Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Grave said:

WoW is just an absolute phenomenon. I don"t think you can relate subscription rates to design choices at this point. I"m pretty sure they could do anything they wanted, terrible design or great design, and the subs will just keep rising. It"s unlike anything else at this point. It"s grown to the point that it can"t help but keep snowballing.

Click to expand...

Definitely. It doesn"t matter how many fuckups these devs do, WoW figures will always be impressively high. If you see the current incarnation of WoW and compare it to vanilla and then tbc, you"ll immediately notice the differences, many say the game was better before, many state the opposite and so on, but most of these people keep paying and playing.

Sci-fi: I don"t find the setting particularly interesting for the reasons Pyros listed and because at the bottom, I"m a huge D&D fan, a game I started playing over 20 years ago and still play as of today. I loved half-life and other sci-fi games, but they are not MMO material for me.

ToeMissile said:

16% of 13M*$15/mon is a pretty big chunk of change.

Click to expand...

Oh yeah, I don"t deny that, I"m just saying I don"t think there"s any reason to believe that a larger percentage of players are women now than in 2005.

Ngruk said:

Put another way, around 1.8mm women play wow, if that number has NOT grown, which it has based on current data, but even if it hasn"t, it"s 1.8mm WoW players being female.

To put that in perspective that"s 6x the population of EVE online, and WAR, and a few other NA MMO"s.

1.8mm gamers would be far and away the 2nd largest NA subscription based MM).

Ya, it"s a pretty important segment.

Click to expand...

When you throw around the numbers like that everyone gets giddy. Those 1.8 million may all be female but I am sure they do not all play WOW for the same reason. Thinking of men and women as two segments that you both need to attract is probably not the right way to look at it.

Not saying that you look at it this simple, it is just that working with those big WoW-numbers can really pull things out of proportion.

Here"s another "segment": male, hardcore(6-boxing and thrown 1000"s of bucks into these games), hating PvP, 95% explorer, solo-player, never reaches max level, plays 8 hours a week, browses game-forums 24 hours a week.

I hope your game appeals to that segment.

Azrayne said:

Oh yeah, I don"t deny that, I"m just saying I don"t think there"s any reason to believe that a larger percentage of players are women now than in 2005.

Click to expand...

Before 2005 the entire MMORPG was far more male dominated as was computer game playing in general. There are alot more women getting into computer gaming as a whole nowadays more then ever before. D&D was a male geek phenomena and the early MMORPG"s simply got those players, EQ was mostly a male player game with way less then 16% female players and the initial players of WOW were basically former EQ players who moved over. In 2005 women were just starting to find out about the game, then the word of mouth of the game began to spread as a girlfriend tells her other girlfriends about it.

I think there is strong reasoning to think that in a male dominated gener of games when the things finally started to change and women started to play it there is a very strong likelyhood that the percentage of women is going to increase over time as the game becomes more popular and accepted among their gender.

I would be willing to bet 500 gold on it in fact that the percentage of women who play WOW now is higher then it was in 2005.

About 38 percent of video game players and 42 percent of online game players are female.About seventy percent of casual gamers are women. Estimates vary, but it is clear that women have become a major subgroup in gaming.

Source:Wellesley Centers for Women - Gamer Girls Rising

Appealing to women isn"t just useful for the number of female subs alone. You"ve got to factor in the huge number of people who play these games for the social element. So it stands to reason that having a healthy female population will help you retain a greater number of social/casual male players.

Any way you look at it women make up a big chunk of wow players, 16% is 1 in 6, and is alot more players than any other mmo. My 57 year old mom plays, and alot of players in my guild and on my friends list are women. Most of them aren"t hardcore raiders, but are hardcore in terms of time played. For my mom the social aspect is what draws her to play, and from my experience thats what draws most women.
Min/maxing, hardcore raiding and pvp doesn"t appeal to most females I"ve played with, so a game like War probably wouldn"t appeal as much.

Bah 2 responses while i posted saying the same thing. Oh well.

Miele said:

Definitely. It doesn"t matter how many fuckups these devs do, WoW figures will always be impressively high. If you see the current incarnation of WoW and compare it to vanilla and then tbc, you"ll immediately notice the differences, many say the game was better before, many state the opposite and so on, but most of these people keep paying and playing.

