f13.net

I just started playing this four days ago because some old friends did and poof, no more server...  Oh well, at least I didn't fail any tests because of it.

http://ipyuo.com/

What a damn shame. My GM thief will be missed. Poor Azaroth :(

Seems like all a hard core open PvP advocate has to do is run a server with said rules for a while to see the light.

Nice to see someone from the "other side" before finally "get it" when they actually tried to run one of these things.

Bruce

It does only take trying to herd that bunch of exploiting leeches to figure out that those really aren't the kind of people you want to base a community on. Some folks can't be told, they must see it for themselves.

PVP will only work on a large scale basis if there are enough restrictions to make it a valid playstyle without making it a valid griefstyle.

That's exactly it, Haemish...the commercial entities and even any group that is shooting for popular appeal starts trying to balance between keeping open PvP, but curbing grief play.

At some point, it becomes a choice as to whether open PvP is more important than widespread popularity. Obviously, with commercial MMOGs, this isn't really a choice at all.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

I never played pre-Renaissance Ultima Online, but from what I gathered it was a potentially unfettered virtual world of unmatched player freedom that was ultimately ruined by griefers.   That IPY attempted to bring back the glory days, and was briefly successful, only to have it descend into something that was ultimately ruined by griefers...   Well, the consistancy sort of backs up my initial evaluation.  

I suspect that pre-UO:R not only attracted psychopaths: it trained people to be them.   I'm not saying everybody who played IPY was a psycho, but I am saying that in order to succeed in that game you quickly would take on psycho-like characteristics, because ultimately the griefers were the only ones that came out on top.   The griefers were the ones who found fun in the game beyond simply making chairs.  Those who weren't griefers yet were given a constant stream of abuse until they became one.   In the end, early Ultima Online was a game that, once the initial shiny wore off, was only enjoyable through grief play.   Azaroth, while he remembered the glory days of Ultima Online, forgot what ultimately brought about their downfall, and the troubles he ran into were simply history repeating itself.   Un-surprise for you!

Like Origin before, the ideal solution would have been not to give up, but rather to design solutions to the grief problems without comprimising what it was that made early Ultima Online great.    Origin's solutions were to severely hamper PK viability, which killed the freedom of the gameplay.   Whoops, threw the baby out with the bathwater, did we?   IPY's solution was to shut down the server entirely, which certainly saved a lot of time, but destroyed Ultima Online's glory days with equal efficiency.

Somewhere in the massive bitbucket of the Internet are gigabytes of discussion about how early Ultima Online's freedom could be preserved without causing the playerbase to descend into anarchy.   Much of it, I imagine, on the original Lum The Mad website.   Ultimately it comes down to this: in a game that attempts to emulate real life society as much as the early Ultima Online, player characters must be held accountable for their actions.    Hey, I have an idea, lets build a virtual world where the police just hang around towns and there's no such thing as jail or execution to keep crime in line!  Then, lets let everybody kill eachother all they like.   Boom: early Ultima Online.   Shadowbane demonstrated some ways in which accountability can be done quite well, but I imagine a lot of that simply had to do with eliminating easy means of escape.  

Unfortunately, any such solution to the grief problems would likely just take a lot more development time than either the original Origin developers or Azaroth had available.

I didn't play on IPY very often, but I will be sad to see i go. It was one of the most fleshed out and well done UO shards around. If they would've just added statloss it would've been perfect in my mind.

Ah well, it will probably not be the last, or even close to the last pre-UO:R server, nostalgia is a powerfull thing. Probably won't see many with it's kind of success though.

Any alternatives to IPY? I was comtemplating getting back into playing on IPY and then I came here to find the bad news.

"Angel Island" has a stable and dedicated guy (Adam Ant) running it.  I made a character there and it was pretty dead when I played, but maybe some IPY people will go there.  Azaroth was pointing people towards "Rebirth", which is an attempt to recreate 1997 UO.



Nah, "Pre-UO:R" wasn't bad at all.  There are lots of revisionists out there who will try to get you to believe it was a living hell, but it wasn't.  Now I started during the reputation system era and didn't play during the notoriety system period, which was supposedly where the serious PKing/griefing was going on (no penalty for PKing other than being red).

And there are just as many revisionists who've romanticized it into some kind of paradise populated by Noble Reds indulging in honourable PvP.

Sure, they existed but they were vastly outnumbered by the exploiting retards who drove people out of the game and forced OSI to put limits on PvP.

Shadowbane's accountability amounted to "put your killer's name on a list for the ineffectual NPC guards to attack" never remembering that the character probably didn't need to be near your town ever, could make a new character that was your best friend, and could make your own town in about an hour of playtime. They wanted accountability, but true accountability was more of a burden on the victim than on the attacker.

Just like in UO.

Here are a few links that will help show you a bit more about Angel Island.

http://uoangelisland.homestead.com/index.html

www.samhamwich.com

http://boards.powergamers.net/viewthread.php?tid=15554

Angel Island is run by Adam Ant and GUL, and anyone who is familiar with them from UO will have a further understanding of their great approach to UO.

Some old Adam Ant OSI UO episodes (http://www.game-master.net/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=5)

Jade, co-GM of GUL (http://www.game-master.net/images/girls.html)

I never had problems with griefers in SB, closest thing to griefing in SB was no-show banes people would drop on your cities every few days. I can see how you can be griefed if you are freehold newbie but once you join established guild that would be thing of a past.

I also learned to shrug things off fairly early during my UO days. I'd get PKed fairly regularly during my newbie days in UO but all it meant is short run to the healers for ress then stop by bank to pick up one of the many bone armor sets I had stashed and back to doing whatever I was doing before it happened. I was killed but I learned to fight back and be very hard to catch and kill, I was scammed but I learned from it and made a point to stay on top of all scams.

