f13.net

Subspace:

Death Penalty? No
Item Loss? No
Item Dependant? No
Dev kill? No
Indy or AAA? Indy

It worked. Not a huge player draw though playing asteriods in space. Still alive today, still fun.


UO:

Death Penalty? Yes - Put out of fight as a ghost until able to be resurrected by players or wandering NPC/shrine
Item Loss? Full
Item Dependant? Slightly
Dev Kill? Dev's ripped the soul out of the game.
Indy or AAA? AAA

Player skill mattered in UO, exploits hurt the game badly though. Was , and still is, considered some of the best MMO PVP ever. Still alive today, I guess.

Neocron:

Death Penalty? Yes, you were removed from the fight and taken to (sometimes) far away bind point. Had some item drop
Item Loss? Varied throughout game life.
Item Dependant? Yes
Dev Kill? Only do to some major bugs and poor PVE design.
Indy or AAA? Indy

Bad initial grind to get to the fun. Small group outpost battles were win. Good PVP

Shadowbane:

Death Penalty? Yes, backpack drop and trip to the tree
Item Loss? Backback only
Item Dependant? No
Dev Kill? Sb.exe , glaring bugs, extremely poor PVE design. Diku PVP failure.
Indy or AAA? Indy

Planetside:

Death Penalty? Minor
Item Loss? Full
Item Dependant? No
Dev Kill? No. Yes. No. I don't know really...
Indy or AAA? AAA

The concept is awesome, but sluggish FPS game lost its luster. Graphics were dated when release. Good try, missing the hook.


EvE:

Death Penalty? Yes, full item loss. Insurance makes this less painful
Item Loss? Full
Item Dependant? Somewhat
Dev Kill? No. Game survives and thrives to this day.
Indy or AAA?

EvE PvP is niche. There are heavy grind aspects, but is a good alternative to all Diku games and is a different setting.

Lineage (1):

Death Penalty? Yes. Loss of XP, possible to de-level and lose abilities.
Item Loss? Yes. Limited by alignment.
Item Dependent? Somewhat.
Dev kill? Too grindy for fat lazy Americans. Still big in places where they speak funny.
Indy or AAA? Indy that became AAA PDQ.

Lineage 2:

Death Penalty? Yes. See above.
Item Loss? Yes. See above.
Item Dependent? More than above.
Dev kill? See above. And then some.
Indy or AAA? Very much AAA now.

AoC:
Death Penalty? Very Minor.
Item Loss? No.
Item Dependant? Yes
Dev Kill? Yes. Game was prematurely released and devs failed to address the glaring holes in the game.
Indy or AAA? AAA

AOC stood out for a while with a different combat system, but the bait and switch chafed many asses. The PVP was fun, but the grind was not. Another Diku PVP failure.

Warhammer:

Death Penalty? Minor
Item Loss? No.
Item Dependant?
Dev kill? Verdict is still out.
Indy or AAA? AAA

Signs aren't looking good, pointing towards another Diku PVP failure.


I did not play Guildwars.

From looking at these, the most common thing I see is Diku and PVP don't mix. Skill based, non-item based seems to be key for what I find to be a good PVP system. This is a lot of games (and there are more like Fury) that have failed. What is the MMO genre missing when it comes to massive PVP? It's hard to believe it is the infrastructure these days. Bandwidth is readily available. Why is it no dev house can seem to make a game with that Counterstrike kind of replayability and grab? Are we closer, or farther away than 1997?

I think the better question is: do MMO PvP games have broad appeal in the way some pre-WoW DAoC-RvR fans thinks it could. I contend that conventional wisdom considers this a risky territory not worth of the sort of development resources really needed to even try and do it right by itself.

Entire genres exist with more solid and more specific PvP, like every sports, RTS and FPS title out there. I get the sense these days that the sort of escapist immersion people seek is roughly akin to getting sucked into a good casual online game where you can occasionally interact with other people to share the achievements or get help from them to do so. PvP that gets in the way of that has largely only appealed to the people who try to get in the way of others, or the smaller subset of players who are truly seeking that totally accountable immersive world. I personally believe that the deepest immersion in an MMO is only possible with full-on PvP. But I also know I won't like that game. And I suspect not enough others do anymore to make a serious (as in, lots of budget) try at it.

The days where PvP mattered to ones own holdings in the world seem to be pretty far behind us. Nobody wants to lose their shit, especially to another player. And no other genre really makes you lose your stuff and have it lost forever. You win or lose and the world resets.

Trying to apply that here is a contradiction to the RPG roots. But it also works very well (in the form of WoW BGs and WAR Scenarios) because nobody goes into those caring beyond whether they advance a little by losing or advance a lot by winning.

So it's not that MMO Devs aren't good at it or haven't tried their hardest. It's that the potentially limited appeal narrows the resources put against the goal at all.

Item progression/time investment + Items with Stats that determine outcome + PvP = fail.

Planetside out of all you listed, got this right. EXP/Time/Whatever does not increase your power, it only expands your options.

You left off DAOC. Love it or not, it was clearly a successful PVP MMO, and it was Diku-based.

I'd say further than ever before.  Too many of the people in charge seem to be intoxicated by the ideas of subscription dollars they can gamble towards by trying to be a watered down dog-turd that the carebear majority will like.

The closest I ever saw a DIKU get to fun PvP that didn't have sb.exe was the Darktide server in Asheron's Call, and that was mostly due to the community driving it and Turbine giving them the choice, without any tools beyond letting the players attack each other without restriction.

Well, I suppose you could say they provided little carrots to fight over later in the game with the allegiance manors...

Funny that you were making this thread: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15082.0

meh DAOC is a failure by modern standards, the only real successful PVP mmo is Guild Wars, it took at least 2 years for Guild Wars Pvp scene to truely tank, and it wasn't even the complete fault of the devs when it did. Planetside is liked a polished version of Age of Conan by modern standards, but again it was far too sluggish for people to keep playing with problems the Devs made worse. Its not a matter of people funding a pvp based mmo, Age of Conan, WAR, EVE all games with money behind it, not indy titles at all. But it is a matter of development sitting down and actually removing some of their vision crap, stop comparing their features to WAR, and actually measure their game up to successful PVP games like CounterStrike, Team Fortress, Company of heroes, you know games where PLAYERS COMPETE AGAINST OTHER PLAYERS (notice I said compete and not "ROFL GANKED YOUR FACE OFF NEWBBBIIE!!"). Guild Wars based their game off Magic the Gathering, and they did extremely well by any standards, actually making their main competitors (WoW) pvp look like monkeys flinging crap at each other. In fact Guild Wars didn't really die until the devs started bending over to a very small portion of the playerbase that figured that their entitled to make fun killing changes to the game because they can spell pre-prot.

DAoC:
Death Penalty? Very Minor - ten minute travel time to get back into RvR.
Item Loss? No.
Item Dependant? Yes
Dev Kill? Yes. Killed by bizarre expansions which added ever more pve grind. Attempts to resuscitate by removing grind were too late.
Indy or AAA? AAA

Guild Wars
Death Penalty? No.
Item Loss? No.
Item Dependant? Yes
Dev Kill? Yes. Excruciating PvE, wasn't even very long, but so unbelievably painful. Also the sport pvp endgame stops new players ever having a way in.
Indy or AAA? AAA

just had to correct that, guild wars allowed you to create a max level (with armor and weapons) toon in 5 secs. also there was RA and TA for new players, later AB....what killed the high competition for new players was simply rank discrimination that was 90% player driven (community fault)  and 95% dev fault for even implementing a ranking system not based on win/loss ratio....but even at that PUG groups were very successful (when their builds weren't hit with the nerfbat by the 2% of the pvp community wanking on the forums.).

Sorry. But no.

It's not 'community fault'. That's a pointless way of looking at things since the 'community' is not a collective intelligence capable of choosing how it reacts to given circumstances.

The problem was that the sport pvp endgame design gave established guilds no good reason to ever deign to interact with newer players. Developer's fault.

A Tale in the Desert
Death Penalty? YES, Permadeath
Item Loss? NO
Item Dependant? Situational
Dev Kill? Yes.  Levels added.  Finite game length (not a persistant world).  Popularity contest
Indy or AAA? Indy

It's an MMO and it is PvP.  It just lacks the standard player killing mechanism.  You kill players through reputation, competition, and potentially DP ban.

Note: Edited with help from Eldaec

Technically ATiTD has permadeath - it has the harshest death penalty ever devised short of reaching through the screen and stabbing you in the face.

Thankfully death is rare, I don't know if there have been any cases of death outside of the 'SotS'/Cabbage-juice mechanic?

Funny, it didn't seem like a failure to us when we worked on it. In fact, it seemed pretty darned successful, with hundreds of thousands of people enjoying it, making the studio a lot of money, all that. I guess modern standards changed from "profitable and fun", though!

More on topic: slinging phrases like "carebears" and "wowheads" around implies that the speaker doesn't *want* a 'successful' game by whatever standard you use, they want a game that makes them feel better. Included in an elite, "skilled" for playing it, whatever. (Eve is great for this - it's a successful PvP game that is probably the most new-player-inaccessible ever made.) Same reason why some people don't listen to bands that have record contracts, I guess.

UO rhetoric is another good example. "THE DEVS KILLED UO". No, the Devs *saved* UO, because if a firewall vs. unchecked PKing had not been put into place, UO would not have had the subscriber base to continue running. It may not have been the game YOU liked any more, but doomcasting it because you couldn't kill miners and roleplayers wthout consequence any more is somewhat of a short-sighted analysis.

DAoC was fine at the time, as both a game and a subscription base relative to the size of the genre of the day.

Didn't you get the memo?

By modern standards anything that doesn't involve the developers moving into golden palaces with armies of 1000 servants and 500 concubines is a 'failure'.

Also, by modern standards anything that does involve the developers moving into golden palaces with armies of 1000 servants and 500 concubines is considered a sellout and a 'failure' on an artisitic level.

Sorry. But no. The community chose to use rank as a form of deciding player ability, which created a farming mentality for new players in order to get into HA PUG groups. There have NEVER been ANY reason for Guilds to train new players in ANY game, that is PLAYER driven by its very nature. It doesn't matter if its open world or real competition based pvp, whether a Guild takes new players in is the choice of the Guild. As a whole the guild community was much more forgiving than the PUG community of guild wars. A new player could always use their personal skill or social skills to get their way into guilds. The PUG's hardly ever allow players of lower rank to join their groups, thus limiting the amount of players interesting in competitive pvp by default. It wasn't that there wasn't a market, the playerbase just wasn't mature enough to folster it.

But your right the blame isn't entirely on the players heads because as a whole, they can only make similar decisions but not the same decisions.

The Developers stupidity in even inventing the rank system. You don't design a rank system in a serious pvp game without it be depended on win and loss ratio, Guild Wars rank system only counted wins. Which was effectively counting how long you played the game vs how good are you at it. If the rank system of guild wars was honest (counting wins AND loses) we have a different game. For years new players in order to play HA had to grind the first map, much like WAR makes you grind scenerioes, individual player skill was mute because all anyone cared about was getting that r3 tag and hopefully joining the teams that wouldn't let them in. HA was suppose to be casual gaming experience for those wanting to engage in competitive pvp without joining a group or having a large friend list, one of the perfect avenues for getting new players use to the finer mechanics of high competitive pvp. It turned into a race to see who gets their rank the fastest, no one cared about winning the Hall of Heroes anymore, HA stopped being casual or competitive and thus many players were simply turned off to serious pvp before they even did GvG.


oh and speaking of DAOC, when I say "by todays standards" I'm not talking about how much cash it made, I'm talking about the laundry list of dead mechanics and bad design decisions.

The words you are looking for are "I didn't like it personally", not "it was a failure by modern standards". :)

of course DAOC was fun when I played it back in the day, so was runescape...

EvE disagrees.

The thing about EVE is that you don't lose everything, you lose the ship you were flying and everything it was fitted with, but any established player will have at least half a dozen ships fitted for different purposes, and it never breaks the game for you to lose a spaceship.


This is something the fantasy mmogs have always failed to grasp, they've generally fluctuated between losing/winning everything (or at least an awful lot) and losing/winning nothing. There is a middle ground out there.

thats the thing that erks me about Eve, how long do I have to be playing the game before my hand can stop baby sitting my cock...

The GW assessment is factually incorrect. Absolutely zero PVE is required to participate in PVP with a max leveled, max geared character. PVE is entirely optional (but I kind of like it, especially the later campaigns.)

Technically UO worked this way too. Any established player had a bankload of stuff and getting killed and looted resulted in about 2 minutes of re-equipping.

The problem is getting to the point where you are an established player before you die and lose all of your stuff.

 :awesome_for_real:

Wut?

I assume you meant any game except DAoC, EVE, Shadowbane, Planetside, and the metric butttonne of other games which don't put an upper limit on the number of cats you choose to herd in your pvp team?


Or do Goonswarm not really exist?

So...having 1000000000000000000000000000000000000 players in your pvp team makes your inherently more likely to let joe new player in your team? well I guess zerg guild always needs to recruit cannon folder...

Though it was technically an incentive for individuals to train noobs rather than guilds, both AC and AtitD have/had systems in place to do this.   

I didn't play AC either.

For me there seems to be a real connect between good PVP games, and item/territory gains and losses.

need to add Lineage 1 and 2 PvP 

There is a reason why Eve is so unique it's a genre unto itself.

Eve is only "thriving" because the "established" players all have 6 accounts, a lot of which they bought from people that already quit. I've talked to many people since I quit eve and outside the addicted circle jerk the amount of players that are quitting eve is going through the roof. And no-one really has a good word to say about the wonderful Death experience. Eve is designed to need multiple accounts to play at this stage and to have you buy a character at least a year old to have a hope. No-one really believes its skill based anymore.

You might say that it never breaks the game to lose a spaceship, but I have ground weeks to replace ships I have lost. Literally weeks. That is stupid grind, especially if you are trying to avoid stupid jerks at the time which stop you recovering. Of course I could have bought Isk from CCP, but then I saw though their little pyramid scheme at least a year before I finally found the willpower to finally quit.

Anyway back on topic, the only true PVP- style game that I played was Battlefield 2142. And the thing was it was completely fair. And when I logged off, no matter how much I died I could shrug and be back again the next day. Thats what fun is about. I don't need gaming to be my job

Regarding leveling. Theres 2 types of players really. The first is the type that goes along, enjoys the experience and thinks about what skills he is going to boost max one or 2 levels ahead. The other is the one that maps out his skill progression knows exactly where he is going to grind to get the best items and basically rushes through it to get to the gold standard near the end. The problem is that player type 2 is the most likely to quit when he realizes that the gold at the end of the rainbow is not that shiny or is not the shiny that he wants, or the rest of the world is not as obsessive as he is. Player type 1 is easier to please, but it requires a far different style of game than player 2, Its very very different to satisfy both camps, and player 2 types tend to be the ones screaming the loudest.

And the thing is, despite the fact that Battlefield might be what player 2 says he wants, in reality they done play that? You have to ask why? I think the reason is they want to feel powerful. they want to lord it over people that dont have any real way of winning against them. Thats the seductive draw of a level based system. No fight is ever completely fair, as everyone's equipment and stats are different. And the temptation to game that can be irresistible to a lot of people.

Also you have to remember that in the era of DAOC, the gold farming and skill grinding industries were nowhere near as big as they are now. These days Gold sellers are beta testing their strategies before the game is even live. Its their business to do that. And when you have that no game can really survive.

That is how I, and about 10% of the userbase of Ultima Online played the game pre-trammel. Too bad the other 90% of the people playing didn't see that memo.

I think there is a real connection between games with little grind having excellent pvp and games with time sinks having medicore pvp.

Darniaq the reason player 2 doesn't play battefield is because player 2 is not a pvp'er to begin with  :awesome_for_real:

Thats funny, I keep watching people leave and try games and keep coming back to Eve. Many of them love the rush like I do. I think death penalty is good, when you pop an enemy ship you actually took them out of the fight. It mattered. When I get popped, 90% of the time I go...."Ah fuck, I shouldn't have done that" and learn from my mistakes. You popped their BS in a fleet fight, thats one less BS you have to worry about until they can get reinforcements or run off to carebear in empire. Territory matters. Fight for the good stuff.

You absolutely are off in the year old character thing, but oh well. The skill in the game is your smarts, reaction to situations, and execution of plans. The other side is properly setting up your gang to be effective. Me in my friends often roam in some of the 'worst' T2 ships in the game, assault frigates, and I could link you some killboard results from those. If you think Eve PVP doesn't take skill, then you are fooling yourself.

Dont give me that BS. (a) I killed roughly 3 -4 bill in crap in my Eve carreer and lost about 1-2 bill. Second. I flew dominixes in sole of the worst fucking hellholes in eve. I thought I was shit till one say I had a bit of spare cash and I though "Hey lets splash on some t2. Should not make THAT much of a difference"

The result was 3 months of utter carnage as I blew everything to hell. Same guy, same skill, same tactics. T2 was the only difference.

So go pounce on some newbies and think you are winning. I had over 40 million skill points and I wound up flying cov ops becasue I would up not believing any of my kills were anything to do with personal skill.

Are you talking about capital ships or something?

Losing a battleship is 40M? So, 2 hours of ISK generation tops, and that assumes you don't play with an alliance that issues refunds. Which you can (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15037.0)

Losing T2 crusiers is what, up to 100-150M?

Anyway, regardless of EVE, my point still stands, looting after pvp is perfectly possible so long as it isn't built around your character losing 8 near-irreplaceable pieces of equipment that define the character more than any other factor.




But how long did you play it? And how long would you have been willing to subscribe?


I loved Planetside for the two months I played it, but after that, having seen/done everything, I just ran out reasons to play. I was perfectly happy to have bought the game and got two months out of it, but I rather get the impression that the dev team was set up for much longer subscriptions.



When you really think about it, it has an awful lot in common with UO. It just goes a different route to fix some of the core problems that launch-UO hadn't worked out yet.

it takes skill for those who bother to grind for money and get the 3-6 ships. for everyone else  :uhrr:. I mean seriously people go back to WoW after trying new games, does that make WoW arena any less gear based?

And nano domis I bet :)

Not trying to get in another Eve pissing contest...your points are valid and I won't concede mine.

The enemy is persistence.  It seems to be the major thread that ties the genre together.  If you rip that out you end up with completely different games.

What does persistence give you?  Typically a hardcoded advantage over the new guy.  Not fun when you're losing.

What games have done a persistent world with a flat power curve to avatars?  I've only really played about half of the example games in the thread.   Can those games maintain a subscriber base without the lure of power creep?

All the shit thrown in to justify a monthly charge (both to devs and to consumers) tends to get between you and fights.

Handful of regs - Free
Brown healer rob - Free
Dear Hat - Free
Halberd - Free
Dropping in pvp tuff guys in a manner of seconds: Priceless.

You could heavily mitigate item and skill level discrepancies in early UO.  Most people would laugh at what kind of skills/gear my character ran around with.  Game inched towards gear + skill level > player skill and situational awareness.  Oddly enough, this is what makes the game difficult to consider coming back to even on a purely pve/recreational level.  Mudflation is a bitch.


AC had item loss.  AC also had people fighting over territory.   :awesome_for_real:

Good pvp, in your mind entails risk, but most of the good PVP you're mentioning also has real easy ways to mitigate that risk.  I've seen permadeath work well in PVP oriented muds because there were enough ways for the non brain dead player to avoid it.

While this is getting dangerously close to forbidden chart related subjects, EVE does have other innovations which allow this to work.


EVE territory mechanics and design support players in controlling territory to make it safe for PvE activity even in 0.0, and even non-allied players can go hang out somewhere like Providence and rely on CVA for protection from pirates.

EVE has its own form of Trammel in the shape of Empire space, and while it doesn't offer perfect protection from Slayerik, CCP has shown they will shrink loopholes as they arise to stop ganking being too common in Empire.

It's much easier to run from combat if you don't want it in EVE than it was in pre-trammel UO.

EVE has more territory, which is easier to hide in, and if you avoid obvious through-routes it is not unusual to go undisturbed in a star system for hours at a time.


Planetside, which has the retention problems your post suggests.

DAoC is flat in the end game, only getting to the end game was an unbelievable chore.

Guild Wars also avoids power growth beyond the pve levelling, though the sport-pvp concept has the problem of new players not being able to break into teams, and random pug arenas got old fast.

Not an expert by any means, but I think that to a lot of devs, "PvP" means "let the players generate the content", and that doesn't really work. 

You look at a PVE game and it can't just be a set of gameplay rules and combat mechanics; it has to have quests, story/plot lines, many diverse areas, raid zones, advanced AI, trinkets, pets, seasonal fare, all sorts of crap.  You look at PVP games, and often they're just "Ok, here are the combat mechanics, here's 6 scenarios to fight over, go!"

To hell with that.

Of course, having 2534 keeps (each custom-made with unique artwork and flavor), 6000 scenarios, 10,000 battleground areas, etc etc. for players to experience and never get bored because they can always go to the next one and see something new, that requires a huge playerbase, all concentrated, else the world feels empty.  So maybe CCP did stumble onto the winning formula (everyone on one server). 

I don't know.

Players making their own content works just fine and while not massively popular, has proven to be a system with longevity (UO, DAoC, SL, ATitD).

I think the shock comes to developers when they see what players do with the tools that they were given.  Perhaps they become disillusioned when the players do something with the sandbox than they had neither hoped for nor expected.

Shadowbane did not have full looting/item loss. You only dropped the items in your bag/inventory. You never dropped anything that was equipped. Also shadowbane was more item dependent than UO.


One of the devs (Warden) said (on the beta forums) the reason was that his girlfriend cried because she dropped her pretty armor in an earlier beta/alpha phase.

