This post was prompted by a thread on f13, which asked “is there any difference between open PvP and gang warfare?”
It’s an interesting topic. Let’s look at it first from a purely game-specific level.
Ultima Online was pretty much full-on gang warfare, and I suspect the memory of which prompted this specific thread. There wasn’t a great deal of organization, and what organization was introduced (guilds, notoriety, order/chaos) tended to be ignored. PvP combat in UO could be broken down into either internecine gang warfare (two PvP guilds duking it out), vigilante action (PK and anti-PK guilds duking it out), or petty crime (PKs ganking helpless passers-by). (Note that this is my memory of UO circa 2000; I’m fairly certain it’s changed dramatically since.)
Everquest was, uh, broken PvP. If you remember, the original plan was to have PvP and non-PvP players on the same server, where PvP was an opt-in system that had you hand in a Tome of Discord and flag yourself eternally red. The problem was that flagging yourself PvP meant that you basically could not group with a non-PvP player (could not heal or buffs, accept heals or buffs, etc). Which meant that effectively, your character couldn’t actually play. Eventually, I’m fairly certain, resetting the status of players who mistakenly or were tricked into handing in that book as a “quest” became such a CS hassle that the entire system was scrapped. Asheron’s Call and Everquest both had “open PvP” servers which were popular, but also pretty clearly afterthoughts that would often be broken by patches to the “real” game.
Of course, there wasn’t a lot of discussion about social structures in the above paragraph, was there? That was intentional. With such a tangle of rules and bugs and strictures, any social structure was choked in its crib. AC Darktide had a pretty efficient social structure, but it was mainly gang warfare squared, with the XP chaining scheme helping to encourage a terminal mass of people joining the dominant gang.
Then you had the next iteration of games; Shadowbane and Dark Age of Camelot. Both took very different takes on PvP. Shadowbane tried to create a “guild vs guild” game where guilds would form into meta-groups of nations and fight over territory. In practice, the meta-groups never really took; the game crystalized into guild vs guild wars… again, gang wars by another name.
Dark Age of Camelot’s thesis was to ditch the open PvP model completely. Instead, DAOC channelled everyone into one of three sides and treat the other two sides as very smart NPCs. No trash talking, in fact, very little interaction between them at all. Personally, I think this is a very underestimated part of the equation. Without the social (or more appropriately antisocial) behavior in game, two very distinct and almost contradictory things happened; players in-game acted as opposing sides as designed – Britons would fight Elves on sight, Trolls would attack Highlanders, etc. And, interestingly enough, the interaction between the two migrated to message boards out of game. Even to this day, the VN board for a Camelot cluster is composed largely of “@CharacterName” messages aimed at trash talk or, more surprisingly and more often, compliments for the way a fight went the night before.
So, Camelot managed to avoid the ‘gang warfare’ symptoms to a large degree. People seeking out gang warfare – called “8v8s” in DAOCspeak, the moniker for a full group fighting another full group – were a part of the game, but not the majority. Most players could find gameplay by attaching themselves to what the “8v8s” would derisively call “the Zerg”, a somewhat self-explanatory term for the massive armies of loosely coordinated players looking to swarm over one another.
The next step up in PvP complexity released shortly after DAOC, but took some time to really get rolling. Eve Online is undoubtably one of the most punishing games you can play – it’s full PvP everywhere, even in the new player areas (you are protected by NPC police, but can still be blown out of the sky by a suicidally motivated PKer). But Eve iterated in many interesting ways – even more interestingly, not on the simple nation-zerg model of Dark Age of Camelot, but the virtual world model of Ultima Online – specifically, the depth of the economic model. Like UO, most everything of value in Eve is player crafted. And the game provides enough tools for economic manipulation that one could viably play the game as a day trader – not of goods back and forth, but literal commodities market manipulation.
The benefit here is sublime in its simplicity. A: Valuable goods need to be mined. B: You need to hold territory to mine those goods. C: There are no other rules. This swiftly led to D: The Carving Of The Map. Instead of relying on players to go to great lengths to defend the innocent, as UO asked, Eve asks you to, more simply, take what you want and hold it. Greed trumps altruism.
