll be different stats for PvP kills in space that have nothing to do w/battle space… & then of course there are all sorts of other things like missile accuracy, gun accuracy; there’s a lot of different ways we can slice that up – we can do it by ships so people who are in heavy ships that have missiles vs. light fighters w/energy weapons & so on. ((Mike R.))-- Yeah & just to answer that we’ve actually got alot of this leader board stuff on the website. In testing at the moment we’ve got our friends & family guys, so we’re just kind of tidying that up a bit and putting some gumph on it. Yeah, we should have that in time for launch. ((Khatie)) – Some nice what on it? Did you say “gumph”? ((Mike)) – I said gumph. ((all laugh heartily; someone, ”What the **** is that…?&#8221) That’s an English thing, sorry haha. ((Khatie))-- I’m like, “…wow, what are they putting on their leader boards…” ((Hermann talking thru smile))-- I don’t know about you guys but I don’t want gumph on my leader boards! ((all guffaw)) ((Khatie)) – You’re gonna get in trouble from Ben; I already did.
TTH: Ten Ton Hammer *is* live…
Female: Uh oh.

TTH: Okay, I’ve got a question from Cobra5Mil, “How will exploration work? Will there be a fog of war type system that will let you map out asteroids in other locations after you visit that spot? Also will you be able to add notes &/or waypoints to your own personal map, like this area has (x) type of ore?”

JGE: ((Hermann))—The way that it works right now is there’s a map, a universe map, & it zooms in to each different series of sectors & you see them in like, & I’m gonna make it sound really unsexy, but basically like dots on this pretty-looking background, & when you roll over ‘em you get information about ‘em. And then, you know, you can travel to each one; we’re kind of undecided as to whether we should tell ppl about stuff in advance, because it’s cool to kinda see, “Oh yeah I wanna go there because that’s where this stuff is happening,” or whether we should just keep that a secret and force you to go there, which creates an exploration aspect. I can see the arguments for both; I’m a big fan of the exploration side. There’s no fog of war, per say, like where you’re talking about a WoW-style map where this area is grayed out and then you walk over here and all of a sudden *boom*: it’s revealed & you get 50 exp. pt.s… there’s nothing like that right now. Instead, what we’re trying to do is make it so that there’s different, interesting things to do in pieces of the map, right, so we could hide something over here, hide something over there… as far as waypoints go you can open up the map & right click & set waypoints that you can say, “I want to travel from this area to that area in ,you know, oldschool space style & you just follow those waypoints there. There’s no custom notes right now, but that’s also a pretty cool idea.

TTH: Timmah asks, “Could you talk a little bit about the endgame and what we can see there. As well as what you have in mind for future patches that will enhance the endgame after official launch?”

JGE: Right, so endgame: there’s a few things that are there; I think, of critical importance is, the public open space PvP. That drives a lot of what ppl wanna do. So if that’s not really fun to do over & over again & if there’s not a reason to control this part of space & you lose it over time & get it back, then there’s a significant # of ppl that will maybe not even get to the top – they’ll just go away. Then, um, the other side of it is that you need to have sort of very difficult-to-achieve tasks. This can be things like Conflux hive ships &… I don’t know if this should be like a permanent thing or if we should make it like a time-based thing, but we’ve discussed having things like any sort of endgame regions you could have monstrous #’s of conflux that are invading an area, and that happens on sort of like a nightly or weekly basis, or a special event kind of thing. Because that’s something that ppl come there, & then of course you could give them a reason to do it, so there’s an award like this ship & we’re only going to give it away this one time & it’ll never come back again. Or this cool piece of equip. that you really wanna get – collectors’ items & things like that, so… really the PvE & PvP, that’s really big & then, of course, you also need I think (cuz I’m kind of a meta-game player) you need this sort of high-end manufacturing stuff. I want to spend a lot of time building things in the game, & collecting all the pieces that I need order to go & get them, & so I think those 3 pieces represent what the endgame has to be. To me the most important part is that you’re able to, with some predictable frequency, release new content into the game. New areas to explore, new PvE & PvP things for ppl to do, new stuff to make, new ships to get and, I mean, the natural tendency is to get bigger & bigger & bigger. At some point maybe you want to add things like this is speculating for future features. Some of the feature that I’ve heard over and over & over again are: multiple player being together in a big ship, flying around & fighting, so that’s a big one… the other one that I hear a lot bigger is you know, planet that you can go land on and explore. The other one that’s really high on the list is player-owned stations, right? We’ve got lots of ideas for modular station designs so that you can actually create, literally, your own parts of space & put stuff out there that other players can go & interact with. Ideally you want to get to this scenario where your players are creating content for themselves & each other. It’s hard to do that, and like I said, if I had time & resources I’d add *all* those things right now, hehehe, because I think they’re *all* awesome.

