f13.net

PvP design 101

1) Even out playing field – standard gear/level/skills/whatever should be accessible to everyone in reasonable time. Call this ‘golden standard’, make sure its good enough to compete with whatever ‘best’ you put into the game and make sure nobody can be kept from reaching it.

2) Aim for skill based PvP – you should give players enough options and enough template diversity to avoid cookie-cutter templates and predictable fights. PvP should be about paying attention to what is going on and reacting accordingly as oppose to mashing the same 3 buttons in specific order every time. There should be no ‘best way to fight’, just good counters to your opponent’s attacks.

3) Slow it down – ideal fight should last at least 15-20 seconds and should consist of at least 5-6 individual actions. You should give enough time to act and react so less-than-ideal connection of 150-200ms can compete.

4) Limit effects of focus fire – you will have group warfare in your game and people will get focus fired. If you don’t take steps to prevent it from being instadeath your group warfare will be lousy regardless of how great your 1v1. Good methods to limit focus fire are – short invulnerabilities, damage feedback powers, maximum damage rate or damage saturation, friendly fire and splash damage, collision and line of sight. Bad methods - removal of targeting and assist, forced or sticky targeting.

5) Add objectives to fight over – if it is going to be turf wars make sure turf has something desirable. Create few very desirable and tons of less desirable objects to control and make holding more than few highly problematic, this way more groups get a chance at ‘controlling’ something, not just best few.

6) Add effective power reach. Make sure that distance matters and adds logistical complications. You should be able to ‘pick up and leave’ and move away from ‘lost cause’ situation and end up out of reach. Don’t ever implement instant travel or effective teleportation or summon abilities. It should be very difficult to move anything but a small group over large distances.

7) Limit how much you can lose if you keep losing. String of bad losses should never put you into situation where you can’t realistically win again.

8) Soft-cap effective maximum size of any given group of players – make sure that bigger is better but up to a point and make sure that this limit takes population into the account and dictates that there will be a number of different groups on any given server regardless of population.

9) Don’t instance – unpredictability of who will show up to any fight is what makes politics important. It puts checks in place on guilds that now have to consider use of their influence and power or face bad odds. It limits 'poor sportsmanship' guilds in what they can do alone.

10) Make sure individual effort always matter and that it is possible to solo at all times. You should not be always forced to group to enjoy PvP, so design solo objectives and/or ways to solo. Good way to do it is via stealth classes.

11) Segregate PvP+ and PvP-, there should be no PvP- players around PvP fights - it leads to all sorts of bad things.

12) Always remove player from the area after death, there should be no reason whatsoever to linger or come back once fight is done. This will greatly limit all negative post-fight interaction. You do need to have in-game channels for communication, but not trash talking.

13) Start everyone able to contribute to fighting, even if it is support or mop-up roles

Heroes and followers

Heroes and followers, permadeath idea

Following is my idea for incorporating permanent death into PvP mmorpg while minimizing its negative effects.

* Permadeath good, bad and ugly *

I am a big fan of permadeath, in MUDs it added very serious consequences to escalating conflict and often added unprecedented depth to politics. If done right it also made recovery for losers much easier, if you did good job fighting but still lost winners are not that much better off than you.

Permadeath also has plenty of negative consequences – people generally too attached to their characters and will avoid fighting unless absolutely necessary, not something you want in PvP game. Additionally permadeath makes it necessary to minimize advancement curve or risk permanent domination by small group of surviving characters that can no longer be practically challenged.

* How it can work, or The Idea *

Have you seen movie Troy or ever read Greek mythology? To me that how epic fights should feel – evenly matched armies following different heroes, where two heroes end up fighting each with fight’s balance depending on outcome of this fight… While many PvP fights are fun they just lack this epic feeling. Also how can you let someone play hero and expect rest of the players to be content with filling secondary roles? Here is how…

Put in permadeath *only* for powerful champion characters, called heros…

Each guild of sufficient size and sufficient game standing (assets, levels, reputation or anything else that measures guild advancement) can undergo expensive and time consuming process of creating a brand new hero to join their ranks. All guilds are limited to only one hero,  in any nation composed of multiple guilds only dominant guild can have a hero.

*Hero is a significantly more powerful character when compared to regular player that can grant considerable bonuses to all regular players from the same nation around him. Downside is that hero can permanently die if slain in a PvP fight.*

When hero defeated in any fight he/she gets knocked out but instead of respawning like regular players they stay down until revived or finished off (causing permadeath). Only players can finish hero off and it is not instant or automatic action, this way if hero is defeated in a PvP fight he/she is not automatically lost. 

I believe this will give more epic feeling to fights, it will also add something to lose for both attackers and defenders in any serious battle. If you fight an army with a hero but lack one of your own it should not be automatic loss, but result in an uphill battle, making hero presense in any serious fight a norm.

Hero should be hard to kill but by no means invincible to regular players, so you should rarely see hero used without serious backing due to significant time and resources invested into creating one. Heros should have very shallow advancement curve, your brand new hero will be slightly weaker than fully developed one but only in strength of effects on your followers, meaning maxed out hero will provide more benefits to followers.

Heros can advance only by participating in PvP fights. This will make sure that no 'grinding to max level' is possible.

I don't see how these two can coexist.  A 20s fight seems WAY too brief to adequately counter attacks using a varied skill system.  Skill should be a balanced combination of twitch, situational awareness, and strategy.  Think about a fight between two seasoned fencers.  It could be considerably longer.  Too long is also a problem, so finding a compromise between dying in 20s and 5 min fights would have to be found.  DAoC started with the former and has now evolved to the latter.  The long fights now just result in frustration due to adds or being zerged.  I think something between 1-3 mins for a fight is about right for a 1v1.  For group vs. group or zerg vs. zerg I'd like to see fights last longer. 8v8 fights in DAoC now last on the order of 5-6 mins and can be very entertaining and as much about twitch skill as they are the strategy of overcoming short-term setbacks.

I think most people would agree with at least the core concepts presented in the rest of your ideas.  I'd like to see it pulled off. 

I think your hero idea may be too extreme. EVE already has something similar with Titans or command ships and leadership skills. Titans take a lot of time to build, are expensive, and have one shot kill everyone weapons but they keep getting killed while the player isn't even online (metagaming). The other part is the leadership skills where my skills give bonuses to the group but if I get sploded and leave the system no more bonuses.

I'd go with something more accessable like the leader of the current group/gang gives out bonuses if you stick near him or he gets buff spells he can cast. More on the modal of the heroes in WC3, Warlords Battlecry, and Savage.

I'll put this here, where nobody will read it, rather than in the Guild Wars forum (where nobody will read it).

Something must be done to make sure no individual player loses all the time in PvP. A game that cannot guarantee at least the chance of a win from time to time will simply disgust the losers, and a game which leads to much less than one win every three games will start to drive players away. It's just not fun to get squashed every time you get in a fight.

I've been bad at MMOG PvP for a long time, and unlike some folks who suck at it I love the promise it displays... but I'm getting pretty close to giving up on it as a concept. In a massively multiplayer environment skill levels will necessarily vary considerably more than they do at home. A "friendly game" of Soul Caliber is not like going to the arcade. There is no guarantee that you'll have fun unless you think losing constantly is a chance for improvement. Those two guys kicking everybody's ass will continue to do so until you all run out of quarters.

That's probably a waste of quarters, kids. Go home and play with your friends on the Playstation.

If you happen to be the best kids at the arcade you really get to impress the rest, but everybody else is basically there to watch... whether they pay for a fight with you or not. If I'm paying... and I'm paying to play any MMOG (even Guild Wars got $120 out of me) I expect to have a good time.

Losing all the time just makes me wonder why I wasted that cash in the first place.

The only way I see it happening is to give good player incentive to use cannon fodder in bigger fights. This way if you bad player you still get to play a role in good player's victories. But this leads to zergs... I think its better to give ability to meaningfully contribute than try to give a chance (inevitably random) to win.

Not neccessarily.  One way you could approach this is by making sure you have varying TYPES of pvp available in the same overall worldspace.  For example, taking the SWG world, you could have the FPS style single avatar control ground combat, real time space combat via fighters, but also have a more strategic turn based game for say espionage (hacking into a system), or creature handler areana combat (squad base rts like), or even turn based card and other games (casino's, influence peddling),and rythm games (musicians, dancers).

Oddly enough, the leading examples of this were SWG itself with it;s bolt on space module for ship combat, and Vanguard with it's card based diplomacy game.  Not exactly the level of quality we all want but a step at least.

People need to stop thinking of pvp as limited to one on one FP ground combat using the same engine and options that there are in pve combat model.  You've got a whole worldspace; feel free to fill it with multiple game system that are actually different.

90% of everything is crap, so 90% of players are crap.
Lets server have 3600 players concurrent, so their are 360 good players
Lets say it takes a group 6 to take an objective, that's 60 good groups.
Lets say it no one team has more than a third of the players, so max any one team can field is 20 groups.
Therefore the game needs to always have a number active objectives inexcess of 20.
That way no matter what, the biggest team with the best groups can't cover all the objectives and there is room for the crap groups to succeed. 

These two points seem to contradict each other, to me.  We're taking out grinding, because (presumably) it's unfun and unbalancing, but then we put in another system where you have to grind resources to build some guild uberunit?  That actually seems a bit worse, to me (at least in most current MMOs, my grinding has some immediate benefit to me, personally, rather than all my resources going to my guild leader's best buddy).  It also seems to go explicitly against the concept that "nobody can be kept from reaching" a competitive level of power; if I can't afford one of these expensive hero guys for my guild, it sounds like I'm going to get creamed.

Why do you think resources can't be acquired through PvP and land control or crafting and controlling NPC shops? For example, you build a farm and you put 3 farmer NPCs into it, they generate food resource until killed by your enemy. You PvP and as long as you maintain some control of your land you get resources, better control more resources. Alternatively you can raid your enemies and steal some of their resources.


 Hero should be 'standard equipment' in nation fight, we can't punish individuals for losses but some loss should occur or large fights will be meaningless unless asset destruction is involved.

It would depend on exactly how powerful these Hero people are. Sinij mentioned that Heroes wouldn't be completely invulnerable to the other players, which makes it sound like the "standard" can still compete with the "best". The main point of them would be for the bonuses to the rest of the players.

That said, for some reason I don't think Heroes would add the kind of epicness you desire. There are movies with epic combat, but do not involve one main character taking on all comers. What makes a big battle more epic, imo, is duration of the fight, number of combatants involved, and the fighting system. Sieges and battles lasted a long time and that gives people the ability to think, but I'm also talking about the individual fighting. Set up fights like modern day fencing matches or ARMA sparring. Two players lock onto eachother and focus on very little else. Whoever is the fastest (determined by some kind of stat or situational) gets the first action. Make it almost like a card game where each player, dependant on his skill setup and weapon type, gets a set of options for each combat situation. So player one who went first would get presented with the option to (I'm not creative with names here, bear with me) "Sideswipe", "Lunge", "Overhead Strike", "Feint, Then Trip", and other such things. He chooses Sideswipe, now player two who is defending, again depending on his skillset and whatnot, gets the option to "Sideparry", "Dodge", "Intercept", "Shield Block", etc and chooses to sideparry. It goes back and forth with lots of parrying, dodging, blocking, until someone finally gets presented with a situation in which his set of cards can't handle. Each one of the cards someone uses will have different values on them, increasing or decreasing some situational pools called Footing, Positioning, Advantage, Distance, and others I can't really think of right now. Some cards require you to have better Footing before you can use them, or requiring you to have the Advantage. Each weapon type and fighting style will give its own set of cards as well as the way the rest of the character is set up, and will utilize different situational pools (Example, using a big two-handed sword your cards will have the most/best options if you can keep your Distance large, as big weapons are never good when you're right next to someone, and if you keep a high Advantage. Whereas something like two-weapon fighting will have access to its best cards when you have a high Footing and Positioning advantage over your opponent). If you set it up this way, it will have lots of players skill involved... you have to know your skills, and I mean know your skills, because when and what you execute will be the foundation for the rest of the moves you can make. If you run across someone who ebayed their character, even if its an elite character reknowned as Lord Pwnage, you'll be able to defeat him if you know what you're doing. As long as you know your skills and know where his skills are at their best, you'll be able to deny him Footing, Positioning, or whatever he needs and take him down.

This also would solve the issue of the high level players completely destroying everything in their path. Getting to higher levels will afford you some new cards, which means you may find a way out of a couple situations which you wouldn't have been able to before or will allow you to smash even harder once you get you gain the Footing, Advtange, etc that you need. For instance, using my previous situation, when someone attacks you with Sideswipe, you'll not only have Sideparry, Dodge, Block as your abilities, you'll now have "Block, Then Repost" or "Feint Parry, Then Dodge" or something, and each will add different things to your situational pools as well as change what kind of reactions your opponent can make. It will get the point across that you're becoming a skilled and powerful fighter, but what it will never do is make the playing field uneven. You've been playing for five years and have a maxxed out Halberdier, but some guy who just joined today managed to get rid of your Distance advantage and is now up in your face with a sword? You're not going to make it out alive. New players can always contribute. Always.

