Open PvP mechanic for the mainstream

[Typhon]

[stuff]

I was sort of pointing towards the Eve cloning idea, which would be painless if insurance covered the full cost of any ship you lost and it wasn't possible to deny people access to cloning facilities. (last I checked, I just watch the war stories, I don't play)

World of Warcraft is interesting on a pvp server.  What's on the line is your grinding time.  Sure, if they gank you you're pretty much forced to call it quits for leveling in the vicinity.  But then, depending on your temperament, maybe so are they.  My younger brother calls this "don't shit where you eat."  He's very, very good at it.

There have been times when I do the punitive, "ok, so you want some of this?!" fighting that you are talking about.  And there have been times when the opposition wasn't so grossly under or over geared that the "fuck you! NO! FUCK YOU!!!" went back and forth for three or four times (that's about 5% of the time).  Even if you win, it always ends with reinforcements being pulled in, and it all serves no point.  The amusement rides keep running behind you as you play out your little hissy fit.  I guess what I'm saying is that, to me, WoW pvp servers don't seem interesting at all, they just seem hollow and pointless.  A way to say "fuck you!" to someone, and that's about it.

If there was a single reason to fight each other I think there would times when I would enjoy it.  But there is just no reason at all, other than to be a dick.  A FPS is a different game, you are there for one reason alone, there doesn't need to be an incentive.  These games are about progression, if you character isn't doing something that helps character, guild or realm progression is just seems, I don't know, out of character I guess (couldn't find a different way of saying that).

[Kageru]

They did try doing that with WoW. The burning crusades had a number of zones in which there was a "PvP" mechanic which would flag you PvP and count up zonewide points. After a time the victorious side would gain some advantage (either zone points or badges). The problem is with no population control is that it would either be a zerg or some loner capping points. Restrict the population needed to start the ride and it spends even more time unused.

Ultimately there's just no *benefit* to having open-world PvP unless you build the whole game around it. Including resources to make people want to fight, material they can use (or lose) to fight, something to deal with population imbalance (even if it's only a safe zone to flee to) and a great variety in places to fight over. But it's so much hard and niche compared to having a battlefield based game I'm not sure why you'd bother.

For example Eve is epic, battles are intense, but the game is incredibly bad because your fun it so strongly dependent on other people to provide it and battles are generally decided in the macro. Log into WoW (or TF2, or monday night combat) and find fun action with low downtime immediately and learn to get better at it ... or 5 * 24 hours camping a section of space hoping stragglers log in so you can gank them 300 on 1. If Eve launched today it would probably never get the same traction, and emergence of the political entities that gave the game ongoing meaning, as it enjoys.

[Koyasha]

There were two main problems that I could see with the Burning Crusade PvP objectives.

First, the benefits of winning were relatively minor.  And second, the Hellfire forts and Halaa were able to be constantly contested, so even when you flipped control to your side the enemy could immediately start trying to take it back.  Which results in the situation I mentioned earlier where there's no victory, there's only 'which side is willing to stay and fight the longest'.  I don't really care for pvp when it basically boils down to 'we killed each other for a couple hours until I went to dinner'.  I want an exciting fight, then either I win or I lose, and it's done.

However, the Bone Wastes tower control thing around Auchindoun was interesting and well-done, I think.  The six towers that, once all were locked to one side, would stay that way for six hours.  There was some moderate interest in fighting over them whenever the time came up for it.  If the reward had been truly worthwhile rather than just spirit shards from Auchindoun bosses for the next six hours, I imagine there would have been strong competition every six hours there until Lich King.  Unfortunately the benefit was only marginally useful to a few players, so sometimes you'd get a pretty big fight, other days one or two guys could cap all the towers without anyone bothering to even try to stop them.

Wintergrasp was the next step in this sort of thing, and it started out well, but then they reversed course and turned it into basically a battleground by having the numbers on each side limited in order to force even numbers.  So it looks pretty clear that WoW has given up on any possibility of making open world pvp objectives from now on.

[Lantyssa]

They should, since they're so bad at it.

[Malakili]

  Unfortunately the benefit was only marginally useful to a few players, so sometimes you'd get a pretty big fight, other days one or two guys could cap all the towers without anyone bothering to even try to stop them.

