Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Wodin said:

This is more or less true if you limit yourself purely to the character that you create when you log in. One of the unique aspects of EVE is that it is, AFAIK, the only MMO with a legal character market where in-game currency can be exchanged for a new character. So while the guy you create tomorrow will never be as good as my character which I created 1.5 years ago, you can play 5-6 hours a day while I"m off trying and failing to get Gladiator in WoW and earn a crapton of money, then buy a character that"s substantially better than mine.

Click to expand...

This is a good point regarding EVE. If you are good at making money in EVE (i.e. a good trader, industrialist, or scammer - the three most lucrative things by far) you will within a matter of months or a year find yourself able to legally buy with ISK whatever character you can dream of, so skills aren"t really a hard barrier to you.

However, I don"t like this as a solution personally because of the big alt extravaganza aspect that I mentioned earlier. It"s very difficult for me to suggest something better, because I really enjoy the fact that in one important aspect of the game, I"m not pressured to be playing every day to keep up with my peers. If there was a skill system where I had to "practice" skills somehow to improve then I would feel compelled to grind them all the time, and it would be no fun. So I am conflicted as to how to achieve a good skill-based system with one character that allows older characters to become powerful at their own pace, but not insurmountably so, without leaving casual players unsatisfied and behind.

I think EVE does a good job at making young characters useful fast, but it is probably open to improvement, because you still hear a lot of people saying that they feel a bit left behind compared to the older characters.

I think the one big thing WoW missed on was community. I don"t know 99% of the people on my server and they don"t know me. Back in "the good old days" of EQ people knew who a lot of other people were on their server even if they were in different guilds. You were occupying the same dungeons at the same time, either leveling or competing for boss spawns.

WoW"s community "feel" apparently consists of 8,999,999 idiots on the WoW forums and "you". In WoW you rarely, if ever, deal with another guild for anything, hopefully future games will put a good mix of instanced and non-instanced content into their games.

Frax said:

I think the one big thing WoW missed on was community. I don"t know 99% of the people on my server and they don"t know me. Back in "the good old days" of EQ people knew who a lot of other people were on their server even if they were in different guilds. You were occupying the same dungeons at the same time, either leveling or competing for boss spawns.

WoW"s community "feel" apparently consists of 8,999,999 idiots on the WoW forums and "you". In WoW you rarely, if ever, deal with another guild for anything, hopefully future games will put a good mix of instanced and non-instanced content into their games.

Click to expand...

This. Big time. I used to be able to walk into any exp zone in EQ and know a few to a lot of people in it and get a group easy. Going to CL and later the Bazaar to buy and sell was a good way to run into people and BS a few. Body get stuck in the geometry and you need a bard or necro? Np you probably know a lot of them by now.

This is probably the biggest failing of games anymore - a real lack of community - because games doesn"t encourage it anymore. The shame of it is too, that back in EQ"s day I knew a lot of housewives and other non-target MMO audience people that played because it was such a social game. None of them play any MMO"s anymore. Most of them tried one or two after EQ and nothing stuck. But I doubt we"ll see this again anytime soon, as all the games anymore are easy solo games. I mean, what need do you have to talk to anyone else? (Except Eve, which does have a decent community, but is a pvp game so...)

There is no lack of community. I know plenty of folks in the game from previous guilds and other things. You won"t step into a zone knowing people because you don"t spend 6 hours grinding to gain 20% of your level.

The community is there if you want it, you just have to create it yourself instead of having it forced on you. We"ve had this discussion on this board plenty of times though.

In any large population I won"t know everyone, just my immediate surroundings, i.e. your guild.

Flight said:

I"d be very interested to know who is responsible for quality at 38 Studios and who is the guy ultimately answerable for it (I don"t personally do quality but its an area of interest to me).

Click to expand...

Blackguard said:

Every. Last. One of us.

Click to expand...

Thats a really great answer to a very poorly prosed question A big part of the issue is that I say QA and most of the industry think "bug finding and testing" or lack of bugs.

