Members of the Trion Worlds team traveled to PAX East to host a party and celebrate the game's launch with fans. We got the chance to talk with Rift's executive producer about a variety of topics.

ZAM: Getting back to the update, in your 1.01 letter you mentioned wanting to fix mages. Can you talk a little about balancing the callings and souls post-launch?

Hartsman: It's been interesting because the balance points are different every four to five levels. The balance points change for all the souls. Bluntly, we don't want to make all the souls exactly equal at every level range. If you're playing one calling, maybe some level ranges are great and others you're behind other people. We think as long as in the end-game people end up competitive with each other, we've done a pretty good job.

Right now, it's mostly about making sure that... I'll use the mage as an example. There are some places early on in the game – and the early levels are obviously important for people to have fun and not feel like they're playing on hard mode – where if you're playing a soul that has a pet or can drain life, chances are you feel like you're playing one game, where if you're playing a mage soul that doesn't have the ability to tank adds or get life back, you feel like you're playing a much more difficult game. We've been working on that. The class designers are figuring out exactly which souls need some tweaking and what to do from there.

ZAM: So the queue problem seems to have died down a bit since launch.

Hartsman: Yeah, opening a bunch of new servers fixes that problem pretty well it seems. It took about a week to flatten out.

ZAM: How are all the population levels? Do you feel like that many servers will be consistently needed?

Hartsman: I hope so. They way our server clustering works, I'm not too worried about it. The way it distributes by function instead of by region allows us to do all kinds of things. It's a great architecture. But for the time being, we're just watching them all fill up. I think some of that will go away over time obviously, just because of players' patterns. When a game is brand new, players tend to play one and a half to two times as many hours in a day as they do after they've settled in permanently. So we'll definitely see some leveling out there.

ZAM: Do you think the server list is basically stable at this point? Do you foresee adding new ones here and there?

Hartsman: If there's one thing the last couple of weeks has proven, my ability to see the future is not exactly perfect. The way it usually works with MMOs is you get this huge blast of people looking at the game in beta. We did that open beta for almost a full week where we said, “everybody on the internet, come on and play!” What we were expecting to see was a settling down now that people had to pay money. We thought there would be fewer of them. We were not expecting it to continue to go up, which it did. We really broke away from the pack doing that. Now we watch the leading indicators of the number of people downloading the game at any giving time and the number of keys being registered at any given time. Now it's just watch and react smartly.

ZAM: What's the status on server transfers?

Hartsman: We actually just rolled out the first part of the back-end tech for that in the 1.01 update. We don't have full server transfers yet. We're going to keep an eye on the queues a little bit and we're going to see if there are places we can target specific servers to offer some moves off to lighter servers. We'll see how that works. The vast majority of times are zero, but even on servers that do have queues, other than one or two servers, it's down to minutes. I'm not too worried, but we'll probably have people taking us up on the offer.

ZAM: So you plan on initially offering targeted server transfers to deal with remaining queue times, and then offering full server transfers?

Hartsman: Oh yeah, we'll offer that over time. We really didn't want to rush out a pay service when the first goal is to help the couple servers that are still having crowding issues. And then later on we can roll out a web pay service. We're focused 100% on making the existing experience as good as it can be.

ZAM: Do you have plans for other paid services down the line?

Hartsman: It's not on the radar at all right now. Don't get me wrong, have we talked about them? Absolutely. We've talked about most options that are available in different games. But right now we're focused on the game since it's brand new and live. We have a really aggressive update and content rollout schedule, and we have a really aggressive bug fix and balance and tweak schedule. We're really just trying to keep on the stuff that's in-game.

The only out-of-game stuff we've been doing is our data exports, which enables fans and players to build their own cool toys with our data. You know how the game tracks everything that gets discovered in the game, whether it's a recipe, artifact collection, quest, item or NPC? All of that discovered information is public knowledge. There are no secrets about it. We wrapped it all up across our servers with timestamps and server names and wrapped up all the presentation data, and we will be updating it frequently on one of our websites so people can pull it down and build their own sites out of that data and do cool stuff.

