Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

No one has brought up developers who buff or fail to nerf their own playing class, or skills they like to use? Or does that not happen anymore?

*CoughEQ2DarkElvesAndAssassinsCough*

Damn, that"s a painful cough.

Kuro said:

*CoughEQ2DarkElvesAndAssassinsCough*

Damn, that"s a painful cough.

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Yes it is :\

Faille said:

No one has brought up developers who buff or fail to nerf their own playing class, or skills they like to use? Or does that not happen anymore?

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lol you mean like trying to get something done with the warrior class in EQ2 while a certain moderator (who now works for 38 studios) played the most OP fighter class and would defend any changes to said fighter class while pretty much telling warriors they"re fine and working as intended?

I"m sure that doesn"t happen anymore

Ngruk said:

I don"t mean this to be personal, but really? I mean I read this and the rest of the post is lost on me, not really interested in reading any further.

I am the farthest thing from an ass kisser, but can you honestly say that enormous piece of content they created was "meh"?

Is it a case of eating filet your whole life and not being impressed with a fantastic piece of Kobe beef?

No one touches WoW in polish. No one touches them in innovation imo, not yet anyway. Sad thing is I think the next game to "touch them" in either area is going to be a game they are making...

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Yarly, I don"t take it personal, but I do believe you"re wrong. I"ve played most MMO"s out, I don"t just taste from the WoW pool. There is a reason I"m once again playing WoW, I"m not saying its a bad game.

The leveling content was quite nice, past that the game is in worse shape end-game wise than it has been since longer than I can remember. As a poster above me said, a rehashed raid from Vanilla makes up the majority of end game content atm, and they made it SHIT ASS easy compared to how it was. The trash in Naxx alone was harder than the bosses are now.

Arena balance is a mess, Wintergrasp is an outright failure, and the heroic dungeons are no challenge whatsoever. About the only "innovative" thing they did was steal an achievement system from Lotro (cept it doesn"t improve your class in WoW)

Polish? Are we just going to ignore the outstanding number of bugs in game? The broken patches thrust on the population? Crushing server/technical issues in a 4 year old game? The terrible balance issues people had brought up early on in beta and yet they still didn"t listen? The snails pace of releasing new content?

WoW has done a lot of brilliant things to get to where they are but it certainly doesn"t make them infallible. If there was ANY other MMO out right now worth a shit I"d quit again in a heartbeat.

So yeah, I stand by my previous point, besides the leveling content and ok, the achievement system, its more of the same ol same ol, cept not as good or as much of it as in the past.

Daezuel said:

If there was ANY other MMO out right now worth a shit I"d quit again in a heartbeat.

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I think that this statement is the sentiment of a lot of the old-guard MMO players (myself included) that aren"t interested in the mainstreaming of the genre at the cost of all the things that used to be fun like mystery and exploration.

Spoiler sites, databases and everything else started a downward spiral of entitlement of information such that everyone wantseverythinghanded to them. If there isn"t a giant exclamation point or exact coordinates involved, no one wants to touch it anymore. Even less if critical thinking, exploration or actual tests of player skill are involved. It is truly sad that none of the current generation MMO development teams understand the difference between intuitive behavior, ease of use and thoughtful/responsive design and handing out your content as if there was a government mandate for equal access.

There are so many ways in which WoW was a landmark title, yet there are so many things everyone in the industry gleans as necessary which I shake my head at. Does everything have to have an exclamation point or detailed satellite imaging to be worth a visit to players now? What about talking to townsfolk or actually, hell I dunno, going to places like taverns or barracks to find work instead? People don"t even read quest text anymore, they want bullet points and arrows because they"re more interested in maximizing exp/hr than exploring. I"d much rather log on for one session and solve some mystery in a town and be rewarded a level after traveling and finding someplace which wasn"t on google maps in lieu of grinding out kill x quests over and over which have no meaning.

