Hi everyone!  Okay, so I've got the transcript for the second installment of Ask the Devs ready to go.  You can find it here as well as on the DDOcast forums under 'News and Announcements'.  I've also created a PDF for it:  Here's a LINK to the PDF - left-click to open, right-click and 'save as' to download.

Just a note that we're looking for your questions for the 3rd installment of Ask the Devs!  Send your questions to ddocast@gmail.com.  Thanks!

###

ASK THE DEVS 2 - Recorded for DDOcast, Episode 58 (air date: March 9th, 2008)

Jerry Snook - host, DDOcast

Glin:  DDO Producer
Eladrin:  DDO Lead Designer
Keeper:  DDO Level Designer
Eldorudo:  DDO Quest Designer

also doing behind-the-scenes work and technical help: 

Quarion:  DDO Community Relations Manager

Jerry:  Hello and welcome to the second episode of Ask the Devs!  Very much appreciate you listening to the show.  Let's go around the room and introduce who we have with Turbine with us this time around.  First up we have DDO Producer Glin, how's it going Glin?

Glin:  Going very good!  Glad to be back.  I'm glad you decided that it was safe to invite me back.

Jerry:  Oh, yeah!  No - it's great to have you back!  Very much appreciate it.  Also is DDO Lead Designer Eladrin - how you doing Eladrin?

Eladrin:  Doing great.  Thanks!

Jerry:  Also with us is DDO Level Designer Keeper. 

Keeper:  Hi there!

Jerry:  Hey - and it's great to have you on the show.  This is the first time I've heard your voice - certainly been reading your posts on ddo.com as well.  So, hey - glad to have you with us.  Also with us is Quest Designer Eldorudo.  How's it going Eldorudo?

Eldorudo:  It's going great, Jerry.  Glad to be here again, thank you.

Jerry:  Cool.  And thanks for those promos you sent in for the event this past week too.  I know a lot of the listeners, you know, got a kick out of them, so real nice.

Eldorudo:  You're welcome.  Yeah, we just wanted to throw something together real quick so I thank you for playing them.

Jerry:  Yeah, it's great.  Okay, let's get right to the questions here. 

First question comes from Lloyd who asks, "I have a very simple question to ask:  When will half-orcs be added to the game as a playable race? I'm also interested in what type of enhancements they might have?" 

I know we've heard quite a bit about half-orcs in the past, can't remember exactly what the status was on those in terms of when they are coming to the game.  So who wants to field this one?

Glin:  Yeah, as far as the timeline, it's something that's in development now.  I know that some of the promo video that we put out showed some wire frame, that we've already been working on the modeling.  We don't have a release date - we'd like to get a little closer to starting to polish the playability part but, uh, the half-orcs is definitely going to be a playable, playable option for characters.

Jerry:  Ah, cool, cool.  Any idea of what sort of enhancements half-orcs might have?

Eldorudo:  HALF-ORC SMASH!  (chuckles) I'd be very surprised if they didn't have strength-oriented enhancements as well as those that synergized well with the barbarian and ranger classes, uh, and eventually druid.

Jerry:  Oh, okay.  Alright, Good deal, good deal. 

Next question comes from Sarezar, who says, "Will we ever get evil alignments for our characters?  If yes, would you provide an alignment respect?" (Jerry: for the people who want to switch sides, I guess, go to the dark side...)  "If not, why not?  Is there someone or something that doesn't allow you to implement evil alignments?" (Jerry: which he says have been proven to be successful in other games and of course are a part of Dungeons and Dragons)

So, evil alignments - That has to be something, I'm guessing, went back to even the early design of DDO here.  Whether or not you should include them, could include them and how it would work, so....what do you think?

Eladrin:  There were several reasons behind the exclusion of evil alignments in DDO.  One is from the Player's Handbook where it states that the three evil alignments are for monsters and villains, while the first six alignments (lawful good to chaotic neutral) are the standard alignments for player characters.  Uh, also, content-wise, an evil party probably wouldn't be as quite as happy going through some of the heroic dungeons and experiences that we have in DDO.  Sure they'd be okay with "Purging the Heretics" but the bulk of the content wouldn't be something that is especially geared towards them. 

