[MMORPG] The Lost Concepts of PvP

[Zarcath]

Originally Posted by Jerrith

One concept I'd find interesting is this: Your normal items are safe from loss on death, but there exists an "artifact" style class of item that is significantly better than a normal item. These artifacts would, of course, be unique (per shard) and significantly more powerful than a normal item of their power. Anyone carrying one of these would automatically be flagged for PVP, and these items are always dropped on death. They'd also be dropped on logout as well, to keep people from hiding them away on logged out alts.

There was a 2D graphical game I saw a few years back that had something similar - some unique pieces of armor, that if you had all (5?) of, you could use a unique sword - the most powerful sword in the game. Sadly, the impression I got was that most of these items stayed banked or on alts, etc, and weren't put "at risk" often.

Thoughts?

In the realm of supposition

I would suggest that armor bought with PvP points can be looted. The catch being that armor is unique per faction and per class, either in the sense that stats for side A differ from side B, or graphically unique.

You'd collect opponents armor and could wear it, so your peers could see your PvPnes. Put some sort of additional incentives for collecting armor sets, maybe if you have a full set of armor you can use enemy vendors or walk into enemy towns unmolested. Maybe you have to purchase a warbanner from their PvP leader and this gives you immunity to guards or even enemy players won't be able to tell you're an enemy until you drop your disguise.

Maybe, even having set bonuses on armor that only apply to enemies that wear it. Say for example in WAR, if a... Black Orc kills a Swordmaster. He can then loot a piece of whatever PvP flagged armor that Swordmaster is wearing and equip it. After this Black Orc kills enough Swordmaster to collect a set of PvP Swordmaster armor, they would activate a Black Orc set bonus on the armor. They could then gain limited use of Swordmaster or Order related vendors. These vendors would sell other things that have benefit to the Swordmaster stats wise, but serve the purpose of advancing the Black Orc, rank wise.

Then throw in some public quests that revolve around PvP.

The next truly innovative PvP system will incorporate some sort of cloak and daggers aspect to it. Right now I'd call PvP crude and barbaric, there's no finesse. PvP is about griefing, knowing that you're better than the worms that crawl beneath your feet.

edit: Mythic should hire me

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by masteen

I love how the PvP asstards always start with the assumption that everyone loves the thrill of watching hours of their free time get flushed down the toilet.

Yea hours. Oh wait, you just got your new gear crafted in 10 minutes including travel times. And if you are smart, you just get a couple of backup equipments.
Oh wait, your everquestclonewow-career of gaming watered your understanding of content down to raiding for purple items. Of course, that changes everything. Because then people that suck cannot keep their cool gear and only the skilled people would have it. In this case I wouldnt want player loot in my games either, if I would lack self-confidence in my abilities.

But back on the OP.
WAR has an awesome list of RvR features and there is no denying. If I would be an RvR player, I would be in love with it. Sadly I do consider myself a PvPer - which is a large difference. Its like Melodic Death/Black Metal (depending on band) and Viking Metal. RvR is kinda a descendant of PvP, but there is a clear difference. I know more cool people will take away more internets from me for saying RvR is not real pvp :b
[Edit: Two internets taken away already!]

wanted to analyze, what makes a PvP system good? Is it the ability to PvP more? the gameplay? the quality? individual/team development?

The ability "to pvp more" is always good. I mean every PvP system should get you into fights. Some players dont even want to enjoy PvE parts of games which is the most enjoyable thing I experienced in WAR: Carebear PvP/RvR to level is more fun than PvE. By far.
Quality is something that makes a game good overall, so this would include the PvP. Imagine games like SB done in the quality of WoW.

I'd say you can rate a PvP game by the following factors:

1) Combat and its Mechanics.
As worst example I have to take EVE. Its basicly what keeps me from playing it, even thou I think everything else EVE offers is beyond awesome. Combat is slow, largely boring and requires more watching than playing. So far I consider Guildwars (as everquest example) or the more action-based combat such as the upcoming Spellborn and maybe the old Neocron to be the best example of what combat should be like.
Based on skill of the player not on the characters, fast and full of action, but with high tactical components. Numbers shouldnt be a primary factor in winning, too.

2) Gameworld and integration of PvP
Having PvP added as a minigame like arena and so called battlegrounds and then running a pvp server where you can attack anyone doesnt really make it a pvp game. All good PvP games had PvP as a real part of the world, designed to be part of it not added as aftertought.

3) PvP Systems
Captureable/Destroyable locations such as castles, outposts or space stations fall also under "2)".
Military ranks, rewards, levels, talents and so on. While they are not essential to the basics of a pvp game, we all agree that they multiply the fun and draw more people in that otherwise wouldnt pvp.


Sadly most or all games do not get all 3 things right.

