Deca Games の Q&A

Deca AMA Answers
Deca Games Developer: Sil3x

Hey realmers!

As promised, here you will finally find the answers to our top 10 Questions that we hand crafted from over 100 submissions. In our blog post on our website, you will find some more information on the process and my person.

How did you come up with the name "Deca Games"?

Deca comes from Greek, meaning ten. This number is at the heart of the mission and vision of the company. With every game we take on, we aim to make a 10x difference over 10 years. this is the approach we have to operating games. Thinking long term, not short term and coming up with a plan to keep players happy and engaged for a decade. (Oh and the name Blizzard was already taken.)

Where did you first find out about RotMG, did you play it before you took it on?

Since several of us were working for Kabam before, this is also where we first got to know the game. We were long time admirers and it was easy for us to see how unique the game was and how much potential was still there. And yes, we all played it before taking it on.

How much do you know about the game and do you play it for fun or will you just be running it?

We've been playing and studying the game a good bit. We've probably read every post on the forums and read most of the guides out there. We're probably at an average level now. We need to play alot more to understand it as well the experts do. Its important for us to get a deep level of understanding before we decide to make any big changes. That being said, with the transition phase, we don't have as much time to play it as we'd like. That's why it's really important to us to get involved in the community and work with you.

What is your favorite UT in the game?

Anything that can be used by a Ninja, because Ninjas are cool - on that much we could agree

Will you re-open the testing realm and re-activate the closed testing team to keep working with them?

Yes, we are already working on the testing realm and we would love to see a reactivation of the A-Team - we will need you!

What will your community management look like? Will you be sticking to reddit as your main community hub or do you plan on having your own forums and how will you integrate the Kabam forums? Additionally, who will be talking to us and will actual devs be showing up as well?

Sil3x will be our main voice in the community, there will be others over time as well. The community was a big reason we took on Realm as a project. So we'd really like to be actively engaging with you guys as much as we can. We won't be on all the time since we need to keep focused ramping up on the game and designing new stuff. But we intend to be pretty active.

There will be in-game moderators and there are already reddit mods. Reddit and RealmEye will continue to be fan led initiatives. We will support and engage, but leave it to you guys to make it sing. We are also thinking about how we can involve community volunteers in other ways outside of standard moderation.

The whole company is actively lurking in the community. Not in a creapy scary way, but we read alot and use that to prioritize what we work on. Producers and Engineers will be on here from time to time answering questions and learning from you guys to improve on what we design.

Regarding the Kabam forums, we will move them over to our homepage and archive them, so they can be used as a resource while our plan is to use reddit as our main hub for information and engagement. Most players are already there so we didn't see a need to re-develop something that already existed and then double post everything. We know that some people aren't fond of reddit or just like standalone forums better. But give it a shot for a while and as with everything, if it isn't working we will adjust.

What aspects of the game - both in terms of gameplay and monetization - do you think work well and which ones do you think still need to be looked into? Are pets on the list as well as balancing?

Let's start with what works well. For all the flack that the feature gets, a lot of players are actually keen on hatching and leveling up their pets with food (we will get back to that later) and there are definitely some dungeons that you guys really enjoy, like The Shatters, Ocean Trench or Tomb of the Ancients. We think the fame trains can also be considered an organically grown game mechanic now - even though it might be cool to have more ways of farming. On the other hand, features like the arena or the guilds are definitely underutilized and not a significant part of the core gameplay.

Right now, we are still working on understanding all aspects of the game and gameplay to their full extent. So we don't plan on making any sweeping changes anytime soon. We are talking every day about how we are going to make Realm really interesting and engaging again, to fix all the things that are broken. We have some good ideas on how to do that, but its a bit too early to go into any details. We know people are looking for better balance, more challenge, and more stuff to do. Rest assured we'll come up with something really great with your help.

We want to pay heed to the fact that pets come up a lot during community exchange and grant them an extra paragraph The answer is not as straight forward as you might think though. Looking at all communication channels, even the community seems torn on the topic. We think the general idea of having pets is a good one, afterall, the road is less tiresome with a companion at your side - plus they look cool. Meanwhile, the way we have them in the game right now, is not probably not balanced enough. We are talking about both the power and the effort to level them up. In addition, it would be cool if pets could be more than just a buffing tool. We don't want to promise anything we will later on not be able to keep - but we are definitely thinking about expanding the feature to give it a fun spin (and no, we won't be those funny guys who just add another power level).

What will you do about multiboxers, hackers, notifiers and spambots?

We consider each of these issues a top priority. So you'll be hearing alot more about our approach as we get ramped up.

Dealing with all of this will be an incremental process and as you are probably aware of, there is never a 100% fix. While we have seen some of the WoW multiboxers do some impressive stuff and it was kinda hard to be mad with a guy that blinks into 4 different directions with a mage to nuke you with simultaneous fireballs after, the situation for realm is different. Multiboxing takes away a good part of the required skill and in addition makes it way harder for other players to get a shot at their well deserved loot. Thus we will be taking a similarly tough stance on this topic as on hacking.

In a first step, we will set up policies for each offense that will outline the penalties for those actions, meaning that in most cases players will be banned temporarily or permanently. Our admins will do this on a case by case basis and it will not affect the realm eye bots. This will be a short term solution until we can implement something more meaningful and automated. We are looking into additional solutions to deal with each of these issues. Some solutions will be technical and some will be just reducing the benefits via game design.

We also want to comment that we understand that some people are using hacks as performance boosts or game play enhancements, so we want to look into those and see if we can implement some of the useful things from hacked clients so that we do not force upstanding realm citizens into the shadows.

With flash fading away quickly, what are you going to do with the game? Are you contemplating moving it onto a new platform?

The mission for the company is to run our games for a long time, hopefully another decade. Within a decade, Flash will probably be fully faded away. So we will find a good solution for this as time goes on. For now, for all its scars and warts, we will be able to run the game on its current codebase for a while - which gives us one important resource: Time. We will use this time to think about what next steps to take regarding the technology. It was definitely interesting to read that some people would be up for funding a kickstarter campaign to port the game to a more future proof technology. We don't know yet if that is the way to go, but we will be looking at all available options and you guys will be among the first to know.

Taking realm to new platforms would be very fun and exciting and is a potential route we might take. But for now we are focused on stabilizing and fixing up the current game on the current platforms. The better we can do on the current platforms and the more people invest in the current game, will give us increased ability to invest for the long term and in more strategic improvements.

How do you feel about the realm community, how much do you know about us and are you in favor of player created content?

As we mentioned in our first post, what drove us to Realm of the Mad God was seeing you guys stay passionate for a game that was not being actively tended to. The activity level you guys muster is impressive, no matter if in game or here. Whether it's your opinion, your suggestion or your creativity, you always keep the community flowing. We really saw this opportunity to breath new life into RotMG so you guys can keep thriving while we have a cool job that allows us to live out our own creativity and passion.

Thanks to all your feedback, we have a clearer vision of the community. What's amazing and invaluable is that there is a lot of ""conflicting"" points of view which create a rich discussion over serious topics (pets are an excellent example of this :P).

As for player generated content: Three words - we love it! We will always make time to sift through the ideas that are submitted via the drawing tool and other channels. When we can, we will try to work good ideas into our content roadmap as well as improve some of the content generation tools.

We also wanted to note a big thank you to all the positive feedback we've received in taking over RotMG. Getting this kind of positive reinforcement really makes our jobs worthwhile and motivates us to get this right.