IPY is done.

[Jacob0883]

I just started playing this four days ago because some old friends did and poof, no more server...  Oh well, at least I didn't fail any tests because of it.

http://ipyuo.com/

[Moroni]

What a damn shame. My GM thief will be missed. Poor Azaroth :(

[Phred]

Seems like all a hard core open PvP advocate has to do is run a server with said rules for a while to see the light.

[SirBruce]

Don't attract these players. Make the game completely unappealing to them.

That's what creates a lot of the games you see today that you have no interest in playing. It's not people being stupid carebears - it's people not wanting to put up with the crap that people like the people who played IPY bring to the table. Your actions bring this upon yourselves, and you cause your own misery. Every time.

Do you honestly think that player freedoms are removed or simply not included in a game because people are "faggots"? Not by a long shot. It's because you are.

There, I said it. It's because you are.

Nice to see someone from the "other side" before finally "get it" when they actually tried to run one of these things.

Bruce

[HaemishM]

It does only take trying to herd that bunch of exploiting leeches to figure out that those really aren't the kind of people you want to base a community on. Some folks can't be told, they must see it for themselves.

PVP will only work on a large scale basis if there are enough restrictions to make it a valid playstyle without making it a valid griefstyle.

[Dark Vengeance]

That's exactly it, Haemish...the commercial entities and even any group that is shooting for popular appeal starts trying to balance between keeping open PvP, but curbing grief play.

At some point, it becomes a choice as to whether open PvP is more important than widespread popularity. Obviously, with commercial MMOGs, this isn't really a choice at all.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

[geldonyetich]

I never played pre-Renaissance Ultima Online, but from what I gathered it was a potentially unfettered virtual world of unmatched player freedom that was ultimately ruined by griefers.   That IPY attempted to bring back the glory days, and was briefly successful, only to have it descend into something that was ultimately ruined by griefers...   Well, the consistancy sort of backs up my initial evaluation.  

I suspect that pre-UO:R not only attracted psychopaths: it trained people to be them.   I'm not saying everybody who played IPY was a psycho, but I am saying that in order to succeed in that game you quickly would take on psycho-like characteristics, because ultimately the griefers were the only ones that came out on top.   The griefers were the ones who found fun in the game beyond simply making chairs.  Those who weren't griefers yet were given a constant stream of abuse until they became one.   In the end, early Ultima Online was a game that, once the initial shiny wore off, was only enjoyable through grief play.   Azaroth, while he remembered the glory days of Ultima Online, forgot what ultimately brought about their downfall, and the troubles he ran into were simply history repeating itself.   Un-surprise for you!

Like Origin before, the ideal solution would have been not to give up, but rather to design solutions to the grief problems without comprimising what it was that made early Ultima Online great.    Origin's solutions were to severely hamper PK viability, which killed the freedom of the gameplay.   Whoops, threw the baby out with the bathwater, did we?   IPY's solution was to shut down the server entirely, which certainly saved a lot of time, but destroyed Ultima Online's glory days with equal efficiency.

Somewhere in the massive bitbucket of the Internet are gigabytes of discussion about how early Ultima Online's freedom could be preserved without causing the playerbase to descend into anarchy.   Much of it, I imagine, on the original Lum The Mad website.   Ultimately it comes down to this: in a game that attempts to emulate real life society as much as the early Ultima Online, player characters must be held accountable for their actions.    Hey, I have an idea, lets build a virtual world where the police just hang around towns and there's no such thing as jail or execution to keep crime in line!  Then, lets let everybody kill eachother all they like.   Boom: early Ultima Online.   Shadowbane demonstrated some ways in which accountability can be done quite well, but I imagine a lot of that simply had to do with eliminating easy means of escape.  

Unfortunately, any such solution to the grief problems would likely just take a lot more development time than either the original Origin developers or Azaroth had available.

[Rodent]

I didn't play on IPY very often, but I will be sad to see i go. It was one of the most fleshed out and well done UO shards around. If they would've just added statloss it would've been perfect in my mind.