A far more important aspect of Quality Assurance is controlling the managers, the project managers and the management processes. Making sure every aspect of the project and IP creation is controlled / directed properly from the first inception meetings. Process management, better communication, better co-ordination, better documentation and better change management are far more important to a project than even bug finding and fall under the QA remit. The QA guy should have the authority to make sure all the companies managers and project managers are doing it all properly.



I can"t emphasize enough how strongly I feel about this and how much I believe a revolution could be realized in the MMO industry. I"m going to cut and paste a couple of posts I made on a different forum on this exact issue. I believe the rewards are huge for the gaming company that decides to investigate and pursue these ideas.

Most people think Quality Assurance / Management started in Japan. It actually originated in the theories of a small number of Western academics, notable among them being Dr Deming. 50 years ago these theories were rejected by the West; Japan embraced them and this led to a revolution in the Japanese manufacturing industries.

My point here is that the modern Western gaming / MMO industries are ignoring these lessons today. The company that embraces them will take off the way the Japanese manufacturing industry did decades ago, leaving the competition behind.





edit to make clear a point - the management processes in themselves won"t make better games; what they will do is liberate the developers to do their best work, co-ordinating and guiding it. Getting the best from everybody, individually and collectively.

It will produce scalability, resilience, reliability and continuity in everything about the IP and in the gameplay and fun aspect, from the first release of the game through its expansions.

In short - most importantly, for players, games would ship as complete as possible (well beyond what is presently considered the "norm"), on time and to spec. Most importantly, for the companies producing games, games would be delivered on time, to spec and within budget.

A small number of professions do not have the level of competence within the industry, that exists outside of it. I"m talking about Quality Managers, Project Managers and Managers, rather than developers and game designers.

I used to work for IBM. I went to work with them for Dresdner and Kleinwort Benson (merchant bank) on a couple of projects in London, Madrid and Moscow. They offered me six times what I was earning at IBM to stay with them, which was hard to turn down as a family man.

What I"ve learned in the ten years since, is that there are a small number of people in the IT world whose competence dwarfs what I had previously believed existed. They, almost without exception, work in the finance industry because they always pay top end to get the best. I"m not talking about creative people, like developers, I"m talking about managers, project managers and people in quality management.

One of the projects I"ve done more recently, was in a place called Royal Liver Assurance, in the UK. You American folk probably won"t have heard of it, but the Liver Buildings in Liverpool are pretty recognizable for most of the UK folk. I normally work from London, but Liverpool is my home town and the buildings are an icon to me. I was supposed to design and implement a corporate wide network, sack most of the staff and replace them, setting up support teams and processes.

What I did, instead, was bring in a small number of friends to work with me for a year and pass on a large part of their skill set to the existing work force. And this is the vision I could see working for the MMORPG industry. A small number of key workers. introducing their skill sets and passing them on. This entire thing would be as an enabler, to allow the existing folk, like developers and designers, to reach their full potential.


As an aside, one of the other big lessons I"ve learned is to do a job you enjoy and believe in. If I didn"t live in the UK I"d have sent a CV to GMG 15 months ago and happily worked a hundred hours a week for a crust and a glass of water...

You trust yourself to QA your own work? Shouldn"t you have someone else doing that? Or was that just a testament to your own responsibility for your work?

Draegan said:

You trust yourself to QA your own work? Shouldn"t you have someone else doing that? Or was that just a testament to your own responsibility for your work?

Click to expand...

Is that aimed at me or Ryan, Draegan ?

Draegan said:

You trust yourself to QA your own work? Shouldn"t you have someone else doing that? Or was that just a testament to your own responsibility for your work?

Click to expand...

Yes, yes, and yes.

Ngruk said:

Yes, yes, and yes.

Click to expand...

That"s great to hear. I"m a big proponent of having a 2nd and third opinion of quality.

I play these games to have fun. I play with a pretty standard group of friends and my guild pretty exclusively and always have. I don"t pug unless I happen to be standing in front of something and someone asks me if I can tank if for them and when I am done doing that I get out of the group.