The Eve forums are far from civil most of the time (neither are the DAOC forums, really), but the passion is there regardless. Eve’s gameplay is still gang vs gang (note the meta-guild names like “Goonswarm” and “Band of Brothers” on the Eve map) – but the gangs got organized, they formed alliances, and they police their own neighborhood. Kind of like, you know, nations did.
And finally, the juggernaut, World of Warcraft. WoW’s PvP model is basically “DAOC, polished to a sheen, with instancing.” There, done, ship it. (Bitter? Moi? 
) Not really open PvP, even on the PvP servers. But still accessible; and noticeably, World of Warcraft has far many more PvP servers than one would expect from the history of such things. Clearly, there’s a market for people who want to fight running battles in Stranglethorn Vale instead of killing 10 tiger cubs.
So, there’s the models extant today. What does that show us?
I personally believe that Eve shows what can happen with a mature endgame owned by the players. The trick is getting them to that point; something DAOC did remarkably well. But what will result, if done right, won’t really resemble gang warfare much at all. My off-the-cuff opinions on how to make that happen:
- Lesson learned from Eve: a deep economy is critical to a deep PvP game. To the surprise of the Wolfpack guys, clearly people DO bake bread AND crush. (Sorry, everyone who didn’t get that. Long-running in-joke.) Economy gives you the skeleton of what to fight over.
- Lesson learned from Camelot: limit the grief. (This goes against the lesson from Eve. But DAOC, and its descendant WoW, are a touch more popular.) Whatever you can do to “NPC-alize” enemy players, do so. Those truly motivated to exercise the art of the trashtalk will move it to the forums, where, in a win-win, it’s both content outside your game and easier for CS to manage/ignore.
- Lesson learned from Counterstrike: skill-based PvP has it’s place. That place is not an MMO. The tyranny of a skill-based elite is only compounded by the permanence of the MMO. As seen with the popularity and success of the Camelot zergs, people can be successful as part of a massive team, but that success wears down if that team can be wiped off the map by 5 really super guys.
- Lesson learned from World of Warcraft: item-centric PvP makes your game painful to balance. I can only imagine what gyrations the Blizzard PvP designers are going through trying to “load balance” arena matchups based on item loadouts. Plus, an item-centric game built on loot drops also tends to break your player-run deep economies – which violates the first lesson above. Item-centric PvP – bad touch.
- Lesson learned from… well, my own delusions: context matters. It’s my belief that if you set up enough of a context within the game’s environment for nations to come together and fight for/against something, a core of your players will take it and run with it. This hasn’t really been tried yet – Shadowbane came close with its deep lore that the game systems tended to ignore.
What lessons would YOU add to make a PvP game more of a struggle of nations and less of a gangbang?
#1 by Neep on February 21st, 2007
“EVE’s alliances aren’t nations. More like organized crime syndicates (have taxing, provide protection and encompass different types of workers). Nations have strong social, historic and cultural bondings. They don’t disappear or ‘disband’. Right now, you don’t have that in mmos. Maybe that’s the next step – make people tied to the space live in and fellow players.”
No. Just no. I don’t want to be tied to the space I live in with fellow players. I don’t want to play a game with nations of the modern style. You can’t force… civility into your PvP. You can’t and shouldn’t expect to be able to build up a civilization your players will identify with. If you can’t identify with your little gang nation, find one you can. Don’t expect the designers to be able to code in all this cultural, historical and social bondong you want. It’s not possible. If that’s what you demand, to have nations, then you will never have nations in a game. You can’t create any of those things through code, those can only be created either the way they are in the real world, through heavy duty jingoistic and racial indoctrination, or they must be player created through an active desire to role play. Neither option does the designer have control over. Either learn to call the gang warfare (which looks a lot like medival warefare) nation warfare. Or join the army.
#2 by xaldin on February 21st, 2007
“the peak daily player count on the server dropping from 20,000 to under 5,000 (to compare, standard EVE player counts range from 19 to 30,000.) People who lose outright at PvP MMOs quit,”
Mud’s exhibited the same behavior pattern. During any major war your average active population would drop and it’d take months after it for new people to replace the old who left for good.
