Stratics Interview with Star Wars Galaxies Producer, Tony Teesquared Tyson
We popped Tony Teesquared Tyson, Star Wars Galaxies Producer at Sony Online Entertainment ten questions on the current state of SWG and some of the key issues being flagged up by the Star Wars Galaxies community. The answers are impressively candid, read on for the full interview
Q1.You've been both the SWG Producer and Technical Director for around 15 months now; in that time we've seen some SWG Dev staff move from SWG to other SOE games and other studios. SWG seems to retain a core of dedicated Developers who are churning out some impressive content and fixes, what are the challenges in keeping the level of quality high and what is the team usually focused on?
Star Wars Galaxies is a great product to work on. We are celebrating our seventh anniversary this year, but there always seems to be new things to explore and learn both in game and development wise, even for us veterans.
For new folks, its a great opportunity to understand how an MMO works. For SWG, we do have a few folks, myself included, who have been on the project many years. We also have many folks still at SOE that worked on SWG and help us out when needed.
Im glad you like the recent game updates. The team is very focused right now on giving players what they want. We value the forum feedback and suggestions. Overall, having experienced developers on our team in addition to the many resources still available in the SOE Austin studio has helped us keep the quality high.
A view from the SWG studio back in May 2009.
Q2. The Witches of Dathomir content is now on Test Center which we assume will be "Game Update 19". We've seen the GCW Leaderboard, Fishing Leaderboard and Rare Loot system go live in the last two months, all badged as "Hotfixes" to "Game Update 17" with "Game Update 18" being the Galactic Moon Festival. What constitutes a "Game Update" these days and the associated marketing push that goes with them, often drawing more new and returning players to SWG?
Actually WoD Prologue was part of Game Update 18 which started out as the Galactic Moon Festival. You have a good point though. The update cadence of SWG has changed recently. Instead of holding back for large sets of changes, were trying to push more incremental changes live.
That has caused some confusion regarding the game update numbering. When we do an update number increment now you can expect a series of changes to go out over time in that update. For example, Empire Day was the start of Game Update 17, in which we later released the leaderboards, the SWG 7Th Anniversary celebration, and the Rare Loot System. Game Update 18 started with Galactic Moon Festival and also included the WoD Prologue.
Going forward you can expect us to keep doing this approach.
Game Update 18.2 features the WoD Prologue
Q3. We've heard from players attending the last Fan Faire that you've had the automatron DevH working on a server side spam filter to block out all those pesky "credit spammers", is this now nearing completion? Were you able to make any improvements to the chat system as part of this work, for example, will players be able to join chat channels on other servers?
We understand the value of credit spam prevention to our players. DevH originally implemented the Warden System a few years back to give players the ability to prevent credit spammers themselves. Since then, however, credit spammers have come up with different ways to continue to disrupt our players plus we have added game features that they are using. We are aware of these issues and are looking for ways to stop this.
As has always been the case, Customer Service will take action against accounts that are reported as credit spammers. We also just recently released a change that will prevent players in the tutorial from sending unsolicited private messages and in-game mails. We will continue to monitor the situation and look for ways to help prevent credit spam in the game.
Our current solution did not involve extensive changes to the chat system, nor are we planning to add cross server chat channels to the game at this time.
Q4. There seems to have been a concerted effort by the Dev team recently to address some of the more dull and repetitive systems in SWG that lend themselves to being played via unattended macro. Pet Levelling and Reverse Engineering have both had a pass and code was added to the Rare Loot System to prevent drops going to unattended players. Do you have any other systems in your sights for similar treatment?
Yeah, we are always trying to address the issues of away from the keyboard (AFK) game play. As players bring issues of AFK play to our attention, we try to brainstorm design or system changes to counter them. Another system that is suffering from this type of issue is Chronicles. Were planning to look into the grind aspect of that system when we do Chronicles 2 next year.
SWG Developer "Jaskell" reacts with a /facepalm as former Game Play Senator, Vincent76 and New Player Senator, "Lasod" demonstrate the AFK Chronicle, Pet and Combat Level grind at the Dantari Village during Fan Faire 2010.
Q5. You've previously hinted at system that are in the Dev Roadmap for SWG such as "GCW 2" including "Space Invasions", "Unique Spawns", Player City improvements and profession updates for Officer, Entertainer, Chronicle Master and Storyteller. It seems like this will certainly keep you busy for the forseeable future, how do you prioritize which gets done first, how flexible is the Dev Roadmap and are there any particular challenges in reaching your goal of adding all this to SWG? How is work on all these new systems coming along?
