Suck it EA

[Sky]

EA may be hurting their bottom line, but it's got to be incredible pressure on the smaller dev shops to compete.

One thing that bugs me about america in general and capitalism in particular, is that this is a /good/ thing. Put the other guys out of business, put their families on the street, survival of the fittest. At any cost. Must win.

At least it jibes with the christian beliefs of so many american capitalists.

[HaemishM]

It's the Shadowbane principle. Winning doesn't mean shit if you can't make the defeated quit the game.

[Stephen Zepp]

It's the Shadowbane principle. Winning doesn't mean shit if you can't make the defeated quit the game.

Heh..never heard it said that forcing people to quit the game was a desired thing...most of the time that was one of the fundamental design flaws in people's minds--when you got defeated, you gave up and quit the game, therefore lowering the server population.

Not that your point isn't a valid one at all--long term consequences of winning/losing are important...just hadn't heard it phrased that way, and I personally think forcing them out of the game entirely is counter-productive.

[HaemishM]

Watch out, that's a sarcasm truck bearing down on you at 90 mph.

[Hoax]

I'll buy that Haem, winning is much more satisfying if it comes with absolute destruction none of this respawn button bullshit.      They should have to start from scratch.  I played a fairly successful mmog where that type of winning was possible.  Hell yeah it burned people out but they always came back.  Also it was no easy freaking task to newbie lock somebody...

*sigh*  There's something to be said for not only destroying the castle but then burning the land it was on, then plowing it with salt and kill anyone else who may of known about the castle in the goal of erasing it from history.

[HaemishM]

The only problem is that the people whose land just got salted don't want to keep paying the MMOG subscription company for salted virtual land. So they quit. And with them, all that fat money.

Dev team goes broke, publisher closes down the game.

[sinij]

It's the Shadowbane principle. Winning doesn't mean shit if you can't make the defeated quit the game.

You learned wrong lesson. Winning is not a good thing if defeated quit the game - you end up with one boring sim game and nothing to do. Nowdays ever SB's 'greif crews' avoid pissing off people to the point that they quit.

[HaemishM]

We really do need a sarcasm tag. I thought I was making a funny, and suddenly, it's taken seriously.

[WayAbvPar]

Maybe a font color dripping with green slime to indicate sarcasm?

[Stephen Zepp]

We really do need a sarcasm tag. I thought I was making a funny, and suddenly, it's taken seriously.

Heheh...the reason I didn't take it as sarcasm is because to an extent, it's true: defeating someone meant nothing--especially folks like gank squads. At worst, they logged off until the next day, and were right back at their ways the next day. To bring up my mantra again (sorry!)--without persistent consequences, the game events (defeating an enemy) meant pretty much zero--and therefore after the player base tries it a few times, they start playing the game in the easiest manner, instead of the intended one.

[Hoax]

/agree

Its not sarcasm because the balance between "salting the earth" and "protecting the people who dont have thick skin" is the struggle in pvp. 

On one hand you have WoW:
PvP so meaningless I think that pvp servers eventually had less pvp then the pve servers.  Uncapturable towns, bind rushing galore, not even a durability penalty.  Oh and a 30sec death run in many areas with lots of fighting.  But wait!  They are going to make instanced zones where you can fight with a purpose, destroying the enemy base which will then rebuild itself automatically so you can destroy it again in 10minutes!

On the other hand you have 10six/SB:
PvP that burns people out because you have to defend your assets 24/7 and that means the more time you spend online the better, loosing city/camps is a huge blow in resources/time investment and power.  Players are able to literally scatter other guilds to the wind (it didn't work perfectly in SB due to dummy cities under fake guild tags).  PvP where there are times that the loser has nothing really to do but quit for at least a little while.

[HaemishM]

I know which one I prefer. Three guesses.

In pure capitalism terms, with profit as nothing but the motive, the Shadowbane principle is in full effect. However, for a society to function correctly, that has to be tempered with the idea that monopolies are generally bad fucking ideas for everyone except those with a financial stake in said monopoly.

