Of perhaps more interest is a post by the new Anarchy Online Producer, Ilaliya, in a wholly unrelated thread:

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showpost.php?p=6040923&postcount=39

In reference to this MMORPG article ('Content Locusts')

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/6045/Player-Perspectives-Content-Locusts-Killed-My-MMO.html

++++++++++

Good article!

Disclaimer: The below is my philosophical meanderings, so please don't read into it too much when it comes to practical applications in AO.

First off, I'm not sure it's correct to say that WoW was the first MMO in the genre where the journey didn't matter; where end-game and max level are the game. WoW was probably the first nakedly theme-park park game, or maybe the first to make the explicit admission that the "real" game started when you hit the level cap. I'll explain this below.

The two MMOs I played immediately before WoW were Shadowbane and Lineage 2. Lineage 2 was a grind, and I never reached endgame - although, I heard it's where all the 'cool' features were and guilds could own castles and whatnot. I stopped playing because it was taking me too long to get there. Shadowbane was fairly quick to level (and in fact we had late night macro parties to reach the level cap), and the end-game which was city sieging and global politics was the entire point of that game. The players all knew that levelling up was pointless a time-sink during which there was nothing to be gained other than a level increase.

The problem with the MMOs of those days was this: It's not as if one would find Excalibur off a level 20 rat. It's not as if any NPC in the game cared that at level 37 you helped Farmer Bob clean out the skeletons in his basement. In an RPG, which by definition the important thing is how the game perceives and reacts to your character, if the game itself does not assign particular importance to an activity why should the player? Compare to Fallout New Vegas where you could find cool unique weapons all over the place AND Farmer Bob's opinion of you could very easily be relevant 23 levels later (also true in Fallout 2). In fact, in my opinion this is what RPGs do.

In WoW, the job of the levelling game-play itself is to funnel you to the end-game. This is internally consistent, and really a logical conclusion. And what I mean by "nakedly theme-park" - in that the game is aware of it's own design premise and the limitations of the genre. Not sure if this has changed much, but at the time players generally didn't macro in WoW simply because it wasn't advantageous; the game got you to max level soon enough. There was no conceit that killing 10 ogres over and over in an open world was in itself fun, or that it particularly mattered in the scheme of things. If reaching end-game is a race, at least in WoW it's a race where the fast-track is what the designers intend. The game says "use this lane" and off you go.

Now this raises some peculiar questions: Why have levels at all? Why not just skip all the boring stuff and have players create a character at end-game or close enough where they play through a several hour single player tutorial and then have at it?

I think what we are seeing is exactly this: that time-to-reach-level-cap is decreasing with each generation of game. So one answer is clearly "let's not have levelling time, other than what convention dictates" Compare to the old-school answer of "the actual game is the journey, so lets spend time making this content matter."

Which leads us to our next question. Why does the MMO industry seem to trend towards answer #1?

Now, allow me to put forth some principles for your consideration:

1. As game designers, we want to remove barriers of entry to players experiencing the "fun" of the game, whatever that is defined as.
2. As MMO designers, we want players to have other people to play with (which clearly is not the case if a large percentage just solos or afk macros).
3. By the same token, we also don't want players logging in and then either waiting a long time and/or logging out because they can't find something to do.

These principles when taken together, and put in the larger context of the MMO industry, create a unique pressure. Let's examine the issue of grind. I don't think any (western) game designer says You know what? Grind is fun. Lets do that.

Rather, we are acutely aware that grind is filler. The extent to which it exists is generally symptomatic of an overly-aggressive content goal measured in time (which goes to game longevity) coupled with too little features or too little resources. When you see grind in a game it's often because a philosophical decision was made early on that players should spend X hours in the content. But sometime during production, it becomes clear that resources on the project cannot be applied to fleshing out what the player is doing in those hours due to an ever-raising bar of expectations completely unrelated to the "game" part of the game. And thus, grind is born.

The fact is that as the MMO genre matures, more developer resources need to be spent on elements of the game not central to the core fun. This could be anything from photo-realistic graphics and all the rendering features that entails (and the constraints this implies for artists and designers creating content); to more sophisticated rigging and animations; to a massive world which needs to maintain performance with high resolution textures and high-poly meshes; to technical features like no loading times, or instancing, or now phasing; to features such as moving platforms or physics; to even things like voice-over or cinematic content. These are things that players increasingly expect from their shiny new next-gen game, but in a budget sense it "steals" resources from the unique game-design specific elements that make a new MMO different and better than all previous MMOs. Or, what I call the "game" part of the game.

