The Game Director answers - From the official website
Posted: - 13.06.2008

Each month Gaute Godager, the game director on Age of Conan, will answer some of the biggest topics currently being debated in the community. Here is the first round of answers!

Let me explain first that these questions come directly from going through the player boards. Spending time being in dialogue with you, our esteemed customers, is not only a necessity – it is an absolute pleasure. -Gaute

Q: When will the guild buildings bonuses be activated?

The building bonuses "work" already, per se. Their major problem is that the tooltip from the feats don’t show. This has been worked on and will come in a patch very soon. In addition we felt the bonuses were a bit "stingy" and have decided to increase their effect.

Both of these changes will go out at the same time.

Q: Are you going to remove or change the apprentice system allowing characters to level up from level 19 to 80 in only 32 hours played?

A. We are putting a cap on the apprentice system and limiting it to 20 levels. This was the original design but a bug snuck in. We are taking all these types of instabilities in our leveling system very seriously.

Q. Do you plan to debug tradeskills and make them even more interesting/useful?

Improving and evolving the crafting system is definitely a very important task. We have reorganized the internal Conan teams and put even more people and more senior people on this task.

We have also found a few bugs lately that "Hid" a lot of the work that went into crafting prior to launch. This has made a lot of content and possibilities "hide themselves" under the hood basically. While this may sound strange, please remember that there are so many parts to a MMO, and sometimes not even we are able to catch everything. They are now ready to be exposed. So new stuff – and unveiling the things already there, will be coming in for the times to come.

Q. Is Guild versus Guild PvP planned to be available anytime soon?

There was a bug in the Tier 3 keep construction that stopped the PvP system to work properly after we launched. That this came unto the live servers is shameful to us, naturally, and it has been fixed. It should be out very soon. This will enable people to participate in the Siege PvP system fully. We are also increasing the bonuses granted by the PvP Keep system. At highest tier they will equal roughly 2 levels worth of power – which is substantial.

Q. Did you remove the towers and resources nodes in PvP areas or will they follow later?

The towers were disabled just prior to launch because we didn’t feel they were performing as well as we had planned for. We aim to turn them on again in an update soon. The so called "Minor objectives" will give the not-so-elite-guilds opportunity to have fun PvP’ing for a bit more transient but much less expensive targets than the Battlekeeps!

Q. Do you plan to add moderators/GMs on RP servers to help enforce the RP rules?

If you feel strongly about this and want to help out making – among many other things – the RP servers "pure" you can apply for the "Followers of Asura" here ... This is a great way to come behind the scenes of a MMO company, and we know that a lot of people really enjoy being part of this program. I also want to add that we shall never "police" people trying to roleplay by saying "you don’t play well enough". It is the unwanted shouting to global channels in l33t speak that would be examples of something we could talk to people about. It is very important to me that people do not arrive in a closed society when logging into a RP server with secret rules which you might get kicked out if you don’t follow. The definition of RP is very flexible. Still, while we do not plan to police it, RP’ing is something we do take seriously, so we naturally plan to continue working on features which can be of interest to the RP community as well.

Q. Do you still plan to add a bounty hunter system?

We have had many names and ideas for a system like this. Let me explain what the system is – it is a PvP system where players feel the consequence of a certain type of behavior (most noticeably ganking a lower level player) There are two ways to do this. We can police the system actively, or we can let the players do it themselves. Us policing it has been called the "Fugitive" system, and several ideas has been worked on there. If we let the players police it themselves it means letting people add a bounty on the people doing "unwanted" behavior.

We have decided on making a game-policed system first – especially for the "ganking" of "lowbies" or players substantially lower in level than killer. This will be coming with the PvP Evolution update in June. There are several reasons for this but the most important one is that it gives players a higher degree of predictability and "fairness" rather than relying on the offended party putting up a bounty. (As if a level 20 lowbie-first-timer being chain-ganked could ever offer anything substantial enough to interest you in pursuing the offending level 80 player!)

Q. Are you going to improve guild tools in game (like the tax for instance)?

We are working on a guild tool and interface evolution. What this will be in specifics is Not something we want to reveal right now. What I do want to say is that we appreciate your concrete feedback on this, and we are using it actively to improve the game!

Full article here