Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

As someone who 4-6 boxed in EQ2, tried to multi-box WoW and didn"t push it this conversation is more than a little interesting.

First off, and people that have designed games can chime in, I"m of the opinion MB or non MB in a game is something that derives from the UI design, instead of potentially driving it.

You create a game and stick to your concepts, your core design ideas, and if MB is "doable", great, if not, so what.

It certainly is a way to monetize your customer more, but isn"t that taking the exact OPPOSITE approach to creating an awesome game?

I mean if the $$ tally and spread sheet results, and ARPU are driving design decisions you"ve lost before you"ve launched imo.

I"ve always felt multi-boxing, and I mean regular MB like I did, multiple-accounts on multiple machines, no macro"s, was a by product of what the game was that was created. It wasn"t, at least to me, something I"ve felt the need, desire, or smarts, in having be a true game design decision.

To that end I almost felt like WoW was designed, from a UI and game play perspective, to not support MB without a lot of effort on the players part to setup macros and a lot of other stuff.

I multiboxed heavily from pretty close to release onward in EQ, and I really enjoyed doing so. However, what I would have enjoyed far more is a playing a single character that takes all of your focus and attention to play to its full potential. That"s not to say that controls should be needlessly complicated, only that there should be enough depth involved to the playing of a character that the difference between playing lazily and playing with 100% focus should be very different... different in the playstyle and different in the performance attained AND those differences should be big enough to make investing the focus well worth it.

The best EQ analogy I have is swapping from a constant 3-4 (6ish at times) box setup with a standard group makeup to a dedicated charming enchanter in PoP/GoD era... (ok, well, I still 2boxed with the chanter, but still...) A great boxer could play a group of 3-4 better than the average group of non-boxers that you"d come across, but if that same person had only played tank or a cleric or a wizard or whatever, he could have been better than the average person, but not by a massive margin. However, a very good charming chanter was WORLDS apart from an average chanter... as in, the two people aren"t even playing the same class any more. THIS is what I wish all classes could be like, where skill and focus aren"t just important but are VASTLY important. Of course, that game might drive people away, but I fully know that the game that I"d prefer to play isn"t really a mass-market game.

Imo, people box for two reasons. Some people just find playing a single character boring and need the extra interaction to push themselves. Some people want the extra power that comes from having their own little army. In the above example, both are satisfied just by having a deep and challenging mechanics that empower the player as they get better. I shouldn"t need to play six characters to push myself. Ideally, any player on any character should be able to find that push within the abilities given to it. Tough to design and balance? Damned right. Worth it? Hell yes.

Well shit, EQ was like that for a lot of classes.

The different between an average Bard and aGOODBard was pretty wide.

splok said:

However, what I would have enjoyed far more is a playing a single character that takes all of your focus and attention to play to its full potential. That"s not to say that controls should be needlessly complicated, only that there should be enough depth involved to the playing of a character that the difference between playing lazily and playing with 100% focus should be very different... different in the playstyle and different in the performance attained AND those differences should be big enough to make investing the focus well worth it.

Click to expand...

This is one thing WoW does excellently in my opinion. Classes are easy enough to pick up and play, but in the raid game (at least during TBC and WotLK) it takes a good amount of focus to really play the classes well. Particularly with the Death Knight, which is what I play now, there"s a very obvious difference when someone is playing well versus being lazy or simply unskilled. The same can be said for quite a few classes. Whether certain rotations for certain specs are actuallyfunor not is another thing, but many certainly do require your attention.

Well, bards are a good example, though I never played one seriously, but I"d hardly sayalotof EQ classes were. And ya, the effectiveness of DK"s definitely varies quite a bit with a decent player (I play a DK a bit), though I think much of that difference (especially with WoW) is being aware enough to spec and gear yourself appropriately for the job you want to do. Given identical characters, I don"t think you"ll see massive performance differences betweendecentto great players (comparing great players with the worst of the worst isn"t really useful since anything is infinitely better than utterly worthless).