I play these games to go out night after night and have heroic adventures with my character. I don"t want to go someplace and stand in line for a chance to get to play my character, I don"t want to be on a list for a mob, I don"t want to have to wait to go do something.

Instancing actually allows me to play a game in the manner I choose. I get my group of trusty friends and we go do it. Period. This isn"t a world simulation, its a game. I am not going to the movies where another couple hundred people are going as well, I am going to kill a monster. If there is a line for said monster then that breaks my immersion. If I have to camp a spot and hold it from all others then that breaks my immersion.

How many heroic adventures have you read where you get the epic quest and find another 100 people working on it when you get there??? This is a game and one where you are trying to get the people playing it to feel special and have fun. Its not fun to compete, its not fun to race, its not fun to stand in line.

Instancing is merely a means to give players the illusion that they are accomplishing something unique. It allows for a suspension of disbelief and makes it a little more realistic since you don"t step over dozens of other players while making your way to fight the dragon.

Would it be fun to allow multi-group instances where you do have to race and compete for something at the end?? You bet. But when you make it so that you have to compete and race for everything you just lost a very large portion of the player base that just wants to hop on and play their character.
I want to play my game when I want and how I want. If you limit how I can play based on what others can do is when I will stop playing your game.

Ngruk said:

I am curious to know thoughts on instancing.

Click to expand...

As the father of two young boys, I care about convenience. I don"t care what mechanism you use to create that convenience. On the other hand, I do like the idea of exploring a virtual game world but I am a Gamer first not a virtual Tourist.

While I am playing, I may need to go change poopy at any given time. Instancing makes it much easier for me to plan my play schedule. It makes it much easier for me to get to an encounter for the 2-3 hours of playtime I have each evening. My ideal MMO would be as easy to get into a group as a TF2 match each night. For me, that would be the ultimate MMO experience. I despise LFG but think solo play is equally as boring.

During the EQ1 days I was single and childless so I did not have a care in the world about time or convenience. Those days are long gone but I still like this hobby. I don"t want to play a game that is meant for only people in my situation but I would not play one that did not consider me either. Although my situation may not be the majority of this board, I think in general there are a lot of people like me who play these games. We are the "2-3 hour/night" after work crowd. Right now, WoW has a good mix of instance and non-instance content balance. Guild Wars, D&D Online is too much and VG is too few. WoW and EQ2 are right in the sweet spot.

Instancing for PvE = great. I greatly prefer the feeling of "doing" a dungeon, from start to finish. Where your team works your way through, with an area that is tailored to them, with scripted events and such that you can take much further since you don"t have to worry about random people interfering.

I"m not a fan of just sitting around, doing portions of dungeons (i.e. today we camp the ancient croc, tomorrow we camp the ghoul room), and I"m not a fan of competing with other players over PvE.

Instancing for PvP = bad, though. Seeing as I prefer PvP over PvE, I want my PvP to feel meaningful, rather than just being a fun minigame.

Ngruk said:

I am curious to know thoughts on instancing.

Click to expand...

I think instancing is a great way to help drive the story lines of a game, but if you"re always locked in your own private sandbox all the time it can detract from the feeling of expansiveness within the world. To use WoW as an example, going from the Human newbie area all the way through Westfall into the Defias hideout was amazing. You were delving into this mystery of what was behind the Defias threat alongside other players in a non-instanced world, but for the grand finale you are treated to a highly-scripted dungeon crawl that brings the chapter to a fulfilling close.

When I look at Dire Maul, however, it"s one large dungeon that is fairly open-ended and, while there is a story to it, there"s not the big build-up to its exploration. It seems as though Dire Maul would have been better off as a "traditional" EQ-ish non-instanced dungeon, where any players can go in and explore, camp, etc. and intermingle. With the issue of over-population that could occur, I wouldn"t be against making public instances, where once a certain number of players is in one instance another one is generated and any new players are put into that one, but grabbing 4 friends and going throughout the whole place absolutely isolated could be rather dull.

