Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

All I want to know is whose dick do I gotta suck to get into Alpha? Moorgard"s? Shit, I"ll suck it. Come on over here and drop trow, sweet cheeks, daddy needs a new beta key.

WoW didn"t really have an NDA even in the friends and family beta, I think? I forget its been so long and i"m old!

edit: err, and my point was the lack of an NDA didn"t hurt them at all.

dorfeater said:

I guess the "living breathing world" thing about MMO"s is dead with all this talk about offline rewards and browser based bullshit.

When you log out, your toon goes to sleep for the night. Nuff said.

First it was zone maps.
Then it was crazy addons that tell you when to take a shit.
Next comes browser based tasking, LFG and chat systems.
Soon enough you"ll just be paying $15.00/mo for an empty box, irc chat, and a game called "Imagination the MMO"... wait a minute. Are we de-evolving back into MUDs?

Offline resources are great, don"t get me wrong. Armory, Forums, Even Sony"s EQPlayers thing had some good points.

But the second you allow someone to play the game offline, even if it is just simple, mindless tasks like gathering or farming. You"ve just made a horrible mistake in my opinion.

Though.. that would be a good way to combat the gold farming companies. Make everyone a bot.

*rolleyes*

The LFG app with a link to launch the game is about as far as I would take it. Anymore than that and you"re just pushing it in a direction where people wont log in to your game.

Think about it, Your main toon in WoW. What would you login to him for, aside from raids, if dailies and farming mats for elixir"s, pot"s and food"s could all be done offline?

Even if it doesn"t start out this way, we"ve seen it in WoW one hundred thousand times. Blizzard implements something to make things more streamlined/easier. Then the masses say, well wtf.. if we have this, why can"t we have that too? Then three patches later, we have that.

I guess it really doesn"t matter to the gaming company though. Whatever the fuck is making them money, and ideas like this probably would make a shit load of money.

But I thought the majority of the discussion in here was about making good games.

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We weren"t discussing playing parts of the game via browser through the day, when not actually in the game. We were considering time based character advancement, as an addition to the regular XP or skill system, and perhaps tasks that could be scheduled while playing the game and which you could then maybe monitor from a browser. There are a lot of options and it needs whiteboarding with a group of people.

Interesting that today Blizzard is discussing putting a time based advancement system into WoW 4.0 on top of XP. It will work and it will come to be looked on as a standard, even though EvE did it first WoW is in danger of going doing in peoples memory as implementing it as an AA. Copernicus should implement something along these lines and make sure to release ahead of WoW.

Utnayan said:

But I can guarantee you if you release a month ahead of an expansion, try to beat one, or shortly after, you aren"t going to succeed.

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I think again it comes down to them trying to apply single player game mentality to the MMO genre. You release a week before your competitor, little timmy who doesn"t know what"s on the horizon goes out and gets mom to buy the first game. Now when he wants to get game #2 his parents say no he already got one game he doesn"t need another. Parents are assholes.

To be honest, if you know your game is shit, it"s not a bad idea. Release a month or two before a major WoW content patch or expansion and all the people who are sitting around waiting for more shit to do in WoW will garuntee you almost a million box sales.

Of course then WoW will patch and everybody will abandon your terrible steaming pile of shit game but hey, maybe you made the money back you spent on those giant 54 inch plasma TV"s you bought to line the walls with so you could show off how everyone is falling behind on their daily metrics interspaced with announcements of peoples birthdays.

I think even shitty games would do better released 6 months later. Look at WAR, lot of people bought it, but most of them jumped ship back to WoW when WOTLK came out because WAR sucked arse, and never gave it another try.

Now if it had released in april or may when the boredom with running naxx for the 30th time started to really kick in, and they"d had the advantage of 6 months to iron out bugs, and there"d been no new expansion for people to run back to, I think Mythic would be doing fairly well for themselves instead of being on the verge of shutting down their game.

I guess my point is it"s always better to err on the side of caution. When in doubt, waiting is always the right choice.

I hope Curt lets you in Alpha UT. You"re a bit of Vag but I think your feedback may actually help. That is if you can stay classy and post some constructive stuff.

Utnayan said:

I suggest a Non-NDA Beta to shut me up.

