Sanya speaks out some more! Good to hear that the game people keep in touch. Sanya was interviewed by Robert "Apache" Howarth of Voodoo Extreme and I wonder about that comment about the eggnog. ~giggles~ After a few cartons of eggnog we managed to get an interview out of Sanya Thomas, the community relations developer at Mythic Entertainment for its popular massively multiplayer role playing game - Dark Age of Camelot. The last time we interviewed her was a few months prior to the game's release, now a few months after it's gone "live" we caught up with her to see how things are rolling. Now that Dark Age of Camelot has been live for the last few months, do you think that you've worked most of the major release kinks out? What still needs to be worked on? If you go over the last three months of patch notes, the amount of stuff we've added has been HUGE. There are a couple abilities (shapeshifting/disguise) that still need to be added, and the content crew is always going to be adding more stuff (quests, encounters, areas). Some guild features still need to go in (the guild bank vault, automatic dues paying), along with another way to enjoy the fruits of your realm points, and a way for our trader community to better sell their goods. And of course, little tweaks here and there. We hired more CS people that will start after the new year, and more content people - the item designer now has an assistant, among other new hires. We made a few changes to how we document our progress, which along with the Camelot Herald should give the players better communication. I'm really proud of how hard everyone at Mythic has been busting their asses - at no point have I seen a single one of my coworkers step back, sigh, and say, "Well, that's the best I can do, now I'm going to take a nap." There has been no difference in the number of hours worked pre-release and now. I send the whole crew boatloads of questions every day from the community, and all the bug reports the players send in via the /appeal system are poured over. If the players say there's a problem, we ALWAYS look, even if we don't think there's a problem at first. I think we've begun as we mean to go on, with lots of goodies added every patch and fast responsiveness to problems. I wouldn't want to work anywhere else. What features are you most proud of in the game? All of it. If you tied me up and shoved wires under my fingers, I would say our interface (which is absolutely the most customizable, intuitive, and easy to use interface in the MMOG genre, in my terribly humble opinion), our beautiful world, our interaction features (guild/group/chat) that put all the power in terms of determining how groups work in the hands of the players, and RVR that I find exciting without pissing me off. How much actual balancing is still going on? Is this a constantly evolving process, or have things calmed down to the point where nerfs are a thing of the past? Balancing for existing spells and class features is in the tweak stage. Adding a little more damage to this style of attack, take away a half second of casting time for this spell, that kind of thing. The days of "oh god, the thanes have a dozen spells they can instantly cast and crush someone twice their size into dust without risking their own skin, maybe we should put those spells on timers" have been over since beta =) And the "ye gods, these characters are balanced at 30 but unstoppable at 50" days are coming to a close as more people reach the end of the level process. Any NEW abilities or spells we add, and we're adding both, might be subject to changes. We're working on ways to get more and higher level players on Pendragon to minimize the impact of our changes on the live servers as much as possible. Personally, what do you think is the weakest class in DAoC? How about the strongest? (both in PvE and PvP) Why do you hate me, Apache? Seriously, it's hard to say - if you spec a class one way, it's better in PVE than PVP. Spec a different way, different results. Some classes are harder to play well than others, and need more tactics. The personality of the player has a big part - I am perfectly happy to play a support role, but if I wanted to be in the front line of battle I would find my character horribly gimped. The way I play the character, I think my class is powerful. Some classes need their damage adjusted, I will happily say. The short version is NO, I WON'T ANSWER THAT QUESTION, I DO NOT WISH TO BE SET ON FIRE. Overall, what's the most popular realm? For that matter, how do the player populations break down on the typical server? (example - 40% Midgard, 30% Albion, 30% Hibbie) No one believes me, but I'll try again - it's really pretty evenly split. HIbernia is SLIGHTLY behind the others, and our next patch adds more spells and magical damage to that realm. Recently, there have been some instances of players using hacks to steal relics. In addition, there are some passive third party programs that are able to map out mobs and players around them (not that I've used them). How difficult is to combat cheating, and if you had to guess - how successful is Mythic in preventing it? We've got logs, alert CSRs, and some hidden weapons that I intentionally don't know much about so I can't spill the beans. We've been good about the one strike, you're out rule as far as hacking our game. The relic hacker got caught within five minutes and banned, so his impact on the game was minimal. That passive program is a fun one. It's not too terribly horrible, since it neither shows stealthed characters or the entire zone (DAOC works on a bubble method, information is sent to you only for a specific radius around your character), but we still don't like it as it gives a user an unfair advantage in RVR. So, we keep on trying. I'd say we were doing very well busting hackers, and keeping up with the passive program. How many paying subscribers does DAoC currently have? We have 108K paying customers. Considerably more than that are signed up, but still on their free month of play. That 108, by the way, is up from 105 at the beginning of the week, so we're still climbing at an excellent rate. Recently, the number of players for DAoC online have tailed off a bit. What do you attribute that to? Well, the "first rush" is over - people are settling into their normal playstyles, and normal for most people doesn't include twelve hour marathons. Also, mid December means people are shopping, finishing work-related projects, spending some time with their families and friends, and for our students, studying for finals. I'm really proud that this game is enjoyable for a casual user - I don't usually have time to play except on my lunch hours and weekends, but I've got a toon that can RVR and solo and do all the fun stuff without feeling like a gimp. Some people have complained that there is a real lack of high level content in DAoC (the same dungeons and mobs get old, even with PvP mixed in). Are there any plans to spice things up for the higher level folks? Yep. Is the world of Camelot pretty much feature complete, are will be seeing some new regions (I hate to call them zones) opening up? No world is complete. We've got more features planned even now. And yes, we've got a few regions planned. With a rumored expansion pack on the horizon, will Mythic create a "live" team to support DAoC, or will the dev. team support the old game, plus create new content as well? The entire Mythic staff is the live team. Any new stuff we work on is lower in priority than the live game. Finally, in Matt's last producer letter he stated "we're moving to a totally new engine at some point in 2002", could you go into a little more detail to what he was talking about? It's just an upgrade to the engine we currently use. I have the technical knowlege of this beer I'm holding, so I'm not sure of the details, but I think it lets us do more colors, more depth, more detail, that kind of crap. About the only thing I know for certain is that it will be backwards compatible. I'm not sure we're releasing any details though - we're sort of pushing back the whole expansion thing. The original plan was to release an expansion in May. Can I get a "YEAH RIGHT" from the choir? [choir: yeah right!] Most people don't realize how much we bastardized the off-the-shelf [NetImmerse] engine to do this game. The lead programmer is an honest to god rocket scientist, and is the main reason Mythic can be so independent. Thanks, Sanya!