Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

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kcxiv_foh

shitlord
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Gnome Eater said:
I know absolutely nothing about baseball, but isn"t Ngruk a sport superstar? That alone probably is why he is credible enough to pitch an idea and get people to listen - as a society tend to worship our sport champions.

This doesn"t mean that his game will be automatically amazing, but it does mean that venture capitalists might be willing to hear his pitch out at least, so it will be easier to gather funds.
I dont think he"s the most liked guy in baseball. He says whats on his mind and some people think thats a bad thing, he also deserves to be in the hall of fame imo, but i am sure people are willing to listen to him because of who he is and who he has a partners. They are some big guns.
 

Darph_sl

shitlord
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Zehn - Vhex said:
Warhammer killed themselves by releasing before WoW did. It was, simply put, the dumbest fucking thing they could have done. You can"t steal WoW"s thunder. All you can do is watch as your subscription base gets raped.
You mean: "Releasing a game that was marketed at PVPers, but had such poor PVP balance that they couldn"t even COPY AND PASTE classes that were supposed to be exact mirrors of each other?" Aka Bright Mages doing 2x the damage of Sorceresses?"

Don"t even get me started on the PVE.

WoW had little to do with it. I"d be back to playing right now if the game was good.
 

faille

Molten Core Raider
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The first question I would ask if I was creating a company to enter the games market, was could the company survive the complete failure of a product? If not, then the scope / scale / budget should be dropped to the point where the answer is a yes.

Obviously no one wants a complete failure, and that is a worst case scenario, but you just have to look at the history of MMO"s to see how even below average returns can result in companies folding.

If WoW had been a complete failure, I"m pretty sure that Blizzard would still be around. It would have hurt for sure, but they would have survive. Microsoft seems to have made a hobby of throwing money into failure MMO"s and they are not going anywhere.

Too many companies, and sorry to say that I"m including 38s in this, have jumped into the deep end without learning to swim first. There"s always the chance they"ll make it, and I wish them all the best, but its still more like gambling then following any sort of strategy.
 

Gnome Eater_foh

shitlord
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Has any MMORPG done pvp balance right? Guildwars kind of got close, and WoW season 2 was pretty good as well, but PvP balance has been sort of a pipedream.
 

faille

Molten Core Raider
1,854
454
Gnome Eater said:
Has any MMORPG done pvp balance right? Guildwars kind of got close, and WoW season 2 was pretty good as well, but PvP balance has been sort of a pipedream.
battlefield 2 / battlefield 2142 were pretty close!

granted, less MMO, but more balance!
 

Mannorai_foh

shitlord
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Faille said:
battlefield 2 / battlefield 2142 were pretty close!

granted, less MMO, but more balance!
Why does no one seem to comprehend the reason for this? Not to get into an epic PvP debate (God knows I love them). I simply haven"t seen someone make a statement so unintentionally profound, at least on the the subject of PvP, in a long time. Great all the same, whether anyone else realizes it or not.
 

Darph_sl

shitlord
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Gnome Eater said:
Has any MMORPG done pvp balance right? Guildwars kind of got close, and WoW season 2 was pretty good as well, but PvP balance has been sort of a pipedream.
Meh, the most fun pvp games have generally ignored classes and focused on Skills, such as: Eve Online, Asheron"s Call and granddaddy Ultima Online.

For those who didnt play Warhammer let me put this into perspective.

Imagine if Alliance Mages did twice as much damage as Horde Mages, based entirely on the fact they tried to make the horde ones more "evil."
 

Darph_sl

shitlord
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Mannorai said:
Why does no one seem to comprehend the reason for this? Not to get into an epic PvP debate (God knows I love them). I simply haven"t seen someone make a statement so unintentionally profound, at least on the the subject of PvP, in a long time. Great all the same, whether anyone else realizes it or not.
It"s simple: Complexity.

It"s pretty easy to balance 2 Warrior archetypes clubbing on each other with auto attack. It"s even pretty easy when you account for healing and things of that nature, but when you get into burst abilities, evasion and crowd control, things tend to go to hell in a hand basket.

You simply have to play test it, even with restrictions like AOC"s "1 CC per minute."
 

Zarcath

Silver Squire
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Darph said:
It"s simple: Complexity.

It"s pretty easy to balance 2 Warrior archetypes clubbing on each other with auto attack. It"s even pretty easy when you account for healing and things of that nature, but when you get into burst abilities, evasion and crowd control, things tend to go to hell in a hand basket.

You simply have to play test it, even with restrictions like AOC"s "1 CC per minute."
They just need to stop trying to design 1 system to encompass 2 gameplay styles. I"d be fine with a game that had 2 completely different systems created for PvE and PvP.

Like say if WoW BG"s really were just like BF2. Your stats don"t mean as much, your weapons are broken down into types (doesn"t matter if you have an Armageddon or Betrayer, it"s just a 2H weapon). Your equipment art is unique to your character but all the stats/skills are based on whatever role you select for PvP. You know, maybe I want to heal in a BG but I don"t want to level/gear a healer to 80?

