Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

gnomad said:

Not at all Soygen, got the exact response I figured I would get. Just a slight variation on the response I would expect from Brad McQualude.

Looks like in a year or so UT will have a new crusade to take up with GMG since at this point in time I see no fundamental difference between them, Sigil, or SoE. In fact isn"t GMG involved with SOE somehow? Seem to remember that the original press release also mentioned SOE in it.

Oh well not worth the time to look it up. I am sure that all you people that want to (fill in the blank) to try to get into beta will do it for me to show how "much better and more supportive" you are then I am.

As to your comment Curt about being able to tell what my feedback is you are so wrong, but then again I expected that kind of a response from you.

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Interesting how you were able to determine there is no fundamental differences between the companies from 1 press release and maybe 15 posts from the GMG president. This is why any game company would be crazy to promote or even show any bit of their game on a message board. Brilliant minds like yours have the ability to deem a game shit after a few posts on a message board. Man it would be nice to be 17 and have all the answers again.

Im not sticking up for any one company here, I just tire of seeing conclusions made by turds who havent seen one iota of the game, not even a screenshot nor a comment of what the game really is. Its fine to argue the +/- of a game mechanic or a genre selection but to make a conclusion base on that is moronic. What that does is fuck it up for the rest of the people who enjoy the conversations and things being bounced around in a thread like this. It deters those involved in a game company from posting here because it turns into a waste of time.

Prolly the best course of action for the gnomads of the world would be to design their own game, shop it around and show us all how a game should be made. There are several game companies out there that would snatch up a great idea and publish it. Man up and put your money and time where your mouth is.

Oh and Curt, how about my Tigers? All that young pitching starting to come together. Only took 22 years! What do you think of Verlander, Zumaya and Bonderman?

Ngruk said:

A game that openly allows people to further their virtual life with real world money is wasting designers time. Oh I know you can"t stop it, it will happen, but just allowing it to happen while turning a blind eye is not something I am an advocate of.

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You can stop people from buying virtual advancement in your game, you simply have to create a "signifigant" chance that thebuyerwill be banned. Banning sellers will drive prices up so that buying a Vorpal Sword isn"t an option for some people, banning buyers would mean that players would invest the time or do without the Sword rather than risking losing all the time they have invested in their character.

Many people have posted on this board that they would rather pay some money than farm herbs, if one person credibly posted that they got banned for buying gold most of those people would spend the time or do without the potions rather than risking losing their character.

That post would also start a very long thread on this board which would include many people announcing that they are quitting the game and maybe even a "You have 14 days to unban this character" post but the option does exist to cripple the secondary market in a MMORPG.

Fuvi said:

You can stop people from buying virtual advancement in your game, you simply have to create a "signifigant" chance that thebuyerwill be banned. Banning sellers will drive prices up so that buying a Vorpal Sword isn"t an option for some people, banning buyers would mean that players would invest the time or do without the Sword rather than risking losing all the time they have invested in their character.

Many people have posted on this board that they would rather pay some money than farm herbs, if one person credibly posted that they got banned for buying gold most of those people would spend the time or do without the potions rather than risking losing their character.

That post would also start a very long thread on this board which would include many people announcing that they are quitting the game and maybe even a "You have 14 days to unban this character" post but the option does exist to cripple the secondary market in a MMORPG.

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I think the hope is that you create something so good, that has such a huge player base that banning people that cheat is an option. Blizzard could do it because 7 million minus 59k didn"t impact the bottom line in a hurtful way. Most other games would be eliminating nearly 50% of their player base in taking the same action. So yes the intent will be to ban players that violate the agreement we all click through and never read, but you pay outrageous legal fees to teams of lawyers to draw those agreements up for a reason.

Understand when I say that though, that I understand how big that secondary market is now, and will be when our game launches.

Having said that, I also know that from a content and creative standpoint, what we are doing will be very very different in ways that will directly impact that market and players perceptions of that market as well.

I"ve been a filthy gold-buying scumbag in WoW but I never was in EQ or any of the other games I"ve played. I shall now waffle on a bit in an attempt to understand why.