The problem is, make it that "beneficial" and suddenly 1/2 your players are crying every six hours because some important thing is unavailable to them.  I'm convinced that *mainstream* PvP has to be fun for its own sake.  Hardcores aren't going to care if they have to wake up at 4am to make sure they control the thing that is super important (see EVE).  But its almost impossible to hit the perfect balance of "important enough that I care, and unimportant enough that it doesn't turn me off the game if I lose" when you are aiming for a mainstream, casual audience.

[Kageru]

I agree.

Plus you can't easily balance the rewards against the challenge. You'd get things like win trading, zerging or small groups just flipping it when there's no opposition in the area and still getting "lucrative" rewards.

I'm pretty sure they gave up on Wintergrasp as world PvP when they realised that the server could not handle it. Same thing CCP realised as well, but they just let the players deal with black screens and 5-10 minute action lag. The average WoW player isn't going to put up with that.

[pxib]

From the Rift thread:

Back when WoW was first announced, I was hoping PvP would be like a game of Warcraft, from the player's eye view. With constructable/destructable buildings and vehicles. Boy howdy was I let down.

Separate battle zones from the open world, but don't instance them. PvP guilds bid (money? reputation? whatever...) for particular play times, and then arrange a queue of people (guild members first, I imagine, then other queued players) to get "constructed" and "upgraded" by the various buildings. Until then they play observers. The winning guild (and other players who participated) gain specialized buffs that last, I dunno, a few days or so and the side that controls the area gains some world effect during the next battle in that area (which only works outside its battle zone). Something like the world effect and improved elementals in Wintergrasp would be ideal.

Heck, the battle zone could just be a "phased" version of the real zone... and when the battle ends its conditions alter. Run battles every fifteen minutes and figure out stakes that assure the battle will be over by that time. PvE players get random bonuses sometimes, but not all the time. PvP players get to queue for random battlegrounds (or a specific one, if they like it and don't care how long the queue is) and get "constructed" at some random battle zone somewhere to play out a particular life and death, and then queue again. If they put together a guild they can actually control the flow and get moved to the front of a particular battleground's queue every time they die.

How's that sound?

[Typhon]

I really wanted (and like Ratman, thought) it would be a like a match in Warcraft.  I hoped that the "casual" queue would be two NPC generals facing off against each other.  They would be responsible for creating the serfs and grunts.  The would give players tasks, players would receive rewards based upon their successfully completing tasks and destroying enemy units and buildings.  Depending on the game type, the rewards would be slanted more or less toward completing tasks.  Each side would have a budget.  The budget would be primarily be spent on players, the rest would be spent on serfs (so if your side had lower ranked players with worse gear, you'd get more serfs to start) - an attempt to balance the match.

The rated battle ground version of that would require pre-built sides with someone playing the role of commander.

Players would have to play through a tutorial which would try to make clear to them that following the commanders orders is 1) the way the player gets paid, 2) the way you win and winning also effects how well you get paid

[Malakili]

I really wanted (and like Ratman, thought) it would be a like a match in Warcraft.  I hoped that the "casual" queue would be two NPC generals facing off against each other.  They would be responsible for creating the serfs and grunts.  The would give players tasks, players would receive rewards based upon their successfully completing tasks and destroying enemy units and buildings.  Depending on the game type, the rewards would be slanted more or less toward completing tasks.  Each side would have a budget.  The budget would be primarily be spent on players, the rest would be spent on serfs (so if your side had lower ranked players with worse gear, you'd get more serfs to start) - an attempt to balance the match.

The rated battle ground version of that would require pre-built sides with someone playing the role of commander.

Players would have to play through a tutorial which would try to make clear to them that following the commanders orders is 1) the way the player gets paid, 2) the way you win and winning also effects how well you get paid

The more I think about it, the original Alterac Valley was actually somewhat close to this.  Not dead on, but actually not insanely far off either.

[pxib]

Depending on the game type, the rewards would be slanted more or less toward completing tasks.  Each side would have a budget.  The budget would be primarily be spent on players, the rest would be spent on serfs (so if your side had lower ranked players with worse gear, you'd get more serfs to start) - an attempt to balance the match.