Bullshit. Your definition of grief is pretty small.

My biggest gripe in Shadowbane was the ability for people to drop a throwaway tree anywhere in the world with little to no effort. Drop a tree right next to your enemy's city, open it up to the entire fucking world so that every random pk jacktard in the world binds to it and uses it to attack your guild's hunters. In order to remove the tree, you have to bane and destroy it. The owners of the tree don't defend it, since they'll have dropped another 20 trees all around it in the time it takes you to bane it. And since the KOS thing was so ineffectual, it was harder to even attempt to let your guildies know that people with that crest should be attacked and killed on sight, and guards were ineffectual.

Griefing through guerilla warfare was way too easy and way too effective.

Throwaway open ToLs were considerable problem but it is long since resolved. You now need Rank 5 tree to open it up, so it takes less time and money to bane and destroy any tree than it is to open it up.

When open tress were still a problem my guild dealt with it in few effective ways. First we would capture all open trees that were used to attack us, so it wasn't possible to put one right in our backyard, being on a big island helped a lot in this regard. Second we get attacked we would send a stealth group to camp offending tree and cavalry to kill attackers - that discouraged attacks for considerable time since double equipment damage and ending up at random ruins gave them something to think about. Third, If our p/l group got rolled, big deal, it was restarted moment hostiles were dealt with. If that was our war group that got rolled – well they deserved to roll us.

In my book it is not griefing if you have an ability to do something about it.

Grifing was not one of SB's problems. If anything - lag caused by zergs, forced grouping and lack of PvP- content are main problems of SB.

I think that the main reason why Shadowbane griefing isn't too badly out of control is because there's no magical super means to escape retalation.   In Ultima Online you had, to name a few that even a UO newbie like I am aware of:

• Marked Runestones - Teleports back to anywhere you've been, allowing quick instant transports to safety as wel as channels to lure people to ganking locations.   "GET THAT RE... oh wait, nevermind, he got away."
• Impenetreble Safehouses - Once home, lock yourself in, and laugh at how they cannot retaliate.    "It's no good, men, the villian is at home.  Lets go back to the guard house so he can continue his reign of terror."
• Hiding and Invisiblity - Made much easier by a two dimensional isometric perspective that made it difficult for pursuers to track you down even when you were visible.   "I know he went this way!  His name was on the edge of my screen in this direction a minute ago!   Crap, do you think he was under a tree bitmap?"[/list:u]
  So, did early Ultima Online nail accountability as well as Shadowbane?    Not even close.    Ultima Online made it very easy to grief and get away with it.   Once griefing ran rampant, you'd generally just get griefed until you canceled or decided to become a grief player yourself.   I'll say it again, early Ultima Online was a online psycho trainer.   Input normal Ultima loving nerd.   Output complete online social reject.
  
  But, honestly, early UO (and IPY's) plights didn't surprise me all that much.  I had seen it happen a more times in text based MUDS (with inadequette PvP controls) than I can shake a "+5 sword of ultimate gank" at.

The other difference with SB is that you know exactly what to expect the moment you enter the game. UO was more open-ended. UO also wasn't nearly as bad as many parrot. Neither is SB, but you've got to be playing SB for the right reasons, and be compatible with the type of playstyle it offers.

That's true of all MMORPGs, but more so in SB because the core game concept has a narrower appeal.

No one is saying the first year of UO was grief free. In fact, it was shit. However, after the rep system came in (basically, dying while red could cause you to lose up to 10% of your skills and stats if you resurrected when still red), things settled down to a point where the people who wanted to have a good time could at the very least punish the people who were attempting to infringe upon it. IPY used that ruleset, which was the way to go.

Hell, I was into pvp. My character was perma-red. Even I liked statloss. The fact is people need to stop corellating pvp to grief. It CAN be a method of griefing, but it's by no means the most effective. Most situations where I was getting griefed ended when I killed the bastard so he'd have to go away and res to come back. Problems with pvp begin when it's restricted to the point where it can used as a griefing tactic. The fact EQ2 isn't even allowing pvp via duels is just asking for it.

I agree Joe, why is it PvP is strongly associated with grief while PvE is not? You can be equally badly griefed in both if anti-grief measures implemented, why is that everyone thinks PvP = grief? Personally – I’d rather be repeatedly killed than denied whole portions of the game by ubers/e-bayers.

I agree. I've seen more grief in PvE games because the griefers can get away with it.

Of course, I accept that for what it is. People are asses, and I'm not a psychologist. I just don't mind using the tools of a griefer to grief them right back.

The games are getting more constrained in this regard though. While this does limit how griefing gets done, it also makes for more contrived combat mechanics. I know EQ2's Locked Encounters were not designed to minimize griefing, but it is a side effect, as is the impact on random people meeting random people. I felt like LEs were fish bowls, and I didn't like being a fish.

Because the more PvP features you have:

1. The easier it is to grief someone trying to PvE.
2. The effects are usually greater.
3. The number of griefers is also greater, because of the whole PvP mentality.

I realize these a very broad statements.  Please keep in mind that yes, you can challenge them with certain specific *types* of PvP designs where the above are not true.  But to answer your question, historically, said PvP designs have included at least one of the above points, if not all three.

Also, another way to understand to dichotomy is to realize that very rarely do PvE-ers "grief" a PvP-er.  It's very hard to "grief" in a way that's not directed *at* someone or someones.  Not all PvP is grief, but just about all grief is PvP.



The thing is you and people who feel the same way are a very, very small minority.

Bruce

I was griefed alot more in EQ than i ever was in SB.  The problem is for some people being pked automatically = griefing.  SB had all the tools you needed to deal with problems: the name of the asshole bothering you and the ability to go kick his ass.  Thats all you need.

