ZAM Catches Up with Rift's Scott Hartsman at PAX
This article originally appeared on ZAM on March 15, 2011.
Members of the Trion Worlds team traveled to PAX East to host a party and celebrate the game's launch with fans. Editor-in-Chief Darryl Gangloff got the chance to talk with Rift's executive producer about a variety of topics.
When I walked into the main entrance of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to begin my PAX East adventure, the first thing I saw was a huge banner hanging from the ceiling with the now famous phrase, “We're not in Azeroth anymore.” Despite not having a booth, Rift definitely had a presence at the convention.
Trion Worlds hosted a party on Friday night to mingle with fans, and I had the opportunity to speak with Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman the next day about a wide variety of topics, ranging from account security and server transfers to future updates and balancing souls. Check out what he had to say below!
ZAM: You came to PAX East this year to host a party, but you decided not to have a booth. Why not?
Scott Hartsman: We were doing this thing last week: launching a game (laughs). We kind of decided that was going to be a little important, but we still wanted to come out and say hi and have a party. A party is something we can plan with one or two people, where a booth involves big operational things. Our ops team was working double time on just getting the game out the door and the developers were working double time on making sure the game was actually functioning when it got out the door. We didn't want to interrupt the flow of launching the game to do a show. Coming out and saying hi was good enough.
ZAM: A bunch of fans attended the party. What was it like to interact with fans after launch?
Hartsman: This is the first time since we've been doing large-scale betas that we've been able to come out and have real interactions since the game launched. It's been remarkably positive. I had a couple of things pointed out to me, but they were things that we already have on the list to be fixed, which is good. It was nice that the tenor was more about “what cool thing is coming next” and almost no “when are you going to fix this?” That was incredibly low compared to any other game I've worked on or heard about. A lot of it was, “I'm having a lot of fun. When's the next big stuff coming?”
ZAM: Speaking of what's coming out next, you recently launched update 1.01. How often can players expect major patches?
Hartsman: Right now it depends all on what goes into them and where in the story we are. For the update we just did, it opened some more raid content and raid rifts, and was really just a bunch of usability tweaks and balance tweaks. The game is live and everybody is bringing their A game, so now it's time for us to get into live team mode. Things like that we can do as quickly as once every week or two. Larger updates that include full new content and areas and system, depending on the scope, will be every 4-8 weeks.
ZAM: You said you didn't get many complaints about fixes at the party. Are there any bugs in the game now that are on your personal priority list to fix?
Hartsman: In terms of bugs, not really. The big priorities for us right now are the speed with which the game came under attack from hackers and thieves and credit card fraudsters and all of that. We knew it was going to happen the instant we launched, but it came with more volume than we expected. As a matter of fact, it came with so much volume that had our ops teams not planned for it the right way and expected this amount of it, it would have taken out a smaller company. It was effectively the same thing as being denial of service attacked. The attacks were coming that fast. We reacted pretty well.
With the attacks also came the spam. We reacted by tuning up the spam filter than had been collecting data all through beta and getting that turned on within the first few days of Head Start, which cut down on spam a lot. When you block game spam, people move to mail spam, so the mail spam filter is being updated right now.
Also, the other thing is people who have used the same log in credentials for our game as they have for other games and been hacked in other games, those hackers still have their credentials. A lot of the time we'll see people getting their stuff hacked that way. We're actually going to a more secure log in system where if you log in from a place other than your current computer, we will be economy locking your character. We're calling it a coin lock where you can play the game, you can gain stuff and loot things, but you can't sell or destroy anything you own or mail off your coin. That's the first thing they do. They log into your account, sell of your junk and mail all the coin. If you log in from someplace other than where we know you've logged in as you, you're going to get an e-mail with a one-time password that you're going to use to unlock your character. It's just another layer of protection that's going out pretty soon. There are a couple other plans in the works as well.
ZAM: That sounds incredibly interesting. Do you have any thoughts on players who jump computers a lot? Will they have to input that password every time?
Hartsman: The nice thing about this is it shouldn't take any longer or be any harder than using any existing pin-code type of thing. The pin is coming instantly to your e-mail instead. I'm not too worried about the delay. But yeah, over time we'll be able to whitelist all of your existing computers. But right now we really just want to make sure to get something out there that's going to help some of these people who are compromised from other games and don't even realize it.
