Can (player) towns/castles and pvp conquests wars coexist?

[element_of_void]

Maybe its just a stupid idea but then again maybe not.

PvP Conquest Wars as a pvp focus in an mmo with city building features.

Let's take a theoretical mmo with the feature to create player cities. Let's make this city building feature rich, well thought out and implemented. Let's say players are able to help NPC cities to grow larger and build own cities. Each city has some sort of town core (a magic crystal) and that there is a set of rules for playing buildings preventing blocking of paths with non-combat buildings but allowing for city walls, guard-houses and stuff.
Let's furthermore say that there are castles that "control" surrounding cities, collect taxes and whatever else.

Let's say that said game was designed to be both PvP and PvE focused (like a theoretical 50% / 50%) and there are three realms that fight for dominance in the world. Controlling castles means power or benefit of some sort to the owner and therefor all realms constantly fight for those castles and the cities that surround them.

Cities are hot spots for PvE activities. Player houses, workshops, bank, auction house, merchants, trainers...
Castles are hot spots for PvP activities. Sieges, fights, intrigues, big scale battles...

Would you leave it as that or would you include both hot spots into the other playing experience? Castles could accommodate special vendors, traders or whatever.
Towns could supply castles with guards, warn them of an invasion and so on. Towns could guard themself with walls, NPC guards and active players defending their home. Taking down the towns first could reduce the spawn of NPC guards or reduce the power buffs of the defenders.
Losing the control of a town should not "kick out" all people that live there but belong to another realm but it might mean higher taxes or something like that. Loosing all your PvE Stuff (house, npcs, equipment) because some big guild ransacked your hometown would turn down many players that focus on PvE.

There could be PvE and PvP flagged houses in a city but that would lead to masses of enemy players rushing through those otherwise PvE cities and therefor reducing the "fun" part of all strict PvE players cafting, trading or questing there.



Rewards for control of cities and castles should not include combat power in a greater extend but some sort of shiny for the winner. Taxes, influence, special quests or access to certain areas (both pvp and pve) magic crystals, cosmic balance, I don't know. Defending and reinforcing a town/castle might yield special rewards for player groups that invest time/money into the defense.



Just in case that you think of Planetside, thats sort of what I have in mind but that game doesn't have PvE as a problem being full PvP  so I'm looking for possible theoretical solutions for a hybrid game. I also liked the realm wars from DAoC being only castle siege battles but to those who remember the Atlantic AddOn, there was an event with towns/castles in the desserts that comes to mind.

[apocrypha]

Why don't you capitalise your thread subject titles?

Loosing the control of a town

Losing.

[element_of_void]

Sorry for not capitalizing them. I'll try to remember that for the future. And about losing...  how could that one slip through. Some day I'll have your language mastered, thats for sure. Until then I'll keep improving. Thank you for your good advice.

[Stormwaltz]

My opinion, worth what you paid for it, is in favor of a two-tier system.

Everyone gets an "apartment" for free in a PvP- town of their choice. They have a bit of secure storage and a relatively low density of possible decorations. Apartments are instanced and accessible from public doors along the streets. So, for example, I walk up to a door and enter my apartment, another guy walks up to the same door and enters his apartment, my friend (who I've given permission to enter my place) gets a UI asking him which apartment he wants to enter.

Guilds can build cities in PvP+ territory. The primary purpose of cities is easy access to rare crafting materials (the mine produces mithril), high-level crafting stations (player owned forges grant +20% chance of critical success) and/or high level content (gold donations to a player-owned temple generate "tickets" to access the "Goddess of Time" instance). The secondary purpose of cities is incentivized optional housing. Want more secure storage space than you have in your "apartment?" Risk putting it in a city house. Want a greater density of decorations? Risk a city house.

I think relatively few players will risk building a home that can be razed, even with the incentives of greater storage and decor. Cities that provide resources are one thing. Your home is your home. If a player's home is burned down, they tend to move on.

[Lightstalker]

Half your players will always have the wrong expectation in any encounter (PvPers in PvE, PvEers in PvP) - worse when one side seeks out the other.
Splitting your resources into building two different games into the same world will only result in pain.
If any part of your world is PvP every part will be (witness the impact of Arenas on WoW itemization and class balance).
Go back in time 5 years and play Shadowbane (or read about it).

You don't need to incentivize winning (e.g. the proposed tax is as lethal in a war of conquest as any combat buff).  You do need to encourage the loser to keep logging in, despite potentially losing everything they'd worked for to date in the game.  That's a big ask.  This is also typically hard on Late Adopters, and guilds as the tools required to build and maintain something worth conquering are typically woefully inadequate in terms of verifiable information in game.  Most people are risk averse, playing a losing side in a battle of conquest is typically all risk.

War-gaming works because the side that loses the fight might win the encounter by losing less badly than the winner won.  In MMOGs losers just lose in every way that matters while winners gain in power for each victory.  They have a strong incentive to seek out lopsided encounters and unify the world under a single banner that cannot reasonably be opposed.  A token opposition that puts up a good fight is what most want from their game experience (perhaps without conscious awareness of the token status of the opposition – a steady stream of victories they can feel good about).  When the environment is that token opposition there is no risk of it getting discouraged and quitting; not so much with the players.

[element_of_void]

The point about designing two games (pvp and pve) is absolutely valid but I dislike the idea of a game that leaves our half of the player base by default even though I am aware that trying to mix pvp and pve in one game might in the long run ruin it for both of them.


Just a shot at how to reward the losers when fighting the big guys that never loose.

• Record the time and power of big guilds. The longer they rule over major parts of the land (owning most of the castles), the higher their counter gets.
• Give players a reward for every kill against a strong opponent (high counter).
• Balance the reward of killing big guys against the rewards for being in charge of the country.

Another thing about pvp comes with factions. In a world, that is only guild versus guild you encounter the problem of big guilds being intangible because of their size. If you mix in factions and different flavors of said factions, you might prevent that a bit.

Let's say you have three factions. Having two factions isn't such a good idea if the game is about conquest. If one faction is slightly stronger (more players) then the other one will lose to often and people will quit making the faction even weaker. Having three factions, you might still have one strong faction but they have to fight on two fronts. Dividing their power will cause them to be weaker on both. Unifying their forces will cause them to lose half of their territory. They can still get it back easily but this way the factions will take turns of being in power of parts of the world.

Being a small guild in a realm fight doesn't matter that much, because if you play well and partake in the big battles, then you will get your share of fun, fame and kills. Being with the big guys would be better, because they obviously know how to kick ass but you can still have fun with your buddies in realm vs realm war. If you have enough friends in your smaller guild then maybe it's even enough to conquer a castle for yourself.

