f13.net

The re-opening of IPY had me thinking about this, so tell me how the players break this system:

3 categories of players: innocent, aggressor, defender

Definitions: Aggressors have a history of attacking innocents, Defenders have a history of attacking Aggressors, Innocents have little to no history of attacking other players.  The history is some form of /played time formula spent fighting others.  Player characters are immediately and easily identifiable as belonging to one of the three categories.

Mechanic to prevent ganking:  When one player of any category attacks an innocent, the attacker is stunned and rooted for 2(?) seconds.  During this 2 seconds, the victim can 1) Flee or 2) Summon Aid.

Flee: Instant teleport to nearest safe location, to be defined in any numerous ways

Summon Aid: 1-10 available (player toggle) Defenders receive a window informing them an innocent is in danger and offered a teleport to the scene of the crime.

These options are only available at the beginning of the fight and disappear if the victim inficts any damage on the attacker, thereby removing the stun+root.

Guild on guild conflict could be exempted from this mechanic or it could be tweaked to allow guild members to summon fellow guild members.

To prevent Aggressors from attacking Innocents engaged in PvE, all PvP initiations are blocked if the Innocent/victim is not at full health.

Would aggressive PvPers still want to fight if they were limited in this way?  Is attacking by surprise too much a part of PvP?

There are subcategories of aggressor:

1) Those that enjoy preying on the weak

2) Those that enjoy gladiator style combat

3) Those that enjoy large scale battle type combat

4) Combinations of the above

5) Others I can't think of atm.

I imagine there exist a variety of nonaggressors as well.  Catering to all gamer types is a tough road to attempt. 

Solo gankers mostly avoid fights unless they think they can win. They'll never win under your system so there will  be no PvP. You'll have gone to a lot of trouble to create a PvPless game so why bother? Make a PvE game.

DAoC says that you're at least partly wrong.  There was a thriving solo game that had a mixture of the people that you describe as well as people that would go out of their way to find something close to a fair fight.  I can remember weeks of gaming where 8 man groups would only engage other willing 8 man groups on the island in search of "fair" fights.  A significant portion of the DAoC playerbase that lasted 3+ years after release enjoyed the bragging rights as much, if not more than stomping newbie faces.

The people that want a fair fight aren't assured of getting one. Their target might vanish or 1 to 10 sheepdogs might come pouring out to jump into the fight.

I played DAoC for years and had many nights of fun with fights as close to fair as the game's construction allowed.  Sure, there were always people more interested in engaging only in winnable fights, but I don't think that you can ever separate those two cultures in a pvp title without gating the content heavily.

Zerg has a set of innocent alts all logged out at the same place. Zerg takes turns bringing an innocent alt on, having it attacked by one member of the zerg, and then letting the zerg kill however many defenders are summoned. Rinse, repeat.

If an innocent can be repeatedly attacked by different individuals to re-trigger the same defender summon effect then only one innocent is needed to summon groups of defenders to their deaths.

Disagree, DAOC was not an open PVP game so the lessons it teaches are not really applicable, unless you're talking about the 'dreds. People in DAOC knew exactly what they were getting into when they went into the frontiers, and there were vast safe zones they could do their thing in if they weren't interested in PVP.

I count that as part of the risk of Defending.  I know of pelnty of ex-PvPers who would relish the role and the risks.  If a zerg of Aggressors want to hang out in one place and invite a zerg v zerg, then that's great.

Fair one on one fights could still happen with a /duel command that disables the flee/summon aid device.

Yes, but you're not trying to appeal to those people... they're not a very big market. You're trying to appeal to the Innocents, and for them there's little difference between your system and the one on a PvP server in WoW. Let's imagine a hypothetical character, leveling in the woods. Either he's not very good at PvP or they're going to be attacked by somebody with superior skills and equipment. The attacker or attackers have probably chosen him for exactly this reason.

WoW's graveyard dynamic and open PvP leaves him with a small set of choices:

1. Die. Call for help in guild or general chat. Run back to corpse in order to continue grinding and gathering.
2. Die. Call for help in guild or general chat. Respawn at graveyard. Go grind somewhere else.
3. Die. Log off.

Your Game has a few more options:

1. Teleport somewhere safe, complain on general chat, and run back to where he was grinding in order to continue.
2. Teleport somewhere safe, complain on general chat, and find somewhere new to grind.
3. Teleport somewhere safe, log off.
4. Call for help, die, and watch various defenders show up... possibly they are triumphant and resurrect him. Possibly not.
5. Always keep his health below 100%. An intriguing but potentially tedious mini-game.

He's going to learn pretty quickly that if he is attacked by a single individual it's not much of a hassle, and if he gets attacked by a dedicated group he's probably fucked. If he gets attacked by the zerg, he's definitely fucked. He won't figure out any of these things nearly as quickly as the Aggressors do, so they will only ever attack Innocents while they're in packs. This means that the chances of Defenders being triumphant drops to nearly zero... and so if he calls for help, the Innocent has basically brought his grinding to an end: The Defenders and Aggressors will be fighting where he needs to be for the forseeable future. Instead, 99% of the time he just chooses to teleport away.

This doesn't feel any different to him than a WoW graveyard run.

For Defenders and Aggressors it plays like a WoW Arena matchup, except Aggressors usually win because they can always prepare a perfect ambush.

...and if you're thinking that keeping health below 100% will be a fun game for Innocents to play, I can assure you most Innocents would much rather be on a PvE server where they don't have to play it.

The long and short of it is that the people who "don't like PvP" don't like combat starting unless they initiate it.  My guess is that people who dislike PvP are going to be just as pissed when a Rift falls on them in Rift and they die without being able to do something about it.   

 I think what PvPers do is they have their PvP "switch" on all the time, which is to say, PvP isn't just the physical attacking of another player, but a state of mind which is defined by taking an approach to the game which is that while you are logged in you are committing to being aware of who and what is around you, being ready to fight all the time, and so forth. 

So keepign those (maybe wrong) assumptions in mind it seems that to me a system "for the mainstream" would need to include:

1) Allow players to simply "turn off" heir PvP switch without it ruining their experience of the game.  Most people simply don't want to be on edge for 2 hours a night, they are on edge enough during their day.   I can't think of a mechanic that would accomplish this without basically defeating the purpose.  I think about it some more.

