Ultima Online never existed.

[WindupAtheist]

The system used in WoW is zone-based and faction-based, and is comparable more to DAoC than Shadowbane.  It has nothing at all to do with the sort of free-for-all system we're talking about.  But you know, fine.  Dread Lord UO was a paradise, and the only reason open-gankage isn't popular now is because those stupid developers can never do it right.  Because, you know, Counterstrike was popular and stuff.  And that totally applies to discussion of an MMORPG.

Really, whatever.  This debate ended half a decade ago.  If you want to sit in the corner, rocking rhythmically back and forth in a puddle of your own urnine, chanting "Everyone liked it!  Everyone liked it!" as you think back on owning newbs in the late 1990's, go right ahead.

[ahoythematey]

Online FPS have investment, but the investment is less tangible than Sword of +3 Leetness: it's refined player skills.  I also like how you really glossed over Guild Wars in your tired diatribe on how there is only fucktard gankers in PvP worlds.  Even the people here will explain to your dumb ass that they had some fun in Shadowbane despite sb.exe and the useless monster grinding.

[WindupAtheist]

Let's see...  I make it clear that I'm speaking specifically of open PVP in the subscription MMORPG market, and so far your counterpoints consist of:

1 - CS, which is not an MMORPG
2 - WoW, which is not open PVP
3 - GW, which is not subscription

Shut the fuck up until you learn to read, douchebag.

[Arnold]

I remember that.  I think you mentioned one or two of my utilities in it.

Did you do the OMG SKILL NOW! eggtimer? That's the only Siege specific one I can remember.

Yeah.  ROTBuster was sort of mine too, but I didn't program it.  SP Assist came out later and was much more what I had in mind, but lacked the skills to program.  I had never programmed a Windows application before that, and literally learned VB by making that thing.

ROTBuster was my idea.  Originally, wedecided not to release it.  When the programmer did, it was kind of a surprise to me, because of the whole macro witch hunt thing that was going on.  I thought releasing it would be risking a ban, but nothing ever happened in thie end.

[ahoythematey]

My counterpoint examples are to show that there are plenty of gamers interested in PvP that can be attracted to a MMO if the developers were to build the right one and not fuck it up substantially.  Planetside is still around, but I don't have any idea what kind of numbers it's pulling in so I suppose I can't use that as a sound example.  Shadowbane is admittedly a disastrous clusterfuck, but that can be blamed on the fact that it's a hideously buggy mess and that the basic method of leveling is horribly tedious whackamole bullshit, of which your primary PvP audience has little tolerance.  I grant you that Guild Wars is heavily instanced and not quite subscription based(though it may as well be if new content is what you want from an online game), but I'd have gladly paid a monthly sub on top of whatever expansions they threw out if the number of players per exploration area were upped to 32 or something similer, as I'd have paid a monthly sub for D2 in exchange for some of the originally planned persistent things like clan halls and such.

WUA, you can keep throwing around the faux-boog hate as if your opinion was divine order, but the truth is there is a substantial audience that not only has no problem with open-PvP worlds, but would pay for one if it were built better.  Proof can be found in the fact that, prior to the giant catastrophe of the intial honor system, even on the "normal" servers places like Tarren Mill, South Shore, and Crossroads were perpetually hotzones of fighting between alliance and horde.  Proof can be found in the fact that the PvP servers are quite populated.  You can call it "controlled" and "zone-based", but that would be glossing over the fact that you cannot progress to a level of competitiveness without going into contested territories.

Suck my PvP-loving dick, you fucking carebear.

[Venkman]

The problem is the time investment linked to ability. This is an argument older than Lake Fucking Superior.

Somewhere along the way it was decided Dedication = Time = Power = Win. That's not a good formula for fun and engaging PvP. While SB was built on the same formula, by the time I got around to playing it (Jan-Mar 2004), nobody cared. It's not that you were ignored before hitting R5. There was still risk. But most people had long since decided it was more valuable to hit R5+ and go hunt other R5+ for their shit/town. Players changed the rules because a) they could; and b) the rules sucked.