With factions comes balance (or the absence of balance). How different are the factions? Completely different classes/skills or races? Another ingame language? Just another color?
I'd say that a player should be able to chose his faction anytime, not only on character creation. Link the faction to some source of power and let players of each faction gain special skills, spells and powers that define their way of playing to some extent. As I said in another thread, I'd do away with classes and use skills instead. All general skills should be available to all players - magic, weapons, combat styles, crafting and so on. All 3 factions will come with the same set of basic skills and all races will be present in all factions. Each faction should have a different background and culture, that adds some flavor. This background should also be present in their symbols, crests and banners. The source of power, that I mentioned could be something mystic, magical or whatever and fighting for your realm and it's source of magic should give you new powers only available to you and your fellow countrymen. Maybe the further you progress on your quest for realm power, the more it alters your appearance (an aura or anima of sorts).

just a few thoughts on RvR, I am sure there are lots of things/factors I didn't think about.

[Lightstalker]

# of PvE interested players >> # of players who say they are interested in PvP >> # of players who are actually willing to PvP

Why you'd treat the groups as equal partners in the operation, especially with the latter group finds enjoyment in disrupting the enjoyment of the former groups, is difficult to rationalize.  PvP interested players certainly are not half the available players, sufficient for their own niche market sure, but not the big prize that pulls in the venture capital.

The counter system sounds like the points system in Aion.  Of course since there is a reward for being on top the guy on top guy can quash an arbitrary number of lower tier guys.  The guys on top are far more likely to work together to make sure one of their number is on top at all times - even if they have to pass it around.  Same thing happened with the GM grind in WoW, repeated across a hundred servers and a thousand GMs.  This is a known non-solution to the problem of promoting open accessible conflict. 

Shadowbane added a guild-as-faction aspect, which was really undone by an implementation that depended on the highly mutable guild crest of that nation/guild.  Factions are irrelevant to players, of course, unless you are suggesting eliminating friendly fire.  Then factions are an incredibly bad decision as you'll have to deal with enemies who are immune to repurcussions in game. Factions will be gamed to facilitate espionage and making sure the same out of game group controls the best resources and titles in the game world.

Being a small guild in a game of conquest is a horrible experience.  Once the larger guilds are done going at each other (e.g. one logs off for the night) the other ends up looking for anyone online to PvP with.  That typically results in wildly mismatched contests where the only way to 'win' was to log off and eliminate the enemy's ability to consume your game time.  If you didn't happen to get your fun as part of the hoard vs. hoard fight, you'll simply be meat for a bored uberguild.



You are struggling to map Realm vs. Realm onto a game of conquest.  Unfortunately we already know that when provided an immune base of operations from which to strike at their enemies the players will use it (even if that means is as primitive as a mule character to hold the guild bank contents).  Nothing of value will be contestable, while each player hoards their resources behind the immune NPC cities.  Conquest games are fun when there are resources on the line, but most games of conquest do not support guilds who have something to lose.  In Shadowbane the end result was a huge vanity city for most nations and a large number of minimal cities used for transportation and to tie up the map resources.  No revolution in skills/class balance will change the underlying playability of your game of conquest.  If it isn't fun in ASCII, if certainly will not be fun in fully rendered 3D with hundreds of other players all trying to DDOS your connection and fool the server into misreporting their positions.  All that is distraction to the play of the game of conquest, which is at odds to the PvE experience.

PvE requires one group of players to be online and actively seeking matched opposition which is provided by the game.
PvP requires two or more well matched groups to be online, and willing to engage one another. 

If the map is meaningless groups cannot evade their antogonists in order to rebuild or find willing opposition.  If the map is meaningful it stands as an impediment to bringing online players into contact with one another.  Add in the complication of finding willing players of the same inclination (PvP or PvE) and you've made it needlessly complicated to find people to play with right now.

And no, one big group vs. a bunch of smaller groups is not a well matched contest in the absense of other constraints.  Not on a player level, not on a guild level, and not on a realm level.    A contest all sides find enjoyable will not just magically happen because you've started ranking things.  The system must encourage guilds/realms/factions to limit themselves in some relevant way.

[element_of_void]

I must say that your answer is well-thought-out and seems to make sense. One thing I wonder about is how that matches Dark Ages of Camelot. Maybe the European / German servers were different from the US servers - I don't know - but in that game you had 3 factions fighting each other. The main difference seems to be that they separated PvE and PvP into different zones and you needed a second account or access to "out of game" communication channels for espionage.

For the rest of your arguments, I will take them in and think about them. I started like three reply posts but I ran into a dead end or contradiction every time.

[Sheepherder]

You can solve the griefing problem with effective police/guards that escalate in severity of response and numbers every time you commit further crimes against other players, like you see in Grand Theft Auto.  The severity of response should be based on what was done, how many times it has been repeated, where it was done, who it was done to, and whether the offender has fled the scene.  This would make hit and run attacks more prevalent, and corpse camping near suicidal.  To ameliorate griefing players preoccupied with a mob, you could make that mob's AI "honourable" or "cowardly", so that when the griefer strikes the mob turns on the griefer, abstains from fighting, or runs away from both players.

To stop exponential power accumulation with zone control you simply don't reward players significantly more for owning more/higher tier zones, and you don't allow the high tier guilds to directly own low tier zones, instead forcing them to give up their low tier zones when they advance and smaller guilds duke it out between each other for the control of the now vacant zones, ostensibly as a "vassal" of the old ruler of their new property.

Combined, you're putting all the pvp action in the city, and make it an outlawed activity, so that you never get to a point where a zone is unusable for long stretches of time for the PvE crowd, because eventually the guards are going to roll in and rape face if the PvP players don't flee, which would be an interesting meta game in and of itself.  As a whole, the entire thing would be about low intensity warfare which you could probably also bolt a working PvE worldy game on to as UO did.

You could solve the spy/saboteur multiple character problem by making it possible to break into a player's apartment and discover the allegiances of all of his characters (exclude the names though).  Optimally, you would also want several forms of player organization, in the same way that WoW separates arena teams and guilds, so you don't have to make yourself a PvP target to talk to friends.

[Lightstalker]

I don’t really think you can solve the griefing problem, because I don’t think you can fix people with code.  Many attempts to solving the griefing problem only make things difficult for normal users.  Your rules and countermeasures only provide greater opportunity to abuse the normals to a grief attuned player.

