Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

They have plenty of experienced designers on their staff, that much is for sure. C"mon they have Blackguard, like I said previously, how could you go wrong?

However if you"re creating an end-game with large scale grouping objectives you should have people on some level with experience in designing successful objectives in the past.

TwiNCannoN said:

I wanna be the guy!

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.

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Bullshit. Sorry. I raided for years with Rob Pardo"s warrior in Legacy of Steel. You think that experience in a top raiding guild "didn"t mean anything"? I can 100% guarantee you that the changes you saw in WoW that allowed more casuals access to the endgame was a direct experience of working at Blizzard and finding the time to make our raids as someone with real life responsibilities. In most progression guilds in WoW there is enough time to raid just a few hours a few times a week and make progress, even if you were not "bleeding edge". In Everquest, this was *impossible*. Brad was completely out of touch with his playerbase, something which I pointed out earlier in this thread (back when VG was in beta) and Curt responded to me saying "you are wrong" and that Brad was making the game he wanted to make yada yada yada.

Oh really? How is Vanguard doing again? Go back and reread my posts on like page 34, which were a lot more detailed than the ones you are reading now, where Curt posted among other things, this little gem.

Ngruk said:

Your Vanguard example is perfect, because in that example I think you prove some things. First off you"re wrong. The developers aren"t out of touch, it"s just that what they made you don"t like. It"s obvious to anyone playing the beta that VG is being made the way Brad wants it to be made (which in most instances I like), it"s not a mass market game, it"s not supposed to reach mass markets, it"s supposed to hit the niche Brad wants it to hit, which it most likely will. You don"t like it? That doesn"t mean the developers are out of touch, at least in this case, it means to me they made something you don"t like, or they aren"t in touch with what you want.

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I guess Brad found his "niche" alright with empty servers and a giant turd of a game, insert the words "I told you so" anywhere you"d like. Also, as much as I remember of Curts experience was being guilded with EQ2 in Drow who had developers on its roster, and then using his celebrity status to cheat and get his entire guild zoned into an instance their guild was locked out by calling up a SOE buddy (probably Moorgard/Blackguard). I forget the guild that called him out on it, but it was pure hilarity after seeing Drow get busted trying to cheat just to get a firstkill.

People are vastly overstating the importance of hiring hardcore raiders as designers of raid content.

Is experience helpful? Yes. Do you need a Tigole and Furor to have decent raids? No.

Having those types of players as testers giving feedback would be just as beneficial. As long as your testing process involves communication, feedback and dev interaction.

TwiNCannoN said:

I wanna be the guy!

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.

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In theory, that"s true, but in practice, not so much. You know how everyone on the forums is convinced that their idea is the best, and that they have the perfect solution to all design problems? It"s not much different in the industry.

Digo said:

In theory, that"s true, but in practice, not so much. You know how everyone on the forums is convinced that their idea is the best, and that they have the perfect solution to all design problems? It"s not much different in the industry.

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Pretty much where the rubber meets the road.

How many "Man if I had 30 million I"d..." posts do you see? Speaking from experience, being one of those people who used to say "Man If I had" and actually taking that next step and putting the money where the mouth is, is not what I expected.

I thought it would be me sitting in this ivory tower delegating design initiatives to people all day, cool stuff, and watching them make it.

It"s not, and thank God it isn"t because when someone like Jason Roberts lays out for me the "expense" of a system I think is the cats ass, in man hours, dollars and other features that will be cut, it becomes real clear why they do what they do, and I do what I do.

If you don"t understand that EVERY single in game feature has a cost associated with it, a tangible dollar value, you shouldn"t even start THINKING down this path.

Quick story.

In our office we have a "visual aid" to how Jason Roberts thinks, and it"s scary. Basically it"s a MASSIVE piece of white paper, and on it is every single solitary system contained within our game. This is the stuff the MADE THE CUT! because long before you have this piece of paper you go through stack ranking and prioritizing game features. A process I thought would result in the inclusion and implementation of ALL OF MY ideas......

