Halloween Masquerade 2006 Continues

We're in the home stretch of the 2006 Halloween Masquerade! If you haven't collected all the masks yet, you have until early Tuesday morning (Pacific Standard Time) to do so. Go blast some zombies!

One of the reasons we like these holiday events so much is it gives us a chance to step outside of the Matrix canon for a little while. Are we going to explain how zombies or snowballs relate to the struggle between the three Organizations? Nope. We just put them in for a little fun.

And anyone who attended the Halloween evening parties can tell you: The team likes being able to let loose on occasion. How else do you explain RSIs changing into cats, Complete Corrupted, and helicopters? (I've been informed by Rarebit that it's now officially designated The Matrix Online ROFLcopter, by the way.)

Come next Tuesday morning, everything goes back to normal...er...whatever that means. Until then, have some fun!

Upcoming Change to CS Interface

Insert black cat: Yes this may seem like deja vu, as I mentioned it last week. I'm here to remind everyone that we switch over to the new Customer Service interface next Thursday morning. If you haven't yet, you should read the article on how the new interface is going to work.

Advertising Contest Update

I know the contest is way behind schedule, but we're almost there. At the moment, we're waiting on replies from the winners before we make the announcement. We're also lining up our "runners up" in case we don't hear back from one of the winners.

Sometimes these things take longer than we'd like, but we're forging ahead as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience; we hope to be able to announce the winners soon!

What Are We Hiding?

A thread appeared on the forums this week, asking why we aren't implementing new Organizations in the game. It has since been removed for various reasons, one being that people shouldn't be poking around in the game code. It's a bannable offense, so please refrain from doing so.

Anyway, on this particular topic, the implication was it's all there and apparently we simply are refusing to flip the "magic switch" to turn them on. (Yes, I realize some debated the other side of the issue.) I certainly wish it were that easy.

If there's one thing I've learned in my time in the industry, it's that some things that seem simple may be horribly complicated. Sometimes, things that seem complex turn out to be easy, but that's a much rarer occurrence. Just because part of the Organization code is there, doesn't mean it's ready to roll.

The Organization code hooks into many diverse elements of the game: the mission system, crews, factions, etc. On top of that, the database has to be set up to handle each Organization. The fact is: Much of what is required to implement new Organizations simply doesn't exist.

Then there's the logistical side. We have to produce five critical missions for each Organization every episode. I suppose we could do an extra ten missions each cycle. However, that means we wouldn't be working on other things. What should we cut? Live Events? Luggables? Bug fixes? Art and text tweaks? It certainly would reduce our ability to add any new features.

The Balancing Act

Making improvements while keeping up the episodic content of The Matrix Online is a balancing act. We sit down regularly and discuss what's coming down the pipeline and what we'd like to try and add. In the list of things we're thinking about doing, we also have to decide what adds the most to the game without taking up all our time to develop.

You may recall that towards the launch of Combat Revision 2.0, updates were mostly episodic content. Large projects like that eat up resources that otherwise could be working on something else. After CR2.0 launched, the team agreed that the changes were great, but that embarking on something like that again wasn't advisable. It seemed more valuable to look for small- to medium-sized changes that added to the game, rather than biting off something big.

That's why we've spent a lot of time reviewing what wasn't finished before coming to SOE. If we find things that appear to have value and won't take too much effort to finish out, we look into adding them. That's why we took on the luggables. We have to check on and modify their behaviors a bit, but a majority of the code is already in place. After that, it's a matter of deciding what exactly we want them to do.

The Halloween Masquerade is another good example. We knew the zombies were there and that their animations were mostly hooked up. At first, the idea was to just add them to the game for the event. Dracomet said it would be simple to add the zombie virus and really make them special. Meanwhile, Rarebit had the idea of changing the mask icons to make them more useful. We looked through the options, scaled the additions so we weren't impacting the normal release schedule, and hammered everything out. We can't always rely on things working out that way, but in this case they did.

In the end, we pay attention to community feedback and see where we can work things in. There are going to be some cases, like new Organizations, when it's just not feasible for us to spend the effort to make something work. It's always hard to say "no" to something we know would be popular. But when we do, it's only after we've thought through (and heavily debated) the issue.

We're not hiding anything. We're just making The Matrix Online the best game we can.

See you on the other side next week.

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