Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Pimpbot 3000 said:

it is pretty much masturbation.

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But isn"t that the entire point of the internet?

Utnayan said:

Quit analyzing the fuck out of the market and what people think sells (And don"t give me shit about that, you know God Damn well why you are here and it sure as fuck fire isn"t about design philisophies) and design your own shit, design your own game. But you can"t do that can you?

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The awesomeness of this mindset is hard to explain. You are stupid enough to think I would come here, "pawn" ideas, then pass them off to our design team....

You truly are an idiot.

Those guys are already on these forums, they already read this stuff. Ya, most of it is redundant, much of it is way cooler in theory than application. But every so often someone says some stuff that is better than the rest and if some day it actually happens that something comes out of here that positively impacts Copernicus, cool.

I"m not designing the game dope, I"ve had much of "my say" in that, and we"re far past the point of my extensive feature creep capabilities. Now I only cost us time and money we don"t have.

I finally did figure out how to manage this thread, which is cool, and will likely make it far more enjoyable moving forward.

Ngruk to Utnayan said:

You truly are an idiot.


I finally did figure out how to manage this thread

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Well played sir.

Now Curt. Let"s be honest here. You could manage this thread even better. Boston is sending poor Smoltz(y) on assignment, which probably means you could (hopefully) get a call. Sure, you can"t play in the playoffs, but you could get a few starts in...

That said, should you accept and write FoH on your tits I will play your MMO.

I promise.

Yeah our GM has no clue... getting rid of Smoltz and Glavinn was just wrong. He should have kept them a few more years and retired in our uniform. *shakes head*

Ngruk said:

You truly are an idiot.

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QFT. Been saying this for years.

Tropics said:

So, anyhow back to games for a sec.

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Good point. I come to this thread to wax intellectual about video games, not break down into a Utnayan vs. Duppin 20 page derail.

So here goes. I whole heartedly agree with your point, but not your implementation. It"s no secret that I hate random loot. It"s simply not -fun- in a group setting. And before you say "But Diablo..." Diablo was a fucking slot machine, not a game. You pulled the lever and saw what came out.

But don"t base your entire reward system around pulling a lever. A finicky one at that. And before you argue replayability, "twinks with benefits" combined with a loot select system will add more replayability then random loot ever could with far less frustration.

As for items with proc"s, the problem is it breaks down into a simple dps calculation anyways. With testing you can know the frequency at which an item proc"s, you can determine it"s relative uptime from that frequency, and you can average out how much dps it adds. Or even for none dps proc"s you can work out how much EH it adds to tanks over a given period of time or HPS/HPM calculations for healers.

Personally? I"m okay with itemization being "+ more gooder." The general public likes being able to know if an item is an upgrade or not as well without having to run it through a spreadsheet.

If you"re going to mix up loot, add in specific gimmick items just for that purpose. Throw in the occasional mount, illusion item, pet, clickee item just for that purpose.

Don"t get me wrong, I enjoyed abusing the shit out of the green whelp tunic. But I also hated having to have an admiral"s cap and the "Buff buddy" system just for that extra hp edge back in the day. These items that you intended to be fun and add versatility to people become no better then the hassle that was building a nature resist set for Ahn"Qiraj.

As for ICD"s vs. random proc"s...the problem is people tend to hate random proc"s. Especially in pvp. Skillherald and so forth. ICD is actually quite an elegant solution. It allows them to create powerful proc effects without having to worry about back to back proc"s making it absurdly overpowered or proc famines making it a worthless item.

It also solves the problem of scaling proc"s due to haste effects and the like.

In WoW, specifically, random does not contribute to awesome. At all, period. With its focus on endgame raiding and the carrot of PVP, they have to put the brakes on abilities to an extent so that the random factor isn"t as random as ye olde Windfury bitching would have you believe. It is as much a product of the PVP system as it is a product of balance for endgame raid fights. It"s also a sad factor of lazy testing processes. You can"t account for random, true random, period. Because well, that would defeat the point of being random. Now, accounting for a fight where a boss enrages in 10 minutes and some proc or other on a given weapon has a ICD of 1 minute? Yeah, shit tons easier to design around. And that"s the crux of the issue.

At this point, Blizzard is content with simply taking the easiest route when designing content that will also have the least loopholes in it"s design. Putting hard caps, soft caps and time delay based caps upon abilities and damage potential (everything from global cool downs to my Arcanite Reaper and its glorious Normalization push) is a way to streamline the design process so that their absolutely glaical content release schedule doesn"t get positively frigid with each update.

And seriously, being completely honest, WoW is stale for a hundred more reasons than its mechanics. For a reasonable amount of its playerbase, 5 years is 5 years enough.

With that said, one cannot have random and the word "balance" in the same sentence when involving mechanics and still keep credibility. Because frankly, one defeats the other.

