MMO drastic changes...for the ruin?

[Hanzii]

I tire of repeating myself, but the short reply is:

No sane person expected that to happen.
now where does that put you?

[Zephyr]

Maybe I am the exception, but for me ganking was worse before the honor patch.  After the patch, most Alliance chose to fight it out in TM and I was actually able to quest in Hillsbrad on an alt with very few deaths.  The same goes with STV, everyone was too busy in the mass fights and later in the battlegrounds to camp Horde quest areas. 

I know that a guildie was on the edge of quitting because he made a beeline for the quest areas in Hillsbrad.  After showing him the out of way path to avoid the mass zergs he was able to finish up his quests very easily.   

[WindupAtheist]

Oh man, who'd have thought a free-for-all PVP server (or as close as you're gonna get in WoW) would turn out to be rife with grief-ganking?     Welcome to the harsh realities of eight years ago, geniuses, and where the hell have you been this whole time?

That sort of shit was BOUND to happen, and bound to pick up as time went by and the proportion of leveled-up people looking for something to do increased.  A PK in UO couldn't enter town, was vulnerable to attack by everyone, and could face either days of macroing or serious damage to their character skills if they died, and that never stopped them.

[Viin]

That doesn't mean we can hope/expect something better.

I don't have (hardly any) problems with ganking in BF2 or Guild Wars. Don't have problems with it in EVE.

[Bunk]

The way this is reading to me - people at first complained that there was no reward or motivation for PVP. Gankers were just killing anything at random, because there were was nothing in place to direct them. So they put in a reward system. That's what the hardcore pvpers were asking for. Reward system = catass paradise. So now the gankers are killing everything rather than just killing at random.

Am I wrong, or does the new system not discourage the killing of low level npcs? That seemed to be the biggest complaint I was hearing in the pre reward days - that gankers were killing all the quest NPCs for no reason. So now they are ganking players instead, and we still have complaints.

Anyone who plays on a pvp server has to know going in that the server is going to attract the lowest common denominator of pvp players. If you want controlled and semi consenual pvp - play a pve server. If you want gankfest - play pvp. What were you people expecting? That they would patch in some sort of massive town control, world affecting, Shadowbane type system?

Even if you were expecting that, do you really think that would make the pvp any less ganky? The only example of open pvp I have ever seen come close to working was AC Darktide, and that was only because so there were almost no controls on pvp whatsoever. This forced players to actually adapt thier own rules, and for a while, it balanced out. You're never going to see that in a game that tries to make pvpers follow a bunch of hardcoded rules.

I play on a PVE server btw, and I love the battlegrounds and the current pvp implementation. I do honestly feel bad for those of you that aren't enjoying it.

[Pococurante]

I play on an RP server and the new changes simply rock - I spent all weekend on raids.  Died non-stop and immediately rezzed and jumped back in.  This is the kind of PvP I love the most - no penalties other than the shame of dying and the time lost running back in.

I never had any interest in playing on a server where PvP is non-consensual.  There is only one outcome, and it's the same outcome I've seen since my MP BBS days: unrestricted PvP always involves serious ganking.  Always.  Never seen the exception.

Dishonor points or no the cheap thrill too many get from their inherent need to be lame and self-delusional just guarantees it.

You who are pissed off on the PvP servers - come over to a normal/RP servers.  It's exactly the same gameworld and the protection from ganking is built-in.

[Merusk]

Don't you hate it when you come into a conversation, and everyone's said what you were going to?

It's also frightening that WUA is sounding reasonable and more even-keeled than some of you in this thread.  Make the crazy stop.

[Paelos]

WUA has his moments. Mostly because he can refrence UO in some fashion that makes sense.

[HaemishM]

Let's review the lessons of WoW:

Levels in PVP suck.
Balance in PVP is extremely important.
Population imbalance is deadly to PVP.
Most people prefer to have a choice in whether they get ganked or not.
Casual, solo play helps build subscriptions, but time-sinking catass-enriching achievement schemes lead to disgrunted players.


 
Oh and Lowbie grief is bullshit. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying it is a MUCH MUCH less disrupting thing than high-levels ganking low levels. There are also ways around it, but even if there weren't LOWBIE GRIEFING IS NOT AN ISSUE ON PAR WITH HIGH-LEVEL GANKING. That is a myth, perpetuated by bitter catasses who want to "earn" their levels and think 1 level 60 should be able to kill infinite level 20's.

[WayAbvPar]

Casual, solo play helps build subscriptions, but time-sinking catass-enriching achievement schemes lead to disgrunted players.

Eventually it leads to EX-players, which is when the powers that be start to give a shit.

[sarius]

Gotta agree with Paelos on this one.  Anyone who believed that Blizzard had the magical cure to stop griefing in PVP just because the promised they could, was fooling himself.  Instead of poison in the analogy, let's use the less fatal example of urine.  Now let's say for the past several years, MMO devs have been offering you glasses of urine claiming they're water.  Then Blizzard comes up to you with a cup filled to the brim with a warm, steaming, yellowish liquid telling you it's some nice refreshing spring water and you make the mistake of guzzling it down.

The rest of us have two options.  We can get pissed off at the guys who keep trying to trick us into drinking urine, but that never seems to do much good, or we can tell the latest victims not to drink the fucking urine next time.  You're right Margalis, the mistake people made was taking Blizzard at their word and assuming they would deliver what they promised.

Someone asked about the SWG CURB earlier -- We have the DEVS actually posting irregularly on the forums now.  My favorite is where Blixtev admits that some Daze effect is a MAJOR problem and rife with grief, and he'll fix in in a month or two. :)  All this from the CURB that was supposed to fix everything.  They are still changing end-game templates after people have spent a year+ trying to achieve them.  They all lie.

[El Gallo]

Hanzii, who is that woman in your sig?  I keep thinking I know who it is but can't place it.

[tazelbain]

Shockeye, are you saying any large, structural charge to a game post release is bad, regardless of the merits of the change?
Big changes always alienate more players that it attracts?

[chinslim]

Shockeye, are you saying any large, structural charge to a game post release is bad, regardless of the merits of the change?
Big changes always alienate more players that it attracts?

That's why I started this thread, dammit.

[tazelbain]

Yeah, I am all sort of confuzzled.
So answer the question.
Big changes are bad, even if the changes are good?
Do you think it would have helped CU if the changes implemented in progression?
RvR update for DAoC seems like a counter example.

[Threash]

Oh and Lowbie grief is bullshit. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying it is a MUCH MUCH less disrupting thing than high-levels ganking low levels. There are also ways around it, but even if there weren't LOWBIE GRIEFING IS NOT AN ISSUE ON PAR WITH HIGH-LEVEL GANKING. That is a myth, perpetuated by bitter catasses who want to "earn" their levels and think 1 level 60 should be able to kill infinite level 20's.

I guess you've never been on a kazzak raid.  Thats the only instance of lowbie griefing there is atm, but thats because there is no dishonor system.  I don't consider high level ganking an issue at all, the danger of being killed at any time you step out of the safe zones is basically the one and only reason to play on a pvp server.  You don't lose anything other than a couple minutes of your time at most, and you voluntarily chose to put yourself in that situation, thats NOT an issue thats the expected result.  Of course lowbie griefing is a myth atm since there is no dishonor, but the lowbie kazzak griefers prove that if there was a way a throwaway low level char could be use for griefing it would be rampant.

[Margalis]

People shouldn't have to be experts in MMO games to make decisions. And for people on PvP servers they've invested a lot of time in their characters before the honor system came out.

That's one of the roots of the problem with making changes. People invest a lot of time building up a character, being in a guild, etc, then one day their character is nerfed or the rules are changed and their server isn't fun anymore or the item they spent months getting is now worthless, or whatever.

I've been thinking about making an online tactical battle game and that's one of the things I've been thinking about, how do you introduce rule changes and nerfs in a way that makes sense to the players? Because any time you change anything some people are going to be unhappy. Even if you don't nerf anything and just make some classes better, you've basically made the other classes worse.

There are a lot of things you can do. Allow people to choose to play under the old rules. (Maybe on special servers) Or do something like this: Items eventually break, and the new versions of X overpowered items are worse, but the old versions are still overpowered until they are eventually used up. (Which they would be eventually anyway)

Changes to online games are inevitable and should be planned for up front. If people really hate the honor system Blizz should just offer a few servers running pre-honor system with the understanding the servers will never be updated. Allow people to transfer to that server for free, and allow them to transfer back at a later time if they so choose.

[Hanzii]

Hanzii, who is that woman in your sig?  I keep thinking I know who it is but can't place it.

Very famous and accomplished gamedesigner. Picked her for Raging Douchebag Week and never got 'round to changing the avatar, because nobody cared enough to comment...

[TheWalrus]

Well I'll say it. I'd do her.

[HaemishM]

Is that the one that slept with her bosses to get her tits done, or was a man but became a woman and got his/her/its tits done?

[Xilren's Twin]

I've been thinking about making an online tactical battle game and that's one of the things I've been thinking about, how do you introduce rule changes and nerfs in a way that makes sense to the players? Because any time you change anything some people are going to be unhappy. Even if you don't nerf anything and just make some classes better, you've basically made the other classes worse.

Which is one of the main reason all games with offical boards quickly turn into "gripe of the moment" cesspools.  Any change is going to be perceived as negative by someone.  Even if you make something EASIER, the players who made it though before now feel slightest that somehow you've reduced their e-peen.  You still can't let the whiners stop you from making changes that benefit the game as a whole.  That's where having a good communication strategy with your subscribers and actual informed people doing the communicating can work wonders.  Notice I didn't say it had to be two way communication...

There are a lot of things you can do. Allow people to choose to play under the old rules. (Maybe on special servers)

Too expensive to maintain 20 different varieties of servers and rulesets so I don't see this happening much.  PvP vs PvE servers are about the extent of what we get today as far as divergence.

Items eventually break, and the new versions of X overpowered items are worse, but the old versions are still overpowered until they are eventually used up. (Which they would be eventually anyway)

While I agree with your premise, this situation still favors those who can farm the best equipment or the moment i.e. catasses.  Remember the mana stone anyone?

Changes to online games are inevitable and should be planned for up front.

One of the best arguments for having games with actualy ending world states is just this sort of situation.  Whether it's SB that should have reset a server world every X months to games that have cyclic states built into them like mtgo expansions instead of EQ style expansions.  For exmaple, don't take everything you had before and then add 3 new classes and 10 new zones on top it; replace 1/4 of what you had before (especially the broken, not working right, not fun, or too popular parts) with new stuff (hopefully designed more intellegently the first time around based on lessons learned during live).  I think I heard this called "rolling content" as opposed to "aggregate content". 

But, you'd have to set the stage for this style of game from day 1, and market it accordingly to manage player expectations.  Else, bile will flow like water...

Xilren

[Shockeye]

Very famous and accomplished gamedesigner. Picked her for Raging Douchebag Week and never got 'round to changing the avatar, because nobody cared enough to comment...

Stevie Case (Killcreek)?

[Shockeye]

Shockeye, are you saying any large, structural charge to a game post release is bad, regardless of the merits of the change?
Big changes always alienate more players that it attracts?

I didn't start this thread. I only questioned whether it was sane to expect people not to attack other people willy-nilly on a PVP server.

[El Gallo]

Very famous and accomplished gamedesigner. Picked her for Raging Douchebag Week and never got 'round to changing the avatar, because nobody cared enough to comment...

/lightbulb.  Thanks, that was driving me nuts.

[Alkiera]

I was hoping for something like this from SB, during beta there were discussion of events that might make certain classes no longer available, but adding new ones.

IMO, you'd have to do this in a game with a relatively short advancement as far as time input goes, like SB, or a low advancement game.  You'd also want to work out some way to take the old characters out of the world.  If they were already very underplayed/buggy classes, okay, but if they are bugged and inherently overpowered, so you want to take them out, how do you get rid of the existing characters?  I suppose you could have a story explaining a major nerf (priests of Blahbla are now much less powerful due to the recent death of their deity at the hands of the overgod, Meh) and then change the client to allow no new priests of Blahbla to be made.  The characters could still be played, as much less powerful than before, but perhaps as a novelty, like people who gather all the 'rares' in other games.

I agree that the possibility of this happening should be made known pre-launch and on the box(it's a FEATURE!), and forwarning of such happenings should be made in both in-lore story and outside of the game in plain English.  Rather than a 'persistant' world, where everything stays the same, I'd rather have a dynamic world, where things change, and the players know and expect that.

Alkiera

[Shockeye]

Very famous and accomplished gamedesigner. Picked her for Raging Douchebag Week and never got 'round to changing the avatar, because nobody cared enough to comment...

Stevie Case (Killcreek)?

Yes it is Killcreek. Digging around in the rathole that is the intarweb brought up this nugget of funny that Lum wrote in regards to Killcreek and Playboy.

KILLCREEK LOVES YOU

You know, Sunsword may be many things, but he has very few nude pictures of himself circulating on the net. As of now, that cannot be said of his sister in game design, Stevie “Daikatana Does So Not Suck!” Case. Yes, ever since playboy.com published nekkid pictures of Ms. Killcreek, every single horomonal joeboy has been circulating them like trading cards. I don’t need to link them. You’ve seen ‘em. I know you’ve seen ‘em. You know you’ve seen ‘em. Just quit pretending.

I bitch and kvetch every time some immigrant genius finds a picture of me posted on the net and posts it along with snickering commentary, but that’s nothing compared to this… you’re a struggling game designer, you’re working on a game everyone is trashing at a company that’s been a laughingstock for years, and now, to top it all off, every twelve year old has your surgically enhanced breasts on his hard drive.

So, how does this help your credibility? When you go to apply over at, say, Maxis or Red Dragon Software, what do you do when your prospective boss looks over at your …assets and drools? Knowing that he’s seen The Pictures. Everyone’s seen The Pictures. Hell, your mom’s probably seen The Pictures. You thought it might have been cool once, and your boyfriend, who is Very Big In Japan, encouraged you, egged you on, even. But now reality has set in. Millions of people have pictures of you without clothes on. They don’t have them because of your cunning deathmatch skills. They aren’t terribly interested in how well you write a design document.

Ah what the hell, just slap the Killcreek pics on a game box somewhere. It’s what everyone wants. MORE BREASTS! MORE NUDITY! After all, if you’re a typical hormonal guy, that’s all you care about? Right?

Just don’t look in the eyes. Good general rule.

[AOFanboi]

Big changes are bad, even if the changes are good?

Yes, if they change a central rule of play that players have based their character advancement on. That way respec lies. Even small changes, like Funcom changing a MA attack in AO - the only reason many MAs put points into Parry - so that it either became useless or no longer based on Parry, I forget which, causes big uproars among those affected.

[Velorath]

Big changes are bad, even if the changes are good?

Yes, if they change a central rule of play that players have based their character advancement on. That way respec lies. Even small changes, like Funcom changing a MA attack in AO - the only reason many MAs put points into Parry - so that it either became useless or no longer based on Parry, I forget which, causes big uproars among those affected.

In other words it pisses off all the people who jump on whatever is considered to be the uber template at the time when said template then gets nerfed by the changes.

[Morfiend]

Speaking of WoW and the PVP grind stuff.

I cant link because the site seems to be down. A dev just posted that the PVP rewards will now be baised on HIGHEST ever rank, not highest current rank. So once you earn your pvp reward, you can keep them.

[Train Wreck]

I love the PvP, and I love Alterac Valley.  I did it four times last week, from start to finish.  This despite the fact that I'm only 52 and perfectly gankable by almost everybody else in the instance.  The only thing I dislike is that most of the mobs are red to me, but that's to be expected at my level.

[kaid]

Ah that would be a nice change its one of the reasons most of the folks I know are doing altarac valley instead of trying to rank up. They liked the rewards and knew that at least they would always have access to them if they lost pvp standing.

Gaining ranks currently is so freaking obscure the thought of finally gaining some levels only to lose it again really sucked whatever interest I had in gaining ranks.


kaid

[Train Wreck]

I was never interested in getting ranks, because I'm far from a catass and knew they would be dominated by the most urine-reeking of them all.  I just enjoy the mass PvP, especially in the context of a pitched battle, complete with fortifications.

I raked up 2,200 HKs in just four nights.  Though that seems a lot to me, I well imagine that I probably have to have at least 100,000 to compete.  Fuckit, not interested.  For me, it just make me smile to sheep a lvl 60 Shaman and watch him get surrounded by six alliance warriors and rogues.

[Pococurante]

I was never interested in getting ranks, because I'm far from a catass and knew they would be dominated by the most urine-reeking of them all.  I just enjoy the mass PvP, especially in the context of a pitched battle, comeplete with fortifications.

Same here - I'm just pleased to have PvP where damaging my character isn't on the table.

It seems to me making the rewards permanent will lead to more grinding though, especially in the short-term.

[Train Wreck]

It seems to me making the rewards permanent will lead to more grinding though, especially in the short-term.

It will be less grinding in the long term because once they have what they want, they will relax.  When they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, yes, they will grind even harder to get there, but once they've gotten it, they're done.

With the old system, it was a matter of grinding more than everybody else.  There was no end in sight, and when you gave up, you lost everything.  Suck, suck, suck.

[Lum]

Let's review the lessons of WoW:

Levels in PVP suck.
Balance in PVP is extremely important.
Population imbalance is deadly to PVP.
Most people prefer to have a choice in whether they get ganked or not.
Casual, solo play helps build subscriptions, but time-sinking catass-enriching achievement schemes lead to disgrunted players.

So which of these lessons are WoW-specific?

And actually, the Killcreek story you posted wasn't supposed to be funny. I was actually being serious. Have you ever looked at the eyes of most porn stars? Dead zone.