TTH: Okay I’ve got a question from Glenario ((Glenarielle? sp?)) who’s asking, “Can you tell us a little info. about the guild system – will the guilds be an important part of the endgame, & are there objectives… specific guild objectives or will the guilds be more of like a chat system? (like in other MMO’s)”

JGE: Yeah, this is another one of those sort of, you know, terrible time-vs.-feature sort of things. Ideally, what guilds will certainly be (squads) is you’ll name them, they have a hierarchy, you can see the name of the person’s guild when they’re flying around, of course, there’s special chat channels, voice-chat channels for that guild, you can see where ppl are, what lvl they are, what they’re doing… so that’s the basic functionality. We’ll certainly have that. Going up the ladder of speculation, guild banks I think are an important thing so that you can share resources & money, going *further* up the ladder of speculation something we encountered was group manufacturing kinds of things would be really cool, so that you have different ppl kind of aspiring to make stuff, & then of course group medals, things like that, you know, group achievements so that they’re guild-types of achievements, so that you can say, “Well, get 100 members, this happens… these guys working together can open up this area to go fight this stuff, but if you’re squad doesn’t have 50 ppl in it, you can’t get access to that. So there’s a lot of different things we could do there; how many of those things we get in before release, I don’t know.

TTH: Okay, there’s a bunch of questions about the release of the game in terms of, I guess, kinda like the marketing angle. D-Hack ((sp?)) was asking if there will be a Mac release of the game…? Doomtron was asking if they get a month free w/purchase & a free trial, & someone was asking about digital download. Are these questions you can answer right now or should we expect some info. soon?

JGE: ((Mike))—So I could answer a bit more about this: Mac support – we haven’t done any specific work on that; I know that a few guys in our friends & family are using Mac’s & operating systems to get the game running & that’s been quite positive so far. Re: digital downloads, we will be having digital downloads I believe we may be going with Steam for that, so you might be able to grab it on Steam. The month free trial, yes. You’ll get your month’s free subscription when you buy the box, if you get the other editions which I’m probably not supposed to talk about you might get a bit more time. Yeah watch their website for that one; I’m sure Hermann & Khatie will be talking about that in great detail. Was there any other questions? Did I get everything there?
TTH: I think you got it all.
JGE: ((Khatie))—There will be different levels of membership that you can buy – different packaging; we just saw it so it hasn’t been finalized & approved, you know, Net Devil just sent their ideas to Codemasters so we’ll learn more about that in the months before launch for sure.

TTH: Very cool. I have a question from…Gudsu((sp?)), “I have friends possibly choosing different factions suiting their personality style. Will we be able to party with members of opposing factions?”

JGE: ((Hermann))—Currently no. Yeah, see, the answer’s right there. Um, here’s the thing: originally, that *was* there, along w/guilds & stuff. We quickly ran into all sorts of problems, esp. things like public PvP, but also Battle Space. Right, so if you & I are in the same squad & we enter into a PvP fight together that’s happening along national boundries, then I can kill you, you can kill me, but we’re in the same squad & we want to track squad-able stuff so how do we do that? It starts to become this messy thing. You could make it completely squad-based where squads *only* own those certain areas, & squads compete only in PvP… there is no concept of a national battle, but then the battles will always be small, right? Because they’ll only be as big as the biggest squads that want to participate… & so how do I, as an individual go into there, is it a group lvl, & so it just became this huge design problem & it turns out, I think, that’s why most competitive games break you up into a group. If you play an FPS you’re either this side or that side; if I’m on this side I can talk to you but all these guys are against those guys or if you play an MMO like Dark Age of Camelot or something you can’t group with those other people. Now, we didn’t want to cut off interaction completely because I feel that’s going too far, so you can still go to their stations & buy stuff from the auction house & trade & so on. But we found that that was where the line had to be drawn. I mean, maybe that will turn out to be terrible & we’ll come out with some solution to it & change it – I don’t know. You can talk to other nations.

TTH: Someone was asking about Nvidia’s 3D Vision & I know you guys have announced support for Track IR which anyone that’s into flight sims knows all about that head-tracking software. Can you talk a little about you support for peripherals & how you can support these really cool kind of gadgets without gimping the game for everyone else?

