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tikkus_foh

shitlord
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This isn"t a response to anyone in particular, just an idea.

I personally think that the best items in the game should utilize both crafting and raiding, as per Grave"s idea. Hell, I remember reading a post by Furor before WoW"s launch outlining a quest where you absolutely had to forge a certain item in the spine of a slain dragon. I"d really like to see more stuff like that.
 
Eonan said:
The mentoring system in EQ2 is in my opinion the best MMO feature to come to the industry with this "generation" of games. The only catch to it is, there needs to be a reason to "mentor" down and go through content that won"t provide you with gear upgrades (yes I know EQ2 gives you a slight reason to through AA XP). A mentor system would never work in a game like WoW where there is absolutely nothing to be gained (OMG ACHIEVMENTS!? ) from doing old content.
Fun?

Two things that come to mind, though, are helping a friend or guildmate through content but keeping it enjoyably challenging through mentoring down instead of PL"ing, and for the higher-level player going through content you didn"t get a chance to experience the first time (likely due to leveling out of it).

Leveling needs to be a bit slower than the current trend imo. Yes, I"m not a believer in instant gratification for the average player, and for those that couldn"t play online as often, a mentoring system would serve a purpose.
 

Zehnpai

Molten Core Raider
399
1,245
Leveling speed is irrelevant. What"s important is the amount of unique content for it to not feel stale. If you really want your players to do all your content, then just get rid of experience entirely and reward advancement based on completion of story events.

That"s ultimately what I"d do anyways. Most of your character upgrades would come from completing each zones main storyline(s) whith various sidequests that reward you with reptuation/items/money/whatever.

That way you get your new spells as a factor of slaying an evil (or good if that"s your thing) wizard and stealing his spellbooks as opposed to the more classic "kill 300 boars, buy new spell, repeat."
 

Greyform_foh

shitlord
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MrGraham said:
Sure, but by making it take crafting you reward a player for working on crafting. One of the things that was nice about EQ/EQ2 was that we had a person who was amazing at the market and tradeskilling and house building and they really helped out the guild, both in terms of progression with the tradeskills/money and with morale with the house shit. Fast forward to WoW and there"s no real equivalent role for her, so she quit pretty quickly. If you suck at raiding/pvp there"s no real way for you to contribute to your character or your guild. Part of this is a lack of slack within raids (taking an extra body to EQ raids was rarely an issue, regardless of how bad they are), but I like the idea of having real alternatives to slaying teh dragon (or column hugging!) when playing the game.
I see where you"re going. I think EQ had it right with Bane weapons. Where you could not do the quest without the right type of weapon.

LOTRO sort of had the idea where you needed certain drops off of specific mobs to complete some recipes. I think they reversed this later to make them more generic.

I believe they also added (I"m not sure I quit the game awhile ago) where you could only make some items from certain forges found in dungeons.
 
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From that Salvatore interview:

Salvatore: Why does this dark elf named Kizdean Gix keep chasing me and killing me? I don"t understand.
Man, I remember that, and good ol Ambassador Dvinn

I gotta say, I hope that we can have a new game some day with that sense of awe in wondering wtf was going on in the world
 

Genjiro

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
5,218
5,066
Eonan said:
The mentoring system in EQ2 is in my opinion the best MMO feature to come to the industry with this "generation" of games. The only catch to it is, there needs to be a reason to "mentor" down and go through content that won"t benefit you. Yes I know EQ2 gives you a slight reason to through AA XP. A mentor system would never work in a game like WoW where there is absolutely nothing to be gained (OMG ACHIEVMENTS!? ) from doing old content.
City of Heroes had the sidekick feature (mentor up)implemented before EQ2 even launched, and then added the ability to mentor down later on. Just sayin.

That game may not be perfect, but they have had more out-of-the-box thinking than pretty much everyone else put together imo. The mission architect system CoX recently added is the most important thing ever done with an MMO in recent years, and I"d be willing to wager is going to one day be the future of online gaming. These companies simply cant put in enough new content with the manpower they have to ever keep us from the giant shitbag of farming the same raid mobs for the thousandth time over due to their awesome-tastic year or more development cycles.

That"s the giant disconnect between pen and paper gaming in something like DnD and mmos, and once someone can bridge that gap with an interface that is usable by everday Joes (ie you dont need C++ certs to do it) -- like maybe some drop down menu screens that even have ways to add in scripting events, I think that will be the end of these shitty games and the beginning of a true online rp experience like you get in a pnp game. As for now, I guess we will be stuck with what there is, which quite franky sucks dick (WoW included). I"m guessing Copernicus will simply be regurgitated WoW in a new medium/setting with better art and writing perhaps, but then again I haven"t been overly optimistic of a good title when game after game in recent years has failed miserably.
 