ZAM: Do you have plans to implement an authenticator?
Hartsman: Yeah, it's in progress right now.
ZAM: Will it be physical, downloadable or both?
Hartsman: Right now we're looking mostly at apps for phone downloads and text messages. You can register a cell phone and have the code texted to you.
ZAM: Cool, so players who don't have smartphones can still have access to it.
Hartsman: Exactly. The goal is to make sure it works on any phone. If you can receive a text message or receive an e-mail, you can use it.
ZAM: Getting back to the update, in your 1.01 letter you mentioned wanting to fix mages. Can you talk a little about balancing the callings and souls post-launch?
Hartsman: It's been interesting because the balance points are different every four to five levels. The balance points change for all the souls. Bluntly, we don't want to make all the souls exactly equal at every level range. If you're playing one calling, maybe some level ranges are great and others you're behind other people. We think as long as in the end-game people end up competitive with each other, we've done a pretty good job.
Right now, it's mostly about making sure that... I'll use the mage as an example. There are some places early on in the game – and the early levels are obviously important for people to have fun and not feel like they're playing on hard mode – where if you're playing a soul that has a pet or can drain life, chances are you feel like you're playing one game, where if you're playing a mage soul that doesn't have the ability to tank adds or get life back, you feel like you're playing a much more difficult game. We've been working on that. The class designers are figuring out exactly which souls need some tweaking and what to do from there.
ZAM: So the queue problem seems to have died down a bit since launch.
Hartsman: Yeah, opening a bunch of new servers fixes that problem pretty well it seems. It took about a week to flatten out.
ZAM: How are all the population levels? Do you feel like that many servers will be consistently needed?
Hartsman: I hope so. They way our server clustering works, I'm not too worried about it. The way it distributes by function instead of by region allows us to do all kinds of things. It's a great architecture. But for the time being, we're just watching them all fill up. I think some of that will go away over time obviously, just because of players' patterns. When a game is brand new, players tend to play one and a half to two times as many hours in a day as they do after they've settled in permanently. So we'll definitely see some leveling out there.
ZAM: Do you think the server list is basically stable at this point? Do you foresee adding new ones here and there?
Hartsman: If there's one thing the last couple of weeks has proven, my ability to see the future is not exactly perfect. The way it usually works with MMOs is you get this huge blast of people looking at the game in beta. We did that open beta for almost a full week where we said, “everybody on the internet, come on and play!” What we were expecting to see was a settling down now that people had to pay money. We thought there would be fewer of them. We were not expecting it to continue to go up, which it did. We really broke away from the pack doing that. Now we watch the leading indicators of the number of people downloading the game at any giving time and the number of keys being registered at any given time. Now it's just watch and react smartly.
ZAM: What's the status on server transfers?
Hartsman: We actually just rolled out the first part of the back-end tech for that in the 1.01 update. We don't have full server transfers yet. We're going to keep an eye on the queues a little bit and we're going to see if there are places we can target specific servers to offer some moves off to lighter servers. We'll see how that works. The vast majority of times are zero, but even on servers that do have queues, other than one or two servers, it's down to minutes. I'm not too worried, but we'll probably have people taking us up on the offer.
ZAM: So you plan on initially offering targeted server transfers to deal with remaining queue times, and then offering full server transfers?
Hartsman: Oh yeah, we'll offer that over time. We really didn't want to rush out a pay service when the first goal is to help the couple servers that are still having crowding issues. And then later on we can roll out a web pay service. We're focused 100% on making the existing experience as good as it can be.
ZAM: Do you have plans for other paid services down the line?
Hartsman: It's not on the radar at all right now. Don't get me wrong, have we talked about them? Absolutely. We've talked about most options that are available in different games. But right now we're focused on the game since it's brand new and live. We have a really aggressive update and content rollout schedule, and we have a really aggressive bug fix and balance and tweak schedule. We're really just trying to keep on the stuff that's in-game.
The only out-of-game stuff we've been doing is our data exports, which enables fans and players to build their own cool toys with our data. You know how the game tracks everything that gets discovered in the game, whether it's a recipe, artifact collection, quest, item or NPC? All of that discovered information is public knowledge. There are no secrets about it. We wrapped it all up across our servers with timestamps and server names and wrapped up all the presentation data, and we will be updating it frequently on one of our websites so people can pull it down and build their own sites out of that data and do cool stuff.