I think what players perceive as a "dumbing down" of MMOs is really just a function of limited resources (in this case, it's money that hires people) which needs to be applied to things which didn't even exist 5 or 10 years ago. For every dollar spent developing volumetric fog and sliders that increase the width of the character's nose is a dollar not spent making a comprehensive open-world system of capturable PvP objectives, destructible terrain, modular auto-generated maps (or pick whatever feature you like here).

And furthermore, because of the increased complexity of MMOs overall (and what this means for the code-base), the exact same design feature gets more costly every year. All the while, the quality bar gets higher.

I remember attending a GDC in 2006 (I believe it was 2006) where Raph Koster had a presentation on the exponential increase of MMO costs. He said then, that within 5 years we'll have our first billion-dollar MMO. Everyone in the crowd laughed. Crazy old Raph talking about the unsustainability of MMO development. And yet here we are. And interestingly enough, the extra man-hours you are afforded from a project measured in the tens, or hundreds of millions, or billions, doesn't really get applied to what gamers consider "design features" and "content." It's all the things I talk about above, and then the corporate structure it takes to manage and organize a several-hundred-person team.

In my own case, even though I had played MUDs in the early 90s, it was UO which got me hooked on MMOs. For about 10 years, for the most part, I exclusively was an MMO gamer. And I find myself now playing single-player RPGs more and more. Why is that? One day I woke up and realized that everything a next-gen MMO does for me, a single player RPG can do better. I don't need phasing and these complicated systems of client-side tricks to give me the illusion of changing the world. In a single player game I can actually change the world, because the entire game is on my machine and the game literally does revolve around my character. Basically, single player RPGs are supremely superior to MMOs at being single player RPGs. And, they can do it much more cheaply.

In a single player RPG there is no race to end-game (and no pressure to do so). The game has an end and therefore I want to prolong that as long as possible by doing every side-quest and finding every collectible and so forth. I can login and play on my own time and don't have to wait for anybody else. If I find a game-breaking exploit, it's actually counter to my interest to use it because it reduces my own enjoyment.

In fact, the only thing an MMO does better than a single player RPG is user-generated-content (competitive and cooperative PvP/PvE). Providing situations that can only arise by having sandbox elements that encourage player interaction.

The main challenge with themeparks is this inherent conflict. If you want players to always log in and have something to do, you increase solo viability; but then run the risk of making a bad single player game with a robust chat lobby. If you want players to avoid a grind by shortening the journey to end-game and thereby increasing the amount of player-interaction (since everyone is playing at endgame), you run the risk of making a MOBA with a short single-player tutorial instead of an RPG. If you want to make an epic story-driven MMORPG with no grind because it's all content, and an endgame with the longevity of a MOBA, you run the risk of absolutely destroying your projected budgets and time-lines and spending a billion dollars.

Sandboxes have a more straightforward challenge. If predicting player-world interaction is notoriously hard in single player RPGs, predicting player-player interaction is next to impossible in MMOs. It's horribly expensive to develop, and it's very easy fail. At best I think you can make a generic framework with a simple rule-set and clearly defined bounds, and accept the fact that players will do things you never intended. And have fun in ways you never intended. And to be honest, this is largely what designers what to make. I don't think anyone who is an MMO designer at heart would make a game on rails as their dream game. Certainly, nobody I know.

And then we come full circle to the business of MMOs. Let me say it again: Predicting player-player interaction is next to impossible in MMOs. This sounds great as a player, and this sounds equally delightful as a designer. But this doesn't sound so great of you are looking to make a return on investment with 7 or more zeros and a 5 year development cycle. Because what you want out of your investment with 7 or more zeros is a favourable revenue projection, based on the reality of customer behaviour. And here we have the conflict -- the need for predictable customer behaviour which makes good business sense, and the desire for embracing unpredictable player behaviour which makes for appealing game design. See: Minecraft.

Now here's the billion dollar question: what does this mean for the industry?

