f13.net

Going down May 1st (http://ubbforums.ubi.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news&Number=3465328&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1)


I looked but didn't see this posted anywhere else, if it was please just lock this post.

Two things killed Shadowbane.

1.
Listening to the extreme hardcore players and making losing a city so painful that people opted to quit rather than rebuild. That was a change they snuck in just before release after a long focus group discussion where moderates like me lost out.

2.
A poor game engine that couldn't handle massive PVP fights, and at times couldn't even handle a simple group vs group fight.

Oh well, it was good for the memories either way.

It's always sad when a mmog dies.

That said, I get to continue playing games to bake bread.

I won't see you in Shadowbane, bitches.

*raises a glass and a loaf to the Great Experiment*

Shadowbane still has the best worldly pvp ever. I guess there's a reason why I am not a game designer, but player built cities, infeudation and subinfeudation and land control? I can't really understand why no one is cloning that point by point. Hell, we play so many stupid browser games with the same concept just because it's a great concept.

Shadowbane 2, just better graphics and less bugs, would be money if they could do it with a low budget.

If the devs don't close the server by dumping everyone to one final sb.exe then they should never be allowed to work again.

This.

I don't care what anyone else says.  Once some of the more serious technical issues were worked out SB was and still stands as some of the most fun I've had in a MMOG.  The class design and lore were fanfuckingtastic.  I absolutely loved creating different characters/builds and exploring all the interesting options offered.  As waylander pointed out there were some early design issues that caused problems, but I still had fun despite them and many of those issues were worked out and/or mitigated as development continued.  A big salute to Lietgardis and any other old school SB devs that still hang out here.  Shadowbane was a great game for many people despite its flaws; don't let anyone convince you otherwise. :heart:

The MMO medium is like a sea of lost potential.  We send another MMO off to their watery grave.  

Shadowbane had so much wasted potential.  Were it not for the aggrivation I suffered because of it, I could probably muster a little sympathy.  

(http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/5020/vikingfuneral.jpg)

Shadowbane had 4 things that were done better than anyone else:

1) Customizable UI - it was arcane at first, but even without modding, the damn thing was so deeply customizable you could literally have a completely different game from someone else.
2) One of the deepest character advancement systems I've ever seen. Lots of options that could make 2 players of the same class be completely different types of characters.
3) A flat xp curve.
4) The ability to group with players of any level and still gain the same amount of experience as you would solo.

The excreable click2move, the shitastic bugginess of the engine and servers, and the retarded design decisions that virtually guaranteed 1-2 authoritarian guilds would take over a server causing the losers to quit make it deserve a watery grave.

5)  Duck hats.

In the aftermath of the Trammelization of UO, Shadowbane was the Great White Hope of the disenfranchised PK asshat brigade. Oh, how many threads I saw about how the game was going to be doomed as soon as SB came out. It was like the retardation surrounding Darkfall, only that much louder since UO itself and the debate regarding FFA PVP were both still relevant.

Looking back on those days, and even though I don't really play UO anymore, I would just like to take this opportunity to publicly dance on Shadowbane's grave.

/bakes bread

Hey WUA!

edit: Sorry, i forgot the  :heart:

SB was an example of what not to do every fucking way.  It fucked the concept of Open PvP so hard it may never recover.  Good riddance. 

It was the same thing on DAOC boards. Shadowbane was going to KILL DAOC DEAD.

I miss it already :heartbreak:

I may not have played in a year, but it was always good to know that I could get back into it for free.

The few gamers I still talk with on a regular basis, still talk about the fun they had in Shadowbane (pre oblivion). I agree there were many many design flaws and a crappy engine. It survived nonetheless. This speaks to the strength of the market available. Open summoning and pvp worked in a simplistic sense. There was lots of good ideas (pre-order unlockable classes!) and lots of bad ones (only tree you can port to is your home city?).

I'm a lot too old to spend the time and effort on the next one, but I will always remember the fun I had sneaking though the bodies looting, assassination attempts on me in my own bank, and the massive sight of catapults outside a burning city's walls (at 1fps if you were lucky).

The only game Shadowbane influenced is EVE, the MMO with the healthier pvp in the world, and you talk about hard to recover fuck ups?
Well, you are just wrong. Shadowbane was plagued, no.. DOOMED, by technical ineptitudes. When they recovered from that, 4 years later, it was too late. So yeah, rest in peace.
But the PvP system grew on strong ideas and became unmatched after a few years later, and it's obvious to me that your concept of open PvP is very limited and simplihistic, some version of persistent Unreal Tournament where it pretty much means nothing.

Unless you are pretty much uninformed about Shadowbane save for the terrifugly first year experience.

It doesn't matter what happened after the first few months if the game doesn't turn around commercially.  This isn't art to be admired for how aesthetically pleasing the game mechanics appear.  Subs are that what influences the genre.  If UO had negative subs than SB had an imaginary number of subs.

EvE is a fine (logistical simulation) game, but the bulk of the players live in PvE space.  I am sure that is in no small way due to SB.  But SB push EvE away from Open PvP not towards it.

I'm surprised it lasted this long and yes it was completely flawed. But I still have some very very fond memories of my short time there.