Rather than try to balance the battle with serfs, I'd recommend making battles short and fast with success by degree: Lots of victory oriented tasks of increasing difficulty arranged based on how difficult they are for the opposite side to prevent. Then when the arbitrary limit hits (when both sides run out of money, say) rewards are distributed and buffs assigned based on how complete the victory is.

In terms of your budget, Warcraft III's gold mine implementation would work as a great soft cap. Each side starts with a fixed budget which trickles in over time, and the more (or the more advanced) players they have, the more of that trickle is taxed away before it arrives. "Generals" have a choice between a large, overwhelming army with a short fuse or a small, efficient army with a long one.

It would be tough to balance on a strategic, battleground by battleground level, but individual player against player dynamics wouldn't matter so much.

[Nebu]

Most mainstream gamers have a short attention span and almost no appreciation for a war of attrition.  Given a choice between the two, I'd guess that they'd prefer a massive short-term army.  This would cause them to lose consistently to hard-core gamers capable of seeing things in the long-term.

If you want to make pvp mainstream, you need to level the playing field between the skilled and unskilled player.  Current MMO's do this by rewarding time investment (gear + levels).  We know how the dedicated pvp crowd feels about this.  I think the only solution may be to separate out the two crowds and allow them to play only in a world with each other. This would require some kind of ranking system.  When you go up in rank, you get moved to a world where you fight others your own rank.  If you don't wish to separate by worlds, an alternative would be to handicap the better players in a way that they don't feel the handicap as much.  Something like granting titles and appearance options while decreasing their power in combat.  Perhaps the decrease in dps/hp could be countered by some increase in group utility?  That way the solid pvp'ers could enhance the fun of the less skilled, mainstream players by augmenting their power in battle.   

[Typhon]

The best reward I can think (I'm not saying it's great) of is that purposefully avoids the 'rich get richer' model of reward is guild housing.  Participating in (and winning) battlegrounds gives you (and your guild, when you play in an arranged battleground) cash to spend on bling, the most 'important' of which would be housing.

Guilds that are at the top of the ladder get rent on the choice real estate that is actually in the game-world (not in the housing shards - although i would assume that you also keep your lot in the housing shard so that folks can access your housing through the shard or through the game).

Loved the gold mine idea pxib.

Makakili I think they tried with the Alterac Vally, but there wasn't any way to know what you were supposed to do.  So they just drop an army into the valley and people run around like chickens.  Folks should be given different tasks.  The enhancements to the mini map and auto-quest system that WoW has released with Cata seems like they have a better chance of making something like this happen (at least for the NPC-leader versus NPC-leader battle) - but my guess is that the engine is still too stupid to actually make it feel like a Warcraft III game (where you are one of the army).

[Koyasha]

I'm not sure about everyone else's idea of it, but any mechanic that limits the number of people able to participate on either side of the battle immediately stops it from being open pvp anymore.  The entire meaning of that as far as my perception of the phrase means a battle that has no such limitations.  This is why Wintergrasp used to be open but isn't anymore since (as I understand it, since I haven't actually played it since before this was implemented) it now has that 'sides must be even' mechanic, which makes it, like Tol Barad, a battleground that happens only X period of time.

The original Alterac Valley was, I would say - with a bit of tweaking - the best example of an instanced battle I have ever seen, and it could even work as an open pvp zone.  The mass NPC's evened things out to some degree and allowed the time necessary for being strategic rather than just tactical.

One of the problems often brought up for actual open pvp objectives is imbalanced numbers on one side or the other.  I think this could be somewhat alleviated (as long as the population imbalance on the server isn't huge) by having multiple open pvp objectives that all occur simultaneously.  In addition to that, NPC numbers can be adjusted to somewhat mitigate the population issue - if one side has more people, the other side gets more NPC's and stronger ones, preventing the other side from crushing them quickly, and giving them time to come up with and implement a winning strategy.  Consider three AV-like battlefields, but open and they all take place simultaneously so that it is impossible to attend all three at the same time.