2) Make death no big deal. (simple enough, plenty of MMOs do this already)

3) Make it easy for players who do want to PvP to find it.


I'm sure there are more things, but the issue I see is that frankly, its just not ever going to happen.  People want their entertainment the way they want it, if they don't like being attacked, putting in forced game mechanics that make the PvE experience tolerable and the PvP experience worse isn't going to get you any customers, the PvE players will go play WoW, and the PvP players will go player whatever it is PvPers play right now.

I have many friends that are pvp adverse.  I find that they actually enjoy the pvp experience if a) they are ready for it (as Malakili stated above) and if they don't die in 10 seconds.   I think that a key to making pvp approachable is to 1) limit access to pvp areas to only those of similar ability (be it skill, gear, level, etc) and 2) limit premades until higher tiers. 

MMOs fail in the pvp department the moment that a player can be quickly killed by another player with less skill.  It's a double smack.  The gear/level difference smacks you first, followed by a faceroll to victory smack.  Most pvp-advers players won't see the light at the end of the tunnel (getting geared will make you more successful) and will never try pvp again.   

I also think there are people whom for whom stress is exciting, and people for whom stress is exhausting. It's a continuum rather than a switch, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's genetic. A lot of PvP+ folks talk about how the feeling of constant risk keeps them hyped up during the game, and I think that makes them more likely to stick around long enough for the gear and skill level to balance out.  On the other hand, people who feel sick and stressed when presented with constant risk are likely to find some other game to play.

That's an excellent point.  I wouldn't be surprised if this had a lot to do with the disproportionate playerbase sizes of the pvp and pve communities.  I know that I am a bit of an adrenaline junky, but I only enjoy playing on open pvp servers when I'm in the mood for it.  Sometimes I just want a mindless game to help me wind down from my long day at work.  PvE MMO's are ideal for that.

This is probably true.  I know the fact that the stress/excitement of SC2 is what makes the game so damned hard for me to put down.  No other game I've played recently gets me going in that way and when I've tried to replace it with less stressful games, they just feel really boring by comparison.  That being said, like Nebu I do enjoy some mindless games after particularly rough days when I just don't have it in me to play something more intense.  I suspect that maybe I have a higher threshold than most though, and on the days when I'm still willing to go for "excitement" other people might be well into stage where they want something more mindless.

The other side of it is winning v. losing.  With a PvE MMO you are pretty much always winning/making progress.  If you had a shit day at work, the last thing you want is for some trash talking 13 year old to kick your ass in PvP, even if you like competition as a rule.

While true, there are other factors.

I don't mind some risk.  I hate not having any chance.  If I have to wade through months of no chance, I won't bother.

Absolutely. Which is why population imbalace is such a problem. Also classes (like stealthers) which allow for easy ambush. Also wild differences in power (like levels) between characters. "An element of risk" is not "an unrelenting slaughter". Revenge is only sweet enough to cleanse the palate after a shit sandwich, not a twelve course shit supper.

I just wanted to make it clear that there is a substantial population of people who won't eat shit at all.

I've never really minded that personally in PvP games.  I really think the key to a good PvP experience is simply not playing if you aren't in the mood to possibly die.  Now, thats a problem because in PvP SOMEONE is going to die.  The good thing about PvE is no amount of kobolds feel bad, even after you've camped their spawn for 2 hours or something.  Whether I had a chance to fight back is far less of an issue to me than whether or not I'm in the mood to die.

I've gotten FUCKING PISSED in WoW when I died a death that set me back nothing in a battleground that meant nothing because I was in a bad mood and queued anyway and wasn't really in a PvP mood. (stupid I know, but illustrates my point).  Likewise, I've lost ships in EVE worth quite a pretty sum and not really missed a beat, same thing for that matter with hardcore characters in Diablo 2 or Torchlight (more recently), though that isn't PvP.

My point being I think that the biggest issue is the mindset of the players.  No mechanic can substitute for that when it comes down to it, the more I think about it.  THe issue is, how do you make a game that lets you remove yourself from the possibility of PvP, and still be an open PvP game in anything but name?  I'm not sure you can.  "Just don't play" works for me if I'm subscribed to a PvP MMO, I'll stay subscribed just to play when I'm in the mood if I like the game enough.  On the other hand, I suspect a lot of people will simply unsubscribe if they find they are paying 15 bucks a month for a game they often simply don't want to log into.  EDIT: Maybe thats the genius of EVE's leveling system, it gives you a reason to keep paying even on those off times.

Open PvP is pointless because it has no direction, no mechanisms with which to try for some degree of "balance" and if there are objectives they will either get blobbed or alarm-clocked. Eve being an example of the last. So if you are happy with being "niche" then play it up and integrate it. The world is dangerous and when attacked you need to fight back, flee or travel in packs. Only design requirement is to make sure you have graduation of threat from safe core, contested space with havens (stations in Eve) and neutral or enemy space with no havens.

I've heard lots of people saying they enjoy the "danger" of being in an open-PvP environment. But I'd say virtually all of them are pretty sure they're going to be playing the part of wolves rather than sheep. I mean half the reason most of them are looking for X on 1 PvP in a MMO is because it generally allows for imbalance through gear, spec and situation over a game dedicated to PvP where you don't tend to run into people "just levelling".

That said there are WoW mods that will permanently flag you as being PvP if you really wanted to exist in a world where everyone is your enemy. Likewise you can assault a city or enemy guard and not only get PvP flagged but send out a message to the enemy channels that they can come and find a fight. Don't wait up though, in general most people in WoW get their PvP in battlegrounds where there is an objective, incentive and in theory a balanced field, numbers and levels as well as constant activity. And I'd expect pretty much all future MMO's to follow that model because it is the only way you can have balanced PvP. Possibly connected with some sort of abstracted strategic layer like global agenda and WoT.

Pretty much what Kageru said. I'll also take this opportunity to link an interesting Massively opinion article (http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/01/04/the-soapbox-sandboxes-and-the-cop-out-of-ffa-pvp/) about pvp sandboxes / open pvp; I agree with most of it, I think "open pvp" is just a cop-out and isn't actually fun for most of the populace.

