RIP: Shadowbane

[DLRiley]

Well nipping at a larger force heels kinda helps the larger force. Less to worry about and technically does provide more fun for the larger empire since they can also steam roll whatever they lost and to them the map isn't as static or boring. Ultimately you fall into the the trap of, once an empire has been built how can it fall and is being constantly steamed rolled by said empire be outweighed by your ability to ninja cap territory.

[Falconeer]

You are already looking to exploit a system who isn't even there.
Hindering a larger force by giving the smaller ones evergrowing advantages, or constantly and progressively weakening the larger one, can't be broken unless you do your best to do it wrong.

Worst it can happen your player base will hate the fact they can't win forever (as in NA sports).
But there are mechanics other than resetting maps to prevent factions to stay in charge forever. You could even make it as the more days you stay in power the more money it'll take you to run the empire, to the point where keeping it is not worth it anymore or you can't actually afford to do it. Or NPC that starts rioting in all your hamlets and mines declaring independence and forcing your players to go there and fight off rioting independetist NPCs AND other players too, this way making the leading spot very prestigious but fatiguing (who wants to fight off evergrowing masses of unruly mobs in a PvP game anyway?). Your guild could get permanent credit or awards and achievements after losing the throne anyway, so keeping it as long as possible would it still be meaningful.
Seriously, I am no programmer, but tabletop games can teach a lot about how to balance the conquest part of MMORPGs.

Resetting the maps isn't a great solution as it would probably lead to the same outcome everytime, same catassing/large guilds would get the better spots anyway and everything would be back exactly where it was before the reset in no time.

And finally yes, if even in a game people can't get over differences and get a group large enough to fight a common enemy, then they don't deserve to ever win. Last time I played Shadowbane it wasn't broken at all. Sure, the Asians were dominating the maps. Was it the game's fault, or the stupid haters unable to get together and fight off the well organized easatern alliances? 1/3 of the player base ruled over the remaining 2/3 in a game with no need for epic items and the like. Well, hats off.

But still, the game, for its own health, can help those disorganized fuckers with a few enforced mechanics. It can be done.

[DLRiley]

You are already looking to exploit a system who isn't even there.
Hindering a larger force by giving the smaller ones evergrowing advantages, or constantly and progressively weakening the larger one, can't be broken unless you do your best to do it wrong.

Worst it can happen your player base will hate the fact they can't win forever (as in NA sports).
But there are mechanics other than resetting maps to prevent factions to stay in charge forever. You could even make it as the more days you stay in power the more money it'll take you to run the empire, to the point where keeping it is not worth it anymore or you can't actually afford to do it. Or NPC that starts rioting in all your hamlets and mines declaring independence and forcing your players to go there and fight off rioting independetist NPCs AND other players too, this way making the leading spot very prestigious but fatiguing (who wants to fight off evergrowing masses of unruly mobs in a PvP game anyway?). Your guild could get permanent credit or awards and achievements after losing the throne anyway, so keeping it as long as possible would it still be meaningful.
Seriously, I am no programmer, but tabletop games can teach a lot about how to balance the conquest part of MMORPGs.

Resetting the maps isn't a great solution as it would probably lead to the same outcome everytime, same catassing/large guilds would get the better spots anyway and everything would be back exactly where it was before the reset in no time.

And finally yes, if even in a game people can't get over differences and get a group large enough to fight a common enemy, then they don't deserve to ever win. Last time I played Shadowbane it wasn't broken at all. Sure, the Asians were dominating the maps. Was it the game's fault, or the stupid haters unable to get together and fight off the well organized easatern alliances? 1/3 of the player base ruled over the remaining 2/3 in a game with no need for epic items and the like. Well, hats off.

But still, the game, for its own health, can help those disorganized fuckers with a few enforced mechanics. It can be done.