God bless games like ShadowBane that fail in an utter sea of flames fueled by its own failure. I can't help but dance on its grave. Oh and people please stop saying EvE is some great spiritual successor to the world pvp model. Its a game with as larger percentage of pure pve'ers than even WoW and makes no bone about stacking the odds nice and high for the old "me gank noobies" crowd.

Let's not forget the issues of guilds 'winning' the map, requiring things to be reset.

And runes that were essential to being competitive.

And having a different publisher in every region. Hello, Entranz.

I might go back and try it before it dies forever... or maybe not.

Those are not always bad things.

Your point is lost in a thread about a game that died, was resurrected, fully reset its servers at least once and is on on the verge of fully dying again.  :grin:

sb.exe launched 25th of March 2003.
EVE launched 5th of May 2003.

I really don't think either one had much influence on the other.

I could be wrong, but you couldn't build your homebases in 2003 in EVE.

However, my main point still stands: they are the only two western MMOs with meaningful territorial conquest, where you have to BUILD your empire, where alliances and diplomacy are critical, where you have to keep your vassals close and happy, because losing a war means LOSING a lot.

Still, Shadowbane concept is fail and EVE is awesome? Whatever rocks your carebear boats, dudes.

Lets also not forget that most of the guilds that 'won' did so because they were hand picked for the beta and basically spent months training for release.

Which points out another problem with beta tests.  Many guilds with a desire to win-at-all-costs will selectively forget to identify bugs and broken game mechanics that they can exploit early to their advantage.  While these things get corrected eventually in many cases, they do allow these guilds to have a large advantage in the early arms race leading to a fairly long reign at the top. 

Well, losing in EVE means a lot, but how many people outright quit when they lose territory in EVE versus either rebuilding their empires or being absorbed into another alliance? Even reverting to a more casual lowsec/highsec Empire-based corp is a legitimate, if a bit dull and humbling, option. From the limited amount of time I've put into EVE, it seems like even if the corp/alliance itself can't regain a foothold, individual players can still have enough of a "résumé" of skills and ship piloting abilities to fall back on when they try to get into another corp. Alliances and the reasons for them existing seem fluid enough that it looks pretty tough for one single ubercorp to effectively control 80% of the map (barring Chinese EVE of course).

When your tiny out-of-the-way Shadowbane guild city that you've worked for three months constantly farming PvE to rank up gets roflstomped at 5 AM Eastern by the server uberguild who only allowed you build yourselves up that high out of a desire to have something to destroy rather than crushing your Tree an hour after you plant it (which they will do if you try to rebuild), it's just that much easier to simply quit rather than going through the futility of either trying to rebuild or trying to join another guild who likely has half a dozen people with the same class and confirmed-not-gimp build template as you.

I loved SB, was one of the best MMO experiences I had, even if plagued by:

* technical problems, sb.exe errors and network instability for a game that needed "big battles" to be handled smoothly without hundreds of dropped connections…

* should have had server choices — blitz server (frequent restart/rerolls with even more rapid XP advancement), regular interval resets and perma-world…

* maps should have been random, with the rune drops at different locations…

* grind of leveling replaced with grind for money to build and maintain castle… …should have incorporated more offline "work" accrual and/or other means (not even sure best methods for this, but I believe others have thought on this matter in more thorough veins)…

Maybe some or all of these were rectified since I last played… …but if so, it was long after any hope of "critical mass"…

RIP, Play 2 Crush

Those without beta experience could be competitive from day 0, but yes there was a strong advantage towards beta guilds.  Of course, mitigating that advantage leads us back to drastic changes in how the game plays, right before release, and without testing - another complaint lodged against SB.exe.  Maybe the team doesn't see a priori that weight based inventory (http://www.bung.org/~sergi/image/stupid_001.jpg) (or elven boots, or tower archers) will crash other people's clients but some issues with the play of the game should not have been a surprise:

• Blacklist KoS.
• City construction time / upkeep costs / administration-trust breakdown.
• The loss of your ToL disbanding your guild communication channel and scattering your players to the 4 winds.
• Nothing to do short of totally annihilating each other for guilds while at war - you could always gank, no need to declare war for that.

Loads of the things that "SB should have done" were planned - random (or at least a variety of) maps for an obvious example.  They ran out of time and shipped what they had, it isn't all that uncommon for an MMOG to do that sort of thing.  It is no surprise that the to-do list wasn't finished when it came time to deliver product, especially when they had such glaring concurrency and stability issues.  The argument that something was bad because they did it wrong is not that interesting - Shadowbane was a case where despite being done wrong the game was still fun (up until you quit).  There have been some games out recently that have not been fun despite having more of the technical ducks in a row, hard to judge which is more frustrating.

Full disclosure: I started playing in Feb 03, became a moderator in March, and burned the cities of my own nation to the ground in September 03 when it became obvious that we could no longer maintain 24-7 watch over our assets.  Stories of being horribly outmanned and breaking a siege by launching a counter-siege, or using Camoflage to hide 3 groups of non-stealth classes while the enemy rolled through our position are enough to remember fondly the potential for fun (and maneuver) within the game.  Much of the community lacked respect for themselves and their opposition.  I would still play on an invitation only server (e.g. open to wargamers with lives/jobs), but as an open system too many of the rules of fair play are left to the discretion of the player.

