It’s nice to know that the rabid hardcore still exist, and still hate you.
So how do these games become more accessible to the drooling masses? Easy! Just implement grinding, level treadmills, restrict any and all competition whatsoever. These systems are intentionally in place to prevent anyone from over-achieving or failing. I recently saw a WoW ad that said “Come join 8 million heroes!” Suddenly every single player is automatically a hero? Essentially, most MMOs are designed so anyone can hop on a game, gain levels and pay $15 US per month for their instant hero status.
These designers don’t want to reward players for their achievements. They just want to make every mouth-breather who logs on think that they’re special, for fear that they’ll quit playing at any sign of disappointment. And even worse, they expect us all to be morons.
Ah, for the days when games violently punched you in the throat and dared you to keep paying them money.
The problem with hardcore PvP games is, as has been often said by myself and others, that while many think they are of the hardcore, few actually are. And while the spectre of being killed repeatedly with no recourse, your home sowed with salt and your guild banners used for tablecloths for the meal of human jerky you kindly donated to may sound nice at first, the bloom tends to fade from the rose when you realize that no, you’re probably never going to be the guys carving the jerky.
Which isn’t to say that Darkfall won’t TOTALLY ROCK YOUR FACE, because honestly I haven’t a clue. But the rhetoric from their fans sure looks familar!
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Yes, all we need is harder games. Perhaps the reason why Raph Koster – and the rest of us – are advocating doing whatever you can to widen your addressable market is because games aren’t getting any cheaper to make.
Player skill can certainly be one engagement vector in a successful game, provided those who don’t want to compete in that vector are able to avoid it. Other, more accessible vectors are obviously time and money. More often than not I’ll play a game that offers a combination of money & time vectors as I know I’ll never be able to compete in the skill vector.
I’m not sure why anyone developing a large scale MMO – with all its attendant development costs – would choose to embrace only the skill engagement vector. Developing a game for only the TRUE hardcore isn’t exactly a well-worn path to profitability.
I’ve played games for years, starting with the release of EQ. I’ve moved through DAoC, Lineage II, WoW, LoTR and a smattering of other games. I love MMOs. I also like games that are challenging. But I have also gotten to the point where I can’t spend my life in a video game. I’m an adult with relationships, responsibilities and a demanding job. All of the games I’ve played have eventually chosen to make challenging=timesink.
I want a game I can play for 30 minutes or 6 hours and feel like I am accomplishing something. Unfortunately, I think that means I want too much.
*boggle*
The writer sounds like the kind of guy who’d be found in the studio audience of the latest Ronco infomercial.
Isn’t Darkfall bordering on vaporware? 5 years of development, and a beta that has been “starting next month” for the past couple of years?
I think besides the glowing praise of a game that doesn’t actually exist yet, the important point from the article is actually one you agree with, Mr. Jennings, so I’m not sure why you would be so critical. The point that I’m refering to is that these games have been made more ‘accessible’ by turning them into long, boring grindfests, mostly devoid of any creativity or even our traditional idea of ‘fun’ that we expect from video games.
I suspect, from the tone of the article, the author not so much resented long boring grindfests as the fact that everyone can do them.
The term vaporware was created soley as a cautionary tale for games like Darkfall.
This game, along with Dark and Light, have promised pvpers exactly what we have been looking for. The problem they seem to have run into along the way is that it’s much easier to talk about what would make a game 12 layers of pvp wonder-kind, than to actually, you know, make one that is.
There is a market for a game that captures the feel of UO circa 97-98. The challenge is in creating a game so good and with grass so green, that the lambs would be willing to lead themselves to the slaughter. As noted, much easier to write about, than to implement.
In your article, you’re dead on about how many people fool themselves into thinking that they are the wolves. The best example of that was Mordred/Andred. Honestly, one of the best times I’ve had in any game ever was the first month of Andred. It was pure unadulterated carnage, and I loved it. Even better was the constant tells we would get after going all pirate on an xp spot. I’m talking tells of pure hate.
It boggled my mind that people would choose to play on a FFA server, get killed, then have the temerity to bitch about it. I knew then that the server would die. Quickly.
As much as I would love a wonderfully constructed, polished, open world style pvp game, I’ve relegated myself to the fact that it probably won’t happen.