I disagree Bruce, you can grief using any game mechanic equally well if there are no safeguards built into the game - be it scamming you in social situations, getting cheap kills on you in PvP or kill stealing in PvE. You could be killed and driven out of the area by higher-level PKs as easily as you could be denied most of the monsters in the area by effective ‘farmer’ if game does not have built in safeguards against it.

Missed point. That (and any other grief you come up with) is inherently Player versus Player. An antagonist and a protagonist.

But that's like saying two uberguilds arguing over a dragon in EQ is player vs. player. It is, but not in the traditional definition of the phrase.

If you're going to extend the definition to that level, pve becomes such an afterthought it could be completely removed. People vying for social position is what these games are about. To equate it to what's commonly referred to as pvp is silly.

Did you even read my caveats?  You just contrived a situation just as I said one could.  Nevertheless, that happens far less often in practice.  Why?  Perhaps it's because most games had far easier griefing methods such a PvP.  Perhaps it's because most games have had those built in safeguards against it.  Perhaps it's because, just because it's theoretically possible, in practice griefers don't find it nearly as enjoyable.  Whatever the reason, my previous generalizations, I think, are still broadly true.

Bruce

Discarding anything that is contrary to your point as a fluke and atypical thing and treating everything that proves you point as a rule and typical situation is a natural thing to do but does not lead to logical resolution of a problem. Please show me on the doll where PvP touched you to make you abandon any attempts at rational discussion of the subject.

If "just about all grief is PvP" were remotely close to truth pure PvE games like EQ, SOL or TiTD would be free of griefers. We know that is not the case.

I agree.  Why, then, do you constantly do just that?



I am being quite rational here.  You're the one refusing to acknowledge general principals on the basis of some hypothetical PvP design that could be done that would not inherently facilitate griefing to a larger degree than without PvP.



No, it just means that such games would have less proportional griefing than games with lots of PvP.  Which I think history has demonstrated pretty well.

Bruce

Actually, Bruce put it quite well, and the quote Sinij lifted was humorous and succinct. I doubt he's really trying to redefine the common usage of the term PvP at all, but I'm sure he can whip up a few paragraphs to argue the minuitae of that quote in full.

I've yet to find any online game without griefers. PvP, PvE or just plain chat there are opportunities to cause woe for your fellow players in all multiplayer games. However, PvP games have historically passed on easier tools to the miscreants.

PVP is a superior method of grief. If you get a choice, you choose the superior grief method. In my brief return to UO a few months ago I used to grief people alot (it's full of self-righteous, greedy little shits who have no qualms about abusing people over nothing and sometimes I'd just lose it after extended periods of exposure). The weapon of choice was stealing their kills while "accidently" standing on their pretty avatars and saying random shit all the time. But you can bet I'd be killing them if the option was there (train kills were always good but you could only do them very seldom or be busted, and sometimes you'd kill some bystander who wasn't a dick and feel bad about it).

That's where the misconception comes from. Griefers aren't majority PVP, it's just that PVP is the best tool for the job. And if you're gonna grief you might as well do it right. I guess that could turn some griefers into PVPers though, when their PVP is taken away they lose their best tool and don't get the rush from other methods. So they gravitate to places that still allow said tool... like IPY.

See, it's only a tool for grief if there's no defense against it. Griefers used to love killing miners, so my friend (Il Pesto from boards past) had a miner who also happened to be a 3x GM warrior. He successfully hammered most miner killers into the ground.

I'd argue the superior method of grief is the stuff you can't directly fight, e.g. kill stealing, training in non pvp games, etc. I know when I was doing my griefing schtick when I was fifteen, the last thing I'd want to do is something people could fight against.

Joe for teh win.

I'd rather have my enemies stand out by being highlighted red, than to have them as "wolves in sheep's clothing". I'm not going to expand upon that analogy, because I'm sure Bruce now has a raging hard-on thanks to that visual.

If OSi had closed the loopholes that allowed for NPKing and opportunistic blue-killing, enforced statloss on death (not resurrection) the rep system could have been a great thing. Some asswad got it in his skull that macroing counts was like jail time....that's all well and good, except that their 'sentence' still consumed bandwidth and server resources, plus the dead reds did as much unattended macroing as anyone.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

That's pretty obvious.

As someone who was a hardcore early UO player, this is an ancient mistake. I used to define grief pvp as pk. So you'd have the pvp'ers and the pk'ers. One is a fun fight the other is someone trying to piss someone off and get their kicks in a juvenile fashion. There is pvp and grief pvp, just as there is definite grief in pve, that you can't usually retaliate against. Though I'm not a big fan of using retaliation (player justice, whatever) as a valid excuse, because then you shift the pacing and gameplay to the griefer. If we are in a town meeting with the yew militia and have to go fight off a wave of death-robed purple-potioners for a couple hours, then the griefers have their fun for that duration, and we are cockblocked from our meeting until we're done dealing with them. And we were a goddamned player justice organization.

UO pvp was great, it formed the basis for the greatest online roleplaying I've known to date. It also formed the basis for the most egregious griefing, because you could. And if you can, people will, because people are worthless piles of shit, for the most part.

We can excuse OSi for not having 20-20 vision in hindsight.  But that still begs the question of why IPY closed its doors.  (which HAS the benefit of observing the original UO).   Somehow i don't think quick and easy answers are forthcoming.

As far as PvE having more grief than PvP, i suppose that would best be measured by how many people leave PvE games because of griefers than leave PvP games.  I suspect PvE players would put up with much less greif and still i think that more people leave the PvP type games than the PvE games (due to griefing).