I really hope that Capernicus somehow incorporates the ability to allow players to craft truly wonderous items.

I fully realize that with MMO"s it"s extremely hard to balance and that there"s a serious risk of an "epic assembly line", but I do feel that it can be achieved.

Maybe it could be limited by an extremely long (6 months to a year, or however long the expansion cycle is) account bound cooldown (to prevent alts from churning out the items). Or possibly require some significant sacrifice from the character that regenerates (very slowly) over time (or maybe not at all). Of course, this would be in addition to the ridiculous cost and/or rare material requirements of the crafting process.

But please, if you do something even remotely like the above, please get away from the thought process that rare components need to be consumed upon a crafting failure. It"s not fun, and that sort of penalty is completely unecessary to maintain the integrity of a crafting system.

A lot of players (myself included) would like to take part in forging something fantastic. Allowing us to have to opportunity to craft something powerful, unique (let us name it, have a hand in it"s statistical outcome, and maybe even its appearance), and beautiful, would be enough for me to buy your game, in itself.
 

Thengel_foh

shitlord
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Greyform said:
I see where you"re going. I think EQ had it right with Bane weapons. Where you could not do the quest without the right type of weapon.

LOTRO sort of had the idea where you needed certain drops off of specific mobs to complete some recipes. I think they reversed this later to make them more generic.

I believe they also added (I"m not sure I quit the game awhile ago) where you could only make some items from certain forges found in dungeons.
You just noted bane weapons from EQ and 200 trips to the dark forge in BRD as GOOD points??

Either idea may look good on paper and sound nifty in your head. Hell, they might even not be terrible ideas on the very small scale. As soon as they are awesome items though, or required to move entire raids, the idea gets shitty, and it gets shitty fast.

Any blacksmith in early WoW that had the honor of repping up thorium brotherhood and making 400 trips to BRD to equip entire guilds with dark iron gear will certainly tell you that the cool and special feeling didn"t last very long.

Any person that was raid leader or such, attempting to equip an entire guild with bane weapons will probably not point to them as a great idea for future designs.
 

Zehnpai

Molten Core Raider
399
1,245
Grabbit Allworth said:
I really hope that Capernicus
You basically just described player characters. Requires rare/expensive materials to make badass unique version of, can give it a name, takes months to perfect, is relatively unique.

Besides, do you intend to reward just the poopsockers? Or do you plan to make it relatively accessible to everyone and kinda defeat the purpose of "cool, unique!" in the first place. Why limit it to tradeskills which a significant portion of your player base will just not enjoy? Why not just make that a neat feature of character development kinda like whatchamacallits in phantasy star online? Perhaps every character has a familiar and you can train him, grow him like some kind of pokemon.


Thengel said:
You just noted bane weapons from EQ and 200 trips to the dark forge in BRD as GOOD points??
You should go check out the Mortal Online thread. Pretty much the poster child for the simcraft players out there who don"t realize how terrible these ideas will translate to gameplay. OMG IT"LL BE SO COOL WHEN 70% OF MY SCREEN IS BLACKED OUT BECAUSE I"M WEARING A HELMET!

Yeah, right.

Whenever you have an idea, you need to ask yourself two questions.

1) If applicable, will this be fun the 500th time I"m forced to do it? Will it at least be tolerable.

2) 250,000 to 10,000,000 people will be doing this. Is it still a good idea?
 

Cadrid_foh

shitlord
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James said:
The very fist time my cousin (Paladin) and I (Prot Warrior) did DM (with a few other people), we had the book drop from the last boss, and no one--even The Interweb--knew what it was. So he and I rolled on it, since it was Pal/War only, and only months later did we discover what the result was: one of the best tank 1handers in the game at the time.

Of course, he was a Retadin, whereas I was a Tank Warrior, so he didn"t want/need it anywhere near as much. It annoyed me that we basically wasted an epic item because we didn"t even have a clue as to what it was for. It took another 2-3 months to get him the sword, which he almost never used because a blue 2hander was so much better with his skillset.

So go ahead and implement these super-cool, unique, mysterious advancement opportunities. Just be aware that the folks whom discover it first will get the penultimate shaft if you don"t do it right, and that"s NOT fun.
 

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,533
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Cadrid said:
So go ahead and implement these super-cool, unique, mysterious advancement opportunities. Just be aware that the folks whom discover it first will get the penultimate shaft if you don"t do it right, and that"s NOT fun.
It"s BOE/BOP that"s the problem here - not the random nature of the drop. If the final blade had been tradeable there wouldn"t have been a problem.
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
2,161
786
tad10 said:
It"s BOE/BOP that"s the problem here - not the random nature of the drop. If the final blade had been tradeable there wouldn"t have been a problem.
And instead of having a ret pally accidently roll on it not knowing what it is, you"ll have a whole group intentionally rolling on it knowing exactly how many thousands of gold it"ll go for on the AH.
 

