Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

The issue with mods is really one of game / encounter design. Mods to move around graphics, fix buttons, arrange hotkeys I can understand. But the raid mods made the game an arms race. The analogy to steroids is completely correct. As raiding progressed there was an expectation that mods were used, and every encounter designed with that in mind.

The problem of course is that the default GUIs in these games are often terrible. It"s odd because GUI is vital to your game play experience. I dont know why MMOs are designed with all the different aspects so "seperately" as if the guys working on the GUI dont talk to the raid encounters, dont talk to the class designers. Everything should be designed such that your GUI is sufficient and player friendly enough that the basic setup should make raid encounters doable.

I cant even imagine most of post BC raid content being doable without some form of raid mod.

LOL they should remove the message NPCs emote in EQ when they"re casting complete heal. That totally trivializes Vox man. She TELLS you when to start spamming kick/bash/slam!!! God! You should just know from the experience of defeating other frost dragons locked in icy caves on when they"ll cast complete heal.

Reeling back in a little, creative and distinct particle and sound effects would do the job of the emote and the mods in warning you about this particular event. I remember the sound and look of "gate" in EQ being very distinct. I didn"t really need a warning that the froglok was going to gate, but it did help identify WHICH froglok was doing it. We heard that shit and alarm bells went off.

While it doesn"t cover everything I think visual and audio cues are largely missing from encounters to guide you along the path to success. You ought to be able to manage from paying attention to the environment, and I do view this as a weakness in their raid design.

I don"t really think mods turn people off from the game though. It seems like a barrier of entry, but everyone is very open about telling you what mods are wise to use. I think Blizzard has benefited from the mod community and could stand to benefit more, but the mods I appreciate the most are just usability mods that lessen the item/spell management burden. For example, I can"t play the game without a one bag mod, outfit swap mod, and a hot bar mod. It was a great day when they added in their own version of floating combat text and they claim to be working on both a threat monitor and an outfit swap solution.

They need to step up to the plate and work to design their content to be more intuitive rather than just turning off dynamic data and telling us to live with it. Decursive was crucial back in the day, and when they decided that kind of power was too much they also changed encounters to not be so reliant on that form of assistance anymore. If a mod exists to present a solution then the designers ought to be looking at the problem it aims to fix.

Fayvren said:

The issue with mods is really one of game / encounter design. Mods to move around graphics, fix buttons, arrange hotkeys I can understand. But the raid mods made the game an arms race. The analogy to steroids is completely correct. As raiding progressed there was an expectation that mods were used, and every encounter designed with that in mind.

The problem of course is that the default GUIs in these games are often terrible. It"s odd because GUI is vital to your game play experience. I dont know why MMOs are designed with all the different aspects so "seperately" as if the guys working on the GUI dont talk to the raid encounters, dont talk to the class designers. Everything should be designed such that your GUI is sufficient and player friendly enough that the basic setup should make raid encounters doable.

I cant even imagine most of post BC raid content being doable without some form of raid mod.

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Want to know why? Because the players know best what they want and how it should look. I guarantee you that if Blizzard implemented a threat meter, people wouldstilluse Omen. Same way people are still using Scrolling Combat Text, or Mik"s Scrolling Battle Text, even though there"s one built into the game.

Lonin said:

This is something that I hope is... solved? That"s not the right word, but as someone who has jumped into WoW a few times but never played to any major extent, the mods are overwhelming. I think it"s detrimental to a game when a newer player hears that they need mods X, Y, Z to do this encounter and that mods A, B and C are practically necessary for leveling quickly, and so on. In addition to that, like someone mentioned above, having to rely on the honesty and altruism of random people across the net to make sure that the mod you"re using isn"t also stealing your username and PW makes it a bit like a mine field.

I"m not really sure what the solution to this is. I guess part of it would be to include a lot of the basic functionality and usability stuff in the game from the get go, obviating the need for many mods. Of course, there will always be stuff you either didn"t think of, or that players want and you don"t want to officially include in the game. In those cases, maybe something like an iTunes app store or the Firefox add-on manager would work? Allow people to submit mods to 38S which are then checked out to make sure they are clean and work as intended/advertised. This would give people a centralized, official, easy and trustworthy place to download the mods they want and not have to deal with all the downsides of modding.

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By the time you need mods for playing your first character you"ve gone through 70 levels of playing. Don"t worry mods are easy once you know what they do.

I for one would play any MMO that offers a modable UI etc just like WOW. Developers will never create a UI thats flexable enough to satisfy me and everyone else at the same time. Give the players the tools. Don"t thing your art is the best because half the people out there is going to say it sucks. I hate fancy UI"s and usually I just want boxes with shit in them and the ability to scale them to the size I want.

