Welcome to Gaia :: Qixter's Answer Thread

Ye Olde #1 Question: When will Battle be launched?

Ye Olde #1 Answer: Summer of 2008.

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Howdy, Gaians!

I've responded to a lot of threads today, but this forum is ACTIVE...so in the interest of making those answers available to as many of you as I can, I'm creating this locked thread so that I can keep copying answers up here as a sort of "FAQ-in-progress".

So, keep an eye on this thread if you're interested. It'll definitely grow over time.

-- Q.

1) Some folks are concerned that the Slots/Fishing/Cars/whatever servers will be slammed when Battle launches. That won't be the case. Battle will have its own servers, completely separate from those other servers. In fact, the architecture of the Battle servers is different than our other games and is being designed for much higher capacities.

2) Are the monsters shown on the website (mmo.gaiaonline.com) all the monsters in the game? The answer is no. That's not even half of them.

3) Will Battle be just like "XXXX" (fill in the MMO you've played before)? The answer is "no". Or rather, there will be some elements in it that will be the same (like figthing monsters and going on quests), but many of the fundamental game systems are quite a bit different than other MMOs. You should enjoy the uniqueness of Battle.

4) Will Battle launch with PvP (player-vs-player) in it? No. Will Battle get PvP added to it post-launch? Yes. We're designing elements of it now, but it won't be available until sometime after launch. Why? Because we want to concentrate on getting the RPG elements correct and fun before we concentrate on PvP. Do we like PvP? That's an unqualified YES. We can't wait for it either.

5) Yes...Battle will have a lot of quests in it. It will have many other things, but yes...for those of you that asked if the backstory involved the opportunity to do lots of questing...yes, you will definitely see many quests.

Some folks got annoyed that the clothing items they purchased that look like weapons or armor won't have any useful bonus stats for the MMO.

This is a response that I posted in a thread earlier today that sums it all up at once.

-- Q.

That's correct. The clothing items you purchased that resemble weapons and armor do nothing special within this MMO (except look good).

Why?

1) We want Gaians to be able to look like themselves while playing...not be forced to wear armor and carry weapons.

2) We will not attempt to add battle stats to all the thousands of clothing items on the avatars (and weapons *are* clothing items, designed for appearance sake only...and not for any other purpose).

3) Your existing weapons have no animations for you to be able to do something useful...like, oh...swinging it. Those assets would all have to be created for your avatar to use weapons.

So...we developed the ring system because it's incredibly flexible for gameplay, allowing users to easily swap out skill sets with minimal pain between missions, which also encourages experimentation while playing.

The rings are extremely visual and I think you'll find the effects flashy and combat-oriented enough to satisfy your combat aesthetics.

I hope this all makes sense. The game is going to be a blast...but Gaia has always said that weapons would only be useful for aesthetics...not as Battle items with bonuses. We're not changing that tune now.

I'll keep trying to update this thread from time-to-time, but you can usually find even more answers by ghosting my profile, where I get grilled pretty constantly by a friendly group of folks from the MMO forum site.

Check it out!