Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

I"m going to throw this in here just because.

Please implement a thorough, fun, useful, fully fleshed out tradeskill system. I could go on and on and on (and on and on) about tradeskills, but I think it"s relatively safe to assume y"all are skimming these posts, so I"ll just throw out the short version :

- Able to start the game and go immediately into your crafting profession
- Adventurers are reliant on tradesmen, tradesmen are reliant on adventurers
- Skill/knowledge should play a part in the tradesmen"s products; You want plain old waffles? Go somewhere else. You want the best damn waffles this world has ever seen? You best bow before the Waffle King "cuz you"re playing by MY rules!
- Barrier of entry; Just like I wouldn"t be able to get a max level, fully decked out Warrior in a week, nor should some adventurer be able to become my equivalent as far as craftsmanship in such a short period of time.
- STRONG, PLAYER-DRIVEN ECONOMY!!! This includes player-run shops/vendors/cities, tools to easily allow buyers to find sellers and vice-versa, stuff to spend currency on, etc.

This is an incredibly simplified list, but a good start for what I"m personally looking for. I realize I"m in the minority on this forum as far as "hardcore" tradeskillers go, but dammit, we are out there. Don"t forget us.

You can also take a look at SW:G. While they did a LOT of things wrong, the tradeskills were very engrossing.

Malakie Torsade said:

I"m going to throw this in here just because.

Please implement a thorough, fun, useful, fully fleshed out tradeskill system. I could go on and on and on (and on and on) about tradeskills, but I think it"s relatively safe to assume y"all are skimming these posts, so I"ll just throw out the short version :

- Able to start the game and go immediately into your crafting profession
- Adventurers are reliant on tradesmen, tradesmen are reliant on adventurers
- Skill/knowledge should play a part in the tradesmen"s products; You want plain old waffles? Go somewhere else. You want the best damn waffles this world has ever seen? You best bow before the Waffle King "cuz you"re playing by MY rules!
- Barrier of entry; Just like I wouldn"t be able to get a max level, fully decked out Warrior in a week, nor should some adventurer be able to become my equivalent as far as craftsmanship in such a short period of time.
- STRONG, PLAYER-DRIVEN ECONOMY!!! This includes player-run shops/vendors/cities, tools to easily allow buyers to find sellers and vice-versa, stuff to spend currency on, etc.

This is an incredibly simplified list, but a good start for what I"m personally looking for. I realize I"m in the minority on this forum as far as "hardcore" tradeskillers go, but dammit, we are out there. Don"t forget us.

You can also take a look at SW:G. While they did a LOT of things wrong, the tradeskills were very engrossing.

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Unfortunately, some of us don"t pay much attention or care for tradeskills in mmo"s =\, I started playing EQ in 2000, and for the love of god I"ve hated tradeskills in any game ever since... I do not want any system where tradeskills are a must or heavily dependent on leveling/adventuring (that side of things) - true it may strengthen player economy and such, but the fact is theres still a good % of the mmo pop that pay no attention to tradeskills or at least do the very minimal. I also don"t want to have to rely on other people (tradesmen) or what not because I choose not to part take in tradeskills. Also why make lvling up tradeskills a slower process, its already a pain in the ass for most I"d imagine (boring, tedious etc cept for you tradeskill loving freaks)... not something the player is just dying to bust out. VG"s looked half engaging at first until I along with everyone else realized that it was going to flop hard.

-Jaroc

Heh I could see how EQ could make you a tradeskill hater. Making arrows for ranger twink = wrist falls off. I"m not too huge of a crafter myself either but that"s only because most of the times it"s done horribly imo.

UO"s system pretty much has me looking down on everything else and wondering why no one can even come close as good. I especially hate, hate, hate the "node" harvesting system that seems to be the only option devs consider now that WoW has done it (aka copper ore node, etc). UO"s system was simple. You see a tree, you use an axe on it, you get wood. The tree doesn"t have to be sparkling and have a name floating above it (although I must say, chopping down a harvestable tree in vanguard is awesome). Of course that was just the harvesting side though, the crafting in the game was pretty damn good for a while as well since you literally had people going to blacksmith players at the brit forge for fresh equipment after getting PK"d and such. Had a very genuine feeling to it.

