“Massive” is the defining element of an MMO. It is by far the best part of the genre and what makes an MMO so engaging. It is also what makes designing an MMO so damn hard. When thousands of players converge on your world, your design is put to the test. During this last closed beta test, the quest to destroy the rampaging ghilliedhu, Vekas, ran into a big fail. The issue here was a bottleneck when thousands of players all needed to kill the same guy. This is a rare issue that will only occur when we launch a new server. Once the population spreads out, things will go back to normal. For our betas and through the first few weeks of launch we will be having three Vekases spawn on a shorter interval. This should alleviate the burden and get users moving on. Our fix isn’t elegant, but it gets the job done for the short term while we enhance our systems for a long term fix.
As for the , I am quite happy with our changes. Immediately after the first closed beta test, we sat down with the dedicated western design team and went through our critical and major issues. We were able to identify, schedule, fix, QA, and deploy a new patch within two weeks to address this market’s specific feedback. How sweet is that? I’ve been working on titles from east to west for a long time and have never seen dedication and turnaround time like this for an east–to-west product.
The closed beta tests are the perfect opportunity for En Masse and Bluehole to get this community feedback-to-patch cycle down to an exact science. So, please keep up your feedback and we’ll keep up the patches.