Blade & Soul recently got its first expansion last week, but there are still some things that fans of the game might have been wondering. Siliconera spoke with NCSoft to discuss more on future chapters, what fans have been requesting, and the issue on bots in Blade & Soul.
What is NCSoft West doing about the bot problem in Blade & Soul?
Julianne Harty, Brand Manager: We’re doing a lot of stuff for the bots. This is unfortunately one spot we can’t be really transparent about. If we say what we’re doing bots will change. We’re constantly looking at patterns and behavior. It’s not enough. People seem to think it’s easy enough to stand there, see someone and go ban, ban, ban, ban, and ban. It’s exhausting.
We ban on an account basis. It’s still I don’t know of any MMO that has gotten ahead of the bot problem and honestly it comes down to why they’re boting. What is the rationale behind it? Some players need to get to whatever it is as quickly as possible and have it running. In other areas it’s a company running thousands and thousands of programs in order to buy gold and sell it to players. Players are buying gold and it’s like why are you doing that? We are trying to provide incentives for players to do things legally. We have our currency exchange, for example, so players can trade gold with each other. That’s not a problem. We still have a lot of tools on our end that we’re detecting and banning as much as possible.
What feature is most requested by the player base?
Spectator mode. Spectator mode is very, very strong. We have a version called broadcast mode which if you’ve seen the world championships has a good view of the two fighters playing. But, there’s no way right now for a regular player to go in and watch a match as a spectator. A lot of people have expressed interest. Almost immediately we went back to the dev. team and said we need to have this. They are working on it and are planning to make it a global feature across all of the regions.
Some regions requested small things and we’ve gotten the benefit of that too for example, server times. We have a clock in our UI that most people didn’t mind that we didn’t have one, but apparently that was a feature that was requested elsewhere and we added a clock in the UI. We’re developing communally, a product that is evolving.
When are the next story chapters coming?
Our next set of chapters, Act 5 and Act 6, I believe are slated for this year. We have the additional challenge that we have to localize it in three languages. We have to translate it into English and then to French and German. That adds more time to our process. We’ve also got voiceovers and mouth movements too. It takes us a little more than we would like, but it is being planned and we are looking forward to it.
Blade & Soul is currently available for PC.