Or maybe I"m just too desperately clinging on to the RPG in MMORPG when everthing has become generalized simply to MMO.

I think if Ulduar was out right now most people wouldn"t be complaining about how easy the end-game content was. It was meant to be entry-level. On the other hand, unless all of the hard-mode versions of bosses in Ulduar have extended loot tables like Sarth, Ulduar may be disappointing as well. We"re probably looking at a base difficulty level of T5...I anticipate we"ll start seeing a bit of separation between real raiding guilds and all the "lol free loot" guilds, but unless raiders start to embrace hard mode as the true elevators this whole expansion is going to be a disappointment.

All that said, I agree with many points. Arena is a fucking mess (I hate arena so whatever), class balance in PvE is still shot, raiders are bored, heroics are trivial...there"s a lot of cleaning up to do. However, I think Blizzard has set the stage for a potentially terrific expansion for everyone, even if the best thing about it so far is the leveling content.

We"ll see.

Also: part of me wants to get a 310% proto, and another part just doesn"t give a shit as long as we"re farming the best loot every week. Am I alone in this? Last two weeks we haven"t bothered with the third drake on sarth because we can get the best loot from two, and lag has been so terrible that we"re minimizing our raid hours.

Seems to me that perhaps prestige isn"t everything. Maybe I am just a loot whore.

The dropped drake isnt 310%, You need to get the glory of the raider or Heroic: glory of the raider.

While i have my complaints, i am still enjoying the expansion. However i find theres a lot of time to watch tv and sit around doing nothing. My enjoyment doesn"t change the fact that even though i raid with 2 different characters, 1 in the best guild on the server the other on the 4th best i literally have nothing to do after Wed.

The dropped drake isnt 310%, You need to get the glory of the raider or Heroic: glory of the raider.

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My point was muddled. I mentioned Sarth 3D only because it is another example of extra effort along with the achievements that go into GotR. I didn"t even do 10s this week, and I have like a dozen achievements to go with them.

Ngruk said:

I am the farthest thing from an ass kisser, but can you honestly say that enormous piece of content they created was "meh"?

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Given millions of people playing, youwillfind all the gamut of opinions on it. Including the fact that it"s "meh". Or worse.

Of course, I find defaults in the game. It"s not perfect. Nothing is. There"s rough pieces (the various factions who are completely undevelopped - so undevelopped they rewrote one achievement afterwards, since it didn"t fit - or the fact that they repeated the mistake they did at launch with heroic-Karazhan equipment), but it"s clearly an extremely good expansion - more so thematically than Outland was.

Gnome Eater said:

Ngruk, I think the point is, if you look at the playerbase as a whole, most players have a horrendous track record as far as balance predictions. I completely agree with you.

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Exactly.

The point is not to listen to your playerbaseas a whole. Well, a bit.

The trick is to figure out who is competent, and listen to them. Just because you"re not shown the nitty gritty internal meetings doesn"t mean you"re walking blindfolded. Do not underestimate the players - a few of them are going to have models that work as good, if not better than yours (if only because they work without preconceptions about "how it should work", but have only "how it does work" to live with). When such a player says X, it doesn"t mean you have to implement X - it means you should look at why he has raised the point.

In fairness, I think developers do talk to a few players directly, but while I was in the loop in having the "batphone" to the EQ developers, I do not in WoW, so my personal perspective is skewed.

I do know that a few of the balance changes they have made, especially on the PvP front, are completely fucked up and any highly rated gladiator would have immediately shot them down.

For the record:
[Blizzard] Petition: Bring Back Chess - Arena Junkies Forums

That"s like 1000+ gladiators all agreeing that the current idea of dps killing healers unaided is retarded, and if you have any experience discussing shit with PvP"ers, you know how you can never ever get them to agree on anything. Given how few gladiators actually exist, 1000+ agreeing on something and directly disagreeing with a developer is pretty unheard of.