Hey Scott, regarding all the talk about good lesser known games, can you do a post sometime about some rpgs and mmos that might be very small / independent, that you think deserve a look? I extend that to Brian and others too on their blogs (I even emailed Professor Bartle
) Basically since it’s such a hot topic right now, and these companies already have problems with marketing and getting known, might as well talk about them and help them instead of just saying how tough it is. I’d like to see some of them, but right now have to search though a dozen blogs and comments to try to find names of games. I’ve found a couple so far only.
I know sometime I think last year you posted ‘what i’m playing now’ but maybe more up to date? Or maybe there’s a site I don’t know about that has such reviews.
I will even check them all out I promise!
Unless NCSoft has some rule about you giving publicity
Then just email me 
thanks.
The basic problem is simple: The number of people willing to pay to be punching bags for anonymous assholes is very very small. Those of you praying for the return of pre-Rep UO need to keep this in mind: The sheep are not going to be there. The sheep are going to be playing some other game, that doesn’t allow them to be killed, looted, and cut up into jerky, for the unspeakable crime of going to the brit graveyard to kill some undead.
The other problem, which Scott identified, is that something on the order of 10% of the playerbase is good enough (read: has the skill, gear, and time, to get good at the game) to win 50% or more of their fights. As attrition takes out the people who can’t compete, people who were winning 50% of their fights suddenly find they’re winning 20%. Or less. So they quit. If you’re lucky, you end up with some equilibrium where you stop shedding players faster than they’re coming in. If you aren’t so lucky, you end up with a server empty, but for one guy who’s won the game. Then he logs out, because there’s nothing left to fight. (I read this has happened to a few MUDs. No, I don’t have any concrete examples.)
very few mmogs have good pvp
Ah yes. “Come play our game where only a select few of you will be chosen to be heroes. The rest of you…um…may we have $15 please?”
I too think it would be great to be independently wealthy so that I could create a game where I paid people to not be the hero in my game. I mean, how cool would it be if I could play with thousands of other people, but I was the only hero? Freakin cool, that’s how cool. Oh wait…you say you want a game like that to be profitable? Oh.
This game will be a smashing success (unless it costs more than $50,000 to produce).
If I really want to play a player skill based PvP game there are oodles of them that either don’t require a monthly subscription (like BF2) or are part of a subscription that I already have like Xbox live. The only real new aspect of this concept is that there is character persistence and the character may get better. The gear is even less persistent than in a FPS, in most cases if I die in a FPS at least I can respawn and buy a new gun every round.
“I suspect, from the tone of the article, the author not so much resented long boring grindfests as the fact that everyone can do them.”
Eh, thats just not what I get out of it. What I get out of it is that the constant dumbing down of these games has created games that are insults to their own players. Where ‘casual player’ got conflated with ‘I want to do the same 3 quests over and over for 70 levels’ I don’t know.
mouth-breather
I take offense at that poster’s discrimination against persons with adenoidal and sinus problems.
It is a bit distressing to me there seems almost no middle ground to the entire “hardcore” vs. “casual” gameplay discussions. People, like the article’s author, seem to think that all casual gamers are unskilled, “mouth breather”, buffoons. This seems to be a kneejerk, unqualified reaction to the addition of so many additional new customers and a noticeable shift in the market focus, necessary to sustain the industry.
While I think a lot of “old school” gamers are a little worried that the majority of games made will more resemble Barbie Horse Adventures rather than Halo. But is this fear valid? Probably not; rather it sells short the Industry’s ability to adapt to a new market while maintaing its draw to the more “traditional” gamer.
Of course, no matter where the industry goes, it seems we will always have the gankers who love nothing more than the power rush of ganking “less-skilled” players.
Mist,
Here’s the relevant quotes: “Just implement grinding, level treadmills, restrict any and all competition whatsoever.”
“They just want to make every mouth-breather who logs on think that they’re special, for fear that they’ll quit playing at any sign of disappointment.”
That ain’t ‘treadmills are bad’; that’s ‘if the game doesn’t let me victimize people, it sucks.’
Once again: hardcore peeps, you will be the assrapee, not the assraper. The only people who willingly allow themselves to be victims are people in jail because the alternatives are worse. Nobody wants to pay for your bullshit power trip.
Darkfall’s vaporware.
Yeah, I said it. Eat me.
