f13.net

Is the single-player portion of the MMO genre necessary?

How about:

- All goods are made by crafters. There are no other mechants. There are no "drops".
- All goods are either clothing, weapons, or trinkets.
- Clothing and weapons decay over time, require repair, can be enchanted, whatever.
- Trinkets are ammunition, potions, charms and their ilk. Small inventory space. Can be looted from corpses or stolen in PvP.
- All fighting takes place in PvP "missions".
- All resource gathering for crafting takes place in PvP "missions".
- "missions" take place in instanced locations with matched teams of similar numbers.
- "missions" involve claiming artifacts, relics, and locations which you must then defend in similar "missions".
- Artifacts, relics, and locations have value to your entire realm (to use DAoC's terminology) instead of merely to your team

- player clothing and weapons cannot be taken from corpses
- players have access to a "locker" from which they can requip once they "respawn"
- player clothing and weapons can be disenchanted or cursed while on a corpse


So one realm has the mission "defend your mine" and the other two realms (for DAoC's realm number seems about right, too) have the missions "destroy the mine" or, of more difficulty,  "destroy the defenses and capture the mine" Each assault team has fewer players than the defense team, together they have more. Players can be introduced (or leave) in groups of favorable ratios over the life of the instance. Throughout the instanced mine location are herbs and metals and animals with hides or whatever... metals and gems being the big bonus to anybody who can actually get inside the mine and spend the time extracting them. Resource Advantage: defense team! GO! Anybody who can get resources back to their "locker" will have them when they return to the towns which serve as hubs to this instanced mess... and they can sell them or use them as they see fit.

Let's play capture the Holy Grail... let's play sacrifice McGuffins on the altar... let's play skirmish on the way to another mission...

Some sort of indication in the towns as to which missions are near depature and only need a few more players.

Once they get a little starting capital, quality crafters probably wouldn't need to PvP anymore, and could hang around in the towns buying resources to fill their goods orders. They could also moonlight as warriors and run missions with everybody else. Resource gatherers can focus on their gathering at the expense of assisting with defense... PvP thieves become a viable class. Etc. etc. etc.

I know this sort of "I've got an idea! It's totally not one that everybody has already had and it's AWESOME DAMMIT!" is frowned upon, but I saw the article about Fury and it got me thinking. I don't yet have a blog on which I can post this self-important blather.

Never liked the idea myself. Gamers are not economists. For the most part, they're self gratifying adolescents who have no concern for the big picture of things (including myself). The more freedom and authority you give them in this area, the more they will fuck it up.

More NPC merchants, I say. They're like watchdogs.

Shouldn't this be in Game Design? You're designing a Raph Koster game, BTW. I approve, but beware of missing the fun. Also, you're trying to narrow things down too much. Churn will bite you in the ass.

The first question should be:

"If I was a fucking asshole who got a stiffie from fucking over other players (note: This is not the same as "winning"), how would I exploit this game so as to remove the 'fun' elements and make attempting to play it as designed a chore for everyone else?"

Griefing isn't PvP. PvP is just an easy tool for griefing. You need to step back, look at your proposed mechanics and think "If I wanted to fuck over the fun of this system, how would I go about it from inside the game?".

To me, the pay out in MMORPG is when we (the group) can accomplish what none of us singly could have hoped for. Now put that group dynamic with the PvP I owned you and you get my guild can or will beat your guild which has been done kinda nicely but leaves the nonguild ed out in the cold. I like the PvP dynamic to the extent that AI just doesn't cut it and a player is a much more challenging opponent. I don't like the grieving, corpse camping trash talking. And hey, I think im not alone. So tell me how do we reconcile this game wanna be so a casual gamer with 30 min to an hour can join and play. Well hey, If we can solve that why cant I get a group for a PvE instance run? Is it just me? Or is this the riddle inside the riddle? And wouldn't it be solvable by bigger worlds?

It's not in game design because I'm not designing, I'm just imagining. This is a hypothetical framework for game to be built atop, not the game itself. Narrow? Absolutely. One hopes I, or someone more clever, could think of a fun game within this system.


For big obvious holes, yes... and any system that depends heavily on players will certainly be rife with opportunity for the hardworking asshat. That said, as with any bug hunting, the real asshats are going to be more numerous and more successful than any asshat I can currently imagine. There is no system which dedicated asshattery cannot exploit. It's a good first question, and fifth question, and thirtieth question... but it's one that you can ask forever and still miss something ugly.

It sounds to me kind of like Guild Wars, but without the PvE, so it would probably still catch most of the criticism that Guild Wars caught for it's PvP design (no persistance of the world, battles feel irrelevant, just Diablo but with a graphical chat lobby, etc.).

Balancing seems a bit off to me.  You're forcing balance on the instances, which is going to insert some  barriers to entry, but it also sounds like you're building in a lot more barriers than you really need.   If you just had two even teams, the only qualification you'd need to join a game would be one other person on the other team who also wanted to join.  If you've got three even teams, you need two other people.  If you need three teams with odd balances (like where one team has more than a third of the players but fewer than half), you need more than that.  It starts getting complicated, and if the factions are unbalanced, people could be spending serious time in line waiting for one of the balancing conditions to be met.  Why not just limit it to two factions?  As far as I'm aware, the kudos that DAoC has gotten for using three factions have been largely related to dealing with population imbalance; if you're ALREADY controlling for population imbalance, what does the addition of a third faction add to the gameplay?

I also gotta agree with Stray about the crafting.  An unregulated market run by fifteen year olds will kill itself.  It also seems out of place in this game.  This sounds like a game, not a world, which is fine, but crafting is usually more of a world-y activity, and it doesn't really sit right with me (I'm having trouble putting this into words that don't sound totally idiotic, but the way I'm imagining this game, crafting seems like something only the guild mules are going to end up doing).

Let me point one flaw to you:

People don't like loosing. In your PvP, we can assume players will lose 50% times at best. In PVE, it's usually 1%  or so.

Moreover, game design is just like your standard leftist economy system should be equalling chances between players. For example by awarding persistent PVErs with better items so they chances with more gifted PVPers. Just giving the better guy your items doesn't cut it - the best guys will end with pile of loot and the 'second best' will end playing different game.

Re: Crafter haters. Play EVE, stop smoking crack. 

Re: pxib

You pretty much described Planetside.

Not a crafter hater. I frown upon MMO's that don't make an effort with it actually.

What I am is a "100% player economy" hater. I like player economies, but I think games should always have some mechanism (in this example, NPC merchants) that set the trends. If you leave it to players to create prices, then they're always, without fail, going to create a market that makes everyone else to do a lot of work.

NPC merchants also give the buyer a way of telling crafters to go fuck themselves. That's a good thing. The power to bargain. Something pure player economies fail to simulate well. The power to not have to participate in their little game if you don't want to (no different than pvp flagging really).


As for Eve, I think it's boring. I wouldn't play it for that reason alone (but that's beside the point). But if you're trying to prop it up as some model to follow when it comes to "economy", I'd have to say you're the one smoking crack. If it was so good, then most of the people who play it wouldn't be RMT'ing, depending on charity, and/or working overtime to keep up.

What is this Most business you speak of?

Sounds interesting to me.  I'd like to see something like this.  I'd try it.

Have you played Fort Aspenwood in Guild Wars?

