Gl0BuZ: переводы

→All of us at KritzKast would like to thank Robin for finding the time to answer these questions. We hope that he’ll continue to expand this game we love. So long as there’s TF2 there will be KritzKast.

→Robin Walker: We used to be good in the few months following TF2’s release, prior to which we’d been in months of heavy playtesting. Now, we’re all old and tired. Most of us still regularly play TF2 in the wild, but it’s almost all pub play. On rare occasions I’ll join a scrim, with some of the competitive folks on my friends list, to remind myself how terrible I am. Luckily, this isn’t very relevant to TF2’s design, because we try hard to avoid using our own play experience as data when we’re working on TF2.

→Kritzkast: On a personal note, do you and your dev team still play TF2 outside of the test environment? Are you any good even without invoking your God-mode-esq rocket launcher? Have you tried scrimming or are you strictly a pub/LAN player?

→Robin Walker: Like anything else we do, we’ll ship what we think is a solid initial feature set, and then see what feedback we get. If that’s what everyone is screaming for, then that’s what we’ll work on.

→Kritzkast: Will there be a place for 3rd parties to create their own trading facilities such as shops, trading posts and semi-automated trading?

→Robin Walker: We’re still working on trading. It’s been slower to implement than we’d like, mostly because it’s a feature that straddles across the development cycles of both Steam and TF2. So there are pieces of work that we need Steam’s dev team to implement (and they’ve been real busy on the new UI, among other things), and other pieces we need to do ourselves, and we’ve been real busy on the Engineer update and other things we believed were more important. To summarize: yep, still coming. Sorry for the delay.

→Robin Walker: We’re still working on trading. It’s been slower to implement than we’d like, mostly because it’s a feature that straddles across the development cycles of both Steam and TF2. So there are pieces of work that we need Steam’s dev team to implement (and they’ve been real busy on the new UI, among other things), and other pieces we need to do ourselves, and we’ve been real busy on the Engineer update and other things we believed were more important. To summarize: yep, still coming. Sorry for the delay.

→Kritzkast: I think I a lot of people are holding their collective breath waiting for the your trading system to go live. Are those plans still on the engineer’s table or did a wayward OMGWTFBBQ incinerate them all?

→Robin Walker: We’ve never really planned too far ahead in TF2, because we want to be able to react rapidly to community feedback. So, we can’t give you any assurance that we won’t move on to another product at any point, but we wouldn’t have been able to give you that assurance two years ago, either. We’re already working on the next big update after the Engineer pack, though.

→Kritzkast: With the fast approaching (valve time) last known update, the engineer’s, what assurances can you offer that Valve won’t simply drop the TF2 update program, close the blog and move on (to TF3)?

→Robin Walker: See the analysis line above, especially the last “cost to build and ship” bit.

→Kritzkast: Please, Mr Walker, may we have a guard doggie for our Birthdays? We promise to walk it and feed it and wash it when it smears its body in the dismembered corpses of our fallen foe. I shall call mine Kevin.

→Robin Walker: We love these. On the game team, we love seeing interesting ideas with more thought put into them than just text. Our web team loves seeing the way these pages have used the style of our TF2 update pages to do neat stuff, often challenging us to do better ourselves (see http://www.engineer.fragfestservers.com/). Ultimately, good ideas make their way into the product by passing an analysis of what problems they solve, what benefits and disadvantages they have, the amount it costs to build and ship, and so on.

→Kritzkast: There have been several fake engineer updates by the community, ranging from guard dogs to chicken guns and ammo magnets. Many of these have been very detailed and well thought out. How much notice do you take of the fakes and what’s the chance of one of these ideas seeing its way into the final build?

→Robin Walker: One of the other things we tried was a secondary weapon that instantly teleported the Engineer to his teleport exit. So Engineers could leave their sentrygun for a bit to skirmish or collect metal, and be able to immediately teleport back to the sentrygun if something bad happened. It did work at achieving those goals, but we didn’t like the side effects. Teleporters stopped being much of a team focused tool, with Engineers placing them in places that made sense for their personal use, and not necessarily for the team. We also felt it was too easy for Engineers, almost eliminating the risk inside the decision of whether they should leave their nest to grab some resources. Both of these were solvable issues, but while testing this we found another idea that played much better, attacked the same problem of Engineers being rewarded for moving out from their nest occasionally, and had lots of other interesting applications.

→Kritzkast: Mentioned on the blog was one of the ideas for the Engineer update that was tested and removed. What other design ideas have you tried, tested and rejected in the course of your search for engineer update nirvana?

→Robin Walker: We try to include a community map or two in every major TF2 update. We playtest a bunch of community maps internally, and we try to pay attention to what maps the community seems to be having fun with. Once we select a map we contact the author and see if they’re interested. So far no-one’s turned us down, but they’re absolutely within their rights to do so.

→Kritzkast: The standard map base for TF2 has expanded rapidly largely as a result of community maps. Under what conditions do you attempt to take ownership of a map and has a map maker ever turned you down, are they even allowed to?

→Robin Walker: It’s something we think about on a case by case basis. As mods become more popular, we generally start by adding some functionality to solves specific problems the mod authors are having. If it continues to expand in popularity, and fits well enough into a TF2 customer’s expectation of what they might see in front of them when they join a server, we start thinking about building it directly into the game.

→Kritzkast: We’ve seen PropHunt, Dodgeball and various other brilliant community created mods emmerge as add-on server modes for TF2. Is it your intention to merge these concepts into the final product, exposing them to all TF2 players, or are you simply happy to allow them to exist on their own terms?