That"s sort of what I"m saying. This has been taken in a direction to say that the devs should have their batphones and that"s it, but that"s not my point at all. I don"t think a lot of myself when it comes to game design, and yet I know some things just should never have passed the smell test.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

That"s sort of what I"m saying. This has been taken in a direction to say that the devs should have their batphones and that"s it, but that"s not my point at all. I don"t think a lot of myself when it comes to game design, and yet I know some things just should never have passed the smell test.

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Right, I agree - the thing is if you post this, someone inevitably counters by saying that while players have been correct about a lot of things, players as a whole have been incorrect about more things than not.

I think a solution to this is to have a forum similar to the old beta-boards that EQ had where you can have accomplished players (multiple gladiators, guild leaders of high end guilds, well-respected theorycrafters) who can give feedback and argue among themselves, and make it a serious priviledge to post there.

I think ultimately it"s more of a commentary on the devs than the community. There are a lot of people who should be listened to in the community, but honestly...things like the Holy Light glyph, or the old DnD glyph. Some stuff should just not ever happen because someone should be saying "uh, you know, that"s an absolutely terrible, awful idea on paper and I"m pretty sure it"s not going to magically work out in the game world." We"re not talking about obscure stuff you could really only depend on your player base to come up with consistently, just obvious things.

And then, we really don"t get answers on some things. Did Blizzard, perhaps, not realize how ridiculously OP it was to allow knockbacks and DG to affect tanks? Or how much it hurt DKs to not be able to disease tanks? Or did they simply have technical difficulties?

There"s no transparency, so there"s no way to know, but it"s that sort of thing which makes one lose respect for some of the folks pulling the strings.

I think we can agree sort of. I see exactly what you guys are implying but at the same time, being around this team I have to make this next point and hope it comes across how it"s intended.

There is a CRAP TON of money, and time, being spent to build this game. I have yet to hear anyone walk into a meeting saying "Hey I have this idea that will make the game suck"

It"s always the exact opposite. You come to the table with ideas you think will make the game great, or better, or more fun.

I say that in defense of the "lose respect" comment. The folks in this company have all bought into "we"re not making my game, or his game, or her game", we"re make the game. So no idea is so important, no person is so important, that their ideas are implemented at will.

Everyone is trying to make the game better with every idea, every change you see has hundreds if not thousands of man hours behind it, from concept to implementation.

We"d be naive to think that"s across the board because we"ve all seen and played games with ideas and concepts that scream "I want this feature in no matter what, because it"s mine and I say so" and I think we could point many of them out.

Having said that I see Blizzard as the polar opposite. I could be wrong, but their track record suggests otherwise.

Ngruk said:

It"s always the exact opposite. You come to the table with ideas you think will make the game great, or better, or more fun.

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I think this is the case for creating content, and I think even the most blizzard hating person in the universe cannot deny that the amount of effort that goes into creating zones by blizzard is incredible. Everything from the art direction, the lore, the pacing, it is all perfectly and lovingly done.

The class balance decisions on the other hand are often just really dumb. Holy light glyph. BM nerfs that were mathematically overkill. Arcane changes that were obviously too powerful (and people said so). Even the change that they want pure raw damage to be viable in arena is hated by all people who play arena.

There seems to be a huge gap in the quality of the content versus the quality in the ability to balance the game, especially in wotlk. When I look at the zones that Blizzard makes or the raid fights they make, I never think "wow I could do better than this". When I look at a bunch of the class balance changes that are made very often I think "wow this is retarded and is going to get nerfed, hard" and I am right more often than not, and I wager so are most hardcore players.