PS, random loot is retarded for reasons that don"t need to be stated again. Forcing the game to add a "roll" mechanic for rare loot is even more retarded indeed and a factor of the overall retardery that is random loot in the first place.

You should just play on player made servers Zehn, then you can just buy all the gear you want off of the vendors. Loot in an MMO designed by Zehn would have no objective meaning. Why even have gear if you don"t want it to represent your progression? Looking back I don"t mind that I had to do 20 UBRS runs to finally get my Shadowcraft Tunic. Having it be a 1 in 8 shot every run was way better than the horrid Zul"Gurub implementation. MC was a little ridiculous with it being 100% random but that was the exception really.

Levers aren"t bad, it keeps you coming back like a coked up blackjack player in Vegas. Minor modifications for raid loot is fine since there are many more people with the same small number of drops. Other than that I don"t see what the big fuss is about.

Locithon said:

You should just play on player made servers Zehn, then you can just buy all the gear you want off of the vendors. Loot in an MMO designed by Zehn would have no objective meaning. Why even have gear if you don"t want it to represent your progression? Looking back I don"t mind that I had to do 20 UBRS runs to finally get my Shadowcraft Tunic. Having it be a 1 in 8 shot every run was way better than the horrid Zul"Gurub implementation. MC was a little ridiculous with it being 100% random but that was the exception really.

Levers aren"t bad, it keeps you coming back like a coked up blackjack player in Vegas. Minor modifications for raid loot is fine since there are many more people with the same small number of drops. Other than that I don"t see what the big fuss is about.

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On the one hand you say Zehn"s idea of a definitive carrot for beating the content is stupid and trite and "Randomized loot is good!" Then in the next breath you say "Molten Core"s random loot was bad." What Zehn is suggesting is that players are rewarded for beating the content on a more consistent basis than "We killed Big Boss X! Shit, he dropped 2 helms for class X and our only class X already has it! Well, thanks for coming everyone, your time has gained you abso-goddamn-lutely nothing!"

Fun, quirky, clicky gear being dropped on a random table is fine, but when progress through the game"s content is roadblocked by a digital dice roll and players are forced to fight a war of time atrophy something is clearly FUBAR; overcoming the game"s hurdles should play more like chess and nothing like craps.

I have to admit, other than his hatred of the Random Loot System, I"m a bit ignorant of Zhen"s overall gear acquirement scheme that is proclaimed "The Best." Is it simply a ticker that settles upon the best quest in the world (ie, Onyxia head quest that can only be completed once) upon so many successive completions of a specific event or is there a simple "lawl you win but there"s only 5 rewards that can effect your class, hence 5 kills and you"re done" type mechanic?

Zehn - Vhex said:

Personally? I"m okay with itemization being "+ more gooder."

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My original intention was to quote you so that I may challenge you to a death match. However, despite my best efforts to not poison my brain with any of your evil voodoo magic, your blathering bleed forcefully through my tightly closed eyelids and like the words of the necronomicon, the above quote was illuminated.

Darph said:

My original intention was to quote you so that I may challenge you to a death match. However, despite my best efforts to not poison my brain with any of your evil voodoo magic, your blathering bleed forcefully through my tightly closed eyelids and like the words of the necronomicon, the above quote was illuminated.

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Don"t hate me because I"m right. Hate me because I"m beautiful.

Rezz said:

I have to admit, other than his hatred of the Random Loot System, I"m a bit ignorant of Zhen"s overall gear acquirement scheme that is proclaimed "The Best." Is it simply a ticker that settles upon the best quest in the world (ie, Onyxia head quest that can only be completed once) upon so many successive completions of a specific event or is there a simple "lawl you win but there"s only 5 rewards that can effect your class, hence 5 kills and you"re done" type mechanic?

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I"d link you to the post but I lost all my bookmarks when I reformatted. Cliff notes is that if you do the Zehn the MMO way it"d still take you 40+ clears to get everything everybody in the raid wanted out of a dungeon. More then enough time for even Blizzard to kick out a new content patch. If you tack on cosmetic items, you"re looking at a year+. Add in the "twinks with benefits" system and you"re easily looking at 5+ years.

My way comes with far less frustration, you earn the items you have and for the handful of people that have convinced themselves the only way an item has any value is if they won a lottery...well, they can join some scrub guild that randoms for loot.

A pretty much "everybody wins" situation. In the end, I"d rather stop doing a dungeon because we finally got all the loot we need. Not because I"m so fucking sick of doing it for the handful of items we want that never fucking drop (I"m looking at you Hyjal.)

There are a few things I disagree with you on fairly vehemently, but this isn"t one of them. Random loot needs to die up the ass. It"s frustrating and often downright painful.

Hell I think we all hate random loot, but I dont see it going the way of the dodo either.

