Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Well...what facts do you need other than he supported the monk nerf based partially on inside info from SOE to account for my non-fandom??

-shrug- Really didn"t think it was that "fact" intensive.

I think the real issue here is that he was overly reliant on SOE"s tests, not on how he presented himself to others. Perhaps he was naive back then and figured that since it was the company that made the game, they should know. Obviously, that turned out not to be the case. People like Gaerath who were negatively impacted by his unwillingness to critically analyse SOE"s test should still be cautious, because the same thing could easily repeat itself. For example, the community presents information that conflicts with the company"s information and instead of really finding out which is the truth, just assumes the company is right. That"s where I think still being cautious about how he approaches such things is still quite valid. Now, maybe he won"t makes those mistakes, but that"s for the future to decide.

God damn.

Some of you people with all of this built up angst over things that happened in EQ"s time need to LET IT THE FUCK GO ALREADY.

Duppin said:

God damn.

Some of you people with all of this built up angst over things that happened in EQ"s time need to LET IT THE FUCK GO ALREADY.

Click to expand...

Hehe. Ok ease back a bit

I was explaining in a confusing way that if we were going to debate who said what, when, why, where and how, that it"s a lot easier said and done with facts. "Nooz came on and said he was supportive of the change, but the more important point, and my real argument against the initial opinion was that Steve was a PLAYER at that time, not a community guy or dev, but a player.

That to me changes the dynamics of it all. Sure he was a monk, sure he had some influence on whether or not it happened, but he did not work internally so he didn"t have the whole picture in front of him, nor was he a member of the design team with intimate knowledge of the change and it"s ramifications world wide.

The two positions, player/designer, are in such complete and totally different worlds, regardless of how "informed" or up to date that "player" is.

After getting to know this system and process over the years the more amazing thing to me is that a studio lead actually allowed a player to weigh in that heavily on a game change. Speaks to very different things about both people involved and the main one is one of the reasons I wanted Steve to be part of GMG from the start.

Well, sure, and I understand all of that.

My point is that people continue to rehash, and hold people"s feet to the fire over, mistakes that may have been made back during EQ"s time, by people that may have only been peripherally involved.

These game designers, guys? They"re fairly smart people for the most part. That includes the ability to LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES. The Brad McQuaid of 2006 is not the Brad McQuaid of 1998, etc etc.

*shrug*

I don"t know that I was holding feet to the fire and looking for a MY pound of flesh. I merely said I wasn"t a fan due to a stance he took in the past. NG asked me why and I told him. Don"t ask if you don"t want an honest opinion.

Like I said before, I truly hope he is the best thing since sliced bread. But it wouldn"t be entirely truthful of me to say that without pointing out a...concern I felt about him because of past occurances.

The only experience I have with him is Mobhunter and the monk nerf. I can honestly say I haven"t seen a thing about or from him since that time that pertains to an area of my interest until now.

To put it in sports terms (since we might have a couple sports guys around) I had a teammate tank on me. He quit playing because management told him it was the right thing to do for the good of the team and then he tried to convince the rest of the team it was ok because management told him so and he had the spreadsheets from them to prove it

Now, the kids got talent, everyone knows and can see that. But if I really want to win how can I trust him not to tank again???

-shrug- He has to prove it. Until a comfort level arrives that allows me to look at his tanking moment as a bad decision in the past, and not something indemic to his personality, I will always be wondering if he is going to quit on me again.

I am not on the "ride em until they scream like a little bitch" bus like so many of the bashers we have around here. I am just cautious based on the only experiences I have with him.

I don"t find that odd or unfair. And... I was asked.

Ohh....and Happy Turkey Day!!!

May the buttons be loosened and the pie flow like wine.

Ngruk said:

Hehe. Ok ease back a bit

I was explaining in a confusing way that if we were going to debate who said what, when, why, where and how, that it"s a lot easier said and done with facts. "Nooz came on and said he was supportive of the change, but the more important point, and my real argument against the initial opinion was that Steve was a PLAYER at that time, not a community guy or dev, but a player.