Well, I take exception to “casual player = mouth-breathing retard” considering that me and my guildies were some of the most feared bitches to ever shut down Freeport for an hour a day every day on old Tallon Zek during our lunch breaks at EAC. You can be a lover of teh peeveepee, have decent gaming skills, and be casual too.
That said, I am sure we drove at least a couple of people off the server, if not right out of Everquest, so I really doubt those days will ever come again. SOE at the least and other companies clearly have learned from the EQ and UO (and Shadowbane) examples.
Nonetheless I hope Darkfall DOES rock my face off, but I’m not holding my breath to see the day it comes out.
“Just implement grinding, level treadmills, restrict any and all competition whatsoever.”
Grinding and level treadmills and gear supremacy just move the competition from the PVP battlegrounds to more a more social venue: guilds. No, I’m not trying to kill you, but I did run a secret campaign to subtly undermine your status amongst the guild, ultimately resulting in me securing that staff (or the last slot on the raid roster) we were both vying for. PVP is some kinda carebear compared to the internecine guild warfare going on daily.
Isn’t this the same hard-code elitist attitude that was so looking forward to Vanguard?
Hard-core I meant, /sigh
Todd Ogrin understands. Do you? Some people want anti-social behavior to equal advancement in a MMRPG and most of us want social behavior to equal advancement. Can you imagine how unfun a game that uses anti-social behaviors as a means of advancement?
Well, I’m off to play some Counter Strike…
D-one has it!
A game can be very competative and player-skill centric, and still be fun … even for those who haven’t got it.
How many people have played the various FPS over the years, enjoyed it immensely, and weren’t in the top 10% wrt skill. I certainly never was that quick with the mouse and strategy, but I enjoyed HL and UT immensely.
There IS a market out there for a different kind of game … one not so based on repetative grind … one that centers around multi-faceted player competition and world building, but done well. No doubt, it wouldn’t be easy. But I’ll bet the 50 million Euro budget of WoW (or whatever it was) could achieve it.
The reason people would enjoy a FPS and not a MMORPG based on the same concepts is that the FPS isn’t a persistant world. After the FPS game is over the world resets. Winning one FPS game doesn’t give you a mechanical advantage (gear) over the next FPS game.
And yet there were ladders … ladders that did not reset. Rudimentary, true … but persistant all the same.
No doubt the design of such a game would be difficult and perhaps would require discarding many of the tenants of traditional MMO.
Well, I was all set to write yet another long post about how this game Darkfall, if it ever achieves more than vaporware status, will share a fate resembling that of Shadowbane. All with references going back to Ultima Online and how in the 1998 – 1999 period, rampant PKing (often called “raping” other players) pissed off/drove off enough paying customers that the PKers screwed-over themselves…but I see that Lum, Soulflame, Isildur and J. have it all covered. I complement you all on your posts, especially Soulflame who said:
“are going to be playing some other game, that doesn’t allow them to be killed, looted, and cut up into jerky, for the unspeakable crime of going to the brit graveyard to kill some undead.”
You got it absolutely right, Soulflame. The problem the PKers either didn’t understand, or more likely just didn’t care about, was that were playing “lets treat other players as my own personal Stop-And-Rob stores”, while the other players were trying to play “lets get together with a few friends and go dungeon crawling”. Those players just wanted to get together with their old buddies online and do some “Dungeons and Dragons style” adventuring, or Ultima style roleplaying, or even just wanted to freakin’ mine some ore and work on their crafts, simply LEFT when another alternative was presented. Which explains why EQ did so well.
If anyone out there in the “InterWebs” is STILL confused, please search this web site for Scott’s post “The Unbearable Darkness of Ultima Online”, or else search Raph Koster’s site for stuff he was saying in 1998, and then look at how that changed years later, especially when PvP was being discussed for Star Wars Galaxies. Heck, even “Designer Dragon” admitted that EQ proved him wrong about the PK switch being commercially unviable.
The weed of rampant PKing in UO bore bitter fruit for the “0Ld $k00L” PKers.
P.S. Yeah, I still exist and I still hate the rabid hardcore back
I’m also proud to have been the person who helped coin the phrase “PvE”, back in the day.
Hehe – I like to think of good ‘ol WWII Online as “keeping it real” for the hardcore PvPers and disproving a lot of their precepts
Averaged over our 6 years, the bulk of our exit polling has been hardcore players leaving because it was “too hard”.