I think that we end up with a greater net win if we bring more cool stuff into the ecology that is Rift as opposed to focusing on more monetization. Here's our core credo: “If we make something great and awesome, people will continue to choose to pay for it.” We just really want to make a great game.
ZAM: What's next for Rift? You talked about an aggressive patch schedule, so can you give us any hints?
Hartsman: We're targeting major updates, like I said, every 4-8 weeks or so. A lot of it's going to depend on the size of the given update. Smaller ones could be 4-5 weeks, larger could be 8-10 weels or somewhere in there.
The content for the first, second and third updates have actually been in development for quite some time. We are very fortunate to be in a boat where we launched a game with content in development and testing in the hopper already as opposed to launching the game, scrambling to get it stable and then scrambling to find something cool to do next. We've always had a pretty clear understanding that the road to 50 is not a grindy, punitive one, and if you're going to launch a game like that where you're more about the ride being fun, you need to have more content in the hopper for people to do when they get there.
So far, really tiny fractions of people are even at top level. Actually, it's kind of funny just looking at the level distribution. We know we should get more content out there for those folks, but man, that's going to be a lot of aspirational content for a lot of people who are level 20. But then we are wrapping that all up in larger scale events so that there are things about the major updates that hopefully everyone who plays the game will be able to participate in.
The whole point of any new content, whether it's new dynamic or new zones or new rifts, is all about advancing the overall world story in a way that people can feel that the story is progressing. They all go back to serve the purpose of telling a story over time.
ZAM: Let's go back to March 1. What was launch like for you?
Hartsman: I can easily say it was the quietest day I have ever had at Trion. That was very weird. By the time we launched, I've made no secrets that one of the reasons we did those beta events was to get practice for launching. We treated every single one of those like a game launch. When it came time to launch the game for real, it was 100 people doing what they had done eight times before. There were no panics or anything like that. We didn't have a single server process crash for the first 24 hours, which I've never heard of in an MMO launch before.
We were able to say to the development team, “you don't have to get any work done today, play the game. Keep an eye out for fires, scan the forums, scan game chat because that's the best place to find out when something is truly broken.” People played on their servers, rolled up their characters and played alongside everyone else. I would say a good couple of dozen of us were sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it never did. That was our day. It was a lot of nervous expectation and watching server population levels.
ZAM: What's your game experience like? What are you playing?
Hartsman: I will never tell in a game with two sides and four archetypes! I can say that during all of our alpha and beta testing, I did play both sides to cap. I played one of every calling, although I didn't get every calling to 50. I tried them all out. I'm one of those guys who's a little too busy these days for the hardcore 6-hour play sessions, so I picked a good calling and good souls to be able to log in, do an instance, do a warfront, do some tradeskills and log out. I picked some good souls for that.
ZAM: Now that Rift had a smooth, successful launch, what's next for Trion Worlds and your other games?
Hartsman: Obviously we've made no secret that End of Nations is a game in development. We're showing it off and it was playable last PAX Prime. People were having fun with it. Expect some more noise about that in the future.
We've still got the Syfy project. That one is earlier in its development than Rift and End of Nations, but they're both still working and very playable. They're both good looking and they're both fun.
ZAM: I know you can't give any details about the Syfy game, but do you expect Rift fans to enjoy it, or are you going for something completely different?
Hartsman: There's one thing I can say for certain, and that is we are not making the mistake of saying we are making a game for our existing audience. It is an action MMO. It's different from an MMORPG. It's going to play like an action MMO. Granted, gamers tend to like more than one type of game, so I'm absolutely sure there's going to be some overlap, but we're not intentionally going to design a game in a totally different genre for this audience that likes RPGs.
ZAM: Is there anything else you want to say about this entire experience?
Hartsman: Honestly, if you would have asked me a year ago, “Hey, what would you think about going to a convention a week after you launch a game,” I would have said, “Are you out of your freakin' mind?” The fact that I was confident enough, and the fact that the entire Trion team proved itself so amazingly, is great. I got on a plane to come out here and I'm checking e-mail now and again. People are doing their stuff. They're pros by now.
One of my friends asked if it was like leaving your kids with a babysitter. No, it's like leaving your kids with Nanny 911. They can do the job better than me and they're just kicking ass. I'm really proud.