It allows for terrain and weather pentalies/bonuses. You need lots of room to fight with your big weapon, but are crammed in an awkwardly small corridor? Good luck getting full bonuses from your swings (As in, they won't contribute as much Footing, Positioning, etc and some cards may be disabled due to being crowded). Muddy ground making Footing and Positioning harder, if not impossible, to gain and again possibly disabling some cards.

Hell, this sort of a thing will even help PvE. If the developers want to give a certain group of mobs, like elite guards of some temple or seasoned gladiators, better fighting skill then they can do this and actually make it more of a challenge than "x2 hp, x2 ac, call them elites". They'll give those NPCs better cards, and it'll instantly and legitimately make it more challenging for PCs to fight them. While the strategy of removing Footwork and then going in for a Lunge finished off the lesser guards, these elite ones have a card that allows them to block in that situation and now the PCs will have to think of a new way to defeat them.

Anyways, I'd type more but I have to go. Obviously a system like this would need a ton of finetuning and working on, but if its the core of your game then you'll have a lot of resources to commit to it.

Edit: Totally forgot, the entire point of this is to make a battle between players (and subsequently mobs) and actual battle of wits and strategy while removing the sparkly button spamming fluff that doesn't actually need to be there. It opens up combat to more players and so provides more challenging opponents for players. And you'll never have a moment where you say, "Damn, that guy just rolled me and there was nothing I could do!" and instead you'll be saying something like, "Damn, if I had managed to lure that dual-weilding maniac into the slippery mud, he wouldn't have been able to deny me Distance like he did!". You should always be looking for potentional advantage vs. disadvantage tradeoffs. And always needing to make decisions. And each decision should count.

Star Wars Battlefront somewhat solved this by having the option to have bots (NPCs) on your side. You get an epic feeling without so many players being fodder.

Also, support roles solve some of the "losing every time". Planetside, Eve, and Guild Wars all have them.

Lastly, I still think something like having players control a group of NPCs might be interesting. MMOG Total War where each player gets a group of units to control and if even one man from it survives you can build it back up again.

  Isn’t this precisely what we want?  The main issue plaguing an open PVP world is the idea that there will be rampant player killers running around with impunity.  With Permadeath there are two factors which would drive down the incidence of PKers, first the death of even one character would elicit real outrage against the player killer, secondly killing a player killer means that that player has been effectively stopped and not simply deterred or delayed.  Suddenly the idea of police forces seems reasonable.  Players would be more likely to see the value in a police officer who could effectively eliminate criminals.  Permadeath could also mean having police would really mean something more than blues and reds playing what amounts to an RvR battle.  As long as PVP deaths carry no weight PKers have nothing counterbalancing their homicidal tendencies.

Problem is it causes people to quit when they were killed instead of try again.  It's one of those things that is good in theory but not good in practice.  Hell, Shadowbane wasn't even permadeath but a lot of people couldn't handle losing everything they worked for.  They quit instead of building up their guild again to the power it once was.

Um, that's the exact reason a lot of them do it.  See griefing.  PK'er generally don't care about their characters and it would be typical for a single PK to cause at least several normal player deaths (or lots) before any "police force" caught up to them.  Then they just create another throwaway character and repeat.


I really don't think you've thought this through.  Pk'er don't care about their characters; they are just a means to an end.  So introducing a measure which punishes people who do care about their characters, like permadeath, actually makes the ground much more fertile for Pk's, not give them a disincentive to play.  And player police has always been and will always be unworkable unless the game design is built around making it much much easier to catch and kill "reds" than be one, and I am highly dubious until shown such a system.

In large part because it takes so long to get to the 'fun' again.  Even in SB, which reportedly had such great easy leveling, getting back to R6 and farming money to get your guild built back to having a city was such a drag, people didn't want to do it again.

In a game where 'the grind' to get a useful character is less* the 'well, I'll just quit' tendancy isn't so strong.  Also, fights should tend to end like duels in WoW... with the loser at 1 hp, on his knees, at the mercy of his attacker.  At that point they can demand money, items, fealty, whatever.  And still have the option to just knock them out cold (say force-quits them, and looks just like being killed to the person being KO'd... so you have to re-log in to find out what happened; maybe a dream sequence upon logon if you're just KO'd, if it hasn't been very long, so you don't wake back up almost immediately.)   If you're killed, you have to rebuild your character, but it shouldn't be anything like 'level to 60/70/100/250' or whatever.

Permadeath is not compatible with DIKU at all.  IMO, PvP isn't very compatible with DIKU, given the inherent imbalance associated with 'levels'.  WoW could be the same game, if they started everyone with the same set of powers, (say their level-cap set), and made the whole game not about gaining exp, but about the storylines/equipment; work talent points in there somehow too.  Mobs wouldn't get any hard, really, aside from elites and the like.  Or maybe they would vary, but only +/- 3 levels or so.  Implement 'same family name' to prevent creation of one-time grief characters, and you're golden, IMO.

--
Alkiera

(*) I'm saying there should be some option to start at 'functional', but not neccesarily ideal.  In WoW, say you died with permadeath, but got to restart at the level cap with reasonable equipment, but had to quest to get your talent points back.  Max 20-25% improvement from reincarnation to being competitive as far as character progression goes.  Admittedly, in WoW, gear is half or more of your strength, but I'd opt for less; a 'low magic' type setting.  On top of being more rare, magic items would be harder to interpret, and on-character storage place less... no 'I killed 100 bad guys, here are all their suits of plate mail,' nonsense.

Those two concepts don't work together though.  In order for Permadeath to be effective as you said, you must be attached to your character (and thus it must take some time to build him up).  If there is no grind, then I have no attachmenet at all to my characters and I really don't care if I have been killed, because I will be back in the next day. 

Lets take GW for example.  I can create all the level 20s I can.  Lets say everytime I lose or get killed (whatever your preference) that character is deleted.  I don't care, because I can just create another one with minimal effort.  It won't effect me at all but be a minor nuincance. 

If you want perma-death to be meaningful, you have to find a way to have your players be emotionally attached to their characters.  In order to get people to be attached to their characters they usually have to play that character for a certain amount of time. 

  OK a tweak to the classic idea then, instead of PKers being flagged as red they are flagged as mortal.  Meaning that if you kill, you face permadeath when you die.  Kind of like kicking PKers out of eden.  (It might even be interesting to keep their status a secret, at least to other players, like a curse or a scarlet letter)  Non-PKers who are killed will have some death costs, exp, items, whatever, but they will not lose their character as long as they don't spill blood.  Then you get to keep the long investment characters because the farmers and crafters won't be faced with total loss, while PKers are constantly reset to zero.  Of course there would still have to be the normal flagging rules, if someone attacks you first you don't get permadeath flagged if you kill them, PvP zones don't cause flags, etc.. 

  And yea, police need to be coded into games if your going to have the sort of freedom that open PvP (aka the only PvP where PKing can happen) brings to a game.  Why bounty hunter classes aren't a devs best anti pk tool is beyond me.  "hey bob, we've got a pker. do you want me to ban him?" "naw, just put a bounty on him and see if that clears up the problem." and bam every domino, dog, and fett starts tracking the bastard.

  full disclosure: I'm not a PKer, or even a PvPer, I'm a crafter/explorer and yet if I could play in a responsible open PvP server I would. The trick is giving the players the ability to exercise limitless freedom but making it a really bad idea to.

Homicidal tendencies? Rampant player killers? Let it go, this isn't 99, time to move on. Go play bash monsters, nobody forces you to participate or even wants you around their PvP.

As to answer your question - no that not what we want. Considering that PvPers want to PvP (I know would would have guessed?) making expected outcome of PvP fight (someone loses by design) punishing is not a good idea. Only most hardcore and most successful PvPers will be able to sustain momentum, rest will have no chance.

As to self-policing? SB and UO proved, might make it right. It will happen only if dominant group sees it as worth-while.

UO showed us that all that happens with this kind of system is they bring an alt with them that deals the final blow.

  Actually you do want me around your PvP, that is, unless you want your Pvp to be a niche game with no general appeal.  While that is arguably a valid stance, it's not really interesting, anyone can make a PvP game for PvPers.  It's making a PvP game that everyone else wants to play that's difficult.
  Hence my second post where I answered all of these points.  Read before posting.
  The dominant group in any MMOG are the developers and CS, they are the only legitimately responsible group, they must take the lead roll.  I'm not advocating self policing but rather that people could play as police if you made the gameplay of that role fun.

Trust me, I don't. Go bash monsters. Look at rule #11 and stay the fuck away from my PvP, by design.

Developers have virtually no control of how players choose to use rules of the game, they can only change rules. There is no 100% way to remove PKing other than to remove an ability to attack other players. So why bother with convoluted rules that don't appeal to PvPers and don't always protect PvEers?

If you don't have PvP - well your problem with PKs is solved. If you do, well why place PvE anywhere near PvP and worry about possible ways to limit effect of one on another when you can just separate them?

Policing and ideas of this sort approach problem from wrong direction. If there are no victims, meaning everyone involved is aware or ought to be aware of risks involved, there are no criminals and no need to police.

Permadeath should be approached only from 'does it make PvP better' angle. Thats it. There is no reason to even consider other aspects.

The way SB was structured, it was impossible to rebuild after your city were burned down. There was no place you could go outside your enemies reach. In Eve, 2 thing mainly make it better: strong economy in the safe areas and the game space is too its fricking big. Even so, its a monumental task just with morale issues alone.

  I read your rules; go play Guild Wars, stfu, and stop acting like you have some new angle on PvP.  The only interesting bit of you post was the permadeath, and that's all I want to talk about.
  Because I think that PKing should be in games.  When all else fails, and you have no further recourse, you should have the option to kill the bastard.  What I don't want is the rampant part, when people PK cause there bored, or PK because killing level one newbs will get them their next level faster than killing mobs.
  I understand where your coming from, if PvP and PvE are segregated, then you are right, however if as I contend, there is a system where open PvP could live in harmony with PvE then cops would be nice to have, if not necessary.  If you have too lofty an idea of police ethics then instead think of mafia enforcers, they keep their streets safe... enough.  The point is to allow for retribution in a just form (even if all we can hope for right now is an eye for an eye) because that allows for a new level of PvP gameplay for PvPers, and less opportunity for the rampant PKers.
I disagree with what you said.

I think putting PKing into otherwise non-PvP game is Bad Idea - getting PKed doesn't appeal to non-PvP players and being restricted as to who you can PK doesn't appeal to PvPers. Still if you insist on doing it there should be no penalties to death whatsoever.

As to permadeath idea in my original post - its equivalent to asset destruction in large guild vs. guild combat only assets are 'hero' characters that can die. I don't think it will work if there are no 'large guild vs. guild combat' in your game.


Good, maybe mmorpg developers will read them as well. For some reason these basic rules are still not common knowledge and not clearly understood. I don't act "like you have some new angle", I just think PvE and PvP playstyles don't mix and there is no good reason to mix them. What little PvP PvEers want to do can be instanced away and what little PvE PvPers want to can be channeled into crafting/gathering/hunting.

There are reasons to have PvE in a PvP game.  I don't think the two are totally mutual exclusive by any means.  It's just a delicate balance to make it work effectively (and has to adhere to the goals of the game). 

Almost everything you mentioned sounds like oldschool UO to me.

That is just a terrible idea; fucking lame.  Might as well just roll some dice.  If a player doesn't want to lose all the time in PvP, he needs to improve his game. 

You also need to think  about what "lose" means.  If  I fight 1 to 5 odds and my team manages to kill a few before dying, I consider that a victory, but the tards who had the 5x advantage probably consider it a victory too.  Everybody wins!

In a sport where players compete for fun, absolutely. When players fork over the cash to buy a game and then are expected to pay a fee for the priveledge of playing, they will not be satisfied with a string of crushing losses. The game will not keep them playing long enough to improve or inspire much positive word-of-mouth advertising. On the other hand...


...this is absolutely true. I frequently felt "victory" in Planetside knowing that my futile actions served to distract the enemy from more important goals. If I can see that my actions had a positive purpose, it wasn't a loss. Also, every once in a while in the Guild Wars Random Arena, one or two players would drop out and it was satisfying to fight well against slightly overwhelming odds, win or lose. So long as players see some positive side to throwing their lives away, they will continue to play. Not every loss is either meaningless or hopeless.

Avoiding meaningless losses is still a design challenge, and one which I have seen little progress towards in recent games.

Jesus, my fucking irony meter just exploded.  Sinij has invented Trammel.

That must be why Counter-Strike isn't successful. 

Oh wait, it is.