In EQ I never felt the need to buy plat. I was never super rich but there was a limit on what plat could buy you anyway. Sure you could get a few superb droppables (cloak of flames, blade of carnage, varies by era of course) but most decent guilds could get you those anyway . . .and if not then your guild wasn"t fighting the things you needed that gear for anyway and you were just looking to be a sick twink. I guess that"s the nub of the gist: plat buying in EQ was a matter of luxuries not necessities.

In WoW, sure I could have lived without an epic mount. Or I could have grinded out the 900gp if I was somehow sick in the head and magically found myself with 3x the spare time I actually have. Epic Mounts were, for me, the number one reason for gold purchases. I know the theory was that they were supposed to be elite rewards blah blah but bollocks to that - travel speed, and thus the proportion of my gaming time that i "waste" travelling, is utterly vital to the playing experience. So dropping a minor amount of RL cash to save myself (and my missus) umpteen hours of mindless cash farming was really a no-brainer. Farming cash is not "elite" and there was no other way to obtain said mount (0.01% droprates and not-yet-invented honour grind does not count).

And that"s it for me. I"m not interested in pimping my alts to the Nth degree to WTFPWN THE 10-19 BGS!!!1! I broke my game-currency-buying virginity because an important in-game asset was hidden behind a wall of pointless grind. If every class had a challenging and involved epic-mount quest at 60 like the warlock and paladin, it would never have happened.

Utnayan said:

2> Design your game so it is impossible for them to impact the integrity of the economy which would destroy the economy anyway.

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The economy of poor scaling *should* be destroyed... if you really consider the effect killing some shitty trash mob repeatedly has on the game, you"d note that you should only be able to make the money to buy an epic from a raid dungeon or even the epic mount after months upon months (years?) of doing it.

Coordinated, skillful efforts should yield far more than grinding on your "solos easily" character, but it really doesn"t.

So, you could omit parts of the current economy without completely shattering it. Scaling it properly for one, giving certain currencies that are only valid in and of their own area for another.

Tancred said:

I"ve been a filthy gold-buying scumbag in WoW but I never was in EQ or any of the other games I"ve played. I shall now waffle on a bit in an attempt to understand why.

In EQ I never felt the need to buy plat. I was never super rich but there was a limit on what plat could buy you anyway. Sure you could get a few superb droppables (cloak of flames, blade of carnage, varies by era of course) but most decent guilds could get you those anyway . . .and if not then your guild wasn"t fighting the things you needed that gear for anyway and you were just looking to be a sick twink. I guess that"s the nub of the gist: plat buying in EQ was a matter of luxuries not necessities.

In WoW, sure I could have lived without an epic mount. Or I could have grinded out the 900gp if I was somehow sick in the head and magically found myself with 3x the spare time I actually have. Epic Mounts were, for me, the number one reason for gold purchases. I know the theory was that they were supposed to be elite rewards blah blah but bollocks to that - travel speed, and thus the proportion of my gaming time that i "waste" travelling, is utterly vital to the playing experience. So dropping a minor amount of RL cash to save myself (and my missus) umpteen hours of mindless cash farming was really a no-brainer. Farming cash is not "elite" and there was no other way to obtain said mount (0.01% droprates and not-yet-invented honour grind does not count).

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This pretty much sums up why I buy (bought actually, fuck current postbanning prices) WoW gold. Except add in potion and repair bills, but that has come down recently with less wiping = more gold staying in my pockets and herb prices falling.

Utnayan said:

3> Ignore it or do what SOE did with station exchange to at least make it safe to do.

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My buddy got me to play EQ2 for a while (really liked it actually, but was too invested in WoW already), and I bought like 10 plat to get myself some gear to help level faster. SoE may have the station exchange, but I would never buy from them. It may be safer, but I got like 10pp for the same price I would have gotten maybe 1 to 3 on the Station Exchange. Farmers will just beat the prices on the "legit" sources.

