Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Maleficence said:

Honestly, I can"t really see much benefit for them either given their status and current market share. It would benefit me, as given my play habit I"d end up paying less, but the difference is obviously not big enough that I can"t afford the current fee.

It might make sense for a new MMO though. They might try to entice customers with a lower price-point while still offering a similar feature set, while offering the possibility of a more complete feature set for a higher (but still comparable to other MMOs) price. However, as one of your points stated, the cost to the company remains the same whether the player is using arena/bg/instance/zone to play in, bandwidth, server-time are all still being used, and lowering the price reduces the margins.

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It has the negative aspect in this.

Blizzard offers the game at 10 bucks.

for 5 bucks more you get Arenas and Battlegrounds, say 75% of the people decide they don"t want to participate in those activities. Now I don"t know how blizzard tracks use of specific features,with Arenas they have team statistics I"ll assume but with BG"s can they only track the number of matches per hour? I don"t know, irregardless they now know that only 25% of their player base uses X feature and as a result they devote less development time to said feature and more to the majority. Great if you are in the Majority, bad if you are not. Say they do the same for raiding, you need to pay to participate in expansion current raid content, this is 5%? that"s not good money. Lets develop less raid content cause no one pays for it, or worse lets dumb down the raid content and make it less time intensive to attract more customers...

To me the bad points outweigh the good,mind you I am speculating but most of it just seems to be common sense. The Sony Station style of added outside game content like player profiles or extra character slots seems like a better option. It doesn"t effect players really in any way but gives those that want more out of the game something to buy. By the same token the subscription model of having multiple games is nice to. Maybe you track what games that person owns and every X amount of months he is given the option of buying a new game on the subscription plan if he only played a couple. Like Station has 20 games or something but you only pay two so some of your fees go to a credit that purchases another title available in the sub system to get you involved in their other titles and ensures you continue to use that sub model even if you end up quitting one of the original two you played that got you involved in that model in the first place.


The EVE style game card selling I don"t agree with at all. The company likes to spin it that you are using money rather than injecting it, like farmers don"t use the money they make and so all income bought through farming is income that didn"t exist in the game beforehand because it wasn"t being used. This is BS; people that buy the cards for 360 million isk aren"t using their money either that"s why they buy the cards, it"s disposable income. They make more money than they can spend and the money stagnates in the economy, it injects just as much as a farmer does and all this system does is encourages farmers to generate more "non-existent" income so they can sell it at prices that are far more cost effective than buying a GTC even at the risk of losing the money. So you end up with more miners and farmers than you would if the risk fee system didn"t exist. That"s my opinion, many might argue that and there is counter points.

As far as I a concerned though any money that is stagnant in the game economy that is given to someone that is going to spend it immediately is bad for the economy and the company sanctioning it isn"t doing anything bu making money off this since every card sold by a player gives them money as the GTC is used when the transaction takes place. Great money for them and they can spin it however they like but it"s no different than farmers save the spam advertising, and cleared roid fields. So newbies can go mine and not have to put up with the AFK"ers. If your game is abusive to newbies in terms of economy to the point that you need to create a system that legalizes them buying currency then maybe you should address those issues rather than the if you can"t beat em join em attitude CCP has.

The good thing about Eve"s system is that there are some self regulating elements. Firstly, it has a much better exit system for money in terms of people losing ships and stuff like that. Combined with a nice logarithmic scaling of power. Buy something that"s 5% better for 10 times the price.

This means that people with disposable incomes who buy their power are punished more harshly. They are usually the ones owned by experienced players flying more cost effective ships and setups.

GTC have fluctuating price depending on player supply and demand. While you can argue that direct isk sellers might undercut the GTC price of isk, it can"t get too far under before the GTC price drops to match it.

Also GTC haven"t a finite supply. There"s certainly a huge supply enough to make trading in them fairly easy, but it"s not infinite.

The one drawback that eve has is that there is probably too much game risk free ways to make money, like high sec missioning or mining. There"s not enough balance to it to reduce its effectiveness as more people use it or more currency is generated by it.

