Picking Mark Jacobs' brain about the Warhammer launch

Assuming you've been on the internet this week, you may have heard that a little game called Warhammer Online is launching fully into production just two days from today. Players who pre-ordered the Standard Edition of the game are eligible to jump onto the live servers today. In honor of this 'second' launch of Warhammer Online, we had the opportunity to sit down with none other than Mythic Entertainment's CEO Mark Jacobs.

We talk a bit about the long, hard road that the Mythic team has traveled to get where they are now. We also go over the team's launch plan, Jacobs' decision to start blogging publicly, and more on World of Warcraft's role in the industry. Said Jacobs: "Beating WoW, really, means that you have to do what only one company has done in the 11 years that MMOs have really been popular. That is, to really expand the market by a huge percentage over what the previous guy did. Blizzard did that, they blew out EQ/Final Fantasy's numbers by tenfold. We'd have to top that by a lot. That's just a level of hubris I just don't have."

Read on for our full discussion about the kickoff to this highly-anticipated game.

Sir, we know that today has to be very busy for you and the team and we really appreciate your time.

Mark Jacobs: No problem. It's a good week.

What's the mood like at Mythic right now?

MJ: It's fantastic. We just had our head start launch yesterday. It was about as clean as you could hope for. We had no crashes, no game crashes, no server crashes. We didn't have to do any emergency patching. The game ran from the time we put up the game until now. It's still running! The collector's edition folks got in around 12 o'clock EST, and within a couple of hours we had a ton of people playing. I can't think of any way it could have gone better.

The only thing it seems like people have big complaints about is the server queues; those are in place because of the way you're stepping up server populations, right?

MJ: The queues went away in about two and a half hours. By three it was pretty quiet on the boards. At that point there were only two servers with queues, and we'd already told people there were going to be queues on those servers. People went anyway. We laid out our exact plan for how we were going to do this to people on Saturday. Which servers would go up, how many they would support ... but you can't do anything if one or two servers are generally popular.

Let's say a server supports 4000 people, if 2000 from Order come in and 2000 from Destruction come in, you can't let 2000 people be in the starting areas at once. You just can't. The complaints were exactly what we expected ... when you compare it to the launches of every other MMO that's come out recently, I think we were near the top.

That plan you laid out on the Vault message boards was very specific, how and where did you develop that?

MJ: Experience. What we'd been doing during the different phases of the Beta test, that was all in preparation for this week. If you want to see what it's going to be like on day one, what do you need to do? Well, you need to get everyone starting fresh. And all trying to go to the same servers. We watched what happened, all throughout Beta. We watched play patterns. How long it took people to move through the starting areas, how many could they hold without being awful ... the last thing we want is for people to get into those areas and be really unhappy. The other thing we need to track is the general experience overall.

As much as we want everything to go well, we can't be as concerned about day one as we are about week one. We can't be as concerned about week one as we are month one. If we had put up more servers really quickly, which is what a bunch of people wanted, more players would have gotten in more quickly. You just can't do that, though, because you might have ended up with servers that were mostly empty for the head start folks. People would have been unhappy, there would have been no-one to fight. We couldn't just open up all the servers at the same time.

Also, to be honest, we wanted to make sure that the CE and the SE pre-order people didn't have a big advantage over people who are just going to buy the game in the store on Thursday. Everybody who's serious about RvR is going to want to make their name on a fresh server, to see if they can get their statue in the capital city. It would have been unfair, frankly, to the players who are coming into the game on Thursday, to do that.

Player frustrations are something that you've mentioned before on your personal blog. Are they something that's on your mind much as you're coming up on Thursday's hard launch? Where are you right now, as that date approaches?

MJ: Where am I? I'm happy. We just announced that we're going to ship one and a half million units to start with. That crushes pretty much every other MMO that's ever come out. It's not even close with the vast majority of them. That feels really good. We're also the #1 EA PC pre-order title of all time. That's amazing, EA's been around for 26 years. We're their number one PC pre-order title of all time. That's really great to think about.

As far as generally with the launch, we've got the servers in place ... we've got the customer service in place, bandwidth is ready to go ... When we went through Beta, wiping and restarting, wiping and restarting, we kept having mini-launches of the games. The tech that we had with Camelot, which we're using somewhat even today, was designed to scale very well and it did. We totally outsold Vivendi's projections back then. We're doing the same thing here with Warhammer. We started with a small number of players in Beta, and we've been slowly increasing it through Open Beta, and everything went really well.

So far so good. I'll know more later this week. If the rest of the week goes as well as the CE head start did, I'm going to be feeling good.

Speaking of your blog ... why did you start doing that? It's been interesting to see you addressing some of the things you have in that space. What made you decide to do that right at this point in time?

MJ: Two things. One, I wanted to do it for a while. I just never had the chance. Two, it helps me relax. I'm a quick writer. I'm not that great a writer when it comes to grammar and sentence structure, I know that. But I do write very quickly. For me to be able to come home, think about things for a bit, and then relax by writing a piece or two makes me feel great.

Looking back over the game ... how long have you folks been working on Warhammer?

MJ: Three years. We got the license in May of 2005. We then started talking to Games Workshop about the design right away, I wrote the initial design and went out to England in June. We spent some time there going back and forth on it, put a small team on it when I got back, and then started up with a larger team in October of that year. We've basically been working on it three years, maybe a little less.

Over that time there were certainly times when you and the team experienced frustrations creating the game ...

MJ: [Laughs loudly] Yes.

Would you be willing to share some of the moments that really had you shaking your head?

MJ: There were lots of them. When Burning Crusade came out, that was one of them. I looked at it, played it, and said "we need to raise our game a bit." We had to redo some of the starting areas more than twice, that was frustrating. Looking at class balance had a bunch of fits and starts, we had to go back to that several times, more than I would have liked. And then probably when we finally decided to cut the cities and classes.