Jerry:  Yeah, I'm guessing, a lot it's one of those tricky things.  I remember back in my 2nd Edition pen and paper days, the old house rule that we had is that generally alignments don't matter that much - just kind of play the character however you want to play them.  But I remember also being in some kind of pick-up pen and paper group where people were real strict on alignment, so it's gotta be kind of tough to know if - would an evil character be even in a party with a good character and visa versa and that kind of thing.

Eladrin:  We were fairly light with alignment in DDO.  We don't restrict the quests that you can go on.  But I believe that the suspension of disbelief needed to have evil characters enjoy the entire experience would be, uh, not the best thing in the world.

Jerry:  All right, Drallac asks, "Were the new death penalty affects a unanimous decision on Turbine's part?  Or was it as big a debate like it was in the ddo.com forums?"

Eladrin:  We thought long and hard about the death penalty changes and had a tremendous number of discussions in-house.  Including debates about what we were going to change, what we wanted to do with it, what the philosophy behind a death penalty in an online MMO is.  Um, all in all, we're all pretty happy with the changes that were made, so, uh, I guess we're unanimous.

Jerry:  I imagine there was quite a bit of debate though.  Cuz, I mean, really, the death penalty impacted, a very, uh, well, numerous aspects of the game.  I mean you had everything from, say, you had to take into account time of progression, what people like and what they dislike and what's an incentive and disincentive to playing, and all these things.  I bet you had to get answers to most of that stuff, huh?

Glin:  It was quite a bit of internal debate for, for several months.  I do recall when we posted the solution on the web that I was able to find a document, at least an email thread going back a full year on discussing dropping the XP debt.  Lots of negative feedback from players in player exit interviews about how it affected their game, and we went with something a little more tried and true, a little more traditional, that we thought that our current players wouldn't hate, because our current players are there because they weren't concerned about the XP debt, in, in some sense. 

But it had kind of a negative effect on how long people stayed in-game, because we found that people were dropping out, uh, and waiting for their XP debt to regenerate, and that was a pretty negative experience for people who were trying to keep their parties and their guilds full as well.  Um, it wasn't as apparent (I think) from the player side, but it definitely went into our decision-making and helped to turn the tide on anyone who was actually still against that.

Jerry:  I know I've, uh, you know, given my thoughts on the show about the death penalty and how it affected me before.  I've had a character, let's say, I ran Ghosts of Perdition and it didn't go very well, and it didn't go very well probably five or six times in a row.  And so that was a disincentive for me to actually pull out that character.  At that point, I was just like "well, let's set this character aside for a week and play someone else, and so I guess that really kind of goes to the core of what you were saying there.

Glin:  Yeah, I mean that's definitely an experience that even us as players at home, uh, in our own game, were kind of getting frustrated with.

Eldorudo:  Sorry about that Jerry.  I'll take the blame for Ghosts of Perdition.

Jerry:  (chuckles)  No, you can actually blame the other five members of the pickup group I was in.  They were a bunch of zergers and it didn't go very well.  That's a hard one - that's still one of my harder quests though, but, uh, all right. 

Oleg asks, "What is the probability of true random dungeons?"  What he's talking about here is a random number of traps, random kinds of traps, random ways of getting to the end of a dungeon.  He says, "I understand it can be random only within some parameters, but still it would be so cool to go into a dungeon and not know what awaits you."

Keeper:  Uh, unlikely to happen.  Unfortunately our world-builder tool's like a pencil, you need someone to wield it.  You can do a lot with it but it's not very good at spitting out random things on its own. 

Jerry:  Now, you guys have done sort of, uh, in I believe in some of the new Vale quests, is it "Rainbow in the Dark" where there are times where there are traps there and some times when there are not.  So I guess we've at least seen sort of random trap generation, things of that nature, but, uh...

Eldorudo:  Players keep asking for random content but they've got lots of it in "Rainbow in the Dark".  Cuz, see, that thread was one of the longest we've had in a while, so apparently people like having that element of surprise, "Is it random?  Is it not?"
 
Jerry:  Yeah. 

Eladrin:  Also in The Shroud we've introduced a lot of randomness with, uh, which Lieutenants would show up in the second phase, which room you end up in (EDITOR'S NOTE: in the third phase).  Some limited randomness.

Jerry:  Yeah, and I bet we could probably see more of that kind of thing in the future here too. 

