Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Zehn - Vhex said:

stuffs

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it"s a game. it"s meant to have unknown elements that you don"t know will happen (or in this case, drop). you don"t play monopoly and get to choose which card you want to pickup from among the stack. you pick an unknown one. because not knowing is what makes it fun.. it"s what makes it a game. every game in existence has this. what you want is stat analysis software. i bet you would love matlab. could jerk it all night to bigger %s.

Terrible analogies are terrible. Because when I play Monopoly and I land on boardwalk and pay 400 dollars, we don"t shuffle the deck and then randomly hand out a property.

When I land on chance I know I"m not going to draw a card that says "Hit your opponent in the face."

And Tad...do you think pvp in WoW would be more fun if the reward was random? I want you to do this. Earn the 30k honor. Then go up to the pvp vendor and do a /random 1 57. The number that comes back is the slot that you buy your item from. You may get rogue gloves. You may get a paladin libram. Who knows? EXCITING!

How about every other game with static rewards? Once I did my 14 achievements and unlocked the backburner with my Pyro in TF I was pretty happy. I was pretty fucking happy when I got my wizard epic in EQ. Would have been pretty awesome if when I turned everything in the dude said, "Sorry, here"s the enchanter epic which you can"t use. Haha, eat a dick!"

Anyways...

There"s a place for random loot. I"m not saying all loot in the game should be unrandomized. I enjoy getting random world blue drops. And you can even add random gimic items to bosses (White chocobo for example). You can add a casino, or a "random loot boss!" to dungeons if you really wanted to.

But it just breaks down at the endgame.

Zehn - Vhex said:

And Tad...do you think pvp in WoW would be more fun if the reward was random? I want you to do this. Earn the 30k honor. Then go up to the pvp vendor and do a /random 1 57. The number that comes back is the slot that you buy your item from. You may get rogue gloves. You may get a paladin libram. Who knows?.

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Heh. Well that"s partly an issue with BoP loot - which I despise for just this reason. I like your epic comment though -- I certainly don"t think all loot should be random. Quests should give you specific loot. We"ll have to agree to disagree though since I"m not designing any MMOS anytime ever - my opinion doesn"t really matter much in this regards.

Zehn - Vhex said:

why am i playing?

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why do you play the game? to wait in line? if you know you"re getting loot, if you know you"re the 2nd paladin tank, why are you even playing? you know you"re going to get it if you just wait. there"s nothing unknown about anything in the game if you can pick what loot drops.

now, you don"t know what will drop. you don"t know if all three items will be for you or none. the exciting part isn"t necessarily getting items; it"s not knowing what they"ll be and possibly getting them knowing this fact. do you understand this difference?

you can use any analogy you want if you don"t like that one. because any game will have this type of element in it, else there"s no reason to play.

tad10 said:

Heh. Well that"s partly an issue with BoP loot - which I despise for just this reason. I like your epic comment though -- I certainly don"t think all loot should be random. Quests should give you specific loot. We"ll have to agree to disagree though since I"m not designing any MMOS anytime ever - my opinion doesn"t really matter much in this regards.

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It"s mostly about finding a happy medium. The game itself should be challenging and fun enough that the reward is more of a key to unlock the next tier of content. Shitty analogies are shitty, but pulling a lever isn"t very fun. The only way to make it fun is that you have a 1 in a million chance to make it big.

By contrast, Poker is a fun game in and of itself. The reward just makes it all the better even though you have a fairly reasonable knowledge of what the reward of each hand will be.

There should be random elements in the game. Not tacky bullshit ones like Deathtouch but you get the idea. Really is no reason for the winnings to be randomized unless it"s the players themselves influencing it.

Of course someone will mention how most encounters in WoW are very much akin to pulling a lever these days anyways, but that"s more a fault of only having the "easy" tier of raiding in at release then anything.

Edit: I"m trying to avoid examples because you can find instances of both in analogies. In the Price is Right, they always knew what they were playing for and that made victory/defeat all the sweeter. Then again, they used "random loot" on Wheel of Fortune and you could always see the disappointment when some fat dude won a trip to Florida or some stupid shit instead of the 10,000 dollars that other people would fucking flip out like some kind of psychotic ninja when they won.

