New guy questions regarding dev priorities

[Schmiggz]

Hey guys, new guy here.
First and foremost a big thank you to the devs for bringing back one of my favourite MMO experiences ever. I'm having a blast running around in rvr, doing some SCs and so on. Very glad that something like this happened.

I just have some questions regarding dev priorities.
Is there kind of a rough prioritiy list for the devs, that we are allowed to know?
For example, I'm a huge warhammer lore fan and I really enjoyed reading all the quest descriptions and stories throughout the leveling process, but in RoR you seem to get only the half of the texts, so you always miss the conclusion of those story chains.
I KNOW, it's surely a low priotity issue, since those guys are trying hard to maintain the basic gameplay concept, which is COMPLETELY understandable.
I'm just curious. Is there are overall rough plan of stuff to fix the we are allowed to know?

Thanks for any answers, keep up the good work and an enormous THANK YOU for hooking me up with that sweet sweet warhammer game!

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH!

Schmiggz

[wargrimnir]

Azarael is currently doing class balancing and RvR work.
Londo is working on the patcher and an Instance Builder (for dungeons/city siege).
The Database team works a lot out of the Bugtracker and is fixing PQ's and creating live events.
The GM team primarily exists to wreck cheaters and exploiters. Sometimes we help people in-game.

[Schmiggz]

In which manner are you able to interfere with the "source code", if at all? I'm not that good with programming, can you explain how it works?

[wargrimnir]

In which manner are you able to interfere with the "source code", if at all? I'm not that good with programming, can you explain how it works?

Everything server-side was written from scratch and needs to interface perfectly with what the client expects or it causes many problems. We never received any source code from the live servers, just whatever was figured out at the time. As long as it doesn't break the client, we can change it. With client patching the limitations are only on the game engine itself.

[Genisaurus]

In which manner are you able to interfere with the "source code", if at all? I'm not that good with programming, can you explain how it works?

We have the client, which is a black box. The team can't change the client source code in any way, but eventually they will be able to change the resources used by the client. This includes art, and text files used for tooltips and such. It remains to be seen whether content could be added to those resource files (instead of replacing something else). In theory it could, but without knowing what's hard-coded and what isn't, there could be issues.

The server code is an emulator that was built from scratch. None of the server code was ever used in Age of Reckoning, and at no time have we received any assistance or tips from former employees. Basically, somebody made a tool that intercepted packets sent between the client and official servers when AoR was still alive, and a couple hundred people ran it sporadically over the course of the game's existence. From those sniffed packets, the server code was eventually reverse-engineered.

Depending on when certain packets were sniffed, and how well that information could be translated, some information was incomplete. And of course, people didn't do certain things while their packet sniffers were running, so there was a lot of missing information too. Half of what the dev team does is fixing bad information and restoring missing stuff (like items nobody equipped while running a sniffer).

[Schmiggz]

Just.. wow. You really can understand the effort behind this project much better once someone starts to explain all the work that goes into it in this (for me) understandable manner.
Would you guys even accept help from a former employee if he would give it freely or are you determined to make this project kinda "your thing" ?

[Genisaurus]

Would you guys even accept help from a former employee if he would give it freely or are you determined to make this project kinda "your thing" ?

Not in the slightest, but that's not for the sake of ego either. It could get everyone involved in a lot of legal trouble.