Utnayan said:

Not really because it is exponential. Out of 7 million, you"ll see more of a demand for farmers based on simple supply and demand. For 100-200k, you see less demand, so equally less supply across the board, which means less bannings. 59k out of 7 million isn"t even 800 players on a 200k scale. So, it is relative. The matter of difference here is the amount of funding you are willing to put into the back end to enforce it. And this is where you are going to not want to spend money, but rather ignore the problem and hope it doesn"t become that big of an issue for you, or, design around it, which can destroy your player driven economy depending on how far you take it. .

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But you aren"t competing against 7 million players for resources, or items, or anything. You are competing against 3-5k players on your server.

Point taken on the relative numbers though.

More players, in these models, just means more farmers and more potential buyers, which in a sense validates part of what you said above.

Utnayan said:

Which in other words means, you either design around it, or spend all your money backdooring your self because it is fruitless to even attempt to stop it unless you put design implementations in play to make sure it doesn"t happen. .

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I don"t believe it"s that black and white.

Utnayan said:

Sorry, heard this before. There is no magic 8 ball for this. There is no different way to approach it with an idea touted to be pulled out of Jesus Christ"s ass. You either do one of three things:

1> Enforce rules and spend the money to do so.

2> Design your game so it is impossible for them to impact the integrity of the economy which would destroy the economy anyway.

3> Ignore it or do what SOE did with station exchange to at least make it safe to do.

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There is no magic 8 ball, but there are multiple ways to approach this beyond the three stated above, in addition to combinations of the three as well.

GMG just moved into their new offices:http://business.bostonherald.com/bus...ticleid=164951

frott said:

Coordinated, skillful efforts should yield far more than grinding on your "solos easily" character, but it really doesn"t.

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WTF are you taking about? As far as I could see a 5 man run still yields more gold than a farmer in the same time period.

Same shit held true for EQ and WoW from what I remeber.

Granted raiding is not a money maker, but you are rewarded in other ways for your efforts, rather than gold.

Mkopec1 said:

WTF are you taking about? As far as I could see a 5 man run still yields more gold than a farmer in the same time period.

Same shit held true for EQ and WoW from what I remeber.

Granted raiding is not a money maker, but you are rewarded in other ways for your efforts, rather than gold.

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I don"t think its valid to say "you are rewarded with equippables" when talking about farming cash. Point remains, go into a raid dungeon and split the cash amongst everyone there as usual and you"ll see that you made less in gold than the farmers do. The only difference is that you were going for those upgrades.

That doesn"t help the fact that there is a portion of the game that requires spending cash. Apparently it is an OK thing to farm dungeons for the nth time, for cash, to pay for farming dungeons for the nth time for items? Shitty dynamic. It"d be nice if that was a conditional based on your familiarity with the upper end game but whoops, it isn"t.

Utnayan said:

I personally think this idea would be too similar to one to stop mudflation. If I have it right, you are basically saying gold in "Area 1" is not usable in "Area 2"? Almost what it would be like to stop mudflation by hard coding levels in expansions, so once a player leaves that expansion area, they de-level to the max level of the previous expansion or retail released lands.

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Not necessarily - think of it like "arena tokens" or faction as currency. Pretend the savage fronds and etc. were not tradable. This would then require you to work to make the currency relevant to the faction based vendors.

While I"d really prefer there to be a universal money unit (because really it is a bit BLEH to go into TBC zones and see some new faction based token needed at each camp) I don"t think it scales right - killing 10,000 dung beetles shouldn"t equate with "getting enough gold for an epic item."

And so, making dung beetles drop "dung beetle eyes" as a currency for a certain set of quests makes plenty of sense. Make them untradable and you have no level 60 farming them for the short-take on trading/currency.

I suppose it could be referred to as an economy of relevance. I can see us already veering away from any sort of univeral money economy because doing so destroys the relevance - if the only reason you"d farm dreamfoil and black lotus is to actually use them on raids because they were unsellable, you"d edit out that portion of the economy.

I don"t think we"re going to see a repeat of CC faction "farming in 5 man instances to just use gold for the faction-yielding pages that other farmers are selling" nonsense any time soon. The irony of not being able to farm the ACTUAL CAMPS because they were infested with farmer teams, I hope, wasn"t lost on anyone.

