f13.net

The Vanguard Live thread got me thinking about this subject. This is in no way an attempt to start (yet another) UO griefer/pvp/carebear argument.

The games in which I truely enjoyed PVP all had one common denominator. Looting of some form.

UO: Full looting rights. Chop up their body, hell chop their head off (depending). Made a risk factor for bringing out that sexy Vanq Halby/Kat.

SB: Full looting. Kill a guy and take his rune he just camped. Kill a guy and take the money he was farming. Try not to get killed or stolen from while getting that commander rune.

Neocron: Loot random module off defeated enemy (this was changed from a much more harsh penalty).

Eve: Ship loss, random module loot.


So why were these better than lootless PVP? To me it must be the thrill of the hunt, or on the otherside the urgency to live. When you PVP in WoW, you die and are back after a 2 minute death run. Nothing changes. Winning or losing means dick. So you don't care either way. Its item based PVP without item risk. In item loss PVP, the difference in adrenaline and will to live is huge.

That is why the argument of "go play quake if you want to PVP lol" is BS to me. You have nothing invested, no reason to truely want to escape or kill. Its just twitch. I like having something on the line, as well as something to be gained. Make death at least somewhat meaningful and you have my 15 a month. No wonder I can't even get into the Burning Crusade. Eve actually gives me that rush. Its probably just a matter of preference, but I'm curious to see if others feel the same way.

As I said it elsewhere multiple times: to me PvP without loot is like Poker without money.

SB didn't have full looting, fyi.

You need to define terms here.  SB did NOT have fulll loot, as your equipped items were not lootable.

That being said, Looting of Players in a MMOG is a great way to get them to cancel their sub after they lose something they value.  So if your goal is to lose subs at a rapid rate, looting of players is the way to go.

My mistake, you didnt get their equip IIRC. Full backpack looting though, right?

Yeah, it was full backpack looting.

I believe this is a pretty fair argument. Since only two of these games were not horribly buggy, you could contribute sub loss to a combination of the two (bugs and item loss, sometimes at the same time). I don't see Eve dying due to this, though it is a semi-niche game if you compare it to the Giant.

PVP looting would be nice if structured similar to the way AV is setup in WOW.  Why not allow you to collect token turn ins for rep and equipment.  Don't take something away from the other player, but make it part of the economy.  Have token coin, again not taken from the other player.

PvP whose only consequence is time works and seems to have some level of mass appeal.

To you, perhaps.  To many others, however, the PvP without loot loss is the optimal way to go.

I've never understood the premise that winning is meaningless unless you can also take something from your opponent.  The VAST majority of games out there do not involve a penalty other than losing, so are you suggesting they are meaningless?

Yeah, but if you're in Eve for long you realise that there are a lot of people in Empire space trading, missioning and generally carebearing (non-perjorative use of the word), and that most of lowsec, let alone 0.0, is amazingly empty.  There are big areas in 0.0 (especially in the map's NE) where you can go for days and never see anyone.  From what i see in chat when a mission-runner first takes a lowsec hauler mission or something and gets ganked, I honestly don't think that the majority of Eve players ever spend time in free fire zones.

I think it really depends on the player's preference. Clearly to some, full loot PVP is just more fun. To others, like me, the fun in PVP comes from the fight, not the aftermath or consequences (either positive or negative.) I don't have a problem with partial-loot PVP as in EVE, but overall I prefer something less ball-wracking like WoW, simply because when you lose something in EVE, you have to work to replace it, and I'd rather just fight rather than farm to fight.

But aren't you farming to fight in games like WoW? Grind that gold out so you can buy a blue. Raid MC for the 50th time to finish up your set. Since there is a large number of PVP servers, with raiding guilds, are they not farming for advantage in PVP? I guess it can't be proven either way, but that would seem to be the case. In the end, you probably would spend similar amount of time farming in either sense.

Two years ago or so, the devs came out and said that 2/3 of the playerbase spent something like 90% of their time in .5 and higher.  That's when things started to change to really push players out into lowsec at the least.  From the times I've played Eve, it hasn't worked and these folks have just taken to grinding longer on the lower payouts, or flying lower missions.

Lots of people don't like or enjoy gambling, so the 'thrill' of item loss isn't exactly going to appeal to them. (I'm one!) However, I love pitting my game skill, knowledge and ability against other players rather than the AI all the time.  Thus PvP without looting tends to be my preference.

 And yes, I do enjoy shooters a great deal.  Moreso than RPG PvP, in fact.)   I just want to do it on MY terms and when I want to.    The last few games to come out that incorporate systems along these lines have done well, and seem to show I'm not in the minority here.

Of course, after you've done all that "grinding" ( most people in WoW would call it just "playing" though, and PLENTY of people PvP there in Blues or even Greens!) you aren't going to have to do it over again simply because you lost ONCE. 

If I remember correctly, when EQ had pvp added it had corpse looting.  I think you could loot any 1 item that wasn't a weapon or in a bag. 

I'm all for corpse looting as long as a) equipment doesn't make the player and b) there is gear of reasonable quality easy to obtain. 

AC Darktide had the best system, a couple of high value items drop randomly, the number of items increases as you level.  You can carry death items (high value crap) to try and defeat the random nature but there's always a chance you will drop or loot something good.  

Reequipping everything is a major pain in the arse in a full loot system, so what tends to happen is they gradually introduce no drop items, which just means they should have went with a limited random drop in the first place, no matter what their item system was like before, the best no loot weapon available is now the best item in the game.

I'm not getting into it in the other thread, but money looting is not item looting, there's a major difference, noone should give a shit about money after a few hours play in any of the current games.

Even limited item looting is not going to be popular but what I'm hoping happens in a future game is looting of cloned items, kill a plate warrior, get a chance of looting a cloned plate item of something that guy was actually using.  Everyone wins sometimes and the dead guy doesn't need to moan about losing something.

Eh, I don't see that working.

Then the guy who goes out and spends a bunch of time to craft the platemail of awesome just gets camped over and over while some pvp guild farms his gear.

I'm partly in that same category.  That is, I don't enjoy gambling (for no reason other than I don't find it fun), so any aspect of PvP that coincides with that is dull for me.  At the same time though, I tend to seek out PvP+ games that have looting of some sort.  What I enjoy is risk.  I like that there is a sense of danger, and that I need to keep on my toes to survive.  The catch is that I want a mechanism(s) in place so that if I do keep on my toes, I probably will survive (ie, get away if not win). 

UO had that; just keep recall on the ready and you're fine.  Eve sorta has that; keep warp aligned and you'll mostly be fine.  My old MUD had that; there were places you could run to escape PKs, so long as you knew where they were, how to get there, and could survive long enough to make it.  Shadowbane didn't have that very well, as recall was put in late and iffy in use.  Lack of much of a death penalty and ability to spot PKs early on track mitigated that though.

Lets not make any illusions that WoW isn't a grindfest (be it for rep, gold, or items). Hell, what MMO isn't these days.

With UO as an example, you dont necessarily have to make items the end-all-be-all. I think there could be a middle ground somewhere. I am in the minority, but nowadays you will find that the MMO playerbase has expanded. People WILL burn on WoW. 1% of wow's current numbers is something like 60k subs. Will the WoW polish and hand holding doom any niche games to failure? I don't think so.

That was basically my point. When I'm done getting gear for PVP in WoW, I can just log on and PVP whenever I want. I don't have to worry about farming up gold or raiding for new armor to replace what I lost, or worry about much of anything at all other than what I like to do.

I think this could also reflect the difference of interest in MMOs split between 'virtual-world' versus 'game-game'. If you're playing an MMO because of the virtual-world part, the looting in PVP makes sense from a gameplay perspective; consequences are incurred as a result of engaging in conflict, and war is for more than the scorecard at the end. For a game-game MMO player (to whom WoW has more appeal) the ability to log on and play a game and have fun is a transitory thing, and not necessarily as much dependent on whether that combat has long-term consequences as whether it was fun in and of itself, for the competition's sake (not that this isn't true of a virtual-world player; it's just that they place game value in more than just that).

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In my opinion, it's only a grind if you don't enjoy doing it.

I'm a big fan of corpse looting and perma death, but my tastes are arguably niche.  

Here are a couple of reasons why I think the days of corpse looting are over:

1) If the gear is worth looting, then the gear makes the toon.  In a pvp game this is a fundamentally flawed system.  If skill makes the player, then why wear gear?  If the two are balanced, then well-equipped characters are penalized most as they invested the most time gearing up.

2) This still creates a disparity between classes.  Melee classes are far more dependant on gear.  Running around in a minimally equipped caster would be the preferred method of making money/loot.  

3) Corpse camping and zerging people isn't fun for the person on the receiving end.  I love pvp, but getting run over repeatedly by full groups sucks.  A corpse looting dynamic will force grouping and discourage many from playing.  

4) Class balance is a pipe dream.  The disparity chasm will widen as the more powerful classes/builds will continue to prey on the weaker implementations.  

5) The game would be too niche to garner investor dollars.  

I just think games shouldn't be punitive.  You should go play poker with your paycheck, that'll give you the thrill you are for.  What gives me a thrill in PvP are tough fights.  Punitive PvP encourage people avoid tough fights.

Back to you subject, a few ideas:
Graduated looting like EvE security, the farther out you are the more lootable you are.
Full looting with guild based equip, you can lose all your stuff but you can back to your guild and stock up.  If you die too much it weakens your guild and strengthens others.
Full Loot, but blessed items don't drop.  Blessing is expensive and temporary.  That gold drops in place of the blessed items when you die.

 

The problem is that sort of pvp intensive MMO won't sell much in the mmo market. How many times people quit when they get scammed out of a lot of gold or lost a weapon due to account hack? Add in full losses losses from just doing 'pve' and being ambushed by some guy 40 lvls higher than him, do you think he'll even want to continue his sub past the first month? I know the example is extreme but some people just dont' give a shit how low or cheap the guy's gear is, free loot is free. One shot, loot, sell. It's easier than grinding mobs at the same level for cash. 

Chance to drop is random, chance to drop is based on minimum number of items carried, additional loot table based on class and race to make it more random and character death timer added.  You could even further prevent it based on a last five characters who killed you list, but there are really dozens of ways to prevent farming the key part is don't release the information on methods used to prevent farming.

Interesting statement....

It's my belief that gear is nothing more than stats, at their core.  The same stats that say, your dodge/parry/block/etc are.  As you play, your dodge/parry/block increases at the degree that they are used.  Further, innate spells and such could be viewed as nothing more than 'stats'.  The more you play, the more you grind (bad word choice, I'll admit), the higher your stats (abilities) go.

Saying 'as long as the equipment doesn't make the player' seems to say to me 'as long as we're all the same level with the same stats with all the same skills and abilities'. 

That sort of homogeny would be a bit boring, yes?  No real 'ding gratz reward' for time or 'effort' spent?

I'm sure there could be a way to prevent it, but saying that players won't figure out a system eventually is just poppycock. Player have, can, and will eventually figure out every system you've made for your game.

I seem to remember Lum or Raph mentioning something like that.

It's all about what you find fun in the game.  If "ding gratz" is the game to you, then it would be boring.  If PvP is the game, then wouldn't even fights be more fun than getting steamrolled by some guy that lives in his mom's basement?

The way to offer a carrot is similar to what you see in planetside and (to a lesser degree) DAoC.  You offer ability diversification with PvP kills.  Being able to "pwn with impunity" is only fun for the people with lots of free time to invest.  To attract a large audience you need to offer rewards for participation that don't overly skew the fights.

Nonentity, It's not rocket science, you just make it so difficult to intentionally farm cloned items that it's not worth the effort.  But you know what, you have convinced me, being able to loot items based, in part, on what you just killed is a stupid idea.  I withdraw the suggestion, players are clearly far to clever to be defeated by a random element.

I think this is the pvp equivalent to the pve players who believe you need to grind and invest massive time to get around cockblocks (corpse runs I'm  looking at you.) for the game to be meaningful. Both are looked at as crazy by most other gamers. Both mindsets believe you need to be punished so you earn your fun in the games.

I sort of see why you have this feeling. I remember adrenalin rushes in UO. But as another poster said, this kind of pvp is punitive. You are literally punished for losing. And history has shown that this is just not popular, anymore than corpse runs are popular with pve players.

Out of your games that are examples, only UO and Eve can be considered any kind of success. Neocron is basically begging for subscribers and SB is dead. And out of UO and Eve, UO survived only because of Trammel (and I know this debatable in some people's fantasylands but the numbers bear it out.) and Eve is niche and not full-on pvp everywhere in any case. It could be argued that SB died because it was horribly made, but the same really can't be said of the others.

1. Items don't "matter" : Then what's the point in looting them?
2. Items "matter" but are trivial to replace : Then what's the point in looting them?  Why not just "buy" them if they're trivial to obtain by other means?
3. Items "matter" and are non-trivial to replace : Then the loser of a PvP battle has a non-trivial task to perform EVERY TIME THEY LOSE.

All adding item-looting does is widen the power differential.  

In virtually every other PvP game besides MMO's, there is a considerable effort to afford all players an even footing prior to the contest, yet in MMO's all of a sudden we want the loser to not only pay by virtue of having lost the combat, but to ALSO be weaker for the NEXT combat.  With any other game, that would be considered a broken mechanic.

What made looting in UO work from 97-99 was that replacement items for everything were easily obtained.  You had PK's and Anti-PK's, and they were killing one another so frequently that you were able to stockpile resources. I used to write about that sort of stuff on stratics all the time in Hades Hall of Warfare.  The difference was when one side or the other got killed so frequently they couldn't restock, but I saw plenty of naked PVP fights that were quite entertaining.

Shadowbane's problem was that gear and runes actually did matter, and repairs got too expensive to the average fighter.  You were lucky if you could kill mobs for 10 minutes before being killed, robbed, or both. The most money I ever had in shadowbane was 40 million gold for selling two high demand runes, and it financed my repairs for the next two years.  But many people weren't in that situation, and SB lost a lot of casual gamers as a result.

Both of those games have one thing in common, the hard core thrived while the casual player died and left.  Example. If I've got 3 hours a day to play and I'm repeatedly killed, looted, and my gear destroyed then I can't participate in the player economy very well. Therefore I'm going to a game that will allow me to PVP, but within a limited ruleset.

I am on record for many years now for saying that games should not make farming players the fastest way to make money, and unfortunately for both UO and SB they both promoted that concept. I prefer PVP with skill involved, and there is no skill in an 8 man team rolling up on 2-3 guys exp'ing and killing them in the middle of a pull.

IMHO PVP rewards should be for gear (that wears out), titles, badges, temporary power up items, etc.  BG's should have ladder rankings where guilds are ranked by kill to death ratios, wins, and dps. Arenas should have ladders for several group sizes, sort of like WoW has now.

Open PVP environments simply don't work anymore because players do not police themselves, and open environments make it too easy to farm players in situations where looting is allowed. So for better or worse we can expect to see RvR, GvsG Arena, or BG's as a mainstay for MMORPG's for quite some time.

I love/hate this argument. It always helps distinguish the Carebear Cousins from the normal Carebears though. Carebear Cousins are the individuals who want conflict with no consequences. In fact many of them feel they should be rewarded for losing. I can see several of you posting in this thread already. Many of you falsely believe that nothing other than level and loot based systems exists/works. Maybe you never played UO? I will agree that looting and PVP in one of these (level/loot based) games will never work. But pvp without consequences will never work either.

Just look at the pile of shit called Asheron's Call 2. It's the perfect example of why no consequence PvP does not work. In Asheron's Call 2 when you killed an invading enemy the fight did not end. That enemy would just spawn at the nearest lifestone, and then return again. Eventually he would wear you down, and manage to kill you. The fight would then move to the lifestone itself. At that point the winner would be decided by who got bored first. I finally won the ultimate victory when I cancelled my account. No consequence PvP leads to boredom. Maybe some of you are just boring people, and it fits you like a glove. Many of us prefer fun and excitement over boredom though.

I'm not saying that a loss should make you want to quit the game. But I am saying that it shouldn't make you feel indifferent toward the guy who just killed you. I played WoW for a year, but I can't remember a single opponent's name. I can remember a few guilds, but that's about it. I played UO for 3 years, and I can remember almost every player that ever killed me. I can even remember the name of the first guy to pk me as a newbie. His name was Pen15, and he killed me at the west gate of Trinsic. I can remember things that happened ten years ago in UO, but I can't remember anything from playing WoW last year. Obviously WoW's pvp was not able to hold my attention.

Looting is a bond between the victor and victim. If you take that away, it (pvp) really is just a game of quake on a public server.

If I had in-game ways to point to another player and say, "I killed that stupid bitch 138 times last month, they aren't as hardcore as they claim," I would be happy with no looting in PvP.  Stat tracking and whatnot, I guess.  All easily accessible in-game.

As was said earlier, I think AC had the best PvP ruleset as of yet with Darktide.

LC is right.  AC2 failed becuase the PvP sucked.....

I agree. I've spent many many hours on FPS games and never felt I needed to get some concrete gain out of each dead opponent. The fun of the combat against real players was its own reward. I feel exactly the same in WoW PvP - it doesn't matter that it is less skill based, or that items/levels have such an influence on combat. PvP is fun in and of itself, plus you get goodies for doing it. I don't need the "adrenaline rush" of fearing I might lose items, that just wouldn't be fun.

The fun of combat against another player being it's own reward is absolutely true in action-oriented games(which is why I loathe things like BF2's unlocks), but when RPG's are involved I still want my ding-gratz achievement pellet to openly display.  PvP players can like variety too, mmkay?