(aside: I used to GM for a RP-heavy UO shard with full open pvp and permadeath. Oh god, the metagaming. :why_so_serious:)

I agree with that, it isn't fun for most people.  That fine.  I've played a few open PvP MMOs (UO, EVE, Darkfall).  The truth of it is, I never played a "wolf" in any of those.  Hell, in EVE I could barely pilot a ship with guns.   In fact, as an industrial corporation in EVE we relied HEAVILY on diplomacy to keep ourselves safe.  It didn't always work *shrugs*  Fact of the matter is, without the open PvP system EVE had, there would've been no need for large scale industrial corporations like us in the first place, and that kind of fun would've been inaccessible to us.  Maybe people like us are just the very small minority of MMO players, I'm willing to accept that.

I don't think its a cop out at all though.  I think its a way to make a very specific kind of game, and maybe it just isn't a type of game people are willing to invest time in.  Some of that article is really bogus too:


Yeahhhhh a lot of thats going to go over real well.  Piracy, Bounties and Espionage already emerge freely in PvP games if players want to play those roles, and they don't need specific mechanics.  Imprisonment? Yeah, that'll go over well, instead of killing someone, lets lock their character up.  Same with kidnapping.  Torture is meaningless.


This is just talking about standard MMO RP - you can do this is ANY MMO regardless of PvP or PvE, or hell remove the MMO all together and just to it on some forums somewhere to cut out the middle man since the game mechanics are being totally ignored anyway.

Lastly:


I disagree just about as much as I possibly can here.  This is my absolute main problem with MMO RP - it isn't RP - its storytelling.  Storytelling is fine, I actually think its a great tradition, but to me the potential of MMO RP is that non consentual actually playing a role in the world RP.  Yes, people might not even do it with the intention of "RP" might loathe "RPers" but exactly the kind of thing the author is bitching about is exactly why I think EVE hits the nail on the head - because you are effectively RPing even when you aren't an "RPer" because your motives mirror the motives of your character. 


I do agree with his point that hardcore PvPers are best served in no MMOs though.  Starcraft 2 , Quake 3, whatever, I think those are the best purely "PvP" fighting games, they are a comeptition.   MMO PvP to me isn't about a competition, its ideally about simulating the "old west" sort of romanticized lawless setting.  EVE does this well because it has a gradient of lawlessness.


Anyway, none of this servers to answer the question of what an open PvP mechanic for the mainstream would be.  I'd simply say - make PvP games for the niche and and if can't stand the heat, stay out if the kitchen.  Hell - I might even add that lately I CAN'T stand the heat because I don't have the time to devote - my response isn't to bitch about game mechanics, its been to stop playing those games for now.  When I have the time again, I'll be playing them.

As an RPer I disagree, too.  I want to react to situations as my character would.  Pre-scripted events have no interest to me.  Improv is far more interesting.  If I wanted to be an actor playing out others' tales, I'd join a theater troupe.

I am by no means a hardcore PvPer, but I do like how the threat of being attacked by a player adds to the drama and excitement of an MMOG as long as 1) defeat is not destructive to progression (exp & equipment loss) and 2) there are reasonable ways to take a break from that drama and excitement without logging off.  I am just curious how much leash the wolves would tolerate.

Every day I think about PvP for the mainstream, I feel more inclined to say the problem is the power discrepancy in most games progression systems, not the fact that PvP happens. This thread seems to want to address the latter. That ultimately means less PvP happening.

As time has gone on, more and more systems try to adress the consequences of the progression system, this is a mistake i think, or at the least, not the real issue.

A separate issue is that of some players do want PvP, but only when they are READY for it (Meaning they dont really, but thats a different topic). That at times is at odds with most PvP systems. Systems get developed to cater to those two things, and essentially strip away PvP, or making it extremely rare or complicated to do.



Funny side note:

In LFd2, players are the non PvPers (they have a goal), the undead are the PvPers (they want to interfere with that goal), and the director AI is a griefer! (Waits for you to be alone).

No one gets pissed at this though, mostly because of the incapacitation system (Team based system), and the fact that investment in toon set up is short/shallow/utility based (Axe or chainsaw with the shotgun or machine gun?). And it was not a die roll augmented by a bandanna that made that head shot.

What about a system where everyone had the same hit points forever?

Slight variations are not all that bad. Things can be balanced by give and take. However once you have a bandanna of +20000000 to hit, its not a PvP game anymore. And thats the part that pisses off the level 5 player. Not really that PvP happened.

Which is why Guild Wars is the game with [arguably] the best-balanced pvp currently (also see this thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19560.0)) and part of the reason why the only mmog I'm looking forward to is GW2.

Encouraging all of that to happen in-game through dedicated mechanics lets the developer spread that information around so that uninvolved parties know shit is going down, throw in a ton of little mini-games to give the players a visceral reaction to it, and reward the character that does it in ways that encourages them to use their main rather than a bank alt. (skill+/experience+, faction+, crafting recipes, non-transferable currency rewards, achievements, titles)

Piracy: Let the player don a disguise, do their banditry as fast as a [minor?] skill allows them to identify and strip items off of players/conveyance/properties, and doff the disguise to shed the bounty.  The game records relevant data, and an investigation skilled player can reconstruct the crime scene by tracking the criminal to the place where they donned/doffed the disguise, ask nearby NPC's to identify the perpetrator, and identify the stolen articles to be returned if recovered or re-imbured by insurance.

Bounties: If they're posted on a sign in-game it gets the entire player base in on the action.

Espionage: Stealth missions in the enemy's guild HQ, complete with NPC's including guards and clerks which will sound the alarm.  Or the ability to disguise your avatar's name and disguise yourself as a different person.  Stealth missions can be a variety of stuff: from robbing the guild bank (requires physical access in a NPC patrolled area which is frequented by players), covertly adding yourself to a low rank position in a guild, stealing crafting plans, getting detailed information on player location.  Make all of these activities result in an NPC "mole" and clues to the whereabouts and identity of the infiltrator being placed in the guild HQ, giving the targeted players something to do with the investigation skill (weed out the mole NPC's, find the infiltrator).