JGE: Yeah – that’s always the trick… a lot of times it’s easy & sometimes it can be hard. I haven’t done anything specific for the Nvidia 3D vision; we have done the X52 Pro, we have done, I believe, the Logitech LCD, we’ve done, I think, light fx for the Alienware, what else… Track IR… gosh I’m trying to think of them all, hehe… ((Mike in background re: Saitek; back to Hermann))-- …all the Saitek stuff, yeah there’s a lot. Some of it is very easy, some of them are hard; we’ve looked @ some other stuff kind of decided against it. Mostly because of dev time; we also want to get the game finished instead of supporting everything, but we felt strongly about like the X52 – the Saitek joysticks, the more advanced ones. &Things like Track IR – they really help a lot. The other thing that’s really cool that required almost no work was the whole 3 monitor setup – the triple head. *That’s* cool! I want to buy 3 monitors because of that. We’ve actually had it running on 6 monitors which is just, like, ridiculous. I don’t know how far we could push it; the only reason that works at all is because we’ve tried to keep the specs low. You can run it at these ridiculous resolutions that look really cool, but it’s sweet to see it on all of those monitors. It actually makes head tracking kinda work, ‘cuz I don’t know if you’ve ever used head tracking – it’s kinda weird; like, you’re staring at the screen & you move your head, and so it’s cooler if the screens are all around you, hehe, you can just kind of turn around, so yeah. Lot’s of that stuff.

TTH: Very cool. Okay, we’re down to our last question, so what we usually do is give you guys like some sort of consensus in the channel as to what our last question should be.

JGE: So, Flux – pretty much total overhaul; there’s tons of different Conflux in the game in addition to lots of other strange types of things. One of the coolest things (I don’t know if I’m supposed to be talking about this but I’m going to anyway) is basically there’s this region where there’s this Conflux hive structure like a medium-size boss creature. It looks like an asteroid, so we have like these Conflux-infested asteroids sitting around & they have this cool animated texture on them, so they’ll look really cool… and so you blow up like the side of it and you actually go inside it and take out like these weird sort of innards of the Conflux which I think is really cool. What we’ve discovered is that big enemies that you fight inside of are really cool; you can think along those lines as far as what we have in mind for like the Conflux and different kinds of enemies like that – it’s *really* cool… umm, so that’s that. I mean Beta, what can I say? You know, we’re doing… the thing is people think of things as if development is layed out in these nice, neat little chunks where today we’re in Friends ‘n Family, and then we’re going to do these 85 things, and then we’re gonna be in Beta, but it’s more like you’re in Friends ‘n Family, & then you’re like: oh, look there are all these problems, and people don’t like “this” & let’s try that & let’s change this… then we have nice little graphs that show CCU & hours played & lvl & so on. & we say: okay, now it looks like this is pretty good, we don’t get enough info. this group of ppl; now let’s more ppl in, & at some point once you’ve let a certain number more ppl in, then the publisher kind of decides, “Oh, hey, we’re in Beta,” & so you say, “Oh… yeah, now we’re in Beta,” & so it looks like it’s in these clearly planned-out phases that come at predictable intervals; it’s really not like that & so testing is much more like… the goal of testing in my point of view is to get the information you need to make the game better. Once we have that info., we act on it, & then we test again. That’s kind of how it works. I know ppl will say “Soon ™” &, you know ((laughter)) Betas are all like a big joke, & it seems very frustrating & I know what that’s like, but it really is true, like what I just outlined is exactly how it works. You never know what going to happen – 3 days ago Boost stopped working, & so there’s like this weird problem with like networking code & it breaks Boost or whatever, & so how long is that going to take to fix? I don’t know, right? But do you want me to go and say, “Hey 5000 ppl come into Beta. Oh by the way you can’t Boost…” that doesn’t seem like a good idea. That’s kind of the stuff that happens.
((Formalities, thanks etc. & end))

1st question: Will there be a designated up and down? I want to coordinate formation flight, and think a common up and down will be helpful.

Answer: There is a general sense of up and down designed into the sectors, but it isn't strictly enforced. We're working on various ways to display where other ships in your group are located and oriented, but no automatic formations. There's a reason why real life formation flight is very complicated; you need to maintain good situational awareness. We're focusing more on cooperative combat features, rather than showing off.




2nd question: Can we have more info on the combat and support platforms?

Answer: Referring to different types of ships... iterative design has shown us the best way to go is to strongly separate the different types of ships. We've done lots of testing with light fighters and heavy fighters in PvP with 10 to 15 ships on all three sides to make sure it works very well. The natural extension of the design process leads to the support classes. These might rearm other ships, or boost their shields... maybe even repair, although that leads to interesting balance problems. For PvE we have commercial ships: things like mining and cargo vessels.

We're trying to very specifically type the ships so there isn't much overlap between the specialties of each one.

Within the groups, for example the heavy fighter can have a choice between having large guns or large missiles. We're balancing the choices.

PvE has to be fun, but PvP also has to be fair. So it's much harder to design something for PvP. We design for PvP first, then we bring it over into PvE.




3rd question: Will there be any role play servers, or support for last names?

