Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

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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I"m definitely a non-instanced kind of guy. The amount of instancing in WoW really killed it for me. I much prefer the EQ-type set up, even if it means getting trained and facing a couple immature people here and there. It felt a lot more interactive to me, which is one of the top reasons I played the game. I never got into WoW like that, it was fun for a while, but I think it"s pretty dull now.

I"m afraid instancing however is the future of MMORPG type games. I have a feeling my opinion about instancing is a part of the minority and that the vast majority of players prefer the opportunity of running a dungeon whenever they want. I can"t really see any developers (successful developers anyway) using the non-instanced "EQ" type model.

Zehn - Vhex said:

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.

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Moar bullshit statistics pls

ooc/shout chat is what made the game what is was.

Araxen said:

ooc/shout chat is what made the game what is was.

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I did get petitioned against once because I was using /shout for non-roleplaying when I was supposed to use /ooc. Good times indeed.

Though I did find ways to enjoy myself. Apologies for the low image quality.

Zehn - Vhex said:

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.

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If I am looking at the past through rose colored glasses, you are looking at it through shit colored ones. I would say 90% of my player interactions were fun, or at least competitive (read: fun).

So the 10% who were dicks (every one of you FoH cock smokers on Veeshan, lol), added their own element to the gameplay... They camp-jump your group, so you steal their mob... They train your face, so you call in sick to work and proceed to crash the zone for the next 6 hours... They make a righteous indignation post on ign boards, so you call in the Airforce hitman squad to pay them a visit IRL.

It"s great fun really, just ask Israel and the Middle East. They have known wassup for years.

The only people I know in WoW, were the 25 people in my guild. There is zero need or benefit to me to expand my horizons past those folks. It"s pretty limiting and boring as fuck.

Faelor said:

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.Everyone can get their fill in the same area, so it"s a high traffic zone that canhopefullycreate some sort of community.

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This is pretty much where I think MMOs should go - best of both worlds. I would add that it"d be good to add a few portal stones so once you"ve run through the public areas to (for example) the group instance or raid instance you"ll be able to port directly to the start of the instanced areas from a "hub" area of the dungeon.

I want to just make one more comment on the importance of having good solo/duo content near the group content -- this allows you to go hang and do something while waiting to get a full group together.

* * *
Also, as is usual recently, I agree with Zehn. Let"s see some a few more rare overpowered items. Who the fuck cares if they get nerfed later -- they"ll give some few their shining moment in the Sun.

Zehn"s right and we"ve all argued this before. "Social Dungeons" are just going to promote camping for gear and if the gear is of equal value to instance gear, it will make the instances obsolete. It"ll turn into another crap fest camp check shit.

Meh. You want social dungeons? Open them up and instance or phase the bosses. Whatever gets us away from spamming to tag bosses.

part of the Death of "community" has to do with shear volume of players, part of it has to do with everyone being in their own sanitary instance, and part of it has to do with being required to hit a button every GCD (and thus preventing the random bullshitting that *is*community*building*)

I"m finding that Atlantica Online has a problem with that 3rd bit. 25second round timers leave you no time to chat, or your dudes stand around getting munched on. So even "new" games still hit these pitfalls.

Now you can argue that we bullshitted it up due to being bored from only having to hit 1 button every 4-10 seconds, and that"s a fair interpretation. But either the combat slows down, becomes automatable, or we all just accept dealing with fuckwads (rather than chat) on public voice channels for our chat needs; or this form of community building is dead.

Me, my time on Team Fortress voice servers has scared me enough to shy away from public access vent. Thoughts and stupidity that wouldn"t have been worth typing out suddenly come out when its just a single button push (or *shudder* non-push-to-talk)

Draegan said:

Zehn"s right and we"ve all argued this before. "Social Dungeons" are just going to promote camping for gear and if the gear is of equal value to instance gear, it will make the instances obsolete. It"ll turn into another crap fest camp check shit.

Meh. You want social dungeons? Open them up and instance or phase the bosses. Whatever gets us away from spamming to tag bosses.

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Warhammer instanced social dungeons were kindof fun.

They had one or two of them?
Overall dungeon was instanced for entire faction. With 3 paths, and 3 public quests per path with like 3 min resets on the public quests.
Then final bosses were instanced again, for parties.

Well, seeing as it will never happen, I can never really know how a noninstanced thing would work.

To me, I just see it like this: Non-instanced Shadow Labyrinth. Group goes in, clears it and kills murmur. Another group shows up wanting to do the dungeon, but they can"t since it"s been cleared and won"t respawn for an hour.

I played EQ from April of 99, so I know what a non-instanced world is. I had a great time guild racing and griefing people in NToV.

