Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Tropics_foh

shitlord
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Digo said:
Err, unless he has some other characters other than the ones he posted in his sig, Curt doesn"t strike me as a hardcore raider. Maybe he was in EQ. Feel free to correct me if this was the case.
He does not seem to be a huge raider in WOW. But in the name of a great Studio38 MMORPG Casual could offer to take Curt on a trip through some raid content a few times to get the idea of WOW raiding from the MC-Nax content and through all the TBC stuff. I mean, heck, that would have to be worth a beta slot for your guild in the guild beta and at the same time it would help Curt huge to have that kind of a view of the raid content.

Or he could watch most raids on youtube I guess.
 

Fammaden_foh

shitlord
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Froofy-D said:
Whoever designed Meeting Stones v1.0 is a perfect example.
Meeting stones aren"t really the sort of "unintended results" thing everyone is worried about with raiding though. They seemed more like a stubborn decision to simply be different and unique without regard for what has actually worked and made sense. Someone probably thought this was a great thing for casual players to automate the LFG experience but it was so poorly implemented that we were all baffled on how it ever got in. I would guess it was a pet idea of someone who was too important to just outright say no to and it got put in and allowed to garner the inevitable poor feedback as the only way to eventually fix them to some degree. Using them to summon ended up being a grand idea, but they remain a complete failure otherwise.

The things is though, they really didn"t hurt anything other than delaying implementation of a better LFG tool. Decisions made on entire zones worth of high end content designed to absorb large amounts of playtime need to have some grounded basis in what worked in the past to avoid potential nightmares in player-dev relations. They probably do have some people on the team with real time gaming experience for all I know. I still think it can"t hurt if you have at least one person who is not only bright, talented, technically capable, focused and goal oriented BUT ALSO with a solid history of seeing the live testing and tuning of raid zones by paying users. That person might be hard to find though and I can understand that a company probably wouldn"t or shouldn"t just grab a dude off a forum as a raid consultant just to say they have one on the payroll.
 

Cybsled

Avatar of War Slayer
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As a warlock, I LOVED it when meeting stones could summon people. Saved me so many damn shards.
 

tad10

Elisha Dushku
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Genjiro said:
Well I guess it really depends on what you are trying to do with your game, which we don"t know anything about right now.

My point is *IF* you are wanting to do new, interesting, dynamic raid content you sure as shit better not have Joeblow "Creative-but-naive raid developer" like so many games have (hi2u Talisker on the VG team who knew better than we, with his infinite wisdom gleaned from working on Earth and Beyond). He might think something is cool and new but chances are WoW has already done something just like it many times..
Well some of VG"s innovations were actually innovative. I don"t know who came up with Defensive Target/OT in VG but he or she didn"t get it from WoW and it is a vast improvement over single targeting. Using VG"s combat or class system as an example of bad design by fairly new developers probably isn"t your best line of argument since I think any Diku-type system going forward would be advised to steal from VG"s healing classes and combat system.

Gotta love soaring leap.

Anyway VG thread is that way --->

Fammaden said:
Meeting stones aren"t really the sort of "unintended results" thing everyone is worried about with raiding though. They seemed more like a stubborn decision to simply be different and unique without regard for what has actually worked and made sense.
That"s the winning comment for this section of the thread. Curt"s the boss and can do what he wants -- we"ll see if he listens to the player base or keeps to his stubborn decision with respect to raid designers/testers.
 

Genjiro

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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tad10 said:
Well Tad, it sure wasn"t Talisker. We were the top guild in beta by far with the highest levels, had at least half of the class leads in our guild (Ascension), and worked with them on a lot of shit. Lets just say some of the people working on VG felt like Talisker was a moron too. I think most all the cool class design shit was from Aruspex, like the blood mage iirc, and Jerrith really knew his stuff and a great guy too.

Telon was just such a lame world with no story back then. There were no gods then in beta and nothing to support the world in terms of lore at all hardly. There were no paladin and shadowknights being diametrically opposed, those classes were metrosexual politically correct. Give me pure good in a paladin or pure evil in a shadowknight and the gods they worship over "death knights are like loners who dont care one way or another" any day--just bland. What happens when you walk into Orgrimmar? You see burning fire, fucking war drums are beating, giant spikes and shit all over the place. What is the orc city in VG? It looks like the crossroads in the barrens with 0 character and looks like a deserted camp not an actual city at all, bleh. Talisker was not open to suggestions at all, when asked about it in MSN to add some more deep meaningful class design, his response was literally "you might see it in other games, but you"ll never see it in this".

Our collective response for the most part was "ok then, bye"! I think the next day 90% of us rolled up new characters in WoW.
 

Tagad Sigil_foh

shitlord
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Genjiro said:
Well Tad, it sure wasn"t Talisker. We were the top guild in beta by far with the highest levels, had at least half of the class leads in our guild (Ascension), and worked with them on a lot of shit. Lets just say some of the people working on VG felt like Talisker was a moron too. I think most all the cool class design shit was from Aruspex, like the blood mage iirc, and Jerrith really knew his stuff and a great guy too.
1. I apologize for responding to this derail. This really has nothing to do with 38 Studios / the thread as a whole. I wish the team over in Boston the best of luck with whatever it is they are actually working on.

