Heya guys.

As we know its been a while coming, but we got there.(Next year we will preplan )

 The awesome fact of these questions is the DEV team have answered these, which I think you guys will like.

Walrus has assured me he will work to get the rest of the questions answered aswell.

So for now Il just throw them up here for you to read and discuss. Enjoy.

These are the questions that where originally for all four SOE members.

Signed sealed and approved by marketing

* How is your relationship with each other? Do you ever go out for drinks after work hours, for example? - Yasamuu 

Rarebit: I work long hours to avoid the awkwardness of social interaction. Seriously though, I don't take time out of the office much, which is too bad, because for instance I had a lot of fun with Walrus on our Fan Faire trip.     

9mmfu: I try to be social but usually I just want to decompress after work. I try to keep myself as low stress as possible for the mental/physical health benefits. As with any work places everyone has good days and bad, I just try and roll with it.  

Dracomet: Not so much with the other current members of the dev team, but me and Walrus occasionally go get drinks or something with former MxO devs and other SOE employees.  Or at least, he gets drinks, and I eat something, since I don’t drink.  I think I’ve shot Walrus a few times with my semiautomatic nerf tommygun as well. 

Walrus: We're all pretty much the same in this instance--once we're done with work, we tend to turn into our non-dev alter-egos. Working on an MMO can be pretty stressful, so it's nice to completely escape when we leave work. We do occasionally go out on special occasions, but otherwise lead our own lives outside of the office. 

    * In your opinion, would a completely new outlook for THE MATRIX ONLINE bring more customers to the game, or do consistent updates and patches based on a game three years old provide enough stimulation for customers to buy and play the game? - Bluecode 

Rarebit: I think we've seen in other games, and in our own experience with changing the combat system to "CR2.0," that widespread and drastic changes to an existing game, no matter how much of an overall improvement they may be, only tend to turn off some of your current players, and do little to bring in new players. That's just the nature of the industry and its customers. Of course I'd love it if we could have a team working in the background on an expansion pack or something like that, but that's a question of available resources. I am pleased that recently--heck, probably for the past year or so--we've been hitting our update deadlines very consistently. 

9mmfu: As with Rarebit I think you would likely alienate more of your existing players, than bring new ones in that will actually stay with big sweeping changes. I believe the real problem with MxO is lack of things to do. To respond to this issue, the team is constantly putting more into the game which is giving player’s more to do. So I think at this point if there is more content going in for players, old and new, they will be more inclined to stick around. 

Dracomet: I don’t really think either approach works to attract players who just aren’t interested, or players who tried it before and didn’t like it in the past.  I discovered recently (when new accounts stopped working) that new people try out our game every day, and that’s all I can really hope for. 

Walrus: After it's initial release, an MMO always has trouble continuing to net gain subscribers. Even expansions only tend to bring players back to the fold, rather than add to the community. The only time you really see big increases after initial launch is if the game expands into new markets it wasn't in at launch. 

What we aim for is our consistent updates with occasional new features to keep the current community happy and try to get players to come back and try it again. The MxO community we have consists mostly of hardcore fans of the game and those are the ones we'll have for the long haul. With luck, they'll bring in some friends when we introduce something cool. We made our big change with Combat Revision 2.0 and aren't likely to mess with any other large system unless it's completely broken. 
 

    * What is, hands-down, the coolest thing you have seen in MxO and its community? - Phi 

Rarebit: Oooh too hard to decide... To weasel out by taking the fickle "what have you done for me lately" approach, I'd say odj's recent entry in the RSI forum's video contest was really super impressive, especially in view of how excited everyone else was after seeing it. 

9mmfu: Well made player art, both still and video. I think our community represents itself and the game well by making visually stunning images from our game. A close second, baring the drama, is the real player discussions about the philosophical implications weaved in the Matrix genre. 

Dracomet: I don’t watch the community like Rarebit does, but I’ve always liked the videos produced by the community. 

Walrus: The community videos and art are definitely cool. And I'm tempted to say our end of beta event pretty much rocked the world--I don't know of an MMO that has beaten it yet. However, I'm going to have to say finally having a group of players, including several from across the pond, show up at this year's Fan Faire. And, of course, watching Roukan punt Brewko IRL.

   

    * So far what has been your biggest MxO "whoops" moment? - Phi 

Rarebit: QA catches most of the bloopers I make in material that comes out in the updates, so it tends to be things I do Live. Like, in a recent EPN event on Vector, I not only got the names of two story characters backwards (Shimada calling Rachel Dunkirk "Sarah" after Rachel's friend, Sarah Edmontons), but I'd also whispered the wrong location directions to four separate factions. Oh, and the day before I'd crashed the Mara-area region-server on Vector during a little spawn "test." Oopsies. I blame Fan Faire hangover.

9mmfu: Well unfortunately when QA goes oops everyone knows about it even if they don’t realize it was something we dropped the ball on. I would have to say all missions in downtown mapping to the org area teleport door was a pretty big oops on our part. Or perhaps the archive mission token that was the wrong one for Chapter 7. These were easy catches and should have been caught but weren’t. But like the CIA “our failures are well known but our success will never be known”. 

Dracomet: I let someone hit me with Crash while I was an agent back when we had eyes in the sky.  There’s a lot of bugs and stuff too, but the bigger and more interesting ones I can usually blame on someone who isn’t on the team anymore

Walrus: Yeah, do I really have to answer this one? Death of the Destroyer. Spoiler. 'Nuff said.

Brewko's Questions.

• How hard is it to sort through the various
  CCR's you get and determine which are valid complaints/bugs and which
  are just used to falsely accuse other players? - Archduke

It's actually pretty easy to determine which valid complaints are and which are not, SOE gives us some great tools to use here so anytime we receive a CCR ticket.  When it comes to players reporting another player for exploiting, what we do here is simply login and watch the player who is being reported and if we see them doing something wrong we'll contact them, if they are not doing anything wrong then we'll let it go.

• Has there ever been a moment while you're doing
  your CSR duties in MxO that you've just had to sit back and laugh at
  the situation? - Archduke

Yes and that's about all I can say on this subject without giving any privileged info away. 

• How many games do you actualy do work for? Do you ever get them mixed up and give the solution for the wrong game? - Phi

I work on 3 games on a daily basis (MXO, Planetside and Star Wars Galaxies) and I have on occasion given the incorrect game name in my response.  We do have a QA team here that goes through and reviews are tickets each month so if we do give an incorrect response they let us know about it so that it doesn't happen again.

• Hm, I suppose this could be an awkward question
  but I'd like to ask it anyways; You've caused controversy in the
  community before, but have recently worked hard with CSR events such as
  Quizes and White room pvp tourneys...Would you say that mistakes have
  been made in the past? We're all human after all and that is one of our
  major flaws...And are we likely to see new CSR events? More Quizes etc? - Yasamuu

I am aware that I have a certain reputation in the community however that just comes with the job, when it comes to disciplining players who violate the rules of the game it's never fun for our GM's to get involved but unfortunately it does become necessary from time to time. 

As for the Trivia Events and such, well this was an idea that Moonlite and I came up with that we thought could be fun for the players and let the players see another side to our GM's.  So far these have been very successful and I can honestly say that both Moonlite and I have met a lot of great MXO players in the game, we were even lucky enough to meet a few of them at our recent SOE Fan Faire.

• I will be punting you. Be ready, plzkthnx? - Roukan

I was there and ready, I think Roukan was afraid though.  **cough** he's all talk.