The game’s crappy launch has tarred its reputation so that people assume its small stature is because its buggier than anything else out there and I can’t deny we’ve had our wtf patches. Over 6 years. We’ve gotten rid of some of the ludicrous difficulty (like the four key combo to discharge a rifle, lol)
Chess has ladders too but I don’t think anyone would consider chess a MMO. Part of the design of a FPS is knowing that any unbalancing content, a BFG perhaps, is going to reset every match. This is not the case of MMOs because of the persistant world. To say that because people like FPS’s they would like an MMO based on that ruleset is to misunderstand MMOs, FPSs or people. Or all of the above.
99 called and wanted discussions about ‘lamb’, ‘victim’ and ‘eeeevvvil PeeKaays’ back.
Its time to move on people, all PvPers want is a game where, you know, one could *gasp* PvP without having to endure endless grind and where player actions(aka skill) make more difference than time put in.
*sigh*
This guy should get out and try Iraq. Talk about ultimate risk vs reward with everything on the line baby.
Yes, I went there.
Ok to the guy who suggested reading Lum’s post “The Unbearable Darkness of Ultima Online”. Thank you. that was a very good read, and a thank you to Lum as well. great post even if it is over 2 yrs old.
EvE is about the only hardcore (nearly ffa, corpse looting, etc) pvp MMO I can think of with some success.
And even they’re struggling with the POS stuff to remember what everyone thought was fun about dying repeatedly.
“all PvPers want is a game where, you know, one could *gasp* PvP”
I just spent a couple of hours PvPing in Pirates. You want skill-based PvP? Come on down. I’ll be happy to hand your ass to you a few dozen times in identical ships with identical gear.
But I don’t expect many hardcore PvPers to show up, because my game is not designed to let you gank the unwilling. So you’ll be facing people who want to fight you, who are prepared for you, and who will slap you around like a little girl with nothing more than superior skill.
And the ‘hardcore’ don’t want that. They want a 6v1 gangbang outside of Minoc followed by assrape emotes. It’s just, see, the rest of us have all moved on.
I played Shadowbane from release until the population crashed drastically after about four months. I think it was the biggest, most heartbreaking disappointment of my MMORPG life.
Shadowbane was doomed at launch. Its PvP model was only one of its many lethal flaws.
Some of them were purely technical, such as the login servers that thought they were firewalls, the game servers that crashed at random when you had more than about 50 people in close proximity (yeah, in a game that promised mass battles), or the never to be sufficiently condemned sb.exe errors, which left you suddenly looking at your desktop while someone/something killed and ate you. The 3D engine was a nightmare; getting stuck on the ends of bridges, clipping through parts of buildings (and getting stuck), falling through the mountain in the undead farming zone (thereby getting stuck), and getting teleported to 0,0 when you flew over a wall (then drowning and losing all of your gear) were regular occurrences. They had no admin tools to speak of, so when Trees of Life randomly deranked, or whole guild towns disappeared, the CSR’s admitted they had no way to look up what rank they had been, and guilds lost millions of gold and weeks of ranking time, not to mention the use of their NPCs. Exploits included not just duping, but one guild discovering the CSR “god mode” switch was in the client, giving themselves CSR powers, and doing things like moving entire cities (and everyone in them) to the bottom of the ocean. If everything else in the game had been wonderful, the technical problems alone would have been enough to kill it.
Then there were the rather bizarre assumptions that the developers made, such as the idea that “function follows form.” They thought if they provided the outward trappings of a quasi-medieval society, such a society would develop to make use of them. Walled towns and siege weapons should cause sieges to happen, no? Well, no … not when the players had telepathic communication, cloaking devices, transporters, phasers, resurrection, and more. A healer/channeler, for instance, with flight, stealth, elemental nukes, etc., was more like an A-10 Warthog aircraft than anything that existed in the medieval world. Form follows function, and we got summoning chains, flying nukers, and the infamous zergball. They also forgot the natural human desire to join the winning side, and to group with others to insure personal safety. Wolfpack thought that perhaps a guild would dominate one server after years of trying; instead, it happened on virtually every server in a matter of months.