Members of the Trion Worlds team traveled to PAX East to host a party and celebrate the game's launch with fans. Editor-in-Chief Darryl Gangloff got the chance to talk with Rift's executive producer about a variety of topics.
When I walked into the main entrance of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to begin my PAX East adventure, the first thing I saw was a huge banner hanging from the ceiling with the now famous phrase, “We're not in Azeroth anymore.” Despite not having a booth, Rift definitely had a presence at the convention.
Trion Worlds hosted a party on Friday night to mingle with fans, and I had the opportunity to speak with Trion Worlds CCO and Rift Executive Producer Scott Hartsman the next day about a wide variety of topics, ranging from account security and server transfers to future updates and balancing souls. Check out what he had to say below!
ZAM: You came to PAX East this year to host a party, but you decided not to have a booth. Why not?
Scott Hartsman: We were doing this thing last week: launching a game (laughs). We kind of decided that was going to be a little important, but we still wanted to come out and say hi and have a party. A party is something we can plan with one or two people, where a booth involves big operational things. Our ops team was working double time on just getting the game out the door and the developers were working double time on making sure the game was actually functioning when it got out the door. We didn't want to interrupt the flow of launching the game to do a show. Coming out and saying hi was good enough.
ZAM: A bunch of fans attended the party. What was it like to interact with fans after launch?
Hartsman: This is the first time since we've been doing large-scale betas that we've been able to come out and have real interactions since the game launched. It's been remarkably positive. I had a couple of things pointed out to me, but they were things that we already have on the list to be fixed, which is good. It was nice that the tenor was more about “what cool thing is coming next” and almost no “when are you going to fix this?” That was incredibly low compared to any other game I've worked on or heard about. A lot of it was, “I'm having a lot of fun. When's the next big stuff coming?”
ZAM: Speaking of what's coming out next, you recently launched update 1.01. How often can players expect major patches?
Hartsman: Right now it depends all on what goes into them and where in the story we are. For the update we just did, it opened some more raid content and raid rifts, and was really just a bunch of usability tweaks and balance tweaks. The game is live and everybody is bringing their A game, so now it's time for us to get into live team mode. Things like that we can do as quickly as once every week or two. Larger updates that include full new content and areas and system, depending on the scope, will be every 4-8 weeks.
ZAM: You said you didn't get many complaints about fixes at the party. Are there any bugs in the game now that are on your personal priority list to fix?
Hartsman: In terms of bugs, not really. The big priorities for us right now are the speed with which the game came under attack from hackers and thieves and credit card fraudsters and all of that. We knew it was going to happen the instant we launched, but it came with more volume than we expected. As a matter of fact, it came with so much volume that had our ops teams not planned for it the right way and expected this amount of it, it would have taken out a smaller company. It was effectively the same thing as being denial of service attacked. The attacks were coming that fast. We reacted pretty well.
With the attacks also came the spam. We reacted by tuning up the spam filter than had been collecting data all through beta and getting that turned on within the first few days of Head Start, which cut down on spam a lot. When you block game spam, people move to mail spam, so the mail spam filter is being updated right now.
Also, the other thing is people who have used the same log in credentials for our game as they have for other games and been hacked in other games, those hackers still have their credentials. A lot of the time we'll see people getting their stuff hacked that way. We're actually going to a more secure log in system where if you log in from a place other than your current computer, we will be economy locking your character. We're calling it a coin lock where you can play the game, you can gain stuff and loot things, but you can't sell or destroy anything you own or mail off your coin. That's the first thing they do. They log into your account, sell of your junk and mail all the coin. If you log in from someplace other than where we know you've logged in as you, you're going to get an e-mail with a one-time password that you're going to use to unlock your character. It's just another layer of protection that's going out pretty soon. There are a couple other plans in the works as well.
ZAM: That sounds incredibly interesting. Do you have any thoughts on players who jump computers a lot? Will they have to input that password every time?
Hartsman: The nice thing about this is it shouldn't take any longer or be any harder than using any existing pin-code type of thing. The pin is coming instantly to your e-mail instead. I'm not too worried about the delay. But yeah, over time we'll be able to whitelist all of your existing computers. But right now we really just want to make sure to get something out there that's going to help some of these people who are compromised from other games and don't even realize it.
