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Runes of Magic interview
Hi everyone,
My name's Jörg "Kerensky" Koonen, English-speaking Community Manager for the European Runes of Magic community.
I've been in the gaming industry for the past 7 years now, working on several MMO projects in Germany and the UK. I've started as moderator for one of the largest DAoC fan-sites before I went to the UK working on Sci-Fi and super-hero themed MMORPGs. Since October 2008 I'm responsible for community and fansite relations; forum and website communication and - with my German speaking colleague - event / contest planning. In short: I'm the person relaying all kinds of information between the developer, the publisher and our players.
In general the main parts of the zones will be persistent. There may be new NSCs, entrances to instances or such but the existing zones will remain so that all new players will have the same gaming experience.
Farmers are the curse of any MMORPG, I agree with you there. While a developer can only do so much to make the life of farmers harder, the main grunt is taken by the Customer Support team. They are policing the game and react on all reports of our users immediately.
We ban accounts of gold farmers and are working on certain mechanisms to block them permanently.
Frogster has always relied on an internal GM team. Since Runes of Magic has launched we more than doubled the size of the team and employed moderators and GMs working for us remotely. During our launch phase and the holiday period we rely on third party services to help us cover all our users' service requests. Our aim always is to provide best experience for all players.
Our GM team is essential for the organizing and running ingame events. Of course their main job is to support our players in times of need but we also rely on their help during community events ingame.
The most striking difference between Runes of Magic and your run-of-the-mill F2P game is that we do *not* sell items like weapons or armour but only items that you can use to shave off some playing time or that have decorative character. All weapons, all armour etc. can only be found in the game.
Additionally many items from the Item Shop can also be found ingame as rare drops from certain bosses or they can be acquired with "Phirius Tokens" - a reward for certain daily quests.
Other items, that are only available in the Item Shop, are special furniture for player's houses, pets or special mounts, although players can rent pets and mounts from ingame merchants as well.
In the meantime, we have set up servers for Runes of Magic in the US, the EU and Russia. All the servers run on the same version and are all updated at the same time. So one of the main jobs the developers and we as publisher share is to make sure that all new content we are implementing over time will cater to both player groups; balancing between PvP and PvE players.
Personally, I like stealthers most - so I am a Rogue / Mage. I know that I am a bit squishy when it comes to direct attacks, but I try my best to protect myself with my mage's wardens, pour a bit of poison on my daggers and sneak up behind my enemy to deliver a hefty, deadly blow to his back.
Additionally the ability to set traps (my Rogue / Mage Elite skills) helps me to cover my retreat if the enemy doesn't go down quickly enough.
I would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to have this Q&A and wish you the best of luck with Runes of Magic!
Thank you very much for your questions. I hope I have been able to answer them to your satisfaction.
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