Brad McQuaid Site Updated

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

People who bitch about EQ's forty minute hp regen mechanic as being "bad design" misses the point. The reason it took you forty minutes to regen wasn't because the devs couldn't figure out that "fast regen = less time waiting around." It's because they didn't want you (and by you, I mean the primary grouping classes) soloing.

The problem was they didn't have any mechanics to fill that design spec. Shortsighted development was a norm. Mistakes made the fun.

It's the same reason why clerics had less dps than a sponge and spellcasters got interrupted if you so much as sneezed in their direction. Player interpendence.

Player interdependence doesn't have to be frustrating as shit either. Player interdependence doesn't mean forcing people to sit on their ass waiting for buffs, heals, teleports; without a normal means to do it on their own in a reasonable amount of time. In EQ you didn't have the option. It was either pay for a GG, or take an hour and run it. If you wanted a bind, you were stuck waiting and then forcing a group to get one. Which was fucking retarded and took the player out of the gameplay. You talk about grouping as that is what they designed, then fell flat on their ass creating the right tool system to find groups easily. Which resulted in people logging in and sitting on their ass for an hour hoping to find something. Then feeling guilty if they had to leave without putting in hours of play.

Player interdepenence in that fashion is just like the same bullshit put up with in Realm Vs Realm combat and a reliance on an uncontrollable population. You can't control the classes either. And sooner or later as a population dwindles on one side (RvR) or both dwindle via player interdependence, the entire system designed revolved around uncontrollable aspects is fucked.

Good groups maximized their exp gain while minimizing their downtime. That was considered a part of the challenge.

And then you get a clarity and mana regen didn't matter. My groups in EQ were not based around managing this. My groups in EQ were spent fighting other camps for mobs while waiting on our repops.

This is why WoW's gameplay challenge boils down to not dying and beating the enrage timer, and why the mechanics for every class comes down to pushing buttons frantically until you win.

Oh bullshit. WoW's raid challenges are more fun than anything today because you are not stuck with a tank and spank every damn fight while the resource management you talk about in EQ never existed. I would rather know I have to jump on a heap of snow, or get behind a snow block, or you know, actually play the fucking game and learn encounters, than get an enchanter buff, pull a mob in a corner with a Warrior and 5 clerics on a Cheal rotation. Did you even PLAY the EQ end game? Groups and Raids were boring as shit. I would rather not have to worry about resources and have fun learning encounters or going through a story in an instance with different mob encounters, than sitting in a group not having to manage resources anyway because of buffs and slow repop timers in an overpopulated Sebilis.

And by the way, Brad McQuaid didn't come up with extreme player interdependence.

You are right. He took it to the extreme even more so.

[Bongk]

This thread is hilarious with people talking about how EQ was 7 years ago and thinking they know the game. Its like raiding Molten Core and thinking you know what wow is about forever.

Durrr... every raid is tank and spank yo! Man the ghoul lord is end game!

Than we have UT who thinks he is some super secret sleuth who knows more than anyone else about games who has secret inside infoz and sources on the inside. Thank god he is here to save us from the evil gamer devs. But in reality he is a blowhard with an ego complex who loves to shout down anyone who dares disagree with him on topics that are opinion based.

classic gold... I don't know who is dumber, the people who quit during velious who "know" EQ, utnayan for thinking we are all sheep, or me for reading this crap.

[Agraza]

Well I quit during OoW b/c I liked the GoD design of glass cannon mobs and they decided to give OoW trash a bajillion extra HPs to placate the classes with DoTs that lasted longer than a minute. Fuck mind numbingly boring trash that hit like the explosion of an eight year old girl's fart and take an eon to kill.

I heard they actually balanced tanking and introduced interesting raids right after I quit. Too little too late.

[EtadanikM]

Originally Posted by Utnayan

The problem was they didn't have any mechanics to fill that design spec. Shortsighted development was a norm. Mistakes made the fun.

Sure they did: the idea of tank-dps-heal-CC, soloing and grouping classes, limited resource combat, threat control, etc. Later on, raids, scripted encounters, phased fights... WoW benefited from all that. It's like comparing Warcraft II with Starcraft and wondering why orcs and humans didn't have more distinctions.

Player interdependence doesn't have to be frustrating as shit either. Player interdependence doesn't mean forcing people to sit on their ass waiting for buffs, heals, teleports
without a normal means to do it on their own in a reasonable amount of time.

Uh, yes, it does. What do you think player interdependence means? What would be the point of designing for it if people could do everything on their own in a reasonable amount of time?

