Open PVP and Full Loot

Esquire, where you see UO succeeding in that transition to elective PVP is exactly where I see it failing. Yes, the introduction of Trammel came before UO’s subscription peak but that is being biased in the sense that it also came before UO’s mass exodus.

Up until Trammel, UO’s problem was not retaining customers as they saw steady increases consistently in subs right until about a year after Trammel… people then achieved everything they wanted in a “safe” environment and then subsequently quit the game with nothing left to explore.

I see this as the problem.

Trammel lured the mainstream gamers to UO which of course boosted its subscription count. It prospered while all of these new players enjoyed what the game had to offer in complete safety and eventually “finished” the game (at least their personal version of finish as it’s different for everyone). At this time, they left. Throughout this process, those who enjoyed full freedom of action became frustrated with the changes and the somewhat “removal” of one of their playstyles. They left too.

In the end, the game died out. I’m confident it could have maintained a steady increase in subscribers and am just as confident that its current subscription level would still be profitable if not much better than the state of the game as it is now.

Where you see Trammel as a precursor to its peak, I see it as a catalyst for its eventual failure. Technically, we’re both right because record numbers of new subscribers came but so did record numbers of players quitting.

The easier they made it to get to endgame, the more accessible the game became but only at the expense of longevity. The brightest flame burns quickest after all.

Sorry for droning on with multiple posts but another problem with “safe zones” or “PVE servers” is that a very large portion of these gamers are eventually interested in trying PVP but because they’ve been coddled for their entire existence in the game, they are not capable of handling themselves in that environment.

They play a year on PVE-only then give PVP a shot and the people who’ve been there from the start are handing them their carcasses over and over. It’s not fun. I agree that the helpless feeling that you think people hate is a terrible feeling, it’s not fun and it causes people to leave. I think protecting people when they want it only lends to this problem. It compounds it. They will never truly enjoy PVP because of it and that closes off an entire dimension of a game to them, only making them get bored faster.

Make people defend themselves from the start, make them learn how to survive, how to counter different skill sets. Make them survive in a harsh world and they’ll be better for it. The first time they actually successfully defend themselves will be their happiest day in the game world yet. The first time they see someone powerful come to their aid will only make them aspire to one day be that avatar for someone else.

People want to be inspired, they want to have a sense of accomplishment, they want to earn things, they want to feel joy. None of these things exist without contrast. Without dark there is no light, without evil there is no good. You have to feel the lows to appreciate the highs. It creates a much more fulfilling experience in gaming just as it does in real life.

Just think of the gatherer and his mindset. I see myself mining for example. I go max my skill and I learn my way around and I find out that in 1 hour of gameplay I earn x amount of ore which translates to x amount of profit. Every time I log in, my goal is to earn x amount in x amount of time because that’s what mining does. I log in and I mine and nothing else happens except the predictable outcome of obtaining what i always obtain in that timeframe doing that action.

Now think of the miner who has enemies. I spend time between mining sessions learning new skills or ways to survive while mining. I spend my mining time learning new, safer routes. I get killed a few times today and yielded 80 units of ore in the hour I mined. I also learned that x spell will buy me enough time against players using x combat skill to help me get away. Next day I go back out and get better, I get killed twice but avoided three other attempts on my life. I also earned 120 units of ore for my troubles, WOOHOO!

My gaming experience was more full. It was busier. It was less tedious. Sure, I got less ore than I would have in a PVE only world but it’s relative to the landscape. Everyone struggles to earn ore… makes the ore I earn that much sweeter, thank you!

Also got a wicked story to tell my guildmates about the time the 2 casters jumped me and I ended up killing one and scaring the other one off… all with only my miner!!

Maybe I’ll start a caster and show these punks how it’s done…

About Darkfall; I was around when the first issues of beta were announced. The invites were given out at certain times, and you had to register on the website, pay an initial fee, etc. The servers got swarmed with tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, wanting to play Darkfall — causing the beta servers to repeatedly crash on end, and the only way you could get through the process is by repeatedly refreshing the page hoping it would load up. People LOVED the idea of Darkfall, but the problem with it was that it was so poorly executed; it wasn’t the open-world free-loot PvP that killed it, but the game engine and design itself.

I, myself, left Darkfall for a number of reasons. For one, the system they had for open-PvP greatly benefited naked griefing; players who wore absolutely nothing and a shoddy sword to absolutely mitigate any losses they might have to essentially make it a reward-only system. An even bigger, more blatant reason for leaving was that they did not have any sort of a skill cap in place. A huge design flaw by my standards, this made everyone in the end-game become clones of one another; everyone had maxed out skills so there was no variety. Some other reasons were the lack of the ability to drop items on the ground, the grindfest that was crafting/resource gathering, and terrible PvE design.