Glin:  Yeah, I think what Keeper was speaking to is more of the, uh, the actual dungeon creation of people want to see a kind of randomness that's the room kind of growing on its own, in a way, as opposed to this is a room that's mapped out and planned and plotted and architected.  The elements in it can be scripted to have the randomness in certain areas, but it can't be too chaotic-random, which is just the next level of going from where we are now with the randomness to sort of chaotic.  And then it becomes a big game play issue, uh, when we're not really controlling what the experiences that we want the players to have. 

Jerry:  Yeah.  All right, Steve asks, "What is the status of the fix for greater teleport (that he says) was promised for the next patch after Mod 4?"

In particular here he's referring to the ability to cast greater teleport in public areas.  He says a fix for it was announced with Mod 6 but there doesn't seem to be any visible change.

Eladrin:  I have some tech requests in on it, uh for, doing things like locking teleport locations until you visited areas, and, uh, some other improvements to the spell.  I'm sure that at some point in the future we will be looking at the spell again.

Jerry:  Kasmir asks, "Could we have guild-bound items?"  Say, things that officers could bind, and then take out of their guild banks, and things of that nature.  Maybe more rankings for guilds, different kinds of membership, a guild house, things of that nature.  So, what's the latest on guild housing and guild banks?

Glin:  You know, Jerry, we've taken a lot of the, the feedback on what players would like to see for guilds and we're actually implementing that in the designs that we're putting together.  Um, we don't have an immediate release plan for this one, but guilds and guild support, guild banking, these are things that we recognize is important for the retention and the community spirit, the veteran players helping new players and that sort of thing.  There's definitely a value in supporting guilds more than what's in-game currently, so, the player feedback and suggestions like this are definitely something that we want to see as we're, as we're, building these things. 

Jerry:  Sure, as long as you allow my guild to have a floating castle above the Wavecrest Tavern I'll be happy.  (chuckles)

Glin:  That's going to cost you some plat, though.

Jerry:  Yeah. (laughter) All right, Robbie asks, "I mostly play clerics.  Since the launch of DDO, clerics have been missing their domain powers.  I know you tried to please clerics with the 'follower of' enhancement line," but he says there's only two of those available to all races and maybe not a lot of diversity in the abilities.  So he asks, "Are there any plans to add more 'follower of' enhancement lines, maybe like a Blood of Vol?  Or maybe are there any guesses on when we might get domain spells?

Eladrin:  Well, there's five total lines of the "follower of" enhancements.  Two of them, the Silver Flame and Sovereign Host are available to all the races as they are the dominant faiths in Eberron. 

Uh, we do plan on expanding those lines and (have) additional diversification of the enhancements that follow off of the original "follower" enhancements, but at this time we don't intend on adding something like the Blood of Vol. 

Similar to the question about evil alignments, uh, I know the Lord of Blades isn't exactly the nicest guy, but at least he works well with adventuring parties (their goals sometimes coincide).  The Blood of Vol very rarely has, uh, goals that cooperate very well with the rest of adventuring society.  I'm always looking at including more and more options for the different character classes, and clerics and paladins both gain quite a bit from enhancements to the faith lines.

Jerry:  Sure.  All right, Chad asks, "I'm an aspiring game designer and I'm currently going to college at the Art Institute of Atlanta for a degree in game art and design.  Question is what did you guys do to get your jobs?"  (chuckles)  "What kind of education and areas did you study before being hired at Turbine?"  He says, "Basically I want to make sure I'm on the right path by simply asking those who are already in the industry."

Keeper:  There are quite a few paths into the industry.  I got here by studying illustration in college and I spent six years making art for Turbine before moving over to the design department. 

Jerry:  So, you mean, what, like Asheron's Call and that kind of thing?

Keeper:  Asheron's Call 2 and then Middle Earth Online before it was Lord of the Rings Online.

Jerry:  So that's some pretty good advice there.  I guess, is there a right way?  Is there a wrong way?  Maybe the wrong way is to show up for the interview with a bag of money and try to bribe them, huh?

Eladrin:  That could work pretty well, actually.  (laughter)

Eldorudo:  If you're going to show up, Jerry, you got a job.

Glin:  Especially if you show up with a bag of money.