I thought Puzzle Pirates did a good job with a 100% player economy although the labor model is crap.  Instead of bidding for new commodities, you'd have them fight for them.  I don't know if I'd have such a literal implementation.  If there is a route than a bunch of resources flood the game.  On the other end, a team could fight really hard and not get anything.  I'd abstract it out.  Make a fun PvP map set it in a theme to match the resources. Then hand out resources at the end based on how well your team does.

I was thinking you could implement player monsters in a game like this.  I would love to see an epic level raid set up like this.

I don't think it is frowned on per say.  It just some people get all defensive when people criticize their "brilliant" idea.  So remember we are just shooting the shit.  Things will be fine.  Multiverse.net looks like it may be going into Open Beta sometime this summer, so I have been thinking about what game I'd build.  Many of my points were the same as yours.

you pretty much come close to describing SWG.  The only (and big) issue there was crafting became a matter of getting the best component crafting drops, since with prime resources and rare components people could easily outperform anyone else.  And this was a real drag in PvP.  But it also affected PvE because those same folks then could take down Krayt Dragons, for instance, more easily, thus getting more component loot , and so on.  While it sucks, some kind of soul-linking is needed per item if you're going to go this route.  But yeah, I like to overall model you propose as well.

No kidding.  Add crafting to Plantside, and maybe a better commander interface, and it's spot-on.

I don't know that that is a bad thing honestly.

You guys may remember when I first joined the community, I talked a lot about a bunch of ideas that pointed in this way--and Planetside for all it's downside (no persistence -really- sucks IMO for long time players), but one of them is that different playstyles interact with the world in different ways. You let your RTS style players create your cities, your crafters populate those cities with items, your explorers go out and gather raw materials (as appropriate for your world), and hell--even give your griefers a positive conflict play mechanism: let them be powerful monster-type creatures that can raid cities...

No, I don't know what Fort Aspenwood is.  I played GW when it came out, but didn't play the expansion.

Never got into the economy in Puzzle Pirates.  I saw the shops but didn't quite understand what was to be done.

PvP rocks, I think that can be determined by people still playing Counterstrike.  But losing sucks only if you lose something that it took significant time to earn.  The key is to find a way to do lossless PvP without giving up persistence.  Figure that out and you don't need PvE anymore, you just let people play as monsters that level up. 

PlanetSide came close, with free equipment limited by character experience and death didn't cost you more then a minute or two at the most.  WoW came closer, where crafted items can give you an edge in PvP. 

Maybe the next novel iteration will be a hybrid, and have some kind of 'rationing' system, where people will be assigned a limited number of 'points' at spawing, and they add abilities, equipment, and other character traits in preloaded configurations, letting people rebuild their images at will.
 

Well thanks everyone, you've pulled my head out of the clouds and given me a lot to think about. I'll definately give Planetside a more serious look, give Fort Aspenwood a try (I bought the Guildwars Expansion, was turned off by the start of the new campaign and haven't played since) and perhaps devote a little time to grim introspection over the ruins of SWG. I'm glad to see that other people are thinking along these lines and hope one of them somewhere is more likely to produce a game than I am.

Those are still flawed, simply because of the nature of persistant worlds vs FPS servers.  The key difference being, if you get stuck on a server in CS where you're repeatedly getting slaughtered, you can find another server. 

You can't do this in MMOs.  It would be like taking your 5-hour a week CS player, telling him he gets to play ONLY against a Professional Team of  Counterstrike players, or he doesn't get to play.

 If you let them jump servers, where is the persistance? The whole system starts to become more transitory, like Guild Wars.

What I would give to actually have the MMO equivalent of "Professional Counterstrike Players". At least there'd be more options to compete with them other than what it usually comes down to MMO's : Catass or quit.

Ouch. Wouldn't PvP take care of fun, given you don't make it overly punishing on the loser?

Not automatically.  There are a lot of sub-optimal PvP systems out there.  If you took World of Warcraft and just sold the PvP game (the battlegrounds), it would suck.  Heck, even among online FPS games (where loosing is about as painless as you can make it), there are a lot of stinkers.  I suspect that's why you don't see many PvP centric MMOs; it's HARD to do a PvP game that's complex enough to hold people's interest, easy enough for newbies to understand, and polished enough that you don't put your fist through the monitor when someone kills you with an exploit.

You also need to make it so that although PvP is possible, it isn't a constant occurence.  No one likes to play long-term, persistent worlds where there is gankage left, right, and center.  That's not PvP, that's anarchy.  PvP can introduce an element of danger to the world, but it can't be so common that one is aware that they are going to be ganked around every corner.

The problem is that the playerbase for these games can't be trusted to behave like grownups, so developers need to place artificial, annoying, and counter-intuitive blockades in the way to ensure that online sociopathy doesn't run rampant.  I don't see any way around that.  Eve has probably come closest, but they still have blockades in place (patrolled space, etc).

What is there in that idea beside a crappy form of instanced PvP?

I mean, where's the difference from DAoC, WoW's BGs, Guild Wars?

Beside the fact that there isn't PvE, obviously.

Why not? If you play to PvP and you have different goals and some impact (so you don't get burnt out rushing the tower add nauseum) I don't see why not. Many play FPS to "gankage left, right, and center" why mmogs would be that different?

Fine you hate instantized PvP, but there are a good number of us who don't. 

Getting rid PvE is a good first step.  I just don't think fighting AI monsters can be compelling in the long run.  Unless you have eaten a lot of lead paint chips, it not going to be very long before you see through the AI.

I mentioned Fort Aspenwood (http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Fort_Aspenwood_%28Mission%29) earlier.  It's casual friendly.  It has many strategies.  It is fun.  Sadly, you have plow through a lot of crappy PvE to get to it.  If you made an entire game of missions like these, I feel it'd be pretty damn good.  Sure, making good PvP missions is hard, but the longevity on that content would be amazing.

Fury does seem something like this.

The point is that "not having" something isn't usually a quality.

What I mean is that it makes more sense to wish for a PvP game, instead of one "without PvE". Which is again nothing new around here. So where's the idea? In instanced PvP? Because if we are wishing for a good PvP game then there are plenty of better systems than mission-based instances.

Perhaps you could read the title of the thread and come to an understanding of what it's about. But maybe you just like typing.

> Because if we are wishing for a good PvP game then there are plenty of better systems than mission-based instances.
Well, Gee Whiz Whillikers. I don't know you had already solved the riddle of good PvP.  It must be the heat that causes me to see large gaping flaws in all the PvP systems.

I like instanced PvP because it can discourage teh zerg while assuring player consent and combat-readiness. I like mission-based PvP because it gives the players a goal other than FFA slaughter. In the better instanced PvP scenarios I've played (some in WoW, some in GW) ganking is actually counter-productive. Any time you waste killing random people is time in which the other team is completing important tasks. If one player can distract several of the other team's killers, every second that they do so is one more second their team has to do the important work of... well, winning.

Now, I was a big fan of DAoC back in the day. World PvP certainly creates the feeling of being a member of an army, a cog in a great war machine -- when you're part of teh zerg. When you accidentally meet teh zerg it tends to create the feeling of being a turtle on the highway. Outside teh zerg there are occasional moments of fine small-group PvP, but they are much rarer than either small group vs. zerg and small group vs. lone PvEer. You don't get to choose which of these situations occur, they happen at random amidst long hours of waiting for something exciting to happen.

Admittedly, I treasure those rare experiences more than anything that I ever did in Guild Wars. I have told and retold the stories of my friar being ambushed by ignorant backstabbers (dodge dodge OH SHI-), of my troll cave shaman turning the tide in the battlegrounds "Whoa, Book is like an army!", and of three healers defending a keep against a full, higher-level group just by staying inside and keeping the archers alive. Those few stories comprise the entirety of my happy memories of RvR. Everything else was empty and dehumanizing. Long on stress and boredom, short on fun.