People want to win in those games not compete. Your either always the winner or the whipping boy. So ultimately players will game the system (maybe not at the beginning but eventually) to obtain the quickest and easiest path to victory. Ironically much like pve'ers do for loot or rewards in  general. Unless you figure out a way to force competition, your all ways going to have that problem. Now there is a catch 22, those players who would like a world pvp game aren't playing the game for the competition but for the wins. So even if you force it to happen (competition), your pissing off your core player base by the very fact that there are no real winners and losers (at least permanently).

The idea that I bolded is a pretty good idea. Should flesh that out more.

[UnSub]

I've been here too long - DLRiley is making sense. 

And finally yes, if even in a game people can't get over differences and get a group large enough to fight a common enemy, then they don't deserve to ever win. Last time I played Shadowbane it wasn't broken at all. Sure, the Asians were dominating the maps. Was it the game's fault, or the stupid haters unable to get together and fight off the well organized easatern alliances? 1/3 of the player base ruled over the remaining 2/3 in a game with no need for epic items and the like. Well, hats off.

It is a design issue where 1/3 of your players drive off 2/3s. "Organise moar n00bs" is not a great argument in a thread about SB's demise.

I won't pretend it is an easy thing to fix, but if you want a PvP-focussed game, it needs to be covered.

[Falconeer]

And why not? The unwinning 2/3 weren't really driven off. They were unable to "kill" the enemy empire, to drive THEM off, but they were still having fun conquering small cities, trading land, stealing mines so it's not like they weren't playing. Would you say you are not having fun in EVE unless you are BoB or the Goons? But no, too many people felt they were just LOSING because they were unable to take the map the way the Asians did (which still weren't really holding the whole world, just a large part. BoB anyone?). So what the hell do they want? If Asians have better numbers, why should they not be "winning"? What would it change by resetting the maps? Wouldn't the Asians still have better numbers?
Remember, we are not talking about early days SB, where you could wake up in the morning and your city was no more.

Sometimes it's ok to accept that you can play, you can win some, but you can't win it all. Or, if winning is that important, then you need a new strategy. Shadowbane wasn't about outmanouvering your opponents, it was BUILT on diplomacy. So by refusing to play the diplomacy/organization game to the point you can overcome the rulers, you are a kid stomping your feet cause the fucking game is not bending to your wishes.

"Gaming the system" DLRiley says? Gaming the system in the later SB meant ORGANIZING and DOING DIPLOMACY, not grinding for epics or catassing AAs.
That's pretty much why, laugh all you want, SB wasn't for everyone. Not because it was broken or had so many design issues when it came to global war and conquest. Just because it was much more about diplomacy than the art of war.

Then again, people unable to organize deserve to not win in a competitive large teams based environment. They deserve to play, they deserve samller goals, and they are entitled to content that can be fun anyway. But the ultimate world-wide win? Not so much. It's not a design issue if they are not winning. It's like playing the raid game and saying it's a design issue if bosses keep handing you your asses when you can't even gather 24, or 18, or even 6 or whatever is the minimum required number of players for that encounter.

These are not hard-faction based games, where you suck if your Hibernia, or Vanuatu, or Horde side has fewer numbers than your opposition (another reason why I hate games with hardcoded factions). You are screwed when that happens. These are games where factions are flexible enough that you can't blame anyone if you are unable to get better numbers.

But BUT

The part DLRiley underlined is misleading. My post was more about mechanics that should be applied to make the game interesting than just a scolding to egocentric fuckers and their inabililty to fight common enemies instead of quabbling each other for an inch more of epeen.

So I pretty much agree: unless you want a die hard diplomacy game, you should design your territorial control and conquest MMO by developing one of the many possible mechanics that enforce a periodical, meaningful and slow but constant shifting of power. It is more than possible to do it.

[Righ]

As I think that you and a couple of other people have alluded to in this thread, many of the gameplay problems in Shadowbane were at least partially solved later in its life. I'm of the opinion that the only thing wrong with allowing a superior force the ability to utterly destroy an enemy was the time cost of rebuilding. I wasn't even in favor of the change to having "siege windows". A hardcore PvP game should have hardcore PvP. However, if it also has hardcore PvE in order to participate in PvP, its not a game I'll enjoy for long.

