Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Cylus"s experience is a unique one, so while his initial posts may seem aggressive they are phrased that way thanks to his experience in the gaming industry. I think they"re great due to how blunt they can be, though you may need a take them with a grain of salt.

Mannorai said:

How severely are you underestimating viral marketing here? This statement seems really strange to me, considering where this discussion is taking place.

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Well, there is a difference with what Moorgard is posting and say another developer making specific promises to the community in late development. I agree with Moorgard on the fact they have no reason to win over a few people here and there that disagree with them. While these boards generate a massive amount of traffic for the MMO community that likes to look further than their login screen, it"s not like they enraging the portion with describing their general game plan. If anything, a solid disagreement can be constructive for later discussions and possible considerations.

Locithon said:

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.

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I called Nino an asshole because I was mad at him at that point in time. I"d call you, or anyone else for that matter, the same if I felt that I had cause. It has nothing to do with someone being in the industry or not and, last I checked, it happens pretty damn regularly between individuals on this forum, most of which aren"t in the industry.

I"m very aware of the fact that I"m a cynical, aggressive and argumentative son-of-a-bitch, all of which probably contribute to your opinion that I was "lashing out." From my end, I"ve posed a couple of questions and responded in kind; if any of those were off-base, I"ll live with it. Healthy discussions are fun, don"t let me put a damper on the party.

Darph said:

It"s simple: Complexity.

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The problem is even further compounded by the fact that you"re stuck in most MMO"s with what you pick. You can"t 3 minutes into a match realize that your composition is clearly outmatched and change things up and switch your class to compensate. If a Heavy/Medic is raping my team in TF, I switch from Soldier to Sniper to take those mf"s out and then go back to Soldier to camp enemy snipers.

Current MMO"s simply don"t offer a similar option.

Gear in a rated/ladder system is borderline silly as well. I mean items are necessary in an item-centric game to begin with, but can you imagine how IMBA StarCraft would be if Savior got to start with +2/+2 on all his units because he won Blizzcon and had a higher rating then Nada from now on?

Balance is pretty much impossible. It"s simply a buzzword these days. "Balanced PvP" is about as likely as Darph getting his own personality. You might as well toss it in the bin with other words like immersion, innovation and meaningful as words that simply carry no weight anymore.

The best you can hope for is to make it so that it"s fun. This post is already getting tl;dr so I"ll cut it here. Time to go play some more Rock Band.

P.S.: Curt I"m willing to do consulting work. As you can see by my internets I am quite the important person in the MMO community.

As long as we"re hiring people out of this thread I"d like to mention what an amazingly talented writer I am; PM me the details of your relocation package to...*gulp*...Massachusetts.

Birthplace of democracy!

PS: put Darph on your PvP team but don"t let him anywhere near pretty much anything else.

PPS: Vehn - Zhex sucks.

Hire Tyen to blog about the rockstar lifestyle of a game developer. Booze, bitches, and BAC. Wait, that was alcohol twice.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Vehn - Zhex

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I will cut you. IT"S FOUR GODDAMN LETTERS.

Gear in a rated/ladder system is borderline silly as well. I mean items are necessary in an item-centric game to begin with, but can you imagine how IMBA StarCraft would be if Savior got to start with +2/+2 on all his units because he won Blizzcon and had a higher rating then Nada from now on?

Balance is pretty much impossible. It"s simply a buzzword these days. "Balanced PvP" is about as likely as Darph getting his own personality. You might as well toss it in the bin with other words like immersion, innovation and meaningful as words that simply carry no weight anymore.

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I"d like to reiterate that balance is possible if you do it from the ground up as a specific PvP system, and not try to make a PvE system work in a PvP setting. Balance in WoW? Yes, pretty much impossible.

Ranked PvP shouldn"t punish you for picking the wrong race/class or items. The only thing you should be punished for is your skill and stupidity. It"s absolutely retarded that people who want to excel at Arenas make characters/classes with that specific goal in mind.

They should make a seperate Arena server, and on that server you can copy any level 80 character you want, and you get all of the Arena equipment provided to you. The only thing you should be competing for is prestige and respect. The main reason why Arena PvP is so stupid is because it"s dragging a boulder behind it, and that boulder"s name is PvE.

