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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  Game Design/Development  |  Topic: Can (player) towns/castles and pvp conquests wars coexist? 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: Can (player) towns/castles and pvp conquests wars coexist?  (Read 18260 times)
DLRiley
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Posts: 1982


Reply #35 on: December 05, 2009, 06:03:40 PM

Pxib the only problem is defenders can lock out pvp action by well not defending. Though you have a system in place to discourage that, it isn't nearly as abuse proof as it should. What made alliance battle work is that 1. It was a battle between NPC Alliances, any lack of action during one time zone can be fixed by cross-server ques and 2. It allowed individuals to get in on the action in a matter of clicks. Towns/city/castle confrontation is way to "guild" centric like early WoW raiding. The unwashed mashes shouldn't have to saddle up with the nearest guild to fight for or to defend the nearest castle. Let the unwashed masses well be the unwashed masses. There is nothing wrong with that, hell if there was something wrong with that we would still be attempting to level up through group content only.
pxib
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Posts: 4701


Reply #36 on: December 05, 2009, 06:34:19 PM

That's just a matter of scaling. Set it up so that individual players can do the same thing in instanced resource gathering zones with a variety of safety levels, or group up to take on instanced areas (maybe DotA style, with creeps) where they conquer them to gain goodies and then defend them to harvest resources... until they get bored (or frustrated) and leave and the whole place disappears in a puff of pixels. Like EVE (or Guild Wars) you don't need "cross server" queues because there's only one (massively instanced) 'server'. Everybody queues together.

As much as I think there might be abuse issues with players failing to defend in order to protect their towns from attack, I believe it's important that be a mechanism for just that. Some players who don't PvP may want towns for non-PvP reasons, and though they may not be THE BEST sort of town, it's relatively easy to give them that option. What I specifically want to avoid is the Planetside experience: Spend the whole evening pushing the front one direction, go to sleep, and return to find everything back the other way. If the guild had to be defending in order to have the situation change, then SOMEBODY knows what happened. Better that there be a story (even a distressing one) than that there be no story at all. Plus defended towns opening up at different times as different guilds are gathered and awake would give both warriors and traders different places to visit and explore.

...and just think, while you fight raiders all the traders and crafters visiting your town will be cheering you on! Better to be well defended than holed up in a grim town locked down for a seige.

if at last you do succeed, never try again
Venkman
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Posts: 11536


Reply #37 on: December 06, 2009, 10:16:39 AM

At an abstracted level, this sounds very similar to WAR's zone "ownership" by whichever way the scale tips between Chaos and Order. Really just a question of getting a zone buff or not, but it was based I believe on PQs, lakes and even instances? This theoretically allowed players to choose their own activity while also contributing to the whole.

I imagine they intended for that to apply to the big final battles over the various pairings. But once again we can't get an example of this idea working because of a bunch of other unrelated reasons.

Which is why in my mind, you really can't have design discussions without also having development ones. But that's another topic smiley
element_of_void
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Reply #38 on: December 06, 2009, 11:06:06 PM

There is one thing I still fear has some impact on the actual implementation of any solution in a PvP and PvE hybrid game. How does the fight over the city affect the PvE crew that went to "Grignr's Landing" to get some nice shoes and a few sets of "daiklaves" done.

1) Having PvP battles abd sieges in or even near a city will have an effect on the performance in most games. I know this can be handled by some games (good design/programming) to some extent.
2) Having PvP players in enemy towns could mean raiding parties fighting through the local defense not to conquer the city but to kill important npcs (traders, bankers etc) or attack, provoke or annoy PvE players that do not wish to participate in PvP activities.



The "attackable time frame" system was what SWG went for, if I remember correctly. Set your base to be attackable in a certain time frame (i.e. 6 hours ranging from 17 - 23 o'clock of your most favorite time zone. During that time you are most likely to be able to defend it. Attackers are also most likely to be online during that time. If you set it to 2am to 8 am you will have less attackers but if anybody attacks, there will be nobody to defend (and guilds do actually organize raids for 4am if that brings a certain benefit worth the amounts of coffee).

I know that I often fought for a whole evening to conquer castles in the frontier zone for Hibernia to log in the next day and see that all castles and 2 of 3 relicts were in Albion's hands. I also know the same feeling from Planetside. There were people from different time zones that singlehandedly conquered the whole world piece by piece because there was no defense.

Would it be possible to combine NPC guards and players for defense? Let's say the game determines the amount of friendly players in the area and thereby determines the amount of NPC guards. The more players fight to defend the castle, the less npcs are spawned. Could be tricky to balance but doable. Could be hard to determine the right area of control (so that only people actually fighting to defend do count but it doesn't end with people standing just outside that area and casting/shooting into the area to help the defense without lowering the NPC guard count.

The amount of defensive NPCs could be increased by the controling faction through high cost/maintenance guards. The level of defense (casters/archers, towers etc) could be controlled likewise. Could also be a nice money sink if implemented correctly.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel,
I'm just curious why the square one didn't work out in the long run.
DLRiley
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Posts: 1982


Reply #39 on: December 07, 2009, 11:21:50 AM

A better question is whether you can combine NPC's and players in offense.
glennshin
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WWW
Reply #40 on: April 28, 2011, 03:04:02 PM

Necro... because I would like to see a game like this.

What if guild members could take control of the Guard NPCs? Basically if/when players aren't on or don't feel like defending their town then an NPC guard would substitute. The guard tower could be upgraded w/ barracks or other structure to increase NPC capacity/upgrades. At least this way there is a visual indicator of possible city strength. You could have a spy class/job infiltrating the city ala Romance of the 3 kingdoms for any detailed town info to show up at the Guilds commander main UI.

I imagine for the PVP to work in this type of shared world they would have to have the least amount of power in changing or disrupting the game world. They would be the agents of the politician or crafter classes. They would be the ones to gather resources for the crafters or fight/sabatoge/espionage for the politicians. They would be the ones put in dangerous situations against other PVPers while the crafters & politicians can do most of their gaming in the relative safety of cities or 1.0 security.

For this to work there'd be a need for fairly deep fight mechanics so the PVPers always feel like they have a fighting chance to accomplish whatever goals and fight amongst each other in bars/arenas/leagues. With the already complex city building/politicking game it's no wonder a game like this hasn't seen the light of day yet. But one can hope?
Soln
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Posts: 4737

the opportunity for evil is just delicious


Reply #41 on: April 28, 2011, 03:23:14 PM

Im hoping with SWG EMU this will be possible.  SWG had the best politician and town model IMO.  Several of the constraints, like the temporary enemy flag (TEF) were broken, however.
Malakili
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Reply #42 on: April 30, 2011, 05:25:15 AM

Thinking about it, I wonder if the answer to this is to make building shit easy.  Taking my PvP MMO of choice (World War 2 Online), and thinking about how often things change hands in that game, I wonder if it would be possible to do something similar but with players of creating the cities instead of having them be part of the game world from the beginning.   It seems to me that the longer you make people grind to do stuff, the less fun its going to be to lose it.  But if you are able to build things up with relative ease and are part of a fairly constant back and forth, it seems more like a viable model.  Just sort of spilling thoughts out here though, needs refinement.
Soln
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Posts: 4737

the opportunity for evil is just delicious


Reply #43 on: April 30, 2011, 06:33:22 PM

there was a lot wrong with PvP in SWG, but the ability for players to own faction buildings outside of the player town limits created a lot of fun.  They could not only change owners, but be destroyed. 
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