Now that you think about it, it"s pretty fucked up that you could end up losing in a BG (I"m using BG"s because that"s more casual than arenas), not only based on the player skill, but the make-up of classes and their equipment. At least in an FPS games (CS/TF2/L4D/BF2), it"s mostly based on skill. Even games like TF2 and BF2 where class make-up is important, you"re never forced to play certain classes. Can you imagine being able to only play 1 class in TF2/BF2 and having to exit the game just to change your role?
 
Gnome Eater said:
I know absolutely nothing about baseball, but isn"t Ngruk a sport superstar? That alone probably is why he is credible enough to pitch an idea and get people to listen - as a society tend to worship our sport champions.

This doesn"t mean that his game will be automatically amazing, but it does mean that venture capitalists might be willing to hear his pitch out at least, so it will be easier to gather funds.
Hi! I play baseball! Will you give me 10 million to fund a startup studio and our fledgling MMO? I swear that we"ll be more productive and successful than the studio across that block that"s been around for 5+ years and has proven that they can ship titles!

While I realize that I"m being harsh, I"ll admit that I was annoyed by Mr. Schilling"s inference that somehow his title/studio stands above the plethora of other closing studios out there that actually have a proven track record. The fact that we know absolutely nothing about his title only compounds the matter.

Don"t get me wrong, I still wish the studio the best and hope that they can contribute something new to the genre. Less talk, more walk please
 

Ngruk_foh

shitlord
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CylusSoulreaver said:
While I realize that I"m being harsh, I"ll admit that I was annoyed by Mr. Schilling"s inference that somehow his title/studio stands above the plethora of other closing studios out there that actually have a proven track record. The fact that we know absolutely nothing about his title only compounds the matter.
And you inferred that from which quote of mine?
 

Gnome Eater_foh

shitlord
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What exactly did he say that gave you that impression Cylus? If anything what he said is pretty much what you expect to hear at such a conference, just general talk of leadership and emphasis on building a team - nothing particularly new, but then again, what else do you expect at a "leadership forum"?

I just don"t really see anything to get outraged about, I thought the talk was rather plain apart from the baseball metaphors.
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
2,161
786
Darph said:
You mean: "Releasing a game that was marketed at PVPers, but had such poor PVP balance that they couldn"t even COPY AND PASTE classes that were supposed to be exact mirrors of each other?" Aka Bright Mages doing 2x the damage of Sorceresses?"

Don"t even get me started on the PVE.

WoW had little to do with it. I"d be back to playing right now if the game was good.
WAR"s shortcomings aside, I think they would have done much better if they delayed another 3 or 4 months. Given how devoid of endgame content WoW is currently, and the horrible state of balance, if a game that offered a whole new world and experience as well as an attempt at pvp came out, I imagine people would flock to it because WoW doesn"t have any fixes on the horizon. And even if it sucked (nevermind that thats another 4 months to work on it), people would probably stay with it to a greater extent because WoW only offers a night or two of content a week right now anyway.

Instead you get people like me who wanted WAR to be awesome, tried it, were underwhelmed and left as soon as WOTLK came out, and now just don"t care enough to reload/reactiveate/refamiliarize. I"m bored with WoW, but not bored enough to go back to WAR, whereas if WAR hit right now when WoW is at it"s weakest and just kept going from there, I"m sure a lot more people would have stuck it out a lot longer.

But what"s done is done, I guess.

I think it"s interesting that we"ve finally come to the end of "the next big thing." Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, AoC, WAR, and I"m sure a couple others I"m forgetting, all offered the biggest and baddest MMO experience, and none of them managed to gain a significant foothold (VG is good as dead, TR "is" dead, AoC, from what I hear, is good as dead, and WAR is getting by as a niche game that never quite met expectations). For the first time since EQ, there isn"t really a "next big thing" on the horizon. It"s just... WoW. And the nebulous new Blizzard MMO. It"ll be interesting to see how sick of WoW people will be in another 4 years of no alternatives. Up to Curt and crew to see how easily they can tap into that though.


Has any MMORPG done pvp balance right? Guildwars kind of got close, and WoW season 2 was pretty good as well, but PvP balance has been sort of a pipedream.
DAoC had a "post WoW, pre-completely dead" phase where they actually managed to balance things very nicely, I"d say it was as damn near balanced as any MMO can reasonably expect to achieve (well, they could have improved that by deleted stealthers, but that aside). It"s just a shame it took them losing 90% of their players to WoW to pull their shit together, and as a consequance nobody actually got to witness how well they can do.

Actually it"s a shame because it looks like the B team at Mythic are actually much better at balance than the main players. Maybe that"s why WAR suffers all of the EXACT SAME horrible balance issues that DAoC did. They need to take whoever was balancing DAoC when the main dev"s moved onto WAR, and let them go crazy on WAR for a good year or so. Whoever it was did an amazing job making DAoC go from "horrible" to "the best example of MMO balance yet" within a 12 month timeframe.
 
CylusSoulreaver said:
While I realize that I"m being harsh, I"ll admit that I was annoyed by Mr. Schilling"s inference that somehow his title/studio stands above the plethora of other closing studios out there that actually have a proven track record. The fact that we know absolutely nothing about his title only compounds the matter.
It sounds like you"re taking Curt"s line about knowing the players out of context. He"s not claiming to be a player, but rather that the current economy makes it clearer who--in the field of investors and VCs--are the serious players in the game. Anything more than that was implied by other posters.

