Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Froofy-D said:

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?

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This might be a controversial statement to make, but I don"t think you should ever design something with the intent of curbing gold farmers unless there"s no way it would affect a normal player. In fact, I might go so far as to say if gold farming is rampant then your game is probably pretty damn popular. As long as they aren"t ruining things for your normal players it"s not really a big deal. Sure, you have to make a public display of banning a lot of them, but I don"t see a reason to devalue gold because of them.

For every one vocal person that complains about gold farming, a thousand more are buying gold and enjoying your game more/continuing to subscribe because they"re having more fun by not being made to farm it or earn it themselves. Even if us hardcore guys don"t like it, that"s just how it is.

The big problem with gold farmers these days is that they establish themselves very quickly in new games. They control the economy and make it very hard for the folks who don"t buy items/in game cash.


I"d suggest it would be worthwhile considering having no auction house facility in new MMOs at launch.

Froofy-D said:

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?

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Nothing binding on pickup and gold not worth anything really stopped farming in Diablo2 didn"t it.
There"s no difference between farming gold, and farming items.

Gold farming as an issue is WAY overstated. why does anyone care if someone else is buying loot/gold/progression? It only matters if somehow their doing so interferes with your own play experiances.
Are the farmers overwhelming and dominating spawn locations and npcs? Thats a problem.
Are the buyers gaining unfair advantages over those who do not purchase items/gear/gold?
Thats a problem.

Zehn - Vhex said:

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."

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This. In my private armchair dev. moments I"ve had similar notions for advancement. And from a developer standpoint it seems like it would offer much greater control over the relative power of players when they experience given content. I could see some people object to a lack of freedom though. Advancement purchased with xp and gold as currency lets people get there different ways. Some people would rather kill 300 boars to get the xp/gold to level/buy skills rather than have to go through "The Catacombs of Terror" to kill "Malthazar the Wicked" just so they can learn Ice Bolt. Especially after the nth time. I"m not one of those people though.

Caliane said:

It only matters if somehow their doing so interferes with your own play experiances.

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Bingo.

I haven"t seen a gold farmer/botter in over 3 years and I haven"t gotten a tell from a spammer in over a year. I can pretty easily afford everything I want to buy on the AH due to relatively low inflation.

I know botters/farmers/spammers are out there, but I don"t hear shit from them so I could care less. Whatever Blizzard is doing is at least keeping me happy in this regard.

GuyJantica said:

This. In my private armchair dev. moments I"ve had similar notions for advancement. And from a developer standpoint it seems like it would offer much greater control over the relative power of players when they experience given content. I could see some people object to a lack of freedom though. Advancement purchased with xp and gold as currency lets people get there different ways. Some people would rather kill 300 boars to get the xp/gold to level/buy skills rather than have to go through "The Catacombs of Terror" to kill "Malthazar the Wicked" just so they can learn Ice Bolt. Especially after the nth time. I"m not one of those people though.

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Character development in the Zehn system can be supposedly be tied to solo quest lines or group quest lines, if you do a mix of both you"ll have soloers complaining, if you don"t, people will complain that there is no need to group, that"s why the 600 boar grind has always been left in as an option.

In today"s market you cannot say "hey, you know what? fuck soloers/groupers!", but you have to satisfy a playerbase as large as possible, because making these games costs a ton of money and you want a solid base to give you a predictable income after the first few months.

So all soloable when it"s about getting spells/skills etc? Why not scale content for the heck of it instead?

If one day, some group of devs will make content that scales in difficulty according to the number of players involved, you wouldn"t be forced to have 5 players groups or 25 players raid, you could have any number of players doing any kind of content: your guild has 8 players? good, here"s an instance scaled for 8. You have an amazing 50 players force always online? Get your 50 players raid.

You need only an upper cap (you don"t want 300 players crashing a zone or lagging to death) and have to set some triggers, crap like: for every 1 player after the first five, add X mobs to the brawl, enhance AE damage by Y and add Z skill to the villains. Scale hp, damage and so on accordingly: complex? Yup, but it would be cool, wouldn"t it?