Even better, if the victory in one battlefield affects the conditions on the next cycle, strategy becomes even more important.  Imagine three battlefields, each of them linked to the others, with several possible objectives to win in different ways.  Resource victory (gather more resources without letting your opponent achieve any of their victories), military victory (defeat the opponent's forces) or transport victory (successfully transport existing resources through the battlefield without letting your opponent achieve any of their victories).  If you win a military victory, resources the next cycle go down, if you win a resource victory, resources go up, and if you win a transport victory, resources at the other two battlefields go up.  Or perhaps there's two separate transport victory objectives, one to transport resources to battlefield X, the other to transport them to battlefield Y, and you have to choose which one to resupply.  Resources affect NPC numbers and strength in an important way.  This would make the entire system long-term strategic.  It's likely that at any given moment, at least one of the battlefield/objective combinations can be won, but what you choose to win this time - and what was won and lost last time - will affect what you can do at the moment and in the future.

Now make all of the battlefields give a noticeable bonus to the entire world.  Not a stupid bonus like '5% more exp gained' because if this is being done in a game with levels, then it is likely that most of the participants will be max level - more exp gain is irrelevant to them, therefore not an incentive to participate and win.  A bonus like 'everything costs 5% less to buy' or '5% damage increase (doesn't apply to the battlefields themselves, of course)' or basically anything that will make a max level player want to win it.

I would make a battlefield mechanic like this the core of the game, build things around it.  Flatter power curve, etc.  I don't think pvp of any sort in a persistent environment can ever be made as mainstream as PvE, but done correctly I think it could build up a significant user base.  Even with my belief that population imbalance would affect this system less than a single battlefield model, managing that balance would also be key to the success of the game.  To that end, I think allowing switching sides is key, but only to the sides that are less populated.  More importantly, outside these battlefields, people could group with each other regardless of side, or something of that nature.  Something to allow switching sides to be as painless as possible.  Add incentives for people joining the less populated sides too.  Now you can switch to the less populated side, gain a bonus, and still keep playing with your friends outside the battlefield.

[pxib]

All good ideas, and I especially appreciate your definition of "open PvP" as a lack of hard participation limits.

A question, then: How do we disincentivize the zerg? It's confusing, it's population sensitive, and worse still... it's tough on bandwidth and processors. Simply allowing AoE to pwn groups doesn't work, because the performance hit still occurs as people gang up.

[Ingmar]

I'm not sure you should disincentivize the zerg. All the things you say are true, but the 'dream' of a massive game is, well, massiveness. Big armies clashing. A huge keep siege, not 5 guys trying to take a tower from 3, you know?

That's what I want out of PVP, certainly, while I enjoy 2v2 arena I loved dropping AE thane hammers down on 50 Albs far more.

I don't have time to go into detail, also, but a lot of the other ideas in this thread seem too complicated for the "for the mainstream" part of the title. Above all people need to understand in a very simple way what they're trying to do and why when they go out into PVP. All this stuff about victory conditions and guild bonuses and this and that, is all pretty arcane stuff. What you need is a system where Joe the Troll goes to the battlefield and his objectives are clear to him (on the level of "take that hill"), or you're never going to capture said mainstream.

[pxib]

The complicated bonuses and conditions aren't for the masses, they're for the people the masses follow. Most of they want is what CoD delivers: the opportunity to pwn. Give them fast access to fights and they'll be happy. The difficulty is more a matter of convincing them that an MMO has something to offer that their FPS cannot. Yes, that can be the moment whe1re they drop he hammer on 50 guys and grin their cheeks sore ("Hahahaha fuckers, look what I did."), but that comes at a steep cost in terms of playability. No matter how awesome the zerg feels and how it satisfies a particular dream, the zerg breaks the game.

The bonuses and conditions are, instead, for the grognard masochists who organize raids and establish protocol. Those few nuts who can delay gratification long enough to put logistics and strategy in the forefront and, at the end of the hour, kill the lord and take the keep and smile as the flags change color and a little buff in the corner of the screen ticks forward two percent. "Well done, team. Look what we did." Then turn around and do the whole thing again.

To get the mainstream we have to provide the grognards with tools and design decisions that let them turn their plans into clear and simple orders ("take that hill"), and with their help give the masses the chance to take part in something they can't experience in less than massive online multiplayer... the opportunity to turn the tide in a larger war.

