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?
{ 85 comments… read them below or add one }
I wonder what people think of Pirates of the Burning Sea’s proposed model, whcih seems to combine EVE with Camelot.
A long running theory of mine, which was supported by DaoC and proven by WoW:
Give all sides in a PvP MMO the same classes with different graphics and if you really feel the need, different named skills. Dread Knight and Paladin. Exact same stats and skills, different names and graphics. Paladins have holy strike that looks like an explosion of light, Dread nights have generic_dark_attack_spell that looks like a purplish/black cloud with skulls. Use of either links to the exact same information on the server, just different graphics. They’re the same stuff with different names. Then when players bitch about Dread Knights having better attack spells you completely ignore them because they’re literally the exact same thing.
And keep the “team” sizes even. Thermopylae is fun to read about and even occasionally fun to play the Spartan side, but logging in to 10 to 1 odds every night is ass. Eventually I just went and killed tomtes till I unsubbed.
I’m sorry, but classes and skills in DaoC were impossible to balance well against the other realms with no two classes in the game having the equivalent portfolio of abilities. Stir in the widely varying realm populations and well, anyway…
WoW gives both sides the same classes, and via BGs keeps the sides even. It’s perfect. Now, the classes aren’t balanced against each other terribly well, but on a larger scale of conflict it’s irrelevant. All sides have access to the exact same things, at least as of BC. If you read the boards, the “nerf shamans/paladins” threads are all but gone. Not having to deal with evaluating that sort of shit endlessly has go to save them resources and make the sides easy to balance.
Erm, also…
Gank Squads/premades kill your PvP game quickly for all non-superhardcore players. Whatever developers have to do to minimize their advantage over a PUG MUST be done. MUST. Even if it’s severly limiting a premades ability to fight PUGs, or disallowing it altogether.
DAoC has a pvp ruleset server too where there are no sides. Pretty hardcore stuff.
I keep hoping they will merge it with the pure pve server. That would make for some quality forum threads.
“Gank Squads/premades kill your PvP game quickly for all non-superhardcore players. Whatever developers have to do to minimize their advantage over a PUG MUST be done. MUST. Even if it’s severly limiting a premades ability to fight PUGs, or disallowing it altogether.” -Angry Bob
I don’t agree. Premades are bitchy to fight against as a PUG, sure, but think about why. Beyond item loadouts, it’s because the players in the premade have an advantage from social activities and familiarity, an advantage nobody is denied in terms of game mechanics.
When the cries against premades stand as “They’re well-organized and socially superior!”, it’s time to give up that argument, and work to make your own premade if your primary motivation in BGs is victory.
Other than that, solid observations, Lum.
>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.
I disagree with this. PlanetSide is still running and still making money and it’s effectively CounterStrike Online. What it doesn’t have is enough of everything else that a decent “world” requires to attact players who want more than just PvP.
As it stands, i believe its subs are now approximately on a par with those of AC’s DarkTide at its peak which indicates that there is a market for fulltime PvP and that it is growing but it is not enough by itself to escape form the dreaded niche.
Anarchy Online and the combination of Notum Wars (stat bonuses for guilds and members) and the pvp title system (obfuscated ELO rating) presents a few interesting lessons as well.
The “hardcore organisations” to pick a name for them got into playing a game similar to a very powerful mafia, and the prey was huge alliances of more casual organisations. If the balance where you fight hardcores with volumes of casuals the game is won by the hardcore until they decide to take a break. The social structures which maintain the casual alliances ar not strong enough to survive the stress from having one of their allied organisations singled out for repeated attacks, eventually that ally will be excluded from the alliance since people refuse to waste their time defending someone who “never” has to return the favour.
The ELO rating system also made a large portion of the hardcore pvpers very scared of pvp, so they generally didnt participate in the big organized battles. The servers also tended to go down for hours during the biggest fights, which gave the victory to the most persistent as opposed to the best.
I personally believe that Eve shows what can happen with a mature endgame owned by the players.
I grinned
What lessons would YOU add to make a PvP game more of a struggle of nations and less of a gangbang?
Nations have civilians, Eve does well in encouraging non-pvp activities in the alliances but in the end everyone is expected to fight. The alliances who didn’t expect everyone to fight have slowly died off as they are uncompetitive.
This may be due to the way alts work in eve, but in general people can buy as many accounts as they like so a civilian class can’t exist as long as pvp and civilian activity combined take less real time than the players have.
To get a civilian class for the nation to protect will require the civilian jobs and pvp jobs take enough real time and player skill that one player can’t do both. This breaks your “Lesson learned form Counterstrike”
Still, at this point we’ve only got to a warrior nation with economic pets (BoB). Moving from there to making the warriors work for the civilians seems difficult.
Maybe we need an economic system even more complicated than Eve’s.
As probably part of a small minority here I play SOE’s Planetside. This is a PvP only environment where 3 empires fight a 24/7 battle for real estate.
It’s not a new game, even though I have only been playing for about 9 months. The graphics aren’t “amazing”, but I still find it addictive. Sure as a n00b you get you’re arse handed to you for a while as you start out
Now this is my first online game. Yeah I know I’m not 10 so I must have been living under a rock
There’s three main reasons why this game has me hooked:
[1] PvP – I was always pretty good at FPS. Quake, UT etc, but people are sneakier and waay better fighters.
I’ve lost track how many times I’ve done something I thought was cunning, only to get fragged by either the guy I thought I was going to toast, or by his team mate comvering his back. Man, people are cunning!
