Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Zehn - Vhex said:

How many people here were required to level up leatherworking in order to beat end game content. You can get an almost, I think the number was something like 8% raid wide dps increase if everyone is leatherworking.

Come on, show of hands.

No? How about you Fog, your guild is in SWP. Did you require everyone to roll up leatherworkers? No?

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Ahem,

Fires of Heaven Recruitment said:

Resist Gear, Enchants and Professions
All applicants will need to have 205+ Engineering (if you have a gathering + combining skill, keep gathering if it is herbs, we have our own Alchemist, Enchanter, etc.) If you have rare recipes, this requirement is negotiable.
All applicants are required to obtain their own resist armor and do so before coming to a raid. There are plenty of sites to find Nature Resist and Fire Resist armor, our members would be happy to help you as well.
All applicants wanting enchants (such as libram, ZG, etc.) can obtain such things without the assistance of the guild. Do not apply and expect us to wipe your ass.

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Old and fairly brief requirement.

Pyros said:

Now that"s somewhat another discussion though ^^. I think however the spec system is one of the reason I never really liked the pure dps classes(mage lock rogue, I actually liked hunter for different reasons though). You"re only limited to one role. One thing I liked about my druid is I was able to run heroics as feral to get badges if I wanted to, or run them as resto if I knew the tank, or run them as feral dps or moonkin if I felt like doing something different(worthless, but different).

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Good, we need another topic anyway. This one has become pointless, as it"s clear that there is simply a difference of opinion going on (and I do respect your opinions Zehn/Foghorn, even if we"re disagreeing) and there"s no reason for everyone to get pissed at each other over it.

As I said, I"m a pretty big fan of different specs. I think it should be done a little differently than WoW, however.

First off, it should be free to respec. Not much to say about that, but that"s just what I think. The 50g it costs in WoW is really nothing considering dailies and it"s basically just a meaningless inconvenience. Wouldn"t you have had more fun leveling if you could have respecced all you wanted and just played with different talents?

Second, in my opinion, spec should onlyenhanceabilities you already possess rather than grant completely new ones. You should gain all of your class abilities as a base and have all of them to play around with, but those that you spec into would obviously be much more powerful and sometimes even have completely new effects, which is how it is balanced. It also has the side effect of people learning their class a bit better, because they can use and experience all of their abilities rather than the spec they chose.

To use an example from WoW, I see no reason every Warrior should not be able to Shield Slam regardless of spec. Sure, you might not everwantto use it, but it should be available to you if you do. Speccing into it would give it the additional damage modified by block value and also additional threat, or something like that, making it clearly better and more useful for Prot Warriors.

This would be especially cool because, for example, an offtank could switch to his more dps oriented skills and actually contribute to the fight even if he isn"t doing as much damage as the Warrior who specced Fury. Similarly, that same Fury Warrior could slap on his shield and actually have access to much needed tanking abilities if the others go down. This type of thing already happens sometimes, but often people feel limited to useless because they aren"t the right spec.

Lastly, I would like to see more varied and perhaps nontraditional specs for classes, especially dps classes. Like Pyros said in the quote above, unlike other classes in WoW the dps classes usually merely have different ways to dps and not much else. What about a Necromancer that becomes a viable pure healer through channeling his own lifeforce, similar to a Shadow Priest or Blood Mage? A class that is normally only dps/utility could then fill the role of healer. Every class should, in my opinion, be able to fill at least two of the crucial group roles, if not more.

Kuro said:

I just really liked the FFXI job system because it cut down on the x-box-hueg list of alts on the friends list that most of the games I"ve played have ended up with, and that it seemed to be a decent form of personal accountability, since all of your classes are on one Name, people have more time invested in the name and are less likely to be an asshat to everyone in the zone while working on Alt Class #3859.

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easy solution to this would be a way to send a message to 1 alias that actually sends it to whatever linked names are with that alias, with say a max of 10 names attached to an alias(to prevent massive spam of course)

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Old and fairly brief requirement.