Griefing isn’t just about killing your target.  Denying another player a MOB kill by forcing a mob to run away (e.g. the honorable or cowardly mob persona) would be a fansy-esque behavior just as bent on causing grief.  This would be especially prone to silliness because the griefer wouldn’t even have to be competitive 1v1 with the griefed player - just like fansy.  Automated enforcement and escalation creates its own problems, right along the lines of the recent City of Foo example where that "researcher" was using teleport foe on enemies in PvP right into the invulnerable instakill guards.  If guards in the game world automatically deployed, it is as simple as flagging a number of lowbies and following around your prey until their AE kills you – even that is common enough in WoW (e.g. flagged opposition standing on/over quest NPCs in popular areas such as the opening of the sunwell island quests hoping for a misclick autoattack to flag some poor sod attempting to turn in a quest).  Grief-as-victim is just as easy and rewarding to the griefer as grief-as-overmatched-aggressor. 

Spy/sabotage is not possible to prevent in the context of the game, because the game doesn’t monitor your idling in IRC, chatting on web-forums, or to your very own head while you log the first character/account out and log the next (rival faction) character/account in.  What is possible are better mitigation tools for group assets, chains of ownership and responsibility so that the inevitable director level betrayal, to grab a highly visible EVE example, comes for in game reasons rather than because one guy decided to play both sides against the middle - by actually playing both sides.  The EvE example may be a case where the betrayal was for the right reasons, but the damage caused by a single agent was far out of proportion to the damage that ought to have been caused by a single agent.  Part of the abstraction in games like these is the total lack of personal consequence to the avatar – they are a puppet and are not necessarily rationally motivated by massed blaster fire as you or I would be.  Shadowbane was classically bad in terms of permissions.  Permission to manage a shop vendor in essence granted full access to the entire shop’s inventory as well as the ability to cause the shop to be down-ranked or destroyed by removing maintenance gold at the right time.  WoW guild banks are only slightly better, but cause endless CS headaches as gold sellers have decided it is easier to hack an account and liquidate resources en mass rather than harvest NPCs for gold.  Valuable commodities cannot be risked to the guild bank even in a world of trust among mates because of the ease of violating the user accounts themselves.  Alternatively the guild simply relies on the outstanding CS department to repair any damage fairly quickly – put this into a world where your guild can suffer losses to another guild between the time the guild resources are plundered and restored and you’ve got a recipe for always winning your tactical battle in the war of conquest.  Or, if you grant immunity for recently plundered groups and you’ve got an officially sanctioned get out of jail card flag that simply requires a self-plundering to instantly opt out of repercussions.  You don’t even have to look for corrupt GMs or Developers interfering with game-play to abuse the protections on offer. 

I don’t think it impossible to achieve player built cities and sieging/conquest in the same game, I think it only remotely possible to achieve without understanding the limitations of what has come before. 

[Sheepherder]

Griefing isn’t just about killing your target.  Denying another player a MOB kill by forcing a mob to run away (e.g. the honorable or cowardly mob persona) would be a fansy-esque behavior just as bent on causing grief.  This would be especially prone to silliness because the griefer wouldn’t even have to be competitive 1v1 with the griefed player - just like fansy.

1. Mob CC.
2. Diminishing returns.
3. Guard response.
4. Welcome to 2004.

Automated enforcement and escalation creates its own problems, right along the lines of the recent City of Foo example where that "researcher" was using teleport foe on enemies in PvP right into the invulnerable instakill guards.  If guards in the game world automatically deployed, it is as simple as flagging a number of lowbies and following around your prey until their AE kills you – even that is common enough in WoW (e.g. flagged opposition standing on/over quest NPCs in popular areas such as the opening of the sunwell island quests hoping for a misclick autoattack to flag some poor sod attempting to turn in a quest).  Grief-as-victim is just as easy and rewarding to the griefer as grief-as-overmatched-aggressor.

1. Factionless guards are not innately hostile to any faction, the initiator of the attack is first targeted.
2. Faction guards only defend faction owned property, punt players off property at health = 0 rather than kill.
3. Players luring others to faction guards are still "criminal" if they attacked first.
4. Require /pvp or the press of a special attack button before auto-attack is enabled near an NPC.
5. Allow surrender to guards for modest offences.

Need any more obvious rules?

[element_of_void]

So the consensus is that you can't mix PvP and PvE in a game without having PvP players messing with the PvE experience of the majority of the player base.
At the same time you will lots and lots of players demanding PvP in a pure PvE game (my experience).
Either you turn the game into a hardcore PvP experience and lose all the less hardcore players (in my opinion the worst scenario) or you design a game with PvE and PvP in mind and find a solution to griefing which will cause griefing in more creative ways.

I think that espionage and sabotage can't be prevented by game developers unless there is no benefit to it.

I want to get back to possible solutions of that PvE/PvP city problem again.

If you have PvP zones, you can't have PvE cities there. They automatically become PvP cities and will scare away PvE people.
If you have a PvP flag system, you will end up with people griefing said system unless you give players an option to say "I don't participate in PvP" to prevent misclicks and ae flagging.

The question I'm working on right now is, what happens if people fight over a city.
You don't build a city over night, it takes huge amounts of materials, time and work. Making cities destroyable seems like a bad idea to me. So what about the people that live in a city when it is conquered... they suffer under the new ruler but not necessarily have to leave their home. Especially in a game where the control of cities and castles might change many times a week, maybe even a day.
You could flag the whole town as PvE and only certain buildings as PvP, making those destroyable. Capturing a town would then mean that you win against the defenders (npcs depending on the PvP buildings and all the players that decided to defend their city) and repair/rebuild those PvP buildings. The PvE buildings would be left unscratched and the citizens can still live safely in their homes but the PvP combat (many players, spells and effects) will cause lag and therefor a bad gaming experience for those PvE people in town.



I'd like to see a game where players fight over territory and special points of interest (like in planetside) but in a game that still works for people playing PvE. Thats why I'm so interested in possible design ideas that include both pve and pvp but not necessarily pvp zones (battlegrounds and frontier zones void of PvE players) and no hardcore solutions like shadowbane (as I heard, I didn't play SB)

[Lightstalker]

PvP and PvE regions side by side (or interspersed) will cause issues at the boundaries.  Classic boundary value problem in Shadowbane:  Someone built a vendor on the border of the safe zone, so people could vend their loot at a better than normal rate without risk of getting ganked while carrying a lot of cash.  The building spanned the boundary, and was subsequently destroyed by players standing in the safe zone and immune to counter attack.  Another, different, boundary problem with hard rules: stacking damage modifiers (penalties) caused a total damage modifier that was less than zero.  Healing effects were not flagged as hostile.  With negative modifiers healing spells became handy damage sources in safe zones - permitting killing without the possibility of retaliation. 