[2] The loose empire organisation. Ok so you can run around solo, or you can tag into a Squad. get 2-3 squads working togther and you have a platoon, complete with numbers, waypoints and battle plans on the map. Cool. But the killer feature here (IMO) is that when your “command rank” rises high enough (CR5) you can global chat to any player on you empire regardless of location.
What this means (loosely) is that Empires start to work together as a very large team. Now not everyone wants to go fight the “primary” battle outlined by someone else, but I’ve had some of the best fights when theres been a three way fight between 1,050 PvP’s over a couple of bases on a single continent!
[3] No expense. There’s no economy, and no cost. I grab a tank out, and trash it 5 minutes later. So what? All that means is that I can’t get another for 4 minutes. No tears, no massive frustration over 8 hours of mining in Eve and then getting mugged
Apologies for the length. IMO you can do FPS MMO and it can work, and it can work as PvP only.
There’s room to improve here, and SOE don’t seem to do more than maintain the game these days.
Just my worth
Cheers
Adam
Well, Eve PvP is both largely item based and very, VERY player-skill determined. The whole package matters, after all. And largely, people have the same stuff. (Oh, they CAN step up and have 10% better gear. But that’s litterally 50x the cost. And wont save them if you focus on them…)
Making a few, distinct sides with a very limited number of classes from a generic sounds frankly yawnsome. I always know what a given enemy will allways be able to do – this is a MAJOR factor in WoW, and gets rapidly very formularic.
“Moving from there to making the warriors work for the civilians seems difficult.”
Why would you want to? Throughout history having civilians work for the soldiers has been VASTLY more common than having the soldiers work for the civilians (fuedalism etc.).
But your point about making it possible for a civilian class to emerge is important. I think the BoB’s pet-corps are what we’ll see more of in the future. What needs to be done is to put in mechanisms to allow players to automatically pay a certain amount of money to a guild (set by a guild) to flag blue for that guild for a certain amount of time (basically automated taxation).
PvP guild members would then be able to spend their time wandering around killing poachers and protecting taxpayers instead of fighting for the right to grind…
I still have some fond memories of our 8 man wiping a midgard zerg of 34 off the map 4 times in one night. The sheer carnage was enjoyable.
That said my best memories are pre expansions where we’d lay siege to a poorly designed, bad los location castle for 3 hours with a hundred others.
UO doesn’t really have any memories like that. Just roving kills. WoW definitely has no memories like that. Whee another WSG flag cap. Yawn.
“What needs to be done is to put in mechanisms to allow players to automatically pay a certain amount of money to a guild (set by a guild) to flag blue for that guild for a certain amount of time (basically automated taxation).”
Ooohhh I like that. I also think that highlights one of the major reasons the warfare apears like gang warfare instead of nations. The game mechanics, the coding of the game, supports a gang mentality easily, but not a national one.
There needs to be an extensive rule set involved in the formation of guilds that allow a nation mentality. Taxation is a good point, the ability to call on police protectors, maybe to pay them to be protectors from a guild fund. Basicaly you need a way to manage a guild besides trust. Gangs are gangs because the reason people listen to you is through the force of your will and power. The reason a nation is a nation is because your people listen to you because the rules behind your power make sense to them, and allow them to remove you if they don’t want to listen to you.
The coded rules and tools could be the same for every guild, but better yet would be a set of tools that allow a guild to code in their own rules. Something robust enough so you can create a socialist society where it is all metered out, or a purely capitalist one where you’re taxed for every action you want guild help in.
Ok, I’m rather un-eloquent about this (I am at work, should be working not typing
) but basicaly. If you want a nation, you need laws. Code them in, or be happy with gang warfare.
Don’t sell DAOC’s pvp short. I think it’s still the best pvp game on the market.
DAOC’s players were begging for 8v8 arenas for years — just like what WoW has. It would have given the gangs something to do besides abuse the casuals in the zergs. It’s too bad that never happened. I think for a good pvp experience, you need to provide a mix of:
1. Persistent world combat. Advantage: motivation to fight for something (real estate, relics, etc). Disadvantage: Uneven numbers.
2. Instanced pvp.
Advantage: Even numbers/fair fights
Disadvantage: Boring/same experience every fight. Vulnerable to elite “premades” that roll the other sides repeatedly. Scott mentioned some of this in his section on WoW loadout balancing.
3. Provide VIABLE routes of advancement through pvp only. Poeple HATE having to do pve encounters to be competitve in PvP. We saw this in Daoc (ToA) and in WoW (40 man raid content > pvp gear). This one is game breaking and we still haven’t seen anyone do this correctly.
I’d like to see a DAoC with some ideas taken from later games. To get that EVE angle, all the little grunts wishing they were level 50 would farm resources for the war effort, which the big boys use to build and defend castles. When WoW had the whole AQ ‘war effort’ event going on, that was some of the most fun levelling up I ever had. All tradeskill stuff I looted could be turned in for bonus goodies, which eased my levelling, and had a measurable (if small) impact on the entire game.
One thing that was always an illusion breaker for me in DAoC was how castles would magically rebuild as soon as the boss was killed. Due to the way defense worked (read: it never did) most players felt it was easier to just let an enemy take the keep, and when they left, take it back. Keeps weren’t seen as defensible strongpoints.. they were regarded as places to get trapped and farmed for realm points.
More formidable, player-invested structures that could be configured in natural chokepoints (much as I liked New Frontiers, it really destroyed the effect of the mile gates, which I also liked) seems like a fine idea for dealing with this. Placing defenses to protect resource areas would be nice too..
