OneEye responds to some of the "tougher" questions.

Quite a few people thought that the DEVs were pulling a fast one by shying away from the tougher questions. So they started asking them in the forums. And they got some answers.

If you follow the forums pretty regularly, you'll get to know who the people are and what their prime concerns are. Leah, for example, usually talks about two major subjects: Hair and Quest Logs. Both of these questions have been answered before (and we've covered the answer to the hair question here). But this response went into some more (or oft forgotten) detail. There's even a bit about the concern of "Pay to access" dungeons.

OneEye posted in Meeting with devs on servers ....:

Hair - The paperdoll data we got from TKO when we bought the game was corrupted. There is no source art available. That means we have to re-create the paperdoll system from scratch to 'fix the hair'. The original system at TKO took 2-3 artists 2-3 months to get to the state it is at now (about 90% complete - this was never fully finished before TKO shut the Austin team down). That is alot of man months of work - something we haven't had the luxury of doing up until now - we have 1 artist.

It is something that is important to us however and we are constantly trying to come up with solutions - I personally don't like the look of any of the current paperdolls and would love to re-create it.

Quest Log - All quests are in script code - not in some kind of quest editor. Dransik/AE have had several different designers write quest code over the years - all of them without standards. There are literally 1000's (there are about 90,000 lines of script code in AE now) of quests now in the game. So, in order to create a quest log, all of those quests would have to be standardized in some way. Doing so is a giant undertaking and would more than likely break tons of current content.

Last week a new programmer started for us. We have him kind of training up on Dransik right now. When he moves over to AE, one of his first taks will be to try to figure out how to solve this problem.

Dungeon - over the last 6 months we have reduced the monthly cost of AE by 33% - from $8.95 a month to $6.00. In order to keep reducing the price we have to do some creative thing like the broken finger dungeon.

Reducing the price is important to us to bring more players to the game. We have made the game basically free for anyone to play for as long as they want with some 'premium' benefits.

BF is just a premium content feature. And lets face it, even with spending a full day of online time in this dungeon every month (3x.75) you are still spending less money per month than you were 6 months ago. AND - this dungeon isn't something that is required to enter. You can choose to go or not. Over time there will be other 'hot' areas which will make this dungeon less attractive - remember for example when VF was the place to be. Now it is rarely used. This is a cycle in all MMO adventure games.

OneEye also gave a response to another question about Pvp.

OneEye posted in Meeting with devs on servers ....:

changes were made to balance the 'classes' of the game to address PvP concerns. Changes were also made the the alignment system both on the overall alignment scale and how alignemnt was recovered.

The big change that small segment of the community wants is non-alignment based inventory drops. The people that want this are very vocal, but are a minority. This is an issue that will never make everyone happy and thus right now it is better to leave the system alone until some kind of compromise can be reached.

This and a couple of other responses on the thread made me think. Just how many people are satisfied with the PDD system as it is? And what changes, if any, would the "majority" agree to? Flat PDD rates? No PDD? PDD only when wanted?