If you mix PvE and PvP in close proximity you'll have players playing by different rules running into each other all the time.  If there are different rules for different parts of the city you'll have people operating across these boundaries and this is a hard problem from a test standpoint.  You know the behavior should be different across this boundary, but it isn't always clear how it should be different as you move back and forth across that boundary.  This leads to special case code, one of the the best features of special case code is how quickly it gets out of date with subsequent changes to the product.  Some hard separation would be easiest, and therefore best, such as instancing all PvE or PvP content.  That goes right into game vs. world arguments which are often as not religious battles.



A capture mechanic that didn't leave the captured playerbase abandoning their former home would be great, but even better would be knowing the agressor had something on the line in the event they lose the attempt to capture.  If any idiot with a robe and a halbred can put your enjoyment at risk why bother building up a capturable asset in the first place?  You'll get all the fun and none of the risk taking out someone else's resource commitment.  When your opponents don't bother to have an asset worth counter-sieging the fight is entirely one sided with the builders taking all the risk.  That's not exactly fun, especially since your game is relying on the builders generating these points of interest worth fighting over.  Of course, this makes it harder for late adopters to get into the game, which is not a problem to be ignored in a game that if everything goes to plan will run for many years.

If you embrace the abstraction the fighting need not occur in the actual city the players have built. 

[Sheepherder]

Bounds checking isn't computationally expensive, and shit like checking to see if simple programming objects always output a correct value will never be outdated.

[element_of_void]

If you embrace the abstraction the fighting need not occur in the actual city the players have built. 

Like having another plane of existence and people phase over to that plane to fight for the "soul" of the city in the otherworld? I don't know whether you know Exalted (the pen&paper rpg). They have something like that, "the shadowlands" or the underworld I think they were called. A plane of existence for the deathlords and their servants. It was a darker mirror of the "real" world with a touch of emo, gothic and lovecraft.

Creating another layer above the "pve layer" would cause a lot of new things to worry about. Where can you change from one plane to the other? What happens while phasing through, some immunity time while loading or whatever? Should there be blocked zones so that people can't run into the enemy city in the real world and then phase through to attack the town center directly?



In my opinion, heal killing is a programming failure, not a problem for pvp design ideas.



What should an aggressor have one the line when attacking a city? His fame and honor? His life? His money?
I'd like to mix planetside pvp (attack base, cut supplies, drain resources, destroy shield, enter base, capture command center) with SWGs city building in a good way (for example fixing some major city building design errors swg had). That means the "owner" of a city or castle changes often but the effect on the pve people living in that city isn't that big. Capturing or recapturing should grant some sort of power or advantage to the winner that doesn't make him directly stronger but offers him something thats worth fighting for, fun and something else. I mean why did people play planetside? They didn't get much from world domination but nevertheless they fought over the same dozen bases over and over again... why? Because it was fun. You played planetside to fight about bases and kill stuff. Sure, you got some stuff like skill advancement, kill count, commander exp and stuff but mainly if was for the fun. Thats what I'd like to see in a pvp mmo rpg. People fighting for fun because it's a goddamn game they are playing and that game is about that.

Whats in for the people that build the city? Dunno, maybe some fame for being one of those who build a city or helped it's development. Or maybe they wanted to create a guild town of their own to make some kind of dream come true. Placing the PvP crowd in a different layer might solve some of the problems with the city building people ("Oh, our towns crystal changed to purple again, guess we won the last fight in the shadowlands.")

[Malakili]

I mean why did people play planetside? They didn't get much from world domination but nevertheless they fought over the same dozen bases over and over again... why? Because it was fun. You played planetside to fight about bases and kill stuff. Sure, you got some stuff like skill advancement, kill count, commander exp and stuff but mainly if was for the fun. Thats what I'd like to see in a pvp mmo rpg. People fighting for fun because it's a goddamn game they are playing and that game is about that.

This here is actually a really important point, so i want to quote it and talk about it a little bit cause it could get lost in your post I think.

1) Playing "for fun" is something that I am mixed about.  First I think it needs to be defined.  Obviously people have different versions of the term "fun."  For instance, I might describe playing Team Fortress 2 as fun, and then I might also describe reading a new book about medieval russia as fun.  The emotions are almost totally different though.  I think when people say "fun" in the context of video games they most often mean "exciting" (though I think this is open to discussion.)  Likewise, i think there is also "fun" in the strategic aspect of clan warfare/Pvp Conquest that is "fun" that goes far beyond the actual fighting over those towns, the resource management of building them, the political maneuvering to make sure clans around you are allies when possible, the economic benefits of controlling an area of the map, etc.  The reality of those mechanics is that it is a lot of spread sheeting, talking in chat rooms, etc, but it is a very enjoyable aspect of the game.

This leads to a few things.  First, when you are playing a "serious business" game like EVE Online lets say, a lot of people blast the game for being "boring."  While other people blink their eyes and say EVE is the most fun they've had in a video game.   Take the most recent EVE Dominion Trailer for example, its basically fleet warfare.  EVE fans basically say, yeah, this really captures what I love about the game, because when they think fleet warfare they think of the strategic planning that went into the attack, the resources they built up, all larger stakes aside from the ships involved, all of that is sort of inherent to the trailer to anyone who has taken part in that stuff.   However, the person that played EVE for a couple weeks just says "That stuff rarely actually happens."  While strictly true, the stuff that LEADS to those massive battles is happening all the time.

So, whats my point?

I think that PvP in an MMO can be "for fun because its a god damn game," but I also think that the context (strategic, economic, political, social) is a big part of the enjoyment a lot of people get out of these sorts of conquest games, and while something like Planetside is also fun, I think that totally separating the city building and pvp parts  like you've described would take away a lot of the elements that make those games fun.

Then again, the population that is willing to spend their time building up a town, playing the political game, and then is willing to risk losing it, pick up the pieces, and still play a game even after a major setback might be low.


_____


Now that I've come to the end of this post I'm actually looking at what you are saying in a different way, so I'll add a bit more.  I think it sort of sounds like you have  PvP "frontier" like maybe Dark Age of Camelot, while having "player cities" (which are maybe more like highly customizable player/guild housing?) somewhere else.  I suppose that sort of thing could work, now that I think about it.  I don't know if I would play that game over something like EVE/Darkfall, but I think there probably is a population that would. 

[tazelbain]

I don't why you are using Planetside as model of success.

[Lightstalker]

Bounds checking isn't computationally expensive, and shit like checking to see if simple programming objects always output a correct value will never be outdated.

I sit corrected, professional developers never leave those types of oversights in their products.

Dragon Age, which everyone is raving about recently, left 9 crash/hang reports in its wake during my first playthrough.  Single player.  Small world.  Tightly constrained experience.  Well received product.  Couldn't keep it together the required 30 hours - I play on a Dell, hard to get more mainstream than that hardware configuration.  The uptime expecations of an MMOG are far greater than those of a single player RPG (not to mention the concurrency aspect or hardware diversity).  I can crash WoW (today's gold standard) on demand 5 years after release, and pretty much each patch contains some new visit to Blizzard's crash handler.  Pardon me for taking the extra complexity in this type of 'solution' seriously.
 