(Okay, the "paying a fee for playing" part is a difference.  But if anything I'd expect the fee to KEEP people playing, at least until the subscription runs out, so they can "get their money's worth".)

Counterstrike is a sport people play for fun. I suck at Counterstrike, but I play it. When I lose over and over again I stop playing... but since I never have to pay a subscription fee I occasionally hop back in to try again. Most of the folks playing counterstrike suck at least as much as I do, and from time to time my meager skillz triumph. That's all it takes to keep me playing until a few capable players remind me why I stopped last time.

I invest nothing. Guild Wars worked the same way until the folks who sucked more than me all quit and my meager skills just didn't cut it anymore, but I imagine I'll still log on and play a bit from time to time. I've got nothing to lose.

I have never resubscribed to Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, or World of Warcraft. I left every single one of them because I was sick of paying to be constantly flattened in PvP.
Indeed it did, and until the subscription was over I'd keep coming back (just like the non-fee games) because I knew I'd never play again once it was over. I don't think this is in a MMOG company's best interest. Here's a player who continues to use bandwidth, constantly rants about how much he hates the game, but feels obligated to stick around and chat with his friends until he's kicked off. This is why free trials ought to be short term affairs. If somebody doesn't like the game and hasn't paid for it, they need to be shuffled off ASAP.

MMOGs turn me into a preacher of doom, attempting to convert the poor fools who love the game from their misguided ways.

From the content of this site I'd imagine that is not an uncommon affliction.

Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned.

Is this discussion even worth having if we're operating from the assumption that people don't play MMOGs for fun and never will?

On individual level I just don't see a way how to let unwashed masses win and still keep victory a meaningful event instead of a dice roll. This problem will only further compound if you throw some PvE people in the mix that are not at all prepared to rapidly changing environment of PvP.

Perhaps we can define more victory conditions, so for any given fight there are more goals that can be considered victory by players. Maybe if players can say 'we lost that fight but....' where '....' can be large number of things so perhaps they will not feel it was defeat. Make 'clean win' a very difficult thing to archive, so losers can also get some satisfaction of knowing they archived something in that fight.

PvE has it easy - you can let players win all the time, after all mobs don't mind. In PvP someone *has* to lose and they do mind.

Absolutely. We can try to decide whether PvP is the best way to turn them into customers willing to pay monthly for a long-term service.. I'm proposing that, in its current state, its absolutely not. There is more game loyalty to be gained by fostering cooperative rather than competative relationships. I believe people are willing to pay more, and pay longer, to support companions than they are willing to pay to struggle against rivals. Cooperation within teams and competition between teams has temporarily blurred this distinction in mainstream games.

I hear a lot of support to the idea that a game ought to be fun from the moment a player starts playing. If PvP is a central game dynamic, then losing either need to be fun or infrequent. These are both extremely challenging to pull of without making PvP meaningless. If they players don't get some positive feedback during their free month they're going to leave. Without monthly fees, the development costs of a MMOG would have been better invested in some new non-subscription game. A Mount & Blade version of Counterstrike, maybe.
Yes. Everybody seems generally agreed that we can't make losing less frequent without making winning less meaningful. If somebody has to lose, how do we make losing fun both in the skirmish and the war?

Can everyone win the World Series Poker everytime, no.  Can everyone win couple hands, sure.

Hm.  I was under the impression that most people here were trying to imagine a fun game they'd want to play themselves, not an unfun game they could conceivably make money from by conning someone else into playing.  I suppose that is how most commercial MMOGs actually get designed though, which explains a lot about them.   :-P

No argument from me. It has built an empire of shitty, unpleasant games I no longer enjoy... but merely thinking up fun games I'd like to play is, at best, an academic exercise. Anything as complex and expensive as a MMOG (like a blockbuster studio movie) is made not because it's the most enjoyable project that could be produced, but because (on paper) it promises a guaranteed return on investment. That promise may turn out to have been a lie because the project isn't actually entertaining, but if the names and numbers hadn't looked solid it wouldn't have been greenlighted at all.

We can rail about that system but we're not going to change it. If we're seriously thinking about how PvP could be changed and could change the way these games play, we'll have to keep that ugly system in mind.

As opposed to what we're doing here, which is serious business, rite?

^This is the only worthwhile post in this thread.

The rules are an ok attempt at a pvp standard.  Here are some I take issue with.

6.  Instant travel and/or summoning have caused problems but I dont think they are inherently bad things to have in a game.

8.  I would prefer to see in-game mechanics not arbitrary caps.

9.  Depends on if you are going for "sport" pvp or "world" pvp, both are viable choices.  It is annoying that WoW ever pretended it was about world pvp but now that they have the arena season its a viable sport pvp game.

10.  I think you are way off, also stealth classes have only worked in SB.  If you want to take Xilren's advice and create layers of pvp and make one an espionage/information warfare thing, sure.  But seriously if I never see a class with stealth + huge burst damage from stealth again I will be a happy gamer.

11.  There are ways to integrate pvp and pve, as others have said but its a bitch and nobody has really come close to getting it right so far.

Most of what you wrote I agree with. The part I dont agree with is PKers not caring about their characters. You will rarely find someone that tries harder to tweak and perfect their setup then someone who will be putting their ass on the line. As much as you have described these players as basically mindless killing machines, I do believe that they sure as hell dont want to regrind a character.

Most likely they will find other PKs and find the best way to group up and kill people with a group of 4 hour old characters. PKs will find a way to minimize their own time lost/invested, but dont fool yourself into thinking they dont care about their notorious reputation or time they have spent working on skills/items for it.



Non perma death thoughts: I was thinking about some sort of real Noto system. For killing 'Reds', you earn a percentage of their points (depending how much negative rep they have). The higher your positive rep is can open up new quest lines to you from NPC sheriffs or mayors. Possibly the high end of this would have special titles/items opened up to them.  This could make anti-PK worthwhile.

My other thought is, if you become too nefarius as a PK that is when Permadeath can happen (say after 6 murders). Though having such a rating would cause you to not be able to go into certain towns, it would also open up access to 'evil' towns/areas having items that could only be obtained there. Risk/reward. With the permadeath caveat, it would also put a real damper on abusing the noto system...you really want to kill your own PK character off for good noto points/bounty?

I believe in stealing the best systems and tweaking to your own use. Take Diablo 2 loot. Add UO full loot drops on player death (PVP deaths only, PVE drops a corpse only scoopable by the character to prevent ninja looting by a 'groupmate'). Make sure characters have plenty of bank space. Players then have the choice of what gear set to take out adventuring with them. This is one of the things missing from today's games. No risk/reward, just throw on your best gear. Sure, it would suck losing a nice unique sword, but then you realize you have a very nice sword in the bank that you wanted to try anyways. Good replacement armor is reasonably priced and drops frequently in dungeons as well. A huge money sink could be very very high priced 'blessings', that allow you to die a certain number of times and not drop 1 item. Maybe make rings/necklaces soulbound.

Steal and tweak Eve's security status. 1.0 is fully town guarded insta-pop on aggression. Basically a police state. Mines have Copper.

.7 Heavily guarded towns, slightly better resources...mines have copper/some silver.

 .5 is less so, there are brutal roaming patrols that will KOS low noto characters. Roads are well guarded. .5 Monsters, dungeons, towns and resources have more options. Mines have silver. Guild Houses can be placed at .5 and below.

.3 will have occasional bounty hunter NPCs, or a passing armed Caravan occasionally. Zone guards only. Higher end monsters, dungeons, and drops. Towns have high end crafters and trainers. Mines have gold.

.1 Very rare bounty hunter NPCs. No road guards. Mines have gold/Platinum.

.0 Wild wild west. Conquerable towns. 'Evil' towns (Good noto players would be ganked). Mines have Gold/Plat/gems


Instant travel would be accomplished by high end NPC wizards, very limited in the world. Player characters could possibly spec that direction as well. I had some other ideas last night, and more to it, but the premise is, steal the good shit from many different games, add an original system or 2, and game on :)

One thing you might add to this is a stat that is based off how often your Noto points swing back and forth.  If you kill good people and go 'evil', great... but if you try to beat the system by then killing off some other 'bad' guys to get back up to neutral, it records this somehow, perhaps when you hit certain thresholds, so if you make a habit of killing good folks, then log on your other account with a Dread Lord on it and kill him a dozen times to fix your rep, it'll be noted and somehow flagged to your character.  Perhaps you lose Sanity or something, and after a certain amount of loss, you go nuts and the char is just unplayable, a la Call of Cthulu.

The idea being to reduce the ability to 'game' the Noto system.  Generally, you want to make a choice, and stick with it.  If you decide to change your mind, great, as long as you don't do so every week.

--
Alkiera

BUT WAI!

This is really bad idea. You do not want to have gear-centric game with full loot simply because loss to players will be too significant. Designing good PvP game is about minimizing immediate individual consequences and maximizing group and long term effects.

Lets look at few examples, just to make sure this very important point is well understood:

1)   WoW – player dies in PvP, nothing bad happens regardless of fight’s pretext. Overall this scenario is less than ideal due to lack of consequences, you can’t hope to drive off somebody and regardless of your actions there is no effect on game world. Gear also a dominant factor in determining outcome of the fight. Your PvP will be viewed as ‘meaningless’
2)   SB – player dies in PvP, minimal gear repair penalty happens but if it’s a fight over an objective this can have very lasting and negative consequences to all involved. Problem with this system is that gear can greatly influence outcome of the fight.
3)   UO - player dies in PvP, gets looted. Again this is less than ideal situation - while there some consequences to PvP death there is no objectives to it. As a side benefit all gear tend to be equal due to full loot.


Full loot on death should not be used as a means of adding consequences to PvP deaths, instead its main purpose is to make sure everyone is on equal footing when it comes to gear, keeping mudflation in check.


To me ideal PvP mmorpg design includes full loot, but not because I think it will add consequences to death but because I want to make sure at no point it becomes item-centric. Still when you design PvP you should consider how much of a penalty PvP death would result in, under no circumstances should you spend more time recovering from PvP than you are PvPing.

What Im saying is how many blue weapons drop in Diablo II? Fuckin every mini boss you kill has at least one. People could have stockpiles of those, use standard crafted armor like UO did, magic armor if you have balls (UO-esque), and stuff.

I hear what you are saying, but to me it would fit nicely together. Half the time people probably wouldnt loot 'just another blue greatsword'...but if the guy had balls and brought out his Yellow and died....tough luck for him...no huge deal because you have access to many different cool blue weapons, or standard crafted stuff.

What was weird in UO is that in my early days, before I was a totally PvP, I knew PvMers who had houses full of endless vanqs, and they refused too use them for fear of losing them.  It boggles the mind.  These people would use force weapons, but hoarded all the good stuf, of which they had plenty.  When I knew them  it was after statloss was introduced, and they still woould not break out the good stuff.  I hunted with them every day for half a year and I know they did not die to PKs often.

Then I slowly got into PvP and eventually had a perma-red.  I would carry the best stuff on me that I could afford, at all times, because I got attacked by everybody.  If I was able to carry a two-handed vanq and a one-handed vanq(so I could down potions while swinging) at the same time, all the better.  Many times it was power, but I did the best I could.  It was just amazing that all these people were hoarding equipment that could help them out a lot.

Then I got into the order/chaos thing, and that's mostly about being a team player.  There I tended to die so much, becauseI was playing for the team, that I went back to using GM made stuff (being red was a much more solo thing).

What we need is a Cyberpunk MMO ala Neocron... except FUN, and oh... the engine has to work properly
Player housing is required
FPS Required
No locked targets... FF should be a danger
Full PVP but murder of a faction member results in 24hrs in jail. You can gank someone if you want, but your done for the night if you do. Maybe 1 faction could be lawless and exempt or something.
No "Levels"
Skill based progression, and the ability to change professions ala UO
No jackass Meleclasses. Who the hell thought a sword wielding human could take out a machinegun wielding robot in AO should be given a sword and told to charge a real machinegun wielding robot.
Vehicles, Aircraft, spacecraft and interstellar craft... all required from the start. I want my guild to be able to buy an interstellar cruiser... go to another planet, launch our dropship and massacre the population before stripping the world of its resources. Now THATS a raid.
No level limits on weapons. 1 character per server to prevent twinking. If a riffle is really that good, it'll cost 100Million credits. And the fact that you can change your skills anytime you want means there really isn't a reason you'd need more than 1 toon
Faction based with Several different star systems... 1 for each faction. Maybe 5-10 different factions. Basically full on PVP but raid style. You have to battle through the other systems outer defenses to get to their homeworld... so they know well in advance that you are coming. In fact, when a raid was incoming I'd love for the apposing faction to see a new star in the sky that your breaking thrusters as you pulled in-system.
Huge XP bonuses for those that defend the homeworld.
Tradeskills should be a major part of the game. The best equipment would require resources from several different worlds, requiring a full raid to capture and area, setup base and protect your mining crew... etc... Less valuable resources found in asteroid belts that are less well deffended.