When I say Shadowbane PvP is great I use the present. When I say they should clone it I mean the system NOW in place.

Many people hate Shadowbane for what it did 6 years ago to their PvP feathers. I can understand the emo behind that.

But why can't people understand the game slowly evolved and became much, much, much better? It built on MANY of the mistakes listed here and after a few years delivered lots of what it was supposed to be. PvP-wise, of course.

I am not trying to convince anyone SB deserved your money or your heart. I am just saying too many love to spit on its grave without knowing all the good actions it did to repent its sins before dying. Which led to the best open/worldly PvP short of EVE.

It was a piece of shit for so many reasons, but a pretty much resource-less piece of shit.
And instead of giving it the deserved credit for offering worlds worth building and battling for (a feature STILL FUCKING missing in the 2009 fantasy MMORPG industry!), it's so easy to join the clueless and uninformed bandwagon, led by Marshall Carebear and The Betatesters (class of 2003).

Well, shame on you.

Had to end it by calling people carebears.

Ironically, I started playing this just recently.  Friend of mine was kinda bored with WoW and wanted to screw around some other things, but had no money, so I thought of Shadowbane after a bit, since it's free.  In the time I played recently it seemed to have improved quite a bit.  A lot of nice things such as the ability to untrain skills (as opposed to release where, if you spent even one skill point in the wrong place, FUCK YOU, REROLL, BITCH) traveling stance (out of combat running buff, as opposed to back where only a couple classes could increase their movement speed), and a number of other things that made the game much easier and more fun to play. 

I may play a few more times in these last few days, but I'm really somewhat saddened that I never really got a chance to play the new and improved Shadowbane seriously.  I strongly suspect that if you took Shadowbane, made it work right (technically), then reworked a number of the systems that need overhauling, you'd have a reasonably successful game, especially in this age where pretty shitty games get almost a million box sales.  A game where you fight for something significant, not just more points or whatever, has a place.

Shadowbane wasn't really a good game.  But it was bold, trying at some ideas that were good, at least parts of them.  I'm sorry to see it go.

Shadowbane beta was awesome. After they decided that building a town should be a fucking chore involving weeks of PvE farming, the awesome was forgotten fairly quickly. Once people started knocking over towns made out of pure PvE grind, you had to be either duping money or a Korean PvE grind fetishist to find anything fun about the game.

PvP games will always weigh themselves down with worthless PvE, and once they transition from beta to retail they will decrease the rate of gain from this PvE content to try to retain accounts. It's counterproductive, but I don't see anybody rushing to change the model.

So what's the middle (hopefully, successful) ground?

Planetside failed on the MMO side (based on forum discussions here) much in part due lack of persistence, and lack of "meaningful-ness".

Many feel that SB farming for gold to invest in cities was it's downfall, since it was made to require so much (time) investment.

If both ends of the spectrum are failure, is there a middle ground, or is it simply a no win scenario?

Reset everything every two weeks or a month.  Give the winners the ability to wear cool sunglasses or dye their armor or get a title or something.  Give the losers a wintergrasp type damage buff if they lose more than once or twice in a row.  Scramble maps to put the winning faction in a bad strategic position, give the losers more land and more resources, etc.  And three factions  :oh_i_see: 

Shadowbane has conquerable mines that once taken mine gold for you, and can be attacked (so change owner) once a day for 1 hour. The catch is all your mines become vulnerable at the same time so you can change that vulnerability window but it'll still happen once a day, and the more mines you have the harder it is for you to defend them all. Brilliant.

I think the common ground would be more stuff like this, or EVE (where at least you can farm AFK-ish), than boring and endless building resources grind as in Age of Conan or the former Shadowbane.



I hope that's green. Can you think of EVE with three factions?

It wasn't that a lot of farming was required (and it certainly got much less over time), but that the balance was out of whack. What could take a few months to build could be razed in 1-2 hours.  First contact / the skirmish-line with the enemy was often at the heart of your empire, with no way to enforce boundaries and the perimeter of this territory you 'control.'  All your assets were at risk all the time, the game actually favored building empty cities, so that you'd have nothing to lose (ye olde "one cannot be betrayed if one has no people").  The cost was significant only in the (lack of)security it provided, building a city made you a target instead of a power.

Massed Blaster Fire was a big problem both with the PvP and with the Siege mechanic.  On the small scale in a maneuver oriented fight it was really fun (so long as you were ranged melee and immune to typical sync exploiting).  On the large scale characters could be dead on the server before their client registered the first attack.  The large scale favored tricks like hiding casters within the character models of meat shields, or stacking attackers and defenders to mitigate the ability to select a target, to game one another with the font style of the game "Hello Mr. II1111IIII111I1, I'm looking at you." 

There was no mechanism to make subsequent victories more difficult, to focus a defender's power and boost their defense the closer they got to their capital, or to tax the winner with defense of his newly expanded lands.  The strong naturally got stronger and the weak were exterminated - by design.  Unless you are willing to regularly reset, this game design isn't a lot of fun late adopters over the long term.  You don't beat the early adopters under this game design, you outlast them and take your turn at the top after they've grown bored.