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Why would I care about shutting you up? Why would anyone care beyond it being easier to have constructive conversation? If I were to cull anything from this entire thread you"ve offered in the way of constructive criticism I would be stunned. You"ve offered absolutely zero that hasn"t been brought up by someone else in an easier to read non-pubescent fashion, so who would care?

I"ve said it before and I will say it again, "Beta" as we all have come to know it, is your game launch. If you think otherwise you"re screwed.

You better have a close to completed, close to polished as it can be, ready to go product, when you launch the conventional "Beta".

As far as launch window goes, ya you launch with a million factors in the mix right? Obviously first and foremost has to be a completed kick ass game. But market factors into the launch window as much as anything. Who"s launching what when? When is SW coming out? How about Blizz"s new MMO? And by our launch date there will likely be about a billion other games being talked about and developed.

We"ll have a bunch of opportunities prior to that to prove ourselves in some small ways, that we aren"t talking crap when it comes to quality. That we aren"t talking out our butts when it comes to what we want to provide as a customer experience. We"ll have a bunch of pre-mmo runs at it to make it as perfect as we can.

At that point it"s on us, front to back, to deliver.

And as for this?

I hope Curt lets you in Alpha UT. You"re a bit of Vag but I think your feedback may actually help. That is if you can stay classy and post some constructive stuff.

If there were even a millionth of a percent of a chance of that happening I"d be stunned. Anything a person like Ut could offer is and has been, and will be, offered by a ton of other players in a format that will actually matter, be understood, be productive, and be offered rationally.

Azrayne said:

I guess my point is it"s always better to err on the side of caution. When in doubt, waiting is always the right choice.

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Ya, I don"t think anyone would argue that. But if at launch, when your burn is at it"s peak, you have the resources to do so, you make that decision. That"s one of the things we are working through on funding. You can"t have just enough in the bank to get to launch, you need a war chest to be able to hold on, if in fact you want to, and maintain what is an excruciatingly high burn rate for X number of weeks/months, and be able to afford it.

One of the advantages of being self funded is the freedom it has given us to create far more over a far longer period of time before we headed out to talk to publishers about partnerships. We"re in a far different position than many small indies that start out in their garages.

Ngruk said:

If there were even a millionth of a percent of a chance of that happening I"d be stunned. Anything a person like Ut could offer is and has been, and will be, offered by a ton of other players in a format that will actually matter, be understood, be productive, and be offered rationally.

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Makes sense... I tried UT=p

Ya know Curt, I know guys who don"t follow MMO"s but know of this game and are intrigued enough to ask me questions. I hope you come through on this.

With that said, what do you think? Phils repeat?

Convo said:

Makes sense... I tried UT=p

Ya know Curt, I know guys who don"t follow MMO"s but know of this game and are intrigued enough to ask me questions. I hope you come through on this.

With that said, what do you think? Phils repeat?

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Hard if the Sox get in and advance. Beckett, Lester in October, with that offense, are going to be hard to beat.

Ngruk said:

Hard if the Sox get in and advance. Beckett, Lester in October, with that offense, are going to be hard to beat.

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Yeah, they will be tough but that would make for an awesome series. Phils are tough as all hell in a 7 game series too. Btw, what"s your opinion on Lidge? He just too in his own head?

My opinion? Ya he needs to pitch better, he"s on my fantasy team...

Ngruk said:

Why would I care about shutting you up? Why would anyone care beyond it being easier to have constructive conversation? If I were to cull anything from this entire thread you"ve offered in the way of constructive criticism I would be stunned. You"ve offered absolutely zero that hasn"t been brought up by someone else in an easier to read non-pubescent fashion, so who would care?

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He"s been around the industry.


Anyway, NDAs are funny because if you get enough people who build up steam, holding that NDA in place just builds and builds up so that the second it is released a whole lot of vitriol comes out after waiting so long.

All of the armchairing is easily ignorable: sitting in an ivory tower when you have contributed directly to fuck-all except via YOUR OPINION is meaningless. Especially when "backup" is provided that someone shitting all over themselves in the form of sketches and ideas...

I stay in Minnesota because my family is here. If they had a development house here, I would put my money where my mouth is. But don"t think for a second that the best damn developers have never come from exactly this type of site. Because the shit bags that kiss ass or fuck their way in go no where. The people that love, eat, and breath video games and are that passionate about them - the sky is the limit.

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What the fuck are you talking about?

