f13.net

According to this douche (http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/06/23/gaming.first.person/).

 :roll:

Its CNN.  They're playing to an audience that probably hadn't even heard of a MMOG until they read this.

He didn't say Everquest was the first:


This quote leads me to believe he is saying it was the first one to become truly popular. Which is true. UO killed itself by being griefer heaven. EQ came second and was smart enough to make the game safe. And the rest is history.

Sometimes I wonder, had Raph and the others not made UO totally open pvp would we be playing UO-clones instead of EQ-clones. I suspect, yes. That one decision, to allow griefers and PKS free reign, directly influenced MMO development for almost a decade now.

I think the relevant quote is
Of course, sometimes you have to squint to see any difference when changing equipment on an UO character, but...

But at least UO let you dress as a jester!  Whenever you saw somebody in one of those hats, you knew to stay far away from them.

Agreed. The other mistake is less publicized but actually is what fueled the insane ganking: mob spawning.  Or none to speak of as was the case.

Initially it was a problem with Raph's idea to close global resources, e.g. something had to die/be harvested before something else spawned.  It was an interesting concept with no fun factor for a large world.  But even after they ripped that out spawns were just pathetically underwhelming.  I recall adventuring for several hours seeing little more than the occasional raven.  And of course reagents... bah.

Anyway with no monsters to kill players turned on each other.  And then seeing how fun/rewarding it was with no ramfiications for their actions... the rest is infamy.

To be fair the original OSI devs had no idea how many customers they would draw - they were still sizing for traditional MUDs.  Even pre-existing commercial products like Gemstone3 were just starting to see populations over 500. (when I started GS3 we rarely had more than a few hundred users)


Imanewbie (http://www.imanewbie.com/loband/lo-idx-frameset.shtml)!!!  He rocked.

Nope, sorry, that was just a badly researched article. UO was the largest, most popular MMOG of its time. It reached over 200k subs before EQ even came out, IIRC. Not even fucking mentioning it in the article is just bad, bad reporting. It's one thing to not mention MUDs, it's another thing entirely to not mention the game without which, EQ would never have reached the numbers it did.

What a tool.

I think you're over analizing it Poco. There was only really a lack of wilderness spawns, and once your were past newbie stage, there was nothing worthwhile to get off of mobs you found in the woods. It was much easier to just wait for someone running back from a dungeon or an orc fort.

People ganked for two reasons - it was by far the easiest way to get money/loot, and they really enjoyed the reactions of the victims after they lost everything.

I think there was a small percentage of people that ganked because they simply preferred pvp, but mostly it was just power gamers that realized that ganking was the easiest way to "win" the game.

Then there were people like me that eventually got so jaded by the Glorious Lord Gankers, that we turned to bank stealing runes/keys and looting houses.

Oh yea, original topic: the author of said article is a newb.

I think UO falls under that heading.  Heck, just about every MMOG released to date falls under the heading of 'rudimentary'.

Alkiera

Please don't say things like that.  They make me cry.  And they fill me with bitter contempt for poor old Raph, who really is a swell guy.   :cry:

Actually, I always thought the main tenant of UO was every player in the world was forced to choose between being a ganking douche or an essentially decent human being. UO wouldn't have been UO without open PvP.

Unless you're talking about skill based systems and such, but UO was all about the community, which fostered in an attempt to protect each other from assholes.

Which never really worked.  The gankers won and everyone else just got a hose job.  It wasn't fun to die all the time.

But don't worry about the CNN article.  Most game columns these days, even those in "pro" magazines are written by new school gamers who barely acknowledge anything before the PS1 anyhow.  Most of em have no respect or knowledge of videogaming's history whatsoever. 

A lot of us said the same thing about UO...  :wink:

There was a good decade of experience before it after all.

I eagerly await Haemish's 48-point red fonted rantings in a few years when someone at a mainstream news site refers to World of Warcraft as the first MMO.

I'm pretty sure he would not bother typing anything at all and just go into murder-death-kill mode.

It would truly require a larger red font than 48-point, seeing as how they would have glossed over the joy that is ES-BEE-DOT-EEE-XXXX-EEE.

See, I can say it without frothing.

This seems like an apt time to throw in the old saw "those who do not read history doom us to play games with the same design flaws all over again."

Isn't that the Blizzard mantra?  :evil:

Played Doom 3 lately?

Doom 3 is merely Unreal for the modern age with a nostalgia edge.  Same basic game.  Same basic concepts.  OOH ITS PRETTY.  Hey wait, its a bunch of scripted ambushes over and over again till it stops being scary.  Gimme JDoom with Doom 2 or H2H Christmas levels 2 over Doom 3.  Its Doom but prettier and with mouse aim.  Doom 3 isn't Doom.  Its Unreal, a game that was pretty underwhelming in the first place.  Not that Doom 3 is awful or anything, but its not Doom.  Fortunately for me I waited till the X Box version in the lovely metal keepcase with the DVD style special features and the original Dooms on it. 

But who would want to play that crap?  I would have quit the happy world of Trammel in under a month. 

The only MUDs I ever played were non-PvP and I never lasted long in them.  I would get to 10th or so level, find  myself doing the same quests and killing the same monsters and think, "WTF am I doing here?" and quit.  In UO, it was my arch enemies that kept me interested.  I wanted to get better so I could kick their asses.

UO didn't hit 200k until after Renaissance, which was well after EQ, and in direct response to it really. UO was a niche title for the more dedicated gamer. EQ knocked the shit out of it, popularity-wise, in ways not seen again until Blizzard handed SOE its lunch with EQ 1.75.

But this article is not about that. It simply shows why history is written by the victors. That mostly happens with hacks parrot what they hear rather than do any real fucking work. Becausew work is hard.

SOE has milked and promoted the EQ brand all over the place in many new and fascinating ways, from other games, to any sort of attention given it due to success. Again, like WoW. I mean, shit, fucking PARC is talking about WoW? That's a sign of popularity: something so fucking big it can't be ignored.

Meanwhile, EA has done precisely shit with UO, basically adding to the decline of the Ultima brand started with Ascension.

I doubt it personally. EQ's success and the derivatives it spawned is, imho, based on players wanting a "deep" combat experience through a fairly predictable linear typical RPG experience. Even Trammelized UO couldn't do that. Crafting, commerce, and virtual citizenry were almost as important as combat, which itself was fairly one dimensional, being little more than a means to and end. This is similar to SWG, which I've always considered UO2 anyway, since the theme has zip to do with the underlying gameplay.

If you say UO, Sinij and Arnold will appear to bemoan the passing of the Dread Lord Days.  It's like an F13 law.

PLEASE try to keep your limbs inside the vehicle at all times.

 - meg

That's neither here nor there. The first successful Massively-Multiplayer Online Game was UO, and even if it didn't reach 200k until after EQ was out, it was still as huge as EQ on its release. It was totally and completely ignored, which is bad research AND bad writing. No, it's not surprising, just galling.

Mainstream media game articles are always retarded puppet theater. Amazing really, given how much time organizations like CNN spend on "white girl gone missing" stories.

The scary will hit you when you realize that they spend as much time and effort researching those 'white girl gone missing' stories as they do the gaming stories.

I was always under impression that Meridian59 released quite a bit earlier than UO and was for a while successful title.

Well... maybe... sorta... I guess... but there wasn't any /pizza command.  suXX0r.   :roll:

No one had the numbers UO did on release. NO ONE. M59 was moderately successful, but I don't think it ever got even half the numbers UO did. Same goes for The Realm.

Funny thing is that UO shards were designed with 1000-1500 people in mind. UO's success was its undoing. Who knows maybe player justice and population spawns  and number of other controversial ideas would have worked out if not for thousands of JoeShmoes stuffed into Moonglow graveyard.

Naaaah, it really did just suck.

Dreamer

I only mentioned the pre/post-Renaissance gig because that's when it really began to be a relevant member of the triumvirate. I never really knew how successful AC1 was, but we were all there during the My Game Is Better Than Your Game days. It still happens now, but it's quieter because everyone's spread over many more places :)

Ah well. The CNN article still sucked. It did ignore a critical bit of MMORPG history.

On a just-barely-related-enough-for-this-thread track, I've always wondered: if not for the trammelized experience, how UO would have faired? Would it have ever broken 100k? Would it's lack of success just propelled EQ further? It's not like UO having hit 200k really did much more than let us play UO2 in SWG, so maybe it's irrelevant anyway.

Reading this I get a feeling that you don't really want to remember that UO hit above 200K subs *before* Trammel was released. Who knows how UO would have faired if not for generation after generation of fucktard developers jerking it in a different direction every time.

The lack of a Trammel wouldn't have changed much of anything during the "Big Three" era.  EQ would spank UO a little harder, but AC would still sit a distant third place.  But things like DAOC and AO would have hurt UO much worse than they did historically.  The carebears who didn't immediately jump to EQ would eventually find SOMEWHERE else to go as the market expanded, and a solid chunk of the fighters would be attracted to games with some semblance of an organized PVP system.  That would leave UO with it's partial share of the fighters, the diehard carebear minority who just can't stand leveling and refuse to quit, and a bunch of griefing teenagers.

Inflexible 'organization' is THE LAST thing PvPers are looking for in the games. UO's attraction to PvP crowd was that you were not very restricted in your choices of how, when and why you decide to engage in combat.

I was going by the assumption that UO didn't hit 200k until well after the April 2000 launch of Renaissance. However, at the time, their press release about the launch mentioned 185k accounts, so I guess that's close enough to your point: Renaissance didn't make the game go from 50k to 200k players. They did hit somewhere around 250k eventually.

In any case, I agree with Atheist.

However, not sure I agree that all PvPers should be lumped together in saying they seek totally-open PvP to the exclusion of organized PvP, at least in MMORPGs. Short term anywherePvP can be fun, but it's the longterm connection with the game world that is attractive to some. While a rather impressive trainwreck, the folks in Shadowbane enjoy/accept anytime/where PvP while being part of the larger goals of the game (towns and their sieges, resource control, etc.). Not everyone's building a city, but everyone's got a place in the grand goal.

Which is why Shadowbane rules the MMOG world, while WoW languishes in obscurity.  Oh wait. I forgot I'm dealing with Sinij, who thinks his tastes in PVP are the universal standard, and not the niche interest of himself, Arnold, the three people who still go to Felucca in UO, and the five or six people still playing Shadowbane.

Are you forgetting the many PvP-oriented Asian games here? Lineage 1/2? Ragnarok?

Maybe sinji is Korean...

I have a roommate that is VERY into Ragnarok, and from what I see of it, the PvP is mainly limited to weekened events where guilds fight over control of certain castles.  And maybe a few PvP plus zones to screw around in.  Rest of the game is just ENDLESS grinding.  In the most grindingly grindy worst way possible.

So I don't think it really constitutes a PvP centered game.  Never tried either Lineage. 

Sorry, but I never played under the Notoriety System.  I started playing shortly before T2A was released.  But after experiencing Siege Perilous in all its early glory, I'm sad that I missed the Dread Days.  My guildmates who played them told me that early Siege had a lot in common with them.

Correct.  UO was a HUGE FUCKING SMASH SUCCESS!  From what I gather, early UO had somewhere in the range of 130,000-150,000 subscibers.  That is way, way above anyhthing that Origin ever expected from the game.  It's funny how we start taking things for granted so quickly.  I believe RG thought ~30k was the upper bound of customers for such a service.

I don't know about current numbers, but for a long time, AC1 hovered around the 100k mark.  It is a hack and slash game with cool (but not mandatory) lewt that catered to solo players, unlike EQ.

UO DID have over 100k players before UO:R.  Also, from my experience, I think that most of the "new" accounts that

I don't know about current numbers, but for a long time, AC1 hovered around the 100k mark.  It is a hack and slash game with cool (but not mandatory) lewt that catered to solo players, unlike EQ.

UO DID have over 100k players before UO:R.  Also, from my experience, I think that most of the "new" accounts were started by veteren players who wanted to grab as much land as they could in Trammel.  Right before UO:R, OSI changed the housing rules so that each account could only own one house (with multiple, existing houses grandfathered in).  Pretty my every player I knew had 2 accounts after Trammel hit.  Some had crazy numbers, like 10 accounts, with property on them.

By the time UO:R was released, there were choices that featured WAY more of teh shiney than UO.  I can't see any 12 year old kid picking UO over EQ in the store.  Kids tend to go for the newest, coolest looking thing, and that was not UO.  This is why I refer to the situation as "the great Trammy lie", because those accounts were, for the most part, bought by existing players, not sheep returning to a UO with a new world of milk and honey.

Shadowbane sucked ass; nice strawman.  The Shadowbane devs were a bunch of fucktards, who wouldn't know a pvp game if it bit them on the ass.  They should have played some AC1 to see what a 3D, PvP MMORPG should feel like.  Also, you should never, ever, ever have to kill a fucking snake to level up in a pvp oriented game.  More to the point, there shouldn't be any levels in a PvP oriented game either.

Bla bla bla everyone will love a gankful MMORPG as soon as someone does it right, same old shit I've been hearing for half a decade plus.

I am not defending WUA here, because I personally believe his opinion on PVP gameplay isn't worth jack shit, but you still had to grind it up in Darktide before people crunched the very core of the game and xp chains became commonplace.  In Shadowbane it was simply faster and more buggy.

My opinion on PVP is this:  Consentual PVP, in the form of arena-based or faction-based systems, will continue to be popular as one aspect of a larger game.  However, anyone who still thinks a free-for-all PVP MMO can succeed as a mass-market venture in the West is smoking fucking crack at this point.

Yes, it might make it here as a niche product.
Yes, it might sell in Korea.
Yes, chess and soccer and Counterstrike are all players versus other players.

But I'm talking about subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games and the Western market thereof.  You know, the subject LtM and it's progeny have primarily talked about for the last seven years or what have you.

WUA is raging carebear with an issue, he believes PvP to be root of all evil and the sole reason why his games suck, even if it is something that no self-respecting PvPer would touch with a ten-foot pole. Anything he says with regard to PvP is what *he* thinks PvPs should be doing/enjoying.

Sinij, I love you man.  You're priceless.  You're like an elderly Japanese soldier stranded alone on a tropical island, ninety years old and convinced that WW2 is still going on.  It doesn't matter what the market does, or what the players do, or how many years go by.  What the mass-market really wants is Dread Lord Days 2.0, Trammel and EQ be damned!

EDIT:  Yes, I chose examples (Trammel, EQ) each over half a decade old on purpose.

Oh. My. God.

Quick, some one do some thing nasty to me. I agree with him. FUCK.

Only because I'm fucking brilliant.  That, and the fact that my above-cited opinion is simple common sense.  I mean, it's not as if I'm weighing in on some sort of controversy.  People want PVP when they want it, and they want to be left alone the rest of the time.  This... shouldn't even bear repeating.

It's because he is right. Early UO told the Western World one thing. The little sociopaths may enjoy open PvP but normal people don't. PvP in some organized manner, ala WoW, is fine. Open PvP is only for the hardcore who feel they have something to prove in their lives and torturing kittens is no longer doing it for them.

Long after EQ is dust and WoW2 shuts down its last servers, people will still be arguing about Trammel.  We'll be old men in our floating cities jacked into 10 generation total virtual reality MMOs and still bitch about how our miner was killed and our 2 Garlic looted on Lake Fucking Superior in 1998.  That alone shows that UO has some sort of power, some sort of hold on us, that no other MMO could ever achieve.   

It's the 'first mmog' thing.  Your first MMO is always special, as you go, 'Wow, all those guys are played by real, actual people!'.  The wonder sticks with you for awhile the first time, and then less for the next game, and so on.  You always remember the first one with the wonder you had at the time, and can't quite achieve again.

Alkiera

The key difference being that 99% of the people on Siege were there either to PvP, or knew that they were probably going to be involved in PvP at some point. There was no such thing as minerkillers on Siege (although miners were killed).

(idly wonders if the Siege guide he wrote for Stratics is still around somewhere)

Seige may have been the pinnacle of mmorpgs. I wish they had included the thief code from early UO (when thieves went red from stealing from too many blues), but otherwise it was a great server. The skill advancement code was nice, the cap, that is. Work on skills for an hour or so, then just play the game and not worry about it.

Guilds really meant something, guilds 'owned' certain areas, and your reputation (real rep, not the coded rep) meant everything. Small community for the motherloving win. Large communities are a major problem, imo. Anonymity breeding douchebaggery and whatnot. SCS+guilds+open pvp = minding your manners or joining a big enough group of like-minded douches to protect you.

And I played a character with absolutely no combat skills at all, no magic, nada. Pure thief. I still remember the sweat of stealthing out of the bottom of Shame loaded down with 12k in gold or so, with reds everywhere (and npc monsters as well). Not because I needed the money, I was rich from treasure hunting, I did it for the excitement of penetrating enemy territory and looting them blind while being completely unable to defend myself.

Suck on that, carebears. Oo, the big mean pks...pshaw.

Ooo...I know the answer!

"Who the fuck cares?"

Maybe some folks are after great gaming and not market share.

Certainly.  Level escalation and the introduction of far too many no-drop items were the main reasons I left the game.  But you have to remember that AC wasn't designed to be a PvP game.  Darktide was just kind of tacked on as an aftrerthought that somehow worked (for a while, anyway).  Shadowbane, on the other hand, was designed, from the ground up, to be a PvP game.

I remember that.  I think you mentioned one or two of my utilities in it.

Really?  But the rest of us like crappy gaming, because we're not as awesome as you.  Hey, speaking of which, I remember you from last time we had one of these threads.



Pwned by history.

Anybody that claims PvP is for the sociopathic niche gamer in the Western part of the world must be unawares of Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Starcraft/Warcraft, Goldeneye/Timesplitters, Guild Wars, etc.  Either that or exceptionally stupid in a world of stupid people.

The problem isn't that players don't want PvP in MMOs, because they do.  The problem is that MMO devs so far seem wholly incapable at building a good, PvP-oriented MMO.  I have a tiny bit of hope for the Conan MMO to pull it off because of the license really not working without it, but then it is Funcom...

Last time i played EVE it was open pvp. And they've not gone out of business yet, have they?

 - meg

It's funny when you get all jackassy smug like that. Those are the perspectives of two players, neither is indicative of the entire game. Maybe ras had a guild of hundreds of folks who were everywhere in the game at once. Or maybe they just patrolled those common spots I was talking about and ganked whiny little twits like you (which was probably a service to the game, in fact).

Or I was a superplayer who was Sam Fisher avoiding gank mobs with my l33t stealth skillzorz. Maybe you're onto something.

Honestly, the only real problem I ever saw in early UO was miner killers, because that was lame. Everything else could be dealt with or avoided if you knew the map and tendencies of other players.

But I didn't mean to spoil your jackassy moment. Sorry, WUA.

I was there as well and unadaptive loosers like WUA was the reason UO was dumbed down to its current sorry state. I also started my first character as a miner and was PKed dosen times until I learned about 'approaching red names' and recall scrolls. I also didn't go mining around crossroads or deciet entrance. After that I learned that you can hide without fail around houses, open trap pouches to stun break and precast heal or recall spell to make sure you can get away.

Those games you mention require no investment in your character. You die, you respawn, you go back and fight and it just doesn't matter. That doesn't work in a MMOG when you have to have the opportunity to work on skills and upgrade your equipment. Not in a mass market mmog anyway which is what we're talking about it. EVE and Shadowbane and any other wide open PvP games are definitely catering to niche markets in North America.

Did you do the OMG SKILL NOW! eggtimer? That's the only Siege specific one I can remember.

Weird then how more people are playing on the WoW PvP servers alone than there are playing any other MMORPG in the western world. This when the PvP servers add exactly zero to the game except random gankage. Indeed, add the Euro servers to the NA ones and the players on the WoW Gankage servers outnumber the "normal" ones. So umm...bullshit on PvP being a MMORPG niche.

The system used in WoW is zone-based and faction-based, and is comparable more to DAoC than Shadowbane.  It has nothing at all to do with the sort of free-for-all system we're talking about.  But you know, fine.  Dread Lord UO was a paradise, and the only reason open-gankage isn't popular now is because those stupid developers can never do it right.  Because, you know, Counterstrike was popular and stuff.  And that totally applies to discussion of an MMORPG.

Really, whatever.  This debate ended half a decade ago.  If you want to sit in the corner, rocking rhythmically back and forth in a puddle of your own urnine, chanting "Everyone liked it!  Everyone liked it!" as you think back on owning newbs in the late 1990's, go right ahead.

Online FPS have investment, but the investment is less tangible than Sword of +3 Leetness: it's refined player skills.  I also like how you really glossed over Guild Wars in your tired diatribe on how there is only fucktard gankers in PvP worlds.  Even the people here will explain to your dumb ass that they had some fun in Shadowbane despite sb.exe and the useless monster grinding.

Let's see...  I make it clear that I'm speaking specifically of open PVP in the subscription MMORPG market, and so far your counterpoints consist of:

1 - CS, which is not an MMORPG
2 - WoW, which is not open PVP
3 - GW, which is not subscription

Shut the fuck up until you learn to read, douchebag.

Yeah.  ROTBuster was sort of mine too, but I didn't program it.  SP Assist came out later and was much more what I had in mind, but lacked the skills to program.  I had never programmed a Windows application before that, and literally learned VB by making that thing.

ROTBuster was my idea.  Originally, wedecided not to release it.  When the programmer did, it was kind of a surprise to me, because of the whole macro witch hunt thing that was going on.  I thought releasing it would be risking a ban, but nothing ever happened in thie end.

My counterpoint examples are to show that there are plenty of gamers interested in PvP that can be attracted to a MMO if the developers were to build the right one and not fuck it up substantially.  Planetside is still around, but I don't have any idea what kind of numbers it's pulling in so I suppose I can't use that as a sound example.  Shadowbane is admittedly a disastrous clusterfuck, but that can be blamed on the fact that it's a hideously buggy mess and that the basic method of leveling is horribly tedious whackamole bullshit, of which your primary PvP audience has little tolerance.  I grant you that Guild Wars is heavily instanced and not quite subscription based(though it may as well be if new content is what you want from an online game), but I'd have gladly paid a monthly sub on top of whatever expansions they threw out if the number of players per exploration area were upped to 32 or something similer, as I'd have paid a monthly sub for D2 in exchange for some of the originally planned persistent things like clan halls and such.

WUA, you can keep throwing around the faux-boog hate as if your opinion was divine order, but the truth is there is a substantial audience that not only has no problem with open-PvP worlds, but would pay for one if it were built better.  Proof can be found in the fact that, prior to the giant catastrophe of the intial honor system, even on the "normal" servers places like Tarren Mill, South Shore, and Crossroads were perpetually hotzones of fighting between alliance and horde.  Proof can be found in the fact that the PvP servers are quite populated.  You can call it "controlled" and "zone-based", but that would be glossing over the fact that you cannot progress to a level of competitiveness without going into contested territories.

Suck my PvP-loving dick, you fucking carebear.

The problem is the time investment linked to ability. This is an argument older than Lake Fucking Superior.

Somewhere along the way it was decided Dedication = Time = Power = Win. That's not a good formula for fun and engaging PvP. While SB was built on the same formula, by the time I got around to playing it (Jan-Mar 2004), nobody cared. It's not that you were ignored before hitting R5. There was still risk. But most people had long since decided it was more valuable to hit R5+ and go hunt other R5+ for their shit/town. Players changed the rules because a) they could; and b) the rules sucked.

The converse is WoW, little sandboxes of mass duels called an "endgame" only because the ladder of achievement matches the EQ endgame of raiding. Joy. Lots of people play WoW. Lots of people never played an MMORPG before it. Blizzards making a shitton of money and could close tomorrow making Vivendi richer than ever. But WoW only attempts to solve through further compartmentalization. The opposite point of the genre.

Western market reality. Give us a bunch of people so we can justify the monthly fee, but don't make us interact with them lest they waste my precious time. Some folks think this'll change. They see the Korean game sphere (both titles and the culture acceptance of RMT) as some sort of Panacea, vision of a near-term Western future.

I disagree somewhat, but only because I measure the near-term in two years. For the next two years there's nothing that's tossing out the trend we're already on of protecting players from each other. Cannabalization will ensue, and only games with licenses/brands/sci-fi will be viable. Screw that noise. I'm more interested in Huxley than anything I've seen from the existing devs.

Except that WoW isn't an "open-PvP world", right?  There is a bunch of red tape around where and when who can fight who.  I haven't heard anyone here saying that all PvP is evil and must be purged in order to usher in the New Age of gaming.  The argument I've been seeing is basically between "anywhere, anytime" open PvP (e.g. Ultima Online) and the much, much more constrained PvP that's in most MMORPGs nowadays (e.g. Guild Wars). 

Nobody here (I hope) is stupid enough to argue that all online players want to coexist in peaceful harmony and that fighting other people online is nothing anyone wants to play.  The point is that there are people who don't want to live in a state of perpetual war.  In a limited PvP game, like WoW, there are a lot of people who like PvP, and a lot of people who don't.  If you don't like PvP, you can play on a normal server and not have to deal with it very much.  If you're looking at an "open" PvP game, but don't like PvP, your best course would be to not buy the game in the first place.

In a nutshell, limited PvP games allow most people to have fun, regardless of if they enjoy PvP or not, while open PvP games are only going to appeal to people who enjoy PvP, so the number of people who like them is going to be smaller.  Nobody's saying that PvP should be eliminated, just that a game that caters only to the extreme hardcore (of either side of the PvP debate) is going to be less widely appreciated than a game that caters to both sides.

I'm not asking for coexistence, because I honestly don't want it with the diehard PvE'rs: they are rarely worthy opponents.  With the previous posts I've been defending/supporting my stance that there are enough PvP+ gamers out there to make an open-pvp world profitable, and quite successful if you provide the tools/support to manage and handle it.  Old-time angers flare up from memory every time I see somebody use decade-old (and fallible) arguments of the hardcore blue-elitists, which might explain my probably-excessive aggression towards certain others.

I disagree. The number of people who want open pvp is very, very miniscule in the Western World. Games that tried it have either had to change to meet reality (UO) or failed miserably. (The Lineage games and Shadowbane.) You can make a semi-viable excuse that the later games simply were badly implemented or didn't appeal to Western tastes (in the case of Lineage) but the fact remains, no open pvp game has ever truly survived in the Western Market.

You're dreaming of a dev house that is willing to throw away probably 90% of its market just to cater to a hardcore niche that will probably bitch and move on anyway. It's not going to happen. Shadowbane was your last hope. It failed.

Wrong.  ATITD showed us that these games can be made cheaply, for a niche market.  Eventually someone will make a really cool, open pvp, niche game.

BTW, Shadowbane is a really, really, bad example to hold up as the holy grail of pvp gaming.  Shadowbane sucked ass, hard.

What the fuck makes you think the average Counterstriker wants to hear about things like "player justice" and all that assorted horseshit?  What he wants is a quick fix of short-term and consequence-free PvP.  Like, say, a WoW Battleground.

But sure, someday someone will invent a Shadowbane Done Right that every FPS junkie will want to pay fifteen bucks a month for, and then I'll see what's up!   :roll:


A greater number of MMO players are willing to forgive bugs and tedium than currently play Shadowbane.  Shit, if that weren't so, the market would have gone belly-up ages ago.  It's the design, stupid.


Then you're just a retard.


People would love open-PvP, and as proof you offer the consent-only fighting at Tarren Mill on a PvE server?  Dipshit.


A game where (theoretically) half the playerbase is in your faction and unattackable, and where the other half can only be attacked in certain zones is NOT open-PvP.  It just fucking isn't.  I know you'd love to "win" this argument by subjectively redefining open-PvP to mean any PvP of any sort, but that shit just isn't going to fly.


So far as proof of the popularity of open-PvP in MMORPG design, you've offered up first-person shooters, consentual fighting on PvE servers, and fighting taking place on faction-based PvP servers, all while downplaying the failure of ACTUAL OPEN-PVP GAMES like Shadowbane and Planetside.

Sorry, but you're a fucking moron.

I wouldn't go as far as to say Shadowbane sucked. It was actually a lot of fun. The real problem was anyone with gold could become a leader, and shitty leaders could be shitty forever as long as they had the gold to support their guilds.

Truly open PvP (a la Darktide) is a tough pill to swallow, and even my die-hard self can't handle the idea of being at the mercy of people dozens of levels higher than me when I'm trying to buy regs. Learning to survive in that environment culls the herd, sure, but eventually the wolves run out of food. UO had safe zones in towns, which was enough for me, but I never ran into many gankers when I played UO - I was either lucky or better able to understand places you DIDN'T visit at prime times. WoW's PvP zone setup was really well done, aside from the fact someone five levels over you (and gaining experience in the same zone) held an unruly advantage, which ultimately was the reason I quit.

Fact is, PvE only worlds are boring. EQ during its golden age was a possible exception, if only because PvP took place in the inter-guild politics I was so fond of mucking up. People, by nature, enjoy establishing a pecking order; whether or not it actually takes the form of combat is just details. I suppose it comes down to how you like establishing the top dog. I'm a fan of Machiavellian scheming, but enough of that occurs in daily life. I'd rather just hit someone with a brick and challenge his buddies to do the same when I'm gaming.

Then again, I'd play any game where I could actually affect the world in a meaningful way. UO and Shadowbane were fun in that sense; control territory and shape your neighbors' lives. PvP was just a medium to prove that I indeed mattered. Should a PvE game manage to duplicate that feeling without me having to suffer a kill stealing jackass (something that never was an issue in UO/SB or on Skullcrusher) or whiny prick lusting after a guild rank, I'll be all over it, too. I'm just not sure anyone yet has a good scheme set up to allow such things without instancing, which defeats the purpose of an MMO for me.

ninja edit: WUA, stop Sir Brucing - it's only cool when he does it. Also, you're just pissed about the elves.

Eventually, if someone can get the money, and that's a pretty big IF. Any non-follower of the MMO scene is going to do a  brief history lesson, see the mess that was Shadowbane and ask if you're insane.  They'll say very simply that it's a better risk to dump it into someplace like Sigil since history has shown they're more likely to achieve even a fraction of wow-like numbers than any PvP MMO.

 It's going to take someone with a passion for MMOs and a lot of money to fund any such PvP game.  That means someone more like Bruce than any other VC, and I don't think even Bruce would do it again. Too much risk, not enough reward.  SB is a big blight on the advancement of any PVP-centric game and is going to be one for a long time. Yeah, it's a bad example for those in the know, but it's also the most prominent for those not in the know and one that'll stick up as a big red flag when they do their research.

I'm thinking if Conan can't pull it off then this supposed GTA MMO could prove that people want and will play Open-PvP MMO's, should it take the logical steps from the gang turf system and street racing in san andreas into a persistent online world.

Art imitates life.


(insert expletives here)

UO elves = WUA's sb.exe

There's an awful lot that is wrong with you if elves are the primary reason for leaving UO after all this time.  I mean, you'd think somebody that weathered out samurai, robots, and years of taking it in the hershey highway from EA, could handle some elves being introduced in a fantasy world, nevermind that elves are always flaming homosexuals.

If they never added ninjas, I could have stood the elves.  But now we're gonna have elf ninjas.  Who can stand that?

Ninja Robots.

The weird is that AC:Darktide actually grew.  It was a far more cool server, in the early days, when it peaked at 300-400 players in primetime.  You knew who was who and what monarchies they belonged to.

Later on we got 329i23942384 re-rolls as everyone tried to make flavor of the patch character, due to AC (at the time) having no skill retraining system, a la UO.  Also, you had a metric shitton of carebears, who got bored on the ghost servers, coming over to play.  Those carebears brought their playstyle to DT, and refused to change it.  XP whoring monarchies didn't care; they just wanted the XP. 

So you ended up with lots of players who decided they wouldn't participate until level X.  They decided they would sit in the same dungeons and level until the mission was accomplished.  They didn't give a crap which monarchy owned the BSD they were leveling in, just as long as they were a member, and they had no qualms of jumping back and forth to whoever ruled the dungeon in question.

I wouldn't necessarily say that's wierd. AC1:DT was an exception to the rule in a game that never hit huge numbers anyway. Something more odd would have been UO's SP server garnering a significant amount of the UO accountbase, or heck, even EQ's PvP servers, which were there simply because SOE was floating in enough cash to keep them open.

PvP requires dedication. Any CS/UT/BF:V player can attest to that. You're either into PvP or you're gonna get steamrolled until you leave from unenjoyment. This is because the AI is smarter and keeps adapting, as does the game itself.

I've generally felt that the dedication required for PvP is the main reason it doesn't have widespread appeal in the U.S. The more dedication required, the narrower the appeal. The greater reliance on other people ("forced grouping"), the further narrowing of that appeal. We like our games but have relatively short attention spans. Get in, adapt, master, move on to something new. WoW was designed to be played 10 hours a week, it shows, and it's success is based mostly on that. More people will never hit the "problems" than the vocal ones who do.

Well, you do work on skill, it's just not tied to a character and some artificial dice roll modifier. You actually learn skills yourself. I think that's better. And watch as the fps genre moves to stat tracking ala BF2. With upgraded equipment.

Someone mentioned Eve in this thread.  I think Eve is a little bit of a different case.  In essence, you have UO's open PvP, even including color-coding known gankers, but the guard zone extends to cover a lot of territory in which you can actually do interesting things like hunt NPCs or mine.  Effectively you have the friendly/contested territory duality of WoW but it's not a hardcoded prohibition on attacking, just suicide if you do (same as uber UO town guards).

Even given that, Eve is niche.  It doesn't seem as niche as others because of their single-server model (11,000 peak lately, with a total of like 40k accounts IIRC).  I think that's pretty good evidence that an open PvP game can work, but they will ALWAYS be niche.  And that might be a good thing. 

This messageboard is niche, but the Vault isn't.  Think about that one.

There have been third party stat tracking programs for sometime now, at least for CS.

What's up with the blue skin love these days? Not only UO, but also the new race in AC1 has blue skin. And I am sure you can pick a blue skin for AC2 drudges.

Bah to retrofitting Night Elves as if that's what WoW's success hinges on.

Outside of duels, I have PvPed once in WoW - against an Orc warrior who killed the quest NPC I was returning to, which annoyed me greatly. (My level 9 rogue 0wned his level 12 ass naturally.) Was it fun? Sure. Would I give up questing and exploring for it? No. Why? Because they are the meat of the game as designed and implemented. If the game is designed for PvP with some PvE thrown as a diversion, then PvP can work as the focus. But current MMORPGs aren't designed like that - not even the ones that claim to be.

We need to lay down some Holy Covenants of PVP.

Herein is contained the sacred word of the prophet Haemish, Grand Poobah of the Disenfranchised, and shall henceforth be known as the Law of Player vs. Player.

1) Open, no-holds barred, non-territorial PVP games will always be niche, unless nothing is lost or gained from winning or losing.
Proof:  Shadowbane was successful on release, fucked up beyond recognition by bugs one month into release and even at the height of its success, never garnered even as many subscriptions as AC1.
2) Faction-based or territory-restricted or instanced PVP will always be more commercially successful than open-PVP, because people are allowed to choose when and where they may be ganked.
Proof: Guild Wars, WoW, DAoC
3) Having PVP in a game means that you will have "gankage" but not all PVP is ganking.
Proof: Many, many stories of people being killed questing in WoW, leveling in the frontiers in DAoC, etc. all of which is gankage, which should be generally accepted to mean "Being killed by someone you have no hope of killing in a fair fight, and usually at a time when you will be completely unprepared for it." PVP in Battlegrounds, on even footing and with the consent of both parties is not ganking.
4) UO was so popular because it provided so many different types of gameplay in one game, truly being the only game that could please "all of the people, most of the time."
Proof: You had dread lords, gankers and griefers existing alongisde faggy roleplayers and PVE'ers.
5) Trying to please "all of the people, most of the time" leads to fracturing of the playerbase, lost subscriptions and ruin.
Proof: UO tried to please too many people, without actually figuring out who they wanted their audience to be. Thus, the community became a series of armed camps, full of zealots on all sides, each lobbying to make the game fit their playstyle, which was usually diametrically-opposed to some other playstyle. Subscriptions were lost on all sides.
6) There are more pure or mostly PVE players than there are PVP players.
Proof: UO's turn to Trammel showed that there were more PVE'ers than Dread Lords, which makes sense. EQ1's success solidified the proof of that.

Shadowbane's PVP was very good, and had it not been so goddam buggy, with such an insistence on leveling, it would have been a success. But it STILL would never have gained the numbers WoW, DAoC or EQ did.

UO SP never took off due to severe neglect from developers and RoT that guaranteed that you have to spend 3-6 months playing newbie character on a very PvP competitive shard. That and plenty of PvP was available on regular shards even up to UO:AoS, so insensitive to pick up, move and spend next long while as a newbie just wasn't there. On top of that siege-specific bugs took forever to fix, new content always bugged something there and very few carebear changes were not implemented there. If SP went away with RoT and stayed with pre-p16 rules it would be a lot more popular.

PvP "done right" means PvP done for a purpose, and one which does not put either contestant in a fight at odds with that purpose.  The point of a FPS game is to frag; the purpose is to kill, and ONLY to kill, so no one is ever really at odds.  Achievement is the 10 seconds it takes to find a gun, exploring is done offlien, and socializing is limited to "wtfIpwnj00!".  The difference with UO is that its very nature created multiple goals, with almost all of them NOT being PvP.  Hence the aggressor was conflicting with the aim of the victim, which causes bad experiences for the players.  This is your basic wolf/sheep argument.  Wolves kill the sheep, sheep leave.  Wolves look at each other and realize that most of their joy was from hitting soft targets because their goal wasn't to frag, it was to r0x0r weak targets to disrupt them.  So wolves leave.  As noted, this is old news.

What is needed is to bring the purpose of each side into alignment.  Example; PvP missions.  Shadowbane's territory control is another way (putting aside for the moment problems with how city sieges disrupted other goals, such as gear, socializing and leveling).  Faction wars in a "no man's land", a-la DAoC or WoW is another.  The difficulty in most of these systems is that there needs to be a way for the PvP game to be enjoyable by the individual playing.  If faction wars become a struggle by numbers, personal accomplishment is lost, and there are few willing participants outside well organized guilds.  It becomes niche in its own game.

I do think there are rewards for pubs/devs with a solid PvP game, because playing against other people is just so much more damn fun than playing against a computer.  At the same time, the rules of engagement have to be laid out to be enjoyable by everyone involved.

Dedicated PvP servers have shown, time and time again, that there are a lot of sheep who think of themselves as wolves.

It's also worth pointing out that there are plenty of games, such as Enemy Territory, where your character can "level up" in limited fashion. In ET the levels just reset after a campaign, so there is no lasting advantage. And the levels your characters gain depend on skillfull play. (ET was a pretty good game overall I thought, the only FPS I've ever been even half-decent at)

Windup's addendum to the Holy Covenant of Haemish:

A non-persistent small-scale multiplayer shooter is as wildly different a gaming experience as could ever be possible, in comparison to a persistent massively-multiplayer RPG.  Henceforth anyone who attempts to rebut the failings of an open-PvP variant of the latter by citing the success of the former will be smothered to death with a giant plush Care Bear.

I will argue that the success of multiplayer shooters proves that the mass market does want some PVP, they just want to either be able to choose when they can get ganked or they want to know beforehand that they are going to get ganked.

... and be able to do so with little more loss than face and the time it takes to jump back in the fragfire.

That's nice and all, but I already have a giant plush Care Bear on the end of a broomstick, ready to shove down the gullet of the next asshat to exclaim "If it weren't for bugs, Shadowbane would have been hugely popular!  After all, people play Counterstrike!" as if the two gaming experiences are remotely comparable even in theory.

A giant plush Care Bear filled with my shit.

Here I agree with you Windup. Only a small percentage of people leave games over bugs. People play around bugs if they actually like the game. Shadowbane had plenty of other issues beyond the bugs that pushed people away:

> one guild overrunning a shard in two months, with no hope of losing control
> horrible newbie experience if you didn't have a guild lined up in advance
> peonship - only a select few in each guild got to enjoy the town building aspects, everyone else was a gold farming grunt

Those to me were all bigger reasons for its lack of success than sb.exe

RAGE FESTERING COCKBLISTERS

There was a lot more than just that bug which contributed to my leaving Shadowbane, despite being in a good guild. Not being able to attend the 3 a.m. sieges (both attack and defense) because really, that's about the only time anyone sieged. Feeling like all the good PVP was going on after I went to bed. It was a huge time sink of a game, but not because it took long to level, but because farming gold was constant, and defending/attacking was constant, and because there was no real way to hold on to territory. There was also no controls set up to avoid the "one-tree" syndrome of every cocktard dropping cities left and right, and there was no player accountability despite some attempts at doing so.

The shitty game engine and pve requirements as well as my suspicion of templating were all the reasons I never bought SB after beta.

Then reading how some guilds dominated servers, the thought of losing the entire town, dropping those whatevers (banes? I dunno) in the middle of the night, it just seemed like a pretty shitty way to have consequence and persistance. I don't like games that are only fun for one side.

Oh, and level-based pvp is retahded.

Level-based PvP doesn't work unless everyone on the same level. Fortunately SB level grind is done macro AFK and is reasonably short. Makes you wonder why not just skip it altogether and let everyone start at completive level?

Sigged!  Tho you basically repeated what sky said, the way you said it was funnier.

Alkiera

Which then in turn brings the thought; why even have levels in the first place?

 - meg

(http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/intro/ibank/ibank/0081.jpg)

<3

Er, yea... which would make it open pvp i think, unless they've done some drastic changes since the last time i played.

To be honest, i don't really want to split straws, but i had been trying to subtly trying to point out that making retarded statements like "open pvp does not work period" is silly. Now obviously EvE gets the 'niche' label stuck onto it, but that does not, in my eyes, make it any less sucessfull a game. This is where the Vault analogy works both ways - WoW has many subscribers, but 99.99% are retards. Much like those who bought the millions of Britney Spears cds does not make her a worthy musician.

 - meg

To measure your character's achievement to some degree. At release reaching maximum level was a PvP achievement since every spawn that would get you there was highly contested. Not so much anymore, so PvE in SB is largely meaningless and unwanted.

Ideally in a PvP game you should start at PvP-ready status and then proceed to fine-tune your character through PvP or quests. In SB terms you should start at lvl 10 then complete quest for your class, get bumped to level 60 somewhat trained then PvP to get to level 75 while getting your disks, gear and stat runes through quest system or your guild.

*sigh* I don't know, i just don't get it i guess. Why have levels when you end up skipping them anyway?! It all sounds too contrived.

I guess i will just sit quietly and wait until someone makes a player-skill-based morpg. Maybe Vin Diesel can...


 - meg

Unless your game is free of class restrictions you will want some character achievement to stop people from jumping into flavor-of-the-patch character. Also a lot of PvPers are also Achievers, just not your typical bash-the-mole for ding EQ catasses.

I think UO's 'use your skill to improve it' approach might work for PvP-oriented games, as log as improvement curve is fairly shallow and does not make untrained characters completely useless. Perhaps way to do it is to give more options at higher levels instead of more raw power.

God this is just begging to be photoshopped. Someone creative (and with PhotoShop) get cracking!

My current concept involves advancement as mostly refinement, rather than the massive level improvement curve.  In CoH at level 2 you hit even mobs for 10, say, and at 50 you hit even mobs with the same attack for 250... and level 2 mobs for over 1100.  In my system, a newbie mage could use a spell and do X damage, whereas an experienced one would do the same damage with the same spell... but might have an easier time switching to a different spell if that one didn't work than the newbie.  A newbie fighter would know several useful combos for attacking/defending with his sword, but an experienced one would have more options gained thru questing/training.  Not Always better options, but options that were better in some circumstances.

Thus, an experienced character could likely defeat a newbie, not because his attacks do 20 times the damage and always hit, but because they have a few more options when fighting, and are likely to be better at the fighting 'mini-game'.  Idea being that with combat slowed down moreso than CoH, there is more room for thought, and therefore tactics and skill.

Alkiera