BUT my point isn"t that games don"t do this! Of course they do, to some extent at least. I"m just saying that I think games (at least games that I would want to play) should really focus on this and ramp it way up.

I dunno, I think it just depends on the type of combat environment you want to create.

It can go too far (see EQ2 spamfest), or just not feel right (see LOTRO) when you try to ramp it up as you say. The reason I say WoW did an excellent job is that most classes feel very tight and there is a good amount of synergy and flow between abilities. It"s easy to overlook this and not appreciate it until you go play other MMOs and realize the difference it makes.

That being said, when I made a brief return to EQ1 for the nostalgia factor awhile back I realized how much I enjoyed doing almost nothing in combat, haha. I couldn"t explain it, it really makes no sense to me, and yet I really liked just autoattacking and throwing a spell every now and then (Ranger) versus the more hectic playstyle I was used to in WoW. In retrospect, I think this type of combat is actually perfect for a game like EQ where you might just be sitting in one spot killing for long periods of time. It would be much more tiring if you had to focus and do more. So yeah, again it just depends on the design goals I guess. Of course, I don"t see anyone making a slow paced combat game like EQ1 ever again.

Ngruk said:

It certainly is a way to monetize your customer more, but isn"t that taking the exact OPPOSITE approach to creating an awesome game?

Click to expand...

There are a few points I"d like to pick up from various posts, but this is foundational and the most significant.

One of the first lessons we were taught on joining the army was that you can be one of two types of leader :

i) objective focused;
ii) "man" focused (taking care of your guys).

That"s true in the military. But the majority of people in "civvy street" also adopt that approach in their every day businesses. I"ve been so successful in developing IT teams and large scale Project Management because I believe you can do both. If you look after your guys - career development, encouragement, let them take the plaudits instead/as well as you, nurture them in everything they are and do - you are capable of achieving greater objectives than if you are not that sort of person. (It"s something you either are or aren"t - its not an approach you can learn.)



In a similar manner monetizing your customer does not have to be the opposite of creating an awesome game.

The fact is we are more than happy to be monetized - we just want it to be our choice because the game is awesome and not the objective of the game designers. The problem is when games make the monetizing us the objective, instead of making the awesome game the objective.

So I agree, absolutely, that monetizing the customers should not be the objective. But if you make an awesome game you will not find people reticent to throw money at it.


Its also very relevant to the boxing discussion. Its not a case of do we assign resource to the boxing community or not. The considerations which have been suggested are largely things which also improve the game experience for non boxers. They are minor improvements to everyones gaming experience.

Lets triple underline, what is being suggested is not major development of content for boxers, what is being suggested is largely small considerations of basic game mechanics.

I can look at recent MMOs and very quickly point out where a couple of hour brainstorm based around boxing would have helped them pick up things that regular development and testing didn"t. I can also suggest improvements based on boxing experience that would benefit everyone.

Ngruk said:

To that end I almost felt like WoW was designed, from a UI and game play perspective, to not support MB without a lot of effort on the players part to setup macros and a lot of other stuff.

Click to expand...

WoW is actually easy to box - probably the easiest of all MMOs. Most folk use something like Octopus with multiple PCs - broadcasts keyboard strokes with a white list or a black list and allows you to move the mouse between all of the PCs and operate the keyboard and mouse on individual screens - or Keyclone, which broadcasts keyboard strokes to all clients on a single PC.

Example of a very basic setup in a 5 mage setup :

/assist leader

All have presence of mind on key 2

All have Pyroblast on key 3


Target a mob or PC with party leader, press 1,2,3 - 5 x instant cast Pyroblasts on the mob.

Similarly, 5 "locks can press 1 2 3 45 and have 19 DoTs and a fear on someone in a few seconds.

5 Hunters is more awesome than pretty much any game experience I ever had.

Having said all that most boxers roll with a rezzer/healer in the team.


5 Elemental Shaman is a popular setup - you can setup the toons to target each other and cast Chain Heal for huge survivability and elem Shaman have very large burst DPS - of course 5 chars in a party with self rez is not to be overlooked.