I judge other players based on the mods they have. If your pug tank is in full pvp gear and doesn"t have omen, you can expect bad times ahead.

Ngruk said:

This has led to another incredibly interesting topic, the mod community. It is now an undeniable presence and very significant part to the high end raiding guilds successes and failures.

A year ago I"d never had even ONE mod on any game, I think I am around 100 or so in WoW now. I can"t fathom some of the mechanics of the raids that mods decipher, being beatable without some of the mods out there like BigWigs and Bosswhisperer.

I will offer up one gem, Wowmatrix if you for some reason don"t have it, get it. It"s by far the best thing I"ve ever done to reduce Mod headaches and manage my WoW mods.

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While it is true WOW makes it essential to have mods galore I am not sure I see that as a positive. Alot of the reason mods work so well in the game are that mobs are often quite predictable, AOE"s go off on timed intervals, mobs do various things at various times or HP percentages. I think a MMORPG should add more random aspects to the raiding and named boss mob scene such that these mods do not become so critical and such that fights become more reactive. Instead of having a mob do a specific AOE every 40 seconds how about instead having that mob do a roll to see if it will AOE the raid once every 10 seconds with a 25% chance each time. It amounts to the same percentage but fights will be alot more random, sometimes you might get blitzed and lose, but luck being a small factor in these games is not a bad thing, they started with rolls of the dice after all...

Predictable becomes boring far quicker then something that randomizes things to an extent.

Um, Random elements would make Mods even more required so that those elements are not missed.

As far the the old days in EQ thought, how many guilds had some sort of access to ShowEQ or similar programs that serve pretty much the same purpose as mods do today. Back then people were in theory bannable for using those if they got caught, but now its just part of playing the game it seems.

God you all are a bunch of old, bitter, cranky gamers. It"s like if my dad was complaining about these yipper snappers and their fancy pants mods, and how everything was so much better back when everyone just read their combat logs to figure out what was happening. Except oh yeah, the people with serious game who were fighting to be the best all used MACROQUEST, which is actual cheating. I"ll take mods over macroquest any freaking day.

Mods are good. They"re not going anywhere. People here are stuck WAY back in the past. I don"t agree with the new generation of WoW raiders on every subject, but about mods...it"s the way of the future, and it rocks. WoW UI is infinitely better than EQ UI, and makes the game more enjoyable.

You can"t take any steps back on this. You just have to integrate more and keep giving players the tools they need to modify everything to their liking. To suggest otherwise just shows a severe disconnect from reality. If you think it"s blasphemy to mod the UI, then enjoy the default, and shake your fist at us cheaters who use everything we possibly can to play better.

But let"s not be suggesting they should cripple their whole game by giving players no choice whatsoever.

Being able to mod UI is certainly a good thing but, as we"ve seen with WoW, it can be taken too far and in some cases needs scaling back/nerfing. Unless you think the old to auto-interrupt spell casts and the like were somehow a good thing.

The problem is where do you draw the line? Instead of automatically dispelling, we have a mod that simply targets (or highlights? it"s been a while) the player with the debuff and then you click the button. Is that really enough of a difference? (random example)

Zhakran said:

Stuff.

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I think the big thing to consider here is how WoW players ended upneedingto use mods because Blizzard couldn"t design their encounters, the base UI, or AI reactions in a way that would give people all the info they needed without it being plastered across the screen or shown in a bar graph. Some of the mods outside of UI customization in WoW are really cool (ArmorSets, WeaponSwap, Atlas and Gatherer to name a few), but MMOs in the future should be able to take the popular mods in WoW and incorporate the mechanics into their game in a fun and more immersive manner.

For example, instead of threat meters, why not have the AI react to a person that"s creeping too close to the top of the threat list? Let"s say the tank has 1000 threat built up but a careless rogue is now up to 952 threat while fighting a big, badass dragon. The AI could be scripted so that 10 seconds into the fight anyone who comes within 50 threat of the main tank"s is hit by a secondary ability (be it CC, damage, a debuff, knockback, whatever) that momentarily takes the encroaching player out of the fight. In this way the rogue knows he needs to tone down his DPS a bit, but he"s not staring at a chart to figure it out; the big, badass dragon said Mr. Rogue was a growing nuisance.

I"m sure there are ways to design a game in a manner that other more "intrusive" mods can be put to rest, it just takes some time to think them up and implement them.

It is a matter of encounter complexity and reaction time. WoW is by far the "twitchiest" MMORPG and has a humangous amount of information going in that you all need to know exactly in real time.

As long as raid encounters are simple, then you can get away with just showing information graphically, but UI"s for WoW, especially if you raid lead, are more like HUD"s than UI"s.