And sorry, we don"t intend to show "the walk" until it"s in our best interests to do so. Winning over skeptics on a message board is not our primary objective. The results of our work will be the only thing that can do so, and that isn"t something we"ll reveal this year.

We do continue to talk about our studio and philosophies, so if that kind of thing irritates you then I suggest you put this thread on ignore until 2010.
 

Mannorai_foh

shitlord
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Zarcath said:
They just need to stop trying to design 1 system to encompass 2 gameplay styles. I"d be fine with a game that had 2 completely different systems created for PvE and PvP.
You"re absolutely right. First, they are completely different aspects of gameplay. Opposing aspects in a sense, but that"s a discussion for another time. If it is going to be implemented, it should be separate from the PvE game. With all of its faults, I still feel like EQ did it right with there simply being separate servers. Why hasn"t this model been followed (beyond merely naming)? There seems to be a lot of emphasis on a perfectly fused balance of these aspects that just isn"t possible.
 

Genjiro

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
5,218
5,066
Faille said:
battlefield 2 / battlefield 2142 were pretty close!

granted, less MMO, but more balance!
There is nothing in any mmo that will ever touch the fun of zerging a flag with 10 people in vent all as medics and only using shock paddles. Bf2 > mmos
 

Mannorai_foh

shitlord
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Moorgard Mobhunter said:
And sorry, we don"t intend to show "the walk" until it"s in our best interests to do so. Winning over skeptics on a message board is not our primary objective. The results of our work will be the only thing that can do so, and that isn"t something we"ll reveal this year.

We do continue to talk about our studio and philosophies, so if that kind of thing irritates you then I suggest you put this thread on ignore until 2010.
How severely are you underestimating viral marketing here? This statement seems really strange to me, considering where this discussion is taking place.
 
Ngruk said:
And you inferred that from which quote of mine?
Your words: "The economy has only more clearly defined the players"
My brain: "The economy has only culled the weak, thereby making it easier for the strong, ie us, to secure funding for our deliverables." Yes, I could have easily read too much into it but that"s how it came off to me. If that wasn"t your point (and I"d hazard a guess that it wasn"t), I apologize for letting it rub me the wrong way.

Moorgard said:
It sounds like you"re taking Curt"s line about knowing the players out of context. He"s not claiming to be a player, but rather that the current economy makes it clearer who--in the field of investors and VCs--are the serious players in the game. Anything more than that was implied by other posters.

And sorry, we don"t intend to show "the walk" until it"s in our best interests to do so. Winning over skeptics on a message board is not our primary objective. The results of our work will be the only thing that can do so, and that isn"t something we"ll reveal this year.

We do continue to talk about our studio and philosophies, so if that kind of thing irritates you then I suggest you put this thread on ignore until 2010.
Fair enough. Having given it some thought (damn drive to LAX this morn), it"s definately not the general discussion regarding the studio that irritated me. Ultimately, I"m irritated that MMOs have this bad habit of annoucing years before they are able to show "the walk"; unfortunately, in this case, I just happen to have y"all as a target It"d be nice if they took a cue from some of their console couterparts and didn"t annouce until they were able to show that "walk" (in-game trailer with gameplay, pretty please). Granted, it"s a tired topic that pertains to other genres as well but it seems relatively bad in the case of MMOs, who tend to go viral years in advance of being able to deliver something substantial to the public. Now, I realize that keeping your yapper shut is easier said than done (case in point: me), especially for a start-up studio that"s excited to get up and running. And yea, I also realize that y"all owe us nothing, but a fan"s unwarranted sense of entitlement shouldn"t exactly be news to those in the entertainment business.

Hell, I"m a cynical bastard, I"ll admit it (VG has that uncanny effect on people, especially for those that worked on it...Minoh may or may not attest). My "show me or stfu" attitude isn"t exactly friendly so all I can do is apologize in advance and attempt to temper that cynicism in the future. I seriously do wish y"all the best and hope that you can bring something new to the table; just show me, already
 

Bellstian_foh

shitlord
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They haven"t really even announced anything or even hinted at what the game will be like. All this thread has been is general MMO discussions and a few hire announcements. All the info currently available could have been inferred from press releases anyways. Curt is basically just sorta-hyping his dev team, it"s not like they have some 50 page faq and the game forums like VG had 3 years prior to launch.

Cylus always seems to lash out at others in the industry who post here, I remember Nino kind of putting him in his place a few times.
 

Ninen_foh

shitlord
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Guildwars (as befitting the idea they"re projecting about being a mostly pvp game) includes almost all of the "mandatory" pvp elements.

limited gear, weekly skill tuning (last I checked), pve and pvp rulesets.

Heck, with their pvp unlock system they use, you could even say they allow you to change classes nearly on a whim (unlock your items/skills through pve/cash shop; then create max level pvp characters and gear/skill as you wish).

You can certainly change how your class plays based on what 8 skills you bring to a match.