Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Vepil said:

Now I do not have a clue if this would be possible or how huge a undertaking it would be to code. I have never done any coding. This is just an idea I have had for a while about making gray trash meaningful.

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you basically add an extra field in the database. animal, plant, mechanical. then rotate who is paying extra or less or regular in the hubs based on that.

nothing conceptually hard but having no idea how their back end works... not something i would ever want to touch.

Zehn - Vhex said:

It"s Goliath. You can pretty much put him on ignore and not miss anything.

Anyways...

Ideally you"d unlock upgrades to abilities as rewards for questing/achievements but in a more standard xp->levels system, it is rather silly that they don"t just upgrade as you level.

Upgrading at the trainer made sense in EQ since they considered each new spell an ACTUAL new spell and not just an upgrade to a pervious rank. But in the current system with ranks it just...well...seems silly to not just have the abilities scale. For what it"s worth, your spells in EQ ~did~ automatically upgrade as you leveled, though usually in a not significant amount and only for 1~4 levels after you got it...but still.

I mean in WoW the mana cost scales per level making it shittier each level until you get a new rank so why not just fucking upgrade the damage while you"re at it? You don"t have to go to the trainer to buy your new talent point so...y"know?

It"s a leveling tax is all it really is.

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Right after you make a long post agreeing with me. Great job mate.

But hey, it"s Zehn. You can pretty much put him on ignore and save yourself reading 20,000 words per day because the fucker spends more time on the forums than he does sleeping and makes every post as long and as bland as possible with extraneous shit in every sentence.

Azrayne said:

No, having my abilities upgrade at arbitrary levels and often going 4 - 6 levels at a time without any of the spells that actually make a difference to my character improving pisses me off. But hey, thats cool, instead of telling me why you disagree with me you can just throw baseless ad hominem attacks at me, that makes you look just awesome

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It seems the kids taking PHI 101 these days are just flooding the streets. Keep using big words you learned in the class in order to feel sophisticated, meanwhile they are baseless because I explained WHY you were wrong. Reread my post and you"ll find it in there; it doesn"t take much to say something if you know how to write.

Ngruk said:

That"s Peter Moore, President of EA Sports, and Todd M at the EA HQ in California. Peter is a DIE HARD Liverpool fan. Check out his blog That"s the only reason I use the "Go MU" all the time.

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I want your white-board.

I"ve probably gotten in trouble over things drawn on white boards more than anything else in my professional career.

Goliath said:

It seems the kids taking PHI 101 these days are just flooding the streets. Keep using big words you learned in the class in order to feel sophisticated, meanwhile they are baseless because I explained WHY you were wrong. Reread my post and you"ll find it in there; it doesn"t take much to say something if you know how to write.

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Did you quote the wrong post? This makes no sense.

Anyway, grey items are a little cool. It"s neat to have some tiny bit of flavor in the loot you get from everyday mobs. It"s just the hassle that isn"t cool, right? So if you don"t want to have unlimited bag space -- why not at least have unlimited space for grey items? Pile them all into one slot in your inventory unless you hover over them, in which case it would show you the breakdown. That way you aren"t burdened with an inventory full of crap, and they"re easy to sell.

Fog said:

Did you quote the wrong post? This makes no sense.

Anyway, grey items are a little cool. It"s neat to have some tiny bit of flavor in the loot you get from everyday mobs. It"s just the hassle that isn"t cool, right? So if you don"t want to have unlimited bag space -- why not at least have unlimited space for grey items? Pile them all into one slot in your inventory unless you hover over them, in which case it would show you the breakdown. That way you aren"t burdened with an inventory full of crap, and they"re easy to sell.

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Again, what is it about the grey items that makes them coolbecause they"re grey? That is, why can"t you move those cool items (like The Stoppable Force) up to white, where they can be converted into tradeskill materials/used as a silly gimmick/etc?

Goliath said:

It seems the kids taking PHI 101 these days are just flooding the streets. Keep using big words you learned in the class in order to feel sophisticated, meanwhile they are baseless because I explained WHY you were wrong. Reread my post and you"ll find it in there; it doesn"t take much to say something if you know how to write.

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Zehn wasn"t kidding, you"re not just stupid, but the special kind of stupid convinced that it"s brilliance.

Your opinion sucks and you"re probably a bad person. Gee isn"t this fun!

Was a nice constructive conversation for a while there.... haha


Grey items.

Do you think every npc in the game should reward you with experiance, and monetary reward?
And if so, don"t you think its a "neat" feature if the items are relevant to what you are killing?
And then, do you think everything you kill should drop items that have a use?