ZAM: Do you have plans to implement an authenticator?
Hartsman: Yeah, it's in progress right now.
ZAM: Will it be physical, downloadable or both?
Hartsman: Right now we're looking mostly at apps for phone downloads and text messages. You can register a cell phone and have the code texted to you.
ZAM: Cool, so players who don't have smartphones can still have access to it.
Hartsman: Exactly. The goal is to make sure it works on any phone. If you can receive a text message or receive an e-mail, you can use it.
ZAM: Getting back to the update, in your 1.01 letter you mentioned wanting to fix mages. Can you talk a little about balancing the callings and souls post-launch?
Hartsman: It's been interesting because the balance points are different every four to five levels. The balance points change for all the souls. Bluntly, we don't want to make all the souls exactly equal at every level range. If you're playing one calling, maybe some level ranges are great and others you're behind other people. We think as long as in the end-game people end up competitive with each other, we've done a pretty good job.
Right now, it's mostly about making sure that... I'll use the mage as an example. There are some places early on in the game – and the early levels are obviously important for people to have fun and not feel like they're playing on hard mode – where if you're playing a soul that has a pet or can drain life, chances are you feel like you're playing one game, where if you're playing a mage soul that doesn't have the ability to tank adds or get life back, you feel like you're playing a much more difficult game. We've been working on that. The class designers are figuring out exactly which souls need some tweaking and what to do from there.
ZAM: So the queue problem seems to have died down a bit since launch.
Hartsman: Yeah, opening a bunch of new servers fixes that problem pretty well it seems. It took about a week to flatten out.
ZAM: How are all the population levels? Do you feel like that many servers will be consistently needed?
Hartsman: I hope so. They way our server clustering works, I'm not too worried about it. The way it distributes by function instead of by region allows us to do all kinds of things. It's a great architecture. But for the time being, we're just watching them all fill up. I think some of that will go away over time obviously, just because of players' patterns. When a game is brand new, players tend to play one and a half to two times as many hours in a day as they do after they've settled in permanently. So we'll definitely see some leveling out there.
ZAM: Do you think the server list is basically stable at this point? Do you foresee adding new ones here and there?
Hartsman: If there's one thing the last couple of weeks has proven, my ability to see the future is not exactly perfect. The way it usually works with MMOs is you get this huge blast of people looking at the game in beta. We did that open beta for almost a full week where we said, “everybody on the internet, come on and play!” What we were expecting to see was a settling down now that people had to pay money. We thought there would be fewer of them. We were not expecting it to continue to go up, which it did. We really broke away from the pack doing that. Now we watch the leading indicators of the number of people downloading the game at any giving time and the number of keys being registered at any given time. Now it's just watch and react smartly.
ZAM: What's the status on server transfers?
Hartsman: We actually just rolled out the first part of the back-end tech for that in the 1.01 update. We don't have full server transfers yet. We're going to keep an eye on the queues a little bit and we're going to see if there are places we can target specific servers to offer some moves off to lighter servers. We'll see how that works. The vast majority of times are zero, but even on servers that do have queues, other than one or two servers, it's down to minutes. I'm not too worried, but we'll probably have people taking us up on the offer.
ZAM: So you plan on initially offering targeted server transfers to deal with remaining queue times, and then offering full server transfers?
Hartsman: Oh yeah, we'll offer that over time. We really didn't want to rush out a pay service when the first goal is to help the couple servers that are still having crowding issues. And then later on we can roll out a web pay service. We're focused 100% on making the existing experience as good as it can be.
ZAM: Do you have plans for other paid services down the line?
Hartsman: It's not on the radar at all right now. Don't get me wrong, have we talked about them? Absolutely. We've talked about most options that are available in different games. But right now we're focused on the game since it's brand new and live. We have a really aggressive update and content rollout schedule, and we have a really aggressive bug fix and balance and tweak schedule. We're really just trying to keep on the stuff that's in-game.
The only out-of-game stuff we've been doing is our data exports, which enables fans and players to build their own cool toys with our data. You know how the game tracks everything that gets discovered in the game, whether it's a recipe, artifact collection, quest, item or NPC? All of that discovered information is public knowledge. There are no secrets about it. We wrapped it all up across our servers with timestamps and server names and wrapped up all the presentation data, and we will be updating it frequently on one of our websites so people can pull it down and build their own sites out of that data and do cool stuff.