In EQ you didn't have the option. It was either pay for a GG, or take an hour and run it. If you wanted a bind, you were stuck waiting and then forcing a group to get one. Which was fucking retarded and took the player out of the gameplay.

You're assuming the "gameplay" is combat. While that was a large part of EQ, it is not all there is to the game. Soul binding as a mechanic has no place in a market-dominant game, but it fits completely under the player interdependence design.

You talk about grouping as that is what they designed, then fell flat on their ass creating the right tool system to find groups easily. Which resulted in people logging in and sitting on their ass for an hour hoping to find something. Then feeling guilty if they had to leave without putting in hours of play.

The lack of a good LFG tool was, indeed, a severe problem, but when they finally got around to making it, it worked reasonably well. By contrast, Blizzard's level-based matchmaking system is still retarded despite five years' worth of player complaints.

Player interdepenence in that fashion is just like the same bullshit put up with in Realm Vs Realm combat and a reliance on an uncontrollable population. You can't control the classes either. And sooner or later as a population dwindles on one side (RvR) or both dwindle via player interdependence, the entire system designed revolved around uncontrollable aspects is fucked.

This is a problem endemic to class-based systems. The key is to promote interchangeability. EQ pigeonholed itself into an inane balancing philosophy (ie "clerics must always be the only healers capable of healing raids") and this was one of its biggest weaknesses as a game.

And then you get a clarity and mana regen didn't matter. My groups in EQ were not based around managing this. My groups in EQ were spent fighting other camps for mobs while waiting on our repops.

Mana regen always mattered. Fighting other groups for mobs was a problem that VI probably did not anticipate, since their immediate predecessors never had enough players to make that a major issue. It was part of the learning process.

Oh bullshit. WoW's raid challenges are more fun than anything today because you are not stuck with a tank and spank every damn fight while the resource management you talk about in EQ never existed. I would rather know I have to jump on a heap of snow, or get behind a snow block, or you know, actually play the fucking game and learn encounters, than get an enchanter buff, pull a mob in a corner with a Warrior and 5 clerics on a Cheal rotation. Did you even PLAY the EQ end game? Groups and Raids were boring as shit. I would rather not have to worry about resources and have fun learning encounters or going through a story in an instance with different mob encounters, than sitting in a group not having to manage resources anyway because of buffs and slow repop timers in an overpopulated Sebilis.

But this was a fault of EQ's class design, which was simplistic (with a few exceptions, like enchanters) and tech-limited. It had nothing to do with whether you could use efficiency as a design mechanic. WoW started off with efficiency mechanics but ultimately messed them up. That whole knee-jerk "let's nerf the spirit out of in-combat mana regen" was an attempt to bring it back for raids, but Blizzard knows well and enough that mana meant nothing outside of them.

As for resource management not mattering in EQ, you're tripping. All of EQ was based on resource management. There was one reason and one reason alone why it sometimes seemed otherwise, and that was CH, another huge design mistake that VI/SOE later admitted to. But even if cleric mana did not matter (and it still did, even with CH, as anyone who played a necro could tell you with a grimace), caster mana did, and melee cooldowns did. Most fights in EQ were a race against two things: spike damage/human error (same as WoW) and resource exhaustion (not same as WoW).

But of course, the lack of anti-zerging mechanics meant that you wouldn't have realized this in raids if you ran with ten warriors and twenty clerics. If early EQ had raid restrictions like WoW, the resource management aspect of it would have been obvious, as it was built into the game from the ground up. Every EQ caster knew the difference between DPS and DPM. They cut their teeth on efficient spell selection and in-combat meditation. Even soloers had to balance between DPS, DPM, and MPS. There is no WoW equivalent.

[Bloodget]

What I get from many of these post is a "wtf why EQ didn't do better than WoW in everything".
Seems like many forget that WoW is just a copy of EQ, not the other way around. I wanted to add that Half-life is superior to wolfenstein too, but then it is not a good analogy, because HL is really superior in everything to it, while WoW didn't even manage to be superior in many things to its predecessor.

[Lost Ranger]

Originally Posted by Bloodget

WoW didn't even manage to be superior in many things to its predecessor.

Care to share with the class what features in EQ are superior to WoW?

[BanquozGhost]

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

People who bitch about EQ's forty minute hp regen mechanic as being "bad design" misses the point. The reason it took you forty minutes to regen wasn't because the devs couldn't figure out that "fast regen = less time waiting around." It's because they didn't want you (and by you, I mean the primary grouping classes) soloing. It's the same reason why clerics had less dps than a sponge and spellcasters got interrupted if you so much as sneezed in their direction. Player interpendence.