It's really easy....the guy was sick of spending his own time and money on a project that progressively went from an enjoyable project to a complete PITA.

Could they have modified the ruleset to try and find the perfect fix? Sure, but then they'd have lost a great deal of "Just like Pre-UO:R" appeal that made them popular in the first place.

Honestly, I just think he realized he was sick of all the bitching, and that he was going to get more bitching no matter what he did. When you're damned if you do, or damned if you don't, pulling the plug and saying "GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN" seems pretty attractive by comparison.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

This is why IPY closed down, and why UO lost a lot of customers. If you can, some asshole will. And the more you can do, the more harm one person can do to many.

This is the ultimate lesson of PVP environments, and I'm saying this as someone who loves PVP. If you let people do something, they WILL DO IT. And they will often do it in ways you do not anticipate, and often to hurt other players.

To a person who only wants to PVE on that particular occasion, ANY FORM OF PVP IS GRIEF. Period. If all you want to do is kill your bags of xp, get the loot and not be bothered by other people, ALL PVP IS GRIEF. Period.

That is not to say that PVP isn't a valid playstyle, or that people who PVE are pussies and PVPers are teh hardcore. But if you dont' want to be fucked with, any form of fucking with (including kill-stealing and PVP) is grief.

Just to clarify, I'm not equating PvP to Grief.   Grief is basically the result when PvP happens irresponsibly.   (Granted, the definition of Grief need not be so needlessly restricted to actions within PvP alone.   I've been griefed by PvE kill stealers, chat windows, and winger pron (fortunately not simultaniously).)   PvP is fine so long as it's not so inadequettely controlled that hurting others is easier and more rewarding than actually playing the game in a non-grief manner.  

Early Ultima Online PvP was irresponsiblibly executed.   There were a million ways they could have reserved the freedom that made it interesting without cutting it off entirely.   These ways revolve around adequette accountability for one's actions.   Instead, they chose to be lazy.  Stat loss was a lazy solution.   Cutting the world into Felecia and Trammel was a lazy solution.   Taking IPY down was a lazy solution.   (Of course, it's all very easy for me to call them lazy when I'm not the one doing the implementing of a real solution.   Coding is easy!  You do it with a magic wand while being pleasured under the table by swedish bikini models!   Spaghetti code is actual Spaghetti you enjoy with a luscious meat sauce eaten with folks made of thousand dollar bills!)

So, lets talk about some solutions that could have worked...

Jail.  That would have worked.   I know there's at least one little known MMORPG (I forget wat it's called - Exile?) that has a system for jail.   If you PK wrecklessly and are caught, your character is locked in a little room and formed to perform medial tasks with other PKs until you're released.   That system works because PvP becomes less fun.   Also, it's very satisfying to consider Sir Ganksalot who enjoyed killing helpless miners is currently confined to a small portion of the world breaking big rocks into small rocks for hours.   Whose the miner now, Sir Ganksalot?

Permadeath for particularly flagrant criminals would have worked as well.   Yes, I'm torching your character because you were using it irresponsibly.   Cry more, you red PK.   If we're putting together a realistic game in which players are allowed to interact with eachother in a realistic manner, you should expect to face realistic consiquences for your actions.   Sending rampant PKs to the gallows (so they lose their characters altogether) works because it makes PKs have to work harder to keep their characters up to snuff versus blues or light PKs (who do not need to face permadeath).   It also makes the game more interesting at the same time - permadeath can be cool if it's something the average player can easily avoid by simply behaving themselves.

Personally, I'd be up for a bit of both.  Jail of varying durations for minor infringements, permadeath for hardened criminals.   Perhaps for real minor infringements we can just force them to wear dresses and sing salty pirate tunes.

Nestalgia may tell you that Ultima Online had a good thing going for it because of the freedom it offered to interact with other players in a violent manner, and that's true.   However, PvP without adequette controls (not to mention being able to lift incredibly lucrative rewards off the corpse) equals grief, like it or not.   Here, I've just demonstrated a few ways you can keep the freedom that makes that PvP interesting without removing that freedom altogether.   If you want a game with realistic crimes, you need to integrate realistic punishments.   MMORPGs are unfortunately burdened in such a way that, hey, those are real player's efforts your hurting over there.   Most people don't understand that, or just say "yeah, well screw them, I'm having fun."  That's just a no go in terms of building a MMORPG responsibly.

The problem with both of those ideas (and the problem with previous attemps to curb PKing - like stat-loss) is that they focus on punishing the PK. They do nothing to lessen the impact of being PKed by the person who did not want to be in a fight with another player.

Like Haemish said, the fact that a PK might go to jail, suffer stat-loss, lose standing, or even be deleted in no way makes the naked-miner feel any better about being PKed. They're still going to be pissed and they're still going to consider it griefing.

I'd love to see some solutions for open-PvP that take it from the victim's side, rather than the PK's.

Personally, I think the PK needs to be punished, first and foremost, to stop it from getting out of hand.   If there's absolutely no reprocussion to stealing cars, my gargage would be a much more varied and intresting place.

However, from the victum angle, the idea of insurance is the best I've come up with.   The thing that chafes the most about having some jerk pop in and steal all your hard work is that all that hard work is gone through no fault of your own.   That's no good, so restoring a bit of that via insurance works.  

Yes, this has the potential to create some "duping" via insurance fraud.  That's why you can't get around punishing the PK.

Insurance for items won't matter. It isn't so much the items the victim might or might not lose, it's the interruption in his play time. You can't refund or insure that time.

The interruption to his play time is just more play time.   In a MMORPG, you don't just happen to other players, other players happen to you.    Playing a game in which the potential exists for you to get ganked is what makes it interesting.  When it actually happens, that's genuinely exciting: time well spent.    If you're irritated that other players can butt in, a MMORPG of unrestricted freedom and potential is not for you.