That plan (one can crush all their enemies and win) with regular resets would have been servicable.  Many browser based games successfully go this route.  Even if the player lost this time, there is always hope that the next reset will be different.  Everyone has a gamblers chance of winning big.  The rush of the new map was quite successful, scoring after 3 months reset on 4 months and you've got 3 challenges per year - a fine pattern of play that will provide a chance to recover and prevent player burnout.  Easy and obvious points for late adopters to get in on an even footing.  Of course, under such a plan cities need to be cheap/free since their expected lifetime will be short.

As a persistant world players need something to do that isn't obliterating their opposition.  They need skirmishes and regular light risk encounters to prevent burnout from incessant high risk encounters.  They need some reward for building their city because it goes a lot further towards making them a target than it does towards protecting them.  Cities could be expensive if they'd be expected to survive for a while.  Much was untested at release and players damaging buildings was one unfortunate slip, spec groups of siege weapon wielding barbarians could raze an upgraded wall section in 90 seconds.  If the build time on a wall was several days (and weeks of resources) you can't have it fall down in a couple minutes.

So really, the balance was off, horribly, at release.  It got better over time, but the game design did not favor building large cities rather minimal cities with minimal risk due to the cost of construction and ease of destruction.

EVE.  :awesome_for_real:

Slightly more seriously: PvP is all about fighting other players and making you feel like you achieved something. PS didn't give that sense of achievement over the long-term. SB required a ton of PvE to get to a point that you could PvP and it was possible for a guild to permanently 'win' the map, thus making the act of fighting other players redundant at best, a death sentence at worst.

Resetting the map doesn't work (POTBS).

My key things for a successful PvP title are:

1) Everyone plays on one server;
2) Combat is quick to get to, quick to get into  and provides both winner and loser with rewards; and
3) The devs are interventionist gods. No point trying to have systems auto-balance - the devs have to get out their and shake things up from time to time. Break the stranglehold of the dominant, support the underdog. Give players hope that they can be victorious. And yes, dev avatars should be killable.

SB had great classes and a nice easy levelling curve.  Everything else was pretty bad.  Don't make a pvp game if your engine can't handle it.  I'm looking at you WAR.

And I would say that AoC is the spiritual descendant of SB. 

Eek!
Yes, maybe reading pre-launch features.

The Middle ground was DaoC with more RvR/WorldBuilding depth.


My Guild in DaoC held onto a keep for months on end, but all we could ever do with that keep was put a few extra guards and another vendor.

One of the problems that I have with MMOG PvP is that the scale of combat in these PvP-oriented games is strategic, but all the gameplay is tactical. You are trying to play a wargame where the pieces are small, independently controlled, and not even guaranteed to exist when you need them (the latter is a reference to needing to protect assets 24/7).

I never got into Eve combat because I don't really have fun being a cog in the machine, and I certainly also didn't feel like spending all the time in between girding up doing the mining, hauling, and/or bashing to get there.

I don't know about you, but for me and a bunch of other people, it was that a lot of farming was required, not the 'balance'. If it had taken two months to knock down a town that took two months to build, we'd probably all have left before we had to do any repairs. We were there for PvP, not for extended collaborative PvE mechanics.

As I stated above, the beta was awesome. The 'middle ground' that Steven asks about was already developed. PvE mobs dropped around an order of magnitude more loot and it took around an order of magnitude less time to build up town buildings. A full town could be build in around five days. It could be destroyed in one, but destroying it was tough, requiring several people who were awake enough to sync up trebuchets on the tree after everything else was destroyed. There were no stupid 'siege windows', so people could sneak raid your town if you were all absent overnight. It was a harsh world, but if you did log in to a hoard of enemies having destroyed the easy bits and who were working on several hours of killing the tree, you could rout them and build the town back up over a few days. If you somehow allowed people to destroy the tree entirely, a new seed and a new town was a small gather/build mini-game away. It was hard to eradicate anybody to the point where their will wasn't there to rebuild. There were two gigantic bugs that they needed to fix from beta - crashes to desktop and an "end of the world" bug where there client would stop loading terrain if you took a long enough trip. They fixed the latter, they changed everything and added dozens of new bugs, broken game mechanics and a horrendous grind. Clearly that wasn't their finest hour.

Of course, the people who play betas also tend to have more investment in MMOGs, so retention of those accounts is probably easier in any case. But beta was a better game. Not a perfect game, but a lot of fun and more of a game than the miserable launched product was.

Thanks.  We appreciate it.

I wouldn't necessarily say resetting the map is a failure based on POTBS; POTBS had so many other flaws gumming up the model that I don't think you can draw any clear conclusions about that one little part.

Actually, this is a big problem with any MMO - they are such a function of complex interlocking systems that often when we point out one system that worked / didn't work we ignore every other issue that built up to that success / failure.

POBTS' map reset showed that particular solution can end up with one side constantly dominating, constantly resetting the map and actually creating a permanent stranglehold on what is meant to be an impermanent world.

The lesson I take from EVE is that you need every player in a PvP-orientated world on one server so as not to fragment your player base and also need to give them enough room so that if a group want to get away to carve their own niche, they can give it a shot.

Why cant there be more games with SBs level of character customisation? im sick of my only decisions coming down to spending talent points.  I want to assign stats and skills and pick sub classes.