For getting around most boxers use a straightforward two line macro :

/target "leader"
/follow



Anyways, /EndOfOffTopic

Zehn - Vhex said:

Making the game more duo/trio friendly to encourage friends/couples/small groups to form is one thing and something I can get fully behind and would make for an interesting brainstorm

Click to expand...

I"m sorry this wasn"t picked up on for further debate - it"s a really great point.

It"s easy to box, just not to peak performance in a competitive raid/pvp environment. You can brute force your way through trivial content or blow up nubs in arena 5"s on a shitty battlegroup if you"re lucky but honestly? Those 5x pyroblasts mean jack and shit when 3 seconds later 4 of your mages are lying dead on the floor because you can"t spread out in time to avoid mana flare. There is simply no way you"re boxing on a fight like Sapphiron and being as valuable as someone of decent skill is playing straight.

And again, the number of people multi-boxing in WoW for anything other then powerleveling/dragging through to soak up loot is easily in the less then 1% category. And the number of people boxing in progression content the same way we used to box clerics in EQ is easily close to if not 0%.

Zehn - Vhex said:

There is simply no way you"re boxing on a fight like Sapphiron and being as valuable as someone of decent skill is playing straight. And the number of people boxing in progression content the same way we used to box clerics in EQ is easily close to if not 0%.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree with this; which is the way it should be. Its not hard to box up to one party content, but boxing should play no part in raiding, ever.

Zehn - Vhex said:

You can brute force your way through trivial content or blow up nubs in arena 5"s on a shitty battlegroup if you"re lucky but honestly?

Click to expand...

Depends what you mean by trivial content. If we are discussing 5 man content most Heroic content was comfortably 5 boxed in TBC. Don"t know about Wrath, I stopped playing it on my main before I even got to 80. I really dislike the way that game is going.




Lets try get back to the small party content idea ......

Flight said:

Depends what you mean by trivial content. If we are discussing 5 man content most Heroic content was comfortably 5 boxed in TBC.

Click to expand...

After the nerfs to heroics yeah. At that point they were pretty much trivial content to say the least. We"re talking shit like early BT, SWP, etc...

Anyways...

WoW has started sorta doing that with overworld questing ever since TBC with the 2-3 man elite quests.

All I"d really do is make sure that the shit for the first 50% of your game at least is duoable, maybe trioable at most. Really is no reason that the first "grouping" dungeon you encounter requires tank+heals+3 to go. That"s one thing that really pissed me off about lotro. At level 15 I wanted to do barrow downs with some friends but nobody was playing a burglar so we were right fucked and I had to box a minstrel (Yes, I"m a habitual boxer) to even get past the first few pulls.

I mean that"s just terrible design. It isn"t until I"m in the mid-30"s, starting to get a feel for the game, starting to know other people who I"ve met while leveling and questing...then start putting me in a tank-healer-dps paradigm. But until that point let me grab the 2 guys who I bought the game with and go.

If you think about it, and I am sure there are metrics to prove/disprove this, the smaller group focused your content is, the larger your potential audience could be.

It"s like min specs, anytime you move one notch up, be it RAM, video card, anything, the more customers you take away as potential players.

The smaller your group content, that larger potential audience you could potentially launch to.

If you had a player base of 1mm players, does it make sense that more players are going to play and enjoy content made for 2,3, 4 players as opposed to 5-6 or 10 person groups?

The flipside Ngruk is that developing a shitload of content that is for 1 person only is incredibly expensive and time consuming unless you make an insanely harsh levelling curve.

I remember talking to a few ex-everquest developers who were working on vanguard right when wow came out and they were astonished at how quickly wow content got "used up". As in, a beatiful zone like lakeridge might only last ~5 hours for a player who does all the quests, and might take months to develop.

Take even WOTLK - if you do all the quest lines/see everything/check out all the lore, dragonblight sans naxx might take 10 hours or so, but the amount of time that developers put into creating it is probably in the several thousands of man hour.

