Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[KharzaWHA?]

Guess I'll toss my opinions on the pile.

First, +1 to wodin's post. Poor mechanics have a nasty habit of biting you in the ass. I strongly reconsidered re-subbing to WoW when the nerf to illumination went through, bringing it down from max 100% manacost reduced to max 60% manacost reduced. It shows me that blizzard IS trying to look ahead to the future of the game. Just throwing that out there, because I think it is a very important point, and I don't want it to get lost in the subjective rambling about trade skills and what have you.

For my own opinion, I'd like to put down my largest pet peeve as poor character class structure. I think most people rate classes as overpowered or underpowered based on PVP. And when you look at the mythos of a Rogue or Thief class, it's supposed to be untouchable. To have good player vs player interactions, there needs to be a back-and-forth mechanic. There's more than that, but that's one of the pieces. So if you try to make a rogue class in an MMO, you have a problem. Either you fail at creating the mythos, and your untouchable ninja is going to get two-shotted, or your rogues ARE untouchable, and you fail at creating a balanced game. And as a note on that, player perception plays heavily into that. The number's I've heard for customer satisfaction are 1:5, meaning if your company fucks up ONCE for a customer, it's going to have do a satisfactory job FIVE more times before that customer will consider your company a good company again. Meaning if rogues are two-shotting classes 1/5th of the time, having roughly even fights 3/5ths of the time, and getting two-shot 1/5th of the time, NOBODY thinks rogues are balanced.

I think mechanics feature very heavily into this. There's all sorts of scaling that WoW really missed the boat on. Only some classes at release scaled with gear, other classes scaled their power up only with levels. Also, on a slightly different axis, classes such as Paladins in WoW become drastically more powerful the more allies they are around. Conversely, other classes like warlocks, which rely on single-target avatar control for defense, become hamstrung once multiple people are on them. Scaling doesn't mean just gear and levels, but also utility across different numbers of people.

I guess you could sum up my pet peeve with MMOs as this. WoW is excellently crafted, but poorly designed. I want to play an MMO that is excellently crafted, AND excellently designed.

[Draegan]

Originally Posted by Vatoreus

Anyone with common sense would read what I wrote, see that bear-ass collecting isn't interesting, re-read what I wrote, and see that it not being something fun, would fall into my "needs to be changed" area of "lame MMO design". But, again, that whole common sense thing.

Go watch the latest podcast from WAR on quests. He talks about bear claws, but it's the same thing.

[Duppin]

Originally Posted by Vatoreus

Anyone with common sense would read what I wrote, see that bear-ass collecting isn't interesting, re-read what I wrote, and see that it not being something fun, would fall into my "needs to be changed" area of "lame MMO design". But, again, that whole common sense thing.

It's interesting you would accuse me of not reading what you wrote, since it was pretty clear from your original post that you didn't read what I wrote (i.e. it's very rare that the time spent attempting to make the inherently boring early parts of character development are worthwhile and it's better to just let people comparatively skip to the end and spend time on THAT instead).

But back to the thread! I also still hate gnomes.

[Mkopec1]

Originally Posted by Duppin

.... it's very rare that the time spent attempting to make the inherently boring early parts of character development are worthwhile and it's better to just let people comparatively skip to the end and spend time on THAT instead.

Then it is up to the game makers to make all parts of the game interesting, not just the end game. What makes these games interesting for me, and others im sure, is the slow progression and build up of power and skills over time. Exploring and discovering new content along the way. Without this you might as well just play a fps or Guild Wars. I dont want this part ofthe rpg to be taken away.

And then what? You will still complain that the "trash" be taken out ofthe dungeons too? Then get rid of all travell,world...etc. Because its not fun and boring, right? And then we will all just login at 7:00PM and go kill 10 bosses in our own little instances that we teleport into for 2hours and log off?

Maybe a nitche type game could be made for folks which only like to raid and do "end game" content over and over. But I definitely dont want a game like that. To me the leveling part is not boring, and will never get boring. Because I love RPG games which are all intrinsically "leveling up" games.

[Maxxius]

Actually I often find the early levels far more entertaining than the end levels. Found that to be the case in EQ, WOW and LOTRO. It is at the end that I get bored.

[Vatoreus]

Originally Posted by Draegan

Go watch the latest podcast from WAR on quests. He talks about bear claws, but it's the same thing.

See, but that would require me having any interest what-so-ever in that game, which I just don't have.


At all.

[Cybsled]

What keeps gamers coming back constantly to games like Counter-strike and Starcraft even though they're long out of date?

