If you have paid attention to the DUST 514 forums within the past few months, or so, you might have noticed a new name with a blue tag floating around. I’ll echo Ripley Riley’s words, “Yeah, DUST 514 got a new employee on staff. I’m just as surprised as you are.” His name is CCP AquarHEAD, and we are very, very pleased to have him on the blog answering a few questions, so that we all can get to know him better. It’s always nice to see a new face joining the team to help improve the game. So, with all that said, I present Lou Xun, CCP AquarHEAD!
Biomassed: First off, and most importantly, what is the origin of your name?
AquarHEAD: It’s Aquarius (because my birthday is in Feb) plus RadioHEAD, which actually is not my favorite band right now, but I was listening to them while thinking about an unique username to use on the internet. This was quite some time ago, around middle school, and I think it’s around the time when I started to use Gmail, and I wanted a unique username instead of silly combinations of names and dates. That’s about it, and I’m pretty satisfied with it still! It never conflicted with anyone else so far.
Biomassed: What do you do at CCP, and what parts of Warlords 1.1 have you worked on?
AquarHEAD: To be honest, it’s a pretty hard question! I could say I was involved in every project that ever existed since I’ve joined CCP Shanghai, or rather helped on them. Mostly making tools or fixing bugs behind the scenes. As for 1.1 I did matchmaking change and PC reward change, to be specific.
Biomassed: What were some of the challenges you faced while tweaking the current matchmaking system?
AquarHEAD: I think it is split into several parts: First, programming side – which is using Python – a dynamic language, which is hard to explain in a simple way, but in the end that makes it hard to know what I can use in the matchmaker, and it take some time to understand how everything works together. Then, because it relies heavily on live scenario, it’s really hard to test. By test I don’t mean to test whether it works and doesn’t break things, but to test whether it brings improvements. Even though we have several tools to help even using real data, it can still convey false information, and we can’t really tell until it’s really online. And even after we put it online, I didn’t fully understand how each parameters would affect it until after several days of tweaking and looking at all kinds of data.
Biomassed: What is an average day like for you? What is your routine?
AquarHEAD: I think being in the game industry – or rather programming work as a whole – is about changes and challenges. That to me means that I would help on whichever has things coming up or needs help – mostly DUST and EVE China since they are the two live games that we work on from Shanghai. Our working hour is 10am to 6pm, and I live really close to our office – 15 minutes of walk at most, so I would get up around 9am in the morning, enjoy some fresh air then come to office. There are quite a lot of meetings involved, and a lot of planning happening in the morning. Lunch happens at 12 and then we are back to our regular schedule. After working hours I often stay late since it’s just the time when our coworkers in Reykjavik office start coming in. I really enjoy talking and working with them since I can learn a lot from them.
Biomassed: What are some of your favorite aspects about the game in its current state?
AquarHEAD: Its connection to EVE!
Biomassed: What is your favorite fitting to use when you play DUST?
AquarHEAD: I would say Sniper. I’m a long-range-style fan in all kinds of games, but I also like stealth gameplay. Anything but direct face-smashing melee combat. 🙂
Biomassed: What is something you would really like to see implemented into a future iteration of the game?
AquarHEAD: Me personally? I would love it if DUST can have more impact on EVE, like capturing/destroying structures or even capital ships.
Biomassed: Are there any specific forum posts, or topics, that have made you giggle as you read them? If so, what are they?
AquarHEAD: I do read them all the time! But there is way too many to count or name specific ones to be honest. Rattati and Frame can often be fun to read as well when they randomly show up and throw a line or two in some thread.
Biomassed: What is your favorite Pokemon, and why?
AquarHEAD: Well this is a real hard question. I was born in 1992, so I missed many old games. When I was a kid I didn’t watch TV or played console games – so my childhood is probably different than compared to our players and my colleagues. I believe I’m the youngest here in CCP Shanghai, and probably the second youngest across the whole company. So unfortunately, Pokemons were not a thing that I was interested in by the time I started playing games.
Biomassed: Are there any secrets about DUST that you can tell us that won’t lead to CCP Rattati killing you in your sleep?
AquarHEAD: I would take my privilege to skip this one 😀
On behalf of the team here at Biomassed, I want to thank AquarHEAD for answering our questions. I know I personally cannot wait to interact with you more on the forums, and maybe even shoot you in game. 😉
