f13.net

Wanted to bring this up after I read this:


You see, I totally made the point Tazelbain is making here, except at the time I was pointing out how shallow and stupid I found DAOC RvR to be.  This time around I'm on the other side.  Proclaiming that with Tribes1 gameplay it would be awesome because well aiming, flying and blowing things to shit is way cooler then /stick /assist and the boredom of auto attack + hotkey combat.  It is the same old stupid static fortress over and over I cried, the relics are stupid the bonus is intangible victories are meaningless boohoohoo.  I called for more "meaning" in pvp MMOG's across the board without really even knowing exactly how to define meaning.  I took that to f13 and got involved in all sorts of intraweb disscussion about the matter.

This line of thought just leads into the whole, you can't reward people for winning nor make winning matter without the losers just quitting or joining the winning side.

So should developers even be trying to make a game with persistence and pvp or is it a waste of time?  Do things like winning and loosing only work in the vacuum of instant-respawns and no item-loss?  Or can some kind of tight-rope act accomplish removing the hey we've already taken this stupid objective 100 times syndrome while still having objectives?

This question really applies to things like Age of Conan and WAR so if anyone has a good idea of how they are SAYING they will handle this, feel free to give a refresher to those of us who stay away from sites for games that aren't even in beta yet.

I'm interested to hear what others think about this, especially when it comes to those on the pvp-light end of the spectrum.



New thread, same old topic.

*edit* restructured a few things, my bad..  *edit*

I don't think mmo players can't handle losing so much as they can't handle rebuilding. If it wasn't such a bitch to recover from your losses, then the pain of defeat might not be so bad for them. If you changed the systems that make these games harsh to begin with, then it might be easier for some to deal with losing in a persistent world.

For example, making cities cost so much in Shadowbane was a terrible mistake. That game probably wouldn't have gone down the drain so quickly if it had been easier to recover from war. As it stood, having your city baned was like getting a big "Game Over, man!" flashed on your screen (not for me necessarily, but it seemed to be that way for many others).

Then again, I could be entirely wrong. Before that Huxley thread existed, I had no idea there were people who'd consider "shooting" to be overpowered.  :-P If there's a big segment of players like Geldon out there, then no, skill or "meaningful" pvp in mmo's in pretty much hopeless.

I do think that there are games that can do persistance and PvP well.  EVE comes to mind.  WoW, I think, does a lot of things well, but there have been a number of times when I've wished that they'd adopt a more Diablo-ish setup, where I can play offline or over a LAN if I want to.  I've never thought that about EVE.  EVE simply does not work without the massiveness or the persistance.  WoW, to a large extent does, and so (I'd be willing to bet) will all the "me too" clones who think they can compete with Blizzard.  That includes (as far as I know) Warhammer and Conan. 

The difference is that EVE has been designed from the ground up to be extremely social, which means sometimes (quite a lot of the time, actually) people will want to do things to you that you don't want.  And, by and large, the EVE devs have been more willing to tell people to lrn2ply than most other companies.  Theirs is a game built around PvP, and that means that some people will be pissed when their ship gets dusted, and the devs understand that.  I don't think EVE (or any game like EVE) will ever challenge WoW for player numbers, because too many of those pissed off players will be leaving, and spreading negative buzz about your game, and doing all the stuff that makes marketing people cry.  But I do think that if you're going to really take the whole massively multiplayer thing to the limit, you have to allow players to interact, both positively and negatively.

I prefer RPG gameplay to FPS gameplay, particularly in MMOs, because FPS takes too much energy. I like to relax and settle down with a game, not get psyched up about it. There are times when I like to get psyched up, like if I'm playing something in real life; laser tag or paintball or football or kick-the-gonads or whatever. But not all the time.

I think this is what Planetside has against it, and what Tabula Rasa should look out for. We need decompression time from adventuring, and it's more fun if we decompress in-game. The more energy we burn, the more decompression we need.

I love PvP in WOW, because when you lose, you get something shiny. When you win, you get something shiny. Holy crap you get shiny things no matter what you do! The more you win, the more shiny you get! If you don't win so much, well, you still get shinies! SHINY SHINY SHINY PVP YAY!!! This distracts most of us who suck at PvP, so we don't realize how bad we suck. We just get to have fun at it. Compare this to UO or SB, where if you suck at PvP, you not only lose the fight, but you lose the entire game FOREVAR. I like UO and I like PvP, but I suck at UO PvP, so I don't play UO anymore. This makes me sad.

I don't know if I suck at WOW PvP. I keep getting shiny things, so I must be doing something right.

Just random personal thoughts, for what it's worth.

Regarding the winning/losing thing, I'd have thought you use a line of control, as one side moves the line forward it becomes steadily harder to move it further forward (more NPC guards, better keep defences etc), eventually you reach an equilibirium point with both sides winning a similar amount, and good players and teams on each side being able to score an above average number of wins; but with the system still demonstrating which realm is ahead precisely because the combat has been pushed back to Caer Sursbrooke or whatever. Daoc went a little way along this road with the NF RvR reboot, it's just a shame they don't seem to want to push it further with warhammer.

In most systems currently being employed by MMOs, PvP is a useless notion. In fact, it may be self-defeating to try and base an MMO on PvP. PvP, is not the MMORPG's strength on it's own. But PvP itself, need not be removed from the games. It is a useful tool, but it is only a tool. Not the endless well of content that developers want it to be. PvP can be best realized in an MMORPG as a system for settling disputes.

The only logical way to implement this PvP system into an MMORPG, is to not have any coded reward. Perhaps the system would have some mild penalty to the loser, and even some penalty to the winner if it is a PK situation, but no hard-coded reward even if the fight is consensual.

This is a system for a PvE world. A world rich in content, rich in socialization, and rich in PvE experiences. The world need not be driven by PvP, yet PvP exists. It rarely happens, but when it does, the players involved are ripped from their normally predictable AI calculations and PvE casual atmosphere, and enter a few heart pounding minutes on the edge of their seat. The people who win get nothing other than emotions of joy and feelings of superiority. And the losers get nothing more than a feeling of vengeance or defeat. Perhaps they'll now be driven to play harder to beat those guys some day.

But at the end of it all, they all go back to PvE, and the world moves forward.

To me, any system other than this does not make sense for an MMO. If I wanted the kind of PvP in WoW, I could play dozens of non-MMO games. This goes for MMOFPS too. They cannot simply be an FPS + 5,000 player servers. MMOs have the ability to implement long-term emotion driven systems that simply cannot be done in other games. You can get a sense of accomplishment in counterstrike after you awp a guy, or even a desire for vengeance after being gunned down 3 rounds in a row by the same dude. But it doesn't really have the same weight as it would in a world where the opportunity rarely happens, and the moments of PvP are looked back on like as fond memories despite being so few and far between. It doesn't get those weeks to brew and stir and become a focus of your goals, until you finally gank that griefing bitch with your friends and proclaim victory.

Unlike many hardcore PvPers, I do not see death penalties as needing to be raised. No, that won't solve the futility of MMORPG pvp. The lack of penalties are not the reason why WoW's PvP feels pointless and repetitive. The problems are the rewards and the frequency. One should not be PvPing to advance their character. PvP is about settling a dispute, or continuing a rivalry between people or clans. Nothing should be on the line other than your reputation in each others eyes, and to be honest, for most people that's worth a lot more than shiny.

Until people can enjoy playing a game for the sake of playing rather than winning, no. You can't have a game unbalanced by winning, especially timesink rewards, because you'll eliminate any new players after a short time.

I think Planetside handled it pretty well, allowing vets to use more weapons but not really be stronger than a rank newblette. Of course, people still 'ground xp' like mmogtards, but whatchagonnado? They also handled it pretty well with the way benefits worked, holding the tech base or holding the bio base or whatever lent tactical advantages to everyone in that instance (continent/island/whatever).

But some people need to 'win' to have fun, and as Hoax points out, will switch to the winning side if they're not. I used to kick people from our BF1942 server for that garbage. Seems most people can't try to fight on the losing side, they'd rather bail and 'win' (even though other players pressed the advantage into place). Also seems the best BF players will hop to the losing side to avoid the mindless tards hopping to the winning side, it almost balances at times in a retarded way.

I think the only to handle it is to make it a big game of chess. The pieces would massive NPCs that duke it out and players struggle to tip the balance in their teams favor.  Eventually leading to one side winning.  I.E the Battleship White Bishop assaults the Black Knight Fortress.  Black players would attempt disable the battleship's systems and help destroy it at the same time defending their fortress.  This would add more strategic elements because different match-ups that would play out differently and players would have to decide which match to help with.  Add a finite resource system to craft new pieces.  After the game is over pass out special titles, certs, and armor looks to encourage them to stick around for the next game.

GW random arenas let everyone win 25% of the time. Which means the hardcore people only win 75% of the time. The way to add persistance to that would be to make each random battle a "switch" on a hex map. When your faction wins the hex gets set to your faction and therefore the area that your faction "controls" gets larger. The bigger your area of control gets the harder it is to hold on to because you have other factions chewing at your control area from all sides.

EVE pretty much has this implemented organically. It's just much slower paced, 100% persistant instead of instanced, and the little issue of everyone not winning 25% of the time.

Short on time, lets see if I can get a post done in 5 minutes.  Apologies if I'm just repeating points already made here, as I had to skim.

I think that a large part of the problem with PvP having a lack of meaningful consequences in a MMO is the players' expectation of persistence.  In Tribes, it's perfectly okay for things to reset every round because the players don't expect their efforts to last beyond that round anyway.  In Planetside, however, you expect the results of your actions to have some lasting consequence on the grounds that this is supposed to be a persistent state world.

If developers want to make players feel like their interactions matter in a MMOG, they need to avoid setting up unbeatable scenarios that are intended to last forever.  By all means, let the Vanu Sovereignty wipe out the New Conglomerate and Terran Republic if they're having a good week.  Having them take over every map in the game and then nothing happens because they can't take out the HQs belonging to the other factions is crap.  People will eventually win, often due to simply being the faction with the highest population, and in this event you either let players win or you declare your online space a farce.

Another big problem Planetside ran into is the issue where you could either spend several hours wrestling a map away from the rival factions or you could spend 10 minutes taking bases with zero opposition.  If the faction starts to resist, no problem, recall back to sanctuary and hit another map with zero opposition.  There was never steady garrisons in Planetside where people are waiting around, bored, for players of rival factions to try to take bases from them.

One more thing: Resources.  Resources give players a reason to conquer terrain.  If the NCU you harvest in one continent affected all other continents, and because you don't hold more than 2 maps you can no longer spawn a Prowler tank, players will find it far more important to hold onto those continents.  (Granted, in this particular example it's actually somewhat counter to good game design because you're putting a faction already at disadvantage enough to lose terrain at a further disadvantage by robbing them of their best equipment.)

I've seen many good experiments in Battletech MU* of making holding persistent online space matter.  It's a bit of a seesaw between providing players incentive to care whether or not they have holdings in the virtual space versus causing mass defections because players don't want to deal with how much of a disadvantage they're at due to lack of holdings in the virtual space.

Alright, now I'm late :P Final point: You want to get it done right, you'll probably have to do it yourself.  Heh.

I played Eve for some time and although I don't usually like PvP myself, in this game I was part of a corportion and alliance that did a lot of it, to defend their territory and sometimes to try to steal systems from their enemies.

In my experience, the vast majority of my corp friends (who were probably PvP light in the sense that they didn't seem like the people who would have been PKers in UO, for example) really hated being ganked by pirates when they were in central space doing missions or mining, but were more than happy to accept the risk of losing their expensive ships in corporation wars in disputed territories, as they considered that type of PvP to be fun.

Perhaps it helped that territory ownership in Eve was fairly static. I know huge political changes can happen, in terms of who controls star systems, but losing a battle nearly always meant losing a ship - which can actually hurt a lot in Eve - but not losing your player owned structures and the really big stuff your corp has worked for.

I was never strong enough as a character or skilled enough as a player to really take part in PvP, but if I ever went into a disputed system for some reason and got killed I was always fine with that. I knew what I was doing and it had some meaning.

(in Eve, corps who own systems will usually kill anyone who wanders into their system who is not an ally even if they are not actually an enemy - they are protecting their resources as they kind of own the asteroid belts, or they think you might be a pirate or enemy spy, or just want to show who's boss in their part of space. But sometimes you might have a reason to take a risk and see if you can sneak in).

But like the rest of my corp, I hated being killed by pirates in central space. Central space is all owned by NPC corporations and there's no political reason for killing someone - often not even an economic one, as my crappy ship had no parts worth salvaging.

You could argue that the pirates still played an important role in the game and I would agree, but that did nothing to make the experience more fun.

I'm not sure how this relates to other games, but I believe it is possible for even a carebear like me to enjoy being in a world full of PvP. I am going to try Conan and see if it offers an experience in any way similar, without getting my hopes up too much!

Sigged!


As to the overall point of the thread, I think Eve is important in that it shows that a PvP++ game can succeed, albeit with a niche audience - though maybe not quite as niche as people might have thought.

I think the other (major) entries into this space, namely UO and SB*, were/are loved and hated precisely because they had potential, but a few major missteps doomed them to the dustbin of history.  Eve, however, shows that the model is viable if "done right".



*I think M59 is in this crowd too, but I can't really speak to its success or failure because I don't know much about it.

I trying to put my figure want I find distasteful about Eve's PvP, the best I come with is...
I don't want to be another point in the blob.
Politics and the political state are opaque to the spectators and the majority of the players.
Something about the target system felt alien to me.


Mass PvP should be more like the NFL.

I think you can mesh the two quite nicely. It's obvious many heavy PvP players don't like the "worldly" part of the games. Thye just want to kill stuff. If Devs could nest something like BF2142 inside an MMO and make the results of those battles reflect on the persistent state of the World, it could be very cool. There were "battlefields" in a game-that-shall-remain-unnamed that could have been used for this purpose. Marked off parts of every planet where it was PvP only.

I agree, but that would never happen in a digital medium. Imagine playing Madden where every player was controlled by a real person. It wouldn't be any better than any other pvp game. Even if all of the individuals knew how a football game should work.


I'd have to disagree there. Seems to me most heavy pvp'ers like to simulate all the goods and ills of worlds more than anyone else.

I don't know. Of course, my perspective is mostly from the people on that other game, whose forums are hosting about a dozen threads based on the "decay or not" concept. PvP'ers don't want decay because it would take away from their killing time, and they don't want to give their money to other players for said goods. They seem vehement in playing an online version of Quake or PS.

Some would like Quake, I guess, but as far rpg's go, many people want lootable corpses (far beyond mere item decay), non cookie cutter class systems, conquest (as opposed to a WoW bg scenario), city building, etc..

I didn't mean literally :)
It should be:
A) winnable
B) transparent, everybody plays with their cards up.
C) watchable, you should able to watch it figure out what is happening.
D) broken up discrete objectives. plays -> drives -> points -> wins -> championships
E) parity
F) room for individuals to shine, and because of C people can see them.

My problem with PvP in EvE is much the same as it was in UO.  You leave a gate, there's a player sitting on the other side, they launch their "An Corp!" missiles, and boom: you're dead, and the product of 50 hours of ore harvesting is now theirs for the taking.  Oh, too bad, I guess you weren't in the exclusive club that knew that was a bad place to be.  LOL n00b, suck it.  The only reason this isn't entirely out of control in EvE is that there's some level of accountability - you can't escape retribution quite as easily as in UO, so when said n00b complains to his big bad corp members the pirate has either moved on to another gate or is scrap.

I think that things lost and gained in PvP should not belong to players, but rather an organization above the player.  Those dirty socialists in the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek didn't having to stress overmuch about losing their ship to a Borg Cube because it wasn't their ship but rather belonged to the greater organization.  Assuming the officers survived, the next ship off the construction line will likely benefit from their experience.  We don't necessarily need to have a socialist government for this to happen, as such a thing is really the case in any army.  You don't own the tank or aircraft you're piloting, you're just a soldier fighting for the country, and so you won't be expected to pay $30M when your F-15 gets shot down.

Players in MMOGs where it death is a PITA are basically entrepreneurs.  They pay for their own gear and take their own risks to make a profit of which they keep 100% of.  Maybe they have insurance, but chances are they're expected to shoulder the majority of the burden in deaths, and that's what makes organized PvP efforts counter-intuitive.  It's not rewarding to risk your own junk. 

Players in Planetside have no problem with death because they don't own anything they're losing.  So, why do we have a problem with Planetside?  Because things don't matter enough, defeat is impossible anyway, and victory is meaningless knowing that the base grants you nothing any other base doesn't already and in another hour you could lose the very base you took because there's nobody around to defend it.

Yeah, I was just typing in a rush. I thought you were mainly talking about cooperation.....Which would still be difficult to encourage in online games. People who cooperate are going to do it despite whatever game system exists. And people who don't will probably go on being dumbasses.

That brings up another issue with games like EVE. Sure it's great to be in that corp/guild that has all the resources and power and can provide you with the replacement gear when lost, but most people Do Not get to be in that corp/guild. When most people start playing EVE these days, they already have friends in game, or are bringing a pack of them from a different game. Trying to play EVE while not knowing a single soul in the game... it's just frustrating at best, down right unplayable at its worst.

It's these situations where games like DAOC have the edge so to speak. DAOC made everyone part of the team and even at its worst you could still hop onto a zerg and smack some albs etc. Everyone was welcome for a keep take, or a relic raid, no one was really excluded.

PvP must be inclusive for it to ever be anything but a sideline or niche. Of course, the very same things that allow for ease of inclusion also create a 'lack of meaning' ... quite the problem isn't it :(

Have you played Eve?  Is that a real example from your life?!?  The only way that happens is if you're not n00b but retarded.

I've only been to 0.0 once and lowsec a few times so far, but I've known for a long time that I wouldn't jump willy-nilly into a lowsec system in a hauler with the results of "50 hours of ore harvesting" sitting in my cargo.  Even using a single mining laser on crappy, 1.0 space ore that's almost 50,000,000 ISK. And you didn't check for podding or ship deaths in the last hour on the map before jumping into the system?  And did you just sit there while your cloak wore off (UO didn't let you stand there, invisible, and decide what to do)?  Did you decide to take extra cargo expanders in your low slots instead of stabilisers?  Did you just cross the boundary from lowsec to 0.0 without considering what the numbers meant?  Yuo didn't bother to get a scout to jump through first when hauling your 50 million+ ISK?  Were you, ilke, on autopilot?

Nobody, after 50+ hours in a game, can make the excuse of being a n00b.  Yes, there are always things to learn, but if you decided to run the results of all that mining down into zerosec space you were either after money and willing to gamble, or you had just indulged in 50 hours of hermeticism.

Eve is about player knowledge as much as character skills, sure, but that's a good thing.  And the info is all there to be seen in prminent places, especially when you're about to leave 0.5+ space and the system pops up a warning box saying that you're giong to a bad place where you're not protected...

??? This recalls what I said about lame players who switch sides in BF2 when they start losing. The whole fucking point of the goddamned game is to fight. Recalling to sanc when someone puts up a fight is so utterly fucking stupid I can't even comprehend how someone like that makes it through a day. You're playing a wargame and when someone actually engages in war, you leave? Seriously?
I would often hang out in periphery bases, those on contested continents that had strategic value, but weren't currently under assault. The ones that people would always try to sneak into without a fight (in a wargame).

Problem was, not many people played like I did. I had the same issue with UO thieves. I played a great rp thief, but most were dipshit bank thieves or notopks.

As always, the problem with mmo are the fucking players. Thus I contend, going with the topic, that I know what I want. Single player games, mostly. I don't want to spend my evening with people who aren't interested in a good battle in a wargame. Or who are more interested in winning than in having a good fight.
I guess I'll never understand why people need 'meaning' in a goddamned video game. There was no meaning in Gauntlet, there was no meaning in Pac Man. The game is supposed to be fun. You shoot people. People shoot you. You try to pull off some interesting tactics to shoot people better, they try to outsmart you. Meaning? Fuck.

You're confusing ganking with PvP.  Eve has both.  The tools and techniques are there to prevent or minimize your ship losses.  Some people learn and use them, others don't and die a lot.

Although far gentler than it used to be, Eve can still be brutal.  It usually weeds out the people who get all queasy over self-inflected laziness/stupidity induced losses fairly quickly.  That's fine with me; the servers can barely keep up with the people joining the game as it is.  Actually no, that's impossible, we all know a PvP oriented game will never succeed because all gamers are pussies.

Without the risk of a painful setback your gains are meaningless.  There are plenty of risk and pain free games out there for those of you who can't cut it in Eve.

You're right.  People that enjoy and have success with hardcore pvp in video games are quite obviously non-pussies.

(http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/1196/test2xw2.gif)

 

Ya, no. You can keep your self-flagellation.  I am here to have fun.

The knock on Eve years ago (and the predictions of how it was doomed to failure) was that everybody "knew"  how PvP oriented games could never succeed because everybody "knew" that gamers would never stand painful setbacks.  That in other words - gamers are pussies.

Asserting the reverse as an rebuttal in your attempt to win board snark points doesn't work.

You're attempt at sarcasm fails.

That's cool with me - different stroke and whatnot.

Gamers are typically people seeking entertainment, not validation.  Keep that in mind when you consider the success of hardcore pvp games. 

Hey, look! Another one who thinks they can gain 'meaning' (in a video game) by punishment.

Since you're new, I'll share my solution with you: Hook your nuts up to a car battery and light 'er up when you die in a game. That should provide the negative reinforcement you seek.

Have a cookie.

(http://www.cookingforengineers.com/hello/259/958/640/DSC_1144_crop.jpg)

ALL games have goals.

Some games provide the goal(s) for you and others allow you to set them.

The goals of whatever game you play should be fun and enjoyable to you.

Eve provides me with the opportunity to set myself goals and challenges that I find to be enjoyable.

Because the goals and challenges I find to be enjoyable you find to be masochistic does not mean I feel validated, or superior to you.  Furthermore, it does not mean that I enjoy testicular mutilation.  It simply means we like different things.

Yes.  Thus, what you're saying here is basically, "L0L [retarded] n00b, suck it." 

Not that you need to be retarded to run into this scenario.  I've been podded just mining asteroids in one jump away from the starting system, and I don't think mental deficiency was the cause.  Maybe EvE has increased security levels a bit since then, or maybe the person who podded me was another newbie who was bored and didn't mind having security forces come after him later.  The details, like the 50 hours of mining that was a massive exaggeration, aren't really the point.

The point is only this: unrestricted open-ended PvP opens the possibility for ganking of newbies and veterans alike.  Being better at avoiding it doesn't remove the consideration it may be a problematic game aspect.  It belongs in this conversation just because we're discussing improved "meaningful" PvP models (and the neccessity thereof).

I've run into this in every single online game I've played: When one side begins to lose, there's a surge of turncoats to the other side so they can win.  It's something the developers need to plan for, perhaps provide shineys to keep people interested in playing the losing side.  It's the bane of autobalancing on BF2142.  Why the developers couldn't code it to only autobalance the players that had been on that team the least is beyond me, but it sucks when you've been working hard and are about to score your x2 victory points only to get shuffled over to x1 defeat points land.

You can get ganked in "safe" space in Eve.

The point here is not whether you can get ganked, even (theoretically) while running through the newbie tutorial.  You can, Eve is PvP+ all the time, everywhere.  The point is that there's a PvP+ game that is commercially successful, on a scale that is beyond what we believed possible (Eve is well over 100K paying accounts, probably past 150K).  That may be small potatoes in this post-WoW, anything-under-1-million-is-a-failure market, but that says something too, that there really is an alternative to chasing the mass market.

Eve is probably the most *important* game in existence right now.  WoW is destined to become a footnote in history, the game between EQ and the Game That Replaced Religion.  Eve shows us that most of what we thought we had learned about MMO game design was wrong.

--Dave

For the few that played it, I enjoyed Battletech 3025 as a PvP experience.  (PvP only at that.)  Territory was fluid but by having pre-defined realms people worked very hard on defending them before pushing into enemy territory.  Slyfiend's point about always getting shiny was true here as well.  Whether you won or lost, you got some pay.  Winning and being good got you more.  Your 'mechs were repaired after each battle.  The only real consequence to losing was a loss of territorial control.

Now there certainly could have been more to the game, but as far as PvP goes it was one of the few where I had tons of fun.

I liked Eve while I played it. It's not real friendly to my playtime windows, though. Too much time travelling, I never got into the bookmark things. I acknowledge I was a lazy newbler :) Great game, though. I do wish it had a more TIE Fighter kind of flight model...

Clearly, Eve pays the bills.  But like in the Bioware interview, the word out of developers mouth is usually niche.  And that's not a compliment.  I have more hope for WAR (assuming EA doesn't fuck it up) not because I think it what a perfect PvP game should be, but as a further attempt for PvP to make in-roads into the mass market.

Bingo.

Every day of continued Eve growth God strangles one of the Dev's who "knew" that there was no market for a game where the PvP wasn't a pathetic, painless joke.  Everybody knew that nobody would tolerate being stolen from or scammed.  Everybody also knew that gamers were really a bunch of whiney, nerd, grind monkeys who needed a fantasy setting playground (heavily bumper padded to prevent anything negative) where they could mindlessly level away without any risk of setback.  They also knew gamers were totally incapable of setting their own goals, or measuring their own success without being spoon fed a quest/storyline and provided a "You are teh uber Level 60" title next to their names to reassure them they were achieving something in a non-persistent game setting.  Oh yeah, they also knew forced grouping was a swell idea.

Give us a persistent sandbox, toys that go "pew pew", and get out of our fucking way.

That's a problem. WoW is going to take the damage EQ dealt the industry one step further. Now dumbing down gameplay isn't enough, you have to hit meeeelions of subscribers to be 'successful'.

Eve is successful. CoH/V is successful. Great games that target what they do. If only PS could have caught on (too many bunnyhoppers imo). Rather than trying to be some mega giant and structuring your development costs around that, try to get a few guys on first base.

Also, part of skyrocketing dev costs is salary. Take a reality check.

LOL, thought of a better example of niche.  SWG. They fell into niche and it upset them so badly they felt the need to gut the game and the playerbase.

Nerf the artists and bring in the programmers to do procedural content.

It didn't dumb the gameplay down. It just took the electrodes off people's nipples. I don't really think that a PvP+ game needs to rape my mom and salt my lawn if I get blown up.

If you can take the nipple electrodes away from EVE, make it accessible, and make it fun within some reasonable time frame, you'll get Money Hats.

- Not being able to jump to zero in EVE was pretty odd. They changed that.
- EVE's character creation system was confusing and you could relatively gimp yourself. They're changing that.
- Maybe they'll even make the tutorial less soul-crushing one of these days.

CCP appears willing to take a bit of soul-crushing away if it boosts the fun by a large enough margin. If they don't, they'll get their PvP+ lunch eaten just like EQ.

You could take Eve's systems and cut/paste them into a fantasy setting and wear money hats, too. Then you'd have to deal with things like hand to hand combat lag and a couple other logistics nightmares, but it could be excellent.

Was it too much to ask for Auto Assault to do that?

Defend, someone said Planetside and defend in the same sentence. I saw it. In Eve  a player will defend because the space there holding means wealth. Theres a reason to defend.  Asteroids grow every day during downtime, If you hold a section of space your wealth grows every day during downtime. There is a reason to defend. There is no reason to defend in planetside, or battlefield. Thus , few do.

You know, thinking about it that would have worked brilliantly. The answer to your question is "Yes" by the way.

Speaking of Auto Assault...it recently went down to $0.01 at Gamestop, so if you REALLY want a copy, you could just try asking for it.

Now there is a game that needs a NGE.

If you look at the percentage of the overall market size though, PvP+ is arguably just as insignificant now as it was when SB launched. Eve caters not to an MMOG player as defined by where most MMOG players are. It caters to a subset, an MMOPvP player, or some new definition to be defined.

Eve is important, but in my opinion mostly because it's yet another example of a completely vertical company carving themself a good niche within a larger base. CoH, GW, EQ1 early on, DAoC before EA, SB from Wolfpack, UO before EA. Extend that out to Runescape, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel before Virtual Magic Kingdom. One company, one game, one team, one business model. Create a compelling game, align it to a good niche, scale your business to match.

WoW as a footnote? I very much think not. M59 vs UO vs EQ. Where do most neophytes think the genre began? How much does the expert truth matter to the folks coming with the money? What do they see? What inspires their emulation.

Indies need to define their own space, so broaden their view. Big companies will zillions though? They look to the big numbers. And it's hard to ignore where those big numbers are.

As to "what is massive"? Oh yea, Eve is definitely the best example of what a massive multiplayer 24/7 online game should be. But it also requires we ask that question: just how much massive/immersion does the average gamer want (http://www.darniaq.com/wordpress/2006/06/mmo-live/how-much-immersion/)?

WoW sorta answers that.

WoW says what EQ already told us: Fantasy diku is really easy for new players to get into. And the market for these is really big, Korea and the rest of asia wasn't a fluke, just a fast-forward version of the inevitable future as far as size goes.  Yes, there will be a game that makes WoW look like EQ, numbers wise.  It won't really be any better than WoW, just "more accessible", more expensive, and marketed like a blockbuster movie.  Yes, I'm predicting we will see a game with 70 *million* players or more, a budget (including a world-wide marketing carpet-bombing) in the hundreds of millions.  Scary, huh?  On the other hand, odds are it will be made by some company in Asia, and we'll have no idea what the hell they see in it.

EDIT: What I missed in there was my point: Fast-forward 10, 15, 20 years.  Do you think that the games we play then will just be slightly tweaked versions of Diku/EQ/WoW updated for new technology?  Or are you like the Linden Labs guys, you think that some virtual reality cyberspace will absorb everything?  Or maybe you're with Raph, expecting something closer to a gamey version of MySpace in 3D (which really isn't that far from Second Life)?

Me, I think that we've only barely scratched the surface of the potential of these games as an entertainment medium.  And games like Eve and ATITD represent something far closer to what these will become than WoW does.  While Second Life and the "pure social space" environments Raph focuses on lately are something important, to me they aren't *interesting*, and ultimately they aren't worth working on from my POV.

--Dave

Err.. Ok. Sorry games had a difficulty/learning curve. Don't go into dangerous places loaded with valuables. Around we learn that young, maybe you live in some nice small town that leaves its doors unlocked. It was my thought that compared to UO, EQ's PvE death penalty was nipple electrodes (and the final straw for me, losing levels that took me months to gain was garbage).

Kind of depressing, but I want something else. I already know that I find WoW boring, and I don't want more Habbo Hotel, Second Life, or a damn 3D MySpace.

Am I going to be stuck until someone makes Holodecks?

I always knew you were a closet LARPer.

Not to be snarky (seriously!), but it sounds like MMOGs are not for you.

If I'm reading and inferring right, it sounds like you think that they may have unrealized potential, but are not there yet. Sounds like you should check back in a few years, or just write it off as a loss.  I thought my first girlfriend had a lot of potential but it eventually turned out, she didn't.  I moved on.


I don't think I buy that fantasy diku is only for new players.  There are plenty of us 10 year+ vets that enjoy the casualness of WoW (now that we are 10 years older with the corresponding dwindling in playtime).

Sure, I'd love to get into a deep experience like Eve, but I don't have the time to devote at the moment.  Not just to playing, but to learning the deep skills I need to excel and watching the political situation sufficiently.  Grind for honor?  Easy, interruptible.

Finnegan's Wake is a demonstrably better and more rewarding read than (say) Steven King, but I just don't have time to delve into it.

But this isn't "new players" really. This is "friends of folks who like the same sorta thing" getting their feet wet, fringe followers who eventually are enticed by a title. The public face of this genre hasn't radically changed since EQ1 really, so it attracts people of similar desire. That has been successful, but until WoW it was largely thought to be steady growth, not skyrocket. And since WoW, people are back to steady growth because few feel like the critical success factors of Blizzard/VUG can be replicated by anyone else.

Some think another WoW can come along and out Blizzard Blizzard. But all that does is beg the question of whether there are orders of magnitude more people out there who want fantasy-themed diku, and not getting their fill in all the Western titles and many of the Eastern ones (Maplestory chief among them). Codemasters and MTV are making their bets now. We'll see how that goes. The challenge with Eastern titles is their reliance on microtrans, something Westerners consider "RMT" restated. Can games like Kartrider and Audition survive as flat-fee games? We'll know soon.

Some will. Others won't. This genre will continue to be impacted by other ones. FPS interfaces, RTS methodologies, aggregated mini games in persistent environments, Sports titles. Think of the differences between 20 years ago and now. I say forget 20 years. 5 years from now we'll likely see games as big as WoW but for completely different players.

It'll be the folks that can drag in the GTA player, the FIFA player, the Halo player, monetize them, retain them, that'll truly grow some breadth to this genre. It won't be folks who wrap diku with housing and crafting mini games. We know how much the current player really cares about that stuff (as in, they'd rather quest and combat).

Basically, we completely agree in that we've only just scratched the surface. I don't think they'll become like Eve though. That's simply too immersive for the average player. ATITD too. SL with a good intuitive user experience would also be. I don't think humanity will evolve to prefer what the fringe MMO players are doing. There's only so much escape the average person is even interested in having.

I do think some of the elements of the indie titles will translate to broader experiences. But I also think those broader experiences will first radically change by incorporating concepts from beyond dice rolling in a Tolkien-esque setting.

If that is what you think.. Then you shouldn't read anything. You are beyond hope. Seriously. If something requires a greater commitment of time then it simply takes longer. It doesn't require that you have more free time. So stop reading King for a week and instead read Joyce in a month. You'll read 1 book compared to 4, but as you said; it'll be more rewarding.

That said. It is in no way an apt comparison to MMOGs. Most MMOGs require a commitment of time over a finite period to be rewarding, not a commitment of time over an infinite one.

As far as the world goes, I'm inclined to think were're reaching the nadir of overconsumption, or will in my lifetime, and that the future of computer games is not all along existing lines.

Anyway, Genre lines blur. At some point I expect most games will be MMO ones. People will stop giving a shit about WoW and 'subscribers' once they come to terms with this and get back to making good games and not chasing after numbers.

I think you are missing the trend that everyone is turning into nerds.

Before I start....How serious are you being here?  :-P

I hope not very much. It's like when the masses first started buying home PC's -- It didn't make them nerds. Or the dot-com boom. Didn't make them nerds. Wired might have proclaimed a Geek Revolution at this time (not to mention labeling themselves stupid shit like "the Digirati"), but the revolution never really happened. Nerds are still nerds, and normal people use them to fix their spyware problems.

Well, yes and no. Would I give it a shot? Sure...but I can't stand the people I've met that do it, and I don't have the time. Also, I wouldn't do it unless I could do it right...psuedo/realistic gear, and fuck that beanbag shit...but the kind of mechanics I am looking for are prolly not used.



I dunno...there's Something for me in this space. I had fun in EQ, for awhile. I also had fun in CoH, Eve, WoW, and GuildWars, for awhile. I even had some fun in Earth and Beyond, for awhile.

It might just be possible to chalk this all up to my tendency to become bored of things very easily. I delve into something, eat through a lot of content, get bored, and leave. This does not just apply to MMOs. /shrug

I don't agree. It isn't happening overnight but it is happening. Without going into an entire diatribe I'll just list some shit which I think is  nerdy that has become mainstream. Pick any of the below that you don't think was nerdy at one point and is now mainstream.

Myspace & Widgets. iPods. PVRs. WoW. Cell Phones. Web cams. Blogging. Blackberries. Star Wars. LOTR. YouTube. Comics. Video games. VOIP.

Should I even list the Internet and computers here? Watch some news clips about the internet from the 80s and early 90s. It looks pretty fucking nerdy.

The average Myspace page looks like dogshit. Not geeky.

Chalk up iPods, pvrs, cell phones, youtube, voip, and web cams to mere convenience. Are washing machines and blenders geeky too?

Star Wars and video games were never geeky. Childish maybe, but not necessarily geeky. Popularity among different audiences is due to the children growing up.

Comics still aren't popular. The movies are. Same goes with LotR.

But....I will say that's the one realm where there could be some argument here.

You missed it. The fact that people customized their pages at all with CSS and HTML and flash widgets is nerdy. The fact that 40 million or so fucks made their own geocities 2.0 pages is nerdy. The fact that internet dating exists is pretty damn nerdy. It's so nerdy that nerds think it's nerdy.

Cell phones having ringtones and cameras aren't a convenience. It's a gadget. It's Dick Tracy's watch which is pretty nerdy.

iPods are nerdy. They had to load the music onto it from somewhere somehow.

Recording with VCRs was pretty nerdy. Only nerds ever had the correct time on their VCRs.

In 1995 the Internet Phone was pretty damn nerdy. eBay bought Skype for a billion dollars or whatever it was semi-recently.

Some old guy who was making YouTube web cam videos died. His wife made a video to say he died. That's pretty nerdy.

Internet video was pretty damn nerdy when Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for X billion dollars. Now CBS is saying YouTube is boosting their ratings by 13%. That is nerdy.

Star Wars isn't nerdy? Give me a break. It has aliens and magic. Mainstream people laugh at Star Wars jokes.

Grown men and women sitting around playing Madden 2006 and Bejeweled is pretty nerdy. NBC lighting Christmas trees in SL is pretty nerdy. Gangbangers sitting around slackjawed playing GTA is pretty nerdy.

Hollywood making assloads of comicbook based movies isn't nerdy? Some senator comparing Iraq to Mordor and Sauron isn't nerdy?

Politicos interceding in the Blackberry patent dispute so their shit didn't get shut down shows how nerdy they are (oh nooos don't take away my email and IM).

Recording with VCR's was nerdy? WTF?

I'd say going through the trouble of setting up internet phone in 1995 is nerdy. Hell yes it's nerdy. But that has nothing to do with appreciating the benefits of that technology --- once it's been packaged and tweaked to convenience. You're confusing end users with fidgeting enthusiasts.

Star Wars made a gajillion dollars in 1977. Not yesterday. All kinds of people loved it. Just because nerds flipped out from it doesn't mean they were the only ones. Fucking John Singleton of all people (guy who directed Boyz in the Hood) decided to become a director when he saw it.

"Nerdiness" is a state of mind. Technology usage does not make you a nerd.

Quantify that.

Just to sum up my point of view: The average person isn't embracing technology just for the sake of it. It's purely because of benefits and convenience. That's the main difference between them and nerds at least.

Also, if anything, nerds have become more approachable and/or acceptable in recent years (in a Kevin Smith kind of way). So it's not other people who've changed. Nerds have.

I'd define that as 'hacker'. I think I'd define what I think Trippy means by "nerdiness" as a state of mind as 'hacker' too.

I don't embrace tech just for the sake of it either. Early adopters do that. And I fail to see the benefits and convenience of sitting around at home recording yourself on a webcam and uploading it to YouTube.

I can agree with nerds becoming more integrated but it's a two way street. Nerds aren't the majority of the ones playing Madden 2006 and Bejeweled. Even at a conservative count 1 in 7 people in the US have a customized Myspace page. That's pretty significant.

People have not become more nerdy.

Perhaps when you were a kid you just didn't realise that more people are nerdy than the obvious ones that stick out in class.

That you are noticing now does not mean it's on the rise.

When I was in school, I was one of maybe ten kids with a computer. Now all kids have computers and spend way more time on them than I ever did, even though I programmed and ran a bbs. I used to go to the library after school and read for an hour or two, now kids come in and spend four hours on myspace.

They're a bunch of fucking geeks. I love pc games but spend maybe an hour a night playing them (if I'm lucky). I consider myself a geek, but I spend a small fraction of my free time on the pc compared to most folks I see. If it weren't for internet access at work, I'd have maybe a couple dozen posts here :)

And geeks are cool, now. That alone is a sign of the rise of the geek mainstream.

That they're using PC's a lot still doesn't indicate geekhood. More than likely, they're just downloading porn and talking to friends. That's a far cry from spending an evening coding BASIC.  :wink:

I don't know how history will judge WoW, but the fact that people in the industry (or at least one) are saying that the future does not have to be all about WoW clones fills me with hope  :-) I speak as someone who currently plays WoW and enjoys it.

I think this new direction for the thread not only indicates gamers don't know what they want, they also don't seem to know who they are....

Also a bit of "we are not the masses".  Most of us would play a niche game if it had what we were looking for.  They would never know about it, much less try it out.

At some point, you realize that your conversation is going nowhere, because you and the other participants are using a fundamentally different definition of a key term. One side of this discussion is saying "geekiness is mainstream, because things that used to be considered hopelessly geeky are now common."  The other side is saying "geeky is whatever the mainstream considers geeky."

Before MySpace, having your own web-pages that talked about yourself was either geeky (if you were mainstream) or vain (if you were a geek).  Now it's just normal.  Before Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, using the words "spell", "magic", "wizard", etc. in a sentence out loud was geeky, and any form of entertainment involving them was hopelessly geeky.  Now they are just normal.  Before WoW, online fantasy games were geeky, now they are almost mainstream.  After one more iteration, any MMO that *isn't* pretty much like WoW will be what's geeky.  For a while, anyway.

Success implies virtue, something can't be fringe and mainstream at the same time.  If "geeky" and "mainstream" are moving targets, and generally in the direction of geeky things becoming mainstream, then the question is only what currently "geeky" activities will next become mainstream.

--Dave

Pretty much.  At least as far as fantasy games (broadly construed to include any game where the player is represented by an avatar who is supposed to be someone other than the player herself) go.  WoW isn't an abberation, it's the exact same type of game which has dominated that market forever.  WoW is, in the end, just a slightly tweaked version of Akalabeth -- a game over a quarter-century old -- updated for new technology.  I see no reason to expect that to change.

Now, those games will be dwarfed by communications hubs where people are represented by avatars who are supposed to be that person (the souped up AIM/myspace of the future, or the persistent ladder of Madden 201x Online) but that's a quite different kind of beast.

Geeky? Mainstream?  Bah!

How does it play?

Here's one gamer who knows what he wants: quality entertainment.  The tricky part is getting there.  I suspect that MahrinSkel, Raph, Ubiq, and other developers would have an easier time with that if there were less cooks in the kitchen, or at least better synergy between said artists, and no IP expectations skewing their audience in other directions.

There's nothing nerdier than a bunch of nerds arguing about nerdiness.

Hey, I'm no nerd. The Geek Test says I'm only 10%. Which is to say, I have Geek tendencies ;)

[edit] If anything, I'm a wannabe. Geeks are such a sweet, innocent people.

WINNAR!

Nyuck, in a few days of loony ramblings and curiously embittered spoutings, that's your best so far.

And the Hagia Sophia is just a slightly-tweaked hut, too.

You're missing the point. The world isn't getting nerdier. The tools are getting easier. You think CSS is nerdy? How about the seventeen layers of code and architecture that exists between that and pure binary? Nerds built that shit so the unwashed masses could use them.

You could say the same thing about automobiles from the 1880s compared to those of the 1980s. Or clocks over time. Or shit, computers themselves. The average person never learned Cobol. Meanwhile, the average person has already used two versions of the Windows operating system.

Basically, MahrinSkel said it best:

Bah, I can get way loopier.  And this is easily the sanest (and certainly the least bitter) thing I've written here in days!

Seriously though,

Akalabeth--Core Game: kill rat, get sword +1; kill orc, get sword +2; kill dragon, get sword +3.  Frills: none.

Lots of games in the decades between Akalabeth and WoW--Core Game: kill rat, get sword +1; kill orc, get sword +2; kill dragon. Frills: polygon elf boobs, storyline written by angsty 15 year old.

WoW--Core Game: kill rat, get sword +1; kill orc, get sword +2; kill dragon, get sword +3.  Frills: polygon elf boobs, storyline written by angsty 15 year old, lots of other people making Leroy Jenkins jokes.

WoW's gameplay would be instantly understandable to an Akalabeth player: the only real change is from "ding-lewt" to "ding-grats-lewt."  But the revolution is coming any day now, diku is just about to die.  To the streets, my brothers RAWWWWRRRRRR!

I'm sticking with the world's getting nerdier.

Self-validation or stubborness? Either way, you lose  :evil:

Once again technology usage does not equal nerdiness. The younger generations always adopt new technologies more quickly and easily than the older generations and then those technologies become the norm until some other new technology comes along. As I said, being a nerd is a state-of-mind, like prefering to spend your Friday nights hacking on the latest version of Fedora Core instead of going to some Frat party.

Actually I think it's more of a state-of-other-peoples-mind's. If I spend thursday night building a pet robot and friday night partying at a club then I'm a normal guy who has an interest in robots. If I spend thursday building my robot and friday sitting on my computer making a mod for some game i'm a geek. If I spend both thursday and friday sitting at home playing games on my xbox then i'm a bit of a loner.. etc

There's no link to what you do, or how smart you are, or how you look or anything, it comes down to how other people view you.

Most of my friends got married too early (those bastards!)....Some just do stuff I'd rather not be around anymore (drugs). Others work too damn much for 20 somethings. I'm more alone than I'd like to be. Thank God for 21st century entertainment. Bring on the robots.

labels are bad, i cant believe how stupid you gamers are to still buy into that "nerd" and "geek" crap.

Hell, I think having an active MySpace is incredibly lame and vain. But that's me. I have a completely irrational dislike for the whole "phenomenom." Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get it. At all.

I'm waiting for the day when Skinny QR Factorization is mainstream and people get together on Friday nights and do that instead of go clubbing. That's when geekiness will be truly mainstream.

Seriously though, I agree with the point that 80 years ago car usage might have been geeky. New tech is always adopted but new tech is also always invented. MP3s may be pretty mainstream but podcasting is still pretty geeky, and when podcasting is mainstream there will be some newer geek cutting edge.

New technology is continually adopted while not being understood. The sign of a cultural shift towards geekiness is not in the adoption of new tech but in the understanding. If we reach a point where most people understand how their new gadgets work that will be a real shift towards geek culture, but that will never happen. Lots of people listen to MP3s but talk to them about wavelet based compression and you won't get very far.

It might have been rich.

Wanting to be a mechanic might have been geeky, though.

It's a bad comparison to make.

it wasn't about being rich. Like anything, it was about prioritizing to get it.

Think about the dawn of personal computers. You had to be rich to get those too. Or the dawn of MMORPGs in MUDs, when you paid by the minute or hour. Rich there too.

New tech/experiences often are more expensive at first. The car analogy works because who adopted those was both a way niche subset of society and had the means to go get it, whether they compromised something else in life or were just rich enough to not have to worry about compromisiing at all.

I know the year I got my first computer (Apple //e), my parents decided to get that instead of spending that $5k on a newer car.

It's all about personal perception. MMO without hasrh death penalties give me the feeling of playing a single game in god mode. Sure, it's not the same, as in a single player game when you die you have to get back to the last saved point, but I could argue that "You just got punished! And lost your precious played time since the last save!", while in god mode you don't actually lose anything. As strange as it may sound, lots of casual gamers don't complete single player videogames cause they die and got pissed at loading back to the last save. For them the challenge simply isn't rewarding (or fun, but I suspect the two things are related) enough to cope with failure. In a MMO, dying without losing anything it's even a milder penalty, especially dying to other players, cause it doesn't even push you back in the storyline or the story mode. It just geographically moves you back some (usually a few) miles away. It is nothing, it's just a little waste of time. Bu isn't that a form of punishment anyway, both in single players where you have to load back and in multi where you get moved elsewhere?
What would you answer to a player saying that he/she hates games where you can die and lose a game cause that's just punishment and they just want to advance, watch the story or get the best items, and are not bothered by the challenge at all?
So, perception: what you consider punishment it's balanced for some by the rewards and the challenge, while what you don't conisder punishment but just fun gameplay it's perceived as boring and punishing because of the lack of risks and rewards by others.

Let's put it differently: MMORPGs where the PvP doesn't cost you anything are to me like Poker without money. You probably think that poker players could "Hook their nuts up to a car battery and light 'er up when they die in a game (when they lose a hand)." ...and get the kind of reinforcement they need, but I think that poker is a nice example of risking to get rewarded, and the reward (money in poker, items or e-peen credits in MMOs) to some people, is more appealing than the fear of losing it all.

I feel PvP is similar to gambling, and as much as you could despise gambling it still appeals to lots that deserve good products too.
Actually, I like EVE more than Poker, but "emotionally" they are in the same family.


That's the point. Do you have an idea of how many people I heard in my life moaning about how fun Poker and Horse Racing would be without the betting?
I respectfully disagree :)
You want to take the "money" out of Poker, Horse Racing, Roulette, Slot Machines and EVE. I don't get that. There are lots of games you can play without the risk of losing money. Why bother about these ones?

Back to the subject: I think there are lots of gamers who don't know too well what they want, and just a handful that do. It's so human. Look at politics...

Don't.

80% of PvPers are going to lose the majority of the time.  I suppose the take is great for the 20% on the top of the heap, but you will soon find those 80% taking their chips and going home.  The only way to get them involved is to not make it so punitive that they lose everything every time they play.

If you are happy with a small player base great, just be aware it will always be small under that type of system.

Woohoo made up facts??  (I am disappointed)

There is some area in between "poker without money" and "so punitive that they lose everything every time they play" isn't there?

Let's face it, WoW is poker without chips, the pvp is so stupid that it manages to be a mockery of pvp itself.  How do I know this?  I played WoW with a bunch of people set on pvp'ing a ton.  We were on a pvp server.  Before the first year was out most people had quit or declared.  Its not really worth pvp'ing because winning gets me nothing and I need to keep up with the Joneses in the raiding game.

Shadowbane is the latter statement, loosing cities and being left homeless is tough, gold farming is boring.  Having your items break and no city where u can safely repair them is pretty mean also.

In EVE, for example, as in UO, you don't lose *everything* every time you lose.
You just lose the pot. You lose what you brought with you.
You are not supposed to go all-in at every pot.

Diku games and uber rare driven carrot/stick games are a different kind of story, I know. But we are not asking for a good pvp diku. We are asking for a good pvp mmo.

WoW PvP is stupid only because it has no real point. It's really just a gate to more content. Obviously people are fine with that. It's all linear.

"Real" PvP is enjoyed by far FAR less people, because it's more immersive by virtue of it being more accountable. Eve, old UO, Shadowbane, all fun and stuff, but never big hits. Their nicheness is not because of bugged code or when it was launched. It's because, by and large, the average gamer is not interested in as much immersion as those games require.

This genre only started taking off when the accountability of the average player decreased. That's an important insight into the sociology of this space.

The 80/20 split is rather well referenced...  but whatever.  PvP is great.  Rah.

Why does PvP have to 'mean' something? Can't it just be fun? I know I'm an anomaly, but shit, man. Win, lose, who cares, it's a game. It should be fun. The journey is the thing, not the destination and whatnot.

Meaningful = memorable. Most FPSs are fun but not very memorable. Guild Wars was fun but not very memorable. Old UO and EVE are memorable and therefore meaningful.

Sky, don't get me wrong. I agree with you, fun is above all.
But sometimes I get fun playing darts over a good laugh, sometimes I get fun playing limit poker over 50 bucks. I won't get rich nor I'll be ruined winning/losing those fifties, but still, it's somewhat thrilling and it can be fun.
Upping the ante is up to me, or you... or anyone else.

I'm not sure your poker comparison is very durable.

In poker you generally get to choose your opponents, and you can walk away at any time.  If you do play someone you don't know, and lose enough that you figure out he/she's a shark, then you can take your chips elsewhere.  Next time you walk by the table, he won't aggro you and force you to sit down and lose again.

Also, everyone has an equal chance (raw material-wise) by design in poker.  No one can ever get ganged or gatecamped in poker.

It's really more like a /pvp switch if you look at it that way.  If you add some way to bet gold on the outcome of a duel in WoW, you have poker.

You are stretching it, but I guess it's unavoidable.
You can alwas take your chip elsewhere (as in a different zone or betting less chips) in MMOs. Point is carebears (as in players who play in PvP+ games or servers and definitely SHOULD NOT) hate to be forced to do that. When that happens their frustration rises and they blame the game and the devs. It's pretty much like when you are playing poker with friends and lose. First time it's fun, second time it's disappointing. Third time the carebear says he/she doesn't like poker.

Again, on the point that everyone has equal chance, that's eqully true in MMO without RMT where everyone starts with the same chances, money, level. Of course catassery shifts that balance, but the same is true when you are playing Texas Hold'em and a couple of stupid guys go all-in, lose, give all their chips to the bad guy and now you are all alone against the Orc chipleader. He has more money now, he can gank you to death and that happens a lot.

To sum it up, of course my comparison is far from being perfect, but I am just trying to state the obvious: there's lots of players who know what they really want, harsh and riskful PvP, and they give any crappy game that promise to have those features a chance, cause that's what they really like. On the other hand, people who don't like that kind of PvP, instead of being satisfied with the multitude of games already developed for their tastes, feel the urge to keep mocking and bashing those with different needings. I could take that mockery without a sniff if I had a couple of good and lethal pvp mmorpgs to play. The fact that I am minority makes me nervous, as no one has the money or the talent to develop for me.

Perhaps those who came up with those conclusions should not have been so dismissive of the millions of Asians playing PvP+ MMORPGs, but they were too busy blaming the players for their own crappy design failures. Actually I think WoW is a purer test than Eve. WoW's PvP servers add nothing whatsoever to the game except random griefing, yet a clear majority in every part of the world are choosing the PvP servers. Somehow we didn't turn out so different from those crazy Lineage obsessed Asians after all.


The most succinct analysis of the MMORPG genre ever written. There really is nothing else to it....except different shades of implementing PvP.

Well, perhaps a step in the right direction would be to stop calling it "griefing", since it apparently adds a heck of a lot more than that.

This seems to be a pitfall to me. We keep looking at Asia and saying "It's successful in the East, so we should make it in the West." Now from a business sense, we should be making MMOs here in America, and marketting them overseas, and fuck all us crazy American gamers, because we're not where the money is.

But for some reason, that hasn't happened yet, so we get more EQ clones. Meanwhile Korea is cranking out Flyff clones every week it seems, and those are doing okay. Flyff isn't a PvP game. It's a very cute, light DIKU with fuzzy kittens and pastel flowers. People are making a profit from Non-PvP Diku. (We need a name for that. Maybe Nopiku? Anyway....) So where does that leave us in the WoW observation? WoW's PvP is lighter than Lineage's PvP.

We didn't turn out so different from those crazy Lineage obsessed Asians after all; we want lighter and lighter gameplay.


Yeh, but if we're boiling things down to Akalabeth proportions, we just have two shades; PvP+ and PvP-

That's WoW Battlegrounds to a T.

Otherwise, it only matters when PvP and PvE are at odds. Like, say, in a PvE quest-based game where other players can impact you completing a quest that has nothing to do with vP.

Sky's point of view is OK for individuals. Not very fun on a faction wide or a guild vs guild level imo. War and conquest is where it's at there, not just battles.

Unfortunately (imho), war and conquest do not at all mix with persistent, unless you want a niche title. That can (and has) work(ed) of course.

Man, persistency is the best thing about war and conquest.

Scratch that, it's the only thing. It is persistency itself that I'm really advocating for here.

The real problem is penalty and loss. Persistency doesn't necessarily need to throw the whole weight of those things against losers in order to be "persistent". You still need to make a game. Balance penalities, and more people would like it.

I don't think there are very many players who are unsatisfied with the idea of "losing" period. They just don't want to be completely humilated, homeless, and bankrupt.

LOSING IS PART OF THE FUN!!!

I think persistent warfare could be more palatable to the masses -- and thus more profitable -- if it wasn't a case of win/lose. All sides would have to be winning, all the time, but they would just be winning different things. Lose resource nodes, and your equipment is made better. Expand your territory, and your defenses suffer. If you outnumber another team, that other team gets a bonus to experience gain. Stuff like that.

Links please?  Somehow I missed when this became an accepted number.

Stop saying this, just fucking stop it already.  This has never added anything to any discussion yet in every thread about pvp somebody has to say it once every 2-3 pages. 

<Insert any fps here>:

example1:  Playing in a random public game with random people who you dont know at all, in a server you joined because it had good ping.

example2:  Playing for a top ten spot on a laddar in organized clan versus clan action.  You know all your teammates you have voice setup you have a plan, tactics, a leader, etc.

If you can't see how one has more M E A N I N G and is therefore more F U N to everyone I've ever known who has done both then I just give up.

I actually agree with Sky here... "The journey is the thing" is what makes clan play fun. Any time I happen to be playing with my friends or clan/guildmates is bound to be more fun then when I'm playing by myself. Some of my greatest memories are the "Remember that one time when you..." stories from a scrim, not that we won the match that night.

Yes, one means more, but that's not what makes it fun. The meaning is a just a vehicle to get you to do it at all. It's what keeps you playing when it isn't fun.

Me too: Sky pretty much hit it on the head, and Hoax's view sounds kinda unpleasant to me.  I have things of "MEANING" in my life already, thanks.  I want PvP play, like all of my game-playing, to be anything but loaded with meaning. 

I want something between WoW and Shadowbane. Is that too much to ask?

Sounds like he's just talking about cooperation, organization, and score keeping. That's unpleasant? I thought things like corpse looting and heavy farming after a city being razed were unpleasant. Now it's just....Teams and teamwork that's unpleasant?

Personally, I don't care about leaderboards....Unless it's reflected in the game somehow (i.e. conquest).

[edit] Also, I don't like leaderboards that are focused on and solely reward individual achievement (i.e. WoW). That shit sucks, and just encourages people to play for their own personal shiny, not their faction and/or guild.

I agree with Hoax.  Losing is not fun.  Losing is acceptable if while losing I'm learning something, and by learning I feel that I have a better chance to win next time.  i.e. I'm improving my skill.

Not caring whether you win or lose sounds to me like going through the motions so you can be out on the same field with other folks.  I hate playing against people who just don't give a shit.

Playing with/against people who care enough to improve their game is more fun (for me).

Back to the original question: I think that meaningful PvP can exists if the spoils of war have nothing to do with future success/failure on the field of combat (e.g. a gladiator game where winning increases your fame, earns you money to buy a house (and decorate it) or allows you more options to modify your avatar (a la CoX vetran rewards), but has nothing to do with the skills/weapons you have), or has an inverse effect on your ability to continue winning (as was already discussed)

Yeah, but why think in terms of "gladiator" games when this genre is supposed to be about "massive"? Just asking.

"Meaningful" pvp to me is one that applies to the entire world, and every single tile and texture in it.

Not to say I'm advocating intrusiveness....Just scope.

IMO the massive in MMO has rarely (if ever) equated to "massive battles" with even the current state of the art.  A gladiator game could include 5x5, 10x10 and 20x20 matchups (like WoW) that involved taking/defending a castle.  Story could be created to justify taking that castle.  It could be a "land war" where holding more land made buying houses cheaper.  My argument is that the current WoW PvP is largely a gladiator game.  Except that the successful gladiators (up till now) haven't really be recognized by any in game mechanic, only those folks that played a hell of a lot of PvP were recognized by the game (by giving them access to a title and better loot).

I'm just suggesting that the game should recognize those who are successful in PvP in ways that don't degrade the ability of the losers to wage war/be successful in combat going forward (i.e. giving the winner access to loot that is significantly better than what other folks can get creates a feedback loop where the successful get more successful).  Improving player skill is the only thing that should make a player win more matches within a certain game-state (where game-state could be a certain level bracket, level of achievement, ladder bracket, etc).

Shadowbane and Planetside for me have had VERY massive battles. The sieges I've been in within both worlds numbered in the many scores of players. I think the battles in SB where bigger than the ones in PS on average, but both really addressed my need for "massive".

It is intrusive though, and has been roundly proven to not have mass appeal.

I don't think we need to discuss whether PvP is fun or compelling. We KNOW it is and can be. I actually loved SB too. The problem was that existing in that game required much more of me as a gamer than I could dedicate. And given the amount of people it managed to attract over time, I don't think I'm alone.

And FPS games aren't the best parallel either because the average gamer is not in clan warfare. It's certainly compelling and fun, but requires as much dedicated as MMO-based PvP, just differing in what one needs to learn and keep practicing at.

So, how do you make push/pull persistent rewarding PvP in a mass-marketed game? "Just make it fun" has never been the whole answer because to date it's been proven that some vaguely defined "fun" hasn't been attractive to enough players. Or we'd all be playing Halo MMO with millions of subscribers.

I see a few ways:

• The afforementioned "always winning" element, where losing on one front can mean winning on another, or in a battle of a different form.
• Not tied to a linear PvE-based advancement schema. This was SB's problem in my opinion. And DAoC for a long time.
• Don't market as PvP. Just market for being an open world. Eve is a good example. There's a LOT of PvP in very many different forms. Eve's downside is the very many factors that will keep that title forever niche.
• No levels. I really feel PvP in RPGs are held back by levels and an adjustable-stat-based combat system. Go with something where a player performs an action based on their skill and can intuit the results based on that. Maybe TR. Or Planetside done right.
• Make it Fantasy based. This CAN work. It doesn't always need that RPG = Fantasy and FPS/twitch/skill = Sci-fi. That's holding things back as much as anything else.

Just to clarify: It's not massive battles I'm talking about necessarily though (but that is nice, when it works). I'm mainly concerned about massive effect (which is why I keep using the word conquest). Effects on the world. Because it is a world. Anything less, to me, is "meaningless". It's the difference between the War of the Roses and Bobby and Timmy getting in a fist fight at the playground.

This is why the economic part of the better games is so interesting to people who don't really enjoy combat. The effects of a players part in an economy can be felt and rewarded. Reputation can as cool as it can be bad. Also, btw, games with a player driven economic system are 100% PvP! Merchant-on-Merchant wars can be nastier than the nastiest 11 year old ganker. Its a "thinking man's" PvP.

Yeah, but I'm not too good at that . ;)  Or rather, I'm just not interested in interacting that way.

I remember when SWG launched, the best PvP was going on between weapons crafters in particular. Everyone else was just a pawn in their game.

But yeah, it's the same principle.

So you want SB.  Except by all accounts SB didn't work out so well (I never played it, didn't want the pain of all the bugs).

Maybe supply lines to keep cities from extending their military presence too far form their city.  Maybe trade routes and trade guilds, as a seperate faction that was playing a different game than the free cities (just making up a faction name).  So the free cities play the conquest game, and the trade guilds play the crafting/mercantile game.  Make it so that the trade guilds benefit from there being more cities.  And give that the trade guilds a way to hire merc armies/other free cities to "discourage" a conquest-minded city from growing too strong.  Maybe the trade guilds would be nomadic, moving from city to city.

Difficult, I think, to keep an out-of-game guild from creating members in the trade guilds as well as in the free cities and just gimmicking the game.  You'd need to have the "one character per account" trick down alittle bit better.

OR, make it so that a city can surrender, and make taking other cities the goal of an attacking force (i.e. a land war).  Have the game support the conquest of vassal cities only so long as a necessary condition is sustained.  What pops to mind is: cities are captured only so long as the king remains alive - making conquest a matter of attacking and defending.  Puts a different slant on the rogue/assasin character.  Course, it could make being the king a boring affair if the king is made as a PC (which argues strongly for the king being a non-PC).

Lots of holes in that second idea, I konw.  Just trying to toss out ideas that have a negative feedback loop while still having conflict have consequence.

Uh, for those of you looking for how a PvP system somewhere between SB and WoW could work, take a hard look at Lineage 2. That game may have plenty of other flaws, but its Castle/Siege system works.

That was a terrible rebuttal, but I've come to expect as much from you. That was a great example of organized pvp vs chaotic pvp. It's not at all what I was talking about. I used to play bf1942 in a clan, imo it's really the only way to enjoy that game.

It has nothing to do with death penalties, catass rewards, exp points, or anything else that makes mmo pvp suck so people can have a 'meaningful' experience.

Yeah, I'm all for Fluff rewards for PvP - nothing that could actually impact the PvP itself.

I wonder if geography is a key feature of any game that aspires to have meaningful conquest.

Maybe SB's problem (leaving aside the many and glorious bugs) was that the world was not big enough.  The map itself was small enough that one uberguild could have enough members to control it all, and deny any who opposed the ability to run away and fight another day, because there was no "away".

Contrast with Eve, in which the universe is full of places to run and hide to.  In fact, it's so big that even the biggest collections of "guilds" (corps) can only hope to control a certain region.  That makes rebuilding after a sound defeat possible, and hence a steady-state server-wide hegemony leading to stagnation and boredom, impossible (for now).

Again as Eve shows, it doesn't have to be populated with content every 5 yards, so long as the points of interest are sufficiently interesting.


edit: omg clarity

Yes, I was thinking the same as Malathor. Let's try something new here: please don't give me your opinion on Lineage 2 as a whole game, just on the PvP part of Lineage 2. Don't consider the ubergrind and/or the fact that you don't like this or that aspect of the game. Let's take it from the gamedesign side of the mirror:

What do you all think of Lineage 2 PvP? What's wrong in it, in your opinions? (Ask if you don't know how that works...)

I have to admit to being *very* impressed by the size of Eve. I liked the possibility of holing up somewhere out of the way. That was one of the things... well, one of only TWO things that interested me about Dark & Light. The size of the world and 3D flight.