The converse is WoW, little sandboxes of mass duels called an "endgame" only because the ladder of achievement matches the EQ endgame of raiding. Joy. Lots of people play WoW. Lots of people never played an MMORPG before it. Blizzards making a shitton of money and could close tomorrow making Vivendi richer than ever. But WoW only attempts to solve through further compartmentalization. The opposite point of the genre.

But I'm talking about subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games and the Western market thereof. 

Western market reality. Give us a bunch of people so we can justify the monthly fee, but don't make us interact with them lest they waste my precious time. Some folks think this'll change. They see the Korean game sphere (both titles and the culture acceptance of RMT) as some sort of Panacea, vision of a near-term Western future.

I disagree somewhat, but only because I measure the near-term in two years. For the next two years there's nothing that's tossing out the trend we're already on of protecting players from each other. Cannabalization will ensue, and only games with licenses/brands/sci-fi will be viable. Screw that noise. I'm more interested in Huxley than anything I've seen from the existing devs.

[Kail]

the truth is there is a substantial audience that not only has no problem with open-PvP worlds, but would pay for one if it were built better.  Proof can be found in the fact that, prior to the giant catastrophe of the intial honor system, even on the "normal" servers places like Tarren Mill, South Shore, and Crossroads were perpetually hotzones of fighting between alliance and horde.  Proof can be found in the fact that the PvP servers are quite populated.  You can call it "controlled" and "zone-based", but that would be glossing over the fact that you cannot progress to a level of competitiveness without going into contested territories.

Except that WoW isn't an "open-PvP world", right?  There is a bunch of red tape around where and when who can fight who.  I haven't heard anyone here saying that all PvP is evil and must be purged in order to usher in the New Age of gaming.  The argument I've been seeing is basically between "anywhere, anytime" open PvP (e.g. Ultima Online) and the much, much more constrained PvP that's in most MMORPGs nowadays (e.g. Guild Wars). 

Nobody here (I hope) is stupid enough to argue that all online players want to coexist in peaceful harmony and that fighting other people online is nothing anyone wants to play.  The point is that there are people who don't want to live in a state of perpetual war.  In a limited PvP game, like WoW, there are a lot of people who like PvP, and a lot of people who don't.  If you don't like PvP, you can play on a normal server and not have to deal with it very much.  If you're looking at an "open" PvP game, but don't like PvP, your best course would be to not buy the game in the first place.

In a nutshell, limited PvP games allow most people to have fun, regardless of if they enjoy PvP or not, while open PvP games are only going to appeal to people who enjoy PvP, so the number of people who like them is going to be smaller.  Nobody's saying that PvP should be eliminated, just that a game that caters only to the extreme hardcore (of either side of the PvP debate) is going to be less widely appreciated than a game that caters to both sides.

[ahoythematey]

I'm not asking for coexistence, because I honestly don't want it with the diehard PvE'rs: they are rarely worthy opponents.  With the previous posts I've been defending/supporting my stance that there are enough PvP+ gamers out there to make an open-pvp world profitable, and quite successful if you provide the tools/support to manage and handle it.  Old-time angers flare up from memory every time I see somebody use decade-old (and fallible) arguments of the hardcore blue-elitists, which might explain my probably-excessive aggression towards certain others.

[Riggswolfe]

I'm not asking for coexistence, because I honestly don't want it with the diehard PvE'rs: they are rarely worthy opponents.  With the previous posts I've been defending/supporting my stance that there are enough PvP+ gamers out there to make an open-pvp world profitable, and quite successful if you provide the tools/support to manage and handle it.  Old-time angers flare up from memory every time I see somebody use decade-old (and fallible) arguments of the hardcore blue-elitists, which might explain my probably-excessive aggression towards certain others.