I think that people are forgetting that the Chinese EVE server is pretty much in endgame ShadowBane mode.

(http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2009/gu_20090420.jpg)

Fabricated's thought in comic form.  Nice.

I don't understand the bugzapper in that picture.

Long running joke in that comic. Its where dead MMOs go to get zapped when they're officially closed. Woody isn't all that funny, but I've liked that series.

That's because unlike in the Western server CCP added all of their advances simultatneously instead of staggering them...   As a result one could put up a POS with relativley few skills/resources but it took many many months to train a character to operate the Dreadnaughts necessary to take the POS's down.  The result was a massive landgrab which resulted in a completely static world where one side just horded enough resources to gain complete control of the entire universe.

EvE does have a decent model with POS's though (even though the gameplay is boring as hell).  You put material into the POS that makes it invulnerable for X hours after shields have been taken down to a 25%.  When shields get to 50% you cannot alter the amount of material in the POS.  As a result you can chose the time that the POS comes out of re-inforced, but a dedicated enemy can try to swing it to a time that is advantageous for them.

Hard to say, possibly doesn't exist, surely never been done.

I think you have to make a game where within 20 minutes people can get into a fight, that is fun, preferably where you've somehow artificially given them some kind of a chance while still allowing the players to drive.  Combine that with somehow making the fights impact the gameworld in a variety of ways but instead of allowing winners salt the earth it should be more like the losers are driven back to their safehaven where they always log in and things look and feel desperate and fucked up but they can still get a fight in 20 minutes and all forms of gameplay are available to them.

So basically, I have no idea.  I can make something up and I can list the problems to avoid but solving this one might just be too difficult.

(http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2006/gu_20060724.jpg) (http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2008/gu_20080924.jpg)(http://www.gucomics.com/comics/2009/gu_20090224.jpg)

A swift and deadly stroke, I agree. Bravo Falc!

Shadowbane in 3 acts

Act 1:
  Designer 1: "The more territory you take and resources you have, the more powerful you are, right?"
  Designer 2: "Yeah"
Act 2:
  Designer 1: "Let's make it so the more powerful you are, the easier it is to take territory and resources!"
Act 3:
  FIN


I remember in exquisite detail the response a dev posted many years ago as server-lock was burgeoning.  He said 'human nature' would naturally cause the breakup of the dominant faction.  I'm not sure where Wolfpack hired their VP of Human Nature from.

The logic, which is used idiotically in most arguments for ffa games or rvr games with 3 or more sides in conflict, is that the smaller fish will gang up on the big fish and it will be a dog eat dog world where the strongest will get mobbed by a horde of weaker factions banded together. Works sometimes, but when it no longer works, as in your player base takes the most optimal path to victory, that logic falls apart faster then a house of cards.

A greater dynamic with a MMOG — "teams" changing alignment (to gang up on the leader) is one aspect, but in a MMOG the individuals that comprise those teams also hop on and off the teams.

In TBS games, FFA really do have a "gang up on the leader" vibe, and diplomacy and politics flow until there are 2-3 challengers left.

In all truth, i think this was the best mmo. sure it had problems, but there isn't another game of it's type where i really wish many of it's core features were implemented elsewhere (read: everywhere).

On this topic: when can we start producing content for Broken Dreams schild?

Whenever you'd like.

I only played "Act 1", but my guild controlled the server without even having much land. Just the general Commander Rune/Elf area and some lizardmen lvling spots and such. Yet there was a lot of bitching. Not sure how or why Wolfpack got involved, but I guess they thought it'd be funny to help all of the assholes (read: carebears  :why_so_serious:) on that server out. They equipped rival guilds with top rank mercs and gear, joined them on the field with uber characters and pounded everyone I played with until we simply stopped logging in.

Act 2: Going to SWG afterwards (thanks Wolfpack  :|).

Isn't this a problem inherent with meaningful PvP though - to be meaningful we players tend to think it has to reward the victor and perhaps punish the loser, and the best reward in an MMO, or perhaps any game, is to make you more powerful, whether that means getting xp, items, land you can harvest resources from or whatever.

Eve does actually deal with this through human nature to an extent, but it's not the weak ganging up on the strong, it's the strong become corrupt and cocky and self-imploding. But Eve is odd.

I don't know what the answer is - you either reset, or the victor keeps the spoils which can only help them in the next fight if the spoils are worth having at all.

Victory is its own reward.  People enjoy winning.  Giving them even more of a bonus on top of that joy isn't strictly necessary.

But people will complain your pvp has no depth or meaning if in game assets that are fought over, have no virtual gain other than the joy of taking it.

A good mechanic that could help games like these: ruling empires/guilds get a debuff called DECADENCE which affects everyone in those guilds/alliances. The longer you rule without a break, the bigger the debuff grows. Slowly, of course, and barely significant at first. But over (a long) time you won't eventually be able to keep off opponents anymore. As soon as you lose your throne the debuff goes away and starts affecting the new rulers.