I see that as a problem yeah, I am new to the game,having only played about 6 months now. Initially money was not easy for me to make,because I chose a combat path. Someone suggested Salvaging to me at some point and while it had a high start up cost in terms of skill books and Equipment and eventually a dedicated ship, the pay off was huge. I make far more money doing it than I can spend in terms of what I need to do my PVE missions. To the point that I haven"t been salvaging much lately because it"s kinda boring and I don"t currently need the revenue.

If I was pushing to get into a BS right away or something then yeah I could go the GTC route or salvage/mine like a Maniac. The thing about the free easy money , I don"t know I would have liked to see a way to invest .I know they have stocks but the system seems to have drawbacks and doesn"t seem to be recommended by other players. So maybe you get into trade and moving merchandise from systems to other systems,requires a large sum of money to be profitable and that"s an avenue but even then it"s only so interesting.

The payoff of ships VIa insurance,but not the modules works to a degree, but it"s not really effective if you follow the don"t fly what you can"t afford to replace without insurance route.

I just think they could go other avenues to inject all that isk back into the economy rather than just having the players sell it for real life money. I find the financial aspects of the game intriguing especially in a single shard environment but there is certainly ways they could improve on it while also working to create an economy that isn"t so inflated from people with tons of cash and nothing to spend it on.

even with insurance you lose money, but yeah, careful players playing low risk strategy don"t really fall into the money sink plans. Out in 0.0 where you can not only lose your ship and mods, but any implants you use and replacement clones, it"s a different story. And there"s always ton of silly expensive shit to buy which costs an absolute fortune but gives you like 5% more power. It"s by no means a perfect system but seems like it"s better then any other I"ve seen.

The problem of having a lot of people with tons of cash is really hard to solve. There are two ways to attack it; prevent people from amassing tons of cash, or give them things to spend tons of cash on.

Preventing them from amassing it is really tough provided that your game has an interesting economy. The bell curve is inevitably going to float the most intelligent and motivated players to the top; in EVE, that"s the people who are smart, dedicated, and have smart, dedicated connections so that they can hold valuable moons, run the best complexes, or manipulate the market. In a MMORPG where the scale of playtime and intelligence in the playerbase goes from 1-hour-a-week-and-clueless up to 80-hours-a-week-and-brilliant, there is going to be a similarly enormous disparity on the amount of wealth people sit on.

Giving people something to spend their riches on sounds easy, but it"s not. In EVE, a "rich" player (pulling numbers out of my ass, I"ll say this is the top 1% of the population, and peg that number at about 10 billion ISK in assets) has alotof different ways he could blow that money. You could easily spend that on about three or four deadspace-fit faction battleships, add in an implant set, and blammo, you"re broke. A "super-rich" player (call this 100 billion in assets, which is probably about the top 0.05%) could blow the same amount of money on an officer-fit supercapital.

However, you"ll find that rich and super-rich players almost always prefer to sit on the majority of their assets, rather than spend them on these things. The problem is that spending your money on things like that gives you a significant, but marginal performance upgrade (and, gameplay-wise, a similarly marginal entertainment upgrade -- maybe a downgrade if you"re buying a huge ship!) Even most rich players feel silly spending a big chunk of their cash on expensive rare modules that give maybe a 50% aggregate bonus to their ship"s power for a few weeks until they explode.

From a gameplay perspective, that"s not something that is easy to change around. It would be unfair and un-fun for the majority if expensive gear were really supremely powerful in any conventional way. About the only thing you could do is provide some kind of enticing expensive cosmetic or convenience upgrades of one sort or another.

(And having played for 6 months isn"t new to EVE anymore!)

I"m not sure if anyone else has been to 38 Studios" page lately, but there"s a competition for game artists going on called Dominance War III. Three of 38S"s are in the final stage: Minoh Kim, Billy Ahlswede and Josh Singh. My personal favorite of those three isKim"s "Aphotic Invoker"illustration. Damn impressive! It was really great browsing those forums, too; incredible amounts of talent in there.

Fog said:

(And having played for 6 months isn"t new to EVE anymore!)

