Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Don"t think anyone will be at the Indy Gen Con this year. With so little to give in the way of game information our focus in the near future is announcing our company presence more than anything. Meeting fans, talking to potential partners and laying ground work to establish ourselves globally on the business front.

Now a game question. Third party software, mods and such, are an enormous part of MMO communities these days. I think we are looking at that from a million angles but I am curious as to what some of you guys think just for my own piece of mind.

I have never been a big mod guy or add on player, until WoW. I don"t use cheats but Titan panel and the Loc mod, gatherer, and some others, I find immensely useful. The mod that gives vendor values on drops is one I find incredibly useful the minute I am on a machine I don"t have it installed in.

I guess my question is whether or not the games should provide this or allow players to provide it? Players will always mod, that"s a cool thing, some of the UI stuff players come up with is pretty incredible and from what I have seen a lot of players have used that path to get a job in the industry. The more I see how the mods work the more things I see and think the publisher should have included in the game. Now that treads into the arena of development priorities and feature creep. The cost vs reward aspect of development is something we drill very deep into with everything we are doing now, and will continue to do in the future.

UI is just one area of this and imo is almost it"s own topic, apart from the other mods out there, but some of the other mods work for me on a lot of levels and I wonder how many others are really into the mod scene. I can remember the EQ days where I"d see screen shots and wonder what the hell the game was I was looking at, because the mobs and PCs looked like EQ stuff, but that was it. It"s a game I was late to the party for sure, but it"s a pretty significant market now and I am curious what you guys think.

3-4 years from now we will be looking at some vastly different stuff, but I am one of the people that believes no matter how different the experts think this space is going to be, it"s still going to be centered on games, great games. Change the revenue streams, change the access to the product, change the markets, change it all, but at the end of the day the game will still be the key piece to all the changes that are going to happen.

I like mods. I love mods like Titan panel that give information. I hate when mods dictate beating the game and make people lazy players. By the time I was finally done with Burning Crusade, if I wanted to raid, I was required to have multiple mods cluttering up my screen. I mean are we killing dragons or going to Calculus class? Fine line...

Blackulaa said:

I like mods. I love mods like Titan panel that give information. I hate when mods dictate beating the game and make people lazy players. By the time I was finally done with Burning Crusade, if I wanted to raid, I was required to have multiple mods cluttering up my screen. I mean are we killing dragons or going to Calculus class? Fine line...

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Mods that affect an encounter are cheats imo, plain and simple. I like the information mods, maps and such, and think there is a legitimate need/use and place for them.

Having played L2, EVE, WoW since beta, FFXI, EQ2, and various other beta MMOs, I think that WoW in TBC is pretty much right. You can"t write mods that automate actual in-game tasks, but you have massive freedom with regards to the appearance of incoming data(unit frames, scrolling combat text, some of the combat log parsers) and adding in accessible but inconvenient data(like the mods that shows vendor prices on items, or times abilities on boss fights).

I think that giving players a sandbox to work in and allowing them to build the tools to suit what they need. Just make sure that you don"t run into the SWG/late WoW 1.0 problem where the internal scripting language allows you to bot using it.

I think you should give as much freedom as you can for players to choose how they want information presented to themselves. Changing functionality, bad; changing form, good, imo.

I know that me and many others have had a lot of fun in WoW just making mods and tinkering with our interface. It"s like a little minigame tbh and I miss it in EVE.

Wodin said:

I think that WoW in TBC is pretty much right. You can"t write mods that automate actual in-game tasks, but you have massive freedom with regards to the appearance of incoming data(unit frames, scrolling combat text, some of the combat log parsers) and adding in accessible but inconvenient data(like the mods that shows vendor prices on items, or times abilities on boss fights).

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While I dont think it can be said any better then this, just ensure that the game can be played at all levels with the default UI. Sure addons may serve to help people, such as alerts or timers, but they shouldn"t be a requirement.

Speaking as somebody who has written well over a dozen WoW addons, I think modding in WoW is STILL too much. Just visit warcraftmovies.com and watch an Illidan kill video, especially from a healer"s perspective. The amount of crap those guys have on their screens is ridiculous.

That doesn"t mean, if I were a game developer, that I wouldn"t include some things into the game to replace all those health bars however. For healers in particular, since they have it the worst, I would try to remove unit frames altogether and instead include some sort of avatar visual cues to the player to indicate which players are damaged and in need of healing. I.e. players limping, bleeding, etc. If not that, then at the very least I would (instead of unit frames) put health bars above each player so healers would be watching their viewports instead of a list of 25+ health bars in the corner of their screen.