I'd have to vote for "custom user generated content" to be honest. Variety and freshness are what will keep people coming back in the long run. Eventually a game is just gonna get stale, no matter how godly you are at it. Don't forget that CS itself was a solution for HL becoming "boring". Team Fortress was a solution to the Quake MP which began to grow stale. In CS itself, mods like Zombie help keep it interesting. Desert Combat or that realism mod kept people in BF42. And look at WC3...DOTA keeps thousands of people playing that otherwise would have uninstalled WC long ago. And after awhile, when the custom stuff becomes boring, you can go back and enjoy the vanilla game for a bit.

While skill, or rather the perception of skill, will keep you in the game, the variety offered by custom content allows for a game to live on far far longer then it normally would.

[TwiNCannoN]

Originally Posted by Campa

I loved mining in UO since:

• you didn't have to run all over the place to find ore, any mountain would do
• if you used a special pickaxe to get a better quality ore it had the chance to spawn an Ore Elemental on you, which typically dropped decent loot

The amassing of materials should NOT be the timesink for crafting IMO.

I want MMOs to make crafting matter and let players create items that aren't completely dwarfed by dropped or quested loot. But the question is how do design a system where anyone can do it easily but at the same time offer an advantage to a dedicated crafter??

I think LOTRO's mastering system is a step in the right direction. Perhaps they could expand on it with an experimentation system where a master crafter could take a combination of mob drop resources & crafter resources to experiment at making new items. The more times you succeed at creating something new you would advance your experimentation skill. The higher you got the better the new items you could discover/create.

I would probably even extend it to be race/faction/region based so that you have to "grind" on different experiment techniques. So once you've mastered the Bree-land Humans experimentation techniques you could go work on another "Factions" techniques.

LOTRO's system was good until you get GM and then it's like... mehhhh. It's just farming all over again. Even worse in some cases, the shit they want you to get for stuff that will be necessary to raid (brilliant tokens for example) is insane. 6 beryls per 6 people per 15 minutes in a raid - have fun fuckers!

Anyway, there sure seems to be a lot of "fuck, UO owns" sentiment on these boards lately.

[Traldan]

Originally Posted by Faille

the one thing I would want to see removed from MMOs is developers asking what the 1 thing players hate about MMOs. Seriously, MMOs are far to complex to be summed up into 1 major flaw that if solved will drop everything else into place. These things don't exist in a vacuum, and very few of the people complaining about any particular thing can see beyond the thing itself to how its removal is going to effect other aspects of the game.

True that!

IMHO, Developers need to stick to their guns. Listening to players is all well and good, but building a game around AVOIDING certain aspects is just silly. A GOOD game will survive despite flaws, because the whole thing fits together well. It's not a piecemeal of good things from other games - it's a solid game, with solid mechanics, and a solid story. In a well-integrated game like that, there may be less-enjoyable portions but that's the nature of the game and the nature of the genre. Trying so hard to avoid certain things and cater to others without a good overall plan will not end well (Vanguard, for instance).

[Campa]

Originally Posted by TwiNCannoN

LOTRO's system was good until you get GM and then it's like... mehhhh. It's just farming all over again. Even worse in some cases, the shit they want you to get for stuff that will be necessary to raid (brilliant tokens for example) is insane. 6 beryls per 6 people per 15 minutes in a raid - have fun fuckers!

Ya LOTRO definitely suffers from the lack of material supply problem that I wish we could get away from and that definitely have a lot of stupid designed into some things current (*cough*shield spikes*cough*). But I do think the system design itself is pretty good and could get a lot better.

Anyway, there sure seems to be a lot of "fuck, UO owns" sentiment on these boards lately.

That's because it did. :P

Hell just the talk about UO we've had on the boards the past week or so has been making me want to try out the new client but then I think about the fact the AoS item bullshit is still there and I remember why I left.

[Lleauaric~EW]

There should obviously be a end game boss named Stewart in some zone..

So F'in close

[Cybsled]

I heard a rumor that Curt was buffed during that almost no-hitter game. The main rumor is Manny secretly rerolled bard and was playing a haste song. I also heard Veritek was refreshing shaman buffs between pitches while the ump wasn't paying attention.

[Zhakran]

Originally Posted by Cybsled

I heard a rumor that Curt was buffed during that almost no-hitter game. The main rumor is Manny secretly rerolled bard and was playing a haste song. I also heard Veritek was refreshing shaman buffs between pitches while the ump wasn't paying attention.

It's Varitek.

And I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. I'm a huge nerd, obviously, since I'm on this board...but I think you just crossed some sort of line there :/

[Cybsled]

He's the EQ player -_- hehe

[Dumar]

Originally Posted by TwiNCannoN

fuck, UO owns

probably the best thing that's been said here in awhile.

anyway, if mr. schilling is still reading, the most important thing he can take from this thread and all the others is that we as players want freedom and mechanics in the game that support this freedom. the two biggest ways you can do this is removal of a class based system and not having the raidgame dynamic. gut and fix these two problems (yes they're fucking problems) and you have the start of what potentially could be the next generation mmo game.