Posts by Taylor

The documentary is a bit dishonest, though. Implies they screwed over Wiebe a lot more than they actually did, and that Twin Galaxies is actually relevant.

Heh, whoa, I don't want to get myself in trouble. I joined for a short project because everything since Viking was getting cancelled. They did offer to extend my contract but I declined for a few reasons, though I won't go into them (and some where just like Portsmouth being horrible and wanting a break). I think most of the 'horror stories' come from the old London studio, no?

Ah, Climax.

http://alexandertaylor.net

It’s my last work day tomorrow. I’ve applied for a few places but I think I want a break from the industry for a bit... Is it still "going indie" if your contract just ends? Doesn't sound like I'm raging against the corporate machine.

There are contracts for temporarily staff and probation periods for making sure people are up to snuff.

Edit: Urk. I'm just saying it's worded as standard practice. Obviously shit happens.

That press statement implies id software culls people frequently to keep the head count down, which I imagine isn't the case...

Anyway, I guess this means Rage didn’t sell very well. I thought it’d do decent just on the strength of it being by id, but I guess they’re not really a household name for the new generation.

He doesn't have time to win the internet. He's solving Chaos Theory.

It's because they're not saying it right.

I’m trying to avoid a quoteathon and distil this down to something manageable. My argument was that you can’t criticize something as 100% factually bad simply because it allows imbalance as the inevitable little imperfections can be enjoyable. Your argument seems to be that that perfection is actually achievable and thus my argument is irrelevant because any desired imperfections can simply be designed in.

So the onus is on you to show us these tools, methods and procedures for making a game of massive complexity perfectly balanced while highly customisable and scalable; because as far as I’m aware you are dealing entirely with unsubstantiated theory. While there certainly are known techniques for helping you with balance generally their goal is information, as balance is currently handled more as an art than a science; and thus flaws are innate.

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i never said that skill trees were incapable of balance, i said that the current implementation of skill trees that are perceived as balanced or well designed, in fact, aren't. does this mean that skill trees are incapable of balance? no. does this mean that there aren't skill trees that are well balanced? no. what it means is that i am refuting the claim that the skill tree of e.g. wow is not balanced or indeed well designed, and that many mmo's haven't balanced their skill trees because the designers behind them have little to no clue on how to balance them. currently this is done on a trial by error base, in the form of playtesting.[...]

as for your controversial subject, first off: de gustibus non est disputandum. i cannot account for what you or anyone else likes in a game, nor is this in my interest for the subject at hand. i also think that you're arguing something a bit different here. choice and perfect balance are not mutually exclusive factors in a game. you can choose to play a class or character that has trade-offs if you are so inclined, with whatever implications this has for the match or match-up. but giving yourself a handicap in this way should have no effect on the overall balance of the game; this is your choice in the game, not a choice that the game does for the sake for balance.

Yes... squid pro row.

You said the WoW Skill Trees could never be balanced because of differences per tier. I was trying to suggest a little bit of injustice in the tiers is fine, if not better, than clinically balancing everything to be even.

Choice and perfect balance are mutually exclusive in any practical application. Each meaningful choice you give the player is going to drive things more and more towards imbalance because it’s exponentially adding variables each time. Theoretically all this could be tracked and perfectly balanced, for better or worse, but I can’t see this happening in practice.

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secondly, balance is a fickle thing. how would you go about defining balance in a game? how would you go about measuring balance in games? you mention tier lists; most if not all tier lists are not made by the companies releasing the game, but rather as a subjective gauge from seasoned players. while these players usually know what they are talking about, they still make mistakes, and they are still learning from the game. since tier lists are dealt in the realm of subjectivity (at least at the time of writing), they are too baseless to use as a method of properly gauging balance. however, i concede that i would consider any official tier list released from a game company for a given game the gold standard of balance for that game for no other reason than i would expect them to have done the calculations beforehand. this is probably why game companies do not release tier lists.

Companies don’t release tier lists because they design the game hoping everything is going to be even (ignoring comedy characters like Dan) but this is rarely the case. Sometimes the imbalances are

you wonder how they managed to ship but other times even years on people don’t agree as you say. Ono (SFIV producer) came out and said they purposely make characters stronger than others but I think he was trying to save face because Arcade Edition had Yun, Fei Long and Viper dominating so much the top players all dropped their main characters for them.Anyway, I don’t think Fighter approaches like tier lists or match-up charts really apply to a game like WoW because the fundamental mechanics make it hard or impossible to outplay the difference. At least in the video I just linked Tager still has to make a mistake before he takes 40% damage and is vomited to the other end of the obstacle course. It’s stacked but it’s not unwinnable, however this is not the case with WoW PvP. If you look at team compositions for Arena this season they’re almost exclusively based around legendary equipped Rogues. If you went in with some “low-tier” composition and/or gear disadvantage then how well you play is fairly irrelevant.

From a competitive point of view this is the main problem with the game; not the numbers, statistics, formulas, skill trees or whatever else. The root cause is WoW was designed as a PvE game and retro-fixed for PvP much later. It launched with a lot of easily identifiable problems (Ex: Stun Lock) and the delay on the honour system seemed to suggest they thought most people wouldn’t be too interested in it.

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but i digress. ultimately, the question of whether "perfect" balance is necessary or even desirable for any given game is moot. however, all game designers should at least be able to attain to the knowledge of creating perfect balance in any given game, simply because this insight would allow them to create games of any level of balance below "perfect". or if it isn't possible to attain "perfect" balance, then at least attain the closest upper bound to it.

It absolutely is not moot because, as you have just spent several paragraphs explaining, designers don't actually know how to make their asymmetrical games perfectly balanced. In a real project you will need to make this decision.

I have read everything David Sirlin has written, including the articles he no longer keeps on his website such as teaching bread crumbing with the Donkey Kong Country example of a huge arrow of collectibles, and his old forums where he claimed he had achieved more than anyone else in the games industry.

But I don’t really see how this supports your claim that Skill Trees are factually incapable of balance, if anything it says the jury is still out because there’s so little research?

Though I’ll jump ahead and just say my controversial thing now: Where is the evidence that perfect balance is a good thing? Most of us are PC Gamers and used to frequent updates that alter the game hopefully moving it towards a more balanced state, but not all platforms work like this. If you went to a fighting game forum and complained about a 6:4 match-up people would just tell you to man up. Now, I'm not advocating 8:2 or 1:9 match-ups but is a little rough really that bad?

I absolutely love watching underdogs prosper and tier whores topple, if I’m watching some random a-cho video I know who I want to win before the match even starts. I usually end up playing low-mid tier (not by choice; tiers take years to finalise and initial predictions are usually wrong) and my most memorable wins are unsurprisingly those stacked against me. This is a whole area of enjoyment you lose in some theoretical "perfect" game.

Quote from Sentura

That's an awfully long post that only conveyed the information that these two words could have covered: "I disagree."

you misunderstand, it's not opinion, it's fact. whether you think it's well-designed or not is irrelevant.

Sorry Sentura, but I feel there are few facts in design no matter how strong your opinion is. I would take something imbalanced and varied over something balanced and dry any day. Significant imbalance too, that’s actually going to change battle outcome given two equally skilled players of the same level and equivalent gear (which is a can of worms in itself). The problem with MMORPG design is imbalance is often very hard to outplay, but this isn't an inherent the fault of the skill tree.

Quote from Serenius

WoW didn't invent skill trees, they just established a really well-designed implementation of them for an MMO. NEXT!

Please show me where I said they invented skill trees or I'm not dealing with this strawman. The only difference between implementation in these two games is in one you go up the tree and in the other you go down.

Don't talk wet. The talent trees are an exact copy with the names jumbled around. And I've played plenty of MMO's that didn't use this system: EQ, AO, Aion, Lineage II, so don't try that noise.

Quote from Sentura

i understand that you can copy wow because it's the most succesful mmo out there, but isn't copying wow going against the logic of this business? i mean if people wanted to play a game that is reminiscent of wow, wouldn't they just pick wow to play in the first place? there are so many mmos crashing because everyone believes them to be the new "wow killers", but really, that isn't possible. the mmo business isn't the fps business, where you can copy paste elements (such as between the battlefield and modern warfare games) and still expect a large group of players to play on both. a mmo requires commitment in the form of a subscription, so most people will be hard pressed to find time to play more than one at a time.

True, most of your target customers are playing other MMO’s, have invested hundreds of hours into it, and are unlikely to play simultaneous MMO’s because of both the cost and splitting game time. So giving them same game with a different skin probably won't work. However the other side of this dilemma is they’re the most expensive genre out there to create so you can’t afford to go totally loony with the mechanics when you know stuff like the Talent Training Trees work, and it’s fair to say the main draw of a Star Wars MMO is Star Wars.

Some of WoW’s changes are simply better than what we had before too: It took an obscene amount of time to max level in older MMO’s, playing solo was restricted to a few classes that weren’t supposed to be played solo but could, and there were no instances so bosses were free for all. WoW had a few world raid bosses in vanilla that were kind of frustrating – though partly because they had all the tools to be a griefers dream.

To be honest WoW doesn't really feel like an MMO anymore but a smaller game with the best lobbies ever. I think that’s because they’ve systematically removed drama and reduced community interaction to a minimum.

http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/sit ... /sorcerer/

I lol’d

I know copying WoW probably makes a lot of sense (and I don’t claim WoW was completely original either) but I’m not really sure the whole tank, heal, damage trinity really works in a sci-fi setting. Surely there are better ways you can MMO this franchise without Lightsabre: 8-12 damage.

It’s also kind of strange to me that how much people like modern MMO’s is often directly proportionate to how little they have to interact with other people. Oh this new MMO is great becaus the dungeons have storylines and I can play singleplayer with my AI companion... play single player games?

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http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

As a shmup fan I’m happy people have stopped just making twin-stick arena-shooters where your eyes melt out of your skull.