Eldorudo:  Yeah, exactly, that's what I'm saying.  I think we all have different paths.  I know mine is kind of like a nontraditional path.  Um, I had been working kind of dead-end jobs, you know, nothing that was all that enlightening.  So, I decided instead of selling games for an eBay business, I'd wanted to make them.  So, I quit my job making decent, well, actually, pretty good money and just became a QA tester making ten dollars an hour.  And actually took a job at Turbine over two other companies that had better offers because I wanted to do MMO's.  And it obviously paid off because I was in QA for four months and then I went up to Online Community for about six months and now I found my home in design, been here for about a year and a half now. 

So, um, my main tip would be to tell people to network, to find, check out the IDGA and your local Game Developers Association and find out when they have meet-and-greets.  I know in Boston here they have one once a month and that's how I got into the industry was just going there and meeting people, making contacts, and eventually that's what landed me my job here at Turbine. 

Jerry:  You know I've heard that before that, say, getting a start in QA can be a good stepping stone to a career in the industry there.

Eldorudo:  Yeah, it really is.  It's the best way to get in, you know, unless you have a game design degree.  And that still doesn't guarantee you anything, but if you do want to get into the industry QA is an excellent way to do it.  You basically get to touch all the different departments, you get to write bugs for art, for code, for design and you basically get to interact with all of the different departments.  It's an excellent introduction to the industry.

Glin:  From a management perspective, you know, I came in as a manager into the console and PC game industry, but my background prior to that was as an engineer.  Prior to that I was actually working in recording studios (I had more of a multi-media background).  Not all of the managers that work here have that, in my case I have more of a hands-on development background, and then others have come in from the area of having the degree, you know, a business degree, and a real strong keen interest in games, and they too will work their way up into that level. 

But there's really two tracks to go, as you come in as an associate level, or as we were just saying the QA.  Working your way towards the development, more of the technical hands-on side, or you can take the management track which has to do with more of your people skills and your organization.  But really a lot of it stems down to you have to be willing to take those steps to work on something as fun and interesting and creative as working in the game industry. 

Jerry:  All right.  Kind of a related question here and I just thought of this so I don't know if you guys can answer it, but let's say for example this guy wants to get a job at Turbine.  I think I've been to the Turbine web site.  I believe you actually do post up some jobs there as well, don't you?

Glin:  Yeah, absolutely.  We're going through a big hiring growth spurt right now.  Just put my name on all of the applications...

(laughter)

Kate:  Hey!

Glin:  Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.  Um, yeah, people should submit their resumes through the web site, it definitely gets attention there.  There's also submitting reels for artists, and, you know, my developers, game developers can submit their reels through that format as well.

Quarion:  (Jerry's note:  Quarion was working behind the scenes to get the group Skype chat set up and help the devs with any technical issues during recording...that's why he wasn't introduced at the start.) And, Jerry, they can do that through www.turbinejobs.com and they can also sign up for an email alert through that too to find out when we post new jobs that become available, they can be alerted either for a short time or forever, to find out what new things are opening up at Turbine.

Jerry:  All right, so I'm going to kind of spring this next question on you, so I'm not sure, heh, what all we can say about this but let's just kind give this a try and see what we come up with.  This has obviously been a really big week in Dungeons and Dragons Online.  You guys have been working on a live event all week for Update 6.1 here.  This is actually being recorded, I should say, on Friday, uh, it's going to be airing on Sunday, so, so the "Big End" has not happened as of the time of recording this. 

But, uh, I just wanted to get your thoughts in general here:  Anyone got any thoughts about how they think this week went?  Did it go, well I guess like everything, maybe it doesn't go exactly as planned in all aspects, but overall are you guys pretty happy with it?

Keeper:  Considering the ways that it could have broken, I'm really happy with it.

(chuckling)

Eldorudo:  Yeah. 

Jerry:  It is some really neat technology there, I mean it's really kind of, um, is it a game-changing technology?  I mean, could we see this, at least maybe parts of this sort of implementation, you know, throughout, throughout the rest of the development cycle here at DDO?

Eldorudo:  Well, Jerry, just to add onto that I just wanted to commend all the players.  I've had a blast reading the forums this week, it's been great just seeing how everybody's getting into the story line. 

