Err, unless he has some other characters other than the ones he posted in his sig, Curt doesn"t strike me as a hardcore raider. Maybe he was in EQ. Feel free to correct me if this was the case.
Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling
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Lleauaric~EW said:
Bottom line is I don"t know what his definition of a hardcore raider is when he says he is one. Maybe he means he is a hardcore player who raids. There"s a difference. If he was really a hardcore raider I"m interested in knowing what his raiding accomplishments were. Not because I don"t think he"s qualified to make an MMO without them, but because the issue has been raised about having raid experience on your design team, and how some of us feel it"s important.
I still don"t feel that you can start down the road of making a next-gen game with raiding if you skipped an entire raiding generation (WoW).
Yeah, and he posted in this very thread that he only recently was raiding Gruul and Mag"s and made it sound like it was his first time doing so. So, yeah, maybe in EQ, not in WoW, and now there is an article where he is quoted as being a self described hard core raider. Maybe hardcore PVE"er but that"s not hardcore raiding to me. Not bashing the guy, once again. But unless his EQ career was very different he is not on the level of Tig and thus not what people are saying he should have on board for a consultant.Digo said:
Even despite his EQ record, some WoW knowledge on board would probably be good since raiding has evolved so much. Maybe some post PoP EQ knowledge too. I really didn"t think it was that big of a deal but the other proponents here have sold me on the idea. I think Blizzard has clearly benefited from having raiders around on the design teams.
Not to mention that when you talk about Tigole or Furor you are talking about people who beat their heads against untuned, untested content and dealt with dev reactions to their tactics first hand. You could be a high end raider in WoW and never have really been on the bleeding edge. Plenty of guilds are riding the strat train and don"t see too much of what kinds of "exploits" will happen in the course of figuring shit out and taking it down for the first time. If we agree that this is a highly valuable type of person to be on a team, then it should probably be someone with a resume from a consistent server first (or faction server first) guild to have the best sorts of insights.FoghornDeadhorn said:
Couple more relevant quotes:
I"m not trying to misrepresent the guy or anything. I don"t know, but he didn"t strike me as the top end raider. His four level 60"s in EQ2 might have only done normal stuff and been alts he made to kill more time. EQ2 might not be the raid game we want emulated anyway from the way it sounds. Maybe he just now got tired of leveling WoW characters and hunkered down to raid on them.
Unless he is personally designing the raid dungeons and encounters I don"t think it matters. Unless you think John Smedly and Bobby Kotick are hardcore raiders too.
Oh? Because you said...FoghornDeadhorn said:
I don"t see why it matters if he has raid exp or not.
Christ on a cricket, even if you only started reading on this page you could havesomeclue why we"re discussing it, perhaps go back 20 posts so you can be up with the train of thought?
I"ve been reading the "does Curt have enough raid experience" drivel for several pages now. It ultimately started repeating itself and so I started skimming over the last few pages. So if the reason for it has some how changed I didn"t see it, nor do I care to reread the bullshit.FoghornDeadhorn said:
Regardless people are still discussing whether or not he has any raid experience. My point still stands that it doesn"t matter and has absolutely nothing to do with how this game will turn out.
Agraza
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I find the foundation of your refutation to be flawed. What exactly do Bobby Kotick and John Smedley have to do with good MMO design anyway? Bobby Kotick, formerly CEO of Activision and current President of Activision Blizzard, has zero MMO experience that I can find, and John Smedley"s design contributions to EQ are nebulous at best. Not that EQ is a shining example of great design anyway.
Why are you using these two figures to contrast Curt? And why not just use Curt"s own statements that he has creative people to do the creative work?
Now there is a near unassailable fortress of anonymity. The people listed on the 38 studios website virtually never mention their MMO game experience if they have any at all. Artists and business people are safely discounted as irrelevant, but the designers ought to be bragging about what they played and liked in the genre they"re attempting to invade. There are a handful that are identified as fallout from SOE which could be good or bad, and then maybe a handful that list their MMO game experience. These are some of the same people.
The one that lists the most numerous credits in the field of shit I give a damn about is Salvatore"s kid Brian, though likely for a lack of the questionable credits the others are so proud of. Questionable because as an MMO player I don"t care about your degree, your console games, or work on unreleased software. Really aside from Curt and the EQ2 designers we have no information on their experience. Freed from the suits at SOE perhaps they can do some good.
Why are you using these two figures to contrast Curt? And why not just use Curt"s own statements that he has creative people to do the creative work?
Now there is a near unassailable fortress of anonymity. The people listed on the 38 studios website virtually never mention their MMO game experience if they have any at all. Artists and business people are safely discounted as irrelevant, but the designers ought to be bragging about what they played and liked in the genre they"re attempting to invade. There are a handful that are identified as fallout from SOE which could be good or bad, and then maybe a handful that list their MMO game experience. These are some of the same people.
The one that lists the most numerous credits in the field of shit I give a damn about is Salvatore"s kid Brian, though likely for a lack of the questionable credits the others are so proud of. Questionable because as an MMO player I don"t care about your degree, your console games, or work on unreleased software. Really aside from Curt and the EQ2 designers we have no information on their experience. Freed from the suits at SOE perhaps they can do some good.