Until we can eliminate latency, continue to expect Meleclasses and locked targets. Even when faked such that once somebody is in your "targeting reticle" you have them "targeted", you're still going to wind up with the same bizzare spacetime warping LOS issues that plague any high ping FPS. Go play a little Planetside or GunZ The Duel (http://www.gunzonline.com/) for examples galore. Note how heavily they limit the number of players in their instanced fights and how strenuously they police latency.

Melee is popular in MMOGs because fighting at zero range blurs a lot of these problems. It evades the LOS issue, for example. Sadly, as GunZ also makes obvious, without a locked target it's still hard to hit somebody with a high relative ping. Melee will also specifically stand for punching, slashing, and stabbing rather than acrobatic sweeps and throws. For similar reasons to why Bungie removed multiplayer from Oni seven years ago... we're not going to see intuitive twitch combat show up in a Massively MOG any time soon.

[edit]
Actually, it's even worse than GunZ or Planetside will lead you believe because they are only persistant worlds in the loosest sense... there are almost no consequences to death and very little character development. Your mention of player housing and talk of in-faction murder consequences and friendly fire leads me to believe you want death to be important. To simulate whatever inconvenienences you want death to have, stop playing for five to ten minutes every time you die in Planetside or GunZ... or Team Fortress or Unreal: Tournament or whatever FPS you enjoy.
[/edit]

Honestly, planetside is pretty good. There are occasional oddities but they are manageable. I think there are 4 things you need to really pull it off:

1. Client side hit detection but non-predictive projectile spawning. This is the only way you can really go; it opens your client up to hacking and exploiting (sending you hit packets), but the trade offs are huge. If you go with projectile over hitscan weapons, which is suggested, you will get some weird issues about bullets appearing where you WERE in the game world and travel to where you were aiming at the time. This isn't horribly debilitating and games have been doing it for years, including planetside, to good effect. #4 also helps with this.

2. Don't have a changeable/deformable world or you will start getting into some really weird causality issues; make it so it's player versus player with the world being immutable obstacles only.

3. Make combat long enough so that the opening volley of a laggy player won't kill you. You don't want someone to be able to run around a corner and completely unload and actually kill you before you even see him and respond.

4. Make player run speed fairly slow. This is to help with the 'bullets from the void' issue you'd see in #1 so that you can't shoot yourself in the back, and it also helps with #3 by making combat and positioning slower and thus combat a bit longer.

Just had to throw this thought out there...

Why is it in games, the best defended areas have the worst resources?  Shouldn't it be the exact opposite?

I want to run Darkfall through this list, I think they got a lot of these points right. Anyone with more first-hand expirience can do point-by-point comparison?

In order for those games to have a functioning pvp system, the idea is to entice the pve'ers into leaving their well defended towns/cities, and go into the undefended areas of the game in order for the so called pvp'ers to kill them. Sheep and wolves dynamic. If there are no reasons for the sheep to wonder, the wolves can't hunt. If the wolves can't kill sheep they will be forced to kill each other, which of course means a drastic decrease in the amount of wolves. This is what many of those so called pvp'ers call a reason to fight. You generally want a constant influx of players hoping to score it big do to their being a large amount of resources/loot in order for the "pvp'ers" to have a guaranteed 'match'. It's really players vs pve'ers and not player vs player, though very few people make that distinction.

I generally given up on the notion that designing a game around open world pvp doesn't make in garbage. Even EVE had to stack the odds in favor of the sheep several times over, to insure that their playerbase doesn't self cannibalize itself at break neck pace. Maybe its because I'm not the target demographic, neither enjoyed UO or 13 or a someone with a lot of free time on my hand and with very little human contact to spend it with, or a person who generally sucks at 99% of any real pvp game. If "UO BUT WITH a TWiSt11" is the best the hardcore crowd have to offer, i'm going to wait for the answer to this one question "why should someone spend millions developing your game 'done right' when there are such things as pvp servers."

Random idea: Generic framework for instanced, two-tier open PvP system.

Instanced battlefield objectives, populated by a set of infinitely respawning NPC defenders. Guilds or even PUGs can attack these, claim them, and use whatever advantages they have. Guilds become progressively more likely to have their claimed objectives randomly attacked (rather than an NPC objective) based on how many objectives they control and how many players they currently have online... players can also choose to re-attack claimed objectives they have recently encountered, or from those belonging to guilds with which they are at war.

These objectives could even have some sort of "tech tree", making it impossible to encounter higher level of objective until your guild or group controls some number (or specific kinds) of lower level objectives. Lower objectives woudl be easy to capture and hard to hold, higher level objectives would be progressively slanted towards the defensive... but lose some defensive advantage as more of the lower level objectives which support them are captured.

Objectives would also contain resources for the crafting of loot, much of which could theoretically be gathered without engaging the NPCs.

The two tiers:

Trash: Those defensive NPCs can be controlled by the defending players... both in general (by fine-tuning the likelyhood of particular sorts of NPCs spawning, and what crappy NPC tactics they would employ) and by specifically creating an controlling individuals (up to the maximum number allowed by the objective). They respawn practically instantaneously, FPS style, and though they can dish out capable damage they have very little ability to absorb it and die quickly. Attacking players can also produce trash (up to the maximum number allowed by the objective) who spawn or respawn at some specific distance from attacking heros, or at a random point around the instance perimeter.

Heros: These are the PCs. They chew through any trash that catches their attention and must be ganged up upon to be killed thereby. Attackers are allowed to have one more hero than defenders do, up to the maximum allowed each by the objective. Heros also have "travel time", a LONG (multiple minutes) period during which they may not respawn, during which the player will be controlling trash. If, after a combat timer has elapsed, the defender has more spawned heros than the attacker.. defense wins.

Attackers have specific, varied tasks they must complete to gain victory in objectives. Each completed task will slightly increase the combat timer.

Very interesting pxib. This would work something like instanced dungeon that you could conquer, build up and later contest.

Initial conquest can be basic "ready check" - is your group/guild ready to enter PvP competition phase? If you can't defeat Trash/Boss, then no you are not ready. Second stage will be build-up, something to the effect of Dungeon Master. You plan defenses, choke points and so on. Third stage - entering "arena" with your instanced dungeon. Your team get rated and you enter competition against equally-rated opponents. They attack your dungeon, then you attack theirs and based on the outcome move up or down the ladder.

That part is the most interesting to me, and something I'm surprised has never to my knowledge been done.  Either you spend a long time out of combat or you're instantly returned to combat, but I have never seen a game where when you lose, you get a secondary role to perform for the time it takes your 'main character' to be ready to return to the fight.  Delaying the loser's return to the fight is vital in order to make a fight winnable by attrition, but giving the loser something to do which still contributes, albeit to a smaller degree, is an excellent way to keep it interesting when someone dies and is 'waiting for res'.

...but travel time sucks.
 
That was one half of the inspiration for the whole mess. Plus heros can get their jollies insta-gibbing groups of other players, without those gibs being overly upset about it... because they're congratulating themselves on putting off the assault the few moments required to let their side get its heroes back. It's a common dynamic in MMOG PvP that I'd like to see more effectively codified.

The other half was a desire to get away from the two conventional forms of attack/defense: The strictly instanced sport vs. the open world war. Planetside and Dark Age of Camelot eventually seem meaningless because any progress disappears as soon as the defenders get bored and leave... but WoW's battlegrounds are meaninglessness from word go. Capturable instanced objectives are "permanent", but the barrier to entry can be more effectively policed. Then with easy access to trash but limited access to heros, the side that isn't "ready" won't be totally overwhelmed unless they're trying to hold more than they can control.

Why you would ever think that full loot on death would keep mudflation in check boggles the mind. Transferring items from one person to another changes nothing. As long as you have new items coming into the economy from resources and mobs, you will have mudflation problem. Now if you destroyed all (or most) items on death (which is what EVE does), then that might keep mudflation in check.

As an ex-anti-PK from UO, when some of the PK keeps decayed, I threw in the towel and gave up. Why? Inside those keeps were chests so full of gear, we would not even pick any of it up. I lost count of it all. I realized I could kill PKs from dawn to dusk and not even make a dent in their hoard as they could farm it right back. (Plus, playing defense in a world where everyone can pretty much teleport anywhere is another exercise in frustration.)

Supply and demand disagrees. UO's problem was duping, not vanquishing weapons.

There has to be an audience for a game that can be a forgiving as WoW and as brutal as say old UO in terms of PvP.

I posted an idea in an old thread long ago that outlined a system by which the game would support a mechanic that would track some form of PvP metric (via open world PvP, BGs, or PvP related quests. Hope no one minds a revised repost of that since it is buried.  :grin:

Once that metric was hit, the entire server population would be presented upon logging into the game a form of server vote for war or peace. This vote would last a predetermined time, something on the order of a few days, only allowing a single vote per account. Then based on that vote, the whole server would be thrown into war or peace would resume.

Being in either state would even award some form of associated bonuses, for example:

War - You could add a mechanic by which PVP would actually net XP by which to level or award some form of tokens (like emblems in Wow) as currency
Peace - You could increase PVE/Quest XP increased by X% or add more money/better loot drops

Once War is established, then it will continue until one side racks up more "points" which could consist of several activities including but not limited to:
* PvP Quests
* PvP Kills
* Buildings destroyed
* Objectives taken
* Territories taken
* Battlegrounds won

The winning side of the War would be granted a series of bonuses that could consist of:

* XP
* PvP Experience/Honor
* Gold
* Achievements/Appearance only gear

If Peace is established PvP can only be performed in PvP areas (ala wow) until the metric is hit again (which should be set high enough that several days or even a week will pass regardless of activity before a new vote for war is presented.

Something like this will allow the server to determine the game mechanics and it would be rather cool to have servers in different states.

Straight up voting would fail.  Imagine if you implement this in EvE, the PvE masses would vote down War every time.  It wouldn't even be close especially with PvE rewards for Peace.

Additionally what do players who are only interested in War do during Peace, and vies versa?   It would seem you are asking them to log out during the time the voting doesn't favor them.

Yeah, it seems like you're trying to address some perceived problem with PvP rulesets except I have no idea what that problem is. Assuming your game has multiple servers, how is having a PvP server for PvPers and a PvE server for PvEers any worse than having a single schizophrenic server type?

And wouldn't the community naturally divide itself into war-all-the-time and peace-all-the-time servers anyway?

Peace mode would allow PvP in contested areas, ala WoW in its current state on PvP servers so there would be plenty of PvP still. However if a War state was declared then all hell breaks loose, towns can be taken, no safe zones, etc.

At its most peaceful state the PvP would be on par with most "PvP" servers in say WAR or WOW

Some of the most fun ive had playing a game of any genre was a FFA pvp mud. Gear could confer an almost insurmountable advantage if it was stacked properly. Truly unique items had to be "fed" frags to be retained by the wielder. If they were not used after a duration of time they poofed back to the mob they were tagged to.  But it created an entirely self contained ecosystem of content. You never ran out of content because the gear circulated around the playerbase. A complete noob could luck out and get a set of gear they would otherwise have no chance to attain. And even the strongest character could easily lose everything.

Reacquiring gear was not very difficult lots of the moderate powered stuff could be attained by a single person or duo. The top tier stuff required a fairly sizeable group to get. No levels attached to gear any level character could use anything but there was hardcaps on stats depending on level. After level 50 you advanced in level through a potion tagged to a certain zone. Level 51 required this place and so fourth. You could lose levels which actually helped keep some of the content active.

Frags were divided between everyone in the killers group with strict group caps to prevent zerging. Lots of AoE effects that would nuke any player regardless of race not in the casters group, that kind of restricted a random person trying to vulture in on a corpse or kill. I am not certain if this can be recreated with a modern MMO playerbase (so many people) but i will be all over an EVE style game with humanoid avatars running around. Able to use so much more of your resources on refining your game when you dont have to spew out a constant stream of PVE content. Maybe even afford a decent GM to player ratio to enforce rules and such. Lets hope WoD offers something along these lines.

Good to know that while you kids were busy buttfucking each other in muds I was busy putting bullets in people heads. So is there any pvp ideas for the kids who didn't spend there early years playing the geekiest form of gaming known to man or at the very least not nostalgic about doing so?

Does playing a P&P RPG count? :awesome_for_real:  I'm curious as to how well a pvp game built on the premise of political infighting (assassination, gang warfare, industrial sabotage) rather than global conflict and open world gank squads (Warcraft, Warhammer, DAoC, Darkfall, Conan) would work.