Slow mana and hp regen wasn't there to create interdependence amongst players. Back when EQ was still in development McQuaid got into a debate with Koster about player vs. developer generated content. Koster held that it was impossible to have a complete reliance on dev generated content and keep players interested and playing over the long term and that it would be too resource intensive. McQuaid insisted that it was possible if that content was properly designed. It's not to hard to figure out what proper design meant to McQuaid when you look at all of the assorted time sinks EQ was built upon through that lense. They didn't want everyone chewing through the game only to ask "now what?" several months before the next expansion would be ready.

[Bongk]

Originally Posted by BanquozGhost

Slow mana and hp regen wasn't there to create interdependence amongst players. Back when EQ was still in development McQuaid got into a debate with Koster about player vs. developer generated content. Koster held that it was impossible to have a complete reliance on dev generated content and keep players interested and playing over the long term and that it would be too resource intensive. McQuaid insisted that it was possible if that content was properly designed. It's not to hard to figure out what proper design meant to McQuaid when you look at all of the assorted time sinks EQ was built upon through that lense. They didn't want everyone chewing through the game only to ask "now what?" several months before the next expansion would be ready.

Why not thats what we all do in wow. It sure hasn't hurt them has it?

Koster is moron who should never be allowed to design a game again after what he did in UO and SWG. At least McQuaid shipped one game worth a damn, Koster hasn't.

[Bizanich]

Originally Posted by Bongk

Why not thats what we all do in wow. It sure hasn't hurt them has it?

Koster is moron who should never be allowed to design a game again after what he did in UO and SWG. At least McQuaid shipped one game worth a damn, Koster hasn't.

Please explain what Koster did to UO? Trammel is what is widely viewed as killing UO, and that wasn't Koster.

SWG also, while not WoW successful, wasn't exactly a wasteland either until the CU.

He may not design games that are WoW size, but both Koster's games were profitable. Can't say the same for both of McQuaid's necessarily.

[EtadanikM]

Originally Posted by BanquozGhost

Slow mana and hp regen wasn't there to create interdependence amongst players. Back when EQ was still in development McQuaid got into a debate with Koster about player vs. developer generated content. Koster held that it was impossible to have a complete reliance on dev generated content and keep players interested and playing over the long term and that it would be too resource intensive. McQuaid insisted that it was possible if that content was properly designed. It's not to hard to figure out what proper design meant to McQuaid when you look at all of the assorted time sinks EQ was built upon through that lense. They didn't want everyone chewing through the game only to ask "now what?" several months before the next expansion would be ready.

Every MMO has timesinks. The question is where you put them. I recall that the issue of hp regen was brought up early on in EQ's debut, and the answer then was "you're not supposed to solo; you're supposed to group with a healer." All other aspects of class design fit with the player interdependence model, so why not hp regen?

I think Brad was referring to content design in the sense of:

1. Hp/DPS ratio: EQ was much slower than WoW in how much DPS players were able to put out relative to the hp of mobs; this meant that you could support a larger number of players with a smaller number of mobs

2. Camping: a single camp in EQ could keep a group's attention for hours, days, or even weeks, and a single zone can have many camps

3. Rare drops and rare spawns: see #2

[Horse]

Originally Posted by Lost Ranger

Care to share with the class what features in EQ are superior to WoW?

what i liked about EQ that isn't in wow:

~ not mod crazy
~ no built in mapping
~ feeling of situational / memmed spell limit
~ AA points
~ leadership points
~ tribute
~ feeling of epic progression (strong mobs in weak areas), running across the world
~ no tethering
~ I played in 1st person because that's how you played RPGs!
~ group reliance
~ not on rails
~ nothing insanely spoilered before the goddamn content comes out
~ random, mysterious quest / tradeskill items
~ non instanced

what i liked about wow that wasn't in EQ:
~ interface
~ pacing
~ graphics + style
~ auctionhouse
~ quest centric, EQ really didn't have that many quests overall, let alone a coherent, in your face storyline
~ far, far, far more robust scripted events
~ soloability
~ instances for private num nom sessions
~ pvp integration into the pve experience in a non-retarded manner

Apples, meet oranges. You can't simply take the immersion out of EQ and put into a game like wow while retaining all of the things that make wow far more accessible.