Death: Characters are instantiated.  Instead of permadeath, or corpse runs, you can freely switch to an alternate version of your main character, with the same skills, a modified name that they can still identify as you, and a modified appearance.  Consequently death timers can be long (hours long, even), but the penalty is fairly slight because you're right back in the action.  Whether you get to customize the appearance and name, and whether or not gear transfers too, could vary depending on how you want the system to work.  If gear does transfer you would need a system whereby which players can't loot corpses past a set period of time, or alternatively can't loot equipped items, so that your alt doesn't have shit disappearing on them as you play and item dupes don't occur.

(could also be a non-magical version of fast travel)

Imprisonment: See "Death," but you can raid the other players to break your main out of jail, or log onto your main and effect the escape on your own.

Torture: They can show up at your cell, attempt to wrestle you character into a chair, (you can escape if they fail) and flog the shit out of you/your NPC stand-in to gain access to guild info or bonuses to espionage attempts.  If you happen to be online you can resist, if you're on an alt you will be warned of what is happening on your main.  If you resist the attempt you can give them false info, force them to kill you, (you are free, but dead) or attempt escape depending upon how successful your resistance was.  They / you get additional rewards beyond just the info for doing it the hard way.


Oh, and a danger meter UI element telling you the threat posed by enemy players.  Whether they're close/stealthed/targeting you.

It helps you can't have a level 32 Smoker beat up a level 4 Zoe.

Having any serious power curve to PvP is stupid and it always will be short of finding a way to leverage that power difference for a play mode, such as King of the Hill.

Yep, thats what I said.

One of the biggest questions to me about any kind of open pvp is, what happens when you lose?  Obviously in a game where there's a serious penalty to dying (like losing gear or your ship or whatever) this is inherent in that penalty, but bringing pvp to the masses can't possibly be considered compatible with that kind of mechanic, I don't think.  So we assume no penalty.  But if there's no penalty and you can run back and fight the same guy that just killed you, then you didn't really lose.  You were slightly delayed.  No open world fight in those circumstances ever amounts to a victory or a loss, it's simply a question of who happens to stay in the area the longest and put up with the fighting the longest. 

Take WoW pvp servers for instance.  I get attacked while out in the world and let's assume it's someone close enough to my level that I fight and defeat them.  I happen to be questing in the area or whatever.  They come back a couple minutes later, catch me when I'm weak, and kill me.  I come back a couple minutes later and do the same to them.  This continues until one of us finishes our quests in this area, or gets tired of the constant 'catch him when he's weak'.  I never 'win' since the closest options I have to 'victory' are 'outlast the enemy in willingness to remain in the area' and 'leave the area on a high point, after having killed him'.

To that end I like Sheepherder's above mechanic of an alternate version of your character after you die.  Sort of.  I think that, if when you die, you simply get phased out of the victor's worldspace into an 'alterante character' or something of that nature, where you can go about your business but cannot interact with the person who killed you or his allies (in any way - nothing you can do can hinder them even slightly, you can't take their mobs or anything else, because they have an entirely different set of mobs even if you're basically in the same area) that allows for some victory in open pvp.

If you can make open pvp result in actual victory and loss, without inconveniencing the player so much that it makes the system something only feasible in a very niche game, then I think that's the first necessary step in making an open pvp mechanic.

All I keep thinking with all these suggestions is that the people who want PvP will think these games have stupid mechanics that prevent them from fighitng and the people who don't want PvP would just keep playing WoW.    I think a much better approach would be to try and emulate a PvP that already has a big following - something like Call of Duty.

Without putting too much thought into it, I could see an open world PvP game in which objectives are designed as sort of individual "maps" that have a victory condition, and when that is won, its locked down for a some amount of time to encourage players to go fight over a different objective.  These would be part of a larger open world, but would be designed as to be fun as self contained areas as well. Fast paced combat, easy respawning, heck, even let people switch sides if they want (like WW2O does).  The idea being that you can get a similar experience of CoD in any given play session, but over the longer term, you experience a changing map, which objectives matter the most, and so forth.  

I think this "make PvP suck less for the people who don't want it" idea is just the wrong way to approach the problem.  The answer is to figure out what kind of PvP people do like (I'm using CoD as an example purely because of its popularity), and make a game that features that kind of PvP.  Trying to force PvP in some kind of minimally odious way to an experience that most people expect or want to be PvE based, and it just seems like you are going to end up with a game that feels really unintuitive, arbitrary and unsatisfying.

The bottom line seems to be: People will engage in pvp more often if they feel like they got a fair fight before they lost (FPS are a great example).   PvP MMO's by and large don't do much to ensure a fair fight.  I think that's why they attract the players that they do. 

I think Malakili's got it: If you want a mainstream PvP game, make a mainstream PvP game. My concern is that the best, cheapest, most profitable PvP you can make isn't an MMO. Most players are happiest when they don't have very much at stake. They aren't playing to see a character they've lovingly leveled up and customized get smeared across the pavement, and they aren't playing to watch equipment or territory they've carefully acquired destroyed and despoiled. Most players aren't playing games in order to experience loss (http://www.next-gen.biz/features/gdc-sid-meier-explores-player-psychology):

The majority of dedicated PvPers aren't interested in a fair fight so much as they're interested in a meritocracy. They don't care if every fight is fair, so much as they care that skill determines who wins and who loses. In their ideal game, a skilled and prepared veteran should be able to ambush the unprepared and unskilled because the veteran understands the strengths and weaknesses of every attack and knows the ins and outs of the local terrain. Winning unfair fights is the veteran's reward for study and practice. When that same PvPer was on the opposite side of the same fight he understood that his loss was just a signal that he had more to learn, and took notice of the tactics his opponent used to destroy him.

Most people would rather win all the time. As Sid notes, people who want to learn from failure are rare.

Just not quite as rare as the people who genuinely want an endless stream of fair fights.

