Topic: S.MG - The Ministry of Games. - page 9. (Read 27185 times)

How much marketshare do you have? 2%? 5%? 10%?

Well at least he's established proof of talk, right? That also counts.

Proof of work is the most important factor of all 

Being first to publish and getting it at least half-right does.

Being first in the field doesn't matter as much as doing things right.

Heh. You don't come here telling me that, sparky. I go to your thread telling you that.

Lurk moar.


It was.

Lurk moar.


Don't worry, I really don't give a shit. Your relative cluelessness tells me all I need to know about this "well-funded group".

Until this "well-funded group" actually releases something it is still a wide open field.

S.MG is past the stage of raising capital, or didn't you notice that the IPO is already done?

There is already a well-funded group developing proprietary gateway software to integrate a BTC economy into several major game platforms. If you are still at the stage of raising capital you have probably already missed the boat. It should have been obvious for at least a year that BTC is ideally suited to replace in-game currencies, especially if you want to migrate assets between platforms. The only sticking point has been the resistance to abandoning control of the value of current proprietary game currencies for a self-regulating one. But that resistance is beginning to crumble as the benefits begin to make themselves apparent. They are doing quite a bit behind the scenes on this, and whether they are successful will be for the future to determine. Please take this with a grain of salt, I can offer no proof, so just consider it a random rumor, and just another datapoint.

I am under NDA to really say anything else, so don't ask.

Thats why I don't play MMORPGs.

Also when I play a game I don't wanna deal with internet people. If I wanted to deal with internet people I'd go troll a message board or something.

Just call me Pat.

Your false assumption is that you are a capable judge of what's art and what's not, which is an amusing situation in that it actually begs the question. But hey, phrases change meaning all the time, so for all intensive purposes, you spoke correctly.


Would work in the library eBook rental sense. If you go to Terrible Boner Town and rent the chalice of terrible boners, the Terrible Bonians would want some sort of assurance they'd get their chalice back, instead of just getting stuck with permanent priapism every time someone "rents" a chalice.


(!!!)

This brings us back to the usefulness of in-game banks, or at least safes. If ol' Reggie Greyhawk was holding his full wallet when he got killed, he'd be awful sad. You'd make a killing on deposit/withdrawal fees alone.


Well, I don't have any gold on me, but I've got this chalice, see...

Kids listen to what people tell them. Because they do not have a choice in the matter. Because they don't have a job.

"People" does not denote and cannot be stretched to denote random forum cumrags/lolcows such as yourself.

Let me recap some chief points to perhaps more palatably flavor the spent grease captive between your ears:




Actually the relation between you and art closely approximates the relation between usagi and finance. Come to think of it, that coincidence begs the question whether you're also gender ambiguous and nationality confused. Do you know what year it is?


IANAE, but isn't the entire point of WoW raiding, and is it pretty much impossible to play if you're in a shitty guild that can't raid worth a crap?


Dude this is shocking news to me, I've seen so many dorks dork all over each other on the basis of absent of insufficient wowskills?!


I am authorized to anticipatorily state that moreover the game won't have an end. A game design announcement still is scheduled, probably will clarify a lot of points. Likely sometime in July.


Not to mention it creates cooperative behavior of a kind never seen before in mmorpgs: sword RENTING.

Think about it: if you were to identify a town in your own head not by some arbitrary name the developers alloted it, but by the fact that it's that one town which owns that one sword which does X exceptionally well....


I am sadly not authorized to comment on this point, but if I were you'd be wowed right now. Sucks to be me.


For "some reason"? Ask sir Reginald Greyhawk what the reason might be. He might ask for pay first however.

Well WoW is an old game now, so declining subscription rates are not as meaningful as they may have been earlier -- but I was under the impression that WoW has been hemorrhaging players for quite some time. They made a very dramatic shift from focusing on the early and middle progression of the game to the late game, and destroyed new player's experience of the early game entirely. It began with flying mounts, which removed the need to explore the land on quests. It's like a trope, walking form one place to another repeatedly. In Ultima it was, Lord British tells you to find Mariah in the Lycaeum, (or in Moonglow in one version), then when you find her you have to go back to Lord British, who then sends you after someone else. Back and forth. It was an impetus to explore and just dick around in the game and have fun in your role. Something which I have only really seen expressed well recently in Fallout 3 -- a game I enjoyed much more than WoW and which I feel has a greater replay value.


No, MPOE-PR likes to make quips at me for some reason, that was in response to her.


Well like I said, I'm interested to see what they will put out.