Neocron did have a decent system for loot drop.  The more "good" you were the less of a chance you had of dropping items.  There was a slot added later which would make 1 item non droppable on death; this helped attenuate the death penalty a lot; due to the uber crafting mechanic weapons were a top priority and it took a lot of time to get that perfect raygun/cannon/flame thrower put together.  

On the flipside, if you went "red," you would drop a ton of stuff.  So the random PK element was pretty low; those who went that route became infamous and well known.  Really, NC's original PvP mechanics were the best I have seen.  I could go more in depth, but it does not matter.  They killed what I loved about the game with their "expansion."

AC2 is a good example of how NOT to do just about everything. Not just PVP.

It's just fine to like it, but you have to realize that ding-gratz and PvP aren't good company.  When the disparity gets large enough that new players have no chance against established players, then they lose incentive.  If ding-gratz is used in a diversification sort of method, then experienced players get more abilities without necessarily more power and the whole thing works.  If I'm going to enter into a battle with someone, I need to know that I have at least some chance to win or I lose all incentive in the encounter.  This is possibly the biggest problem with the implementation of PvP in mmogs. 

There should be situations in which you have a very low chance of victory, but it should never be zero percent.

Did you even read what I wrote before reacting? I was explaining why levels and PvP are a BAD IMPLEMENTATION IN MMOGS. 

Same as in the other thread.  You post before even reading what I write.

See, thats the thing...I expect to get steamrolled by the guy that lives in his mom's basement, in ANY game whether it's tic-tac-toe, chess, or <insert MMORG>.  If all he does all day every day is play tic-tac-toe, I *expect* to get beat everytime.  But I also realize that the proverbial basement dweller is in the smallest minority.

I'm getting the impression that you're polarizing ding gratz or pvp or <whatever>.  Why can't it be all those things?  (If I am getting the wrong impression, let me know.)


Again, the 'pwn with impunity' crowd is small, very small.  They're vocal, yes.  But it's such a small subset of player that it really shouldn't even be considered.  It's the same as Blizzard not freaking out when the powergamers flew thru content and levelled up the 'toons at breakneck speed in beta.  They realized and understood that they were not designing their game for the powergamer hardcore.

So the good guys never lost anything but the bad guys lost everything? That was a good PVP mechanic? So the guys doing the Neocron version of EVing balrons for 6 hours a day never lost anything when they died to another player - yet the guy who kills those tools loses everything when he finally dies. I hate it.

UO had little ding grats.  The game was based on character skill development, and with little work a noob could survive after a week or so of exploring.  We need to start pressuring Mythic to open a UO shard without Trammel and Item insurance!

Nah, what they need to do is focus on making that new client great and not another UO3D coding abortion. Then they need to leave player-ran shards alone and let people use the fancy new client to either A) relive the past on runuo shards or B) swing neon katanas at each other while riding etheral llamas on the EA shards.

Sorry, but your replies got so boring/rehashed in that other thread that I stopped reading them after the first line. I will admit my loss this time, and rewrite my response.

From what I understand of Warhammer Online, they will treat other player characters as mobs after killng them, where you can loot their corpse for random money/items. I'd love to be able to point at someone and say, that's the guy who I looted my epic sword of awesomesauce from. If they allowed cross faction communication, I would link it to him in tells everytime he logged on.

I don't think it would make money for them for all of the overhead costs that they'd incur.  But, that's a topic for another thread I suppose.   Good PR decision, poor business decision.

They would need to implement new hardware and copy the code over from Siege Perilous, minus the stupid ass ROT bullshit.  Viola!

I know it is a bit more complicated than that, but it would be good for drawing in box sales.  Dunno, I will have to ponder it some more.

I'm pretty sure they removed ROT years ago.

No worries.  It was obvious that you missed the part where I said that I thought Vanguard was a shitty, bug-ridden game but I enjoyed looking around anyway.  Keep up the personal attacks. They're obviously helping you build some self esteem.  

Snake: I think we just have a difference in taste.  I prefer my PvP to be filled with fights of varying degrees of challenge, but I always want to have at least some chance against my opponent.  There has to be a point where skill and strategy can defeat an unskilled, yet well-equipped player.  I don't mind the existence of some carrot to encourage people to enjoy some type of character development, but skill should still be the dominant factor in determining outcomes.  My ideal is that someone that plays a lot isn't guaranteed power... ability still plays the major role.  Now, if they happen to develop skill by playing a long time then good for them.  One of the many reasons that WoW pvp fails is because gear and level play a HUGE role in success.  

I'm not really looking for an adrenaline rush in games, I'm looking to relax and unwind, to play casually and let my guard down and not have to look over my shoulder all the time.  Hence, I try to avoid PvP, and if I do get involved in PvP, I prefer the lootless kind.

All the examples you cited are "better" if you're PvP'ing for the adrenaline rush.  I can't imagine having to suffer the whole fight-or-flight physiological state for 4 hours a day, as soon as I get home from work, for 5 days a week and then the whole weekend; it's the opposite of relaxing, and thus the opposite of entertainment, for me.

When wasn't Neocron begging for subs? I'm amazed it is still going, it never really caught on. Outpost battles in that game are some of my fondest memories out of any game. Their system for drugs kicked ass. The implant system kicked ass. It really was a cool game , IMO. Shadowbane had WAY more problems than a few noobies getting killed. My guild experienced a bug that wiped out our entire city. Just....gone. SB.EXE errors in any real combat, and randomly did nothing to hold subs.

Shadowbane done right would hold as many or more subs as Vanguard. I think any company with some balls when it comes to PVP and skills when it comes to coding could do quite well.

This entire thread is kinda silly when you think about it.  The Marketplace has pretty much rejected Looting in PvP for a few years now.  No MMORPG developer (except maybe Glitchless) is going to put in PvP loot.  The overwhelming majority of mmorpg customers don't want it.

You become more trained over time. You lose a lot of being tense, you just follow certain rules and you keep yourself safe. The rush is always there though, when its engage time. You go from shaking every time you fight to your heart just racing instead. You go from needing a cigarette after a tough fight, to just a drink of water. You becomed conditioned to it, those that don't usually don't care for those types of games....or love the hell out of em.

I have to admit that's one aspect of UO that I will always miss.  That intangible feeling that you could be attacked at any time and lose anything of value.  I think that and EvE are the last examples of games where you're really required to pay attention to everything all the time.  I think there's still a market for games like that, it's just small meaning high risk for ROI. 

FYI Neocrons system of PvP was extremely versatile and well balanced.  I can post a synopsis later if someone wants me to.  For now I must brave the snow flurries and drive across the bay! 

Work 4tl.  Why do you assholes engage in interesting conversations when I gotta go?

Yeah I know I'd become conditioned to it over time, but at this point I'm not looking for ANY amount of adrenaline whatsoever (it's bad enough at work), and so I don't want to spend any time whatsoever doing these two things:

a.  Suffering through high adrenaline / high alertness 4hr periods so that I CAN get accustomed to it.
b.  Spending extra time grinding for the extra cash/gear needed to offset in high death penalty costs.

To compare it with TV, I'll watch Discover, Sci-Fi, History channel, or whatever dumb movie's on, but definitely NOT any truly scary horror movie (good horror, not crap that's so bad it's funny).

I was going to say almost exactly the same thing, but you beat me to it.

I love my WoW PVP.  Running back from the graveyard is annoying enough that I don't just blithely attack everyone I meet while on my way from point A to point B.  But at the same time, I can get steamrolled and rezkilled a couple times without gritting my teeth at a mental laundry list of farming and shit I'll have to do later just to break even.

Just about every mmorpg in existence right now already caters to your needs. We don't really need more of them.

My understanding is that the items will be spawned on the corpse and not come from the player's actual items.

I don't think anyone is arguing that you can't have your own MMO if you want it. The big argument is that it probably won't happen because the market isn't asking for it in enough numbers to make it worthwhile, regardless of how you or I feel about it. No company is going to sink even Vanguard amounts of money into a looting PvP type game because they will lose money. And if you don't have the money, the game is probably going to be underproduced and you'll end up with another Shadowbane. The best you can hope for is really EvE levels of success both in market and in a well-made game.

Which brings us back to the original discussion. There simply aren't enough players who enjoy this "adrenalin rush". No amount of arguing or waving your e-peen in the faces of people who don't enjoy it will make it happen. Sorry.

ETA: This really comes down to the whole point that most gamers do not want to be punished for losing in a game. This applies to both pve and pvp. I'm not sure I understand why that is so hard to understand.

Actually, we're in 100 percent agreement.  I, too, would like the same.  Guess I didn't (or haven't) expressed that well enough.


I think that currently exists, to be honest.  I couldn't tell you how many times I was victorious in SWG against either ebayed Jedi (who I KNOW had superior equipment to what I had with my Jedi or when I beat them with my eternally fooked Commando).  There are LOADS of players out there with topnotch characters, but don't understand the combat dynamic of the game itself.


To me, that is the MMO conundrum, in that 'skill' in an MMO is overrated.  When it comes down to it, it is at it's heart a math game (i.e. whose player skills are higher than the other).  If you take two players of equal skill in terms of understanding the combat engine and how it works, and give them characters of (for example) level 50 versus level 60, the level 60 is going to win 9 times out of 10.  It's not because one player understands the combat theory better than the other, because they both understand it equally, it's that the level 60 'toon is superior to the level 50 in every way.  The 'math' favors the level 60 more than the level 50.


Absolutely agree.  Just because the basement dweller plays 70 hrs a week versus my 7 hrs a week, doesn't mean that he or she understands how the game works more than me.  It's especially true if they are creatures of absolute habit in which their attack goes root/snare, DoT, power attack power attack power attack everytime.  


Again, in my view it all comes down to the math.  And when dealing with a level based combat engine, that is the way it is going to be every single time.  And developers are going to go the route of level based progress because that is the easiest to create and balance.

Conversely, if you take the 'skill' and put it squarely in the players hands (a la FPS), you get SWG NGE.  And we all know how that worked out.  You can ignore the fact that lag and latency that is inherent in an MMO, and you will STILL have the issue of the basement dwellers pwning with impunity over the casual players because their twitch reflex in that setting is so much further refined.  I've got a 4 handicap in golf, I'm a damn fine tennis player, played every sport known to man, and played baseball during my four years in college for a major div I school.  I'm a hell of an athlete.  My hand eye coordination is way above average.  But I can't compete with red bull guzzling teenagers in CS.

The closest thing to a player skill based combat system was preCU SWG, IMHO.   It rewarded being prepared and informed about what foods and drinks and buffs did what, and knowing your 'template'.  As a Pistoleer/Smuggler or any other sort of ranged-centric 'toon, I had NO problem with melee stackers.  I never worried about melee stackers on my Jedi.

WoW's PvP is a failure?  Last I checked 10% of the Earth's population was logged into Battlegrounds....

WoW's PvP is a financial success.  I happen to be of the opinion that much of it could be improved from an implementation standpoint.  WoW is a PvE game with PvP thrown in.  That's obvious to anyone that has played games designed with PvP as the primary focus.  I don't find WoW's pvp to be all that engaging.  If other people like it, then great... it's right there for the taking.

AFAIC FFA PvP with player looting will require:

(a) Uniformity of avatar skill and abilities. Any character with a basic combat skill set ought to theoretically be able to kill or escape from(escaping PvP is almost as fun as winning) anyone else. You must never get killed in a situation where you had no chance to flee or defend yourself. If you lose, you lose because the other player played better than you... which also means:

(b) Equipment must not grant large advantages without equal and opposite disadvantages. Like with (a), you should never lose because the other player's avatar is better. If they gain some advantage from having awesome armor, that armor should also give them an obvious vulnerability to exploit. If paper meets scissors on the road, paper must be able to identify scissors and take appropriate action... and players should get a thorough explanation of rock/paper/scissors before they make it to the road. In other words:

(c) Players must receive a complete explanation of the combat mechanic and have the opportunity to experiment with it in a relatively safe environment. How do you fight? How do you disable an attacker to run away? How do you guage the safety of a situation and keep yourself tactically prepared? What locations and terrain features could hide an ambush? These questions must be treated with the same importance as use of the WASD keys and the hotbar. Players must also get the opportunity to practice safely so:

(d) There must be non-lethal option for combat. Pins, for example.Every kill must be a choice. A player doesn't have to "die" in order to lose control of his actions. Perhaps he is simply "exhausted". He can no longer fight or defend himself... but he may be able to bandage his bleeding wounds, call for his friends, or open a trade window and beg for his life, but he's completely out of combat and cannot move at more than the slowest of crawls for a few minutes. Alone he's doomed, but as part of a group he may have a chance. What's stopping the enemy from making the choice and killing every time?

(e) Tangible consequences for choosing to kill. The most obvious one is that a killer loses precisely that protection: killing a killer has no consequences. This should last a non-trivial amount of time. A week per kill, perhaps. Perhaps during that time period the character cannot be deleted. Even if he dies, that character slot is locked. Even after that time period has elapsed, the player whose character was murdered will always be able to kill the murderer without consequences... revenge is a dish best served cold.

Theoretically a group of PKs in a situation like this could have a designated killer. As such it's important that they share the revenge option, but not necessarily the general kill protection and slot locking. Accidentally grouping with a psycho killer shouldn't doom you beyond the bitter fury of his particular victim. This sort of "notoriety" system is hard to arrange fairly. UO taught us that.

Once you have all those things, corpse looting is still problematic... but I think it would work fairly well so long as:

(1) Player inventory comes in layers. Any potion, bandage, or spell item you have in a hotkey slot is vulnerable to theft and looting. Items that are easy to transfer into those hotkey slots are one layer down... items you can transfer into -that- space are deeper still. The easier an item is to access and use, the more risk that it will be taken. Indeed, player theft and looting work best if:

(2) Player inventory is extremely limited. A thief or looter must choose between the items he carries and the objects available for looting. Regardless: what a player has in his inventory will be a small part of what he actually owns... and any large items he's wearing or wielding will be hard to carry extraneously. No spare battle-axe and cuirass in inventory... that's ridiculous. Also:

(3) Armor isn't fungible. One size doesn't fit all. Perhaps it can be retailored or reforged, but that's an expense by itself. Added to (b), looting somebody for his clothes or armor ought never be a concern.

(4) There must be time in combat to say "Your money or your life." This relates direclty to (d). The victim needs to be able to lie about what he's carrying in the deepest recesses of his inventory... and he'd be well served to carry some decoy valuables that he can pawn off to save his skin if he's got something -really- valuable. He must also effort to make his lies convincing. If "Your money or your life" is a genuine option, even the grittiest griefer will explore and enjoy it.

This framework isn't perfect and will STILL BE NICHE, but I think it offers some unexplored flexibility.

And yet, we have people arguing to apply a handicap (item loss) to people who are less skilled (the losers).  What kind of nonsense is THAT?

I'd lose every single game of Chess against a grandmaster, but at least I wouldn't play successive games against him with a loss of material. 

The losers aren't always the less skilled. Most the time, they are the ones that can't adapt. Sorry, its true. Adaptation includes: Strength in numbers, escapes (such as recall / root and run). Sometimes luck is a factor, as well as environment.

Just become there is some item loss doesn't equal huge roaming death packs of people. From your quote it sounds like you don't like losing to more skilled players than yourself. You know you will never be the best so you say remove any death penalty. My five year old daughter is obsessed with winning too. So when she loses and starts throwing a fit, I take her toy away.

The point, you ask? Item loss is a bitch. But its sure fun to be the one taking the item!!! :P
 

The only problem I see is one for the solo/casual player.  The mentality will quickly become one of run in an optimized group for maximum gain.  Groups of skilled players will band together dominating weaker opponents, taking their stuff, and widening the gap even further.  Forced grouping, forced grinds to replace items, and forced grinds to have the best available skills. 

I love PvP but hate forced grouping.  Where do I fit in?

Hahaha...No doubt....

In my view, PvP isn't about a tangible reward.  It's purely about the competition, whether it's 1 vs 1 or 1 vs 2 or 100 vs 100.  I don't need a reason to fight.  I just enjoy the fight itself.

However, having said that...

If PvP could offer my 'faction' a bonus, whether it be land / territory control (resource spawns, etc), mission/quest payout bonuses, and that sort of thing, I would be in complete heaven.  PvP reward, in my opinion, should be rewarding to more than just the individual, it should be rewarding to my entire 'faction'.

There are plenty of people willing to play such a game. There is just no way to prove it without a game to use as a measure. Shadowbane had a large number of players at release. You can find threads similar to this on just about every forum in existence. There are even websites dedicated to it. Your argument is like saying companies shouldn't market products to minorities because there are more white people. I have no doubt that a lot of the vocal MMO players have this kind of mentality (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMECGvP7UsY). But there are enough of us normal players to make a proper PvP game profitable as well.

My post has nothing to do with the losers always being less skilled.  The point is that less skilled people lose MORE OFTEN.  That's kind of by definition, wouldn't you say?  If it isn't, then you're better off just rolling dice, since apparently skill has no effect at all.


*laugh* Where in the world did you get THAT idea?  I play a LOT of games.  I certainly expect to lose to more skilled players, and what I said has nothing to do with not enjoying playing with more skilled players.  If you actually, you know, READ what I said you would realize that it's not the opponent's skill at beating me that I wouldn't enjoy, it's the loss of material. 

Playing at a disadvantage, having a handicap, those are all things that MORE skilled players do in order to foster a challenge against a lesser skilled opponent.  To suggest that a player should have a handicap on their next game because they lost the last game?  That's a broken system, my friend.

