Update From Mythic

[Lord DaKaren]

Originally posted 04 Feb 2009 12:10:55 by Robert Mull on the UO Herald:

As director of the MMO community here at Mythic, I'd like to refer you to a post made by Mark Jacobs on the Warhammer Herald regarding changes here at Mythic. I'd like to mirror these sentiments for UO. Ultima Online has an active and dedicated community of world-wide players. EA has supported this franchise for over 11 years and as long we have players dedicating themselves to the game that will not change. As a company, EA is proud to have three exciting MMOs UO, DAOC and Warhammer Online in its family of games.

Originally posted by Mark Jacobs on the Warhammer Herald:

(http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warhe ... war?id=607)

Folks,

Mythic has always been committed to maintaining a high level of development and customer service to our MMO players. In anticipation of rumors regarding staff reductions here at Mythic today, this seems like a good time to provide some insight into the future of development, customer service, quality assurance and play testing at Mythic. Though we are resizing the team to move from a pre-launch to a post-launch size, we remain fully committed to creating and delivering the best WAR experience.

We have a very exciting schedule planned for new WAR content and that schedule is unchanged. Over the next few months, the announced "Call to Arms" live expansion events, new careers, new Tomb King themed area and RvR dungeon will be made available to our players as planned.

With respect to customer service, quality assurance and play testing, prior to the launch of WAR, we hired additional people to deal with the rush of demand associated with an MMO launch and to insure the best possible experience for our players. We accomplished that goal and as a result we had the smoothest-ever launch of a major MMO. Since the launch last year, the demand for customer service has gone down as players become more familiar with the game. Obviously, demand for a large QA and play-testing staff also falls after launch. As a result, we saw a staff reduction which is in line with the company-wide initiative. In no way does this conflict with our commitment to customer service. Staffing numbers will always map to consumer needs – it goes up when we launch new products and expand popular ones, and comes back down as players become familiar with the game.

Although we now have fewer developers on the game than we did leading up to the launch, WAR still has a larger dev team today than we ever had for Dark Age of Camelot. At Mythic, we’re committed to maintaining the trust of WAR players – we’re going to deliver the content and service that keeps you playing.

Mark