Zeste said:

Well, seeing as it will never happen, I can never really know how a noninstanced thing would work.

To me, I just see it like this: Non-instanced Shadow Labyrinth. Group goes in, clears it and kills murmur. Another group shows up wanting to do the dungeon, but they can"t since it"s been cleared and won"t respawn for an hour.

I played EQ from April of 99, so I know what a non-instanced world is. I had a great time guild racing and griefing people in NToV.

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Are you arguing for or against instances? What is fun about showing up to a dungeon and having to wait an hour for it to respawn?



Different or parallel topic.
Build non instanced dungeons and world bosses specifically for pvp.
PvE-race to finish?
PvP-outright kill each other.

world bosses in wow were something the did right at first, but gradually got worse and worse.
The key was obscure location to make getting to difficult by everyone.
Very high npc hp to ensure killing took a while, meaning other players had plenty of time to get to the boss when it spawned, and fight over it. IF the boss dies in 5 minutes, they can be burst down before anyone can show up to dispute it. It should take a good 10-15minutes to kill.
While the npc itself should be fairly weak offensively. This means the majority of those fighting over the npc, can be fighting with each other while slowly taking it down.

A dungeon built specifically for this would be interesting too I think.

I really miss the open-world bosses from EQ1. I know there are some in WoW, but they seem very few and far between. When playing EQ1, if you saw a named somewhere, there was excitement because you knew that a) it"s a "rare" spawn and b) you"d probably get some cool loot out of it. In WoW, I see a named and my first thought is to check if I have a quest involving it. If I don"t, I generally ignore it as it probably serves no other purpose. Even if it does drop something, it will most likely be a random Hardened Leather Shoulderpads of the Eagle or what have you. It really kills that feeling of awe and excitement.

Zeste said:

Well, seeing as it will never happen, I can never really know how a noninstanced thing would work.

To me, I just see it like this: Non-instanced Shadow Labyrinth. Group goes in, clears it and kills murmur. Another group shows up wanting to do the dungeon, but they can"t since it"s been cleared and won"t respawn for an hour.

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It"s quite simple really.

• Very large dungeons with various points of interest, and preferably a quest hub or two within it. Look at how you would design an outdoor zone (which are going to be non-instanced anyway) and apply that to a dungeon.
• Few or no fixed spawn locations for random nameds. No camping one spot waiting for one to spawn. These nameds would just spawn in a random location and wander around.
• Toss in a few triggered Nameds. Maybe after looting so many of x object, or killing so many of one type of mob, a named spawns and is already tapped by the group or player who triggered it.
• Phase or instance quest nameds so people aren"t fighting over those (assuming they aren"t triggered like above). Normal quest mobs can remain un-instanced, but make sure there are plenty of them.
• Reward the player for killing trash. Token drops that can be turned in for fun items (illusion clickies, temp run speed potions, teleport scrolls) or reputation items, etc. Trash is supposed to besomethingof a chore, but it doesn"t have to be outright miserable. Let the player feel like they are at least getting something.

You get the idea. The fact is we play in non-instanced content everyday and no one cries about it, it just happens to be outdoor. The second you mention non-instanced dungeon people freak out. Meh.

Grave said:

It"s quite simple really.

• Very large dungeons with various points of interest, and preferably a quest hub or two within it. Look at how you would design an outdoor zone (which are going to be non-instanced anyway) and apply that to a dungeon.
• Few or no fixed spawn locations for random nameds. No camping one spot waiting for one to spawn. These nameds would just spawn in a random location and wander around.
• Toss in a few triggered Nameds. Maybe after looting so many of x object, or killing so many of one type of mob, a named spawns and is already tapped by the group or player who triggered it.
• Phase or instance quest nameds so people aren"t fighting over those (assuming they aren"t triggered like above). Normal quest mobs can remain un-instanced, but make sure there are plenty of them.
• Reward the player for killing trash. Token drops that can be turned in for fun items (illusion clickies, temp run speed potions, teleport scrolls) or reputation items, etc. Trash is supposed to besomethingof a chore, but it doesn"t have to be outright miserable. Let the player feel like they are at least getting something.

You get the idea. The fact is we play in non-instanced content everyday and no one cries about it, it just happens to be outdoor. The second you mention non-instanced dungeon people freak out. Meh.

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So basically, just an outdoor zone tuned to 5 player groups?

Zehn - Vhex said:

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.

