Are Dev's Bad, or do MMO PVP Games Not Work?

[Warskull]

On the concept of rewarding losers:
Guild Wars gave very poor rewards to players who lost and as a result always had difficulty growing its PvP player base.  In a grind based game (most MMOs) players expect some sort of return on everything they do.  So if they go PvP, lose, and get nothing, they are encouraged to go back to PvE and never try PvP again.  This is what happened with a ton of players in Guild Wars.  You want respectable encouragement for beginner players.  The desire to succeed (get a better reward) should be there, but they should walk away with something and feel like they made some progress.

You can have many levels of competition in a game.  You have your basic pub formats where bad players face off against each other.  This is like the pub server in CS, winners and losers aren't that important.  You ideally want everyone to enjoy the game and have a good time.  People get their taste for the game here.  This is where everyone regardless of how they do gets a coupon for a free ice cream, but the winners might get a gift certificate for a nice meal.  Then you have your top level competition where people play for blood and winner takes all.  You give out your truly nice rewards here, unique titles, unique items, ect.  You have your little league games where everyone goes out for pizza afterwards and your World Series were people pour blood, sweat, and tears into the game in an attempt to win it all.

A big thing though, you don't ever want to give the players who already excel at the game and tend to win rewards which make them more likely to win.  In a grind MMO giving tournament winners an epic weapon that no other player can match is just a recipe for disaster.  That's part of why grind based PvE + PvP don't mix.  Grind hurts PvP because the things you end up rewarding players with stop making your game fair.

Encouraging that guy who always loses in a game is good.  That guy who always loses is probably the new guy, you want him to stick around long enough to become an average player and grow your player base.  You lose players at the top over time, you have to be able to replace them or your game will die.

Warcraft 3 had an excellent system for this.  You got a fancy little icon next to your name.  You could grind that icon out no matter how bad you were.

[TheCastle]

on this subject I bumped into something of note... I am not sure yet about all of the information at hand here.

Our server is mainly designed for Hardcore PvP.

Working Battle Grounds, WSG and AB, Arena. Everything on the server is free. Instant lvl 70 and free Season 4. Malls for each faction sells everything available in our database. New Azshara Crater PVP area and much more..

Enjoy your stay!

Anyone here aware of an underground PVP scene regarding WOW and how big it is?

[Litigator]

You have to wonder what would happen if class balance was done purely around group combat, and all the money and energy spent making PvE content was spent making PvP content instead.

PvP has less of a need for content than PvE, because the players provide the content.  Learning maps is less fun than fighting skilled opponents on maps all players are familiar with, which is why, even in games with large map packs, a few maps tend to be much more popular. 

The whining about WoW classes is vastly disproportionate to the class problems, but the reward structure has become less accessible, which has deflated the arena.

For those unfamiliar, WoW arena assigns weekly reward points based off of a chess-style rating system.  Games are zero sum; the point value of the game is based on the relative ratings of the teams and the winner gets points and the loser loses an equal number of rating points.  The rating to point equation decreases on a gentle mathematical equation below the starting rating of 1500, and increases according to a geometric equation above 1500.  So a 1200 rated team will get around 225 arena points, a 1500 team will get around 275, and a 1800 team will get around 800. 

That means being really abyssmal, or not trying is roughly the same as being mediocre, or trying and failing.  What's more, if you failed every week for three or four months, you would have enough points to buy a weapon that was comparable to raid loot.  Of course, since the key to advancing in PvP was the PvP armor that permitted greater survivability, getting the weapon did not make you fail much less in arena, but it did help people succeed in PvE, and it also made PvE players feel their accomplishments were diminished.

As a result, in season 3, Blizzard imposed an 1850 rating requirement to buy the weapons and a 2000 rating requirement to get the shoulders for the PvP armor.  In season 4, they raised the rating for weapons to 2050 and the rating for armor to 2200, and implemented a rating requirement of 1550 for pants, 1600 for chest armor and 1700 for helms.  The bottom dropped out of the arena because this meant that the reward for failure was almost zero.  As a result, the rating requirements for the top titles declined by around 200 rating points.  Duelist, the top 3% of the arena was at around 1875 in S4, down from 2100 in S3.  That means the PvP weapons were available to only about 1% of arena players, and the subset of players participating in arena was smaller as well.