Ngruk said:

How do you define "significant" raiding experience and why would having that be valuable for creating end game content? Who on our current staff would meet that "significant" raiding experience pre-req?

If I remember correctly the WoW "endgame" at launch was a cause of major backlash wasn"t it?

Creative thinking, cool idea implementing people are just that, regardless of the amount of time they"ve spent in Hyjal, ZA or The Plane of Fear. I would argue that knowing how that content works and has worked in the past is a valuable part but by no means is it a priority or a need for people to create that raiding high end content for Copernicus.

It"s awesome that the entire design team can reference past work, or past experiences as they are creating and will create this content for our world but some incredibly cool and very unique and different ideas and creations have come from people that have done zero raiding or high end content in WOW or EQ.

The main thing, for me, that people with game development exposure to creating this content bring to the table, if they are good at what they do and into making a great game (and not their game) is allow us to get farther down the road without stepping in the potholes they all stepped in the first time around but also go in directions they couldn"t or weren"t allowed to the first or second time around the block.

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I can"t wade through the next two pages to feel I can respond to this. Youhave to have experience on your raid design team.Either get it or don"t have a raid game. Most of the issues with the early raid game were that it was either too buggy or too easy, and MC was artistically a little bland. WoW currently sports the most creative raid game out there and you"d be a fool to think that they haven"t profited greatly from having experienced people doing it. Some of the miscalculations the WoW team made prior to launch:

A) Being able to have as small of a raid team as they did, causing the pre-expansion content pace to be really abysmal (hi four major zones, four outdoor dragons, two more outdoor mobs, and a single dragon in a cave in two years).

B) The power of the user interface. Don"t even get me started here. Maybe talk to some Conquest members for real insight on this.

C) The attractiveness of the zone-within-a-zone mechanic, and the extensive problems caused by the durability system + being unable to zone directly in + being unable to summon into an instance.

D) The fact that largely, their player base was not "casuals and hardcores" but more "casual hardcores" (among those who were even hardcore at all). Things like the Thorium Brotherhood rep were dissonant with their overall design. People who had been hardcore in EQ did not come to WoW to play a raid game where hundreds of manhours had to be spent by a few individuals to get repuation for a few individuals to make pieces of gear which were essential to deep progress in the first raid zone.

What I"m going to recommend to you is that you get some people with a significant amount of WoW raiding experience, because the EQ raiding experience that the WoW raid team walked away with left them having to come up with a lot of creative solutions to bring the world of raiding and the world of "allowing your players to have a life" together, as well as more creative encounter design. Those who have played through that start with a much better springboard to find the solutions to the next generation. I think, and I"ve been mulling this over in my head a lot, that Blizzard could be providing more raid content and higher quality content (in some respects) than they are, but for the mechanics they have in place I believe that TBC has shown a great deal of growth in encounter design creativity, and you cannot expect to compete with it any time soon if you are starting with a bunch of goddamned amateurs. You also cannot expect to comprehend the consequences of some of your design choices unless you have a seasoned raid team. Little things that may seem like a good idea can be identified as truly disastrous without checks when put into a raiding environment.

Don"t discount experience on this front. It"s a really, reallybadidea. WoW"s raid game was only as good as it was because it had the people it had, and it would never have evolved into what it is today without those minds at work. I like a lot of what you"ve had to say, Curt, but I can say that if this is your current stance, raiders should stay well away from your game until you get that wake up call from the ones who didn"t.

Jaroc said:

Unfortunately, some of us don"t pay much attention or care for tradeskills in mmo"s =\

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You may not, but don"t project your own opinion onto others and assume that the "majority" feels the same way you do.

It"s quite possible that people don"t seem to care much for tradeskilling in a game like WoW or EQ2 because it"sdreadfully boringand oftentimes the rewards are not even worth it until the very latest stages of the skill.

You might be surprised how many players would love a robust crafting system and player-supported economy. If they make a crafting system that is just as rewarding to crafters as delving into dungeons is to adventurers you would see a lot more people participating. As it is now, it"s generally only a supplemental section of the game.

I always find that people who love tradeskills get all pissy when people talk about the "majority" of people don"t care about them. It happens all over the internet.

Draegan said:

I always find that people who love tradeskills get all pissy when people talk about the "majority" of people don"t care about them. It happens all over the internet.