I disagree. The number of people who want open pvp is very, very miniscule in the Western World. Games that tried it have either had to change to meet reality (UO) or failed miserably. (The Lineage games and Shadowbane.) You can make a semi-viable excuse that the later games simply were badly implemented or didn't appeal to Western tastes (in the case of Lineage) but the fact remains, no open pvp game has ever truly survived in the Western Market.

You're dreaming of a dev house that is willing to throw away probably 90% of its market just to cater to a hardcore niche that will probably bitch and move on anyway. It's not going to happen. Shadowbane was your last hope. It failed.

[Arnold]

It's not going to happen. Shadowbane was your last hope. It failed.

Wrong.  ATITD showed us that these games can be made cheaply, for a niche market.  Eventually someone will make a really cool, open pvp, niche game.

BTW, Shadowbane is a really, really, bad example to hold up as the holy grail of pvp gaming.  Shadowbane sucked ass, hard.

[WindupAtheist]

My counterpoint examples are to show that there are plenty of gamers interested in PvP that can be attracted to a MMO if the developers were to build the right one and not fuck it up substantially.

What the fuck makes you think the average Counterstriker wants to hear about things like "player justice" and all that assorted horseshit?  What he wants is a quick fix of short-term and consequence-free PvP.  Like, say, a WoW Battleground.

But sure, someday someone will invent a Shadowbane Done Right that every FPS junkie will want to pay fifteen bucks a month for, and then I'll see what's up!   

Planetside is still around, but I don't have any idea what kind of numbers it's pulling in so I suppose I can't use that as a sound example.  Shadowbane is admittedly a disastrous clusterfuck, but that can be blamed on the fact that it's a hideously buggy mess and that the basic method of leveling is horribly tedious whackamole bullshit, of which your primary PvP audience has little tolerance.

A greater number of MMO players are willing to forgive bugs and tedium than currently play Shadowbane.  Shit, if that weren't so, the market would have gone belly-up ages ago.  It's the design, stupid.

I grant you that Guild Wars is heavily instanced and not quite subscription based(though it may as well be if new content is what you want from an online game), but I'd have gladly paid a monthly sub on top of whatever expansions they threw out if the number of players per exploration area were upped to 32 or something similer, as I'd have paid a monthly sub for D2 in exchange for some of the originally planned persistent things like clan halls and such.

Then you're just a retard.

WUA, you can keep throwing around the faux-boog hate as if your opinion was divine order, but the truth is there is a substantial audience that not only has no problem with open-PvP worlds, but would pay for one if it were built better.  Proof can be found in the fact that, prior to the giant catastrophe of the intial honor system, even on the "normal" servers places like Tarren Mill, South Shore, and Crossroads were perpetually hotzones of fighting between alliance and horde.

People would love open-PvP, and as proof you offer the consent-only fighting at Tarren Mill on a PvE server?  Dipshit.

Proof can be found in the fact that the PvP servers are quite populated.  You can call it "controlled" and "zone-based", but that would be glossing over the fact that you cannot progress to a level of competitiveness without going into contested territories.

A game where (theoretically) half the playerbase is in your faction and unattackable, and where the other half can only be attacked in certain zones is NOT open-PvP.  It just fucking isn't.  I know you'd love to "win" this argument by subjectively redefining open-PvP to mean any PvP of any sort, but that shit just isn't going to fly.

Suck my PvP-loving dick, you fucking carebear.

So far as proof of the popularity of open-PvP in MMORPG design, you've offered up first-person shooters, consentual fighting on PvE servers, and fighting taking place on faction-based PvP servers, all while downplaying the failure of ACTUAL OPEN-PVP GAMES like Shadowbane and Planetside.

Sorry, but you're a fucking moron.

[Joe]

I wouldn't go as far as to say Shadowbane sucked. It was actually a lot of fun. The real problem was anyone with gold could become a leader, and shitty leaders could be shitty forever as long as they had the gold to support their guilds.

