Piercing the Veil™ #1







Greetings my dear duckies and welcome to the first Piercing the Veil™!!!

Piercing the Veil will be a semi-regular event that we shall host until the game shuts down or until the end of time, whichever comes first! We intend for this Q&A to be both fun and informative. We will answer silly questions right alongside the more serious game-oriented questions. My chief endeavor is to help build an informed and happy player community and PtV is one of the tools that I believe will help me achieve that goal. Keep an eye on the forums for new discussions where you can post questions. Thanks to all of the Founders who took the time to post their questions for this PtV!

Renée Machyousky, Community Manager, City State Entertainment

Are there any live Ducks near the office and do you feed them?

You wouldn’t want to feed the ducks around here. These are some severely jaded ducks. They eat a mixture of buffalo chicken wings and asphalt, and they actually experience road rage. We prefer our ducks bright yellow and plastic, with their innocence still intact.

Sornin Asked:

Will guilds be able to form formal alliances with other guilds in order to share communications and resources?

Do I blow a cute fuse each and every time I see a baby duck? YES! We absolutely want our players to be able to create formal alliances. I was in a rather small guild in Dark Age of Camelot, and being part of an alliance made for much easier group finding as well as intel and resource sharing. So, if Mark said no to alliances he would have to deal with some pretty epic pouting…from me.

Harvest Asked:

Every Class will have different Specs?

Maybe, sorta, kinda, yes and no :p /dodge! Sorry to be evasive on this one. We have discussed things like: having classes that do one thing very well, or having classes that can be specced multiple ways, as well as having combinations of both. Rest assured that if we went with limited class speccing, we would make up for it by having a greater number of classes than we laid out during the Kickstarter.

Mirelind Asked:

Did you get any ideas from this forum that you are going to put into the game?

Mark has said that the Becoming™ tale for the Bean Sidhe was inspired by a couple of questions from the forums. We believe that it’s extremely likely that Founders are going to come up with interesting ideas for us to incorporate over the lifetime of the game. As a matter of fact, Mark has a reward system that we will talk about in a future PtV. Mark would say it is ‘an oldie but a goodie’. 😉

travy Asked:

How will up-scaling a pledge work?

Like magic of course! Our programming team is working on this now; we will have actual answers for you at the end of the month when we hope to reopen Paypal with fresh tiers. I like saying ‘fresh tiers’.

Meddyck Asked:

Are “Arthurians”, “Tuatha de Dannan”, and “Vikings” the final names for the 3 realms or could those change before release?

These are not yet set in stone! I am on a steady diet of Founders’ thoughts and opinions, and this topic is no exception. I distil down what you folks say into a readily digestible formula for the team to consume (even though many of them are happily active and/or lurking on the forums). Fun Fact: Mark was originally going to use “Sidhe” instead of “Tuatha de Dannan” but he thought “Tuatha de Dannan” just sounded cooler.

Hellraise Asked:

Are you planning to organize the forums with structured / moderated questions and topics or are you happy to keep it as it is?

Definitely planning a re-org of the forums. As we say, it’s on the list. We’ve had a lot of feedback asking for a simpler design and once we port over to our own hosting, we will have far greater control over the set-up, mods (the code kind), etc., and we do plan to simplify some. We are also planning to have localized subsections of the forums for our communities that prefer to read/write in languages other than English, provided there is enough interest, and so far there is from at least three non-English reading/writing communities.

Incan Asked:

Do you have any idea of what the world will look like?

Many, you should see our dry erase boards here! Ideas are not something this team is lacking. It’s rather like our confection situation actually. 🙂 There is nothing congealed enough to bite into yet however. As you know, Mark has said that this will be a large world, and while the art team ready the throwing daggers every time he mentions that, we do all agree that we are better off with a map that is maybe a bit too large rather than one that has people feeling crammed in.

Peter kokocha Asked:

Have you ever eaten DUCK????

Umm. I umm. You see, what happened was…well, it kinda flew into my mouth… OKAY!? It also just happened to be dead, nicely crisped and covered in an amazing orange demi-glaze. As for the rest of the team, they have informed me that during the Kickstarter, some kind Founders sent over some Peking Duck for lunch. They report that it was yummy!

Phoxx & Fenris Wolf Iron Asked:

When will the next 24-hour live stream be?

We are considering having one for the re-launch of Paypal tiers later this Fall! This time we will be prepared, as opposed to the big guy strolling in here and suggesting, “Hey we should stay up for the last 24 hours of the Kickstarter!” At which point everyone wishes they hadn’t stayed up quite so late gaming the night before. I am sure most of you can relate.

Nibs Asked:

Will we be able to swap out the music files like we could in DAoC? I loved being able to swap out the 2 default combat musics to my own choices.

We haven’t discussed this before today but I believe that we will give players the ability to do so!

Belatucadros Asked:

Mark recently finished a document on the magic system, which he said was then discussed amongst the group at CSE. How much of it survived the group contact? Specifically Andrew, who would be making tech decisions.

Our programming team was so on board with the Magic Systems doc, that they started suggesting embellishments and talked about how it would work, rather than how it couldn’t. They are good at life. 🙂

We were all excited actually and the whole team had questions and suggestions. It was inspiring! I think Mark was rather pleased with our reaction to his ‘idears’. In all fairness, Mark usually spends a lot of time talking about his system ideas with the team before he works on the design docs, just to get our initial feedback and suggestions.

That’s it for this round folks! Thanks again for your participation 🙂