That there are some people that can't seem to see that is amusing to me.  It's even MORE amusing when they suggest that I don't approve of item loss because I don't enjoy losing to players that are more skilled than I am.  What does that have to do with what I said AT ALL?

What makes you think that players who want what you consider a "proper" PvP game are "normal"?
By any rational definition of the term "normal" I'd say they want what WoW offers. 

Unless of course by "normal" you mean "thinks like I do about PvP" in which case I'd say you have a distorted sense of self-importance.

I'm not sure that's necessarily the case.  Less skilled players that wish to remain in the game world will find other ways to compensate, usually by running in larger numbers.  This is very much the case in DAoC as most players do poorly when on their own and will band into groups to prey on smaller groups.  If that's the dynamic you're after, that's fine... I'm just reminding you that there are alternative ways to get around skill determining outcomes.

Many WoW players are just there because nothing else is available.

Yeah, that must be it.

I think the WoW players stay in WoW for many other reasons like loot, "ding-gratz", linearity, social ties, and even inertia.  There are games like Planetside or EvE available for people wanting a different PvP experience and neither seems to be benefitting from WoW run-off (that I can tell).  I think that WAR and AoC may test your theory, but it will be a while until we'll be able to watch that happen.  

Oh agreed.  But that just points out what I've been saying all along: You handicap the "Winner" not the loser.  In this case, if you had a roaming pack of players who, individually weren't the best, but together could roll over anyone else, would you then handicap everyone else?  Perhaps by taking away their ability to group with others for a while each time they got killed by a group?  

It's just madness.  It's like the PvP item looting crowd can't see the effect it would have...

Correct me if I'm wrong but you just want to the freedom to kill players anywhere, loot them and hold territory.  That's all a real pvp game needs, as clan warfare should provide the rest of the content, that's right isn't it?

Your previous response, and this; you seem to believe that this thread is about "There need to be more PVP MMOG's!!!!!" and people arguing against that, when in fact the thread seems to be just a discussion about the pros and cons of various PvP systems, and what's fun in them, with no relation to the existence or popularity of certain games.  You don't need to defend anything, we are not clamoring for the death of corpseloot PVP in all its existing forms.

Either you're blatantly trolling or stupid, either way, talking to you is becoming repetitive and boring. However, I'll give it one last try. BTW, when people start thinking you're worse than Geldon or SirBruce, you might need to take a step back and look at your posting habits. Hell, I feel like I'm insulting Geldon by mentioning him in this post.

Now, on to the relevant stuff. If by plenty of people you mean a niche market. Then yes, you're right. At its height, most sources cite Shadowbane having around 50,000 players. Hmmm...50,000 vs 8 (or so) million. Do you see the problem here? The U.S. alone has around 300 million people. Which means if all WOW players were from the U.S. it would account for 2-3% of our population. Shadowbane isn't even a measurable blip on the radar. Shadowbane was about .000016% of that population. Or about 1/2% of WOW's numbers, rounding up. Even early UO which is gaming nirvana to you people was never even close to the success of WOW. In fact, it hemorrhaged subscribers until your preferred type of gameplay was taken out.

As for the minorities vs white people argument, this is just more of your blatant trolling and if anything indicates your own not so well hidden racism. Not to mention it makes no damned sense in the context of this argument and you probably know it.

What you seem to be missing in all of your bullshit is the fundamental understanding of two things: How a market works and human psychology.

Human psychology does not favor your kind of game. The vast majority of people do not want to be punished for losing in a pvp match.
Market forces will not support something that is not and never has been profitable. Game companies are you know, in it to make money. You and your buddies don't do that for them. Sorry, you lose to capitalism. Suck it up and be a man.

BTW, I wonder if you realize that a carebear is actually an anti-pk, and results from events back on UO when some antis rose up and utterly humiliated a prominent PK guild. So, calling people a carebear is actually not at all an insult since it implies they are an adaptable, versatile pvper who enjoys wiping out PKs.

You're more or less right in this. I'd say some people, like me are stating the obvious, corpseloot pvp was inherantly unpopular and is pretty much dead due to market forces. Other kinds of pvp are actually making strides from the near-death pvp suffered during the EQ era. (I'd say pvp was damn near wiped out because of corpseloot pvp and how it pushed alot of people away.) WOW has actually gotten alot of people to try pvp and enjoy it, which is partially what is making games like AOC and WAR possible.

The other thing he believes the thread is about is himself, and anyone who disagrees with him being some treehugging wimp.

It helps if you understand LC's background.  He was one of the hardcore SB beta testers.  I belive he eventually got banned for exploiting, but I'm sure he will fill you in on the details.

That being said 50k subs is probably the most you could get with a Full loot game.  (I think I said this earlier)  It would have to an indie game with crappy graphics, but it could be done.  Send Psycochild a PM or something and get him to comment.  He would know better than most people...

Yeah because when EQ2, Vanguard, DDO, LotRO, AoC, WAR ships, boy then there's going to be a big exodus.  :roll:

Correct. I just suck at making the point clear.

Before I leave work, I must say that comparing any games at this point to WoW is pretty stupid. WoW is the Giant. All of your friends play WoW. We are just the nerds that know there is other stuff out there. Eventually, churn (I feel smart now) will have an effect, and people will most likely look for a diff MMO.

Some of those people will be PVP junkies.

That's like saying nobody's switching from Comcast because Peoplepc dialup internet services became available. I meant a quality game with proper pvp. Those released games you mentioned are turd piles.

For light "fun" PvP. Not the nads kicking "FUCK YOU I WIN BITCH!" ass-raping of pre-Trammel UO, which some so obviously long for. They like PvP in which they die, rez, and get back to the fight.

Not PvP in which they die, rez naked, have to go buy more stuff which is inferior to their original stuff while the winner prances by in their old hat throwing the money he looted off their corpse at beggers.

I'd like to suggest there is a subtle, but important, difference between "I die and lose my stuff" and "I die and you get all my stuff". I suspect the former is a hell of a lot more popular than the latter, although neither are going to be anywhere near as popular as free-play PvP with nothing but a small time or durability loss.

It's not stupid to compare other MMO's to WoW.  There's a REASON it's a giant.  Indeed, there's probably MANY reasons.  I happen to think one of those reasons (at least in the case of the PvP servers) is the lack of a lasting penalty to the losing side of a PvP fight.

There's a lot of people on the WoW PvP servers, how do you think those PvP server populations would fare if they had item loot upon death? Do you NOT think that the consequence free PvP model that WoW offers is a draw to those servers? 


 

You are really trying hard today. Quit the fucking trolling already.

No - you remember it because it was your first taste of it. Ask any herion addict about the first time they shot up. Then ask them about 4 times ago.

And no - it isn't a bond. And what Sky said about you being a troll. Go place boards with nails in them on a freeway,  I'm sure you will form the same bond with people.

That is pretty much the dumbest fucking thing I have read on internet forum.  Seriously.

That's funny because I was thinking the same about you.


"In its second recorded week of sales, Shadowbane falls off the sales charts after making a debut in the number eight spot after release."

Word of mouth is a bitch. It started off strong for low budget game from an unknown developer. Shadowbane was flawed to the core. It didn't even have full looting.

I think things would be much different for UO if it was launching tomorrow with a modern client+graphics. Most of the PvP issues in UO were because of poor coding. The majority of players were on dialup, and a few were on faster connections. Those few were able to dominate because the game allowed them to move much faster than those on dialup. It was a massacre, and left many people feeling bitter. The blame was misdirected at PvP in general, and OSI quickly patched out PvP instead of fixing the real problem.


Just who am I racist toward? You don't even know what race I am. I could very well be in one of those minorities. The racism card is an easy way to cover your own stupidity.


There's no proof to back this up. Well unless you really think WoW proves it. But MMO players are still a very small percentage of gamers. Which is probably due to the monthly fees, and lack a of variety.


And "gay" once meant the same thing as "jolly".

There is a market for pvp with looting, but no big budget game is going to go purely after that section of the playerbase, it doesn't make sense as the people who don't want a stiff death penalty out number those who do. 

Some game companies might try to attract the hardcore pvp player with special ruleset servers, after all they have already laid out for all the expensive items like game engine, artwork and coding. 

However the biggest barrier to getting pvp ffa with looting servers, has always been and probably always will be people like LC, because any major game community reacts very badly when the subject even comes up. 

That's solely down to players like him who just cannot separate being a prick in game (which is fine) from being a prick to the rest of the playerbase when they actually outnumber you.   Being a prick on an official forum gets you noticed, but doesn't serve any purpose in getting your wants fullfilled, if your very presence enrages the majority of the games future customers.

So you expect me to believe that in one week, just one, word of mouth killed Shadowbane? It's far more likely that its core audience accounted for enough people to buy it in that first week.


Which was it? Poor coding or differences in hardware? In any case, you're right. It was poor coding. Full ffa pvp with looting enabled drove away players. Thank you for making my point.


I had an answer but I took it out. This "point" is so flawed it's not even worth arguing.


Ok, get this? When I can bring in numbers, and all you can do is stick your fingers in your ears and yell really loudly that I am wrong the burden of proof is no longer on me. The proof is in the sheer numbers. Full loot pvp games aren't in the market because there is not enough demand to justify the price it costs to make an mmo. It really is that simple. It's not a carebear conspiracy, it's not that most people are wrong and you're right, it's market forces.


*snort* and PvP once meant UO-style. That's changed too.

ETA: Apologies to other posters who had to read this post. Oh, and Arthur Parker is exactly right. Though don't worry fellow posters, LC will say he is wrong and all WOW players are waiting for is his kind of game.

I think LC is just angsty over the fact that he missed being user number 1337 by only 1. Now he's just LEEG!

Well, the shift towards item-based games with Everquest made full looting impractical. If you were a ranger and you killed a wizard - if he dropped 100% of his loot, what percentage could you put to use? Let's ignore the, "you might have a wizard friend!" angle and let's just concentrate on what percentage of loot you could put to use.

Like in WOW - can you imagine full looting in WOW? Let's ignore the obvious "I've spent 3 sleepless weeks of my life in Molten fucking Core" problems and think how worthless it would be to kill a paladin and loot him. Since, you know, you're horde. I knew I was pissed when +int plate dropped, and I was a shaman and couldn't even use plate! I'm sure the warriors felt worse.

Anyways, with levels and more specifically item-based gameplay instead of character-skill (not player skill - avatar skill ) we won't see full looting, ever.

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_player) (yes I know, but if you can quote a better source go ahead)

Your reading comprehension is horrible.

Full ffa pvp with looting just took the blame for other shortcomings. Just like video games that make children shoot their classmates.

If you released UO today, everyone would still go to Trammel.  If Trammel wasn't in, they would go to WoW.

What the Wiki leaves out is the event I was referring to. The RP group made throwaway toons and used them to grief KOC right back one day. Here from the KOC website is a very abreviated version:


From http://www.keepers-of-chaos.com/post/Keepers-of-Chaos-History.html (http://www.keepers-of-chaos.com/post/Keepers-of-Chaos-History.html)

They play the event down somewhat (mostly I suspect out of pride.).

What color is the sky in your world? The problems FFA pvp with looting caused were compounded by the other issues. But people who hated that environment didn't hate their modems you twat (to borrow from Angry Bob) they hated the FFA pvp with loot. You fuckers singlehandedly did more damage to pvp than any number of carebears ever could!

In trammel, you can mine ore. With ore you can make a breastplate that gives a defense value of 30. If you are really good at working with ore to form metal, and shaping metal in general you can make an exceptional breastplate that provides a defense value of 32.

In felucca, you can mine ore too. In felucca, you can mine up exceptional types of ore, if you're really good at harvesting ore. Valorite ore will make a breastplate that provides a defense value of 34. An exceptionally crafted valorite breastplate will offer a defense value of 36.

Copy/paste to every resource in UO and you have people in Felucca. Risk/reward.

I'd love to see what percentage of people playing "old school" UO felt they were PvP'ing and what percentage thought they were just being prey to someone who had played a bit more then them...

I know I went into the game expecting to be a knight, protecting Britania, I didn't expect to be put smack down in "LA Gang warz - extreme!"

I do wish I could go back today and play with the right expectations. Because I really do enjoy PvP, but UO was never about PvP for me, it was about getting stomped down every hour before I could ever build myself up.

Riggswolfe the point I was making was the term was originally meant as an insult to mean "you don't like pvp", even when first used.  The fact that the first people it was directed at, used a clever and humiliating pvp tactic to embrace the insult doesn't change the original intent nor what the term is commonly accepted to mean (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=carebear).  Carebears are cute cuddly and come in different bright colours (http://www.care-bears.com/CareBears/html/index.html).

New question for you all. Make UO (pre-trammel), use the Ultima Online 2 name for recognition (bad or good), and make it 3d. Would it be a 'success'?

I believe the sandbox factor and PVP and real player housing would prove to be successful.

If you had different trammel and felucca ruleset servers, yes I think it would do fairly well but trammel would be more popular, there's no doubting that.

Would it be fun? Yes.  Would it be a success? No.  It would certainly attract older gamers and those that have graduated from Runescape, but WoW and other games on the horizon would be too big a draw to allow this to be anything but niche (maybe 10-20k subs).

10-20k seems low to me. Hell, the original UO is doing better than that, isnt it? Regardless, it would be cool in my book :)

I didn't read the whole thread, so if someone already said this, I'm agreeing with them  :-D

I think that the lure of early UO, in large part, was the danger of losing your items, and only to a lesser extent the thrill of winning them.  So that makes it ironically the losing of items, not the gaining of items, that is fun.  Now of course I realize anyone who loses everything they own with no way to recover is going to be demoralized and probably going to quit.

However, the real RUSH comes from being out and tottering on the edge of the abyss, and surviving.  A red comes at you, you recall with a sliver of life.   Or you fight back and barely win.  Or you are the red, and everything's on the line.  You die, there's statloss.  You lose your vanquishing hally of wtfpwnage.  But if you win, there's another pile of loot to stash in your house against the next death.

It's ridiculously punishing and demoralizing to those who habitually lose, but to those who learn it and do well (but not too well, to keep the sense of danger), it's intoxicating.

I think this is why people - certainly why I - play PvP servers in every game, even WoW.  I have never been much of a ganker or even PvPer, but I do like the danger of there being a potential ganker around every corner.  I'm not easily demoralized and don't mind unexpected things occurring.  I guess I'm in the minority, but the relative popularity of PvP servers even in the safety and comfort of WoW says that it is less of a minority that one might think.

Regarding a new UO, who knows.  It's not the IP, it's the gameplay.  IMO Origin got a lot of stuff right quite by accident, then proceeded to scale it down and mellow it out after the Everquest model proved more popular.  If they would have stuck to their niche, UO would probably not be as popular as it is now, but the few players it did have would be maniacial in their fanaticism.  Not thinking of any names or anything.  8-)

I'd argue that the lure of early UO was that there wasn't another decent option.  Call me cynical. I know I was still playing (and designing) MUDs at the time. 

I think pxib hit on a good looting issue which was make the looter actually carry the loot. There is no reason why characters today can't visibly carry the stuff they are carrying around either visually on their character or in a backpack on their character. Make the backpack grow depending on how much loot is in it.

Also the amount of loot that you CAN carry in current games is ridiculous. If you are wearing a set of plate where are you hiding the other 5 sets of plate that you magically have on your character? If characters need more holding space than they are currently holding they should have a pack horse (this is PVP context only; don't respond about PVE). Planetside does this right to some extent.

Pxib's other idea of layered loot was also pretty good. If I am wearing layers of crap it should take time to strip that crap off to get the loot and the 'lower' the layer the longer it should take to get the loot. Instant looting + PVP is ridiculous in an RPG. When you are trying to loot you should be more vulnerable.

Looting also wouldn't be such a huge problem if every NPC you killed gave full loot. Loot scarcity is probably a main reason why people dislike looting.

EVE is full loot. The loot that you don't get is removed from the game. What is lame about EVE is that it is a zero sum game. Why should I have to destroy your 1 billion ISK ship when I would much rather capture it (without your permission)? And if I can capture it there is now loot time involved because I can only fly one ship at a time. Instead of reducing the number of ships/items in the game every time you get captured it increases the number of ships/items. Trees of Life in SB should have been capturable not destroyable. Maybe captured items take damage each time they are captured and expire after X captures.

The other thing about EVE is that YOU choose how much risk you want to take in PVP. If you want minimal risk you fly with a fully insured ship, cheap gear, and normal character power. If you want more risk in exchange for more character power you fly with more expensive uninsured ships and gear.

I prefer looting not because it deprives the other person of the loot but because it's the ding gratz for PVP. You never know what you'll get when you open the box. Beating the other character is just a sideshow for the loot. I don't like losing stuff myself so I adjust my play style accordingly and only use low cost gear to minimize my risk (be it in UO or EVE). I'm perfectly fine without loot too as long as there is some kind gain from the PVP be it faction goals (land or whatever) or personal (skills like in GW). I don't get very far in your traditional FPS before getting bored to say the least.

WoW could have the greatest PVP in the world and I still wouldn't grind the 70 levels to get to it.

To paraphrase part of Raph's Theory of Fun: the players will do whatever provides the most rewards. If what provides the most reward makes them miserable, they will feel that the game makes them miserable. If they have to do something they hate in order to get the best resources in the game, they'll do it anyway and hate the game that forced them to. For a little while folks from Trammel would take risky trips into Felucca... then they'd get sick of it and quit paying the subscription.

