Mini Q&A #6

Beta, Real Money for In-Game Items and More!

As we have every other Friday for months, we present to you another Tactica Online mini Q&A. In this series fans have the chance to present questions to Luke Carruthers, the main man behind this tactical MMORPG.

When did fun gameplay become inadequate? Perhaps Tactica Online has an advantage, being without a subscription fee, but having to rely upon treadmill tricks to keep players around seems like a doomed effort. As soon as they find something that’s more fun, they’ll leave anyway, and the fact that players form communities means they’ll take others with them when they go. We’d much rather deliver an experience that keeps you coming back because they enjoy it.

Of course, if you’re taking this approach, it’s important to recognize that any game that stays the same inevitably becomes uninteresting, so one of the keys to keeping things fun is regular change. This needs to be balanced against allowing players to become comfortable with the game as it stands, which means you have to carefully walk the line between too much change, overwhelming players with the need to relearn everything, and too little change, leaving veteran players with increasingly stale gameplay.

Let us be clear: the sale of accounts and items for real-world money will not be allowed in Tactica Online. Allowing it will have a negative impact upon other player’s enjoyment of the game. This can be hard to enforce, but it’s something we will be vigilant about policing.

As you note, the game design isn’t conducive to the sale of items, because the scarcity isn’t really in equipment, it’s in your skill, so we don’t expect it to be as big an issue as it has been for some other games.

We don’t have any specific plans for Tactica Online in this regard, but it’s an interesting idea, and we’ll be following what happens closely. From an industry perspective, we think the move towards collaborative content is an important one, and that it will become increasingly common. Of course, from one point of view online games have always been about collaborative content, so this is merely a more structured version of the things they’ve traditionally offered.

The real challenge of course is not in making the tools, but in ensuring the quality of the player’s experience, or at minimum enabling them to form accurate expectations. There are lots of systems that might potentially work, but very few that have been tried in a practical context.

We’re actually starting the first stage of external testing right now. A very restricted set of people are helping us with what we’re calling Technical Testing. It’s focused on the server infrastructure and network performance, and will lead into wider public testing in the future.

Along with the Technical Testing phase, we’re starting to release more information about skills and the different factions, and the official forums are going live.

The next stage will be a limited Alpha test, and it will begin the focus on gameplay testing and balance. We expect it to start in August.