As a trivial example, Sebudai posted this right after the hunter changes had gone in:

Originally Posted by Sebudai View Post
In an attempt to be more constructive:

* Revert the nerfs to Kindred Spirits and Serpent"s Swiftness.
* Drop the coefficient of Explosive Shot from 0.16 down to about 0.12.
* Remove the range requirement from Sniper Training. If you want the talent to be more interesting make it a buff you gain after not moving for X number of seconds or something.
* Reduce the mana cost of Chimera Shot from 16% of base mana down to about 12% of base mana.
* Improve the proc chance of Wild Quiver to 5% per rank.
* Increase the coefficient of Spirit Strike from 0.04 to 0.045.


There. Each spec doing about 5500 dps. If Blizzard wants us closer to 6000 dps, increase the coefficient of Steady Shot from 0.1 up to 0.15, and increase the critical strike damage bonus from Marked for Death to 3% per rank. 5500 spreadsheet dps would translate into hunters "losing" the meters to a few other classes by a decent margin right now. I am operating under the assumption that those classes should be toned down as well.

BM was never that overpowered to begin with and was nerfed based almost entirely off of meaningless 2.5min Patchwerk parses. As I said originally, the nerfs to BM went overboard.

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Ghostcrawler a week later:

We talked about it a great deal today and agreed that we probably over-nerfed BM. Marks is in a good spot and Survival might be too high once we look at the changes we are making to all other classes.

Our plan is to buff BM before Ulduar, but I can"t give you a timetable more detailed than that, and things could change for any number of reasons. We are unlikely to touch Steady Shot for the reasons I have mentioned before. We are more likely to look at Kindred Spirits and Serpents Swiftness again.

Again, huge caveats: Predicting changes we are discussing making but haven"t made yet is fraught with peril. I only wanted to address this issue because it caused a lot of consternation in the community.

I don"t mind admitting when we make a mistake in the hope that it builds our credibility in the community. This was one. It won"t be the last.

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I can dig you up a huge amount, but basically when it comes to DPS/PvP, a fair few members of the community are waaaaay ahead of developers, because developers have to watch all talent trees for all classes, while players can afford to focus on one particular class full-time.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

You"re making it sound harder than it is. Sure, these games are overwhelmingly complex, blah blah blah.

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There"s a fine line between Bureaucracy and Due-diligence. When you trust your staff, you want them to the have freedom to make changes easily, without a lot of red tape. This makes employees happy and builds a product with a lot of human "fingerprints."

However, on occasion easily reversible things such as that Glyph you mentioned will make it into the game and be Overpowered.

So the goal is to have enough processes in place to keep GAME BREAKING mistakes from making into the game (via Q/A playtesting and "sign-offs"), but allow employees the freedom to innovate.

Genjiro said:

Which is also why some games have separate data tags attached for things like pve and pvp. If you choose to use a catchall for both, you are going to have a widely screwed up system like WoW has been for arena for practically every season.

If target = player
If target = npc

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No. Then you have a convoluted system of coefficients for the relative power of the spell against a particular target. Displaying this kind of poo in a HUD is confusing, and overly complicated.

Here"s a theory we"re gonna" throw out there. We"ll call it Darph"s Uber Mechanical Balancing Law. Or "The D.U.M.B. Law" for short.

Step 1. Balance "player power" around PVP, in an arena style setting. A mix of simulation and play testing may be used. Play testing being of the highest importance. End-Game loot needs to be tested at this time, for obvious reasons.

Step 2. Balance PVE encounters around the now-defined "player power." You may tune the creatures, encounter and etc. However, the raid team may not tweak "Player Power" simply to introduce a new "exciting" mechanic to an encounter.

Additional Info: There are numerous ways to add additional powers to players without effecting the rest of the world, via power ups, etc.

Zarcath said:

Dailies and Badge vendors are the wave of the future. Any MMO without a daily logon incentive is asking for trouble.

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All persistent games will want to incentivise you to log in each day, but there are better ways than simple quests. Oh yes my friend.

Ngruk said:

This thread really did start when the company started for the most part. I enjoy talking theories, concepts and gaming in these forums when it doesn"t get personal and petty.

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Oh, it"s ALWAYS personal and petty.