Miele said:

Character development in the Zehn system can be supposedly be tied to solo quest lines or group quest lines, if you do a mix of both you"ll have soloers complaining, if you don"t, people will complain that there is no need to group, that"s why the 600 boar grind has always been left in as an option.

In today"s market you cannot say "hey, you know what? fuck soloers/groupers!", but you have to satisfy a playerbase as large as possible, because making these games costs a ton of money and you want a solid base to give you a predictable income after the first few months.

So all soloable when it"s about getting spells/skills etc? Why not scale content for the heck of it instead?

If one day, some group of devs will make content that scales in difficulty according to the number of players involved, you wouldn"t be forced to have 5 players groups or 25 players raid, you could have any number of players doing any kind of content: your guild has 8 players? good, here"s an instance scaled for 8. You have an amazing 50 players force always online? Get your 50 players raid.

You need only an upper cap (you don"t want 300 players crashing a zone or lagging to death) and have to set some triggers, crap like: for every 1 player after the first five, add X mobs to the brawl, enhance AE damage by Y and add Z skill to the villains. Scale hp, damage and so on accordingly: complex? Yup, but it would be cool, wouldn"t it?

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But then you are scaling encounter difficulty on number of players exclusively. There is nothing special about a group of 6 players doing a dungeon built for 10, etc etc. I always enjoyed trying to take down tough mobs with as few people as possible (didn"t have to spread the wealth as much).

Mr Element said:

But then you are scaling encounter difficulty on number of players exclusively. There is nothing special about a group of 6 players doing a dungeon built for 10, etc etc. I always enjoyed trying to take down tough mobs with as few people as possible (didn"t have to spread the wealth as much).

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Yep, not to mention it"d be an itemization nightmare unless you had scaling items too.

Loot is already boring enough in WoW with the 10/25 man versions, this would just make it worse. Pass.

Advancement doesn"t have to come entirely from gear upgrades. If the quests and the lines they were involved with also bestowed statistic increases as well, it would give the player tangible power without requiring a leveling method. To give classes different perspectives so that playing through content twice wasn"t that exact same game, make quests have multiple paths from step to step that enabled different statistic/gear upgrades with different goal requirements to achieve them. While the "warrior" might be sent to slay the leader of a band of gnolls by the sheriff to get a +1 strength increase as well as progressing the storyline to helping the mayor fight a dragon, a cleric might be sent to cleanse some undead from a local graveyard for a +1 wisdom increase before the priest sends him on to the mayor for the same dragon fight. The dragon fight could have multiple pieces of equipment (or the tooth crafter thing, whichever) so that both the cleric type character and the warrior character would get something useful from the fight.

And it doesn"t have to be hardcoded. Yeah if you want to play the same class you might have similar quests, but who says that your cleric has to be a wisdom based healing machine instead of a strong ass smiter of evil? (ala paladin style) The quests would have the reward presented in the text, but you could shop around till you found the increase that you wanted and go with it. Finding that your all wisdom cleric is having issues carrying around his holy platemail armor made of heavy metals? Take on a quest that bumps up your strength to make it easier. Growth you can control but at the same time is meaningful without having the experience bar involved.

What does advancement methods have to do with scaling dungeons to group size? What few quests you have in dungeons you can eventually outgear/outlevel and go back and trounce through anyways and when you finally do hit the end game "level cap" of sorts and all there is left to do in terms of PvE encounters is dungeon running anyways....in short I"m not really seeing a problem here.

Itemization and quest issues aside, problems arise quickly with scaling dungeons to group size. It works in CoH because all the classes are very samey and it"s basically just "throw more mobs they could solo anyways at them, making AE ridiculously powerful." In a game following more along WoW"s class/encounter balance, it would take a little more work then "Same shit, hits harder, has more HP, done!" Heroics in WoW assume the same group size, just better gear so there"s no real dynamic change. What would you do to make them harder if you could suddenly bring 8 people instead? Just add another mob to each pack, make the last boss have 33% more hp and call it a day?

To use an example what"s the breaking point between Kel"Thuzad casting Mind Control and him not? The difference between 10 and 25 man encounters is large enough that they can make several assumptions, but if you try to scale it per person...maybe at 13 he can cast but it"s interuptable. At 16 he casts but it only lasts half duration.