I cannot believe that any amount of reward will make players currently uninterested  in UO's PvP suddenly decide it's a lot of fun.

I can believe that a system could be devised which would make PvP and player looting considerably more palatable. I threw out some random ideas (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9295.msg268573#msg268573) already. They would require design from the ground up. The whole game would need to revolve around making every battle as exciting and balanced as possible. I had hoped that this thread would revolve around discussion of that potential... and it has produced a few gems:
The sort that makes victims quit, and limits the venture capital that FFA PvP gets in the future.
- How do we limit the impact of that handicap without removing it?
- How do we stop the zerg and give casual players a chance to shine?
Krakrok doesn't like the zero sum game, but imagine having to watch some smug bastard flying around in your billion ISK.
If they capture the ship (armor,  weapon, whatever), all the work you did to get it was functionally work for them.
- How do we limit big-ticket risks?
Even LC contributes! I once rambled at length (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=4947.msg135194#msg135194) about how feeling heroic depends upon feeling like you have a chance. To lose because you made a mistake or got in over your head is frustrating, but understandable. To lose because you were doomed the moment the fight started? (Gee... why am I playing this game?)
- How do we conspire to only place players in fights they have a chance of winning or escaping?

And the point I was trying to make is that it was actually first used by antipk's and was later coopted by pvpers as an insult. Pretty much the opposite. Who knows what the truth is anymore, I am going from what I was told by a person who was on the server and active in the forums at the time. The story, btw, in its entirety is quite funny if you ever get a chance to read the full version of events that occured.

For a moment we'll dream and pretend a dev team gets the funding and makes this game. And that it is stable, polished, etc...

So, let's answer your question. Will it be a success? From the standpoint of making alot of money and being one of the big dogs? Not a chance. But it could potentially be an "Eve-style" success, ie, a niche game that has a core group of players that enjoy it. I doubt if it would get even Eve level of subscribers though. Pre-trammel UO was weighted heavily towards PKs over all other playing styles and it succeeded for awhile on the strength of the IP and the fact it had almost zero competition. People have too many options now to want to put up with that playstyle again and the IP is tarnished almost beyond repair at this point. (Not to mention the generation of gamers that remember Ultima is aging and has moved on to other IPs for the most part.) So basically, it'd cater to the catasses of the PK world. My prediction? Less than 50k subs once the dust settled.

OTOH Pxib has some interesting questions and suggestions in his latest post and I'm interested in what people have to say.

I think this could be mitigated if there was such a surplus of hardware that winning and losing stuff was functionally irrelevant (re: full loot from NPCs). I don't know how many people here were ever at the Orc fort near Cove in UO but basically the place would get swarmed with players fighting NPC orc spawns and everyone was dying left and right. The ground was literally covered in everyone's gear and people who had died would come running back and just grab whatever they could to continue fighting.

EVE is probably not the game to implement it in but if you had something similar to EVE with it's four empire factions. You join a faction's military and war against the other factions. You're part of the military so you get a standard issue ship. However, you can trick out your ship with extra gear so when you do lose it there is a sting but it is functionally an irrelevant loss from a gameplay standpoint because of the military baseline ship as a backup. Planetside except you could trick out your gear from the baseline. How much longer would EVE battles last if instead of trying to one shot single ships on the opposite side (re: the group target thread) you were instead launching marines to capture enemy ships? You might even be able to save the economy if military hardware couldn't be bought and sold on the regular EVE market.

The same type of setup would work in fantasy RPGs as you could join the city guards who would bankroll minimum equipment. Heaven forbid that when you join an NPC guild they actually give you useful shit.

A theory of fun from a guy that makes unfun games. Is that irony?

It works well in Eve. Even the most hardcore of carebears will risk some of their virtual assets for the rarer resources found in lawless regions of space. A game that caters to all sides could be made easily, if you follow Eve's example.

The problem is, that if losing your gear is functionally irrelevant then it kills the "rush" that seems to have been the driving force behind having looting pvp in the first place. If it doesn't matter if you lose your gear, then what's the point? So we're back to where we started again.

It shouldn't be irrelevant, but it also shouldn't be something you can instantly recover from. About ten minutes would be a good time for recovery after a death. You could even have the local town provide him with a decent set of equipment. It would be functional, but it wouldn't look as cool as the stuff he could get from crafting or whatever. Equipment should make up maybe 10 - 20% of your character's power. The rest would be made up of player skill, and choice of abilities. It wouldn't be a huge gain for the winner, but he could break down the junk he can't use for crafting or to sell.

Neocron had a steady amount of 70k or so players before the billing fiasco.  Despite the fuck up they still maintained around 10k-20k subscribers, many who had to jump through hoops to stay subbed. 

And it had a crappy launch with little quest content.

How is Neocron now, in your opinion?  It was a game I always wanted to try, but never got around to playing.

The point is to mitigate the losses of normal people. Take what I already do manually to mitigate my risk and make that a gameplay mechanic. You have to choose to trick out your base ship beyond what's free. I'm not advocating that there needs to be a "rush" component to it. GW has succeeded without one. FPSs work just fine and everyone runs around trying to get the 30 second quad damage. I think what I am saying though is you can provide looting in PVP without a downside for normal people and for those people that want to risk extra gear in trade for a little extra power/notoriety for the "rush" they can.

Some alliances in EVE do this manually. "If you splode fighting for the alliance we buy you a new ship." It would take a gameplay mechanic to have it gamewide though.

It would be a little like Hardcore Mode in Diablo.

You do know antipk's are pvper's right?  I was an anti on Europa.  Did you play UO?  I remember the screenshots being posted of the carebears, not sure if it was before I started playing or what but I do remember reading about it when I was playing.

Provide no easy identification of the quality of gear... and make inventories small enough that people can't hold piles of extra weapons. Folks will likely only take your armor or weapons because, by your notoriety or skill, they have come to assume your stuff must be better than what they have. Otherwise they won't have room to cart around excess junk. The main items players would want to loot are disposables: Potions, bandages, and reagents in UO's case. Things which are lightweight, small, and allow fighting to continue unabated.

Perhaps a player who dies loses all of those disposables, but probably keeps armor and weapons. The player who kills him gets the thrill of looting those unused items to carry on fighting without needing to return to town to restock. Outfitting for battle becomes a matter of considering exactly how many disposables you'll need to sustain your life without providing too much reward to those who finally manage to take it.

If death provides you with a free resurrection at a shrine back in town (or at some sort of wilderness outpost with a cache, or a WoW mailbox, or whatever) then you can't immediately restock and head back to recover your favorite battleaxe and fight on.

First, yes, I played UO. It was my first mmo experience and I got in one-two months after launch and played for probably two-four months (I don't remember exactly.). So I was trying to get bonearmor and learn the mechanics while everyone else were playing dreadlords and pking. UO damn near ruined me for pvp. Luckilly, later games like AC1, WOW, and others showed me that pvp that didn't punish you and reward griefers could be fun. I owe UO a deby of gratitude though, my experience with it was so horrible it took AC1 to get me back into the genre, so I missed the EQ craze, thank god.

The term carebear was coopted by hardcore pvpers and pks from what it used to be. It went from a term used to humiliate a pk guild to a general putdown against people who weren't as "hardcore" to what it is now, a purely derogatory term used to imply a person's e-peen isn't big enough for pvp. I'd say at this point the term carebear is tossed around so much that any sting it ever had is essentially dead except to total newbies.

In other words, it didn't originally refer to people who are against pvp or "the right kind of pvp" as it is now. It was much different.

ETA: I was on one of the Great Lakes servers.

No offense, but it sounds like you started a little late and were slow to figure out the basics. Everyone else playing Dreadlords and PKing? GTFO of here...I'll say it for the last time, PKs/gank groups weren't the majority. It might have seemed that way if you decided you wanted to only hang out at hot spots but right there it sounds like you got murdered once, lost some gold, broke your keyboard, and quit. I'm sure it happened to others, you aren't alone. Some Most people just can't handle the danger. It's ok. MMOs have taken the safe route from there on, I'm just saying there IS an playerbase (probably a 'niche') out there for those that want that back. Or would like the rush if they tried it.

The issue with UO Dreads or similar PK types is that their visibility is much, MUCH greater than the average player.  If only 1% of your population are the Dread type, you will have a game that looks mostly like a no man's land. 

Riggswolfe, let's just agree to disagree.

This is a great thread.  Any developer who is considereing Looting in PvP (or any kind of open PvP) that reads this will realize what a horrible idea it was and will run away as fast as possible.

I started a little late so yes, other people had a couple of months of experience on me. And I didn't get PKed at hotspots, I got PKed literally every single time I walked out of the city. On my server, the PKs basically circled the cities like vultures especially during peak times of play. I got pretty good at escaping/hiding/surviving but one loss was enough to set me back for days, since I didn't have the advantage of a guild or anything at that time. I probably got murdered 20 times or so before I quit. Why keep playing if I could never get ahead? I got grandmastery in a few skills, and made it up to the rank right below Brightlord or whatever the "good guy" rank was, but I was never able to get ahead. Sure, I put stuff in the bank but I never had enough of a stash to be able to recover quickly from the inevitable seven on one gangrape.

If I remember right, I quit right around the time they were first beginning the murder system. At the time I played PKing was literally the most effective way to skill up and get loot and so it was very, very rampant on my server. Even though the murder system got added it still hadn't had much of an impact on PKing when I quit.

Since I've grown to have little problem with pvp as long as it is not rewarding to the 12 year old sociopaths. Pvper != PK. I'd consider myself a pvper who grows more fond of it by the day, but like most people I won't expose myself to a pk environment again.

As for your last statement, duh, almost every post I've made has said there is a niche market for your preferred playstyle. It's never been denied. I don't think it is a big enough niche that you'll see a company invest enough money to have a stable, fun game. But that's just me. The best that can be hoped for is once again, an Eve-style game, but even Eve doesn't cater to your playstyle everywhere, and that is probably the best you'll get.

Edited to remove some redundancy in my long ass post.

Fair enough

"Danger"?  What is this romantic nonsense?  There's no "Danger" here, just annoying busywork when you lose items that you had to spend time to get. 

Incidentally, I hear trepanation is also popular amongst a certain percentage of the population.

I've NEVER been to 0.0 in anything other than a shuttle.  3 years of playing, absolutely no interest.  I do not care about "rarer resources", or "end-game gear"; if it's not fun to get it, I won't bother.  EVE caters to all sides, but the carebears stay in the center, and the PvP'ers get out and go occupy the lowsec and 0.0 space.  In fact, PvP'ers have to resort to war decs to get carebear targets, that's now much the carebears hate getting out of their high-sec no-risk homes.

You'll have to define "fun" and what you consider "proper PVP", and as soon as you do, you should realize that a very small minority considers the two together.

Show me on the looted corpse where the carebear touched you.

Was it your e-peen?

One thing that I think people forget when they get nostalgic about UO is that the game was a once-in-a-lifetime gaming phenomenon.  The UO world contained ALL kinds of gamers slammed together into the same game world.  This is a dynamic that was unique to UO and gave it some of that "feel" that we don't see anymore.  You had RP'er, hardcore pk's, anti pk's, etc. all coexisting.  Given an option to live in a new world, the gamers quickly split.  I believe that were you to re-create these game worlds again, it just wouldn't have the same feel that original UO had for just this reason. 

Creating games with a hardcore pvp experience will attract primarily hardcore pvp'ers.  While I love to play PvP and enjoy hardcore PvP, I can only take the juvenile behavior that often accompanies it in small doses.

Riggswolfe - I'll agree with you.

I love PvP but UO wasn't PvP for me. In EvE I have to chose to leave .5 or higher space. Sure I can still get ganked in higher sec space, but it's unlikely. UO was pure gank squads from my eye. I hear about this great PvP that UO had at higher levels of wars and such, I never saw it. I just saw 7 people running around steamrolling anyone they could.

Slayerik, everytime you post you sound more and more like the PVP equivalent of some deranged Everquest catass pining for the bad old days of punitive corpse runs and twelve-hour spawn camps, so let me clue you in:  Nobody but hardcore Vanguard fanboys and the people who still miss ninties UO enjoy timesinks.  And that's all you're really talking about, a timesink.

You say wise things I agree with.

No it doesn't. The bulk of the players in EVE reside in fairly high-sec space, and many have never even visited 0.0 space.

There are entire corps of "carebears" who never fly below .4, and spend 95% of their time in .8 or higher.

There were other options at the time - but neither of them wore the Ultima brand name. (Meridian 59 and Darksun Online)

Excellent point.  I stand corrected. 

I often wonder if that when people think back to the good ol' days of UO, EQ, and such that they aren't completely delusional about something else.  We were all younger, all much more carefree.  Didn't have 'real' jobs to worry about (for the most part), no 'real' responsibilities.  UO or EQ was first to give that 'omg this is awesome' to many of us (brave new MMO world).  Probably had a little less extra weight around the middle.

Now many of us are older.  A little heavier.  Married.  Divorced.  Kids.  Job.  Less free time. 

Now that there IS a game (Vanguard) that brings back those old hardcore memories of EQ and UO, noone is rushing back to embrace the catass of a an updated pretty version.  I know I personally don't have the free time on my hands when I was 23.  Hell, I don't have the free time I had 2 years ago.  I lasted a week in Vanguard, until I said to myself "Um. Yeah. Fuck this.", cancelled, then played with my dogs and baby boy.

It's like some MMO midlife crisis.  It's not the GAME you want back, per se, but it's that time of your LIFE you want back.  Freud and Pavlov would have a field day with MMO gamers....

You have to look at the targetted demographic of a game to be able to draw conclusions as to why, and "older people with responsibilities" (which we are now) aren't really the targetted demographic.  Most MMOG's are still aimed at the teen / early 20's demographic, and there are plenty of people that fit the category even if we're not in it.

You can say that the game has no appeal for people outside its target demographic, but you can't generalize that to "no one".

You're probably right, but I'll try once more before I abandon ths thread.

The PK/Victim model is broken. Period. If the strong can always eat the weak, the weak will leave. Sane humans don't play games in order to fight a long losing battles against overwhelming odds. Peoples throughout history who have fought against overwhelming odds have done so for only three reasons:
- They had lost their minds.
- They were being paid extremely well, and needed the money.
- Their only other choices were a quick death by execution or a slow death by despair.

Only the first group would do it as a fun way to relax after work.

Like Nebu says (and Nija specifies), UO was the only massive multiplayer option at the time. Everyone on this board is aware of how addictive and exciting massively multiplayer games are, even when you just want to play solo in them. The choices were "play some niche game my friends have never heard of", "go back to grinding Masters of Orion II", or "stick with the community in UO." Enough players bit their tongues and stuck with the third (and enough new players arrived) to keep the PK/Victim model going far longer than it would have under any other circumstance.

PK/Victim: Broken. Scares away customers. Scares away venture capital. Period. Fun as it is to argue, the issue was decided seven years ago when the only game to ever seriously allow it literally split in half and players fled to the half that kept them safe. EVE, popular as it is with this crowd, is not a good counter-example. Aspiring to produce the next EVE is like aspiring to produce the next Meridian 59. Nobody is going to dump $30 million on an idea that has never been on the top of the charts. They want to make the next WoW.

What I'd rather argue is whether PK/Victim can be turned into exciting PvP without killing the high. I agree with Slayerik that the risk of losing made the few times I ever won (or even successfully fled) in games which made death at the hands of a player supremely dangerous were SUPREMELY REWARDING. They did not make up for the dozens of times that proceeded them where I realized my death was inevitable and simply bent over to receive my azzrape. Like Riggswolfe, when I quit I was so turned off that I missed EQ altogether and didn't play another MMOG until Dark Age of Camelot.

Is it possible that a game could be created in which there was real risk, to keep the "I defied the odds" high, but which could still maintain a mass market interest in not to being ganked? If so, how?

I'm not interested in whether carebears are gay. Those gay carebears pay developers' salaries.

Is there a model that would get them PvPing?

You play WoW for your timesink fix.

UO was as much of a timesink as any game out today. Im guessing people left because in the middle of their gold farming they could be killed and looted. I think thats the bottom line. Don't get in the way of teh phats. That wasn't a problem for me because A. I banked often - B. I found out of the way places to hunt - c. I had a hot-key for recall - D. I was in an anti guild and fought back

WUA, timesinks are universal. UO's timesink was friendlier than many out today to get competitive gear. Difference was, your miner could get azzraped.

Forgive me for being deranged and timesink lover. You hit the nail on the head.

Regardless,  lets agree to disagree on this one before someone calls someone a fag and feelings get hurt :)

The closest I can think of is a system where you get rewards in pvp and lose them in pvp. IE, some sword or other tangible reward you can get by pvping, but it is also losable if you are killed in pvp. I'd also make this item usable in pve to make it valuable beyond just the pvp battlefield.  Perhaps even a system like WoW faction points, but when someone kills you they get a percentage of your faction points. You'd have to be real careful though, or else you once again end up with a situation where one side gets an insurmountable advantage and the game falls apart. Maybe set a cap, both in how much you can get and how much you can lose in a day.

This might have some self balancing, in that the good pvpers are also going to be primary targets because they will give the best rewards for being killed. Still, I don't pretend to have the first idea on how to keep this all balanced and working.

Your are mostly right, however, the part I think you're somewhat missing is that for most players UO was a larger timesink than even today's games because of the assraping. You sink a bunch of time into mining or acquiring gear, then if you get assraped, you lose it all and suddenly that timesink counter is reset to zero.

Dude, we get it. You dont like being PKed or even having the danger of it. Some people do, be it a much smaller piece of the pie. Please quit blurting out the same shit.

