Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Yeah, Ngruk is mixing up apples and oranges here a bit. I wouldn"t trust any player with coming up with new abilities or new class mechanics.

What I trust a select few mathematically gifted players with is TUNING pre-existing game-mechanics. There are simulations that can predict exactly how much damage a class can do. When developers announce a change, you can bet that players know exactly how big an increase/decrease it will be.

Take PvP balance implications as well. Most Blizzard developers are awesome gamers, but there are several players that are much better players than they are. Noxn held n1 in several brackets 3 seasons in a row as a SHADOWPRIEST. Serennia did the same. Hydra does things with a priest that make you go wow. Neilyo, as much as he is a shithead, as far as raw skills go, is pretty incredible as a rogue.

If some changes go in and all the top elite players almost unanimously say "this shit is retarded, fucking revert it" you want to think twice before you go ahead.

Right, but I wouldn"t trust players when it comes to fun. I wouldn"t want them anywhere near DESIGN.

What I want players to help with is mathematical finetuning and balance - not, "will this mechanic end up being fun" but "will this mechanic with these coefficients end up being too strong"?

Zehn - Vhex said:

"Hrmn...how could players exploit this?" isn"t much different then a player saying, "Hrmn...how can I exploit this?" when you"re looking at abilities on a case by case basis.

Click to expand...

And you"d be surprised how few people think like this.

I work in computer security these days (ok, apart from my stint in the game industry, like these last 14 years), and that always strikes people how I approach things.

When I"m presented with some new things, my first impulse isn"t "how will it work". It"s "how will itbreak". It"s a mindset that"s generally not present in people, but an essential part of security work. Witness the large amount of programmers whose first impulse is "but nobody will ever do this!"

Lesson of the last two pages: "It takes all kinds to make a massive video game."

Tyen said:

There is not any person that would be in a position to manage game design that isn"t a rabid gamer. If there was than he/she shouldn"t be in that position to begin with. There is no getting around the concept of finding people that are not passionate about certain design mechanics to manage the design stage.

Click to expand...

I agree that all designers should be gamers, I don"t agree that all gamers should be designers. I don"t trust most hardcore (non-designer) gamers to design clever and fun mechanics.

I trust a few hardcore gamers to mathematically balance the coefficients in different abilities; for example, I"d trust Manly to tell me what coefficients the different mages spells should have, but I wouldn"t trust him to come up with a new clever mechanic that makes frost rotations more fun because he"d come up with some exceedingly complex system that is challenging for him but impossible for 95% of the playerbase. It would end up perfectly balanced, but it would cause most players to commit suicide.

You"d be surprised. There are a lot of designers who aren"t active gamers.

Zarcath said:

You"d be surprised. There are a lot of designers who aren"t active gamers.

Click to expand...

They are a rare breed though - although afaik the guy who designed OS never played, and OS was one of the best dungeons ever made.

Gnome Eater said:

They are a rare breed though - although afaik the guy who designed OS never played, and OS was one of the best dungeons ever made.

Click to expand...

The next designer I meet that is not a gamer, will be the first. I"ve never met one, in 11 years of being in and around the industry I have never met a designer that was not a gamer.

That would be like hating sports but playing professionally, makes zero sense and I would not imagine that person would be very productive.

Ngruk said:

The next designer I meet that is not a gamer, will be the first. I"ve never met one, in 11 years of being in and around the industry I have never met a designer that was not a gamer.

That would be like hating sports but playing professionally, makes zero sense and I would not imagine that person would be very productive.

Click to expand...

If you are good at something that can make you a ton of money, even if you hate it, then most people would still do it.

There was a pro football player in the "70s -- think he was a running back -- who was interviewed by NFL Films and said he hated the game and only played for money. I don"t think they ever aired that interview until they did some retrospective a few years ago on NFL Films.

Happens in film as well. Honestly someone who was not a gamer may give you a fresh outlook on something that other designers had missed because they are so influenced by other game designers.

If something gets stale,bring the oddball in.


Now that I am thinking about it,and after watching the Todd documentary. I"m not sure Todd ever liked comics that much ( he always saw it as something he could do,and a fall back from his sports career), otherwise he would still be doing them like the rest of the other Image founders. Could be wrong on that tho, he may love comics but hates to draw them.

Should have met the guy from EQ2 who we worked with helping them test combat changes. The amount of common sense shit you thought everyone knew, this guy had no clue about.

He was a fucking prick too. He at first huffed his chest out and said no guilds would beat his new content we were going to test for a long long time. Since we only had 18 on test show up out of 24 he wanted to cancel and got pissy with me that we were wasting his time. So, we take our 18 and steamroll the shit out of his "hard content" and then he starts getting all bitchy. He tries to accuse us (when we were doing them a favor) of fucking exploiting buff stacking, when if his dumbass had ever opened the forums up once in the last 6 months at that time, he would have seen dozens of threads about troubadors ability to stack stam buffs and how it made dirges then mostly worthless.

