Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Lleauaric~EW said:

Fuck you Zehn, you Pokemon faggot. Go jerk off to Dragonball Z more.

Anyway.

Still <3

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MY POKEMON BRINGS ALL THE NERDS TO THE YARD.

Zehn - Vhex said:

It wasn"t fleshed out enough but that is hands down the best way to go about implementing a non-combat system. Look at how terrible EQ2"s tradeskill system is. They tried to make it a whack-a-mole combat system without realizing the reason we enjoy killing shit isn"t because we"re hitting buttons but because we"re killing shit..

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Fuck that. The best way to implement an MMO combat system is with a card-based system.

The "WoW-kiiller", the "next-gen" MMO will be based around CCG mechanics (combined with some Diku mechanics of course for flavor).

Imagine we"re on vent:

Where we are today:
EQ/VG/WoW/Etc.

Guy: Don"t overdps DPSFucktard. Let the MT build hate.
Buddy: Fuck, lost aggro.
Friend: shit. shit. shit.
DPSFucktard: down.
Guy: ORLY.
Friend: Take the wipe.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Add in various special abilities for the Boss that have to be accounted for. Ultimately combat is the same: you"re all using the same abilities at roughly the same time in each combat (dependent on those aforementioned special abilities).

Where we could be with CCG based combat:

Friend: We"re fucked. Anybody have anything?
Guy: Holy shit. Just got Armageddon.
Friend: Pop that SHIT! Now.
Buddy: You got the mana.
Guy: Yeah
Friendopt that SHIT! Now.

Point being that combat options that are dependent on semi-random card selecton makes every combat different.

Draegan said:

I think you"re confused.

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If I could give you more -internets, I would.

tad, I"m not sure how serious you are, but if there"s one thing that I"m tired of from TBC raiding it"s the power of random. We"ve implemented strats that basically say "for 3/4 of the pulls this is the best way to go, but that 1/4 of pulls this strategy will leave us wide open to get absolutely raped by retarded combination of boss abilities X, Y, and Z."

Random is good. Random with no consideration of the ludicrous power of some abilities stacking on top of eachother =

I could go on and on about this subject, but I don"t feel like it so I won"t.

I think Tad has finally lost the last semblance of sanity he had.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

tad, I"m not sure how serious you are, but if there"s one thing that I"m tired of from TBC raiding it"s the power of random. We"ve implemented strats that basically say "for 3/4 of the pulls this is the best way to go, but that 1/4 of pulls this strategy will leave us wide open to get absolutely raped by retarded combination of boss abilities X, Y, and Z."

Random is good. Random with no consideration of the ludicrous power of some abilities stacking on top of eachother =

I could go on and on about this subject, but I don"t feel like it so I won"t.

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Eh. I"m completely serious. My dream MTG MMO doesn"t have random boss abilities X,Y and Z that spark at random times. The bosses are running known decks (or at least decks that you"ll get to know as you encounter them and lose to them in the first instance) as such the raiding team will be altering its decks to beat the boss decks.

MTG is rock-paper-scissors. Super simple artificial example: my direct damage deck will (on average though not always) beat your creature deck which (on average though not always) will beat JoeCCG"s control deck which (on average though not always) beats my direct damage deck. Yes there is a random element in that some times really shit luck with draws: say getting mana screwed early or too much land early -- will result in me losing to your creature deck or your creature deck losing to JoeCCG"s control deck but generally rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock.

Anyway, same thing but in an MMO context. Another super simple artificial example first time you encounter Boss X. It turns out that Boss X runs a pure red (direct damage) deck. It also turns out that none of you guys were expecting it so no CoP:Red in anyone"s deck. Unable to deal you wipe. You all aquire CoP: Red put it into your decks for the next go-around. This time you might get a lot of CoP:Reds early in which case you win, you might get most of them late, in which case you lose. You might get enough midway through fight to protect your MT and healers -- in which case the fight will hinge on your non-CCG Diku abilities (how well you taunt, heal, feign deathing -- well the fight wouldn"t hinge on FDing but just giving an example of non-CCG abilities a class might have, etc).

