Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[Flight]

Cross posting this from the SoE thread. In short, designers need to decide as early as possible if their game is going to cater to holders of multiple accounts/boxers.

Originally Posted by Elerion

1. You speed the game up and increase interaction required, which makes multiboxing harder - see WoW relative to EQ.

I've touched on this numerous times. MMO designers need to decide early on if they are going to support multiple accounts and boxing. If they decide they aren't remove /follow from the game goes 90% of the way to eliminating it. Two points :


i) multiple accounts and boxing make up a large part of the customer base; I would be surprised if its less than 40%.

ii) no game has taken multiple accounts and boxing into account at the design stage;

...iia) thats a huge part of the customer base whose needs are not being taken into account;
...iiib) the fact their game play is not considered at design stage is a big part of the reason boxers annoy non-boxers.


Small things - eg making mobs drop a quest item for everyone in the group, not just one person - would make a difference. Boxers 'control' areas of the game sometimes because it takes so much longer to get the items they need.

Instanced, repeatable content you port into that are mainly tank and spank cater to boxers and get them out of the hair of non boxers.

Even slightly more complex encounters than tank and spank discourage the majority of boxers. Balance the two types of encounter in instance runs in line with how/if you are catering to boxers.



We need to start thinking out of the box and realize that we can have it all. Some people like boxing, some people like grouping, some people like soloing. The main point is that it has to be foundational - you cannot plug in whole new directions for gameplay, as EQ2 has tried to do, over the years.



1) Introduce repeatable, instanced content, where you can accrue rewards and that are straight tank and spank. Hey, the game has content for boxers.

2) Utilise the job system we have been discussing across threads. Even boxers have mains. There are numerous reasons why this would help the boxing issue and promote non boxing.


Designers need to understand boxers; so do people who don't box. I box a lot, but I prefer to group. Why not have content that covers it all ? Of course, remove /follow and there's nothing else to consider.

[Araxen]

Why would any dev cut off the extra revenue generated from multi-boxing especially in this age of everything being instanced. Seems dumb to me.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Especially when there's no effective way to prevent it. Even if you remove /follow, there's clonekey. And even if you somehow prevent that, there's still synergy which is impossible to prevent players from using.

You're imagining a problem where there is none.

[Araxen]

It just comes down to people being jealous that people can multi-box just like twinking was such a huge problem back in the day. All it came down too was jealously. There was never anything wrong with twinking just like there is nothing wrong with multi-boxing.

[Caliane]

Originally Posted by Araxen

It just comes down to people being jealous that people can multi-box just like twinking was such a huge problem back in the day. All it came down too was jealously. There was never anything wrong with twinking just like there is nothing wrong with multi-boxing.

Well, twinking in a pvp game, gives an unfair advantage. There needs to be a semblance of an even playing field. Giving enjoyment to the few "twinks" at the expense of everyone else, isn't a good design plan.
Not that I think twinks shouldn't exist. Its fun. I just think there should be a way to keep new players from being thrown into the same field as a twink to get slaughtered.
With instanced pvped, brackets and leaderboards at all levels would solve this. Twinks would "outrank" newbies and get pushed into higher rating brackets, and not be put into matches with lower ranks, assuming a decent matching system, and a population to support it.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Especially when there's no effective way to prevent it. Even if you remove /follow, there's clonekey. And even if you somehow prevent that, there's still synergy which is impossible to prevent players from using.

Presume you mean Keyclone, I've never heard of clonekey? Unless you mean Clonekeys, which is Mac software.

Synergy, Keyclone, Octopus, Hotkeynet and the other similar packages only broadcast keyboard strokes to multiple PCs or clients. Using them doesn't negate relying on /target, /follow and /assist for 95% of the game.

[Ukerric]

Originally Posted by Flight

i) multiple accounts and boxing make up a large part of the customer base; I would be surprised if its less than 40%.

(splutter).

Sorry. You ruined my mug of coffee.

I would be surprised if the multiboxer customer base was expressed in any double digit %. 40%? In what kind of twisted perverted parallel universe do you live in? Don't tell me: Sam Da Man is a world celebrity there and goes on to explain his newest rig on Oprah once a year at least, right?

I don't know any multiboxer in WoW. None. There is one person who had a second account, and two who use multiple accounts because they are babysitting their spouse's account - which hardly qualitifies.

Sure, there are games where multiboxing runs rampant. Because the game explicitely requires it. EvE? EQ? Yeah, those are games where you multibox-multiaccount a lot, because the game structure gives you a major advantage in practical terms to do so. But other games? Except for the chinese farming crowd, that is...