Otherwise they'd rather PvP in a game where everybody has the same gear and they don't hit 3fps every time the action heats up.

[Koyasha]

All good ideas, and I especially appreciate your definition of "open PvP" as a lack of hard participation limits.

A question, then: How do we disincentivize the zerg? It's confusing, it's population sensitive, and worse still... it's tough on bandwidth and processors. Simply allowing AoE to pwn groups doesn't work, because the performance hit still occurs as people gang up.

Part of the reason for my idea of having multiple simultaneous battles going on was to prevent too much zerging (beyond what the server can really handle) without putting any sort of hard cap on it.  If three battles are going on at the same time and one is being zerged, the other two should be easy pickings for the enemy.  Possibly include some sort of quick-transport mechanism from one battle to the others, to make sure that if people want to switch to a different battlefield they can.

If you mean zergs within the battle, that seems to be more down to the fine details of the objectives and how to succeed at them.  Points that need to be defended like AV towers certainly disincentivize the zerg by requiring you to split up your forces to defend.  With NPC's involved, defense is always a little easier than offense (again, taking from original AV design, the NPC's are always around to help defend, but only a few events like triggering a wolf rider attack or whatever get them to help on offense) so if you try to zerg the enemy position it's likely they can commit part of their force to circle around and take out your undefended locations, and so on.  Obviously there's a lot of details about the specific objectives in the battle that would need to be worked out.

As for tools that let the grognards turn their plans into action, that's definitely one of the bigger pieces that should be worked out to make any large-scale pvp system viable.  One idea would be to sort of 'buy' command with some sort of special command-currency.  The person that wants to be in charge arrives at the main base and uses her command currency to buy the ability to give orders through the system - such orders provide bonuses for the people following them, in order to hopefully get people to follow.  If the battle is won, then the commander gains more command currency than she spent.  If the battle is lost, then she doesn't get any back.  Successful commanders would then accumulate larger amounts of command currency, thus allowing them to command future battles.  As for rewards for commanding, those would have to be very carefully determined.  What they shouldn't be is something that everyone would want.  So no uber gear or anything.  You want to encourage people for whom command is its own reward, not encourage everyone to want to command because the rewards are awesome.  I'm not really sure what sorts of rewards would be appropriate for this though.

Another thing command currency could be used for is a global channel that everyone on your side can hear.  Make each message on that channel cost a small amount of command currency, this lets commanders inform people of where they're needed (like, 'battlefield A has enough people, battlefield B is overpopulated, go to battlefield C it needs reinforcement!') but it's not a permanent privilege, and since it costs command currency each time, they're unlikely to want to just chatter or spam it uselessly.

[Lantyssa]

The Zerg is sometimes fun.  There just needs to be some scaling so that one AoE cannot wipe out dozens of people.

Some of the best keep battles in WAR though, was a couple of warbands fighting off another couple.  At least until rank differences let some sides just stomp all over the other regardless of size.

[DLRiley]

Trying to fight against players natural tendency to just zerg is going to produce a lot of whining about how 90% of the players are ignoring the objectives all together. Or it will be boring because players will just travel in huge zergs that trial the opposing, picking off the tail end of stragglers.

[pxib]

Zerging has a tiny risk/reward ratio because the risk is so small, AOEing the zerg has a tiny risk/reward ratio because the reward is so large. Based on how infrequently people talk about how awesome it is to be part of the zerg, the former is a lot less fun than the latter. So we should vastly improve the ways players can find advantage against large groups, while slightly increasing the amount of risk required to gain AOE rewards.

Get rid of ground targets. Make every melee attack AOE within a small radius (Already a popular idea, look at Age of Conan or all the Dervish love in the Guildwars 2 thread) so that players are ill-served to crowd on top of eachother. Then make "magic" AOE operate by jumping from target to target, decreasing markedly based on the distance it has to jump. Give ranged attacks a substantial range bonus against players who are grouped together, but randomize the target to demonstrate how easy it is to hit SOMEBODY in so large a group. At the same time, decrease the amount of damage players do based on how many other players are simultaneously attacking the same target.

