Darth Hater

Georg Zoeller
Bit of confusion here, which is bound to happen if someone summarizes a 60 minute talk into a single page, so let me clear that up.

Additionally, the talk was aimed at a professional audience and centered around methods and workflows and how to use metrics and visualization to support content iteration, it wasn't specifically about the game design of The Old Republic.

The context the quote in the original post was used in was something like:

"We use metrics to validate that the content provides the challenge we intend it to provide. If we design a boss battle to be hard and players breeze through it, that's as bad as player dying several times in places we designed to be R&R zones."

The whole death thing was just one of several examples used to show how metrics can be analyzed.

Metrics are one tool in our box of helping us validate our game content against the design goals, but if you attended the talk, you'd also have heard about how important it is to play your own game, how sometimes just asking the players is the right thing to do, and how it's dangerous to just go on fishing expeditions for problems when using metrics.

If you're interested in the full context, the slides for the talk are out there!

Georg Zoeller
Actually, I said that a more completionist player might spend 15 hours on the planet, I didn't qualify class content only.

Thus are the dangers of people doing live transcriptions of a talk: the quotes usually are missing a bit of context (the context being 'one planet in this game has as much content as some singleplayer games offer, since we have 8 classes with their unique stories plus world content plus other activities on a planet).

As for how long it will take someone to finish just their class content on any given planet, it absolutely comes down to playstyle and preference and there's little sense in trying to predict how much time YOU will spend on a planet, because I don't know how YOU play

Georg Zoeller
At this time, we do plan on having "racial" abilities, but they will be cosmetic in nature. Think of them as "social" abilities or actions that your character is able to do based on their species.

We wanted to give you something special for your character based on species, but we did not want it to influence your choice in the sense that you would feel "I have to be a Twi'lek Consular because they get +5 Willpower."

So, active "racial" abilities are planned, but they won't affect your combat gameplay in any way.

We'll elaborate more in the future.

Georg Zoeller
Like 'Hide head slot' or 'Unify colors to chestpiece,' this is a game option, on by default, which can be toggled on a per character basis.

Georg Zoeller
I hope this is true. BioWare has stated that they want you to select a character you can relate with. Allowing class racials in-game that enhance performance, even just 1% healing or 1% hit, is enough to really put pressure on people and takes away from that sense of "pick the race you relate with the most."

Adding fun abilities like new dance moves, or special emotes, maybe even "Crafting" preferences to some races that would let you do certain crafts a little faster (not better, just a little faster), are fine. Adding performance enhancement is opening a can of worms. Even worse is adding combat-related class specific abilities.

Keep race selection based on aesthetics, not performance.My team put them in, so yeah, it's true.

We are all sick of mails touting performance enhancing products , so we wouldn't want to put performance enhancing racial abilities in the game

Georg Zoeller
All tank specs in the game are designed to function as a main tank. There are no 'off tanks' by design in the game, that would involve players intentionally choosing such a role by speccing hybrid.