Ya, not so much. Basically this chart is color coded, and for examples sake we"ll go with red, yellow and gray. Red is saved for the most crucial game important features and parts. Yellow is the 2nd tier, gray the back end. Any time I come up with a "Mounted Combat on flying pigs in an underwater zone" ideas I get marched to the board.....

Ok, your idea hits this red box, and the 143 yellow and gray boxes attached to this red box now need to be redefined and restructured. It will add x hours to this, which will add x hours to each of these.... You get the idea.

One of the things I see as my job here is to make sure that at the end of the day, when everything is put into place, we don"t end up with "more of the same", which I am very comfortable we aren"t and we won"t, but it"s also to recognize what I bring to the table and where to apply it. I do believe I have some pretty decent insight into what makes an MMO good/great, and I put my money on the line to truly find out, but I also invested very heavily in incredibly bright and talented people to do what it is they"ve done, and they do, better than the rest of us, and letting them do it is the only way to realize the value of that investment.

We made a smart decision very early on, and one that will someday, I think, be incredibly useful. We"ve filmed this company since BEFORE we entered this building and have continued to document on film and in other ways, the growth of the company and the IP. Every now and then stepping back to see what it was and what it has become is amazing.

Genjiro said:

Bullshit. Sorry. I raided for years with Rob Pardo"s warrior in Legacy of Steel. You think that experience in a top raiding guild "didn"t mean anything"? I can 100% guarantee you that the changes you saw in WoW that allowed more casuals access to the endgame was a direct experience of working at Blizzard and finding the time to make our raids as someone with real life responsibilities. In most progression guilds in WoW there is enough time to raid just a few hours a few times a week and make progress, even if you were not "bleeding edge". In Everquest, this was *impossible*. Brad was completely out of touch with his playerbase, something which I pointed out earlier in this thread (back when VG was in beta) and Curt responded to me saying "you are wrong" and that Brad was making the game he wanted to make yada yada yada.

Oh really? How is Vanguard doing again? Go back and reread my posts on like page 34, which were a lot more detailed than the ones you are reading now, where Curt posted among other things, this little gem.

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I don"t know why you"re bringing up VG, I only used Brad as a "what not to do" example and I"ve never raided in it. I said it"s meaningless because the lead designer having or not having raid experience will not make/break a game. If he"s the only designer on an MMO then the game is most likely doomed anyway. I didn"t say a development team would not benefit from having people with raid experience - ideally there should be a mix, fresh eyes are just as important as theorycrafters who know all prior content inside and out.

Digo said:

In theory, that"s true, but in practice, not so much. You know how everyone on the forums is convinced that their idea is the best, and that they have the perfect solution to all design problems? It"s not much different in the industry.

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Yeah, and that"s one of the worst things about having a tiny design team. "Pet features" that suck but the lead designer simply has to have them in the game; not spending enough time/care to work on features important to the masses, not knowing how to manage time and trying to get something huge in the game before a deadline (although I guess that"s more the producers role), stuff like that.

Obviously I can"t say anything about WAR being that I"m not in beta and I have no hands-on experience, but I predict that we will see the difference in the "AoC vs WAR" debacle to come: AoC really suggests a design team that was flawed or ruled over; whereas WAR"s team is so open that they"ll even make sweeping changes instigated from their community before the game is even out.

OK, maybe while you"re here I can ask you a quick question to perhaps resolve this whole discussion:

A) Do you plan to have a serious raiding game in your MMO?

B) If so, how much serious raiding experience doyouthink you should have on your team, if for no other reason than to help anticipate the problems that arise when design decisions meet the raid zone?

PS: Regarding the one line in Digo"s post that has gotten a response so far, this is probably the main reason I shouldn"t work in the industry. I come with a great deal of conviction, and while I can stomach watching things be fucked up in jobs I"ve worked because things weren"t taken in the direction I insisted they should, I"d find that much more difficult when working on games. Lord help me if I"d been working at Blizzard when their latest round of arena "fixes" hit instead of anything meaningful.