Guildwars small-arena fighting is constant fun, but utterly meaningless. There's no community except at the very high end. You never feel particularly proud of yourself for beating any particular player because you'll likely never see them again. Same goes for guilds. I play a little random arena once a week or so. I always enjoy it, but it's a silly time waster not a world.

Warcraft's world PvP was almost as meaningless as Guild Wars' while simultaneously being as boring and stressful as Dark Age's. You eventually got to know the good players on the other side (it's just a server, not the whole gameplaying population of the world), but mainly you get to know how it feels to be killed by a rogue or by a large group. Warcraft's battlegrounds keep the community advantage ("Oh hey, that's Slam. He's a scary Dwarf Warrior with a lot of hitpoints.") while making sure that there will be equal numbered groups of players, all of whom are ready to fight. Trouble is, they're worthless for anything other than trinkets and bragging rights... and the mission goals never change... and then because people spend most of their time in PvE, there's the queues...

Still, I tell people heroic stories from Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin... both in game and to players in my real life. When I talk about Guild Wars I have lively discussion of various build and team-composition ideas. I see no reason why a game couldn't encourage both, even though I lack the resources and imagination to invent one. If I want to play PvE, nobody does it better than single player games. I have had the highest PvP fun/wait ratio in instances, whether it felt like part of a community or not... so I'd like to see games focus there.

You said meaningful and pvp in the same sentence, brace yourself.

I will help you if I can, but I fear that even a veritable army of "heavy hitters" wouldn't be enough to protect you from the derision that usually accompanies such a statement.

At least he used meaningful = memoriable instead meaningful = punishing which is a step up in my book.

Yep, the main problem is that considering mission/instanced based PvP as something helping the longevity is a myth.

Mission based PvP gets boring FAST (as in WoW), for the very simple reason that it lacks persistence, so it lacks purpose.

PvP has the real potential IN the persistence. Providing motivation, context, consequences. A reason to fight for, to feel involved, to make choices. Elements that build a world where you have a role. Removing it would mean removing one of its innate and most important qualities.

That idea is like DDO. You take those PvE dungeons and turn them into PvP missions and that's it. I don't think it would be all that successful. And I know that it wouldn't appeal me so much.

Like Guild Wars, but without the PvE. So where's the cool factor?

pxib: What you are describing sounds an AWFUL lot like the system the Stargate MMORPG is supposedly going to use. Admittedly, I'm thinking "All hat, no cattle" on their laundry list of promises, but it pretty much sounds like what they're aiming for.

Well as I said elsewhere (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5145.msg134381#msg134381), what I love about games is the stories I can tell. Memorable games, even silly ones, feel less time-wastey than even the most engaging twitch experience. At least I'm wasting time, but I got a story out of it!
I agree completely. I don't want these missions to be something the player chooses. They're something the game chooses. Right now Tilwaria controls three mines, a small forest, and the high temple to Aku'rass. Each of those provides Tilwarians with bonuses and gives them access to specific resources, blessings and enchantments. If Borglad wants gems he'll join an "instance" of one of those mines (understanding that there will be a group trying to take over the mine and, in addition to gathering gems, he'll be playing on the defensive side). The game may throw him into a random travel "instance" as he and other miners run into a bunch of Uurite pilgrims on their way to be blessed at the Shrine of Noss. All I mean by "instance" is that it's not part of some solid chunk of world map. Not just anybody can run into or out of it at any time. Outside of a few safe towns, everywhere your character travels is a contained PvP space. The game regulates how many people are playing in any given area. Everything is still meaningful. You can lose that mine, and have to do your future mining at an attacker's disadvantage.

The Shrine of Noss might even be a safe town "instance" which transfers from owner to owner. Players inside get news about how the battles for it are progressing in instances "outside" and, if they're still there when ownership changes they get booted into the battle instances or instanced versions of the Shrine, or, if there are too many, into travel instances where they, as refugees, could run into ambushers or other traveling groups, or whatever.

I like instances because they keep combat manageable and relatively number balanced. Just because they have so far been used to destroy persistance does not mean they must do so.

I summarized what I like and do not like about PvP here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=4947.msg135194#msg135194), though that particular post is about game combat in general.

My head is officially back in the clouds you bastards.

An MMOG with Soul Calibur 2 level combat and a blowjob attachment couldn't put my head back in the clouds these days.

Titan Quest is good stuff though. And I can't wait to play the Chromehounds persistant online server next week.

This seems to be a bit inefficient to me. 

It comes down, again, to people who want a "fair game" versus people who want a "battle" or something.  You've got instances all over the world, what do they do?  In this design, their main purpose seems to be to keep the teams numerically balanced.  Fine, okay.  But then you've also got other things in there, like the fact that one team can control (I assume) all the iron (for example) in the world, which is inherently unbalancing.  If team A and team B are both made up of fifteen guys, but team A has sticks and rocks while team B has enchanted gem encrusted greatswords, team A is going to get stomped every time.  They're not going to think the game is very fair.  You can stick in all kinds of rules and stuff to try and balance it back out, but it's going to get extremely convoluted extremely quickly because you're fighting your own design here.

For instance, in your game, say there are ten iron mines, and the Horde controls them all.  The Alliance tries to take one back, but it's fifteen unequipped Alliance characters versus fifteen Horde characters with huge weapons.  Horde wins.  The Alliance gets pissed off, and attacks a different one, but the same thing happens: fifteen versus fifteen, Horde wins.  Even assuming the Alliance, I dunno, befriended the Ewoks or something, so that they'd have a chance of victory, all the Horde has to do is NOT send anyone to defend those mines, so the instance never begins, and they can continue to fight the Alliance in other areas (for other resources) with their vastly superior equipment.  Now the Alliance has nothing, while the Horde rules the world.  The kicker here is that the smaller your faction is, the easier it is to do this (keeping twenty guys well equipped is much easier than keeping an army well-equipped), so victory will likely go to the faction with FEWER players.  Now the majority of your players are sitting around with crappy weapons and items getting harassed by a tiny group of uber-warriors.

See how these things aren't really lining up well?  Yes, you can ad-hoc some rules in there, give the weaker team weapons or allow them to take an undefended mine, but then why are these mechanics in there in the first place?  The system seems to work against itself.

If you're looking for a fair, balanced, equal game, then I'd argue that instancing things Guild Wars style is the way to go.  No, the game isn't very persistent; that's what makes it fair.  The more persistent you make the world, the less fair it becomes (because if a team looses a fight, they'll be weaker than they were going in, which will make them more likely to loose next time). 

If you don't give a damn about the game being fair, then why instance things?  You're chopping up your world into tiny bits, making people wait in line until a series of arbitrary rules are fulfilled before they can participate in a fight which still isn't fair.  In the Alliance vs. Horde example above, in a non-instanced world, the Horde is going to have to spread their defensive forces around ten iron mines, while the Alliance can just zerg any one of them.  No, it's not fair for the poor Horde soldiers who have to fight ten-to-one odds, but by widening the playing field, you're also making it harder for one team to lock the entire game down.

I have nothing against instancing, and I'd love to see a fun PvP oriented virtual world, but I don't think that you can easily just mash together all the neat things you like about both systems and come up with some uber game that's better than either of them.