I think we're seeing a convergence. I think business-wise, MMOs (or, at least persistent online games) actually do make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. They are fairly immune to piracy, ongoing revenue, micro-transactions, etc. There's a lot more financial stability than the single-player-box-sales model, under which a studio is always one failed release away from shutting down. When you ship a single player disc, and you have no regular venue for patching (make players go download something off your site after realizing the game crashes), it's very hard to recover from a shaky launch. MMOs at least give you the tools to do so. So personally, I think we'll see a trend where big-budget games across all genres will more and more start to resemble online themepark games. For better or worse, the industry is already blurring the line between DLC and Booster Packs, what ships on the disc and what you have to unlock. I imagine in the future, more and more single player games will require you to log-in, and everything will have a chat lobby. In the AAA space, a persistent internet connection will become somewhat of an assumption.

By the same token, I think in the sub-AAA space sandbox games will really thrive. With sophisticated middleware and high-level programming languages, the barrier is constantly lowering for indie developers putting something together with a small team on budget with less than seven zeros. Maybe even less than six zeros. It's a lot easier to take risks when failure doesn't mean closing down studio doors.

Not to break my disclaimer at the top, but this is why I'm very excited about AO. There is a great freedom in being a smaller player to be ambitious and take risks, and defy expectations by making those ground-breaking features which change the landscape of the genre. I think in the future, it's projects exactly like AO is now which will drive all the innovation which the big AAA games copy a few years later. I'm a designer at heart (I was a designer and design lead for years and years before becoming a producer), and like all designers I want to be on that cutting, forward-looking, creative edge. Truth be told, this is why when the opportunity presented itself I made the move.

tldr; AO is the future

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=596946

Monthly Development Update: January 2012

It's my first time doing something like this so please bare with me! I've done a lot of preparations for this update to give you a fair insight into what we're currently working on, and I can see us sharing some good times ahead.

Graphics Engine
One of the things that we really want to focus on right now, is showing you the progress of our new graphics engine! We feel like it's about damn time, and thanks to Parsed and also Cube we're finally ready to produce our very first video!

Our artists have been preparing a couple of playfields to a standard that is very close to what we're aiming for. The focus features for this video will be showcasing what we feel look fantastic; grass, shadows, skydome, self illumination and, drumroll... godrays! (Water looks pretty neat too, but what do I know I'm not an artist (: )

I'm hoping to produce more videos when more features and areas becomes available, and I'm expecting that this first one will hit you sometime in february!

New Bug Report Forums
Another thing we want to focus on is making sure that we keep the communications line open with you. It's an important part of what makes AO special, and something I definitely want to maintain. To help with this we've gotten a few cool new things up and running. Kintaii has been setting up our new Report a Bug and Report an Exploit forums. Thanks to our amiable volunteers - This is now open and ready to be used!

If you post a new thread in this forum the development team can see it immediately, and only the people handling your report (the development team, quality assurance and bug hunters) will be able to see your post. This will allow you to bring these issues to us in confidence, and that you can help ensure we have direct knowledge of the things that effect you day to day.

We also wanted to make it easier for you to contribute on the test server. So as an extension to this new system, I present to you our new Test Live robot ”Auto” – who can boost your character up to any level free of charge on the Test Live Dimension, so you're ready to help us indentify bugs immediately without having to transfer an existing character. Test live is an essential part of our development process so we want to try and improve the ease with which people can help us out if they want to. I think there has previously been a barrier here, and with this addition we wan't people to just get into the action immediately and have more fun while testing.

Please keep using the ingame petition for any issues that disrupts you while playing. That is still your primary communication channel with the good people in customer service.

Character Heads
I'm very happy about us getting additional Funcom resources to aid us in the production of new Solitus character heads. This is greatly going to speed up our work, and once they have all been polished and approved by Flap and Mstr we will share some of them with you. These Solitus heads are in the last batch of heads we're re-making, and judging by the quality examples we've obtained I think you're going to find them hot! (:

Profession Changes
Many of you have asked me about the balance act, and ideally all of the things we want to improve would come at the same time, but in reality things will have to be prioritized. So right now we are working on approving the suggested changes, making adjustments here and there, and indentifying in which order the changes should be released. Genele is currently buried in piles of documentation, and she is doing a great job leading these meetings and I definitely feel that we can do this, a little bit at a time.