EDIT: The idea isn't that different from the thing I LOVE the most of US sports: the draft concept. That way, theoretically, the waekest teams are always supposed to have a chance at getting better while the best team is penalised for being the best.
And while it's true that drafting only exists in the US (Canada maybe?) whereas everywhere else the winning team is basically decided by how rich family or firm backing the team is (MMORPG-wise: biggest guild, biggest catasses, biggest farmers), it woudn't be a bad start if at least a half of your global market -in this case the NA half- couldn't help being ok with such a rotational winning system which is ingrained in your competitive nature.

Unfortunately it's gamed the same way as most easy solutions to knocking off the king of the hill.  You just have two dominant factions setup an out-of-band alliance and they agree to swap leadership.  It's a little bit better, because one could decide to dick the other, but probably not.  I like solutions that involve exponential or geometric increases in resource costs to gain more territory, preventing any faction from getting too big.  But this is still gameable with alliances. 

Some combination, where a single faction can't get too big (say no more than 10% of the total area realistically) plus a rustiness debuff that causes all of your combat skills to degrade if they haven't been used (discouraging peace) would probably go a long way.

As I mentioned elsewhere Shadowbane had a system like the one you mentioned: the larger your empire, the hardest it was to defend all the mines cause they all went up for defense at the same time. What was lacking was the right balance between needed resources and mine productions, so in a way larger empires could easily afford losing extra mines at some point.

That shouldn't happen: when you are ruling the map the upkeep should be very high, ruling shouldn't be something you can sit on just because you have the numbers. If, as someone else pointed out, Shadowbane proved human nature won't unite people enough against the tyrants, then you can make a game where being the tyrant is cool and great, but requires great effort to keep your throne to a point where, eventually, you can't keep it anymore (the draft and rotation system). Better than resetting a map I guess.

Once the systems are in place (decadence debuff, harder to defend a larger territory), tinkering with values to make the upkeep hard to keep up with or to prevent friendly guilds ping-ponging their kingdoms shouldn't be that hard.

Well nipping at a larger force heels kinda helps the larger force. Less to worry about and technically does provide more fun for the larger empire since they can also steam roll whatever they lost and to them the map isn't as static or boring. Ultimately you fall into the the trap of, once an empire has been built how can it fall and is being constantly steamed rolled by said empire be outweighed by your ability to ninja cap territory.

You are already looking to exploit a system who isn't even there.
Hindering a larger force by giving the smaller ones evergrowing advantages, or constantly and progressively weakening the larger one, can't be broken unless you do your best to do it wrong.

Worst it can happen your player base will hate the fact they can't win forever (as in NA sports).
But there are mechanics other than resetting maps to prevent factions to stay in charge forever. You could even make it as the more days you stay in power the more money it'll take you to run the empire, to the point where keeping it is not worth it anymore or you can't actually afford to do it. Or NPC that starts rioting in all your hamlets and mines declaring independence and forcing your players to go there and fight off rioting independetist NPCs AND other players too, this way making the leading spot very prestigious but fatiguing (who wants to fight off evergrowing masses of unruly mobs in a PvP game anyway?). Your guild could get permanent credit or awards and achievements after losing the throne anyway, so keeping it as long as possible would it still be meaningful.
Seriously, I am no programmer, but tabletop games can teach a lot about how to balance the conquest part of MMORPGs.

Resetting the maps isn't a great solution as it would probably lead to the same outcome everytime, same catassing/large guilds would get the better spots anyway and everything would be back exactly where it was before the reset in no time.

And finally yes, if even in a game people can't get over differences and get a group large enough to fight a common enemy, then they don't deserve to ever win. Last time I played Shadowbane it wasn't broken at all. Sure, the Asians were dominating the maps. Was it the game's fault, or the stupid haters unable to get together and fight off the well organized easatern alliances? 1/3 of the player base ruled over the remaining 2/3 in a game with no need for epic items and the like. Well, hats off.

But still, the game, for its own health, can help those disorganized fuckers with a few enforced mechanics. It can be done.

People want to win in those games not compete. Your either always the winner or the whipping boy. So ultimately players will game the system (maybe not at the beginning but eventually) to obtain the quickest and easiest path to victory. Ironically much like pve'ers do for loot or rewards in  general. Unless you figure out a way to force competition, your all ways going to have that problem. Now there is a catch 22, those players who would like a world pvp game aren't playing the game for the competition but for the wins. So even if you force it to happen (competition), your pissing off your core player base by the very fact that there are no real winners and losers (at least permanently).

The idea that I bolded is a pretty good idea. Should flesh that out more.

I've been here too long - DLRiley is making sense.  :why_so_serious:


It is a design issue where 1/3 of your players drive off 2/3s. "Organise moar n00bs" is not a great argument in a thread about SB's demise.

I won't pretend it is an easy thing to fix, but if you want a PvP-focussed game, it needs to be covered.

And why not? The unwinning 2/3 weren't really driven off. They were unable to "kill" the enemy empire, to drive THEM off, but they were still having fun conquering small cities, trading land, stealing mines so it's not like they weren't playing. Would you say you are not having fun in EVE unless you are BoB or the Goons? But no, too many people felt they were just LOSING because they were unable to take the map the way the Asians did (which still weren't really holding the whole world, just a large part. BoB anyone?). So what the hell do they want? If Asians have better numbers, why should they not be "winning"? What would it change by resetting the maps? Wouldn't the Asians still have better numbers?
Remember, we are not talking about early days SB, where you could wake up in the morning and your city was no more.

