Quote of the Day – President of PvP

even the disgusting PVE carebear servers will be ready day 1. I’m not happy about that but people tell me I need to get over it.

-John Smedley, on ramping up for H1Z1

I found that quote amusing if only because I thought I read somewhere that H1Z1 was striving to be more of a cooperative survival MMO, at least when compared to Day Z and… wasn’t there another one… zombie apocalypse games aren’t really my thing… which by all reports quickly devolved into solo ventures where you fought or avoided any other players you encountered.  PvE seems like a way you could fix that problem and make the game more social or cooperative.

But maybe SOE has a fix for that end result when it comes to PvP servers.  We shall see.

Anyway, I am sure Smed was kidding around with that quote.

Then again, he is the PvP loving boss of a company that caters to a lot of carebears.  He has always championed Planet Side and PlanetSide 2 even as PvE in Norrath paid the bills. (Planet Side isn’t paying any bills, having no revenue at all now, and, as noted recently, PlanetSide 2 just hit the point where it brings in more money than it costs to operate.)  And I would guess that he might have pushed some of the unsuccessful ventures into PvP with EverQuest games. (How many EQII PvP servers are there now?)  So I guess it is no surprise that the PvP side of H1Z1 is where his heart is.

Zombie cleanup on checkout six please!

Still, it sounds like SOE is going into this… closed beta… early access… Landmarkian zone of featureless despair… whatever it is… in a big way.

looking like we’ll have 150-200 H1Z1 servers on 1/15.

we’ll be announcing the distribution of them (i.e. rulesets, etc) in the next day or two. I think people will be happy.

John Smedley, on Twitter (first and second)

150-200 servers?  I am going to guess that server populations are planned to be pretty low.  That is a WoW level of servers, and I don’t think this game will get WoW numbers when it comes to players.  Also, good luck playing with friends if you don’t coordinate in advance. (Also, wasn’t early access going to be 4-6 weeks from April of last year?)

l will be interested to see the rules sets and distribution of servers… that is to say, how many of each type they run with.  And I will be even more interested to see how things shake out as the game goes live, gets past its initial burst of activity, and settles down to a steady pace.  Will the “disgusting PVE carebear servers” end up paying the bills?

Addendum: I see Syp picked up that quote as well, though he had a more direct response to it.  So did Aywren.

Addendum 2: Smed has some further words:

so for you PVE loving folks, we will have vanilla PVE and hardcore PVE that requires headshots, and only support First Person. (twitter)

so despite my jokes, we really have gone out of our way to make sure PVE players will be happy. Not everyone enjoys KOS (twitter)

for PVP we will support hardcore as well.. first person only, headshots required and you lose recipes when you die (ouch). (twitter)

Proteus Arrives in New Eden

Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, “Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

CCPs “every five week” expansion march continues as the Proteus expansion drops today.  I get the feeling that this might be a holiday hangover release as up to the end of last week the expansion page itself was a placeholder and dev blogs haven’t exactly been as prolific as past launches.  There was one about the next round of module revamps while the only other one was a summary post that included items in progress for the future.

The image for Proteus

The content of Proteus feels a bit light, at least in comparison to the Rhea expansion of five weeks ago.  But Rhea not only got in some big things, like new ships, new space, and a new rendering system, but also a few probably not difficult to program but very popular with the masses changes like the expanded skill training queue and the end of clone upgrades.  (Plus I think CCP needed something to counter the grumbling that surrounded the the Phoebe jump fatigue changes.)

After that Proteus was probably destined to be a bit of a let down in comparison, a situation not helped by a couple weeks of holidays in the middle.  But that is bound to happen when you go with the sort of release schedule CCP has set for themselves.  Not every train leaving the station is going to be full.

What does Proteus bring?

There is the revamp of recon ships, which I understand is a big deal to a small percentage of our fleet composition.  They are all getting buffed as well as disappearing from the directional scanner.

There is a new model of the Exequror cruiser, making it more symmetrical.

The new Exequror

Related hulls, including the Oneiros, a ship I fly from time to time, will get the symmetrical update in a future release.  So for now I will remain off balance as usual.

Oneiros at a Cloud Ring POS

There are also new exploration sites, which expands a feature I have never explored, new asteroid field graphics, which mean new screen shot opportunities for my other site, new player mining locations, which would interest me if I still mined I suppose, updates to the map, new languages for Aura, and then the latest round of module tiericide (or “tier side” as somebody’s spellchecker at Massively probably insisted) which just makes my brain hurt.  Most of those modules… mining lasers and upgrades for example… do not affect me at all, but others are on fleet doctrine ships.  Is my fit going to work when I get home from work?

We shall see tonight I suppose.

Anyway, that is what we are getting for the Proteus expansion.  There are always the patch notes for the expansion if you want to get into the gritty details.

The next stop is the Tiamat expansion, due out on February 17th.

Until then we can enjoy the Proteus theme, which has a spooky air to it.  Perfect for roaming alone in a recon ship.