Zehn - Vhex said:

By contrast, Poker is a fun game in and of itself. The reward just makes it all the better even though you have a fairly reasonable knowledge of what the reward of each hand will be.

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have you ever played poker without money? it"s a yawnfest.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Grave...use your head. First off, you"re terrible at Math. Second, design around the design.

For simplicities sake, let"s take the last boss and give him 3 BiS items for each class. He drops 3 items. A raid of 25 people will not be done with the content for...dun dun da dun...25 weeks. And considering most guilds typically roll with at -least- 5 extra"s, and you"re looking at 30+ weeks.

Even with WoW"s limited hybrid system that means my paladin may be looking for 9 items. It"ll take just ~me~ 3 weeks to get all that I want.

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Alright, I misunderstood and thought you were also agreeing with earlier posters who wanted everyone to get something from each boss. As in, everyone chooses a piece of loot from the bosses loot table each kill, which is where I was pulling those numbers. This would obviously be terrible, but I see that"s not what you"re saying at all.

So, in the end what you"re proposing wouldn"t be bad, it just ends up being a matter of preference. Some people are going to like the rush of random loot, some not.

I think rather than flat out letting people pick from a list of loot (I just don"t like the feel of this for some reason) it"d be better to simply offer a few alternatives to obtaining them, as has been discussed previously. Sort of a middle of the road solution. Things could still be random, but you also have a 25%-50% chance to get some kind of special badge or tradeskill item which would eventually let you buy the item you were after or craft one similar. If these had a chance to drop from every boss it would be pretty reasonable to get what you were after in an acceptable amount of time.

I"m not a big fan of badge/point systems in lieu of an actual solid looting system. You can make them make more sense from a roleplay standpoint such as identifying/repairing a magic item and whatnot. But if you"re going to go that far, why shit it up at all?

I know that some people enjoy the random aspect, just like some people enjoy mana, right clicking on corpses, grinding the same 8 mobs day in and out, AA"s, whack-a-mole tradeskills, killing deer and rabbits for xp, managing inventory space, classes with no flexibility, fights that require class stacking and every other mechanic I"ve railed against over the years.

Just like I know that not all people who use twitter are narcissistic community managers for a shitty company headed by Raph Koster, not all black people steal bikes and Dumar isn"t always wron...isn"t always..isn"t...w.r.o.n.g. Sorry, hard to choke that one out.

But having to caveat that before every discussion would be boring!

Zehn - Vhex said:

I"m not a big fan of badge/point systems in lieu of an actual solid looting system. You can make them make more sense from a roleplay standpoint such as identifying/repairing a magic item and whatnot. But if you"re going to go that far, why shit it up at all?

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I just think it"s a nice compromise. I don"t mean only have badges or whatever instead of loot like people were saying earlier. Just something like a 50% chance for each boss to drop some kind of shard or something that could eventually be turned into the collector"s choice of loot. It answers those extreme cases where people literally never see an item drop, but in a way with no real consequences.

Selecting loot just seems to come along with several potential issues. Doing loot would take a lot longer unless it had been predetermined before the raid (which is kind of weird/boring in itself). There would be potential CS nightmares with tons of people reporting that the wrong item was selected or awarded. It could also cause added drama within guilds/pugs since it"d be up to the ML to choose which items they receive.

I dunno, it"s not that the suggestion is bad, it"s just that I don"t know if all that change is really necessary just to address a problem that only truly plagues a small minority who have very bad luck. Something simpler like the shards could fix that for you with no added hassle.

I like the idea of item molds (not nessecarily "plate bp", but "Chest Emblem" that the smiths/tailors make into the item for you, either NPC or PC)

For weapons, its a bit more complicated. My theory is weapons should rain from the sky from trash mobs. You shouldn"t be able to clear a goddamned dungeon without equipping your entire raid in said weapons.

But they should be weak shit. If DPS weapon progression is 25, 50, 75 for raid dungeons tier 1-3, the tier 3 trash should drop 30DPS weapons (for example)

These weapons should then be augmented with different raid boss drops. These drops would be in the form of "spike of Striking" "Cuttleboner of Slicing" that would add varying DPS ammounts, and certain abilities. Say the Stone of Flaming Rage would add a +hate proc and lesser DPS, the Magmastone would add a utility clicky +medium dps. the striking would add major DPS, but no proc., etc..