It only sucks when you have to deal with long term reprocussions.  Possession loss.  Humiliation.   Death.   These are things games can get around.

Don't like Insurance?  Well, if you wanted to get really elaborate, you could always code a means to find stolen items and return them to their owner when the PK is caught.

RL comparisons to crime and punishment as a deterrent simply don't work. In MMOGs, there is no physical pain, and no punishment that can't be avoided by one method or another.



Insurance doesn't eliminate the grief. Keep PKing until the insurance runs out, and you hit the jackpot. Even if it doesn't, at least you cost the guy 300GP each time you kill him...meanwhile the victim is every last bit as aggravated as if he were being sodomized by the business end of a rake.

Above else, recognize that being killed in a MMOG by any means is a blow to the ego. That's why PKing is hated even more than thievery.



Insurance fraud? If you use insurance, it has to be a money sink for the victim, or else you're opening up a gaping loophole. If you go that route, the PK cannot gain by PKing, and the victim has to lose moneyfor the insurance. Even as a zero-sum system, it would be exploitable.

And it still doesn't address the point that insurance doesn't remove the ability of griefers to piss someone off by killing them repeatedly.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

Again, it isn't so much the death or loss of items that piss off the PVE player who just got PKed. It's the interruption.

Yes, I realize that interruption is par for the course in MMOG land. But it still pisses people off, and I'd wager is the single-biggest reason PVE people don't like PVP. Well that and the fact that in games like old-school UO, the PVP was usually followed by a long, immature tirade from Jimmy Poopypants about how "owned" you were.

Thank you.  I saw very little "griefing" on Siege Perilous because you could kick the little griefing fucker's ass.  Griefing is for the weak, and they will have their asses handed to them in a full on PvP game.

The main angle I'm arguing upon is not from the perspective of a casual player trying to avoid getting inconveienced, but along the lines ofa designer attempting to capture the sheer passion that made the old days of Ultima Online one that all those crazy PKs seem to be trying to get restored.

RL comparisons of crime and punshiment as deterrent don't work?
Insurance doesn't eliminate the grief?
People will exploit an insurance system?
Griefers will ruin a game with less restrictions on the level of interaction?

Yeah, I've heard it all before.  We've seen the "care bear" solutions.   We've seen Shadowbane's "all PvP" excess.   I'm talking about creating a virtual world that really feels like it matters here.   A game with some serious gonads that doesn't pussyfoot around the issues.

So yes, I'm instituting capital punishment within a game world because I'd like it to be a game world players take seriously.
Yes, I'm suggesting insurance because I don't want a major setback to be game breaking.
Yes, I'm aware people will exploit the insurance system, so I tweak it so that the acts involved in doing so are more costly than it's worth.
Yes, I'm aware griefers will ruin rampant if I give this level of freedom, and that's why the capital punishment is neccessary.

I'm tearing down walls over here and saying, "lets see if what happens really matches up to the lessons we think we've learned from previous MMORPGs".  

Because I'm wagering the answer is, "We overcompensated by taking the least work solution to fix these issues, and if we really knuckled down and did it RIGHT, we'd see what we think we're missing from Ultima Online."

I always thought that a karma-type system would be the best way to help victims from PKing. Basically that some force protects everyone from eachother (you'd need to make everyone some sort of special freak of nature or sub-human to explain it though), but the protection waxes and wanes with certain actions. Someone who never fights would be invulnerable, someone who fights occasionally would have high damage reduction, so they'd have the opportunity to run if attacked, or would not be disadvantaged if jumped and wanting to fight back. A constant PK would be open season for everyone.

Just a thought.

Oh, and the thing with siege perilous is that it is where the hardcore supposedly go (and it was for a while, but it wasn't quite as hardcore when I rejoined). Plus most characters were made with a PVP focus, with PVP in mind, or full knowledge that they'd have to PVP. Your regular player on a regular shard even pre-trammel was hopeless at defending himself. And that's not even going into gank squads (we will ignore non-combat characters, they shouldn't exist in a PVP world without protection) or waiting for them to go low on health before jumping them. So even though they CAN fight back, they rarely do so successfully. PVP is also a very different skillset than PVE so anybody who wasn't used to it was again in a severe disadvantage. That makes the whole "the player can fight back" argument lose alot of steam.

The way I see it, you need to either have everyone ready and able to PVP, or you need to protect those who don't want to PVP (and I like Calandryll's point about punishment not being enough). I don't think it will work any other way.

geldon, the people who are "missing" that feeling from early UO are precisely those sorts of people who want the PvP that they had back then, which the bulk of players have subsequently rejected.  That's not to say everyone who waxes nostalgic about those days is a rampant PK griefer; many simply enjoyed playing in that environment.  Others view the past through rose-colored glasses.

We *have* learned the lessons from MMORPGs with PvP.  What we learned is not to put them in our PvE RPG games, or to make them extremely limited in those games, and instead to make other, PvP focused games.   That many of those games are still left found wanting I think speaks to a lot of the *other* aspects of UO that have never been fully copies (or can't be), not the PvP ones.

Bruce

Well there we're going to have to agree to disagree.   I'm not positive we've learned those lessons.   The reason why is because we never actually took the time to implement a real solution.

And guess what?  There's some lesser known games out there that have.   Neocron actually has a "Soul light" system that is very similar to the karma system that Calantus mentioned (except the consiquences are getting attacked on sight by NPCs in civilized areas and not being protected from other players), and it works quite well.   Though there is a PvP switch in Neocron, most people disable it because the Soullight system works that well.   That game I can't remember the name of has somewhat unrestricted PvP, and it works excellently by using a jail system.