2. Defensive Targeting was put forth by myself and Martin "MSEW" Sweitzer back in the first days of VG. I played a cleric for years in EQ, as well as MUDS and we wanted to make classes have the ability to play both offensively and defensively at the same time.

3. Talisker is a bad ass. I"m sorry that you are bitter about the decisions he was entrusted to make.

4. Avair (not Aruspex) also worked on class design in VG and he worked very closely with Talisker. It wasn"t like he was off running in a different direction. (Aruspex did tons of work on the diplomacy system).

5. Jerrith really did know his stuff and is also, in my opinion, a bad ass.

~Tagad
 

Digo_foh

shitlord
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Tropics said:
He does not seem to be a huge raider in WOW. But in the name of a great Studio38 MMORPG Casual could offer to take Curt on a trip through some raid content a few times to get the idea of WOW raiding from the MC-Nax content and through all the TBC stuff. I mean, heck, that would have to be worth a beta slot for your guild in the guild beta and at the same time it would help Curt huge to have that kind of a view of the raid content.

Or he could watch most raids on youtube I guess.
That"s exactly my point: taking people along on a tour of raiding will never give them the same understanding of someone who does it every night for years. It might spark some kind of curiosity or new awareness, perhaps.

Let me put it this way: I wouldn"t open an MMA school after my first sparring session.
 

Genjiro

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Yea Avair is who I meant, I haven"t played since beta got the "A" names mixed up I guess. Anyways, you are welcome to your opinion, I"ll keep mine that he did a miserable job with the classes he touched (like the monk, it was just so so so...unbelievably bad). Vanguards epic failure was the result of a combination lot of things, and class design was among them.

Going into launch, about the only classes people actually liked were the warrior (which the class lead Adamarr designed--who Talisker offered a job to and who declined), ranger -- due to them having literally everything in the game (thx Brad), and blood mage. It was basically WoW classes spells/abilities, minus the freedom of having tree choices, and just upgrades to the same shit over and over again aka EQ. This is not 10 years ago, people want to have a lot of customization over their characters--even EQ2 eventually realized this and adopted AAs.
 

Danth_foh

shitlord
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"It"s a pretty sad state of affairs when your raiding history reads like a resume."

That"s appropriate enough, since raiding as it exists in most MMORPGs effectively amounts to a part-time job, or more in many cases.

Danth
 

Gaereth_foh

shitlord
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Ngruk said:
If you don"t understand that EVERY single in game feature has a cost associated with it, a tangible dollar value, you shouldn"t even start THINKING down this path.

Quick story.

In our office we have a "visual aid" to how Jason Roberts thinks, and it"s scary. Basically it"s a MASSIVE piece of white paper, and on it is every single solitary system contained within our game. This is the stuff the MADE THE CUT! because long before you have this piece of paper you go through stack ranking and prioritizing game features. A process I thought would result in the inclusion and implementation of ALL OF MY ideas......

Ya, not so much. Basically this chart is color coded, and for examples sake we"ll go with red, yellow and gray. Red is saved for the most crucial game important features and parts. Yellow is the 2nd tier, gray the back end. Any time I come up with a "Mounted Combat on flying pigs in an underwater zone" ideas I get marched to the board.....

Ok, your idea hits this red box, and the 143 yellow and gray boxes attached to this red box now need to be redefined and restructured. It will add x hours to this, which will add x hours to each of these.... You get the idea.
This type of stuff is what gives me hope.

We know nothing about the game, there is no smoke blowing up our asses and nothing is even known of the IP, yet I can see what I consider to be competent business practices being used. It appears as if 38 has a firm handle attached to the project and are actually driving the game rather than allowing the game to drive them.

One of the most interesting discussions in this thread was, to me, the QC and business practice portion of the thread with Flight I believe. We have seen so many companies that don"t appear to know what the left and the right hands are doing at any point in time and instead simply soldier on to the end.

Seeing a small example of the people in charge being able to take ANY idea and give a complete overview of what it would take to implement and what it would effect gives me a little faith. Especially when they are walking the boss through his pet ideas and actually showing him the negatives rather than just saying, "Sir!! YES SIR!!!"
 

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
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3
I hope a functioning GUI with guild organization tools, a properly working chat system, who list, friend list, guild list etc etc etc are actually function unlike every other MMO released to-date are near the top of that list.
 

Bongk_foh

shitlord
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Draegan said:
I hope a functioning GUI with guild organization tools, a properly working chat system, who list, friend list, guild list etc etc etc are actually function unlike every other MMO released to-date are near the top of that list.
More importantly do what EVERYONE else seems to forget, copy EQ1"s LFG tool exactly it is the best ever designed and noone else has come close since. Its amazing to me, blizzard takes everyone elses ideas and makes them better, but for some reason they fail with LFG system. They are on what their 3rd try now? The first incarnation with meeting stones OMG...
 

Maleficence_foh

shitlord
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Hachima said:
They are all /anon =(
Not to nitpick, but didn"t you leave /anon status when you went /lfg? Anyways, that"s a non-issue in most current MMO"s as no one"s going to be pestering the clerics to go and rezz them half-way across the world, because they want a 96% rezz.