Therein lies a core problem with pvp systems. Its a lot like nuclear war. The only way to truely win is not to play at all.
#3 by perianwyr on February 21st, 2007
isildur, that’s…interesting. Every time I fly through the newb systems, there are 4-5 different recruitment spams in local in the minute or so it takes me to cross them.
Yes, but most of those guys spamming for recruitment just want you to come mine in 0.6 space or something.
If Eve doesn’t make the transition from Empire to 0.0 smoother, the game has no future, really. While some alliances seem to be doing a good job of recruiting from out of game, the game itself recruits people into shitty 1.0.
#4 by perianwyr on February 21st, 2007
Also, the goal, past a certain level, of a PvP MMO is to make your enemies quit doing what they’re doing, and usually that means they quit the game too. I am not sure whether this is a dynamic that developers want to encourage, but it’s always been the case.
#5 by Rich on February 21st, 2007
Rather than repeat my entire lengthy reply from another thread on the subject (because it is LONG), I’m just going to link in and summarize.
http://www.psychochild.org/?p=269
I truly think a tiny little game called Puzzle Pirates has figured out the PvP issue. A serious battle over a valuable bit of land not only can reach 1000+ players, it is routinely expected to. If you can’t support at least 500 people, don’t bother coming to the high endgame table.
Low-end PvP can have as few as 2-3 players working in concert against twice as many lower skill level ones. (or occasionally just one person, if he’s really, really good) The more skilled players usually win, but there is always the potential for surprises. Going up against 5 newbies led by a single experienced ship captain can give would-be gankers a rough time.
From the end of that other reply:
* PvP offers concrete rewards greater than PvE, with equivalently greater risks.
* PvE is sufficiently difficult to prevent green players from even being available for ganking by highly skilled players.
* Measures exist to prevent extreme power imbalances in battle. While rewards do not change, the risk factor goes up incredibly when you try to gank a group of newbies.
* Even unskilled or semiskilled players can contribute to a victory, whether PvE or PvP. Only those at the top of the game actually control the ships, but everyone is rewarded for their cooperative efforts.
* Endgame PvP is both risky and highly rewarding. Cooperation is not only encouraged, it is mandatory. The side that plans and cooperates better, wins.
* Finally, the lack of levels is a strong feature in the balancing act of the game. Players can buy better gear, but it has little effect unless the player understands how to play the minigames in the first place. A skilled group can almost always beat an unskilled one, but there is no magic “I’m level 60, you’re level 1, I win!” factor.
#6 by Sweetmeat on February 21st, 2007
One thing DAoC did right was that none of the three realms was expressly evil. I think it’s going to be a major problem for Warhammer. I tried playing Freeport in EQ2, and I tried CoV, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like working through content where I feel like a bad guy. I’ve met a fair number of people who feel the same. If you make a system where people have the choice between being good guys, and being bad guys, then you’re going to get an imbalance from day one which will screw things up for the side that is “evil”. I’ve said this before, and people who don’t mind playing evil tell me I’m wrong, that plenty of people are willing to play evil, but I think they are mistaking the views of a pretty large large minority, enough that it will skew populations. Any game that wants decent PvP will need to work with neutral entities as starting points.
#7 by Jessica Mulligan on February 21st, 2007
Slog said:
“This sheep and wolves crap has to go. There were no sheep in Shadowbane, and it worked well.
What Shadowbane proved is that the losers of a persisant MMO will quit when they have no chance of making a comeback.”
—
I disagree with your conclusion, slog. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, “I agree, and that is the whole point.” What it proves is that creating a zero-sum situation that drives many of your customers away is stupid business for a commercial persistent world, at least one that wants to stay in business.
It doesn’t matter if it is the coolest PvP system ever; if it ends up driving away more and more of your customers, what is the use? When the whole purpose of the game is PvP, setting up a situation where the losers are almost always going to be losers, with no chance to be on the winning side of the equation in some fashion, is silly; of course they will leave. That’s why no purely PvP game with a zero-sum solution has succeeded in the West (Asia is a different kettle of fish). And in the end, SB ended up being a zero-sum game; you were either a member of the largest guild on the server or you left.