Ah well, it will probably not be the last, or even close to the last pre-UO:R server, nostalgia is a powerfull thing. Probably won't see many with it's kind of success though.

[NiX]

Any alternatives to IPY? I was comtemplating getting back into playing on IPY and then I came here to find the bad news.

[Arnold]

Any alternatives to IPY? I was comtemplating getting back into playing on IPY and then I came here to find the bad news.

"Angel Island" has a stable and dedicated guy (Adam Ant) running it.  I made a character there and it was pretty dead when I played, but maybe some IPY people will go there.  Azaroth was pointing people towards "Rebirth", which is an attempt to recreate 1997 UO.

I never played pre-Renaissance Ultima Online, but from what I gathered it was a potentially unfettered virtual world of unmatched player freedom that was ultimately ruined by griefers.   That IPY attempted to bring back the glory days, and was briefly successful, only to have it descend into something that was ultimately ruined by griefers...   Well, the consistancy sort of backs up my initial evaluation.

Nah, "Pre-UO:R" wasn't bad at all.  There are lots of revisionists out there who will try to get you to believe it was a living hell, but it wasn't.  Now I started during the reputation system era and didn't play during the notoriety system period, which was supposedly where the serious PKing/griefing was going on (no penalty for PKing other than being red).

[Reg]

And there are just as many revisionists who've romanticized it into some kind of paradise populated by Noble Reds indulging in honourable PvP.

Sure, they existed but they were vastly outnumbered by the exploiting retards who drove people out of the game and forced OSI to put limits on PvP.

[HaemishM]

Shadowbane's accountability amounted to "put your killer's name on a list for the ineffectual NPC guards to attack" never remembering that the character probably didn't need to be near your town ever, could make a new character that was your best friend, and could make your own town in about an hour of playtime. They wanted accountability, but true accountability was more of a burden on the victim than on the attacker.

Just like in UO.

[WonderBrick]

Here are a few links that will help show you a bit more about Angel Island.

http://uoangelisland.homestead.com/index.html

www.samhamwich.com

http://boards.powergamers.net/viewthread.php?tid=15554

Angel Island is run by Adam Ant and GUL, and anyone who is familiar with them from UO will have a further understanding of their great approach to UO.

Some old Adam Ant OSI UO episodes

Jade, co-GM of GUL

[sinij]

Just like in UO.

I never had problems with griefers in SB, closest thing to griefing in SB was no-show banes people would drop on your cities every few days. I can see how you can be griefed if you are freehold newbie but once you join established guild that would be thing of a past.

I also learned to shrug things off fairly early during my UO days. I'd get PKed fairly regularly during my newbie days in UO but all it meant is short run to the healers for ress then stop by bank to pick up one of the many bone armor sets I had stashed and back to doing whatever I was doing before it happened. I was killed but I learned to fight back and be very hard to catch and kill, I was scammed but I learned from it and made a point to stay on top of all scams.

[HaemishM]

Just like in UO.

I never had problems with griefers in SB, closest thing to griefing in SB was no-show banes people would drop on your cities every few days. I can see how you can be griefed if you are freehold newbie but once you join established guild that would be thing of a past.

Bullshit. Your definition of grief is pretty small.

My biggest gripe in Shadowbane was the ability for people to drop a throwaway tree anywhere in the world with little to no effort. Drop a tree right next to your enemy's city, open it up to the entire fucking world so that every random pk jacktard in the world binds to it and uses it to attack your guild's hunters. In order to remove the tree, you have to bane and destroy it. The owners of the tree don't defend it, since they'll have dropped another 20 trees all around it in the time it takes you to bane it. And since the KOS thing was so ineffectual, it was harder to even attempt to let your guildies know that people with that crest should be attacked and killed on sight, and guards were ineffectual.

Griefing through guerilla warfare was way too easy and way too effective.

[sinij]

Throwaway open ToLs were considerable problem but it is long since resolved. You now need Rank 5 tree to open it up, so it takes less time and money to bane and destroy any tree than it is to open it up.