We all want AO to use it's full potential. That's why we are doing this, we want you to understand what all your tools do (yes I'm partly speaking about LE procs), and we want you to be able to use all your tools no matter where you are in the game world. Right now this is not the case because of how several systems are built on top of eachother. Improving this will also allow us as designers to make new fun content more freely.

Server Merge
I've seen a lot of discussion about doing a server merge, and we are infact looking into the possibility of doing this. The server capability now compared to ten years ago is a little more buff, so the hardware can definately handle an increased population. It's too early to give our verdict, but Macrosun is doing his thing and as soon as I know the result I will talk about it more because we feel like this is a natural step that will allow us to have more enjoyable team based content no matter in which time zone you live in.

Summary
So, to summarize our vision for 2012; for the next couple of months our combined efforts will strive towards three major goals: shipping the new player experience, the balancing act and the new graphics engine.

These are large tasks that will involve most people in the team at various points, but with good planning we will still be able to release content patches, continue to eradicate bugs and exploits, optimize and improve ao and deal with all the new and creative ways in which fate decides to mess with us.

Finally, as a more long time vision, I'm seing us planning for the next expansion or booster pack once we are done with what we're already working on. It's a little early yet to say when, but it's definitely on our horizon!

In the next newsletter I will amongst other things talk about my thoughts on the new startup experience, the battle station (and pvp in general), and the item shop. I need a chance to roll up my sleeves and get some more work done first.

The Next Game Update
The next patch should be released on the 8th of February.
This includes new fun content for Valentine's Day, created by the designer that brought you the Christmas missions - Michizure, and it will be available until the 27th of February!

By your request: Amesha Vizaresh will be greeting you on the platform leading to The Gauntlet, announcing the countdown timer until next Vizaresh spawn!


Please keep being the wonderfully unique community that you are, and I will do my very best being your advocate.

Kindly,
Fia ”Lindelu” Tjernberg

Ps. Hi Means (:

__________________
Game Director, Anarchy Online
 

SWG had lots of good stuff and some pretty bad stuff (mostly thrown on it by SOE), but it was a true sandbox.  SWTOR is a nice  voiced adventure game with a vanilla MMO chassis bolted on.  minimalist and streamlined with few sharp turns to cause confusion or generate bugs. I'm playing SWTOR and enjoying it, but expect to move on by April as I cannot see any way it will hold the level 50's more than a few months. 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595827

Friday with Means - December 9th, 2011 - Next Update info

I returned to work Thursday this week after my trip to Disney with my family (now I REALLY need a vacation...those of you with small children will totally understand) so I'm busy catching up with the team about all the cool stuff they made that I didn't approve of while I was gone. It seems like the long standing tradition of "make cool stuff while Means is away" is still in force and has produced some fun stuff for this year's holiday. The entire Phasefront platform on Newland Lake is my favourite example of "he's on vacation" content...wow was I surprised when I saw that....and quite impressed. It looks like the holiday content is shaping up quite well and the version on Test is looking like a great candidate for the live dimensions next week.

Work continued on the engine while I was away. They have fixed the horizon object to no longer randomly allow partial light to pass through (a visual glitch visible in the old AO client too) and are currently working on fixing self illumination of monsters.

Other things next week's update will contain that is not Christmas related:

- The Gauntlet should no longer cause issues with multiple bosses.
- The ancient novictum refiner should no longer be unique nor nodrop, but it will still be expensive to buy.
- You can now ask John Smith for up to 3 Battle Station daily missions per day.
- Notum Scourge in Penumbra should no longer be spawning underground
- Daily Mission: Emergency Call will no longer be bugged for level 219 players.
- Pocket Bosses will no longer remove most of your health.
- Inside the Ruins in Arid Rift will no longer reset if you leave it (only the solo instance)
- Daily Mission: Rats/Bugs! Will no longer reset if you leave it, and if you fail you can restart by talking to the Exterminator NPC.
- New stims/rechargers have been added as loot of npcs in dungeons on Rubi-Ka
- Shades will now be able to more easily get spirit from a new pocket boss in Shadowlands
- Treatment kits can now be used on pets out of combat.
- New Daily Mission: Pendpod Rescue
- Daring Syndrome (AI hostile monster nano) removed.
- Fixed various exploits
- The Cup is no longer missing a Bartender
- Penumbra Questline now offers a new Bureaucrat nano crystal reward: Carlita Desposito. If you have already completed this quest line - speak to the yutto again to get the reward. The old nano can still be obtained via Rubi-Ka missions terminals, and it is no longer no drop.
- New MA weapon and tradeskill added to the Beast

Sector 10

- Removed snare towers.
- Exits have been added throughout the area.
- ICE and Bounty items are no longer available.
- Bosses are no longer rooted.
- Bosses will now be fought in team/solo instances available at the entrance.


Have a great weekend everyone!

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595691

Friday with(out) Means - December 2nd, 2011: The origin of the word 'Humbug'

(it is not as cool as i had hoped)

Hey guys! Means is out and about enjoying the many splendors of Disney World (we on the team are currently hoping he brings back one of those mouse ear hats) while we here in Montreal slowly begin to freeze to death under the looming threat of the impending winter - Even newly-upgraded-from-intern Art Guy Cube has also escaped back toward his home for a while, headed for warmer weather than here in Canada. We're all really spectacularly jealous.

While Colin is off enjoying his well-deserved break, though, things here at the office keep rolling, with the first version of our incoming holiday update having hit our Testlive servers this past Thursday. If you're itching for a sneak peek at what we've got around the corner, our annual Holiday Update Preview article has screenshots and information on how you can join the festivities - With tons of great goodies *and* a brand new holiday-themed instance headed your way, we hope to see you there!

Otherwise... not much to blabber on about this week, to tell the truth - Mostly just been keeping busy and getting things done at great rates of speed. Hopefully you guys are all doing great, and we'll see you back here next week. Take care!

__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595560

Friday with Means - November 25th, 2011 - Less words more screens

Being brief this week after huge amounts of text last week. A few screens this week for us to share from work on the engine. Really starting to come together and Parsed has really been destroying a lot of the engine bugs during the last weeks together with help from Cube. Work on the Christmas content is going well and we hope to get it to TestLive sometime next week.

I'm taking my family on vacation for the first time this year so I will be away for almost two weeks...taking the kids to Disney while they are still little...so Kintaii will be sharing more secrets next week.

Have a great weekend!

Attached Images

Bridge.jpg
Swamp.jpg
Terminals.jpg
Swamp2.jpg
road.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595402

Friday with Means - November 18th, 2011 - Agent Document vs 1.2

Here is the first version of the Agent document after some alterations suggested by the professionals. Conceptually most of the toolset changes and adjustments can be seen in this version. There are still some changes to conceal being considered at this point but they are not reflected in this document and certainly not set in stone. A special "Snipe" special equal to two normal hits (instant with an independent timer, not requiring conceal, and using the AS Skill as an attack skill and having the possibility of crit hits) is also not reflected in this document. Raw numbers in this document are exactly that...Raw....and will be adjusted after the final version of the redo of the Perk document that is absolutely essential after the overhaul that all the nanos have received in the time between the previous perk document and the last profession nano document.

Also enclosed is a Solitus Female head we received this week from the Beijing office that we are quite pleased with.

Have a great weekend everyone

Agent v1 Nano Document Feedback Thread

Attached Images

new_solifem.jpg

Attached Files

Agent - November - 18 - 2011.xls

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

I'm approaching it with cautious optimism. 

Some of the issues FC has had in the past *cough* Gaute Godager *cough* are not present in TSW and Ragner himself has a winning record.  Looking back in history, AO launched with serious issues with game code, with servers, with accounting and it was a good year before they righted that ship.  AoC launched with fairly stable code, very solid servers, and poor accounting/CS but also saddled with a ton of poor design choices, much of which can be laid at Gaute's feet.  It took Craig Morrison, yanked from AO to run AoC in place of Gaute, a good year to stop the backpedaling, and another year to get some forward motion going.

I'l be in the beta at some point and get a much better view of things, but for now I jsut take notes and read all I can.

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595258

Friday with Means - November 11th, 2011 - 111111 - Open questions

The agent document has been released to the Professionals this week so NEXT week we should be able to share the altered version with the open community.

I received a few requests this week for another "open questions" session and it was pointed out to me that we have not had one for quite a long time.

Ask away and I'll do my best to answer as many of them as I can.

_________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

((Responses were posted the following Thursday in a separate thread - 4 pages worth))

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595374

.
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=595113

Friday with Means - November 4th, 2011 - Late at night

Another crazy week with an incredibly busy finish. I've been really pleased with the progress made in many different areas this week...most of which are unfortunately too early to really discuss. The update this week went quite well and we are looking forward to getting out some more adjustments in the next few weeks. It has been great to see everyone enjoying the Halloween content

In tribute to the lateness of this post this week...please enjoy the ambience of this late night screen of the outskirts of Omni Ent.

Attached Images

omnient02.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594926

Friday with Means - October 28th, 2011 - Happy Halloween!

After a quick downtime today to restore Lya's armor to outdoor pvp area Uncle Pumpkinheads Halloween seems to be back on track.

As I've been busy this week working with the team fixing things and planning our next little projects I'm sorry I have not prioritized responding to inquiries on the forums.

Bounties and Sector 10:

Yes bounties were removed on purpose...mostly. It was our intention to remove bounties from Sector 10 along with some larger changes we are making in the next update (team and single player instances for spawning the boss at the beginning of the playfield) but the data snuck in on us. Bounties were originally loot from Sector 13, 28 and 35 that dropped from bosses. As these were raid bosses (or at least required an entire team of skilled players to complete) it was not an overwhelming amount of credits to be adding directly to the economy. We tried adding these items to Sector 10 as a way for leveling players to have an opportunity to gain some quick credits on the way up..unfortunately this is not the way the bounties were being obtained or being used. Specialized characters were being made to directly farm these items in this playfield to obtain credits for the use of high level players as the credits that could be obtained directly and dependably within this playfield exceeded that of any other opportunity in game. Ironically the credits created by this system made the inflation that new players were faced with worse rather than better. The behaviour of twinks in this playfield, training new players, regularly harassing and out-damaging them to discourage them from participating in this playfield removed and true benefit these items might have brought to the intended group. Adding appropriate credit rewards and gear to non-repeatable missions on the leveling path to 220 is the correct way to proceed with this issue and it is how we intend to proceed with the problem in the near future. We want people to be able to obtain what they need to be able to contribute to their groups...but injecting billions of new credits into the economy was not helping this issue and had to stop.

The Gauntlet (New Pande instance):

There are some problems with this instance and we have been working this week to correct them. There should be an update coming out next week to fix the vast majority of the details that you all have been kind enough to point out to us.

Halloween:

Just going to put this link here to remind people of the Halloween Party this weekend and some of the content they might not have found yet!

http://www.anarchy-online.com/wsp/anarchy/frontend.cgi?func=publish.show&template=content&func_id=2658&table=CONTENT

See you all at the party!
Attached Images

Halloween.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

They are also trickling in new textures.  Here's an example that sharply delineates the difference in a new, hi-res item, and the old textures:

Hi-Res helmet

This past weekend Funcom posted an opening for a C++ programmer.  Kintaii has confirmed it is an additional position, not one to fill a vacancy.

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showpost.php?p=6018015&postcount=71

Link to the job position can be found here:

http://www.funcom.com/jobs/montreal

Qualifications:

•  C++ (including STL and recent standard evolutions)
• Visual Studio
• Linux
• SQL & Databases
• Ability to work with other professions (like designers and graphic artists)
   Service minded attitude
  
  Useful additional knowledge set:

• Python
• VBA
• Experience working with distributed systems

Common for all positions, you need:

• to have a passion for games
• to relocate to Montreal, Canada
• to have good written and oral skills
• to be able to work in (large) teams

If you lack some of the above-mentioned qualifications, but consider yourself a highly skilled coder and a fast learner that Funcom can't be without, apply as well.
Please apply in English (email only). Attach your resume, samples of your work and source-code. Runtimes are not really needed, but is a nice add-on. Please state clearly in the application what kind of position you are applying for.
Applications lacking relevant work samples (or link to a website with such material) will not be reviewed.
Please allow a few weeks processing time.

Contactc: Kim Pasquin - HR Manager

               kimp@funcom.com

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594699

Friday with Means - October 21st, 2011 - Canyon view

This week we have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the Halloween update which will obviously be out on the live servers next week as my attempts at delaying Halloween were not successful. I'm really exited about the Halloween content this year...and getting to see our new designer's first instance and the new Pandemonium instance at the same time is sure to be interesting.

Work has been continuing this week refining lighting and self illumination effects to really get the mood we all want to see both during the day and at night. I imagine when/if the Rookie gets stuck in here (screenie attached) it will be because he can't believe how good the canyons look now

Have a great weekend everyone!
Attached Images

outzone_3.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594525

Friday with(out) Means - Oct. 14th, 2011: Pumpkins Incoming

Hey guys! Means is on his way toward a wedding this morning (got one to head to myself in a couple of weeks), so I'm in with your Friday update today - Things are a little quiet on the floor at the moment as we simultaniously breathe from releasing the last patch and scramble around to get the next update together and ready for the live dimensions, and that whole "no rest for the wicked" phrase is proving so, so true these days. XD

Speaking of the incoming update, we have a special preview of the incoming Halloween festivities (and loot!) up on the main page and I gotta tell you that in terms of cool goodies? I think I'm more excited this year than I have been in a long time - The artists have all really outdone themselves creating some cool new Halloweeny items *and* we'll even have some special new seasonal content incoming from Genele and brand-new-designer Michizure! Tons of great stuff - Hopefully you guys will be as thrilled as I am. =)

I also wanna make sure you guys drop by and check out our annual in-game Halloween party, with ARK Community Relations and the boys and gals of Gridstream Productions holding it down correct - Music, prizes and the whole nine yards always equals to a good time, so I hope to see everyone there! Dates/times are as follows:

    October 29th 17:00 GMT to October 29th 20:30 GMT on Rimor
    October 29th 20:30 GMT to midnight (00:00 GMT October 30th) on Atlantean

And with that, I... am gonna get back to it. XD Still lots of little things to polish up for Halloween *and* the new Pandemonium encounter, both of which will be hitting the servers soon (™). Hope you guys have a great weekend, and we'll see you back here next week!


__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594291

Friday with Means - October 7th, 2011 - Patchtastic

An obviously busy week that has kept us *mostly* out of trouble and prevented us from doing anything truly terrible with our time.

Big News this week:

1. The 18.4.8 Update went out. Closely followed by the 18.4.9 Update. There was an issue with the 2nd boss in the new instance that made it impossible to defeat..and as we were going for "difficult" rather than impossible we were uncomfortable with our over-achievement in this new area. I understand some of you have managed to defeat it already. Lies...I refuse to believe it.¨

2. Super exciting news for us here in Montreal is that we have hired a new member of the team to start sharing our suffering, nightmare, technical disaster workload here in the office. The new member of the team is Henry Senger who some of you might know as Michizure on TestLive. "Michi" has been working with us secretly on TestLive for a period of years now and despite that still was very interested in joining the team. We are very happy to have him here in Montreal getting used to the workflow and working hard on making a new fun seasonal encounter to be enjoyed by all for Halloween. I've wanted to see this one in for years so I am really looking forward to seeing Michi's first thing hit the live servers.

Thank you to everyone who applied for the position. It was incredibly difficult to choose between all of the very knowledgable and qualified applicants this time around. I'm certain Michi will work obsessively to prove that he was the right choice over the next while. I certainly feel good knowing that the next time we have an opening there are so many good and qualified people out there in the community to choose from.

3. Nano Cans are now available in the in-game store. The cans that are available are limited to those that will not be a significant factor in PvP but will merely be a convenience purchase for those wanting to do some twinking.

4. Last week we published some screens of the water and people complained that the water looked like ugly blue goo. They were right. There are many tweaks and settings available for the water in AO and those have now been adjusted for Tir...and are obviously attached below for your viewing pleasure.

Have a great weekend everyone!
Attached Images

tir_water-5.jpg
tir_water-1.jpg

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=594106

Friday with(out) Means - Sept. 30th, 2011: More Pictures? More Pictures.

Hey guys! Means is out of the office this morning so just kind of a quick update from me; not a whole lot to report on as we're all pretty much busy prepping for the incoming update and getting AO's Halloween content ready for the holidays. As Means mentioned last week work on both the new engine and the remodeled heads are coming along swimmingly, and since when I don't have much to talk about breaking off a few shinies always seems to be the way to go forward today we have a couple of screenshots from the new engine, this time showing off the reflective water and some very nice HDR in Tir - Really, *really* pretty stuff. Likewise we have a few MAX renders of the new head models and an extremely... interesting... picture from the artist's corner - Any guesses on what it could be?