Even with the rewards some people who PvP a lot; who play the game only to PvP, hate the arena.  They say that they don't like "dueling in boxes," or whatever, but what they really hate is losing progress, which is not something you experience elsewhere.  Even with the backstop against meaningful rating-to-points declines below 1500, people hate losing in arenas and watching their ratings fall.  In season 4, players could get the season 3 armor with no rating requirement, and, overwhelmingly, players rejected arena entirely and got season 2 gear for honor points in battlegrounds instead.

The lesson is that they need to dangle some serious carrots in front of players to convince them to put up with constant PvP ass-kickings that leave a lasting mark in the form of a bad arena rating that people can look at on armory. And unfortunately Blizzard is not prepared to do that; there was a 1665 minimum cutoff for epic pvp armor at level 80 in wrath beta. A ladder system won't work if there's no incentive for players to get onto it.

[Ratman_tf]

Fuck, I can't be arsed to quote all the TheCastleOText stuff but basically I think you are off-base on this:

From my own understanding of the topic is that the second you market a game to be PVP you cause people to get stage fright. I believe that you cause people anxiety when you say that you have 1 tutorial level and then you are blasted off into intense PVP action. I think a lot of it can boil down to marketing but I imagine that your player threshold shrinks considerably when you take a MMOG and say this is a PVP only environment. While you can in fact expect a decent amount of skill from your player base if you ramp them up to it properly and you can in fact have casual forms of PVP style games but you still have this problem to contend with.

When you market a game into being PVP these days, people get stage fright? People have been playing wow for like 4 years now, and many FPS games much longer. This isn't the days of 'ZOMG PVP LIKE SCARY UO' , run to Everquest!!! Why is it that games like Warhammer and Age of Conan sell a million boxes? Here's a hint...it's not their IPs.

They are selling people a PVP MMO - at least that's what they claimed. They both fucked up in their own way.

I could see something similar to a Planetside 2 being a success these days. You just need the grab. The progression system was fine. How do you improve upon it and make it replayable/enjoyable for 6+ months? People have been trained to expect rewards these days, how do you reward for massive PVP (besides the fun) ? In Planetside, the fun kept me there a long time...but I had a pretty awesome outfit.

Possibly reward with awesome looking skins, customizable vehicles, etc. Maybe if you get enough defense kills you get a special suit/titles...IDK. I guess if I had the answer, I wouldn't be sitting here doing desktop support.

Achievements? This seems to be a pretty popular thing for FPSes nowadays.

IF it was handled correctly. Where everyone can see your achievements, and completing a set of achievements unlocks a title or new skin/vehicle/armor/whatever cosmetic only of course.

[tmp]

Achievements? This seems to be a pretty popular thing for FPSes nowadays.

They seem to make many retards focus exclusively on completing them though, which tends to mess up gameplay for other people in team-based encounters.

[TheCastle]

Achievements? This seems to be a pretty popular thing for FPSes nowadays.

They seem to make many retards focus exclusively on completing them though, which tends to mess up gameplay for other people in team-based encounters.

this can easily be solved by carefully crafting achievements so the goals are not so random or cause undue friction.

[tmp]

Except this is basically "it just needs to be done right" argument...

(trying to develop fool-proof solution remains largely theoretical when the environment keeps coming up with continually better fools)

[TheCastle]

Except this is basically "it just needs to be done right" argument...

(trying to develop fool-proof solution remains largely theoretical when the environment keeps coming up with continually better fools)

true true.. What can you do when the larger your audience is the more shallow the waters become....
Still, handing out achievements only for winning X battle X number of times seems pretty fool-proof. You then only have to worry about people throwing matches just to farm achievements. You should be able to solve/reduce that problem over the course of a year or two.. hehe