One of the things I do remember enjoying about non-instanced dungeons in EQ was the ability to find a camp, relax, kill some baddies and pass the time with friends. Almost like a day on the beach, but with frogloks. I wouldn"t want to do that every day; when you only have an hour or two to get stuff done it"s great to have a more streamlined dungeon experience. Sometimes, though, I get tired of the rush-rush-rush that instance crawls invoke and would rather find a comfy place to whittle away the time while still enjoying the game.

Frax said:

I think the one big thing WoW missed on was community. I don"t know 99% of the people on my server and they don"t know me. Back in "the good old days" of EQ people knew who a lot of other people were on their server even if they were in different guilds. You were occupying the same dungeons at the same time, either leveling or competing for boss spawns.

WoW"s community "feel" apparently consists of 8,999,999 idiots on the WoW forums and "you". In WoW you rarely, if ever, deal with another guild for anything, hopefully future games will put a good mix of instanced and non-instanced content into their games.

Click to expand...

I agree 100%. The whole point of MMO"s (before WoW came on the scene) was the fact that you were playing *with* other players not just playing on the same server as other players. There was a sense of community back in those days and the mechanics of those games supported it. You could not afford to be a rude asshole or your repuation would suffer and you would not get groups. (Only soloists could afford the luxury of bad behaviour which explains the "necromancer" syndrome. Many anti-social misfits seemed to gravitate toward that class as a result.)

EverQuestfor all it"s failings created a MMO where group interdependency was a cornerstone mechanic that created a cohesive community. People needed the cooperation of other people to perservere and progress. Contrast that with WoW where players act rudely and uncivility to each other -- hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet. Why? Because they can get away with it as and the help of other players is non-essential for character progression.

These days in WoW people are downright indignant if you dare ask ask in General Chat: "LFG to quest or grind with". Grouping for fun and social reasons seems almost unheard of now as players solo and take the path of least resistance. Buffs which used to mean something and helped players bond really have little impact in WoW as well. This is just another example of a MMO where players really don"t need each other at all. Welcome toWorld of the Mercenary.

Of course we know that players no longer have to bond with other players in WoW unless of course they manage to reach the "end game" at level 70 with raiding. Suddenly players start to care about their reputation. Shouldn"t banding together to defeat common enemies happen much earlier in an MMO?

Good MMO design uses gaming mechanics to promote community. Players need adequate rules and more responsive environments to let communities flourish. There also needs to be adequate policing of servers in the form of proactive gamemasters -- another area where Blizzard has fallen woefully short.

Sure we all want to play a "good" game. But aren"t MMO"s supposed to be more then that? Shouldn"t they be about banding together as a community, facing adversity and the shared experiences that follow? For me those are the memories that matter and why real MMO"s like EverQuest were so special.

Blizzard has created a visual and stylistic masterpiece with WoW and millions of people have heeded it"s siren call. Yet something is missing. Strangely enough, It feels more like a single player game then a MMO. It looks, feels and sounds like a virtual world but it"s all fancy window dressing and polish can"t hide the fact that the game lacks a soul. I believe that a good community is the true soul of a good MMO. While WoW has been a pleasant diversion and admittedly has had it"s triumphs, I long for a new company to create a MMO that will put things back on track again and create a community focused transcendent gaming experience.

Well said, Potter. There needs to be a company who is brave enough to do some things differently from WoW - just because they have been wildly successful does not mean their formula is the only one that works.

It"s unfortunate that many devs will look at Vanguard"s failure and think their ideas or concepts were flawed, when in reality what they were trying to do could have been very good. The execution is what failed. Sadly, I doubt there are many companies that will take the chance to do it right, or better, for some time to come.

Old Man Potter said:

Good Stuff...

Click to expand...

Well said Old Man. Tabula Rasa, WoW, and PoTBS and most of the newer games are well done but lack that community feeling of EQ1. The old fashioned "camping" was a nice thing. Not camping to wait for a MOB to spawn but camping and just mindlessly killing stuff. There was no need for all these "Go get a bunch of bear heads" quests.