Truly open PvP (a la Darktide) is a tough pill to swallow, and even my die-hard self can't handle the idea of being at the mercy of people dozens of levels higher than me when I'm trying to buy regs. Learning to survive in that environment culls the herd, sure, but eventually the wolves run out of food. UO had safe zones in towns, which was enough for me, but I never ran into many gankers when I played UO - I was either lucky or better able to understand places you DIDN'T visit at prime times. WoW's PvP zone setup was really well done, aside from the fact someone five levels over you (and gaining experience in the same zone) held an unruly advantage, which ultimately was the reason I quit.

Fact is, PvE only worlds are boring. EQ during its golden age was a possible exception, if only because PvP took place in the inter-guild politics I was so fond of mucking up. People, by nature, enjoy establishing a pecking order; whether or not it actually takes the form of combat is just details. I suppose it comes down to how you like establishing the top dog. I'm a fan of Machiavellian scheming, but enough of that occurs in daily life. I'd rather just hit someone with a brick and challenge his buddies to do the same when I'm gaming.

Then again, I'd play any game where I could actually affect the world in a meaningful way. UO and Shadowbane were fun in that sense; control territory and shape your neighbors' lives. PvP was just a medium to prove that I indeed mattered. Should a PvE game manage to duplicate that feeling without me having to suffer a kill stealing jackass (something that never was an issue in UO/SB or on Skullcrusher) or whiny prick lusting after a guild rank, I'll be all over it, too. I'm just not sure anyone yet has a good scheme set up to allow such things without instancing, which defeats the purpose of an MMO for me.

ninja edit: WUA, stop Sir Brucing - it's only cool when he does it. Also, you're just pissed about the elves.

[Merusk]

It's not going to happen. Shadowbane was your last hope. It failed.

Wrong.  ATITD showed us that these games can be made cheaply, for a niche market.  Eventually someone will make a really cool, open pvp, niche game.

BTW, Shadowbane is a really, really, bad example to hold up as the holy grail of pvp gaming.  Shadowbane sucked ass, hard.

Eventually, if someone can get the money, and that's a pretty big IF. Any non-follower of the MMO scene is going to do a  brief history lesson, see the mess that was Shadowbane and ask if you're insane.  They'll say very simply that it's a better risk to dump it into someplace like Sigil since history has shown they're more likely to achieve even a fraction of wow-like numbers than any PvP MMO.

 It's going to take someone with a passion for MMOs and a lot of money to fund any such PvP game.  That means someone more like Bruce than any other VC, and I don't think even Bruce would do it again. Too much risk, not enough reward.  SB is a big blight on the advancement of any PVP-centric game and is going to be one for a long time. Yeah, it's a bad example for those in the know, but it's also the most prominent for those not in the know and one that'll stick up as a big red flag when they do their research.

[ahoythematey]

But sure, someday someone will invent a Shadowbane Done Right that every FPS junkie will want to pay fifteen bucks a month for, and then I'll see what's up!   

I'm thinking if Conan can't pull it off then this supposed GTA MMO could prove that people want and will play Open-PvP MMO's, should it take the logical steps from the gang turf system and street racing in san andreas into a persistent online world.

[WindupAtheist]

I wouldn't go as far as to say Shadowbane sucked. It was actually a lot of fun. The real problem was anyone with gold could become a leader, and shitty leaders could be shitty forever as long as they had the gold to support their guilds.

Art imitates life.

ninja edit: WUA, stop Sir Brucing - it's only cool when he does it. Also, you're just pissed about the elves.

(insert expletives here)

UO elves = WUA's sb.exe

[ahoythematey]

There's an awful lot that is wrong with you if elves are the primary reason for leaving UO after all this time.  I mean, you'd think somebody that weathered out samurai, robots, and years of taking it in the hershey highway from EA, could handle some elves being introduced in a fantasy world, nevermind that elves are always flaming homosexuals.

[WindupAtheist]

If they never added ninjas, I could have stood the elves.  But now we're gonna have elf ninjas.  Who can stand that?