In every case your strategy is the same with respect to this boss: he"s a pure red DD boss -- you"re going to CoP:Red your tanks, then your healers, then everybody else when the card pops. Whether or not your strategy succeedsd doesn"t depend on what semi-random ability the Boss is playing but on when the card pops in all your various decks and whether y"all execute the strategy correctly (e.g. DPSidiot#1 gets the first CoP:Red but instead of using it on your MT or a Healer he uses it on himself or ignores it and uses some other card).

Obviously the real deal would be much more complicated -- something like a pure red Boss (or the equivalent in other CCGs) would only be something you"d see at the low level. But you get the idea.

Random is okay when the outcome is still usually determined by how you, the player, executes with what you"ve been randomly given (acknowledging that sometimes you"ll be given nothing: e.g. in MTG too little or too much land) and it"s not okay when in the usual case -- or even 1/4 the case it doesn"t matter what you do, or how well you execute (as in the example you posted).

I do not like rock paper scissors as a PvP concept. All it says is that as rock I should never fight paper, and instead run, but always fight scissors. How is it fun that I WILL lose to paper if I engage? Everyone should have elements of rock, paper, and scissors. The difficulty should lay in properly responding during the fight rather than having it handed to you at the outset.

Agraza said:

I do not like rock paper scissors as a PvP concept. All it says is that as rock I should never fight paper, and instead run, but always fight scissors. How is it fun that I WILL lose to paper if I engage? Everyone should have elements of rock, paper, and scissors. The difficulty should lay in properly responding during the fight rather than having it handed to you at the outset.

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Because a PvP game should never be balanced around 1vs1. It should be balanced around group vs group and multi group vs multi group. And this is where the whole RPS comes into play.

And if like you said, everyone was balanced 1vs1 what most fights would come down to is not properly responding like you think, but based on the luck of your rolls.

Besides, fuck games that are totally balanced, every class is as powerful as the next. (Like it is possible to do this anyways ) Then what happens when you add any sort of stat/gear system? Balance is thrown out the window anyways. Then it comes down to how wel geared you are if you run or not. Seriously, go play some FPS if you want balance. RPG with levels, classes, skills, gear, weapon types just does not lend itself to a balanced 1vs1 experience.

You have to be careful with your random elements. It"s an extremely slipperly slope. Especially when you consider making powerful abilities random.

You can see the bullshit at work in WoW as is. Our second m"uru kill we had awesome gravity ball placement and nobody died. Our latest kill we had terrible ball placement and by some stroke of luck we managed to kill him with absolutely nobody left alive.

We"ve had Brutallis fights where I"ve gone 2 minutes without having to heal burns because he keeps targeting mages/paladins/rogues, I"ve had others where he did nothing but hit the same 3 priests over and over again and I"m chain chugging mana pots shouting "Oh fuck oh god help dear god" by the 4 minute mark.

Oh, and fuck pre-nerf mother slotmachine. "OH LOOK SHE JUST FA"D 3 HEALERS AGAIN AND PARRY FUCKED THE MT, GO AHEAD AND WIPE GUYS."

Random abilities spice things up, yes, but when random can completely change the difficulty level of a fight from cakewalk to bullshit then...well...fuck that.

Surprise surprise guys, Tad is really bad at Magic! Can you believe it?!

I mean whoa your MTG analogy is fucking horrible. Take it from someone who is actually good at it, you are just saying random BS that you think is true for some reason, without any actual knowledge of competitive games. Rock papers scissors? Lol? Are you serious? That"s the worst MTG comparison I"ve ever heard.

I"m not going to bore everyone with long discussions of various Constructed format meta games, and how there is not really any such thing as a "direct damage deck" in serious competition or anything like that.

(Okay quick aside, skip if you don"t want to read about MT:G)
*I mean you can say sligh, but that"s just an aggressive red deck with cheap guys and burn spells and the always fair and balanced Cursed Scroll. Calling it a direct damage deck is a really stupid classification. It"s like calling a control deck a creature deck because it has 4-6 huge guys for win conditions. It"s like calling a control deck a "direct damage deck", because it has a lot of red spells for removal.

Oh and just so we"re clear, creature decks historically rape the shit out of sligh decks, so you have no idea what you"re talking about. The only reason sligh was ever any good was basically because if you played a deck that beat sligh you would never stand a chance in hell against the multitude of control decks out there.