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It would"nt be a problem if Devs would just be upfront about the Meta game behind that:

The first time a Bladestorm, Katana of Steel Sleet drops, it has a "OP TIMER: 4 WEEKS" on it, and it starts counting down. After 4 weeks, the Bladestorm is downgraded to it"s "NERF MODE". You can see the nerfed stats by MouseOver the OP Timer. The same timer is universal for all Bladestorms that drop, and starts the moment a Bladestorm is first picked up.

Zeste said:

So basically, just an outdoor zone tuned to 5 player groups?

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In a sense, yes. "Dungeon" is merely a setting, it doesn"t require this set of rules the MMO community seems to place on it.

I think it"s a great idea for future games to consider having these social dungeons in addition to instances because of the different gameplay they provide.

You go into an instance on WoW and you know exactly what you"re going to get. You know roughly how long you"re going to be there, you know you"re just hoping to get in and out and get whatever you"re after as soon as possible. That"s the mentality instances like that encourage. Is that necessarily bad? No. But sometimes it"s nice to have an alternative.

You can go into a social dungeon with a different mindset. Maybe I just want to exp for awhile. Maybe I"m looking for a specific drop from a named, so I"m going to hang out here until I find him. Maybe he"s a triggered spawn so I"m going to put forth an effort to trigger that named. Maybe I"ll run into some dudes who are going to the bottom of the dungeon for a quest I never happened to complete, so I"ll hook up with them.

It"s just a different type of experience and I think more players are open to it than developers and designers realize. People don"t try to group up or bother dealing with others in a game like WoW because the gameactively discourages it.It"s more annoying to quest with someone than it is to just solo. Why talk to the guy questing in the same area as you when he"s just in your way? You can"t expect players to do so in that environment. This doesn"t mean they don"t want to play with others, they just need incentive to do so. Non-instanced dungeons are a way to provide that for the players that want it, and nothing says you still cant let others solo to the cap questing elsewhere or have instanced dungeons out the wazoo as well.

Caliane said:

Warhammer instanced social dungeons were kindof fun.

They had one or two of them?
Overall dungeon was instanced for entire faction. With 3 paths, and 3 public quests per path with like 3 min resets on the public quests.
Then final bosses were instanced again, for parties.

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Ya I only got to Mt. Gunbad but that was a really cool area.

I think social dungeons have their place if they are built with that idea from the start.
First of all they should always be quite large with multiple wings, to help spreading out the population a bit, also every named linked to a quest should have a very short respawn timer, while loot bosses should be either instanced, EQ2-style, or on a longer respawn time (possibly with placeholders).

The most important thing would be to have at least 2-3 dungeons per level range, which would help spreading out people a bit more.

I personally loved EQ2 dungeons, they gave a good feeling of crawling while mantaining a social aspect, but most of them had an instanced part at the end that grated your group a chance to kill the end boss and get loot.
Stormhold/Fallen Gate were 2 well built zones, so was Solusek Eye and partially Permafrost, just to mention a couple.
The issue is when devs start being lazy and stuff everything in a single zone, like the terrible Sanctum of Scaleborne: loot, major questlines, rare spawns, ring events and what have you.

I think instancing is just as good tho, I liked every wow dungeon I did: my first Deadmines run was very exciting, and the feeling persisted up to UBRS.
Vanilla Wow had some great moments, TBC not so many but I guess it had to do with the quality of the dungeons themselves and the theme for some of them.
WotLK is halfway between great and wasted potential: for example in Azjol"Nerub when you jump down the pit, you have a glimpse of what that zone could have been, aka all kind of awesome, instead it came out as a shit hole a group could clear in 15 minutes or so.

The problem I have with instancing is that once the novelty factor is gone (one or maybe two runs), every time I go inside one I do exactly the same thing I did the previous time, with only loot as the driving factor. Rose colored glasses or not, a social dungeon allowed me to have different experiences every evening, including dealing with dickheads.

I think every game has had its quality peak: blackrock mountain in wow, solusek eye in eq2, chardok in eq1, etc., it"s kinda pointless to argue whether one is/was better than the others as it"s mostly a matter of taste.

Flight said:

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.

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Disappointed not to get some feedback from anyone on how well, or not, these work in FFXI.

A big part of the success of these systems, apart from offering scalable content depending on how many players participate (solo option is important as shown by AO) is that they scratch that dungeon "exploring" urge. Tile sets generate random lay outs so you can"t "spoiler" the content. Also, they can be implemented to be appropriate for what classes are present (eg you have no tank then mobs hit not quite so hard with less attack power).



Part of the key to them, as with the Anarchy Online system, is having a number of variables that effect the content of the randomly generated dungeon. Anything from how tough the mobs are, to whether to have locked content (for Rogues), to whether mobs are mystical or human. There are lots of options on how this could be implemented.