I have worked with a few developers in and around Minnesota. After you said this I could literally smell the basement you must live in with spiral bound notebooks with TOP SECRET, UTNAYAN"S IDEAS scrawled on the front.


As far as MMOs go, there have been so few that to establish any sort of wisdom from how they must occur is pure bullshit... especially that track record that you waffled on about, and when corrected claimed that people were proving you right. Hm, OK. You"re also leaving out non-American launches which have nowhere near the same marketing and reveal pattern.

It is your haranguing that gets immediately annoying because for the few core things you are correct about, you dump pounds of refutable bullshit around it.

You really should take the Vanguard thread to a therapist or someone who gives a shit about you, it was humorous, then annoying, then angering, then sad. Yes, you thought Vanguard was shit. But so did a lot of other people. Then you took the shit and rubbed it all over your face and said see? look at me, I"m covered in shit! Took a little turd and put it on like lipstick, pumping your shit sceptre around saying Ha Ha! Look at me, my name is Vanguard! Teetle-leetle-lee!

Now you pretend, by being "around" the industry ever since you played your first video game (ok, that was funny) that you have an insider"s guide to how to do things correctly? And only if it were some other parallel universe where you could break away from family to allow us to play the game that you helped with, why, we might learn what it is like to be a gamer?

Obviously someone who"s had a vigorous, important career has probably played less games than some anonymous internet fuck who puts themselves in some sort of fantasy situation where they"re relevant. Do you think that you"re doing anything other than illustrating that point? We know you"re ego delusional, as you think you were helping deflect bad PR, when I thought most people here have learned to generally ignore you except for when your grandiose hallucinations tend towards the humorous.


It really is simple. All the negativity about street-cred on these boards or the point of this thread, or what-have-you are irrelevant. Most of that cred was gained when people discovered that he played MMOs at a time when it wasn"t exactly common for productive people to be associated with them in the mainstream media. I"m sure the Actual True History experts will be quick to correct, but that was the perception to most.


That aside, your prattle holds little or no water when the majority of your relevant background is being a customer.

Get in line and fill out the survey, maybe it will ask you how long you"ve played video games and your heart can skip a beat in the excitement that you get to check the bottom box for the limitless choice, and you get to put "more than 35 hours a week" for how long you play.

So fucking boring.

Ngruk said:

If there were even a millionth of a percent of a chance of that happening I"d be stunned. Anything a person like Ut could offer is and has been, and will be, offered by a ton of other players in a format that will actually matter, be understood, be productive, and be offered rationally.

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UT: What do you think the chances are of a guy like you and a Troll like me... ending up together?

Curt: Well, UT, that"s difficult to say. I mean, we don"t really...

UT: Hit me with it! Just give it to me straight! I came a long way just to see you, Curt. The least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?

Curt: Not good.

UT: You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?

Curt: I"d say more like one out of a million.
[pause]

UT: So you"re telling me there"s a chance... *YEAH!*

One thing I do have to agree with Ut on is NDAs. Simply put they are bad. You guys in the business can thank those that came before you for that. NDAs have been used as a shield to hide the suck far too many times. The only "secret" they are trying to keep is that the game is horrible and they want to keep their box sales and hype high. It does nothing but show potential customers that you have little to no confidence in your product. As a result we the customer have little to no confidence in your product.

Your game needs to be able to stand on it"s own. If come beta time you don"t feel the game is ready for public opinion then your game is simply not ready for beta. Having people send feed back and share their views with the public is a GOOD thing... assuming you are not trying to sell people a lemon. If the game is unstable... so what? The "Its a beta!" excuse there is 100% valid and people will accept that. If the game is not fun and terrible then in my experience a beta test is NOT what the game needs. It needs a shit load more development time and less hype.

This is why NDAs are fast becoming deal breakers for a lot of gamers. People are tired of being lied too. I personally am sick of being told how awesome something is going to be, getting my hopes up and then getting handed shit like vanguard and tabula rasa. Enough is enough.

NDA = not interested. Bottom line really.

Um. It has nothing to do with NDAs and everything to do with every recent (read: Post WoW) MMO sucking complete ass.

If a game was fucking awesome and had an NDA, you would refuse to play it simply because of that? Yeah right.

I do agree that if they are confident in their product, they shouldn"t need an NDA, though.