So let"s scale that back and think dungeon encounter level. Do you give everyone a spell interrupt on a 6 second cooldown or do you only have mobs cast spells that need to be disrupted once you hit a group size of say...4 people when you can be relatively certain someone can interrupt.

Do you really want to commit yourself to having to do that for every dungeon/encounter you design? Personally, in Zehn the mmo every dungeon would be tuned around either 2 player or 4 player mode. I"ve already posted about that at length in this thread so I"ll stop there. Also it"s hard to type and eat eggnoodle at the same time for some reason.

Yeah an algorithm to automatically scale all encounters to be equally difficult with 5, 10, or 20 players would be impossible. If someone does invent such a thing it would be pretty damn impressive.

Also, for the sake of discussion, if you did the "must complete Encounter X to Gain level Y" thing, would all of those encounters be solo? If not, would the entire game be a system of Zone Flags ("must complete Encounter X to enter Zone Y"). I think we all know the popular opinion on zone flags...

Froofy-D said:

Yeah an algorithm to automatically scale all encounters to be equally difficult with 5, 10, or 20 players would be impossible. If someone does invent such a thing it would be pretty damn impressive.

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Depends on the complexity of the encounters but it honestly wouldn"t be at all impossible. That"s silly to assume.

The idea is that they"d be relatively non-linear and you"d probably avoid any crucial new abilities being the result of a group quest, just upgrades to old abilities and stat increases. Again, this works better when the standard group size for non end-game content is 2. Makes forming a group much simpler since pretty much everyone has at least one friend they"re playing with, deveopers can afford to make longer dungeons as you"ll have a lower chance of schedule conflicts, etc...etc...

Zone flags aren"t a terrible idea, they"ve just never been done properly. Plus WoW time releases their dungeons now so there"s really no point anymore. If you were to release several tiers of raiding at the same time it would be something I"d consider revisiting and making non-retarded though.

The biggest complaint about flags is the need to backflag and WoW"s fucked up 5->10->25 flagging progression of TBC. The Sapphiron -> Malygos flagging progression is pretty much how it should be done. All you really need is one person with the key and you"re good to go.

tikkus said:

Depends on the complexity of the encounters but it honestly wouldn"t be at all impossible. That"s silly to assume.

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How so? Encounter dynamics change drastically as you add more people. Again, see previous examples. You can"t assume that you"re going to have all player abilities with a 2~5 man encounter so you have to make it relatively generic. Once you scale up to 20 man encounters you can start assuming all abilities will be represented so you can start creating specific counters.

It would be pretty much impossible to do in WoW with the way things are right now. How do you write an algorithm that works on every Ulduar boss so that it scales from 5 to 25 man encounters? What"s the breaking point between requiring 1 tank vs. 2 tanks on a fight and do the mobs just hit harder or do they also have more HP now as well despite the non-addition of a dpser.

If you do it boss by boss, then you might as well fine tune it for every possible group size, in which case you"ve just extended the amount of time it takes you to design and deliver content by decades.

The argument can stand its ground if you abandon or at least rework some assumptions:

1) more players = better loot
Since it"s pretty much a proven fact that every 25 players raid in WoW has at least 5 terribads players on average that are being pulled through content, having the possibility to run the place in 20 would be a blessing to some guilds.
On the other hand 20 is still a decently large number, but if you scale it down further, it may become harder to design balanced content and offer the same loot quality. Also devs want to promote interaction between players, that"s why raid content shouldn"t scale down to solo content.

2) Class requirements and class stacking is bad
What if a game with a properly implemented job system allows players to switch roles and class with a click (let"s say out of combat)? You need one extra shaman for Y ability? Player_X will switch to shaman. Problem solved, raid can go on.

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Maybe scaling content exactly for the number of players is too difficult, but scaling it by the number of groups partecipating may be not. 1 group, 2 groups and so on up to a sort of cap, let"s say 25, but it could be larger.
It"s true that you need barriers and stuff, but it"s also true that it may not be that necessary to obsess over a specific number.