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Every time I look at my skill book I feel like I just started yesterday =(

Which brings me to something else , I would like to see EVE"s skill system brought into other MMO"s but a little differently. I would like the traditional leveling path or some derivative of that, IE something that rewards the player for time spent so someone that wants to hammer away at the character progression can. At the same time I think it would be cool to have skills that don"t directly effect combat, that a player can train. Like in EQ 2 if you want to learn a language you kill the appropriate mob for whatever rune type thing they drop. How about instead you pick up a book from the library and it allows you to real time learn the language via the book. It"s sort of a way of making a character that is always part of the world even when he"s off line. You log on and go out of your house and kill shit,but when you log off, in actuality you are at home learning a language.


I stress non combat because I don"t want situations where; oh you can"t join our guild because you haven"t got Advanced Armor Identification 5 trained, and don"t receive the added benefit of the 5% increase to over all damage from knowing where to hit an armored opponent. Throw in trade market things like eve,skills that boost faction gains like the Social skills in EVE. Secondary off line progression is cool , I don"t mind it in eve but I wouldn"t take on a second game with that system as it"s primary leveling system.

As a secondary I think it would be sweet,award skill books from big long solo quests that teach you some random ability that"s useful to your character and maybe useful in some way as a financial situation for your character but not something that improves it"s over all combat prowess. Then you still have doors open for things like AA or whatever else in the high end if you like.

A mix would definitely be cool. I like EVE"s system since I can take a break for a week and my character has progressed when I come back, but it"s also nice to be able to sit down at the game for a weekend and get something done faster.

I have to say Surlok that is quite a good idea. Being able to buy copies of books to learn skills through time, in addition to skills learned by playing, sounds great. It does give older players a *reward* of sorts for supporting the game for so long and being loyal subscribers and adds a new dimension to training skills that doesn"t exist outside of Eve. Curt you listening?

The only reason EVE"s system is palettable to people who want to play the game seriously and haven"t been around forever is the fact that character trading is permitted by the developers, and also the fact that there is a roundabout RMT you can use to that end.

Tyen said:

I was looking around at local Tattoo shops to get my next one done here soon. I ran into this. Whose tattoo is that?

Skin Art Studio - Custom Tattooing

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Curt Schilling"s tattoo. He got it done when he started the studio

The devs for Mortal Online are using that exact system where your character can train skills both actively and through time. In addition certain skills you learn with one character become shared with any new characters you make, because why repeat cartography level 3 when you already mapped the world once?

FoghornDeadhorn said:

The only reason EVE"s system is palettable to people who want to play the game seriously and haven"t been around forever is the fact that character trading is permitted by the developers, and also the fact that there is a roundabout RMT you can use to that end.

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I think you may have missed the part where the passive learned skills wouldn"t be a majority, and wouldn"t be anything seriously like "you HAVE to have this skill to roxxors!" It"s just another dimension of training, not the entirety of it.

Eh, I really like the idea.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

The only reason EVE"s system is palettable to people who want to play the game seriously and haven"t been around forever is the fact that character trading is permitted by the developers, and also the fact that there is a roundabout RMT you can use to that end.

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Also, Eve"s system is pretty front loaded, at least it was until they introduced cap ships and what not. You could get to 80% as powerful as another player in 1/10th the time, so while you could never catch up, you can quickly be competitive, added to the fact that skill and organization can more then make up for that remaining 20%.

It"s still frontloaded if you play the game as a non-combat character.

Becoming a high skill trader or industrialist takes basically a couple of months thanks to how much character creation being designed to give so many skills upfront to make early combat training fun.

For those interested in following this as-yet unnamed game, I recently stumbled on a 38 Studios fansite,38Watch, that appears to be doing a good job of aggregating the relevant news.

You"ve got a comma in your link.

Agraza said:

You"ve got a comma in your link.

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Thanks - my bad.

Without knowing anything about the game yet you could say the one thing they have going for them is timing. Besides WAR I can"t think of one major MMO that is in development....and WAR is a bad example because 38 studios game is going to be launched years after WAR. As for MMO"s released around the time of 38"s... if Blizzard started production today on a new MMO it would probably at least be one year behind 38"s game and knowing blizz it would be 2 years. And unless SOE is secretly working on EQ3 I don"t see them in the time window either.

The only other question mark is the unannounced Bioware MMO, so 38 studios potentially has to only worry about 1 major MMO in their launch timeframe.