Sci-fi: I don"t find the setting particularly interesting for the reasons Pyros listed and because at the bottom, I"m a huge D&D fan, a game I started playing over 20 years ago and still play as of today. I loved half-life and other sci-fi games, but they are not MMO material for me.

Click to expand...

WoW managed to do, by plan-design or sheer luck what FF7 did to gain its massive popularity-- it took something (RPG"s ff7 and MMO"s wow) that is not 100% socialy acceptable and cool (closet D&D players, Closet EQ players) and "hip/mainstream" and make it socialy acceptable and cool- that alone did it...and nothing can be the "first" to do it again- that is why I belive there is such a fixed rate to the game- just as there is a fixed attachment to FF7 as well as 8- 8 is just following up on 7 and due to the fact that its not a MMO that can keep the audiance on the same game - its a move to- FF8 sucked it was one of the worst FF games up there with 5, but it has such an attach rate because it followed on the fresh heels and openness of 7. WoW got it and is keeping it within itself.

/randomrant off

Good god this MMO is SUCH a sausage fest!

While a lot of players will say that they like a greater variety of classes, it"s rarely ever a decision maker in terms of whether or not your playerbase will continue playing. From a design standpoint, the number of classes Everquest had was actually a flaw in the design. As the game progressed, people wanted their class to be unique and it was extremely hard to do with that many classes, many of which were performing similar roles. Beyond that, it also creates problems with balancing content and creates quite a bit more work regarding itemization and that has to be done each expansion. If you actually think it through from a design standpoint, it makes far more sense to limit the number of classes.

If you keep the classes limited, there is far more room for advancement and diversity. It"s better to start with a limited number of classes making sure every class plays a unique role, and add classes with expansions if you want to, then to start with too many classes that creates issues for the remainder of the game.

Blizzard picked up on this, and it"s why they used as few classes as they did. You have to think about the impact of that many classes beyond "well I liked it when I played EQ". You also can"t forget shit like the Ranger class being shifted from melee to ranged in Luclin in order to help differentiate them from the other melee dps classes which pissed a lot of Rangers off. The Bard vs Monk arguments regarding the "pulling" class etc. Things were not peachy.

You also have to think about itemization, and introducing new abilities for all of the classes in future expansions as well. Just because you can fit abilities into 16 different classes at launch, doesn"t mean you can continue doing so for several expansions without crossing over into other classes territory. It opens up a giant can of worms because eventually people want their classes to have their own unique niche. The class balance threads during Everquest were pretty intense and there is no reason to go through it if you don"t have to.

The advantages of using a limited number of classes far outweigh the disadvantages, especially when you consider that people will still play your game regardless. Very few people would leave a quality game simply because they only had 8 classes instead of 16 or 20.

The main thing that separates Blizzard from the rest of the industry right now is that they seem to be the only company that understands why things are successful. Everquest was successful DESPITE having too many classes yet people who don"t think about game design properly simply point to how Everquest did it, and think it"s an advantage. Blizzard is one of the few companies that was able to understand the flaws in the game and improve upon them. They can tell the difference between something done right and wrong.

Most MMORPG"s are coming out with huge design flaws at the basic level stacking the odds heavily against them. Just look at Warhammer....

1) Too many classes
2) Used 2 factions in open PVP which makes population very important. If you use a free-for-all or 3 teams the population balances itself out.
3) Used different classes on each team which introduces huge issues regarding class balance that they could have avoided.

Even before you get into the game itself, those 3 decisions stacked the odds heavily against them. With too many classes, they introduced tons of abilities, many of which were a little too powerful. With different classes on each team, populations were shifting based on perceived power of the classes and due to the 2 team concept, that meant a lot of servers had population imbalances ruining the pvp.

That"s before getting to the meat of the game. Now the game could"ve been successful despite all of that, but those decisions heavily stack the odds against you by introducing potential problems that simply could"ve been avoided. Nobody would purposefully stack the odds against themselves, so the more logical explanation is that the developers who made those decisions did not understand the ramifications behind them when they created the game. That"s the difference between a lot of these companies and Blizzard.

WoW deserved to be successful because they made the right decisions, but there has been very little quality competition within the industry as well.

