TeraHispano.com interviews En Masse

Asgeir

Interview can be found in english by clicking here: TeraHispano.com.

Spanish TERA fansite, TeraHispano.com recently had the opportunity to interview En Masse Entertainment COOPatrick Wyatt about security on TERA and TERA productor Sam Kim about TERA gameplay.

(DISCLAIMER: BrotherMagneto - Community Director at En Masse Entertainment has enabled TeraHispano.com to share all shown pics from the FGT2).

Concerning security on TERA, answered by En Masse Entertainment COO Patrick Wyatt:

Greetings from TeraHispano.com, Pat! First of all thanks a lot for your time and for answering our interview questions. How is everything at the moment in the TERA camp?

Thanks for the opportunity to talk to TeraHispano’s fans, Nestor. It has been busy at En Masse Entertainment over the last few months. When we opened the Seattle office in November last year there were only four of us, but we’ve grown dramatically since then--we have 32 people working at En Masse! Now that we’ve brought aboard so many talented people, we’re making preparations for the launch of TERA.

Our most recent effort was preparing for the second Focus Group Test. Unlike a beta test, where users are playing a mostly-complete game and providing feedback about hardware compatibility and server scalability, the Focus Group Test gave several hundred users the chance to play the game early enough in the development process that the dev team will be able to listen to their feedback and then make substantive changes to the game.

 

I´ve read a lot about your point of view about MMOs security. Let’s talk about this first. Gold farmers and game-fraudsters earn about 1-10 billon dollars annually. With TERA in the eyes of a lot of people (and growing) I think you should know TERA will be focused by these "cybercriminals". Are you conscious of this?

We’re very much aware of the problems caused by cybercriminals in other online games; given the enormous amount of money that they can generate by gold farming and stealing game accounts, then selling game gold for real-world money, it’s no surprise that they’re already looking into TERA. While their interest does validate the growing excitement for our game, we know that online crime is a critically important problem to solve, and that we have to do much more than other game publishers have done in the past. Players have already seen that simply pulling out the “ban-hammer”—as publishers have done for many other games—is an ineffective solution.

We have a lot of work to do to ensure that our game has a high-quality play environment free from chat-spam, account theft, purchase fraud, phishing, scamming, and all the other nasty behaviors that criminals use to make money. We don’t have these mechanisms in place yet because we’ve been focused on creating an excellent gameplay experience first. That said we know it is a critical area for us to innovate before we launch to ensure that gamers have a great experience playing TERA. Just so no one gets alarmed by that statement, we won’t be using GameGuard or its ilk.

Gold farming is one of the big hacking problems. Aion had it continuously and nobody seemed to be able to anything about it. Will we see this kind of problem in TERA?

It is essential that we address gold farming. As a person who helped launch Aion while at NCsoft it was incredibly frustrating to see the scope of the problem as it already existed in Asia but not to be able to convince the development team to do more before launching the game in the West. Ultimately, the decision on how to tackle the issue rested with the development team; unfortunately for players, their solution wasn't very successful.

I think we’re in a much better position to address this issue in TERA. First and foremost, the TERA development team has a lot more experience developing MMOs, and they’ve seen how hackers have targeted their previous games. They’re receptive to novel ideas to solve the problem, and they realize that it’s necessary to have time in the schedule to build solutions. There won’t be any one “fix” that will eliminate gold farming. Instead, we have to look at a whole range of solutions: creating a strong account system, enabling players to use two-factor authentication, eliminating chat-spam and URL broadcasting related to gold farming, targeting gold farming behaviors using analytics, identifying fraud rings, and other more radical ideas in gameplay that could reduce the “demand problem,” since it is the players' desire to purchase gold that is the underlying cause of the problem.

Ultimately, if users want to purchase gold, they’ll find a way to do it. The U.S. “drug war” hasn’t stopped people from buying drugs, it merely causes fluctuations in the price of those drugs and the amount of crime and violence that people are willing to commit to buy and sell drugs. If we only try to attack the problem of gold farming by detecting and blocking the gold farmers we will not be effective in stopping that behavior and all of the problems that go with it, like chat-spamming to advertise gold-buying sites, purchase fraud, phishing, and account theft.

The two most interesting solutions I've seen are “Pilot’s License Extensions” (PLEX) in EVE Online and Sony’s experiment with “secondary-market” gold selling on the Vox and Bazaar servers in Everquest.

Will TERA allow users to trade items for real money, like Sony did for Vox and Bazaar?

Selling gold and items for real-world money (known as “RMT” for Real-Money Trading) is something that we’ve discussed internally as we brainstormed solutions to gold farming and its attendant problems, and I think it will be interesting to hear what TeraHispano users have to say about the idea after reading this interview.