The team prioritizes things based on various factors. First we come up with a plan for the year. This is driven by player requests, resourcing, and a desire to have a good variety. For example, we know players enjoy new systems like leader boards, RLS, and persistent story teller tokens, but they also want new content with story, adventure, and discovery. And, of course, they want cool new loot. At the same time, it is a live game so there are times when pressing issues get a higher priority. The systems you mentioned are in development and on the schedule for next year.
2011 looks to be ab exciting year for SWG.
Q6. "Game Update 18" introduced some of the first new emote animations available to players for a long time. Do you have any plans to add more of these? We've heard SWG roleplayers are after new emotes along the lines of /drink, /surrender, /liedown, /brandish, /ignitelightsaber and /handsonhips.
The new emotes and the new mood was a lot of fun to get in for the Galactic Moon Festival. The team learned a lot about those systems and we are planning to do more them. We are not planning to create new animations at this time but we may do new ones in the future. What we can do is make existing animations into new moods or emotes. Plus we added walk and run support to moods. Ive already received some suggestions on walk and run animation changes for many of our existing moods. Well try to see what we can get in. Please keep the suggestions coming.
Know of an existing animation that could be turned into an emote? The SWG team wants to know!
Q7. With such a busy Dev Roadmap, when do you get time to clean up any unfinished business such as the "Double Socket" exploit? How big a problem is this exploit given that the ability to "Double Socket" was only live for four hours?
After that change went live, we added a log to the game to try and help identify specific items that were impacted by that issue. We still have the logs running today. My recommendation for players who suspect someone is using an unfair item is to submit a CS ticket. CS can use the log data to investigate.
The issue only impacted very old items that had never been moded so it was not a huge set of items. And like you mentioned, it was only available for a few hours. In the end, we did not come up with a programmatic way to accurately identify which items were directly a result of the issue however the data is available to manually investigate specific cases as needed.
The official forum thread on this issue is now locked after this response.
Q8. Do you have any plans to address the huge GCW gains possible by Entertainers in GCW Invasions which result in making it trivial for Entertainers to top the GCW leaderboards? There is also an issue where Smugglers can deliberately and repeatedly fail the terminal slicing minigame to generate battle fatigue for Entertainers to cure, which can all be done unattended, any plans to resolve this?
We are planning to continue to balance and polish the GCW. Issues that give an unfair advantage are the top priority. We already addressed a balance issue with Entertainer quest GCW point gains. Well keep doing so. The smuggler issue you bring up has already been addressed. In Game Update 18.4 we adjusted a few aspects of slicing to counter this issue. Several players, like you, have come up with suggested fixes for many of these issues. Keep letting the development know your recommendations and as we continue to balance and polish the system, well look to addressing these issues.
A somewhat typical example of Entertainer GCW gain during GCW City Invasions.
Q9. One of the most common complaints from SWG Players seems to revolve around server side lag, especially on Starsider where the population has exploded since the Free Character Transfer. How much of this really is server side and what can players do to help your team isolate causes of recurring server side lag as they did with a recent fixes to Starsider, Chimaera and Farstar? How does the current population of Starsider compare to previous population levels over the years, is the server just at critical mass or can it cope going forward?
You really cannot compare server populations today with those of years ago since the game itself has changed so much. When SWG launched, combat was much slower and in some regards unresponsive. The game was changed to speed combat up and that ended up having a big impact on server performance.
Anytime you get a large group of players together on a server and in combat using AoEs, you can have performance issues. Some of it is client side and some server side. Situations where there is poor performance when there are not a lot players around are things you should notify us of. For example, the players pointed out areas on Starsider that were always under heavy load. That meant that there were too many high CPU processes running on the same physical box.
The development team addressed that by reconfiguring those game servers to run on less loaded boxes. This is one of the limits of the architecture of SWG, it doesnt have support for dynamic load redistribution and its not something we can add to the game.
An example of "Extremely Heavy" server lag.
Q10. We've seen you attended a number of in-game player events recently, is this something that you enjoy doing? What kind of insight on the different server communities do you get from attending Events and what other activities do you enjoy in SWG?
If I get an invite and Im able to make it, I like to check things out. I enjoy seeing the events. It is fun logging into a player event as a dev but it also can be challenging. I get asked some tough questions and by lots of folks at the same time.
Specifically I checked out some player run GMF events. I wanted to see how the recent storyteller changes were being used. I also went to a few RP events to see how those go. In the end, it is helpful to see what players are doing in the game and give them a chance to interact with a dev. Ill keep doing them when I can.
Teesquared attending a Galactic Moon Festival event on Eclipse.
Many thanks to Tony Tyson for the interview! Feel free to use the comment options below to give us your feedback on this article.
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