Basic Premises:

• Periphery "safe" zones are for lowbies
• The big city hub(s) are for endgame (a single massive one would be best, but that might create congestion issues)
• Crime / Guard response similar to Grand Theft Auto or Assassin's Creed (breaks up pvp action as it escalates, encourages quick raids)
• The major player-created guilds/factions/houses are allowed to purchase large housing in the city, lesser guilds get lesser housing in the city and large housing in the hinterlands
• Guilds can buy up properties and businesses within their area of influence, which handle crafting (any player-performed crafting would be to create high-quality stuff)
• Businesses create NPC's which deliver excess goods + money to their owners, they pay protection money if they fall into the "turf" of another faction
• Properties/businesses can be targets for theft/extortion/burglary above by a party they are not owned by and not paying for protection
• Formal systems for selling your own guild's info to others (what's getting raided next, for example), to encourage intrafaction drama
• Limits on /whisper type chat, which along with information trading encourage hideouts and clubhouses (and infiltration efforts by opponents)
• Fast travel nearly everywhere. (carriages/taxi's run routes along the city coordinated so that every major point has one stopping every ~30 seconds, when a person uses fast travel they are instantly ported into the carriage/taxi next to arrive at that point)

Yeah, it's pretty Eve-style hardcore with a dash of Grand Theft Auto.  Works best in a medieval or modern setting, may work (with modifications) as a White Wolf / World of Darkness type game.

Mud's are the lowest of the low as far as geekdom is concerned, but P&P RPG's? Damn you must have been stuffed head first in a few lockers when you was a kid.

As far as the idea, I'm getting pretty sure that simulating gang/turf warfare isn't as fun as shooting people in the head, though that's just my personal preference. You neglected to mention a pve portion of the game which you will most likely need otherwise your going to head into never before seen problems that were quite obvious if you stepped into the shoes of the player. And your idea will work relatively decently the further you get away from fire balls and two edged swords.

You really are an asshole.  Posting in the Game Design thread like its a Politics thread is a cry for attention.  So there, you have your attention.  Now can you shut up until you have something to add?

Geez does randomly calling people assholes come from personal experience taking it in that area? Or are you mad that I didn't find the time before internet consoles enjoyable. Or is it both  :drill:

There were a shitton of stoners, punks, and emo kids at my school who played D&D with the completely socially incapable, and a friend got a Vampire: the Masquerade manual off of a metalhead and conned me into GM'ing it.  He really should have gotten the Hunter supplement, because fuck vampires.  Also, fuck retarded dice rolling systems, no I'm not going to ask people to LARP just because you couldn't design a system that doesn't require multiple dice rolls White Wolf, fuck off.


Shooting in the head is hard to do on an internet connection, there's a reason shooters are usually small-scale.  Likewise, I have the most terrible internet connection known to man, so I tend to think bandwidth a lot when cultivating my neckbeard, which usually means WoW-style combat.  In the same vein, double-edged swords would be fine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars), though spells would be a bit of an immersion breaker.

PvE could mostly be tacked on as a supplement to PvP with assassinate this councilman / judge / guard captain / witness type missions (note: also needs formal system for mercenaries and contract killers) (EDIT: systems of [fines / imprisonment] for characters caught after crimes would make for interesting PvE encounters involving prison breaks or sabotaging justice and would encourage alts).  Unless you mean DIKU-style PvE and loot, which can mostly fuck right off because catering too heavily to that sort of shit killed Warhammer.  However, for that particular fix you could have [rebels / bandits] hiding in an instanced [cave / dungeon / mile-fort / camp] out in the countryside, or alternatively in portions of the [sewers / catacombs] under the city.

And speaking of neckbeards, enjoy:

(http://images.wowstead.com/1590/75.jpg)

(Courtesy of Squirrel of the Very Hairy Man Guild (http://vhmg.wowstead.com/), best Guild Master ever)

EDIT: The T-shirt image is a tad big, check out the webpage, it's pretty awesome.

 :uhrr:

DLRiley, nobody cares about you or your phony war. Go EMO about it in politics.

Clearly i was talking about first person shooters but thx for the troll.

But then your statement becomes so moronic as to almost make one dizzy. People were giving you too much credit.

The more I play PvP mmorpgs, the more I realize that basics of PvP design are not understood . #1 and #5 seem to be the worst offenders.

If you are designing PvP for your mmorpg, feel free to send me PM and I will be more than happy to provide you with feedback.

World War 2 Online is still one of the best examples actually in my opinion.  And they do 1 and 5 well.  The biggest problem with that game though is that the learning curve is a little tough (though actually not so bad unless you want to be in the air force) and most people don't like the slow pacing of a sim.

Also, hello to this thread after two years, but its probably worth revisiting, what with Planetside 2 supposedly coming.  I still think the biggest problem with PvP is that someone has to lose, and in an MMO there is more to lose than in a random pub match of Call of Duty or Halo.  Most people simply don't want to lose that much, and since humans seem more interested in not losing than in winning, I think they just get turned off the game entirely.

It's been a few years since I last posted in this thread and I've done some thinking. My obsession with the necessity of winning was based on the framework the MMO had established: PvE is about constant winning. With that in mind, many of the problems you mention come sharply into focus. Even playing field? PvE takes place in a playing field wildly sloped in the player's favor. Objectives to fight over? In PvE, objectives are places to exploit and discard on one's way past them. So I've come to believe that most of the difficulties with MMO PvP are based on player expectations created by the Skinner box model these games have adopted.

Why did they adopt it? The game itself isn't much fun. With a Skinner box and disposable objectives, it doesn't need to be. Complex game dynamics are difficult to design and balance... simple quests and conquerable content, considerably less so. For the former every possible interaction must be examined, for the latter it's just a yes or no question: Will the player beat this easily enough?

What keeps me coming back in a multiplayer FPS or RTS is my effort to analyze my own failures and to consider alternate options. That, at least as much as its Free to Play nature, is why I stuck with Guild Wars so long. In addition to improving my basic hand-eye coordination and combat situational awareness, there was always one more build to try. With TF2 it was a matter of figuring out the specifics of map layout and the particulars of timing and aiming shots. Tacticle depth rather than breadth. Either is fine.

That is what the MMOs are missing. Combat maps just aren't that interesting, gameplay dynamics aren't designed to reward much in the way of practice, and players are used to stomping casually across the enemy masses by pushing the same three buttons in roughly the same order. When PvP provides neither Skinner box rewards (wins) nor uniquely educational ones (tactics), there's no good reason to stick around.

I'm not sure that creating successful Skinner box PvP is possible, much less actually worthwhile.

For PvP its actually called sandbox (for 'sand in your vagina box', and no I am not kidding).

Most dedicated PvPers want game as open-ended as possible, story, quests and so on only detract from this experience. Crafting is generally liked, but only because it adds resources to fight over and allows for "full loot" design that most prefer. Yes, it is very niche, but don't assume that everyone is permanently perverted by DIKU cloning that is/was going for last decade or so. Now, beauty of PvP content that while PvPers prefer all these things, most are content with less than full package. You also don't need to design as much new content, because "the other guy" learns, adapts and generally will do everything to be as hard as possible to kill.

Two potential paradoxes there:
If PvPers want a game as open-ended as possible, don't fixed objectives turn them off?
If they don't have to design new content, why are PvP MMOs constantly tinkering with power levels?

Ideal scenario is something along these lines:

Clan A builds a mine. This mine comes online and starts producing resources. Clan B shows up and takes over the mine. Clan A destroys the mine to deny Clan B control of the mine.

Less ideal scenario:

Clan A takes control over static mine. Clan B shows up and takes over the mine. Clan A shows up and takes over the mine.

Bad scenario:

Mine exists, you can temporarily control it, but you can't practically maintain control of it unless you sit and guard it 24/7. You also can't destroy it.

Worst case scenario:

The mine is in safe area and you cannot attack other players using it unless you declare clan war on them.


Incompetence. As a designer of PvP title your concerns are a) stop exploits and cheats to ensure fair playing field b) balance the game to the best of your abilities c) (optional) add more objectives/ways to facilitate conflict.

I think the problem is shoe horning PvP into games which are based on that model as well.  I think the better idea is to take successful PvP games and try to figure out how to make that into an MMO, not try to successful MMO games and make them into PvP games.

I liked Garrot's recent interview, I don't necessary agree with him, but I think he has a point when he talked about non-combatant roles.


Wait a second... non-combatant roles? This thread is about PvP!


Well, since we are talking about how to build a PvP game we might as well look at the whole picture.  I really mean #11 "Segregate PvP+ and PvP-, there should be no PvP- players around PvP fights", if you take one thing, make sure it is this point. ... BUT! This does not mean do not include PvP- activities into your "hardcore PvP sandbox title". Here is dirty little secret - even 100%+ Bartle's killers don't necessary want to PvP all the time. As long as you tie these activities in coherent way into PvP you are only adding depth to PvP conflict. Crafting is great way to introduce 'PvP-' activity into otherwise PvP title, but you don't need to limit yourself to crafting.

Here is how crafting can interact with PvP:

You PvP for control points that produce resources, then you sell them on global auction to highest bidder. If you restrict trade system in any way guilds will internalize crafting roles, you want to aim for as open, hassle free trading system as possible. Crafters operate via resource market system, buying resources at one rate and producing consumable goods at a markup and don't have to engage in PvP. For extra twist - make global auction take heavy cut (30% or so), but then offer crafters an option to open local vendors that sell their own goods. Bonus points - add a role to transporting, while global AH would always deliver your resources/good worldwide, some players might want to try transporting resources themselves to get that 30% cut AH would take.

Can you think of any MMOs that aren't based on the Skinner box model? They all seem to involve one form or another of grinding in order to buy better stuff. Only EVE has eliminated the necessity of foozle whacking (experience is functionally based on the age of the account, and ISK grinding is based largely on politics). Yet even there a huge number of people must still spend mindless hours mining and ratting.

LEVEL UP! is kind of built into the gaming framework. It's a fantastic motivator. What replaces that?

Fun?  No seriously, there are millions of people putting in just as much time to Call of Duty, harness whatever is driving those people.  I REALLY don't think its the tacked on leveling system. (Did modern warfare even have one?). 

Moving away from levels is enough, you want to keep character advancement or reputations become meaningless. Having reputation is very important aspect of any PvP game, via player reputation you can get into player justice, accountability and all other social aspects that make community possible. So, no character advancement = no meaningful community = persistence falls apart.

As to character advancement - per-use character skill gains is nearly ideal system (if you can solve macoing) for a PvP title. More you use something better your character becomes at doing it.  You should be able to compete from early on, and can specialize to get to viable, yet narrow-focus, competitiveness.  This way character advancement is mostly about getting more options, and not necessary more raw power associated with level-based system.

I'm not sure how the kind of character advancement you are talking about has anything to do with reputation. 

To my mind, GW PvP skill purchasing is nearly prefect.  Buying any one particular competitive skill set is not difficult.  But buying them all is a rather large investment.

Here's the PvP idea I thought of today: non-consensual PvP based on social relationships.

In addition to the "friend" relationship that's in every game, you now have another: "enemy". The player is involved in non-consensual PvP with their enemies, the friends of their enemies, and the enemies of their friends (clans work the same way).

To me it seems both meaningful and fair. Full open PvP (ala UO) does not work. The two common ways to make it work are to limit it by area (Eve) or time (old SWG) or both (WoW). The way I described retains the excitement of being vulnerable to PvP any time anywhere, but solves the griefing problem through social means: no one is friends or enemies with griefers, so they can't participate.

It's been years since I've played an MMO, but the most enjoyable PvP I participated in was against known enemies (individuals or clans). If you base your conflict around realm vs realm, or all vs all, these players have no real relationship with each other, griefing will be a huge problem. By basing conflict around social relationships that actually exist in the game, you'd get more fun less grief.

This also gives you new ways to add meaning to PvP, but indirectly, by adding meaning to friend/enemy relationships. Say you have to be friends to trade. Well I know schild makes the best weapons, It would take me forever to find ones as good...BUT he's enemies with half of the PennyArcade clan, and I realllly don't want them on my ass.

Do you choose enemies as you choose your friends, or do have them assigned to you?

Do you have one enemy per friend? If I have five friends and you have fifty, I'm not inclined to participate. If participation is mandatory, I'm not inclined to play your game - it would be systemized ganking.

How difficult would it be to unfriend or unenemy someone? I imagine friend requests in this system are a matter of dual consent, are enemies the same? Do you get a dialogue box when somebody wants to make an enemy of you? If you're being attacked by the friend of one of your enemies, and one of his friends is healing her... can you attack that friend? Can that friend not heal her at the moment? What if somebody else is attacking her while she attacks you and that person is an enemy to both she and her friend but totally unrelated to you. Can she be healed under those circumstances? If, on the other hand, friend/enemy of enemy/friend goes many levels deep what happens when the relationships interact such that somebody is both friend and enemy to you?

What makes you think that griefers aren't anybody's friends (or enemies)? Outside of the most absurd and extreme behavior, griefing is largely in the eye of the beholder... and there are moments of weakness when just about everybody feels a bit of grief is appropriate.

I like the idea, mind you, I'm just not sure it's either as easy or as straightforward a solution as you imply.

You choose enemies just as you do friends, there isn't a ratio or anything like that.