Ngruk_foh

shitlord
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BOE and BOP items should be so cool and awesome you"d create a character to use them. That"s an easily solvable issue.

BOE and BOP are answers to perceived problems in some cases, real ones in others. It really depends on your perspective of the "market" outside the game.
You should NEVER be able to buy your way ahead of players in a PVE game, unless your game is created with that philosophy in mind.
 

Miele_foh

shitlord
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Ngruk said:
BOE and BOP items should be so cool and awesome you"d create a character to use them. That"s an easily solvable issue.

BOE and BOP are answers to perceived problems in some cases, real ones in others. It really depends on your perspective of the "market" outside the game.
You should NEVER be able to buy your way ahead of players in a PVE game, unless your game is created with that philosophy in mind.
Just make bind to account items or better do a job system so I don"t have to roll a 2nd char to level a 2nd class, then you can make everything BoP and crafted stuff all BoE: problem solved.
 

Zehnpai

Molten Core Raider
399
1,245
Miele said:
Just make bind to account items or better do a job system so I don"t have to roll a 2nd char to level a 2nd class
Seconded. Job system (not sub-jobbing for all the people that will whine about it without having followed the conversation the 300 times we"ve had it) is pretty much a must. Rationalize it however you want to make it fit with the LoreLOL but it adds so much longevity and replayability to a game it isn"t even funny.

Anyways...

Bind to Guild is another idea that was toyed with, but hard to work in since guilds these days last about as long as my attention span when Dumar starts talking.

Another idea that I really liked was that BoE/BoP items become "unbinded" after a few weeks/months. Creates a solid economy based around twink items down the road and allows you to "share the wealth" so to speak with new members and the like once the prestige of owning an item has passed.
 

Ninjarr_foh

shitlord
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0
Its more about the caliber of the item that is BOE/BOP than whether or not everything is.

The real issue I (and others) have is when level-up gear is BOE/BOP--that is silly. Raid gear and epic quest rewards should either not be tradeable at all (except in the rarest of occasions) or be bound to the respective guild (when applicable); additionally they should come a lot less often than other gear (on an individual level).

Quest rewards, quest items (be careful of exp-cheating here, it also would be ideal to have quest items drop for players who do not have the quest, as well as give them a merchant sell-value; imo the whole quest system needs to be reworked), harvesting items, dungeon loot and all other non-endgame gear (with a VERY few exceptions) should be completely tradeable.
 

Froofy-D_foh

shitlord
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0
Yeah can we get over the BOE on everything? BOP/BOE should be limited to the best and hardest to obtain items and that is it. If you want incentive for items to leave the economy put in Disenchanting/Salvaging. Who cares if the level 10 crafting market is flooded with a certain item? Make all crafting skills able to modify existing items (thus always useful). Also make crafting not compete with drops for certain item slots (e.g. the best/only items for some slots is crafted).

If you want to curb gold farmers then by all means make everything BOE ... but be sure not to add any 5k+ gold mounts and expensive consumables/enchants. The only way to real way to keep gold farmers out is to make money worth nothing. But then why have money at all?
 

Ukerric_foh

shitlord
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0
Ninajrr said:
Raid gear and epic quest rewards should either not be tradeable at all (except in the rarest of occasions) or be bound to the respective guild (when applicable);
An interesting evolution in WoW is that they have added significant raid-level gear that is BOE. If you take a look at BOE epics, you will notice that every boss in nax 25 (save KT), every boss in Ulduar 10 (save Freya and Yogg... and presumably Algalon), every boss in Ulduar 25 (save Yogg and Algalon again) drops one piece of BOE epic gear.

I did a cursory check, and I can equip a caster in full epic-level gear - except for the wand slot - without setting foot in a single instance, be it dungeon or raid. Between crafted, or BOE raid drops, it"s completely possible to equip a fresh level 80 in epics, resulting in a character that"s probably significantly more powerful than one who hasn"t done anything beyond Nax 10.
 

Apostle_foh

shitlord
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0
I always thought that in a case like what was listed above, there should multiple quest paths for something that unique and cool. OK.. a ret paly looted the book, but due to the fact that a paly and war both have different possible builds, so too should the quest for the end item compensate for that fact.

In this case, there should have been like 4 different possible rewards, giving each class that was listed on the original book drop at least 2 different rewards to strive for. Then the person playing could at least make a choice that would benefit their char the most.