When open tress were still a problem my guild dealt with it in few effective ways. First we would capture all open trees that were used to attack us, so it wasn't possible to put one right in our backyard, being on a big island helped a lot in this regard. Second we get attacked we would send a stealth group to camp offending tree and cavalry to kill attackers - that discouraged attacks for considerable time since double equipment damage and ending up at random ruins gave them something to think about. Third, If our p/l group got rolled, big deal, it was restarted moment hostiles were dealt with. If that was our war group that got rolled – well they deserved to roll us.

In my book it is not griefing if you have an ability to do something about it.

Grifing was not one of SB's problems. If anything - lag caused by zergs, forced grouping and lack of PvP- content are main problems of SB.

[geldonyetich]

I think that the main reason why Shadowbane griefing isn't too badly out of control is because there's no magical super means to escape retalation.   In Ultima Online you had, to name a few that even a UO newbie like I am aware of:

[*]Marked Runestones - Teleports back to anywhere you've been, allowing quick instant transports to safety as wel as channels to lure people to ganking locations.   "GET THAT RE... oh wait, nevermind, he got away."

[*]Impenetreble Safehouses - Once home, lock yourself in, and laugh at how they cannot retaliate.    "It's no good, men, the villian is at home.  Lets go back to the guard house so he can continue his reign of terror."

[*]Hiding and Invisiblity - Made much easier by a two dimensional isometric perspective that made it difficult for pursuers to track you down even when you were visible.   "I know he went this way!  His name was on the edge of my screen in this direction a minute ago!   Crap, do you think he was under a tree bitmap?"[/list:u]
So, did early Ultima Online nail accountability as well as Shadowbane?    Not even close.    Ultima Online made it very easy to grief and get away with it.   Once griefing ran rampant, you'd generally just get griefed until you canceled or decided to become a grief player yourself.   I'll say it again, early Ultima Online was a online psycho trainer.   Input normal Ultima loving nerd.   Output complete online social reject.

But, honestly, early UO (and IPY's) plights didn't surprise me all that much.  I had seen it happen a more times in text based MUDS (with inadequette PvP controls) than I can shake a "+5 sword of ultimate gank" at.

[Venkman]

The other difference with SB is that you know exactly what to expect the moment you enter the game. UO was more open-ended. UO also wasn't nearly as bad as many parrot. Neither is SB, but you've got to be playing SB for the right reasons, and be compatible with the type of playstyle it offers.

That's true of all MMORPGs, but more so in SB because the core game concept has a narrower appeal.

[Joe]

No one is saying the first year of UO was grief free. In fact, it was shit. However, after the rep system came in (basically, dying while red could cause you to lose up to 10% of your skills and stats if you resurrected when still red), things settled down to a point where the people who wanted to have a good time could at the very least punish the people who were attempting to infringe upon it. IPY used that ruleset, which was the way to go.

Hell, I was into pvp. My character was perma-red. Even I liked statloss. The fact is people need to stop corellating pvp to grief. It CAN be a method of griefing, but it's by no means the most effective. Most situations where I was getting griefed ended when I killed the bastard so he'd have to go away and res to come back. Problems with pvp begin when it's restricted to the point where it can used as a griefing tactic. The fact EQ2 isn't even allowing pvp via duels is just asking for it.

[sinij]

I agree Joe, why is it PvP is strongly associated with grief while PvE is not? You can be equally badly griefed in both if anti-grief measures implemented, why is that everyone thinks PvP = grief? Personally – I’d rather be repeatedly killed than denied whole portions of the game by ubers/e-bayers.

[Venkman]

I agree. I've seen more grief in PvE games because the griefers can get away with it.

Of course, I accept that for what it is. People are asses, and I'm not a psychologist. I just don't mind using the tools of a griefer to grief them right back.

The games are getting more constrained in this regard though. While this does limit how griefing gets done, it also makes for more contrived combat mechanics. I know EQ2's Locked Encounters were not designed to minimize griefing, but it is a side effect, as is the impact on random people meeting random people. I felt like LEs were fish bowls, and I didn't like being a fish.

