IGN: There are 'coming soon' listings at rank 27 and 39 in the guild ability pane, when might those be filled in and can you give any hints to what the features might be?
Mark Jacobs: Once again, I've got to keep quiet on this. Soon you won't be able to make me shut up, because we have some absolutely great stuff in store, but for now I've got to stay quiet.
IGN: How's the hunt for players who spam chat channels with gold selling ads going? Is it a problem you believe Mythic will eventually be able to control or, like someone stabbing at an expanding balloon with a cotton ball, is it something in which you can only make temporary dents?
Mark Jacobs: It's going fantastically well. The number of spam and appeals are way down from last week and while it is way too early to declare a victory, the fact remains that players are no longer seeing spam messages every few minutes from the same people, or even every few minutes from anybody. They keep trying to get around our system and so far, we are keeping ahead of them.
IGN: Beyond the changes coming in the 1.1 patch, where do you see the focus of fixes and balancing afterwards?
Mark Jacobs: Beyond 1.1, the focus I suspect will be on making RvR better, more enjoyable, more balanced, and just more irrefutably fun.
IGN: How often do you expect major patches will roll out?
Mark Jacobs: We hope to do one every quarter, and we will continue to release bug fixes and smaller updates with our normal patch schedule.
IGN: When it comes to fantasy MMORPGs, there's a perception within the gaming community that it's the same players getting into all these games. While that's true of some, it can't be the case for all. So in that sense, do you believe the release of Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King expansion threatens your player base? If so, to what degree? Or is WAR, with its focus on realm versus realm combat over large scale player versus environment confrontations, something entirely different and a draw for a specific kind of player?
Mark Jacobs: WoW is the most successful MMORPG of all time and so we suspect that WotLK will of course have some effect on our subscriber base. We'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to expect that. On the other hand, we are in this for the long haul and once people burn through WotLK content, we expect them to begin looking for new challenges and new games. We look forward to that time very much.
IGN: What's your general assessment of the MMO market? More and more MMOs get announced on a seemingly daily basis of wildly different varieties. With WAR, you've gone with the North American standard model %26ndash; a subscription-based MMO. Would Mythic ever be interested in making a title for the more casual market, a less graphically intensive free-to-play MMO, for instance?
Mark Jacobs: It's getting uglier every moment in this space. A number of years ago I said that there was going to be a bloodbath in the subscription MMORPG industry. Too many inexperienced teams were getting way too much money. And now, a few years later, we have seen a number of developers go out of business and even more games that have failed to succeed at any level. With the downturn in the economy, it will be even harder to raise capital either for a startup MMORPG company or even for additional funding for some of the companies that have already been started. And without that capital, they will probably fail. Even if they can get that capital, the bar for entry in the fantasy genre has been raised and it may be raised again by WotLK.
In terms of the non-subscription market, the barrier to entry is not as high but so many companies are now chasing that market that getting a significant piece of it is going to be increasingly difficult over the next few years. Now, that barrier can be overcome but I believe that space is the most competitive in terms of companies/projects in the MMO industry.
In terms of us making one, who knows?
IGN: Thanks very much for your time.