On a side note, i don't know what trepanation is or care to. Keep your hobbies to yourself :)

Items lost in UO were easy to replace yet useful and worth something. It would take a matter of minutes to get re-equiped. Not to mention you could effectively take part in unique forms of player to player interaction from the moment you logged in with a brand new character.

If you want a game to produce unique opportunities which you would otherwise not have the benefit of experiencing. Sometimes a game needs to be unfair or purposely unbalanced. Otherwise you could end up with the same shit repackaged a dozen times.

It is possible to design a game around the concept of losing items, and be a success.

Besides, what if other games decided you no longer lost anything? What if you never died in oregon trail? Never got a snake bite, never had your wagon break down, never got sick, never attacked by bandits, never ran out of food, never got caught in a storm, and always crossed rivers without consequences? Wouldn't it be boring to be provided with the same uneventful results everytime you played? Always guaranteed to cross the 1800s US with the same boring results? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a game producing unique opportunities in the first place?

I think one of the main issues with freeloot pvp games tends to be. Certain groups want freewill and other groups want to police those who take actions without consequences. It's hard to say where a resolve lies in this. You can't police everything other people do, since it's rather impossible. And when you try to police everything others do, that would defeat the purpose of having freewill, eg: Trammel. Essentially resulting in what was once a unique gaming experience into nothing more than a game where everyone's on the same team. And it's just easier to pass it off and forget about it and take the easy way out and copy another diku.

I believe the mechanics in such a game would have to:

1.  Prevent ganking (200 vs. 1, gatecamps, and in general situations where you have no chance). Whether it's done via battlegrounds like in WoW, or some mechanic that simply prevents situations where a group of many can attack a solo or a group of very few, or a level mechanic where high levellers cannot attack newbies, the absolute removal of ganking is a prerequisite. 

2.  Minimize the loss of a player's control over his or her character.  I'm not talking about roots, fear, and stuns, but rather, being stuck in pvp land when I don't want to, being corpse-camped and re-killed as soon as I respawn, etc.  No griefing.

3.  Provide activities that the "carebear" finds interesting.  Those who can't stand PVP still play EVE because it also provides PvE content that they find entertaining.  The PVP aspects of the game can then be interwoven with the PvE, and I think they will be accepted as long as 1. and 2. above are in place.

I think we're coming down to the same notion we have come to before: the wolves want a sheep and wolf game, and the sheep don't want to be part of it (besides a small portion of idiots like me :) )  A wolf and wolf game would be OK, but the lesser wolves end up being sheep, and they like it even less than the real sheep do.  Hence you end up with server ghosttown a la Shadowbane.

Yea - I guess I shouldn't value my time at all. I should be happy to spend 60 minutes finding vendors with gear, or damn - the one I just bough from has now been sold out. I have to find a new one, 30 minutes of searching later, and one more pvp gank squad later I am re-equiped and out of money again.

I'm glad you enjoyed your UO experiences. I recall making a throwaway character who robbed from people at the bank and I got some guys housekey, I wandered over to his house and messed his stuff around, it was all crap. I go back to the bank and start listening to him whining to a GM about how he went LD and I just felt bad for the guy. Maybe if he had some regents instead of a huge stockpile of cloth I would have enjoyed stealing from him more.

For me - it was always about knowing that there was another person playing and how "un-fun" losing all your items and having to replace everything was. I loved the chase and the fight. I just didnt want to spend the hour or two finding gear again.

If I could have bought insurance for gear replacement, or had a vendor where stuff I needed was always there, I would have played a lot more. It was just a PITA to replace my gear EVERY day.

Again you demonstrate just how much you DON'T get it.  I'm fine with PvP, I love games that have PvP aspects to them.  I'm just pointing out how insane and game breaking penalizing the loser of a contest with a loss of material is.  Can you imagine a series of Rummy games where the loser of the last game starts with a smaller hand size?  How about a series of chess matches where the loser begins each game with a loss of material?

It makes no mathematical sense to design a game that punishes the loser by making them more likely to lose.

Furthermore there IS no "danger".  Danger isn't even remotely involved with online gaming, except in the cases where player A kills someone in real life for that sword of awesomeness that was ninjalooted from him.

Losing items never bothered me because I have an amazing ability to hold grudges for years, while simultaneously being blessed with a totally unrealistic belief in my own ability to get even.  I guess I'm just naturally lucky.

That's the thing that always gets me about the PK "hardcore" types. They equate the threat of losing their l3wtz with danger. I've had enough shots fired at me in anger to really not find anything an MMO or pretty much any other computer game can throw at me "dangerous". Is there really that little to their experience that they can get off on that stuff?

I think the experience was more like what you get from a movie.  You know those scenes... where you know something is going to happen... so you're anticipating the event when all of a sudden... a cat jumps up.  That kind of danger.  It was some intangible that any second all the time you spent that play session would be lost.  I guess the tension wasn't all that different from early EQ when you were deep in some dungeon farming a named and knew that any second you could get run over and have to face a 6h corpse run to get your stuff back.  That's funny... I never really saw the similarity with that before, but it's there.  The danger is more derived from a fear of losing time than anything else.  It just pisses you off more in a PvP environment because you know that another player took the stuff rather than it rotting in the bottom of some dungeon. 

Edit: I've been shot at a few times in my life as well... that's an indescribable feeling, isn't it?

But it makes sense to create a game where the loser wins?


I wonder how monopoly would work if you received a loan from the bank every time you went bankrupt.

Are you functionally retarded LC? Noone is talking about a game where the loser wins. To use your monopoly analogy, Valmorian is saying that it would be like a monopoly game where everytime you lose you start with less money the next time you play.

He's not saying the loser should win. (An Oxymoron if I ever heard one.) He's saying the loser should not be punished for losing.

Really, this thread has descended to den-level retardation now and I'm not sure why I keep posting except that when I reply to you it reminds me of poking a rabid monkey who has gnawed on the bars until his mouth is full of bloody foam. It's kind of fun.

I think he means a system like in Poker, where the loser loses, but NOT the ability to draw cards or use aces in their hands or anything related to the actual game.  In MMOG's, losing items or even in-game cash reduces your ability to play the game, whereas if they penalized you $15 RL every time you lost a PVP encounter, it would still hurt after a while, but not your ability to play the game at the same level and with the same setup / items that you played with before.

Bingo! Now if we can figure out something like "poker chips" to use in MMOs we can make some progress.

ETA: This is why I'm somewhat excited about WAR. Losing realm territories and being able to loot the other guys cities with everything resetting eventually sounds to me like the closest we've come to this. Losing matters, but it doesn't cripple you as a player.

Everyone keeps replying, years later, because UO obviously did something right, there are two types of players and we just don't get on.

I think simply put.
 
1. Everyone liked being able to change the world in UO.

2. Most people don't like players who can affect them in any way. 

Sadly you just can't have 1 without accepting 2.  Or to put it another way you can't be good if there is no evil.

Trammel was a very popular boring game.

Let me change my analogy. What if going to jail in monopoly was just a free trip to the opposite side of the board, or when you run out of money the bank just gives you more? That's basically what you are wanting out of PvP. I doubt many people would want to play such a boring game.

I was wrong, he isn't looking for a game where the loser always wins, but he is looking for a game where losing is impossible.

sorry duped...

You mean like WoW or FPS?  Yeah... not many people want to play those games.  In both the penalty for losing is the time it takes to get back into battle (or the free trip across the board in your analogy).  If I understand correctly, what you want is the penalty for losing to be the time it takes to get back into battle + the time it takes to replace your stuff.  Wanting a harsher penalty for the losers is fine, you just have to realize it won't be very popular.

Did I miss something?

Even worse would be that you had go out get more monopoly money after each time you lost so you could play again.

WoW's PvP is popular because they made it into another way for the animals to acquire more shinies without any risk. It's just another grind. The results mean nothing, and it is completely seperate from the game world. Try finding some world PvP in WoW. 

In an fps you normally lose the ability to play after you die. In others (tribes for example) you do have to spend time reequipping when you die. In one of the most popular fps (counterstrike) you lose your equipment, and have to spend more of your limited funds to purchase more. Counterstrike on an unlimited cash server sucks because almost everyone is running around with AWPs which gets very BORING.

Fortunately not as BORING as reading your self-righteous, "I'm the king of the jungle" postage.

Now pardon me while I go spawn camp some newbs  :roll:

As funny as this sounds, I think we agree more than we disagree.  I like games with a high risk vs. reward build.  I want the tough things to obtain to take skill rather than time.  I also want the rare things in games to be just that, rare.  The problem is that people want a way to choose the level of risk vs reward that they feel comfortable with.  This is why PvP has slowly lowered the penalty for deaths... most people don't want a high risk, high reward system.

I'd very much like to play a game where the risks were great (and skill based) and the rewards greater.  I just have to come to grips with the fact that I'm different than most gamers in what I want and/or find fun.   So the closest I think I'll find is a game that has the full spectrum of risk and reward and I'll just have to create my own game within the game.  It seems that, for now, the way risk gets implemented in mmogs is just by requiring raids and juicing up mob hps.  Most of those can be overcome with time rather than ability. 

We like to create our own high risk/reward through cheating. It's the only way to make these bland games palatable. I still hope to see a game I can have fun in without changing the rules someday.

So let me just make sure I have it straight.

You cheat because every game out there to date, despite being pretty bland, is in fact worth playing if you can figure out some way to make them fun using exploits.  You exploit the fun into it.  It was there, latent in the original game, but in ever case to date, the devs couldn't recognize it.

Meanwhile the animals, who (poor things) don't realize that the games they play and love are in fact, pretty boring are off chasing their meaningless shinies, while you and your friends find the REAL and MEANINGFUL bugs and exploit them so that you can wait for the robot jesus game that's no doubt going to come one day and will be so cool you won't cheat any more.

Right?

You read my mind. GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

I'm really not sure how much use I'll be in this thread, but...

First off, I'm not a PK. But I love PvP. I hate spawn camping newbs, or steamrolling the little guys with my friends, or killing people while they're afk. Hell I don't even like to attack people. What I do love, oh so much, is defense. One of the funner experiences I've had in PvP lately was in EvE: My corp was flying some freighters with resources and whatnot to start building a POS in low sec space and we had a contingent of ships escorting the two freighters. We thought we had set out while the local pirate corp was mostly offline, so off we went. Boy were we wrong, halfway through this little trip they came upon us after exiting a warp. Now they were in no condition to take us all out, but they certainly could do some damage and get some valuables especially from the freighters. We lost a freighter and some cruisers, they did the loot n' run while we took out stragglers.

Now, what was the point of me saying all this? Seems like pretty standard PvP fare, yes? Point is that it was movie-like, transporting valuables, flying escort, routine business, and then suddenly being decended upon by a swarm of space pirates. Missiles flying left and right, lazers, explosions, ship wreckage scattering, frantic commands being flung over Vent. And then the inevitable "Damage report!" while rallying for another attack.

Down to the serious business now. This cannot happen in an AI-only encounter. There's always going to be some algorythm that the players will figure out to get around it. Players are still the most devious, most clever (Well.. some at least) opponents you can ever hope to face. They know that frieghter has the good stuff in it, they can see its weaknesses and exploit it to the most. Currently AI scripts seem to only go so far as "Attack whoever did the most damage to me" and "Spam Ability_01".

Next up, yes we DID indeed lose materials and ships. But luckily they're easy to get back, every single piece is easy to get back. Of course unless you have the uber rare mods equipped, which conveniently only give slight bonuses over the regular versions. This allows for people to jump right into combat with cheap stuff and still make a difference. You're only 10% less powerful than the guy who's played for a year longer than you, maybe a little more if he's risking his uber nigh-unreplaceable gear.

Which leads me to the fact that although I was a complete newb and was flying around in the first Assault Frigate I could fly, I still affected the battle. At no time in EvE have I ever felt that I "couldn't get away" or "didn't stand a chance". They actually used a good model in that game, small ships have the innate ability to resist the BFG5000's that shoot down capital ships because they're so small. So in essence the weak are handicapped to an extent. Not so much that they can kill the more experienced player, but they always have the option of escaping. And the handicap is not so much that the experienced player can't kill the handicapped guy, just that he still has to put effort into it (warp destabalizing them, getting them in an easy to hit trajectory, etc). Currently almost all pvp games allow the catass extraordinaire to comepletely demolish the new guy just by pointing at him - I'm looking at you, DIKU!

Last, but not least, this little skirmish pirate raid I mentioned served a purpose. It was NOT pointless. And no, the point was not "to get our stuff". It created content. Now instead of getting a mission from an NPC, essentially we had the option of a multitude of "quests": 1) Revenge on the pirates! Reclaim our stuff! (Or what's left of it) or 2) Retreat, rebuild and retry! or 3) Engage in diplomatic negotiations with the local mega corp for possibile protection or resource reimbursment! or 4) Improvise! Get some of the bigger ships to pick up what's salvagable and continue the haul! or-  You get my point.

To summarize:
1) Movie-like conflicts
2) Options in combat to allow for strategy
3) Uber gear and skills give slight advantages.
4) The weak (Generally the new) are handicapped in defense, but not offense.
5) No DIKU.
6) Allow the creation of content for both the winner and the loser.

There are all things that I feel are needed in order to inject the fun back into the free-for-all PvP.

Hope I touched some points here you never thought possible didn't think of during the course of this discussion.

Movie like conflict? Wtf, u mean like last night when I was just questing in Stranglethorn...and suddenly I spotted this Blood elf Warlock. We both stared at each other getting our spells ready and the rain suddenly came down?  :-D I like that kind of shit too, very rare to find.

Precisesly, I'm not saying WoW doesn't have those moments. In fact, I loved some of the world PvP. Like a couple times when it was just me in a cave when I heard the stealth sound and knew it was on between me and Mr. Rogue. Then the next couple of minutes are us trying to trick eachother into doing something stupid.

Christ, this guy thinks he's in the fucking Matrix.

You know, I really didn't like the Matrix movies. Everyone I know loves 'em to death, though.

Err, I assume that was directed at me. Although I don't really see what any of this has to do with the Matrix - that was all about bullet time and whatnot, right?

I think PVP is as limited as AI, though, in this aspect.  You see, a game with PVP still has to have rules, the devs cannot let the players be completely free.  There are still rules that govern how the game is played, and they restrict the playerbase's imagination.  You might have wild ideas about what to do, and fresh new tactics, but you'll only be able to implement SOME of them.  And eventually the players will figure out all the possibilities that the game allows, and counters to them; it just takes longer than figuring out AI.

Take EVE, and one thing that I keep hearing complaints about... logoffski.  Why does that happen?  Because those with experience can just look at what ship you're flying and they know 90% of the scenarios your brain could come up with that the game will allow.  It took 3 years, ok, but it's happening, despite a plethora of modules, ammo types, skills, and other modifiers that supposedly randomize the fight so it's "unexpected."  Whatever ship you're flying, the tutorials out there on how to PVP against it are pretty much the same thing as the pointers (elsewhere) on how to win an Onyxia fight.

You're AI.

Yes, true, players will always have a set amount of things they can do. The kind of "options" and "strategy" I'm talking about here are more akin to something like the Battlefield line of games. Sure, you know that the enemy in front of you has a BAUR-44 Assault Rifle (The good one). You know it outclasses your standard issue assult rifle in damage and firing speed. However, you've got him on accuracy. He knows this as well. So you duck behind a wall, however he doesn't follow. You peak around the corner in time to see him digging himself into some cover to give him the advantage. He knows that if you try to defeat him in a shoot out in that position, he'll win. You are aware of that, too. But you think quick and before he can turn enough to shoot you down, you've already dropped a grenade at his feet. Bamf. You loot some spare ammo and grenades.

Its the lack of this style of gameplay in EVE that bothers me as much as I praise it for other things. In the above example both players "know 90% of the scenarios your brain could come up with" but instead of it coming down to an automatic win, its judging what you believe your opponent will do next as well as what he might be thinking you're going to do next and so on. It's pretty simple... shoot out, find cover, flush him out of cover, charge, or grenade him. Yet because of the dynamics of the game each one of those options can be altered or changed around buildings, vehicles, other players, different weapons, etc to create many more options. In a system like EVE the battle is mainly decided in your hangar instead of during the actual fight. Thus you start to lose the unexpectedness of combat, instead of gain depth (Hm, is that the right word?).

Which is exactly the problem. Same reason combat in a game should be more than just "Spam your most powerful ability". The other options should be just as viable and effective.

You're touching on something here that I've often thought Rithrin. MMOs by their very nature don't work that great for awesome pvp battles. Putting all the other BS aside in this topic I truly believe that. The player base has too many varied expectations, and for most, there is too much time investment to make "meaningful" pvp worthwile because people dislike feeling like they've flushed that time down the toilet. Add to that the fact that most MMOs minimize player skill (for instance, AC is one of the few MMOs where you can physically dodge certain types of attacks by moving your avatar.) and that gear tips the balance of battle and you have a recipe for pvp that just doesn't have the right possibilities.

Honestly, the most fun, engaging pvp I've ever experienced was not in a MMO environment. It was in various FPS for basically the reasons you've mentioned, player skill in a FPS is paramount over all but uncontrollable variables. (bad connections, etc.) Combat is fast and furious and you have to think on your feet, and most modern FPS have some sort of goal built in. Losing is relatively painless though it still sucks. Compare that to MMO pvp where losing, especially in the environment the OP wants, punishes you and makes your next battle even harder.