[schild]

If they never added ninjas, I could have stood the elves.  But now we're gonna have elf ninjas.  Who can stand that?

Ninja Robots.

[Arnold]

Learning to survive in that environment culls the herd, sure, but eventually the wolves run out of food.

The weird is that AC:Darktide actually grew.  It was a far more cool server, in the early days, when it peaked at 300-400 players in primetime.  You knew who was who and what monarchies they belonged to.

Later on we got 329i23942384 re-rolls as everyone tried to make flavor of the patch character, due to AC (at the time) having no skill retraining system, a la UO.  Also, you had a metric shitton of carebears, who got bored on the ghost servers, coming over to play.  Those carebears brought their playstyle to DT, and refused to change it.  XP whoring monarchies didn't care; they just wanted the XP. 

So you ended up with lots of players who decided they wouldn't participate until level X.  They decided they would sit in the same dungeons and level until the mission was accomplished.  They didn't give a crap which monarchy owned the BSD they were leveling in, just as long as they were a member, and they had no qualms of jumping back and forth to whoever ruled the dungeon in question.

[Venkman]

I wouldn't necessarily say that's wierd. AC1:DT was an exception to the rule in a game that never hit huge numbers anyway. Something more odd would have been UO's SP server garnering a significant amount of the UO accountbase, or heck, even EQ's PvP servers, which were there simply because SOE was floating in enough cash to keep them open.

People would love open-PvP

PvP requires dedication. Any CS/UT/BF:V player can attest to that. You're either into PvP or you're gonna get steamrolled until you leave from unenjoyment. This is because the AI is smarter and keeps adapting, as does the game itself.

I've generally felt that the dedication required for PvP is the main reason it doesn't have widespread appeal in the U.S. The more dedication required, the narrower the appeal. The greater reliance on other people ("forced grouping"), the further narrowing of that appeal. We like our games but have relatively short attention spans. Get in, adapt, master, move on to something new. WoW was designed to be played 10 hours a week, it shows, and it's success is based mostly on that. More people will never hit the "problems" than the vocal ones who do.

[Sky]

Those games you mention require no investment in your character. You die, you respawn, you go back and fight and it just doesn't matter. That doesn't work in a MMOG when you have to have the opportunity to work on skills and upgrade your equipment.

Well, you do work on skill, it's just not tied to a character and some artificial dice roll modifier. You actually learn skills yourself. I think that's better. And watch as the fps genre moves to stat tracking ala BF2. With upgraded equipment.

[Jayce]

Someone mentioned Eve in this thread.  I think Eve is a little bit of a different case.  In essence, you have UO's open PvP, even including color-coding known gankers, but the guard zone extends to cover a lot of territory in which you can actually do interesting things like hunt NPCs or mine.  Effectively you have the friendly/contested territory duality of WoW but it's not a hardcoded prohibition on attacking, just suicide if you do (same as uber UO town guards).

Even given that, Eve is niche.  It doesn't seem as niche as others because of their single-server model (11,000 peak lately, with a total of like 40k accounts IIRC).  I think that's pretty good evidence that an open PvP game can work, but they will ALWAYS be niche.  And that might be a good thing. 

This messageboard is niche, but the Vault isn't.  Think about that one.

[Mortriden]

Those games you mention require no investment in your character. You die, you respawn, you go back and fight and it just doesn't matter. That doesn't work in a MMOG when you have to have the opportunity to work on skills and upgrade your equipment.

Well, you do work on skill, it's just not tied to a character and some artificial dice roll modifier. You actually learn skills yourself. I think that's better. And watch as the fps genre moves to stat tracking ala BF2. With upgraded equipment.

There have been third party stat tracking programs for sometime now, at least for CS.

[AOFanboi]

UO elves = WUA's sb.exe

What's up with the blue skin love these days? Not only UO, but also the new race in AC1 has blue skin. And I am sure you can pick a blue skin for AC2 drudges.

Bah to retrofitting Night Elves as if that's what WoW's success hinges on.

Outside of duels, I have PvPed once in WoW - against an Orc warrior who killed the quest NPC I was returning to, which annoyed me greatly. (My level 9 rogue 0wned his level 12 ass naturally.) Was it fun? Sure. Would I give up questing and exploring for it? No. Why? Because they are the meat of the game as designed and implemented. If the game is designed for PvP with some PvE thrown as a diversion, then PvP can work as the focus. But current MMORPGs aren't designed like that - not even the ones that claim to be.

[HaemishM]

We need to lay down some Holy Covenants of PVP.

Herein is contained the sacred word of the prophet Haemish, Grand Poobah of the Disenfranchised, and shall henceforth be known as the Law of Player vs. Player.

1) Open, no-holds barred, non-territorial PVP games will always be niche, unless nothing is lost or gained from winning or losing.
Proof:  Shadowbane was successful on release, fucked up beyond recognition by bugs one month into release and even at the height of its success, never garnered even as many subscriptions as AC1.
2) Faction-based or territory-restricted or instanced PVP will always be more commercially successful than open-PVP, because people are allowed to choose when and where they may be ganked.
Proof: Guild Wars, WoW, DAoC
3) Having PVP in a game means that you will have "gankage" but not all PVP is ganking.
Proof: Many, many stories of people being killed questing in WoW, leveling in the frontiers in DAoC, etc. all of which is gankage, which should be generally accepted to mean "Being killed by someone you have no hope of killing in a fair fight, and usually at a time when you will be completely unprepared for it." PVP in Battlegrounds, on even footing and with the consent of both parties is not ganking.
4) UO was so popular because it provided so many different types of gameplay in one game, truly being the only game that could please "all of the people, most of the time."
Proof: You had dread lords, gankers and griefers existing alongisde faggy roleplayers and PVE'ers.
5) Trying to please "all of the people, most of the time" leads to fracturing of the playerbase, lost subscriptions and ruin.
Proof: UO tried to please too many people, without actually figuring out who they wanted their audience to be. Thus, the community became a series of armed camps, full of zealots on all sides, each lobbying to make the game fit their playstyle, which was usually diametrically-opposed to some other playstyle. Subscriptions were lost on all sides.
6) There are more pure or mostly PVE players than there are PVP players.
Proof: UO's turn to Trammel showed that there were more PVE'ers than Dread Lords, which makes sense. EQ1's success solidified the proof of that.

Shadowbane's PVP was very good, and had it not been so goddam buggy, with such an insistence on leveling, it would have been a success. But it STILL would never have gained the numbers WoW, DAoC or EQ did.

[sinij]

UO SP never took off due to severe neglect from developers and RoT that guaranteed that you have to spend 3-6 months playing newbie character on a very PvP competitive shard. That and plenty of PvP was available on regular shards even up to UO:AoS, so insensitive to pick up, move and spend next long while as a newbie just wasn't there. On top of that siege-specific bugs took forever to fix, new content always bugged something there and very few carebear changes were not implemented there. If SP went away with RoT and stayed with pre-p16 rules it would be a lot more popular.

[Roac]

PvP "done right" means PvP done for a purpose, and one which does not put either contestant in a fight at odds with that purpose.  The point of a FPS game is to frag; the purpose is to kill, and ONLY to kill, so no one is ever really at odds.  Achievement is the 10 seconds it takes to find a gun, exploring is done offlien, and socializing is limited to "wtfIpwnj00!".  The difference with UO is that its very nature created multiple goals, with almost all of them NOT being PvP.  Hence the aggressor was conflicting with the aim of the victim, which causes bad experiences for the players.  This is your basic wolf/sheep argument.  Wolves kill the sheep, sheep leave.  Wolves look at each other and realize that most of their joy was from hitting soft targets because their goal wasn't to frag, it was to r0x0r weak targets to disrupt them.  So wolves leave.  As noted, this is old news.

What is needed is to bring the purpose of each side into alignment.  Example; PvP missions.  Shadowbane's territory control is another way (putting aside for the moment problems with how city sieges disrupted other goals, such as gear, socializing and leveling).  Faction wars in a "no man's land", a-la DAoC or WoW is another.  The difficulty in most of these systems is that there needs to be a way for the PvP game to be enjoyable by the individual playing.  If faction wars become a struggle by numbers, personal accomplishment is lost, and there are few willing participants outside well organized guilds.  It becomes niche in its own game.

I do think there are rewards for pubs/devs with a solid PvP game, because playing against other people is just so much more damn fun than playing against a computer.  At the same time, the rules of engagement have to be laid out to be enjoyable by everyone involved.

[Arnold]

This is your basic wolf/sheep argument.  Wolves kill the sheep, sheep leave.  Wolves look at each other and realize that most of their joy was from hitting soft targets because their goal wasn't to frag, it was to r0x0r weak targets to disrupt them.  So wolves leave.  As noted, this is old news.

Dedicated PvP servers have shown, time and time again, that there are a lot of sheep who think of themselves as wolves.

[Margalis]

Well, you do work on skill, it's just not tied to a character and some artificial dice roll modifier. You actually learn skills yourself. I think that's better. And watch as the fps genre moves to stat tracking ala BF2. With upgraded equipment.

It's also worth pointing out that there are plenty of games, such as Enemy Territory, where your character can "level up" in limited fashion. In ET the levels just reset after a campaign, so there is no lasting advantage. And the levels your characters gain depend on skillfull play. (ET was a pretty good game overall I thought, the only FPS I've ever been even half-decent at)

[WindupAtheist]

Windup's addendum to the Holy Covenant of Haemish:

A non-persistent small-scale multiplayer shooter is as wildly different a gaming experience as could ever be possible, in comparison to a persistent massively-multiplayer RPG.  Henceforth anyone who attempts to rebut the failings of an open-PvP variant of the latter by citing the success of the former will be smothered to death with a giant plush Care Bear.

[HaemishM]

I will argue that the success of multiplayer shooters proves that the mass market does want some PVP, they just want to either be able to choose when they can get ganked or they want to know beforehand that they are going to get ganked.

[Pococurante]

... and be able to do so with little more loss than face and the time it takes to jump back in the fragfire.

[WindupAtheist]

I will argue that the success of multiplayer shooters proves that the mass market does want some PVP, they just want to either be able to choose when they can get ganked or they want to know beforehand that they are going to get ganked.

That's nice and all, but I already have a giant plush Care Bear on the end of a broomstick, ready to shove down the gullet of the next asshat to exclaim "If it weren't for bugs, Shadowbane would have been hugely popular!  After all, people play Counterstrike!" as if the two gaming experiences are remotely comparable even in theory.

A giant plush Care Bear filled with my shit.

[Bunk]

Here I agree with you Windup. Only a small percentage of people leave games over bugs. People play around bugs if they actually like the game. Shadowbane had plenty of other issues beyond the bugs that pushed people away:

> one guild overrunning a shard in two months, with no hope of losing control
> horrible newbie experience if you didn't have a guild lined up in advance
> peonship - only a select few in each guild got to enjoy the town building aspects, everyone else was a gold farming grunt

Those to me were all bigger reasons for its lack of success than sb.exe

[HaemishM]

sb.exe

RAGE FESTERING COCKBLISTERS

There was a lot more than just that bug which contributed to my leaving Shadowbane, despite being in a good guild. Not being able to attend the 3 a.m. sieges (both attack and defense) because really, that's about the only time anyone sieged. Feeling like all the good PVP was going on after I went to bed. It was a huge time sink of a game, but not because it took long to level, but because farming gold was constant, and defending/attacking was constant, and because there was no real way to hold on to territory. There was also no controls set up to avoid the "one-tree" syndrome of every cocktard dropping cities left and right, and there was no player accountability despite some attempts at doing so.