If you have 5 friends and I have 50, then yeah, maybe you don't want to be enemies with me. Your friend/enemy relationships are a manifestation of social power.

It's not mandatory. If you have no friends or enemies, you are not participating in PvP.


Right, both are dual-consent, like facebook. You'd want an X hour cooldown after changing someone's status, so you can't abuse it.

I hadn't considered the healing situation. SWG dealt with it with a Temporary Enemy Flag -- the unrelated healer would be attackable for 5 minutes. It's not perfect but it could work here.

Alternatively, you could expand the circle of PvP-eligible players dynamically. That is, suppose normally ONLY my enemies are PvP-on. If one of my enemies is around, THEN their friends are also PvP-on (whereas if I just saw their friend normally they would be PvP-off). If one of my enemies is around, and one of their friends is around, then that friend's friends are also PvP-on, etc. That way you can still have large fights with people many degrees away from you, but those people couldn't attack you normally. Yeah I think I like this way much better.

You could be running missions with some random player, get back into town to find that your friend's friend is enemies with their friend's friend and now you're all duking it out.

Griefing certainly wouldn't go away. But the really bad ones, players that are primarily there to grief, I think would be ostracized. The griefing that does happen would have a subtle difference: when a stranger ganks you, you get mad at the game. When someone you know ganks you,  you get mad at them.

Quote is not edit  :why_so_serious:

So do I, but it's a combinatorial explosion of database interactions every time somebody new arrives on the scene... and it's still pretty easy to circuvent. I can imagine, for example, a whole class of middleman mules. Characters who maintain friendships with both crafters and their customers, for example, then only log on in order to safely pass goods around what would otherwise be enemy blockades.

You are wrong.

How so? Why would you opt-in to being enemies with a known griefer or their friends? I don't think griefers are all that involved with the community outside of their circle of friends.


Performance issues can be worked around. It certainly wouldn't involve the database, your friend list would be cached when you login. It's just a matter of having a good algorithm to find the closest relationship (distance) between 2 players (nodes) in an area (graph)...A* would be a good start.

Sure there are ways to circumvent the system to avoid participating, but I don't see that as a big deal. It's much easier to not go into PvP zones, or to not turn your PvP flag on. You can use other rules to limit this if you wanted (eg you can't even equip items crafted by your enemies--don't like the idea, just an example)

I don't mean to be too negative here, I like the idea of this game, but I think you have just invented Street Fighter.

Player 1: Hey guy, you wanna be my enemy?
Player 2: Sure!
Player 1: Well grab a controller.

Not sure I follow...you just described the duel mechanic that most MMOs have, not this system.

I think you mean that players would be unwilling to mutually agree to be enemies. Have you been on an MMO forum before? :P

It's just a matter of adding meaning to friend/enemy relationships. Examples could be:

1. "Notoriety" is how many enemies you have, and how notorious they are. In order to gain favor with a powerful warlord, to be able to access his quests and items, you need to maintain a certain level of notoriety.

2. You could tie NPC factions into it. Think Freelancer. As you do missions for a certain faction (or against that faction's enemies), it becomes more friendly to you. Eventually its enemies become your enemies (both players and other factions).

I've been working hard the past week or so to get friendly with the Bounty Hunters. They have some of the coolest items (flamethrowers, poison darts). Now that I'm in, I realize that a ton of...less savory players love to prey on Bounty Hunters, it's an easy way to get friendly with all of the criminal factions. Do I embrace these new enemies, or turn my back on my new faction allies?

http://forums.somethingawful.com/

Can you expand on your point a bit? It's hard to know what you mean from 3 words and a link.

Open PvP means you can fight
1. Any time
2. Any where
3. Any one

Since this doesn't work in a game as asymmetrical as an RPG, you have to restrict 1 or more. Every MMO with PvP primarily uses #1 and #2. #3 is used, but generally only for lore purposes (Alliance vs Horde) and less for gameplay.

I'm describing a system that primarily restricts #3. I think you're arguing that this is too prone to griefing, I'm trying to find out why.

Here is distillation of this idea:  In PvP titles you want to be able to participate/contribute from Day 1 or have very fast character advancement. You don't want to have character advancement so fast that you can easily reroll to avoid your reputation.

Are you aware of EVE, SB, DF?


Your idea won't fly because it does not appeal to any play style. PvE- have not interest in ever getting attacked, PvP+ players are not interested in restrictions on who they can attack and do not want to have PvP- players interfering with their PvP.

Indeed. Wrong BIG TIMES. Any PvP system that has "safe outs" will be plagued with griefers that will use PvP+ elements to grief and PvP- elements to escape retribution. Both full PvP and no PvP system have SIGNIFICANTLY less issues with griefers.  


Actually both griefers and PvPers are A LOT more organized and networked than your typical PvE- player, because you have to in order to succeed. Additionally griefers are also PvPers (but not other way around), you have to be decent at PvP to use it as a medium for griefing or you get your teeth kicked in and publicly humiliated.

SB and DF failed.
EvE is not open PvP.

Start your own thread if you want to discuss viability of open-PvP in mmorpgs and proselytize DIKU kill-10-rats cloning. This thread is about rules/implementation of PvP.

Sinij, what do you think about something like World War 2 Online?  Is that something you would consider "Open PvP" or is the genre too dissimilar to what you are talking about?  I think for gameplay reasons the game isn't very popular, but do you think something like that (24/7 faction based war, no PvE content, just fighting for control of the map, when one side takes control of a critical % (90% in WW2O), the map resets), is a viable choice, or is that really talking about something different than what you are after?

My opinion on WW2OL tainted by flying tanks and SirBruce, so take it with a grain of salt. With that being said, I don't see how WW2OL can differentiate itself from FPS on a very large dynamic map. If anything FPS will eventually move toward that model.

Mmorpgs, when distilled down to core, boil down to character/guild advancement, and without this basic element you have something else. Think of it as build up/tear down kind of gameplay, if you just tear things down without building them up first you are not part of genre. For this reason I don't consider GW, DIablo2 or WW2OL to be mmorpgs.

Now, doesn't mean you can't have good PvP engagement in these games, often quite the opposite, but lets not confuse this discussion by muddying up the lines.

Thats a fine answer, but it does mean I don't think I have much to add to this thread.  To my mind the future of PvP in MMOs lies outside of the RPG genre.

Well that's easy then. Just stop trying to appeal to anybody who isn't interested in kicking other peoples' sandcastles.

Make it clear in all the promotional material that unless you get a special thrill when you destroy something that another person cares about, this game really isn't for you. Unless you're willing to see your own sandcastles kicked, pissed upon, and mocked just on the whisper of a promise that one day you'll get that special thrill yourself... unless that thrill drives you to the point that you come to relish the fear and anxiety that risky sandcastle building brings, you should probably leave your money in your pocket and walk away.

Then accept that only a few hundred people will play the game on a regular basis so it won't make money unless it has a budget of less than $10,000 and can be updated and maintained by one or two people in their off time while they maintain regular jobs. Try to imagine how unpopular Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress would be if random assholes (with better gear, more sophisticated skills, and a vested interest in exploiting every bug the software provides) could come into your game and wreck your shit.

Figuring how to make an MMO anybody will want to play when you only have $10,000 is a much bigger challenge than coming up with a specific ruleset that will appeal to the sandcastle kickers. They're just in it for the thrill.

This thread is about a) how do you design engaging PvP ruleset b) how do you correctly integrate it into your mmorpg. I mis-spoke when I stated "open PvP ruleset", I think in terms of "open PvP" and personally prefer and play open PvP mmorpgs, but that doesn't mean you can't integrate my PvP ideas into your Plain Vanilla DIKU. It will be harder, because many fundamental DIKU designs contradict PvP goals, but you can always settle on 'decent' instead of aiming for 'perfect'. PvP is PvP regardless of how and when it happens. Style of mmorpg is just a setting. As Malakili pointed out, mmorpg-style PvP can and does happen outside what I'd call traditional mmorpg settings. For example GW has decent mmorpg-style PvP, but I wouldn't even call GW a mmorpg!

Please don't try to drag the thread into different direction. I am more than willing to debate you on viability of open PvP mmorpgs, but such discussion is outside of the scope of this thread.

Allrighty, let's simplify:
1) Even playing field. (This is included in "Skill based".)
2) Skill based.
3) Slow, thoughtful action rather than twitch.
4) Limit focus fire. (Required by the lack of forced grouping and the slow, thoughtful action.)
5) Meaningful objectives.
6) Meaningful logistics. (Truly meaningful objectives include logistics.)
7) Limit the severity of losses.
8) Many small armies rather than a few huge ones.
9) Don’t instance.
10) No forced grouping.
11) Segregate PvP+ and PvP-. (Ideally into separate games. Problem solved.)
12) Death shouldn't overly delay fighting. (Part of limiting loss severity.)
13) Everyone should be able to contribute to the war effort from the moment they pick up the game.

Then I'll bunch up 2 and 3 into: Slow, skill based combat.
5, 7 and 13 become: A constant struggle for meaningful objectives.
8, 9, and 10: Unpredictable skirmishes between an array of shifting factions.

Horizontal rather than vertical character advancement with guild-based objectives operating as a "build up and tear down" framework within an open world.

That's the basics you want to work from?

I guess you haven't heard of Something Awful and/or goons before.  Try and meet up with them ingame in EVE and see if you can get an invite to their guild.

OK, I'll bite again even though I said I was done.  I think the new number three contains a really important word that needs to be discussed "unpredictable."  I think there is an extremely fine line here.  On the one hand, unpredictability is needed in the struggle for meaningful objective (surprise attacks, etc).  On the other hand, I think the day to day experience of the game DOES need to be predictable.  For example, when I was playing Darkfall for a while (a game which I think was a fairly decent implementation of PvP), some days there just wouldn't be anything interesting going on.  Thats why I ultimately stopped playing.  At its best, the game was quite fantastic, but it didn't consistently hit that note, and that is something that I think MMO PvP like we are talking about needs to address.

If we deal with any kind of character advancement and loot system advancement you can have skill based at the top of competition and power gap at the bottom. Idea behind "even playing field" is that even new players should be able to contribute in some way.


Not necessary. You can have player aim thier ranged abilities, this isn't popular choice but focus fire becomes difficult due to friendly fire and line of sight issues. If you have tab-based targeting, then you need to give players enough "outs" so when they are getting focus fired they can get out alive once or twice.


I very much agree that logistics need to play a role, unfortunately when you get down to your typical player they don't want to have anything to do with planning and execution, they just want to pew-pew. I think you need to be careful in implementing logistics to not design small scale skirmish PvP out of the game. Also keep in mind that higher your 'gring'/'PvP' ratio, less players will be willing to PvP.


Not necessary, just like your traditional PvE games (e.g. WoW) instanced away PvP your PvP game can instance away PvE. Scope of "Segregate PvP+ and PvP-" is very limited, just don't have PvE- players around PvP+ fights. Rest of your game can be as hardcore or as carebear as you want to.



Can't agree more.

I'll take them point by point without Sir Brucing:

Why include a power gap at all? Players generally seem upset when they find out that the game they started playing turns out to be different than the endgame. Vertical character and loot enhancement is precisely what I thought you were trying to avoid. Yes, the roles of starting players will necessarily be different from the roles of experienced ones... but what the starting players do should be teaching them the basics of their later tasks. For the same reason, I think it's ill advised to try to jam PvP+ and PvP- folks into the same environment: Everybody should be playing the same game.

I think you have it backwards on logistics. They are precisely what implements small scale skirmish PvP. The large scale stuff is at the objectives, the small stuff runs back and forth between them. You'll get more variety of pew pew wandering the roads hijacking shipments than you will manning the battlements or laying seige.

Focus fire exists because players are usually 100% healthy and effective until their last hitpoint is gone, and healers can restore hitpoints to full in a matter of seconds. "Everybody shoot that one guy" only exists in that bizzare sort of environment. It is the opposite of slow, thoughtful action. It also makes ungrouped players practically useless, since they have to kill someone in less time than a whole team can kill them or they have had no effect at all. The long range glass cannons and stealth based insta-kill classes that has produced are cures worse than the disease.

This is actually very good point. How do you see reducing effectiveness would work? Doing less damage? Longer cooldowns? Move slower?

In terms of basic focus fire mitigation, I liked the idea of lowering melee damage the more melee are engaged with a single target (they can't get a good swing all crammed together like that) and frequently interrupting long range attacks when friendly melee is engaged with the same target ("You might hit [whomever]!")

More important than that, however, I'd like to see more things that make characters less effective without actually killing them. Most of that is about making healing difficult and slow, especially the removal of debuffs. A player stuck at half health and crippled for several minutes is going to have to be extra careful and focus on less strenuous combat roles. A single player can charge a group and debuff three people, for which she sacrifices her life, because that little bit of extra difficulty will make their whole group less effective when the rest of the ambush springs. In a PvP game, "Ha, I'll bet they WISH they were dead" is a feeling that fits right in with the sandcastle kicking mentality. What's more heroic than limping, bleeding and half-blind, into a last stand against an equally battered enemy? At some point even a costly but successful retreat becomes a win.