Answer: We've set up a number of plans for generic servers. We won't be doing specific PvP or PvE servers, because the way the game works, we can incorporate both styles into the game. Same with role play. We're going to start off with a couple of normal servers. If the demand for role play increases, we'll take another look at the possibility of a separate RP server. That's if we see the numbers of people looking for that kind of environment. But right now we're planning on normal gameplay servers. If you have something to say about that on the forums, if we have a lot of demand, then we'll look into that. Obviously, our customers are important to us, so we'll do whatever they want to do.




4th question: Will it be possible to claim space for squads/clans/guilds? What kind of advantage - either economic or strategic gain - can be obtained?

Answer: Capturing space is done by a group, but it represents the nation capturing it. It wouldn't be hard to track which group captured it and then assign rewards based on that, so it would be tiered, and the squad would get more. Right now we plan on an XP bonus for the capture, and then some sort of rebates for subsequent ownership of space. For example: mailing would be cheaper, auction house costs would go down. We're also looking at the long term; the longer you hold the space, the more rewards and bonuses you get. The key is to make sure the advantage for owning space isn't so huge that nobody can ever take it back again. We have to keep balance in mind.

The system differs from the beacons in JGC because now they're actually defended positions. When you take it over it turns into a battlestation that fights for you, so taking it back isn't just a matter of flying through an object to claim it. It takes time to capture. If it's already captured by somebody, then you have to take over the defense.

I think it's going to be a much cooler part of the game, to try to own all the various parts of space.




5th question: Will there be some system in JGE similar to donning pirate tags in JGC? How will that affect targeting options and play options, in and out of your faction?

Answer: Piracy is one of those things we've been looking at for a while. The problem we face is: how do we make compelling gameplay for a pirate-type person? Without impeding that gameplay on other people? A core tenet of piracy is taking stuff from other people. But if you only take stuff from people who don't mind having stuff taken, you're going to find that noone is willing to do that. But if you take stuff from people who don't want it taken, you break the game experience for those groups. That's the way people work. If you just have piracy against PvE, is that interesting enough? Is it cool to steal stuff from PvE AI cargo haulers? Is that a compelling experience?

In the absence of being able to make it a compelling experience, it's something we've delayed making a decision on. It's possible we can do something like if you're in unregulated space, then you can be pirated. But we don't have any specific plans for that right now. At least for launch. Of course, everything is subject to change.




6th question: I understand we'll be able to level from low to high levels in PvP areas or PvE areas, with the option to switch between them as we please. Does this mean the PvP zones will be just as populated with PvE enemies as the PvE zones?

Answer: The game is designed to spread out the rewards and benefits of doing PvP and PvE. The idea is we're going to care both sides of the market. We've got the guys who are just want to go in and - I'll say the word "gank" - go play against other players, have that additional challenge, get additional rewards for it. But we also have the guys who just want to play the game in their own time - I'm not going to say " carebears" because that's just rude - we're going to allow them to play through - as they want to play - through the player versus environment experience, doing the epic quest challenge. We will cater to both, so we'll get both sides of the market cared for in that respect. we expect we'll have equal amounts in both sides, but we will try to entice people into the PvP areas as well. There will be official rewards and benefits there; it'll actually be a lot more fun than you think it'll be. So yes, everyone is going to be cared for.

> You're going to care for the carebears? Is that what you're saying?

> To expand on that a little bit... Our goal is, we don't want PvP to turn into this thing where first you level cap, and then you start PvP. We want it to be more like, if you want to PvP and don't want to bother with missions or anything else, then you can do that and still go through the game. I never understood why some games have these awesome PvP systems, but you have to grind through PvE and then the PvP comes at the end. That just seems not very fun to me.




7th question: Can you please go into some depth on the soft grouping mechanic? Will it be automatic if you go into soft grouping, such as putting twenty people on the same mission?

Answer: In early testing... I'll get to the genesis of it... one of the problems of MMOs is mob ownership, right? In a normal fantasy MMO, or anything that's more turn based, it's very easy to see who's fighting what and therefore who owns what. The ethics... if you want to be a good citizen in a MMO then you don't steal people's mobs! But in a 3D fast paced space game, It's very hard to work out who's fighting what. So we have a lot of inadvertent people stealing kills from other players. And when you credit it either on the kill shot, the first shot, or the most damage, you run into a problem with who gets credit for the kill. So we solved the problem by giving everybody credit if they have some amount of contribution to the fight. In testing, people stopped asking "Hey, is this your guy?" and they immediately flew into the fight and started helping. So it's not a formalized grouping system in that you're asking people to join, but everybody's fighting together and getting credit together. That's where the term "soft grouping" came from. Now it's possible we'll formalize that a little bit more, to try to make it more interesting than everybody getting credit for everything. But the core tenet is, if a bunch of us happen to be together and happen to be doing the same thing, we're all being rewarded for helping each other out. So that increases cooperative gameplay. That's the goal.