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And was never enforced anyways.

Grave:

I know. But being civil is boring.

I don"t know if EQ2 ever implemented it, but there were plans in the works to be able to freely change into a different AA spec at your home/inn. Even something like this would be a welcome change instead of the money sink of respeccing. And while you"re at it, remove the restriction on the number of tradeskills to let people do as many as they are willing to put the time and money into maxing out. I would love to have every tradeskill at my disposal rather than taking all my alts (3 70s and a few others) and doing different skills on each just so I can be somewhat self sufficient since coming back (and without having a guild).

AA Mirror made by tradeskills. Recipe received from 40k rep with your city"s trade faction.

The mirror lets you store 1 AA path and flip between it and your in-use path at will. I"m unaware of any potential cooldown. It seems like it didn"t have one, but I didn"t quite build mine before I stopped playing again.

But then, I feel specs(and classes) are retarded. Paladins should be paladins. The simplicity of having 9 classes is entirely belied by having 3 specs per class.

Well what you and some others are arguing are more wholesale and complete changes to a class design system, and I"d prefer to see it move that way but more in baby steps. It"s a personal preference though, and I think it comes down to what someone alluded to earlier in having an identity as a character being more exclusive than someone like Zehn who clearly doesn"t care. I know people don"t like the inclusion of the "lore/continuity" aspect, but in a game like EQ it would have made zero sense to simultaneously be a shadowknight who worships Cazic Thule and at the same time a paladin who worhips Mithaniel Marr or some shit. It simply, does not work in a game like that if you try and keep any sort of continuity to your storyline and quests that involve it and so forth. At this point, it *will* come down to the developers in terms of their story and what role they want you to play in it in terms of class/alignment and so forth.

From a pure mechanics perspective, sure it could be done, but it lends itself more to a game like WoW whose story is already pretty laughably lame. Hell, you cant go 10 feet in WoW before you run into the Haris Piltons, pop culture references, and some quest/quote somewhere in WoW for nearly every internet meme and famous movie in the past 30 years. It"s ultimately going to come down to how important they feel these roleplay/story elements play, and the world in how it lends itself to that kind of mechanic (no, there is 0 way in hell ever you would be allowed to be some kind of knight in Warhammer and then switch to having a Chaos warrior who grows penis tentacle weapons).

I love the orly and yarly hooluks in KoS (EQ2). They"re entirely irrelevant, but there they sit, orly and yarly. Hooluks are bipedal owl-people for anyone unfamiliar with EQ2 or KoS.

I do prefer game-centric easter eggs over pop culture references. Clicking on character units in WC2 over and over for the comments was great. It"s not expected, and I assume most people comprehend less than half of the easter eggs, but I think they"re harmless.

Sorry to derail the derail,

But grats on the new middleware option Curt. Can you release any real info on why you chose that option and what advantages it"s going to have for your company?

My first concern after reading through the press release is that its aimed at providing higher quality visuals. Not that I mind good quality visuals, but their track record in the industry hasn"t been the best. Will this be able do a lot for low end computers as well?

I still like Zehn"s idea, but people are right. There will come a time when the high end guilds will expect you to have more than one job before they look at your app. There will be guilds for people with only one or two, but for the hardcore min/maxing folk that day will definitely come and most who would go for such a guild won"t even notice since they will likely have at least one more job just out of playing a lot. Similar to alts, though as said your alt is a liability, your second job is a gear sponge and potential fill in role, and you"re damn right it will be required by some.

I got sick of WoW about 12-18 months into release and during a few months hiatus I reinstalled FFXI. I still had the pearl from my old LS, and not having burned any bridges they let me hang while I killed time leveling a subjob. Every time people started logging in to go kill something (or go camp a spawn as the case so often goes in FFXI) they would ask the leader what they should go as.

Everyone logging in: "What you want me as for this?"

Leader: "Hang at the moog house until more get on and I"ll tell you" - - - "BRD/WHM again" - - - "You"re healing tonight, Twinkles and Doobs can"t make it" - - - "Just keep your tank gear on and head over"......etc.

At first I was impressed with how mature everyone"s character had gotten with all the insane grinding required for all those max level jobs. Seemed pretty liberating. Then one day I looked at the website recruiting requirements. "Must have at least four max level jobs with a set of gear" or something like that was prominent in the list. This was a pretty regular HNM killing and storyline progression LS, I"m not saying every shell you could find to do some fun multigroup kills with would be like that. But as the English speaking population continued to advance and develop that was the natural path. If you don"t think any high end unit in any game with a similar system would not end up requiring multiple jobs per character over time then you are blind.

That leaves one of the big big problems with the system. We talk all the time on this board about how WoW fights barriers to entry at every step. As lame as gear resets on expansions can seem, it is smart for the health of the playerbase not to overwhelm potential new players with shit like what EQ AA became in terms of sheer time needed to gain equal footing. Even with fast easy leveling, a game doing this will in fact reach a point where the hardcore will expect you to be able to fill roles dynamically based on what is needed night to night. Unless you take out giant chunks of the leveling, in which case you are back to the "poof, button press class change" problem.

One thing I felt kept FFXI at least a little bit in check is that although every race could be any class, there were clear problems trying to be something like a Galka caster (this could have been smoothed out later, I don"t know). I think if you put a decent chunk of that into a game you can at least limit the viability of leveling ALL the jobs. People could reroll an alt to play a magic class and use a different race if so inclined. People could also still level mage jobs on a melee friendly race if they had the OCD thing, or just were bored, or wanted a challenge and had the time, resources, or money to make up for the deficiencies with heavy duty gear on the mismatched job.

Exactly, Famm. I can tell you played FFXI long enough to see the same things as I did.

Faille said:

My first concern after reading through the press release is that its aimed at providing higher quality visuals. Not that I mind good quality visuals, but their track record in the industry hasn"t been the best. Will this be able do a lot for low end computers as well?

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I was wondering about this too. However, from what I understand it is mostly just a piece of software designed to make animating quicker and easier for the artists. It doesn"t necessarily have to be used for next-gen graphics, it can be used for anything, right?

I don"t know that much about that area of game development, maybe Curt or Blackguard will chime in and let us know.

I"m with Zehn on this one regarding "hardcore guilds will require xxx" nonsense. I"ve played in some pretty hardcore guilds, and even led one. In general, I think most of your top hardcore guilds look for just a couple things.

1. Show up with good attendance, know how to play your class
2. Don"t cause drama

Pretty much, every guild I was in, led, been around, or knew others who led successful guilds....this was pretty much it. When we were the leading guild in raid content in my time in EQ2 we never had any crazy requirements, I know for sure every leader of LoS didn"t either including Tigole/Draed, and I was there as one of the 10 who founded LoS from day 1. I think people who have never played in those guilds get the wrong impression that most are like the people who do crazy shit in Nihilum. I can guarantee you that if EQ required the same bullshit farming to raid that WoW did, nobody would have ever heard of LoS because we would have collectively said "fuck that nonsense". You guys are exaggerating what high end guilds require.

Again, hardcore guilds will do what hardcore guilds want. Forget which guild it was but they required during the height of Naxx that if you wanted to apply you had to provide 20 flasks with your app. Crazy shit. Yet 99% of guilds could give a fuck less.

But let"s move on. It"s mostly a semantic/preferencial argument at this point. Arguing against something because end game guilds are dickbags can be applied to anything.

Grave said:

You can"t change the very foundation of a game just to solve two small problems that only effect a small portion of the playerbase in the first place.

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I don"t think anyone here is trying to insert a job system in WoW. Not gonna happen (although, with possible "dual spec trees" raised as a possibility at WWI...)

We"re talking about an hypothetical game from a non hypothetical company whose name would start with S and end with 8.

Right now, for better of worse, the alt-itis is there. Barring an Everquestesque AA endless grind, which forces you to play your main character all the time, and nothing else, the way most current games work is that many people, except the most casual, have a stable of characters, at various levels. Or jobs.