The blended world model contains more opportunities to do things wrong because you have many more boundaries that matter to players (e.g. you have a clash of foundational assumptions about the very nature of the game you are playing).  That's why it is an inferrior model.  Not because it cannot be done right, or because when done right it is less fun than alternatives done right.  It is less likely to be done correctly by any given development team.  It is unreasonable to take on that kind of liability at the design stage when there are problems aplenty at every other step along the way to release. 

I mean, unless this time you're ready and it will be different.  I feel somehow diminished for taking the time to reply to that.

[Sheepherder]

Oh, okay, so they shouldn't program because they could make an error.  Got it.  Could you be a tad more fucking insane.

[Lightstalker]

The thrilling player at the keyboard slaughtering his enemies experience and the city building experience are not shared by the same set of players.  Multi-player games require player aggregation points, since all the interesting things happen when players come together.  Building a city for yourself tends to spread people out.  So there must be many players for each city, and that means many players for each person who gets to participate in the city building experience in any position of command authority.  Add in the typically woeful tooling around permissions and those charged with building the city for the many cannot share their power too widely for fear of abuse by others and exploitation of the many they represent.  The few with build authority depend on the many who make their building possible, so it is in their interest that the game most of the people spend their time playing be fun.  Sieges and breaking the enemy is fun, no doubt about it.  Unfortunately the difficulty in building often far outweighs the time spent and ease of destroying. 

There are many routes to addressing this imbalance:  allow more people to build cities (smaller cities), allow more people to participate in building cities (better sharing tools), concentrate on the non-building gameplay that most of the people will experience most of the time (better PvP, yo), etc.  Even taking a left turn and doing things like allowing players to 'build' the emplacements that NPCs defend during PvE content for other players (Player-As-Architect during monster-play).  They all have costs and trade-offs of course.  Smaller cities runs against the need for the world to always feel busy and full.  Better sharing tools still doesn't touch every player, and apparently isn't an easy problem to solve.  Better PvP really doesn't need player build city conquest mucking up its game.  At the end of the day both sets of players pay you money, and one set is (necessarily) much larger than the other.  Until your build and capture experience is compelling to participate in as a non-builder it isn't an asset to the title.  You need a system that will suck each player's resources dry with little input on how they are spent and loads of risk and will come out feeling fun for the grunts. 

That's why implementations like the "battle commander gets all the loot to distribute to those who helped with the victory" systems are so comically bad.  The whole trick to this is keeping the guy who can't actually control jack feeling like he's the most important thing in the field - without leaving it to the other players to provide that validation.  The game must do it, because this feature is the game's main draw or differentiator.  The game can't leave it to the good graces of the playerbase to fill it in on their behalf.  All too often, however, the games do leave it as an afterthought or undone.  They think the players or guilds will build their own tools and manage all this for themselves so long as we keep the servers running, but they won't.  The players will leave after the free month, this much we see over and over again.


To not always be the naysayer, I'll share some of the thoughts I had for Shadowbane back when it was relevant. 

• Improved permissions and sharing tools (seperate valuts and by-vendor permission settings / inventories).
• Resources points on the map to fight for short of fighting in the expensive cities that defined each guild (areas of control at 1/4 zone, across the whole world  and not just the defined zones). 
• Control of resource points allowing a visible and fluid border region that small groups could flip segments of back and forth with little long term consequence (color the world map). 
• And the requirement that this border be beat back to the capital before the capital was at risk. 
• Summon only working in 'your' territory for 'your' nation.
• Free teleport to your border (get into the action quickly).
• 24 hour burn in for any region to join your territory (players can push into enemy territory, but they can't get back to the front quickly if the front is in enemy territory).

This was meant to lengthen the duration of the war, provide something to do short of total annihilation of your enemy, and limit player mobility so that a runaway aggressor could be held off long enough for the defender to rally (e.g. today's momentum couldn't eradicate months of work).  Better sharing tools would have allowed more players to participate in building ownership, spreading the management load and improving player buy-in to both the defense of the city and the game itself.  I didn't really have an interest in bringing cities closer together; I already thought worldwide mobility was too fast in enemy territory, minimizing map choke-points and the like.  I was happy with the addition of reverse KoS for NPC guards, the addition of siege spires and mines, but such things were not part of the original plan for the game and the simple problem that it took 45 minutes to destroy 3 months of work remained.  EvE experienced a similar dramatic turn-about due to one person's betrayal, had that game's population not already self selected down to just the sort of people who find that particular intrigue... intriguing, they'd have shed many subscribers as a result.  I think it happened too quickly, but most of the time they have the opposite problem - nothing really changes. 

I liked the building system for the time, though a grace after placement would have been great (one pixel offsets could dictate city construction).  I think having canned templates for cities that the players can choose from (with cosmetic customizations) would have simplified many of the creative uses of game mechanics the players came up with.  As far as housing systems go, I really like LotRO's neighborhood system with the caveat that they should have a reason for visiting one neighborhood or another beyond having a house there - it can feel empty and too separated.  If you added instanced non-breakable neighborhoods to a Shadowbane-destructible city you could really have something fun.  You have the city view where you fight and defend your nation, but you can drop down into any of the districts to visit the shops, own a house, etc.  If the bank gets razed in a siege the housing district around the bank loses that point of interest, but the player housing is not also lost.  Quite gamey though, no pretence of being a seamless world.

[element_of_void]

I don't say that Planetside was a big hit. I do say that I like the idea that lots of people fight over points of interest in tactical battles. I did enjoy Planetside a lot because I loved to fight along side with my mates from [Fight Club] and it was surely a fun game because you could always find something funny to do even though it might not always lead to victory. Having like 12 people with bombers actually teaming up causes havoc. Having 12 people jumping from carriers and bringing down a generator in a minute was fun. Having 12 people riding war buggies... fun! (thats not us though)  Playing on your own, getting killed by unbalanced equipment or bad game mechanics in a mediocre FPS, lag and badly working hitboxes were not so much fun.

I did enjoy my time there but on the long run I preferred a game with no monthly fee and less problems.

That said, I don't want another game like Planetside. I'd like to see a game that has PvP with cities, castles and other points of interest that actually takes some tactics and intelligence to fight and win effectively (while zerging would certainly work as well).