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Well, just to be clear, I have never liked tradeskills in any MMO I"ve played. I"m actually a diehard adventurer type and almost always a hardcore raider. The only game I did tradeskills in was WoW, and that was to support my raiding habit. Even took up leatherworking for drums in TBC despite not really wanting to do it. I did a few levels of tradeskilling in EQ2 before I decided it wasn"t worth my time.

Despite that, I still see the potential of having a better crafting system. Even if I wasn"t the type of player participating in it, Iwantit in my game because of the environment it creates and the community that could come out of it. Hell, if it were interesting enough it"s possible that my playstyle could change and I"d find myself enjoying crafting as much as adventuring.

I mean, think about current MMOs. Ultimately, what is the point of tradeskilling other than to supplement your adventuring profession? Even those rare few who do nothing but tradeskill are only going to amass gold, and what can they do with it if they aren"t an adventurer? Get a bigger house on EQ2 I guess, but that"s about it. Nothing in WoW really.

When we start to see crafting systems that award tradeskillers as much as adventurers, withclear progressionthat is just as fulfilling as acquiring a new piece of raid loot, then crafting will really take off.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Lots of stuff about raiding

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I mostly agree with this very much. You might think it"s not important to have highend raiding experience.

But let me just say this: having gone from someone who was for the most part a casual WoW player pre-TBC, to the very most hardcore of raiders post-TBC, I can say with confidence that unless you have done this kind of thing before and really know the ins and outs of the 6 days a week, 6 hours a night commitment type of gameplay, you are not going to be able to anticipate all the problems or shortcomings your zones and your system might have.

It"s just not something that"s intuitive for anyone. Raiding is a completely different beast from every other aspect of game play, because it brings so many facets of the game together. As Foghorn said, other aspects of the game that might be cool on their own could be awful in practice in a raiding environment. For example....CONSUMABLES. WoW had to correct a ton of this stuff to make TBC raiding what it is.

Ultimately, people want to raid, even if they don"t admit it or don"t want to commit themselves to serious schedules. Once you reach max level, if you don"t want to PVP, or even if you do, this is what keeps people playing longterm. Challenging stuff that you cannot just roll over with minimal effort, that rewards amazing items. That"s what it comes down to, and in WoW right now even the casual players like to do pick up Gruuls and Mag and what have you. And there are more semi-hardcore raiding guilds than ever, who are working on content at various levels.

The EQ raiding community for the most part was very happy when they decided to hire Furor and Tigole because these players represented a raider"s point of view. You need some kind of employees like these who understand raiding top to bottom from an insider"s point of view, or else you"ll end up repeating the same mistakes as EVERY OTHER designer who has failed to put interesting raid content into their games.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

Stuff.

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Good post, I said the exact same things earlier in this thread and he said I was wrong. Seems to me, 38S has a very good chance to be completely out of touch with reality if this sort of attitude is carried into raid development. Every time I see "creative" guys with 0 raid experience doing raid content, those games end up failing miserably or falling well short of a meaningful experience.

Malakie Torsade said:

I"m going to throw this in here just because.

Please implement a thorough, fun, useful, fully fleshed out tradeskill system. I could go on and on and on (and on and on) about tradeskills, but I think it"s relatively safe to assume y"all are skimming these posts, so I"ll just throw out the short version :

- Able to start the game and go immediately into your crafting profession
- Adventurers are reliant on tradesmen, tradesmen are reliant on adventurers
- Skill/knowledge should play a part in the tradesmen"s products; You want plain old waffles? Go somewhere else. You want the best damn waffles this world has ever seen? You best bow before the Waffle King "cuz you"re playing by MY rules!
- Barrier of entry; Just like I wouldn"t be able to get a max level, fully decked out Warrior in a week, nor should some adventurer be able to become my equivalent as far as craftsmanship in such a short period of time.
- STRONG, PLAYER-DRIVEN ECONOMY!!! This includes player-run shops/vendors/cities, tools to easily allow buyers to find sellers and vice-versa, stuff to spend currency on, etc.

This is an incredibly simplified list, but a good start for what I"m personally looking for. I realize I"m in the minority on this forum as far as "hardcore" tradeskillers go, but dammit, we are out there. Don"t forget us.

You can also take a look at SW:G. While they did a LOT of things wrong, the tradeskills were very engrossing.