Perhaps we didn't learn those lessons as well as we think, hmm?

(It's a pity that Neocron and that other game suck for other reasons.  Mostly weak development budgets.)

So yes, there are PvP games and PvE games.  I'm talking about a game in which you mesh PvP and PvE along the lines of trying to go for the "virtual world" approach.   In other words, early Ultima Online done right.

If you want Carebear Everquestish PvE, you've got Everquest (and it's sequel).  If you want competitive Shadowbane PvP, you've got Shadowbane and GUild Wars.  This is something else.

UO had implements to protect people from pvp: guards and houses. You could ban anyone you wanted from your house (unless you were red on Seige), and you could do your thing in town with literally no risk.

However, adventuring beyond the borders of town for whatever reason usually required at least some form of combat prowess, be it magery or melee fighting. Mining and other resource gathering was about the only thing you could do outside of town that didn't require at least a rudimentary understanding of how fighting things worked. Only the stupid ones died, really.

I was a miner for a year. I was PKed once. How did I avoid the wolves among the sheep? High hiding skill, an the ability to avoid the crossroads. It's not like PKs are hard to avoid if you're half awake. Most people aren't, or don't want to be, which is fine, but saying that people are sitting ducks for some faceless thirteen-year-old is a bit of a stretch.

People shouldn't be rewarded for not using the tools in front of them, especially in a world simulation like UO.

And there you hear the tired refrain of the PvP proponent.  "All other attempts at PvP/PvE integrated games have failed because they didn't use the RIGHT solution.  *I* have the elusive, perfect solution that other game companies with dozens of developers and millions of dollars couldn't come up with.  All those other PvE games with PvP that failed to capture a large audience sucked for *other* reasons."  Sure, maybe you are the Orville and Wilbur Wright of PvP/PvE game integration.  But somehow I doubt it.

It's nothing personal against you, geldonyetich.  I've heard the same claims from dozens of people going all the way back to before Shadowbane.

Bruce

My experience with PvP in UO was that housing was one of the reasons they did so well.   You could ban anyone from your house even if they had a very good reason to want to pursue you there, heh.

Aside from that, interesting point there Joe: Realistically it's not unfair to expect a sheep to take steps to protect itself.

Although I could come back and say that realistically it's not unfair to expect the virtual society to take adequette steps against crime.

Is my idea the one best way to make an early UO-like?  Hah, I don't think a "best" way exists.   However, it's not a bad idea.    It's not even all that complicated of an idea.  All I'm saying is if you expect to put realistic crime in the game, you'd dang well better put realistic punishment in as well.

Am I the Orville and Wilbur Wright of PvP/PvE Game integration or even a drop in the greatness of Sid Meyer?   Not until I pull off something like that successfully I'm not.   Just kicking around ideas.  The implementation, now there's the challenge.

I remember one time in UO, about 1999, when I stole an entire keyring of boat keys at Brit bank.  The guy noticed just as I was teleporting out to the first boat.  He had like 12 boats all next to each other.  Some of the boats had stuff on them and some didn't.  We played a mad game of randomly teleporting to the various boats, as I would try to spend hte few seconds before he found the right key looting the best stuff from the hold as he swore at me from three boats over.  I managed to drydock 2-3 of them and get a few good items and make it back to the bank once, he caught me on the second trip.  No MMORPG could EVER recreate that experience...why did perfection have to happen in the very first  large scale MMO and last for so short a time?

Because your "perfection" came at the cost of the other guy's "fun" -- if not him specifically, then other boat-owners in general.  And there are more of them than their are you, so they went off to play someplace else -- and you don't have nearly as much fun doing that with others of your own ilk.

You're basically like the big bully who went out on the basketball court, punched the kid who had the ball until he dropped it, and then shot the basket yourself.  When all the other kids stopped playing, you wondered whatever happened to those great basketball games.

Bruce

I'd be willing to bet that 99%+ characters in UO had enough magery to cast recall.  That's ALL it took to defend yourself in UO.  Even if a PK gank squad was charging through your hunting area, all you had to do was recall, bank your loot for a minute, and recall back.  The gank squad was gone, hunting in another location by then.

No, he was just the bank thief who stole a bunch of keys a guy shouldn't have been carrying if he didn't want them stolen. The remainder of the story is just cool interaction.

I've been on the receving end of a situation like that, except I had one boat and the guy who teleported onto it was trying to kill me. I ended up piloting the boat between successfully hiding from him into guard territory around Britain and got him guardwhacked. It took me forty-five minutes to beat the guy, but it felt great when I did.

Even as a victim in that situation, I felt like I'd experienced something coming close to an actual adventure, though not nearly as epic as I'd experienced later in my UO "life."

I think a lot of it comes down to how willing you are to allow other players to encroach upon your gameplay while you're simultaneously working to affect their world. Some people just don't seem overly intrigued with the prospect of changing the way others experience things. Granted, neither were situations I'd term grief; both my and Ganon's experiences were just non standard player vs. player encounters that UO allowed for.

I played UO from day 2 up through UO:R and like many people posting here I was very, very rarely killed by a PK. As you said, if I didn't want to fight or wasn't prepared, I just recalled. In fact, most of the time if I just ran in a straight line away from the PKs I could get away. But while recall was an option, the fact is many players were not able to get away. Some panicked, got killed before they could cast, or didn't have magery. Some had just taken their first three steps out of town.

The real issue is this. If a game is open PvP and allows for activities that are not PvP related and someone is doing one of those activities and gets PKed, there is a good chance they are going to be upset. Even if it says right on the box and every time you log in "YOU MIGHT BE PKED WHILE PLAYING THIS GAME!".  Especially if they are playing a character that isn't built for combat (like a miner - not to mention most player's combat characters were not built for PvP either).

So even though every player in UO who left town knew they might get attacked, if they weren't leaving town with the purpose of PvPing (ie: mining, skill gain, etc) getting PKed was often seen as an interruption by a good number of players. They don't care that the PK might suffer stat loss eventually, or that he can't go into town, or any of that.

The bottom line is the player decided to do something that night and wasn't able to do it...that's what a vast majority of the complaints (aside from the harrassment issues) over PKing boiled down to.

Recalling was a major pain if you were forced to do it. You couldn't go back right away because they might still be there, and that's if you had a rune there in the first place. If they didn't have a thief take all your pearl first. If you were exploring it was a major pain in the butt. Or my favourite, trying to mark a rune and getting jumped just before you get it. It also depends on how dedicated your pks were on whether you can hide. Some would have tracking and use explosion potions to get you to auto-attack when next to them. Or run off, hide, and stealth back. But the death wasn't the worst part. Sometimes you'd go all over trying to find a good mining spot only to have to run from pks, and then minoc guarded area was full. Or you'd want to go somewhere to train only to find PKs there so you had to go to a lesser place.

I got PK'd a fair bit because I usually fought back on a char if he wasn't new. It rarely annoyed me because I liked that aspect most times (sometimes though...). Even if you or I liked it, alot of people didn't, even if they could fight back or avoid the fight. It was the annoyance of it all that got to people.

Insurance was and still is outright bad idea for UO - it killed all need for crafts and turned PvP into 'who has best loot' contest. As to ‘interruption in his play time’- ‘he’ should not play mmorpgs if ‘he’ is concerned that interaction with other people might lessen your fun.

See this? This is exactly why PVP is not a big part of most mmorpgs. Developers like paying customers.

I am positive that the developers and publishers never learned the RIGHT lessons from those games. They learned some lessons.

Lessons learned:
1) Unrestricted PVP in a PVE world leads to lots of CSR calls and cancelled subscriptions
2) A small minority determined to make things harder for the majority can and will do so if you let them, causing the majority to cancel subs
3) People don't want to be protected, they want to be INSULATED

See other comments I've made about virtual worlds. We are nowehere near mature enough technology to allow virtual worlds to be worth a damn, nor do we have mature enough gamers to allow it. I'm talking we're an entire generation of gamers (not games) from virtual worlds. The online medium does not allow enough accountability to enable virtual worlds, and we as netizens do not have the maturity yet with said technology to not use it as a shovel in someone else's brainpan. We are virtual babes being given howitzers and told "Don't shoot this off!"

I'm not saying PVP can't work, nor that virtual worlds are impossible. It's obvious neither one of those statements are true. But the player base barely has an idea of its own net space, much less someone else's. We don't know how to not act like savages to each other.

EDIT: And when people are PAYING FOR A SERVICE, they have the right to demand not to be interrupted in what they are doing.

I'm just angry that I pay for my Lions tickets, and the other team's defense keeps interrupting them. Oh wait, what's that you say? It's part of the game? And everyone involved knows it's part of the game before they ever go in?

Hmm, interesting....so basically people get mad when they can't et their way all the time, and the fact that they are paying (and can threaten to stop paying) provides them with enough leverage to make people listen.

It's like playing Monopoly against someone, and having them get mad because I bought Marvin Gardens, and won't sell it to them under any circumstances. Or getting mad because I built Hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. I have something to gain by doing so, and they are just mad because I am standing in the way of their success. Quite frankly, I don't care if their only objective is to see how many laps they can make around the board...my goals oppose theirs, whether they like it or not.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

Ahhh, but in football, that is a PVP-only game. There isn't a pair of people in football standing in the field tossing around a baseball while the Lions are playing the Bears. That's a PVP-only game with a VERY STRINGENT set of rules. And I imagine that those football players would get very pissed if some jackass ran down onto the field and starting tossing around exploding devices.

Yes, some people play MMOG's to play what is in essence, a single-player or co-op game with only a certain set of people. And they pay for that, that is their expectation and someone coming in uninvited to mess that up WILL upset them. For early UO, that's the game many people expected, and they were never informed of the ability for someone else to interrupt that fun. That is just one of the reasons instancing has become so popular in MMOG's. It allows for massive subscriptions (good for the devs) while allowing boutique play (good for players).

Haemish, I agree with the sentiment about flawed expectations. I think a lot of people look at MMOGs and think "wow, it's like a persistent Diablo, with more players, and new content added regularly".

Even though their expectations were not consistent with the original intent of designers like Raph, those were the players that were inevitably catered to once Garriott and Koster were out the door. Because there are a lot of them, and they feel it is their god-given right to play any and every game they want to that same way.

As much as those folks may have helped create a comfy niche for producers with their 'persistent Diablo with content updates', some of us still want the virtual worlds that were supposed to be what the genre was all about.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

There aren't currently enough of us who want a persistent virtual world to justify developers spending the money needed to make one worth a damn. The hybrids we have gotten so far are the best we are going to get for a long while.

We aren't ready for them as a playerbase.

My school of thought is one that says that a game trains the players to play in a method that generally is the quickest path to success.   So, along those lines, I don't think of the general MMORPG player base as being "unready" for an unrestricted PvP game so much as the game needs to be designed to facilitate teaching those players the desired way for them to PvP.

Umm, the original playbook that came with UO flat out tells new players DO NOT LEAVE THE GUARDZONE WITHOUT LOTS OF FRIENDS OR YOU WILL PROBABLY BE KILLED!  That book goes into detail about how other players can, and will, affect your play experience and gives suggestions on precautions players can take to avoid them.

Except playerbooks are unreliable, and in even the best of circumstances they say things that are best considered optional.  Heck, if i thought i had to do everything that was listed in the eq manual, i never would have played.

Hide and recall foiled 99% of pk attempts I didn't feel like retaliating. I played from beta (phase 2? I forget, been too long) through UOR, then for a bit on SP about the time I became a lummite. Hell, my SP character had no combat skills whatsoever, nor magery at all, he was straight treasure hunting/rogue-type. Incredibly fun, only killed a couple times, most of those when I went on guild raids (on enemy hqs or whatnot, not some ghey dragon with phat lewtz ;) because I was acting as a distraction for the real combat forces or causing mayhem behind the lines. You can't have that much fun without that level of interaction between players, and you can't have that level of interaction without griefers taking advantage of it to harass people in a mixed environment.

If there had been more options for resource harvesting in justice zones, I doubt I'd have bitched about pking at all, for the rest was pvp and par for the course. For the record, I'm very pro-pvp, partook in pvp heavily in UO, and enjoy online shooters, I'm no carebear.

That's the fundamental problem with player justice, it empowers the griefer, as I said in my post above.

I'd go so far as to say the vast bulk of complaints from mmorpg players amount to disconnects between expectations and reality.  Sometimes it's the players fault for not taking time to understand how a game is supposed to work (i.e. if you signed up for Shadowbane not understanding it's a guild focused game), but more often, it the failure of the dev to properly set, live up to, and more importantly, manage and understand, player expectations (i.e. players expecting PvE to not be a requirment in SB, or players epecting large scale battles to work without sb.exe errors :) ).

That's not even unique to mmorpgs; almost any service organization faces the bulk of complaints from the same thing.

Xilren

I was going to post something, but then I got distracted by a bunch of shadowbane stuff. Oh well.

Bah, horse's mouth has too much foot to speak?

ADD has too much ADD to...

uh

Forgive him. If you have read a lot of his posts, you will notice he gets a bit too excited with his one liners.

Gotta love the avatar though.

Yeah, anyone who goes KITH is ok by me.

Oi! Oneliners is my thing!

Never bitch! I shall have your FUCKING SOUL!

Even if it were read, it would be an irrelevant comment.  Look, trying to mine only to wind up getting corpse raped by a guy when you didn't even have time to register the CORP POR just wasn't fun for the victim.  It doesn't matter if they had an "I told you so", because all they did was to tell the customer that THE GAME WAS UNFUN.  At least for them, the victim.

I like that someone brought up football - but consider that football is a game where the odds are even, the rules are known, and the goals identical.  With UO and PvP, that's not the case.  Want to be a miner?  You're bait.  Want to farm mobs?  You're bait.  Want to explore?  You're bait.  In order to participate in any other aspect of the game, players have to handicap themselves on the "football field", if we were to use the analogy.  You have to scratch PvP skills for non-PvP ones.  Moreover, unlike football, you have to run around with a sub-par "team" for a good while.  It's like trying to take a highschool team against a pro team.  It's not fun.

It's not that PvP is some evil that must be striken from game design, because all that PvP is is player vs player contest; which is included in games like Doom, football, and the rest.  People LOVE to compete, but the only like to do so when the field is fairly even.  Nobody likes it when the deck is stacked dramatically against them.

An easter egg hunt on a football field.

But in a sense, I disagree. I'm still allowed to do that, right?

Back in 1997, sure. You had your one choice. Your game was, pretty literally, an easter egg hunt on a football field. And you didn't necessarily have to know anything about the football players before you went looking for egg one. Mind you, I'm a BIG fan of having everyone in one world.

However, nowadays, you go into a MMOG knowing pretty much damn well what you're in for. If you're new to these, it can be a different story. You'll either find out that this is the type of game for you or it isn't. If not, you will move on to a PvP- setting. If so, you precast recall and grab as many eggs as you can before the inevitable pummeling of your 7-year-old pajamaed ass by the 356lb greasy lineman of death and childish insults. That's the game. It's not fair, it's not supposed to be, it's not football. You choose whether to play or not. It's also not all downsides.

I have very little against the basic concept of player freedom that leads to non-consensual PvP (I also think you may need to learn to seperate the two types of PvP). What I do have a problem with are the people that are attracted by it to a game, and the people that exploit it. They make it a pretty bad idea, it isn't a bad idea in and of itself. In fact, I think, if done correctly from a design standpoint, it can add quite a bit of flavour to your game - and without it, there's something lacking, and a feeling of restriction. Whether I feel like killing someone right now or not. I know I'm restricted in that fashion, and I know everyone else is too.

I will admit, however, that anyone mindlessly adding non-con PvP into their game without a damn good plan for it is making a pretty big mistake. Especially nowadays, with MMORPGs more popular than ever with 17 year old frustrated-with-life computer geeks - and because 99% of them simply don't accomodate that shit, they'll all flock to one when it comes out. Especially during the late betas and opening months, possibly really fucking with your launch success.

And too often, they choose not to.  Staying "that's how the game is played" isn't an appropriate response if the issue you're trying to address is "what's the best way to design a game", or something close to it.  It's well understood that "this is how the game is".  The problem is that how it is, isn't working.  Unfair is not fun and that translates to lack of customers, and lack of customers is Death.  Unfair equates to failure.  THAT is how it is.



You're contradicting yourself.  Good ideas are ones that work.  If the "It" you refer to is made unworkable by a subset of the game's population, then "It" is a bad idea, period.  To claim that if "It" were done correctly then it would be a good idea is a meaningless statement; anything done right is right.  A is A.  We know.  Problem is, the "It" you refer to is already decidedly not right, not good, and hence not done correctly.