I think that we end up with a greater net win if we bring more cool stuff into the ecology that is Rift as opposed to focusing on more monetization. Here's our core credo: “If we make something great and awesome, people will continue to choose to pay for it.” We just really want to make a great game.
ZAM: What's next for Rift? You talked about an aggressive patch schedule, so can you give us any hints?
Hartsman: We're targeting major updates, like I said, every 4-8 weeks or so. A lot of it's going to depend on the size of the given update. Smaller ones could be 4-5 weeks, larger could be 8-10 weels or somewhere in there.
The content for the first, second and third updates have actually been in development for quite some time. We are very fortunate to be in a boat where we launched a game with content in development and testing in the hopper already as opposed to launching the game, scrambling to get it stable and then scrambling to find something cool to do next. We've always had a pretty clear understanding that the road to 50 is not a grindy, punitive one, and if you're going to launch a game like that where you're more about the ride being fun, you need to have more content in the hopper for people to do when they get there.
So far, really tiny fractions of people are even at top level. Actually, it's kind of funny just looking at the level distribution. We know we should get more content out there for those folks, but man, that's going to be a lot of aspirational content for a lot of people who are level 20. But then we are wrapping that all up in larger scale events so that there are things about the major updates that hopefully everyone who plays the game will be able to participate in.
The whole point of any new content, whether it's new dynamic or new zones or new rifts, is all about advancing the overall world story in a way that people can feel that the story is progressing. They all go back to serve the purpose of telling a story over time.
ZAM: Let's go back to March 1. What was launch like for you?
Hartsman: I can easily say it was the quietest day I have ever had at Trion. That was very weird. By the time we launched, I've made no secrets that one of the reasons we did those beta events was to get practice for launching. We treated every single one of those like a game launch. When it came time to launch the game for real, it was 100 people doing what they had done eight times before. There were no panics or anything like that. We didn't have a single server process crash for the first 24 hours, which I've never heard of in an MMO launch before.
We were able to say to the development team, “you don't have to get any work done today, play the game. Keep an eye out for fires, scan the forums, scan game chat because that's the best place to find out when something is truly broken.” People played on their servers, rolled up their characters and played alongside everyone else. I would say a good couple of dozen of us were sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it never did. That was our day. It was a lot of nervous expectation and watching server population levels.
ZAM: What's your game experience like? What are you playing?
Hartsman: I will never tell in a game with two sides and four archetypes! I can say that during all of our alpha and beta testing, I did play both sides to cap. I played one of every calling, although I didn't get every calling to 50. I tried them all out. I'm one of those guys who's a little too busy these days for the hardcore 6-hour play sessions, so I picked a good calling and good souls to be able to log in, do an instance, do a warfront, do some tradeskills and log out. I picked some good souls for that.
ZAM: Now that Rift had a smooth, successful launch, what's next for Trion Worlds and your other games?
Hartsman: Obviously we've made no secret that End of Nations is a game in development. We're showing it off and it was playable last PAX Prime. People were having fun with it. Expect some more noise about that in the future.
We've still got the Syfy project. That one is earlier in its development than Rift and End of Nations, but they're both still working and very playable. They're both good looking and they're both fun.
ZAM: I know you can't give any details about the Syfy game, but do you expect Rift fans to enjoy it, or are you going for something completely different?
Hartsman: There's one thing I can say for certain, and that is we are not making the mistake of saying we are making a game for our existing audience. It is an action MMO. It's different from an MMORPG. It's going to play like an action MMO. Granted, gamers tend to like more than one type of game, so I'm absolutely sure there's going to be some overlap, but we're not intentionally going to design a game in a totally different genre for this audience that likes RPGs.
ZAM: Is there anything else you want to say about this entire experience?
Hartsman: Honestly, if you would have asked me a year ago, “Hey, what would you think about going to a convention a week after you launch a game,” I would have said, “Are you out of your freakin' mind?” The fact that I was confident enough, and the fact that the entire Trion team proved itself so amazingly, is great. I got on a plane to come out here and I'm checking e-mail now and again. People are doing their stuff. They're pros by now.
One of my friends asked if it was like leaving your kids with a babysitter. No, it's like leaving your kids with Nanny 911. They can do the job better than me and they're just kicking ass. I'm really proud.