Grey items in wow were created as flavor to give "gold" to npcs that wouldn"t make much sense carrying gold around. They, as noted also create a secondary use, to make the player head back to "town" more frequently.

If you create a game with base crafting items, it would make reasonable to allow these kinds of things to be scavenged for craft mats. Stone, cloth, herbs, meat, whatever.

I think you guys are overlooking the fun alot of people have for things like noncombat pets, wardrobes, etc in wow. Dumb little things with no real point, can sell a game.

Ninajrr said:

Again, what is it about the grey items that makes them coolbecause they"re grey? That is, why can"t you move those cool items (like The Stoppable Force) up to white, where they can be converted into tradeskill materials/used as a silly gimmick/etc?

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They"re not cool because they"re grey -- I think you might be muddling me up with another poster, which is understandable. They"re cool as opposed to their functional equivalent, raw coin, since they add a tiny little bit of variety. The hassle is the only downside, and it is a hassle.

I"m skeptical of the "go back to town" argument. I think if you"re grinding mobs to the point where your bag is full on grey items, you"re sufficiently dedicated that you probably are not going to go back just to vendor your items. Most people tend to pursue more of a quest/grind hybrid sort of playstyle, it seems to me, and then you"re going back to town for quests anyway.

You could certainly make them all into tradeskill materials, but you"d have to expand the tradeskill system beyond what we see in, e.g. WoW, to have enough appropriate stuff to make with them.

I concur. There is not a sufficient materials system in WoW for it to work, but something like it exists in Guild Wars (to a very simple degree), so that is an example of what I mean (in terms of deconstructing crap items)

The main point I wanted to make was thathaving aclassof items solely to be vendor trash seems like a silly idea that turns into nothing more than a bag-space annoyance.

10 posts later I think that idea is more clear.

Flight said:

Another is the Anarchy Online system, which I am a MASSIVE fan of. I"ve never pushed it hard because I"m not sure how much of it is my personal taste and how much it really is a superb system. In my opinion, it is as innovative and has as much and more lasting benefit than FFXIs job system (withoutsub jobs).


For those unfamiliar with it, the game has "Mission terminals" in the cities and hubs (you can get an idea of it from . You set a series of sliders with a range of mission parameters and it generates a list of instanced missions with an objective from a pool (eg assassinate a named NPC, retrieve an item) and a specified item reward, which can be a piece of armour, a weapon or a skill.

The missions scale according to the number of people in the party and their levels, so its good for anything from 1-6 party members. This system has been easily catered for in expansion after expansion, with increasing level caps, in AO.


If you combined this with the ability to raise all classes on your main character, the longevity and replayability of the two systems would increase exponentially. I can"t stress just how much I love this mission system. It perfectly combines the pure MMO experience, with the D2 experience, that Caliane is discussing above.

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Further to this, I just today received an email from Square Enix, discussing their new dynamic, player generated instances.

Moblin Maze


Generated by a single player and scaling for between 1-6 people.

Anyone done any of these ? I"d love to see a system like this in Copernicus. The genre is in desparate need of such content and other things that can"t be spoilered or have walkthroughs on sites all over the place.

That Moblin Maze thing looks cool but once again it is having people to into a bunch of instances. MMO"s really need to stop relaying on instances and put people back out on to the "overland" areas.

All MMOs are doing lately is making a bunch of single player "games" within their setting and i think its a bad direction to take.


Bring back zones plz ><

Quince said:

That Moblin Maze thing looks cool but once again it is having people to into a bunch of instances. MMO"s really need to stop relaying on instances and put people back out on to the "overland" areas.

All MMOs are doing lately is making a bunch of single player "games" within their setting and i think its a bad direction to take.


Bring back zones plz ><

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No No No fuck no.


Instances and dungeon crawls are what make WoW so much more awesome than EverQuest was. I remember sitting in the zone in to Sebilis for hours waiting for a camp or group to open up. Shared dungeons don"t work in a game where you don"t have to just sit in one camp and kill the same spawn of mobs over and over again.

Maybe if there is a way to do non-instanced group content, yeah that"s fine. But instanced dungeons are what makes people like me play WoW. Knowing that if I have 4 friends, I can go do any dungeon I want, at any time, and not have to fight some other group over the Necrosis Scarab or a Froglok Chef, that is what makes it worth it.

I am not saying that instances are bad, but when they are everywhere and the only thing to do as a group is what sucks. There needs to be a happy medium.

I wouldn"t say social dungeons are the answer though, since they"re basically the same thing as instanced dungeons with the added "joy" of people being able to fuck with you.

Which begs the question, what group content can you really create that isn"t invariable just more dungeon running? There"s PvP I suppose, but WoW"s managed to fuck that up pretty hard and there are some fundamental disagreements in the pvp community about what the penalty for losing should be.