I know that "fun" is hard to catch and harder to keep. (don't know if that saying makes sense in English). As you said, fun is X for person A and Y for person B. Nevertheless I think that the fighting should be fun for as many as possible. That wouldn't take away the fun for the mastermind and accountant type of players that organized the whole war but make it easier for them to get people to carry out their plans on the battlefield. Siege weapons and stuff, defense mechanisms, battles on the walls and in the inner courtyard and finally the warlord claims the castle and displays the last bailiff's head above the castle's gates.

I'm all for intense pvp battles and conquering the world and stuff but at the same time I enjoy spending hours at the forge or training my skills fighting stuff that creeps around in dark dungeons. I even like fishing. I do like both PvP and PvE and I think that there are more people like me out there that would enjoy both and wouldn't like to play 2 games to satisfy both needs.

Maybe even by separating PvE and PvE buildings there could still be a certain amount of risk involved for those that own and improve a city. Building certain buildings that are flagged pvp would mean only people of that faction can use it and if another faction runs the city, you would be kept from entering those houses. This way "nonPvP" people would still build/rent houses and help to improve the city because they only require the PvE buildings.
This separation of PvP and PvE will most likely lead to people saying "What teh f***, I hate carebears, make them all flagged pvp and let me melt some faces" but after playing both pvp and mixed or pve servers in DAoC, WoW and EQ2 I realized that pure hardcore pvp servers don't bring out the best guys but attracts many griefers and other sorts of people. I know other games had even worse conditions.


In games like Eve, fighting has more consequences. As I understand it, even if you win the fight, you might have lost more than the enemy and therefor lost the battle itself. Attacking someone in Eve has more consequences and thats something most PvP games lack. "Oh, I got killed for killing you. Let me respawn and kill you again for killing me for killing you!" I am not in favor of losing all your equipment on death (or being lootable) but I think that losing your ship and therefor lots of credits and materials or whatever it takes to build ships in eve and maybe even losing some skills (I think you did if your last clone copy is to old or something) gives the game more thrill and gives PvP fights more depth.



Lightstalker. By blended worlds you mean my abstraction of having "another layer" for pvp? Yes, thats what I meant when I said that it "would cause a lot of new things to worry about" That was just one idea, one concept, not an attempt on a valid solution.

If you embrace the abstraction the fighting need not occur in the actual city the players have built. 

I'm intrigued by what you could mean by that. The answer to that is more or less what I am looking for in this thread.

I liked the building system for the time, though a grace after placement would have been great (one pixel offsets could dictate city construction).  I think having canned templates for cities that the players can choose from (with cosmetic customizations) would have simplified many of the creative uses of game mechanics the players came up with.

Thats what I mentioned about city building in another thread somewhere. SWG could have worked a little bit better with such a feature as well. Choose from a number of grids/templates and if people want to build in the city, they can choose a plot and build their house on it. I'm not sure what LotRs neighborhood system was but I'll read up on that as soon as possible.


As far as city building and shared tools are concerned, I think that the city should be something many people "experience".
Adventuers fight enemies of the city (thugs, wild animals, underground creatures and stuff).
Harvesters supply the city with goods.
Crafters turn those materials into tools, building material, clothes, food and stuff.
Entertainers keep people happy or maybe even lighten the mood when there's a shortage on supplies.
Traders open shops, manage trading routes with other cities and stuff.
Politicians manage the city and make contracts with other cities or NPC factions.

A trader that creates a trading route might at the same time start a quest for adventurers to make sure the caravan has a safe trip. A politician that makes a contract between his city and an npc faction might cause other factions to feel threatened by the city( adventurer quests) or maby cut supplies (trader and harvester quests).
This also means that if a city lacks a pool of players (ie no crafters) the growth of the city dwindles until someone fills the gap. After a while a trader might import tools and clothes from other cities. If there are no entertainers, a politician might invite them from other cities. If there are no adventurers, someone might hire mercenaries or employ guards.
Another complex system that has to be thought through, tested, fixed, tested, fixed again...


Your thoughts on wars in SB are interesting. It goes away from the idea of rapidly changing city/castle owners to long wars and slowly shifting borders. This would mean that there wouldn't have to be an abstraction of the pvp layer because it would be outside of cities most of the time.

[tazelbain]

In games like Eve, fighting has more consequences. As I understand it, even if you win the fight, you might have lost more than the enemy and therefor lost the battle itself. Attacking someone in Eve has more consequences and thats something most PvP games lack. "Oh, I got killed for killing you. Let me respawn and kill you again for killing me for killing you!" I am not in favor of losing all your equipment on death (or being lootable) but I think that losing your ship and therefor lots of credits and materials or whatever it takes to build ships in eve and maybe even losing some skills (I think you did if your last clone copy is to old or something) gives the game more thrill and gives PvP fights more depth.

You are confused.  Eve is exactly losing most of your equipment on death and what you don't lose is fully lootable.

[DLRiley]

EVE pvp system "works" in the sense that the real large scale turf battles don't happen very often because of the death penalty. The penalty forces players to think about the casualties incurred in a battle and hence not have as many of them. Sure there is plenty "pvp" outside of large scale sov fights but they are with cheap ships people spent several months in advance stock piling to limit their risk. Of coure this is acceptable because it has been established long ago that EVE is not about the actual "pvp" and any "fun" gained is in the logistics of keeping yourself perpetually better than your opponents without actually fighting them. The funny thing

Oh and LightStalker kicks ass, thinking of posting my idea of city seiges.

[Lightstalker]

Pardon the wall of text, I've apparently been waiting years for someone to "get" wars of conquest in a MMOG.  It should be clear that Shadowbane is a heavy influence of current thinking here, but Eastern Front for the Atari 800 is really where this started for me.  


So for me a blended world is one where PvP and PvE exist side by side – Where you can be engaged in some PvE activity and some other group of players can wander by and turn it into a PvP activity.  I would make a hard separation, if you are in the world you are in a PvP+ environment, while PvE content only exists in instances (PvP can also be in instances, or one could reverse the relative positions to keep PvP bottled up in constrained environments – really, implement to preference).  A blended world will have things like safe zones and NPC guards that have to try to figure out when that healing spell was meant to help or hurt or who was standing where or doing what when an attack was uninitiated.   A world with hard separation will just need to handle the transition in a way that provides neither advantage nor disadvantage for popping across the boundary (e.g. you return to a position of relative safety, your capital, and not to the same point after an opportunity to repair and refit your forces).

Embracing the abstraction to me means (in this context) we don’t care about any single arbitrary building in the city, we care that we’re laying siege to a city.  It would make sense to include key points of interest, guard houses, banks, prominent destructible structures, fortifications, etc. but not individual player houses to be singled out and destroyed (or to attempt to defend).  