Gonna bury back into it and get some stuff done - Hope everybody has a great weekend!

Attached Images

tir1.jpg
tir2.jpg
fwmheads.jpg
twhw_screenshot01.jpg
__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades

You certainly don't have to sit on heckler OST/kite teams to level, that's just the lazy way out.  People in my org do hecklers every now and then to clear out some research, and to just be familiar with how those mobs are, and always in teams that take them on directly, no OST or kiting NT.

Teaming is not that hard, either, you just team with orgmates or friends you've made and do stuff with them regularly. If you sit around on LFT and team in PUGs, you'll get mostly lame experiences.  Last night, for example, we had a 4-person group of lvl 175-200 do a Dark Ruins run, followed by an AI City Raid Daily Mission. Then some of the european ppl we were with logged out and some US ppl logged in, and we ran a couple of RK missions with a lvl 126-150 team - lvl 195 mish, followed by a 225 mish (painful but good XP and required coordinated work).  Everyone got 2-3 levels or 1-2 research levels done from that.  No one in that lower group has any AI or OFAB armor, most have moderate Symbiants or imps on. 

If we need cash to buy stuff, the 150's farm sector 10, or have an alt tradeskill stuff like small Arul Sabas and sell them.  Lots of ppl just think they need the billion credits worth of gear because of typical e-peen talk on OOC and the forums but that can be left to those who've gotten 220's to farm stuff for lower alts and know what they are doing with the gear.  If you want to PvP, well, the hardcore vets will mop the floor with you regardless of your gear and the clueless loudmouths will fall easy enough if you have a clue how to fight.

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593944

Friday with Means - Sept. 23rd, 2011: Initiative Data

Update Coming October 5th:
The next update will be coming to the live dimension on October 5th. This version will include the final Dustbrigade instance, 30 new daily missions and a host of other changes both small an significant. I will be posting more extensive update notes during the day today where they should be. The Halloween update will of course be coming very shortly after that to be in time for my favourite time of the year. You can look forward to Kintaii's annual preview of the items in a couple weeks Some creative fun stuff this year.

Another Mystery Solved:
Imagine our horror in trying to produce a more challenging set of encounters for the new DB instance and discovering that initiative values in the game for monsters were capped at 1213. This little data cap was apparently implemented in 2002 as part of the build process due to a bug with high init values creating errors in the monsters DMS calculation that would result in the monster being chain-critted by players. Until now it has been possible to set a much higher value on internal servers, test it until we were happy, then discover to our horror that the number was different on live. As they added nanos previous to 2002 that would reduce the maximum capped-initiative value to below zero this was a perplexing decision...much like the fact that after the offending formula was corrected the cap in the build process was not removed. As much as our efforts to revamp systems has been way more work and taken much longer than we ever could have anticipated discoveries like this one make it pretty obvious that it was very badly needed and long overdue. Monsters will be having their correct initiatives in the next update...this will result in some higher damage from non-debuffed monsters...but it is quite safe to say that the overpowered nature of init debuffs will still be in force until the release of the new nanos...but not to such a great extent.

Engine Work:
Z-Fghting of the night/day sky, the proper reflection on multiple ocean volumes AND proper display of the grass map was corrected this week. Damn fine work by Mr.Parsed and some great help from the rendering group has got us well on our way to getting something quite filmable. Flaptoot and Mstrbstrd have also been working on the final versions of the heads and are 90% complete done the 390+ heads. This has been a very long haul but it is amazing to see the strides made every week now. I am "cautiously optimistic"...let's leave it at that.

Have a great weekend everyone!

__________________
Colin Cragg
This "Means" Cake
Game Director/Producer

Filmed in 70's "tall-vision"
 

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?t=593721

Friday with(out) Means - Sept. 16th, 2011: Little Shinies

Hey guys! Means is a bit busy this morning (and honestly so am I XD) so just a quick one from up here in Montreal. Today we're showing off a few shinies from the artists corner - Can you guess what all of these are for?

Have a great weekend everybody!

fwm_mstrbstrd_turntable-render.wmv

Edit: German Translation!

Attached Images

fwm_flaptoot_conceptart.jpg
fwm_cube_render.jpeg

__________________
Brad L. McAtee / Kintaii
Senior AO Designer & Jack of All Trades