Sometimes it's ok to accept that you can play, you can win some, but you can't win it all. Or, if winning is that important, then you need a new strategy. Shadowbane wasn't about outmanouvering your opponents, it was BUILT on diplomacy. So by refusing to play the diplomacy/organization game to the point you can overcome the rulers, you are a kid stomping your feet cause the fucking game is not bending to your wishes.

"Gaming the system" DLRiley says? Gaming the system in the later SB meant ORGANIZING and DOING DIPLOMACY, not grinding for epics or catassing AAs.
That's pretty much why, laugh all you want, SB wasn't for everyone. Not because it was broken or had so many design issues when it came to global war and conquest. Just because it was much more about diplomacy than the art of war.

Then again, people unable to organize deserve to not win in a competitive large teams based environment. They deserve to play, they deserve samller goals, and they are entitled to content that can be fun anyway. But the ultimate world-wide win? Not so much. It's not a design issue if they are not winning. It's like playing the raid game and saying it's a design issue if bosses keep handing you your asses when you can't even gather 24, or 18, or even 6 or whatever is the minimum required number of players for that encounter.

These are not hard-faction based games, where you suck if your Hibernia, or Vanuatu, or Horde side has fewer numbers than your opposition (another reason why I hate games with hardcoded factions). You are screwed when that happens. These are games where factions are flexible enough that you can't blame anyone if you are unable to get better numbers.

But BUT

The part DLRiley underlined is misleading. My post was more about mechanics that should be applied to make the game interesting than just a scolding to egocentric fuckers and their inabililty to fight common enemies instead of quabbling each other for an inch more of epeen.

So I pretty much agree: unless you want a die hard diplomacy game, you should design your territorial control and conquest MMO by developing one of the many possible mechanics that enforce a periodical, meaningful and slow but constant shifting of power. It is more than possible to do it.

As I think that you and a couple of other people have alluded to in this thread, many of the gameplay problems in Shadowbane were at least partially solved later in its life. I'm of the opinion that the only thing wrong with allowing a superior force the ability to utterly destroy an enemy was the time cost of rebuilding. I wasn't even in favor of the change to having "siege windows". A hardcore PvP game should have hardcore PvP. However, if it also has hardcore PvE in order to participate in PvP, its not a game I'll enjoy for long.

Shadowbane had some serious problems, but overall it was a good game that should have done better. To my mind the biggest failing wasn't a game design decision but an accountancy decision. Somebody pulled out a calculator and decided how many months' income they wanted from people trying to make a fully developed town and set the building rate at that. Applied to the design they had, it made the game unattractive once you had to repeat the PvE grind to rebuild part of a town.

Oh, and the greatest barrier to returning to check out the new content for me was "click to move". It was no fun to return to after playing something else.

The problem is that decadence sets in by itself, without any need for a game mechanic... but it usually means the winners get bored and quit when no one can challenge them. The losers have already /ragequit because the decadent empire is unassailable. Either the game gives consequence to winning or losing, or it's sport PVP. I really don't think there's much middle ground. If what the dev wants is the former, expect a niche audience that slowly dwindles over time and prepare your budget for it. If the latter, make sure it doesn't suck for your target audience - see Guild Wars for a successful example (with its own flaws). If you try to make both sides happy, you end up with WAR (if you're incompetent to the point of being unable to chew gum and walk at the same time).

EDIT:


What happens when you start penalizing the victor with greater and greater maintenance fees without providing requisite benefits? Exactly what happened in WAR with keep taking. Guilds were pissed because taking a keep gave them mostly nothing other than a fat maintenance bill.

You give bonuses for taking things, but increasing penalties for taking too much.  One linear, the other can be linear or exponential but with a higher coefficient.  Guilds will naturally fluctuate to the balance point without outside factors, but in a PvP game those will exist.  Further, it will be a natural tendancy for some groups to try and own too much, which will lead to their downfall.

You can go for more complicated set-ups, like proximity, where a far-flung outpost doesn't give many bonuses but the owner finds it holds a strategic value.  Keeps and territory near one another provide some reinforcing bonuses.

Or you have rotating resources. Your mines/nodes/whatever eventually deplete and you'll need to capture new ones. Eventually the old ones will refresh but it's slow enough that you probably won't own them any more by the time that happens. Means you can't castle up and sit on all the best resources in the game because they are in flux. Meanwhile some punk alliance has found some sweet stuff off the beaten track and are now in a position where they can make a big play.

Empires serve as a good example.  Owning a lot requires greater resources for defense, but comes with greater rewards.  If you had a concept like supply lines from a capital city, then you could defeat a large guild directly at a town or by attrition.  There should be incentive for owning a large empire just as there should be a risk. 

These games benefit from risk/reward.  The key is to get the relationship right... which is hard.

This in conjuction with the mine system they had would have been good.  There should also have been a maximum time limit a mine would operate, and then it should have despawned and respawned somewhere else.

We would have just gamed the system by setting up a dummy empire. 

My take on this is a few basic ideas which would need a lot of expansion, but essentially goes..