There used to be some sort of bragging going on when guilds killed stuff with less players than the maximum allowed numbers, I"d try to bring that back, offer maybe some sort of achievement if you complete the zone with 4 groups only instead of 5 and so on.

In the end the devs goal should be to offer challenging content that every player has a chance to experience regardless of how many friends he plays with (but not guaranteed to beat), not to cockblock those who prefer smaller guilds or can"t poopsock their way to ultra hard mode. You can add different rewards than loot with 7% extra stats, it"s been done today to a point, it can certainly be improved.

If my guild has 12 players and it happens too often that we"re all online, having to sit out 2 of them is a bad thing: let us cheese the 2 group version or let"s us try a very challenging 3 group version with 3 less players (assuming groups of 5), give us a nice mount as a reward if we beat the 3 groups version or give us 1 less drop per boss if we cheese the 2 groups one.

Ten years ago something like phasing zones, smart loot drops, dual specs and so on were not in any game, at best they were in the imagination of the players. Scaling content may not exist yet outside from 25 and 10 men raids in WoW, but it can be achieved and should be something to at least consider.

Of course my vision is biased by the fact I don"t like large guilds, but prefer a small group, your mileage may vary.

Miele said:

Since it"s pretty much a proven fact that every 25 players raid in WoW has at least 5 terribads players on average that are being pulled through content, having the possibility to run the place in 20 would be a blessing to some guilds.

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This is so retarded it hurts. Someone on another board put it far more eloquently than I ever could, so I"ll just quote him:

Maledict said:

The dumb FoH discussion already has folks saying that cutting the big raid size down to 20 would be good, because it would allow them to cut the fat in their 25 player raid. These are the same idiots who said the same when going from EQ to WoW (54 to 40), and then in TBC when we went from 40 to 25. Generally, if you"re in the position to "cut the fat" and can identify it that easily, you"ll always be wanting to cut the fat because the problem isn"t with your players, it"s with how you build your guild.

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Tweaking loot table probabilities based on group size, casualties and time (and any other factor you can think of that is skill-based) is a nice way of changing the focus of killing bosses from zerg to strategy.

It also helps to defeat websites like wowhead which give precise drop chances of awesome items.

This is not quite the same as the Bear Mount drops which are a more discrete time-based challenge, though that idea can be included as well in some cases. Each factor independently effects the loot tables, and cumulatively can add up to impressive differences.

eg: boss loot table, can drop 1 item

Slow, Full Group, Lots of Deaths:
75% decent item
12.5% pretty good item
12.5% awesome item
0% badass item

Fast, Missing a few Players, Few Deaths:
25% decent item
25% pretty good item
25% awesome item
25% badass item

Fucking Fast, Missing a LOT of players, No Deaths:
0% decent item
12.5% pretty good item
37.5% awesome item
50% badass item

That is an extremely exaggerated example, but it helps to illustrate the basic idea. It is "like" adding a scalability to content except the increased difficulty is put entirely on the players beating the odds (which are a lot more fun, no?). Other ideas come out of this as well, such as increasing the number of drops a boss has when it is absolutely demolished (helps to outfit guilds who have dungeons on "farm" a lot faster).

Im sorry, but doing something like that is just dumb. Just because it takes group A a long time to finish a dungeon and they die a lot does not mean they should not have just as much chance at an item as another group. If they can finish the content they should get the same % chance. Group B"s increased chance of your Badass item comes from the fact that they can do that same encounter 3 times to the first groups 1.


You want it to be harder? Make a new instance/encounter that is harder.

Apostle said:

Group B"s increased chance of your Badass item comes from the fact that they can do that same encounter 3 times to the first groups 1.

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This is only true if you remove dungeon lock-outs, which you cannot do without shooting yourself in the foot.

Why should a group that stumbles through an encounter get the same reward as a group that blows it to pieces? The reward for doing the encounter "poorly" will still be worthwhile to that group of players, its not like I am suggesting they get some complete piece of crap item for barely succeeding. The bottom line is that if you want players to play the game well, you need to reward them for it. Make them strive for it.

So what you"re saying is bosses need a "hard mode" version that will award extra loot, achievements, and titles, generally setting them apart from the rest of the scrubs on the server? Sounds familiar...