Control decks losing to creature decks? LOL? The reason control decks EXIST is to beat your standard aggressive decks. And in real magic, we"re talking like 60-40 win percentages even for pretty good matchups, when both players have some sort of clue. That level of randomness in an MMO would be stupid to say the least. You have no idea what you"re talking about, on any level.*
(End Magic Talk)

Just rest assured, all of us who know anything about Magic are laughing pretty hard at that post. Your understanding of both MMOs and M:TG is sorely lacking. Please don"t try and make anyone listen to your ideas about either. Just go build another direct damage deck and play some Vanguard.

More like rock,paper,scissors and bazooka(IE a real tier 1 deck)

Ooo, ooo, you could have a Boss Mob that casts Stasis and locks the raid out of playing the game for the rest of the week!

Zhakran said:

Surprise surprise guys, Tad is really bad at Magic! Can you believe it?!.

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You do realize that "artificial" means not real? I was not actually describing any type of existing deck. It was an artificial example of the RPS elements of MTG. And please look up the definition of analogy before you use it again. And it"s not a fucking analogy you dipshit. I am not comparing two dissimiliar things and finding something similiar. Your brain is like a cow"s ass: they"re both full of shit. That"s an analogy.

In SAT format:
You:Your Brain Cow:___
(a) Cow"s Asshole
(b) Cow"s Tits
(c) Cow"s Tail
(d) Cow"s Tongue
(e) All of the above.

The answer is (a).

Anyway fuck off.

tad10 said:

Eh. I"m completely serious. My dream MTG MMO doesn"t have random boss abilities X,Y and Z that spark at random times. The bosses are running known decks (or at least decks that you"ll get to know as you encounter them and lose to them in the first instance) as such the raiding team will be altering its decks to beat the boss decks.

MTG is rock-paper-scissors. Super simple artificial example: my direct damage deck will (on average though not always) beat your creature deck which (on average though not always) will beat JoeCCG"s control deck which (on average though not always) beats my direct damage deck. Yes there is a random element in that some times really shit luck with draws: say getting mana screwed early or too much land early -- will result in me losing to your creature deck or your creature deck losing to JoeCCG"s control deck but generally rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock.

Anyway, same thing but in an MMO context. Another super simple artificial example first time you encounter Boss X. It turns out that Boss X runs a pure red (direct damage) deck. It also turns out that none of you guys were expecting it so no CoP:Red in anyone"s deck. Unable to deal you wipe. You all aquire CoP: Red put it into your decks for the next go-around. This time you might get a lot of CoP:Reds early in which case you win, you might get most of them late, in which case you lose. You might get enough midway through fight to protect your MT and healers -- in which case the fight will hinge on your non-CCG Diku abilities (how well you taunt, heal, feign deathing -- well the fight wouldn"t hinge on FDing but just giving an example of non-CCG abilities a class might have, etc).

In every case your strategy is the same with respect to this boss: he"s a pure red DD boss -- you"re going to CoP:Red your tanks, then your healers, then everybody else when the card pops. Whether or not your strategy succeedsd doesn"t depend on what semi-random ability the Boss is playing but on when the card pops in all your various decks and whether y"all execute the strategy correctly (e.g. DPSidiot#1 gets the first CoP:Red but instead of using it on your MT or a Healer he uses it on himself or ignores it and uses some other card).

Obviously the real deal would be much more complicated -- something like a pure red Boss (or the equivalent in other CCGs) would only be something you"d see at the low level. But you get the idea.

Random is okay when the outcome is still usually determined by how you, the player, executes with what you"ve been randomly given (acknowledging that sometimes you"ll be given nothing: e.g. in MTG too little or too much land) and it"s not okay when in the usual case -- or even 1/4 the case it doesn"t matter what you do, or how well you execute (as in the example you posted).

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Couple things. I played a little Magic, and once I got into some competing situations I felt that game was so far from RPS it was laughable.

No clue about deck vs deck comments other than you made a "simple artificial" example I am guessing, for ease of posting sake.