If Arena equipment was free, and you were required to wear it in Arenas, and that armor didn"t work anywhere else except in Arenas, do you think people would still do it? The answer is yes.

It still wouldn"t be balanced because of the reason Darph mentioned. It"s simply too complex. There are people who make careers out of doing the kind of math behind the internet itself and even they couldn"t figure that shit out no matter how much weed you gave them.

Could you with enough time theoretically make 1v1 balanced with seperate rulsets? Sure. The minute you go to 2v2 though? That shit goes out the window.

Can you make it less ridiculous? Sure why not. But you"re not going to make it so that you can pick any 2 classes/spec"s and expect to reach 2000 rating if you outplay everybody else which is the "goal" of balance.

Your idea (and mine as well) doesn"t make shit more balanced, it just makes balance less of an issue.

It"s a noble goal to strive for no doubt and you shouldn"t give up on working towards just because it isn"t possible. Shoot for the stars and all that ruckus.

You have to design around the brackets you want to set. With a game as complex as WoW, I don"t think 1v1 or 2v2 works as well because it severely limits your tactical options when fighting other players. Ladder matches were an afterthought for WoW, they should have just stuck to BG"s. Why don"t we have ranked BG matches?

But that comes back to my point about being "stuck" in a class/role. If you could change your class/role when you die, it would be less of a problem, because you would just pick whatever to counter what they"re currently.

WoW could introduce limited Arena skill sets, like Guildwars does.

I"m just going to go ahead and be the guy to say that arena smaller than 5v5 was a bad idea.

Hell, maybe arena was a bad idea. I"ll admit that when I saw one of the very, very first promo videos for WoW -- the one with the arena face-off -- I was excited. But now that I"m a grizzled and bitter WoW veteran I can say that it"s adding a THIRD ruleset to the game. What matters in arena is not all that important in BGs and often less so in raids. If I had my druthers I"d never do arena; I"d only do battlegrounds and raids. In fact, I"m very close to just closing the book on arena for the rest of my WoW career the way this season has been. So, having the rules for the things I care about being hamstrung (if you will) by arena concerns ticks me off just as much as people in arena get tired of their balance being affected by what"s happening in the raid game that most of them don"t give a crap about.

WoW has proven that you can have brilliant developers and still completely suck at PvP balance when you"re trying to move the same sliders for 2-3 completely different modes of play. Of course, there"s also a great deal of community-deafness going on there, but that"s just inviting a derail I don"t think anyone is interested in infecting this thread with.

Zehn - Vhex said:

It still wouldn"t be balanced because of the reason Darph mentioned. It"s simply too complex. There are people who make careers out of doing the kind of math behind the internet itself and even they couldn"t figure that shit out no matter how much weed you gave them.

Could you with enough time theoretically make 1v1 balanced with seperate rulsets? Sure. The minute you go to 2v2 though? That shit goes out the window.

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You don"t ever balance 1x1 for the reason you state. The only reasonable "balance" achievable in an MMO is Rock-Paper-Scissors.

Class 1 should usually beat Class 2 (1x) Class 2 should usually beat Class 3 (1x) and Class 3 should usually beat Class 1 (1x1). Assuming you ahve more than 3 classes then: DPS classes should beat Tanking classes which should beat Healing classes which should beat DPS classes. It"s not perfect and there will still be some balance issues intra-class type (e.g. if you"ve got four healer classes that are at all distinctive one or two will almost certainly end up better than the others) and if you add in hybrid classes you"re probably screwed. But you can go for some kind of balance using RPS -- you don"t have to give up on balance entirely.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

I"m just going to go ahead and be the guy to say that arena smaller than 5v5 was a bad idea.

Hell, maybe arena was a bad idea. I"ll admit that when I saw one of the very, very first promo videos for WoW -- the one with the arena face-off -- I was excited. But now that I"m a grizzled and bitter WoW veteran I can say that it"s adding a THIRD ruleset to the game. What matters in arena is not all that important in BGs and often less so in raids. If I had my druthers I"d never do arena; I"d only do battlegrounds and raids. In fact, I"m very close to just closing the book on arena for the rest of my WoW career the way this season has been. So, having the rules for the things I care about being hamstrung (if you will) by arena concerns ticks me off just as much as people in arena get tired of their balance being affected by what"s happening in the raid game that most of them don"t give a crap about.