The big boys lay out the framework of the keep, the newbies farm and turn in resources to build it, while the enemy tries to tear it down with siege engines. You get that EVE effect of “stake your claim and hold it”, the anti-grief environment of DAoC, and the viability of a civilian population, which no game has made a feature yet (other than WoW’s AQ war effort).
To expand on your point of context, I think forced role-playing needs to happen. A gang is just a gang, unless it came together because they were once slaves to a race of space lizards. The space lizards may think of them as just a gang until they lose key sectors of space, then they become terrorists to them. Of course, the force thinks themselves as freedom fighters avenging their century-long slavery. Both labels would open them up to other “gangs” who roleplay as mercenaries for hire, or another nation that that has sympathy for slaves, or another nation that makes its money capturing and selling slaves, and so on.
All of that needs to be hard-coded in not just the atmosphere, but in how players conduct their activity. Combat would give bonuses or penalties where appropriate, morale as it relates to the character needs to be defined in any situation and affect his performance, roleplay and gaming items should reflect the nation or group’s style of roleplay, and so on.
Drawbacks would be that you can’t force a player to speak their roleplay part all the time and the fact such a roleplaying system would be a monster to code. However, a well made roleplaying enviornment would desguise a lot of a player’s non-roleplay activity as roleplaying, and that’s just as good as willing participants.
I also like the other ideas in this thread, especially the thought of a working class that needs protection from soldiers.
One last note: I had absolutely no interest in eve until the scandal broke. The metagame drama it provided is probably the most fascinating bit of context for an MMO ever. I now keep an eye on its politics for the sake of finding out if the angry players are able to deliver in-game mob justice against the developers. I wouldn’t want metagame drama to affect in-game activities, but it’s a great example of context being put to use.
Another thing maybe worth noting is the culture of the players. While Eve TQ is still more or less an open conflict of a few large alliances the Chinese instance (“Serenity”) apparently is being dominated by one uber guild. I couldn’t find any evidence to back this up, just more player quotes. All that means (if true) is that an open PvP model depends on players not cooperating as much. And/or, players not willing to submit to a larger organization in order to make gains. Otherwise, there’s an immediate disadvantage for new players who have to churn or submit to the overlords of the cluster.
You looked at history of mmorpg PvP through distorted prism of hear-say and reached wrong conclusions. I think its prevalent problem with PvP designing, its never designed by someone who actually, you know, serious PvPers, instead it what other people think it should be and it often fall short.
PvPers want gang warfare and turf wars! Small scale guild warfare over points of control is ideal state of PvP in any game. For example in Shadowbane its moved past gang warfare, and into large Nations composed of multiple guilds that formed Alliances and it become less-than-ideal. Its became too much of organization with too much logistics and overhead where fighting became, well less important than say politics, wealth and status acquisition and guild drama.
As to my list of lessons:
1) Even out playing field – standard gear/level/skills/whatever should be accessible to everyone in reasonable time. Call this ‘golden standard’, make sure its good enough to compete with whatever ‘best’ you put into the game and make sure nobody can be kept from reaching it.
Limit effective maximum size of any given group of players – make sure that bigger is better but up to a very hard limit and make sure that this limit dictates that there will be a number of different groups on any given server.
2) Aim for skill based PvP – you should give players enough options and enough template diversity to avoid cook-cutters and predictable fights. PvP should be about paying attention to what is going on and reacting accordingly as oppose to mashing the same 3 buttons in specific order every time. There should be no ‘best way to fight’, just good counters to your opponent’s attacks.
3) Slow it down – ideal fight should last at least 15-20 seconds and should consist of at least 5-6 individual actions. You should give enough time to act and react that less-than-ideal connection of 150-200 ping can compete.
4) Limit effects of focus fire – you will have group warfare in your game and people will get focus fired. If you don’t take steps to prevent it from being instadeath your group warfare will be lousy regardless of how great your 1v1. Good methods to limit focus fire are – short invulnerabilities, damage feedback powers, maximum damage rate or damage saturation, friendly fire and splash damage, collision and line of sight.
5) Add objectives to fight over – if it is going to be turf wars make sure turf has something desirable. Create few very desirable and tons of less desirable objects to control and make holding more than few highly problematic, this way more groups get a chance at ‘controlling’ something, not just best few.
6) Add effective power reach where distance matters and adds logistical complications. You should be able to ‘pick up and leave’ and move away from ‘lost cause’ situation. Don’t ever implement instant travel or effective teleportation or summon abilities. It should be very difficult to mover anything but small group over large distances.
7) Limit how much you can lose if you keep losing. String of bad losses should never put you into situation where you can’t realistically win again.
9) Don’t instance – unpredictability of who will show up to any fight is what makes politics important. It puts checks in place on guilds that now have to consider use of their influence and power or face bad odds.
10) Make sure individual effort always matter and that it is possible to solo at all times. You should not be always forced to group to enjoy PvP, so design solo objectives and/or ways to solo. Good way to do it is via stealth classes.
I think you misunderestimate how much of an impact Nations had in Shadowbane. Nations were all too frequently TOO successful, and most servers would end up becoming 2-3 nation warzones, with a whole bunch of little guilds trying to get into the nation fight or get out of the way.
Lesson from Shadowbane: The losers of any fight will only take being a loser for so long before they leave (either go to another server, or leave the game entirely). It’s imperative to give them a way back into the fight.
I think Lum misunderstands and underestimates a lot of things about PvP in mmorpg and it is understandable, you can see only that much by looking at it and not participating. Its like me trying to design effective database mmorpg, I have seen it done, I know basic principles of what going on but I would fail since I lack practical experience doing it.
Yeah, despite playing UO for 4 years (and Siege Perilous for 2 of those) and DAOC RVR for 4 years, clearly I’ve “never participated in PvP”.
Your insights into what makes PvP fun are interesting, sinij. Your ad hominem flames aren’t. Future examples will be moderated off, as the rest of this discussion is too interesting and relevant to be sidetracked into wang-waggling.
Damion’s point about nations in Shadowbane is well taken. Power aggregates very easily. One of the posts I remember was by one of the Bobs, saying that he didn’t want to play because he couldn’t have a little house in the hills where he and some friends could login and PvP now and again. Participation needs to be available at a variety of scales and with great granularity. And I need to be able to logoff without feeling I’m letting my side down.
I’m not sure what the lessons of PlanetSide are, but I’m sure there are some. It’s nice, low barrier-to-entry PvP that can be very engrossing or very dull. The lack of context and any dimension beyond the constant battles hurts it, and leaves it in a state of constant rumble, never beyond. But good rumble, much of the time.
PlanetSide also includes something I think any PvP game needs, a reset mechanism (actually several, on several levels). The greatest danger in a PvP game, and I think EVE is headed for this, is victory. Unless there is a way to level the board, within the context of the game, the game is liable to hit a stable point and stagnate.
Skill and organization should matter, but there should be times when that doesn’t matter. There need to be battles where the Zerg wins, because without the Zerg, battles will soon cease to be epic, and then you may as well play CS.
On the gang war front, I think the answer is better and more flexible social systems, something that MMOs in general fall short on. Beyond that, there needs to be some viable path to neutrality. If the only choices are alliance and opposition, then ultimately the game tends to fall to a single alliance. Everybody joins the winners.
There needs to be a cost for winning, as well as a reason to fight. If there is no cost, then there is no reason not to conquer more turf, until you own everything and the other side has nothing. Ultimately, winning is the greatest danger any PvP game faces.
Basically,
Don’t add tools for he management of really large groups of players. Add in some game inefficientcy factors in mass management, even.
You have to be careful with it, but 20 factions fighting is a LOT more interesting than 5.
sinij,
You have to be careful with #4. Certainly, short invulnrabilities. Certainly, powers that hit (within reasonable limits) everyone attacking you.
But damage “saturation” penalties lead to near-invulnrable players given healing (unless you cap THAT too, then you hit major PvE issues or have to support 2 entire rulesets), and penalise concerted group effort.
LoS/splash/etc. is game-dependent. Remember that LoS checks are VERY expensive.
To your #7, a hard limit means that again you’re putting an artifical tax on organisation, when soft caps on organisation and combat (like, say, my old global ECM idea for Eve – too many people in an area and guns start to miss lots..)
As for #10, completely disagree. Stealthers, with the quick-kill capacity they need (or are crap without, see Eve’s stealth “bombers”..) encourage gank gameplay, and devalue individual skill (since a couple of stealthers on you means you’re plain dead).
“I wonder what people think of Pirates of the Burning Sea’s proposed model, whcih seems to combine EVE with Camelot.”
We did, in fact, take our lessons from DAoC and Eve for PvP design. The lesson from DAoC is that it’s fun to have automatic allies. Nothing says ‘part of a larger whole’ than running across a fight between your guys and their guys, and jumping in on the side of your guys. Even when you have no idea who ‘your guys’ are; you know they’re allies, and that’s all that matters.
The lesson from Eve is that if you give people a sense of ownership over the game world, they’ll self-organize their PvP activities. If the world is just an endless, meaningless gankfest, no-one will care enough to protect noobs, defend territory, or go to war. I sometimes imagine what Darktide would have looked like with actual game mechanics for allegiance control of territory.
The negative lessons we took from both games:
1) Give people something to fight for that they care about. DAoC keeps, circa Darkness Falls, were traded around like commons at a M:TG tournament. Nobody cared except to get dungeon access. There was no sense of ownership, and it didn’t really matter to you, the PvE player, that your side had lost all its relics and three of its frontier keeps. Unless people can make a long-term change to the world state, they won’t care about the strategic game.
2) A barrier between the casual and the hardcore creates a two-game world. Eve is a totally different game in 0.0 (full PvP) space than in 1.0 (very restricted PvP) space. Long-time Eve players will tell you, if you say ‘This is a boring mining simulator!’, that you’re not playing the ‘real’ Eve. But that’s the Eve that exists throughout a good chunk of their game world. That map Scott posted is telling: see that big uncontrolled area in the middle? That’s going to be your first experience of Eve, and unless you somehow stumble across a major player organization, that’s going to be your only experience of Eve. Unless you integrate the 1.0 and 0.0 parts of your world, to borrow Eve’s terminology, you’ll never show the vast teeming hordes of casual PvE players just how exciting well-implemented PvP can be.
(Obviously, there are other major elements of our design that speak to some of our own prejudices and preferences.)
I’ve PvP’d in three games. UO flat-out sucked. DAoC got alot right, namely giving PvP a purpose, which was realm pride (at least on my server). The problem was class imbalances between the realms. There’s just no way to balance that. WoW got the balance right, and there’s more choice in PvP, but there’s no real purpose. PvP is just another grind, and equipment makes a huge difference. Players that are able to go farther in PvE will have better equipment and roll over players with inferior equipment in PvP. It remains to be seen if the expansion has fixed that last problem, but I doubt it.
Everyone wants to be a wolf, and no one wants to be the sheep. Figure out how to balance that, and you’ll have the perfect system.
Daztur:
“Why would you want to? Throughout history having civilians work for the soldiers has been VASTLY more common than having the soldiers work for the civilians (fuedalism etc.).”
That doesn’t really fit my idea of a nation, but sure that’s fine too if you want that result. There’s only so much time people will play the role of the mud covered peasant before quitting, but the warlords will have to work out how to deal with that. Something like feudal Japan perhaps.
tide:
“While Eve TQ is still more or less an open conflict of a few large alliances the Chinese instance (”Serenity”) apparently is being dominated by one uber guild.”
I heard two guilds, but either way this just changes the game slightly. It becomes a game of advancing yourself in the factions of beauracracy in your chosen alliance rather than militarily competing with other alliances. It’s very interesting the Chinese server would turn out this way compared with the western TQ, but we should be careful of reading more into it than the data can support.
Andrew Crystall,
I agree with your comment to #4, these invulnerabilities need to be very short, disallow any action or movement while invulnerable and on a long recast timer or it will have detrimental effect on rest of your combat. Depending on rest of your game it should last 1-2 typical actions or 4-8 seconds. Typical use I see is panic button. You get focus fired, you turn invulnerability on and you buy your group extra 4-8 seconds of a) you are not doing anything useful b) everyone who is targeting you not doing anything useful making focus fire less useful.
Example of how to not design invulnerabilities is WoW paladin class. Entire class revolves around invulnerability that makes it the best support class in PvP and makes it very problematic to balance. It is very problematic to balance class that can have ‘another go’ in any encounter, and it is frustrating to play under normal circumstances where you have only few glory seconds and rest of recast timer of being underpowered. Invulnerability should not be ‘second chance’ or ‘get out of jail free’ power, just a power that stalls combat for few seconds.
Damage saturation:
I think there should be hard cap on % of your total hit points you get to take in short time (1-2 seconds). Reaching cap can lead to damage reduction, not necessary invulnerability and it can apply to healing and damage likewise. With damage saturation I want to limit death before you get to react problem in larger fights where you have so much firepower stacked against your character that there could be no meaningful reaction from you or your healers. Hopefully with damage saturation – if you want someone instantly dead you still can have it but you will lose % of your useful damage where you enemy will out-damage you over time by spreading damage and not reaching saturation cap.
With #10 I had more Scouting and Stealing in mind. Shadowbane had whole sub-game of stealth fights where lone thieves try to hit-and-run a group occupied by something else, farming for example, and scouts will try to stop it. I do not, under any circumstances, advocate hit-and-run insta-frag abilities.
The problem with shadowbane pvp was that you had no penalty for having a huge nation. If you had had a cost associated with having more people in a guild, you wouldn’t have had the 2000 people guild taking over the whole server.
In the real world, having more people leads to logistic issues. In shadowbane, having more people just allowed you a bigger town and a faster summon-chain.
In the end, it made sense for most players to join the bigger guild and stay on the winner side.
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.
Wow, you just gave me a hot flash. It had been years since I thought about Pac Healers casting an Instant-AOE-Stun on a 200 Man zerg while his two PBAOE caster friends moved in for the kill.
Incidentally, that brings up the subject of the PvP freedom allowed by technological developments. In WoW, for example, a large group of players who were all /following a leader would be vulnerable to an AOE attack (not quite as much so as in DAOC, due to class ability reasons that aren’t worth getting into, but still vulnerable), yet you almost never see a large group of players defeated by such a tactic because they never travel that closely together. They don’t need to bunch up because the lag, the location-finding, the controls, the GUI, and the server code I won’t pretend to understand are nowhere near as clunky or prohibitive as they were in DAOC. You couldn’t travel in a loose formation in DAOC because you invariably ended up losing the rest of your force and sailing all over the map.
In response to the original question,
Lesson: The only difference between a gang and a nation is scale. Decisions to act based on diplomacy and long-term strategy will only occur when the cost of warfare outweighs the utility to be gained from grudgefuckery.
From this, we can conclude that we need to incentivize guilds to acquire more members and forge alliances. Increasing size must also yield logistical and economic issues, otherwise it’s better to construct larger and larger nations until you have eliminated PvP by having only one meaningful faction.
My opinion is much beyond this point, we get into vagaries of specific implementations, all of which have their virtues and vices and decisions between them should be based on their value to the game as a whole.
Oh, and briefly: context does matter, but it’s better to let the players make most of it. Lore tends to be boring, poorly written, and disconnected from player ownership. Context is better provided by economics, in my opinion.
-The Wondersaurus Fantabulorus
The key that gets missed in most games I’ve PvP’d in is that many designers seem to not understand the long-term potential results of cause-and-effect or don’t understand the players and how they think. You can have a very high level of control over how your players play the game if you look at the secondary and tertiary (and so on) effects of each design decision.
One of the basic rules here is that players will figure out the most efficient way to play the game, and that most of them will use that way and teach it to others. There will always be some exceptions, but the majority of them will be as coldly efficient as possible to achieve the game goals (be it gaining exp, items, money, or power in some other form). If your game has multiple paths to power (i.e. items vs exp) they will find the most efficient path to take (be it items-then-exp – aka twinking – or exp-then-items – aka powerleveling) and most of them will take that particular path. It’s all very predictable, and the results will be the perfect picture of a bell curve distribution in every game with more than a few hundred players.
You want big ponderous Nations for your PvP, where there is taxation, policing, and some people play non-combatants? Then make sure your design results in the most efficient path to power being one where people group in very large groups and need to employ or otherwise incentivize (and protect) the participation of non-combat support classes, and once it’s figured out that’s the best way to go then that will be the way most of them go. You want a more splintered set of smaller Nations, be sure to design in diminishing returns based on Nation size, so that the most efficient path to power is to have smaller Nations, and that is what they will do. It’s all about the most efficient path to power, every time, every game.
You want small-scale skirmish PvP in a gang-warfare model, then … well, this is sort of the default when you don’t design well so you can throw any old thing together and this will result. Not much thinking here, so go with that if you aren’t a good designer.
There is much to be said about KIS principle. You can over-design any game (look at MOO3) and it still won’t be fun. Aspiring to build a game that supports raise and fall of nations, meaningful economy and in-depth player interaction is noble but does it necessary result in more fun game or does all fun gets drowned in guild drama and job-like maintenance activities required to do your part in running empire.
There is good reason why no mmorpg to date implemented mandatory need to eat and take a dump, some level of details adds nothing to overall fun.
I’d like to see a more dynamic game world myself, where players are incentivized to form Nations and when they do the game world reacts to reasign NPCs, the size of NPC towns, and even newbie starting areas in response to the situation on that server. Well-policed areas start to spawn NPC gaurds for that nation over time as reinforcements in those areas, and the system tracks the most well-protected region of each Nation and new characters get to pick their starting newbie area based on that information (along with descriptions that are a combination of player-made and generated information to let the player know just how secure that area is compared to others). To avoid imbalance maybe have less secure starting areas give better rewards, thus encouraging rebalance. As players start to build up and inhabit a town it actually grows and NPC vendors start to spawn that weren’t there before, and even new buildings are built. As an area drops in protection the NPCs start to migrate elsewhere (despawn) and the buildings that are abandoned start to crumble into ruins. Maybe even design it so that a large city that is decimated by another Nation and is then abandoned by both sides decays into a dungeon overrun by monsters or undead or something.
This may seem off-topic, but it’s not entirely. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d like to see a game where the PvP drives the PvE instead of the other way around. Where you don’t neccessarily have to PvP to be a part of the game, but where changes in the PvP environment so effect the world that even the PvE’ers need to pay some attention to shift their playstyle to meet the changes being wrought upon the land. EVE has had some success along these lines, where the PvP environment has huge effects on the market and economy in the game, but it’s only minor so far as the NPCs and the game world itself has only minor shifts in response to player’s effects. I want to see more.
In response to isildur:
The comment was made where “unless you stumble across a major corporation, all you’ll see is the center mass.” Two points to mention with the eve system as it stands:
1) There is indeed a middle-ground with regards to the safe region of space vs the lawless one. Purists would argue that it might have many levels of gradiation coded in (in terms of danger, who is permitted where, and what rewards exist — the system may deserve a post all its own), but with regards to danger from other players, there is really just one kind of middle ground. It still does offer something besides the stark black and white. In some ways it is a very different system altogether.
2) The lawless area is indeed open to all – solo, small corp, or megacorp. Many are actually fairly successful at even soloing in 0.0, although it is admittably risky. The risk is balanced out with the rewards offered and the skill/knowledge required. Both of which are often considerable but of course are tied in to the overall economic system.
Joining one of those megacorps is often trivial anyhow if you can type properly, use a voicechat, and prove you’re capable of rational thought and initiative.
The real irony in Eve is that the core corperation of the most powerful alliance on TQ (Evoloution) is communist, and the big powers on the Chinese server are capitalist.
sinij,
I think game setup should prevent dying before you can react, more than anything. If it’s only a targeting time or similar mechanic. The healing cap is going to put a hard cap on how nasty you can make many PvE encounters, as well.
As for stealthers, my problems stem from gritted teeth at WoW’s “stunlock”. Making scouting tactically important gives stealth-types an important role. Making stealth-types also the best way to deal with (although not necessarily detect) the enemy stealthers is interesting as well.
Wondersaurus – there does seem to be a reluctance to get dedicated game writers early on in a MMO. Sort of job I’d like, really.
I love how people pigeon hole PvP problems and successes into the hands of one person. The development teams are just as vast in play styles as the community. Are we ever going to get past the step that an MMORPG isn’t developed, built, or programmed by a single person? No MMORPG will be launched with a singular focus by a large developer. There is an indie (or niche) market for a reason.
What makes MMORPGs great are the combination of play styles. Shadowbane and the comments about Shadowbane here pretty much show that the wolves don’t like it when there aren’t any sheep around. They like it even less when bigger, badder, and better wolves come knocking on their doors.
The changes we have seen in PvP over the years have dominantly trailed away from the “Play to crush!” mentality. The PvP that is working and selling games has a new moto: “Fun and purpose.” Lum did a great job of providing examples of it.
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.
Instancing only works for games suffering from overpopulation problems (a horrible thing, I know, cough).
gravdiggr: “The problem with shadowbane pvp was that you had no penalty for having a huge nation.”
Speaking as a former minor officer in such a ShadowBane nation, I’d say the guild drama involved was a big penalty, and part of the reason I left the game the first time. Which leads me to part two.
Andrew: “Don’t add tools for he management of really large groups of players. Add in some game inefficientcy factors in mass management, even.”
First off, players will simply bitch about how shitty your tools are, then invent their own, then bitch about what a bunch of wimpy designers you are for not inventing their tools to begin with.
More, the stress of running guilds in a PvP game is one thing that drives the guild organizers to quit, which is a costly loss to a social retention strategy. I would argue that all social groups in any MMO need the very best communication and logging tools they can find. No guild leader should every log on and say ‘Where is the 2mil gold I put on the TOL this morning?’. All guild members should be able to see who is adding and subtracting from the common pot, although security may dictate a variety of pots be available to an organization. If I have a stake in an asset, there needs to be a secure and reliable method for me to monitor the handling of my stake. Enron was not good PvP.
If you design a broken system, then even if your execution is perfect, you are probably going to end up with a broken system. The cost of winning needs to be a logical part of the functioning world, not an intentional dysfunction of the game systems.
PS What slog said.
As a further postscript, let me speak in praise of the SB Scout Battle, particularly as it unfolded before a major engagement, when stealthers tried to penetrate the opposing scout screen to give their side military intelligence. I think that this was largely a function of the inverse correlation of stealth and offensive power. Certainly, as a pure scout, I felt that Guildsay was my only meaningful offensive weapon.
“I don’t agree. Premades are bitchy to fight against as a PUG, sure, but think about why. Beyond item loadouts, it’s because the players in the premade have an advantage from social activities and familiarity, an advantage nobody is denied in terms of game mechanics.
When the cries against premades stand as “They’re well-organized and socially superior!”, it’s time to give up that argument, and work to make your own premade if your primary motivation in BGs is victory.”
While that is all technically true, it’s also completely irrelevant. It’s no different than telling casuals/non-raiders/off-hour players to make enough friends to raid or quit. It was the now proven to be completely wrong answer to MMO endgame design, and changing it’s wording around to fit PvP is wrong as well.
The simple fact remains that in a system that allows gank squads to fight pugs dies, and does it to the background music of angry players on forums. People don’t like to be victims, and every PvP system for MMO’s to this day has proven that. It’s not even open for debate. If a game’s PvP system allows the choice of either running in a hyper-competitive gank squad or being constantly trampled, the game’s system sucks and WILL die the death it deserves. Or at the very best manage to be a niche game long enough to break even or make a small profit.
scrappinak:
What you said applies to experienced player who knows how the whole game world is working.
When I started, it took me nearly a year to make jump from empire carebearing to hardcore 0.0 PvP.
After taking some break and starting anew, armed only with my knowledge I was soloing 0.0 spawns in hostile territory in 3 days from creating my toon.
isildur:
Since you started with mentioning how you’re talking lessons from older games, mind if I ask you a question that was running in my head for quite a while:
How are you going to cope with realm inbalance?
Netions:
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.
Evangolis, and I don’t think the game designers should explain mechanics either
When I say inefficientcies, I mean in-game ones incidentally. Spiraling costs to hold massive guilds together (so smaller groups, but…)
I should find out more about the SB scout wars tho, sounds interesting.
Actually, Eve does something VERY important for group identity. It tells you who is in the chat, and uses pictures. It’s one reason there’s no PUG concept in Eve, even in high security space.
Scott’s original post here is very good, the best I’ve seen on the topic recently. While we cannot say the topic of PvP is overlooked, it is not rarely understood on a conceptual level, nor does it seem people try to all that often. While I don’t agree with all of the conclusions about the lessons learned, I do agree with most of the premises.
I think you nailed UO and EQ well enough, but here’s my take on the other lessons to be learned:
Lesson learned from AC – A good FFA PvP server will keep a lot of the heat off your other, non FFA servers. Darktide did a very good job consolidating the hardcore PvPers on one server and away from the general population.
Lessons learned from Camelot – Many lessons here. Agree on the trash talk part here; limiting ingame communication is good, but making it an opt-out system might be better. As for the Counterstrike part, might as well have included that here. I’m not sure if making things skill based is bad, I really doubt it, because otherwise only numbers matter. But it IS a wise idea to limit player’s ability to deal a large amount of damage to a large number of attackers to something that can only be deployed on a strategic level, not by any of a few dozen Enchanters running around the frontier at any given time. EVE has this, its called a Titan, a ship entirely designed to destroy zergs.
Lessons Learned from EVE – ‘Nation States’ are not functionally different from gangs. Really, really big gangs. Also, if your ‘Nation State’ combat system allows and even encourages mass warfare, make sure your client and especially server software can support mass warfare. Also, most importantly, if you want PvP to be truly meaningful, people must fight over resources, resources that have actual value, not just taking Fort Shitmeer for the 997th time. DAoC, when it was at its height, had this too, Darkness Falls was essentially a resource point, an item and experience ‘mine’ if you will. Unfortunately, their being only one such dungeon, its ownership was far too binary, you either had control of it or you didn’t.
Lessons Learned from Shadowbane: If your client’s graphics and stability make it so you’d have to be an idiot or a madman to even bother trying to play your game, then that’s all you will have for players. Also, you’ve got to have at least a little carebear in your game. Even EVE has Empire controlled space, which while not safe, is a decent place to go and recoup if your ‘Nation State’ gets burned to the ground.
Lessons Learned from EQ2: Nothing really important, but the ‘exile’ system they had on their PvP server seemed like a good place to start for a future DAoC-alike RvR game. Allow the ultra hard-core to opt out of the static factions if they so choose. Give it a huge cost/risk (but not crippling or detrimental to the point where it’d never be used) and little direct benefit other than cool points. Then just make some fake accounts on the boards and call anyone that’s not an exile a ‘huge faggot.’
Lessons Learned from WoW: The masses have spoken, and the masses want PvP. They want PvP servers to play on even if they have no intention of actually PvPing once they play there. The sheer fact that more than half of the WoW servers are PvP, and those servers are generally more populated than the PvE servers, means that lots of people who at least like the ‘idea’ of semi-open PvP. Also, the other major lesson is that if you are going to have sides, you MUST have a system in place to balance those sides, and it MUST be in place from launch, otherwise you will NEVER be able to implement any meaningful non-instanced PvP.
My lesson contribution: Providing a sandbox for players to mess each other up in PvP ala Ultima Online (GM tinkered boxes etc) is freaking awesome fun! … For the people on top, and a gigantic pain in the butt for everyone else. Someday I’ll make a PvP game called Darwin Online and it will based entirely on a survival of the fittest model.
JoeTF:
One nation can’t just overrun a server and take everything over. Or rather, they can, and the game has a victory mechanic whereby one side is declared the ‘winner’, given rewards, and then the server’s PvP state is reset. (We figure that, given the frequency with which this actually happened in the Caribbean, we can justify these resets in-world as well.)
The victory mechanic also favors the losers of previous rounds, making it easier to win if you’ve just gotten your butts kicked.
Also, our decisive port battles are population-capped; you can only bring 25 people on your side. If your side is outnumbered 2 to 1, you can still beat the zerg if you can field 25 competent players.
The number of decisive battles possible over a given period of time is also capped; each side can only have 3 offensive fronts open at a time.
That said, we don’t think we’ve solved the problem, and we have many layers of backup planning both designed and speculated on.
Don’t forget lessons from old school UO. In my experience with that game, and the mothers that followed, those lessons would be:
1) It’s better to be able to speak with your enemy than not. The Alliance/Horde gibberish barrier on WoW, for example, completely shuts off the types of rivalries and alliances that made UO interesting.
I know there’s down sides to trash talking, but I still find the ability to speak with everyone far more interesting than arbitrary racial barriers.
Some of my best UO friends started off as my worst enemies.
2) Open skill systems are better than class systems. I’ve never enjoyed being forced into a “group role” in games since UO. I miss the freedom of hybridization, and the ability to tweak or completely remake your character.
3) (go go along with #2 above) Some type of skill use-based advancement system is better than the XP grind. A three week old character should be able to tag along with friends that are three years old – even if it means they might suffer for it. UO didn’t have WoW’s panic-like feel to keep up with the rest of your guild just so you weren’t left behind. Hell, I had more fun playing as a one hour old Bob in UO, than I have ever had in any of the newer games.
Finally, maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety, but UO’s overhead text speech was more intuitive and immersive than the chat boxes of today. Too bad it doesn’t really work in the new mega 3D worlds.
The 1.0 game in EVE sucks ass and should be thrown down a well. The 0.0 game is unmatched and is the reason I got back into MMOs after Ultima Online turned into crap. If I had started EVE as a 1.0 player, I would not be playing. But I joined the Swarm and started as a 0.0 player from almost day one.
Goonswarm, the aforementioned Eve guild, makes a point of recruiting newbies and sending them into the most heinous fights in the game. One notable example: I heard of a fellow last week who was on his first op ever, and the first words he ever spoke on teamspeak as a Goonswarm member were “2 points on a Moros.” Essentially, he’d used his frigate (given out for free by GF, and worth around 350,000 isk) to disable the movement of a dreadnought worth a couple thousand times that. Movement is life in Eve, and newbies tackling you will kill you.
Another critical element for newbies is that Goonswarm has a pretty amazing wiki where we keep the collected knowledge and bullshit of the membership. It’s stuff that beats the official playguide in every way, and I feel sorry for people who don’t have it (the mind boggles at the stupid shit people fit on their ships when they don’t know what they’re doing…)
I’m sure most other alliances have similar facilities, but I joined Goonswarm because that’s who I heard about the game actually being fun through.
Oh, and about the Chinese server: everything you hear is correct. The large group is called “Heaven Morning Empire” and the guy that runs it makes his money off of time card sales. Oddly enough it’s like Ancient China on there; there’s an emperor and he controls access to resources (irrigation in old China, and mining/NPC killing in Eve.) As long as people can mine and shoot NPCs they are happy. The emperor mercilessly cracks down on any militarization and dissent.
There was a big two-guild conflict on Serenity a while ago that resulted in the dominance of Heaven Morning Empire and 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, 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.
perianwyr,
All my Eve examples come from the few months I spent as part of Goonfleet. My experience was that before I joined goonfleet, nobody gave a damn about me, and certainly no-one was recruiting me. If I had been a totally raw noob, I would have had no reason to know that player corporations were out there, and no reason to know that what they were up to was at all different than the endless dull mining that is 1.0 gameplay.
There’s a reason that the goonfleet recruitment threads are always so evangelical. If not for evangelism, no-one would give Eve a second look; there just aren’t sufficient hooks in 1.0 noob gameplay to lure the noobs out into the real game. The Eve fans at SA spend most of their time defending Eve in one thread after another, because people who don’t get pulled into goonfleet tend to play for the free trial and quit with the impression that Eve is the dullest game on earth.
When you remove the ability of the sides to talk…they use offensive emotes. Ahh, progress.
perianwyr, CCP dosn’t explain anything, which is why virtually any 3rd party source is “better”. The best sources are…not public. (And sure, the Goon’s wiki is okay (if poisoned slightly) but it dosn’t discuss some of the heavier math).
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.
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