But your explanation of raid mechanics and losing the "random" factor but rather having things "swapped out" for other card abilities, and understand I am speaking TOTALLY from a players perspective here, is not adding anything that doesn"t already exist really. The main issue here is you talk about these (and by you I mean we) raid encounters from this design format and some of us miss the point that these are not designed or played in a vacuum. Whatever your "random" or "X card" is, is on the WWW four minutes after being exposed and the raid mechanic to beat it shows up 5 minutes later.

A wise man once told me "You don"t decide "how fun" you are making the event, you have to decide how many _times_ you want it to be fun".

Because face it, end game min/max spearhead players will arrive way ahead of the rest of us and usually in 1/3 the time designed for the rest of the normal world to arrive, and they"ll chew it up, dissect it, then beat the piss out of it until something else is offered up.

So the FUNNEST raid event stops being fun the X time through right? If we can all agree that a hypothetical "Raid on the Pigs Scrodum" is just an all out hoot fest and fun as hell, we can all also agree that at some point that "fun factor" will lessen for each of us. How soon? How much? How long before you can get another batch of that sort of raid fun?

The fun factor for end-game encounters isn"t something a developer can create. Developers can create challenges or difficulty, but they can"t create fun.

Fun comes from playing with friends.

I think the only encounter I actually said "Wow that was really fun" was 4H, and really that might have just been me because of my role as a tank. That old CS mantra "you can"t please everyone" holds true to fun. Everyone can"t have the same level of fun from an encounter. Not just talking about personal fun preferences, but also from a class role perspective.

I would say to ensure the fun factor, to design A+ in-game social network, this includes cross-server chat channels. May sound corny to some of you loners, but really, an MMO boils down to socializing.

Imagine if WoW had a seperate in-game client like Steam Friends or Facebook, they kept track of everyone you ever grouped with. How often you"ve grouped with them, your own personal comments about them, rate them how good a tank they are. When you"re LFM you can see who they"ve grouped with, guilds they were in. All of that social interaction presented in a friendly format. Would beat the shit out of this stone-age friends system we have in WoW.

If I"m with a good group of friends, I"ll tough out the most retarded encounters you can come up with. Instant death touches? Fuck bring it on, send in the ranger let"s all have a good laugh. Even if I"m not playing with a group of friends and i"m pugging with a bunch of strangers, as long as I can talk or interact with my pals, on whatever server, or where ever they might be IRL (intergrate in-game with mobile messaging if you want to rake in $$$), and i"ll be fine wiping all day.

That"s just human nature. Eventually you will get bored of something and want some variety or something new. Granted, some people can be entertained on things they consider fun for a long time. I used to play stuff like Starcraft and Battlefield 1942 daily for years, purely because I truly enjoyed playing them.

MMOs kinda differ, at least on the high end for me, because after awhile they feel like more of a 2nd job. Generally that"s because invariably some mechanic is introduced to force you to do other activities beyond what you want to do. For instance, EQ1. I liked to raid. However, you needed to earn AA points and you could not earn them on raids. You had to grind. So beyond the hours I spent raiding, I had to spend even more hours grinding just so I could maintain my raid worthiness.

WoW. I liked to raid. However, the raid game slowly started to move towards "lolol flask n" potions every attempt to even have an iota of a chance to beat it!!!", which to me harkened back to the grinds of EQ1. While the recent dailies made obtaining gold much easier, it was still another mechanic forcing you to do stuff beyond what you wanted to do. I want to high end raid, but you can"t get the flasks and potions and gold you need on raids, so I must farm stuff for hours in order to raid.

But I digress. I guess in order to keep raids fun, you need to introduce new mechanics every now and again. Stuff like the Chess Event in Kara is a perfect example. It"s extremely easy, but it"s a complete break from the normal "Dance Dance Revolution" mechanics that dominate most fights: step here, count to 20, move here, nuke nuke, step back, count to 10, etc etc. I read about a possible fight in WOTLK where players mount flying dragons with different abilities (tank, healer, etc). Stuff like that is a good direction to take. Try to inject your MMO with more of that, rather then crap where you wipe because the mob boss randomly poops out orbs of death or you only had 3 paladins instead of 4 or everyone dies because someone got a lag burp and was standing .00001 inches out of the required location.