[Gnome Eater]

For EverQuest, 40% of multiboxers sounds high but not unreasonable.

Back when I played almost every single person in a high end guild had a cleric bot.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Flight

Presume you mean

Yeah sorry. I just pulled an all-nighter. 8/

Anyways...

Again, you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Ukerric

Don't tell me: Sam Da Man is a world celebrity there and goes on to explain his newest rig on Oprah once a year at least, right?

This exemplifies just how anti-boxing this forum and community has always been; the worst possible place to have a discussion about it. Its not many months since people who box were catalogued with lepers and rapists on here.

However, it is a significant issue, with a significant potential customer base and future game designers need to prepare their games for it - one way or another, if they want to optimize the game experience and customer attraction/service.

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Again, you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist.

Not sure what you mean by this mate ?

All I've said is that people with multiple accounts present potentially significant revenue streams and that past games have not considered their needs or their impact on the players around them. Obviously that will be different in different MMOs.

[Zehn - Vhex]

People who multi-box do so for the challenge and for the freedoms it offers. You don't really need to do anything more then WoW did. A moddable interface and the non-banning of software like synergy/keyclone is good enough.

Making 'Simple fights for multi-boxers!' defeats the whole purpose of multi-boxing. Essentially, multi-boxers are little/no different then just a group of normal people in terms of impact/needs.

It's a non-issue. Seriously. Multi-boxers have never been frowned upon. Those that thought they were hot shit because they had more then one PC were, but that's because they're douche bags, not because they can handle more then one account at once.

[Kuro]

I don't see any reason for people to dislike multi-boxers in the new world of instanced content.

However, I fully understand the annoyance/anger early in EQ, before low server pop lead to everyone having a Shaman/Cleric bot, where a single "person" was taking up content that could be advancing ~6 people.

Leveling/AA spots is srs business.

[Toxxulian]

Originally Posted by Grave

Also, I realize WoW never intended for levels to mean anything specifically. That's fine. However, as a personal preference, I think it's a little silly that so many quests even in WotLK involve killing bears, wolves, and so on.

I don't understand why so many people in this thread hate killing animals for quests. How do you expect players and npcs get leather? As long as you have a choice to do these quests or not why does it matter?

Right now I'm finishing up the quests in WoTLK for the achieve and easy money and i'm in Grizzly Hills In almost full t7.5 killing bears and wolves for their hides, and i honestly don't mind it, I'm choosing to do this because it's easy money. What would you prefer these quests be? I mean i can understand if most of the bears don't drop hides but for most of the part they do. No matter what level you are if you are a leather crafter you will always need leather, it's the same thing for skinning, how do you expect to get leather without killing animals?

Maybe i missed the reason behind the argument, but i don't understand why it's so many people hate doing these types of quests.

[Grave]

It's just boring, Toxxulian. It doesn't feel very heroic to kill bears and wolves.

I think leatherworking / collecting hides is completely fine and a great tradeskill, but I don't see why the animals can't be relegated to gathering like other trades have.

Like I mentioned earlier in the thread, you could have a Hunting skill that was all about tracking animals and getting hides/meat from them. Rarer hides could come from rarer critters.

No reason to make half the quests in the game about killing animals though.

[Ukerric]

Originally Posted by Flight

This exemplifies just how anti-boxing this forum and community has always been; the worst possible place to have a discussion about it. Its not many months since people who box were catalogued with lepers and rapists on here.

It's not that I'm anti-multibox. Far from it; how people play... I couldn't care less about it.

It's just that you need to realize that multiboxing is NOT a significant amount of the playerbase. At all. The only games where it is prevalent are those where you need multiple players to do anything at all (EQ), or where the structure of the game rewards holding multiple accounts in parallel (EVE training system).

As soon as you remove those constraints, the number of multiboxers fall to a meaningless proportion of the population. Suggesting "you have to design your game for multiboxers because they will multibox" is a fallacy - multiboxers multibox because the game encourages multiboxing in the first place.

Now, of course, those games that do reward such a thing in practice are never "correctly" designed to recognise this. That's perfectly true. And they don't because designing your game for multiboxing is something that no self-respecting designer wants to.

If you want to design your game so that the same player controls multiple characters, then you would design your game so that it's the normal mode of operation - and done from a single account. Your basic unit isn't the character - it's a party. Just like almost all single-player RPGs out there.

You do realise that pushing the "let's design around multi-account/multi-box" philosophy is skirting close to a big no-no around these boards? Namely, rewarding the "I pay more than you do, I'm better in-game" philosophy that's a big anathema around these parts?