The obvious flaw I've missed in my breathless hubris. Good show. It hadn't occurred to me that fairness and persistence are so opposed... although it's been proven again and again in the real world as well as within games. Games are fair because everybody agrees on the rules, life is unfair because the side which changes the rules wins. Try to design for both and you're fighting yourself.

Did Richard Bartle already phrase this as a law or should Kail stake his claim now?

How strong is the community aspect in FPS though? Some of the time when I log on to DaoC I'm tired. I don't want to go out and pwn, I just want to chill and chat with my buddies.

It can be very strong, especially in team based FPSes that have some sort of organized play. Unlike MMORPGs, though, you usually don't "log on" to your game client just to talk to your buddies so FPS players go elsewhere for that sort of thing, typically IRC.

And I still think you can take all that, put it all in the same shared context and remove the barriers of the instances for a seamless world.

Instancing everything and automatizing the missions means that the players have little control and tactics in the game. Imho those missions should take place ON the world map. These missions could be tools chosen by the players and playing a tactical value in a conquest system. Solving "zerging" is another problem that can be done in other ways. Plus it's another great source of fun a fight that can involve a lot of players in a huge siege. Reducing the game again to just small skirmishes is about limiting its potential.

And, by the way, you just described Mythic's Warhammer.

You confuse equal-footing with complete staticity here. The fun PvP game isn't the one so "balanced" that is always a draw. The fun PvP is the one where you lose and the game still offers you strategies to overthrow the situation.

As I repeated endelssly along these years, being on the losing side and then fight back till the situation is reverted can be the MOST FUN scenario in a PvP game. Winning an easy battle where you have an advantage isn't all that fun, but it's winning the battle where you have little hope that is truly rewarding.

Concretely this means that a good game isn't the game where noone loses and noone wins. But it's the game where "losing" still hands you fun strategies and possibilities where you can still have fun and try to revert that situation.

"Losing" doesn't mean that in that particular state the gameplay in the game sucks. You can open up new possibilities that unlock only when you are losing. So "losing" could even be a key for something fun that wasn't possible before.

Of course the losing side shouldn't have the same objectives and gameplay of the winning side. That's what leads to a frustrating game. But if the conditions and gameplay adapt, then the game can be a hell of fun and incredibly dynamic.

Think for example to a situation where you are excessively outnumbered and lost a significant amount of your territories. In my idea you just don't have to fight back an impossible battle (since they are zerging you and you have no hope) but this scenario may open up special "stealth missions" that you can use to sneak behind the enemy lines and disrupt the expansion of the other team.

In short: losing doesn't necessary mean that what you have to do is less fun.

What if there were several ways to participate in PvP? I've been playing BF2 a lot lately, and although its not an MMO... hmmm... well, maybe it is.... but anyway, one of the things I like about it is there are several roles to play, and a few of them dont *have* to include picking up your gun and shooting someone.

I was always fond of the unrealized potential of the Squad Leader in SWG. Their job was mainly to hang back and direct the actions of the others. Medic run around reviving and healing, support replentish ammo and lay down some light artillery, Engineer lay Mines and booby traps, etc...

I think it would be stellar if this would happen in an MMO like it does in BF2. Hell, lets dream big... what if there was a CENCOM for my faction, and I, as the General, was able to organize and manage several simultaneous battles (instanced)? These battles were of a limited length with a clearly defined winning scenario, and the results had a meaningful effect on the game world by influencing the setup of the next battle.

My biggest beef with MMO combat in general is the friggin boredom. Click monster till it dies. Click next monster, etc... ad nauseum. No appreciable tactical options like cover, terrain, height, lighting, etc...

I agree that offering completely different roles (not only as "skills" but also as different goals while playing depending on your role) and tactical variations is something required for next-gen PvP.

My old idea about the PvP progression was about unblocking new roles, all based on a squad system that branches up. For example for one group leader (with set skills) you always need five base soldiers. Your character could unblock the "group leader" skills by collecting points, but you would become a "group leader" and use its skills only when effectively leader of a group with five standard soldiers within. So unblocking the class wouldn't let you use its skills automatically. You'd need to group and then the people in that group to "enable" you.

Instead of a scenario where everyone needs to "max out", the idea was to develop a squad system with linked groups that would unblock new roles. With those roles (such as leaders) voted through a public voting system.

Let's say that a raid leader has access to really significant skills and buffs. The rules in my model would allow only one "raid leader" to exist every 20 players. This would prevent a situation where these PvP roles become just another treadmill to catass. Instead these class would really go to differentiate gameplay. Setting different goals and mechanics for each class.

Ahh, old ideas :)

And in reality, not everyone *wants* to tank the dragon. Some people *like* to hang back and snipe at it, or try to nail it with a fireball. its really amazing how much more effective it is in BF2 to see a group of players form a squad and actually USE it. Even though the medic is always running around like mad, didging bullets and shrapnel so he can revive or heal others, he plays an important role. When you find that magic mixture of people who are willing to fill a needed role, the effect is much greater than the sum of the parts.

I can totally see a PvP only MMO. Hell, make one based off BF2, and you'll have an engine that handles up to 64 players inside a small radius, with a pretty dang nice draw distance, 3D flight, pretty cool lighting and sound effects.... and make it persistent. The cool thing about Eve is how with only one shard, they can make changes based on players actions. If they want. ATitD does it too.

We just need someone to put the pieces together. I nominate myself. And I'm still waiting for my 20 million dollars.

Role-based PvP is something used even in Planetside.

In DAoC the Realm Abilities have the problem that they give you power, so the goal is about having all your group at the higher end. The higher the better for everyone. Despite the diminishing returns you can still have a scenario where PvP is definitely "unfair", with a full group of maxed RR against a group at RR1. And in a few cases you could be left out of a group since there may be better players available.

My idea was to fix that problem. Unblocking a "role" would give you new skills, buffs, new gameplay possibilities and so on. But each new role doesn't stack on the other.

Moreover, you cannot have a scenario where you can build a group filled with "x" role. Because the requirements to use higher roles is about organizing large squads and battles. So if the battle is 20 vs 20 and the requirement for a "raid leader" are 20 players, then there can be only one raid leader for each of these two groups.

So, for example, in a WoW battleground you'll never have a scenario where one group has players all at rank 1 and the other all at rank 14. There would be much more *balance*. While the "progression" would still be possible without screwing that balance.

The other aspect of the idea was then not only giving new powers with each role, but also a different way to play. So different gameplay, different goals, where at the end each group works together on the various layers of the battle. Which would make PvP extremely more involving and tactical.

At the end, to enable all this system, you cannot just go in a battle on your own (because of players' requirements to unblock roles) but the system will encourage the players to really organize squads with definite groups, classes and tactics. So a rather complex battle system, with the goal to organize the large battles into something tactical, instead of just having unorganized zergs that just charge back and forth.

Oh, think to this raid interface.

Instead of having all the players in the raid divided into groups, the UI will display graphically the ranks hierarchy, the raid leader at the top and then all the different commanders, different squads possible, specialized groups and so on till the bottom level of the basic "soldier".

As a raid is built all the forty players will be just soldiers, so at the bottom of this graph. Then one or more of these players will propose himself as a candidate for "raid leader" and then voted. Who wins will be moved at the top of the graph.

At this point all the players with a role unblocked different from "soldier" will be able to propose themselves for that role. They would appear in that position in the graph with their name in yellow and the raid leader will have the possibility to select them and confirm, or deny and toss them back at their base role.