There was a lot they apparently didn’t know about basic human nature. They assumed, for instance, that people would prefer to fight others of their own level, with an equal chance of dying and losing their stuff, gold, etc. Sadly, many people who call themselves PvPers are … well, not. If given a choice between a fight they might lose and a fight that’s a guaranteed win, they will go for the latter every time. For those people who did not level up during the first month, during the first race to the top, the game was virtually unplayable. Guilds did not recruit newbies who would need protection but be unable to contribute anything useful. The newbies themselves, no matter how they tried to band together, were helpless in the face of people 30 or more levels above them out to farm them for the few coins in their pockets. The area outside of Khar was a gauntlet of newbie-gankers waiting for fresh prey (and sometimes a few bored people like me, ganking the gray-gankers). When balancing their own short-term gain (gank that little guy for a handful of coins and some vendor trash) versus the long-term good of the game as a whole (let that little guy level up so he’ll be fun to play with later), they went for the short-term every time. With no new players coming in, no new characters being leveled up, to replace the people who left, the game began to die. I remember my last day there … I ran around most of the main continent … everywhere I saw the ruins of abandoned cities, the empty farming zones, the vacant wasteland that had once been the home of adventurers and armies. I saw, however, no people. The world that had existed only weeks before was dead.
Then there were the issues of gear decay, repair costs, and time. I worked out once that for every 10 minutes I spent in PvP, I had to spend the better part of an hour farming gold to pay for my repairs. Great idea, right? Invite people to play a PvP game, then force them to PvE until their brains bleed in order to be able to participate in that PvP. It makes the leveling treadmill look like fun. Or how about a big city raid? An hour getting everyone together, an hour getting to the target, 10 minutes of fighting, and fizzle, down goes the server. See above regarding login servers, etc. And let’s not even get into city maintenance. The amount of farming necessary just for basic building payments (never mind ranking them up or repairing them after a fight) was oppressive. Whole guilds quit over that.
And we can’t forget the live team’s utter contempt for their players, and ham-handed stupidity in administering the game. The “events” that led to equipping one, and only one, guild with siege engines, or giving one, and only one, side in a guild war a free invulnerable, fully-equipped demon city (in both cases, very dominant guilds already) are landmarks in the history of bad game management. Their refusal, until just before I quit, to put in any sort of respec system because people who didn’t want to spend weeks of PvE levelling up new characters if they wanted to change their spec (or the game changed around it) weren’t “hardcore” enough (note: “Pay to Grind” != “Play to Crush”) infuriated the pioneers, who had to learn the game by trial and error and were getting wtfpwned by the people who had their errors to learn from. After the infamous CSR power exploit disaster, they first were going to roll back the affected servers 3 days. When people complained, they changed that to rolling back individual characters by 3 days upon request … so a vast number of people handed all their gold/gear to a friend, requested a rollback, and enjoyed the fruits of company-facilitated duping. They insulted players in the forums, they ignored their own beta testers, and their arrogance alone drove players out of the game. They not only tolerated but condoned griefers whose “fun” came from destroying the fun of others; they told the players to police the game, but gave them no way to do so.
Shadowbane still lives. It has grown back up to almost half as many servers as it had at launch. I’m told they’ve added things like content, they’ve made the costs more reasonable, and one has to assume they’ve added some way in which new players can level without being the endlessly frustrated chew-toys of the gray-gankers. Somehow, they’ve kept it going. Maybe they even made it not suck.
To this day, people (especially the moronic bean-counters who hold the power in the industry) see Shadowbane as a failure of PvP. But it wasn’t. The reasons Shadowbane failed had very little to do with PvP. They had everything to do with bad concepts, bad design, bad coding, bad implementation, bad management, bad customer relations, and a general-purpose failure of common sense. Shadowbane didn’t fail because people didn’t like “Play to Crush”; it failed because they didn’t like “Pay to Crash”.
That said, there will never again be anything like what some people remember through their rose-colored glasses as the “golden age” of UO. That was a product of a time that will never exist again. If people wanted to play a major MMORPG, they had to play UO. If they wanted to play UO, they had to be sheep to the predatory PKers’ wolves. There were no other options. That can’t happen again because there are many choices of games, and the people who don’t want to be prey can play any number of them, WoW being foremost among them. Nobody is forced to be unwilling prey anymore, and few will be willing prey. It’s tough, no doubt, for the people whose e-peen size depended so heavily on being able to win fights they had no real chance of losing, but personally I have no sympathy at all.
