A New Approach

**Rarebit**

I'm going to try to keep this brief. I will have much more to say about the topics touched on here once this initial foray has been digested and thoroughly chewed over.

Starting with subchapter 11.3, the content that you will receive in our regular six-week updates will be changing.

For most of this year, updates have consisted of three main items: 1) weekly critical missions, 2) a replayable "quest," and 3) daily live events.

This is going to change to: 1) a new cinematic, 2) quests with missions, activities, and rewards for each organization, based on the latest advancement of the story seen in the cinematic, and 3) an organization-wide meeting announced well in advance so that as many members as possible will be able to attend.

Other, related changes will be taking place as well:

- No more colored "EPN" or "CYPH" faction tags will be offered. Existing factions with those tags will keep them.

- Archive reward items, such as the War Sword and Seraphic Vision, will have their timer extended to five minutes, and can be reactivated thirty seconds afterwards.

- Completing a subchapter's worth of a single organization's archived critical missions (except for the very short subchapter 1.1) will reward an IS Booster item.

- Neighborhood street gang bosses will have a 10% chance of dropping a reusable "RSI Capture" tool that will allow the player to assume that NPC's appearance indefinitely.

- Organization "liaison officer" positions, played by LESIG members, will no longer exist. Some LESIG members will probably choose to keep their established characters, while others may recycle them for use in other events and activities.

- We'll be throwing a game-wide party in a low-level-friendly area on one server each update period, announced well in advance.

**Rarebit**

Reasons

This change has both advantages and drawbacks as compared with the type of content we've been developing up to this point, but we believe that for the majority of current and potential players, this will be a step in the right direction.

Those of you reading this, who follow the forums closely, also tend to be those who have most assiduously followed the daily events and weekly missions, and are perhaps the most strongly affected by these changes. While I cannot hope to replace perfectly the types of content you've seen in the past, I'll at least try to describe briefly the two main reasons why I believe this change is both necessary, and the right thing to do for the overall health of the game.

1) Long-term development

While investigating ways to develop the game over the past year--missions, events, quests, and so forth--our development efforts have spread far and wide. Now we need to refocus our development into a concentrated direction that continues the story of the Matrix while also delivering new challenges and adventures in the Matrix Online over the long term.

2) Extending the reach of the story

The story of the Matrix, as told through weekly missions and daily events, has become very detailed, and very complex. This has had an appeal for the story's most hardcore fans--those willing and able to put forth the considerable imagination and effort required to track the separate threads of the story across each week, each day, each organization, and each server, and weave them all into the overall narrative being told--but has been largely lost on more casual players, or those players dedicated to the pursuit of the latest and greatest gear.

For what appears to be the majority of players--those who don't read over each mission, or each event--the story, as it has grown more intricate, has grown harder and harder to follow. Although all missions and events are archived, catching up on them is a significant challenge, and this difficulty has increased since the discontinuation of cinematics earlier this year. Cinematics have the power to bring any player--new, casual, hardcore--up to speed on the story instantly, and to bring it home in a very direct and compelling fashion. Furthermore, they allow the story to go places that missions and events--bound by game mechanics--cannot.

This is why I believe that we need to devote time to bringing cinematics back, to combining organization storylines with gameplay that is challenging, varied, and rewarding in very definite, material ways for your characters, and to scheduling large-scale meetings where as many of our players as possible will be able to come together with their organization leaders to discuss policy and tactics. The heart of the ongoing game, from a development perspective, is the story that we have dedicated ourselves to carrying on, and we need to make it as meaningful and rewarding as we can.

**Rarebit**

A few details:

- Cinematics will be hand-drawn, silent, subtitled .gif animations. They will play in the standard cinematic browser window in the Loading Area, but will load and begin playing back more quickly, and will not have the compatibility issues of the old WMV cinematics. They will be drawn and animated by me, and I think I will be able to make them longer and more dynamic than the old cinematics, although I expect the first one or two to be a little rough as I work out my production method.

- The main-story quests will, similar to the Pandora's Box quest arcs, include mission phases, exploration phases, and collection phases. They will tend to take place in a specific neighborhood somewhere in the city, will require a minimum level of 30, and will feature new rewards for level 30, 40, and 50 players, sometimes specific to each organization, although you will also be able to trade the reward items if you wish. Level 100 Agent attacks on Zionites will be disabled in the target neighborhood for the duration of the subchapter, and afterwards will occur there at a decreased frequency. The quests will remain in the game permanently, so that you can always go back and revisit quests from previous subchapters simply by travelling to the right spot in the city, which will most likely be pointed out at the end of each subchapter's cinematic.

- Organization-wide meetings will take place on a single server per organization. Which server hosts which organization's meeting will rotate every update. Meeting time and location will be clearly and publicly announced well in advance. The format will be--as closely as is possible--a roundtable discussion of the concerns and topics most relevant to the organization, in which the story's official organization representatives--Niobe, the Merovingian, Agent Gray, and so on--will need the input of their operatives. The intended model is something akin to the meeting of Zion captains held at the beginning of The Matrix Reloaded. This type of openness and flexibility was simply not possible under the old scheme of pre-planned, pre-scripted, daily and weekly events and missions.

- The small-scale live events that we've been doing on a daily basis will still occur from time to time--in general, when specifically required by the main story.

- The Cypherite and E Pluribus Neo organizations are returning to their original, "underground" status; their characters will still exist in the story, but we will not attempt to support them as player organizations with live quests or meetings; we have attempted to do so up to this point, but our development capabilities and existing game mechanics have never been able to do them justice. Their "parent" organizations (Machines for Cypherites, and Zion for EPN) will give these operatives full access to information, as if they were members of the parent organization. Players will not be restricted from forming new factions with "CYPH," "EPN," or similar, plain-color notation in their names, but the continued existence of the old gold or blue tags will lie solely in the hands of those factions who possess them at the start of subchapter 11.3.

I will have, as I said, much more to say in relation to these changes, and I hope to be able to describe and discuss them with you at length once they've been widely read and assimilated. Please remember that, although we don't require you to agree with everything that is posted by us or your fellow players in these discussions, we do require that any discussion you conduct is done in a civil fashion.

Okay, over to you.

privaronT · 10/09/2008 13:12:24

Let me be the first to say were all very dissapointed in you Rarebit. It's a shame your stripping the game down like this.

What's refocus your development efforts mean exactly? How hard is it to organize three people to develop a last generation mmo? Another question is will we have a chance to ever interact with these characters for sub orgs or do we have absolutely no content to look forward to anymore?

It seems to me like you basicly just told 2 out of the 5 organizations their not going to be offered even minimal support as subscribers. Why exactly did you make this change?

**GamiSB**

Sounds good to me.

A question though. Are live events being reduced to ONLY org wide meetings or can we expect to see the occasional exile in need of help or meeting between two characters once every blue moon?

**Silenci0**

What's the storyline related plan to get CYPHs involved with mech stuff? I am afraid that this is going to be tough to gain their trust and work together like nothing ever happened.

**Mathalos**

Rarebit,

Will we be getting Chapter 11.3 with the Halloween Update on October 23rd, or will we receive it the week after on October 30th?

**Virrago**

Mathalos wrote:

Rarebit,

Will we be getting Chapter 11.3 with the Halloween Update on October 23rd, or will we receive it the week after on October 30th?

Halloween update is scheduled for Oct 23rd.

**GamiSB**

Also why the decision to just drop the EPN and CYPH orgs? With this new method of telling the story via quest is it still to time consuming to give EPN and Cyph there own?

And can those who have stuck with the EPN and CYPH orgs expect anything ever in terms of the story and playing a part within it? Or are we left with our leaders being underground and just "pretending" to be apart of them like we were before the orgs were revealed fully?

ReProgrammed

Looks cool, Can't wait to see your cinimatics. And to see what these Org specific reward mission type-a-things are. Sorry to see Lesig go away, but hopefully we will still have event where we meet with Pace, Gray, Niobe, Ghost, Twins, ect ect and do some task for them to help the story along. Just viewing the story while the main characters do everything is so dull and everday game way. MxO was great because of the player interaction,

Can't wait to see everything.

**SampleNow**

Although I am sad that the daily events will be changed, I am excited with what is planned. I am also glad that many liaisons will be gone.

**exsuscito**

I see this as an extremely positive forward step, and indicative of how the MxO team truly cares about the Matrix universe and how they bust their collective behinds to produce a game symbolic of this devotion.

It'll be a shame to see the LO's go, and the EPN/CYPH status is a little troubling. Overall, however, I fully, fully support this change. It may just make me interested in the story again (no offence intended - I'm a picky bastahd).

This may have materialised via convenience and/or various constraints, but my initial reaction is that the forward momentum we have is preserved.

**Mathalos**

Virrago wrote:

Mathalos wrote:
Rarebit,

Will we be getting Chapter 11.3 with the Halloween Update on October 23rd, or will we receive it the week after on October 30th?
Halloween update is scheduled for Oct 23rd.

I meant when will Chapter 11.3 be coming out, along with the Halloween Update or the week after in a seperate update?

privaronT

SampleNow wrote:

I am also glad that many liaisons will be gone.

Amen at least theres that to look forward to. It was getting pathetic that you had to pay tribute to fellow subscribers just to get full service in a SOE mmo.

**Mathalos**

With the RSI Capture tool, will we be able to turn off the disguise, or is it a permanent change that will still be on you the next time you log on?