Then, the raid leader can also take a player and drag&drop him in a different role. It would be quite usable and you could see at a glance how the raid is organized between the various ranks/roles, where you are supposed to go and so on.

Plus you can then give all sort of skills and special powers because the raid will be always balanced since there will be always just one raid leader for each raid. He could even have his personal stats multiplied, area-based skills like morale boosts at a long radius, AoE shields to protect an area, wards and so on. It would be a hell of fun.

Once you get carried away with all kinds of mass scaled, "strategical" ideas like this, you might as well give each player 30 or 40 controllable bots to command, pin him against another player with the same setup, put them on a battlefield and call it a RTS.

In fact the whole idea IS about integrating RTS elements in normal PvP battles. It's spice.

My opinion about the zergs is that they are unfun just because they are disorganized and basically there's no gameplay left. The point was about creating new rules to regulate and make those battle special. Instead of just a mass of players.

Right now we have rules and mechanics only regulating groups of players. The zerg is mindless. But if we bring in mechanics and rules that organize the "zerg" and larger battles then I think things can be really fun.

Because I believe there's a huge potential of fun in those massive battles with a lot of players involved.

There will always be zergs. Even in strategical games (hell, the word was invented from a strategy game). Very few people would take advantage of features like that. And even the ones that would are pretty much already doing it and going to kick your ass anyways.

Besides all that, the solution to good PvP is not some top down approach that just looks at how to organize players. You've got to solve it from the bottom up. None of that organization means anything if the combat system is trash. And a combat system with "raid leaders with multiplied stats" and "40 players with defined roles" is trash. That shit is made for zerging.

You can't control the nature of zergs, but you can control their strength -- Making a combat system that allows one skilled player to possibly rock the shit out of dozens is a zerg problem solved.

People WILL use that. Because if you are alone you can use only your class skills. While organizing into raids allows you to still fully use your class AND get access to the skills of the various rank/roles.

So an organized raid of 40 players is significantly stronger than 40 ungrouped players. There's a strong, practical incentive there and people WILL use it if they want to play.


But it's in fact about changing the combat system. Battles now stack horribly because the large majority of the mechanics are thought and designed with the 5-man group in mind. The "zerg" isn't something DESIGNED to be fun. It's just a heap of players, hoping that the system that was built for a small group is still decent even where there are more players involved.

My idea isn't about multiplied stats and nothing else. But about roles and gameplay variations.

One of the skills I thought was about a spherical force field, with a radius of, say, 50 meters. This force field could have a duration of two minutes or so, with longer recast timer. For allies the force field is intangibe, so you can move feely in/out of it. For enemies it is impassable. They can move out if they are already inside, but they cannot move in. Only ranged attacks and spells work through it and it can absorb up to 70% of the damage or so.

It's one simple skill that WILL somewhat organize the battle. Because it defines a space, so, instead of a zerg of sixty players all scattered around, there would be zone of concentration that is clearly visible even if you are far away.

Other skills should work based on similar mechanics. Ways to organize the space and the sqads so that the players stick together and then coordinate attacks between each group.

So skills that affect a lot of players around you, more than skills that boost your own stats. Morale boosts at a radius, wards, shields, "zones of influences" (think to an area where all healing spell casted receive a boost, all healers would concentrate there, but at the same time they would become an easy target for an AoE attack) each with its own bonus/malus etc.. These can be ways to organize the battle instead of just having all players doing the exact same thing.

EDIT: And another idea I had at the time was about "rituals". Types of spells that require more than one caster. One player can initiate a ritual by drawing a big magic circle on the ground and then other casters could position themselves to join the ritual.

Again with the purpose of making the players collaborate and plans tactics instead of just running each on its own in a battle with no sense as it continuously happen in WoW's Alterac Valley. Concrete reasons to *group* and create group mechanics instead of "each on its own".

And remember that the "zerg" is what made Planetside, DAoC and UT2004 Onslaught mode *fun*. Huge battles can offer a kind of fun that is just unique. If well designed.

Problem is that nowadays "zerg" is unfun just because all the mechanics are designed for single groups. And not for large battles in mind.

/shrug

Go play Savage. Good luck on finding a match.


My second point addressed this. Fuck classes. Fuck anything resembling an RPG. That's a big reason why these games (and the PvP) suck.



Wait...So you're only talking about fixing "WoW" specifically (telling by your complaint about "5 man groups")? I didn't realize that. Nor do I care really. Sorry. See my above reply. And good luck.

No, I'm making practical examples from games everyone knows so that it's possible for everyone to understand the idea.

But yes, I like these kinds of games (or I wouldn't write about them), and looking for ways to make them much better and solve those problems I recognize.

A raid of 40 players is already significantly more powerful than a pickup group of 40 people because they know how to communicate and coordinate. All your idea will do is make organised, grouped players more powerful than they already are, and make the game less fun for those who don't have the time to find a dedicated raid and the time to set up all the ranks and squads you detail.

Yes and no.

I'm a DAoC player and I know that one of its positive traits over WoW is that when you go PvP you are really cooperating with your group or more players. In WoW you can just go on your own in a disorganized battle. In DAoC you don't leave a keep if you aren't in a group or are a stealther.

My idea is a definite incentive to PvP as a coordinated effort. With the goal of making this way to play a standard for everyone. So my goal is integrating the players in the process, not let them out. Setting the ranks shouldn't be a daunting process more than joining a battleground in DAoC and finding a group.

Beside that, the idea starts from a single group up to larger raids. Get five players together and you can already play with some PvP ranks. Organize your group with others and you have access to more combinations and variations.

The goal is that if you are a solo player who just logged in, you should easily find groups already established because there's a strong incentive to cooperate, instead of each going on his own.

Since the duty to organize roles is mostly about group and raid leaders, then not every single player has to go through that.

The only real problem is about having enough tactical depth that not every players is encouraged to bundle in one spot only. But that's more tied to the geographical conquest system (if you focus on one point, you expose yourself from other sides and regions that are undefended).

Think to a scenario where you are automatically put in a raid the second you enter a PvP map. Then the raid leader will drag&drop you in the appropriate rank and group (after you send a request). That's my goal, without being forced to and with other incentives to not have one-only raid, but more than one depending on tactical needs coming from tactical decisions and the way the conquest system works.

I've been lurking this and I figured I'd add my two cents.  Fixing pvp games comes down to a few key ingredients that while sounding simple, seem near impossible to obtain. 

1. Take a tougher stance against players with destructive behavior.  Those players are the reason most people opt out of pvp. 
2. Remove exploits that give players an edge.  Many of these are coupled to targeting, character location, and the generation of lag.  Poor character class balance, item balance, and realm/race imbalances can add to this. 
3. Have a system that relies on character development as well as player skill.  In DAoC, a skilled low rr player CAN beat an unskilled high rr player.  Similarly, a skilled high rr player is a formidable opponent.  I think this balance aids retention and gives players a feel of being a real hero in game.  It also gives incentives for low rr players to hone their skills.  I always enjoy beating those with higher status than me.  It's like a built in difficulty setting. 
4. Give players a reason to want to pvp.  Unfortunately, this is often done in rewards which turn out to be imbalancing.  Small gains (diversity instead of power was a great move in Planetside), titles, and/or realm bonuses are a start.

A few comments.


One solution to this is the creation of class-dependancy.  Unfortunately, the gaming community seems to hate this. 

I also find it interesting that we both play DAoC yet see the game so differenty.  The realm vs. realm game in DAoC has very little epic feel to me and often time is just a matter of which side has the superior numbers of the right classes.  I think the skirmishes (8v8) are where DAoC really shines.  These small battles are won with tactics and good communication.  The zerg on zerg warfare is often little more than people spamming keys at random until the larger force has decimated the smaller one.  I also disagree with your statements on realm rank.  Obtaining RR5 takes a couple of weeks of casual play (< 20h a week) and is sufficient to make most people competitive.  The gains from RR5 to RR10 are marginal and take a considerable time commitment.  A solid group of RR5 players can/do compete with the higher RR groups.  I've also found that good players get groups regardless of RR.  If I know a player, their RR has little impact on my decision whether to group with them. 


Leaders in games are often in that role because of a) thier personality and b) the fact that they live in the game.  I don't want to envision ANY scenario where these players have even the smallest input on my gameplay session.  I don't want cues to RvR.  I don't want other players dropping me in an appropriate ramk/group.  I want the more organic experience that social interaction provides.  If people in game know who I am and how I play, I should have no trouble getting in on the action.

Even if it is easy to get in and out of, I still debate the practicality of the matter. Being limited in your options is exactly what you don't want in a game where people pay money to have fun the way they want. People don't always want to be a cog in the well-oiled machine of war. They will want to solo or duo and assassinate people.

"Play your role" gets old enough in PVE; there's no reason to turn and apply the same model to PVP.

The counter arguement is: If everyone can do everything, they have no need for eachother beyond scale of force (i.e. numbers).

That's true, but 'scale of force' is but one variable in a conflict. You still need to factor in how well someone plays their character and how well they work with others. It then becomes a matter of 'are you a good player' rather than 'can you spam heals on the MT'. If we're not going for a system that rewards player skill, then sure, HRose's idea works fine.

Could you define "player skill" in the context of an MMO?

I tend to think that player skill in an MMO should be derived from strategy of knowing how to use your class and when. As well as leadership strategy to coordinate the players. To me, HRose's idea sounded convoluted and overcomplicated, but it rewards "player skill" just as much as any other.

Player skill is ability to pwn newbs with little or no risk.

Player skill is where the differential between you and your opponent is your skill at playing your class.

So what you're arguing for is generally a world where everyone has the exact same set of skills available so that the "best" players will win (plus or minus the zerg factor accounting for large battles).

I see.

I think the bottom line is (hard truth incoming), MMORPG players are generally unskilled compared to the gaming community as a whole. We fall somewhere below the average. Some of us have skills, but we play more than just MMOs. We might play CS a few times a week and do really well. But while we're playing MMOs for long sessions of 4+ hours, we can't expect to be skilled the entire time. Planetside was an online FPS, yes. Most would say that an FPS requires more skill than other games. But Planetside didn't actually require you to be terribly skilled. If you're not so skilled, play an anti-air MAX. Those are pretty easy to use. Or maybe you could use the flavor of the month heavy weapon (I don't know what it is, jackhammer at launch, lasher later on). These days unskilled players can even play in a giant robot (BFR) and conquer armies with their mighty certification!

But you always had that option to play an infiltrator with knife only and try to rack up some points. Or fly a mosquito against those skill-less AA MAXs.

Maybe theres a lesson to be learned there in allowing players to set their own skill levels. No?

At the risk of sounding condescending, I have to ask anyone who lacks "player skill" why they even play video games in the first place. How, when, and why did you pick up this hobby? What exactly were you playing in the old days when just about every title, from games in the arcade to the Nintendo to the Apple II, required that you have some skill to play? What in the world were you doing when 99% of the titles released weren't following some rpg/class based paradigm (as opposed to player based)?

One of the greatest misconceptions in gaming is that skill = twitch.  While twitch is a skill, it's just one of many types of gaming skills. Understanding game mechanics, developing sound strategies, utilization of abilities, timing, and communication are also skills.  This is one of the things that I enjoy about DAoC, it requires not only twitch, but strategy, communication, and awareness.  Yes, your realm rank, champion level, and master level play a part in your ability to do wel, but players of lower rank with superior strategies will usually win.  That's been the draw of the game for me for nearly 5 years.  Granted, DAoC suffers from other glaring flaws... but for mmog-based pvp it's the best available. 

Yes, avoiding lock out is important but I don't think it kills the idea. 

-Reward the losers at a significantly reduced rate.
-Have medicre NPCs take sides if one side can't or won't field a side.
-Have nodes spread out so it is unrealistic for one team to control all the nodes of one type.

Two things about this whole MMO/RTS thing that I want to say:

-Grouping players heirarchically doesn't, in my opinion, solve a whole lot.  In Real Life, it's used for organizational purposes, not because it provides tactical bonuses or something, and the organizational problems it solves in real life don't seem to be present in video games.  I've seen systems like this in a number of games, and usually, they're not terribly useful.  In Allegiance, for example, you could group players into squadrons, and say stuff like "gamma squadron, defend the base!" that sounds all exciting and dramatic and stuff, but is less effective than just grabbing all the players by the base and telling them to defend.  Plus, and this is a significant concern for me, at least, hard coding a chain of command into an MMO sounds like a recipie for clash-of-the-titans level ego wars.  So I show up to a game, and suddenly, I've got to take orders from some ten year old who thinks he's all badass because he's a Sergeant and I'm a Peon?  I do not need some power hungry kid who thinks the stripes next to his name mean something telling me what to do and exploding into temper tantrums when I tell him that he's retarded.  In most current RTS/Action games (Like Allegiance, or Natural Selection, or Savage) you've got one guy running the whole team; he's the one who tells you what to do.  Sometimes he's a dick, sometimes he's not.  By adding in more layers of organization, you increase the number of people who are ordering you around, and with that, the odds that you'll be taking orders from someone who you can't work well with.  This happens all the time in guilds and clans, where some guy somewhere up the line is being a dick and pissing on someone below him;  I'd rather not see it in pickup groups, as well.

-Strategic battle may be fun for the commander, but it's not always going to be fun for the soldier.  In most strategy games, you can have a number of guys who never see action, because they're defending for an attack that never comes, or something similar.  Likewise, as a commander, it's generally your goal to win, which means that you're going to be trying to send huge numbers of your units after small numbers of the enemy units, or aircraft against units with no anti-aircraft ability, or cloaked units against units with no detection ability, et cetera.  Would these scenarios really be fun for the players controlling the guys getting cut down with no defense?  Would they be fun for the players who are just hosing down their helpless opponents?  I've never seen a game that has balanced this well.  If you try to create a strategic game (like the average RTS), then the players are probably going to get bored.  If you try to minimize the amount of strategy (like in Savage), then the commander is probably going to get bored.  How would you control for this?

As someone whose twitch skills were always mediocre, and are now sub-par as I get into my 30s:  Strategy Games, Turn-Based Games,   Adventure RPGs ( *Quest, etc.), in addition to the RPGs that were out there.   The difference wasn't that the titles didn't follow some RPG/Class based paradigm, but that you could proceed at your own pace.  You didn't have to worry about min-maxing and exploiting the newest tricks or bugs in favor of FUN and nifty tricks that were there only for "ooh" factor.

Single Player FPSes and other twitch-based or "who can build fastest" games like RTSes are still fun for me, but I detest playing them online.  More and more game devs are incorporating Multiplayer not to enhance the game experience, but to replace actual content or gameplay.  This means I HAVE to min-max and exploit or learn what the counter for the exploit-of-the-atch is to even feel like I'm getting value out of a game.  Otherwise I'm just a skill-less target for someone else's enjoyment.  (At which point I question cynicaly, how is this different from pwning an NPC? Because I can get frustarted but the computer cant?)   It's no wonder I've just about stopped buying PC games anymore, because that's just not fun for me.

I don't think this will work.

-Reward the losers at a significantly reduced rate.

This probably won't fix anything; it changes the rate of the game imbalance (probably slows it down), but doesn't do anything to fix it.  If winners get 100 gold and loosers get zero, then if the winner wins ten in a row, he's up a thousand gold.  If the winner gets 100 gold and the looser gets 50, then after ten wins the winner still has five hundred gold more than the looser.  Yes, the looser can buy more gear than he would be able to if he got nothing, but he's still not going to be on equal footing with the winner, and that gap is going to get bigger every time they fight.  The system still gravitates towards imbalance.  The only way to fix this is if the winner's "reward" is exactly equal to or less than that of the looser, which automatically pulls the game towards balance, but a lot of people are going to bitch about for obvious reasons ("OMG why m i beang punished when I am t3h winnar?!?! I pwn3d him, I desarv t3h ph4t l3wtz!").

-Have medicre NPCs take sides if one side can't or won't field a side.

This sounds like you're basically suggesting that we add mobs to our "World Without PvE".  Quite possibly insurmountable balance issues aside, it seems counterintuitive to design a massively multiplayer PvP only game and then throw the players into bot matches.  I admit that this probably has the best chance of fixing the problems, though.

-Have nodes spread out so it is unrealistic for one team to control all the nodes of one type.

Unless you can fix the instancing problems, then this won't fix anything.  If you've only got one group of guys on your team, then none of the instances will instantiate (is that the right phrase?) unless that group enters the instance; it would be impossible for anyone to take an instance without fighting them.  One group could defend every zone in the world against an army of infinite size.  I don't see how adding space between the instances would fix anything.

For the record:  I'm also a DAoC player.  Other than that,  I play Magic Online.  The bulk of the rest of my gaming is Turn-based/Strategy games in single player.

Thoughts:

1.  "Skill".  As has been pointed out,  there are more than one type of skill.  Twitch is skill, sure,  but it's also reflexes, concentration, and learned heuristics.  I still almost remember the mantra from Warcraft II on Kali:  What, 3 peons mining, then build farm, then wood chopper, then barracks?

Magic Online is skill as well.  Long-range planning and effective use of sideboarding.  Deciding when to use resources (counter that spell, or save the counter?).  Bluffing.  Analysis of opponents decks and threats.  The same can be said for any Turn-based or Real-time Tactical game.

I think that Wizards does a good job pushing multiple formats,  so that different types of skills come to the fore.  I'm a pretty good constructed player,  and a mediocre drafter.  Drafting tests card knowledge and interactions, and long-term planning, as much as play skill.

MMO's generally reduce the reliance on concentration and moderate the reflex elements.  That's why the target demographic is so often people that have a million and one things going on.  Kids running around, talking on the phone, dizzy from 10 hours working, whatever.

I don't think most MMO players are less skilled:  they have more distractions.  When I go into a Battleground with guildies,  a guy might sit out a round or two because his daughter needs something,  or another guy needs to do something for his wife,  and I'm generally hopped up on insomnia and 12 hours tax work.

2.  Specialization.  I'd rate more then moderate specialization as a very bad thing for a game.

A basic axiom of economics is the increased gains to specialization.  Having 8 guys that do a bunch of things poorly will always lose to 8 guys who each do one thing very well.  That's the grist behind the dominance of carefully min/maxed RvR Gank Guilds in DAoC.

This creates bottlenecks in group design:  There is always going to be one or two roles that are necessary to be filled by a skilled player,  and generally,  that role will also be as much fun to play as punching yourself in the face. (For the majority of players)

I play Hibernia, mostly.  You can't beg, borrow, blackmail or coerce a good Bard (crowd control, speed, end regen) to join you Pick up Group (PUG).  Hell, most players refuse to play the class.  You also need at least one very good healing druid.  You might as well sit in as safe zone as go out without one.  Basically, that's speed, crowd control, and good heals out the window for most players.

Everyone is running around playing the "fun" damage dealing classes.  It's a bottleneck in good group creation.  Hell, gank guilds will sit in a safe zone or at the portal keep for upwards of an hour if they need to fill in a "required" role,  waiting for someone good to log in rather than pick up another class or an unknown player.

I don't play FPS games,  but I imagine it's the same thing in the more specialized ones?  50% of the players in a "random" (non-organized by guild or clan) game want to run around as Timmy the uber-sniper, even if you actually need more team players or medics or engineers? 

3.  Organizational rank and hierarchy.  I actually think some good stuff could be done here,  at least in recognizing what already takes place in massive side on side fighting.

In DAoC,  how you do as a realm is dependent on population, realm balance, and a much more nebulous organization/morale.  All Realms have had raid leaders that are at least competant,  but more importantly respected and listened to.

These people can generally throw together a realm defense or keep takes,  or a relic take, based solely on their ability to get people to listen to them.  A good leader, who keeps his side organized and spirits up,  can lead a side to gains despite having a population or power imbalance.

Don't attach any real benefits to a rank,  but make it something that can be voted or acclaimed by the players.  Give the chosen general a different color voice chat,  or some limited moderator abilities in general chats in contested zones.  Set a limit of term.  Make a significant number of players able to vote him/her out of the rank.

4.  Zerg/population imbalance.  I'm of mixed opinion about this.  Having twice as many opponents running you down, farming you, or camping your body is obnoxious.  On the other hand,  an organized zerg or greater population is sometimes required in the face of poor realm balance.

In DAoC, to generalize: 

Albs had he population advantage for much of the game.  They also had the shittiest "built" gank group set up.  Roles were spread out between too many classes.  A couple of classes that are very strong in certain situations.

Mids had the best 8-man set up.  High damage classes with god specials,  solid support classes.  Famous for having at least one DPS class that was completely unbalanced (pre nerf zerkers, pre nerf savages, pre nerf warlocks).  Low amounts of aoe, charm and "siege" abilities.  A bunch of very subpar classes (Thanes!)

Hib had pretty good 8-man and siege/aoe abilities.  Concentration of abilities on a few necessary classes (mostly bards) meant there was a big discrepancy between casual/PUGs and dedicated 8-mans in realm.


This sorted out to alb generally zerging around,  mid running lots of gank groups, Hib running good 8-mans and the PUGs getting run over by mids or the alb zerg, until the PUGs run together.

The hib or alb casual player is forced into a situation where they have to zerg or be run over by gank crews/opposing realm zergs.  And casual mids are just sort of out of luck. 

The present DAoC situation is pretty different,  with hib's massive siege abilities really pounding the other realms.

Heh, I'm not sure if this rambling point is communicating what I mean....  I might be channeling Hrose.

5.  Fun & Winning (Losing).  Without sidetracking the debate too much, I hope, into the gutters of "what is fun?"

Playing as a casual,  I'm enjoying myself if I have the opportunity to win, or at least impose a cost on the winner.  I have just as much enjoyment from a fight where my opponent goes limping off almost dead from my corpse,  or my group kills half the opposing team before getting wiped up, as winning. 

In group vs. group fights,  some of my most enjoyable we maybe killed one guy.  The 5 minutes it took for the opposing group to wear us down,  or the fact we almost tipped the scales, make it memorable.

It's when you repeatedly play out situations where you had no chance from start to finish of even an outside shot of winning that the game loses alot of it's flavor.  If you're predetermined to lose,  and lose badly.

Running into a zerg of opposing players,  or getting run down from behind by the same ranked out min/maxed uber group who dump high cost realm abilities if there is trouble, or getting jumped by 5 stealthers whenever you try to leave a safe zone solo.

I'm going to have to agree with Kail and Johnny Cee here; they're saying pretty much what I wanted to get across.
- Being a soldier is not very fun
- Doing one thing is not very fun
- Skill is not just twitch; it involves player knowledge and analytical thinking.
- I don't think MMO and RTS-style gameplay are compatible; they serve different interests on different levels

Fuck a bunch of "player knowledge" and "analytical thinking". In this context, those phrases really just amount to some circle jerk discussion about class builds and/or prepping. It has nothing to do with actual in game actions and player skill.

Perhaps if you had said "tactical thinking", I'd agree...But you didn't.

Player skill, as far as combat and action is concerned, is simply anything that requires actual in game player control and participation. It has been this way since fucking Space Invaders and Pong. It could very well apply to puzzle solving and the like, but most of the time, it really has something to do with "twitch". For example, the difference between "player skill" and "character skill" is having the timing and coordination to jump out of the way of danger, instead of relying on your +5% to dodge racial skill, or your uber "Boots of Escaping". When people say they want more "player skill" in a combat system, they want more of the first. Anything else is just more RPG wankery.

Mage opens with a frostbolt - analysis says he's frost-specced, he'll try to freeze you and unload from range. Fireball or pyro tells you that he's fire spec, maybe with arcane power. He'll go for as much burst damage as possible, and probably burn cooldowns on you. Hey look, I just analysed - and this will have a direct impact on how I fight them. Sure, that's tactical. Let's not split hairs here. Any PVP encounter is tactical.

I agree with the rest of your statement. Did you assume that just because I didn't say 'apply it in-game' that I didn't mean that you applied that knowledge and thinking ability in game?

> it changes the rate of the game imbalance (probably slows it down), but doesn't do anything to fix it.

If you give out a resource, like iron from an iron mine, then at some point the team that wins all the time is going acquire more iron than they could use.  If a PvP instance is giving free iPods to the winners, the iPods eventually become worthless except as item to sell to people without iPods. More likely they'd move on to another node with a resource they don't have in abundance. Anyway the result is that people who can't win consistently to get their ore are going have to work harder or learn fight better. But it’d never be impossible to get the resources they need.

>This sounds like you're basically suggesting that we add mobs to our "World Without PvE".

I have no problems with npcs being in the game.  I have problems with NPCs as central foil (ie PvE).  PvE villains just stand around with their thumbs up their butts waiting for the players to kill them. NPCs fight in predictably which make killing them challenge in only the most trival sense.  NPCs in a PvP game should be used in a utilitarian fashion.  In this case, the NPCs are the Washington Generals sent in to put up a half-assed effort to defend when a guild is unable to fight.  A guild that relies on the Generals too often is likely to lose control of the mine.

>it would be impossible for anyone to take an instance without fighting them.

That was the whole point of item number two.
 
It’s hard to talk about how all this would play out without more specifics.  One thing that would reduce lockout is a craft system that doesn't rely on a few resources.  So if 1/5th of recipes rely on iron ore, the uberguild that did manage to lock down the iron mines in spite of all the above precautions would only be locking down a small subset of the crafting tree.

Two groups are a approaching each other.  You have an insta speed interrupt.  Who do you interrupt?  After you interrupt,  who do you nearsight?  Or do you stop, drop a speed warp, and prekite?

Yes, there's twitch in there.  But there's alot of analytical and strategic thinking.

If you're a caster heavy group running into a tank heavy group, you're going to extend and draw the opposing players away from thier support.  Two caster groups, and it's more important to mess up their primary CCer and have your own primary CCer dump a nice mezz on where they're concentrated.

So then, doesn't this all come down to something that has been said many times before...... No one game can ever be the end-all be-all game? Doesn't this all mean that all a company can do is to make a game that works well in its niche? I honestly dont get why WoW has so many people playing it, but I many never "get it". I think it all boils down to "to each his own". Mine might be a pre-CU SWG and BF2. Someone else Planetside and WoW.

But I still think its too bad they cant layer SWG/BF2/Eve. I think that would rock!

I think that is true. There never is one... anything where people's opinions and tastes are concerned. Coke or Pepsi? Or RC, Faygo, Sam's Club, or any other small brand cola for that matter... people are so fickle and carry so much other baggage and various decision factors that it is silly to think there is just one holy grail of a game out there waiting for someone to discover the magic formula. It just doesn't and won't exist.

But, I was thinking about the whole PVP/BF2/General MMO thing and wonder if there could be a gentle merging of some of the stronger features of both. PVP generally does not make me happy. It provides some of my greatest memories of triumphs, but also my darkest feelings of frustration. MMO's are a more pleasant experience, however the boredom, been there done that feeling, starts to appear faster and faster the older and more experienced/jaded I become. Repetitive AI just makes my eyelids droop.

I agree with one poster here in that the DAoC battlegrounds PVP (not the high level where RR's rule the day) is about as close to a perfect PVP scenario as I have seen in any game. I have played BF2 (quite extensively) and what irritates the hell out of me are stupid little things like how someone with many more hours under their belt can do that little bunny hop-to-prone, shoot me dead with one shot kinda thing. Makes no sense to me why hopping does not take stamina like sprinting, but even if they eliminate that, it is only a matter of time before some other game capability is found to provide some advantage like that. Besides that, there is no death penalty aside from the respawn timer. It is only a matter of time before my never-ending assault of full health cannon fodder can overwhelm your Audie Murphy ass in the machine gun nest. [WoW PVP is so gear dependant that I am doomed before I even start out and I have limited other PVP experience outside of those.]

But I digress.

What BF2 has is a decently balanced set of player roles. What it is lacking is a sense of persistance and little to no death penalty. What DAoC had (for me) was persistance, however it was gear and RR dependant at the highest levels. I think a scenario for success is blending that persistance and balance, while at the same time rewards players for staying alive (rather than penalizes people for dying).

So, what about if there were benefits for staying alive such as slight increases in atributes or abilities (with diminishing returns)? There would have to be some "threat" assessment to keep people from entering a game and then going to hide in the corner or going AFK in a keep (similar to Oblivion's skill increase function for stealth where you only gain skill if there is someone who has a possibility to see you). How about using some thing to reward over time to add persistance such as kill to death ratio, which could add either some status increase like a rank or unlock some small, incremental special abilities or perhaps add a mount?


Is there a game out there like this? Is there one in the works?

You can use PvE objects in a PvP game: the trick is to make mobs player-controlled, player-summoned, and never name them.

Making them player-controlled and player-summoned is nothing new.  Planetside calls them 'deployables'.  WoW calls them 'Pets'.  EVE calls them 'drones'. 

Making them unnamed is a rarer trick.  PvE mobs shouldn't be the stars of anything, and naming a Mob busts immersion.  You can kill 'Evil Cultists' all day long, but when you kill 'Bob The Evil Cultist' ten times in a row, any sense of immersion is officially gone. 

A real tricky concept for most games to handle is player-controlled mobs.  EVE took almost two years before they settled on their drone-control interface, and even that feels crude.  Most games take the coward's way out, and make player-controlled mobs limited to a single pet, rather then admit that their basic hotkey interface can't handle the challenge.