What resulted was a long talk about the future of MMOs, people in the industry, the Chapter 11 proceedings, changes to Horizons both present and future, and well, anything else that struck our fancy. Below you'll find part 4 of the interview - you can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here and watch for part 5 from Chris Tulumello and Tulga Games in the very near future.

David Bowman: I grew up where my teenage years were D&D. It didn't exist before my teenage years. I grew up in a very small town - miles from neighbors very small town - I didn't have a lot of people I could play with. There was a bit of loneliness in that. My high schools friends and I would get together and socialize around D&D. So, that grouping happened and that formed my opinion of what healthy entertainment was. The group of us weren't the scary side of it - the people who were already having problems and this just exacerbated it - we were socializing. We got be creative and expressive and we got to bond and entertain each other.

GI.n: Here's the problem I saw with your marketing, because you were all over the place with your marketing before launch but it's not your strenghts that you were pushing. Quite frankly, what you're describing is what women look for in MMOs and you didn't market to them at all. You didn't market to the casual player. You have the social structure. If you want to fight you can, but you don't have to. If you want to craft you can, but you don't have to. You can just simply sit and work with people - but your strengths were never shown. It was all about "we've got dragons and elaborate crafting and all of these events" but every game has something like that, maybe not what you have but something like that. But what you did is design it around the idea that is all about going to have fun with people.

David Bowman: If you're a marketing person - especially a marketing person who doesn't play the game - and you want to advertise this product, to get out to the customer. Ok, what are your buzz words, what are your hooks.

GI.n: But, you should market to both.

David Bowman: I'm aware of that.

GI.n: That's where I think you failed. Even in your interviews and previews it was about features and not design. This an MMO that is designed more about people than about things.

David Bowman: We failed in a number of places in marketing. This is an MMO that is about the relationship between human beings and their impact on space. How do you market that "sexily"? How do you market that in a magazine?

GI.n: I agree, it's a hard question to answer and you'd never market in that manner to hard core players. But you were trying to get the people who'd never played an MMO before and yet you had a tutorial that was built by people who had been playing MMOs and even I had issues with it. There's a disconnect there somewhere in both the marketing and the initial experience. So yes, I agree, use the dragons as the hook, use the events as the hook...but you really need to find the other people. And I don't know that I can offer you any good answers for that but it really seems to need to be your focus.

David Bowman: And going after the moderate gamer as opposed to the hard core gamer is a different challenge because there's no avenues. Steve Escalante was our internal marketing person and he was asked that question all the time. "Ok, great, we've got a game designed for moderate gamers how do we get them?"

GI.n: I'm a moderate gamer. Regardless of my involvement in the industry I don't and can't game much. Most of my game time is spent with my children and the only suggestion I could give would be television. Get out of the gaming magazines and into the magazines I read. Online is not where you're going to find us.

David Bowman: See that's the challenge. Perhaps the biggest mistake the company made or I made, is making a game that I am certain there is an audience for but did not have a plan to reach.

GI.n: I don't know that anyone does. I think you may be the first to try.

David Bowman: But there's danger in being the first to try. We're going to take a longer slower approach. We've stream-lined our operations; we've lowered the cost of our operations. We've gotten so that the audience we know we can get will sustain the company. We now have the metrix, we now know what hardware we actually, we know the bandwidth we actually need.

GI.n: If I can think of anyways you can reach me I'll let you know, because I am absolutely in your demographic.

David Bowman: I need to reach you and a few thousand of your friends. Somebody who is not afraid of a computer, uses it, has used a chat program before and likes the online component. Not willing to give up their life to commit to a game. There's a problem with the cost of acquisition as well. If it costs $200 to acquire that player then it won't be worth it.

I have some strategies and we'll approach them as we get to that point. Today, focus on the players that we have, make them evangelists, make them proud that they play the game. Make it so they no longer have to apologize for playing horizons. Get that nailed. Make sure that everybody who is playing the game thinks "this game rocks!". I will be going after the people who have given the game up. I just have to tie a few loose ends up, then I'll be approaching those who gave up.

David Bowman: The things that we've been doing have been focused on correcting flaws that we both inherited and designed ourselves - put into the game thinking this was a good idea - oops! Not a good idea. And we've been correcting them right now. This is our last chance to do that. We've just completely changed the world. Migrated everybody and everything and made the game what we wanted it to be in the beginning. We've included the improvements that we always wanted to - the "if I ever had the chance to do it again I'd do this". Well, we've done all those things. Many of them aren't obvious to the players right now, we've only built the foundation. And I've got a group of people who have proven that they understand the audience, they understand the core elements of the game. And they're going to nail this. I'm going to help them. I'm going to focus all of my energies on this product to make sure it's right.

What's going to excite people? The Withered Aegis are finally going to show themselves to be what they should have been from the beginning which is something to invoke fear. The forces of the Withered Aegis and the players are going to be able to push them back. This is one of the things that we had focused on from the beginning, this is part of being a dynamic world - that the players could affect the whole world. Our ability to let them do that, never matured, it never happened in the time frame that we promised it would happen. So, we broke that promise. We're going to fix that. We're fixing it right now. We're getting the Withered Aegis ready - we've applied a lot of lessons to the indigenous monster that we're going to apply to the Withered Aegis - we know we're going to spawn them into the game; we know how the players will be able to interactive with them. That will be the adventuring side; we're making the adventuring a lot more exciting and meaningful.

The rewards for adventuring are changing and they're changing dramatically and I think for the better. For those players that are more item-oriented and success-oriented there will be more things offered for those people. But we're going to do that without losing the crafting/building/construction. It's not going to be about "look at the size of my belt-buckle" it's going to be about "I helped save the town. I helped my community get the resources that it needed". So, it's much bigger.

The reason originally, that we put a web-interface into the product, and you can see the vestigal aspects of this still on the site. And it is coming soon! You can see that we intended to flesh out recognition on that page. Because everyone funnels through there and enters the game when you're in the world you don't really know what's going on all around you. We don't want to make it that you know everything about everything.

We have 5 worlds that are very active and the way we're opening the worlds we're going to have the grand events again where Chaos or Order get is it first. But, the Europeans are our some of our most dedicated fans so I don't want to ignore them at all. I want them to come into their own.

A website is an opportunity for us to proclaim and herald for everyone what's going on in the game that's out of context. When I'm in the game and I'm in my character that's one thing, but I want to know about the broader game. I want to know who is doing what in the game. Our intent was to have all of that information available to you as you came into the product and if you just wanted to dive in you could dive in. But, if you wanted to know more about what's going on, take some time right here to learn that. We've failed to implement that. We've got the hooks, we have not had the opportunity or the resources to flush that out.

GI.n: Should you get the in-game support in the future will there be the opportunity for more global announcements?

David Bowman: You missed our end of the world events before the consolidation. On Sunday, we took our player snapshot and rather that bring the shards down while we consolidated them we kept them up and we ran world-driven events. People had 500 death points. We destroyed the world in real-time in front of peoples' eyes. The blight advanced against the lands and it was different on each shard because we had world managers in the world. It was sad because it was part of the consolidation, but it very exciting. We really wanted to pull the stops out.

We've now got Chaos and Order and we've got World Masters for each of those shards. So, we're ready to focus live in-game that we couldn't do with 8 shards live. There will be a lot of exciting things happening that we were prevented from doing before because we had to many shards, too few players, and not enough employees to deal with all of those. Now we're in scale, we have the right number of employees for right number of shards at this point in development.

GI.n: So, October could be fun?

David Bowman: October will be fun! November will be more fun. December will be more fun.

So, what should be players be excited about? A very interesting world that's different from any other, that can't be taken away. The Withered Aegis are about to come in with a vengeance. Right now there are very few Withered Aegis at all - there's a few in the Eastern Blight and the Western Blight and that's about it. A few pockets is all that's left. The players are wondering how they're going to get their resources.

We've got monsters that now going beyond level 120. We've got some really tough challenges for some of those players who were never challenged before - a lot of new monsters coming, a lot of new fights. Each monster actually matters now. We totally revamped the appearance of all of our monsters. They all look new and fresh and much better. It's the way it should have been looking from the beginning. We've fixed a lot of the technical issues that were preventing us from doing cool things with our monster characters. They're all in schools now.

Crafting - it's more challenging now, but that will adjust.

GI.n: Is it less tedious?

David Bowman: Not yet. We have introduced rich nodes and mother-lode nodes. For example you're out harvesting gold. If you find a regular node you get say 10 swings at it before you deplete that source. If you hit a rich node you might get 25-30 swings; if you find a mother-lode you might get 100 swings. And we've made a whole new series of cargo discs to help. The gatherers and the miners are now providing these resources in town whereas before you had to be your own gatherer.

Most of the players learned since we launched "well, I'm going to be my own gatherer" as opposed to "well, I'm going to gather when it's convenient for me but if I want to be a processor and make jewelry, I'm not going to go gathering there are people who are more efficient at it so I'll just purchase those resources". If you choose to, it's still there for you.

GI.n: Crafting, and I'm a heavy crafter is a time-sink. I literally read while harvesting. It would be nice if the animations were faster or there was less time involved...

David Bowman: It would be nice to just kill a monster in one hit, too!

GI.n: LOL No, I mean that I have to pay attention to when I'm fighting a monster, but with resource gathering it's so time intensive I DO read a book while doing it.

David Bowman: If you're going after a mother-lode you're probably going to die if you did that because those will be protected.

GI.n: And that's fine. I'm not an adventurer and so I would have to buy it. That's not the player I am, but there are a lot of players like me.

David Bowman: There are. What we've got is an economy/ecology thing going on.

GI.n: You do have the best player run economy I've come across. Leaving loot out of your monster drops is perfect.

David Bowman: Once you leave them in it's over with. So many things that people are assuming from the past 8 months is that the changes we're making are going to make things worse instead of we've learned so that the changes we're making are so you won't have that frustration you had in the first 8 months. That's what we have to do. Otherwise, it will degrade and decline.

With Vaults, Silos are in and in a variety of types, you're going to be able to improve upon your property. All of the new plots we've added are residential, commercial and industrial.

We've automated the plot reclamation process. And we've got some problems inherent in the Guild Properties. Whomever owns the guild plot and if they sell the guild plot, a new guild will own it. Right now we've got 49 guild communities and we want to see what happens with that before we build any more or change anything.

Every time we give the players new tools some people build constructively with them; other players poke people's eyes out with them. We have to find ways to "nerf" which is to make something safe to use.

GI.n: Any last words?

There are so many things in this company that we inherited, or we evolved or we did the best in the circumstances with what we had. Thank whatever divinity that you believe in that we are here and we are going to have the opportunity to continue to make fewer mistakes because most companies don't get this far. Most companies can't launch a MMO, even well-funded large companies find it hard to do this.