Games that were totally PvP have succeeded, but they weren’t zero sum; there was always a way for players to succeed outside of the pure face-to-face combat. Air Warrior, Stellar Emperor and Stellar Warrior come to mind. The beauty of WoW’s PvP is that it is not zero-sum, it is mainly the ‘end game’, occurring after you’ve built your character up to be large enough to have a chance at survival and/or having an effect on the combat (and created an emotional attached to your character). The point is, there is more to WoW than just PvP, and the PvP that is there is artfully woven into the fabric of the game.
What SB taught us: Zero-sum PvP sucks.
What WoW taught us: Non-zero sum PvP doesn’t suck.
Or maybe I just read too much into a short post.
#8 by Tal on February 21st, 2007
When playing EVE a while back, I would constantly see recruitment messages from 0.0 corps – but they all typically had a lot of requirements to them. “You have to move to our system, you have to mine what we tell you, you have to use our voice chat”. That type of thing probably turns a lot of newbies off too.
So there is a gulf between empire play and deep space play, and that gulf is along the lines of casual vs. hardcore or raiding vs. non-raiding in PvE games.
Odd parallel.
#9 by Axecleaver on February 21st, 2007
As a followup to Jessica’s insights about zero-sum pvp, I wanted to comment on pvp reward structures. Rewarding the victors makes sense, but it can be the absolute worst design decision you make.
Case in point: DAOC realm point rewards. This created a situation where the strong got stronger and quickly became untouchable. There was a lot of tuning of this system after the RR5 abilities came out to tone down the dominance. Bunker of faith, purge, determination, etc.
Counterpoint: Counterstrike. The game builds in dollar rewards between rounds, so that if you survive, you keep your guns and get more dollars to buy better guns. But if your side loses 3 in a row, they get a big money bonus so they can buy better gear and have a chance to compete.
Find ways to build in this type of mechanic. Winning should reward you in ways that don’t necessarily affect your pvp viability. You want to avoid a feedback loop where early success guarantees future success.
People love winning when their side is at a disadvantage. So build this in — allow the hardcore to fight battles where they’re outnumbered, for example. Create pvp scenarios where you’re expected to lose, and grade on a curve… how long did you hold out before folding? Traditional tabletop wargaming gives us stuff like this.
#10 by Andrew Crystall on February 21st, 2007
Tal, and yet over half Eve player’s are involved with an alliance. And there are a lot of smaller alliances.
Using voice chat is, frankly, perfectly reasonable. Eve’s chat system barely passes muster in my estimation, and it’s one of the better MMO chat systems. For combat, it remains far too slow. This is going to be true in virtually any MMO, and frex the big WoW raid guilds require voice chat.
perianwyr, and some people enjoy that. It’s certainly a step up for the people who DON’T want to dive right into the dog-eat-dog world of Eve PvP. I didn’t in my first month either (First PvP kill was arround week 6 of playing).
And if you don’t think there’s not fighting and backbiting between Empire mining corps and the producers who they sell low-ends to… heh. Sure, the fighting is often economic or pretty, but it DOES happen. Frequently.
#11 by Andrew Crystall on February 21st, 2007
pretty = petty. Yay my spelling.
#12 by =j on February 21st, 2007
I think perianwyr has hit the nail on the head. I don’t play PvP for long because I strongly object to people trying to stop me from enjoying the game.
#13 by Oliver Smith on February 21st, 2007
Obviously you’re free to think that, don’t let reality get in the way of exercising that right!
Games like SWG, EQ2, WoW, have no difficulty keeping the “evil” side populated. Fortunately most people are smart enough to realize that they aren’t playing an *evil* character, just an “evil” one.
Almost always it is little more than an attribute of lore. Your average Freeport player is no different than your average Qeynos player, your average Rebel no different than your average Imperial, your average Axis player no different than your Allied. They have a different story, different spells, different weapons.
Playing “Axis” in a WWII game doesn’t indicate you support Hitler. Playing a troll shaman in WoW doesn’t make you a paganistic devil worshipper.