Anyone have any further ideas for a similar system. One idea I thought of was that you could choose to have trade skill resources drop off mobs / bosses / resource nodes. Maybe these resources aren"t available in the outer game world or instances and maybe they would be no drop. You could even have rare no drop trade skill patterns drop in there. There"s just been practically zero adventure content for trade skillers and this would be a nice option.


There"s a zillion things you could do if you brainstormed this. Ideas ?

Flight said:

Disappointed not to get some feedback from anyone on how well, or not, these work in FFXI.

A big part of the success of these systems, apart from offering scalable content depending on how many players participate (solo option is important as shown by AO) is that they scratch that dungeon "exploring" urge. Tile sets generate random lay outs so you can"t "spoiler" the content. Also, they can be implemented to be appropriate for what classes are present (eg you have no tank then mobs hit not quite so hard with less attack power).



Part of the key to them, as with the Anarchy Online system, is having a number of variables that effect the content of the randomly generated dungeon. Anything from how tough the mobs are, to whether to have locked content (for Rogues), to whether mobs are mystical or human. There are lots of options on how this could be implemented.


Anyone have any further ideas for a similar system. One idea I thought of was that you could choose to have trade skill resources drop off mobs / bosses / resource nodes. Maybe these resources aren"t available in the outer game world or instances and maybe they would be no drop. You could even have rare no drop trade skill patterns drop in there. There"s just been practically zero adventure content for trade skillers and this would be a nice option.


There"s a zillion things you could do if you brainstormed this. Ideas ?

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First and foremost, developers keep encouraging people at grouping to get better rewards (loot) and such a system would not be so enticing because if the standard paradigm "more people = better loot" is applied, I bet a small percentage of the population would give a damn about scalable content and always shoot for the best stuff.

Possible exceptions would be:

1) people that want to see the so called end game, but do it with just a couple of friends, say your standard 4 to 6 players clique.

2) Die hard soloers.

Obviously, given scaling difficulty, one will argue that 5 people content is easier than 25 people content (which is very debatable, but it"s kinda accepted as true), so the loot would be inferior and this would preclude the small groups to partecipate effectively in other type of competitive content, for example PvP, where they would never have the upper hand.

As of today in the 2 MMOs I played the most recently, all group content is at least 3-mannable, in some cases even two mannable, except for gimmick fights or specific boss mechanics, if the players involved are above average quality.

In short this system would require a total re-thinking of the standard loot progression system (solo->group->small raids->large raids), the pvp system and the type of rewards obtained from such activities.
It could end up as the second coming of Jesus for MMOs or as a waste of development time, depending on the approach taken.

Take for example EQ2: at one point they introduced solo instances, which were pretty much short caves filled with solo mobs and a slightly tougher solo mob at the end. The problem is that the rewards for these instances were total crap, thus they were left collecting dust by the vast majority of players and soon forgotten.

If today in a game like WoW they would introduce a scalable instance mode, people would complain that loot is shit when less than 5 people are involved, or it"s so easy for class_01 while class_05 suck balls at doing it.
It"s already amazing how 10 men content is often harder than 25 men content (if you can call that "hard" at all), yet offers inferior rewards, the further you push the slider towards the low number of players, the louder would be the complaints.

In a game where progression is not necessary tied to loot and/or not so adamantly defending old paradigms as stated above, this system woud have the possibility to work, with one big cost associated: you transform a MMO into a glorified Diablo; if I can kill Baal alone, why would I want more players to take my rewards?

From my personal point of view, disregarding the potential negative effects, I"d love such a system as I don"t enjoy pugging really much, so me and friend or two could see everything (and it must be everything) without needing to invite morons in our groups.

Added risk: In the moment developers start saying "but if you face a dragon in 2 the fight is not epic enough" the system collapses (aside from the fact I think it would be a lot more epic facing a big monster with just two people).

Last but not least you"d have to rethink your class system: if you need a person to keep the monsters attention (read: tank) and another to cure or heal, you are in a terrible situation. Some smart player may come out with kiting techniques that work, but tank and spank risks to be a lot easier to perform.
A job system wouldn"t help much, if all you get to do with it is switching to tank+healer to duo instances, let alone if you have to solo them where everyone would switch to "best soloing class".

Maybe creating a game from the ground up with this in mind is doable, but trying to attach such a system to a typical MMO of today would result, in my opinion, in a massive failure and for some reasons I don"t think Copernicus is shifting that far away from our current paradigm, even if they won"t wow-ify it too much, I bet there will be a typical tank+healer+dps trinity involved.
I"d love to lose that bet and for them to amaze with something innovative.