Shadowbane had some serious problems, but overall it was a good game that should have done better. To my mind the biggest failing wasn't a game design decision but an accountancy decision. Somebody pulled out a calculator and decided how many months' income they wanted from people trying to make a fully developed town and set the building rate at that. Applied to the design they had, it made the game unattractive once you had to repeat the PvE grind to rebuild part of a town.

Oh, and the greatest barrier to returning to check out the new content for me was "click to move". It was no fun to return to after playing something else.

[HaemishM]

A good mechanic that could help games like these: ruling empires/guilds get a debuff called DECADENCE which affects everyone in those guilds/alliances. The longer you rule without a break, the bigger the debuff grows. Slowly, of course, and barely significant at first. But over (a long) time you won't eventually be able to keep off opponents anymore. As soon as you lose your throne the debuff goes away and starts affecting the new rulers.

The problem is that decadence sets in by itself, without any need for a game mechanic... but it usually means the winners get bored and quit when no one can challenge them. The losers have already /ragequit because the decadent empire is unassailable. Either the game gives consequence to winning or losing, or it's sport PVP. I really don't think there's much middle ground. If what the dev wants is the former, expect a niche audience that slowly dwindles over time and prepare your budget for it. If the latter, make sure it doesn't suck for your target audience - see Guild Wars for a successful example (with its own flaws). If you try to make both sides happy, you end up with WAR (if you're incompetent to the point of being unable to chew gum and walk at the same time).

EDIT:

That shouldn't happen: when you are ruling the map the upkeep should be very high, ruling shouldn't be something you can sit on just because you have the numbers. If, as someone else pointed out, Shadowbane proved human nature won't unite people enough against the tyrants, then you can make a game where being the tyrant is cool and great, but requires great effort to keep your throne to a point where, eventually, you can't keep it anymore (the draft and rotation system). Better than resetting a map I guess.

What happens when you start penalizing the victor with greater and greater maintenance fees without providing requisite benefits? Exactly what happened in WAR with keep taking. Guilds were pissed because taking a keep gave them mostly nothing other than a fat maintenance bill.

[Lantyssa]

You give bonuses for taking things, but increasing penalties for taking too much.  One linear, the other can be linear or exponential but with a higher coefficient.  Guilds will naturally fluctuate to the balance point without outside factors, but in a PvP game those will exist.  Further, it will be a natural tendancy for some groups to try and own too much, which will lead to their downfall.

You can go for more complicated set-ups, like proximity, where a far-flung outpost doesn't give many bonuses but the owner finds it holds a strategic value.  Keeps and territory near one another provide some reinforcing bonuses.

[IainC]

Or you have rotating resources. Your mines/nodes/whatever eventually deplete and you'll need to capture new ones. Eventually the old ones will refresh but it's slow enough that you probably won't own them any more by the time that happens. Means you can't castle up and sit on all the best resources in the game because they are in flux. Meanwhile some punk alliance has found some sweet stuff off the beaten track and are now in a position where they can make a big play.

[Nebu]

Empires serve as a good example.  Owning a lot requires greater resources for defense, but comes with greater rewards.  If you had a concept like supply lines from a capital city, then you could defeat a large guild directly at a town or by attrition.  There should be incentive for owning a large empire just as there should be a risk. 

These games benefit from risk/reward.  The key is to get the relationship right... which is hard.

[waylander]

Empires serve as a good example.  Owning a lot requires greater resources for defense, but comes with greater rewards.  If you had a concept like supply lines from a capital city, then you could defeat a large guild directly at a town or by attrition.  There should be incentive for owning a large empire just as there should be a risk. 

These games benefit from risk/reward.  The key is to get the relationship right... which is hard.

This in conjuction with the mine system they had would have been good.  There should also have been a maximum time limit a mine would operate, and then it should have despawned and respawned somewhere else.

[slog]

Empires serve as a good example.  Owning a lot requires greater resources for defense, but comes with greater rewards.  If you had a concept like supply lines from a capital city, then you could defeat a large guild directly at a town or by attrition.  There should be incentive for owning a large empire just as there should be a risk. 