[SirBruce]

I agree Joe, why is it PvP is strongly associated with grief while PvE is not? You can be equally badly griefed in both if anti-grief measures implemented, why is that everyone thinks PvP = grief?

Because the more PvP features you have:

1. The easier it is to grief someone trying to PvE.
2. The effects are usually greater.
3. The number of griefers is also greater, because of the whole PvP mentality.

I realize these a very broad statements.  Please keep in mind that yes, you can challenge them with certain specific *types* of PvP designs where the above are not true.  But to answer your question, historically, said PvP designs have included at least one of the above points, if not all three.

Also, another way to understand to dichotomy is to realize that very rarely do PvE-ers "grief" a PvP-er.  It's very hard to "grief" in a way that's not directed *at* someone or someones.  Not all PvP is grief, but just about all grief is PvP.

 Personally – I’d rather be repeatedly killed than denied whole portions of the game by ubers/e-bayers.

The thing is you and people who feel the same way are a very, very small minority.

Bruce

[Threash]

I was griefed alot more in EQ than i ever was in SB.  The problem is for some people being pked automatically = griefing.  SB had all the tools you needed to deal with problems: the name of the asshole bothering you and the ability to go kick his ass.  Thats all you need.

[sinij]

Not all PvP is grief, but just about all grief is PvP.  

I disagree Bruce, you can grief using any game mechanic equally well if there are no safeguards built into the game - be it scamming you in social situations, getting cheap kills on you in PvP or kill stealing in PvE. You could be killed and driven out of the area by higher-level PKs as easily as you could be denied most of the monsters in the area by effective ‘farmer’ if game does not have built in safeguards against it.

[Righ]

Missed point. That (and any other grief you come up with) is inherently Player versus Player. An antagonist and a protagonist.

[Joe]

But that's like saying two uberguilds arguing over a dragon in EQ is player vs. player. It is, but not in the traditional definition of the phrase.

If you're going to extend the definition to that level, pve becomes such an afterthought it could be completely removed. People vying for social position is what these games are about. To equate it to what's commonly referred to as pvp is silly.

[SirBruce]

I disagree Bruce, you can grief using any game mechanic equally well if there are no safeguards built into the game - be it scamming you in social situations, getting cheap kills on you in PvP or kill stealing in PvE. You could be killed and driven out of the area by higher-level PKs as easily as you could be denied most of the monsters in the area by effective ‘farmer’ if game does not have built in safeguards against it.

Did you even read my caveats?  You just contrived a situation just as I said one could.  Nevertheless, that happens far less often in practice.  Why?  Perhaps it's because most games had far easier griefing methods such a PvP.  Perhaps it's because most games have had those built in safeguards against it.  Perhaps it's because, just because it's theoretically possible, in practice griefers don't find it nearly as enjoyable.  Whatever the reason, my previous generalizations, I think, are still broadly true.

Bruce

[sinij]

Discarding anything that is contrary to your point as a fluke and atypical thing and treating everything that proves you point as a rule and typical situation is a natural thing to do but does not lead to logical resolution of a problem. Please show me on the doll where PvP touched you to make you abandon any attempts at rational discussion of the subject.

If "just about all grief is PvP" were remotely close to truth pure PvE games like EQ, SOL or TiTD would be free of griefers. We know that is not the case.

[SirBruce]

Discarding anything that is contrary to your point as a fluke and atypical thing and treating everything that proves you point as a rule and typical situation is a natural thing to do but does not lead to logical resolution of a problem.

I agree.  Why, then, do you constantly do just that?

Please show me on the doll where PvP touched you to make you abandon any attempts at rational discussion of the subject.

I am being quite rational here.  You're the one refusing to acknowledge general principals on the basis of some hypothetical PvP design that could be done that would not inherently facilitate griefing to a larger degree than without PvP.

If "just about all grief is PvP" were remotely close to truth pure PvE games like EQ, SOL or TiTD would be free of griefers. We know that is not the case.

No, it just means that such games would have less proportional griefing than games with lots of PvP.  Which I think history has demonstrated pretty well.