8th question: I want to ask about the PvP instances... they're supposedly going to be 50v50v50. What happens if one of the races is significantly less popular than the other two? Will there be a massive queue system for the other races? How will that work?



Answer: Right now there is no queue system. The way the math works is kind of funny. If you imagine a game with 2500 people simultaneously playing, and say that twenty to thirty percent of them are going to be engaged in PvP, so two to three hundred people... if you have two maps, you have a max of 150 in each map, assuming they're divided. If you have more than one level range per map, lets say you have thr... [garbled recording, missing some words] ...you get to numbers where you're never going to have tons of people in one area. No more than fifty or so per side, right? Getting beyond that, we might have to introduce queuing if it starts to become too congested.



With regard to the balance: the advantage of having three nations is that if one group gets too powerful, the other two tend to gang up on them. Of course it is possible that we'll see something like, the Octavians dominate PvP because there's a hundred Octavians, ten Quantar, and ten Solrain. I doubt that'll happen, but it is possible. Then we'll have to do stuff like put mechanics in place to cap the number of people or make sure it's balanced. We have right now AI in one of the PvP maps to work with and against the players, although I don't find that to be an ideal solution. I'm hoping it works out that the sides balance against each other because of the three sided combat. Hopefully there won't be a massive skewing, where eighty percent of a server is Solrain, or something like that. Of course, that can happen, and then we'll have to figure out good game mechanics to take care of that. I expect if one side is dominant, then the other two will work to beat them simply because they want to see the big guy fall.







9th Question: The trade system where you purchase things in a different location from you, there was a rumor in the initial JGE announcement that you could high jack other people's shipments.



It was true for a time, but it was inadvertent. Items have real positional value, so if you auction something on Station X and you buy it on Station Y, it doesn't magically appear on Station Y. You can select "Delivery" from station X, or you can fly over to station Y and get it. And so we had a system where the AI would generate a ship which would move your cargo from one station to another if you demanded it and that ship could be destroyed, and the ship would respawn and attempt to bring your cargo back. The problem initially happened not because people would kill it, because we weren't at that position in the game yet, but because the AI wasn't perfected and it would run into asteroids and explode or things like that, and so people's experience in internal testing was "Hey, my package isn't getting here." and then we found out that AI was running into asteroids and exploding and it never got there. It turns out that that is a terrible experience for the person trying to order their package delivered, so we wanted to mitigate that type of situation. How this finally ends up, I'm not entirely sure. We've kicked around ideas like, "So you're in PvP space and you order something delivered and something has to go through there, and the ship gets blown up it will have to get redelivered." You have to balance that against the experience of, "if it's so hard for mail to get to your station, you're just never going to have anything mailed. You're just going to always go get it yourself because it's too much frustration." So for me it's a balancing act. It's cool that stuff's moving through space, but is it fun to never get your package. So balancing those two things is a tricky thing.





10th Question: I've seen a few game play videos and I've seen planets in the background. Will I be able to reach those planets and dock with it because it seems like a Wallpaper?



Right now no. It's cool to see those things out there and you want to fly out to them, but right now they're literally just eye candy.





11th Question: What types of missions will be available in the game? I know there will be combat missions, but I'm curious if there will be transport missions since I know we can use cargo ships?



Yes, we have missions for all different classes of ships. So from mining, to crafting, to cargo runs, to light and heavy fighter missions. So we have a lot of mission writers at the moment between Net Devil and Codemasters putting all these together at the moment, and hopefully cater to everyone and have thousands and thousands of missions for you guys to do.





12th Question: If there is to be no equipment loss on death, how will market flood be prevented?



Well, the same way that it kinda works in other games and actually in real life right. As long as there's something more to be desired, you're always going to be seeking that next thing. I think "equipment loss making the economy better" is only partially true. If you think about it, when I go to buy a new TV I don't buy a new TV because I've smashed my old TV or because I got into a car accident and lost it or something. I buy it because there's a better TV and I want it. That's the goal of companies, to create a desire for the next thing; it's not to destroy the thing you have to force you to replace it. If you look at games that have item loss vs games that don't, what happens in a game that has item loss is that people are much more careful. If you know you're going to lose your stuff when you die, then you die less. If you know you're not going to lose your stuff, you die more often. So item loss leads people to fighting less, because they don't want to lose that coveted stuff. The alternative is you can have a game like Doom or Call of Duty and you don't care about dying beyond the stat that it gives you. So I think there's plenty of examples of MMOs who don't have item loss that have very robust economies by controlling the availability of items and how long it takes to make them; and then continuously getting new stuff into the top. People argue about that and say, "You're just putting new stuff into the top and that's contrived," but actually that's how the economy also works. I want a 50" because I have a 42", and now a 60" comes out and I want that, and then there's HD and I want that. All they're doing is dumping new stuff into the top. I think games work very similar to that.