Maybe some people liked the grinding in WoW, but it was definitely manifested in a different way. There is no absolute dependency on a party. What occurs in WoW is the romantic solo-quest. When partying occurs it's just an extension of this mentality, as well skill really isn't truly necessary. If you watch someone in a WoW dungeon, they rapidly hit keys as if they are trying to refresh reddit when it's down. FFXI is far different due to the timing requirements. Press a button too quick and you fuck-up, press it too late and you fuck up. The entire action of fighting was designed to be fulfilling, holding true to the Final Fantasy franchise, and in turn the process of grinding became fulfilling. It's a sort of emergent gameplay built on a fundamentally sound concept.

In WoW this was highly diluted, for the sake of difficulty. FFXI turned a lot of would-be players off because they had trouble acclimating to the skill level. However many veteran players (which I definitely would not include myself in this category), would say this barrier to entry made the social aspect of the game more fulfilling because the game punishes incompetence.

WoW was always an endeavor to the end level, as the end content was the treat everyone wanted. Maybe in the beginning the journey was fulfilling, but after some time, this became increasingly more "rote" due to the allure of the endgame. This became so pervasive, Blizzard created several "events" and "bonuses" which gave the player double XP. Where in the original incarnation of WoW it would take a least a few months of heavy play time to get to max level. It is said a player can reach max level in the most current incarnation in a matter of weeks.

usagi adequately stated "the journey not the destination". WoW focuses on the destination, FFXI the journey. WoW became more accessible, and subsequently extremely profitable.

I ultimately think you're game will have similar principles to FFXI, focusing on skill rather than rote mundane tasks. Ultimately that's more fulfilling to the player.

You're focused on the effects of farming, the inflationary nature of resources being infinite. This is a definitely and interesting point. As you state in the quote below, when there is only enough money to buy one "Super Awesome Sword of Chaos" in the entire game, it creates an entirely different mindset. If this sword only can have on instance of itself within the entire game as a limitation, this definitely creates a different mindset from the traditional "lets get money by killing shit". I guess you and MP were baffled and annoyed that monsters dropped gold coins in the traditional RPG. I don't blame you.

As stated above with FFXI this isn't constrained to merely an RCE game. This is particularly clear in Dark Souls which is a game in-which the fundamental level of play is dependent on how skilled the player is with his or her character. You see the same signs, the player is more attentive to his items, his movements, his actions, and his growth. Completing tasks/quests within the game bring a certain "fuck yea" level of satisfaction, unlike a simple quest in WoW.

Perhaps it's purely the difficulty, but that seems to be simplifying it too much.

Adding something such as permadeath for the hardcore player usually instantly raises the player's awareness. But that doesn't create any more depth to the existing experience.

Depth is ultimately achieved through the content. Everything within the game attributes to the player experience. This attention to the level of detail is why the GTA franchise has become so successful.

I hope you're not saying I'm saying that, because I'm not.

Just because an individual doesn't have the capacity to perform a task themselves, doesn't mean this person can't procure the necessary resources. This is moot. Perhaps S.MG goes up in flames, but if this is the case, it will be a Hindenburg-like explosion that will be witnessed for miles, and not a puff of smoke. I believe in fundamentals in game design. I play devil's advocate here because I hate when designers use a lot of smoke and mirrors to mask bad design.


They do listen, and in particular Mr. Popescu is willing to listen to reason. Perhaps the reason S.MG is hyperfocused on the business plan is because whatever the designer is doing will not be seen by us unless approved by Mr. Popescu. The designer (if they have one yet), is locked in a box, far way from the public. MPOE-PR even stated that as one of the benefits of being a developer in contract with S.MG.

I'm flattered at people thinking I should be a game design consultant, but I'm just pointing out the fundamentals. Anyone significantly more experienced than I, and is a designer by trade will point out similar things.

I would like to see a great new game as much as anyone.

To be fair, PR's game art contest has been attracting some really serious contenders. It should just be a matter of time before they assemble an entire team of top-shelf undiscovered talent.

No, you don't get it. You have to listen to what people tell you and stop being such a kid. The problem is you want to make money from your game in a "fuck the player as long as we get paid" way. You are putting the money first and it will ruin your game. I am not even close to the first person who has told you this, which is why I quoted thestringpuller. S.MG should probably hire him as a consultant. After what I read from him, I would do so myself if I was involved in game design. He is spot on about everything, although notably he missed with Richard Garriot, who was the producer of Lineage and Lineage II, City of Heroes, etc. as well as a designer and/or producer of a number of other recent games. The next WoW could very well come from him, I wouldn't have characterized him as someone with a small at-home following at all.


It's not a bad thing. It's that you seem to place a great deal of value on success and the ability to get things done, yet you reject advice which comes to you (albeit through others) from successful, accomplished game designers. It's this:


It's the irony of it all. And then you try to make it personal. I'm a child-politician engrossed in welfarism, so you don't have to take my advice. Or I don't have a job. Or whatever. You reek of failure and incompetence. If I was the only person telling you these things it would be different, but I'm not.