What we’re talking about, essentially, is just a couple of labels that have almost no connection to their real-world counterparts.
Infact, in EQ2 it would be more accurate to call the two sides “perky” and “gruff”. And then that only relates to the dialog of the NPC quests. There is nothing any more “evil” about playing a Freeport character than there is Qeynosian.
Except maybe in your head.
Which is exactly why you’re wrong. Because for many people having a character that is generally labelled as “evil” or “bad” or “dark” is just another part of the attraction of this form of escapism.
Scott’s “delusional” rule: context.
#14 by Tal on February 21st, 2007
Andrew,
I have to disagree on voice chat, but I type 140 wpm and I grew up on text muds. In my opinion voice chat is a crutch that gets “required” because people are lazy and never learn how to type properly.
I will admit that EVE’s chat box and interface could probably be a bit better, but I use voice chat requirements as a hardcore-vs-casual example because “casual” players usually can’t be expected to always be on voice chat. They’ve got the babies screaming in the background, the wife constantly interrupting them, and so on.
In fact, most of my experiences with voice chat with various EVE corps ended up in having to put up with that crap while trying to have a meaningful conversation and coordinate tactics. I can’t count the number of times we’d be in the middle of something and someone’s kid would start screaming in the background and totally throw the rest of us off our game.
In short, voice chat requirement != casual gamer friendly in my opinion.
But that’s totally off topic
My original point still stands. A big part (in my opinion) of the gulf between 0.0 and 1.0 is the hardcore vs. casual dichotomy.
#15 by Kunikos on February 21st, 2007
I’d much rather have a skill-based than strongly item-based PVP system, because in skill-based you can have some chance against someone who has simply invested far more time into the game by having no life or rotating multiple people on one machine like a shift crew.
The reason I dislike the PVP system as-is in WoW and DAOC is that the people who end-game raid to get the best items in the game (legendary and highest tier epics, and their equivalents) will trump any manner of player skill. There is simply no manner of mitigating that persons 100-200% higher hit-points, mana pool, armor points, etc. No manner of dancing around spinning and slapping your skill buttons frantically will ever save you.
#16 by Kunikos on February 21st, 2007
One solution to that would be similar to Oblivion’s arena. You are stripped of your PvE items and given a PvP set. Gladiators in the arenas of Rome didn’t always have the luxury of choosing their equipment before entering the arena, you always enter with a simple set of armor and perhaps a basic weapon or no weapon at all and they will drop some random weapons within the arena. Traps and animals would be unleashed on them as well, to make the chance of death even higher. It was popular in Rome for spectating, and I could see such a thing being pretty popular within an MMO as well given a sufficient player base. The Arena system in WoW, for example, could be far more popular if it had spectators and random traps and enemies thrown into the arena with the teams who are fighting each other.
#17 by Andrew Crystall on February 21st, 2007
Tal, no matter how fast you type there are both practical and psycholocial.
As for noise, a reaonable noise-canceling headset is about £15. If you mean “well I can only play occasionally”, then…there’s a limit to how far you’re going to get in a PvP game. Comprimising the design to cater entirely to casual players won’t work, you’ll lose the word of mouth you need to build from the hardcore, who’ll have quit in disgust at “EZ mode”.
it’s a matter of C3. People take far longer to respond to typing, people can have the wrong window active, there’s no way to indicate urgency, etc. There are all sorts of both practical and psycological reasons why voice chat allows for better communications.
And here’s the thing – Eve isn’t aimed at the “casual”, it’s aimed at a certain market segment (too big to call it niche). (Babies screaming? Dosn’t bother me. Get that all the time, shrug)
Also, don’t assume that people are not all professional speedtypers because they’re “lazy”, plenty of other reasons (starting with dyslexia..)
#18 by Evangolis on February 21st, 2007
Both voice chat and text have serious limitations. Voice tends to be a single channel medium, text is slower, but can support multiple simultaneous channels and allows me to review data in downtimes, under some conditions.
Neither is really good enough. This is one location for a MMO Killer App of The Future.
In the wake of WoW, if it rounds to less than 1 million, it’s a niche.
#19 by Amaranthar on February 21st, 2007
Lesson learned from Eve and also early UO:
The “end game” doesn’t have to actualy mean that, you don’t have to design a game about going from point ‘A’ to point ‘Z’.
And a related lesson is that an ongoing “end game” such as this means that the previous levels aren’t so important. They aren’t, or don’t neccessarily have to be, another form of game play.
What this means is that you don’t have to have a level grind. If we can recognize that “Lesson learned from World of Warcraft: item-centric PvP makes your game painful to balance”, then what about the vast level differences that most of the current games offer? Aren’t they just as much of a balancing issue? Especially if we can see that the level grind isn’t needed?
Lesson learned from all the level based games: Huge power differences in levels divides up the player base, neccessarily so. (This is bad for a game that wants to advance social meaning within it’s context.
#20 by RedWick on February 22nd, 2007
I can’t really think of any good examples, but it seems that if one side or one group is really dominating everything, there needs to be some kind of commiserate penalty in some unrelated aspect of the game (hyper-inflation or a dwindling amount of resources or something) to slow them down and make them back off.
I’m not sure if any games out there have tried that sort of thing before. Seems that the winners get all the bonuses and the losers get all the penalties.
#21 by Mutant for Hire on February 22nd, 2007
How do you deal with equipment dominating PVP? It’s simple in concept but a bit trickier in implementation. All you have to do is nerf PVP rewards for victory if the victor has an equipment advantage over the loser. And you boost PVP rewards if the victor has crappier equipment than the winner. And if there’s a big enough gap, the victor might actually be penalized for ganking the loser.
In games like chess, the stronger player often takes a deliberate handicap to even out the fight. This is sort of approaching that from the other direction. Now there is a question of how you evaluate gear bonuses and nerf/boost the PVP victory rewards.
The result of this is that players into PVP are going to be careful about gearing up too much because it could end up neutralizing their victory rewards or in a few bad cases, penalizing them. They’re more likely to use their uber gear only against other players with uber gear.
#22 by Andrew Crystall on February 22nd, 2007
Evangolis, not-so-coincidentally, Teamspeak 3 has deliberately been built for that sort of thing, and the stand-alone client is just that, one of many possible clients.
Mutant for Hire, you’re thinking of ELO ranking.
#23 by slog on February 22nd, 2007
@@ Jess
you got my point. I was just more concise
#24 by Evangolis on February 22nd, 2007
At the risk of a tangent, I’d just say that, while I know nothing about newer versions of tools like TeamSpeak, the bottleneck in voice communications, for me, is that I only have one set of ears, which can only listen to one input at a time.
Now, if you had a client which could take all the voice inputs, including mine, and output a selected one as voice and the rest to text feeds, that might be a move in the right direction, although managing all that information and the game feedback would be non-trivial, and might even require a separate monitor (and perhaps PC) to monitor it. Even now I find I have more text boxes than fit comfortably in the game window. Certainly one challenge I have experienced in PvP is periodic information overload, both for player and computer.
#25 by Tal on February 22nd, 2007
Hehe, the whole voice chat thing was a tangent already Evangolis, so no worries there.
I agree with you though – managing the information coming at you, whether text or voice, is the hard part. I find that because of the problems with communication in EVE, what I have to do is spend some time with my team practicing in order to get an idea of how they work and work more efficiently. Whether we use text or voice (usually text) for this doesn’t matter so much.
I’ve heard the argument that voice chat allows for quicker reactions, but the truth is you only get that if you very strictly enforce a protocol on the channel – People can’t be talking about other stuff, and they need generally stay off the chat unless it’s important. The more people on the channel, the worse it gets, which is why in EQ for the big raids we’d often have a group leader channel, a healer channel, and an overall raid channel. Text is easier to sort out because you can funnel important stuff to one chat box, and nonimportant stuff to another. This is true in any game.
But to return to (my) original assertion: Consider the case of Bob, married father of two small children. Bob works an 8-5 job and usually get some time between 8 pm and 10 pm to play a game. He usually gets interrupted by his wife about once an hour for something, and he has to put the kids to bed around halfway through. Sometimes the wife has the TV going in the background, or the kids are in the room playing while he’s trying to play too.
Bob can play the Empire game in EVE no problem. There’s some risk that he’d take when he has to go afk, but it’s not an unreasonable amount of risk.
But can Bob really play the deep space game? Is Bob going to be able to really participate in voice chat to the point where it’s an effective tool? Are the other players in the voice chat going to be willing to put up with Bob “constantly” having to go afk, or the times when the kids start fighting and his mic picks it up, or the TV in the background?
I know Bob and a lot of other players like him. They tend to shy away from voice chat requirements because of the scenarios I mentioned above. That’s why I brought it up. Other things, like requiring certain lengths of play time, or attendance on certain days, also drive them away from a game.
If you want a PvP metagame to have mass appeal then you need to make something that can be participated in by players like Bob. Otherwise, you wind up with basically a niche population.
#26 by Sweetmeat on February 22nd, 2007
Oliver: I’m not arguing that there won’t be a lot of relatively decent people play the “evil” side of any game. My cousins who I trust implicitly to watch my back don’t even bat an eye about it. What I’m saying is that there are enough people who prefer not to play a toon that feels evil vs people who don’t care or who like the evil feel to skew populations.
To be honest, costume wise, I think I would prefer a Dark Elf Witch over pretty much anything the good side will have to offer but based on not liking my characters to feel like bad people to me I won’t be playing one. I think there are enough people with that hang up out there to give the “good” side a numbers advantage.
I think Warhammer will be a test case for this as it will be the first game where pvp is a major part of the play on every server where the choice of good or evil will be so clear cut.
You may be correct that I am delusional, but I’m betting that 3 months into Warhammer online there will be a relative population disparity on most servers that no ammount of inducements to play the other team will correct. Mythic will be scratching their heads about it because it just won’t make any sense, and I’ll be wishing I didn’t mind playing the “evil” team so I could find an even fight rather than another walkover for the good guys.
#27 by Andrew Crystall on February 22nd, 2007
Evangolis, speach-to-text being viable is still 5 years away. Easily. And well, Eve’s chat system uses tabs AND puts the output of what you type into that tab.
I mean, is looking at what IRC does so hard?
Tal, combat ops = no random voice chat, right (Also, you ARE all using noise canceling* mics with push to talk, bound to a mouse button…right? These things really, really help).
(*You have to TRY and find a mic these days which dosn’t do at least passive noise cancelation)
Also, note, in most cases there is NO requirement to *talk* on voicechat, only listen. Fleet commanders, target callers and scouts are the people who need to talk.
Your Bob can play maybe 5 hours a week, and he won’t be happy – IME – with Eve at all. This isn’t necessarily a problem… Eve is not DESIGNED to have mass appeal. It’s designed to have strong appeal to a certain market segment.
It’s less of a risk, but limits overall possible income. And Eve is doing very well for itself – it’s been in profit for quite some time now. And Eve’s far too big to be called niche (ATITD or Star Sonnata is niche).
#28 by Tholal on February 22nd, 2007
Great discussion!
Most definitely! A strong economy, coupled with semi-limited resources and equipment that can be damaged or detroyed (ships in Eve, armor and weapons in UO) not only provides a reason for conflict, but also creates a hindrance as well.
To create meaningful, fun PvP, there has to be reasons to fight, AND reasons not to fight.
#29 by Calenth on February 22nd, 2007
Two things:
1) It isn’t just “an economy,” and it isn’t just “item based.”
It’s *property*, and the ability to create, destroy, and most importantly, *fight over* property that makes for an immersive pvp world. If that’s what you’re looking for.
2) I think you’re basically talking about two different types of pvp, though. The sort of combat you see in eve is dramatically different from the sort of combat you see in WoW. WoW pvp is basically counterstrike with a fantasy skin on it. Nothing wrong with that. But there’s really little necessary reason for it to be in a MMO.
The real draw of MMO pvp is the opportunity to take part in fighting over the “ownership” and control of a persistent, virtual world. You have that in shadowbane and eve, and you don’t really have that in the other games you’re talking about. It’s a niche market, admittedly, but I don’t think it’s valid to compare it with wow-style instanced capture the flag games or whatever. It’s a fundamentally different type of game, and one only possible in a MMO format.
So I’m not sure it’s valid to draw inferences about WoW pvp from Eve, or vice-versa. The people interested in wow style pvp don’t want consequences, they want action. The people interested in Eve-style pvp are more interested in consequence, risk, and persistent control. Different gamestyles, different markets, different lessons.
#30 by Calenth on February 22nd, 2007
[quote]People who lose outright at PvP MMOs quit, and that’s something as an alliance you have to sort of hope for because that’s the only way you can exterminate these fuckers once and for all.
[/quote]
It’s not just people who lose outright at persistent-world pvp who quit; people who win outright tend to quit as well, because the game gets too goddam boring. That’s why I left shadowbane, the game just got old when we were curbstomping everyone with no opposition.
Eve’s solution to this — and the place they went right where Shadowbane failed — was to simply make the world so big that it was effectively impossible for any one group to completely control it. Anyone who lost could always travel to another region of the galaxy and rebuild. The “lowsec” areas — areas where pvp is allowed, but the space isnt’ conquerable, and everyone can dock at the NPC stations — help with this, as it gives alliances kicked out of 0.0 an area they can’t get kicked out of but can still make some cash.
That said, yeah, it’s true that people who lose at persistent-world-pvp mmo’s like shadowbane or eve tend to quit. But the upside is that people who are interested in that kind of high-risk PVP will play your game in preference to a low-risk-pvp game like WoW. So if you’re developing a game in a market that has to compete with WoW, catering to a niche market that WoW doesn’t cater to can be a smart business strategy. Which is part of why Eve has continued to grow as much as it has .It’s a niche market game, but in a market dominated by 1000 pound gorillas, offering something different and unique can be a smart move.
#31 by slog on February 22nd, 2007
And what else to SB and Eve have in common?
Both were dropped by their publishers early on because of lack of revenue!!
#32 by Rich on February 22nd, 2007
I’m not sure how many of you have had the opportunity to listen to multiple-input voice communication systems, but that’s part of my job.
An average person, with some training, can do about 2 full-scale conversations at once.
An exceptional person can manage 4 communication channels at once, tracking everything that’s happening on them.
Considering the speed of most people for type vs voice, even 2 channels provides far more data than trying to watch (and type) your conversations.
#33 by Andrew Crystall on February 23rd, 2007
Slog – sure. And Eve’s how many times more popular than Shadowbane ever was? It’s interesting, actually, that Eve has succeeded in making a slow-burn game compared to the typical fast-burn MMO model.
#34 by slog on February 23rd, 2007
Actually, I think SB sold over 150k boxes.
#35 by Benjamin on May 31st, 2007
1. Accessibility. Whatever your PvP model is, I have to be able to get into it and out of it within a reasonable amount of time. This isn’t the hardcore vs. casual argument, this is the “my 5 year old needs me for 20 minutes – but I WILL be back”.
DAOC did this effectively with the zerg (you could leave without severely hamstringing your group – you could also rejoin with a minimum of waiting).
WOW did this with BGs (but broke this for all other end game content).
2. Balance. Your system needs to self balance the play given the numbers that are currently playing. In my mind, this isn’t ideally done as WOW did it (BGs of a limited number of players) but closer to DAOC – the side with the fewest players plays defense, and defense should be easier than offense. Perhaps toss some NPCs into the mix to keep things interesting.
3. Control. I should be in control of my PvP experience. If I want to PvP, it is there. If I don’t, I can get away from it. Once again see DAOC and WOW.
4. Equitability. Cannot be overstated. WOW broke this very badly – PvPing with raid level gear was a cruise control win against those without. If you are trying to get new players to PvP, a good introduction is not to tell them they have no shot until they have amassed items X, Y, & Z.
Other than that, I agree with the points in the main article. PvP SHOULD feel like you are playing against very intelligent NPCs.