To provide some background, there are really two kinds of real-world money trading: primary markets and secondary markets. In primary markets, the game publisher sells gold and items directly to the gamers. "Free to Play games" (or more aptly named "micro-transaction games") utilize this system. In secondary markets, players trade with other players for real-world money, whether that behavior is tolerated by the game publisher or not.

There are many users who hate the thought of having game publishers sell gold and items for real-world money (primary markets), and we agree: it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, there are a great many players who are positively inclined to buy with real-world money because they’re already purchasing gold and items from professional gold farmers. Just Google for “buy game gold” along with the name of your favorite MMO and tell me there isn’t a ready market.

Players purchase gold for what many would consider to be acceptable reasons: they want to keep up with friends who spend more time playing; they want to focus their efforts on a part of a game they enjoy, like raiding, rather than harvesting components for raids; they want to play the high-level game with a different character class and don’t want to start from level 1; they lack play-time and want to achieve a goal more quickly; and other similar motivations. Some of those goals can be solved by good game design; for example, TERA allows players to give points to their alternate characters so they can level them more quickly than they did their first characters. Other goals are harder to accommodate, and I think that’s where gold purchases have fulfilled a useful function for some players.

The reality is that whether publishers sponsor secondary-market real-money trading or not, it is so difficult to stop that it will always exist at some level. I personally believe that a player-controlled market using real-world money is far superior to players purchasing gold and items directly from the publisher because it keeps players in control of the online economy: the only items that get sold are ones that players find. And a publisher-sponsored secondary market is better than ceding the secondary market to professional gold farmers because those gold farmers are willing to destroy the game environment in their zeal to earn money.

Griefing is one of the problems created by hackers. In an open world like TERA, is it a problem that will be more marked? Would you mind giving us any example on how to avoid this kind of hacking?

Griefing is a terrible problem in gaming because the primary motivation of griefers is to make other people suffer! When designing a game it’s necessary to think about how each and every feature in the game can be abused and how to minimize that abuse. I think it's safe to say that every game designer on every MMO faces the dilemma of watering down cool ideas in order to prevent their abuse.

It’s hard to characterize how to stop griefing because it pervades every aspect of game design and operation; there’s simply no feature in a game that griefers won’t find a way to exploit if the designers haven’t done their work. For example, in Ultima Online, if two players tried to occupy the same location, one would get “bumped;” in dungeons it was possible for griefers to “bump” other players so they would fall to their death in a pit. The tragic thing is that this same type of bug existed in Age of Conan, released over ten years later. “Good times with a horse” () shows players getting kicked off a cliff by a griefer who is presumably having a wonderful time.

I think the best way to minimize griefing is to hire designers who have previous experience with the problem, and may, in fact, have been griefers themselves!

Do you consider that meta-griefing will be a problem when TERA is released? Will TERA have its defenses up on launch day?

In my Game Developers Conference presentation (http://www.slideshare.net/EnMasseEnt/developers-vs-cybercriminals-protecting-your-mmo-from-online-crime-3589535) I used the term meta-griefing to describe what griefers do to hurt many players at once. Take, for example, a bug that was discovered in both Guild Wars and Aion where it was possible to send a particular string in chat that would crash every other game client who received the message. I’m sure the griefers had fun with that one.

Our development team needs to be prepared to face an onslaught of attacks upon launch day because, while most players are trying to be the first to reach the end-game, hackers are racing to see who can exploit bugs first.

We’ll perform pre-launch security checks, including fuzz-testing, tiger-team attacks, and code review. Games are large and complicated, though, so it’s almost inevitable that a bug will slip through. Ultimately, being prepared to respond to bugs quickly is the best defense against unanticipated problems post-launch.

We’re fortunate here in the West in that TERA will be released in Asia first, which means that we’ll get a version of the game that has been battle-tested before its release here.

What are you going to do if you know that some websites are selling gold or TERA items? And for those users who sells their accounts via eBay?

Preventing players from trading for real-world money is a very difficult problem; most MMO companies have tried working with eBay and other online trading sites to reduce gold selling, but it hasn’t driven the problem that far underground. As I mentioned before, I only need to search online to find hundreds of sites selling gold for whatever game I happen to be playing.

One interesting idea championed by the designers of EVE Online is called PLEX. In EVE users pay a monthly fee to be a starship pilot. The idea behind PLEX, or “Pilot’s License EXtension,” is to enable players to trade gold for play-time; a PLEX-pass allows players who use it to extend their subscription by one month. So a player with money but not so much time—like a dad with four kids—can purchase PLEX to trade inside the game, and a player with plenty of time but not so much money—like a high-school student—can trade game-gold for another month of playing the game. By creating a mechanism for players to exchange gold for play-time, the EVE designers are able to anticipate the demand for game-gold through a mechanism that rewards real game players over gold farmers, because gold farmers don’t want more play-time, they want real money. It’s a brilliant solution to the problem, and one of the potential solutions to gold farming we’ve discussed at En Masse. Folks who are interested in learning more about PLEX can read a detailed article on eveonline.com (http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=684). Note that “gold” in EVE Online is called “ISK.”