I think that we end up with a greater net win if we bring more cool stuff into the ecology that is Rift as opposed to focusing on more monetization. Here's our core credo: “If we make something great and awesome, people will continue to choose to pay for it.” We just really want to make a great game.

ZAM: What's next for Rift? You talked about an aggressive patch schedule, so can you give us any hints?

Hartsman: We're targeting major updates, like I said, every 4-8 weeks or so. A lot of it's going to depend on the size of the given update. Smaller ones could be 4-5 weeks, larger could be 8-10 weels or somewhere in there.

The content for the first, second and third updates have actually been in development for quite some time. We are very fortunate to be in a boat where we launched a game with content in development and testing in the hopper already as opposed to launching the game, scrambling to get it stable and then scrambling to find something cool to do next. We've always had a pretty clear understanding that the road to 50 is not a grindy, punitive one, and if you're going to launch a game like that where you're more about the ride being fun, you need to have more content in the hopper for people to do when they get there.

So far, really tiny fractions of people are even at top level. Actually, it's kind of funny just looking at the level distribution. We know we should get more content out there for those folks, but man, that's going to be a lot of aspirational content for a lot of people who are level 20. But then we are wrapping that all up in larger scale events so that there are things about the major updates that hopefully everyone who plays the game will be able to participate in.

The whole point of any new content, whether it's new dynamic or new zones or new rifts, is all about advancing the overall world story in a way that people can feel that the story is progressing. They all go back to serve the purpose of telling a story over time.

ZAM: Let's go back to March 1. What was launch like for you?

Hartsman: I can easily say it was the quietest day I have ever had at Trion. That was very weird. By the time we launched, I've made no secrets that one of the reasons we did those beta events was to get practice for launching. We treated every single one of those like a game launch. When it came time to launch the game for real, it was 100 people doing what they had done eight times before. There were no panics or anything like that. We didn't have a single server process crash for the first 24 hours, which I've never heard of in an MMO launch before.

We were able to say to the development team, “you don't have to get any work done today, play the game. Keep an eye out for fires, scan the forums, scan game chat because that's the best place to find out when something is truly broken.” People played on their servers, rolled up their characters and played alongside everyone else. I would say a good couple of dozen of us were sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it never did. That was our day. It was a lot of nervous expectation and watching server population levels.

ZAM: What's your game experience like? What are you playing?

Hartsman: I will never tell in a game with two sides and four archetypes! I can say that during all of our alpha and beta testing, I did play both sides to cap. I played one of every calling, although I didn't get every calling to 50. I tried them all out. I'm one of those guys who's a little too busy these days for the hardcore 6-hour play sessions, so I picked a good calling and good souls to be able to log in, do an instance, do a warfront, do some tradeskills and log out. I picked some good souls for that.

ZAM: Now that Rift had a smooth, successful launch, what's next for Trion Worlds and your other games?

Hartsman: Obviously we've made no secret that End of Nations is a game in development. We're showing it off and it was playable last PAX Prime. People were having fun with it. Expect some more noise about that in the future.

We've still got the Syfy project. That one is earlier in its development than Rift and End of Nations, but they're both still working and very playable. They're both good looking and they're both fun.

ZAM: I know you can't give any details about the Syfy game, but do you expect Rift fans to enjoy it, or are you going for something completely different?

Hartsman: There's one thing I can say for certain, and that is we are not making the mistake of saying we are making a game for our existing audience. It is an action MMO. It's different from an MMORPG. It's going to play like an action MMO. Granted, gamers tend to like more than one type of game, so I'm absolutely sure there's going to be some overlap, but we're not intentionally going to design a game in a totally different genre for this audience that likes RPGs.

ZAM: Is there anything else you want to say about this entire experience?

Hartsman: Honestly, if you would have asked me a year ago, “Hey, what would you think about going to a convention a week after you launch a game,” I would have said, “Are you out of your freakin' mind?” The fact that I was confident enough, and the fact that the entire Trion team proved itself so amazingly, is great. I got on a plane to come out here and I'm checking e-mail now and again. People are doing their stuff. They're pros by now.

One of my friends asked if it was like leaving your kids with a babysitter. No, it's like leaving your kids with Nanny 911. They can do the job better than me and they're just kicking ass. I'm really proud.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief