NotAddicted has a review of every MMO to date’s attempt to make a HaRDc0RE PVP server. Worth a read/chuckle.
In most cases, the amount of people who beg for a hardcore PvP server is infinitely greater than the amount people who will actually play it for more than a week.
Nobody creates their evil Orc Shadowknight and imagines that one day he\’e2\’80\’99ll be crying and begging a PK for his +2 cloak back, or goes out of his way to avoid PvP in fear of getting embarrassed again. They imagine their level 352 Orc crushing wave upon wave of newbie roleplaying paladins, because they have a master plan, a little secret that nobody else thought of: \’e2\’80\’9cI\’e2\’80\’99m going to get lots of levels and items!\’e2\’80\’9d Their dream is crushed when they find that 3,000 other people have the same plan, and back to the normal server they go.
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Usually hardcore PvP servers work like this:
1. Devs open up new PvP server.
2. Massive numbers of people swarm in to try it out and goof around.
3. People whine that server is too crowded.
4. Devs open up second PvP server due to high demand.
5. Whiny people and people who only came in to goof around for a week or two leave and server population plummets.
6. People realize that the devs didn’t put much planning into setting up the PvP servers and there’s massive flaws/exploits (the ridiculous ease of Realm Point farming in the DAoC PvP server for example) and they leave too.
7. People get annoyed by low server population and leave.
8. People complain to devs that there’s massive flaws/exploits and ask them to be fixed.
9. Devs don’t fix anything because there’s no many players.
10. Devs think of a different sort of ruleset to use for a different kind of PvP server and everything repeats back to 1.
You’d think they’d learn to just set up one PvP server at a time and ride out the wave of people only staying for a week or three.
The fundamental problem with hardcore PVP servers is that everyone wants to be a wolf and nobody wants to be a sheep. The sheep know this and have figured out that blue servers are more their speed. Hardcore PVP players harken back to the days of yore in UO when the sheep didn’t have any other options, not realizing that that will not be the case ever again.
-Server History
When researching the servers above, history was everywhere. With the increased drama comes increase interest in history, and people dedicate whole websites to famous battles, powerful alliances, the day the most powerful guild was crushed, and so on.
That is so sad dude, it’s like writing down your brave fight against the 4th graders of Fort Couch. I’m sure Captain Kevin earned his spider-man mask that day.
Eve Online comes very close to a hardcore server–you can bug out of low-security (free-for-all PvP) space, but not without sacrificing the benefits of being there. It definitely deserves a mention in this list.
lol, good list and so true
Hmmmmm, sounds like PlanetSide. Pure PvP.
You get mowed down a lot as a newbie, but once you get the hang of it, theres a lot of satisfaction to be had from killing a cunning human oponent
Very few people actually want PvP… they want PvE where the Environment is made of player targets instead of NPCs.
One of my coworkers once convinced me to run a Horde character with him on a PvP server. As one who is generally averse to PvP, I was dubious, but decided to give it a try anyway. I had quit by the time I hit a high enough level to quest in contested areas. I don’t mind admitting that I like dealing with easy, predictable mobs over sadistic twelve-year-olds on a power trip.
I very much hope that the title of this blog was inspired by the Ripper logs, Lum.
Because Ripper is indeed a gangster.
bah. I need a freaking preview button.
The text “From the article:” should have appeared between those two block quotes.
“That is so sad dude, it\’e2\’80\’99s like writing down your brave fight against the 4th graders of Fort Couch. I\’e2\’80\’99m sure Captain Kevin earned his spider-man mask that day.”
Or like winning the big game your senior year of high school. No meaning or memory there, right?
Truth is, PvP does create meaning in a game that really isn’t likely to come in pure PvE. Unfortunately, losing continues to suck. The balance between meaning and suck is the unanswered conundrum of PvP.
Now go and vote. Winner has looting rights.
The problem is the sheeps keep going to the wolves server, expecting it to be different. Then they complain that it wasn’t different.
Some of us want to play where if I want to run my sword though you for being an ass, for having better loot, or just because I felt like it I can. You have the same options. If that’s not cool, great – there are other servers for you.
Planetside is a first person shooter, and the absolute worst possible scenario for dying is “you just pulled out your robot and have to wait 45 minutes for another, and will have to use a tank or fight on foot in the meantime.” Most of the time, when you die you just hit respawn, grab some gear, and are back at it within two minutes.
This is a far cry from the “winner takes all your stuff” or “permadeath” rule sets that the people who ask for “hardcore” rules mean.
What I find funny is that usually the uber pwners on PvP servers are not 12-14 yr old tweens like everyone is crying. Usually it is 20+ yr olds that have a job and then they come home to play the game for the rest of the evening. People log on and get owned by the people that play more. To justify the loss they just dismiss it as some 12 yr old… because it is easier to swallow a pwning by downgrading your opponent to just a whiny little kid.
Actually I find that a lot even when people are refering back to the days of Darktide or Siege Perilous. I can almost guarantee there was less than 1% of the players on those servers under the age of 18. Why? Because young ins didn’t play those games en masse like everyone assumes they do. Even with WoW the population of gamers under 18 is likely very small.
But like I stated it is just easier for an adult to blame getting owned by claiming their opponent was a 12 year old punk.
@heartless:
…or it can be that the opponent’s conduct is more consistent with a severely socially-challenged 12-year-old than a fully developed adult…
I can also see two very different attitudes here. Daztur’s post suggests that general developer apathy and design failings bring doom to the PvP server. Others suggest that the player base is to blame: clamoring for hardcore features only to leave when & they’re not on the top of the food chain.
Truth is, hardcore play- total 100% jackassery allowed, no protection, massive looting etc is appealing to a VERY small crowd. As a subcomponent of a larger game, it hasn’t been appealing enough to support its own server. Everything from “no chatting with your enemy” to “limited looting” has been “softening” the hardcore in an effort to broaden the appeal enough to make it self sustaining.
“Truth is, hardcore play- total 100% jackassery allowed, no protection, massive looting etc is appealing to a VERY small crowd.”
Especially in a game that’s not designed around PvP. But then developers make it worse by splitting the small crowd up into two servers because of the initial rush (that really hurt the DAoC PvP server that I had a lot of fun playing on) and doing not fixing things that would be really really easy to fix (ridiculously short enemy lists in DAoC so you couldn’t keep track of who had killer you/who you wanted to kill).
I, for obvious reasons, can’t get too deep into this discussion. But the Mordred numbers had dropped like the proverbial rock before we essentially took the server off the priority list… and that’s WHY we took the server off the list. This isn’t chicken or egg, this is cause and effect.
The problem was in some part due to the fact that people kept killing the server newbies (of which there were never many), thus ensuring the population would never grow.
Of course, in order to make the server bug-free enough to attract a larger number of server newbies, we would have needed to fundamentally redesign the game. And we were clear about that from the beginning – to do Mordred “right” we would need to redesign the game and we weren’t going to – but people thought they’d be cool with just having a hard core ruleset.
They weren’t. Now we try to work with the Mordred TL and knock out a few bugs every patch, but that’s about it. I don’t claim to be happy about this, and I never will be, but when I’m told I have a stark choice between addressing bugs for hundreds of people versus thousands… the dog needs kibble twice a day, what can I say.
Andred’s death is very easy to explain. Andred opened a few weeks after Mordred. Maybe even days, I don’t remember off the top of my head. The people who went there were largely the people getting owned on Mordred, and they moved with the attitude… well, the one aptly described in the second conclusion of the article. They moved because they thought that by doing so, they would win the race to the top. Many had been on Mordred the first day, though, and just lost. Andred ate its own young within days. Mordred reabsorbed the players who actually wanted to PVP, as opposed to purely ownzor.
UO: My company just took over UO. For the record: There’s no secret password, and it’s on the shard selection list. Siege is considered an advanced server requiring advanced play skill, that’s all. The team doesn’t want brand new people logging into Siege by accident, since that experience tends to chase off the rawest beginners. (It certainly chased ME off in 1997.)
You just have to have ONE character past the pure newb level – which is defined as 40 hours /played and 450+ skill points. Then the “advanced player” tag lands on you, and you’re free to log into Siege.
Daz: Careful with designating something as “really easy” – if it had been really easy, we would have done it the first month when we were totally focused on getting those bugs fixed. And remember, we opened Andred because Mordred was crashing from overload.
Sanya: Well first of all I understand that bugs come first and that RealmPoint farming is hard to eliminate but something like expanding the size of the enemy list can’t be that hard, can it?
As far Andred goes, sure Mordred was insanely crowded before Andred opened (that short period when it was just Mordred was the most fun I’ve ever had in a MMORPG, seer insanity with my guild launching massive raids on the newbie dungeons just for the hell of it).
But’s its obvious in hindsight that opening Andred didn’t help anyone (least of all Mythic’s bottom line). Was it predictable that if Andred opened Mordred and Andred would both soon crash population wise? I think so, the exact same thing happened in EQ.
I really think that the best way to explain Darktide’s popularity is that they kept the PvP population all on one server. I think that Mordred would be at least moderately successful today if Mythic had just ridden out the insane initial rush to play Mordred.
i think it makes sense to say that these “hardcore”/PvP servers mostly failed because the games they occurred in were not truly designed for PvP in the first place.
their design may account for PvP. but mostly it’s an aside, or a half-developed mini-game.
when a game is designed around PvP, this is not an issue, as the author of the linked article hinted at.
[i]Darktide is the anomaly on this list[/i]
Pvp is just less restricted player interaction. There’s a market for it, just as there is a market for those who hate another player being able to affect them in any way. The most extreme example being Conan which will ensure no-one can affect you, as you are not even online for the first 20 levels.
The standard group thought, as Heartless said above, is that those who choose pvp servers are kids. I know from Darktide that out of a guild of over 100 a few years ago, the average player age was 27.
The type of death penalty makes a big difference in pvp servers so making a list of different games doesn’t really prove anything. It would be like making a list of 10 old tv shows and deciding the fate of next seasons show’s.
As for stating in the conclusions that adding a “hardcore” pvp server in WoW (hardcore is not my choice of word) is a stupid idea. I disagree, more choices for players are always good, even if they take it to extremes I’m not interested in like Conan.
I think the conclusion the author was fumbling for was that the “philosophies” of WoW have cracked the market wide open and that a so-called hardcore server is, in many ways, contrary to it’s philosophy. Forcibly mashing those two notions together does not a good game/server make.
As for Andred/Mordred? I played on Mordred when it launched. It wasn’t as bad, in hindsight, as the gnashing and wailing would have you believe and I noticed *zero* change in my gameplay when Andred opened. That said it didn’t take too long following Andred for me to realize that I hated that gameplay with a passion and went back to my stupid fug Theurgist
“something like expanding the size of the enemy list can\’e2\’80\’99t be that hard, can it?”
It is if it’s hard coded in and referenced in a dozen different ways for other functions. This is an MMO, not a bank of boolean operators.
“I think that Mordred would be at least moderately successful today if Mythic had just ridden out the insane initial rush to play Mordred.”
I think you’re right
“It is if it\’e2\’80\’99s hard coded in and referenced in a dozen different ways for other functions. This is an MMO, not a bank of boolean operators.”
Point conceded. I know remarkably little about coding
“Can’t you just make a button?”
The problems with PvP servers I think are that if we look at it like iterative prisoner’s dilemma, there is no penalty for constant defection. the only one that developed a penalty is the case where anti-PK guilds formed. That is the only way you’ll get a sense of normalcy: i.e. just like real life, someone that kills indescriminately would be considered a sociopath and executed. There is room for violence, but it can only be stable when most players play tit for tat.
So there will never be true pvp server where it’s always that sense of paranoia that will ever last long. Because either: a. anti-pk guilds develop as the “order keepers” (which can only happen if there is incentive to do so, i.e. incentives not to die), or because b. the gankers drive everyone away and the server dies off. There is no middle ground. Millions and millions of iterations of prisoner’s dilemma have proven you can’t have a stable society of “always defect”.
I was always under the impression that Sanya had a toon in Shadowclan. I’m not sure where I got that idea, but that was the rumor going around.
Yea, so. I’d point to the hardcore PvP *game* which has a pretty steadily climing server population… (yes, yes, designed for it and all)
For WoW, I’m on a PvE server purely because of BG’s. Not that Stranglethorn dosn’t sometimes turn into a bit of a slaughter..
I played in Shadowclan for a half year or so, and it was some of the best fun I had in DAOC. The constant rp did wear me down eventually (being that I’m not much of an rp’er). But I’ll never forget the klomps.
I prefer pvp servers to pve servers, and I’m anything but a 12 year old boy (I’m a 49yo mother of two). I like the social interactions on pvp servers because there’s more options, it seems. I rarely go out to gank lowbies (unless I have a grudge against their guild or I have pms, of course, and then it does wonders for my mood). I somehow missed the entire UO phenomenon, and EQ; DAOC was my first graphical although I played pk muds before that.
I don’t know about hardcore, though. I’m still waiting for my Perfect MMOG, which will of course include pvp. I’d also like to see more player-generated governance of the game, perhaps with politics (including jurisprudence). And a pony.
Is there ever any reason NOT to play a character in Shadowclan?
Nothing quite approached the fun of being a part of a wave of tiny blue kobolds sweeping across the landscape demanding tribute from all in its path. Seeing the trolls run in horror /shouting WTF while being rooted and having dozens of kobolds /jumping all around them screaming for tribute.
Aaaaah, those were the days…
Ah, but good came from Mordred. I think. I believe that it was having the technology developed for Mordred that allowed Gaheris!
That’s what really got me back into DAoC after stalling out on Guinevere when my guild disintegrated back in the day. I almost hit th e level max and had a lot of fun. A whole lot of fun. I kept my account open over a year after City of Heroes lured me away. I bought the next expansion…but ultimately, the collapse of my alliance meant I never really went back.
But Gaheris was absolutely wonderful. My girlfriend and I keep talking about how neat a coop server would be in the other games we play. (Except Eve.)
What a bunch of condescending mouth breathing crap.
If you are a developer and your game happens to be DIKU-clone (kill yourself now, and stop fagging up the industry) and you spent ZERO development time on PvP – don’t bother with PvP servers, it will be a whole lot more embarrassing than the time you get caught fucking your sister at her funeral.
Now if you actually have some idea of what PvP balance is, how to design goals and guild support and what are things PvPers want out of their game then you can give it a whirl. Still chances are you will end up with third-rate derivative and half-assed result since you will likely have \’e2\’80\’98mass appeal\’e2\’80\’99 aspirations. End result would not be that much different than the rest of your DIKU cloneware, just flaws will be that more obvious and harder to hide behind the mindless grind.
Moral of this story? Don’t bother with PvP unless you are willing to design your game with it in mind from the beginning. Also don\’e2\’80\’99t bother with PvP if you are not prepared to go for \’e2\’80\’98the niche\’e2\’80\’99 (and fuck everything else) and stick to it to the bitter end.
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