These games benefit from risk/reward.  The key is to get the relationship right... which is hard.

This in conjuction with the mine system they had would have been good.  There should also have been a maximum time limit a mine would operate, and then it should have despawned and respawned somewhere else.

We would have just gamed the system by setting up a dummy empire. 

[Koyasha]

My take on this is a few basic ideas which would need a lot of expansion, but essentially goes..

• All actions require resources.  Anything you do, from constructing a building, to defending, to attacking an enemy city/mine/anything.  Even simply being attacked and not doing anything in direct response consumes resources.
• Resources are strictly limited as to how fast they can be acquired.  Resources cannot be traded, or have a very, very strict limit on how much you can receive through trades (such as a max of 5% of your acquisition limit per week or month).
• There is no way to switch ownership of anything "peacefully."  Even doing so peacefully consumes approximately the same amount of resources from both sides as attacking and conquering an enemy.

Resources in this system can't require PvE grind or something to acquire, they should be acquired from things like mines, farms, territory, whatever.  Which is obtained and lost through PvP.  Since there's no way to gain more resources than your limit, secondary guilds, dummy empires, etc, don't help, since they can't trade resources to the main empire.  Since you can't voluntarily give up a city or territory without expending the usual amount of resources on both sides, there's no way to simply trade cities back and forth at no cost when it would be advantageous to do so.  Since both defending and attacking consume the same resources, you can't attack and then be in a strong defensive position.

There's still holes of course, but this closes some of the most obvious ways to game the system, and the basis seems like it could be refined into something that works.

[Righ]

Empires serve as a good example.  Owning a lot requires greater resources for defense, but comes with greater rewards.  If you had a concept like supply lines from a capital city, then you could defeat a large guild directly at a town or by attrition.  There should be incentive for owning a large empire just as there should be a risk. 

These games benefit from risk/reward.  The key is to get the relationship right... which is hard.

This in conjuction with the mine system they had would have been good.  There should also have been a maximum time limit a mine would operate, and then it should have despawned and respawned somewhere else.

We would have just gamed the system by setting up a dummy empire. 

If we're talking about Shadowbane, its more likely that you would find a bug and use it to dupe the rewards.

[Slayerik]

Anyone in this thread that doesn't think sb.exe was the biggest problem with game wasn't playing the same game as me :)

I have many good memories and stories of SB, but in the end when the big battles happened the game couldn't handle it. And I saw my Guild lose our entire city to a bug. Not from any attackers, just wiped out. No help from GMs. That's when i quit. To anyone that played I was Morloch Horde on the Mourning server. I think im even spellin it wrong.  Fuck it im drunk.

[Arrrgh]

Anyone in this thread that doesn't think sb.exe was the biggest problem with game wasn't playing the same game as me :)

A bigger problem was when a guildmate of mine had his character vanish and when he contacted CS was told that the character had never existed.

[UnSub]

And why not? The unwinning 2/3 weren't really driven off. They were unable to "kill" the enemy empire, to drive THEM off, but they were still having fun conquering small cities, trading land, stealing mines so it's not like they weren't playing. Would you say you are not having fun in EVE unless you are BoB or the Goons? But no, too many people felt they were just LOSING because they were unable to take the map the way the Asians did (which still weren't really holding the whole world, just a large part. BoB anyone?). So what the hell do they want? If Asians have better numbers, why should they not be "winning"? What would it change by resetting the maps? Wouldn't the Asians still have better numbers?
Remember, we are not talking about early days SB, where you could wake up in the morning and your city was no more.

I'm considering my experiences in the SE Asian region where the winning sides dominated the map completely, the only safe area was the beginners area and they were quite happy to laugh off attempts at diplomacy written in English.

If one side has better numbers / organisation and wins all the time, that's great for them, but bad for the game. Given we aren't forced to pay $15 a month to make some other side feel good about themselves, it leads to players on the non-winning side heading off elsewhere to spend their money. It's a challenge every PvP game faces: how to keep the losers from quitting.