Yes, I agree with Kaclys.

The issues I had with Darkfall were many and none had to do with it being open pvp/full loot. I came from UO right after it’s T2A days (in fact, I still have a live subscription and so does my brother), and loved every minute. I was and am still not a “PKer”, but I love the thrill of fighting them or trying to escape from them. The risk in losing and the reward of winning feeds the excitement and makes me yearn to do better. Between those times, I killed monsters. I mined. Crafted. Ran around the game world with friends. I rarely sought PvP, and while I hated dying, I never hated the game for it… I hated my own ability to not be better against them… hence friends and relatives to back me up.

I played the same way in Darkfall. I had friends… guilds to back me up… and a city to live in and support it’s growth. Most of the PvP I dealt with was groups of PKers coming into the unfinished city to kill and loot and move on. Most of the time it was fun. The problem with Darkfall came with time. With time came the lack of fixing bugs and broken designs (most notably the gap in the wall of our ‘predesigned city’ that we as players could not fix and was left as an entry point that bypassed the relatively easy defenses anyways) for months on end, the gap between new players and old players (or afk macroers and people who actually logged out when they were no longer playing) because of a lack of a skillcap, lack of open PvE (having only a handful of small locations for goblins or kobolds made PKers able to camp places easier) for people not PvPing, having no real penalty for being ‘red’ as there was really no reason to stay in NPC cities anyways nor did dying red really penalize you, and finally the seemingly out of control hackers who could fly, teleport, etc. became unbearable.

All those issues helped only a small group of ‘griefers’ abuse broken systems without much work at all on their end. The average PvPer was never the issue and dealing with those other problems was on the developer’s hands. The community could not fix that. As long as the developers can maintain and create ways for the communities themselves to essentially regulate or police themselves in a way that doesn’t make it easy for the ‘hardcore’ griefers to overpower even larger groups of people getting griefed, then it falls on us, the players, to decide if we want rampant, meaningless PvP, or meaningful PvP.

Ultima Online lost my interest, not because of griefers, but because the game simply evolved into a PvE world (Trammel being the first big one… they copied the world and linked it via moongates. I’m all for expanding protected areas for newer players but making the exact same world available with or without PKing well most will choose non-PKing. Even people who enjoyed being a PK still went to Tram when they wanted to go farm elder gazers or dragons because it was simply easier), with insurance systems (just repair your gear, you rarely ever had to buy all new that ruined crafting business), artifacts that made crafted gear mostly worthless (although they have continuously tried to balance that), bonding with pets (that ruined the taming market), and the continued expansion of the ‘non-PvP’ worlds. After EA got UO, PvP became an afterthought. A side hobby. The excitement was no longer there… PKer or PKee.

I’ve played many games over the years since becoming bored with UO and trying to find a good sandbox to plant my roots into. I’ve tried most all the major MMOs and even smaller market ones. These days the sandboxes have seemed to cater towards becoming one-man armies or just pure grief-fests. Opting to PvE or PvP systems just seems ridiculous in my eyes. That’s not a good solution. The solution is giving enough protection or help to people who want protection, while still offering incentives and rewards to venture out beyond that protection without completing forcing them to in order to experience a good portion of the game, while similarly providing enough punishment or inability for the griefers to get away with doing so constantly. As Pathy said, PvP and PK are two very different things. Control the PKing in a way that doesn’t make it become rampant, especially against players just starting out (probably DFs biggest issue imo) while not restricting good and meaningful PvP (as in taking control of lands or resources or even punishing griefers).

Pathy, I believe your suggestion of more decay for PVP gameplay would probably stiffle Pking but would most probably stiffle PVP gameplay itself.

As I said before, if PVP gets a little expensive (either in game currency or real money in the case of EU) PVP suffers for a lack of and that is not what I’m trying to do here. What I’m trying to do is have PVP gameplay for those that want it and not have PVP gameplay for those that do not.

I didn’t mean to categorize you Esquire, I wasn’t questioning your game loyalty. I wasn;t trying to insult you, I only look at the fact that I’ve seen you talk about dozens of games as though you played them all. You seem to know about every other MMO out there and I’m not sure how you do if you haven’t played them. I have not. I have played 4 MMOs (3 really since D2 isn’t a true MMO) over the past 14 years. I have not tried any other. My only experience comes from devs giving into the masses and changing their games… in every case I’ve hated the result.

UO segregated PVPers and PVEers, this is a problem for me. Some people like both and prefer a world where both are possible and both and forced. You are convinced I’m a PVPer at heart and I use other players only as content. For one, I rarely, if ever, did PVP in UO… I wasn’t looking for a game where I could grief newbies all day but I found it fun that there was a danger at all times someone could do it to me and I may need to react. Trammel came and instead of having 95% law-abiding players with 5% criminals, Tram became 100%-0% and Fel became 50%-50%. I really didn’t PVP at all back then but the real danger was exciting, made tedious tasks more fun.

BOTH worlds were then broken and that’s what happens when you segregate.

There was no longer enough law-abiding people staying in Fel to balance the system there because they were given the chance to take the easy road. I then became MORE hunted in Fel as a law-abiding citizen because we weren’t the majority anymore. This resulted in MORE people leaving Fel and then we were left with the problem you describe which is a game full of PVPers. That only happens when the choice is given which is why I think it`s best not to give people the choice.

SWG felt a bit like a grind to me but the crafting was just epic, kept me glued for about half a year and that`s when huge imabalance issues sucked the fun out of the game for me. The buffs REQUIRED and class REQUIRED to ever be useful anywhere became so anoying. If you didn`t have the buffs to triple your stat pools or if you weren;t a tamer with a rancor then you were useless in PVE and PVP both…

WoW did themepark better than anyone by a mile and the game was fun for a long time but I`ve been yearning for a sandbox for a long time cause I miss the greatest game I`ve ever played, UO. At least in the beginning it was hard to level in WoW, level 60 was an achievement that took several months for reasonably dedicated gamers and even longer for casuals. This changed when BC came out, levelling became easier, endgame became the game and nothing else was worth enjying. When arenas came out, this kept me busy for the remaining 4 years or so… battlegrounds and arena because there was a challenge and it changed every game, it was fresh.

Humbold, you appearently misunderstood what I said about AoC. I basicly said that after a few short months, no1 used the city destroy development as most in that game just did not want to work a month or more just to have their city destroyed. Most guilds built a city in the instanced PVE areas altho except for crafting, there was little to no benifit to haveing a city there at all. TOrtage was done very well, polished, and well contented. But it seemed that Funcom centered on the “starter” area and left the rest of the game to suffer. Let’s hope that Funcom actualy learned something from AoC and the same mistakes will not be made in Secret World as what they have put out so far looks at the least, interesting. I’m signed up for beta and hopeing that will be a good game.

If your going to play SWG for 8 years, you almost had to try other games as SOE Austin was replete with ways to kill a population with trying to change their game into something else, post launch. At CU, I went and tried WoW. At NGE, I took a 6 month break and went to EU. (I’d play EU everyday if they’d just let me pay 15 a month instead of the buy your bullets development still – it’s a very large sandbox, has PVP toggled, has housing, land ownership, deco, etc etc etc) At C6CD, I went off again to try and find a replacement for SWG as well, trying AoC at launch and a couple of others. The problem, for me at least, is no game “matched” up with the development of SWG. I really liked the crafting (as it seems you did as well), I liked the “sandbox”, the open worlds, the citys, even the PVP (when all the hacks and exploits wern’t going on). There was about 30K of us “diehards” when they announced the closure. I very much looked forward to STO due to the IP and Cryptic had soooo many problems with that game, some still continue such as the inherent lag in the Cryptic engine that makes PVP, at times almost unplayable. (You basicly have to play about 6 seconds in advance of yourself due to the engine lag. You have to heal 6 secs before you need it, you have to use your DPS 6 secs before you want that also.

Nohere, you 1 in a million. I run the “JAG” divison and basicly started the PVP in-fleet night for TOS Vets. This is an over 30 (age) fleet and basicly no1 wanted to use the PVP development in that fleet until I came along. I started getting people interested in PVP via an in-fleet PVP night where no1 yelled “IPWNDJOO”, kills were at the least friendly, and I helped with builds (even posting mine on the fleet website for all to see). Slowly, after people found out that PVP sould be some fun and a change, I involved a complete PVP guild in out night. Bringing their members into our private matches and letting our members see what pre-mades and min-maxers were all about. Many in this guild became avid PVPers but it was a process. Most just did not like getting killed where they never had a chance due to their build, etc and it took even months to help people get over the thoughts they had about PVP in general or even PVPers in general. The fleet leader, in fact, came into the 1st PVP night I threw, I ended up killing him several times, and then trying to help him with builds, weapons (even crafting some for him), and when to use his buffs and when not to, made a joke out of “uttt ohhh, I killed the guild leader, I guess I’ll be a cadet in the fleet forever on vent” and he promoted me in the fleet instantly. I’ve did the same thing in my guilds with PVP over in SWG as well and took many a player who thought PVP was terrible to avid PVPers. The part that makes the most impression is choice. They do not have to go up against the min/maxers right off the bat, they do not have to live in a world where they are constantly killed/cloned just trying to level or gather. They have the choice. That choice increases the PVP community and even gives us min/maxer more to kill. Again, it’s not the system or the development itself, it’s what the community does with it.