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Basically what EQ2 had promised before all the raiders / ubers started whining about having to be at the mercy of the crafters and their prices for the "uber" items.

There were entire guilds forming to do just what you talk about in EQ2 and then SOE slapped them down when they caved to the whiners and let everyone craft not just the original crafting classes. Well they reaped what they sowed.

Very many casuals enjoy crafting (check what sells in the WoW AH) and if anyone doesn"t think casuals are what drive big subscriptions then you blind as to what makes up WoW"s numbers.

Cater to the vociferious whiny raiders / ubers and your subsctiption numbers will reflect your narrow focus.

Of course if you are happy with mediocre subscription results then by all means go for the bottom of the barrel and wallow around with all the other POS MMO"s down there.

Zhakran said:

38 Studios will either learn from history or repeat it.

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Fixed.

I think the main problem is that most games have two economies: a player driven one and an NPC economy.

The player driven economy requires materials, time to gather these and then the production of the item. Meanwhile, the NPC economy is instant and doesn"t require any materials. From a player standpoint, the NPC economy is favorable as its much more convenient. A successful crafting system should be based around a unified economy where both crafters and NPC"s rely on a common production system. All vendor items should be part of the crafting system. I could go on into detail but that"s basically the gist of it.

Foremost, the inclusion of crafting should not inconvenience a player. It shouldn"t be any different trying to get a crafted item from a player or from an NPC in terms of effort required. Most of the current systems inconvenience the player and handicap his play experience. Why should I have to spend 10 or even 5 minutes on the trade channel looking for someone willing to help me craft the item I need? It"s annoying when the rest of my play experience consists of going to hassle-free NPC vendors.

Meh.

While experience with the raiding mechanics of other games is good to have it is by no means the most important or critical credential a designer should have in my opinion. In fact, if there is too strong a common influence on a team, as Foghorn suggested with have many extensive WoW raiders on design, it could actually harm the creative process as ideas have the danger of being drawn from the same small pool of experience.

There is a greater requirement to have people who can think outside of the box. Designers who are willing to do not what has already been done, but create something new and reshape peoples thoughts of what raiding is.
Does anyone really think that people who created Portal, for example, would not be able to create and design a challenging and fun encounter in an MMO?

The team I would make would draw from as many diverse backgrounds as possible, fusing a myriad of experiences to create something completely new.

Digo said:

I do not miss zerging in the slightest. It was a product of competition for limited spawns, so guilds that lacked the gear to get said spawns threw as many bodies at it as possible. I think you"re confusing nostalgia for quality of encounters. I fail to see how anyone could think that any of the NToV fights are even close to Onyxia in terms of complexity or challenge.

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Well other then being a puller on the triplets there is nothing in NToV that comes remotely close to the complexity of Ony, or Rag, or alot of other WOW raids. WOW in all honesty shocked me with the complexity and challenge of alot of their raid content.

That said, you could create raids with just as much complexity and even more so with a raid limit of 60 people instead of 40. Completely thinking out of the blue you could fight a "Master of the elements" mob that starts as a single mob and then splits into 4 distinct mobs at a certain HP% or time expiration or even at some random moment. Now instead of a single mob with various elemental attacks each element is represented by one of 4 mobs, a cold based mob, a fire based mob, a earth based mob, and a water based mob, all fragmented off from the main original mob. With a fight like this you could force a raid to break off into parts and deal with each mob seperately, pulling the parts to different areas of the room or whatnot to avoid multiple AOE"s. Such a fight would leave a 60 man raid with only 15 people to deal with each fragment of the original. I mean, this is spur of the moment invention and yes, it is basic, but with some thought such as WOW put in you could create amazing content that made use of even larger raid forces, encounters that would be virtually impossible with a 40 man cap BECAUSE of the complexity and various stuff that must be done during combat.

I am not a fan of zerging, but taking a larger force into a battle that requires the larger number of people? I am all for that.

Jaroc said:

I do not want any system where tradeskills are a must or heavily dependent on leveling/adventuring (that side of things) - true it may strengthen player economy and such, but the fact is theres still a good % of the mmo pop that pay no attention to tradeskills or at least do the very minimal.

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That"s fine if you don"t want to craft. Ideally, tradeskilling will be completely independent of adventuring; pretty much the complete opposite way that WoW does them.