This was the guy we were told "the buck stops with", with regard to gameplay changes. Wasn"t any surprise that game was so shitty with morons like him in charge. Oh yea, he joined our raid to "help" us and wiped us multiple times, twice pulling agro while the tank was pulling the mob to the raid. We had a lot of laughs at his expense though, thanks EQ2.

Ngruk said:

The next designer I meet that is not a gamer, will be the first. I"ve never met one, in 11 years of being in and around the industry I have never met a designer that was not a gamer.

That would be like hating sports but playing professionally, makes zero sense and I would not imagine that person would be very productive.

Click to expand...

Keyword is active gamer. I"ve found that a lot of the old timers cling to their ideas of what makes a good modern game, applying what they think is good based on their standards from years past. Some don"t even pick up new titles to see what everyone else is doing. That"s dangerous.

I dunno Curt, how many designers do you really come across? Just the ones that HR lets through? do you meet with designers from other studios often? It could just be that all the designers you"re meeting are at the top of their field, and they"re at the top because they go that extra mile. But there are a lot of bad designers out there.

Haha, that"s awesome Genjiro.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

There was a pro football player in the "70s -- think he was a running back -- who was interviewed by NFL Films and said he hated the game and only played for money. I don"t think they ever aired that interview until they did some retrospective a few years ago on NFL Films.

Click to expand...

Come to think of it, i have played with a guy that made no bones about hating baseball. However once you get to know people like this it"s apparent that they really don"t hate it, but they put up the facade to make people think it"s no big deal to them. Set yourself up, if you fail, meh, I don"t care, if you do well, ya, whatever. Weird but true.

I"d argue that there isn"t an even above average game designer that truly hates games, even if they say it.

Think about how "weird" our little culture is. It"s not like a gay man, that hates women, lying to get into the Playboy mansion. The pay isn"t great, the stigma attached to it is not sexy, why would you do this if you hated it?

You meet people that have incredible gifts for game design that suck at or hate games? I can"t see it. Doesn"t mean it doesn"t happen, but I"d bet it"s someone lying about hating games for some weird personal reasons.

Now Artists, engineers, anyone outside of design I could understand and actually do know and have seen. Designers? Nah, trouble seeing that one.

column said:

Happens in film as well. Honestly someone who was not a gamer may give you a fresh outlook on something that other designers had missed because they are so influenced by other game designers.

If something gets stale,bring the oddball in.


Now that I am thinking about it,and after watching the Todd documentary. I"m not sure Todd ever liked comics that much ( he always saw it as something he could do,and a fall back from his sports career), otherwise he would still be doing them like the rest of the other Image founders. Could be wrong on that tho, he may love comics but hates to draw them.

Click to expand...

It"s the opposite. He lives to draw, create art, not sure he loves comics. This guy creates amazing shit on napkins waiting in line. Watched him draw the coolest damn dragon on a torn sheet of paper, riding in the back of a car to SOE a few years back.

hands it to Gehrig and says "That"s why you always draw monsters in cars, the bumps create "mistakes" that always fit somewhere on a monster"

Watched him draw "old school" Green Goblin and Spiderman on a napkin at a Sox game, handed it to my 6 year old who looks at him and says "That"s not the Green Goblin"

...Honest...

Todd, imo, got frustrated and jaded because he had to wear and take on more of the CEO hat and role than he ever wanted to, or thought he might. He went from Todd the artist, creative guy 80% and CEO 20%, to 90+% CEO and 10% artsy guy. That"s changing, as you are seeing, and part of that is his deep seated involvement here. He"s been VERY hands on in mentoring these kids, he lives for that and it"s awesome to watch.

His true love, appears to me anyway, to be animation. It"s where he"s really deep into the MMO and very curious in pushing things beyond what"s out there. It"s fun to watch.

Oh and he makes some kick ass toys.

On a side note, it appears blizzard is hot fixing in nerfs/changes and even some bug fixes and not telling anyone these things until they actually notice it and question them about it

Might be wrong in this, but it sounds like devs are getting butt hurt about their decisions and being told "we told you so" and are going straight into the implement it stage.

I love McFarlane. I used to collect spawn toys until I realized how impossible that was if you didn"t keep them in a locked glass cabinet.

The Freak on a Leash video, at the heyday of TRL, shot Korn into superstardom, and his animation had no small part in that. Suffice it to say I am excited to see his art in action.

(Not to mention I loved Spawn, being the only American comic aside from AoA that ever held my attention)