[Sutro]

The Asian guilds issue was pretty marked on several servers. Later in the life cycle, after it went F2P, they literally turned servers into wastelands. They would take over the map, drive everyone out... and then not fight each other. I remember logging onto one of the wasteland servers and seeing the players just endlessly grinding PvE. For whatever reason, and I have no clue what that reason could be, there seemed to be a desire to turn the game into a PvE game.

It got so bad that trying to keep Asian players out of the game on the non-wasteland servers became like whack-a-mole between NA/Euro players and the Asian players. I thought it was incredibly racist when I first joined up with one of the server's big dogs...

A couple months after joining, as a final 'fuck you' to the server, one of the leaders of a NA/Euro guild that had just lost a big series of sieges turned his last town over to one of the Asian guilds. Every NA/Euro guild dropped what they were doing and had a massive battle just to lay the bane stone. At the siege... shit, I'd never seen anything like it. -Hundreds- of Asian players showed up to defend the bane; the NA/Euro players split into separate warcamps and eventually beat them, driving them yet again off the server.

Again, I know this all has a racist overtone, "Asian invasion" and all that, but I don't know how else to explain it. Players from Asian countries all banded together - despite massive cultural differences between China/SK/Japan - and turned servers into PvE playgrounds. It was truly bizarre. Definitely hallmarks of diplomacy between countries that often hate each other.

[DLRiley]

And why not? The unwinning 2/3 weren't really driven off. They were unable to "kill" the enemy empire, to drive THEM off, but they were still having fun conquering small cities, trading land, stealing mines so it's not like they weren't playing. Would you say you are not having fun in EVE unless you are BoB or the Goons? But no, too many people felt they were just LOSING because they were unable to take the map the way the Asians did (which still weren't really holding the whole world, just a large part. BoB anyone?). So what the hell do they want? If Asians have better numbers, why should they not be "winning"? What would it change by resetting the maps? Wouldn't the Asians still have better numbers?
Remember, we are not talking about early days SB, where you could wake up in the morning and your city was no more.

I'm considering my experiences in the SE Asian region where the winning sides dominated the map completely, the only safe area was the beginners area and they were quite happy to laugh off attempts at diplomacy written in English.

If one side has better numbers / organisation and wins all the time, that's great for them, but bad for the game. Given we aren't forced to pay $15 a month to make some other side feel good about themselves, it leads to players on the non-winning side heading off elsewhere to spend their money. It's a challenge every PvP game faces: how to keep the losers from quitting.

I was waiting for someone to mention this.

[Righ]

And why not? The unwinning 2/3 weren't really driven off. They were unable to "kill" the enemy empire, to drive THEM off, but they were still having fun conquering small cities, trading land, stealing mines so it's not like they weren't playing. Would you say you are not having fun in EVE unless you are BoB or the Goons? But no, too many people felt they were just LOSING because they were unable to take the map the way the Asians did (which still weren't really holding the whole world, just a large part. BoB anyone?). So what the hell do they want? If Asians have better numbers, why should they not be "winning"? What would it change by resetting the maps? Wouldn't the Asians still have better numbers?
Remember, we are not talking about early days SB, where you could wake up in the morning and your city was no more.

I'm considering my experiences in the SE Asian region where the winning sides dominated the map completely, the only safe area was the beginners area and they were quite happy to laugh off attempts at diplomacy written in English.

If one side has better numbers / organisation and wins all the time, that's great for them, but bad for the game. Given we aren't forced to pay $15 a month to make some other side feel good about themselves, it leads to players on the non-winning side heading off elsewhere to spend their money. It's a challenge every PvP game faces: how to keep the losers from quitting.

I was waiting for someone to mention this.

We were waiting for you to mention that you were waiting for someone to mention this.

[gryeyes]

Shhhh, he is about to drop some wisdom. 

[UnSub]

Shadowbane so popular in death, corpse gets extended run and might get a new owner.

[Falconeer]

This is cool.