I was sort of pointing towards the Eve cloning idea, which would be painless if insurance covered the full cost of any ship you lost and it wasn't possible to deny people access to cloning facilities. (last I checked, I just watch the war stories, I don't play)

World of Warcraft is interesting on a pvp server.  What's on the line is your grinding time.  Sure, if they gank you you're pretty much forced to call it quits for leveling in the vicinity.  But then, depending on your temperament, maybe so are they.  My younger brother calls this "don't shit where you eat."  He's very, very good at it.

There have been times when I do the punitive, "ok, so you want some of this?!" fighting that you are talking about.  And there have been times when the opposition wasn't so grossly under or over geared that the "fuck you! NO! FUCK YOU!!!" went back and forth for three or four times (that's about 5% of the time).  Even if you win, it always ends with reinforcements being pulled in, and it all serves no point.  The amusement rides keep running behind you as you play out your little hissy fit.  I guess what I'm saying is that, to me, WoW pvp servers don't seem interesting at all, they just seem hollow and pointless.  A way to say "fuck you!" to someone, and that's about it.

If there was a single reason to fight each other I think there would times when I would enjoy it.  But there is just no reason at all, other than to be a dick.  A FPS is a different game, you are there for one reason alone, there doesn't need to be an incentive.  These games are about progression, if you character isn't doing something that helps character, guild or realm progression is just seems, I don't know, out of character I guess (couldn't find a different way of saying that).

They did try doing that with WoW. The burning crusades had a number of zones in which there was a "PvP" mechanic which would flag you PvP and count up zonewide points. After a time the victorious side would gain some advantage (either zone points or badges). The problem is with no population control is that it would either be a zerg or some loner capping points. Restrict the population needed to start the ride and it spends even more time unused.

Ultimately there's just no *benefit* to having open-world PvP unless you build the whole game around it. Including resources to make people want to fight, material they can use (or lose) to fight, something to deal with population imbalance (even if it's only a safe zone to flee to) and a great variety in places to fight over. But it's so much hard and niche compared to having a battlefield based game I'm not sure why you'd bother.

For example Eve is epic, battles are intense, but the game is incredibly bad because your fun it so strongly dependent on other people to provide it and battles are generally decided in the macro. Log into WoW (or TF2, or monday night combat) and find fun action with low downtime immediately and learn to get better at it ... or 5 * 24 hours camping a section of space hoping stragglers log in so you can gank them 300 on 1. If Eve launched today it would probably never get the same traction, and emergence of the political entities that gave the game ongoing meaning, as it enjoys.

There were two main problems that I could see with the Burning Crusade PvP objectives.

First, the benefits of winning were relatively minor.  And second, the Hellfire forts and Halaa were able to be constantly contested, so even when you flipped control to your side the enemy could immediately start trying to take it back.  Which results in the situation I mentioned earlier where there's no victory, there's only 'which side is willing to stay and fight the longest'.  I don't really care for pvp when it basically boils down to 'we killed each other for a couple hours until I went to dinner'.  I want an exciting fight, then either I win or I lose, and it's done.

However, the Bone Wastes tower control thing around Auchindoun was interesting and well-done, I think.  The six towers that, once all were locked to one side, would stay that way for six hours.  There was some moderate interest in fighting over them whenever the time came up for it.  If the reward had been truly worthwhile rather than just spirit shards from Auchindoun bosses for the next six hours, I imagine there would have been strong competition every six hours there until Lich King.  Unfortunately the benefit was only marginally useful to a few players, so sometimes you'd get a pretty big fight, other days one or two guys could cap all the towers without anyone bothering to even try to stop them.

Wintergrasp was the next step in this sort of thing, and it started out well, but then they reversed course and turned it into basically a battleground by having the numbers on each side limited in order to force even numbers.  So it looks pretty clear that WoW has given up on any possibility of making open world pvp objectives from now on.

They should, since they're so bad at it.

The problem is, make it that "beneficial" and suddenly 1/2 your players are crying every six hours because some important thing is unavailable to them.  I'm convinced that *mainstream* PvP has to be fun for its own sake.  Hardcores aren't going to care if they have to wake up at 4am to make sure they control the thing that is super important (see EVE).  But its almost impossible to hit the perfect balance of "important enough that I care, and unimportant enough that it doesn't turn me off the game if I lose" when you are aiming for a mainstream, casual audience.

I agree.

Plus you can't easily balance the rewards against the challenge. You'd get things like win trading, zerging or small groups just flipping it when there's no opposition in the area and still getting "lucrative" rewards.

I'm pretty sure they gave up on Wintergrasp as world PvP when they realised that the server could not handle it. Same thing CCP realised as well, but they just let the players deal with black screens and 5-10 minute action lag. The average WoW player isn't going to put up with that.

From the Rift thread:
Separate battle zones from the open world, but don't instance them. PvP guilds bid (money? reputation? whatever...) for particular play times, and then arrange a queue of people (guild members first, I imagine, then other queued players) to get "constructed" and "upgraded" by the various buildings. Until then they play observers. The winning guild (and other players who participated) gain specialized buffs that last, I dunno, a few days or so and the side that controls the area gains some world effect during the next battle in that area (which only works outside its battle zone). Something like the world effect and improved elementals in Wintergrasp would be ideal.

Heck, the battle zone could just be a "phased" version of the real zone... and when the battle ends its conditions alter. Run battles every fifteen minutes and figure out stakes that assure the battle will be over by that time. PvE players get random bonuses sometimes, but not all the time. PvP players get to queue for random battlegrounds (or a specific one, if they like it and don't care how long the queue is) and get "constructed" at some random battle zone somewhere to play out a particular life and death, and then queue again. If they put together a guild they can actually control the flow and get moved to the front of a particular battleground's queue every time they die.

How's that sound?

I really wanted (and like Ratman, thought) it would be a like a match in Warcraft.  I hoped that the "casual" queue would be two NPC generals facing off against each other.  They would be responsible for creating the serfs and grunts.  The would give players tasks, players would receive rewards based upon their successfully completing tasks and destroying enemy units and buildings.  Depending on the game type, the rewards would be slanted more or less toward completing tasks.  Each side would have a budget.  The budget would be primarily be spent on players, the rest would be spent on serfs (so if your side had lower ranked players with worse gear, you'd get more serfs to start) - an attempt to balance the match.