That to me changes the dynamics of it all. Sure he was a monk, sure he had some influence on whether or not it happened, but he did not work internally so he didn"t have the whole picture in front of him, nor was he a member of the design team with intimate knowledge of the change and it"s ramifications world wide.

The two positions, player/designer, are in such complete and totally different worlds, regardless of how "informed" or up to date that "player" is.

After getting to know this system and process over the years the more amazing thing to me is that a studio lead actually allowed a player to weigh in that heavily on a game change. Speaks to very different things about both people involved and the main one is one of the reasons I wanted Steve to be part of GMG from the start.

Click to expand...

Something else many people aren"t aware of is just how complex andtotallyundocumented EQ1"s combat system (and pretty much everything else about EQ content design) was.

That led to a lot of assumptions and mistakes in the earlier days, and even in the later period, making changes to a class was based on more on educated guesswork and gut feel than scientific analysis.

Due to the lack of documentation, designers that actually played the game had a potentially huge advantage over the designers that did not play (or who played less hardcore), because the player/designer had better "instincts" and a feel for the overall gestalt of the game. That same advantage was extended to non-employees, and those players that could articulate a problem were seen as a valuable resource by Verant/SOE that was tapped on occasion.

But even then, that instinct and feel still led to some creative guesswork, and mistakes/oversights were still made.

You can"t really vilify the original dev team for lack of playtime, with EQ"s production schedule and small staff, there simply wasn"t room for them to work on the game AND play it hardcore (with a couple notable exceptions).

In the "expansion era", that same time crunch impacted the newer designers brought in from the player base. Beyond the lack of time, there were issues of propriety and trust that actively discouraged dev team members playing on a production server, taking them further "out of touch" from the game, and then the inevitable slow creeping decay of desire to play what you"reworking70 hours a week on sets in.

So, you either hire fresh blood and give them a voice, or start weeding through the plethora of posts by the "armchair designers" in attempt to gain a better perspective on the game.

Hiring fresh blood comes with a whole set of problems, ranging from integrating them into the team (politics and all, no easy feat) to slapping them in the face with the cold hard reality of production schedules, limited resources, and mistaken assumptions.

Gleaning good data from the forums is tricky, because it"s VERY easy to fall into the trap of finding a viewpoint that matches your assumptions/notions, and blowing off the more hostile or differing viewpoints. But you also can"t look at the forums and blogs and emails and decide that EVERYONE is right, that"s a recipe for disaster as well.

Then you have those people with the unenviable job of PR spokesperson. They"re usually hired because they"ve earned the respect of the player base and are articulate. But once onboard, they"re generally not given much respect by the dev team (or even disliked by team members before they were hired), and that"s not a good situation to be in.

Even if the dev team isn"t hostile to the PR spokesperson, the new guy may not know who to turn to for the correct (or as close to correct as possible) answers. And if he does get answers to questions, they can often be filtered through several layers of interpretation. Not hard to see howgarbage inturns intogarbage outin that situation.

Combine that with now being a "voice of the corporation" (limiting what they can say and how they can say it, and who"s actively editing what they say), the inevitable player knee-jerk ("..he"s a sellout..") and a reasonable (butmistaken) assumption that he should ALWAYS be right, and you end up with a bad reputation with some players.

And even if the PR person does "get it", and understands the issue(s), he"s got the uphill task of selling the dev team on a solution, or even acknowledging that thereisan issue.

Long story short, blaming a single PR person like Moorgard (or Absor, or Abashi, or Tweety, or...) for some things is simply making them a scapegoat.

There was usually a whole chain of failures before they made any erroneous posts, and oftenno wayfor them to know the data was bad beforehand, especially if they needed/wanted to respond in a timely matter (rather than taking more time and risking cries ofignoringthe issue).

And often, they wereright, but it simply wasn"t what some players wanted to hear.

As for nerfs/changes, keep in mind that they are just one voice in a crowd on the subject, and often adiscountedvoice.

So when a nerf is made, or somethingisn"tchanged, it"s a lose/lose for them. If it"s something they disagree with, they have to suck it up and tow the company line, pissing players off, and if theydoagree with a controversial change, they piss players off.

(btw, if a moderator has made it this far, what are the chances of getting my old "Kendrick" forum handle back? I forgot the password and the email address that I signed up with back in 2001/2002 is long dead.)

Great post, Kendrick.

I"m a software developer myself, not for games, but for business solutions. Still, everything said above rings true.

Developing, fine-tuning and maintaining huge apps like MMOs is a massive, massive exercise in coordination. You could have the most brilliant devs and designers on the planet, but it simply won"t work unless you get them all on the same page. That"s the ideal, but when the pressure"s on, deadlines to be met and such, overall project coordination suffers. Problems slip through, or more often, the effects ChangeA might have on Systems 1 through 15 might not be 100% thought out to completion.

That"s why good project managers are worth 10X their weight in gold (or plat, if you"re thinking EQ) =P

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Kendrick, well done. That was an outstanding read.

That, to me anyway, is why I come around forums like this and post. Sure there are 80%+ threads in here dedicated to "he sucks/she sucks/game sucks" posts, with a ton of F"Bombs sprinkled about. But when you get really dedicated players who are at least semi-mature, you get dialogue that ends up educating people on both sides of the fence.

Forums like these CAN be an aide, albeit limited, to developers and community people. When a thread is kept on point and the posters think before they post, stuff gets out there and people start to realize that there most certainly is more than one way to look at a problem/solution.

Good stuff.....

I quit eq2 and have recently been playing a lot of nwn/nwn2, and it occurred to me how amazing the effect a community of modders can have on a game. Now I know there"s a lot of practical limitations to implementing this into an mmo, but why has no one attempted this yet, and is this something anyone will consider?

Assuming what kendrick says is true, then why hire the die-hards? A good 50% or more will be willing to contribute for free and put in just as much effort as if you had hired them. It seems like an mmo company might benefit from starting a new division dedicated to "screening" or filtering for content coming right out of the community, be it lore/quests/dungeons/items/models etc. Hell I personally could have come up with and submitted better dialogue/lore for eq2 inbetween work shifts than the shit they flung at us half the time.

I know this would involve some kind of copyright issues and code leak worries (although theres already independent servers for games like l2 etc anyhow), and I know developing a really good toolset like they did for nwn2 will be hard from the ground-up, exponentially so with the complications of an mmo added in, but it seems community modding would be a natural solution to what is ultimately the biggest problem for any mmo, lack of content.

Blaming a single person for a game wide change would have to be considered ignorant in 99.9% of all situations. I would no more blame Moorgard for the change than I would Hartmans office chair.However, having reservations about a person because of something they supported, endorsed, and spoke out in favor of should simply be considered good observational ability.

I would have to characterize how I looked at Moorgard at the time as a missed opportunity. I don"t hate or dislike him in the slightest....but it made me sad. A huge opportunity was presented for the player base to help the design team with something they didn"t understand and ended up breaking. Moorgard was in a unique position where he COULD have facilitated that interaction via his relationship with the designers.

A very, very, VERY small amount of the player base has the opportunity to dialog/interact with the designers. The wheat to chaff ratio is enourmously high and grows more vocal and insistant as time goes on which leads to more and more disconnect between the players and the designers.

So when a player has the opportunity to engage in that interaction and become the medium between the two it can be an awesome thing. It was a missed opportunity and misplaced support.

Holy crap Kendrick, I thought you fell off the face of the earth.

Pasteton said:

I quit eq2 and have recently been playing a lot of nwn/nwn2, and it occurred to me how amazing the effect a community of modders can have on a game. Now I know there"s a lot of practical limitations to implementing this into an mmo, but why has no one attempted this yet, and is this something anyone will consider?