These would be semi-class limited (melee vs priest vs caster); mainly by what weapon they can go into. That way, the bosses still drop good things, and can even have pretty rare "3rd" item types, that are plain items. Say each boss drops 1 armor "badge" 1 weapon aug, and 50% of the time one item from its loot table. This could be any slot, any item, and would have perks, but you"d be serviceable in your standard suit; Shields would work under weapons. In fact, it"d be fun to have different types of shields. the warrior would want a bit protective shield. The dark knight, he"d want his shield to cause damage to those who hurt him. The paladin might make his shield proc a heal on a bash; But, they wouldn"t be limited to only picking their kind of shield. The warrior could have a heal-shield.

To add customization, you could also make trash drop armor augs that would go in boss-made armor.

Off-slot items (rings, neck, mask, etc.) would be filled in through random drops, quests, unique boss-loot and what have you.

This might make 1-group trash farming a little more common, but it"d also make the trash clears semi-bareable, especially if you could turn in those random augs, or the base-weapons for fun to the quest hub of the dungeon, or your home town, for dungeon specific perks.

To use Naxx for example; you might get rewarded with some supply of holy water; which would aid you in further tackling the undead hordes. Holy water could be a big damage shield for your tank, a powerful AE that makes a certain boss encounter real easy; or a big trash pull easy; Could sanctify the ground, removing some boss"s ability to make shitty ass things appear on the ground.


A hundred different ways than "pure badge bullshit" and "fuck this random goddmaned druid robe again!"

Your post makes me think less about raid loot and more about just how cool augs actually were in EQ. Much more interesting and fun than gems are in WoW. I"d like to see "em return.

While I too would like to see their return, we do have a habit of just figuring out how much dps it adds and then going from there. The only classes that are even remotely interesting to model in this regard are tanks (though modern EH calculations kinda fucked that up) and healers...and with healers it just depends on if you"re GCD, throughput or mana locked on a fight.

Even set bonuses are getting more boring. We used to have nifty shit like netherwind (albeit arguably pointless due to GCD constraints way back when) and now we end up with "Your holy light does 5% more healing!"

Glyphs were supposed to be that too. Now most of them are just "Your whatever does 10% more damage!"

"But it just breaks down at the endgame."

Funny you should say that. I agree. Lots of things break down at the endgame. Class balance typically falls apart. Character progression comes to a screeching halt (especially solo progression), or at least slows dramatically. Basic gameplay often undergoes fundamental changes--to the worse, for lots of folks. All that results in discussions such as this one.

I"d venture to suggest that the problem lies with the traditional form of "endgame". You know where I"m going with this. Raiding, at least as it traditionally exists, brings out the worst in these types of games. This recent discussion is essentially about treating symptoms. The way I see it, fixing thecausemakes for a better approach. Maybe the cause can"t be fixed. Maybe it"s time for the genre to move beyond the traditional form of "endgame." Will 38 Studios" project be the game which finally makes that step? My instinct tells me "no", although I"d be happy to be proven wrong in this case!

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On a different, though not wholly unrelated, line of discussion:

In the past I"ve seen a few posters who want to eliminate the healing role and replace it with something else. Good idea--but directed in the wrong place. Instead, move beyond the concept of "DPS" as a class role. In a class-based online RPG, differentiate classes by means *other* than how overall damage they do (specific *types* of damage, such as area-effect, can still of course see specialized classes). Yes, this requires content designed to support whatever other jobs a game utilizes. I can"t--won"t--believe that a majority of the people subscribing to these games are truly satisfied with doing nothing more than keeping a damage skill priority list running while not standing in the fire. Come on, that"s nothing but a contrived, whack-a-mole form of autoattack. Somehow it"s fun now because you have to push a key every 1.5 seconds just to maintain it? I think not.


Danth

i have no problem with raiding. in fact, it was my favorite part of playing EQ and WoW. however, i do hate the fact that in every game i"ve played there are certain classes that are "needed" in order to raid. i would like to see that change and give guilds more flexibility in raiding so that you don"t have to wait all night hoping that so and so logs in because you don"t have enough healers to do a raid. i also think that right around 25 ppl should be the max for a raid. less people usually equals less headache.