TwiNCannoN said:

Being able to mod UI is certainly a good thing but, as we"ve seen with WoW, it can be taken too far and in some cases needs scaling back/nerfing. Unless you think the old to auto-interrupt spell casts and the like were somehow a good thing.

The problem is where do you draw the line? Instead of automatically dispelling, we have a mod that simply targets (or highlights? it"s been a while) the player with the debuff and then you click the button. Is that really enough of a difference? (random example)

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Mods should just present you with information in a personalized way that you can obtain from the logs. It should never automate something for you, so I agree with you in that case. Mods should be there to mod your interface.

Agraza said:

I don"t like the growing amount of ratings. They"re not intuitive

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They are a kludge, remember. Originally, you had percentages. The problem of percentages is that they were scaling (or rather, their value remained constant), where everything else went down relative to your level. The Rend trinket with 2% critical hit would have remained one of the most valuable trinkets in game in TBC, despite being trivial to acquire.

Stats were already "ratings". The higher your level, the less crit you got from AGI in melee or INT when casting. Adding ratings made sense, from a purely math.

The better solution would have been to make each % cost relative to item required level (or quest level), and never make any item where such a % was a "too large" part of the budget (to avoid the "Rend effect"). And put decimal percentiles.

They could also handwave things. Include a ratingbuster in the standard UI, and have all items display their dodge, parry, evade, critical, hit % instead of the underlying rating.

Ngruk said:

This has led to another incredibly interesting topic, the mod community. It is now an undeniable presence and very significant part to the high end raiding guilds successes and failures.

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To the best of my knowledge, WoW was the first to open the doors. You had pretty nice "skins" for some of the previous MMOs, but Blizzard went further, and allowed people to completely access the UI engine. If "The Client is in the hands of the Ennemy", why not let your friends put their hands on it indeed.

Plus, as Blizzard does, keep a look on your community, and integrate the "must have" mods that emerge from the marketplace that is the live servers. You"re never going to think about everything, or prioritize what"s useful from the fluff; let your players show you the way.

One thing I didn"t like about AOC is that the stats on the tooltip actually scaled depending on who was viewing it. So ineffect you had the rating system happening in the background and the stats on the items scaled with your stats in the tooltip.

Really fucking stupid.

Kodylan said:

Want to know why? Because the players know best what they want and how it should look. I guarantee you that if Blizzard implemented a threat meter, people wouldstilluse Omen. Same way people are still using Scrolling Combat Text, or Mik"s Scrolling Battle Text, even though there"s one built into the game.

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I dont think the UI is the big part of what adding a built in threat meter would do. My guess is that it would IMPROVE omen/KTM because it adds functionality to the API that would allow modders to read exact levels of threat. Perhaps in a really cool fashion or maybe just by a call such as

GetThreat(mobName, playerName)

Or maybe each attack/move done by both players and mobs returns a threat value now? Anyway that"s where I see the big gain.

Draegan said:

One thing I didn"t like about AOC is that the stats on the tooltip actually scaled depending on who was viewing it. So ineffect you had the rating system happening in the background and the stats on the items scaled with your stats in the tooltip.

Really fucking stupid.

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Yeah for sure. Was really annoying trying to sell shit on a mule and having no clue what to price most of the stuff because level just said you can"t use it, and arguing with people about a weapon"s DPS... not that it mattered since every goddamn weapon had the dps anyway heh. Game was way, way too set in stone and boring when it came to item stats.

Digo said:

That was environment concept art, yes? Looked very cool.

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http://www.38watch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67

Cool for sure!

Gnome Eater said:

It is a matter of encounter complexity and reaction time. WoW is by far the "twitchiest" MMORPG and has a humangous amount of information going in that you all need to know exactly in real time.

As long as raid encounters are simple, then you can get away with just showing information graphically, but UI"s for WoW, especially if you raid lead, are more like HUD"s than UI"s.

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This is exactly right and at the same time exactly why WoW"s modding goes too far. The cost of all of that complexity and twitch is immersion; you"re so busy soaking in all of the needed information off of your screen in text form that you"re really not interacting with the massive dragon in the room. The next level of raiding in MMO"s needs to convert those text queues for raids and make them environment queues. In order to keep the same level of complexity it really is a daunting task, probably so much so that it can"t be done quite yet, but it is the next level.

Protest said:

First Look at 38 Studios" Environment Concept Art! - 38 Watch - 38 Studios Forums

Cool for sure!

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I refuse to get giddy with excitement until Copernicus has an official title. I will not be the victim of another Project Offset.

...Yes, it was an awesome sneak peek. I want it now!