Assuming what kendrick says is true, then why hire the die-hards? A good 50% or more will be willing to contribute for free and put in just as much effort as if you had hired them. It seems like an mmo company might benefit from starting a new division dedicated to "screening" or filtering for content coming right out of the community, be it lore/quests/dungeons/items/models etc. Hell I personally could have come up with and submitted better dialogue/lore for eq2 inbetween work shifts than the shit they flung at us half the time.

I know this would involve some kind of copyright issues and code leak worries (although theres already independent servers for games like l2 etc anyhow), and I know developing a really good toolset like they did for nwn2 will be hard from the ground-up, exponentially so with the complications of an mmo added in, but it seems community modding would be a natural solution to what is ultimately the biggest problem for any mmo, lack of content.

Click to expand...

A quick look at this post and a quick response.

I can tell you for a fact that one of the MAJOR MAJOR reasons this happens less than either side would like it is the amount of manpower that would need to be dedicated to it. Once these games go live, for the most part, the dev teams go away and a skeleton live team is held over.

This is the bane of a large company, so many things to do in so little time. Once they get something out the door the better companies support it better than the bad ones, but when you see the ratio of customers to staff it"s staggering how few people are left to assist so many.

The other alternative is allowing modding and content creation by players through the game, which introduces a whole new set of CS and oversight nightmares.

Not to say it can"t be done, but there are major hurdles to it being done right.

I agree its certainly not something that can be implemented on the fly in an mmo that is already out, but if it"s tooled in from the ground up at the very roots of game creation it might be more feasible, which is why i broughtit up in this thread

Pasteton said:

I agree its certainly not something that can be implemented on the fly in an mmo that is already out, but if it"s tooled in from the ground up at the very roots of game creation it might be more feasible, which is why i broughtit up in this thread

Click to expand...

And I, and others hanging out in Maynard, would agree with you.

Speaking from a modder"s perspective and a mmo fan, a toolset would be amazing in its value and difficulty.

Pluses:
+ Unlimited content, the players won"t get bored waiting for each expansion allowing for quality over quantity in development from the company.
+ The dungeon master experience, nothing I"ve done in a game has rivaled the feedback from players of my mods. For those whom have enjoyed the role of dungeon master will appreciate this.

Minuses:
- Limited toolsets are not very fun, but necessary to keep the value of the main game and prevent mudflation. Creating scenarios with existing art assets is fun, if you have a good story, but many mods are creating new sword models or new environments. These likely would not be possible in MMO"s.
/*WOW had modding that allowed for displaying new models in the place of *previous ones. This was exploited by enlarging the flags in Warsong Gulch.
*This example is one reason why full modding has to be limited for integrity.
*/
-Even limiting the community to premade items, doesn"t necessitate the implementation of them. Meaning that someone could create the level one rabbit and dropping the best premade sword. This could have a work around of a complex formula system but would be a burden to constantly monitor.

The last option would be allow free reign on modding, allowing them to test their characters in custom scenarios but have them as instances which have no direct effect on the character. This would be the easiest to police from a developer standpoint but also is the most separated from the bunch.

In the past, and I may be wrong in my recollection, guides in Everquest could create GM events. This would be another approach, have a group of dungeon masters whom could manipulate world events. Limit them to non-world changing events and only permit them to give trinkets and titles.

A different approach:

Games in the past, most notably the Diablo franchise had random levels. This creates new scenarios for the player each time through while still being controlled by the developers. An example of this would be Doom 3"s limited re-playability. It is a straight shooter with the same scenarios each time. There is a mod which allows for random levels creating unique scenarios for the player, and this is something I haven"t seen touched in MMO"s yet.

Personally, I"m far less concerned with mistakes that were made in the past, then with evidence that the person has learned from that mistake, and shows that either it will be avoided in the future, or at least handled better.

Unfortunately, is far too risky for people to stand up and admit to mistakes since it usually results in them being vilified in various forms. It"s nice to see posts explaining any mistakes made, what was learned from them, and any ideas on how to deal with them in the future. Kendrick"s post is a good example of this.


ps, I don"t mean to imply that any people mentioned have made any mistakes that they need to admit to, just making a general comment.