I would push for more first person killing and reduced lethality on the guild or nation level in a game world, and therefore not open up the actual building of the city to more people (because I see this as the route to a larger player-base).  EVE goes the other way where the focus is more on the builder side of things with less emphasis on large scale nightly fighting, as other have described.  The tools I seek for building deal with who controls access, permissions, etc. on the actual buildings and services they house.  Most implementations have a direct hierarchy where higher levels have all lower level permissions.  This is an impediment to trust when different groups have to work together in the same nation/city/building – the shopkeeper needs to be able to control his own prices, inventory, etc. without the city owner pillaging his stores while the city owner needs to enforce global rules (tax, maint., KoS list) and make sure everyone maintains their building on time and no one loses an asset because any one shopkeeper decided to loot the building’s vault.  All the extra about caravans and resource supply to the city would be great in a complete world, but without an enforceable autonomy and trust between land owners and tenants in the world you it is a lot of work to build collaborative cities that might be worth conquering some day.

Fighting in the literal city built by the players has a number of consequences, many of which are bad.  As a developer you can’t know how people will use the tools you’ve created for them.  You might have an intended use, but the players typically will find their own way(s).  If there is an advantage to building your city with the walls facing the other way around, you can be sure the players will figure it out and do it (e.g. the /stuck command worked with respect to the orientation of the wall segment and not the logical arrangement of the city in Shadowbane).  If one type of building was extra advantageous to city defense you can be sure that’s the one players will use (e.g. the smallest house in the game could hold one max rank guard NPC, this house could be packed much tighter into the world than any other guard building in the game, despite being a much lower level building it was the ‘best’ for overwhelming defense).  If they could derive an advantage over their enemies they’d do it, with the very buildings that comprised the city (tower archers tended to crash players out of the world when several of them would agro at once, so build a city comprised entirely of corner towers with 2 archers each).  If you’ve got a PvP game to worry about balancing, you often don’t have the resources to balance the incredibly engaging Player vs. Building aspect of things, allowing players in effect more customization in their cities than they have in their characters does nothing to simplify this calculus.  

Combination of these components could easily create cities that were not fun to siege by overwhelming the technical limits of the game.  If builders are constrained to a theme, build quality, and collection of stock wall configurations the actual siege environment becomes a constant that can be relied upon when it comes time to make balance decisions about how hard the siege will actually be.  You won’t have people trying to place cities in locations where there is no legal place to siege from, or interfere with a guild’s ability to repair their walls by dropping a building into the gap (as either an enemy or “ally”).  These are examples of gaming the rules of the game and not really fighting a war of conquest or fighting your opponent.  Gaming the game is fun for a small set of players and is generally frowned upon by most of the rest of the world as being cheap, cheating, exploiting, etc.   This isn’t contradictory to several of the ideas presented recently, just I think my emphasis pulls individual player assets out of the line of fire and puts community buildings only on the path of conquest (personal buildings are instanced and stay with the city no matter who governs).

Even though I would move the action out of the city most of the time, I still think fighting in the abstract city is much better than fighting in the literal city.  When you are fighting in the literal city there is no escaping the consequence that burning down DThis building actually just destroyed some actual player’s actual assets in the game world.  Player housing is one of the big hooks available to a development team, players have shown an incredible willingness to invest in their housing and customization of their housing.  But as soon as all that investment can be obliterated by a rampaging group of enemy players who have nothing of their own on the line these players tend to quit playing the game.  That’s bad all around.  Avoiding the Nation vs. Player fight should be one of the goals of any game based on large-scale PvP.  Allowing a player’s personal buildings to be destroyed as part of a siege is just bad for everyone’s business.  Allowing the forge to be destroyed such that individual player shopkeepers now have their inventory and staff milling around their personal house unemployed is fine, having the whole lot a smouldering crater on the ground is not so much of a good thing.

edit: spelling is hard

[Venkman]

EVE pvp system "works" in the sense that the real large scale turf battles don't happen very often because of the death penalty. The penalty forces players to think about the casualties incurred in a battle and hence not have as many of them. Sure there is plenty "pvp" outside of large scale sov fights but they are with cheap ships people spent several months in advance stock piling to limit their risk. Of coure this is acceptable because it has been established long ago that EVE is not about the actual "pvp" and any "fun" gained is in the logistics of keeping yourself perpetually better than your opponents without actually fighting them. The funny thing

Oh and LightStalker kicks ass, thinking of posting my idea of city seiges.

Eve also works because it's not marketed as a large scale FPS battle of zero consequence for the sake of "just the fun of it all". PvP in Eve is just something you do to live the virtual life you want to live in that galaxy. You're not entirely forced to live that life, but it is a fact of it. It's pre-Trammel UO++.

Which brings us back to the age old question of just how many people want to live a virtual life versus just playing a game. Even the time-commitment of Raiding is just extending the "game". Mentally this is very different than living in a virtual world of risk and intrigue every time you log in. And the market speaks to size of the relative playerbases.

[DLRiley]

Eve also works because it's not marketed as a large scale FPS battle of zero consequence for the sake of "just the fun of it all". PvP in Eve is just something you do to live the virtual life you want to live in that galaxy. You're not entirely forced to live that life, but it is a fact of it. It's pre-Trammel UO++.

Which brings us back to the age old question of just how many people want to live a virtual life versus just playing a game. Even the time-commitment of Raiding is just extending the "game". Mentally this is very different than living in a virtual world of risk and intrigue every time you log in. And the market speaks to size of the relative playerbases.

I think the original designers of EVE wanted a game focused on the PVP element and probably envisioned fleet fights more often as their playerbase gamble their rewards for the sake of fun. But got a PVE game that has a PVP side you don't have to participate in. The funny thing about EVE is that they have made multiple passes at pushing the game in the PVP direction.

My question is that how do you move town/castle conquest away from the realm of virtual world and more into the realm of a game. Or simply how do you mainstream something that is inherently niche, because I like the idea of castle seiges, I simply hate the implementation and even EVE model isn't preferable because I really want to play a game.

[Malakili]

My question is that how do you move town/castle conquest away from the realm of virtual world and more into the realm of a game. Or simply how do you mainstream something that is inherently niche, because I like the idea of castle seiges, I simply hate the implementation and even EVE model isn't preferable because I really want to play a game.

Well, you could do something Wintergrasp style.  Thats a castle siege, and its VERY gamey.   There is also the Isle of Conquest. 

I haven't really played either of those very much to be honest, I did play Wrath for a while, but I don't like WoW PvP very much, so I only did them a couple times a piece to try it out. 

By the way, I disagree with you on what CCP intended with EVE at the beginning.  Back when EVE was released I'd argue that it was even less large scale PvP oriented that it is now.  I'd say they were very much going for "science fictions simulation."   