I also don"t want to have to rely on other people (tradesmen) or what not because I choose not to part take in tradeskills.

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Why should you rely on anyone other than yourself at all? Why shouldn"t you be able to be the best of the best while playing solo?

I"d like to stress what I said initially : Adventurers depend on tradesmenANDtradesmen depend on adventurers. If it becomes a 1-way street either way, the system will never be as successful as it should be.

Quick example. In SWG beta, I needed pelts from mobs that I couldn"t and didn"t want to kill in order to make good armor. I haggled with adventurers, bought my materials, and sold the finished goods for a profit. To folks like me, this is as engrossing as delving deep into some dungeon and finding shiny items.

Also why make lvling up tradeskills a slower process, its already a pain in the ass for most I"d imagine (boring, tedious etc cept for you tradeskill loving freaks)... not something the player is just dying to bust out.

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The reason it needs to be as slow/difficult/time-consuming to master as adventuring is because if it isn"t, every other adventurer type will master some tradeskill and the market for goods will be poor. Obviously there are other ways to do this (limited skill system, for example) but I"m just referring to it as time spent for brevity.

Grave said:

When we start to see crafting systems that award tradeskillers as much as adventurers, with clear progression that is just as fulfilling as acquiring a new piece of raid loot, then crafting will really take off.

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Exactly. A perfect crafting system would be rewarding at all levels, not just the upper 95%.

Maleficence said:

Why should I have to spend 10 or even 5 minutes on the trade channel looking for someone willing to help me craft the item I need? It"s annoying when the rest of my play experience consists of going to hassle-free NPC vendors.

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This is why a fully fleshed out system for buyers/sellers is imperative to avoid frustration. An Auction House is only part of the whole. You need a system in place to place buy/sell orders, advertise your abilities, etc.

brekk said:

I"d add PoHate to that list. Granted its difficulty was somewhat due to bugginess but it had the same effect where the moment you were in the zone your heart rate would go up, and you"d be on edge til the raid was over at the end of the night. You never really felt safe.

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I remember being a puller on one of the first Hate raids, as a human shadowknight. That was definitely a thrill.

Hate and Fear are irrelevant to designing mass consumable raid experiences. They may be intense, worthy of irreplaceable memories, but they are not the correct difficulty for the unwashed masses. I"d say that Fear and Hate are only relevant in knowing what not to do. The point ought to be bringing more people into raiding without sacrificing depth, not just saying "you must be THIS tall to ride this ride". Hate and Fear weren"t that interesting anyway. It was either you get brutally raped up the ass, your puller got brutally raped up the ass, or you didn"t. It was like a 0 or 1 outcome with a potentially irrelevant 0.5 in the middle. What a wonderful milieu of choice you were offered.

If you want to take on WoW then forget they even exist and pick apart MC, BWL, Karazhan, Zul"Gurub, Zul"Aman, etc. If you need to take away from EverQuest then look at Velious, LDoN, and OoW. PoP had a lot of neat tricks to offer, but they"ve been dwarfed entirely by WoW. I have no experience past OoW. Take the best elements and keep on trucking.

Fear and Hate, equally gay and awesome, have their place, but shouldn"t be the mainstream goalpost by any means. I"d make dungeons in their style designed to exude bragging rights and cool toys rather than substantial progression. Go there and earn cool shit or stay in the paint by numbers track that has been lined out for you. This 1) preserves their difficulty for those that can appreciate it 2) doesn"t embitter those that can"t appreciate it 3) obviously lets you make it as fucking stupid hard as you like. Everyone wins.

Lleauaric~EW said:

Meh.

While experience with the raiding mechanics of other games is good to have it is by no means the most important or critical credential a designer should have in my opinion. In fact, if there is too strong a common influence on a team, as Foghorn suggested with have many extensive WoW raiders on design, it could actually harm the creative process as ideas have the danger of being drawn from the same small pool of experience.

There is a greater requirement to have people who can think outside of the box. Designers who are willing to do not what has already been done, but create something new and reshape peoples thoughts of what raiding is.
Does anyone really think that people who created Portal, for example, would not be able to create and design a challenging and fun encounter in an MMO?

The team I would make would draw from as many diverse backgrounds as possible, fusing a myriad of experiences to create something completely new.

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Let me guess...you also think a company that makes excellent trucks can also design a great car too right?