Carbine's Jeremy Gaffney shares his opinions on PvP and class design.

Speak to Jeremy Gaffney for any length of time, and two things become apparent. First, after working on MMOs for most of his adult life, he has a wealth of experience to draw on. And second, in an industry dominated by marketing spiel, he provides refreshingly blunt and honest opinions.

As executive producer at Carbine Studios, Gaffney is responsible for guiding WildStar to a release that we hope is later this year. Taking time out of his schedule, he joined members of the community for lunch on the Brighton seafront. While we perused the menu, we discussed the changing MMO industry, upcoming reveals and the raiding scene.

As our fish and chips or plates of pasta arrived, the conversation shifted to role-play, charging models and class design. And read on for Part 3, which includes an update on beta, add-on issues and more. But first, there was the matter of PvP.

How much crossover is there between raiding and PvP?

Within the guild, what we like to do is have enough crossover so that you can go on a raid, kill a boss in a particularly fast or particularly interesting fashion, capture it, and now you can pin it down in your warplot and have it go beat up the enemy. And that way if your guild is super-active and doing everything every week then great, but if not then have a raiding section earn rewards that it can trade back and forth with the PvP section. And this is fuelled by materials gained by the soloers who are out there doing the dynamic zones that we have set up for the max level unlockable public quests; it’s fuelled by the tradeskillers.

All that together is one big economy inside of the guild, and so a big guild should be like ‘I’m investing in my guild by doing the kind of things I like without being forced  to do what I don’t want.’ And for the players who are like ‘I must go and complete everything,’ awesome, go do it all, cram as much as you can trying to hit all that.

Does this mean that rewards will be balanced between raiding, PvP and so on?

Everything that you do that hasn’t been done before is hard, because otherwise someone would have done it. But the benefits of having, right from an early level, a fully integrated housing system, plus warplots, plus the way that we do itemization, plus the way we do ability unlocks to make them actually matter – the combination of that means we have a huge number of reward streams.

Sorting it out so that normal humans can work out ‘Hey, I want this cool thing, how do I get it?’, such as doing PvP you get PvP gear, that just makes sense. But some crossover is good; capturing a raid boss to use in a warplot is a benefit, I would argue, as opposed to a downside, but it does mean that you’re now incenting people to cross streams. Either you now have to be confident enough to socialize, or you have to do thing A to get better at thing B.

We try to balance that in a reward pass, but it’s not trivial. Of the things I expect us to iterate on moving toward launch, one of those is definitely making sure all those reward streams are compelling. Explorers getting jet boots, that kind of stuff, allows them to do more of the things they love, but combine that with all the other ones.

You want to have a constant stream of jackpot, ‘Ding Ding, I Win’ along the way, but you don’t want to make it that you win so much that you don’t bother anymore because it’s overwhelming. We do try to keep the reward streams separate at the top end, because you shouldn’t be able to get every piece of gear just by doing that.

But because of housing, there’s a whole suite of stuff you can get where it’s not just about building up your armor now. It’s the buff statues you can get in your house, it’s the cool items that are raising up your XP or elder game benefits inside your house, it’s unlocking the party plug so people can run on the giant piano and play weird things, that kind of stuff.

And because of housing, it unlocks a lot of this stuff for roleplaying, which I think is fun. We do festival plugs; put up a fireworks stand and anyone can set them off, or interactive stuff where you can invite people over and make things happen. It’s more of a sandboxy environment.

Will there be role-play servers? Would they be just flagged for role-players, or have an enforced rules set?

It’s an interesting question, and it’s one we’ll be talking to the communities about, because opinions vary on what’s best. If you just flag a role-play server as being roleplaying, you still get a healthy crossover of people who didn’t understand what RP meant next to the server name. You get a healthy percentage of PvPers who think ‘Hrm, role players are easy to kill, I shall go gank some.’ And it’s a griefing flag for people to come and flash their buttocks at everyone in the area.

But simultaneously, figuring out what rules to enforce is hard. What you really want to do is incent role-play behavior, but that’s at least a partially subjective thing. Objective things are easy to stick a rule on and enforce.

You could put in a system where people could vote on good role-play stuff. But then, if there’re higher rewards on that; do guilds come in and abuse the system? ‘Hey, we’ll pick Fred today to get all of our role-play bonus points so he can get the cool item unlock. Or is it ‘meaningless’ so that it’s only adding up for pride, or some role-play-only rewards like extra emotes and stuff like that.

There’s a lot of stuff that can be done like that, but I think because the role-play community is so diverse, it’s very hard to come back with one-size-fits-all for that, because it’s a creative endeavor.

It’s the same way as explorers complaining when they didn’t get a chance to explore; role-players don’t really want to be told how to role-play.

I think the only consensus was on naming conventions.

I remember back in the early days of WildStar Central, there was a discussion about banning numbers in names, but if you’re a Mechari, it would be perfectly reasonable to have robotic sounding names. But now you can have ‘L33tDud3’. Non-trivial.

And if you let players vote on stuff, the problem is that people use it to grief. Let’s suppose people can vote against your name, so that if enough players do it we examine them or ban them. Then you start doing it to abuse; ‘Hey, our guild is pissed off with this guy, let’s all try to get him banned, vote vote vote.’ The fact that you have organized people using the system for things they’re not ‘intended for’, makes it non-easy to add that stuff and not happen.

Or, how much are you going to raise support costs if you put in one of these systems and we have to look at every one? If your game master costs double, it’s a factor. It’s not all about money, but money matters.

On the subject of money, what is it that makes charging models closely guarded secrets or difficult choices?