Not sure if this is a valid point within the scope of the current discussion, but i hate bosses that have abilities that cooldown but then use them whenever they feel like instead of when the cooldown is up (hello to you flamebloom followed immediately by flame dart) because two abilties at once instead of one obviously means more fun?

The fun factor for end-game encounters isn"t something a developer can create. Developers can create challenges or difficulty, but they can"t create fun.

Fun comes from playing with friends.

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Agree on the latter, disagree on the former. Just because most raid games have lacked an intrinsic fun value does not mean it can"t be done. Although, much to Curt"s point, probably the most fun encounter for me in TBC was Illidari Council. For the first couple of weeks. Now I hate that fight. It"s just too long. But it was fun, as the melee tank, for a while. Fun andhilarious.Now those same elements that made it fun and amusing make it a complete drag, even though we beat it in half the time we used to (when we go).

Sometimes on farm nights I just want everything to be like Teron is for the tank. Stand, press buttons, doze off, collect loot. The "fun" and "interesting" parts become tedious. But then, we are talking about a very limited scope of mechanics for most fights, especially for us poor tanks who tend to miss the most "interesting" mechanics implemented in these fights.

Ngruk said:

A wise man once told me "You don"t decide "how fun" you are making the event, you have to decide how many _times_ you want it to be fun".

Because face it, end game min/max spearhead players will arrive way ahead of the rest of us and usually in 1/3 the time designed for the rest of the normal world to arrive, and they"ll chew it up, dissect it, then beat the piss out of it until something else is offered up.

So the FUNNEST raid event stops being fun the X time through right? If we can all agree that a hypothetical "Raid on the Pigs Scrodum" is just an all out hoot fest and fun as hell, we can all also agree that at some point that "fun factor" will lessen for each of us. How soon? How much? How long before you can get another batch of that sort of raid fun?

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Honestly, I feel this reason is why in WoW you do not see massive turnover. A good portion of the raid content is "fun" multiple times. I"m personally way past Kara, but I like the zone and concept behind it.

Transition this to EQ2 raiding. When times were dull after spearing through content and upgrades were only due to rare drops, we would end up doing a lot of the "fun zones" to pass the time. I get rewarded everytime I participate in the zone (badges) and have a relatively fun time. Sure, it is not like the 1st time walking into the Opera event a going "wow thats pretty cool" but it is still worth my 2hrs.

That being said, what is repeatable "Fun"? For me I saw a few things that kept us going back to zones for the rarest of the rare drop and avoiding the annoying zones.

1) DPS was high. People like big numbers to make them feel empowered and show off a bit. Curator in WoW causes a huge dps increase from the norm which is a blast to see what you can pull off. Lyceaum in EQ2 was farmed more than necessary just because it was a riot to see dps numbers. People like to feel overpowered, not get there ass handed to them 24/7.

2) Rewarded for continuous effort. Zul Aman in WoW does this pretty good with the time chest reward. Nothing like a sprint with "cake" at the end. Even Acts of War in EQ2 gave you a "cake" at the end if you completed it.

3) Events with lots of minions to AE. This goes back to DPS/empowered. DPS classes like to AE shit and just obliterate things. Minions are not challenging but having waves of an army coming at you, then blowing them to pieces can only be classified as one thing - Awesome.

4) The annoying wipe because of X. That "random" factor mentioned above really pisses people off. I understand this is a tool that can be used to add difficulty but when it skyrockets probablity to even a 90% chance at a wipe, why even design to it? Instant death, tank charm, long duration random stun/stifle/sleep/mez.... all these may add challenge but they are annoying. Random and be fun but it is a thin line to walk. I personally use it sparingly.

These are just a few things I have noticed people call "fun". Of course the reward/carrot is a big factor and consistant small rewards for everyone can keep people coming back for ages (see badges in WoW). EQ2 lacked that type of currancy and I feel a lot of games could benefit from using a system like that.

Its all about that "high" we get. Did it up your pulse rate? Was it action packed? Did it make you feel important? Did you get "cake" at the end? Do you want seconds, thirds? We stop riding the Tea Cups at Six Flags because A) its boring now and B) the huge 100ft drop rollercoster w/ a 45 minute wait is far more "Cake" in the end.