WoW has proven that you can have brilliant developers and still completely suck at PvP balance when you"re trying to move the same sliders for 2-3 completely different modes of play. Of course, there"s also a great deal of community-deafness going on there, but that"s just inviting a derail I don"t think anyone is interested in infecting this thread with.

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I agree completely. The problem has always been that you have PvE designers trying to do PvP. It"s pretty obvious from the state that BG"s are in that they don"t see PvP as viable gameplay. AV is a constant reminder to all of us how much they care. Wintergrasp is a complete failure in execution.

The only reason Arenas work so well is because they tied it into a real-life money making scheme.

I"ll drop it because this is mostly a semantic argument at this point.

If you design balance as Rock betas scissors beats paper beats rock and then just allow people to pick whatever class they want to be, that"s one way to "balance." And that"s fine. I think that"s what WoW originally intended to do. They just forgot the whole, y"know, be able to switch classes. It"s not fun when you"re stuck being rock and everybody else in the game rolled paper.

The "other" kind of balance is what WoW is currently going towards where sometimes rock beats paper and sometimes paper beats rock. -This- kind of balance is pretty much impossible when you say "well it depends on if rock can pull off the stun lock" (mad rhymes). Then you introduce 2v2 and rock/paper is op because it can beat any team with paper or rock on it unless it"s a paper/rock mirror match.

Especially when you rolled scissors and can"t beat anybody because you wanted to write erotic fanfiction about your character and your succubus.

Where was I?

Suffice it to say, your best bet it to focus on "teh fun" which Blizzard dropped the ball on. I"ve posted at length on how I"d fix PvP so I won"t go into it again, but one new map every two years is -not- how you handle a PvP game. The spice of PvP is having new maps to play on a monthly if not weekly basis. Yes I still play on de_dust but I woudn"t still be playing if that and cs_office were the only maps still available.

Zehn? Job system for Copernicus, can I get a hi-five an an amen?

o/

Hallelujah brotherman!

^5

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Zehn? Job system for Copernicus, can I get a hi-five an an amen?

o/

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VETO

I know you weren"t asking me but although I loved playing FFXI I didn"t like the fact that certain people weren"t known as a good healer, or that shitty tank. Granted there was alot of LS switching (also another retarded concept) but it"s nice when you get to build up a reputation as someone who is skilled at their class etc.

Why couldn"t you get a rep with a job system? I"m familiar with some of the shortcomings of the job system, but I can hardly see an inability to get a reputation being near the top of the list. I could see maybe if all the good players could cover all the trinity then people who would otherwise be known as "good" (AKA "hey, it"s someone willing to heal who doesn"t blow at it and is therefore "good"") would get washed out, but frankly I don"t care about those people.

In WoW you have one class that can heal, melee, tank, and nuke. Everyone else is annoyed at them. Why go down that route again?

Quince said:

VETO

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It"s a good thing I bookmark my own posts now. Saves me so much time.

You could still build a rep as a good healer, tank whatever. The nice thing is that you could do so without changing who your character was. It gave you options but tied you to a character since no one wanted to grind keys and bags and everything else a second time.

Skill trees like the talent system are lame to me. They are a good alternative to the EQ paradigm of very one dimensional classes. But if you can easily be that class on a whim then the one dimensional part doesn"t matter as much. You can just BE that class without rerolling and having alts with five different names. Makes it harder to escape your reputation on a server but still gives the players options. Also easier on balance since you just balance pure classes and not all this hybrid spec confusion.

The LS system was great to me as well. It is great having a core guild of like minded individuals but sometimes after a few years you can get tired of the same fuckers over and over. Swap your LS and you can hang with casual friends or crafters or whatever you want that night without any undue drama on what tag you are wearing.

Of all the controversial things in FFXI, I think LS"s and the multi job system are the concepts most in need of copying. Doesn"t even have to be sub jobs/multi classing, just the ability to use one character for any role you want to fill. You still have to level but you have an advantage which is not purely twink gear, and you are still known to the server you play on as an entity.