My guild relies on that. Almost all officers - and a couple of others - have 3 level 70, raid-capable and equipped characters (not me, I"m slacking - but then, I stopped playing WoW for over 8 months), that we sub as required for raids. And yes, we"d be extactic if we could loot across our characters (it was a running joke for the last 4 months that, whenever our GL was playing mage or rogue, the tanking neck he wanted would drop and be disenchanted, and never when he was paladin).

The mechanics are almost all there. What"s only missing in WoW is the ability to have a shared bank space across characters that accepts bound items. Do that, and you do have your job system. Except that each job has a different name over the head.

The job/shared bank duality comes down finally on a roleplaying decision. Job caters to gamers. Gamers don"t have an in-game identity, they have an out-of-game identity. They"re not characters, they"re the players behind the keyboard. Having a single avatar doing everything feeds off this. Roleplayers prefer an in-game identity. Each character has its own, separate, identity. I"m not Joe Schmuck, I"m the character. Alt with shared banks feed off this. Other than this identity problem? There"s no difference in the ultimate mechanics.

Ukerric said:

There"s no difference in the ultimate mechanics.

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Well, there"s character flagging, reputations, pvp achievements, etc...but I"m sure you could fudge the lore to suit any purpose.

Which again, boils it all back down to one central issue. All this requires suspension of disbelief when it comes to lore/roleplay. There is almost no way to justify a job/heirloom system when thinking about it in the real world. While you can certainly switch between being military and working your desk job in an office, it"d be harder to make the leap between catholic priest and richard dawkins disciple.

Which ultimately begs the question, do we really give a shit about the lore behind most of the games mechanics?

I"m more concerned about them telling a good story then if the fact that I never have to stop to take a piss makes sense. Is the combat fun even though apparently my x-ray vision allows me to see through some trees but not others.

From a pure mechanics standpoint there is no argument. Job/heirloom system all the way. You"d be crazy not to in this alt-filled world we live in. But are you going to get hung up on does it make sense?

Am I endlessly entertained at the end game or do I lose sleep at night trying to reconcile how my god-fearing priest is now a child-murdering rogue?

Grave said:

First off, it should be free to respec. Not much to say about that, but that"s just what I think. The 50g it costs in WoW is really nothing considering dailies and it"s basically just a meaningless inconvenience. Wouldn"t you have had more fun leveling if you could have respecced all you wanted and just played with different talents?

Second, in my opinion, spec should onlyenhanceabilities you already possess rather than grant completely new ones. You should gain all of your class abilities as a base and have all of them to play around with, but those that you spec into would obviously be much more powerful and sometimes even have completely new effects, which is how it is balanced. It also has the side effect of people learning their class a bit better, because they can use and experience all of their abilities rather than the spec they chose.

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I also think respecing should be free. I hate playing a new game and trying to figure out a good spec, and it shouldn"t make you broke. But that"s minor.

On your second point, I think all classes should have base abilities. I think each spec should enhance a certain "set" of those abilities. Warriors in WOW are a good example, tougher tank, 2h dps, 1h dps, so are Mages. Priests are different. I don"t think the Shadow Priest should be it"s own tree, I think it should be it"s own class since it"s so radically different.

Specs should enhance your playstyle, not change it. I hope that makes sense.

I completely agree, and yes it does make sense. I actually talked about exactly that on a recent blog post and in a thread here at FoH a year or so ago. Here"s an example of one of the classes:

Paladin: Tank/Healer
The Paladin is the class to play for those who enjoy being relied on and helping others, but don't wish to hide behind the melee; they want to be in the thick of things. Paladin spells are potent, but have short range, requiring that he be among his companions in order to aid them. They have the highest armor increasing buff in the game, and are capable of protecting others from Area of Effect damage.

Fervor mechanic: Fervor is built up as the Paladin protects himself and his allies. Healing, Buffing and blocking attacks can build up the Fervor gauge and unlock more powerful abilities.