13th Question: In Jumpgate:Classic you had storm clouds. There were 3 different color and all three had different effects on your ship when you're in that zone. I'm wondering if they will be implement in Jumpgate:Evolution.





Yeah, the weather system was pretty cool. It's not in there right now, but we do have plans to put similar kinds of things in there. Similar kinds things in there, much like the Conflux swarms where they would move from place to place to place. Wind was cool. I like stuff that obscures radar, or potentially changing things like how effective your guns or missiles are or scramble your systems. That stuff is all fairly easy to do, but again it's an issue of time and priority unfortunately.





14th Question: Will we be able to decorate or customize our cockpits? Will I be able to get hula girls or fuzzy dice in the window?



Uh.. no, not right now. Yeah, cockpits first, although judging from the spam going by right now maybe everyone wants fuzzy dice and that's something we should be putting in.
15th Question: Will Net Devil be coming out with their own Jumpgate control stick or flight center?



We looked at doing a similar unit to what you can get in Steel Battalion, but it cost us an absolute fortune. So we looked into it, but unfortunate we had to say no. Of course if someone later down the line wants to do something with us, we're more than happen to do it. We're working with a lot of peripheral companies like Saitek, Logitech, and guys like that to make sure we're supporting all their gear. Oh, and of course we've been looking at that funky vibrating chair-thing. I can't remember what they're called. We're looking at that as well. We actually use it in one of our racing/driving games and we're talking to those guys to see what's involved. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of work in-game to make the chair work. We'll see, if we've got time we'll do it.





16th Question: I was wondering if you can control larger ships like large battleships?



The biggest ships right now are the sorta large double-haulers. There's been a lot of requests for large ships. This specifically goes into "I want a battleship that my friends and I can all fly in at the same time. Where maybe I pilot it and there's 4 gunners or something like that." We haven't been able to overcome the technical limitations with that, but it IS something that's planned a lot, so that's what I'd like to do. Based on the demand, I think it's something we're going to be looking into sooner or later. There's a lot of problems with the logistics and latency. The game is still very much "one pilot - one ship" where it is right now.





17th Question: Will there be contraband items that will carry a risk to trade on the market?



This goes along with the piracy question. Right now there's not a contraband market per say. What we did originally was to have commodities that had different prices at different stations. This is your typical offline space game kind of thing where you figure out a valuable trading route and based on supply and demand you make money on it. The problem with an MMO with a player driven economy is that it's very hard to put prices based on supply and demand that aren't either infinitely exploitable like, "I can sell object A for a 1 credit profit on this station all the time and there's an infinite supply." Which means I have a money fountain. So that's the problem on one hand and on the other hand if you make it a limited supply then you kind of have a natural curve where there's never a supply of anything because people figure out where the trade routes are figure out when the items respawn and then they always maximize their profit. So a small number of users will exploit this system. Ultima Online had exactly that kind of system and they had exactly those kinds of problems, and that's without an auction house. So, when I think about things like contraband in a game like Jumpgate, I think about it more in terms like either you have to work up your faction rating with a pirate faction and that allows you access to things that other groups can't build, and if you're caught with those things in a friendly space then maybe you draw fire from the guards or those kinds of things; but they give you a game play element. So you could do things like that, but there's nothing like that in the game right now.







18th Question: It's been stated before that the Zelcane Trust will give out cherry red ship skin as rewards. Do other factions give out different colored ship skins and are there other ways to get custom colored ship skins or other cosmetic customization options?



Yeah, that's the one that's kind of in there right now. So yes, the plan is that there will be many different ship rewards from many different factions as you gain rep with them, and that's one of the primary mechanisms that we want to use to introduce new ships into the game. That way there's always something to work for. So those could manifest themselves as faction rewards, so maybe you grind up your faction with Zelcane and you get a ship, or maybe they could be PvP rewards where if you PvP for a long time then you get something else. There's lots of ways to introduce those things, but I suspect that collecting ships of different kinds (sometimes for power reasons, other times for aesthetic reasons) is going to be a major reason to keep playing the game.





19th Question: With an MMO PvP system dependent upon your active population. What is your current launch goal for simultaneous players per shard?



Right now we're aiming between two and three thousand per shard, and that's largely not technical but game play related. Depending on how big your area is (your world), the more people you put in simultaneously, the less fun it becomes. So 2500 will probably be our optimal number, but that's largely going to be game play defendant. If we find that 4000 is better to make the game fuller we'll do that, if it's less then it will be less.