Zehn - Vhex said:

I wouldn"t say social dungeons are the answer though, since they"re basically the same thing as instanced dungeons with the added "joy" of people being able to fuck with you.

Which begs the question, what group content can you really create that isn"t invariable just more dungeon running? There"s PvP I suppose, but WoW"s managed to fuck that up pretty hard and there are some fundamental disagreements in the pvp community about what the penalty for losing should be.

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Public quests. Those were hella fun in Warhammer while it was new (i.e. when people were actually doing them.) Need some refinement, but a fantastic idea.

Zeste said:

Instances and dungeon crawls are what make WoW so much more awesome than EverQuest was...

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I gotta disagree with you man... to some degree anyways. There are definite pros and cons to both setups.

Truth be told, you could say instancing WoW was a stroke of either genius or dumbluck in hindsight. I am sure they designed the game with only slightly higher expectations that EQ at its peak. Meaning, they would be a success at 500k subscriptions. Which in turn would translate to a few thousand people playing on each server at any given time. It was probably a wet dream to go over the holy grail mark of 1 million.

I am also guessing they went the instancing route to provide a complete and fully scripted dungeon experience... Not because, "OMG, the zergs are coming". Grats to them... WoW really could not exist on the scope and scale it does without instancing. While it made WoW a huge success, it doesn"t mean the EQ non-instanced version sucked.

One of the best things about EQ was the player interaction... One of the things most lacking in WoW? Player interaction... I"ll argue that instancing kills player interaction as much as any other game element. Other players are "game content". EQ got this right in the PvE aspect and WoW nailed it on the PvP aspect.

One of the most memorable things in EQ were the items... One of the things most most lacking in WoW? The heaps of meh items... I"ll spare you the economics 101 speach about supply, demand, and value. It is safe to say that WoW will never suffer from Mudflation... because drowns everyone with items in Floodflation... YAY... right? wait... you mean, more isn"t always better???

bobyab said:

I gotta disagree with you man... to some degree anyways. There are definite pros and cons to both setups.

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We had a big thread about itemization awhile back but the general gist of it is that WoW was very much like early EQ up until TBC. Since then they"ve been very guarded and well...unimaginative. WoW never had mana stone/CH BP levels of broken items to be sure, but Thunderfury was possible one of the most awesome items created in WoW and yet one of their biggest mistakes.

I do miss that craziness though. I think it"s almost better for game companies to introduce a handful of crazy overpowered or crazy awesome shit and then nerf them, if for no other reason then to give players something to talk about/remember.

Nobody remembers the boring items in EQ once they started doing "previous item ++" rut that WoW is in now. I mean fuck, is there any weapon with a proc effect in wotlk? Or any trinket with an effect other then +ap/sp? Yeah it"s balanced but...who the fuck cares?

Anyways...

As for interaction, let"s be honest. 90% of that interaction was people being dicks and the other 10% were people who wouldn"t shut the fuck up in /ooc and /shout. It created interesting server drama no doubt but it didn"t really enhance my gameplay any. The first or second time somebody trained 50 mobs on me during Loken may be amusing. The 80th time they did it though? Fuck man I just want to go to bed.

Mediums are the best for the mid to higher content.

Let"s use Old Seb as an example since it was mentioned earlier. If you want to have a meeting stone mechanic for summoning or something outside or nearby, that"s fine. Old Seb itself would be a "hub", and is by no means safe. It"s a public dungeon. There are many wings to explore, all leading to different areas. Some wings have solo and duo content, very easy to do (disco wing). Some wings are populated with group/elite mobs, which end with an entrance to a group instance (pyramid, crypt, king, chef, etc). The final wing of the dungeon hub would obviously be a path filled with raid mobs which goes in to Trak"s instance.

I thought WotLK was going to use a similar model for Azjol-Nerub. Have a real nice public dungeon that leads in to a couple instances. Instead there is a hole in the ground that you can almost see the instances through. I wanted to see something like Blackrock Mountain. Blackrock Depths the instance is what sold me on WoW. I didn"t want to leave my precious EverQuest and EQ2 characters, but after seeing that whole area I wanted to stick around to see what the game has to offer. From the massive doors outside to amazing hub area inside. That whole area is still one of my favorite spots in the game. It has that epic feeling. A big public dungeon such as Blackrock Mountain that includes more risks (traps, environmental dangers, monsters, events and scripts) would be amazing. And I"m not just talking about it just being in one spot in the game, but having multiple dungeon hubs. Everyone can get their fill in the same area, so it"s a high traffic zone that canhopefullycreate some sort of community.