• All actions require resources.  Anything you do, from constructing a building, to defending, to attacking an enemy city/mine/anything.  Even simply being attacked and not doing anything in direct response consumes resources.
• Resources are strictly limited as to how fast they can be acquired.  Resources cannot be traded, or have a very, very strict limit on how much you can receive through trades (such as a max of 5% of your acquisition limit per week or month).
• There is no way to switch ownership of anything "peacefully."  Even doing so peacefully consumes approximately the same amount of resources from both sides as attacking and conquering an enemy.

Resources in this system can't require PvE grind or something to acquire, they should be acquired from things like mines, farms, territory, whatever.  Which is obtained and lost through PvP.  Since there's no way to gain more resources than your limit, secondary guilds, dummy empires, etc, don't help, since they can't trade resources to the main empire.  Since you can't voluntarily give up a city or territory without expending the usual amount of resources on both sides, there's no way to simply trade cities back and forth at no cost when it would be advantageous to do so.  Since both defending and attacking consume the same resources, you can't attack and then be in a strong defensive position.

There's still holes of course, but this closes some of the most obvious ways to game the system, and the basis seems like it could be refined into something that works.

If we're talking about Shadowbane, its more likely that you would find a bug and use it to dupe the rewards.

Anyone in this thread that doesn't think sb.exe was the biggest problem with game wasn't playing the same game as me :)

I have many good memories and stories of SB, but in the end when the big battles happened the game couldn't handle it. And I saw my Guild lose our entire city to a bug. Not from any attackers, just wiped out. No help from GMs. That's when i quit. To anyone that played I was Morloch Horde on the Mourning server. I think im even spellin it wrong.  Fuck it im drunk.

A bigger problem was when a guildmate of mine had his character vanish and when he contacted CS was told that the character had never existed.

I'm considering my experiences in the SE Asian region where the winning sides dominated the map completely, the only safe area was the beginners area and they were quite happy to laugh off attempts at diplomacy written in English.

If one side has better numbers / organisation and wins all the time, that's great for them, but bad for the game. Given we aren't forced to pay $15 a month to make some other side feel good about themselves, it leads to players on the non-winning side heading off elsewhere to spend their money. It's a challenge every PvP game faces: how to keep the losers from quitting.

The Asian guilds issue was pretty marked on several servers. Later in the life cycle, after it went F2P, they literally turned servers into wastelands. They would take over the map, drive everyone out... and then not fight each other. I remember logging onto one of the wasteland servers and seeing the players just endlessly grinding PvE. For whatever reason, and I have no clue what that reason could be, there seemed to be a desire to turn the game into a PvE game.

It got so bad that trying to keep Asian players out of the game on the non-wasteland servers became like whack-a-mole between NA/Euro players and the Asian players. I thought it was incredibly racist when I first joined up with one of the server's big dogs...

A couple months after joining, as a final 'fuck you' to the server, one of the leaders of a NA/Euro guild that had just lost a big series of sieges turned his last town over to one of the Asian guilds. Every NA/Euro guild dropped what they were doing and had a massive battle just to lay the bane stone. At the siege... shit, I'd never seen anything like it. -Hundreds- of Asian players showed up to defend the bane; the NA/Euro players split into separate warcamps and eventually beat them, driving them yet again off the server.

Again, I know this all has a racist overtone, "Asian invasion" and all that, but I don't know how else to explain it. Players from Asian countries all banded together - despite massive cultural differences between China/SK/Japan - and turned servers into PvE playgrounds. It was truly bizarre. Definitely hallmarks of diplomacy between countries that often hate each other.

I was waiting for someone to mention this.

We were waiting for you to mention that you were waiting for someone to mention this.

Shhhh, he is about to drop some wisdom.  :awesome_for_real:

Shadowbane so popular in death, corpse gets extended run and might get a new owner. (http://www.massively.com/2009/05/02/shadowbane-closure-date-extended-to-july-possible-new-lease-on/)

This is cool.

They should open source both the server and the client and let the hobby developers have their shot at the code base, I think an awesome dev community could spring from it giving it an exciting future.

In Ninth Domain (2003), we had a loose plan that building a player city would first require beating down local mob spawns. They start high-level and get reduced with each kill. Once you had your city and started building more powerful structures, the mob type you displaced would found a rival fortress or city, and grow in power. If you didn't make an effort to clear them once in a while, they'd start sending groups to raid or siege your city. Which isn't PvP, but it is gameplay that people enjoyed a lot in Asheron's Call.

Obviously, the idea remains unproven.

I would volenteer my time to work on f13's Shadowbane server.

I bet you the first person to flesh out that idea will fuck the mmo world silly.

Funcom planned something that sounds very similar for AOC, but dropped it, as you may know. Guild cities, the instanced ones build with gathered resources and ranked up (as opposed to the GvG Battlekeeps in the Border Kingdoms), would have a neighbor village of the local mob type developing in parallel, eventually leading to increasingly serious raids unless they were razed. IIRC they said they dropped it because the AI demands on the server were too high for gameplay that was secondary to what they wanted to emphasize. Which, ironically, was supposed to be GvG, the most painfully underdeveloped part of the game post-release.


Edit: found a reference, surprisingly quickly. http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/626/626620p1.html

Geez dropping a good idea for a half assed bad idea. That worked out well for them  :awesome_for_real: