[WHA] WAR Adds Punkbuster, Cuts 4 Classes and 2 Capitals

Originally Posted by James_EAMythic

Hey guys,



It's important to remember a few key facts:



A) The game is still in development, it's important that we make the right decisions to have a successful launch.

B) We want to make a great game, not a good game. I think we can all agree that playing a career that wasn't up to par with our standards doesn't accomplish that.

C) Capital cities require you to capture 2 of the 3 campaigns. We'll have a much more informative explanation of how city capture works but it's now even more challenging and requires the cooperation of the entire realm to march to the gates of your enemies city and conquer their king, which in the end was always our goal.




WAR, while now different, is more exciting and engaging then ever before and the cities and careers provide an experience to look forward too



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PunkBuster cannot automatically do anything, including boot a user from the server.



It is purely for monitoring purposes and alerting CSR's of any suspicious activity.




It still requires a member of our Customer Support team following our guidelines for support to take any action against an account.



Many of us have played FPS's to be booted from the server for no apparent reason. This will not be the case here as any instance will still require an investigation, it simply allows us to hone in on possible troublemakers faster than ever and keep your RvR and PvE experience as fair as possible

Originally Posted by Mbj

Folks,




Okay, here's the third of the topics I will create today in which I'll explain in more detail, why we made the decisions we made. It's going to be a rather busy day so please don't expect me to respond to every question asked in response or to get into long debates. Obviously, I won't respond to any questions that are off-topic as that's why I'm creating these separate topics.



Well, this is the topic that I have been dreading the most because the message I have to deliver here it the only one that I feel badly about. I'm not going to suger-coat, spin, twist and/or manipulate bad news because I never do that and I'm not going to start now. So, off we go:



1) Losing some of the 4 careers does not feel great. I wish I could sit here and tell you that we were close to getting them right, that everything was going well with those careers but it wasn't. The feedback we were getting from our beta testers on the Hammerer was not good and while the feedback on the Choppa was better, it wasn't great. These weren't classes that were introduced at the last minute and the Dwarf-Greenskin pairing had been through multiple iterations. What we saw after all our analysis, and that includes player feedback on the boards, player surveys and our metrics tools was that these classes weren't cutting it. When it came to the Blackguard, well, we weren't excited about how they were coming along either.



2) When we looked at these careers, we had four choices:




a) Spend whatever time it took to get them in and get them great

b) Spend a reasonable amount of time and go with the best we could come up with

c) Put them in as is and try to fix them post launch

d) Pull them for now



Option (a) was not feasible. This game is not ChoppaHammer or WarHammerer, it is WAR. It is based on a tremendous amount of great Games Workshop IP and these careers are obviously not the only ones in WAR. Our game revolves around RvR, not 4 specific classes, so taking an indefinite amount of time to keep working on specific careers until we get them right was not the right call to make. Option (b) we looked at but nobody could guarantee that these 4 specific careers would have both been great and that it could have been accomplished in a set amount of time. Option (c) is not something we were going to do. Launching knowing that you haven't gotten it right yet and hoping to fix it post launch is not something we are going to do again. When we launched DAoC back in 2001, we knew (and we've said this before) that we wished we had a few more months to get a lot more done in the game. We hoped we would be able to fix things post launch (and for the most part we did) but we were out of money and had no other option. With WAR and as part of EA, we weren't going to go down that path again. WAR is all about RvR and the consequences of having either truly unbalanced careers at launch and/or unappealing ones are worse than in a PvE-centric game. I'd rather cut 4 careers now and then put them in (or other careers) post-launch. We also weren't going to wait till the last minute before launch, pull them and say WHOOPS to the players. That left option (d). We're making the decision now, well-before launch, so we still have plenty of time to make adjustments in the game based on what happens during this current stage of beta, the Guild Beta.



3) We are currently still in beta and beta is all about putting things into development, seeing what happens and making adjustments accordingly. We did just that and the consensus from the players and the development team was that pulling the careers was the way to go. This is precisely the type of stuff that happens during a beta test. The history of MMOs is littered with developers who refused to listen to the players, to the data that was gathered during beta and we refuse to go down that path with WAR. Making a great game is not only about spending money on development it's also about making the right calls during that time. This is one of those calls.




4) The loss of the careers is upsetting but the content is unchanged (other than the career specific stuff naturally). Every race still has its own lands, quests, starting areas, etc. We believe that with the careers with have in there and our Mastery lines that no race will be at a disadvantage. If, during the next few weeks of beta we're wrong, we'll make the decisions we need to do to ensure that we launch the world's next great MMORPG.



5) As to the future of these careers, I would love to say that they will be put into the game at some point but I can't. We will continue to look at them and if we feel we can make them great, then we will put them into the game. If we can't, then we will put in other classes to take their place.



If I believed that some extra time would have allowed us to both get in the removed classes and the other cities, I would have made the call to delay the game and I believe EA would have supported it. However, neither I nor the team believed that some extra time would have changed the situation. I can just imagine how much the community would have howled if we had said "We need to delay the game again for an indefinite amount of time until we can get 4 out of the 24 available classes in the game working well."



I do wish that the news about the classes was better but it is what it is and our goal, as always, is to make a great MMORPG. It was never about whether we had 24 classes or 20 classes, 2 cities or 6 cities, it was about making a great game, first and foremost. By making these decisions we are taking a painful but necessary step to make that happen.



Mark