He"s not going to answer any questions regarding the design of his game. Or at least I don"t think he is.

Fair enough, I guess it"s a dead subject then eh. The odds are pretty large I won"t be playing this game, but I do hate to see a teem that seems steeped in good design philosophy get tanked by a few ignorant decisions. Oh well!

TwiNCannoN said:

Obviously I can"t say anything about WAR being that I"m not in beta and I have no hands-on experience, but I predict that we will see the difference in the "AoC vs WAR" debacle to come: AoC really suggests a design team that was flawed or ruled over; whereas WAR"s team is so open that they"ll even make sweeping changes instigated from their community before the game is even out.

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Having a design team ruled by a few people is not necessarily a bad thing. Rob Pardo only took over as lead designer of WoW in the last 6 months or so of production. Before him, Alan Adham was the lead designer and served as the guiding vision for the game. Both of them served as the final decision makers on policy and determined what the game would be. As for your idea that WAR is somehow an oasis of democratic design, I highly doubt it. Marc Jacobs is the lead.

Democratic design is a bad idea. You will try to please everyone and end up with a schizophrenic, muddled mess. Asking people"s opinions and heeding advice is one thing, but a project is in trouble unless there"s one or two guys at the helm making final, decisive calls about direction.

I agree, democratic is a mess, I"ve tried it myself - the worst part is everyone getting their own vision and everything else being wrong even if you"re talking about the same thing at it"s core. Lots of time wasted over little nuances.

I guess the # of people holding titles doesn"t matter as much as the actual communication, which is what I was trying to get at re: AoC and WAR. It was pretty clear AoC had zero communication in beta and for all I can tell it still has none. WAR seems to be the complete opposite. Not sure where in between the two extremes would be best for an MMO to fall though. Obviously we know that a company that listenstoowell to it"s playerbase can sometimes mess the game up simply by listening to vocal minorities but it is their responsibility to recognize that as well.

Well I guess it really depends on what you are trying to do with your game, which we don"t know anything about right now.

My point is *IF* you are wanting to do new, interesting, dynamic raid content you sure as shit better not have Joeblow "Creative-but-naive raid developer" like so many games have (hi2u Talisker on the VG team who knew better than we, with his infinite wisdom gleaned from working on Earth and Beyond). He might think something is cool and new but chances are WoW has already done something just like it many times. You better have people who have experienced what else is out there to offer who can say, "yea thats been done, but let"s take something like Gruul and add a twist to it", or whatever other WoW example you might want to build on. Raiders expect more than some boring ass Sleepers Tomb "dodge the dragons aoe" fight for 30 minutes. This is where having guys who were bleeding edge guilds is invaluable, they have been there done that, and can say "you know what would have been hard and fun for us to do but nobody ever did? ( ____________ <---insert hard and fun raid content nobody ever did).

There are serious fucking retards in this industry. Let met give you an example. The lead content designer/testerguy raided with my EQ2 guild on test, who was either a) a complete gamer moron or b) was just a coder who never played a mmo in his life. Scott asked us to come help them test the combat changes that were going live, and so (I"ll just call him Sony_X to keep his name a secret) Sony_X decides to join our raid and test combat changes, and since we were a person or two short, he was going to fight with us too. Long story short, he wiped our raid by himself like 4 times, pulling agro on incoming of all things before the raid boss even reached our tank (not even exaggerating), and not knowing anything about the class he was playing at all.

Another time he got agro in about 15 seconds (this time after letting our tank engage first), and then does what every mmo horrible pug player who gets agro does. He runs.....away from the tank with Statue of Solusek Ro 2.0 chasing him, and my guilds Ventrilo goes from WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MORON DOING to complete howling laughter (truly a priceless moment if there ever was one). Instead of giving us gear actual players had (like our live toons) he gave us ALL the best gear in the game because he incompetently copied our characters to test from live from a 5 month old save point. That"s a great benchmark to have for casual raiders! This guy was 100% real, and had a place of huge importance in content design, in one of the biggest MMOs on the market. I could tell endless stories about this guy from the few different things we helped test in EQ2, and regardless how amazing Scott Hartsman was, incompetence in people entrusted with important jobs ultimately was making the raid game bad, very bad.