I question why those so called 'skillful' pvpers would prefer to play a competitive RPG than sticking to a competitive FPS instead, since there is level gap, gear difference involved in RPG...I would suppose they consider such barriers to uberness 'harder to achieve' and possibly as a form of 'shield' ? Because no matter how good the player is, if he's 10 levels below his opponent, he cannot win. So the timesink into grinding is the strength, further seperating the hardcore and the softcore. You don't see softcore people so willing to risk it , while the hardcore people minimizing their risk by playing 10 hours a day and gaining more HP, Lvl and Bling, is able to lower the risk of losing to the point that he's willing to risk it.

Some of us 'skillful' PVPers can still like what comes with a persistant world. Investment into your character, reputation, guild warfare, etc... Why must we be considered so different to the core than a PVEer, we really aren't.

EDIT: And also, you dont see non-hardcore guilds expecting to be able to own Naxx in WoW. "While the hardcore people minimizing their risk by playing 10 hours a day and gaining more HP, Lvl and Bling, is able to lower the risk of losing to the point that he's willing to risk it. " Minimizing loss in a PvE encounter the same way as a PVP would PVP fights. By doing that more, being better and "hardcore" and knowing how to win the fights.

Wasn't directed at you, was directed at LC.

I don't get it either.

Wow, quite the thread here guys. Six pages in two days, and that last four pages worth almost unbearable to read.

I'm going to ignore all that and post my description of AC Darktide pvp looting, because I think it worked the best out of any of the systems. Take from it what you will.

In AC equipment mattered, but wasn't hard to come by. The thing was, it was extremely random. A given weapon could have four or five different random elements, not including appearance. Finding a "good" item wasn't hard. Finding good items with the perfect balance of qualities, and the right look was tough though. In AC it mattered if your armor pieces matched or not :)

Another factor, was that because of the randomness in appearance and color, sometimes people's equipment would actually get recognizable. Everyone who new a particular anti on the shard new she used a pink Yumi for example. On top of that, you could also "engrave" an item with your name. Which was cool, because if you took something from someone, you would always know who you took it from.

So the way the system worked, was that you would drop roughly one random loot item when you died per ten levels you had. This was anytime you died, pvp or pve. Anyone could loot it. The system always tried to pick one of your most valuable items to drop, so people carried what became known as "death items". Generally, these were easy to acquire items like mana stones or jewelry that had little in game value, but a higher cost than most of your equipment. 95% of the time, you would only drop death items when you died. If you dropped death items frequently enough, you'd have to farm a lot more to make enough money to restock them.

So, why would I care if my opponents never drop anything of real value? Simple, it caused attrition. Like other games, you could come running back from the lifestone after you died and keep fighting. Thing was, each time you did so, you'd drop more death items, until eventually your stock ran out. So eventually, you'd be forced to retreat or risk losing real items.

This was important because in AC, territory mattered. You could only afford to tie to a lifestone that you and your friends controlled, or you were at risk of getting repeatedly ganked until you started losing all of your decent items. If someone took control of you lifestone area, basically your only choice was to retreat to a new lifestone - which would likely be a considerable distance away - until you could gather enough friends to retake your area. This is what actually lead to the control of towns in AC, and resulted in a relatively stable political structure.  When you took a lifestone (and thus the town it was near), it would often change hands for weeks at a time. We were actually able to create political maps showing which guilds controlled which areas of the world.

All because dieing mattered.

You wouldn't.

The difference in concepts I see here is this - continuing the Monopoly example, one idea is that each PvP encounter or battle is the equivalent to a single game of Monopoly.  The other is that the entire game, from character creation onward, is the equivalent of a single game of Monopoly, and each PvP encounter or battle is the equivalent of a single turn.  According to the first idea, losing a PvP encounter shouldn't cause you to lose anything because the next will be a 'different game' in which you should start on even ground.  According to the latter idea, losing a PvP encounter is much like landing on an opponent's square in Monopoly, in which you pay money to your opponent, thereby decreasing your supply and increasing his, and this should of course carry on to each successive turn in the overall game.

I wish you wouldn't post things like this.  It makes me overly nostalgic and I already promised myself that resubbing to that game 4 times was plenty.

Wouldn't the key difference in both examples be that Monopoly eventually ends? You go bankrupt in Monopoly, your done till the next time you play. You go "Bankrupt" in a MMO, and your done, the end. I'm guessing most people don't start with less, they just don't start up again at all. Wasn't that ShadowBanes major nontechnical flaw? Once your guild and its city were boned, you had no where else to go?

Basically true, yes.  In some games you lose so much that the thought of starting over is far too daunting to even consider.  Shadowbane being an excellent example of this.  Shadowbane had other problems, in that, once your guild lost, it was nearly impossible to rebuild a power base, since the victor could know where you are, come along, and smash you to rubble before you even get settled again.

I'll say this - as long as building up your strength is reasonably fun, losing it all isn't that bad.  The ideas of a game that gives you a 'baseline' from which you can compete, and allows you to build up from there without ever falling below a certain level seem like the best way to implement something like this.  Another idea that was presented earlier seems also very useful in building a viable system like this.  If you can lose it in pvp, it also gets earned in pvp.  If there is PvE involved in the game, then the PvE stuff cannot be lost through PvP.  This makes it a lot like Planetside, except that when you die, instead of refitting yourself with the best weapons you're certed for, you would refit in a baseline outfit and have to go out and earn your better weapons all over again.  But you could still get out there and kill people.

Personally I believe there's enough of a market for a hardcore pvp game to be successful in the sense that this could make a reasonable amount of money for someone.  However, the problem is as stated earlier.  People don't want to build the next Eve, the next Ultima Online, or the next Asheron's Call.  They want numbers at least as big as EverQuest or Final Fantasy XI, and most people just want to make the next WoW.  The sooner people get the hint that that is not going to happen, the better for actual new ideas and games that appeal to the tens of thousands of players rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions.  You don't need to make WoW-level money to be a profitable business, and attempting to directly compete with WoW is, at this time, sheer folly.  1% of WoW's player base is 80,000 people.  0.5% is 40,000.  Even that many people is enough to make a profit if that's roughly the amount you were aiming for.  Only if you budget and expect to get 300,000 and you only get 40,000, are you going to be losing money on such a deal.

I suspect that at least 0.5% of the population of WoW might be interested in a hardcore pvp mmog with looting - but with baselines to make sure it doesn't get as bad as Shadowbane's 'lose and never ever build up again' mechanics.

I submit that any money folks who want to make the next WoW don't understand the space well enough to make the other good decisions necessary to succeed, much less with a PvP+ game.

Don't know if it's been said already, but the problem with looting in PvP isn't the loss of items, it's more specifically the loss of time. That's why I think Shadowbane had a really great system. If you were out grinding PvE, which just as in all games is freaking mindless and unexciting, you always were a little thrilled because you knew that there could pop up someone and kill you. Since you couldn't drop equipped stuff it was a question of how long did you dare to PvE before heading back to bank your loot & cash. This meant that you always had control of how large your eventual loss would be when you got killed, so there wasn't any "shit, I just dropped my irreplaceable über weapon, better of quitting now", since you would always have that weapon equipped and safe.

I think I just bolded the critical flaw there.

Most people don't find playing the PvE game "freaking mindless and unexciting". They enjoy it -- it's why they play it. The mindset of "I'll grind PvE so I can get to the real game -- the PvP" is utterly alien to most people.

If I'm out playing PvE, I'm having fun playing PvE. Someone trying to gank me is interrupting my fucking fun. If I lose money or stuff, that's even more of a fucking pisser. If he then camps my corpse, I'm quitting because it's obvious my fun is over.

People who don't find PvE fundamentally boring do not find forced PvP a positive experience. They do not consider it "Exciting". It does not add anything to their game. It is, at best, a fucking irritation they have to put up with.

WoW managed -- through dint of making PvP no-loss, segmented by server, by flag, and by zone -- to make this far more tolerable. People are more willing to accept play in PvP-enabled zones because other than time they have little to lose -- and even then, it can be an irritating experience that causes them to switch to an alt or reroll on a PvE server.

Bingo. That miniscule percentile of the game-playing population that thinks unfettered PvP is the end-all-be-all and everything else is just boring shit to get to that needs to realize that they are in a rather small minority and the majority of the MMO public does not now and will never agree with them. For many people, PVE is the point of the game, everything else is just extra stuff they can take or leave depending on their mood.

And yes, the following statement will piss off some, but hey, this is f13, so fuck it. The only people that do find PVE fundamentally boring and need to get their rocks off by the thought of someone ganking them for thier shit in a virtual world are poseur adrenaline junkies that are too chickenshit to go out and do something truly adrenaline-inducing like jumping out of airplanes.  :evil:

PVE is fundamentally boring. Kill rabbit type 1 x 300. Gain new skill BASH 1 to help kill Snake type 1. Kill snake type 1 x 300. Gain new skill BASH 2 to help kill rabbit type 2. Please, PLEASE, tell me that this mindless shit is entertaining. The only thing entertaining about it is the ding grats. For those that have seen the  Purepwnage bit on WoW  (http://www.purepwnage.com/episodes/6/) might get a laugh after he levels. It is fundamentally boring, PVE in general that is.

The funny part about all the anti-PVP folk's argument is you state that we are such a small minority. 95% of the current MMO market has never been in an open PVP environment (WoW bringing in a ton of new blood to MMOGs). 90% of us that have played such games were forced to play trashly coded piles of horseshit. And the gameplay was fun enough to still have us fighting on meesage boards many years after.

Thanks for proving his point.

So you find it entertaining? Like, really fun?

EDIT: Well I gotta go, things to do on SB sunday. I'll just accept that some people like the whackafoozle x 25000 and go cry my psychotic blood thirsty PVP self to sleep.

Yep.

No, PVE is fundamentally boring if you focus solely on the "Whack foozles, get prize" aspect of it. The problem with you PVP is my robot jesus types is that you're focused solely on the kill aspect. Not everyone that plays these games is. And despite your anecdotal assumption that everyone has but to try unfettered PVP before the flood gates open and the worlds MMOs become free-fire zones where you can get your adrenaline pumping to your heart's content, reality is far from there. Many people who do play MMOs play it for more aspects than just the kill factor. If all PVE were was killing shit, you'd have a point. PVE encompasses everything else that PVP doesn't. Including exploring, achieving and just making new gadgets to keep whatever in-game economy is there moving.

Now you want to tell me that all those people that got into games like SWG and stuff to be crafters were just dying for some douche to hang out at their harvesters and gank them for their shit? Surely you fucking jest.

I think you're on to something there, why does the MMO veterans find PvP more intriguing than PvE in a much larger extent than the current average consumer? The majority of the people here seems to have spent a considerable amount of time in one of the earlier dikus, but now crave more "meaningful" gameplay, often in the form of PvP. I would speculate that it's to some extent the logical path once you grow tired of the mindless PvE.

Quest based leveling might have rejuvenated the PvE gameplay some, but I think it's only a momentarial solution, the quest based MMOs we've seen so far has very simple quests which fits in to a set number of categories ( delivery, slay x, farm x etc ). And therefor it will get boring after a while. The reason for why the quests aren't more unique of course is that innovative quests require to much time to craft.

I think there's certainly room for a much more PvP focused MMO in the market place, I think it's a niche which would be very smart to target now that WoW has gotten so many players intrested in the genre. It wouldn't get WoW numbers of course, but if done right it could get a very loyal fanbase, and just as EVE see steady growth for a long while after release.

I agree with you that if done right, it would garner a rabid following and I'd probably play it myself. But for anyone to think it would be anything other than niche is pretty much the definition of wishful thinking.

Nobody said that when the masses finally try a *good* or *real* or whatever PvP game, they'll come flooding out of WoW.  Don't put words into people's mouthes.  Rather, people questioned the retarded assumption that "there is no market for PvP games" and "PvPers are the minority", which doesn't you know, actually have any grounds in reality, despite how cool and popular a notion it is on this forum.  The only thing you can say is that there are no PvP games out, and lots of people play the games that ARE out, which happen to be non-PvP games.  Out of curiosity, how do "market forces" determine that there is no demand for a PvP game, when there is currently no PvP game out as a benchmark?  Surely Market Forces aren't stupid enough to look at Shadowbane to determine this, right?  I hope that's not what you're going off either.

As for your discussion of what PvE and PvP encompass, I would argue that most people (or at least the PvP+ people in this type of debate) when talking about PvE only ARE talking about grinding mobs and fedex quests.  I wouldn't say that the exploration, discovery, etc. aspects are put solely under PvE here.  Suppose not: are you saying that PvP+ people don't want any exploration or crafting or economy or epic storylines in their games?

Then why don't you go play whack-a-mole at Chuck E Cheese you pseudo hero faggot.

Market Forces are pretty stupid, but I'm sure they also are looking at the resounding successes of Neocron, Planetside, non-Trammel UO, EVE, AC Darktide.  All perfectly good PvP games in their own right, but not more than niche.

PvP needs an EQ before it can have a WoW.


Once again, I beg to differ.  I've been playing these things pretty much exclusively for my leisure time since the mid-90s, and I think that the current state of the art is not too damn shabby.

Seems I touched a sore spot. And he calls me a "psuedo hero faggot", no less. I'm not the one that has to cheat unsuspecting other players in a fucking GAME to get enjoyment out of life.

Go nurse your shriveled e-peen on some unsuspecting nerf herder, you fuckin' lightweight.

Anyway, in response to an argument that has some merit...


Neither did I. No words were put in your mouths. Hell, I think 90% of the population of WoW are a lost cause for anything other than WoW. Saddens me to no end.



Now, who's putting words in people's mouths? No one here said that. I think we all agree that there's a market for PVP+ and that there will be a dedicated group of people that will play it and love it if it's done right. All I'm saying and all most of the others are saying is that it's not gonna be a game that's ever gonna be anything more than a niche group.


Fuck no, Shadowbane was an abortion for many other reasons beyond (and probably exclusive of) the PVP+ model. But it does go to prove part of my point. The biggest problem with the SB model wasn't that it was PVP+. (because honestly, that portion of it was kinda fun) It was that the developers didn't think to much beyond that and take into account the consequences of a "Lord of the Flies" online.


Not at all, just that they don't consider that PVE, when for a lot of people, it just might be.

Seriously, you are the poster boy for PVE games. Its ok, like it has been said you are just king dick of the majority.

PvE = Player vs. Environment
PvP = Player vs. Player

Anything you do that pits you against the game is PvE.
Anything you do that pits you against another person is PvP.

Unconventional examples of PvP:
- Ninja looting
- Guild politics
- Becoming a cutthroat merchant
- Forum trolling
- Rushing to be the first person to reach max level
- Rushing to be the first guild to kill the ultimate raid boss

In PvE everybody can win, or everybody can lose.
In PvP somebody wins and somebody else loses.

If, like LC, you can't enjoy a game unless somebody is losing, you have to grief in order to enjoy PvE (even if everybody loses it's better than if nobody does)... and you have to find any underhanded method you can to make sure that PvP is weighted to your advantage, and causes as much pain to the other player as possible. It's an ugly, twisted version of the MMOG Holy Grails: Impact and Reknown. Being max level doesn't matter because everybody's max level...

"...but that guy we just ganked was pissed! We killed him six times then he logged off and posted on the forums that he's quitting the game!" Looting is just a way to make the other player remember you a little longer: "See this battleship I've got? Remember when it was yours?"

Players who want a cooperative rather than a competitive game will never enjoy playing with LC.
They're happiest when everybody wins.

Wow, faggot and king dick all in the same day. Someone picks apart your two-dimensional thinking and you resort to namecalling. Too bad the forums aren't PVP, then the both of you could gang up on me and take my carebear ass out.

Seriously, you're not even trying. Vehementi at least put up a worthwhile argument. And despite your protestations that I'm the poster boy for PVE games, I played pre-trammel UO and did my share of asskicking and getting my ass kicked and I would gladly PVP in a game that got it right. So far, nothing has. And if what I've seen from you guys is the best the PVP+ crowd can come up with, (not to mention the industry) then nothing will. And like I've said over and over in this thread and several others, even if it does get done right. It's not gonna be anything other than niche. Because (now follow me here) when given the choice of playing a game and potentially losing time and effort to someone else or playing a game where the only loss is transitory at best; the majority of the people out there will take the former because why the fuck should they lose their stuff to make someone else happy?

I play co-op games with LC all the time.

Also, I forget who mentioned it but they basically said that LC cheats and makes the game unfun for everyone. I beg to differ.

Who DIDN'T enjoy that huge Shadowbane fiasco with entire towns full of people being teleported to the bottom of the ocean and high level monsters being spawned all over the newbie cities? It was the best thing that ever happened to Shadowbane.

I rest my case.

I think people take exception to LC because he'd rather resort to name calling than just state an objective viewpoint.  Most of us would rather have a dialogue than a playground argument.  

PVP at one time was more than just seeing who could kill who the fastest the moment two people laid eyes on each other. Because interacting with players through methods other than fighting could be considered a form of PVP if a game is flexible enough to allow such opportunities.

As someone noted -- crafting and trading are forms of PvP. At least in systems like SWG and EVE. I'm currently dealing with some fucker in EVE that likes to come in and overbid my buy orders by a fucking penny. So I do the same to him. And that's out in the fucking boonies. The shit that goes on between the real traders is considerably harsher.

You're stretching the definition way to much. So since I get cash from killing mobs, which I use in the market to buy stuff from other players, killing mobs is PvP as well?

Looting isn't just a way to make the other player remember you a little longer, it's just as stated earlier like the diffrence between playing poker with or without money.