Then make all of these dynamics very clear during tutorial gameplay. Provide examples of both sides (offense and defense) using NPCs, and get the players thinking about how to exploit these options.

Then, like Koyasha says, make it easy to move from battlefield to simultaneous battlefield in order to establish combat equilibrium.

[Sheepherder]

Get rid of ground targets. Make every melee attack AOE within a small radius (Already a popular idea, look at Age of Conan or all the Dervish love in the Guildwars 2 thread) so that players are ill-served to crowd on top of eachother. Then make "magic" AOE operate by jumping from target to target, decreasing markedly based on the distance it has to jump.

That's a lot of small data packets.

[Ashamanchill]

What about if when you all bunch up your stats go down or something? Say if you have twenty people in a vincinity, they are at 85% (or whatever) effectiveness, and if they ad another ten, they drop to 75%.

[Koyasha]

Just adding collision would take care of a lot of zerg issues.  If you can't occupy the same space as anyone else, then only a few melee will be able to engage any particular target at any given time, and being completely surrounded by allies means you can't actually attack anyone, either.  Ranged attacks could get penalized if they have to fire through too many allies.  A % miss chance for each ally you have to shoot through, ramping up pretty quickly.  I like pxib's idea on how to fire into a massed group of enemies, that the target gets randomized.  I also like the idea of magic AOE jumping from one target to the next.  I'm imagining being in a tightly packed zerg to be kinda like getting hit by the green beam.

One of the first things that comes to mind of course is 'friendly fire' but I can't imagine any way to implement that without way too much griefing potential.  It kinda worked in Planetside though, so maybe the game design just has to come up with a good enough mechanic for it.  Although the biggest problem with anything like that is penalizing the good players for stupid things others do.  They can't control the presence or actions of their moron "allies", so penalizing them for stupid things other people do is difficult to make fair and fun.

[pxib]

That's a lot of small data packets.

Which is the problem with the zerg in a nutshell. Alternately, just have AOE scale up in damage the more people there are in it while keeping its effect radius relatively small. Have damage scale exponentially rather than arithmetically. It's totally broken as a PvE mechanic, but in PvP it's just a lesson to be learned.

Friendly fire is certainly the grief ultimate, but penalizing good players for their stupid allies is inevitable. So long as there are easy ways to correct them, and simple goals for them to work towards, they'll improve. In terms of 'friendly fire' itself ... better to occasionally interrupt missile fire through allies with "You can't get a clean shot!" and then change the combat target to the friendly who got in the way. Make sure it doesn't happen reliably, however, or people will start hiring unkillable enemy bodyguards. Maybe it only works if the friendly is actually attacking the enemy.

[Ingmar]

I didn't love dropping thane hammers on 50 Albs because it was effective (it was anything but, really); I loved doing it because it was awesome. Take away the giant clash of armies feel and you remove the one really special thing that open world PVP  can offer, in my opinion. There are hundreds of games that essentially do small scale PVP just fine.

[Koyasha]

I think giant clash of armies can be done better than 'big swarm of people packed tightly together come straight at you'.  Battles in Planetside are probably the most 'epic' feeling I've ever experienced, and they didn't really consist of a massive swarm of people charging in while packed pretty close together.  Although that tactic should have a place as well.

Personally I'd start out with player collision and pxib's randomize targets when firing into a big clump idea, and then see how it works out in playtesting before piling on any more.  They're both reasonable limitations, and would prevent a tightly packed zerg from being particularly effective offensively (at least, if most of them are melee).  On the other hand, it makes protecting weaker people by clumping up (so they cannot be focus fired due to the randomization of ranged attacks) a viable tactic, so it has its uses.

[Typhon]

I didn't love dropping thane hammers on 50 Albs because it was effective (it was anything but, really); I loved doing it because it was awesome. Take away the giant clash of armies feel and you remove the one really special thing that open world PVP  can offer, in my opinion. There are hundreds of games that essentially do small scale PVP just fine.

All the Thane animations were just awesome.  Best class idea ever, and they kept it ridiculously nerfed for the entire time I played.  ...  MUST. LET. GO!  /tangent

Focus fire + MMO targeting + large battle = instantly dead.  That is my biggest gripe with large battles.  Make every shot a targeted shot.  If you start taking too much heat, back up behind your mates.  But the opposite of this should also apply - you cannot direct fire through your mates, so if you are a class without an indirect-fire (e.g. a grenade-like ability) you aren't doing any damage if you aren't on the front lines.

Edit: to actually finish the post!

[Kageru]

I didn't love dropping thane hammers on 50 Albs because it was effective (it was anything but, really); I loved doing it because it was awesome.

I'm sure that was fun for you, but fun for the 50? Or adding much to the game?

After all making AoE a powerful counter to the zerg, as tried in DoaC, Warhammer and Eve was dialed back in the at least the last two. For the simple reason that if you make AoE dangerous people will stack it and build tactics around it. Then your 50 man guild group runs all the way to the enemy lands, gets bunched up due to some objective (Doors, Star-gates) and obliterated by a handful of opponents. Which is great fun for only one side of the equation.

[Zaljerem]

Another great thread. I wish I was a little more sober and a little bit more versed in gaming theory.

I wrote another whole paragraph that I can sum up quickly: I'm one of the niche open-PVP guys. In WoW, once I was leveled and relatively well geared from raiding, I wandered the world in search of trouble ... lowbie slaughter was quite enjoyable ... sure, I got killed. A lot. Who cares? All's I got is time. Not like I was losing items or anything!

Anytime I think "hardcore", I remember Myth and its sequels ...

*deadpan* "Casualty."

*rising tone* "Casualties!"

Now back to your thread, already well in progress.

[Ingmar]

I didn't love dropping thane hammers on 50 Albs because it was effective (it was anything but, really); I loved doing it because it was awesome.

I'm sure that was fun for you, but fun for the 50? Or adding much to the game?

After all making AoE a powerful counter to the zerg, as tried in DoaC, Warhammer and Eve was dialed back in the at least the last two. For the simple reason that if you make AoE dangerous people will stack it and build tactics around it. Then your 50 man guild group runs all the way to the enemy lands, gets bunched up due to some objective (Doors, Star-gates) and obliterated by a handful of opponents. Which is great fun for only one side of the equation.

You're missing my point. My fairly weak AE was not swinging the tide of battle (unless it was by generating lag), but it was cool. You don't get to see 50 giant blue hammers descending from the sky when there are only 5 people on each side. That's the point, it is nothing to do with power or lack thereof. My point is not about the power of AOE damage or whatever, my point is that discouraging the zerg discourages one of the few things that MMOs can do better than lobby games for PVP.

[Nebu]

You're missing my point. My fairly weak AE was not swinging the tide of battle (unless it was by generating lag), but it was cool.

It was also lagging everyone to the point of making their play less fun while simultaneously negating the primary ability of pac healers.  I hated thanes, particularly the ones that would spam hammers on the zerg that would have been easily killed using an AE mez. 

I blame the developers for not thinking abilities like these through. 

Sorry for the rant.

[Ingmar]

You're missing my point. My fairly weak AE was not swinging the tide of battle (unless it was by generating lag), but it was cool.

It was also lagging everyone to the point of making their play less fun while simultaneously negating the primary ability of pac healers.  I hated thanes, particularly the ones that would spam hammers on the zerg that would have been easily killed using an AE mez. 

I blame the developers for not thinking abilities like these through. 

Sorry for the rant.

The one they didn't think through was the minute long AE mez, but whatever. 

[Kageru]

It's either weak enough to be "noise" or potent enough that people will optimize for AoE.

The example I had more in mind was Eve where the idea was that Titan AoE would discourage blobbing. Which took about 20 seconds before some player said "so if we had enough of them we could instantly kill an entire enemy fleet?".

[WindupAtheist]

Liked the Massively blog. Tired of the whole "sandbox = doomed shitpile for the maybe 200 people in the world who will still pay money to play 1999 UO" school of thought. Also, as the resident King of Carebears I have to point out that you're probably never going to bring FFA PVP "to the masses" at all. (Not without nerfing PK so hard that it never happens, at any rate.) The almost religious fascination with getting the general public to like something it doesn't like is rather... quaint, at this point.