There are almost 500 L2 private servers (if not more), almost 30 Aion private servers operating now. Do you think NCsoft is conscious of this? If so, why not do anything? Incidentally, there are also about 10 WoW private servers.

All MMO publishers are aware of the problem of private servers, where criminals are charging money for access to servers running stolen game code or binaries; the challenge is that it is hard to do anything about those servers when they reside in countries where intellectual property rights aren’t protected. There really aren’t any viable solutions to the problem once the game’s source code or server binaries have “leaked” to the outside world.

All I can say is that I’d encourage gamers to make the ethical choice to support game developers who build the products they like to play, and not give money to the criminals running stolen game code on their private servers.

Do you think there will be TERA private servers in the following months of its release date? What are you going to do if you know the existence of a TERA private server?

We certainly hope we’ll be able to keep TERA secure so that private servers aren’t available for the game, but as evidenced by the number of private servers for other games and high-profile events like the theft of the source code for Half Life 2 from Valve Software, maintaining a high level of security is a difficult and never-ending challenge.

Thanks a lot for your time and I hope we will keep in contact in the future.

Thank you for the chance to talk about game-security. I hope it's an interesting topic for your readers, since game hacking is a growth industry. And thank you for building a Spanish-language destination for TERA fans, Nestor; I hope you’ll have great success. The folks here at En Masse—myself included—are looking forward to any feedback that you and your readers have to offer!.

Concerning Gameplay, answered by Sam Kim - TERA producer:

Will you include more weapon and armor slots? Feedback has indicated people would like more of them.

We’ve heard the exact same feedback! We’re going to be making a few changes to equipment, including the number of weapon and armor slots.

Channels are a controversial element of TERA for some users. Can you explain their use in TERA?

Channels are something we’re using to help control server stress and traffic in the testing phase of the game. They will be a must-have for launch as well, but once server populations stabilize they will be toned down or phased out entirely.

Will be there different starting zones for every race?

Each race has its own “home,” but currently all players start on the Isle of Dawn. We’re currently investigating ways to make playing each race a different experience.

There is not much info about the Party Distribution System. Would you mind giving us any info?

Feedback about the party experience was one of the key pieces of information we were looking for from the second Focus Group Test, specifically with regard to loot distribution. Partying is clearly something that needs a little work, so we’re going to find ways to make the party experience easier and more fun, and give parties a variety of options for distributing loot amongst themselves.

Will players have the option to customize clothing and armor?

This was a key piece of feedback in the recent Korean Beta Test, and something that was reflected in the local Focus Group Test as well. We can’t announce anything final but it’s something we’re going to explore.

Sieges in TERA: Will be there Castle sieges and defense castle sieges? What will they be like?

There are no castle sieges planned. There will be a Battleground system for consensual PVP, and servers dedicated to world PvP, and we fully expect (and hope for) large-scale battles to be something that players will participate in.

Will be there any unique race skills?

No.

Crafting in TERA: What will it be like?

We’re still finalizing the balance of the crafting system in TERA. We want it to appeal to all users, even those who haven’t made crafting a major part of their MMO experience before, but to reward the hardcore crafters as well. We’ve got some pretty fun ideas that we hope will appeal to both audiences!

We saw that the Elementalist class has disappeared and has been replaced by the Mystic. Will it be a completely new class or is it only a rename?

The Elementalist is now the Mystic, which better describes what the class does and the role it performs in the game.

What kind of remunerations will we earn in Battlegrounds?

We’re not talking about this much, only because we haven’t finalized it yet. There will be a lot of incentives for players to engage in Battlegrounds, some of which may be a pleasant surprise for longtime MMO players.

Concerning characters customization: Will players be able to modify their character’s size?

Nope--races will all have standard sizes.

Will there be "one weapon per class" or will players beable to use more than one weapon for a class? For example, could a Lancer use a lance and a sword?

Classes are tied to weapons, so no. There is an outside chance this could change though, as we heard a lot of feedback about this in the Focus Group Test.

For Spanish people...:

Will there be a Spanish-language version of TERA?

We’re planning on launching TERA in English, French and German but that list isn’t final and is partially dependent on who becomes our distributor in the EU. Stay tuned.

Concerning TERA’s official servers...will there be an exclusively Spanish server or will be there EU servers with some recommended for Spanish players?

We’re still finalizing server plans both in North America and the EU. Very likely we will have a recommended server rather than an exclusive server just for Spain.