Originally Posted by Zarcath

edit: Mythic should hire me

Problem is they are EA Mythic and such ideas are not WoW, therefor there is no way in hell they could ever make money. So even if they would hire you, these ideas would never make it into the game :b

[xSubway]

I agree that the PvP in WoW is bad (BG / Zerg / insta-gib).

To me, the best PvP experience I've had was playing Shadowbane. The first few months after release is some of my best mmo memories.

Now I haven't played WAR yet but I'm looking forward to the RvR combat.

[Zarcath]

Originally Posted by Inconsiderable

Problem is they are EA Mythic and such ideas are not WoW, therefor there is no way in hell they could ever make money. So even if they would hire you, these ideas would never make it into the game :b

PvP Public Quests will be in someday, I guarantee it.

[Tullaeniel]

The major problem with PvP the op is talking about is there are two mindsets when I think of PvP. When some people see PvP they think a meaningful and balanced PvP system. Shit I think most players would be all for it if done right. However, the problem that comes up is a shit load of people don't want a meaningful or competitive PvP experience what they really mean by PvP is that they want to Gank people.

The type of PvP the op is talking about comes at the expense of others most of the time. In the current world of MMO settings you cannot have PvP of this nature and get a large playerbase behind it. After the third time Little Timmy losses his shit because while he's at 10% health grinding away on gnolls some shitstick decides he wants to "PvP"/"Gank" making Timmy not only have to regrind but maybe go back and regear just to finish the quest he was on. He's going to quit and not look back. As they stand now in most games you just die or maybe lose some XP which can mean minutes or hours depending on the game, but at least they aren't pushed a step backwards to add insult to injury.

Hell I can barely count the times in open world WoW I've had people attack me on a somewhat even playing field. Typically most players will avoid you until they are assured a victory then attack, if this is the type of PvP that turns people on then more power to you. I just don't think that many people would get behind a system of that nature. If people were by and large pretty cool and wanted a fair setting maybe but I'm willing to bet a large portion would enjoy that type of game play just to fuck people over. As some of the other posts have suggested there could be alternatives such as prestige items like ears from diablo as an example; which were previously pointed out. Or a separate loot table for PvP that come only from players, it could be like each player you kills drops a piece of cloth and you need one from 40 different players to make a PvP tunic or some shit.

I can give another couple of examples as to why most people wouldn't want to have shit looted when they died. Let me ask this and we'll use WoW's loot as a example. Do you think someone with lets say a pair or Warglaives which took a shitload of effort to get should be obtained by some cocksucker who decided to attack UberRouge_001 while he was finishing an elite quest in Nagrad? Should items that in some cases took months of effort be erased in 10 seconds because they were able to kill a character? For me I would say no but then again there are those few out there who claim PvP is harder than PvE. Not only that but you would need to go back to a system where items are not bound to characters. Otherwise you would have people abusing the system trading PvP kills to either sell loot or simply move shit to alts.

[Ogun Nagoura]

Originally Posted by Desx

Yea you have a good point.. its sad.

You wouldn't be saying that if YOU had dumped 100 million $$ into a MMO and you couldn't lock down more than 300K subscribers.

PVP needs to be removed from top end MMO's, seriously, there is plenty of FPS that take care of that demographic nicely. Heck, I'll put a 12 year old master of Unreal Tourney over a WoW master any day in playing skill and with the FPS they get the added perk of blowing their opponent into bloody chunks.

[Qhue]

WoW is currently balanced around PvP concepts, AOC was billed as a major PVP game and WAR has Realm vs Realm PVP as one of its core concepts building on the success of Dark Age of Camelot.


If you arent satisfied by that then I really don't know what to tell you. If you require the visceral feeling that your "kill" caused the player on the other side of the 'net to feel real and meaningful loss then perhaps the problem isnt the game...

Predator / Prey style PVP requires that you have a large number of people who are more than willing to be prey and that simply isnt the case. It existed in "the olden days" because of a lack of options for the would-be prey species in terms of what game they played.

The cold hard truth is that the type of game you want is just not viable from a business model standpoint. The only possible exception would be the introduction of a game which took a large multigenerational leap forward in immersiveness and gameplay such that people were drawn to that world solely to exist within it and would thus be potential prey much as was done with the original UO. The majority of people who played just wanted to exist in that world and it was that populace that became the necessary cannon fodder.

On the other hand the unstated requirement that all online RPGs have at least a "PvP ruleset" means that there are all manners of PvE playstyles and concepts that are unusable because while they might be nifty in a PvE game they don't work in a PvP context. So while you are looking for the lost concepts of PvP you could also be examining what the pervasive PvP content has done to PvE games.

[Zerai]

Originally Posted by Tullaeniel

--The truth they don't want to face--

What made games like UO successful is that the 'sheep' had no where else to go.

Now there are games like WoW. So any game made with a UO style gameplay will just be the wolves. And the sheep outnumber the wolves 10:1.

[Emrok]

losing personal items during pvp does not pvp make.

daoc had a sweet idea with pvp, you give each team something with meaning, something that benefits them, heres where it went wrong

it gave + bonuses to the already stronger realm...

what would have been a good idea is to penalize the strength of that realm but still reward them financially/visually... like x captures y's relic, puts it in x's castle, their castle begins getting upgrades/looking visually better etc etc, but x players become weaker by the day due to spending so much time upgrading... BUT the longer y waits to take the relic back from x the less reward they get

this gives a reason to pvp, curbs the snail game and gives people something to work for.

now if every guild had a relic they had to hold in their guild town, that would encourage 1 guild to take as many other guilds relics as possible to upgrade their own town into a city etc etc etc...

people could band together to take them down blah blah blah

you dont have to penalize someone to make pvp enjoyable, you just have to reward them appropriately and detur mindless ganking

altho you can also have mindless ganking just make the reward worth it/easy to avoid, like guild x puts a bounty on player y, now theres hitmen out to kill y for $

do away completely with pve, make tradeskills the new timesink/reward system instead of killing monsters... or uhhh let guilds be able to initiate npc attacks on their town and they have to defend their place to get $ to upgrade it....

or random ass pve, like you go out to gather wood to build another building in your town and bam 5 skeleton guys come out to jump you, or allow npc towns to come and go and assault random guilds towns

/ramble off

[Shaod]

Good PvP is all about the penalties. Its not surprising EQ and WoW players will never understand that and this thread has been played out ad infinitum on a thousand different boards in a thousand different threads.

[Lweniel]

The really ironic thing is the people who whine most about wanting to be able to gank are also the one who whine the most when they get ganked.

Someone has to be the sheep for the wolves to prey on, and it sure as shit isn't going to be Timmy, he's not gunna play your game when he can play WoW. It's going to be the worst of the wolves. And then they'll quit too, and then it'll be the next worst. And then it will be you. And you'll whine and quit also.

[needraRZ]

>It was rare that people when around jumping people because they /shouts
>across the zone and the offending player would quickly be hunted down

This.

I'll give the example of Rallos Zek in EQ. This was a pure PVP server. Yet PVP was actually pretty rare. In fact, on introduction of the Bazaar there was more PVP in the arena than the rest of the world.

Why?

Because PVP had repercussions. If a player chose to be a PK then it was a lifestyle choice. They quickly gained a reputation, and eventually notoriety. As a mostly PVE player there were PKS I hated, and some I feared when I noticed them zone in if I was trying to PVE.

BUT. The fact that they were branded outlaws restricted their movements. It was a choice with penalties. And for this reason the server was not a gankfest.

For me, the net result was a very dangerous and real feeling world. Even better the politics between raiding guilds was very very interesting. A full scale war had serious consequences (esp. for PVE progress). I was in several 'council' discussions debating terms for war or peace. Fun times.

Same goes for EVE. I made a different choice in EVE and went pure pirate, roaming low sec space a few weeks after starting with my friends RPing pirates and blowing people up

[Inconsiderable]

Originally Posted by Shaod

Good PvP is all about the penalties. Its not surprising EQ and WoW players will never understand that and this thread has been played out ad infinitum on a thousand different boards in a thousand different threads.

It always comes down to "You havent played it, you do not understand". As seen in the following (and very enjoyable) posting on the df forums.

So many MMORPGers dont understand. - Darkfall Forums

Originally Posted by Chubbyjesus

Long nerdrage to follow-

Ive played so many MMOs.. I feel like a cheap date when it comes to MMOs.. I get into bed with them with little research for most of them, then I start cheating on them or leave them altogether after a couple of monthes. Its like I found true love in Ultima Online and havent been able to get that feeling back.

I read it alot, people cannot grasp the nature of a meaningful PvP game. "Its all about the thrill of the fight!".

No.. Its not. Its all about feeling like the battle meant something. The fun comes with that. They dont understand because there hasnt been a game to capture the glory of UO and back then the industry was just a baby.

Alot of gamers cannot grasp the enjoyment of a looting enviroment. They think its griefing and everyone who plays it just wants to annoy people. Its because they havent played it, plain and simply.

Im not a griefer, im a PvPer. I want each encounter to mean something. Im tired of 'rubberband PvP' which consists of continiously fighting until someone gets bored and wanders away. I want each PvP fight to have closure.

I think too many people are scared of losing anything in MMOs nowadays. This is due to spending weeks/monthes/years to obtain phat loots. Heck I cant lie, I like phat loots as much as the next guy.. But phat loots doesnt have to cost you so much time. Looting would only work in a system where loot is easily obtainable.. They think there is no phat loot or everybody runs around with a vanilla short sword and wooden buckler.

Darkfall will have plenty of great items, both from NPCs and players. Heck some these items may in fact take up to a week to get, but the great thing about a game like DF is that the bonus to using these items is why you use them.

You wont run around with an item because it looks cool.. You wont always be using the same stuff, guarenteed. Also you wont always have the good loot sitting in your bank rotting. Its a common misconception that you wont ever use it for fear of losing it. Most wont understand until they play it. There is a risk and reward balance.. And majority of it is controlled by each individual. You could easily play through this game with the bare minimal, if you wanted.

DF is coming into the market at a vital time, people are tired of meaningless PvP or fighting 'For the horde'.. Alot of games think youll fight for the glory of your side, just for the heck of it. A game like Darkfall will reall instill people with a sense of immersion. You will fight for what you believe and you will fight for yourself. You will find factions in a game like Darkfall, eventhough there is no factions. The communities will split and shift, constantly. There will be simple game morale choices throughout your time in the game. Its like one of those Fable/KOTOR type things, only there is no 'NPC 2 is in trouble, let them die or help them.'.. Alot of these decisions will present themselves as players. Run by see a corpse.. Loot it , gaining an enemy, or rez the guy and help him get back on his feet, gaining a friend.

Eventually how you decide to treat other players, will reflect your alignment. Do you care about the community or do you just want their loot? So many people will play differently. Majority will mix the two heavily.

There is no reason to fear loot and the community it is 'supose' to bring. Its a game where you will have a real reputation. You wont gain it from killing some boss.. You will gain it from interacting with the community.

Are you the guy who sells cheap armor constantly? The guy who kills people by the first dungeon? The guy who helps those in need? The guy who sticks around town and becomes a well known merchant? The guy who runs a huge player city? The guy who explores the corners of the game universe and sells its secrets? The guy finds good housing plots and becomes a realitor? The guy who sells his services to the highest bidder? The guy who gathers wood? The guy who buys and sells goods for profit? The options are endless.

Most MMOs there is a structure.. You must follow it.. level level level, now this is unlocked! Crafting requires certain levels. Everything revolves around 'What level you are!' for what you can do. There is also little reason to go to areas youve 'completed' due to no reason to PvP or no extras to accomplish.

Embrace a game like Darkfall even if you are wary of the nature of it. You will never have such a bond with your virtual characters and never have such a sense of community, and your place in it.

Darkfall wont be a 'die and start over' game by any means and I think thats what some people are scared of. It isnt the end of the world when you die and lose your things. There are more things and such things are not 1400 gold because some no-lifers control the market. Its a simple game at its core, its complexity is in its customization and openess.

I cannot wait for Darkfall and anyone who shys away from it because they are scared of the "looming penalities" is a fool and doing themselves a great injustice.

VIVA LA DARKFALL!

~Chubby

[Bizanich]

Originally Posted by Tullaeniel

The major problem with PvP the op is talking about is there are two mindsets when I think of PvP. When some people see PvP they think a meaningful and balanced PvP system. Shit I think most players would be all for it if done right. However, the problem that comes up is a shit load of people don't want a meaningful or competitive PvP experience what they really mean by PvP is that they want to Gank people.

I don't think they want GANK, necessarily. I think what is wanted is what Eve Online has...meaningful territory control where if someone wanders onto your turf they die or pay you. In fact, something like Eve that worked (no/little lag, no bugs, fun combat), would be an amazing game. Eve is perfect in concept, it just doesn't work and pushes so many people away due to that + the time it takes to get good....

I think the trick is there has to be a large area, like Empire Space in Eve, where the carebears and the sheep have to be safe and have fun. Eventually they can be confident enough to wander into the meatgrinder, but there has to be safe space.

Originally Posted by Ogun Nagoura

PVP needs to be removed from top end MMO's, seriously, there is plenty of FPS that take care of that demographic nicely. Heck, I'll put a 12 year old master of Unreal Tourney over a WoW master any day in playing skill and with the FPS they get the added perk of blowing their opponent into bloody chunks.

I honestly believe PvP is a bigger draw to these games then PvE is. Yes, even for WoW....although the excellence of their PvE is teaching people that PvE can be fun, too.

I just can't imagine a PvE only game getting much higher then Everquest max #'s.

[flv]

Originally Posted by Ogun Nagoura

You wouldn't be saying that if YOU had dumped 100 million $$ into a MMO and you couldn't lock down more than 300K subscribers.

PVP needs to be removed from top end MMO's, seriously, there is plenty of FPS that take care of that demographic nicely. Heck, I'll put a 12 year old master of Unreal Tourney over a WoW master any day in playing skill and with the FPS they get the added perk of blowing their opponent into bloody chunks.

We all know how that worked out for LOTRO.