On a different, though not wholly unrelated, line of discussion:

In the past I"ve seen a few posters who want to eliminate the healing role and replace it with something else. Good idea--but directed in the wrong place. Instead, move beyond the concept of "DPS" as a class role. In a class-based online RPG, differentiate classes by means *other* than how overall damage they do (specific *types* of damage, such as area-effect, can still of course see specialized classes). Yes, this requires content designed to support whatever other jobs a game utilizes. I can"t--won"t--believe that a majority of the people subscribing to these games are truly satisfied with doing nothing more than keeping a damage skill priority list running while not standing in the fire. Come on, that"s nothing but a contrived, whack-a-mole form of autoattack. Somehow it"s fun now because you have to push a key every 1.5 seconds just to maintain it? I think not.


Danth

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I think we"re going to eventually see a shift from the current tank/heal/dps trinity to a tank/heal/debuff&CC trinity, with all of them doing (theoretically) equal-ish damage. The current system is just too flawed, and I think we"ve already taken the first steps with true hybrid healers (blood mage in vanguard, their various spinoff"s in WAR with the Disciple/Warrior Priest, etc), and maybe to a lesser extent the implementation of DK"s in WoW, who are built around being able to DPS and tank with the same specs. Also see WoW gradually putting more and more emphasis on buff and debuff setups.

If this were to happen, I would hope it would lead to the creation of more dynamic PvE encounters that would require the (hopefully expanded) extra CC and debuffing. This genre desperately needs some innovation in the way pve content works. I"m so sick of tank and spank and dodge the void zones and loot.

I think in general, the concept of a pure support class just brings too many issues with it that just cannot be designed around. I"ll be very surprised if the next Blizzard MMO (assuming it conforms to the EQ model) includes the option to be a pure healer at all

I dunno if we"ll see Debuff/CC as a Major Role any time in the future. The majority of the "rank and file" seem to loathe it. It takes a level of thought above "Charge!" Remember how much people bitched about TBC Heroics at first? And see the new WotLK group dungeons?

I dunno, I personally really enjoy set-ups where CC is important, but it seems the % of people who do is dwindling.

Kuro said:

I dunno if we"ll see Debuff/CC as a Major Role any time in the future. The majority of the "rank and file" seem to loathe it. It takes a level of thought above "Charge!" Remember how much people bitched about TBC Heroics at first? And see the new WotLK group dungeons?

I dunno, I personally really enjoy set-ups where CC is important, but it seems the % of people who do is dwindling.

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Blizzard spent 4 years building the most popular MMO of all time, then the next 4 years turning it into Diablo 2.

Kuro said:

I dunno if we"ll see Debuff/CC as a Major Role any time in the future. The majority of the "rank and file" seem to loathe it. It takes a level of thought above "Charge!" Remember how much people bitched about TBC Heroics at first? And see the new WotLK group dungeons?

I dunno, I personally really enjoy set-ups where CC is important, but it seems the % of people who do is dwindling.

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I think the reason a CC/debuff focus class is a bad idea (the reasons, I should say) have been hashed out indefinitely. I"m sorry for all of you people who don"t get to relive your EQ Enchanter power trip fantasies all over again, but it was a very smart decision on Blizzard"s part to move away from that.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

I think the reason a CC/debuff focus class is a bad idea (the reasons, I should say) have been hashed out indefinitely. I"m sorry for all of you people who don"t get to relive your EQ Enchanter power trip fantasies all over again, but it was a very smart decision on Blizzard"s part to move away from that.

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I wouldn"t say it"s been hashed out indefinately at all. In fact I haven"t, in memory, ever seen such a discussion on this board. But sure just make some sweeping statement about an old game instead of actually putting a point forward.

Players merely need to be trained back into it. WoW has trained players to be reckless, there is no reason another game cannot train them to be more cautious.

It is funny though, going from WoW to a more dangerous MMO and playing it similarly for the first few weeks. When I tried out Vanguard I cannot tell you the number of times I tried to hall ass through a camp rather than walk around it only to find myself dead and on a CR. The thing is, Vanguard forced players to jump into that playstyle immediately, there was no retraining, they assumed the players would be able to adapt immediately--I think this was a huge fault of theirs and many other modern MMOs that try to differentiate themselves difficulty-wise from WoW.

If you want to keep your players, if you want skilled players, if you want players to enjoy themselves: train them how to playyour game.