I really liked TBC a lot more than WotLK from a class design perspective. Being a certain spec felt a lot more like a sub-class than a subtle variation from 8 other people in a raid. Add in dual specs + epics falling from the sky and everyone is everything now. Customization and unique roles fell to the wayside right on the cusp of the very mechanics that could have enabled them to remain while not causing issues in progressive raiding.

But I hope the next generation... ok the next MMO which doesn"t suck complete ass has classes and customization that takes it to the next level. I know balance becomes a nightmare with every option you add, but I think there are plenty of superficial visual options and minor play style customization which can be added without causing major balance concerns.

One of the early design decisions was just that. Pushing the amount of classes to a point where they could ALL be intimately developed and provide a truly unique and different experience, enough so that you"d want to try other classes due to playing with them and thinking they are cool.

It"s why I tried and max leveled a warrior and shaman in WoW.

EQ2 didn"t do it for me. I leveled my Shaman, dabbled in other classes but had no desire to put in the large "volume" of work needed to level another tune.

The first real decisions in classes was the UO approach or the EQ/WoW style. RA"s world SCREAMED for a variety of very cool experiences spread out over different classes.

Ngruk said:

RA"s world SCREAMED for a variety of very cool experiences spread out over different classes.

Click to expand...

Holla @ ya.

P.S. Get fucked, Zehn!

well it seems we know Copernicus will have classes and levels (eq/wow) and not skills (UO) for character advancement.

Ngruk said:

One of the early design decisions was just that. Pushing the amount of classes to a point where they could ALL be intimately developed and provide a truly unique and different experience, enough so that you"d want to try other classes due to playing with them and thinking they are cool.

Click to expand...

This is probably (other than the social aspect) the thing I miss most from EQ. The classes were different. Sure you had a Mage and Necro, both casters with pets, but they played wildly differently. Likewise Druids and Shaman could both buff and played the (initially anyways) backup healer role, but again they were very different classes. SK and Paladin? Both good backup tanks but again, played very different. It amazes me that EQ had the number of classes it did and they were all unique little snowflakes, while other games with less classes still can"t pull off that individuality. (The idea of making mirrors of classes really needs to die with Warhammer - EQ2 already having been mentioned)

Now throw in truly different means of inner-class advancement (AA"s, spec"s, whatever) where you can"t choose everything, and yet every path is actually useful at enough points in the game to not feel wasted, and the replayability, as well as overall enjoyment, is likely to be pretty damn high by a lot of people.

Mippo said:

Most MMORPG"s are coming out with huge design flaws at the basic level stacking the odds heavily against them. Just look at Warhammer....

1) Too many classes
2) Used 2 factions in open PVP which makes population very important. If you use a free-for-all or 3 teams the population balances itself out.
3) Used different classes on each team which introduces huge issues regarding class balance that they could have avoided..

Click to expand...

Ok so you say that wow does stuff right and everyone else is wrong. Lets dissect by numbers.

1. Warhammer has 23 total classes, regardless of how you spec they play pretty much identically. Wow has what 8 classes with talent specs that basically make them 3 unique classes which equals 24 classes, so by warhammer having 1 less that has to many classes and wow did it right?

2. warhammer did it wrong by having 2 factions, but wow did it right by having 2 factions. umm ok.

3.they really are the same classes, every core ability stays the same and is equal on both sides. There is no major differences at all. Just because a Chosen and a KOTBS are named different they are the same class at the core.

Bongk said:

2. warhammer did it wrong by having 2 factions, but wow did it right by having 2 factions. umm ok.

Click to expand...

WoW and Warhammer are complete opposites. WoW has as much pvp as Warhammer has pve (or should I reframe that by saying "focus of the game"?). Not sure why anyone would even compare them in this respect.

Bongk said:

well it seems we know Copernicus will have classes and levels (eq/wow) and not skills (UO) for character advancement.

Click to expand...

Yes, no skill system it seems. I like skill systems. I am glad we do not get class-branching though(it seems), which never was fun for me but I hope there is a unique twist to the class system. Did Ngruk already comment on something like subjobs?

One of the more unique approaches seems to be Heroes of Telara, which has 4 core classes(the obvious ones), and then an undisclosed number of subclasses that you can apply to your character on the fly when you loot one of these "subclass" runes or something. You can change these subclasses around and possibly can have more then one subclass at a time. Well, unique at least on paper.

I am getting very curious, we are getting a lot of hints lately from Ngruk.