And I don't see at all what you're trying to get at with the griefer example, how is that related to anything?

I think he was saying that you don't have to loot to make PvP meaningful, and that looting in PvP is simply a way to make them remember you longer.

But, uh, I actually agree with what he's saying. Whether or not you are consciously competing with other players for highest level or richest mogul on the server, with the way these games are designed you always are. In some way you are always competing. When a game is first released, even if you're just a dedicated PvE'er grinding away with no concern for others, there will always be "that guy" who is trying to hit the top level fastest. And you're competing with him by gaining your levels. Just like when the first guild to down XXX boss and loot his epic gear they just competed (and I guess technically won) the competiton against the other guilds/players.

Which is why I find it amusing when people actively argue against PvP (Especially when looting is involved) ingame, but then turn around and go undercutting people's prices on the auction house or bazaar. They're doing the same thing - taking someone else's income. Only in this case it's not beating them down and taking their coins, its making sure the coins from an outside source go to himself instead of them.

Added: While we're on the topic... I would really like to see an MMO where players compete not just in the arena but in other areas, too. I've been playing Vanguard's diplomacy system and I think it would be a good idea. Most players would go through the game trying to "talk" their way to the top of a confrontation via some kind of card game parley, but it would be possible that a situation got so heated (Or one player was provoked through angry statements in the parley) that they resorted to violence in a Shakespearian style rapier duel.

To some extent I agree with that, but it's more about the individual motivation. There's loads of people out there playing who doesn't care about if others are level max before them, or if they're the last on the server to get a specific item.

No, it's like playing poker with money and playing poker with money AND having the winner punch the loser in the stomach.

Analogies are like shit; everybody's got an endless supply.

Eh? You can't connect the dots? I'l try to make it more clear then. When you die in to a player in WoW you respawn without loosing anything and the other player gaining nothing ( do you see the connection to poker without money here? ). In for example SB if you have 50k gold in your inventory and die to another player, he will loot it ( do you see the connection to playing with money here? ).

True, I said that actually. You could have no care about anyone else, but that person who you are now unknowingly competing with will (If you are a great enough threat) take action against you. Whether it be by corpse camping, mass auction house scam/control, following you around and stealing kills/resource nodes, he's brought the PvP to you even if he's not stabbing you repeatedly.

Not just any merchant, a cutthroat merchant. Getting the best price. Demanding the highest price. Killing mobs -can- be PvP... if you're competing with other players for a spawn point, trying to get loot credit for the most mobs... but if you need to kill mobs to get capital you're obviously not a PvP merchant yet. Beg a little, trade a lot. That "playing poker with money" is precisely what I'm talking about. Without cash on the table a loss is just a loss. With cash on the table it's $20. The next week you come back for poker night, you'll still be thinking about the $20 you lost last time. No cash on the table and you probably wouldn't even come back for a second week. You seek revenge because you remember.

Griefing is just PvP taken to its logical extreme. Unable to find (or uninterested in) fair fights, the PvPer seeks out the helpless... either those so weak they don't stand a chance, or (by abusing the rules) anybody in the same faction whom the game does not allow to fight back. As a grief example let's go back to that guy trying to tag mobs such that they attack the other players hunting, but he gets the credit for kills. That -is- the most efficient way to get their loot... it's also going to piss somebody off. Bonus. If you realize, part way through a dungeon run, that you have to leave -- what's more exciting: Warning everyone, and recommending a replacement... or engineering a wipe?

The game can't lose, only people do. If you have to lose, take as many of them with you as you can.

I can't personally play like this -- my conscience gets in the way. I prefer cooperative play and am happiest when everybody is happy and nobody has to lose. I love a successful raid where everybody gets what they're looking for. I try to group with people who are camping the spawn I need... it may slow the rewards down, but it won't feel slow because I won't be alone. I'd rather play with than play against.

BUT

The easiest way to promote player-created storylines is by promoting conflict, so I'd like to see how we can take Sairon's money without making him feel like he's been punched in the stomach. I want the thirst for revenge without all the "this sucks" and "wtf" and "why am I playing a game that pisses me off?"

I still need to write that damn article on positive vs negative conflict in games....

I was going to disagree with this statement but then I really thought about it. The "problem" with the WoW player is that they have been spoiled by WoW. Say what you want about the game, it is very polished and appeals to many major MMO player types. When people start tiring of WoW they will expect the same in the new game they try, and alot of them are going to be in for a rude shock. So my guess is that WoW players will disappear out of the MMO market rather than moving on to most other games.


First off, noone has said there is no market for pvp games. People have said that such a market is a niche market however. The term PvPers is broad.  PvPers who want FFA PvP with loot certainly are in the minority and to think otherwhise is to be in denial. People who dabble in PvP and/or will play a PvP game that doesn't overly punish the loser are growing mostly due to games like DAOC and WOW. In fact, I'd say the percentage of people who purely PvE is almost as small as the people in the PvP with loot camp. The middle ground is now the largest group of MMO players. The important thing to keep in mind is that this middle ground wants two things:

A) A choice: WOW battlegrounds, flags, and/or DAOC frontiers are the future of PVP gaming.
B) Little punishment for dying/losing: This actually applies to both PVE and PVP. The old days of corpse runs, xp loss, pvp loot, are pretty much dead except for "hardcore" games like Vanguard and Shadowbane. The very time investment that draws people to MMOs makes them angry when they lose stuff in the game that they invested time in.


Yeah, Neocron, Lineage 1&2, DAOC, WOW PVP+ servers, and I'm sure others I'm not aware of are not out. You're right, there is currently no game that supports PVP. And to answer your final question, market forces determine there in little demand for the type of pvp game you desire because that is what history in the mmo genre has shown. Admittedly, this genre is still somewhat in its infancy (though it can be argued that all computer gaming is) but so far, no pvp+ game has reached even EQ levels of success, not even the holy grail of pvp+ pre-trammel UO did. In fact, I'd say pre-trammel UO very nearly killed MMOs as a viable genre.


PvP+ people tend to describe exploring, crafting, etc as sidelines to their gameplay. And sorry, but those things are classified as PVE until such time as you get crafting components from killing PCs or killing PCs gives you a map to start some exploring or killing PCs gives you gold/loot. And killing PCs has never resulted in an ingame epic storyline unless you wish to think of some of the more legendary guild rivalries as an epic storyline though that is stretching the definition of epic. So, I'd say that for a large group of PvP+ people those things are part of that boring whack a foozle gameplay that Slayerik mentions.

Really, do you want to know what kills pvp+ games? Look no further than LC and Njia. Given a choice between spending time with people like them and PvE gameplay, most gamers will choose PvE.

No, I don't see any fundamental difference between those two. In either case I would be pissed at myself for the failure, really pissed if I had been failing again and again. Little downtime is of no consequence compared to that, just insult to injury.

Bingo. I may think WoW's a turd, but it's an incredibly well-polished turd. And once people who have never had any experience with any other MMO will, once they tire of the turd they've been playing, look at the field; see there's nothing nearly as polished and say fuck it all, I'm done.

I disagree.  Just like the average citizen goes to some movies and not to others, and if they go to a particulary crappy movie, that doesn't turn them off from EVER visiting the theater ever again, I think that if WoW is succeeded by a period of several years of absolutely crappy junk, when another good MMOG is made, it'll again have WoW numbers.

People don't get into and out of "the genre", they just keep in mind whatever good entertainment is out there (this includes books, TV, computer games, and going out for a social event).

Well, yes and no. There will be those that will find other MMOs. But the barrier to entry is gonna be that much more insane because WoW set the bar so damned high.

But when he was calling us "poser adrenaline junkie chickenshits" it was perfectly fine.

If you're going to make this analogy, its not so much that they are turned off forever by one crappy movie, but that the first movie they ever saw (WoW) had record breaking production funds and was possibly one of the best looking movies created to date. And then after that every other movie looks like crap.

Also -- montly fee. Playing WoW means they probably are more likely to plop down 50 bucks to try Vanguard or Conan or Lord of the Rings Online. (Or, more likely, download the trial and give it a whirl). However, who is going to pay money to keep playing a game that isn't as polished and fun as the one you've got? Especially if it's really derivative.

I play three MMORPG's off and on -- CoH, EVE, and WoW. They're all very different feels. The only "upcoming" ones I'm considering even trying are LoTRO and Pirates of the Burning Sea -- and Lord of the Rings will have a bigger barrier, since it'll have much the same feel as WoW. Fantasy DIKU. At least Pirates are slightly different.

It is a shame that so few of you have played RuneScape, since it puts the lie to a substantial proportion of the comments in this thread, primarily by having PvP with looting and still managing to retain over 100k subscribers.

- it isn't FFA, PvP happens only in a specific area of the world ("the wilderness"), and a couple of other specific locations (like the Duel Arena)
- if you die, you respawn outside the PvP area, so no camping/instadeath
- some areas of PvP allow 1-on-1 combat only, others are many-v-many
- when in level n of the wilderness, you can only attack people whose combat level is within n levels of yours (combat level ranges from 3 to 126; wilderness level from 1 to around 48)
- when you die, you drop all but your 3 most valuable items (4 if you are using the mid-level prayer)
- if you attack someone else you get a skull and crossbones over your head for 5 minutes; die while skulled and you lose all your items

I've been playing RS for around 4 years, though I've never touched the PvP side myself. At least once a week some friend tells me they're giving up the game after losing stuff to PvPers, but over 90% change their mind within a week. At least once a week some friend tells me they're never gonna PvP no more; they invariably go back to it within a week, 100%.

(Sorry I'm a week late with this - I only come looking for new games to play once a year or so.)

Hugo

Does Runescape still look like a DOS RPG? Legend of Kyrandia comes to mind.

Better than LoK, but crap compared to what you'll get with a dedicated Windoze client.

It is a Doom-style 3D engine - you won't ever be able to hide in a tree and watch someone pass underneath unless they script it as part of a quest, but I think it's pretty good within the technical limits of the medium.

Hugo

If I am understanding the play mechanics correctly it is mostly a pve game with one area that is pvp. This is more akin to DAOC. If you go to this wilderness level, you know you're going to a pvp area and so you have options. The discussion in this thread is about FFA PvP with  looting across the majority of the game world.

The two don't compare. It's like saying that if looting was put into WoW's battlefields then a pvp with looting mmo would be the number one MMO game in the U.S.

I wouldnt say this discussion is about FFA looting.

FFA is one aspect of looting in PVP. One that we will maybe see in ten years after people figure out that another WoW clone isn't going to cut it, because you can't beat Blizzard at their own game.

I was talking with my brother on the long ride home about my recent Eve gaming. He played a lot of WoW, and some UO back in the day. He enjoys PVP, but not as much as myself (im a little more competitive in nature). He can see why I burned out in WoW BC at level 64. There is no real conflict, nothing to give a shit about. At least in Eve, Im fighting to achieve an objective (usually), risking some isk buying a nice ship. But when I destroy some battleships on my opponents side, I know it hurts them. I know next time I will see that guy in a Cruiser, and the time after that a frigate. I am accomplishing what needs to happen to obliterate my enemy, and grabbing some of his loot at the same time. The PVP matters. Loses matter. Wins matter. When our fleet loses a Dreadnaught or carrier in a siege, we all feel the sting.

Thats what most PVP games lack. The feeling that you are effecting your world. I know in WoW if I own some noob, he will be back in 30 sec to fight me. I can kill him 1000 times and he will never leave my land. There is nothing stopping him from fucking with me from now until I hearth out.

I don't know, call me crazy but if nothing is on the line in a MMO PVP situation, then it gets old quick.

I don't think it's crazy, it's just a certain playstyle.  As a relative carebear I can, in fact, see the attraction.  But it's just a really refined taste that not everyone has the time/energy/inclination for.

Yes, it's an area that used to be about a third of the game world (4 years ago), and is now about half of that - if you get the balance right, the PvPers are happy and you don't need to fuck with their world (though they like new eq and buffs to play with). PvEers want a place to explore as well, so that's where most of the new areas go.

Going there is mostly optional - a couple of quests require you to go into the PvP area, and several skills are faster to train there (assuming you don't get ganked too often).

There are also areas where you can fight other players without any danger of loss ("Castle Wars", a sort of Capture the Flag type game). Such areas have their adherents, but they don't get anywhere near the numbers of the PKing areas, and the games there are discussed and remembered even less than the numbers would suggest - the emotional resonance isn't there.


It certainly wasn't only about FFA.

My points are only: PvP with looting can work if you get the balance right. It can even coexist with PvE. And not only in a niche (sub 50k subscriber) game.

It is possible FFA PvP can work too, but I can't see such a game being interesting for me.

Hugo

I just don't see anyway that harsh looting doesn't absolute cripple your new players and that's a non-starter any serious development team.  If I couldn't imediately replace my equipment after I die in Planetside, it would be completely unplayable. I need experience to win, but I can't get experience because I get pasted the instance I step on the field.  All my stuff is taken and I have to go through whatever tedious tasks to get a new set, so I can get pasted again.  Why should I give you my money again?  Refugee Online sounds like loads of fun.

Bar the assholes who enjoy taking people's stuff, the problem maybe people are able to endless comeback to fight so death is trivial.  If you have had zone locks with substantial timers upon death than people could keep their stuff but they couldn't comeback harass you over and over again.

For anyone who thinks PvP doesn't sell, look at almost every other genre. There'd be no FPS nor RTS games these days without the online competitive play.

It's not PvP that's the problem. It's accountability in a stats- and acquisition-based persistent environment. Nobody sets out to lose stuff they spent months getting, be it XP, coin, items, whatever, and only a very very small group will accept that.

Don't expect mass market though. I mention FPS and RTS for a reason: neither is persistent between sessions. More sport than anything else.

The core issue with MMOs isn't the combat mechanic nor even the loss potential. It's the accountability. The more the player has to play the game to keep up and/or to maintain their holdings, the narrower the appeal. Eve is a perfect example. It can be played casually, but the best way to play is to live that game like no other (maybe SB). Having deep immersion in the game (and I'd contend, like others, the deepest form of immersion is ownership-driven PvP) is something the "masses" simply either can't afford or aren't interested in.

Lite-PvP will get the numbers. WoW BGs are one example. Maybe GW, but I hear otherwise. You want something that is really only about potential growth, with losses minimized to bindstones and maybe repair costs. There just isn't an awesome way to handle looting without having a system where only a relatively few people will want to bother.

And if you do want a system knowing only a few people will bother, that's probably relegated to an area of your larger game, not a game unto itself.

Its been said before: if you want to embrace looting in PvP, the best model thus far is the Planetside model. 

Make equipment so cheap it is effectively free, but exclusive to one faction.  Then limit who can use what equipment to a persistent, always-increasing skill model.  Add in some model of decay (exclusive ammunition, destroyed if not looted, etc...)

PvP players aren't like PvE players.  PvP players want to be able to boast that their conquests are based on some interpretation of 'skill', and will regard any contest that they can't win in a negative light. Moving towards an achievement system that lets them start as a specialized killing machine and grow into a versatile one is the way to go.

While I agree that Planetside has a decent system, it didn't fare well as a market strategy.  Why pay a monthly fee for an FPS when many better verisons can be played for the box cost alone?  I think the key is to tie players to their characters with some carrot for a development scheme.  The difficulty comes in a) keeping the loss penalty minimal while b) giving enough incentive to gain ranks without them becoming too dominant in the endgame. 

I'll go farther and say the people avoided PS because they have people FPS online before and knew that they'd just be fodder in a competitive environment.  And I don't blame them.  I have been fodder for the last week and its a tough road to travel.  At least with a single player FPS, you set bots to a level so they don't rape you.

People like collecting shit, they'd have been better off letting people have all the certs and making them unlock them one by one. Nothing hard, just get them involved.

Plus, the game really fell down on world feeling.  They couldn't have made the game more generic sci-fi if they tried. Three 3 slightly different human factions fighting over a dozen generic worlds. *yawn*

People avoided planetside because your character is born with Parkinson's disease.

How come there ain't no brothas in planetside?

And according to the original design specs, there was gonna be PVE in PS too. They were gonna have native species randomly running around the planets. I think it woulda been kinda cool to engineer an alien cow stampede in the middle of a base cap.

Seriously. I've fired so many rounds into the sky people are going to think I'm Islamic.

I noticed that when I played.  No Asians either.  Every avatar you can choose is a straight-up whitey.

I mentioned it on the dev suggestion board and it scrolled off in a matter of minutes.

With the notable exception of the female avatars. There's definitely a few Asian faces in there. Azusa laughed at that one and made a few comments about the developers proclivities that I'd rather not share here.   :hello_kitty:

Was it something about fucking Asians ?

While not entirely on the topic of PvP looting, this I think is a good idea.  If in WoW, for example, when I kill you, you go to the graveyard...next time I kill you, you don't go to that graveyard, but the next nearest one.  And so on and so forth (if you happened to keep coming back and being killed in the same place) until you're spawning so far away that by the time you get back to me, the timer has been reset and the cycle starts over again.

That one facet alone would add huge amounts of meaning to PvP in WoW while preserving the whole 'no-consequences' factor that makes it popular enough to have so many players.  Killing people would in effect be like taking territory, because each time they die they're forced to respawn further away, thus giving you more undisturbed time in the territory you've claimed.  Right now, the only way to do that is basically to camp a person until they decide to leave or bring friends.  I know it would satisfy a lot of my desire for there to be some sort of meaning to my victory (or loss).

Except that since everyone demands "instant travel gratification" in today's MMO's, respawning "farther away" is meaningless.