About as much as Curt Schilling? I personally don"t know how involved any of them are in designing their respective MMO. I do know we have spent pages and pages discussing Smedly"s or Kotick"s lack of raid experience, in respect to future MMO"s. So I"m curious why we are doing now?Agraza said:
Agraza
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Kotick doesn"t matter and Smedley is a known entity. We wouldn"t discuss them because there is nothing to discuss.
Curt is a vague entity. We don"t know. That gives every little fact that much more relevance since they stand so isolated. That, in addition to the fact that we don"t know jack shit about his developers, is why we discuss him. We assume he had something to do with hiring them after all.
Curt both raided in EQ and was proud of it. Dan did too. But what does that say about them? It was relevant when Furor, Tigole, and Ariel were developing WoW as EQ raiders. Dan was relevant, but he upgraded to lying for SOE before design. Curt has never voice much in the way of design opinion, but he has said he "just wants to have fun" or something similar, which likely places him as casual+. That"s not bad, but given our dearth of knowledge we"d like to know something.
The point is these few people are all we"ve got and this thread is a whole bunch of nothing. Why NOT discuss him given the history of this thread?
Curt is a vague entity. We don"t know. That gives every little fact that much more relevance since they stand so isolated. That, in addition to the fact that we don"t know jack shit about his developers, is why we discuss him. We assume he had something to do with hiring them after all.
Curt both raided in EQ and was proud of it. Dan did too. But what does that say about them? It was relevant when Furor, Tigole, and Ariel were developing WoW as EQ raiders. Dan was relevant, but he upgraded to lying for SOE before design. Curt has never voice much in the way of design opinion, but he has said he "just wants to have fun" or something similar, which likely places him as casual+. That"s not bad, but given our dearth of knowledge we"d like to know something.
The point is these few people are all we"ve got and this thread is a whole bunch of nothing. Why NOT discuss him given the history of this thread?
I"ll catch you up sporty.Rythonn said:
First, Curt dismisses the importance of having people with raid experience on his design team.
Then, a number of us point out just why it"s important and should not be dismissed, including myself taking it one step further and saying they should have people with serious raiding experience from WoW since they came up with a lot of ideas to advance the...genre, if you will.
Then there was some back and forth, about how raid experience would be further down some people"s lists on importance in hiring decisions. Then I reiterated and clarified my position, saying that if you have designers with little-to-no raid experience who have great ideas, you need those people who really know what they"re talking about to balance that out.
Then someone said "isn"t Curt that guy?"
And then we discussed whether he really had raiding oats along the lines we were talking about.
And then you came in and asked why we were talking about Curt"s raiding experience.
tad10
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Nobody would care one way or the other about Curt"s raid experience if he hadn"t done this.FoghornDeadhorn said:
It"s not enough to "be that guy" -- you"ve got to "be that guy" and know where your weaknesses are -- not great at creative writing (with respect to world lore) or art have a partner/hire a team of guys and gals who can do that well. Can"t program -- hire a team of great programmers. Not experienced with hardcore raiding -- hire a team that includes folks with hardcore EQ/WOW/Etc raiding experience.
Curt seems to have no problem with the first few but for inexplicable reasons dismissed the last. In part, perhaps, because he is an experienced MMO gamer -- and there is an attitude (and truth be told I had the same attitude before I started raiding regularly myself) that a number of casual/casual+ have that the only difference between joe raider and joe casual is just the amount of time /played (follow on with comments about no life and etc.). I don"t want to put words into his mouth -- but that"s the impression I got from his posts.
That"s a distinct possibility. Regardless, I think it"s important to have that experience. Say you were creating a game that didn"t support raids, and the closest thing you had were extremely difficult 5-mans, or something like heroics. You"d still want people that had raided competitively, understood what made the experiences feel epic, how to avoid class stacking, how to itemize, etc. and how to condense that into a more casual experience while preserving a sense of awe and challenge. Simply being good at excel does not make a good designer.
I wanna be the guy!FoghornDeadhorn said:
In all seriousness, this topic is getting obnoxious if not embarrassing. One man"s prior gaming experience on a major product"s development does not mean anything even if he"s the lead designer. The only case in which it does is if they"re a dictator designer aka McQuaid, and that"s a fault in and of itself which usually leads to game-breaking problems. Design teams are teams for a reason, and even past that if you have a good QA department they"ll tell you when stuff sucks.
Listening to and communicating with your developers and teams isimmenselymore important than what raid bosses you"ve had on farm status.
Lleauaric
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The whole thing reeks of asshattery.
Does anyone here giving all this advice have, oh I don"t know, an MBA, or experience running a major company, or lead designer experience, or experience putting together a creative team, or anything even remotely practical?
No. So, Surprise of all Surprises, suddenly great value is placed the only extensive experience many of the advice givers have, high end raiding, as the top desired skill! Wow.. didn"t see that coming. Instant vindication for wasted time!
"Look Mom, see, I told you I"m employable!"
Leaving Sublime, Entering Ridiculousness.
Does anyone here giving all this advice have, oh I don"t know, an MBA, or experience running a major company, or lead designer experience, or experience putting together a creative team, or anything even remotely practical?
No. So, Surprise of all Surprises, suddenly great value is placed the only extensive experience many of the advice givers have, high end raiding, as the top desired skill! Wow.. didn"t see that coming. Instant vindication for wasted time!
"Look Mom, see, I told you I"m employable!"
Leaving Sublime, Entering Ridiculousness.