The rated battle ground version of that would require pre-built sides with someone playing the role of commander.

Players would have to play through a tutorial which would try to make clear to them that following the commanders orders is 1) the way the player gets paid, 2) the way you win and winning also effects how well you get paid

The more I think about it, the original Alterac Valley was actually somewhat close to this.  Not dead on, but actually not insanely far off either.

Rather than try to balance the battle with serfs, I'd recommend making battles short and fast with success by degree: Lots of victory oriented tasks of increasing difficulty arranged based on how difficult they are for the opposite side to prevent. Then when the arbitrary limit hits (when both sides run out of money, say) rewards are distributed and buffs assigned based on how complete the victory is.

In terms of your budget, Warcraft III's gold mine implementation would work as a great soft cap. Each side starts with a fixed budget which trickles in over time, and the more (or the more advanced) players they have, the more of that trickle is taxed away before it arrives. "Generals" have a choice between a large, overwhelming army with a short fuse or a small, efficient army with a long one.

It would be tough to balance on a strategic, battleground by battleground level, but individual player against player dynamics wouldn't matter so much.

Most mainstream gamers have a short attention span and almost no appreciation for a war of attrition.  Given a choice between the two, I'd guess that they'd prefer a massive short-term army.  This would cause them to lose consistently to hard-core gamers capable of seeing things in the long-term.

If you want to make pvp mainstream, you need to level the playing field between the skilled and unskilled player.  Current MMO's do this by rewarding time investment (gear + levels).  We know how the dedicated pvp crowd feels about this.  I think the only solution may be to separate out the two crowds and allow them to play only in a world with each other. This would require some kind of ranking system.  When you go up in rank, you get moved to a world where you fight others your own rank.  If you don't wish to separate by worlds, an alternative would be to handicap the better players in a way that they don't feel the handicap as much.  Something like granting titles and appearance options while decreasing their power in combat.  Perhaps the decrease in dps/hp could be countered by some increase in group utility?  That way the solid pvp'ers could enhance the fun of the less skilled, mainstream players by augmenting their power in battle.   

The best reward I can think (I'm not saying it's great) of is that purposefully avoids the 'rich get richer' model of reward is guild housing.  Participating in (and winning) battlegrounds gives you (and your guild, when you play in an arranged battleground) cash to spend on bling, the most 'important' of which would be housing.

Guilds that are at the top of the ladder get rent on the choice real estate that is actually in the game-world (not in the housing shards - although i would assume that you also keep your lot in the housing shard so that folks can access your housing through the shard or through the game).

Loved the gold mine idea pxib.

Makakili I think they tried with the Alterac Vally, but there wasn't any way to know what you were supposed to do.  So they just drop an army into the valley and people run around like chickens.  Folks should be given different tasks.  The enhancements to the mini map and auto-quest system that WoW has released with Cata seems like they have a better chance of making something like this happen (at least for the NPC-leader versus NPC-leader battle) - but my guess is that the engine is still too stupid to actually make it feel like a Warcraft III game (where you are one of the army).

I'm not sure about everyone else's idea of it, but any mechanic that limits the number of people able to participate on either side of the battle immediately stops it from being open pvp anymore.  The entire meaning of that as far as my perception of the phrase means a battle that has no such limitations.  This is why Wintergrasp used to be open but isn't anymore since (as I understand it, since I haven't actually played it since before this was implemented) it now has that 'sides must be even' mechanic, which makes it, like Tol Barad, a battleground that happens only X period of time.

The original Alterac Valley was, I would say - with a bit of tweaking - the best example of an instanced battle I have ever seen, and it could even work as an open pvp zone.  The mass NPC's evened things out to some degree and allowed the time necessary for being strategic rather than just tactical.

One of the problems often brought up for actual open pvp objectives is imbalanced numbers on one side or the other.  I think this could be somewhat alleviated (as long as the population imbalance on the server isn't huge) by having multiple open pvp objectives that all occur simultaneously.  In addition to that, NPC numbers can be adjusted to somewhat mitigate the population issue - if one side has more people, the other side gets more NPC's and stronger ones, preventing the other side from crushing them quickly, and giving them time to come up with and implement a winning strategy.  Consider three AV-like battlefields, but open and they all take place simultaneously so that it is impossible to attend all three at the same time.

Even better, if the victory in one battlefield affects the conditions on the next cycle, strategy becomes even more important.  Imagine three battlefields, each of them linked to the others, with several possible objectives to win in different ways.  Resource victory (gather more resources without letting your opponent achieve any of their victories), military victory (defeat the opponent's forces) or transport victory (successfully transport existing resources through the battlefield without letting your opponent achieve any of their victories).  If you win a military victory, resources the next cycle go down, if you win a resource victory, resources go up, and if you win a transport victory, resources at the other two battlefields go up.  Or perhaps there's two separate transport victory objectives, one to transport resources to battlefield X, the other to transport them to battlefield Y, and you have to choose which one to resupply.  Resources affect NPC numbers and strength in an important way.  This would make the entire system long-term strategic.  It's likely that at any given moment, at least one of the battlefield/objective combinations can be won, but what you choose to win this time - and what was won and lost last time - will affect what you can do at the moment and in the future.

Now make all of the battlefields give a noticeable bonus to the entire world.  Not a stupid bonus like '5% more exp gained' because if this is being done in a game with levels, then it is likely that most of the participants will be max level - more exp gain is irrelevant to them, therefore not an incentive to participate and win.  A bonus like 'everything costs 5% less to buy' or '5% damage increase (doesn't apply to the battlefields themselves, of course)' or basically anything that will make a max level player want to win it.

I would make a battlefield mechanic like this the core of the game, build things around it.  Flatter power curve, etc.  I don't think pvp of any sort in a persistent environment can ever be made as mainstream as PvE, but done correctly I think it could build up a significant user base.  Even with my belief that population imbalance would affect this system less than a single battlefield model, managing that balance would also be key to the success of the game.  To that end, I think allowing switching sides is key, but only to the sides that are less populated.  More importantly, outside these battlefields, people could group with each other regardless of side, or something of that nature.  Something to allow switching sides to be as painless as possible.  Add incentives for people joining the less populated sides too.  Now you can switch to the less populated side, gain a bonus, and still keep playing with your friends outside the battlefield.

All good ideas, and I especially appreciate your definition of "open PvP" as a lack of hard participation limits.

A question, then: How do we disincentivize the zerg? It's confusing, it's population sensitive, and worse still... it's tough on bandwidth and processors. Simply allowing AoE to pwn groups doesn't work, because the performance hit still occurs as people gang up.

I'm not sure you should disincentivize the zerg. All the things you say are true, but the 'dream' of a massive game is, well, massiveness. Big armies clashing. A huge keep siege, not 5 guys trying to take a tower from 3, you know?

That's what I want out of PVP, certainly, while I enjoy 2v2 arena I loved dropping AE thane hammers down on 50 Albs far more.

I don't have time to go into detail, also, but a lot of the other ideas in this thread seem too complicated for the "for the mainstream" part of the title. Above all people need to understand in a very simple way what they're trying to do and why when they go out into PVP. All this stuff about victory conditions and guild bonuses and this and that, is all pretty arcane stuff. What you need is a system where Joe the Troll goes to the battlefield and his objectives are clear to him (on the level of "take that hill"), or you're never going to capture said mainstream.

The complicated bonuses and conditions aren't for the masses, they're for the people the masses follow. Most of they want is what CoD delivers: the opportunity to pwn (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pblj3JHF-Jo). Give them fast access to fights and they'll be happy. The difficulty is more a matter of convincing them that an MMO has something to offer that their FPS cannot. Yes, that can be the moment whe1re they drop he hammer on 50 guys and grin their cheeks sore ("Hahahaha fuckers, look what I did."), but that comes at a steep cost in terms of playability. No matter how awesome the zerg feels and how it satisfies a particular dream, the zerg breaks the game.

The bonuses and conditions are, instead, for the grognard masochists who organize raids and establish protocol. Those few nuts who can delay gratification long enough to put logistics and strategy in the forefront and, at the end of the hour, kill the lord and take the keep and smile as the flags change color and a little buff in the corner of the screen ticks forward two percent. "Well done, team. Look what we did." Then turn around and do the whole thing again.

To get the mainstream we have to provide the grognards with tools and design decisions that let them turn their plans into clear and simple orders ("take that hill"), and with their help give the masses the chance to take part in something they can't experience in less than massive online multiplayer... the opportunity to turn the tide in a larger war.

Otherwise they'd rather PvP in a game where everybody has the same gear and they don't hit 3fps every time the action heats up.

Part of the reason for my idea of having multiple simultaneous battles going on was to prevent too much zerging (beyond what the server can really handle) without putting any sort of hard cap on it.  If three battles are going on at the same time and one is being zerged, the other two should be easy pickings for the enemy.  Possibly include some sort of quick-transport mechanism from one battle to the others, to make sure that if people want to switch to a different battlefield they can.

If you mean zergs within the battle, that seems to be more down to the fine details of the objectives and how to succeed at them.  Points that need to be defended like AV towers certainly disincentivize the zerg by requiring you to split up your forces to defend.  With NPC's involved, defense is always a little easier than offense (again, taking from original AV design, the NPC's are always around to help defend, but only a few events like triggering a wolf rider attack or whatever get them to help on offense) so if you try to zerg the enemy position it's likely they can commit part of their force to circle around and take out your undefended locations, and so on.  Obviously there's a lot of details about the specific objectives in the battle that would need to be worked out.

As for tools that let the grognards turn their plans into action, that's definitely one of the bigger pieces that should be worked out to make any large-scale pvp system viable.  One idea would be to sort of 'buy' command with some sort of special command-currency.  The person that wants to be in charge arrives at the main base and uses her command currency to buy the ability to give orders through the system - such orders provide bonuses for the people following them, in order to hopefully get people to follow.  If the battle is won, then the commander gains more command currency than she spent.  If the battle is lost, then she doesn't get any back.  Successful commanders would then accumulate larger amounts of command currency, thus allowing them to command future battles.  As for rewards for commanding, those would have to be very carefully determined.  What they shouldn't be is something that everyone would want.  So no uber gear or anything.  You want to encourage people for whom command is its own reward, not encourage everyone to want to command because the rewards are awesome.  I'm not really sure what sorts of rewards would be appropriate for this though.

Another thing command currency could be used for is a global channel that everyone on your side can hear.  Make each message on that channel cost a small amount of command currency, this lets commanders inform people of where they're needed (like, 'battlefield A has enough people, battlefield B is overpopulated, go to battlefield C it needs reinforcement!') but it's not a permanent privilege, and since it costs command currency each time, they're unlikely to want to just chatter or spam it uselessly.

The Zerg is sometimes fun.  There just needs to be some scaling so that one AoE cannot wipe out dozens of people.

Some of the best keep battles in WAR though, was a couple of warbands fighting off another couple.  At least until rank differences let some sides just stomp all over the other regardless of size.

Trying to fight against players natural tendency to just zerg is going to produce a lot of whining about how 90% of the players are ignoring the objectives all together. Or it will be boring because players will just travel in huge zergs that trial the opposing, picking off the tail end of stragglers.

Zerging has a tiny risk/reward ratio because the risk is so small, AOEing the zerg has a tiny risk/reward ratio because the reward is so large. Based on how infrequently people talk about how awesome it is to be part of the zerg, the former is a lot less fun than the latter. So we should vastly improve the ways players can find advantage against large groups, while slightly increasing the amount of risk required to gain AOE rewards.

Get rid of ground targets. Make every melee attack AOE within a small radius (Already a popular idea, look at Age of Conan or all the Dervish love in the Guildwars 2 thread) so that players are ill-served to crowd on top of eachother. Then make "magic" AOE operate by jumping from target to target, decreasing markedly based on the distance it has to jump. Give ranged attacks a substantial range bonus against players who are grouped together, but randomize the target to demonstrate how easy it is to hit SOMEBODY in so large a group. At the same time, decrease the amount of damage players do based on how many other players are simultaneously attacking the same target.