These are the types of game design meta-issues that players simply don't think about when they demand certain features in a game without taking into account the overall big picture. Instant travel gratification takes away at least 4 different positive conflict management systems that could be used to make PvP popular for both "factions" (FFA, Controlled), but just that one small "requirement" takes it all away.

True, but WoW doesn't have much instant travel there..  Relatively quick travel sure, but it's not instant.  Takes 1-3 minutes to cross most zones, even flying.  Longer if you're riding epic mounts, and can take quite some time to get across a zone on foot.  If we have a fight at the Zoram Strand, for instance, and you get knocked to the nearest graveyard (South Darkshore), then the next time you get knocked to Astranaar graveyard, and the third time you get knocked to the graveyard near Splintertree Post, and the fourth time you get knocked to a graveyard in the Barrens...the travel time, even if you're Horde and can fly directly to the Zoram Strand, is going to be enough to notice.  Blizzard seems to be keeping travel fast enough to keep major complaints about the slowness down, while still making it slow enough to be meaningful.  Hard balance to find, I'm sure, but it does seem to exist.

Well, that or the inability to do so, so why not just shoot at them instead?

All they would really need to do is bump up the existing "You've died too much lately, now you must wait two minutes to rez!" timer to make you people happy.  As it is, I'm convinced that "meaningful" PVP is for suckers and catasses anymore.

I don't really care one way or another on all the details for individuals (corpse looting, rezzing, flagging, individual rewards, etc..). If it was up to me, a game wouldn't have any valuable loot at all. None. That, in turn, would shut out anyone whining about or striving for that bullshit.

"Meaningful" mmo pvp to me is world effects and conquest. Something that plays on the whole persistency idea, but applied to battles. Persistency is what's meaningful to me. I'm not really asking for anything more than people who ask for, say, a deep player economy (in a sense, that too is persistent, world pvp). Hell, I'm asking less than that even (i.e. nothing as intrusive and wide reaching as an economy can be).

Exactly.

Diky and gear are bad for "meaningful" PvP. It's why I like WoW's BGs. It's an alternative way to play the game everyone is there to play: achievement. "Meaningful" PvP is Eve (when the devs aren't cheating) and SB, real impact on others.

It has been proven that a lot don't want that level of immersion, but it's also been proven there's more than enough to make a good amount of money from them. How many subs is Eve up to now to boast 30k concurrency? 150k? 160? If EQ2 was around that, I'd be surprised, and that one cost way more to make.

Yea, but you first had to allow that to happen, which means you were running a scientific experiment or being way too tenacious :)

And this has changed from the last 5 years you have been preaching it? ;)

We think about them.  We reject long travel times cause they are not fun.  If you think you can make long travel times fun, then by all means, put them back in. 

Long travel times in and of themself are not fun.  They do add elements to games that have value to many.  Long travel creates an economic dynamic, can occasionally add a regional feel (especially in games like ATitD), and can also add to risk/reward or cost/benefit aspects of games. 

Noone enjoys running for hours, but like it or not it does affect in-game mechanics. 

Definitely leaving people staring at a static screen for an extend period of time is unacceptable.  At least if death kicks some half way across the continent with no way to quickly get back, they can still do stuff and go some where else to fight.  Maybe we should put the timer on, is not on the zones, but the faster travel to the zones.  While the timer is place no spawns; no mounts; no teleports into that zone. You have to hoof it back. And if you die in an area with a timer, the timer is reset and you get a timer on the area you spawned from.

Another way would be no fast travel except by player made buildings.  If you don't like that some is repeatedly spawning in a zone, kill the spawn point.

I sort of agree with Nebu.  I don't know which "we" Slog is speaking of, but in my case, I've always thought that travel times add something to games.  There is a value in just being somewhere when there's travel times involved, and there is no way to create the sense of territory, for example like Eve has, without barriers to travel.

These games are somewhat about achievement, and if travelling somewhere is a mini-achievement, then the game is better.  I don't think you can extrapolate that to say "harder travel always equals better"; there's a sweet spot.  To make it even more difficult to design, the sweet spot varies from game to game.

edit: reword

I buy it too Jayce.  If I just want to zerg and frag, I'll buy one of the shooters.

I think it's worthwhile to contrast (get ready for it) Puzzle Pirates and Eve.

In both of them characters interested in trading goods spend a lot of time shuttling ships between distant locations. In Eve a player arranges necessary escort and then they hit autopilot together. Some scant attention is paid every time they approach or leave a jumpgate (watching for attacks, managing micro warp drive)... but they can spend the rest of the time checking prices or chatting ingame(or watching TV or reading a book). It is a largely passive experience.

In Puzzle Pirates travel time exists only where ships are involved. Players can travel between islands (or onto moving ships) instantly. While a ship is moving it has a lot of maintainance required (carpentry, bilging, sails, and largely optional navigation) just to keep the thing going at a good speed. Players have less time to chat during travel, but they have a lot to do. Along the way the team may encounter other pirates (both NPCs and players) who want to steal their goods. This too depends upon their gameplay skill (carpentry, biling, sails, cannons, combat navigation, and swordfighting) and provides opportunity for great reward along the way. Crew are functionally hired on a contract basis and can be paid a percentage of the booty. Stores of rum and cannonballs must be maintained. There is a light economics game to simply keeping trips profitable.

To be pithy, in Eve travel time is just a delay... it's the tedious thing you do between periods of having fun in order to extend your gameplay. In Puzzle Pirates, traveling is the game.

Ya right.  Fight for 30 seconds, get killed, run 20 minutes back to the fight, get killed in 28 seconds, run another 20 minutes.  Not happening for 99.99% of MMOG players. 

Then we need some XP loss and corpse runs for "meaningful" PVE.

/sadf

I can agree with you, Slog, if that's the ratio.  Reminds me of early DAOC:  run 30 mins out to the frontier, then die from a ranger/scout/whatever you never saw in one shot.

However, I submit it's the ratio that's the problem, not the exact numbers.  If the average (not particularly skilled) player fights for 10 minutes then has to run for 20, it's worth it for a lot more people.  If the average player fights for 10 seconds and runs 20 minutes, I think it's safe to say most people are out.

I do note that no current or past MMOG (that I know of) has this depth of combat.  You're either alive or dead, at full capacity or zero.  I think a lot of things would make more sense if there were shades of gray in there.


As an aside, my original comment was about travel times in general, not about their applicability as a PvP death penalty.  I think the two questions are totally different.

I think the number of people who would be willing to "run" for 20 minutes to play for 10 would be far less than what you seem to hope for.

I'll run for 20 minutes to get to the other side of a continent so I can spend an hour crawling a dungeon with some guildmates, but not for anything less.  Jayce, are you mad?

I tried that "Run for 20 minutes die in 4 seconds" thing the first week of WW2O release. Except it was more like, "Sit on a tank and ride for 20 minutes. See a fight. They might be on your side, they might not be. Who knows? You then jump off the tank and start shooting, running out of ammo 45 seconds later. Unsure if you killed anyone. You then get bored and log out, never to return."

Well part of the point of the knock them further away each time idea is so that they won't come back to the same place.  So that you can win the fight and wind up 'owning' that area for a while.  Battlegrounds are great when you just plain want to pvp directly, and they serve that purpose perfectly, providing a fight, victory conditions, and minimal delay to get back into the fight.  World pvp on the other hand isn't the kind of thing you want people getting back into the fight on.  Why?  No victory conditions.  In my opinion, a fight that goes on until one side gets bored and quits is a failure to both sides.  The 'winner' doesn't feel like they won, especially not through skill, effort, or luck, and the loser feels like it was a complete waste of time.  Not to mention the 'winner' is basically 'whoever can tolerate the repetitive fight>die>respawn>fight>kill>fight>die>respawn...the longest.  So the purpose of the fight should be to essentially get rid of your enemy.  That can lead to many many things..  Successfully capturing and holding an enemy town, for example (yes, until you get bored, but at least there's a point where you can say, I WON, because you stood there totally unchallenged, having driven all enemies away), taking over a zone, etc.  You can essentially 'own' territory, since the enmy can't just stand up and attack you again.

In effect, looting works in a similar way.  You lose gear.  Therefore, you can't afford to keep charging into battle, therefore, when the enemy wins, you need to go away.  In significant part it's about establishing victory conditions in open world pvp.

No, but only because you're not the typical PvP player (as sinij and Slayerik like to follow you around and point out :) )


I agree with what Koyasha is saying. There is a fundamental difference between RL PvP and game PvP - in RL, the dead don't get back up.  Short of permadeath, in order to have any similarity with RL models of conquest or resource acquisition, there needs to be some way of introducing attrition.  When someone dies, they should be out of at least THAT fight (if, of course, you aspire to that model).

This is why we introduce "artificial" victory condition in places like WoW battlegrounds or SB towns or EVE POS's or DAOC relic keeps.  Capture the flag three times, you win.  Destroy the enemy's Tree of Life or POS.  But that only really counts in the strategic sense.  Tactically, in most games, the dead get right back up and zerg you again.

Actually, they do in all games.  At least, until the person you are "killing" decides to quit and no longer play.  Even online FPS games have rounds where everyone spawns again and the whole thing starts over. 

There is no persistance in FPSes, besides stats stored by the server. You should be put out of the fight when you die in any meaningful PVP. Ressing is OK if you hold the field at the end of a fight, IMO. Make it mean something. And drop some loot for me to pick up while you are at it ;)

Sure there's persistence.  It's just that the persistence is in the skill of the player.  Much like the persistence in any board game that requires skill.  Those players that have memorized the map, have learned the proper twich skills, etc, carry that into each match. 

As for whether you should be put out of the fight when you die in "meaningful" PvP, well, "meaningful" is completely subjective, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find many PvP games where you AREN'T put out of the fight when you die.  Even WoW, with it's non-death penalty forces a rez-run method.


Again, "meaning" is something that must be supplied from the player.  For many, the fact that they beat you is all the "meaning" they need.

Using that logic, every game has a persistance. When talking about MMO PVP, lets not try to nitpick the word persistance. There is no world persistance in FPSes. Come on, you can do better than that.

I do concede the "meaningful pvp" part though, as you are correct.

The persistence I am referring to is the only persistence that exists in context of PvP: Ability.  In MMORPGs, where skill often takes a back seat to the numbers attached to your character, then persistence is all about the equipment and experience points your character has obtained.  In a FPS, the persistence is more a quality that is obtained by the player, as I get repeatedly shown every time I try to play a FPS that has experienced players on it.

As for "World Persistence", well, I'm not aware of any game that has any real lasting "world persistence" with the possible exceptions of Eve and Shadowbane.  I don't know many companies that would be clamboring to get a product out that did as poorly as Shadowbane, and Eve is it's own beast. 

Of course, world persistence has nothing to do with whether I drop loot when my character dies..

So knowing how to properly outfit a character, utilize game mechanics for maximum results -- that's not "skill". But your reflexes and learned muscle reactions (or map memorization skills) are?

I think you're overlooking the skill required for MMORPGs -- it takes skill to become a rich trader in EVE. It took skill to become a noteworthy amorsmith in SWG. It takes skill to be a top-end PvP player in WoW -- starting with what gear to where wear, and how to get maximum utility out of it. (Some classes -- like rogue -- can take even more, depending on how it's played).

Ability means many things.

You nailed it on the head.  I think that FPS players tend to also be the more vocal PvP advocates and thus associate twitch with skill rather than realizing that there are MANY skills that contribute to PvP success. 

Huh?  You're talking completely around the point.  I'm not discounting "skill" in the context of MMORPGs, I'm pointing out that PvP persistence exists in all manner of games to some extent.  You carry things from one round to the next, even if those things are improving skills.  The player I've competed with in the last 10 games of Carcassonne is going to take the knowledge gained from those games and use it in the next ones.

But even ignoring that, SURELY you can see the difference in what "skill" means between these two types of games?

In Level based/equipment based MMORPGs, there can be no doubt that personal skill of the sort you are referring to is overshadowed by the underlying mechanics.  You can be the most skilled level 10 warrior in WoW in the context of knowing what equipment you should have and being able to use your abilities, and a button-mashing level 60 character will cream you.   On the other hand, I've personally witnessed very skilled FPS players utterly destroy players who had them vastly outranked in weapons and armor.

No, you're nitpicking the word persistence as Slayerik accused you of.  You can't just redefine it to mean whatever you want, in this case, skill.

Let's get simple:  some games, mostly FPSes, have areas that are reset to a base state every 10 minutes or so.  MMOGS have areas that persist from day to day unless someone changes something.  They can do this when you are offline and the changes persist until you go reconquer the territory.  If you drop a frozen corpse, it will be there for some amount of time regardless of whether you are logged in or not, and no one hits a switch periodically to reset the universe.

That's what we are talking about when we say persistence.  If you say that the person behind the keyboard is the persistence, then the term becomes meaningless, because I don't know a lot of games that are not played by humans.

I'm talking about persistence in the state of that which affects player effectiveness.  The discussion was around making PvP "meaningful" by virtue of improving your situation in a permanent state.  If you are going to disregard personal skill as an example of persistent improvement, then very little if ANY persistence exists in games outside of MMORPGs, sure.  You're just ignoring a huge persistent factor in PvP success.  Either you try hard to isolate personal skill from success in a game, or you acknowledge it and it becomes an important part of PvP "persistence".

Basically, if player skill is important, then it should be considered at least as an important part of "persistence" as gaining a powerful sword in an MMORPG is.




Here's the quote I was responding to: "There is no persistance in FPSes, besides stats stored by the server. You should be put out of the fight when you die in any meaningful PVP. Ressing is OK if you hold the field at the end of a fight, IMO. Make it mean something. And drop some loot for me to pick up while you are at it"

Being put out of the fight when you die ALREADY HAPPENS in many FPSes.  Indeed if "persistence" means what you are suggesting, then being put out of the fight has nothing to do with persistence at ALL.  There are no games where people are permanently put out of the contest forever.  They can always play another game.  Furthermore, they will have improved at the game through lessons learned in previous ones.

If all that Slayerik meant by persistence was what you are indicating, then he already has a number of MMORPGs to select from that do what he wants.


By the way, just because that type of persistence would apply accross the board to all games (which isn't true, games of pure chance would have effectively NO persistence between instances.) doesn't make it meaningless.

This thread has devolved into pure stupidity. 

Not that the whole topic wasn't retarded to begin with.  Looting of items that players consider worthwhile just isn't going happen.

Tell that to the guy I looted a Covert Ops II cloak off of in Eve.

Next.

I think he implicitly means: "Looting of items that players consider worthwhile just isn't going to happen _without their consent_."  That guy you looted could have avoided your attacks by staying out of low sec space, no?

That, and Eve is a horrible example, since the orignal publisher (Simon and Schulster?) lost so much money on Eve that they sold it back to CCP for pennies on the dollar.  Eve may be profitable ongoing, but it's going to be a long long time before they ever make back the original investment.

Dude, they just bought White Wolf. Their original publisher lost money because they cut their losses -- probably a good idea for them at the time. CCP has shown that to be a mistake, and is making quite good money if they can afford to acquire White Wolf.

You miss the point.

Investors are not going to look at Eve-Onilne and say what a great model for investement.  If anything they will say "Hey look, yet another PvP MMORPG where the initial investment was written off"

True. But hopefully some of the Dev house and Publishers will also say "Although it appears a dedicated approach to gameplay can overcome initial handicaps. Perhaps we should keep that in mind as we develop".

Nope, he could have been popped in a gate camp in the highest security system in the game.

Regardless, I responded to what he wrote, then you come in and say 'well what he really meant was' ... he can speak for himself, and has. If you don't like my views then fine, but please don't tell me what other people mean when they post.

Either way, anyone that thinks CCP isn't doing well for themselves must really hate us PVPers :) Anytime the game is considered a successful MMO PVP game people claim "well noone is even out in 0.0". Without the PVP conflict the economy would not even exist for the PvE side to make money at, thus no reason for them to play (because frankly, the PVE in the game is pretty lame). Its PVP. Conquer the market, or kill off your foes and take their space...anyone that thinks otherwise really needs to take a step back from the pipe.

CCP did a good job of getting the PKs, the anti-PKs, the griefers, the traders, the craftards, and the carebears to all pull together -- by offering them a game system that interconnected (through the economy) without really requiring one to partake in any of the other playstyles.

Pure PvE'rs run missions in Empire. PvE's of the type that roll on WoW PvP servers run their PvE missions or rat in corp-controlled low-sec. PvPer's roll in merc corps or aggressive corps, and pirates and solo-gankers have their gate camps and daring raids into one corp-controlled area or another. And the PK's even have the big carrot -- they can gank the peaceful Empire-only trader -- it's just damn hard and the trader has a decent chance of surviving. It's a good trade-off between protecting the carebear and allowing the griefer.

And with the economy, it all works together rather than being a dozen seperate games. In a lot of ways, it's very much a Koster-style game. UO done right. In space. :)

Are you so retarded you can't figure out the difference between "I THINK what he means" and "What he meant was"?


I'm sure they're doing just fine, but they do that by not allowing full unrestricted PvP.  There's "safe zones" (even if they're not 100% safe, they're close enough) that players don't need to venture out of. 

And I think that right there is what it is about EVE that makes PvP'ers so happy. There's no place at all you can go to be 100% safe from other players you've pissed off. They may be damn near invulnerable in certain areas, but with enough effort they can bring the fight anywhere. Which makes the PvP'ers happy (They can kill anyone) and the PvE'ers happy (It'll be damn hard to kill them in "safe space").