EQII's Georgeson talks F2P launch, page two

One of our breakfast topics here at Massively was a comparison between EQ2X and LOTRO, because you're obviously in the same space and doing the same things with both games (in very different ways), which is really cool to watch. It's neat to look at how everything is working out. That said, it seems a lot of potential players are turned off by the lack of races and classes available for free. We ran a Daily Grind where the overwhelming majority of the commenters seemed to prefer LOTRO. Does that worry you at all and are you planning on tweaking the offerings?

[Pauses] Well, I have all kinds of private opinions I probably shouldn't air about why I think our matrix is better. Let's see, how can I say this without getting into a Coke and Pepsi thing here. [Pauses] I think they have some mechanisms in their matrix that look attractive at first glance but after people play it for awhile, they may realize it's not as attractive as they think it is. We've designed our matrix to be upfront as far as what the limitations are. As far as races and classes go, I think DDO is the only one that offers more classes than we do.

I think the biggest differences are in content. They lock a lot of content and make you pay for it as you go; we leave ours wide open. I'm not really sure why people are complaining, because the more I do an analysis of it, I can't see anything that's more restrictive about our matrix than a lot of people's, and in a lot of ways it seems less restrictive. You can play for 30 or 40 levels in the current game without feeling massively restricted. The stuff like spell tiers and legendary equipment, the people that griping about stuff like that are the experienced EQII players.

We're pitching this matrix to new players when they come in, and they aren't going to feel these restrictions until they've played for a long time. Once they've played for a long time, at that point only will they start to feel restricted by it. I just don't see it.

Moving on, many folks have expressed concerns over F2P broker access, and you mentioned in one of the threads that this was intentional, and that you'd even like to see people return to the /auction open air markets like EQ1. Kind of a throwback like WTB, WTS, that kind of stuff. Is this an iron-clad policy or do you eventually see a bit of broker access being available for F2P players?

Nothing is iron-clad about our game. Ever. The reason why we're trying this is again, honestly, I would rather have players talking to each other than paying us money. If players would talk to each other and make some human contacts, they'll stick with the game longer, they'll find relationships, guilds, all that stuff. The game gets better, it's more fun, people are more interested, it just keeps snowballing and it's all good.

I'd much rather that happen than for people to pay us money to access the broker. The broker credits are in there just so people can access it if they want to, but I'd really like it if people did the open air auction. In fact, I've been doing a lot of crafting on EQ2X personally, and even though I have a Gold account and even though I still use the broker, I tend to use the open air auction because it allows me to advertise my wares in a way the broker wouldn't.

For instance, I have a level 84 alchemist — and boy that's a lot of crafting — and typically I'll go on the auction and say "look, I can craft almost every spell for shadowknights or whatever just down the line," and so on and so forth. Is there anybody that's interested? And I'll get all kinds of tells and there's just no way to do that on the broker. So there's a lot of advantages in using the auction channel again. Whether they do or not is entirely up to the players, we're just trying it out to see if it will work.

Do you think, given the launch of FFXIV which has pretty much done the same thing in terms of saying no to brokers and using bazaars, do you think that's a path coming back in game design? Or a growing trend of going back to the old way of doing things?

Hell if I know, but if you follow my career history, I've never been a guy that follows the herd. I've just never really been interested in that. What I'm looking for are things that will make the game more fun. Just because WoW does it or Final Fantasy does it, that means nothing to me. That doesn't mean those games don't have great ideas. One of the things we've been talking about a lot is whether or not we should do the virtual dungeon thing where you can set up for a dungeon across worlds.

That's not pertinent to the subject though; just because everyone else is doing it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea. For instance in our game, guild halls are amazingly good. There's all kinds of stuff you can do with them. It's like once you're in a really well-established guild and all that stuff is there, you don't really feel like being out of a guild again. It's fantastic, all the tradeskill stuff, the transportation stuff. The problem is, it's too good.

Nobody goes to the cities anymore, nobody talks to each other, they cluster together in these private guilds and you never do anything ever outside in the real world again. That's not good for the MMO. They need interaction between the players. Conventional wisdom is "let them push a button a million times and they'll automatically win and be happy," but that's not what MMOs are. MMOs are made out of people.

Soylent Green and MMOs, there's your quote for the day. [Laughs] It takes interaction for the cohesiveness of the community to occur, so we're trying to push on some of that stuff and bring it back. If it doesn't take it doesn't take. Maybe players don't want that anymore, but we feel we need to try.

You briefly mentioned the idea of the dungeon finder. What are you planning, or thinking of planning?

We're just talking about it. There's some drawbacks to it, it's another one of those mechanisms that takes people away from each other. Did you play STO? I liked it, I thought it was cool, one of the things I really liked about it is when you went in a mission instance, you got the public groups. No matter what mission you were going into, you could go in and play the mission with all these other people and it was cool. The thing I hated about it was that as soon as the mission was over, the people were gone.

So you never picked up any friendships, and it's really important for MMOs to have that ability. If we were going to do a dungeon finder it would need to have some sort of stickiness where people could find each other again, and then I'd be interested in pursuing it and going forward with it. It's a cool idea, we just need to work out some kinks that other people haven't worked out yet.

I agree, I hate it when people are just gone.

At that point it might as well be Quake Arena.

[Laughs] Exactly. OK, final question. You mentioned something on the forums about upcoming changes to crowd control after Velious. I know that's a long ways off, but I'm just curious if you could elaborate on that a little bit.

I'll have to cheap out on that one, I can't give any kind of idea yet. I can say this. Our lead designer is working on what I've been calling a class balance manifesto, and that's not due for awhile. That's just theory and concepts about how the classes should work with each other, and one of the subjects is CC, how is it useful. The hardest part about playing a CC character is PUGs because people just don't get what you're doing. They parse out the data and your DPS sucks and they freak out, they don't realize that what you're doing is making them amazing. So we have to figure out some mechanisms about how to make CC better as far as more intuitive and make other players aware of it, but I don't have any details yet.

So this manifesto will be like a document that says "this is how our classes will run?"

The intent is to get everybody to agree internally, which is a hoot by the way, and once we get a consensus on where we're going with it we'll publish it to the players and let them rip into it for awhile. Once we have a finalized version of it to go forward then we'll look at implementing it.

Alright, well players will be looking forward to that, I'll be looking forward to that.

Well it's going to take a while, so don't be looking for it tomorrow. [laughs]

Thank you again, as always.

Thank you.