20th Question: Can you give any details on how it's looking with the cockpit graphics with the first-person view?



Yeah, it's something that we're still working on. I know that cockpits gets asked for all the time, and I feel like it's just like the first-person view, a lot of the videos out there show the ship in the third-person view, and that's because when you show off the game you want to show off the ship, but players want to see the first-person view. First-person is there but cockpit is something we're still working on.





21st Question: Will the latency issue be fairly large in terms of game play, mainly PvP for players connected to a server say from Australia or New Zealand?



So right now I play in the Codemaster's Friends & Family, and I'm in Colorado and their servers are in England and it works for me. We've done a lot to try to make the game very latency-resilient. Obviously at some point that's going to fall apart, especially in an action game; which is kind of why we have the whole "trying to make the servers local to the area." which is a debatable thing that people like or don't like. It really is something we think about a lot. Right now I try to play in all the Friends & Family games and it's not something I noticed in PvP right now. That doesn't mean that it won't be in the future, and we'll spend tons of time fixing it, but that's how it is now.





20th (B) Followup Question: Is cockpit view planned for launch or shortly after launch?



At this point I want to have cockpits for launch. Of course, anything can happen between now and launch, and so until they're in and you can actually see them, you don't know; but I'm a huge advocate of the cockpit thing.

22nd Question: Most of the JGC veterans are a bit concerned that what they liked about the game play of JGC is veering drastically. From what the chats have shown, there is fear that JGE will just be WoW in space.





I think that's a very black and white way to look at it. When you look at game development, my preference is to try to please everybody. Everybody has a game that they want in their mind, including the developers. As a developer you also have to make a game for an audience large enough that it commercially supports the team making it, otherwise there's no game anymore. So one of the things we did when we started working on Evolution was, "OK, how can we make a game that's going to address a large enough audience to make the game successful commercially while still making it a compelling experience in its own right." I think the comparison to "WoW in space" is a bit simplistic. There's things that are really different, so for example the core mechanic of the game is not even close to comparable to WoW. You're flying around in a 3D environment. It's in space, you're not in a fantasy setting. The whole equipment base being manufacturing of items as a positionally oriented thing instead of things appearing magically. It's not a \dice roll\ system where you hit the '3' button and there's a dice roll and you hit or not, so there's a lot of things that are completely different. I think what people are referring too specifically is, what WoW did was it made MMOs mass market in a way that people hadn't done before, and there's things you can learn from that. So for example, making it so you can't just kill anyone anywhere and take all their stuff, which is kinda like, first generation MMOs had that like Ultima Online. It turns out that's fun for a really small number of people. So as you introduce your game to a larger and larger number of people, there's this sort of core group that survives from the early hardcore games, and I'm one of those people, and they resist the changes that make the game more appealing to the masses; and it's inevitable that there's decisions you're going to make as a developer that's going to make those people unhappy. So there's people on the one hand who will say, "No no, you need to make the game more like this" and as you do then they get happier, but then there's this other group on the other side who get unhappy as well. So it's just an issue where you can't please everybody and so you have to make the decisions that you think will make the most fun game for the audience that you're trying to get.





23rd Question: So there are a lot of opinionated veterans who aren't too flattered with the idea of two separate flight systems like the classic JGC system and the new "damper" system. Couldn't a more advanced player alternate between the two systems in combat which would further deeper the combat, and have the developers looked at it this way?



Right now the way the dampening works is it is an "on the fly" thing. You hit a key and you turn them on or off. We've seen a lot of feedback that when you turn the dampeners off it doesn't go enough in the direction of "gliding" if you will, getting rid of friction almost completely. So it's likely that when you turn dampeners off it will be even more sort of Newtonian physics if you will, without any kind of resistance. It's not really that there are two flight models, it's more like there's one system where you sacrifice flexibility for control if that makes sense. So if you let go of everything your ship will stop faster, for example, but as a result of that you can't do things (which I like to do) like fly in a straight line, turn around, and fly backwards while you're shooting at things. The genesis was the control issue. If you put someone in a Newtonian flight system without any resistance most people can't fly that. They get really frustrated and they give up and go away, but if you let them fly in a way that's kind of with training wheels for a while what happens is when they get comfortable with it they tend to move towards the mode that's more open and you can have that full three dimensional motion. So by having both of those options we can satisfy the one group that wants to fly that way right off the bat, but we don't alienate the people who find it very very hard and we let them graduate into it.



24th Question: I've been reading there's different factions per race. Can you explain a little about that, what those are for, and what the different specialties they would give each pilot?