And sure, there are ways we can improve and make this better in the future, but I really love how everyone's been getting so into it, I love reading the posts.  It's been just a joy reading the forums.  And I know that everyone, you know not everyone is happy, we can't please everybody, but the positives that we've taken out of this have far outweighed the negatives, to me. 

Um, and yeah, in moving forward this is something that we can certainly move out across the game in other ways.  This is kind of our "voyage effort", we'll see what happens with it in the future.  It's something we can certainly leverage in other avenues of design, but that's still to be determined.  I would love to get everyone's take on this once the event is finally over on Saturday evening.  When people have a chance to have seen everything unfold before their eyes, I'll be very interested to get, uh, feedback and just to find out how we can do this better moving forward, and what parts were great, what worked, what didn't work, I'm really interested to see what everyone thinks about that.

Eladrin:  We've already learned a lot from this experience also that will help us in future events. 

Jerry:  One thing I was curious about is in terms of the amount of work, frankly, that you guys have to do to put this sort of live event together, how's it compare to, say, putting together a Vale quest?  Is it easier?  Does it take less time, or is it just about as labor-intensive?

Eldorudo:  Well, uh, this one, once again, since it was our maiden voyage it took longer than it's going to take in the future.  We really wanted to get it right and nail it.  So it did take a pretty good effort on everyone's part that worked on it to do this.  And, frankly, if it takes this long again, it's kind of, it would be hard for us to do it to that level.  But moving forward it's going to be easier.

I don't expect we're going to be doing events this epic, all the time, it's going to be tough to gauge.  We have to kind of weigh how long it takes to the impact of what we're doing.  So that's something we're going to evaluate moving forward, but it's certainly something that we are going to use again. 

Jerry:  All right, so one of the things I guess I noticed with this past week, and this has really been an issue with, uh, player-created events as well.  I can think back to the Stormreach Olympics that Merlask organized a while back and things of that nature where you get live events, you get everyone in a room kind of, sort of, doing something out of the norm that you might normally do using the game engine and you get sometimes a bunch of lag. 

You know in regards to lag here, it depended of course on the server, and the time of the day and which instance you were in, but I think it kind of showed a little bit maybe the constraints of how, just how much we can do in a public instance.  I guess I'm just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on the lag, do you think there might be ways we could improve that in the future?  How much frankly is the player base, instance-hopping and things of that, how much did that contribute to it?

Glin:  The lag is something that we were testing for, the min and max and sort of 'acceptable' amount.  What we looked at was min-specced clients and max-specced clients.  A lot of what players were experiencing was client lag for the most part. 

There was definitely, you know, we're watching the servers during the big events and we're watching the frame rate of the servers and, and, monitoring those things, and we're not being hit too hard on that side. 

The groups of players who were the people that were affected the most, I know in jumping in to run around and observe on some of the bigger nights I stayed away from the crowds and for the most part didn't experience the effects, but I could see people lagging on the bridge by the bank, for example. 

So, in general, we found that if you've got a min-specced client, just a, you know, to pick a vague description of a computer, if you've got something that's min-specced and on low to medium settings, once you get more than eight people in your immediate line of sight you'll have a laggier experience.  When you get to like twenty people, then you're going to have a lot of halting, and that's something we considered in designing it. 

I know that in some of the events like things happen in one particular place, and then when things heated up throughout the week we started to spread things out.  But we really didn't have enough clues to players to go out in smaller hunting parties so we were trying to message that through forums, and that's something I think we learned from this event. 

But this event had a sample of pretty much every kind of event we can do with this new tech.  It's not something that we would do for, for, our regular events.  This is definitely a second anniversary, new tech introduced, and we had the jump event, we had the role-playing portion of it going up throughout the week, we had the monster-spawn events and as players know as of today we have the quest event, which is the quest that is only open after the finale.  So, those are things we will probably do in smaller doses, and when we do monster-spawn events we will do them in more controlled environments than big public spaces. 

But this is definitely something that players want to consider when they're jumping around:  instance-hopping is going to put you into an unexpected area.  You don't know how many people are in there.  You might have a really long delay in actually even getting into that instance if you're landing right on top of ten or twenty other people.

Jerry:  Yeah, sure.  Is that kind of why maybe we didn't see...uh, you know there were some people that were thinking, well maybe we could see, say, two hundred devils suddenly start pouring out of the portals and things of that nature.  Is that related to this in that from a technical perspective that was kind of a difficult thing to do?