Actually-- and I know this will sound like something unpopular-- I would rather play a game with a minimalist UI approach, that instead relies on the game"s visuals and audio to cue the player to important details rather than text, numbers, or UI widgets. Use all those gigaflops for more than just pretty pictures. Have those polys tell the story rather than a box with text. Who is injured? Why, the guy bleeding and screaming of course. Which weapon is superior? The one thats all glowing and shit. Which attack is your opponent doing? Look at his animation.

Of course any game that takes a more traditional approach is probably no longer going to get away with not allowing modding to a degree larger than EQs. After WoW, I think people will expect it.

Several things:

- Freedom is a must in UI customization and the use of data given to the player. That being said, I think there is data that has become necessary in today"s MMO genre (locations, mob hitpoints, maps, experience numbers, spell effects, etc) and then there is data that can actually impact gameplay significantly when known (aggro numbers, mob loot tables, mob locations, etc). The latter information should not be part of a player"s repertoire of information made available to them and the former should definitely be part of it.

- Allow drastic UI customization, to the point where someone could totally overhaul the default UI if they so choose. I really hate games that lock you into a certain UI and only allow minor adjustments (a la LOTRO). Allowing total UI customization assures that virtually no one will not play your game just because of the default UI, and it has very little impact on gameplay.

- Allow for ample amounts of interaction points between the game and add-ons. If given the right information (lots of the informational kind and none of the game-changing kind), add-ons can make a lot of people happier and have no adverse side effects.

- The default UI should be simplistic and minimalist. I believe it"s a waste of development time to think up tons of little widgets and toys when Murphy"s law states that everything you think of will be useless and you"ll forget all the important stuff that people actually want. The community is a perfect development team for stuff like this. They know what they want, work for free and have 100x the amount of people working than any company does. Let them take care of it.

- Make the gameplay simple and intuitive enough that UI customization and/or add-ons are not necessary at any point in the game. Like others have said, in WoW you are virtually required to have some sort of add-on or customization in order to complete certain parts of the game. This style of game design hurts everyone and benefits no one.

- Finally, and this is more of a personal complaint, make a robust and intelligent logging system. Granted, game data logging can be used to facilitate macros and bots. However, I"m of the opinion that if someone was going to create a bot or macro for the game, they"d go the far more efficient and precise route and just use memory and packet hacks. When developers cripple logging I believe they hurt more legitimate users than they stop nefarious ones.

I agree about the logging.

The ability to modify how the game looks via mods and how the player functions(not how the game itself functions) adds an aspect of ownership to the game.

When you start adding a feeling of ownership people feel more connected to the game itself. When you can customize what you see on screen to a level you like, when can tinker with stats and gear offline, when you can talk to people online when you aren"t there, people become more connected to the game.

Mods enable a portion of that ingame. You will never be able to build a functional UI that incorporates everythign that everyone wants to see. The cost to develop alone would be a hindrance.

But, you can develop a language and open up functions much as WOW has done and then let the people themselves build the functionality they want as individuals into their game. You will never be able to put the man hours into it that the modders will....let them do what they do and facilitate it.

Then incorporate the basic stuff, the stuff you should have thought of in the first place, into the basic UI as time goes on.

-shrug- Having a fully customizable and self administered UI is probably one of the most basic goals to shoot for. It has to be there.

I like the old days of /tell guildcleric i need a heal fast! When i see the WoW raid interface with every single person in the raid on their screen i was like, you know what F being a healer in that game. I couldnt imaging having to focus on just that the whole time. That doesnt seem fun at all.

Lonin said:

That being said, I think there is data that has become necessary in today"s MMO genre (locations, mob hitpoints, maps, experience numbers, spell effects, etc) and then there is data that can actually impact gameplay significantly when known (aggro numbers, mob loot tables, mob locations, etc). The latter information should not be part of a player"s repertoire of information made available to them and the former should definitely be part of it.

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The problem is, any information that is important enough that it affects the user"s experience in a significant way - like aggro mechanics, mob loot tables and locations - will be found empirically if your game becomes popular. WoW doesn"t make aggro mechanics or mob loot tables available through the UI or scripting in any way, and as far as I know there has never been any documentation available as to how aggro (for example) works. However, players are able to experiment and record enough data to have an encyclopedic understanding of it nowadays.

Also, I find some of your mandatory information odd. Why should players get exact numbers for mob HP or EXP gain, but not aggro? I haven"t played WoW post-TBC, but in 1.X you couldn"t get exact numbers for mob HP remaining, just percentages, and things were OK. What about mob stats and abilities? (Some MMOs give that, some don"t.) It seems to me that where you draw the line is mostly just tradition and convention.