Between the nations you have Octavius, Quantar, and Solrain. We wanted each group to have its own personality and history which was there in the original game and we wanted a way to keep that and try expand on it, but the minute you tie fictional lore to game play, people are faced with this terrible choice where "I really identify with Quantar but I want the racial advantage that the Octavians have. So now I'm going to play a race I don't like because they have the game play mechanic I want." or "I have a game play mechanic I don't want because I want to be affiliated with the race." So we wanted to try to separate that more, so now the distinction is more on what the ships look like and the kinds of equipment you can get and the quests that go through it; and like you said each major nation has a couple of factions associated with it and they also have rewards for sort of working through them. It's this idea (it might be the wrong idea, but it's what we're going with) where you want to separate the fictional qualities of the game and the racial identifiers from the particular game functionality so people aren't forced to make these choices. It's the same thing for games that are heavily based on equipment (like WoW or EQ2), when you put this robe on your character now has that robe and that's really cool because you customize, but what ends up happening is you realize that "the best robe for a level 60 priest is this one" and so all level 60 priests have this robe, and if I happen to hate the color purple and the robe's purple I now have to choose between a robe that I don't like but is functionally awesome for me, or a robe that I like visually but it doesn't do what I want it to do. So we wanted to remove those kinds of conflicts, and that's one way of doing it.







25th Question: I was wondering about the Rank/Level system and how it will work with the game content. Will most of the end-game content be for those who have reached a certain level only? Like in many other MMOs this is an issue because everyone just wants to speed run to max-level so they can join in the fun at max-level.



With Jumpgate it's a little bit different compared to a more traditional MMO (like WoW, Warhammer, or things like that). Because you've got more of a twitch based game, levels aren't as important. Yes, they allow you to open up more ships and equipment and allow you access too different areas where you'll see certain higher level mobs and things like that, but the real game play comes down to skill. So if you're a level 5 or 10 pilot, and you decide to head out to a level 20 area, you can take them out if you're very very good. It might take you a little bit longer, but it's not a level defendant game. So if people are rushing through the levels, I don't think they'll have an advantage to be honest.







Khatie's Note: We'll be announcing closed beta in the next couple of weeks. So you'll know exactly when closed beta is starting. Within two weeks is when we'll tell you when closed beta is starting.. likely... maybe. *girlish giggle*





26th Question: What is the limit of pilots in a group? Is it variable for every Mission?



Right now it's 6, but that's an arbitrary number that's based on UI and the logistics of game play. There's no really awesome reason it's that number. So based on how testing goes, we may increase it.





27th Question: Can you clarify the question regarding multi/non-multi faction squads and how these things organize and why?





Yeah, so the original game had multi-faction squads and right now we're planning that that won't be the case, and we know that's a very controversial issue. The reason why is it starts to interfere with some of the core problems, like for example if you're in in a multi-nation squad (so there's 5 octs and 5 quantars) and you're out in open PvP secenario and you're in the same squad capturing a beacon, do the octavians kill the quantars and how do you communicate that difference to people? That also goes for instanced PvP. When you join a squad with people you kind of plan on playing with them a lot, but if there's any implied negative relationship in the group it immediately conflicts against that. You can mitigate some of that, but \some of that is still there\. It's something that we might change, but the core logistical problems are something that get really big as you add more people to the game and is why many other games have done exactly that. If you have a game that separates upon any kind of line, like a nation or race or something like that, they tend to isolate them even way more than we're doing. We don't want to isolate people completely because we think that's kind of contrived, but there are these natural points where it becomes much easier to separate people in some ways and enforce that with game play rules than it does to try to deal with all the confusing issues with allowing people to mix as much as they want but then to fight the sort of game play problems that come from that.
28th Question: Is the game going to be released in June or Later?



Mike: Possibly.



Hermann: Something we've been trying to communicate is, you always have this fight. You want the game to go out, you want the game to go into beta, and nobody wants the game to go out quicker than me (except possibly Mike). But at the same time, if you follow chats of other games like I do, leading up to beta or release there's this huge tidal wave of excitement for people to get into the game, and then if the game is not ready it's followed by a giant tidal wave of "How come you released the game too soon?" This is kind of the trend that MMOs tend to follow. We're very very committed to NOT following that trend, and so it's a daily debate "Should we let more people in?", "Should we let more people play?", "Is it not good enough?" We're real gun shy about those kinds of things and get that feedback and make sure the game is really really good before we introduce it to a lot of people, especially when you're going to people and and saying "Hey, give me money. Here's this product that's worth you paying for." As excited as people are, they're excited for the game that's in their mind, and their expectations are high. If you come with a game that doesn't meet those expectations, they rightfully crucify you for it. They'll say "oh, this game was supposed to be this good and instead it's that good, and why did you release it so soon?" And we don't want to make that mistake.