I don't think there is a very big market for open world PvP period to be honest, regardless of the implementation.


Oh, back to the main question of the thread though, here is a quick rundown of how Darkfall handles player housing.

1) There are villages throughout the world that are separate from cities/hamlets.
2) Villages have housing plots of various types (different sized houses)
3) You need a deed to claim a house, you can go to an unclaimed plot and use your deed to claim that plot.  Deeds can be found rarely as monster drops or in treasure chests found randomly through the world.  Houses have taxes that must be paid every few days or you lose the house, at which point someone else can claim it.
4) Villages have an ownership stone.  The villages can change hands every 6 hours.  Owning a village gives a clan a set amount of gold per hour when they own it.  Individual houses do not need to be owned by the clan owning them.  Houses can not be destroyed, but the door can be destroyed, at which point people can go inside (say, to attack the people inside).  As long as you keep paying your taxes (which don't go to the clan who owns the village as far as I know, I believe it is just a gold sink from the world) you don't lose your house.
5) In the new Expansion player houses have local banks (which is separate from your normal bank), and you can set up an NPC merchant which stands outside your house and you can basically set him up as a vendor to sell your stuff for you.   

This seems somewhat like what you guys have been talking about in terms of housing/sieging being separate, but it isn't the kind of large scale city building maybe.

Anyway, figured I'd just add that to see what people think of that system.

[DLRiley]

Town gold should be based on actual economic activity. But then again this is darkfall we are talking....

The lack of economic incentive to have said house because it is lootable and actually cost you money isn't necessarily separating sieging from ownership. Because the idea of doing so is to allow a place where the stuff held inside the house is still safe despite the siege.

[Malakili]

Town gold should be based on actual economic activity. But then again this is darkfall we are talking....

The lack of economic incentive to have said house because it is lootable and actually cost you money isn't necessarily separating sieging from ownership. Because the idea of doing so is to allow a place where the stuff held inside the house is still safe despite the siege.

I'm not positive how the looting of houses works actually. From what I have read I'm pretty sure that it isn't lootable UNLESS you have stuff in your local bank and stop paying your taxes, in which case stuff that was stored in your house goes to the next person who claims it.  It also does, as I mention, give you the option to have a merchant to sell your stuff, so there is an economic advantage to having a home in that regard. (It also, gives you the option of buying the spell that lets you teleport to your house, so it also gives you the ability to fast travel to do different places in the world (Your normal bindstone location + your house, which might not be close to each other).

I know you are going to rag on Darkfall no matter what, so its cool if you want to piss on their system, but I think it has some merit.  It also, obviously isn't perfect and isn't going to be "the model" that lives up to everything a thread specifically about this subject wants.   Still, I haven't seen much better that has actually been put into practice.

[DLRiley]

Actually I found the system you described surprisingly not retarded. I simply assumed that going into a house will allow you to loot a house, considering this is darkfall we are talking about. If a house is like your own personal bank/distributor until you can no longer pay the rent, in which case you are locked out the house + any stuff inside. Doesn't sound bad. Though a towns economic benefit should scale directly by the amount of economic activity, and maybe they should be some upkeep(s) that scales depending on how many people in town/how many people not in town and what they are doing. A ghost town should be a money losing venture or at the very least not give any money.

[pxib]

Persistence does not require world PvP. For example, consider the moving Kurzick/Luxon front in Guild Wars: Factions: Their so-called "Alliance Battle". The location of the front determines which world map towns are accessible to each faction's players, making it easier or harder for them to reach certain farming areas and mission objectives. The deeper the front moves into one side's territory (the more completely that faction is defeated), the more heavily the instanced battle terrain is weighed to their advantage... but the higher the "faction point" bonus the winning faction receives. Each instanced battle is 12v12, six squads of four apiece, but there may be ten or twenty going on at once... whether they win or lose determines which way (and by how much) the front moves, and therefore which map the battle will take place on for anybody who re-queues.

Functionally it's just a single scale moving back and forth, making fights easier or harder.

A similar scale (with its own sets of maps) could be erected around the instanced towns of player guilds. The level to which a particular town is "defended" at any given moment might determine how many resources its vendors have available, how much it collects in taxes, or how much it costs to maintain. Fights wouldn't start unless the guild had enough players queued for defense, but an undefended town might not be accessible to shoppers... or it might put a hefty "defense fee" on all transactions. Raiding guilds (or enemy towns) could only queue to fight towns of similar strength. Heck, each defensive map might be a place where town members could do crafting or harvest resources while they're "queued" and each offensive map might serve a similar purpose to raiders, giving players reason to muck around in those instances before there were enough people for a real battle.

It'd only be as persistent as Planetside, but of a smaller, more personal scope.

[Malakili]

Sounds like Global Agenda.

[Venkman]

Persistence does not require world PvP. For example, consider the moving Kurzick/Luxon front in Guild Wars: Factions: Their so-called "Alliance Battle". The location of the front determines which world map towns are accessible to each faction's players, making it easier or harder for them to reach certain farming areas and mission objectives.

Tabula Rasa was suppose to have this, though we know how that went. Movable front lines are cool. Logical extension of the old Darkness Falls realm/system from early DAoC. This is the sort of persistent impact any playstyle can contribute to.

It needs to be so heavily regulated though that it ends up feeling either overly contrived or so far in the background many players don't see their own impact. Which is fine too as this is the case of 0.0 battles for resource runners in Eve or anyone who wasn't submitting resources to open the AQ gate in pre-BC WoW.

[DLRiley]

What learning from Guild Wars? Blasphemy.

[pxib]

It needs to be so heavily regulated though that it ends up feeling either overly contrived or so far in the background many players don't see their own impact. Which is fine too as this is the case of 0.0 battles for resource runners in Eve or anyone who wasn't submitting resources to open the AQ gate in pre-BC WoW.

That's why I suggested instancing and personalizing it by connecting the mess to player towns. Holding off raiders may not change the world, but it will absolutely change how effective your guild's town is, or how profitable your guild's (or enemy raiders') resource gathering is. Effectively every group has its own private version of everything from EVE 1.0 to EVE -1.0 ... depending on how fervently they want to defend it.

Sure, there could be another layer wherein the theoretical location of these instanced towns on a "world map" determines which side of a gigantic faction battle line you happen to fall on, and therefore whether your town is under friendly control or enemy occupation based on how other battles are going. As the front passes, a town might suddenly find itself defended by faction soldiers who aren't members of the guild... in localized skirmishes with enemies.

How much effect that has on the town might be no more than a matter of graphics, opinion and semantics. If the tide turns in your town, or if things get particularly bloody there, you might get a commemorative statue: "The Massacre at Grignr's Landing" with a date.