Yet the solo leveling content is what -everybody- experiences. It"s what you first experience in the game. It"s the majority of what you uniquely experience. You can use that experience to craft an unforgettable memory, tell an amazing story.

And as a developer, you have to.

Grouping, PvP, raiding...that all comes later. Some people might never even get to that point. It all eventually becomes throw-away content as well. Not everybody raided Molten Core but nearly everybody sure as shit did stranglethorn vale, so tell me, where were development hours wasted there?

Neither, obviously. If you"re going to put something into your game, you damn well better make sure it"s the best part yet because you never know what"s going to hook new players. You need a solid solo/leveling game to hook the new players, but a solid end game as well to keep them. You can"t skimp on either and say, "well shit, they only spend 20 minutes there anyways..."

Thousands of developers hours? Seems a fair trade when that 20 minutes will be experienced by potentially MILLIONS of players.

If you had a player base of 1mm players, does it make sense that more players are going to play and enjoy content made for 2,3, 4 players as opposed to 5-6 or 10 person groups?

Click to expand...

If you want to make group content that is for 3-4 just be aware that class balance issues are going to be magnified immensely. The more accessible something is, the more people will complain when they are not wanted for it. No matter how easy it is, if it is much easier with class X in the party instead of class Y, the smaller your groups get the more likely it is that class Y is going to be quite unhappy.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

If you want to make group content that is for 3-4 just be aware that class balance issues are going to be magnified immensely. The more accessible something is, the more people will complain when they are not wanted for it. No matter how easy it is, if it is much easier with class X in the party instead of class Y, the smaller your groups get the more likely it is that class Y is going to be quite unhappy.

Click to expand...

Sure at max level maybe. What Zehn proposed is fine though, design the early content so that it can essentially be roflstomped with fewer people and then slide it up from there. I don"t think anybody is talking about the max level content being 3-4 players.

Zehn, I agree with you completely when it comes to levelling content, my beef is that I doubt you can create enough content at the level cap if you keep making soloable content.

If WoW had a nearly infinite progression of levelling zones without a cap, it would be a lot more fun than raiding - but the amount of time that would require would be incredible.

Erumaron said:

Sure at max level maybe. What Zehn proposed is fine though, design the early content so that it can essentially be roflstomped with fewer people and then slide it up from there. I don"t think anybody is talking about the max level content being 3-4 players.

Click to expand...

Actually I think that may be exactly what Curt is talking about. At its core, it"s a good and bad idea. If you were a smart guy and made the decision that you don"t need to restrict heal spells to less than half the classes you could take any given dungeon and make it soloable, three-manable, six-manable and six-manable-but-harder. If your LFG system is strong (let"s say approximately 3x as good as WoW"s) and it is easy to get groups together, bringing the full group size back to six would not be a big deal and would actually make certain classes fit more easily.

But I digress.

FoghornDeadhorn said:

If you want to make group content that is for 3-4 just be aware that class balance issues are going to be magnified immensely. The more accessible something is, the more people will complain when they are not wanted for it. No matter how easy it is, if it is much easier with class X in the party instead of class Y, the smaller your groups get the more likely it is that class Y is going to be quite unhappy.

Click to expand...

A VERY large part of this is the stupid tank/dps/healer design of nearly all current mmos. Because the archetypes of certain classes are so required, the individual power of each person becomes that much more important.

Break that, and it becomes less important. Who cares if the "warrior" isnt as good as the "mage" if the neither class is required due to some design aspect.

D2 isn"t exactly an MMO, but it IS a online multi-player game with many classes and class builds. And yet, no ONE class is required. some are better then others, but all are welcome.

Current mmo"s requiring a certain party size also kind of sucks. Again, one of the awesome things about D2 parties, is it can be 2 man, 3 man, 8 man, whatever. If someone leaves, or shows up, your "raid" doesn"t stop or need to wait for anyone. You "raid" doesn"t stop dead because your "tank" or "healer" left.