In PvE, where killing is just pushing the paddle for the next treat, anything that retards or interrupts the flow is a tedious annoyance. In order to slow things down and up tactical consideration, however, it's important that damage matter. If people just want to kneel behind a wall for five seconds they can play Gears of War.

Alright, but what about "just dying" to wipe debuffs then jumping "fresh" into the fight? Also are you advocating heal-free PvP model?

I'll tout WW2 Online again then, you've got a stamina meter that controls how much you can do things like sprint.  If you get shot (and it doesn't kill you) your stamina only regenerates to half way, making you a TON less mobile.   Again a lot of the mechanics you are guys are talking about sound like they'd work better outside an RPG setting though.  Limping around in an RPG (aka being snared) feels extremely shitty and unfun most of the time especially because your abilities all have a relatively short range.  If I get shot in WW2O and I can't effectivelymove anymore, I can at least hide in a bush and see if I can get some kills or defend that way.  In an RPG that seems less viable to me.

I think that with doing enough damage "you might as well killed them, but they still can somewhat walk" is interesting idea. We typically see 0-100% health, where at 0% you "die" and anything else you "alive". Maybe adding more states, like "injured", "almost dead" with some hassle (resurrect-like) isn't such a bad idea. This doesn't even require altering how healing works, just make transitioning back to lesser damaging states cannot be easily done in combat.

Then it doesn't have to be limping, it could be an increase in cooldowns or activation costs. Or, like WW2O, a decrease the size of a stamina or mana bar. The point isn't the specific method, it's the principle. Similarly I don't care if PvP is "heal-free" so much as I care that healing be designed differently than it is for the Fighting Elite Monsters model. Perhaps every player has some kinds of activated abilities which reduce or evade damage in combat, and then actual slow, involved healing abilities to use in safety afterwards. I just don't think it should be automatic.

I absolutely approve of jumping "fresh" into the fight when you die, but there should be costs to that as well. There might be a "rez sickness" debuff, and maybe the more deaths you suffer within a particular time period, the more debilitating it becomes. Alternately, you might have to temporarily rez as a different character, or (as I brainstormed upthread) the PC equivalent of a trash mob. Zero consequence deaths don't mesh well with persistance, especially in a world of sandcastle kickers.

I'll take mercy on CadetUmfer here. SomethingAwful is a comedy website with some really active forums, and the forum posters there call themselves the 'forum goons'. Some of them game a lot, and form guilds in various games based around being on the SA forums, these guilds usually have some variation of 'goon' in the name. They are known for being extremely fond of griefing other players when they can. In WOW, the Malganis server was around 90% horde for a while because the horde-side goon guild would attack and corpse camp so much that Alliance basically abandoned the server. In EVE, aside from ordinary stuff like ganking people, they routinely invite new players to their corp so that they can rob and kill them more easily.

They demonstrate conclusively that 'griefers will be ostracized' doesn't actually happen in real games - they simply show up with their own community and start collecting tears. There are other griefer communities out there, but they're the best known since they're large enough to mess with a WOW server population or control large chunks of EVE space.

The best decision any developer could do is invite Goons to alpha and beta their game then preemptively ban them from live. You have to understand than for such players griefing is end game, and they are not shy about organizing around it, like your large raiding guild would.

Sadly this is not well understood by developers or gamers, and frequently method of delivery (be it PvP, commerce... you name it) gets bad reputation, not the people behind it. Ask your typical UO vet, they will rant and rave that open PvP was root of all evil, when in reality it was nothing more but delivery mechanism.

If your first and last solution to griefing is to manually ban griefers, you need to continually dedicate resources to policing and you need to deal with users who are unhappy about being banned arbitrarily.  It is not a solution that scales well.

If you design a building and it falls down, you don't get to say "oh, it wasn't my design's fault, it would have been fine if there wasn't any stupid GRAVITY."  Griefers are an inevitable part of any massively multiplayer game.  Plan for them.

Why would you want to build a game, then turn away hundreds (maybe thousands) of subscriptions from enthusiastic players before it even releases? You're not going to get rid of griefers that way, hell you probably won't even get rid of the goons (it's not hard to use a fake name and proxy service to create an account). BTW, the goons are big on griefing people within game systems, but as far as I've ever heard they don't have any more association with hacks and other cheating than any other large group. Killing and camping on WOW PVP servers is what those servers were made for, and scamming people in EVE is actively encouraged by the developers. Some people get confused because a lot of encouraged Eve behavior is bannable in other games.

I 100% agree, you can't design system that can read intent, don't even try it, and you don't have resources to truly police your game with humans that can understand intent. This is interesting sub-topic, if you create separate thread about it I'd gladly share my opinions.

If you can easily identify griefers (i.e. bunch of them are dumb enough to all play under one tag) there is absolutely no reason not to get rid of them. Whatever they bring in revenue is by far offset by damage they do to your title.

Thanks Pantastic.

What I was really asking Sheepherer is, if I can simply tag you as neutral (or, not tag you as enemy), how you can possibly grief me? This isn't WoW, where you pick a side and now you can be attacked by anyone not on that side, or EVE where the only sides are what the players decide. This is a dynamic system based on social connections between players. If I have no social connection with a Goon, they cannot attack me. The absolute worst thing that could happen here is to unknowingly decide to be enemies with a Goon, or friends with enemies of a Goon, get jumped by them, then switch my status back and never think about it again.

If you make a server where everyone is involuntarily flagged for PVP all the time, how on earth does it make sense to ban people who join the game with the intent of pummeling the opposite faction? Why are you bothering to create PVP servers if you're just going to ban anyone who's focus is on playing PVP and who's plan is to engage in the unique gameplay that type of server offers? If you're building a big PVP 'trust no one' game where there's danger from every mysterious stranger, but preemtively axing any strangers who might be a danger, you're working against yourself.

From all that I've read about them, the Goons just aggressively PVP within the rules of the game they get into, for example I've never heard of them scamming people in WOW (where it's against the rules), just in EVE (where it's actively encouraged by the developers and considered a feature of the game by players).

Penny Arcade had a bunch of exploiters in it in WAR.  Good luck with your guilt be association banning strategy. Truth is you have an axe to grind the the Goons.

If you have no transparency in your social connections and their implications they'll be in trade chat paying dozens of your enemies to friend them, and dozens of your friends to enemy them, so that you cannot establish which one is the offender.  If you do have transparency in your social connections (a little social connection flow chart, for example) they'll datamine it to find all of your friends and enemies, and then declare war on you through obfuscated chains of social connections, like six friends of friends of yours being the enemies of a friend of a friend of an enemy of a friend of of an enemy of a goon mule character who isn't actually in their guild so it is not readily apparent that you've declared war on the goons.  Granted, if an enemy of an enemy is not implicitly a friend you have to remove two connections there, but I think you probably get the gist.

If their fun in the game is fucking with you, it is hard to underestimate the lengths they will go to in order to fuck with you. The more upset you get when they fuck with you (for example, the harder you try not to get fucked with) the more fun it is. If you abandon the friend/enemy lists alltogether, they win and get to fuck with somebody else. They do not care about time or money, only tears.

The only way to beat the griefers is to make the game more rewarding than the grief. You cannot depend upon your players to ignore them until they go away.

Again, this topic has nothing to do with PvP rules discussion. Start your "how to combat griefers" thread if you want to continue discussion.

Can I please get a moderator to den/politics off-topic stuff? Thank you.

I disagree. There is nothing more rewarding to griefers than cause grief. Please start new thread to continue this discussion.

I think this is interesting idea that deserves more attention.

Way I see it works (lets assume generic healing model) is that your character has multiple "dead" stages - Injured, Gravely Injured, Nearly Dead, Dead. Once you drop past % of your total health (stay below x% for y seconds) your total health is reduced, you gain set of debuffs and cannot be practically healed up while still in combat. At the same time, out of combat recovery should be fairly trivial.

With this model you can give players lots of self-healing abilities without turning PvP into unending healing or 1-shots. You can also use this model to limit focus-fire, that is automatically trigger damage cap/reduction if player drops 2 states within X seconds, making it much harder, but not impossible, to drop someone 100-0. Additionally add "dead countdown", giving players 1-2 moves before they finally drop dead.

The problem with this is that it sounds incredibly contrived and complicated and frankly...not all that fun in practice.  You would also need a way to judge that state of a lot of people very quickly.  This could probably be overcome with some good design/ui decisions, but I don't think it would be trivial.  Still, I'm finding it hard to participate in this discussion very much because I think most of my design ideas for a PvP MMO are incompatible with what you are trying to tease out, and you've already asked people to stop when they've done that.

You made a statement that you think a PVP game developer should preemptively ban goons from their game, I responded directly to it mostly asking 'why would you do that', and now you're complaining that my questioning your declaration is off-topic for the thread? If you don't want a topic to turn up in a thread, you probably shouldn't bring the topic up yourself.

Heroes and followers, permadeath idea

We had this in wurm. We have recently had to temper them greatly because in practice they were never used. They became coveted toon alts that were stowed away until the side they were on had no way of loosing ( Thus zero risk of loosing them, because in wurm it can take months even years of play to get the option to convert ).

Currently, they now have requirements to gain a certain number of kills and points or they will De-Champ. This was an attempt to get them out on the field or loose the status. It has resulted in less of them over all. Jury is still out however if a balance has been found.

Of course the player base hated all of the change.

Reference link. (http://www.wurmonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Champion_player#Champion_points)

Another thing to keep in mind is that it usually takes WAY long to "build" something than it does to destroy it. People hate spending hour and hours and hours and then being able to lose it in an afternoon.  I think evening out the time to gain and time to lose something would go a long way to helping make these games more "casual" friendly.  I think think erring on the side of short intervals instead of long ones is better.  When it takes a guild 3 months to build up their city and they can lose it in a day, thats problematic.  But you can't realistically make it take 3 months to take over a city either.  If it takes someone 20 hours to collect a set of gear, and then can lose in 5 seconds with one mental breakdown/mistake, thats also problematic.  I think making gains and losses much more frequent is a better approach.  I'd even be in favor of elimating gear gain/loss from PvP games in general, but thats almost a different discussion.  

Something like WW2O does this well.  

Towns are fought over.  They change hands regularly, sometimes several times a day for a single town if its an especially hot spot/important choke point on the map.  There is lot of action on the map even with a relatively low population game like that.  Make no mistake, which towns you own is vital to your success as a side, but the fact that they can be gained and lost in the order of hours makes it so that no single loss is devastating, and there is always another important and fun battle to jump into immediately.  At the same time, there are the long term goals of taking over areas of the map that give you several small towns from which to launch attacks on a major city etc, so there is a strategic aspect to it all as well.

I think this is far closer to the kind of game that would have the potential to be a popular PvP MMO title, if the gameplay was done in a more action oriented way.

I'm not sure how we could manage this while retaining a lot of RPG elements though.

Here is your #1 problem. "Months even years" is personal effort, when it should be GUILD/GROUP effort and GUILD/GROUP tool and GUILD/GROUP risk. By distributing risk you minimize backlash to any given player when they lose. Losing your own hero is inevitably quit-the-game sucks, losing guild hero (1/100th is yours) is not as big of a deal. Heroes should be expensive, but not in personal time. Plus reading your link it isn't clear what benefits such hero would provide to the group. If you make personally powerful character it will never get used (will be seen as expensive toy), if you make character that makes GROUP more powerful it will get used all the time.


Consider trying carrot instead of stick. Make "getting kills" more desirable. Also add some very visible "e-peen" list, maybe right on your front page, to showcase top-10 list for bragging rights. I personally dislike "time decay" approach, it ties you to the game too much (what about vacations, business travel, RL emergencies? please don't turn your game into a job).

I never heard about Wurm, but send me PM if you want my feedback on it. Is it open PvP?

I never said it was not a problem, quite sure we have many more than that :) I was simply adding some real info to the conversation.

Understood and appreciated. I think I need to emphasize "GROUP" aspect of it more strongly... maybe re-write of 2007 idea is due.

It could be arranged like a RTS build order or tech tree: As a guild "levels up" they gain access to more and more types of buildings and upgrades, but those buildings and upgrades can never be built until their pre-requisites are constructed in the current outpost. The long, hard "leveling" work is done defending outposts built of the basic structures your guild already has... but outposts themselves are roughly as quick to construct as they are to destroy.

A "higher level" outpost has a longer and more complicated sequence of construction, but its upgraded defenses make it slower and more complicated to dismantle. Or whatever. There could even be different "classes" and "builds" of outposts which would level seperately.