If it HAS to be around in some form I"d at least like to see the teeth taken out of it. IE: Group is rollin around with a warrior, priest and mage. Have some kind of intelligent roll system that wont drop shit for other classes (if it"s bop) so when stuff actually drops it"s at least useful for the people present.

Fuck getting more druid sets back in MC days when we didnt even have any in the raid group.

I"d like to see them flesh out the token system a little. Instead of just having random tokens drop then using them at a vendor, have tokens actually be related to the items they give and make sense from a lore perspective.

You kill a boss, he drops [Shattered Blade], you use this item for a quest, or as a crafting mat, and get a choice of one of 3 swords, one for warriors, one for rogues, one for paladins, etc. Maybe a few special items which require multiple componants.

Put 2 - 4 of these items on each boss, as well as maybe a few "flavor" items as random drops. It gets rid of the OH GOD WHY DID I DO MC FOR THE 78TH TIME AND HAVE 2X CENARION DROP YET AGAIN FUCK ME, is a little more fun and preoccupying than "hand in token at random vendor, get loot" and it gives you a ton of chances to expand on crafting and questing/storyline.

Wouldn"t a loot system that is so direct have to be backended by a huge selection of loot at the vendor?

I get what Zehn"s saying, but the content release pace required to keep the game fresh in a small-group setting would have to be astronomically fast.

Do each dungeon once and you"re set? K, wake me when the next expansion is out. Sure, for raiders it"s better, but not everyone raids.

I understand it"s shitty to wait for the RNG to poop out your loot, but at least then you had a reason to keep logging in and doing things. All the friends in the world won"t keep me playing (paying for) a boring game, when I can still talk to those friends outside of the game.

Honestly, I don"t think there"s an answer. There"s no way to provide PvE content that is fun enough that it will last you until the next patch comes out. Either you frustrate gamers with a random loot system and force them to keep paying month after month to try get what they want or you give them a non-random system, have them play for a few months and get bored. Obviously the former is preferable from a financial perspective, but I don"t know if that justifies it purely from a gameplay point of view.

At the end of the day though, companies just can"t churn out content even close to as fast as it"s consumed, and I think that"s the inherent flaw in the MMO design. People speak in hypotheticals about user generated content or randomized content, but the company that truly cracks that nut for the first time is going to kick off a new generation of gaming.

Of course the 3rd option is a well designed PvP system, which ideally could basically be an endless font of content, but nobody seems even close to managing that one and Curt doesn"t seem like he"s going to even try, so I don"t know that it"s worth discussing.

Azrayne said:

Honestly, I don"t think there"s an answer. There"s no way to provide PvE content that is fun enough that it will last you until the next patch comes out. Either you frustrate gamers with a random loot system and force them to keep paying month after month to try get what they want or you give them a non-random system, have them play for a few months and get bored. Obviously the former is preferable from a financial perspective, but I don"t know if that justifies it purely from a gameplay point of view.

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Wait, what? Either way would equate to boredom. First option is more like: Frustrate, Burn Out, and Bore your player base to death. Doing so pisses people off and makes them quit - towards the end of a zone as you start to DE everything but the last couple items people just stop showing up and quit until new content comes out anyways. Well, you hope they come back - sometimes they don"t. The carrot only works for so long.

And Christ - some of you want to play MMOs way the fuck too much. I personally do not want and do not need to raid every single week for the rest of my life. I"m all for lull periods in raiding.

Well I don"t think it"s too much to expect a little consistancy from a game. I hate the whole cycle of "raid for a month or two, get bored, stop playing for 6 months till the next patch." it makes the whole social aspect of the game a nightmare, because everyone is constantly coming and going. I can"t even motivate myself to return when new content does come out because I know I"ll get bored, stop playing, be replaced in the raid lineup, then come back in a few months and have to go through the whole cycle with a whole other raid group all over. It"s hard to give a fuck when it all seems so transient. Maybe that"s just the age of the game showing though, but I think Blizzard"s ridiculous content cycles is part of it.

Azrayne said:

Well I don"t think it"s too much to expect a little consistancy from a game. I hate the whole cycle of "raid for a month or two, get bored, stop playing for 6 months till the next patch." it makes the whole social aspect of the game a nightmare, because everyone is constantly coming and going. I can"t even motivate myself to return when new content does come out because I know I"ll get bored, stop playing, be replaced in the raid lineup, then come back in a few months and have to go through the whole cycle with a whole other raid group all over. It"s hard to give a fuck when it all seems so transient. Maybe that"s just the age of the game showing though, but I think Blizzard"s ridiculous content cycles is part of it.

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Exactly. It"s not a "world" at that point, it"s just a game. Log in, push button, receive candy.

There needs to be a reason to stay on longer or develop some sort of attachment to the world itself.