Oh, that’s easy. It’s because everybody hates them [laughs]. Everybody has business models they cannot frikkin’ stand. How many posts do you see on the forums? ‘If the game has a cash shop, I’ll never play.’ ‘If it’s free to play, I’ll never play.’ ‘If it’s subscription, I’ll never play.’ ‘If I have to pay for the box, I’ll never play.’

You don’t see them say ‘I want to pay $60 up front and then do this.’ Nobody wants to pay any damn thing, of course not. And so it’s very charged on that front, in part because there’s so much implication to any of the business models about everybody being suspicious that you’re trying to gouge them at every step. And that suspicion is warranted, I’d say, by the past two decades of MMOs. Every bean counter is in there is going ‘Hey, if we charge for XP potions we can make X more dollars out of it, so why the hell not?’

But it’s not compelling to users. The best business models out there are ones that are user friendly. The PLEX model in EVE Online is awesome. If you have a lot of money but you don’t have time, awesome, buy a PLEX for real money and it’s a one month subscription. Now sell that to somebody who wants to play for free.  Now the guy who plays for free knows ‘If I get enough ISK each month, I can play for free.’ The guy with lots of money is like ‘Woohoo, I can buy ISK legally,’ and the company’s like ‘Score, the free to play players are paying $20 a month.’ That’s very compelling to all three parties involved.

League of Legends, every three weeks there’s a new champion. You want more power, you chip in. You don’t, no problem. It’s compelling.

One of the games in China, you buy a flower for 50 cents. Other girls compete for the flowers, and whoever gets the most flowers wins an awesome item. So all the girls are competing in a sort of popularity contest, on who can attract the most flowers on a daily basis. The guys have an icebreaker with the girls by buying them flowers, the girls are stoked because they’re 37 year old guys living in their mom’s basement anyway [laughs], but they’re getting cool items out of it. And the company’s literally making $15 million dollars a month out of selling fifty cent flowers.

There are more compelling models than just straight up ‘Hey, let’s figure out how much we can gouge you out of.’

There’s a firm in Korea selling shirts with a wishlist. ‘Hey, I wish I had this shirt.’ Well now, if you want to meet a new person in the chatroom, you buy the shirt for fifty cents, you break the ice, they get a free shirt, the company makes about four million dollars a month.

A lot of those things that are tapping into fundamental human interactions or needs, are more compelling in my mind than ‘Hey, let’s go sell a more powerful sword, that’s going to last a week, that you can only rent for cash, and then you feel screwed when the sword fades away.’ There’re a lot of ways to make that not work well.

Going back to PvP, will Settlers be able to kill the plots of other factions?

For instanced PvP it’s easy, because we make sure each of the paths has compelling things to do on each of the battlegrounds. Settlers are a part of that; it’s natural to build outposts. We do this in the regular world anyway – build outposts, build respawn points, some things that are free to place and drop wherever you want, some things are ‘Hey, go unlock this piece of the battlefield.’

For open world PvP, CBT3 just opened up Whitevale, the first area to do freeform PvP. Actually at Gamescom - we haven’t announced this yet, but I’ll announce it for you guys – we’ll take a chunk of Whitevale that’s particularly awesome in my mind, and let people go in and play it. We’re about to announce a couple of the new races and let them play those hands-on.

What we’ll do is let you flag yourself on the show floor if you want to do PvP or not – some people aren’t going to want to – but for the rest, there’s a giant robot stalking around, and you’re there helping your own faction. So you’re escorting these guys, or they’re escorting you. The whole area’s under a zombie infestation, with these squid-like things that are attached to people’s heads and they’re controlling them. The whole area is high personality, high quest variance and high PvP, because it’s mid-level, it’s a level 27-28 area.

So hopefully, mass battles will ensue with the robots involved and all that stuff, on the show floor. Or people will be scared to push the little PvP button, but I assume that people will want to go nuts on that.

So for the Settler part in particular, we’re working on it. The free-to-play stuff is probably trivially destroyable. It takes so much investment on the faction node stuff that at the moment it’s not destructible, but I don’t know what their plans are for that in the future. I think it makes sense to do that. But on the other hand, if you invest a whole bunch of effort in getting this resurrection station set up or taxi network or whatever, how pissed are you when people come by and trivially destroy it.

I know that there’s some stuff just for PvP, like guard towers and sentry guns, and those are intended to be destructible. It’s things that are more the fundamental structure of towns and what-not that become hard.

As a crafter though, that’s a huge incentive to make stuff, knowing that others can come along and trash it.

It’s a compelling sink, because most sinks suck. Repairing your weapons is not fun, and honestly probably having your $4000 spaceship [in EVE] is not fun, but it’s good fun to hear about [laughs], and it’s very fun if you’re the crafter providing said spaceship.

One of the early aspects of WildStar we found appealing was the telegraph combat system. Subtly different than Guild Wars 2 and TERA, but radically different than RIFT and World of Warcraft.

Well the differences shine too, between Guild Wars 2, TERA and other active combat systems. It’s when you get into large group settings when you can use it to communicate. It’s actually off by default, although we’ll probably change it to be on. The fact that you can hold down a button and say ‘I’m about to do this bad thing, or this good thing,’ helps a lot for communication, because you can’t do that over voice chat, you can’t do that through text for sure. And so coordinating a big strike of ‘Hey, we’ve got to do these five spells in sequence to knock down this interrupt armor to be able to pile in on the boss,’ is much easier when you can hold those down. Or stand over here because I’m going to cast a heal, or place these things on the battlefield so you can heal yourself at your own pace. 

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