We'll see how far you get in game design, it will be interesting to watch. But right now you have nothing, no projections, no dates. Nothing but a lot of talk. The way this is going I'll finish kongzi.ca before you even have a zone editor.

Probably. I might venture as far as to say that the principal value of WoW is exactly this grinding, that some people apparently like, and that the failure to implement same is the actual cause of the D3 collapse, in spite of all the numerous other defects countless web-commentators found.


Well in an RCE game in a sense this is somewhat obliquely present, in the sense that the player is (usually) attentive to efficiency, which means he primarily does whatever he's doing because it's productive rather than because "it's what the storyline hath ordained".


That's okay, ToA are about as scandalous.


Get a job already.


You say that as if it's a bad thing. I can't begin to contemplate what must be going on inside the skullous cavity of some dood imagining exchange executives write the code the exchange works on. Because Bitcoin, still?


Yeah, I can tell. And you're not the only one, either.

I guess this is because I don't understand PR or whatever.


Don't remind me of that issue where you and harnett provided the losses to go with MPOE's performance last year. There's a difference between a bulwark propping up a market on one end (something nobody else has done or could conceivably do apart from MPOE) and some idiot mismanaging funds to spectacular results (something pretty much anyone can do, just like you can).

It's called education; those without it often berate those with. You and Mr. Popescu are no different. You will attack someone for not having an education or not being a success; all the while not having an education and not being responsible for your own success as well.


Having actually played nearly every RPG game in existence, I can at least say something about what keeps me coming back to the genre. It's precisely the opposite of CSR racing. In CSR racing, you have a 10-15 second car race, and you spend about the same time upgrading your car between races if you're quick. And once the game is over, it's really over -- there is no "endgame", and you didn't really earn anything, because you have no skin in the game. Part of the appeal of a RPG is in fact farming and grinding. The journey -- not the destination. And in a MMORPG it's doing that together with (and at times against) others you meet online. This is something that you appear not to get. The problem is not the economy or the gold flow, which is just something you tune to the progression. The problem is that you want to make money from all this. You want to charge a subscription, or have a real money economy, or whatever. And that brings out the farmers. Because as soon as you make people pay for their success one way or another, they will find a way to pay someone else to have that success for them.

Kind of like how Mr. Popescu pays you to argue on his behalf. Or how he paid people to write MPEX (he didn't write it himself).

The same problem exists in a different form in games like Tomb Raider. People will go look up a walkthrough to the game instead of sitting there trying to figure it out themselves. Not all the time mind you -- just on the 5% of the game they don't enjoy. There is pretty much nothing you can do to prevent this from happening to your game. People will not play your game if they can not be entertained and get a sense of achievement from it, and nothing you can do to give a player a sense of achievement can be made non-transferable. In days gone past this means people would often not finish games. Nowadays, everyone finishes every game. If they can't finish it, they just open up a walkthough-FAQ for the game. You can see this in how games like Half-life have changed over the years. Half-life contained many jump and platform puzzles that Half-life 2 did not contain. It's not because the puzzles were too difficult. It's because some people found them tedious or boring. So the game was made easier, and as a result the story had to be a lot stronger and more involving. The puzzles had to be more cranial and less in-game-physical. But you do not have this luxury with a RPG, if that is really what you are attempting to design. Screwing with the genre will just make you turn out a shitty game. We know this now. Being honest I don't know what your plan is for your in-game-economy but I am pretty sure you will not be reinventing the genre any time soon ;-)


You're being an idiot again. Based on what you've said (i.e. "Farming always inflates the economy") can't we conclude you don't really understand progression or economy? In any RPG game there is a progression, not an economy. An 'economy' is just a means to control progression. It means that certain people who have reached a certain level no longer need to look for certain items or go to certain areas anymore.

Other means of controlling progression are level caps, item levels, skill points/skills which unlock at a certain level, time-based controls (such as the pulleys in Act III of Diablo III) and so forth. It's just a method of controlling how long players need to spend in a certain level before they can progress to the next area. Metering content. That is all. I find it so telling how you are discussing the gold and economy of a RPG in place of progression, when discussing problems like "Chinese farmers". You need to understand game design before you can start talking about a revenue model, or you get trainwrecks like trying to put me down by comparing me to a politician immersed in welfarism (another one of the "MPOE-PR talks game design" wtf moments, I suppose?)

I really can't wait to see what you guys are going to come up with. I'll be honest, I never once thought anything connected to MPEX would ever fail, and I was really surprised when MPOE bond had back to back double digit losses. But this is the first project associated with Mr. Popescu that I am sure will fail. It's the way you spurn advice. Let me clue you in. You're the cheezball who thinks they have a new concept for a social network. You know, the marketing genius or fresh MBA grad that thinks they're going to hire their way into running the next twitter. It's just not going to happen. It's your attitude -- not enough that you succeed but that others fail  sort of thing -- combined with trying to break into game design it makes you look and sound like a total douche. You guys are clearly in way over your head on this one. I cannot possibly imagine you guys coming up with any sort of MMORPG at all.

I had a few round table discussions with the interesting points that came up. I must say some interesting things came to light.

First off something unrelated to S.MG:


Definitely. But the most likely reason grinding has become so deeply ingrained in the video game based RPG is due to the limitations of the classic consoles such as the NES. Anyone who has programmed on one of these understands these limitations are pretty extreme in comparison to modern day computers. The designers of Dragon Warrior, one of the first non-text based video game RPG's, is iconic for the slime monster kicking your ass at the start of the game. This immediately forces the player to grind. The designers intention was to create a feeling of "training" or forcing the player to train in response to strong creatures. In a DND campaign where one isn't limited by computational power, an elegant storyline of the party going to a dojo can exist, and levels are disbursed through a scenario where grinding needn't exist.

Saying grinding is "bad by design" is a little blanketing. In FFXI, a notorious game, grinding was the main feature of the game. A lot of people hated it, but just as many people loved it. Grinding came second to the storyline and "quests", making it a game of training, and subsequently discovery once strength was developed. Grinding wasn't mindless, but required skill, it required a party to work together in a harmony not seen in many other games. Each person played their role.

If a healer healed to fast while fighting a mob, he ran out of MP, the tank died, and mob went on to attack the rest of the party, and everyone died.
If the tank didn't maintain the aggression of the mob, the creature went after the healer (since healing aggravates mobs), who died, and subsequently everyone died.

The examples can go on and on and on. I wasn't trying to say grinding must exist for a game to be called an RPG, but merely it has become a part of "tradition" for a lack of a better word. Moreover there are ways to design grinding so it's done well. And when I say grinding I mean the act of killing mobs for no other reason than to gather drops or experience.

Rote and repetitive gameplay is the problem which is generally what grinding amounts to. In the case of Final Fantasy, your role (as whatever job you decided to be), changed depending on the structure of your party. This created a more dynamic feeling to the act of grinding and made it not tedious for the more experience player due to the rewarding nature, rather than it being a rote repetitive task. One quote that sums it up is: "Every battle is like a boss fight." When grinding in FFXI the slightest fuck-up resulted in cataclysmic failure.

Again I'm not saying grinding is necessary. That's definitely not the case, I'm just saying it shouldn't be written off as "bad design".

I think this circles back to the strength of the finite ability of bitcoin. Finite being the keyword. How the cash flows within a game from player to player is a different beast entirely, but games have been very successful in making usable resources finite within the game system.

Star Wars Galaxies, many years back (in the 2004 era), had a system where every "usable" item in the game (weapons, clothes, armor, everything really), was crafted by another player in game. As well, all the resources items were created from, were very limited. This created a very profound emergent effect on the gameplay. Like people digging for oil, various resources on planets would start to deplete over time as people mined them. This created an economy where a lot of people bartered with resources rather than the in game currency.

SWG is a terrible example, for a multitude of other reasons, but for the sake of example I used it. I would think that a system where everything is finite would completely change the mindset of players from trying to "rape the planet" via farming, to becoming efficient hunters as you spoke of earlier. Perhaps I'm simplifying the solution, but I'm trying to understand your mentality on this one.

As scandalous as it was, the China-farmers were breaking the ToA by selling Gil. The management took an active approach to the ever inflating economy by deleting accounts which were selling Gil "illegally", in term deleting their Gil. This in turn did work, very well in fact, deflating the prices in the auction houses by nearly 100%.

Was this a good solution? Probably not, it's like putting a band-aid on a wound that requires stitching. As you stated previous the China-farmer is exploiting something that is already broken. The designer is to blame, not the farmer.

That's untrue.

You only have to consider single-player RPGs to see why.  How much grinding did you do in the best single-player RPGs you've played?  If you've ever played pen-and-paper RPGs you won't have done any grinding either.

Grinding exists because players can consume original content faster than the developers can produce it - not because it HAS to exist.  It's a replacement for meaningful content - a cheap way to keep players feeling like they're doing something whilst they wait for the next update.  It's also widely used as a means to inflate play-through time - so 2 hours of interesting gameplay becomes 102 hours of play time (100 of which is mindless grinding).  It is NOT something that MUST exist just because something's tagged as an RPG.