Then make all of these dynamics very clear during tutorial gameplay. Provide examples of both sides (offense and defense) using NPCs, and get the players thinking about how to exploit these options.

Then, like Koyasha says, make it easy to move from battlefield to simultaneous battlefield in order to establish combat equilibrium.

That's a lot of small data packets.

What about if when you all bunch up your stats go down or something? Say if you have twenty people in a vincinity, they are at 85% (or whatever) effectiveness, and if they ad another ten, they drop to 75%.

Just adding collision would take care of a lot of zerg issues.  If you can't occupy the same space as anyone else, then only a few melee will be able to engage any particular target at any given time, and being completely surrounded by allies means you can't actually attack anyone, either.  Ranged attacks could get penalized if they have to fire through too many allies.  A % miss chance for each ally you have to shoot through, ramping up pretty quickly.  I like pxib's idea on how to fire into a massed group of enemies, that the target gets randomized.  I also like the idea of magic AOE jumping from one target to the next.  I'm imagining being in a tightly packed zerg to be kinda like getting hit by the green beam.

One of the first things that comes to mind of course is 'friendly fire' but I can't imagine any way to implement that without way too much griefing potential.  It kinda worked in Planetside though, so maybe the game design just has to come up with a good enough mechanic for it.  Although the biggest problem with anything like that is penalizing the good players for stupid things others do.  They can't control the presence or actions of their moron "allies", so penalizing them for stupid things other people do is difficult to make fair and fun.

Which is the problem with the zerg in a nutshell. Alternately, just have AOE scale up in damage the more people there are in it while keeping its effect radius relatively small. Have damage scale exponentially rather than arithmetically. It's totally broken as a PvE mechanic, but in PvP it's just a lesson to be learned.

Friendly fire is certainly the grief ultimate, but penalizing good players for their stupid allies is inevitable. So long as there are easy ways to correct them, and simple goals for them to work towards, they'll improve. In terms of 'friendly fire' itself ... better to occasionally interrupt missile fire through allies with "You can't get a clean shot!" and then change the combat target to the friendly who got in the way. Make sure it doesn't happen reliably, however, or people will start hiring unkillable enemy bodyguards. Maybe it only works if the friendly is actually attacking the enemy.

I didn't love dropping thane hammers on 50 Albs because it was effective (it was anything but, really); I loved doing it because it was awesome. Take away the giant clash of armies feel and you remove the one really special thing that open world PVP  can offer, in my opinion. There are hundreds of games that essentially do small scale PVP just fine.

I think giant clash of armies can be done better than 'big swarm of people packed tightly together come straight at you'.  Battles in Planetside are probably the most 'epic' feeling I've ever experienced, and they didn't really consist of a massive swarm of people charging in while packed pretty close together.  Although that tactic should have a place as well.

Personally I'd start out with player collision and pxib's randomize targets when firing into a big clump idea, and then see how it works out in playtesting before piling on any more.  They're both reasonable limitations, and would prevent a tightly packed zerg from being particularly effective offensively (at least, if most of them are melee).  On the other hand, it makes protecting weaker people by clumping up (so they cannot be focus fired due to the randomization of ranged attacks) a viable tactic, so it has its uses.

All the Thane animations were just awesome.  Best class idea ever, and they kept it ridiculously nerfed for the entire time I played.  ...  MUST. LET. GO!  /tangent

Focus fire + MMO targeting + large battle = instantly dead.  That is my biggest gripe with large battles.  Make every shot a targeted shot.  If you start taking too much heat, back up behind your mates.  But the opposite of this should also apply - you cannot direct fire through your mates, so if you are a class without an indirect-fire (e.g. a grenade-like ability) you aren't doing any damage if you aren't on the front lines.

Edit: to actually finish the post!

I'm sure that was fun for you, but fun for the 50? Or adding much to the game?

After all making AoE a powerful counter to the zerg, as tried in DoaC, Warhammer and Eve was dialed back in the at least the last two. For the simple reason that if you make AoE dangerous people will stack it and build tactics around it. Then your 50 man guild group runs all the way to the enemy lands, gets bunched up due to some objective (Doors, Star-gates) and obliterated by a handful of opponents. Which is great fun for only one side of the equation.

Another great thread. I wish I was a little more sober and a little bit more versed in gaming theory.

I wrote another whole paragraph that I can sum up quickly: I'm one of the niche open-PVP guys. In WoW, once I was leveled and relatively well geared from raiding, I wandered the world in search of trouble ... lowbie slaughter was quite enjoyable ... sure, I got killed. A lot. Who cares? All's I got is time. Not like I was losing items or anything!

Anytime I think "hardcore", I remember Myth and its sequels ...

*deadpan* "Casualty."

*rising tone* "Casualties!"

Now back to your thread, already well in progress.

You're missing my point. My fairly weak AE was not swinging the tide of battle (unless it was by generating lag), but it was cool. You don't get to see 50 giant blue hammers descending from the sky when there are only 5 people on each side. That's the point, it is nothing to do with power or lack thereof. My point is not about the power of AOE damage or whatever, my point is that discouraging the zerg discourages one of the few things that MMOs can do better than lobby games for PVP.

It was also lagging everyone to the point of making their play less fun while simultaneously negating the primary ability of pac healers.  I hated thanes, particularly the ones that would spam hammers on the zerg that would have been easily killed using an AE mez. 

I blame the developers for not thinking abilities like these through. 

Sorry for the rant.

The one they didn't think through was the minute long AE mez, but whatever.  :-P

It's either weak enough to be "noise" or potent enough that people will optimize for AoE.

The example I had more in mind was Eve where the idea was that Titan AoE would discourage blobbing. Which took about 20 seconds before some player said "so if we had enough of them we could instantly kill an entire enemy fleet?".

Liked the Massively blog. Tired of the whole "sandbox = doomed shitpile for the maybe 200 people in the world who will still pay money to play 1999 UO" school of thought. Also, as the resident King of Carebears I have to point out that you're probably never going to bring FFA PVP "to the masses" at all. (Not without nerfing PK so hard that it never happens, at any rate.) The almost religious fascination with getting the general public to like something it doesn't like is rather... quaint, at this point.