Twobit Whore said:

People are vastly overstating the importance of hiring hardcore raiders as designers of raid content.

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Hardcore raiders, no. Experienced players, yes. Thankfully, this is easier in 2008 than it was back in 2000 (At Nevrax, I was the only one who ever played in a MMO. The lead game designer discovered T4C during his time there, and thought it was what MMO should be. Sweated tears - and megabytes of .doc - to try to make him understand what a GOOD MMO was)

OK this is a good example of misuse of the rep system:

Then let it go and move on, but I can promise you that you will play this game. Just like most everyone else on this forum who has 50 bucks to spend.

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I"d like to respond to this, but I have to insert it into the thread in order to do so. No, I probably will not, and by probably I mean ~99% chance. I don"t run out and "check out" MMOs, they"re not my thing to "check out." For me it"s play them seriously or don"t play them. WoW is probably my last. So for me, discussion of GMG/38S is purely academic.

[Edit] PS: I am "pathetically defensive." More -internets plz.

I don"t think they can survive without your valuable input.

spronk said:

I don"t think they can survive without your valuable input.

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Did you strain something coming up with this burn?

Ngruk said:

In our office we have a "visual aid" to how Jason Roberts thinks, and it"s scary. Basically it"s a MASSIVE piece of white paper, and on it is every single solitary system contained within our game. This is the stuff the MADE THE CUT! because long before you have this piece of paper you go through stack ranking and prioritizing game features. A process I thought would result in the inclusion and implementation of ALL OF MY ideas......

Ya, not so much. Basically this chart is color coded, and for examples sake we"ll go with red, yellow and gray. Red is saved for the most crucial game important features and parts. Yellow is the 2nd tier, gray the back end. Any time I come up with a "Mounted Combat on flying pigs in an underwater zone" ideas I get marched to the board.....

Ok, your idea hits this red box, and the 143 yellow and gray boxes attached to this red box now need to be redefined and restructured. It will add x hours to this, which will add x hours to each of these.... You get the idea.

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As someone who has worked in corporate America for a long time, and moved between small and large companies, this post really hit home in contrasting the differences between the two.

Most of us who work for the behemoth"s know that prioritization takes a back seat to the whims of executive management, and often times our best work and advice is tossed aside due to the brain trust wanting things a certain way.

On the other hand, not having the deeper pockets seems to limit development, as one can guess with Funcom"s Age of Conan and we know for sure with Vanguard. Small generally means low budget which makes the best idea"s and visions difficult to create and compete with the shiny over marketed big dogs.

Blizzard gets a lot of love here since they have the small game mentality with the designers holding power, but with the deep pockets of the giants.

I wasn"t really interested before in this property, since it seemed to be somewhat vaporware, in it appeared it wasn"t anywhere near release. Your post has intrigued me and I hope your operation is run in as efficient, smart, and good environment as it seems.

If it is, I still hope you hire a few non insider gamers who know content from every MMO and can help implement a design that will enable the game to be everything you hope it is and more. I still believe if you don"t, then all the names you"ve hired with all their experience can roll out a polished good game, but it"ll lack the love in it that would make it stand out from the crowd in the ways the people in this forum want most.

Digo said:

You know how everyone on the forums is convinced that their idea is the best, and that they have the perfect solution to all design problems? It"s not much different in the industry.

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Whoever designed Meeting Stones v1.0 is a perfect example.

Froofy-D said:

Whoever designed Meeting Stones v1.0 is a perfect example.

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Whoever designed that obviously never played EQ It"s pretty bad when EQ has better systems than yours. And how long did it take them to fix that? 2.0 was broken too, I don"t think it stones were useful until what? tbc?