GM Destra has written an interesting dev blog entry to let Champions Online players know what GMs are focusing on in the game. This is an aspect of MMOs that many players may not be familiar with, so it's a nice to get a report on the current projects of the GM staff.

According to the entry, the GMs have been trying to get the most out of their tools and have been toying with their abilities on the test servers. They've also been compiling feedback and are currently focusing on situations that players report as bugs but are actually working as intended. This generally means more communication with players is needed.

Check out GM Destra's full dev blog entry after the jump.

It’s been a while since I sent an update out. I wanted to take some time to let the community know what we were up to, and what’s been keeping us busy for the last few weeks.

Lately we’ve been really focused on getting the most out of our tools. We been implementing new systems, such as the ability to restore deleted characters, and the ability to roll characters back to previous states. We’ve been spending a lot of time testing them and making sure they work in all sorts of situations. We’ve been pleased with the results.

Additionally, now that we are starting to get a firm grasp on the open bugs in the game, we’ve been able to figure out ways to work around them for players. While it initially seems that changing one field on a character wouldn’t be a big deal, it is not always the case. We always do extensive testing before we make any changes to character data, including item restorations, mission completion credit, roll backs, perk data, etc.

So in the past few weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of our time on the test servers, getting ourselves into trouble, then using GM commands to get back to safety. Once we figure out a solution that works, we are able to start offering that to the players. One of the biggest issues we were facing last month was the issue where players’ Nemeses, or should I say, Nemesii, were becoming unresponsive at the end of the instanced mission. We had to make sure that granting completion credit for these missions did not affect their ability to advance is in their Nemesis mission chain.

“Just try it again” is the last thing we want to say.

There are other precautions to take into account as well. We have to figure out how to determine that player’s are eligible for our workaround. We wouldn’t want to give any items or mission credit out when players didn’t earn it – that wouldn’t be fair to the community. This step requires us to take a look detailed look at the technical data stored for each character, to determine what exactly we need to look for.

In other news, we’ve been compiling a lot of feedback. One of our primary areas of focus right now is situations that players report as bugs, which are actually working properly. When we receive a significant number of reports stating that something is not working right, but the developers come back to us saying “Actually, that’s supposed to happen”, this usually means there is some sort of disconnect between the intended design and the community. So, for situations like that, we try and come up with suggestions to improve the way information is presented to the player in the game. This helps the players out, by providing better explanations, but it also helps us out, by reducing the number of tickets we have to respond to with “Sorry, that’s not a bug.”

We hope that everyone has been happy with the support that we’ve been able to provide. We’re doing our best to stay on top of all the updates to ensure that we have processes in place when new content comes out!