Bruce

[Righ]

If you're going to extend the definition to that level

Actually, Bruce put it quite well, and the quote Sinij lifted was humorous and succinct. I doubt he's really trying to redefine the common usage of the term PvP at all, but I'm sure he can whip up a few paragraphs to argue the minuitae of that quote in full.

I've yet to find any online game without griefers. PvP, PvE or just plain chat there are opportunities to cause woe for your fellow players in all multiplayer games. However, PvP games have historically passed on easier tools to the miscreants.

[Calantus]

PVP is a superior method of grief. If you get a choice, you choose the superior grief method. In my brief return to UO a few months ago I used to grief people alot (it's full of self-righteous, greedy little shits who have no qualms about abusing people over nothing and sometimes I'd just lose it after extended periods of exposure). The weapon of choice was stealing their kills while "accidently" standing on their pretty avatars and saying random shit all the time. But you can bet I'd be killing them if the option was there (train kills were always good but you could only do them very seldom or be busted, and sometimes you'd kill some bystander who wasn't a dick and feel bad about it).

That's where the misconception comes from. Griefers aren't majority PVP, it's just that PVP is the best tool for the job. And if you're gonna grief you might as well do it right. I guess that could turn some griefers into PVPers though, when their PVP is taken away they lose their best tool and don't get the rush from other methods. So they gravitate to places that still allow said tool... like IPY.

[Joe]

See, it's only a tool for grief if there's no defense against it. Griefers used to love killing miners, so my friend (Il Pesto from boards past) had a miner who also happened to be a 3x GM warrior. He successfully hammered most miner killers into the ground.

I'd argue the superior method of grief is the stuff you can't directly fight, e.g. kill stealing, training in non pvp games, etc. I know when I was doing my griefing schtick when I was fifteen, the last thing I'd want to do is something people could fight against.

[Dark Vengeance]

Joe for teh win.

I'd rather have my enemies stand out by being highlighted red, than to have them as "wolves in sheep's clothing". I'm not going to expand upon that analogy, because I'm sure Bruce now has a raging hard-on thanks to that visual.

If OSi had closed the loopholes that allowed for NPKing and opportunistic blue-killing, enforced statloss on death (not resurrection) the rep system could have been a great thing. Some asswad got it in his skull that macroing counts was like jail time....that's all well and good, except that their 'sentence' still consumed bandwidth and server resources, plus the dead reds did as much unattended macroing as anyone.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

[Sky]

I never played pre-Renaissance Ultima Online

That's pretty obvious.

The fact is people need to stop corellating pvp to grief.

As someone who was a hardcore early UO player, this is an ancient mistake. I used to define grief pvp as pk. So you'd have the pvp'ers and the pk'ers. One is a fun fight the other is someone trying to piss someone off and get their kicks in a juvenile fashion. There is pvp and grief pvp, just as there is definite grief in pve, that you can't usually retaliate against. Though I'm not a big fan of using retaliation (player justice, whatever) as a valid excuse, because then you shift the pacing and gameplay to the griefer. If we are in a town meeting with the yew militia and have to go fight off a wave of death-robed purple-potioners for a couple hours, then the griefers have their fun for that duration, and we are cockblocked from our meeting until we're done dealing with them. And we were a goddamned player justice organization.

UO pvp was great, it formed the basis for the greatest online roleplaying I've known to date. It also formed the basis for the most egregious griefing, because you could. And if you can, people will, because people are worthless piles of shit, for the most part.

[rscott]

If OSi had closed the loopholes that allowed for NPKing and opportunistic blue-killing, enforced statloss on death (not resurrection) the rep system could have been a great thing.

We can excuse OSi for not having 20-20 vision in hindsight.  But that still begs the question of why IPY closed its doors.  (which HAS the benefit of observing the original UO).   Somehow i don't think quick and easy answers are forthcoming.

As far as PvE having more grief than PvP, i suppose that would best be measured by how many people leave PvE games because of griefers than leave PvP games.  I suspect PvE players would put up with much less greif and still i think that more people leave the PvP type games than the PvE games (due to griefing).