Full player looting, stat loss, slow skill gain, the ability to mail stolen shit to a mule character without getting a reputation/karma/notoriety hit on the mule, and equipment scarcity compete for being the most retarded ideas ever conceived in a pvp game.

Not a bad idea.

My take on build vs destroy is that it generally takes too little effort to destroy. If you had to wheel (or build) catapults every time you want to bust something up you'd see efforts much more balanced. Downside is that it will discourage PvP, but I am strong believer of "safe base" player towns. There are better avenues for PvP, such as resource control, that player city destruction. I also think burn-it-down should be last resort, taxing it, looting and pillaging it... all of that should come before complete destruction. Give player avenues to make a point other that to completely burn somebody down.

Focus fire seems to be a product of tab targetting. EVE seems really bad where all enemies appear on a list, and the other side targets alphabetically... other games where "tab" picks out the closest enemy are also pretty bad. Maybe "tab" should pick out an enemy player randomly in these games (picking out mobs could remain logical)?

Also as an aside, focus nuking is not a problem in Darkfall where there is manual aim. It has an important part in PvP, but it's difficult to be lethally accurate (target caller over voice com uses descriptions like "aim for ork by tree" or tracer spells to guide focus fire), and is used more for disruptive purposes (formation dispersal, disorientation, initiative) before more decisive phases of battle are joined.

Darkfall, where you have to aim your abilities FPS style, does not seem to have focus fire as a problem. At the same time Darkfall doesn't have good group combat. I personally prefer tab, simply because it allows you to focus on What To Do. Playing DF certainly made me appreciate 'tab' targeting system a lot, and I am veteran FPS person, so aiming isn't an issue.


Intentionally breaking system is never a good idea, you will frustrate players and they will still find workarounds. I still stand by "short immunity" and/or damage saturation solutions. Focus fire is only the problem when target doesn't get a chance to respond.

Being taxed, looted, and pillaged isn't more fun than being destroyed. It's less fun because it doesn't have a defined end. It's the point where the enemy team is farming you for honor kills by sitting outside the graveyard where you respawn rather than capturing the last flag. You have become a resource rather than a player.

Making outposts easy to construct but challenging to level up, and allowing those levels to persist after death, keeps the goals small and keeps the Achievers happy. If the enemy gets too powerful and focused you can change venues, or you can call it a night and go home with minimal risk.

Reposting from the griefing thread so we can continue the relevant discussion in the PvP ideas thread:

Seriously though.  I'm not saying I even disagree with you in principle from a design standpoint Sinij, but lets be realistic, how often to the most casual/bad players end up with those roles in MMOs so far?  You can't REALLY think that those 4 roles are going to be hugely fun, engaging and popular for/among the casual player base you are talking about, can you?  If all this is for a PvP title designed for a specific PvP crowd, then fine, you can get away with that. But in the context of a mainstream/popular/mass market PvP game, I can't imagine this actually working out.  This is the griefing thread now, so I'm going to copy/past this entire thing into the PvP discussion thread, since I think it actually fits there better.

Darkfall has great group combat... best part of the game is group pvp.

Darkfall has the worst group combat of any mmorpg I have ever played. 1v1 and 2v2 is fine, but anything above that quickly devolves into spamming nukes on people caught in bubbles. DF group combat is fundamental perversion of almost every rule of this thread.

I don't think you have played much high level Darkfall combat, or at least recently.

Forces that just try to spam out focus nukes are going to get chewed up by clans who know how to use other tactics. Destroyer infiltration, or full out mounted charges through ice storms will shred up someone using that kind of single minded doctrine.

Shot in the dark.

What if your character remained persistent in the gameworld when you log off. Meaning that your avatar will be viewable and killable by any player. Your avatar will be for all intent and purposes asleep and will not respond to being hacked in the face. Oh and there is perma death.

Then you will ether have most of your characters day old or you will have rotation of people playing couple characters 24/7. Assuming you could find people to play your game.

A game so hard core that the hard core will run away pissing themselves screaming, ironically leaving a more casual playerbase to flurish lolz. Its very simple social experiment, normal open world pvp games revolves around small powerblocks gaining early dominance by being the first people to organize while the unwashed masses deal with whatever contrived bullshit the devs thought you need to do in order to level breathing. There is no way for the unwashed masses to fight these power blocks, without joining a power block. But what if those power players were just as vulnerable as the noobs they slaughter in the day time? Powerblocks that are built at its core around friends/hardcore players that play at certain hours of the day, now have to rely on other Powerblocks or even a few unwashed masses to protect them during the their off time. Inherently who can you trust with your ultimate resource when your offline?

I say there is nothing really casual about open world (unless its play with yourself minecraft), just go as hardcore as the internet allows. Push the hard core over the edge and see what your left with, anything catering toward the few casuals interested won't hold them because its too damn safe for the hard core to be well hard core.

Sorry, I don't see how game revolving around punishing players can succeed. I also don't buy "casuals will play what hardcore find too hard", its all around broken logic.

Remember, when designing games you should try to provide fun and entertaining experience, not intentionally recreating Milgram experiments.

I'll level with you, there is nothing casual friendly about a game with full loot rubber stamped on the front. I can also say that a game like say Darkfall doesn't provide a "fun and entertaining experience" despite having a less draconian rule set than the one i stated. The fun and entertaining part is in the player community, or in better words actually being involved in one. Yet being involved in (using darkfall as an example again) the player community significantly enough requires immense amount of time on your end and commitment by the community in question, not because the "fun" of the game is found at the upper end of the power curve, but because the playing field rest sololy at that upper end and to even run away requires a retention killing amount of dedication for the players who aren't scared completely away from full loot but not willing to deal with 6 months of dedicated grind. (i read you darkfall post.)

My draconian rule simple evens the playing field or forces the player to take several steps to defend their most valued asset. Joe new player is just as likely to be ganked at the start (something that will happen anyway without making changes to the ruleset that will piss off the hardcore anyway) as he is to klill a level 20 in his sleep (and how many level 1 players can claim that in any game?).

You're not going to get much of a thrill killing someone in their sleep, even if you are 20 levels lower...

I think the importance of removing a high level from the game and taking his stuff would be interesting enough.

You are talking about survival game, not PvP. Goal of PvP title is to facilitate and encourage PvP, unlike survival game where PvP is elimination mechanism and is to be avoided at all costs.

Good enough for me.

The strategic layers needs to be dynamic.  Resources maps, terrain effects, and tech trees need to be constantly but predictably mutating.  This prevents players from having comfortable seat at the top.  Sure your empire is bad ass when void cannons and damage shields are available, but next week damage shields with be gone and void cannons won't have their AOE damage bonus. Should you invade your neighbor to get silent ore to build teleport nodes and vorpal weapons for you foot soldiers. Or should you expand your production of qi mana for binary armor and grappling claws. What about the enemy? They will be sitting on ton of rainbow cotton and having a nation of people with personal invisibility looking for revenge will be a bitch and a half.  Maybe we should try to raze their fields? Which objective is best? Can we handle all three without spreading ourselves too thin?

To elaborate current pvp titles work like a survival game anyway. Once enough bank is gathered and being camped, the only reason to pvp is to eliminate loosely defended bank you don't have in order to prevent the steam rolling. The keyword being loosely defended, once a side cements there advantage over a piece of bank the desire to actively contest constantly becomes more costly to the aggressors.

So reverse it.

Make constructable targets explicitly temporary. As soon as they are built, they begin to decay... not in the sense that they will fall by themselves, but in the sense that they will take progressively more damage from progressively less elaborate weaponry. A brand new flux forge can't be knocked down by anything short of a battering ram, but one that's been sitting around for a few hours can be knocked down by one patient guy with a club.

Ether can only be gathered with a webwarp (smaller to build than the forge... easier to destroy, faster to decay), and it must be processed at a flux forge within a short period of time in order to produce the highest quality flux. The webwarps also provide a local buff to mana regeneration, and the forges also act as a power for other types of buildings. Nobody with fewer than three operating forges can build an eidolon sanctuary, for example.

Materials common and easy to produce by one side are unusual and complex for the other, so destroyed enemy buildings can be looted for a few of those rare materials. Enemy players who are working at particular tasks provide particular sorts of medals and trinkets which can be turned in for goodies back at HQ. Killing mages while they're affected by a webwarp buff might be particularly worthwhile, for example.

The model then isn't "we're defending this town until it can stand by itself" (a projects that takes weeks or months and is undone in a day) but "hey let's put up an eidolon sanctuary"... something that's realistically only going to survive half an hour, and be pretty assuredly attracting a steadily increasing stream of enemy attention that entire time. The rewards and upgrades survive, the constructed objectives do not.

Interesting. Combine this with SWG-like harvesting/crafting and you are onto something.

Still, I am strong advocate of "secure base" for all players, be it NPC city or Player City or instanced house... in open-PvP title there has to be a spot where player can feel secure or the will dread logging in.

Oh absolutely. I like the idea of fixed safe zones with quest hubs. Stuff like "use this incense to collect smokey soulwisps from the burning corpses of six druids within the next hour". Along with basic purchaseable materials and places to turn in the simplest of medals. Basically a place for merchants and recruiters to hang out and for other players to find either guilds or groups.

Guilds would have customizable instanced bases with features and portals that turn on and off depending on which buildings the guild currently has up and running out in the dangerous world. And the world itself would contain areas better or worse suited to particular buildings and resources, with rich nodes appearing in random locations therein from time to time. Everybody would know where to patrol to look for player outposts of particular types, and the most valuable areas would be the most hotly contested.

Instead of 2AM being a good time to knock over somebody else's creations, it would be a good time to sneak into the best spots with minimal interference. Unless anybody else gets the same idea.

Here is another idea:

Your "character" is your household/dynasty.

Your avatar when defeated in combat get knocked out or outright killed, when simply knocked out you could get revived but if you lose in any meaningful way you are gone since your enemy will finish you off (or maybe captured and held for a ransom where you are given an option to pay your way out of death).  Even when victorious not all wounds can be healed, every time you take damage there is a chance it can permanently cripple your current avatar. When you die/retire your current avatar's son/daughter step in, this is soft character reset. If you die couple times in a row you get progressively harsher debuff "too young", where your character ends up literally a scrawny teenager holding over-sized weapon with minimal training. Death is meaningful but not too harsh since it doesn't cost you anything to move down succession line.

Your "character" progression comes from following - household prestige that translates to ability to manufacture better equipment via household craftsman, more teachers where you gain access to more and higher level starting combat abilities to use and training hall where you can improve your starting hit points. Not all your characters are the same, each generation has built in randomness that you can somewhat influence by "spouse preference". Some will be weaker and some will be stronger at their peak.

Each avatar, after being victorious in combat, gains abilities and stats very rapidly. You gain access to any ability that was successfully used against you at least once and you can take and use any equipment from slain enemies. There is absolutely no limit what you can learn via combat, but you are limited what you could start with by choice of your avatar's trainers.

Your avatar's progression goes as follows - start with a pre-selected choice of abilities, gain new abilities via combat while getting more debuffs via wounds. Idea is that regardless how good you are as a player, eventually you take enough wounds that you have to reset your avatar. If you are bad players, you get mangled fairly quickly but everyone is expected to go through a number of avatars.

EQUIPMENT - heavier armor you use, more resistant to damage (and wounds) you are but slower and more restricted your character gets.

Examples:

Your household have trainers for swing and dodge, so you start with 6/10 in each ability. Within time frame of 1 PvP battle or couple PvE battles you get 10/10 in both of these. Plus you pick up charge (1/10) from being used on you. You start with 10 hitpoints, and quickly gain your peak of 12. In process you take 1 wound lowering your max hit points to 11.

 

You gain access to any ability that was successfully used against you at least once

Actually the best idea in this thread.


Only works if the quest themselves can be done safely. Otherwise the wolves will camp the quest nods and it would be too much effort to do a quest when simply farming the gold/material surrounded by people you already know in places less likely to be filled by afk bots would be preferred.

Isn't that the same as give everyone every skill?

Any typical open world game has a rudimentary skill point allocation system. Say someone uses an advance skill, it can basically unlock the beginning edge of the skill tree it takes to learn that skill. you can choose to divert your skill points to learning that new skill tree or you can continue along your given path. Unlocking a skill tree can just give you an resistance since you have "experience" against that attack and that could be leveled up with each encounter.

It is, unless you hard-reset avatars as part of the game. Idea is that your avatar get physically weaker longer you go, but in turn gains more and more options. If you are really good and/or lucky you can somewhat delay it, but at some point you ether get outright killed or too weak to fight regardless how good you are.

This concept answers couple problems - how do you provide even playing field and still allow some progression, how do you make win/loss less binary and introduce more states (i.e. Pyrrhic victory) and how you give bad players a valuable role (i.e. meatshield or berserker) without dumbing down or making overly random combat.

Downside I expect is that players are trained to identify with their avatars, getting killed and having to go "next generation" might cause grief for your average bear carebear. PvPers, who are used to dying will probably be fine.