Gaereth said:

The ability to modify how the game looks via mods and how the player functions(not how the game itself functions) adds an aspect of ownership to the game.

When you start adding a feeling of ownership people feel more connected to the game itself. When you can customize what you see on screen to a level you like, when can tinker with stats and gear offline, when you can talk to people online when you aren"t there, people become more connected to the game.

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Right on.

A lot of people mention that mods are basically mandatory in WoW to do a lot of things. That"s certainly true to a point; although a superhuman would never need mods, many mods effectively make people more reliable, quicker, and smarter, and many raid encounters are balanced around having a team which is extremely reliable, quick, and smart.

It seems like there"s a disconnect here:

We all agree on point

A) The default UI should be minimal and simple in order to avoid overloading new players with options and information.

And we agree on point

B) The UI should be extremely modifiable so that experienced players can easily present information to themselves in an efficient manner.

So what follows?

C) Therefore, a well-designed modified UI will make players much more efficient and capable.

D) To balance raid encounters to be difficult but achievable, you need to assume that the players doing them are fairly skilled and able to fulfill their roles near the best of their ability.

E) Therefore, difficult raid encounters need to presume that players are using well-designed modified UIs.

F) (Corollary) If a raid encounter is balanced around being difficult for players using the default UI, it will not be nearly as difficult for players using a well-designed modified UI.

Where is the hole here? I don"t find this to be as much of a problem as some people seem to. I"m not sure why a raiding MMORPG player would want to use a UI which made it more difficult to do their job, and I think it"s fair to assume accordingly that raiders are using a good UI.

Fog said:

The problem is, any information that is important enough that it affects the user"s experience in a significant way - like aggro mechanics, mob loot tables and locations - will be found empirically if your game becomes popular. WoW doesn"t make aggro mechanics or mob loot tables available through the UI or scripting in any way, and as far as I know there has never been any documentation available as to how aggro (for example) works. However, players are able to experiment and record enough data to have an encyclopedic understanding of it nowadays.

Also, I find some of your mandatory information odd. Why should players get exact numbers for mob HP or EXP gain, but not aggro? I haven"t played WoW post-TBC, but in 1.X you couldn"t get exact numbers for mob HP remaining, just percentages, and things were OK. What about mob stats and abilities? (Some MMOs give that, some don"t.) It seems to me that where you draw the line is mostly just tradition and convention.

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I probably got too specific there. Put more simply, I meant to say give as much information as possible, but not too much. That sounds like a really vague request though, hence my attempt to clarify. All the examples I gave could go either way honestly, it"s more about what information can really have adverse effects on the gameplay, and the information that is more benign like the type of stuff you tend to see on websites like wowhead and allakhazam"s. You don"t want any of the former but a lot of the latter IMO.

I guess my question is whether or not the games should provide this or allow players to provide it? Players will always mod, that"s a cool thing, some of the UI stuff players come up with is pretty incredible and from what I have seen a lot of players have used that path to get a job in the industry. The more I see how the mods work the more things I see and think the publisher should have included in the game. Now that treads into the arena of development priorities and feature creep. The cost vs reward aspect of development is something we drill very deep into with everything we are doing now, and will continue to do in the future.

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One of the major reasons that mods became so important in Wow is the pacing of combat. You have debuffs that will literally wipe the raid if players dont react in under 5 seconds. At first it was decursive, decurse the raid by spamming a single button so it was removed. Then once that was taken out, all sorts of unit frames to show who was cursed, who was in range etc etc. The game is in some ways unplayable without being able to see everyones HP everyones buff / debuff status. The same can be said for healing. You need to have a heal land within a second of some players taking damage or they die.

While raiding my UI looked like a console of some air traffic controller. At some point that"s just way overboard. Keeping track of a billion numbers and trying to filter out whats going on because if we don"t do it at lightning speed we"ll wipe really isnt that fun. Ideally the pace of combat should be slowed and decision making should come into play. Literally all the UI mods that are required on raids are there because if you are half a second late or half a second early, ur entire raid is doomed. Pacing and speed shouldn"t be the reason that encounters are hard. Look at turn based games for instance, they can still manage to be hard even if you have all the time in the world to think. That"s how MMOs should be designed. Not this mass twitchfest where everyone is trying to numbercrunch and monitor 40 things at a time.

While I feel modding is an important part of any MMO now-a-days, the issue with WoW was that it became a tactical advantage instead of a matter of convenience and personal appeal. Mods that blare "YOU ARE THE BOMB!" offer such a huge bonus that it will lead to an encounter becoming almost trivial in a matter of days, whereas one that lets you more easily view general information (such as damage meters, combat info, etc.) still depends upon player skill and experience to be utilized properly.