Ah shit, you're right. And to think I played SB for way longer than I should have too...

Even in levels-based games, PvP works best is when they're in settings where the levels don't apply. The soft cap in DAoC, R5 in SB, UO (which had some disparity but not much that mattered), Planetside (levels just let you have more options), and GW (everyone just easily got to 20), WAR ranks players to 80% of the tier and WoW players get ridiculed unless they enter a BG at the tier cap  :awesome_for_real:

That indicates to me that everyone realizes levels and PvP don't mix, but they can co-exist in the same game. You just relegate one to being a content and ability/customization gate while the other is more about smart use of those abilities and/or player dexterity. With that of course goes the sort of immersion players think* they want with the big RvR zone control stuff.

* Only because players claim it but less stick with it.

You are right. This is an important thing that is missing from everything, essentially, except Eve. There needs to be a greater "Empire Space" where people can see everything the game has to offer under the strict, but not overbearing, control of the developers. NPC guards that show up and kill you - no stealing from players, whatever.

They also, in my opinion, definitely need those outlier areas that let the players create their own content. Even if that is Nazi Germany vs Poland.

Single server stuff is F'ing brilliant too. Especially considering my current situation where I'm on my 3rd WAR server already.

Lineage (1):

Death Penalty? Yes. Loss of XP, possible to de-level and lose abilities.
Item Loss? Yes. Limited by alignment.
Item Dependent? Somewhat.
Dev kill? Too grindy for fat lazy Americans. Still big in places where they speak funny.
Indy or AAA? Indy that became AAA PDQ.

Lineage 2:

Death Penalty? Yes. See above.
Item Loss? Yes. See above.
Item Dependent? More than above.
Dev kill? See above. And then some.
Indy or AAA? Very much AAA now.

There needs to be some kind of carrot (or whatever the fuck sheep like to eat) to lure the sheep out of the safe pasture and into the forest. Something so tasty they would regularly risk their lives for it.

Nice Righ, updated :)

Fair enough

(For the record, I never flew a nano-domi. Did fly a nano type Typhoon once though)

Both Planetside and Guildwars involved the unlocking of character options no?  I would consider this a power curve. Flexibility, even if you can only leverage it outside of a hot zone, is definitely an advantage.  Guild Wars especially had you playing with a partial deck of skills to draw from unless you paid your dues in the horrendous PvE of that game.

DAoC most definitely had a power curve with realm ranks and like, the entire ToA expansion. Even using the term 'end game' kinda implies the curve had to be traversed.  That fact that someone might have capped off a character is kinda moot.  In a game with time based advancement you get to kill targets that are still in the capping out process.  That's the draw/trap.

If you separate those still advancing and those capped out, you pretty much have two games.  The second one better be damn fun because with PvP the first one ends up being a tutorial.

I don't think Diku and PvP go that well together for very long, but I keep playing them anyway.  The games I stick with for any length of time these days are the ones that relegate PvP to the sidelines.  They just need to make new games fast enough that there is always one less that 3 months old.  Problem solved!

Righ raises a good point about the Lineages. You might want to break your consideration between various markets. Afaik, Lineage 1 and Lineage 2 never hit it well in the US and EU, so the main appeal of their core systems is for a different culture.

Comparing a BR 20 in old PS with a BR 1 , and a level 10 in any game and a level 20 doesnt even come close. Even as a low ranked noob I was fuckin people up in PS.

I think it's important to draw a line between two very different kinds of PvP:

1. Battleground-type.  Also called "sport" PvP.  This is very akin to FPS, where the "world", be it the entire map or just the scenario, resets.  GW, SB (I think?), and WoW battlegrounds and arena are in this category. 
2. Persistent. EVE, UO, AC Darktide, and (sort of) Planetside.  Gains stay gained until you lose them again.  I guess you could break this into item loss versus territory loss, but it seems like the two go together.

I tend to favor #2.  I lost my taste for #1 after Quake 1, though it took me a while to figure out why I didn't like it.  So I'll talk about #2.

To generalize a few of these points:

- Have a big world.  AC DT got this right, EVE gets it right, even UO got it right if you could find space for a house.  Make it possible to "set up shop" far from anywhere.
- Don't have a level or other type of grind before the PvP.  Let a newbie be useful in some way.  AC1 fails, EVE wins. SB tried to mitigate it by making the leveling process fast.
- At the same time let the veterans get something worth striving for.  This is one really hard part.  Even EVE doesn't quite get this right.
- Item dependency has to be limited.  You can't make people lose something it takes over a day to get back.  However they should have the ability to risk losing something powerful for an advantage.
- Maybe this is debatable, but I don't think winning should be based on twitch.  Lag and disconnects are too big a factor.  Factors like thinking ahead and game knowledge should be the deciding factors.

Counterstrike is free, with no real death penalty, a limited form of item loss, puts you into an auto generated team and plays quick matches that reset the map constantly.

WAR scenarios are very close to what Counterstrike is.

Heh, you could make the argument that MMOs make PvP too complex by giving about 80 different abilities per character and then timers to force you to use a lot of those abilities. Counterstrike just lets you point and click.

The problem is that 'meaningful' PvP only feels good when you are winning. Getting stomped into the dirt is less fun, as is being in a permanent world where you are almost guaranteed to always be a bug unless you are willing to devote a 40 hour work week to PvP.

Not true.  The agony of defeat doesn't stop athletes from chasing the thrill of victory.  Not everyone has the guts for it, sure, but that's why there are pure PvE games.


This would be a design flaw IMO.  A common one, to be sure.

I actually think game devs should think more about sports psychology when they build PvP games.

Also, time in game = training. As you get more training, you improve. At some point, that training is going to help you win in an otherwise matched contest. That can't be a design flaw. (Rare random loot drops that require lots of time investment in-game are, of course, an incredibly stupid idea but I'm glad the MMO industry is moving away from that kind of idea (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=397).)

I can't speak for Guild Wars release, but by the time I started playing Guild Wars (around their first "expansion") you could get any Skill/Item for PvP within hours. Probably less. If you were SUPER impatient, you could simply pay an extra 20 bucks or something and have *every* PvP item/skill unlocked.

There's no barrier to entry in GuildWars PvP, outside of the social/player-skill aspect (which is admittedly very large at times). I could setup any template for any class in Guildwars in a Saturday afternoon and it isn't like you lose any of it. Once it's unlocked, it's unlocked for any PvP character (heck skills are even unlocked for your HeroHenchmen in the pve campaigns too, most of my henchmen have better skills then my actual PvE characters).

No where even remotely in the same league as WoW or DaoC or any other MMO I've played.

DAoC had plenty of situations you could lose in a fun way (and plenty of ways to lose in an unfun way).

EVE, Planetside, Shadowbane and the rest are the same.

Mostly it depends on whether losing is instant death to a steam train after spending a lot of time setting up. Or whether you get to take your shot, be involved in something a little epic, and lose after a pitch battle.


When I'm talking about barriers to entry in sport-pvp the social barrier is exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm sure it is possible to set up a system of achiever end-game sport pvp without insurmountable social barriers for new players, but I've never seen it.

Yea, I agree with that. I was just responding to the idea that there is some kind of 'PvE Grind' in Guildwars for PvP. If there was, it certainly isn't there now, is all I'm trying to say.

I agree that there should be incentives for playing in dangerous territory, but leave the sheep out of it. They aren't suited for PvP, and won't have any fun.

***

I think most of us can agree that DIKU levels and geargrind is unhealthy for PvP. It can be done. It has been done. But never in a very satisfactory manner.

WW2OL: (which gets no respect)

Death Penalty? Tiny. You lose nothing except time to combat of a respawn (between 10 seconds for infantry on the front, to 5 minutes for Planes to 30 minutes for a Destroyer. Average misson length is 8 minutes).
Item Loss? No
Item Dependant? No
Dev kill? First 4 years: Yes. Last 2-3 years No. It's now stable, very few bugs, can be played on low end machines. However, that first 4 years (6 if you count dev time pre-release) has nailed into a nitch game from which it will never recover. 
Indy or AAA? Indy. 15 people total. ATTD is probably the only game with less people working on it.


You all want PvP but the only full PvP game with nothing BUT PvP isn't counted. Unfortunately it has no elves with big boobs or the ability to gank people lower in the social order.

More edits- christ, EVERYTHING people say they want  on this page is IN WW2OL right now. Granted you can't build your own little empire to lord over and beat up anyone who comes inside it, you can't choose the colour of your pants and you can't use a higher agility score to beat someone, and the game's NEVER going to be finished, or have as nice graphics as the latest COD clone and is cursed with using real world weapons with all their disadvantages...but it's there, right now. 

However, WW2OL was for all intents and purposes, killed by it's own devs during it's birth, and all we have now is a stil walking corpse that's too stupid and stubben to fall over and  instead we see the EA's and Blizzards of this world spend 100 million on the next great movie world blockbuster extravaganza.

What players say they want and what they buy are not the same thing

How much of that is really due to superior FPS titles like COD4 though? I haven't seem much on COD5 either, as I'm tired of the whole WWII thing, but COD4 has levels and unlockables and merely lacks the progressive element of zone control. But then, the MMOs that have tried that all ended up needing to implement periodic server or zone resets anyway. That's an inherent contradiction: either the world prevents persistent player controls of zones or you allow it and reset it monthly/weekly whatever.

I don't want an MMO developer making an FPS, because they all end up trying to get MMO players to play a pseudo twitch game that alienates actual FPS players. I want more FPS developers stealing the right MMO trappings that add depth to an experience beyond the momentary match.

This. This is why fantasy Diku-style MMOs are still being made.

Nonsense! We want innovation, packed up in something safe and familiar!

Getting back to DAOC for a minute (which was my favorite mmo pvp game), there were two basic incarnations of the pvp (3 if you count battlegrounds).  There was the original DAOC frontier - which was great, until people started grinding realm points in Emain - and then the expansion frontier, which was way too big. 

What I enjoyed most about DAOC pvp was the three-cornered war (which could and was played out in different ways), the separation between pve and pvp zones, and the idea that everyone in the frontier could participate to the benefit of his or her realm.  The rewards for winning weren't so great as to be insurmountable for the losers, and there was a little persistence in it, but not so much that the losers would just give up permanently.

Darkness Falls was a super-sweet addition, in my opinion.  The winners got to control the zone for resource gathering and xp.  Unfortunately, DAOC's pve was not interesting enough to keep me playing, particularly after ToA.

If Counterstrike were to take place in some sort of Kosteresque world of "meaningful" conflict where you get kicked in the ballsack for dying, it wouldn't even be fractionally as popular. On the other hand, if you take even typical MMO combat and condense it into consequence-free fragfests of short duration you get, well, WoW battlegrounds. And that game is sort of popular.

Above and beyond anything else, people just don't like being kicked in the nuts that much.

Oh man, this, for sure.

I think the only way I've seen pvp work well in MMOs is where the rewards for winning aren't personal but realm/faction based. Relic keeps and Darkness Falls were my favourite implementations of this. When the rewards from pvp benefit pve for other players (or your own alts) or grant temporary access to content then it creates an immersive link between pvp and pve.

EVE's 0.0 alliance pvp game does this too - controlling territory by pvp'ing gives pve resources to support more pvp. WoW completely fucks this up. Pvp is totally separated from pve and occurs in sterile instances that have zero connection to the outside world. Plus it centers it all around the same kind of personal grind reward shit that killed Emain.

It's apples and oranges though.  Eve is consequenceful, WoW PVP is sport.  Certain things work better for each type, and if you try to cross them over it often doesn't work. 

For example, fast and furious PVP doesn't work well if there are consequences.  No one likes to be one-shotted out of hard earned money.  If they felt like there was a chance it makes it easier to take. That's one thing that UO got wrong IMO.

Ok, hazy memory here, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't Darkness Falls (DF) come out before the way-too-big expansion? I recall being able to get in there or not based on how well my realm was doing in the Frontiers. But also, and more importantly, didn't the coins you got in there serve as currency to buy weapons and armor from in there?

I ask because I always felt that DF was a one-off idea that was awesome if you could get in there but never adequately followed up on because people were pissed by how often they couldn't get in because their underpopulated realm was not representing in RvR.

But like I said, could be wrong.

That is right.

Though the weapons are armour from in there were only really interesting for the amount of high end material they salvaged for.

It is a great example of a simple realm level objective though. And on most servers having DF meant you lost some number of players from RvR to the diamond seal mines, which in turn made it easier for other realms to capture it (to gain access you just had to be holding more keeps than the other realms).

DF was introduced in an early patch, before the first expansion.

There are a number of things that need to be touched on in terms of future PvP MMOG success, so I apologize if my post seems jumbled.

The reason why a PvP MMOG has not been done at a masterful/popular level is mostly due to developers' lack of the proper mentalities for crafting such a thing.


On the topic of PvP popularity:
Contrary to murmurs by mostly PvE players, competition is a hugely popular thing. Sports have been mentioned in this thread already, and really, there is no better proof of the sheer market for PvP. A secondary proof for the sheer market for PvP is simply non-MMOG video games: Counter-Strike (as has been mentioned already), Call of Duty 4, Halo, and others represent the huge segment of PvPers; these gamers simply haven't seen any reason to move to the MMOG.

On the topic of sports system benefits:
Creating sports-like combat systems and the like would solve a number of issues, the primary being the character progression grind. When improving on one's own skill at using the game's systems (as well as properly infusing and utilizing strategy and tactics), one finds himself less concerned with loot or other grindy elements. Look to any mainstream sport: dedicating time to the sport in question doesn't grant one magic feet or arms; it does, however, grant one with increased performance and ability. And if the systems are deep enough, the carrot-on-a-stick never ends.

On the topic of "skill:"
It has been mentioned in this thread that an emphasis on twitch may be disrupted by server issues and the like. I agree: raw physical ability should not be the dominant factor in a competitive situation. In a majority of sports, simply being strong or tall or fast doesn't mean much if the skills are not put into use through tactics and strategy. In a sports-like MMOG, I would see the emphasis placed on tactics, strategy, teamwork, and then physical ability. I would hope to see player psychology, analysis, and similar actions placed as the deciding factors in a competitive MMOG.

On the topic of gear:
As has been mentioned in this thread already, a PvP game with a focus on gear (and thus, with a focus on raw time spent) is hardly competitive. As such, I would see gear (if it must exist in an MMOG) as being the following: [1] for gameplay styles and the like, where gear choice would impact the manner in which you play; [2] fairly commonplace so competition remains competitive; and [3] customizable in terms of aesthetics so that character persistence remains. On the other hand, gear could act as an economic asset to be consumed, created, and distributed. Whichever path taken ((a) commonplace or (b) rarer asset), the emphasis would have to still remain on player skill.

On the topic of grind seekers:
There are those who would argue that MMOGs are about the acquisition of physical upgrades; so, to satisfy those people without hamstringing the competitive people, I would propose systematic (that is, numerical or aesthetic) progressions focused on either groups (guilds, factions, economy) appearances. So those who seek to pour inordinate amounts of time into something to reap some type of tangible reward (that is, it is not something as abstract as player skill) could seek to improve their guild/faction/economy or attain an aesthetic improvement.

On the topic of massively-multiplayer PvP:
The truly mainstream PvP MMOG would have to, I believe, implement other special elements in addition to the sports-like systems in order to be enveloping. Player politics is another form that PvP could take that, like combat, has been underexploited by most developers (EVE and Shadowbane have gotten the closest to such a thing). A focus on warring and economics could add another layer of depth for another type of competitive player. Of course, with the additional focus on guilds/factions, developers would have to be careful not to allow the zerg to be the dominant competitor.


I am of the thought that contained PvP (sports) and persistent PvP (politics and economics) can both be implemented together in fashions that allow the two to directly complement each other and, in a sense, merge (I see no other way for such systems to coexist successfully without being detrimental to each other). Player politics and economics, done correctly, can serve as that draw into the MMOG for competitive gamers, so long as a sports-like competitive scene is active at the same time.

Have you played Planetside?

I haven't, but have heard so many references to it and still don't know what it was like.  How was pvp set up and what was great about it?  Why did Planetside fail?

Proof?

It was a three faction FPS MMOG. (I'm starting from scratch here, bear with me.)

Gameplay mostly focuses on taking and defending bases on a continent map. There are multiple continents, multiple bases on each continent, and towers around each base.

Game includes vehicles and power armors and multiple types of armor and weapons. Eventually they added mechs.

It has a cone of fire bloom, which basically means bunny hopping and circle strafing were discouraged. With somewhat success. Strafing and jumping around were still valid tactics.

The height of it's popularity and awesomeness is when two or more factions finally clash (usually over a choke point, like a bridge.) And much destruction and mayhem ensues.

Also, combined arms were grand. You could fly a dropship and drop your teammates onto a contested base. Have air support and armor zipping around doing things.

There are levels and gear in Planetside, but it isn't gated content. Anyone can take any certification (ability to use certain equipment and abiliites) but those of higher Battle Rank can just carry more certs at one time.

Thoughts on why it failed vary. The game is still running. Most seem to think the game lacked "stickiness". Much like DAOC, you take a keep, they take it back, ping-pong all the day-long. Also some did not like having to re-cert in order to be able to do certain roles for their Unit. (Clan)

There was (AFAIK) one expansion. Core Combat. Generally thought to have been horrible. It introduced an undergound area of caverns to fight over. Mostly only used to farm the ability to pilot mechs. (BFRs)

I think they're planning a city expansion and a starbase expansion, but I haven't been to their site or played the game in a while.

The one major thing I would add regarding describing PlanetSide to someone that has never played is that there is 0% PvE (well, ok, unmanned base defenses). It's all PvP, FPS-like although at a slower pace for the most part compared to many other FPS games.

Anyone who's never played PS should immediately go do so. It is an example of what could have been for MMOFPSes but with some key early decisions being off target (wrong target audience, wrong business model).

No, but I have friends who have; they've informed me of most of the game's aspects. From what I can piece together, Planetside was somewhat lacking in the way of persistence (save for character names and objective control that ping-ponged back and forth), a problem of which I could see alleviated with increased customization options and greater emphases on skill and player politics.

I already stated that the popularity of sports and non-MMOG PvP video games is proof of competition's popularity. PvP, as it's been iterated in MMOG format so far, lacks the proper draw for grabbing the large competitive segment that enjoys sports and non-MMOG PvP video games.

THAT may well point to the core of the problem.  The attempt to mix sheep and wolves into a single gamespace in what is, by definition, a voluntary recreational activity will NEVER work.  Not unless you somehow eliminate all games that are wolf-free so we're back to early UO days where the choice for the sheep was to play with the wolves or don't play at all.  And those conditions will likely NEVER exist again. 

So the only alternatives for developers are to make something that caters to wolves and sheep separately, limit their market by making something that wolves will enjoy in the absence of sheep, or try to grow the wolf market by making something that will convert sheep into wolves.   WoW, Shadowbane, and WAR are examples of these three respective approaches.  None of these approaches are going to satisfy the rabid wolf who requires sheep to prey on to have his fun.  He's just SOL.

As for modeling PvP play on sports, first you have to concede that sports are inherently unrealistic and ritualized competition, so forget about trying to make it fit into a world-type environment.  Then consider that sport requires sportsmanship, the enforcement of which requires rules and referees, segregation of players by skill level, etc.  Those are hugely developer time intensive.  Or you can have sport among self-selecting and self-policing groups who have the ability to restrict those they play with to others willing to abide by the same rules.  Anything else devolves into jungle rules where the thugs rule the playground and all the other kids go home and play video games. 

This seems to be big part of appeal in the PvP games though. Especially if you can then pick colour of pants for your little army. :drillf:

Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh etc.

WRONG

It works in Eve, but not as well as it could. I think the sheep would venture into the forest much more often if there weren't so many bottlenecks. It could work very well in a more open world without gates to camp. The only hard part is to make the RISK worth the REWARD in the mind of the sheep.

Planetside seemed to have many of the same shortcomings as GW for me.  PvP was deeply dependant on having the right group mix and builds.  They also felt much more strongly tied to FPS mechanics than to MMO play.  If you liked twitch with some strategy, Planetside was good.   I personally couldn't find the hook in the game.  After a while all of the battles seemed to play out very similarly even though the scenery changed.  There were also some balance issues, but that isn't what turned me off to PS.

Fixed.

Incidentally, the sheep are just a crutch for these wolves that can't quite cut it in wolf-only environment. Asking to have some easy prey to feed on delivered right under one's nose is about as carebear as it can get.

You can't say Baseball works because Golf does. People are competitive. They're competitive even in PvE games. In fact, a large part of all modern features are specifically in place because of that competition (anti-twink stuff, instancing, tiered PvP, etc).

However, your earlier point is spot on, and I believe is something a few of us have long felt as well: the wrong devs are trying these things. It's why I added Planetside to schild's list. And why WoW has been so successful. You can't rely on the establishment to radically shake things up. That's why they're the establishment.

However, companies like SOE and Mythic, as much of the establishment as you can get, at least deserve credit for trying. SOE for PS and the upcoming Agency (as well as building a business of their infrastructure to be able to give titles like MxO, PotBS and others a chance they'd maybe otherwise not get). And Mythic because of things they were trying for WAR (PvP all the time in form that allowed everyone a roughly balance chance of participating). Where these things fall down is in the delivery; however, if they weren't creating the rules to avoid, there wouldn't be these chances being made to bring in the attention of outsider companies.

Basically: you couldn't get WoW without SOE having done all sorts of crazy things with EQ1.

Ideally there would be no sheep. The players venturing in the forest would become wolves during their stay. But we know that honks off wolves something fierce when they have no sheep to eat.

For Guild Wars it is important to note that there are multiple points in GW's history.  At release GW was a PvE game with a considerable amount of grind required to properly PvP.  This drove a large portion of potential PvPers away.  They started fixing it and you could get into PvP with reasonably low grind around 4-5 months after release (I think that's about the number), basically around the start of the GWWC.

Currently Guild Wars is one of the lowest grind options to get to PvP.  If the game released with the current concepts in play it would have been amazing and still going strong.

As for Dev kill, I wouldn't quite call it a kill.  Guild Wars is still sort of limping along half-dead after taking a number of savage beatings.  It truly died the death of 1,000 paper cuts.  Getting into high level PvP was difficult, so losing players hurt.  I think the game was at its peak in the middle of the GWFC and very slowly bled to death after that point.  Little things like specific balance issues being ignored for too long, PvP issues going unfixed too long, the poor implementation of ATs, ect killed it a little at a time.  Arena.net is one company I can say who in the end has almost always done the right thing for the game, just too late for it to matter.

Basically the community would solve the current meta and A.net would take a bit too long to catch-up and fix things.  Then the community solved the GvG game type and realized it wasn't so fun.

Moving on to MMO and PvP.  Grind and PvP are enemies when you move beyond the most casual level.  Class based systems and such are fine, the problem is a player needs a high degree of flexibility to swap between classes, skills, and specs as needed in PvP.  Leveling and grinding systems hurt this.  The provide barriers limiting your ability to get into PvP and kill your flexibility.  At the same time PvE and most of the MMO player base loves the grind.  They won't admit it, but that false progression of power is what makes MMOs work.  Without the carrot on the stick they don't bother leveling, why do those dungeons or raids if there is nothing to reward them with?  They want to feel special and unique, the grind and rare items it takes ridiculous grind to get is what enables that.  Feeding this desire while maintaining an easily accessible power cap to keep PvP thriving is a fragile balance.  You directly saw this in Guild Wars, PvE players would ask for diablo style super loot and more levels.  PvPers would ask for less grind and more instantly equipped PvP characters which PvErs stonewalled at every opportunity.

As it stands there are only two games in existence I would use successful and competitive to describe their PvP, Guild Wars and WoW.  One has way too much PvE and stuff I don't want to do to even get close to the stuff I want to do.

In EVE, can't the wolves come get the sheep nearly regardless of where they are?

Of course, then the wolves would face penalties, which they don't like:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e3/Sam_and_Ralph_choke.png)

Does EVE really have "sheep" in the classical sense, or is Empire mostly wolf alts taking a breather and farming resources to go towards more wolfing? (Well, and a minority of dedicated craftards who love the idea of being spreadsheet entepreneurs.) Because everything I've heard says the PVE is terrible and beside the point unless you just need to make money.

It seems to have enough genuine PvE players, ones who aren't in the least interested in PvP aspect and express resentment at being subjected to it... for most of them all to be alts would require some serious personality split disorders all across the playerbase. Yes the PvE aspect of EVE ain't anything to write home about but it's also not *that* much different from other MMOs in this regard. imo. Whacking easy to beat foozles for loot drops has its fans, no matter how simple it might appear.

If your game has pve, even if it is originally designed for pvp and you had a solid pvp playerbase in beta, please expect a massive influx of pve'ers in your game come launch. with that said, EVE has a dedicated crowd of players who been putting up with that game since....forever? by that same token I say that while a huge portion of EVE current player base are players that been playing EVE for at least a year and thus are able to PVP like a PK'ing snob, there  is a good portion that Pve like no tomorrow. I mean it is a space mmo, that has to make some lore loving pve'er somewhere happy.

The practice of allowing thousands of players into any stage of development should be immediately and permanently banned.

Ninety nine point nine percent of the players have no intention of testing.  They are there to see how easy it will be to continue their play style into this new wrapper.  If the player has to shoehorn his/her old playing style into the new game you can count on epic forum whines on how the game will fail miserably.

On the flip side, the developers have little or no intention of changing any game mechanics because we all know developers are always right and players know not of which they speak.

In the end it really doesn't matter, everyone blames the publisher and the circle is complete.   

I disagree. A lot of us thought that world RvR would work fine because it did in the focused beta tests. Unfortunately everyone was testing it and no one was playing it.

When you're past the "let's find all the bugs we can" stage, I think you want people who are going to play it like they will after release.

At this point in time in my life, I don't think I really want the large-scale politics-based Guild vs. Guild-esque PvP game. A lot of people do, and while I still find it fun, I just really don't think I'd have the time for it.

I think honestly they should push more for the small-scale competitive PvP Team vs. Team-type stuff. Take at look at what Blizzard is doing - they're trying to shoehorn competition events into World of Warcraft. You can argue how large of an audience it is, but in all honesty, it's working. You know damn well that the next MMO that Blizzard makes is going to have an even larger focus on this small-scale competitive angle. Get the competitive gaming audience interested in MMOs, and you expand the audience. I honestly don't think that audience would give a hoot or holler about large-scale sieging and so forth (unless it could be replicated on a smaller scaller, such as in a 10 on 10 man format or some such - even then, it's hard to keep track of what is going on).

The hardest hurdle into getting competitive interest is that you need to have a large amount of knowledge regarding the game in order to see what is going on. The 5 vs 5 arena events in World of Warcraft were way too hectic to keep track of, which is why they brought it down to the 3 vs 3 bracket this year. With a game like Counter-Strike, it's super obvious what is going on, even to the layman. Same with a game like Halo - the guy shot the other guy a bunch and he died. The average player is not going to understand what is going on when the Warrior runs in and Spell Reflects the Druid's Cyclone, allowing the DPS train to burn down their Rogue.

If it's complicated in that small scale, imagine how impossible it is for large-scale stuff to communicate what is going on.

Anyways, that's my somewhat unrelated tangent.

Shadowbane, right guys?

I ended up getting drunk and I fired up Subspace (Continuum) again. I went like 16-1 on the Chaos zone. Was a lot of fun, if anyone is looking for a fun, free PVP game here you go. You will get your ass handed to you for a while, but it is quite entertaining. They also have a sport version of it called Powerball, but its kind of a vets only thing.

If anyone wants some advice or gets into it, let me know - we can get on my vent server and I can teach you the ropes.

Ah, Subspace. So many hours wasted on that game!

Wasn't that game Infantry on the Sony Station account made by the same guys? I want to be able to play Infantry without having to pay for a Sony Station account. :(

Yeah, same guys I think...though I never got hooked on Infantry like I did SS for some reason.

Infantry went F2P a while back. I think.

I think some of the success of the arena model is a bit false because there is a large segment of people who only do it to pick up gear to PVE with (like me for example.) We will see how popular it remains after the expansion releases and almost every bit of gear has a rating requirement. I'm guessing arena participation will be way down without those S1/S2 type items that anyone can use.

The thing I've found is that I hate sport PvP, but I love the above style game.  I don't have more than an hour or two per day to play it, but fortunately there are a lot of people who do, and can handle all the political crap while I just shoot who they tell me to shoot.  I can do that within an hour while still having the illusion of context.

Never got into subspace as much as I got into Infantry.  Cosmic Rift is free to play now too, it is essentially a remake of subspace.  The energy as life and energy as shield mechanics those games used worked brilliantly.  In Subspace you use energy to attack and lose energy when you get hit, if you hit 0 energy you die (if you fire all your weapons you get stuck at 1 energy.)  In infantry and cosmic rift they tweaked it a bit so energy acts as a shield protecting your health, still works really good.

Infantry and Cosmic rift have a very minor grind factor.  You can get fully equipped in short order though.  You can really see these games were the predecessors to Planetside.

Aside from all the intrinsic difficulties of rewarding PvP in relation to PvE and all that -

I find it very hard to believe that MMOs as we know them today will ever flower as true competitive games, mostly because they change/evolve too fast and not necessarily in the direction the community is pushing. Games that have been popular competitive games this far have had very strong, player-run communities, that have organized and created the sport aspect themselves, not had it created for them. I don't think any developer can aspire to running the competition for the players, because it'll be too monolithic and slow for players to feel engaged. Competition for the sake of competition (ergo, for fun) always works best.

Perhaps most of all, previous games have almost mutated into something new, where the original tenets of strategy and skill have been tossed out for a new way of playing, and that is something that doesn't wash well with the majority of modern MMO developers. If you "exploit" the game (that is, play it -too- well), you get nerfed. A sport-like game can't suffer that for long - compare to how fractions of larger gaming communities stop in time, keeping to one version of a game that they liked best (before change X, Y, Z).

:eidT spleling is hard.

There are real 'sheep' in EVE, they probably still make up the bulk of the player base. EVE has the advantage of being the only Space MMO around for the most part. (There are dev chats showing something like 70-80% of the player base never ventures into 0.0, the open conquerable pvp zones. )

I would not be even a little bit surprised if EVE subs dropped off dramatically once someone made WoW-InSpace!

As an addition, I think any MMO that relies heavily on gear (especially gear on rare drops) is also not going to gain traction just as a competitive game because too much of getting to the competitive bit relies on getting the gear, and those without the gear are sorely disadvantaged.

Taking CounterStrike as the comparable experience, as a character I'm still dangerous with the basic pistol and knife. Compare that to any MMO (even those with sports features) where I'd just be meat if I never upgraded to the top level gear.

I don't think this sort of environmental change necessarily destroys competitiveness. CCGs basically work exactly like this, after all, and they see plenty of competitive play.

I'll probably rack up enough arena points to get that blue PVP set with no rating requirement and then never go back. Not interested in grinding just to keep my armor from falling off.

On the other hand, this extra advantage provided by gear does have appeal for certain subset of players. If "pwning nubs" wasn't as entertaining, there would be no real need for developers to try and protect the newcomers from getting chain-ganked into oblivion by the 'higher levels' as the issue itself wouldn't exist.

The n00bs will be pwnd because they were always meant to be pwnd.

In CS, the n00bs get pwnd just the same since they don't have the skills of how to play. The guy who takes them out with the DE is just better than them even if they themselves have an SMG or something.

Plus Eve is like the UO of space mmorpg's. If you want to play a scifi/space mmog you don't have much choice, same as fantasy players didn't have any choice but to play UO.

Get a little competition in the genre and watch those sheep fly away.

But they do already. WoW BGs and Arenas. WAR Scenarios. The only type of competition that hasn't really "flowered" outside of Eve, at least in the West, is the server-wide world-changing type. SB was and would always have been niche no matter how stable the game was. DAoC RvR at its peak was after the subscriptions started to decline. People might like to think of pre-Trammel UO as a high water mark, but the game didn't suffer a mass hemorrage of subscriptions when Renaissance launched either.

Competition is here already and seems to be hitting its stride. The part that isn't making it is the big huge epic monsterous world changing you're-society-is-screwed-if-you-lose type games. But then, that makes a lot of sense when you look at the other genres of competitive video games out there too.

Maybe it's just a bad idea after all.

Most people in BGs/Scenarios and Arenas don't participate for the sake of competition, is my point. These things are very heavily incentivized, especially in WoW's case. In WAR's case, have a look around these forums. Most don't want to play scenarios that much, but feel forced to due to side-line rewards. You may call it competition, but I think it misses the point of what competition is. To me, it's just PvE grind against human-controlled mobs.

Here's how I see it: People like competition. No, in fact, they love it. Practically everyone enjoys partaking in competitions that are on their terms, that is, considered fair to them. If given the correct tools and great fundamental gameplay, people will organize and compete without any magic incentive strings having to be pulled.

Competition is fun, it's up to the MMO developers to build a game that enables competition, not maximizing your rewards.

IIRC those haven't done so well.

Fantasy players didn't have any choice but to play UO? WTF are you rambling about? People didn't even know WTF MMOs were at the time. Me and a few friends basically saw our dream realized with UO, being able to actually play Ultima....with hundreds of other people!!! I'm guessing half of the initial players of UO had played Ultimas previously. Then the choice of EQ came as well.

So far how many other space/scifi MMO's have died? Earth and Beyond, TR, and many others that didn't even make it into production.

Say what you will about Eve, but it has weathered a lot of storms the last five years and is the only game that remains out of the Graveyard around here (besides WoW of course). Give it a little fuckin' credit, if not for innovation then for longevity.

For the record, in Eve packs of wolves are constantly fighting each other.

I don't equate video game competition to getting a bunch of family together to play Flag Football at the annual picnic :-)

Without rewards players will go to games with rewards. Or they'll organize around rewards/systems they create themselves. Competition is a social catalyst, but it's not the framework by which people operate day-to-day. We don't compete to compete. We compete to improve.

This is seen in just about every competitive game there is. The big differences are the type of competition and the type of reward.

Then overlay all of that with the MMO gamer mindset/conditioning of acquisition.

In the start of Subspace Chaos Zone, you were basically just playing for stats that reset Bi-Weekly. You compete against the other players in a sort of passive way. They are involved in your final record and points, since you are fighting them daily, but its not mano y mano statswise.

A dueling Zone was created from this, and eventually Pro leagues were formed by the players for 4 on 4 competetions and what not. Other competitive zones, like Powerball, we're formed and have had leagues the last 8+ years (highly competitive).

Make the base PVP fun. Allow the keeping of scores/records. Give your players the ability to run leagues.

This is totally dependent on knowledge of your opponents/social context and how fun the game is.  I disagree with you almost entirely.  Most players never get better at a FPS after playing it for a few weeks, yet they can play for months and months.  Competition because competition is fun is much more highly seen at every level except for the MMORPG grind-a-thon.  From a scale of 1 being picnic and 5 being anti-picnic

1:  Playing super smash bros with some friends is pretty much just like playing flag football.

2:  Playing TF2 on your designated server where you know everyone is a little less like playing flag football, but still quite similar. 

3:  Playing TF2 on a random server isn't much like flag football.  It is still fun though, which makes it like flag football in that way.  You don't have to be getting better to have fun.  I sure as hell haven't gotten better at TF2 in a long time, and I've been playing it since it came out.

4:  Leveling in WAR scenarios with a well known guild group is still a little like flag football.  You don't care about your opponents, but at least you know your group well enough to get some sort of social fun out of it.  The game isn't fun enough to justify playing the same scenario over and over again, so grind is apparent.  Still, the social context mitigates this a bit.

5:  Leveling in WAR scenarios by yourself isn't anything like flag football.  You don't know anything about your opponents, and it isn't fun enough to warrant doing over and over for ages.  This is the first case where you are undoubtedly right Darniaq.  This is a pure grind for power equation.

Certainly you can survive in the 5 level in MMO PvP design:  WoW is arguably there right now.  Of course, WoW is only slightly dependent on PvP for it's success.

Question is, do you really want to compete with WoW in the skinner box department?  I don't.  2nd question is, can a PvP based game really survive if it's core gameplay isn't that fun, and the players you are playing against are meaningless?  It works for WoW perhaps because PvP is a side-show.  Or perhaps because they are just that good at behavioral science.

Yes.

I think you're a little off when you're saying online gaming isn't anything like football at a picnic, because, really, that's where it starts. That's not competition as it's more formally known, but that's still how most people learn to play the game.

I don't see why man-becomes-wolf is the assumption upon which MMO PvP competition builds. It's not the natural way for most people to start competing, they do that by challenging friends and acquiantances in light-hearted ways.

If I'm to boil it down to two points, I believe those would be:

1) Competition must be player-led. Only the players have the insight to create the hierarchies needed to support all "weights" of PvPers, from casual to poopsockers. As I just now noticed Slayerik mentioned, player-run leagues.
2) Every aspect of the PvP should have a "spar mode" where nothing counts for anything. Compare it to the 4.30 AM game of WC3 or what have you, but I believe it's important to allow people to goof around, even if they're competing.

Edit; edit slip text of.

And lots of players don't get that they are improving anyway. Playing the same map rotation with the same friends, you're learning that map better and how your friends play better. This is not a game mechanic, but it absolutely does impact your performance.

And remember, I didn't say "flag football". I said "flag football at the annual picnic". That is a social catalyst only and you by and large don't care how good you did or didn't do. Every single other example you gave is a recurring sport-like activity where you're improving whether you know it or not. How long would a player keep player if they kept ending each match with no kills, 100 deaths, and complete ignorance as to why?

@Tarami: "goofing around", yes, absolutely. There's good examples of this, whether the Bristlebane Basket (I think that's what it was called) fireworks launcher from EQ1 through the fireworks in WoW to the most recent Arcanite Repear weapon/guitar. And there's /duel. And some would argue that BGs in the post-Arena world are too ;-)

This is all about the gray area between the top 1% performers in any organized activity and the nameless rabble that aren't paying attention and kinda just jerking around for a few minutes a month anyway. That gray area is when that lower end group starts wondering what they should be doing.

It's a balance between motivating players with tools they can use to organize into sessions that provide some meaningful immediate or eventual reward.

Yes, and in CS and such that ability depends on vague "skill", the hand-to-eye coordination and spatial orientation that some people are born with, and some aren't. Kind of like some are born with genetic setup that makes them good potential runners able to achieve the best, and some don't.

MMOs in a way level the field here, by attaching more weight to time spent playing than other genres where the performance is more dependant on factors that are really beyond player's control (you're either born with "teh skill" or not. If not, it won't matter how much you practice, you'll still --relatively-- suck) This does turn off some, but at the same time appeals to others.

I see this argument a lot.  While I think it may be true for a small percentage of gamers, for the most part I think this argument is totally wrong.  I see it much differently.  I think the main reason many people like to PvP in a MMOG instead of an FPS is persistence.

Persistence means more than just tracking wins and losses on a ladder.  The game has to give a reason that matters for players to fight each other.  I'll walk through an example in Jumpgate, a Space MMO I used to play.

Haulers (SHEEP) would pilot their giant freighters and move goods from one space station to another to make a profit.  Pirates (WOLVES) would stalk these sheep and try to extort bribes from them in exchange for not blowing them up and their cargo.  Other pilots (ANTI-WOLVES) would try protect the sheep.  Big battles would then happen between the WOLVED and the ANTI-WOLVES.

Now, take away the Haulers.  What do you have left?  Quake in Space between PvPers  Without the sheep, the battles have no meaning.  Who wants to fight over NPCs?

Is this sustainable over the long term in a MMO?  I dunno.  There are a lot of design problems here, many of which have already been mentioned.   I'm not posting to solve the problem, I'm just trying to explain why Sheep are so important to the PvP experience.

I agree with slog here and will add that a second factor in successful implementation is in making the sheep not feel like sheep.  The less people feel like they are sheep, the more often they'll go to slaughter.  MMO pvp is based on the principle that if sheep participate long enough and often enough that they'll no longer be the sheep... it's a diversion.  They're still sheep.  They're just sheep that take longer for the skilled player to slaughter. 

Who wants to fight over NPCs? About 1/3rd of EVE population (the ones who participate in PvP) Access to resources (and defending "your" turf you're able to officially claim) is the main drive behind wars, especially in persistent world where getting shot out of your ship means you need to spend lot of resources to get another.

And the sheep? They are purely optional in this setup and much like civillians/infrastructure that in regular conflicts are just means of production, could indeed be NPCs. If they are 'essential' in Jumpgate to give conflict any meaning, then i'd say it's the problem with how the game is set up -- too much simplification forcing the players to make-believe the 'reasons to fight each other' in lack of actual mechanics providing the incentive for that?

that is the logic of a moron. fact is solid gameplay + non-retarded match making system = EVERY SUCCESSFUL PVP GAME IN THE HISTORY OF GAMING. I don't know why people insist on making it more complicated then it really is, why are games like  UO and WoW examples of pvp games to developers? It's horse shit thinking, a no matter how many "reasons" you invent for pvp if your game doesn't have solid gameplay and non-retraded match making system the pvp fails and should never be considered a serious pvp game. Can we actually learn from PVP games to make PVP games for once? Please?

oh and wasn't jumpgate a colossal pile of fail?

Wut? 

There are people (like myself) who don't even consider a game to be a PvP game unless it's in the style of Eve/L2.  L2 has *horrid* gameplay and no match-making system whatsover, but I've had more fun in that PvP environment than any game before or since.  Neither Eve or L2 were unsuccessful.

but they aren't serious pvp games by any stretch....I give some leeway to Eve because on paper I should like it, but L2? rofl.

Basically, resource/territory control is why Eve works. That and the one huge universe thing, along with a safe haven for if you get sick of the wild wild west.

Imagine if guilds in say WoW fought over portions of the map....say they retired one thousand needles and had rare ore there that was needed in awesome crafting shit. This would cause this ore to be very sought after, and if death mattered in WoW then you have the start of what Eve is doing (though vastly more complex than that). It would also cause people trying to ninja in and grab some. Guilds might end up in escalating battles over a simple valuable rock.

Have 10 zones like these, conquerable, possibly giving substancial buffs to the holders and see what happens. Some times you need monetary reasons to fight, that can produce animosity and that is when shit starts getting good. Or when one uber guild face fucks the server. YMMV :) Still, the hatred built towards said uberguild can go a long way in making 'meaningful PVP'

Well, if excellent hand/eye coordination is your primary criteria for "serious" PvP than L2 was not serious.  I would have definitely enjoyed L2 more if it had improved combat mechanics, but the real PvP game was politics/resource control, which for many gamers are far more significant factors in their enjoyment.  In fact, without these elements there is little to redeem a PvP game for many players.  A game without them isn't "serious" enough.

Eve isn't a serious PVP game? The central premise of that game is corp vs corp war!

And like real corp warfare, it's all done via spreadsheets  :heart:

 :awesome_for_real:

Well played, sir.

Eve pvp works because it requires some skill to actually play. 80% of EvE playerbase don't care about who has what since they don't pvp anyway, and for that matter EvE's playerbase is not divided between several servers, if it was the territory/resource control mechanic wouldn't even work, due to lack of players that care. Death is so world shattering in EvE unless your an already established player, that pvp is actually done in small burst instead of constant warzone type action. on the flip side if EVE death penalty wasn't so punishing, people wouldn't care nearly as much because fighting over the territory would be pointless if your enemies had no down time.  So yeah EvE model is a balanced between barely having a fight when you want one, to people barely caring when you win one. If you translate to WoW? You wouldn't have nearly the amount of pvp'ers interested in WoW, fighting would be too anti-climatic to justify the time and energy spent defending or attacking.

Eve winner takes the all gameplay only appeals to what? 1% of people who actually play player vs player game? Lets be honest about where the real pvp market is at instead of idealizing to fit crappy game design.

Death is not fucking world shattering, unless I do it to you hauling everything you have in empire and I suicide you. You think these 80% of people that don't PVP aren't rich? Don't be a douchebag. I was comparing how the system would possibly work in WoW, not saying they should or that this would be awesome game design.

Any system that involves match making breaks immersion, essentially turning your MMORPG in a MMORFPS.  WoW does a great job of this, to the point that World PvP (the only persistent PvP) is almost nonexistent.  That's fine for many PVPers.  I wasn't trying to address those folks.  I was talking about the PvPers who want PvP to mean something and are talking about Sheep.

Don't forget about the Tarren Mills huge open PVP figths back in the day, before any honor system or anything....people fought because some lowbie got ganked. That lowbie knew a lvl 40. They ganked the ganker. Original ganker called his 50 buddy. War ensues. Some people, myself included, consider this the best of WOW PVP by far.

80% of the people who don't PVP are not interested in EVE's PvP. Last a I check it takes money to get a new ship after its been blown up, unless its insured. I think that's a bit world shattering, unless you played the game longer then a few months or insist on using only cheap ships (which have limited use in EVE combat besides target practice). it would be the equivalent of having to leveling up a new toon every time it gets killed in world pvp, in WoW terms.

slog for pvp to mean something death will have to be more punishing then usual which means pvp happens less often and being in an organized group and playing the game for a long period of time is extremely important before stepping into a pvp zone or seige battle. and there is no such thing as a mmorfps, the fact is PVP is PVP; a mmorpg with decent pvp should be able to look at games like street fighter, magic the gathering, tekken, counter strike, starcraft, commander and conquer, company of heroes in the eye without having the developers of those games rofl. the sacrificing solid gameplay for "immersion" may be fine, but it's no better then pve centric games by the same token.

Are you the screaming German kid from that video? 

One of the nice things about games like Eve or L2 is that even though you are not explicitely fighting every single second you are always contributing to the power and influence of your guild relative to other guilds, no matter what you do.  You could be leveling or crafting or just shit talking.  In this sense, the PvP is more involving and not strictly limited to combat. 

Quake
Quake 2
Quake 3 CPMA
CounterStrike
Painkiller

Are games that have no match making systems in place.
IMHO You cant get much more serious PVP than the Cyber athletes leage.

Quake 3 CPMA could arguably still be one of the most skill based first person shooters ever made.
I think what I am driving at here is that your point sounds to me a little like your oversimplifying things a bit.

Furthermore many match making systems already exist in WarHammer as far as level brackets or tiers. I wouldn't consider these mechanics to be the sole deciding factor that launched War into a potential CPL favorite. There are a lot of things going on under the hoods of these games. However you cant necessarily ignore that a good portion of how people see a game is what people expect before they actually even play the game. It seems to set an initial mind set that from then on remains in the back of that persons mind.

One example of this would be this phenomenon:
Is this a WOW clone?
1. If yes then complain that its a wow clone.
2. If not then complain that its not.

anyway
On the topic of helping people not feel like sheep I would take a good look at what happened with the counterstrike formula after COD4. Most of the changes that occurred are very subtle to the minds eye of the average player. Yet nearly all of the changes made it possible for sheep to feel more like wolves and in my opinion helped greatly with the success of the game.

One of the greatest changes, other than not having to wait until the end of a match after death, is something so simple yet so brilliant. A special spawning system that spawns sheep next to wolves (Right at the action) on their own team and a constant feeling of progression because the made the buying system from CS into a persistent XP system.

Instantly spacial reasoning and navigation requirements vastly reduced and the longer they play the more cool loot they obtain no matter what. Sheep feel more like wolves. At the cost of truly competitive environment the game allows everyone who plays to feel like a winner.

Also I believe that on pretty much every point Sipes was right on the money.
However I have to admit that as right as he is right now if we are talking about truly competitive environments then the MMOG is in a very poor position pull it off. Yes we are obviously approaching this with the wrong mind set because anything from a designers perspective should be possible if you can figure out how to do it right.

However in this situation I have to admit a hardcore skill based competitive PVP MMOG is a hell of a tall order.
Its already a tall order to bring a first person shooter to a truly competitive level in the first place. The more factors you add and the more mainstream you want it to be the less likely you are going to be to get it right.

I have been in a situation once where dm_ballistic was nearly crucified because it had a thin layer of FOG at one point. I remember that to this day. A single clip brush in the wrong place or if it takes 3 seconds too long to reach the mega health your map is deemed free for all only and tossed into a pile. I remember speaking with one of the head designers of CPMA about how removing the random spread from the shot gun was necessary. I don't agree that random things are instantly evil but I do see why he did it.
It gets ugly fast even under normal circumstances when trying to create a serious PVP environment.
Doing so in a MMOG would be an amazing feat. Absolutely amazing.

I don't want to say impossible.
We have things to consider still just looking at competition in games becoming main stream. Mainstream sports never change at all while games, especially MMOGs change constantly.

We have the fact that mainstream sports are easy for people to spectate where as the only way for games to become truly spectator friendly is if watching a game viewed more like some kind of random battle in one of the Lord Of The Rings movies. At that point you might not know why Legolas is flipping around in the air shooting flame arrows on people but it still looks cool and its fun to watch. So we have a very long way to go before before this kind of environment is possible. That is unless someone with enough money and power can approach this with the right mind set.

A RVR MMOG becoming main stream...
Think of the main things that it has going against it.

If their are true consequences and rewards for helping your seciety fight the great war.
Is it fun when your society is being obliterated?
Will it ever be your fault or will it be everyone elses?

If you make it so your society falters in somewhat less obstructive ways..
Then you Create artificial reasons to fight for territory when the vast majority of the people who play are only interested in personal gains.

If it doesn't really matter what you do..
Is it really RVR anymore or just WOW with some keeps..

if realm/territory/resource control was based entirely on pve, would it make a difference in those games? no.

TheCastle if you enter a game, you click on a server, you enter a room, you wait for the match to start, that's a match making system. a decent one would be the ability to click on the "enter the first available match", and an even better one would be "enter the first available match according to my ranking". geez you guys make things more complicated then it really is.

From hardcore to sheep to COD4 to map making to sports to LOTRO and Legolas, to RVR, society, and keeps.

Helluva Post Number 1 lol

If the game had great trash-talking AI, it might not.

Peter Jackson directed my post...

edit: keep the discussion going this thread is delectable
edit2: this thread is delectable .. have no clue why I said "keep it going" obviously its going to keep going lol...

I was thinking that you were talking about a system that matches people by personal skill.
Match making, you are saying that the game has a decent server list and you can click it and it functions thats match making?

But that is a retarded system by definition to be retarded would be to have something that is functional but doesn't think about anything beyond that. The ability to breath doesn't make me smart.


As you describe it ..

The most hardcore FPS PVP games in the history of gaming with the most serious player base I have ever experienced .. One time by chance I simply happened across a dude from Death Row, a top level competitive professional clan, the same one Thresh was the leader of many years ago when the CPL was starting, in 1 vs 1 tourney in quake world on dm6.
He shattered my soul it was disgusting.. and I was pretty good at the time to lol.

So my feelings are that unless the match making is pitting people vs equal skill against each other its not match making.
Why would you consider match making not to be in a retarded state if its most note worthy act is simple acquisition of client server architecture? My confusion stems from this assumption!

edit: as far as the point on the solid game play. I agree solid game play is important for both hardcore and casual players. But it doesn't necessarily bring them together, and for that matter it doesn't put them in a serious competitive environment either.

The question isnt weather or not we need solid game play. that's a given you always want that but rather how do you bring Sheep into a room filled with wolves and have them all stay friends after the massacre...

Match making in a competitive MMOG what would you describe that as? random encounters like quake world?

I don't quite see why the developers of street fighter/tekken and magic the gathering should rotfl at the idea of MMO, considering mmorpg combat lands somewhere in the middle between these two in terms of gameplay -- you have character equipped with number of skills, exact selection of skills can be to a degree customized. You use the skills of your character vs the ones opponent uses against you, the guy with hp bar depleted first loses. Beat-em up games put more stress on the player reflexes while card games put more stress on available amount of the skills to select from. but the core gameplay between these three... well it really ain't that different.

But perhaps i'm just missing your point here. In which case... what exactly were you trying to say?

That the pvp in those games is fun.

No, it's not. :oh_i_see:

srsly, opinions assholes and all that.

Well ok, true. But let's clarify it by saying that "the pvp is fun for people who like that sort of pvp". Now, this might sound like a tautology until you realise that paradoxically enough, what we find is that "pvp in pvp+ mmorpgs is not fun for those who enjoy that sort of pvp".

I'm likely still misreading it because i think given the context ('devs of magic the gathering and street fighter doing roflolol at mmorpg pvp') this doesn't actually mean anything. I mean, people who enjoy the beat-em up PvP aren't exactly the very same population group that enjoys the M:tG kind of PvP. And mmorpg kind of PvP (along with mmorpg gameplay in general) is just yet another type of PvP that appeals to yet another type of people. So unless there's also claim that devs of beat-em up games also go roflolol at the devs of M:tG and vice versa because their respective player bases likely don't find that other type of PvP fun, i really don't get how the justification that the laughter should be had is 'because that is fun and this is not'.  :uhrr:

I can only approximate as to what wuzzman's meaning is. For me, what he is saying is basically that any "pvp developer" from his non-mmo list would laugh at the contrived rubbish that pvp+ mmo players have to go through in order to have fun within that game-context. By extension, loling would also be directed at the developers who go hard-out (*cough* Mythic) to promote themselves as pvp+ and then fall flat on their face.

Ahh, in the sense of entry barriers being higher than in these other game types? OK, hopefully can get reply from wuzzman to either confirm or clarify, but yes could see that as valid distinction. Not sure if it's one worth laughing (like mentioned previously i think mmorpgs just weight differently the need for certain inherent skills in the player vs reqirement of invested time/effort... and it could be argued that e.g. M:tG games also have the investment and 'gear acquisition' requirements built into them) but certainly, it is a point just the same.

pretty much what I was getting at. Mmorpgs are behind PVP in general by a decade, its almost as if the developers of mmo's simply never played a competitive game in their life and was asked to shoe'horn it in because they were running out of pve to design.

tmp sure Magic the Gathering or any TCG for that matter requires a money investment, in some TCG's the bigger wallet > small wallet. But then again with Magic the Gathering, when you do learn the core gameplay and the finesse in deck building your chances of winning sky rockets. Your win/loss ratio is tied to your skill and your knowledge of the game and not upward power scaling which is again largely tied down to time/money spent in game, which you can't possible say for the majority of Mmorpgs. Especially when the majority of those mmo's focus on your "world pvp" mechanics (gank fest) and replicating lord of the ring battles (zergfest), in place of making a solid strategic game (99% of rpg battles are fun because they require strategy...), where you actually have to stop and THINK about how to beat a opponent with a brain and not just treat players like a fresh aggro-ed mob. In fact if WAR simply had large numbers of NPC's seige/defend keeps instead of players, I don't think the playerbase would have told the difference.

Yes TheCastle a decent match making system has pits players of equal skill against each other. If Fury had that much maybe it wouldn't have died...wait if Fury had a **** tutorial it wouldn't have died nearly as quickly and would have at least kept enough players for their match making system to actually work  :awesome_for_real:. But until all mmo's come with big green button at the right hand corner of the screen called "ENTER FIRST AVAILABLE PVP MATCH NOW!!!", then for now, that counts as a match making system.

This thread is now Vault quality.

If you sit back and look at everything with out a microscope for a second.

Increasing the skill requirements in a game will reduce your potential customers.
Joe the plumber can play WOW.

You can look at street fighter and Tekkan and say its perfect in your opinion, but basing your game around tougher smarter opponents means less people are going to continue playing.

I believe at the heart of it all that is the problem with PVP based MMO design.

Sorry, this isn't correct.  You can have very high skill requirements in games as long as a learning curve exists within the game to bring the less skilled player up to a higher level of ability. 

Examples: FPS, Guitar hero, Rock band, etc. 

You can demand plenty of skill from your playerbase as long as a) you provide a fun mechanism of training players and b) you don't demand so much out of the gate that you immediately turn your players off.  WoW succeeds here as it appears easy in the beginning but gets quite complex in the endgame, particularly in the arena and raiding subgames. 

I agree with your points in general.
Keep in mind that the bar for "success" is a bit unrealistic in this thread. Using WOW as an example for everything.

My understanding is that the vast majority of people who play WOW are not end game raiders.
Likewise the further up the totem pole you go the numbers of people who play that content drops.
The most hardcore content has the fewest people while the most casual content has the most.

If this is true then where would PVP fit into the totem pole?

looking at your examples

FPS: are there any PVP first person shooters that have as many players as WOW right now? Halo maybe? The largest I recall I have ever seen a multiplayer FPS get was around 500k players. About where Warhammer is right now right?

Guitar Hero: Very large player base as far as PVE content. If the game was PVP only do you think it would be as big as it is now?
Lets even take this into the casual market for a moment.
If bejeweled was PVP only would it still have such a large player base?

Even with proper match making. Hell give each example superb match making.
I cant think of an example right now where skewing a game, with a huge player base, for PVP or large scale RVR would at least maintain the same number of people playing. And in most cases it ends up being simply because the second you play human opponents is the second you drop any semblance of casual interaction. I think at the very least the bar for success on a PVP game needs to be much lower.

A buddy of mine had a funny quote
"The only time PVP can ever be casual is when I am 10 levels over the other guy."

You can't take Bejeweled and 'make it PVP'

You can't take Guitar Hero and 'make it PVP'


You are just like the developers that don't plan enough into the PVP in their games and try to 'make it PVP' at the last minute. How many people you think play COD4, CS, Halo, TF2 vrs MMOs (or even just WoW) in the US?

The majority of these players are casual as well. Only a very 'elite' small percentage get into real tourneys, the rest frag or join their buddies for some VOIP killin fun.

Castle: If you want to talk about pvp, you'll have to qualify the market.  In the west, pvp games beyond fps are niche.  In the east, games with a pvp component are still quite popular.  I'm a lot less versed in what makes games successful in non-western markets, so I'll leave that discussion to someone that actually can speak intelligently to it.  As I said earlier in this thread: players don't mind losing in pvp games as long as the losing is fun and not too penal.  I'll stand by that with the success of fps games in the west.  

Since the card games operate on business model where their profit comes from getting people to continually buy new card packs, doesn't this introduce issue of power creep with newly introduced sets? While yes, your chances of winning increase when you learn the gameplay, literally the same thing can be said about the mmorpg -- on comparable level of characters' power it's the players understanding of the 'core gameplay and the finesse' that determines the outcome.

I really don't see that much difference here, tbh. Right now TCGs require player to spend lot of money in order to increase their odds to win, while mmorpg's put stress on the time requirement. As the mmorpg's introduce increasing RMT element as alternative for people who cannot spend that time, the difference between the two narrows even further. You might need to spend few hundreds to get gear for the character so they become competitive, but then they *are* competitive and the success depends on your own ability to play and react to your opponent(s)

We run into personal preferences area here. Must say my tastes differ from yours -- i find pre-arranged matches boring to the point of tears and so can't really get into RTS genre (there's also lack of the hands-on component in these but that's another story) It is odd you talk about having to think about how to beat the opponent as part of 'solid strategic game', yet fail to recognize that to succesfully set up situation where you can "gank" the opponent rather than get ganked yourself... in continually changing environment, requires exactly that. Being able to outwit the opponent to the point where you place yourself in favoured situation before the conflict even starts, that's strategic core of real world conflicts. This doesn't change when these conflicts are moved onto virtual plane. And obviously this model really doesn't have much room for the match-making service, since such match-making would pretty much defeat the very strategic element to it.

Does it mean the pre-arranged 'give me a foozle to duel with... now' model is somehow inferior? Of course not, it just sheds some of the tactical element and puts focus on the rest. It'll appeal to some people more, but i'd never say these extra artificial limitations are something that makes it a sole experience  of 'solid strategic game that requires people to THINK'.

Yeah I see what you mean.
However in this discussion even people who are planning around the PVP from the inception of the project are not quite getting it right. I suppose we wont really know how Warhammer will do until it has some more time to grow. But even in the case of Warhammer I feel a little like they added plenty of options into the game to fall back on just in case the RVR didn't work. It ended up backfiring a bit when alternate options turned out to be more rewarding because of a couple bad calls but they didn't kill the game yet imho.

More planning isn't necessarily going to solve the problem here.
We are left with design Darwinism or the possible chance someone with the capabilities simply happens across a new formula that blows the floodgates wide open. That is how I feel emotionally about this right now.

Anyway I need to do some research to see just how big the playerbase for the PVP content is for Cod4, TF2 ect.
Whats the biggest PVP game right now?
I suppose I am not really qualified to speak on this if I don't even know that hehe..

one thing I haven't seen mentioned is kinds of participation.  Skill/Wolves vs. Casual/Sheep players should also be considered in non-combat professions.  E.g. crafting, exploring.

Some of the most fun I had in SWG was crafting great weapons and buffs, since the actual PvP was pretty thin.  While some guilds had high-end (skilled) crafters, a lot of the best crafters opted to be independent.  They might still feed their preferred faction and guild, but they got better reputations and business by being a force unto themselves.  I am not exaggerating.  Now, I don't understand why more depth couldn't be put into crafting in other mmo's such that it had a pvp element instead of just a feeder system into combat PvP.  It's probably because most mmo's control itemization heavily.  But getting crafters to compete against one another (e.g. for recipes, resources, sales location, contracts) for reputation and skill would be a welcome dimension for me at least.  Right now, crafting in most games is just a guild function and it can be more.

An other option is exploring.  I thought the exploring skill in Eve 1+year ago was supposed to be a new navigating/discovery kind of skill. Did that ever happen?  Was there any mini-game or depth to opening new areas or was it just a guild spying game?

It's called Puzzle Quest. And it has been released on every major console and handheld and has sold incredibly well and I would not be shocked if it got released for iPhones and Android handsets.

When trying to argue a point, it's really best if you know more about the market then what you see on the frontpage of AOL Games.

DAMN YOU SCHILD.


Yeah, I was gonna post the Puzzle Quest thing.  Lol @ Slayerik.

Noob.

Damnit. Shitfuck. Cocklick.

Well, whatever. I'll stick to my other points though, and for the record I have never been a console guy. I own a Wii so my wife could play rock band and bowling.

Yes, you use probes to scan for these exploration sites. Some are hacking sites, other archeology sites, some are combat Complexes , and last are hidden asteroid belts. All of these are profitable, but time consuming. The best money is in 0.0, and sheep do go out to 0.0 for this purpose. Luckily for them, they are in Covert Op ships that are near impossible to kill.

Out standing
At first glance this is .. PVP bejeweled.


look I don't want to pretend that I know everything. That I am some kind of forum demigod.
But I can make the same point for this game that I did with bejeweled right?

Imagine if puzzle quest focused on PVP instead of PVE?

Actually I goofed up plain and simple.
Too much speculation and not enough facts.

Sorry

Puzzle Pirates also has PvP !

omg lol..
I was just checking that game out to see if it did.
Seems though that its like WOW PVE first with PVP tacked on.
But like I said I don't know for certain..

What is a Vault Quality thread? lol...

You are tripping on cat urine if you think Puzzle Pirates is in anyway simular to WoW.

Go HERE (http://vnboards.ign.com/) and read a thread from any forum you choose.  I take no responsibility for lost brain cells. 

WOW == PVE first PVP second
I take no responsibility, it certainly was not intended, for the thought that puzzle pirates == World of Warcraft..

Well sorry guys! :uhrr:

exiting stage left haha!

Are Dev's Bad?
Depends on the devs!

do MMO PVP Games Not Work?
Trying to shoe horn ideas from a different type of game into your own game is the problem.
Though I am too cynical to buy into the idea that with a PVP game you will have nearly as high of a player base threshold when compared to game based around the idea of PVE first and PVP second. Selling your game around PVP is always going to cause people to get stage fright.

Death in PVE and PVP will never be a problem if:
1. You know why you died
2. You felt it was your fault you died (Not cheated)
3. Punishment doesn't feel too harsh

I suppose that's about it!
later everyone! :awesome_for_real:

I'm still not sure how you can provide PvP incentives outside of a match summary screen without breaking the game. I played CS and TF2 for quite a while and enjoyed it. I wasn't uber, or even that good, but I had my moments of glory and when I lost I knew it was only because I'd been outplayed. This is partly why hacking is so poisonous to the online competitive games. Not so much because the cheater wins, there's no permanent rewards anyway, but because it makes the loser wonder if they really lost fairly. If you give incentives to the winners of these games, whether territory or gear, then I know going into the game that the battle is explicitly not fair and a lost on my part may represent widening that divide. This reduces participation rates and can enter a negative cycle where increased competition is constantly winnowing out the less skilled / advantaged. WoW arena's are probably at this point which is why they've had to tap the less competitive battlegrounds to keep the system working.

The PvE cost is substantial too. Gameplay mechanics that would be fun in PvE are veto'd because PvP balance is so delicate.

Frankly competitive PvP should be an FPS style environment. Small and balanced numbers, classes, gear and environment and no grind before you are allowed to compete. This is basically what Blizzard did with the tournament servers I believe? Broader MMO PvP should only be for fun and decorative rewards because it won't be balanced. And the people who like it the most tend to be those who revel and exploit that imbalance.

One good idea that Fury had is that, at the end of the match, both winners and losers received loot for playing and got to roll on a chance to get other loot. Winners did get slightly better loot than losers, but everybody got something.

Agreed on the cheating bit: a PvP game you can cheat at and get away with it is one that isn't going to draw the crowds for very long.

Which is wrong. You shouldn't get rewarded for losing. Only someone who never wins could be happy about that.

I was in some club during high school. Every year the club would attend a national competition. I was competing in some lame technology challenge event. I was given instructions, rules, and a list of materials. Using those I had to create a device that could accomplish a task. In the end mine was the only working device at the competition. The others completely failed. They decided that the rules had been too tough, or they hadn't given everyone adequate time to complete the task. So they decided to keep my fucking winners trophy, and give everyone a participation certificate instead. When my turn came up I told them to shove the certificate up their asses, and to give me my first place trophy. I told them it wasn't my fault the other participants were retards. I was booted out of that club, and not allowed to rejoin the next year. I might not have gotten my trophy, but at least I didn't feel like one of the losers as I was escorted out.

No.

These games are about invested time first, achievement second. Power disparity comes from that, in that order. So the people who can always win will be the only people able to advance?

Wrong. The best games (and those most successful, at least in the western markets) ensure that everyone gets something for their time. The winners merely get a lot more, but the losers don't go home emptyhanded.

I'm sorry your science fair epeen wasn't stroked well enough or whatever, but the games that don't reward the losers in some form are either extremely niche, an entire market unto themselves, or closed.

Now, lets take that experience (not yours, but the losers), and repeat it 1000 times.  On the 1001st time, do you really  think losers will not only want to participate, but pay a monthly fee?

Hell no.  They will just play some other game.  This is the fundamental problem with PvP in persitant worlds:

Slog's PvP basic rules:
-20% of the players will always beat the other 80% for a majority of the time.   
-This ratio is fixed
-Players will not pay a monthly fee to keep losing


WoW solved this by making PvP meaningless.  Shadowbane solved this by watching their players leave.  UO solved this making PvP optional. Fury never solved it.  Planetside made winning and losing meaningless.  And so on.

I'm actually trying to work out exactly who PK'd who here. :grin:

It was right to give everyone a certificate of participation. It wasn't right to penalise the winner in that scenario.

Unless the winner told them to shove the certificate up their asses, and to give [them their] first place trophy and then proceeded to them say it wasn't [their] fault the other participants were retards.

That might have skewed their opinion of the one who actually had anything at all that function  :grin:

Ironically, I imagine the "losers" were thinking the same thing about you.  Rewarding for participation isn't an evil, you know.  The goal of PvP in a game isn't to determine who is the best player of all time and immortalize it, it's to provide an entertaining experience for your consumers. 

Probably, but i cannot help but sympathize with the sentiment. After all, maybe minus the window dressing he was pretty much spot on :grin:

If the story went as LC indicated, if he completed the set task, he deserved the reward. That was the 'penalising the winner' situation I was talking about.

But yeah, the rest of it probably didn't help his case to get that trophy.

I think LC's story is a great metaphor.  The organizers were afraid of the long term consequences if they didn't reward everyone involved.  There might not have been any future events if they didn't encourage participation.

Not enough details and those we have come from an biased source. Did he create two cans on the end of a wire while others were trying cold fusion? Was it the local competition to send a single competitor to Nationals (which given what he said he had said at the time, I could easily see the school not thinking him the best representative  :awesome_for_real:)? Being a sore winner can hold ya back as much as being a sore loser.

However, there is definitely something to be said for people not feeling challenged when they see everyone getting an award. That part concerns me even in nowadays kids sports. Everyone gets a trophy no matter how could anyone on the team did. I definitely agree with the idea of everyone getting something. But if we don't recognize nor reward individual achievement, then that doesn't compel people to try their own thing.

Part of what's wrong in the world today. I'd be fuckin' livid if I were LC, too.

Don't compete if you are afraid to lose. Just like field day for kids these days...I hear everyone gets ribbons. Sure, it's nice for fat Bobby but in the end it's teaching bad precedents to kids. You see, in the real world noone gives a fuck and you don't get points for trying and failing. Why teach bullshit? Why celebrate mediocrity?

I was never particularly special at any sport, wasn't overly good at school. I never applied myself to either though, but I never had any illusions. I knew that the guys that kicked ass in sports and got 4.0s would have an advantage in the next phase in my life. Competition is not a bad thing. I chose to smoke weed, drink, get laid, and play MMOs instead.

Back to MMOs, I'm not big on rewarding losers. But I'm a realist dick so whatever.

PvP can be done in MMOs just like sports are currently.

People participate in basketball and win NPA championships along with everything in-between (pickup, YMCA, HS, college, D-Level, Euro, NPA) for example.  People find their level of competing, even if it just against themselves\nature and not other people, and make a system for it.  MMOs have just not gone that deep yet and provided that structure.  They current seem to cover participation and the top winners but nothing in-between.

I am still waiting for a MMO to build a fantasy system or betting system based on players within the game played by players of that game to help with this issue.

I thought WoW implemented arena battles this way.  What they found is exactly the same thing we see in competitive sport; people gaming the system and installing ringers. 

If you want to stratify your playerbase for better competition, you need to make a very solid and transparent means of stratification. 

Every sport has a big old reset button:  Someone scores the most runs after a time limit, crossed the finish line after so many miles, blah blah blah.

Reset buttons break immersion in MMORPGs. 

Is it a reset button?

Past compeditions\events turn into traditions and history.  That is adding content to the game.

The upcoming ones turn into new opportunities.  Seem the "reset button" works just fine for humans since sports were created and it would work in MMO.  Olympics\World Cup resets every four years and that is more or less a would wide event.  No reason to not copy it.  It works.  Not much difference between a digitial and physical court as you still need people to show up and compete in a given time frame.  It is good to see scheduling tools start to show up in MMOs as it is a step in the right direction of control teh "reset button".

Everyone had to build their device to do the same task. I believe 2 competitors from each school were allowed. I was the only person from my school. The next year (and year after that) nobody from my school participated.

They never told me beforehand that I wouldn't be getting anything for winning. They just sprung it on me during the award ceremony. They never even mentioned that I had created the only working device. The altercation came after that as they were wrapping up the event. They told me that I didn't really deserve anything since I hadn't actually competed with anyone else.

:awesome_for_real:

Yes. it's a reset button. And yes, it works great for non persistant events.  See Quake.  Resets every round.

In that context, yea, that sucks. They should have been clearer. I also wonder if the reasons yours was the only one to work is because everyone else there was no reward nor penalty so couldn't be arsed to bother getting theirs to work.


Serious question: how does that matter anymore? I think it's long since been proven that the primary motivation to continue playing after the first few months has less to do with escaping into an immersive fantastical world and more because you're caught on the rails of playing with friends while you continue advancing your holdings/abilities.

As long as the character/holdings aren't reset, people seem to have acclimated quite well to resets.

I think this is a disservice to the losers too.  What is there to look up to and strive for if you lose but you get the same prize as everyone, including the clear winner?

I don't know if LC's story is true, false, biased, or missing information, but in general, you should get something for trying, but you should get something a LOT cooler for winning.  Otherwise there is no incentive to try for it and nothing special if you do put out the effort.

So lets say you give the winners something meaningfull, like and Axe of Destruction that's just a little better than any existing weapon.  You just made it MORE likely that the winners will continue to win, as they have better equipment.

So then you decide to give the winners gold stars or some other token.  The winners then say "PvP is meaninless!! These awards suck". 

It doesn't matter when you drop items on death. Just saying...

Gives you a short term advantage.

The 1st - 3rd place trophies for my event were sitting there on the award table. They just skipped over them when they handed out the trophies.

Taking a step back, does it really matter if the prize is something to let you do the original task better?

In LC's example, the Science Fair prize wasn't a personal session with Stephen Hawking.  It was a trophy.  Everyone would have oohed and ahhed over the trophy and the losers would have redoubled their efforts to win it next year.  But if it were the personal science lesson with the smartest scientist alive, he would have had an even greater advantage next year.

In MMOGs we give the personal lesson. Why aren't people competing for some "meaningful" reward system that's parallel to the system of items or whatever with which the fighting is done?  And I don't mean trophies.  The parallel reward system would have to be THE point of the game, not some side achievement.

EVE is a little like that.  You can make lots of money running missions in Empire, but people still fight over the resources in 0.0.

What you guys seem to want is a game of monopoly in which the bank gives out infinite $2000 loans to anyone that goes bankrupt. The whole philosophy is wrong because eventually everyone gets bored and never wants to play again.

Zombies Vs Zombies

 

Actually, I'm from the school that thinks PvP doesn't work in MMOs.  That being said, I haven't played Eve yet, so I'm not sure whay that works.

I like this topic too much to leave... Ill put forth great effort to not make vault quality posts.

Anyway what about this kind of system...
There are only so many of each type of item that can be given out based on performance every month.
Every month the system is reset.
Combine that with a system that allows you to check the status of each of these items.
Who has it currently and its history dating as far back as when the game was first released.

Then on top of that you give out simple cosmetic rewards to people based on achievements.

There are only so many Omega blaze Bastard swords of destruction with insanely good stats that can be handed out each month. Once you have earned one once you go down in history as being the 18nt person to ever own one and a medal that proves it. You use the sword for a couple weeks and pwn the hell out of people before it comes time for everything to reset.

I'm interested in this topic.

After skimming the last page, it seems to have turned into a discussion about ESports.

That, I'm not interested in.

Someone update me.

Note, winning a monopoly game doesn't actually reward the player with anything but maybe longer e-peen. Each new game everyone starts again from the same (and shared) power level... something completely opposite to the 'persistent growth' model used by MMOs. In short, not sure this analogy works. The FPS matches are perhaps closer here, and quite a few of them do actually allow player to respawn after death, essentially giving them these loans to keep going.... without much of ill consequences, as they use different ways to determine final winner(s)

There's too wide a variety in the definitions for "meaningfulness" in PvP.

• On one extreme, COD4 is just fine. You gain XP and levels and new abilities and access to new weapons and other foozles. You do this in battles though that have no persistence.
• On the other extreme is Eve where you roll over your opponents holdings, after having spent weeks planning, months/years building, and days and hours coordinating battle in the world's largest game of Risk.

Personal achievements only vs personal and cumulative group reward. First I think people need to decide what matters to them most. Is it winning to achieve (typical MMO PvE mentality)? Is it winning to help the group get bigger through more resources (Eve, SB)?

Once you decide that then it becomes easier to discuss in sub-groups "best" systems.

I personally like Eve's the best. If they could make space flight a statistically-affected game of Freespace 2 with all else being the same, I'd probably have that as my forever fallback game rather than WoW. I could always find a niche in Eve even as part of large-ish Corporations/Alliances that had other parts doing crazy things. I'm always just driven away by the sheer boredom of the play part. I never felt rich enough to blow through my own ships in battle nor social enough to feel confident borrowing tackler after tackler while I blowed them up too through lack of skill.

Dude. Do you think pro football players give their paycheks back if they don't make it to the superbowl?

See http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15037.0 .  Where we are right now, tacklers are free for the taking, no questions asked.  And the pilots are valued too.

But enough shameless promotion  :awesome_for_real: back to the topic, I would like to reiterate that ESports and persistent MMOG PvP are two totally different animals and should be treated that way.  I still see a lot of people here conflating them.

I think there are a few qualifications for persistent PvP to work:
1- some sort of drop on death, either full or a partial kind that hurts (like AC's drop items).  If death does not hurt, ESports ensue.
2- gear should only enter the equation as a slight bump in effectiveness. You should be able to risk as much as you want to for an increase in your effectiveness, but the risk should equal the reward.  This counterbalances #1 and keeps it from being a game breaker.
3- there has to be a safe place to retreat to if you're totally beaten to avoid the Shadowbane effect.

No, but does everyone get a ring, including the teams eliminated early?

You know how much winning they had to do to get to that level? They in no way tried, failed, and were rewarded. If their skill level doesn't stay at the top when in the pros, they are replaced by one of hundreds coming from college. That's a stupid example and you know it.

Many football players salaries also reward bonuses for 80 catches, or 1000 yards, 100 tackles, etc.

Anyway, yeah.

... except it is a game of Monopoly with several hundred thousand players who pay you money to keep playing and not everyone starts at the same time.

Wanting to keep players playing vs players allegedly wanting a 'meaningful' experience (is it meaningful if you get ganked in the first five minutes of a persistent event and have to spend the rest of the session watching others play?) that they can 'win' is a basic disconnect with this kind of discussion about MMO PvP. At minimum, PvP shouldn't drive players away from the game for either winning or losing.

I'd like to add two names to the thread:

1. Shattered Galaxy. MMORTS, single shard (for all intents and purposes), 3 factions. Map was divided in provinces, where a limited amount of players could zone into - you also gained different spawn points depending on where you zoned from, so map control was important. You leveled as you units leveled, however most of the game was played at cap. The cool thing was regiments - the game's guild equivalent - were encouraged to transfer to whatever faction was least powerful, so the balance of power shifted often. They also reset everyone to lvl 1 once every few months, while making sure to give the people who participated in the reincarnation extra character points - so the veterans were rewarded, but not massively so.

2. DotA. Don't laugh, I think it's a very interesting case of PvEvP design with quick and gratifying character progression. Not persistent PvP by any means, but it was damn addictive for a mod - much like CS. It also had a lot of replayability with loads of characters to choose from, and relatively balanced abilities.

You guys should take note of some of the major differences and similarities between real life sports and competitive games.

In Football the people who play and are known are much fewer in number compared to the vast ocean of spectators.
In WOW there are pretty much zero spectators and everyone is trying to compete with each other in a vast sea of faces for the same prizes.
That is a pretty huge difference.

Furthermore I am willing to bet that a pretty significant fraction of people that fill each stadium have never even played football themselves to any serious degree. I don't believe that playing a quick game of football with your friends on a Saturday morning is at all comparable to playing some scenarios in War. Playing Football with your friends on a Saturday morning is more comparable to playing some quake dm with your friends.

And on another note:
Time investment for superior gear is actually similar to the time investment it takes to get in shape and learn how to play a real sport competitively. If you think you can just wake up one day and decide you can play professional football or even run a 3 minute mile you will possibly have about the same chances of success as you would attempting to beat someone who is well geared and 10+ levels over you in 1 vs 1. Actually I would think you would have almost zero chance of competing at all under those circumstances.

So I do think it is somewhat hard to say gaining better gear and tweaking out your toon is not comparable to training hard for a sport in real life. Its also similar in the respect that most people at tip top shape perform about the same depending on how they trained. Exactly like when you compete against others in a game when everyone has the best gear available.

I suppose the only defining difference in this case would be that over time gear continues to get better and better because of the nature of the mmog. Well I suppose in that same respect the best professional basketball team from now would also stomp the best basketball team from 20 years ago. Escalation is an observable phenomenon in real life sports why not games too?

So in summary, 'life ain't fair....get grinding fuckers?'

four days without the internet and finally I get a post like this. I like to address your first claim then the second.

1. The yu-gi-oh deck I made 4 years ago with 40 bucks, is as competitive now against players of equal skill who spent 3 times as much on a single deck as it was back when I started getting good at the game. A good TCG provides options, not absolute power creep each expansion. Contrast that to an mmorpg, where levels provide absolute power creep, and where skill doesn't budge that fact at all unless the higher leve/gearl player is a retard and the lower level/gear player is bring his A++ game.

2. You pretty much describe the difference between boxing/mma and street fighting. People pay to watch boxing/mma, people only bet on street fights they don't pay to see them. One is competition and is done out of the spirit of competition, the other is just violence. Sure I can bring a gun to a knife fight and call myself the smarter one for "setting up the situation in my favor". But does that make what me the better fighter? I'll say no. Ganking a player (talking in mmorpg terms) is ok because they should be alert at all times and thus the act of managing to gank him proves you are of the superior intellect. Which may be true, but it is very much false to think that your actually competed with the player who you noob-whacked to the stratosphere. All you did was commit an act of violence, regardless of the reason, all you did was kill a player who for the most part had no intentions on fighting you, or even worse has no chance of winning. PK is different from PVP, one is wolf vs sheep while the other is fighter vs fighter. You seem to enjoy PK, you consider it strategic, and I can't argue with you if you want to commit to that point. But point out that PK, RVR, sandbox games don't even require a balance game to actually function. For example killing lower level players is ok because its up to the lower level player to figure out how to run away or play perfectly in order to beat his much stronger aggressor. It doesn't matter if there is a level/gear treadmill because its just another part of "setting up the situation in your favor". Thus grind helps PK because PK'ers don't want competition, just a kill count. Tell me what is the difference between killing a player vs killing a monster in the world pvp/"win or lose your land" games?

The difference, in Eve anyways, is sometimes your enemies will set up 'bait ships'. You think you are scoring an easy kill, the moment you commit and perform an act of aggression (thus removing your escape via gate)  the wolves that set you up rip you to shreds. Happened to me before. Happened to a couple gangs I've been in as well. Tactics. Wolf in sheep's clothing FTW :)

But yeah, in general sheep will be sheep.

One of the biggest goals for any designer/developer is to make the "Get grinding fuckers" part more palatable right?

If you look at the more successful formulas in game design. Especially in recent years this is more noticeable.
We implore design methods to make things seem less repetitive.

Questing for xp was a huge step forward for WOW compared to grinding mobs for example.
And to some extent I would not be shocked if the "Life isn't fair" mentality continues to gain in some popularity over the years. What with the care bear everyone wins mentality you see spoon fed to people by most devs these days. Its a knee jerk reaction to the feeling of non progression people complain about, a bandied, not the end all be all solution to keep the largest audience possible.

if you don't grind pve your a care bear....I see the logic, I smell the fail

Well there is one problem with this.
And what Slayerik mentioned that I suppose I didn't convey very well.

Let me try again.
If something doesn't feel like grind it isn't grind. You incorporate proper flow techniques into the gaming experience. You convey times when the player changes the flow of the game.
Gind is a beast that if dealt with correctly is always lurking just out of sight. Devs have a vast toolset at their disposal to deal with this beast. Its an entirely different topic even.

In short, saying
"life ain't fair....get grinding fuckers?"
Is a non issue.

Whats more important is how people feel when they play the game.

Let me ask you.
What do you feel is grind?

grind is grind. grind is the amount of time it takes to reach the games last power level. You can not disguise grind, grind IS grind, it is not a feeling; its a quantifiable period of time between the lowest level and the highest level. Its not up to the Devs to make the grind feel less grindy, because the only way for you not to feel the grind, is if you didn't have grind in the first place.Trying to placebo factor your gameplay only increases burn out and decreases retention. It is up to smart Devs to remove the grind altogether or stop calling yourself a pvp focused game. Call it PK, say you have dedicated HARDCORE servers, but don't bother trying sell your boot-leged version of PvP fresh out of the mmo-factory, because you will fall flat on your face.

Blizzard is happy when new designers attempt to "disguise" the grind of their game. Why? Because they know you can't "hide" grind, because it is a quantifiable period of time. Players feel it, no matter how well you attempt to disguise it there is only a short period of time a new game has to convince players that their God mode WoW accounts that they spent the last year earning isn't nearly as fun as being a nobody in your game.  Why would fully decked out players in WoW want to go back to the time when they had no high level alts and pretty much was a low leveled nobody? People try new games, find that they are grindy as hell and go back to their God mode WoW accounts. Plain and simple, you cannot disguise grind.

The defining aspect of the genre is The Grind.

However, it definitely is up to the developers to try and hide it as best they can.

How they do so is entirely up to them. But the only real difference between The Grind and everything else you don't get immediately is how much the player enjoys it. I'll say again, everything you don't get immediately is a grind. Either you grind to get it, you grind to keep it, or you grind to use it.

Rating, gear, advancement, storylines, status, titles, mounts, quests, attunements, reputation, influence, wards, commemorative 9/11 plates, karma, experience, territory. All of it. It's all part of The Grind. Let's not kid ourselves.

Is this in direct opposition to the pick-up-and-go PVP game? As it's been presented to us today- yes.

Warcraft has the double advantage of disguising the grind well, to new players, and representing as the old dog to semi-veteran players who may be loathe to uproot themselves and start anew. The developer of new game X can preach all he want about how WoW has poisoned or tainted the minds of MMO players. Essentially, he'll be correct. They've become poisoned by quality, polish, companionship, and complacency at this point. It's a mighty tall mountain for any company to overcome.

That's my point, at least.

Did you feel that it was a grind to play through Zelda?
Would you consider doing a series of completely unique events a grind?
Do you realize that if Warhammer simply had its level cap at 80 people would have felt they progressed faster even though it was at the same rate?

Do you see doing a series of interesting solo quests to gain a few levels to be less of a grind than killing 250 blue crabs over the course of 4 hours in a group of 6 people that took 45 minutes to get to a camp?

I believe that something can only be considered a grind at the moment that repetition becomes apparent to the player in a negative light.
This is usually around the time when the player realizes that he would lose nothing as far as his playing experience to simply be able to skip everything and achieve his next goal now rather than later.
If you define grind by what you are saying then any game where it does not end the second you start the game immediately is defined as a grind.

Too me that seems rather strange use for the term.
Why not at this point simply replace the word game with the word grind?
Can you give me one game that is not a grind by this definition?

So the only way not to have a grind is to start off at the max / last power level. Sorry, but that's wrong.

The grind is the period where the character advancement mechanism becomes something that is unfun to the player. It is highly subjective and can vary amongst groups of players - see the discussions regarding WAR's scenarios and the way they advance character development - but the aim is to minimise the grind, and therefore the burnout, among your target audience.

The grind can set in at max level too - after all, if you've got everything and all that is left is to try and get rare items via play, things can get repetitive / unfun on that character fairly quickly if the system isn't well managed.

No. Grind is a state of mind about the path to the end of the game. If you're focused on getting to that last level then a) you were pre-convinced something there was better than everything before it; and, b) you don't care about anything before it so are only looking for the fastest/efficient path through what you otherwise deem as an annoying roadblock.

That's how you arrive at the feeling of "grind". This is not hardcoded in the game.

• You could call COD4 a grind to 55. The players might change but the game is the exact same maps over and over and let's face it you're only really doing two or three things, and those are mere variants of the same activity (shoot, throw grenade, place mortar).
• You could call Fallout 3 a grind to 20. You could easily find the single most efficient path to the end of the game.

WoW improved things slightly at first when they (and EQ2) rewarded much more for XP from quests than XP from being a sociopath ;-) But it's still a VERY grindy game, particularly after you hit the level cap. By then players become accustomed to easy achievement that is no longer as easy to find. So they roll and alt and quest-grind through 1-70, or they grind at the cap (raid, arena, faction). But both results are because the reward is more important than the path.

Ergo, state of mind.

It is also difference between sport and war. One of them involves violence yes, but both are competition -- in case of war the competition just focuses on being the last one still standing. And yes, people don't pay to watch wars, but this doesn't make them any less "PvP".

A lot of convenient generalizations here, and lot of it false. Fights in open-world environment will frequently enough involve two 'wolves' as you put it fighting each other, and both of them looking for that fight. No different from two players 'competing' in match of e-sport, just with extra layer of tactics (preparation, ambush, whathaveyou) around the conflict itself. And 'commiting acts of violence'? As opposed to what, people putting bullets in each other's heads and blowing them up with grenades in match of Counterstrike?

This can be true, and note that unregulated nature of PvP in sandbox game also allows the players to balance it out on their own -- a group of weaker players can take on few that'd be individually stronger. The opposite is of course also possible; it's part of the open-ended nature of such setup, lack of predictability and thus more focus on flexible tactics... again making the whole thing more akin real warfare rather than sport.

That's debatable -- if the game has grind it can turn off the players, thus reducing number of participants. Which reduces opportunities to kill which would --by your own logic, which i don't quite agree with btw-- make the game less interesting for players who want 'just the kill count'.

Potential short- and long-term consequences. When you kill an NPC, there is no possibility this NPC is just a part of ambush that may put *you* in disadvantaged situation. There is also no possibility for the killed NPC to show up together with hundred others on doorstep of your HQ two weeks (or months) down the road.

The difference is, NPCs have no intelligence and no politics. Players generally do, and the more they utilize them the more interesting the game becomes.

 :roll:

I see 4 people saying exactly the same thing; As long as the grind is fun there is no grind. Which I agree is a cute little definition for a PvE game but your going to fall on your face applying that definition to a PvP game, behold WAR and AoC. Especially AoC, where dieing over and over again due to level indifference pretty much made players log off and never come back. Even worse AoC felt it was an exceptional good idea revolve sieges around a ton of grind. Or EvE, where you need to hold an account for several months before even dreaming of being more then target practice and nameless fodder. Was the grind from 1-80 in AoC reasonable? Sure, but that's assuming your playing AoC for pve, if your on a pvp server your just sheep. Was the grind to 1-40 in WAR reasonable? Sure, but that is assuming that you don't mind playing scenarios until your brain leeks out of the corner of your ears. Then you can play PQ's until you start wonder why WAR didn't spend more money developing the pve game. Of course it's ok if the sole reason you play WAR is to noobwhack mobs and not be a serious contender in tier 4 RvR as quickly as possible. Is EvE grind reasonable? Of course it is, until you lose your first non-cheap ship. I can go down the list of mmo's that if they only had a real definition of grind and not the "its ok as long as we hide it really well" that their PvP wouldn't be the laughing stock of gaming.

tmp, all that you mention an npc's can't do, they can. You can easily program NPC invasion armies and gank squads with current technology. Hell you don't even need decent AI. A game revolving around PK puts little difference between players and simple AI.

Easier said than done, and proof is in the pudding -- you show me the game that has NPCs operate on level of player-made politics in EVE and i'll concede the point.

But note, using this very logic the e-sport games are absolutely no different. AI can be "easily" made to play any 'competition' games as good as regular or even the best players. What is a difference between beating Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue?

This.  And the rest of tmp's post.

This is why I say (again) that it's so key to note the difference between esports and open PvP.  Chess is a great game, classic even, the most classic.  But it's a sport, because it has no resemblance to real life.  The sides are balanced, the game board is known and the rules rigidly define what you can do in a particular engagement.

Open PVP games are about "simulating", with some greater or lesser degree of realism, an environment to interact, in a friendly way or not, with other heavily armed players, usually in the context of some political system.  The political system can be just agreed upon by the players or actually enforced by game mechanics.

Inside of that context, a particular encounter can be fair or unfair, and the existence of a grind or other advancement mechanism is only important for the effect it has on the experience as a whole.  The important part is the overall effect and the emergent behavior observed and experienced by the players.

TLDR version: open PvP games are about thinking outside the box (much like real life) and esports are about finding more ways to do things or honing the skills to do them inside a given box.

Gary is a thinking human with strength you need to avoid and weakness you need to exploit. An AI can easily be designed to automatically noobstomp any player or make obvious mistakes over and over again, would that be fun? no, the value of competing against players because they have weakness you can exploit and strength you need to learn to deal with. And those strength and weakness change. An AI can't simulate that. An AI can simulate the "war" feeling you expect in world pvp games, they can be as retarded as you like or can show up in vast mobs at your cities and towns by simple setting the spawn rate or even the mob path direction to cross from city to city. Tabula Rasa city siege system is completely NPC generated. You don't need players to simulate the "war" feeling and you don't need Deep Blue to accomplish either.

also Eve works because of its annoy death penalty which totally kills the game for 70% of potential players, but works on the virtue that it simulates "causalities", which is essential for a "realistic pvp" as you seem to consider PK. PK without a punishing death penality is simple a zerg. For example claiming a territory in EvE is not a matter of waking up on the other sides off peak hours and commencing the zerg, attempting to play ring around the rosy with stations don't work because player death matters to much.

Oh, you're talking only about MMOs billed as PvP? Yea, I definitely agree. If you're an MMO and have PvP, unless you're Planetside there's definitely a grind. It's still based on the player's state of mind; however, it is the fault of the developers because if they first make players PvE before PvPing, or compel them to pvE because that's where the best/only rewards come from.

It's about the expectations of the target audience for the game.

That might be a good point.  There are two reasons for an advancement scheme of any kind:  tradition going back to DIKUMud/D&D, and in order to keep people chasing the next cheese to keep them subscribed.

If you can provide a sandbox for players to be motivated to provide the next cheese to chase, maybe advancement is not necessary.

Well I think in this case you are using AoC as an example to quantify to some degree where the bar for quality needs to be where its ok to question whether or not the idea that PVP itself is flawed, or an entire genre, rather than the game itself.
Even in the case of Warhammer I believe that in its current state the game is going to be significantly different than it is now in the next 3 to 4 months.

Basically what I am saying is that other problems have intervened.
I cant say I would use either of these games as Stirling examples of game design because of a fundamental flaw at the heart of the games core mechanics. No I would be more apt to say that problems with these games have come about for various other reasons, not all of them even necessarily related to PVP.

When it comes to a game being skewed for PVP I do believe that you pigeon hole your game a bit more than you possibly should. There are only so many ways you can fight other players. Where as a game like wow gives you a much larger pallet of options to reset your experience at your leisure while a game like Warhammer makes me feel as though you are missing the point when you PVE after being somewhat burned out on PVP... Then on top of that my feet begin to burn in the sand the second I see how much xp a quest gives and how long I am going to be the same level if a continue at this rate. I immediately seek a better option. Just another example to show that Warhammer is certainly not in its prime right now.

However you are describing grind in a different respect.
When using the word grind I always think of it in terms of Bad design or poor implementation. Not allowing the player to reset his experience regularly enough to keep things fresh is almost off topic in my opinion. I see this as another beast that is unrelated. If you design something well enough its water under the bridge that people will not feel the grind.

And what you are describing is very different.
You seem to be saying that emotionally its not worth while to consider anything below a tier 4 PVP pool as a true grounds for actual PVP.
That the only way to extract meaningful competition is if every fight is 100% fair. Performing repetitive tasks to improve your character prevents every encounter from being 100% fair. And that explains why you say everything is grind. Anything that prevents me from having a fair fight destroys all meaning. Anything that makes it so the more skilled player doesn't always win ruins the competition.

Considering all of the other problems with AOC and Warhammer I am not too sure what you are saying is the one defining problem with those games. Just by paying attention to real life phenomenons where escalation is very much a part of real life sports and war alike. I am more inclined to believe the problem lies elsewhere in these examples.


This..
Well people do pay to see wars but for different reasons and with a completely different mindset. Saving Private Ryan is a good movie for example.


You know I never really thought about it this way before. And its true.
In the case of Esports you want the more skilled players to always win. And in this case you need to incorporate ladders and very accurate match making systems to make sure fights are always fair.
You want as few people as possible on each team and a referee to keep things in check.

In the case of a giant battles its more based around doing things for the carnage itself and less about being the better man so to speak. Its not about a skill based encounter but rather brute force and very simple high level tactics. Large scale organization rather than micro managing every detail about every conflict. Your goal is to cut the other guys legs off or kick him in the balls. Winning is the only option so cheap tactics are fair game.

well anyway sorry about the large post.
There are ways to solve all of these problems.
We just haven't seen anyone pull it off yet.
However in the end I still feel that simply marketing your game to be based on Player vs Player you will immediately shrink your potential customers to begin with. I doubt we will ever see 11 million people actively playing a game based on PVP as its core mechanic simply because it is based on PVP and nothing else. But with that said I am willing to bet the threshold for a potential player base is much higher than any current games have achieved right now. There is plenty of potential that has yet to be had imho.

:oh_i_see:

Except these are just small part of the 'human experience'. You just said it yourself -- the AI cannot emulate human strength and weaknesses. (or can it, because acting 'as retarded as you like' would be quite that?) These strenghts and weaknesses evidence themselves and shape the open pvp encounters just as much as they shape the more rigid e-sport encounters.

Open-world PvP without death penalty allows people to simply play over and over and over each time they are defeated, with little to no downtime. You know, just like you can play another e-sport match just after you lose one. If this ability to play constantly is "zerging" well, i guess that's all the e-sports are too, then?

I really don't see the point you are trying to make here.

I don't think you need to nix advancement altogether, just channel it the right way. That's why I keep going back to COD4. They're really close there. Combat itself is not affected by level, as you can use every weapon you can scrounge at level 1. But to get easy access to those weapons and to get better secondary abilities (stat buffs basically), you need to gain XP. And the only ways to gain XP are intrinsically tied to what you're doing anyway (PvP, objectives in certain game modes, Achievements).

But that's "just an FPS game" right?

Not in my mind. Plot all of the maps onto an atlas, allow win conditions that progress to the next map, have recurring server resets as needed, and allow players to travel between maps in the same cohesive group (as an option), and you could start charging $9.99 a month for it. Better than Planetside. I was disappointed when details about COD5 weren't traveling along this vector, but I'd be damned surprised if Actiblizzard wasn't thinking when they get more hands-on with COD6.

TheCastle to explain all that is and was wrong with AoC and WAR would require me to miss the Cowboys vs Giants game, which isn't happening ^_^

Tmp, no dealth penalty makes defending or attacking any fix position pointless.

I disagree, defending and attacking fixed positions has quite a point when ownership of these positions provides the owner with benefits. Eventual death penalty attached to it is quite optional.

But if you want to go there... there is no death penalty in e-sports. Why do people play them, doesn't it make the whole thing pointless?

Of course not -- they do it to test themselves against another human player, to improve their skills and tactics, and for the act of winning itself. You know, it's really no different in open PvP.

Well technically a Zerg is when the fight itself does not reset but the people do. If you are able to reset after death with out penalty and your opponent does not you are zerging him.
All it is by definition is mindless rushing of your enemy with out worry about consequences. Its a very good way to burn yourself out on PVP.. Let alone the fact that you would be tossing aside a great deal of depth to be had in the game in general.

So I suppose on this you will not be able to zerg in a e-sport setting because the match comes to an end.
If it is possible to win a E-sport match with out any kind of skill or tactics while simply swinging away mindlessly then there are bigger problems to be solved.
That would be a pretty failed E-sport design I would think.

imho I am on the fence about whether or not zerg tactics are always a bad thing for all situations. However zerg tactics should never be a dominant strategy under any circumstances at all ever.

The fun part here is, the term 'zerging' itself comes from the 'zerg rush' that's quite a valid tactic to win the match in Starcraft, i.e. what could be perhaps seen as pinnacle of e-sport at this point :grin:

LOL!
Yeah that's a fucking good point lol!

Though to be fair I believe the meaning of the term zerg in a mmog setting has changed over time. It doesn't mean the same thing it does in Starcraft anymore.
If you were to apply what zerg has come to mean in a mmog setting to Starcraft it would be both sides automatically have unlimited resources and when ever a unit dies it simply respawns at your base waiting to be sent out again free of cost. I believe it is also referred to a Zombie tactics in some mmogs.

Yup, i think that's pretty accurate (minus the unlimited resources part, the MMOs can have lot of players but the numbers involved in any conflict do have a cap that's the number of players online and interested in this particular conflict, even if the cap itself may vary over time) ... of course, it can be just seen as simply different kind of challenge. When both sides have (mostly fixed) amount of units available and these units respawn when defeated, then it is still possible for a player to destroy/conquer base of the other player, the game just becomes progressively harder the closer you get to the opponent (as their resupply lines shorten while yours get longer)

edit: which when you think of it also isn't different from how some e-sport FPS games are set up -- the players repeatedly respawn on death, and the goal is to capture points of interest in one manner or another.

I agree with your point on unlimited resources.

In addition to that you bring up a really interesting point about large scale battles and the potential incorporation of a supply line mechanic.
Perhaps one of the most important things missing from Warhammers RVR is the concept of supply lines. We observe this type of phenomenon in real life situations as well.

In its current state right now its very possible to create a hamburger hill scenario where both sides run a stalemate for extended time. This is only a problem because to the player he or she will simply feel that is how the game is meant to be played. Because no other options arise.
Adding a supply line mechanic to Warhammers RVR pools would not only solve the problem where it feels like a constant zerg on the same location. If done right it could potentially force the front lines of battle to be more flexible and cause a feeling of risk vs reward. Losing your supply line would destroy your chances of success. By this I mean your penalty for death would be significantly increased.

Currently, as it stands the RVR pools are a lot more like playing a game of chess where both sides do not have a king and the pieces respawn.
I would very much enjoy seeing a defining lose factor introduced to the RVR lakes Warhammer. A supply line of sorts.

I never said anything was "just an FPS".  In fact I've often thought that an MMOFPS would be interesting if done right.  I suppose Neocron came close from the descriptions I've read, but I never tried it.

The bottom line is, the interface and paradigm (FPS, RTS, RPG etc) are really just details.  Things like death penalty, travel, and restrictions on when someone can engage another are what separate the esports from the open PvP systems, not the interface.


Death penalties and esports don't mix.  That's why the WOW model as they currently have it works so well.  The point of esports is as you state above.  Someone can play open PVP for the same reasons, but the risk is higher because it's not exactly inline with what the game's point is.  The game's point is to take out the competition by any means necessary, not to have a fair fight.  The interesting part is that the fight IS fair, one level higher (the strategic level).

Waitaminnit, I don''t think anyone has quite pinned down a good definition of "grind" yet.  Playing does not automatically equal grinding, otherwise the term is meaningless.  Grind is a label for a specific type of play which has generally negative connotations.  The key characteristic of grind, and what I think is probably the biggest finger-in-your-eye aspect in regards to MMOGs, is repeating content which has become unfun in order to progress.  That is grinding. 

Now, that whole repeating content thing has all sorts of different meanings and nuances depending on individual circumstances.  Killing 10 wolves may or may not be a grind, but killing 500 almost certainly is.  Doing a given quest, instance, dungeon, raid, or whatever may be fun 5, 10 or 50 times.  But eventually, doing it just one more time is gonna feel like definite grind.  Starting a new character and leveling him to 20 or whatever may not be a grind the first time (unless you are completely burned out on level-based RPGs), but in some games it becomes so after the second or third time, while in others it may take 5 or t0 times to become a grind.

The root cause of grind, at it's simplest, is the failure of the developer to provide sufficient content for the player to achieve his goals without "having" to repeat the same content more than it is fun to do so.  One of the key contributors to WoW's success was that it shipped with very little grind required to level from 1 to max.  Ironically, WoW's end-game grinds are probably the worst grinds presented to players (in the Western Hemisphere anyway) since EQ's faction and gated content (PoS) grinds.  Except for crafting grinds, which seem to be universally tedious and long in every game so far.

WoW took several months for all but the most extreme hardcore no-lifers to level from 1 to max, all while experiencing new content the entire journey, and you could do it again with almost all new content a second time by trying the other side.  AoC (barely) provided enough content to level to max, once, but is suffering for having no end game, a short progression from 1 to max (barely a month), and that progression has very few options or alternatives.  So a great many players played through to max, got bored and quit, promising to come back once the game was finished (meaning once there was something new to do/achieve).  Meanwhile, WAR appears to have shipped without nearly enough content to get you to max level even once, even when that journey only takes a month or two, thus forcing players to repeat the same content over and over again ad nauseum just to get one character to max. This seems to be the major factor contributing to the early player burnout it has experienced. 

The irony is that PvP should be (at least according to most developer's theories) the answer to the problem of repetition becoming boring.  Every new encounter with live opponents is a different experience (unless it's just you die immediately) so the replayability is theoretically infinite.  Yet the two recent AA titles which staked their claim to market share on providing PvP seem to have failed to actually provide fun, replayable, rewarding PvP for their players when the players needed it.  The end-game for AoC and the journey to the end-game for WAR. 

Too me I define it like this


When it comes to allowing people to reset their experience they need plenty of options. One analogy I like to use as a technique to allow the player to not feel grind is to look at how some lizards that live in the desert stand on hot sand.

They stand on 2 legs at a time only and switch feet every few seconds. If they don't switch feet they risk burning their feet on the hot sand. Peoples attention spans work in much the same way. A game like WOW switches its feet by changing the type of quests it gives you or allows you to change what it is you are doing it your leisure. A lot of things come into play here from the locations you visit to the types of things you do. In games like Half life the designers set the pace and properly change out the experiences swapping out your feet for you. In a more open ended game you give that power to the player and allow the player to decide when to reset his experience. In Oblivion you are able to chose what types of things you want to do and when for example.

A game reaches a point when it is no longer a grind when the player is constantly jumping back and forth between unique experiences and never has a chance to become bored or come to the realization that he is simply doing the same thing over and over again. Where the player does not allow his feet to burn in the sand so to speak.
Well its a complicated topic like I said before and I am somewhat oversimplifying and imho it is a bit off topic.

Grind exists in virtually all genres as well. Its most notable and talked about in the MMOG. Not too surprising when considering the nature of the MMOG.
Its one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in game design in general however. How people feel when they play your game is of utmost importance.

Yea, sorry to imply that, I just roped you into my narrative :-) I was using "just an FPS" in quotes to convey the sense of dismissiveness sometimes thrown at games without "MMO" in their categorization. And yet, COD4 provides some interesting solutions to problems some of us have been watching go unsolved for 10+ years. A lot of that seems in large part due to either the same old school developers trying again and again without any appreciable expertise in anything but this medium, or outsides like Blizzard coming in and doing the old school formula right.

I don't want another MMO developer making an MMOwhatever. They've had plenty of time and the same old same old isn't going to cut it unless you play (and lose) by Blizzards rules. I want a developer from a different genre altogether to add MMO to their game.

This thread is becoming a grind to read.

The grind becomes worth it in the endgame.

Come on, that's just a state of mind  :grin:

Seriously though, same words five years ago. Next we'll be talking about accountability.

Maybe this is just me but I think that one of the tell tale signs that PVP in MMOGs is lacking in terms of game play is the current trend where 1 vs 1 battles are not always fair or interesting.

How could it be possible that team based game play is running on all of its cylinders if 1 vs 1 is not also just as fun?
Wouldn't that be considered by most to be an important factor when considering an E sport setting?

And for that matter not having interesting 1 vs 1 yet building your game around team or rvr conflict. Isn't that a little bit like building a house with out a foundation?

It depends.  There is a natural tension between viability of 1v1 matchups and specialization of roles.

In less flowery language, if you want all classes to be fair in 1v1, you can't have healers, or crowd controllers, or tanks or anything.  Everyone has to be some different flavor of the same thing.

Every game falls into a part of the spectrum here, from the typical FPS (everyone is a gun shooter) to the typical fantasy mmog thing that tries to balance PVP and PvE (raiding) in there somehow, to the team-based specialized role game that's either full PVP or full PVE (Eve or Everquest), in which no character type is very soloable.

Sniper vs engineer in FPS setting probably ain't very fair nor fun for at least one side, either. This doesn't have to mean much for the team based play though, as teams are combination of abilities of individual players... and as such can have different members take care of both potential weaknesses and strenghts.

Both of your points are dead on. Absolutely see what both of you mean.
What I just said was a massive can of worms more so than I was expecting..
For starters my original point appears to go against all conventional wisdom.. Looking at all class based games with PVP you immediately see that 1 vs 1 has the same problems.

Control of real estate plays an often integral roll in 1 vs 1 combat to a surprising degree. Either it be control of the mega health and running loops in quake or even space on the screen as seen in most 2d fighting games. However this is true for team based conflicts as well in general but with one major difference. In 1 vs 1 conflict the number of mistakes your opponent makes is at its lowest possible denominator before it has a true effect on the direction of the match itself. Meaning that 1 vs 1 should potentially be the ideal platform for an E-sport setting.


Its the archetypes that we hold on to so dearly that are holding us back most. The core principles that we have built around western style rpgs for so many years. The very much ingrained concept of the Warrior, rogue, and the wizard that we have still to this day adapted but never removed entirely from the mainstream RPG and now the MMOG.

Where even under the circumstances where a game is putting PVP before PVE logic dictates that it doesn't even make sense anymore to have a traditional tank in a PVP environment what do we see in Warhammer?

Perhaps what I am saying is heresy but...
Its possible, although it would require experimentation, to have new archetypes that relieve the natural tension between specialization and 1 vs 1 match ups. That combined with new rule sets that say your special action point burning abilities are less effective on yourself than on others and special ways for each class to further normalize any kind of rock paper scissors mechanics that might still exist could very well make it possible to build a true PVP setting from the ground up rather than adopting more complex versions of class archetypes from the first Gauntlet or Diablo or Everquest. ( Games that did not necessarily cater to a PVP setting in the first place )

With a stronger foundation in place your larger scale events could then be more structurally sound so to speak.
sorry I keep editing this damn post ><..

Blizzard has. In fact, there are probably more people in WoW BGs/Arenas per night than total players in most MMOS. You may not agree, but:

- most people like consensual PVP
- most people don't like death penalties
- WoW PVP is also fairly skill-based (if it isn't then why aren't you rating 2000+?)

BGs/Arenas satisfy those requirement perfectly. Besides those, I'd say most MMO PVP fails because of:

- bad interfaces
- clunky combat controls

Compared to WoW just about every MMO combat system is clunky as hell. WAR being the latest offender this department.

Welcome Fippy. But you will not ruin our lands as you have ruined your own!  :awesome_for_real:

Grr. Bark. Bark. Grr.

That is all.  :oh_i_see:

Do you have in mind how this could be improved?
Or do you just see this as a fundamental flaw playing games that have complex interactions in a PVP setting with mouse and keyboard vs a controller?

That describes all team sports and the military.  Every position played or filled in team sports and military is optimized to a specific body type and talent.  (pitchers, lead off hitter, point guard, center, running back, wide receiver, etc.)  Ultimately everyone is different, no reason to do the impossible and make them the same.

I say a compromise at the least is in order.
As it stands in many cases in war or Open RVR for example.. Its potentially possible to have a football game with 18 linebackers..
With an E-sport setting however your point stands up very very well. (edit: as long as its team based PVP )

But then a problem appears.
With the way I see how MMORPGs work is that they are designed sort of like amusement parks. You pay a monthly fee and you can do mostly what ever you want while you are there provided you meet preset requirements ect.
Well then in an amusement park aimed at a PVP a setting. Would it not be best to then support as many forms of PVP as possible in a cohesive package?

So from E-sports to war conflict.
From the smallest controlled events to the largest battles one can fathom.
Am I making sense? I could be off in lala land I have no problems if you say so.

there is a slight misunderstanding. The archtypes used in mmorpgs are not conductive to player vs player combat. If you played baseball, of course you'll need a pitch, lead off hitter, point guard, ect, because those roles are necessary for winning. However classes are usually designed with PVE or role-playing in mind instead of how they fit objectives in pvp. Tanks don't belong in pvp for example. the whole concept of one is purely pve modeling. In pve you have 3 essential classes, tank - healer - nuker. In any game that is the efficient way to get through pve content. What that mean in pvp is that classes designed for those roles and the add on roleplaying classes (archerrs, rogue, support) are either developed to supplement those roles, translate into muddled garbage as far as pvp is concerned (team based or other wise).

Simple put, a pvp game must be designed with pvp archtypes. You can shoe horn pvp mechanics in a system that is inherently pve, but your not going to get the best results. And ultimately the players who do pvp will call out your bullshit.

TheCastle, you can have both. But ultimately like pve vs pvp, your designing two different games. most developers can't even design one.

Yes I suppose you have a point here...
E-sports and War are two very different beasts. However different beasts of the same feather.

For some reason though I feel like the things that balance an E-sport setting are not the same as what makes a balanced war setting. And that in more than a few ways they often compliment each other.

example:
The difficulty of balancing open RVR is much less than balancing 1 vs 1. ( Controlled Team vs team can work either way, full class based, or all the same. So that's a non issue. )
So to focus on 1 vs 1 classes much like you would with street fighter. Then as a secondary priority you give each class a way to share bonuses with team mates or combine power attacks or something that allows people to work together.
In almost all cases PVP is better off with out a Rock paper scissors type of balancing. ( except for controlled Team vs team )

Open RVR is now still fun if 14 Ryus show up. Everything works as intended. 1vs1 is fun no matter what classes show up. team vs team still has plenty of depth. ( Believe me if quake 1 controlled team vs team has depth this would too at the worst )

So in essence make one game but keep in mind that if you start small while not removing your options to think big you can possibly knock out 2 birds with one stone with, at the very most, the negligible loss in quality you observe when looking at a PVE game that has PVP tacked on.

Honestly I think open RVR would work fine with classes balanced for 1 vs 1 that have some ways to heal and buff each other. at 100 vs 100 the chaos has already usually reached a boiling point its not exactly like every little detail is going to matter.

Of course the difference being here is that your theme park has more available cohesive attractions. You can then coin your game as the ultimate one stop shop for everything PVP come one come all...

Is it really must?

Did baseball, football, basketball really start out with specific people in those positions or did it get min\max over the decades?  History looks like it was min\max over the decades.

Teams in MMO have the choice to decide what to play so if one archtype was all that was needed to roll then that is what we would see.  Some mods for FPS or RTS limit archtypes and units without removing the PvP but just changing the choices available.  More options and choices are nice but seem far from being reguired.  Was Pong PvP?

Subspace is an interesting study:

All the ships had the same basic abilities...they shot bombs and bullets and were able to use mostly the same special abilities.

The Ship types were different in smaller ways:

Warbird: Most Manueverable
Javelin: Highest Top Speed
Terrier: Double Guns
Leviation: Larger Bombs
Spider: Cloak
Lancaster: Bouncing Bombs
Shark: Extra Max Energy
Weasel: Showed bombs on map, EMP Bombs

So basically the ships still had all the same basic recharget rates, max energy, specials, and such but you could pick an area to specialize in. Team Tournaments took this to the next level, trying to find the right mix of these ships. It reminds me a touch more of a skill based than class or archetype game. Everyone has guns. Everyone has bombs. Minor differences in weapons and specials, hell it reminds me of an FPS now that I spell it all out.

Not sure what my point is, besides that e-sports can be good...just fuck Diku e-sports.

I guess wuzzman has contributed his last to this thread.

Devs aren't bad: they are just trying to turn a tabletop rpg formula into a competitive PvP formula.  I'm not sure that works.

Archetypes are bad, mmkay.  They are also too much work to balance, and in an MMO you already have your hands full trying to create new content and squashing bugs without having to reinvent the wheel with class balance.  If you've gotta have archetypes, figure out a point-buy system, and set up your archetypes as preconfigured point-buy schemes.

No one really cares about interface configuration unless you're making a hotkey game or you are making an extremely complex sim.  And if you have to make a game where the player needs to have 100+ actions available on short notice, you are either overthinking things to a ridiculous degree, or you aren't making a PvP game.  But still, designing a configurable UI is a good idea anywars, as it means you can do things like make the HUD for different things differently structured; immersion rocks. 


It's form of ship advancement was also fast: losing all your abilities on a respawn is painless if you can get them back rapidly in seconds, or if the server randomly gives you new gear on the respawn.

Planetside followed a similar concept.  They longer you played your character, the more XP you got.  The more XP you had, the more levels you got.  Each level offered you a new Cert point.  You started with 4(has this changed, its been so long...) Cert Points at level 1.

You could spend your cert points on Certifications.  A certification lets you do anything more basic then handling a pistol, stab with a knife, or wear a uniform.  For example, learning to use an Assault Rifle cost 2 Cert points.  Wearing heavy body armor cost three cert points.  Drive a tank, fly a fighter jet, use medical or repair gear, all costs points.  More advanced skills had prerequisite Certifications.  Learning how to work an anti-tank missile launcher required learning how to operate an assault rifle, and cost 3 more Cert Points.  You can turn in all your points periodically and retrain.

Regardless of how many cert points you had, that assault rifle never became intrinsically more or less deadly.  Certain devices could improve situational awareness or run faster or help you recover faster from wounds, or maybe provide a thin sliver of health when a bomb goes off too close, but dead is dead.

In that kind of environment, you can rapidly rise to the top of your damage potential, but after that point it is more about versatility.  The guy who's played for 200 hours might know how to fly a jet, drive a tank and plant high-explosives, but he can get killed by someone playing 10 minutes who only uses assault rifles. 


The gear itself that everyone uses is free.   Whenever you spawn, you walk up to the handy equipment terminal.  These terminals let you pick the gear you want to use for this spawn, and provide access to anything you are Certed to use.  Gear can also be saved as 'Loadouts' or 'Favorites': someone can set up preselected gear sets so they can switch from a tank driver to a heavy infantryman, as long as they are certed for the gear they want to use.  So, gear is free.  The actual value comes during a heated firefight when you're running low on ammo and the nearest resupply is your dead buddy/enemy.    A similar terminal exists for vehicles, but its not quite as handy.

This system of character advancement worked really, really well for an FPS MMO.  Balance issues only popped up between gear that was realm-specific, where people would argue the virtues of wire-guided missiles versus homing missiles versus shoulder-braced laser cannons, or the advantages of vehicles with one gunner versus two, and so on. 

Well
Its not just the archetypes we are having a problem with in this case. ( Aside from obvious flawed concepts like a main healer or a tank in a pvp setting... )
Its the concept that one class is innately weaker vs another class.

This works well with units in a RTS setting.
However it causes friction in a pure PVP environment setting where you are locked into your role.

Imagine Pong where you have a choice between 3 different paddles.
Rock paper scissors determines your effectiveness vs your opponent.
Imagine further being stuck with that paddle until you rolled another toon.

Having archetypes is not really a problem. Its the mentality applied to them on creation.
If I can pick my load out before I spawn in in COD4 I am in a sense changing my class.
Imagine being stuck with one loadout in cod4 until you rolled another toon.

I don't believe having people be forced to gear or respec a skill tree before every match is much the answer either. Unless its basically as simple as buying weapons in counter strike or picking 1 of 4 pre made load outs.

Rock paper scissors is also not always a terrible thing.
However I believe it should never apply on a class vs class basis.
It should however play a roll in environmental or situational strategy.

example:
Sniper rifle works well for long range combat.
If your enemies are submerged in water an energy weapon will cause additional damage.
If your enemy is using special armor he is vulnerable to flame throwers and melee take downs while defensive stance mode is active.
( Unless he uses an attachment that gives him extra protection but limits him from using energy weapons )

However
If I pick this class and you picked that class you are simply fucked... Yeah.. Cmon we can do better than that.

Not necessarily true -- consider volleyball where the players rotate positions on the court each time they gain a serve, which requires everyone to be pretty much jack of all trades in addition to (optional) individual strong points.

In games, there's obviously the earlier FPS games which didn't bother with 'classes' and allowed everyone to perform any role determined by equipment at hand. Locking players in specific roles there is relatively new development. While yes, everyone is different, using these differences to lock people into specific role without ability to perform something else 'because it's not part of your class' is a concept from Gattaca and SF in general rather than our reality.

Huh?  I hope you're just talking about esports (where it's not really true either) but in real life I would rather an infantryman not try to crew a tank, fly an A-10, or attempt surgery in a MASH unit.  They theoretically CAN do it but the results will not be pretty. 

In a team-based game, better not to even try to code the loss of efficiency.  If it's not team-based, well, sure, that's another thing entirely.

two things..
1. It really depends on the scope of the game. Sometimes in the name of fun you have to give up on the reality part a bit. In Battlefield, for example, anyone can fly a plane even a medic. The question is more about when it is appropriate and fun to lock people into their role and when is it not that is most important.

2. Keep in mind that on this particular point about making new archetypes or how things should be set up its hard to really debate further with out going into actual game play details at this point. On a higher level looking down I see that you can very possibly strike a balance where you make classes that do have innate specializations but not go too far in either direction. The point is being that as it stands now the better solution I would say is to strike a balance somewhere between quake 3 and world of warcraft.

Every class has some cool things it can do for a team environment however personal skill is the largest factor on winning a fight either it be 1 vs 1 or larger and not some arbitrary mechanics that feel rigid in a PVP setting.

removed this part after thinking about it. It doesn't make very much sense.
However fun it would be to speculate further I am not entirely sure putting the burden of proof on my shoulders on this topic would necessarily be the best direction for the topic...

would it?

Why, is there some sort of natural blockade put onto one's brain that prevents them from acquiring both the ability to fly an A-10 *and* to operate a rifle? Or once you know how to fly a plane, you can no longer learn how to drive a tank in real life? Note, the context was that classes mechanics is something derived from real life military and sports. Which is imo inaccurate because while there is some specialization in these fields, it goes nowhere near min-maxing and limited skill trees of these games.

It is a common engineering problem in MMOs. Nothing to do with Mouse/KB vs. Controller. The best games have:

- fluid controls and movement
- near instant response
- satisfying user feedback when performing actions (combination of sound, motion, visual effect)
- in the very very best games, the individual actions themselves are "fun"

For example, when I hit the "Mortal Strike" button in WoW, I hear a satisfying "thunk", I see big numbers pop up, I see a cool animation, and all that happens fluidly and instantly. Similarly, consider a headshot in Counter Strike.

In contrast, in WAR when I hit the "Divine Assault" key on my War Priest, there is a delay, it sometimes fires even when the target is out of range, the animation and sound is often badly synced, it seems to fire a random number times when it is supposed to be three. Unlike WoW, in WAR combat actions do not provide satisfying user feedback.

Obviously not.  But in real life, how many A-10 pilots do you know that slum it as infantrymen when business is slow?

The point I was refuting was that specialization doesn't reflect real life.  In fact it takes a career to become a veteran A-10 pilot.  If in a game it takes a level grind to become the best healer possible, that's not far off.  Obviously too much verismilitude can be bad for fun, hence the limited skill trees.

I don't know any A-10 pilots to begin with :grin: but, obvious absurd aspects of the question aside, pretty much an A-10 pilot could handle themselves in pretty competent manner if shot down, wouldn't they? If i'm not mistaken all soldiers undergo basic training, one that --with quick google search-- seems to be currently extended and focused on providing generic war-fighting skills rather than specialization from the get-go ( http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/airforcejoin/a/afbmt1.htm )

Oddly enough though, this is probably one of few cases where borrowing more from reality would actually improve things. Locking people in narrow specializations doesn't appear to improve things as far as fun is concerned, to the contrary if at all. So if it's done for sake of fun, then the end results render this attempt as fail, in my eyes.

To word it differently and hopefully better... specialization as currently implemented in class-based MMOs doesn't imo reflect real life, precisely because it puts more restrictions on the player, and sends them on the min-maxing path that's also more severe than anything currently existing in our reality. THe only 'place' i could think of with similar approach (person's profession determined at birth and then consequent training on that path through whole life, both physical and mental) ... was science fiction where such ideas were explored, hence my original point.

The core problem with the idea that someone who can fly a A-10 as being a specialized class is that in real life there is nothing necessarily specialized about it.

As with many things in real life the more you understand the basic principles about anything, and the more you know about the topic at hand, the more easily you can grasp something new. Chances are if you can fly an A-10 you can also pick up driving a tank more easily than a guy who has yet to do either.

In fact the more you know about everything the more easily you will be able to grasp anything new. A master of kung fu is probably going to be far more effective in a beginners level fencing match than someone who is not.

In any kind of 'world' PvP game, 1v1 balance MUST be a priority. I'd wager a little under half of all of my PvP encounters in that type of game revolved around me running into some other random dude and having to duke it out.


A Punter generally doesn't have to go 1v1 with a Linebacker, but the same can not be said for the warrior and the healer.

Heh. My favorite extreme example is how some classes can't use certain weapons. As in, they can't even equip them. What keeps Buregard the sorcerer from trying to swing a sword? (Magic! har har.)

Balance. If you could equip it you'd expect to use it.

It's stupid, but there it is. And nobody seems to mind. Gamers and their boxes and whatnot.

So do you think mages in WoW would be rolling for tank plate if they could wear it?

Yes. Because there's a lots of stupid people out there.

It wouldn't be right, but that's more because the entirety of the WoW/diku system doesn't allow for it. There's no reason for a Mage to roll for tank gear. The stats are all wrong.

However, a system actually designed for it would be more like UO. GM Mages could wear plate. It didn't do much more than screw up their mana-regen rate, but it was helpful if you didn't know how to play a Mage template ;-)

But this is why I said "gamers and their boxes". People like clearly defined role, goals, and rewards. Too much choice is confusing and annoying to many.

In a PVP setting I would certainly consider a class that can take a lot damage and can help others on his team either by direct healing or increased action point generation over a cloth using main healer anyway.

example
Sentinel:
Heavy armor + shield
Gives up some DPS but can take a lot of damage
Think Zangief from street fighter but has some Aura abilities similar to paladin in Diablo 2.

Action point regeneration is potent because all classes have somewhat similar ways to heal themselves. Having a sentinel in your group allows people to heal themselves more often.

See what I did there?
Everyone can heal themselves to some degree and the "main healer" is someone who simply allows them more options to do so by themselves. Sentinal has high damage moves that take more skill to pull off exactly like Zangief in street fighter so 1 vs 1 is still very interesting. He is a priority in team game environment because of what he does but if the other people in his group are not skilled players they will still drop fast if they dont heal themselves.

You eliminate the problem where people are getting mad at the main healer for not healing as well in this case...
This is just an example of a class archetype for a PVP setting.

There are plenty of mages in WoW rolling for tank plate already.

I'd say that's a user issue and not a game design issue.

Well, yeah. But for example, I'm currently playing a healy paladin. I can use +heal equipment of any type for my healset. Whereas a priest can only use +heal cloth. The game is designed that way, but who decided that priests can't wear heavier armor in the first place? And why can't they balance around that?

Just to bring up a note, "All USMC are trained as a rifleman."  Even the Harrier and Hornet jockeys, the cooks, the truck drivers, and all, can and will grab a rifle and put lead on target. 

RTS, TBS, Sports, Sims, & FPS all let you start out equal, and figure out threw playing the game against others to get better.  For some reason, RPG's based on player vs player (in some fashion) want you to grind to a level in something that really doesn't help you with player vs player conflict.  DAoC, Shadowbane, and now Warhammer, seem to think that players shouldn't be fighting each other till they have unlocked a level by waisting time beating on "bots."  Ask any FPS if they want to play on a serve with "bots" and most would say no.  The "bots, mobs, or AI" just do not compair with real life players trying to kill or help you.

I still think the grind is what keeps most of us out.  I remember way back when DAoC was comming out, I was playing Tribes (FPS) and the talk on the server was how DAoC looked like it might be a fun combat based RPG.  Within a month we were all back on the server bitching about how it was EQ reskinned, and "no way am I going to bash bots for that long, just so I can go fight in the frontier."  If DAoC, Shadowbane, or Warhammer, had started you out like a FPS and made you max level, but with perks to earn, would that have sucked?  I mean Call of Duty, Battlefield series, etc... all basically let the brand spanking 'n00b' be able to aim and kill someone who has been playing forever, and with the rank comes privilages that makes it more fun to blow the other side up.

That's a good example I think. Being variants on a theme they should have more latitude on gear. It's understandable why any class based game does it, but if they wanted some sort of compromise for better-healing Priests, they'd do something like slower mana regen or slower casting or something in the case of a Priest wearing plate. But that gets into a land full of more haziness than that which already exists. And along with it would come the inevitable loot arguments like the Magister/Dreadmist Warlock vs Mage days.

But I think it's solvable. There just needs to be incentive, logic, and a whole crapload more balancing to be done. Which brings me back to the gamers and boxes things. There's already people complaining about how much "choice" there is for gear in WoW.

Well lets take Cod 4
Lets say it has been out for 3 years and had 2 expansion packs aimed at just the multiplayer and about 14 updates to the game over that time. Level cap was raised twice for each expansion.

Because of the MMOG model one of the key ways to keep people playing is to add more stuff. Naturally that stuff has to be better than the things already in the game to make people want it.

In the second expansion they released tier 2 perks. Just like the original perks these are 1.5% more potent and give you more options. You have access to more guns at very high levels and even new attachments that allow you to see people through walls with infrared goggles. Joe "noob" is not going to be as effective as he was 2 years ago.

Maybe it would be just fine. But I think that the second you sell a game on a monthly subscription your tactics to keep people playing has an effect on the game. You have to keep that in mind when simply comparing X mmog to a standard PVP game like cod4.

A group of well-played, low rr toons could and did beat higher rr opponents in DAoC.  Were they at a disadvantage? Yes.  Did they automagically lose like they do in WoW? No.  To their credit, Mythic did produce a game where talent could overcome longevity... the odds were long, but it was possible and occurred often. 

Nebu, could a level 1 toon beat a level 40 toon (or is it 50 now? only played the first month) in a 1 on 1 fight?  How about 40 level 1's vs 40 level 40's?

Call of Duty started back in 1993, they have released 5 games (well 5th one comes out Nov 11), each one building on the other.  They give you single player and multi player fun, ways to advance in both (multi or single), and it is free.  Sure the rookie is going to get smoked more than the veteran, but the vet doesn't win just because he has "more levels", he wins by actually doing something before the other guy does it to him.  They continue to put out a well polished game, that is fun to play in small squads, and the online play is free.

The idea of a MMOG model on a FPS would be a very hard sell, I don't think you would get many to play, especially if it doesn't follow the FPS rule "just because you have the bigger gun doesn't mean you win."  Perks have to be fun, but not overpowering.

What could they sell?  How about size of battles, FPS's tend to be stuck in the small squad setting, with only Planetside and WWIIOnline offering the large engagement of 200+ people (and no they weren't slide shows, it was freaking intense!), the other is EVE (I guess, haven't played it), the problem is getting those large scale fights going, but when they happen it will burn page in your mind about how fun they were.  But, those three games need write ups on what went wrong in those games.

It sounds like we all would like a game where we took RPG and made it like a FPS, we start at max level, rank up, get new perks that are nice but not over powered, and have no pve.  They could make it with small, med, and large battlegrounds/instances, and world/persistant pvp.  Make it fast, furious, and fun.

This makes me think of the way the classes are designed in Diablo II.  The characters seems like they fit into the tank, mage, rogue archetypes, but they don't -- they're all really nukers designed to kill lots of monsters quickly.  This is ok because they're all fun to play and they feel different.  In multiplayer parties, their abilities are mildly synergistic, or they have some buffs, but you never feel like you can't kill Baal because you don't have a barbarian to take the damage for you.

PVP in Diablo II doesn't even try to be balanced, but every class can be dominant in pve in its own way.  Based on this example, I'm not sure if removing the archetypes is necessarily going to help with 1v1 balance, though.

I think you know the answer.  No.  By the time the game evolved, you could level a toon to the endgame in about 24h played with some knowledge of the game.  It would take another few hours to equip to a competitive level. 

My point was that DAoC (late in its evolution) had a very solid game mechanic in place where the endgame was fun and competitive as soon as you passed beyond the entry barrier.  I agree that removing this barrier entirely would have made the game more attractive, but it didn't seem enough fo a deterrent (post-ToA) to keep people from trying several different classes across all three realms. 

MMO gamers like their grind.  I don't know why, but they see the worthless time sinks as some nerd badge of honor and cry bloody murder when they're removed.  Sad, really.

Hello F13.

"Genre diseases" is a nice term. Might have to steal that.

A leveling system is a tool that allows people of all skills to have a tangible measurement for how much they are improving for one.
In a game like quake 3 its very easy to lose casual players because the measurements for improvement are far more subtle. Almost outright invisible to most players.
Leveling systems are a retention carrot. It helps people to keep people playing and gives both hardcore and casual players a measurable form of success.

You might not realize that you have become better at clearing a jump more efficiently however you do know that you are about to gain a level so you can use that new armor you just got.


I disagree here.
Aesthetics are important but if your game does not play well or run on a wide verity of machines you will be considerably less likely to be successful.
Joe Walmart does not look at armpit seams and such. As a dev myself I often have to remind myself to not look at things through the eyes of a dev. Its a trap you can easily fall into in the game industry and one you will see other devs fall into often.

WOW is a good example because more often than not I see other devs mock its cartoony look and blocky characters. Yeah sure that texture they used for that wall might only be a hand painted 256x256 and my characters hair is clipping through his shoulders. These are things only devs care about however. Try your damnedest to fix these things but don't place it on a pedestal where it will have any true implications on the games success.

On this topic what is most important is to pull off an overall cohesive theme and make sure that the world and all of its inhabitants fit together. Little things like armpit seams and such are usually not going to destroy the game if the world has a cohesive style and atmosphere. Jeezus I mean look at Oblivion for god sakes... People insist the game is gorgeous right?
If you stop looking at it through a magnifying glass it actually is a gorgeous game.
edit: And don't play it in 3rd person lol...

Hello F13.

Retention in games that don't collect money after launch is a nice-to-have.

Retention in games that collect money on a recurring basis (mtx, advertising, subscriptions) is a requirement.

While it was cool and interesting that people would play Counter Strike and Starcraft 2 for years on end, neither had business models that required it. Nor do games that get heavily modded, or more recent FPSes like COD4 (and high water mark imho). Longevity here contributes to brand awareness and then can be used to justify expansions and sequels, but that's about it. Making a new FPS doesn't automatically require you pitch some method of extracting fees after launch. It's more about IP development and sequels.

Games that make money on that retention though, it's a much different story. You're not releasing a one-and-done 50 hours of gameplay that then becomes a game lobby. It's hundreds of hours of content you expect people to pay at least three to six months for. Or basically, 200% of the box purchase itself. And they take longer and are much more expensive to make. And they require a lot more than a website and a patch two years after launch. To get to this point you need to have justified a lot, explained a lot, and used statistics and numbers and references people can grasp.

This is why the formula is currently what it is.

Hello F13.

Well there are a lot of different points you bring up Grim.
I think you are missing the ball a bit on this first one:


By definition all games are time sinks.
See how that makes what you are saying sound a bit off?


These days art direction is more important than ever before IMHO. Its always going to be a matter of taste as far as I can tell now.
I can load up fallout 3 and visually see the the engine itself has changed very little from its predecessor Oblivion. The engine arms race is over so trying to push graphics is just a giant double edged sword... Unless you are Epic.. Everyone and their grandmother these days has a 3d engine with all the bells and whistles. Normals, spec, virtual displacement, physics, portals, dynamic and static lights you name it.

Anyway my point is that its better to focus on a solid art direction rather than critique details like you mention before.. I suppose I have lost my point a bit on this one. its really kind of off topic anyway. so lets continue..


Welcome to the club.
Thing is I would not be entirely shocked if you essentially just walked into a room and said that to bunch of people who can all say the same thing.


People only want to spend money on something innovative but wrapped up in a safe and familiar package.
I think most of all of these things have been covered in the first 3 pages of the thread hehe.


From my own understanding of the topic is that the second you market a game to be PVP you cause people to get stage fright. I believe that you cause people anxiety when you say that you have 1 tutorial level and then you are blasted off into intense PVP action. I think a lot of it can boil down to marketing but I imagine that your player threshold shrinks considerably when you take a MMOG and say this is a PVP only environment. While you can in fact expect a decent amount of skill from your player base if you ramp them up to it properly and you can in fact have casual forms of PVP style games but you still have this problem to contend with.

Two different amusement parks that you will have to pay a monthly fee for the right to visit at your whim.

Amusement park 1
It has everything from the big roller coasters to the cotton candy. It has a fairly large section for a fairly decent paintball arena as well. In fact it has a few different types water sports going on. Its an established amusement park that pretty much has everything you could ever want. William Shatner and MR T apparently have been sighted there and will have tea with you..

Amusement park 2
This is actually a theme park aimed at PVP activity. So it gives up on some things like roller coasters and cotton candy and watersports.
it has a paintball arena that's also pretty decent and its a little bit bigger than the one in Amusement park 1. If you get bored doing paintball matches you have little else to do.

You have to pick one you cannot afford both.

if you make a game designed to keep people busy for years its not going to be in the realm of "wow this is much cheaper than if we did this instead". It might sound like it would be cheaper but it wont be. You work on a MMOG you are in it for the long haul and I am 100% sure you would eventually eat your words one or two years into the project when you said how much cheaper it would be.

The argument that its cheaper because we don't have a leveling system so we can make less unique content wont fly. Levels or not your team will be making about the same amount of content easily because the amount of time you want people to keep playing is not different. Actually I can see a potential problem where where taking out a leveling system can increase the demand for more unique events and quests to keep things interesting.

Hello F13.

It does depend quite a lot on execution of the concept. As example, the 'monster play' in LotRO takes interesting approach -- the monster players start with max level* character but one that's granted a handful of skills. The 'progress' is provided through points rewarded by killing players of the opposite side, and as they gain these points they are awarded additional abilities along with optional traits which allow them to tweak their character towards certain strengths and at certain cost (say, increasing amount of hp by small amount at the cost of damage dealt, improved resistance to one kind of attack at the cost of weaker resistance to another kind, things like that) This allows the player to observe tangible growth but without rendering the gap between fresh players and long-time players too big. And there's no "worthless content you spent money on" to speak of because the levelling happens through fighting, in the same warzone people fight even after reaching the cap (that in case of LotRO someone has yet to reach, but that's anoter story)

WAR used similar approach for their battlegrounds with auto-levelling up these who'd enter them, but the crucial difference between both these were, WAR still left room for some level disparity and unlike LotRO PvM zone both sides are limited to equal numbers, which would leave the side with weaker players worse off. In LotRO such side can make up for the disadvantage with greater numbers and/or other mechanics (assistance of NPCs or powerful 'session play' characters which are kind of like 'hero units' with levelling path removed from them entirely)

*) max level in comparison to regular player characters who go through 'traditional' PvE-based levelling process.

Fuck, I can't be arsed to quote all the TheCastleOText stuff but basically I think you are off-base on this:


When you market a game into being PVP these days, people get stage fright? People have been playing wow for like 4 years now, and many FPS games much longer. This isn't the days of 'ZOMG PVP LIKE SCARY UO' , run to Everquest!!! Why is it that games like Warhammer and Age of Conan sell a million boxes? Here's a hint...it's not their IPs.

They are selling people a PVP MMO - at least that's what they claimed. They both fucked up in their own way.

I could see something similar to a Planetside 2 being a success these days. You just need the grab. The progression system was fine. How do you improve upon it and make it replayable/enjoyable for 6+ months? People have been trained to expect rewards these days, how do you reward for massive PVP (besides the fun) ? In Planetside, the fun kept me there a long time...but I had a pretty awesome outfit.

Possibly reward with awesome looking skins, customizable vehicles, etc. Maybe if you get enough defense kills you get a special suit/titles...IDK. I guess if I had the answer, I wouldn't be sitting here doing desktop support.

Before I respond to the many points brought up I have one question.
Where do you place the bar for success in this case because both AOC and War seem to be staying afloat.

Sorry I have to ask its just I think that I am confused on exactly how they fucked up in their own ways. 500k subs is by no means a failure right?

Are you serious?

You sell a million boxes and have like 200k subs (is my random guess) for AOC and maybe 500k subs PRE-WOTLK for War, you fucked up. I'm not saying they are on life support just yet, but you gotta believe Mark Jacobs is not thrilled with things as is.

Ok wait this is important.
we are differentiating between a game that is PVE/PVP (Like WOW) vs a game that is PVP only or PVP/PVE (Like AOC, War) right.

Well lets take a look at passed examples of games that specialize in PVP/PVE
At first glance I have rarely ever seen a PVP game like counterstrike or cod4 have more than 500k people playing. For now lets pretend that is equivalent to 500k subs.

Is there an example of a game, not just an mmo, that is either PVP only or marketed as PVP/PVE that has broke this mold?

Now don't get me wrong I bet I am off base on the whole stage fright thing and all of that. I am speculating as to why PVP/PVE seems to attract less players. I don't actually know why or if its even a fair assessment.

Lets take a look at the people who play WOW
Question:
Which has more players in world of warcraft?
Casual PVE content
Casual PVP content

How many of these people only like PVE but simply play the PVP because its there or it helps them PVE better?

As far as I can tell 500k subs sounds about right for a game marketed as PVP/PVE... So is the bar for success being kept realistic here?

I have yet to see this disputed, but PvP games tend to be less popular than PvE games. That is, when RPG is tacked on to the end of the MMO part.

Something about "Other people kill me". PvE will, i wager, all ways be more popular.

Planetside always had the Zerg.  They solved getting large scale fights going.  Like too much of anything after one has done large scale fights X many times they lose their fun and all the patterns repeat themselves regardless of AI or people doing the moving and shooting.  It seems to come down to maps in FPS and that applies to MMOs just the same.  Playing the same map in a FPS a week straight will lead to burnout in almost anyone.  It just seem to take longer in an MMO since there are more maps.

Hello F13.

I think the point of this thread really isn't about sub numbers. That is probably the downfall of all these failed PVP (with tacked on PVE crap), they think their game won't retain without some worthless PVE grind and DING GRATS progression. That's their first fuck up. They aren't WoW, they never will be.

Build the game. Design it around having fun combat in a massively multiplayer world.

Don't worry about slowing players down.

Don't worry about time sinks.

Worry that your core design is good.

Figure a good reward system.

Planetside was damn close. It really was. Had air combat, armor battles, infantry, a few hundred different maps (different areas where fights happened). Had small groups that could coordinate and take out important objectives.

Hello F13.

Hello F13.

I completely failed to convey my point.
What I was saying is that on paper having a larger variety of things to do will look better to people.

PVP can have tons of different ways you can fight people. You have everything E-sport 1 vs 1 to huge 100 vs 100 player open rvr and an almost infinite number of modes you can create. Problem is, no matter how you slice it I'm killing other players. This is FINE however you have to look at that other game that lets you do everything else too at the same time.

You can cook fish only so many ways. It tastes different yes. In the end its always just fish.
After awhile you are going to get tired of eating fish. You are going to want some beef eventually.

you can use another example
2 music stores.
1 has a lot of everything
1 has a lot of one genre

that was my intended point..

Some players are really tired of PVE grinds. They don't get the urge to fuckin' grind.

What is the point in a game like WAR to even waste all those resources? Do you get the urge to go do bad PVE?

I don't know, I think you are conveying your point ok, it's just I happen to be on the other side of the coin.

Hello F13.

A tragedy is that AoC was so damn close. The real tragedy is that they know it, yet they have given up on it, or have been forced to give up. Maybe they saw that the PVP crowd was the only one they retained, so that's the crowd they were going to have to cater to.

Their initial design was a single-player PVE tutorial followed by PVP. It evolved to multiplayer PVE followed by a mix of PVE and PVP. If only... If only they had been allowed to evolve it to the logical conclusion...

Instead, the allure of inventing a better rock-paper-scissors so that your players will be their own content won. Maybe it was predestined from the first design onwards.

Given the amount of whining done over "welfare epics" and people who would only log onto battlefields and such to /afk in corner ... i'm getting strong impression this isn't accurate. For that matter, seeing how Blizzard actually devoted some of their time to curb such practices and to take away access to PvP gear from people who'd only play to lose, it'd seem their view of the situation was also different.

Don't make a mistake -- just because people have "no need of anything beyond stuff from small dungeons" doesn't mean they won't want anything better, if just as massage for their e-peen and in lack of anything else they feel like they can aspire to.

That's Mythic. I expected a solid, but not blockbuster or groundbreaking game. With parts that just make you go "why?"

Hello F13.

But if these people were /afk'ing, how many did you actually manage to talk with? :why_so_serious:

Though i think if what you say is accurate, then the whole thing makes for even more interesting conundrum -- since it results in having lot of people who claim they want to PvP enter PvP part of game... and actually avoid PvP in there. :awesome_for_real:

Wanting something better just to have it, purely to feel better about having their character "advance" another step on the threadmill after the other way of advancement (levelling up) was brought to halt. It's people who are *not* raiding and so they don't have option to acquire that gear through such organized means. But they still can join a random battleground and get their points for being there and this way get better gear (something the game conditioned them into from level 1) while maintaining their generally solo playstyle.

Hello F13.

Different side of the coin or not.
I have to agree that if a game is being advertised as PVP oriented it should very obviously place its focus on PVP.
I mean take a look at War and AOC, I very clearly see a very slight difference in focus. One could actually miss the point entirely.. "hey look its WOW with Keeps you can fight over!"
Yeah I know why they did it...
Yeah if they stuck to their guns it might not ever end up with as many subs as WOW...
But lets get real here.. No matter what game you make its doubtful you will see a fraction of the subs WOW has.... WOW is an epic fluke. Its a genre king in the middle of a genre life cycle.

Hey Grim what about this for your GDD
Take some mechanics from X MMOG or PVP game, remove some of the more grindy things if applicable then skew it for multiplatform.
Its possible you can supplement lower popularity or sales thresholds by pushing your PVP mmo into the console market.

Right now there are very few multiplatform MMOs in existence. The only one I can think of is FFXI.

On the concept of rewarding losers:
Guild Wars gave very poor rewards to players who lost and as a result always had difficulty growing its PvP player base.  In a grind based game (most MMOs) players expect some sort of return on everything they do.  So if they go PvP, lose, and get nothing, they are encouraged to go back to PvE and never try PvP again.  This is what happened with a ton of players in Guild Wars.  You want respectable encouragement for beginner players.  The desire to succeed (get a better reward) should be there, but they should walk away with something and feel like they made some progress.

You can have many levels of competition in a game.  You have your basic pub formats where bad players face off against each other.  This is like the pub server in CS, winners and losers aren't that important.  You ideally want everyone to enjoy the game and have a good time.  People get their taste for the game here.  This is where everyone regardless of how they do gets a coupon for a free ice cream, but the winners might get a gift certificate for a nice meal.  Then you have your top level competition where people play for blood and winner takes all.  You give out your truly nice rewards here, unique titles, unique items, ect.  You have your little league games where everyone goes out for pizza afterwards and your World Series were people pour blood, sweat, and tears into the game in an attempt to win it all.

A big thing though, you don't ever want to give the players who already excel at the game and tend to win rewards which make them more likely to win.  In a grind MMO giving tournament winners an epic weapon that no other player can match is just a recipe for disaster.  That's part of why grind based PvE + PvP don't mix.  Grind hurts PvP because the things you end up rewarding players with stop making your game fair.

Encouraging that guy who always loses in a game is good.  That guy who always loses is probably the new guy, you want him to stick around long enough to become an average player and grow your player base.  You lose players at the top over time, you have to be able to replace them or your game will die.

Warcraft 3 had an excellent system for this.  You got a fancy little icon next to your name.  You could grind that icon out no matter how bad you were.

on this subject I bumped into something of note... I am not sure yet about all of the information at hand here.


Anyone here aware of an underground PVP scene regarding WOW and how big it is?

PvP has less of a need for content than PvE, because the players provide the content.  Learning maps is less fun than fighting skilled opponents on maps all players are familiar with, which is why, even in games with large map packs, a few maps tend to be much more popular. 

The whining about WoW classes is vastly disproportionate to the class problems, but the reward structure has become less accessible, which has deflated the arena.

For those unfamiliar, WoW arena assigns weekly reward points based off of a chess-style rating system.  Games are zero sum; the point value of the game is based on the relative ratings of the teams and the winner gets points and the loser loses an equal number of rating points.  The rating to point equation decreases on a gentle mathematical equation below the starting rating of 1500, and increases according to a geometric equation above 1500.  So a 1200 rated team will get around 225 arena points, a 1500 team will get around 275, and a 1800 team will get around 800. 

That means being really abyssmal, or not trying is roughly the same as being mediocre, or trying and failing.  What's more, if you failed every week for three or four months, you would have enough points to buy a weapon that was comparable to raid loot.  Of course, since the key to advancing in PvP was the PvP armor that permitted greater survivability, getting the weapon did not make you fail much less in arena, but it did help people succeed in PvE, and it also made PvE players feel their accomplishments were diminished.

As a result, in season 3, Blizzard imposed an 1850 rating requirement to buy the weapons and a 2000 rating requirement to get the shoulders for the PvP armor.  In season 4, they raised the rating for weapons to 2050 and the rating for armor to 2200, and implemented a rating requirement of 1550 for pants, 1600 for chest armor and 1700 for helms.  The bottom dropped out of the arena because this meant that the reward for failure was almost zero.  As a result, the rating requirements for the top titles declined by around 200 rating points.  Duelist, the top 3% of the arena was at around 1875 in S4, down from 2100 in S3.  That means the PvP weapons were available to only about 1% of arena players, and the subset of players participating in arena was smaller as well.

Even with the rewards some people who PvP a lot; who play the game only to PvP, hate the arena.  They say that they don't like "dueling in boxes," or whatever, but what they really hate is losing progress, which is not something you experience elsewhere.  Even with the backstop against meaningful rating-to-points declines below 1500, people hate losing in arenas and watching their ratings fall.  In season 4, players could get the season 3 armor with no rating requirement, and, overwhelmingly, players rejected arena entirely and got season 2 gear for honor points in battlegrounds instead.

The lesson is that they need to dangle some serious carrots in front of players to convince them to put up with constant PvP ass-kickings that leave a lasting mark in the form of a bad arena rating that people can look at on armory. And unfortunately Blizzard is not prepared to do that; there was a 1665 minimum cutoff for epic pvp armor at level 80 in wrath beta. A ladder system won't work if there's no incentive for players to get onto it.

Achievements? This seems to be a pretty popular thing for FPSes nowadays.

IF it was handled correctly. Where everyone can see your achievements, and completing a set of achievements unlocks a title or new skin/vehicle/armor/whatever cosmetic only of course.

They seem to make many retards focus exclusively on completing them though, which tends to mess up gameplay for other people in team-based encounters.

this can easily be solved by carefully crafting achievements so the goals are not so random or cause undue friction.

Except this is basically "it just needs to be done right" argument...

(trying to develop fool-proof solution remains largely theoretical when the environment keeps coming up with continually better fools)

true true.. What can you do when the larger your audience is the more shallow the waters become....
Still, handing out achievements only for winning X battle X number of times seems pretty fool-proof. You then only have to worry about people throwing matches just to farm achievements. You should be able to solve/reduce that problem over the course of a year or two.. hehe