Keeper:  Yeah, you put monsters in a public place and that's bound to cause lag, unfortunately.  Two hundred would be way to many!

Jerry:  Yeah, all right.  So overall though this event was really, uh, really something.  I mean, I haven't seen this obviously in DDO before and I'm not sure that we've seen a lot of this kind of thing in MMO's in general, so, that's got to be pretty exciting at least to, to, if nothing else, at least in the game to be breaking new ground here.

Keeper:  Excellent.

Eldorudo:  Yeah, it is very exciting Jerry.  It's really nice to see that everyone is acting so positively, most people anyhow.  You know, we're trying something we poured a lot of time and effort into this and it's really great to see it unfold before our eyes and see everyone enjoying it.  We hope we can do more of this in the future but once again it's been really great seeing everyone get so into it. 

Jerry:  All right, so, uh, just one more question "out of the blue" here before we wrap things up.  When I was organizing this segment of Ask the Devs with you guys, someone had mentioned that this is being taped in a place called the "Star Wars Room".  I couldn't let you go without telling me a little bit about that.  What makes it "Star Wars"?  Do you have a Death Star in there?  Are you all required to wear helmets?

(laughter)

Glin:  It's as hot as the sun, that's why!

(laughter)

Eldorudo:  Actually, we have a bunch of Ewoks in here that bring us food and drinks. 

Keeper:  I don't know why this room is called "Star Wars". 

Glin:  Bring me coffee!

Keeper:  Most of the rooms here are named after computer games.

Jerry:  Is that true?

Eladrin:  It's the "Star Wars" computer game. 

Jerry:  Oh, okay.  So do you have a Pac-Man room, a Galaxian room, that kind of thing?

Glin:  Yes.

Keeper:  There's a Pac-Man Room.  Donkey Kong.  Frogger.

Eladrin:  Dig Dug.

Glin:  And we just added a Gauntlet.

Eladrin:  Robotron, and there's Robotron.  And Asteroids.

Jerry:  Cool, which one's the bathroom called?

(laughter)

Eladrin:  I call that the men's room.

Eldorudo:  It's called the E.T. Atari game.

Jerry:  (laughs)  Nice.

(laughter)

Jerry:  All right.  So that's going to wrap it up for this segment of Ask the Devs.  I really appreciate you guys coming on the show to answer the questions from the players here and chat with us and have some fun with us. 

Just want to say if you're listening to this and asking yourself, "Well how do I submit a question for Ask the Devs?"  It's easy.  Just send an email to ddocast@gmail.com.  Again, that's ddocast@gmail.com.  Appreciate it if you'd give me a name that I could use on the air, and maybe tag it for Ask the Devs, just so that I know that it's not, say, a question for the podcast and it's a question for Ask the Devs, although I can usually sort that out so it's not that big a deal if you don't do that, but it's just kind of helpful.

All right, Eladrin - it's great to have you on the show this week.  Really do appreciate it.

Eladrin:  Thanks a lot.  It was a lot of fun!

Jerry:  And Keeper - nice to hear your voice and you're doing, you did a lot of outdoor work for Mod 6, right, the Vale of Twilight?

Keeper:  That's correct.

Jerry:  I just need to say excellent, excellent work on the Vale of Twilight.  I think it's one of the, uh, most beautiful parts of DDO here.  So I think you really just have done a fantastic job on the outdoor area there. 

Keeper:  Thank you!

Jerry:  Eldorudo - congrats on putting together with Keeper and I'm sure some others too a fantastic event here in DDO this week.  Keeping you busy, they're keeping you busy, huh?

Eldorudo:  Yeah, certainly kept me busy.  And I want to thank everybody for working on it.  Certainly it was myself and Keeper worked a lot on it, but Eladrin, and JWB and even some of the artists who players on DDO won't know, uh, contributed a lot so it was definitely a team effort, and it's really nice to see it unfolding before everyone's eyes.  I certainly appreciate you having us on and as Veheer would say, "We'll see you tomorrow."

Jerry:  Sure.  And Glin, great to have you on the show again, look forward to having you on again in the future.

Glin:  Thanks.  Big fan of the DDOcast myself so I'm just happy to be a part of it.  Appreciate it.

###

www.ddocast.com