[Sairon]

They should open source both the server and the client and let the hobby developers have their shot at the code base, I think an awesome dev community could spring from it giving it an exciting future.

[Stormwaltz]

Or NPC that starts rioting in all your hamlets and mines declaring independence and forcing your players to go there and fight off rioting independetist NPCs AND other players too, this way making the leading spot very prestigious but fatiguing (who wants to fight off evergrowing masses of unruly mobs in a PvP game anyway?).

In Ninth Domain (2003), we had a loose plan that building a player city would first require beating down local mob spawns. They start high-level and get reduced with each kill. Once you had your city and started building more powerful structures, the mob type you displaced would found a rival fortress or city, and grow in power. If you didn't make an effort to clear them once in a while, they'd start sending groups to raid or siege your city. Which isn't PvP, but it is gameplay that people enjoyed a lot in Asheron's Call.

Obviously, the idea remains unproven.

[tazelbain]

I would volenteer my time to work on f13's Shadowbane server.

[DLRiley]

Or NPC that starts rioting in all your hamlets and mines declaring independence and forcing your players to go there and fight off rioting independetist NPCs AND other players too, this way making the leading spot very prestigious but fatiguing (who wants to fight off evergrowing masses of unruly mobs in a PvP game anyway?).

In Ninth Domain (2003), we had a loose plan that building a player city would first require beating down local mob spawns. They start high-level and get reduced with each kill. Once you had your city and started building more powerful structures, the mob type you displaced would found a rival fortress or city, and grow in power. If you didn't make an effort to clear them once in a while, they'd start sending groups to raid or siege your city. Which isn't PvP, but it is gameplay that people enjoyed a lot in Asheron's Call.

Obviously, the idea remains unproven.

I bet you the first person to flesh out that idea will fuck the mmo world silly.

[Severian]

Once you had your city and started building more powerful structures, the mob type you displaced would found a rival fortress or city, and grow in power. If you didn't make an effort to clear them once in a while, they'd start sending groups to raid or siege your city. Which isn't PvP, but it is gameplay that people enjoyed a lot in Asheron's Call.

Obviously, the idea remains unproven.

Funcom planned something that sounds very similar for AOC, but dropped it, as you may know. Guild cities, the instanced ones build with gathered resources and ranked up (as opposed to the GvG Battlekeeps in the Border Kingdoms), would have a neighbor village of the local mob type developing in parallel, eventually leading to increasingly serious raids unless they were razed. IIRC they said they dropped it because the AI demands on the server were too high for gameplay that was secondary to what they wanted to emphasize. Which, ironically, was supposed to be GvG, the most painfully underdeveloped part of the game post-release.


Edit: found a reference, surprisingly quickly. http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/626/626620p1.html

The third type of combat Conan has to offer is massive sieges. Here, whole guilds can build castles and villages with ramparts and protective towers. The only problem for your guild is that the monsters do the same - using something like an RTS-style AI, they "hive", building an increasingly bigger village until they finally reach critical mass and surge towards your settlement. The only solution to this is, on a continual basis, to "weed" the monster villages.

[DLRiley]

Once you had your city and started building more powerful structures, the mob type you displaced would found a rival fortress or city, and grow in power. If you didn't make an effort to clear them once in a while, they'd start sending groups to raid or siege your city. Which isn't PvP, but it is gameplay that people enjoyed a lot in Asheron's Call.

Obviously, the idea remains unproven.

Funcom planned something that sounds very similar for AOC, but dropped it, as you may know. Guild cities, the instanced ones build with gathered resources and ranked up (as opposed to the GvG Battlekeeps in the Border Kingdoms), would have a neighbor village of the local mob type developing in parallel, eventually leading to increasingly serious raids unless they were razed. IIRC they said they dropped it because the AI demands on the server were too high for gameplay that was secondary to what they wanted to emphasize. Which, ironically, was supposed to be GvG, the most painfully underdeveloped part of the game post-release.

Geez dropping a good idea for a half assed bad idea. That worked out well for them