I guess my argument, in its most basic form, would be that mods that "play the game for you" are a negative, while mods that help youunderstandthe game better are perfectly fine. If a title is built with the intention of keeping mods in the realm of parsing and aesthetic appeal in mind, the game won"t require mods like those found in WoW. It"s when free reign is given to the modding community that developers have to craft encounters and gameplay with the assumption everyone is using a certain handicap.

Cadrid said:

While I feel modding is an important part of any MMO now-a-days, the issue with WoW was that it became a tactical advantage instead of a matter of convenience and personal appeal. Mods that blare "YOU ARE THE BOMB!" offer such a huge bonus that it will lead to an encounter becoming almost trivial in a matter of days, whereas one that lets you more easily view general information (such as damage meters, combat info, etc.) still depends upon player skill and experience to be utilized properly.

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Wait, what"s going on here? "YOU ARE THE BOMB" is just a more user-friendly way of displaying a magic effect which isalready displayedin the default UI. A player can look at the sidebar and see, with 100% reliability, whether they are the bomb or not, because the little debuff icon appears.

The reason "YOU ARE THE BOMB" makes it easier is because the status of that debuff is very important, and the default presentation of the buff bar isn"t very eye-catching, so by moving the notification from a little buff icon appearing in the middle of a bunch of other icons to a notice in chat (which most players are usually watching carefully) it"s easier for a player to pick out immediately.

It seems to me like "YOU ARE THE BOMB" is exactly what mods are best used for - making the information a player wants to see available to them in the manner they would prefer to see it.

Fog said:

Wait, what"s going on here? "YOU ARE THE BOMB" is just a more user-friendly way of displaying a magic effect which isalready displayedin the default UI. A player can look at the sidebar and see, with 100% reliability, whether they are the bomb or not, because the little debuff icon appears.

The reason "YOU ARE THE BOMB" makes it easier is because the status of that debuff is very important, and the default presentation of the buff bar isn"t very eye-catching, so by moving the notification from a little buff icon appearing in the middle of a bunch of other icons to a notice in chat (which most players are usually watching carefully) it"s easier for a player to pick out immediately.

It seems to me like "YOU ARE THE BOMB" is exactly what mods are best used for - making the information a player wants to see available to them in the manner they would prefer to see it.

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The difference between this and a mod that displays your damage/resists/etc. is that this makes it so the player has to pay minimal attention to what is going on around them. Instead of having to look at their character or keep tabs on what debuffs they have they are hard-locked on maximum DPS. There"s almost no player interaction when a mod goes "DINGGGGG!" and tells you to run away.

If a game is made with these kinds of events in mind then the icons will be displayed in a manner that makes visibility of debuffs prevalent and convenient. It would simply take some effort by the player to keep an eye on what is going on around them.

To give a more specific example, if the default WoW UI had separated debuffs and buffs into different groupings, being "the bomb" wouldn"t require (at least not as much) a mod to tell you so. Icon design, sizing based on danger factor, and visual clues would help replace the overt "GTFO!" message of some mods.

Being "THE BOMB!" should make your character visually represent that status clearly enough that even a moron is aware of the situation. Regardless though, I like UI Mods and use and modify many of them myself. I do agree for certain though that they need to be controlled to some degree to avoid excessive botting and other bullshit. As well, of course, your default UI should be good enough that many of the addons we see in WoW would be obsolete. It wouldn"t hurt if your default combat system didn"t encourage things like /stopcasting macros, stance-switching fear macros and other staples of WoW.

As a developer though, you"d be foolish to ignore a massive free coder base that is willing to spend hundreds and thousands of hours polishing the UI. People like making mods and hell, it would cost you a hell of a lot to get results not nearly as good in the end. So open it up a bit and let them come up with what they can. If it proves to be too potent (decursive perhaps?) then you can disable specific functionality at a later time. Huh, I never thought I"d hold WoW up as a model for how to implement UI policies but in retrospect, most of it has worked out reasonably well.

I actually managed to miss the big flashing YOU ARE THE BOMB on my first MC raid. I felt like such a schmuck, I had my raid UI covering where it popped up and didn"t notice it because I was busy clicking frantically to keep people healed (I was using a mod that let me click on raid windows to heal someone).

I needed a mod that shot a jolt of electricity into my ass, or something, I guess.

Duppin said:

I needed a mod that shot a jolt of electricity into my ass, or something, I guess.

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I"d be careful what you ask for, they probably make that product.