Specs: Paladins are either tanks or healers. Regardless of spec, they are frontline fighters and are always in the thick of things. You won't be standing at range spamming heals as a Paladin.

Crusader: The Crusader is a formidable tank, on par with a Protector specced Warrior. This Paladin is the most melee based, striking hard with his shield and weapon to keep the attention of the enemy. He maintains his powerful buffing ability, but his healing is not as potent as the Redeemer. Healing is still an important part of tanking as a Paladin, however, as a Paladin's heals cause extremely high threat. In this way, you will be able to keep the mob focused on you while also acting as a backup healer and buffer. Has the best pure defensive stats of the Paladins.

Valiant: The Valiant Paladin prefers to smite his enemies with Divine power, and is therefore less melee based than the Crusader. He is still a tank, but has more potent stuns and damaging abilities than other Paladins. He is therefore capable of dealing much more damage than other Paladin types, and is recommended for players who want to tank a bit more aggressively at the cost of some defense. The increased spellpower of the Valiant also makes his shielding spells more potent, thus able to absorb more damage before dissipating. This helps to counter the lower defense in some ways.

Redeemer: The Redeemer is an extremely potent healer, and the best friend of melee fighters. He wades in and fights alongside them, casting protective shields that can lessen the AE damage they take while he heals what damage gets through. Having him near the tank is an additional boon, as he can grant increased armor and healing to him as well. The Redeemer gains more powerful single target heals than other Paladins, and is perfectly capable of main healing a group in this way as well, though he will always need to be within range to give the greatest benefits. Speccing this way is the only way a Paladin can remove the intense threat generated by his healing spells.

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So you"ve got 3 trees that enhance and sometimes completely alter the Paladin"s base abilities, such as the threat removal on heals that Redeemer offers. While each has a clearly defined purpose, dabbling in two or all three of the trees would allow you to customize the Paladin to your needs.

With this type of system, the player is always familiar with what his class can do and you don"t have people who feel nervous about trying a different spec because they don"t really know how to play it. It also encourages people to switch specs often if they want and fill whatever role in the group they need or want to.

That"s pretty much identical to what WoW has now via gear swaps. Minus mana + fervor though which I <3.

Right, it is similar to WoW"s talents, which I think is fine because they"re on to something very appealing. The main point is that the character would have all of his abilities and simply enhance them, rather than getting key abilities through the talents only and never being able to use them otherwise.

You bring up gear, which is something I neglected to mention in that post but that I did touch on in the larger blog post. We want the player to be able to switch easily and forcing them to acquire different gear sets would prevent that.

Essentially, with this system, a class would ideally be able to use the same set of gear for all of their specs. You might switch out some jewelry or a piece here and there, but your main set would mostly work for all specs.

Using Paladin as an example again, let"s assume that his main set is basically a Holy Paladin set from WoW. Healing and spell damage, crit, mana regen, and so on. You would then have talents that, similar to altering the Paladin"s base abilities, also alter what stat bonuses do for him.

Ex. say he has 2500 +healing. A talent in the Crusader tree could read "you gain armor equal to the value of your bonus healing". So, from the same healing set you suddenly have 2500 more armor. But, because the Redeemer tree is needed to unlock the more powerful healing, using the same set would not necessarily be overpowered, so it doesn"t hurt that the Crusader is able to keep his bonus healing as well. Another one could be "when you gain a critical from a heal cast on an ally, your shield block value is increased by 100 for 10 seconds" or something like that.

That"s just a really basic example, obviously we would need to know more about the game in question being designed to figure out how we wanted to set things up. I do like how WoW is now consolidating some of the stats on gear and that type of thing would need to be used for this as well in order to make one set work for all specs.

At the same time though, it doesn"t make things boring by making alternate gear useless. You could still pick up some tank pieces that might translate into more defensive bonuses than your main set grants. It would be fun for the min/maxers to figure out the best possible gear choices, wheras more casual players could also still play just fine with the normal gear they"ve collected.