It's a pretty simple spectrum:

immersion seeks to punish those who are disoriented, unaware or otherwise overwhelmed by their surroundings.

accessibility, on the other end, seeks to ease people into their surroundings and make it not that big of a deal if you fuck up.


EQ's early immersion was, for example, if you hand the quest item you worked for hours and hours to the wrong npc (hi there skeleton you can click through and actually click the fucker behind him) he eats it up and you fail. This is against the idea of experimentation. On the other hand, wow doesn't even let you give shit to NPCs.


On one hand, failing at tradeskills. On the other, zero experimentation.



Armchair designer idealists want to make something middle ground. Can we have a wow that uses the resources gained from popular acceptance to make a hardcore friendly game? I imagine that including dumb kiddie toy shit into the game has done more for hardcore development via revenue than any game claiming to be for the old pro would ever be able to generate.

1% of resources from a 75,000,000$ earning game is a lot more than 100% of a 250,000$ earning game.


Did anyone ever resolve that "THERE ARE OVER 9,000 QUESTS STILL YET TO BE COMPLETED IN EVERQUEST?" that was a sorta bullshit statement, I heard, but that number is 0 in WoW, yea?

[Bongk]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

Please explain what Koster did to UO? Trammel is what is widely viewed as killing UO, and that wasn't Koster.

SWG also, while not WoW successful, wasn't exactly a wasteland either until the CU.

He may not design games that are WoW size, but both Koster's games were profitable. Can't say the same for both of McQuaid's necessarily.

Koster didnt ship UO and he was responsible for the Rep patch that created the Blue PK issue that had people leaving in droves.

SWG was always a piece of shit that had no content, I guess if you like running through empty world to find you ant mound, rinse and repeat, Koster is your man.

You are a fool also, McQuaid never shipped a game that made profit? Are you on crack? EQ is one of the highest profit MMOs ever created.

[Bloodget]

Originally Posted by Bongk

You are a fool also, McQuaid never shipped a game that made profit? Are you on crack? EQ is one of the highest profit MMOs ever created.

While that is true, may be VG ate all the gain SoE made on EQ1

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by EtadanikM

Sure they did: the idea of tank-dps-heal-CC, soloing and grouping classes, limited resource combat, threat control, etc. Later on, raids, scripted encounters, phased fights... WoW benefited from all that. It's like comparing Warcraft II with Starcraft and wondering why orcs and humans didn't have more distinctions.

Did this happen after PoP? That is when I left. I wasn't around to see the cluster fuck of anything after PoP. Back in the day (Uphill both ways) we had Nag, Vox, any boss in Kunark, Velious, SoL, and to be honest, I didn't even get through PoP. Other than knowing the Plane of Water was articifially bugged with an FPS hit to fuck up the fight so people couldn't go to PO Time. (In conjunction with the Rathe encounter) Threat control? Threat control amounted to a warrior standing in a corner to hit taunt for half a minute before the rest of the raid joined in, then blew their defensive disc, and the Cheals came in... AFK for 30 minutes and the fight was over. Christn in SoL the entire raid pretty much went AFK with Ssra and watched TV for 45 minutes. Save the clerics who had their TV in a window so they could hit their Cheal macro every minute. Saying WoW benefitted from any feature in EQ is assanine. WoW benefitted from the short falls of EQ. Period.

Uh, yes, it does. What do you think player interdependence means? What would be the point of designing for it if people could do everything on their own in a reasonable amount of time?

You failed to comprehend what I was saying. Class interdependence without options means you need to cater to systems revolving around that mechanic. They had the idea, but they failed on the follow through. If you want to make a game where people shit in socks all day long, by all means do it. But at least make it accessible enough where they aren't sitting in a zone in shouting LFG for 2 fucking hours. Or worse, having 5 classes be the end all be all and nothing else matters so those classes get sucked in the wind. Hell, my necro was nothing but a mana battery for any of my raids. That's fun? Feeding someone else resources so they can benefit the raid? Where mostly those resources were not needed anyway and every single lifetap I threw at a mob was resisted for no logical reason?

You're assuming the "gameplay" is combat. While that was a large part of EQ, it is not all there is to the game. Soul binding as a mechanic has no place in a market-dominant game, but it fits completely under the player interdependence design.