[Stephen Zepp]

I know which one I prefer. Three guesses.

In pure capitalism terms, with profit as nothing but the motive, the Shadowbane principle is in full effect. However, for a society to function correctly, that has to be tempered with the idea that monopolies are generally bad fucking ideas for everyone except those with a financial stake in said monopoly.

I do absolutely agree, winning has to have costs as well as benefits for long term viability. A perfect example of this (don't shoot me, I've only got access to a laptop for the last 9 weeks) is Risk/Risk II--the 'winners always win' snafu is amazing. In many games I've played against the AI lately, I can point to a single turn, and even in some cases a single battle, where the game was won...even if it wasn't -over- for another 20 turns.

And that's a bitch to design for.

Anyway, in a feeble attempt to re-rail this post: Does anyone think that the not-so-silent boycott by the gamer community has anything to do with EA's less than expected earnings?

[sinij]

Does anyone think that the not-so-silent boycott by the gamer community has anything to do with EA's less than expected earnings?

Not a chance, not unless media shows EA developers sweatshops in 9'clock news and make big deal out of it. We are minority and our boycott is a drop in a sea.

[StGabe]

Not a chance, not unless media shows EA developers sweatshops in 9'clock news and make big deal out of it.

Yeah, well the problem with capitalism here is imperfect information.  Capitalism assumes that consumers are perfectly rationale and, even more damning, that they know the effects of their actions.  If people had a better understanding of what it meant for their future to support certain asshole companies then capitalism might work out someday.  But that's like asking MMO players not to grief -- a nice ideal but probably not going to happen without some major infrastructure and a lot of insight that we don't currently have.

As for PvP systems-- I'll take DAoC's as a good balance.  Meaningful objectives and whatnot to drive fun PvP -- but enough distance between players that personalities don't take over and griefing isn't rampant.  Too bad they had such bad buffbotting issues (and I hear the second expansion did more harm than good -- but I didn't play it so I don't know).

Gabe.

[Arnold]

If WoW is having a significant impact on non-MMO sales I find that quite interesting. It never even occured to me that that might happen to be honest.

I am at a point where there are several games I would like to play that I haven't purchased simply because I do not have the time to play them- and WoW is a major reason why. Every time I get the urge to go buy a PC game, I look at the unopened copy of HL2 sitting on my desk. Has even slowed (but not stopped) my purchase of Xbox games.

That happened to me with UO.  I'd buy a new game, play it for 10 minutes, and miss UO.  Eventually I stopped buying other games.

[Arnold]

Space Vampire Nazis didn't help Enterprise and the franchise one bit.

That was the last episode I saw.  I thought the season was good up until that episode.  No, even the episode was good; all they had to do was nuke the last 15 seconds of it.  Up until then, we'd been using Enterprise to go visit my in-laws (they have dish).  After that ending, none of us wanted to see anything else of the series.

Actually, you missed what was probably the BEST season of Enterprise.  There were several really good episodes this year that, had they actually done during the 1st year, could quite possibly have saved the show.

Bruce

I turned Enterprise off after I heard the theme song, when the series debuted.

[Arnold]

I hope the entire gaming industry is annhilated in a massive market crash.  Then I can come here and read posts about how checkers suxx0rz and backgammon is teh pwn.   :-D

Checkers are PvP and we all know from your posts only griefers would want PvP in their games. You got to 'jump' your opponent's checker without consent, oh the horror. You should not be allowed to intrude on your opponent's fun - you should be only allowed to move your checkers without 'jumping' Only 12 year old antisocials with serious mental issues would want to do 'jumping'.

Checkers is PVP with rules.  So blow me.

And Chess owns all.  Since it is PVP with simplistic rules that make for a infinitely complex game.

Did I mention 'Blow Me' ?

UO had PvP rules, so blow me.

[Arnold]

It's the Shadowbane principle. Winning doesn't mean shit if you can't make the defeated quit the game.

Heh..never heard it said that forcing people to quit the game was a desired thing...most of the time that was one of the fundamental design flaws in people's minds--when you got defeated, you gave up and quit the game, therefore lowering the server population.

Not that your point isn't a valid one at all--long term consequences of winning/losing are important...just hadn't heard it phrased that way, and I personally think forcing them out of the game entirely is counter-productive.

Yeah.  SB done right would have the entire population band together to fight off the "crushers", win, and then fracture into a bunch of smaller empires in the disputes after victory... which would lead to the game starting all over again.

Unfortunately, the SB people didn't set up their game to handle everyone jumping on one side from the get go.

[Hoax]

I argued repeatedly that SB would have worked a hell of allot better with server movement implemented from the getgo.  I'm not going to go into detail but I'm damn sure it would have stopped the perpetual winner syndrome everyone here is so worried about.

*added*
It doesn't delay the inevitable if you believe that ego's will eventually override the desire to zerg 4tw.  Which I most definately do believe.

[Evangolis]

No, it would only have delayed it a while.  Not that it wouldn't have helped, particularly since it would have introduced geographiic restrictions at the runegates, but it would have been delaying the inevitable.  And there probably would have been some huge bug that would have made the whole thing into some kind of exploit.

[Stephen Zepp]

Shockeye and I both participated in about a 4 month conflict (first as allies, eventually as enemies, although it was good to have him feeding me information occasionally!) between a lore based nation (mine), and a "ganker turned guild--kind of" based nation that almost turned out pretty ok, and then went all to shit.

Basically, they were griefers, we were anti-griefers (based on our internally written "lore"), and we spent several months consolidating territory and pretty much left each other alone while we each did our consolidation. I honestly think both sides did their best to stay out of each other's way while the consolidation period was happening, but occasional poor diplomacy (first one was on my part, second was on theirs) caused a couple of failed banes (we interrupted theirs in their territory, they interrupted ours against an aggressor), and then wound up escalating quickly into a view on their part summed by "ok, we're done with this shit, destroy their capital". They tried for a couple of weeks (4+ banes if I remember correctly), and tore us a new asshole in our capital city, but never did complete the ToL destruction.

The problem turned out to be that even though the server as a whole tried like hell to only fight in battles/banes that made sense (regional, conquest for territory, etc.), the absolute lack of game mechanics supporting this in any way made it too damn hard for all of us (including those not directly in our war) to stay the hell out of each other's battles.

Perfect example: before this ganker guild went "mainstream" and built up a city, they would bane anyone they chose, and gank all over the place. Even though they did turn "mainstream" and built a city, all of the server's pent up frustration at their history turned the end of the conflict into what we called an "add-fest", where people totally unrelated to a particular war would show up and fight.

When they finally gave up trying to destroy our capital, much of their guild dispersed/went to a new server, and I elected to not destroy their capital since "the threat was gone (lore, again)". Unfortunately, the rest of the freaking server decided that wasn't good enough, and brought easily a 100+ (which was a lot) force to blow up their island city. Hell, I was so frustrated that after 8+ months of the server steadily moving towards "sieges for reason" instead of "sieges for gank", and then all of it going to hell with that final siege, I brought a small crew of alts with me to actually try and -defend- the remainder of their cities--a total violation of my own "stay the fuck out of other people's fights" beliefs.

Ultimately, I wound up playing my last couple of months of Shadowbane on their side of the game, grief/ganking anyone and everyone right alongside some of them. I think that a better design in how to handle "power begets power", some form of persistent, but not "force to quit" consequences, as well as a better mode of play for the killer-motivated types would have alleviated the forces that caused the whole issue in the first place, but hell, who knows!

[Shockeye]

Lore based conflict would've been a great way to go if everyone played along. However, there was no reason for people to play along so the assholes would always come out on top.

[Stephen Zepp]

Lore based conflict would've been a great way to go if everyone played along. However, there was no reason for people to play along so the assholes would always come out on top.

Yes, exactly--and without game mechanics that make "positive" (meaningful for that game at least) conflict easier than "negative" (meaningless/ganking/griefing/whatever) conflict, players will follow that easiest path...many times because they have to.

[sinij]

Your idealistic approach to SB surprises me, you must be one of 'em RollPlayas. On my server politics dictated who would show or not at any given bane and generally if you could show up at a bane you would.

I do agree that in SB nothing was done to keep conflicts regional and localized, as a result most important fights were huge clusterfuck zergfests. SB falls short in this department since there are no downsides to fighting across the world and there is very little land control outside of your city walls.

I personally think that instant teleportation in PvP game removes any chance of localized conflict. Simple way to make most conflict in SB regional is to remove summoning, now all the sudden distance makes huge difference. Add on top of that some value to open space, say an ability to create recourse-producing or guard-producing structures and you have reason to fight your neighbors.

[Stephen Zepp]

Your idealistic approach to SB surprises me, you must be one of 'em RollPlayas. On my server politics dictated who would show or not at any given bane and generally if you could show up at a bane you would.

I do agree that in SB nothing was done to keep conflicts regional and localized, as a result most important fights were huge clusterfuck zergfests. SB falls short in this department since there are no downsides to fighting across the world and there is very little land control outside of your city walls.

I personally think that instant teleportation in PvP game removes any chance of localized conflict. Simple way to make most conflict in SB regional is to remove summoning, now all the sudden distance makes huge difference. Add on top of that some value to open space, say an ability to create recourse-producing or guard-producing structures and you have reason to fight your neighbors.

Well, we were one of the servers that got hit pretty hard by the "Beta Guild Dominance" syndrome the first 3-4 months, and once they imploded, we realized that if you didn't provide reasons for conflict, people would drop to the lowest denominator by default, so yes, we "roleplayed" a nation that many would love and many would hate to try to maintain a good level of warfare on the server without making it "everyone against 1 nation" like it had been for the last 4 months. It mostly worked actually, except for the ending. The whole scenario was the basis of my concept of managing conflict within a virtual world, and as an experiment it mostly succeeded--and it did prove that without game designs built in to manage the issues involved, ultimatley it would break down.

Yes, I agree completely on your ideas regarding summoning, territorial control, and resources. Summoning is a touchy one, because players simply do not want to have to walk endless distances to get anywhere, for valid reasons, so yo do need some form of mass/rapid transit. So far the only thing that I have come up with as a reasonable solution is to allow players themselves to have instant travel, but also to make sure that individual players, even at the group/raid level, are not necessarily the most powerful warfare assets. Think of them as highly mobile but limited firepower aircaft if you will--they can accomplish a lot, but wars aren't won with them and them alone.

[sinij]

So far the only thing that I have come up with as a reasonable solution is to allow players themselves to have instant travel, but also to make sure that individual players, even at the group/raid level, are not necessarily the most powerful warfare assets. Think of them as highly mobile but limited firepower aircaft if you will--they can accomplish a lot, but wars aren't won with them and them alone.

I don't think that you have to provide instant travel in your game for it to be enjoyable. Ideal solution is to build world rich enough that you can have enough points of interest within traveling distance but make sure that traveling distance isn't everywhere.

[Sky]

However, there was no reason for people to play along so the assholes would always come out on top.

A succinct summary of the griefer issue, I'd say.

[shiznitz]

So far the only thing that I have come up with as a reasonable solution is to allow players themselves to have instant travel, but also to make sure that individual players, even at the group/raid level, are not necessarily the most powerful warfare assets. Think of them as highly mobile but limited firepower aircaft if you will--they can accomplish a lot, but wars aren't won with them and them alone.

I don't think that you have to provide instant travel in your game for it to be enjoyable. Ideal solution is to build world rich enough that you can have enough points of interest within traveling distance but make sure that traveling distance isn't everywhere.

The real key is to design game flow so that experienced players are not traversing trivial areas to get to challenging areas.