A smart person once said (could be the same guy!) "The most important currancy a player has is their Time". Don"t waste the paying players time with random, boring, non rewarding shit and you will be successful.

tl:dr version: Being able to choose the loot you want off bosses + job system = extends the fun of any encounter by 500000000%.

I don"t know what type of game you"re going for, but let me give you a golden tip. Bosses become unfun if players no longer have anything to gain from killing it and they"ve done it several times already. And then it cascades. I used to enjoy Illidan. And if we could pop into BT every week and just kill Illidan, I"d still enjoy the fight.

The fact that we have to clear though roughly 7 bosses and 4 hours worth of trash clearing to finally get to encounters where we can actually use the loot? Really rapes the fun.

And then even further when we kill Illidan and he doesn"t drop anything we need (HI2U YET ANOTHER AZZINOTH DAGGER AND HUNTER BOW)...well...fuck that zone. Fuck it in the ass.

Here, I may not know what kinda game you"re going to be making, but I can give you a hint that may just extend the life of your raid zones out to almost infinity. Let"s say you develop fantasy_mmo_#48.

First, have bosses drop their entire loot table. Let players pick what they want to loot up to so many items. If you want bosses to have "rare" loot have it be that you need to trigger that bonus drop, don"t under any fucking circumstatnces make it random. For example, let"s say if you beat the chess event in karazhan without losing any pieces in under 2 minutes, then the chest will drop Atiesh.

With such a system, you know you"ll never ever kill the boss and due to bullshit random luck, you won"t get what you want.

You may think that it would harm the system because players will stop doing bosses after 5 kills once they get all the loot they want. There"s a solution for that as well. Besides, I"d rather have my players get all the loot they want and then move on rather then say "fuck this noise" and just stop doing the bosses out of frustration because WE HAVEN"T GOTTEN A SINGLE FUCKING SHIELD.

If you say, "BUT I ENJOY THE RANDOM FEELING OF RANDOM LOOT, IT"S LIKE A SUPRISE BOX OF CHOCOLATES EVERY TIME!"...

Well that just makes you an asshole.

Anyways...

Then all you need to do is implement the job system (Not to be confused with multi-classing). I enjoy raiding on my paladin, and things go a lot smoother in BT when I"m on my paladin. However, my paladin doesn"t really need any gear there from the first 8 bosses. This coupled with FOUR HOURS OF TRASH CLEARING (hint: trash clearing is not fun, even as a "pacing mechanic" as that asshole Tigole said. Remember, Tigole was the fucker who wanted to keep paladins/shaman as unique classes for the factions)

Where was I?

Oh yeah, the bosses are more fun when I can bring my alts to the raid to soak up rot loot, but it"s a detriment to the raid and just pisses people off.

But, if I could bring my paladin and loot shit on my paladin so that when I go to my races capital city to a special training facility and change my class to druid...well...maybe I won"t be so pissed at the 9th feral druid staff that dropped.

Here"s some quick and dirty math: Let"s assume 25 raiders, every raider has at least 4 alts they want 1 piece of loot off a boss for. The boss drops 5 items. Without the job system, you"d be done with the boss in 5 kills and from then on, it"s a snore fest. Or worse yet, you employ random loot and after the 10th kill you still have 4 raiders left who want items for their mains. After the 27th kill you"re still going back for shit from a later boss but you"re bringing along 7 alts, slowing down the raid and pissing everyone off.

With the job system? It"ll take 25 kills to get everything and on top of that, nothing rots, nobody is bringing a shitty alt to loot shit. It"s fucking fantastic. And that"s if you have a purely static group of 25 raiders. Even better, let"s say you get a new member. You can gear the shit out of him in one run rather then having to do 7 BT runs and pray to god you get enough loot for him to not be a liability in sunwell.

Ah well...

But then again I"m a unique snowflake when it comes to games I guess. I don"t enjoy right-clicking on corpses to loot mobs and I fucking hate sim-closet inventory management. But a little birdy told me some big ol" king of mmo"s did focus testing with what I can only imagine were level 12 idiots in the bar...in some low level area who between chuck norris jokes took the time to fill out a survey that said "Yes, I enjoy looting things." and Blizz...I mean this game developer took that to mean that people enjoy that shit.

No, I"m not bitter. Not at all.