I already mentioned GG's, Binding, and why that was fine and dandy but needed lower end options instead of going to the extreme. When you have class based interdependence, you need a balance. You cannot have easy on one end, and holy fucking there goes my day I just pissed myself on the other. If you want to do that fine, but meet in the middle and allow more than one option. For example, I log in, I cannot find a bind to save my ass. I can either pay money to bind myself to a stone, or, do it for free with someone else who I will most likely pay anyway if they are not in my guild. See what I mean yet? Who gives a shit. It serves the same purpose and grabbing a bind from someone and paying them 10 gold doesn't bring me any closer to the community than grabbing some pub schmuck on a quest in WoW and taking 3 minutes to blast through a leg on a quest chain. But here is the point. One leaves me trying to bind my character while not playing the game, another has me going through content and actually playing the game and advancing my character.

The lack of a good LFG tool was, indeed, a severe problem, but when they finally got around to making it, it worked reasonably well. By contrast, Blizzard's level-based matchmaking system is still retarded despite five years' worth of player complaints.

Right with ya. But the fact remains is that, at least from my chair where I play WoW, that I would rather put up with a couple poorly conceptual designs and a lot of good ones, than a lot of poorly conceptual designs, and a bunch of hilarity / comic fun based on broken/bugged design.

Mana regen always mattered.

In the time I played, in guild or out of guild, mana regen never came into play. Our cleric would sit down, stand up, heal, sit down.

Fighting other groups for mobs was a problem that VI probably did not anticipate, since their immediate predecessors never had enough players to make that a major issue. It was part of the learning process.

I can give you that. But it should have been corrected after Lguk. It wasn't. And they still brought the same issues into the next two expansions. Especially when they started up with those bonus XP zones to bring it right back to the camp-a-thon.

WoW started off with efficiency mechanics but ultimately messed them up.

What? WoW started off with people being able to eat and drink in combat for Christ sake. Efficiency where?

That whole knee-jerk "let's nerf the spirit out of in-combat mana regen" was an attempt to bring it back for raids, but Blizzard knows well and enough that mana meant nothing outside of them.

Blizzard and the powers at be know that you can design the encounters around what you have in play, not design the mechanics around the encounters. The minute you start balancing characters around the encounters is the minute you lose. You will start a snowball of shit and it will keep growing astromically. Design the encounters behind the power already there.

There was one reason and one reason alone why it sometimes seemed otherwise, and that was CH, another huge design mistake that VI/SOE later admitted to.

Yo just talked yourself out of resource management. This was all EQ was about for 3 fucking years was Complete Heal.

But even if cleric mana did not matter (and it still did, even with CH, as anyone who played a necro could tell you with a grimace)

Trust me, I was there. I played a necro. I would pump mana into clerics and they wouldn't even need the shit. It got to a point where I would just park my necro at the zone in and be there with coffins if they wiped. Now THAT is great fucking design eh?

Most fights in EQ were a race against two things: spike damage/human error (same as WoW)

What human error per se would be in EQ? They forget to park the mob in a corner or the cleric falls asleep and falls out of a CHeal rotation? Come on. Really?

But of course, the lack of anti-zerging mechanics meant that you wouldn't have realized this in raids if you ran with ten warriors and twenty clerics. If early EQ had raid restrictions like WoW, the resource management aspect of it would have been obvious, as it was built into the game from the ground up. Every EQ caster knew the difference between DPS and DPM. They cut their teeth on efficient spell selection and in-combat meditation. Even soloers had to balance between DPS, DPM, and MPS. There is no WoW equivalent.

And that statement right there reminds me of an SOE designer who never played their own game. Similar to street smarts vs book smarts. No offense.

[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by Bongk

You are a fool also, McQuaid never shipped a game that made profit? Are you on crack? EQ is one of the highest profit MMOs ever created.

Bullshit. McQuaid did more to harm the industry than anything good done to it. The people that brought EQ to light were the people really behind it (Clover to name one guy who never got the recognition he deserved) McQuaid was Smedley's pal. Which not only ushered in the good ol boys club at SOE (George Scotto, Brenlo to name a few) but also showed the same type of premise in hiring shown at Sigil which fucked that game 10 fold.

For the dumbshits that do not realize this yet.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Clover and Trost shipped EQ.

You can thank McQuaid for the following:

1> Artificial bugs to stall content to gain revenue off unfinished products so you can release faster and build after the fact. (Which then was followed by AO and DAOC, and god knows how many others - he pretty much set the standard for this)

2> Why everyone thought the market was saturated at 500k. (Oh wait, maybe not, hello WoW)

3> Scapegoats to that same market. "But wait guys, these games are so complex." (Tm)

4> Boosting the illegal drug trade.