All it"d take is "binds on pickup" flag to edit that entire set out of the economy.

I suppose a selective audit on "what can gold get you" would be necessary.

frott said:

Not necessarily - think of it like "arena tokens" or faction as currency. Pretend the savage fronds and etc. were not tradable. This would then require you to work to make the currency relevant to the faction based vendors.

While I"d really prefer there to be a universal money unit (because really it is a bit BLEH to go into TBC zones and see some new faction based token needed at each camp) I don"t think it scales right - killing 10,000 dung beetles shouldn"t equate with "getting enough gold for an epic item."

And so, making dung beetles drop "dung beetle eyes" as a currency for a certain set of quests makes plenty of sense. Make them untradable and you have no level 60 farming them for the short-take on trading/currency.

I suppose it could be referred to as an economy of relevance. I can see us already veering away from any sort of univeral money economy because doing so destroys the relevance - if the only reason you"d farm dreamfoil and black lotus is to actually use them on raids because they were unsellable, you"d edit out that portion of the economy.

I don"t think we"re going to see a repeat of CC faction "farming in 5 man instances to just use gold for the faction-yielding pages that other farmers are selling" nonsense any time soon. The irony of not being able to farm the ACTUAL CAMPS because they were infested with farmer teams, I hope, wasn"t lost on anyone.

All it"d take is "binds on pickup" flag to edit that entire set out of the economy.

I suppose a selective audit on "what can gold get you" would be necessary.

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Seems to me you are looking at this from only one perspective, a raider. Sure every server has its farmers and they make up a large part of the economy. But there are a ton of people who gather and craft and play that part of the game. Hell I have friends who play wow just for the Auction House.

How do you move away from a universal currency and large amounts of tradeable items without destroying the real economy? Even a simple economy like WoWs.

frott said:

While I"d really prefer there to be a universal money unit (because really it is a bit BLEH to go into TBC zones and see some new faction based token needed at each camp) I don"t think it scales right - killing 10,000 dung beetles shouldn"t equate with "getting enough gold for an epic item."

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Not to de-rail, but I just had an overwhelming sense of deja-vu. I swear I"ve heard thisexactargument on these boards before.

Also, the 50-50 profit sharing business model would be a HUGE leap forwards for the game industry. I always wanted to be a Game Designer, but between the bad pay, expensive locations (most studios being in the Irvine area) and the fact that you can"t take classes to be a game designer, you have to start as an artist or programmer (and may be stuck in that position anyways), really cooled those jets.

Hopefully by the time my grandchildren are getting into videogames I can pull the "Back in my day..." about the poor working conditions of the industry.

This thread makes me wonder just what type of game would come out if you took the collective knowledge of a bunch of players and let a messege board thread design a game.

I"d like to see Gallenite in here to talk about how their station exchange servers are going, since they took the problem right to their doorstep and integrated it. This really is the one solution noone wants to talk about. Just sell to the players yourself, or put up your own transfer service, and make it more convenient, safer, and cheaper then the other choices.

Zuuljin said:

This thread makes me wonder just what type of game would come out if you took the collective knowledge of a bunch of players and let a messege board thread design a game.

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To some extent Vanguard has done this. Design systems, then open it up to critical review and accept suggestions/revision from beta testers.

Armchair designer posts are some frightening shit. Save time and just read that article Pardo put up a few months back.

Witoubo said:

Seems to me you are looking at this from only one perspective, a raider. Sure every server has its farmers and they make up a large part of the economy. But there are a ton of people who gather and craft and play that part of the game. Hell I have friends who play wow just for the Auction House.

How do you move away from a universal currency and large amounts of tradeable items without destroying the real economy? Even a simple economy like WoWs.

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Essentially you make subsets of the economy - this is already in place to some degree, especially in TBC. Unfortunately a large part of the endgame is contingent on interacting with this lopsided economy.

One simple check would be to assign valuations to items based on their commonality or the time required to obtain them. Free market out the window.