As for the comparison between FPS games and MMORPGs: A leader board does not persistence make. Whether you are ranked first or last on the leader board has no influence, except perhaps psychological, on your abilities in-game. If I beat you in UT, we still start the next match on exactly equal terms, save for our skill. If I beat you in Shadowbane, now I’ve got your gear and you don’t. All other things being equal, I now hold an advantage. That makes all the difference in the world. Persistent PvP systems tend to fall into positive feedback loops — i.e., the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or, the buff get buffer and the weak get weaker, as the case may be. Every win increases the chance of future wins; every loss decreases them (which is why players strive to avoid fights that aren’t guaranteed wins). The losers fall further and further behind, they see their chances of catching up, of breaking even, becoming vanishingly small, and they go find something more fun to do. I remember on the Shadowbane forums how someone, almost certainly a company shill, had this eloquent post about how the members of a guild whose city (representing thousands of man-hours of grinding) had been destroyed in an alarm-clock raid might gather together and vow to rebuild, complete with inspiring speeches … but the reality is, people say “I’m not jumping back on that treadmill. **** this ****, I’m going to EQ.”
I’m still waiting for the PvP game of my dreams … the dreams Shadowbane crushed so badly. Perhaps, human nature being what it is, such a game is impossible. But I’m still looking.
I love the ‘the reason hardcore PvPers don’t play Puzzle Pirates is because you can’t gank people.’ This, ignoring the fact that Puzzle Pirates is a queer kids game that’s got more in common with Tetris than an anything to do with pirates.
The illusion of being a hero is to modern MMOs, as the illusion of being feared is to old pvp free for all MMOs.
Puzzle Pirates is also played by heterosexuals, but isildur is speaking of Pirates of the Burning Sea.
I see. That wasn’t exactly the connotation I was going for with the queer term anyway, but a few usages of it apply to how Puzzle Pirates might look to an outsider. As for PoBS, no info, so no comment.
Regardless, saying no hardcore PvPers will show up to play PoBS because you can’t gank the unwilling is a bit shortsighted, there are (at least what I would call) hardcore PvPers playing both Guild Wars and the WoW Arena system, and those are about as far from grief and gank as I can think of, and about as fair and balanced as you’re going to get. The current WSVG tournaments for the WoW arena are incredibly competitive, and they’re using stock characters with stock gear, and the ingame PvP ladder is not too far from giving away full suits of stock gear at decent rating levels.
If hardcore PvPers don’t show up to play your game, its because theres some other problem with it.
If anything SB shows how much potential PvP title has. Despite many flaws that Wanderer pointed out SB held viable player base for over 2 years. That player base weathered down what can be considered worst release, technically deficient client and questionable support and were happy PvPing with no ‘sheep’ left in the game and no content patches whatsoever.
Note that I put ‘hardcore’ in ‘scare quotes’ to indicate I was ‘sneering’ at the term. Because the people who want fun competitive PvP are already playing fun competitive PvP, in GW and in WoW and in EVE. The people who want to gank are waiting for the Next Big Failure to come along, to let them grief noobs for a few months before it shrivels up and dies. This is because every sane developer has learned this lesson: griefing and ganking doesn’t just lose you the $15/mo from the person who was griefed. It has a multiplicative effect, creating an environment in your game, and a reputation outside your game, and people tend to steer clear. ‘Play to Crush’ as a selling point and marketing slogan probably lost SB twice the players it ended up bringing them.
Competitive PvPers will show up to PvP in Pirates, because our PvP rocks, because it’s fun and rewards player skill. Griefers will show up and discover there’s not much for them to do, because player skill isn’t what they really want — what they really want is 6v1 gangbangs against weaker opponents. Unsurprisingly, I like the former and detest the latter. And I was never even a victim in UO, so I don’t have that ancient bitterness to explain it. But I did fight an awful lot of evenly-matched PvP battles — with open looting and stat loss — in Kesmai.
I can’t say PoBS pvp is worth it, but hey nice to see at least one of their devs read lum’s blog.
Sure, there is no example of a successfull competitive game on the market. Quake, street fighter, counter strike, starcraft etc arent competitive games with 20% of the player ruling 80% of the others and they arent successfull and arent played by millions of users daily.
I strongly believe there is room for competitive games on the market, there is even plenty of room, it s just a matter of having games well designed. I played all the games mentioned in your articles but also Asheron’s call darktide for years and i know there is a “hardcore pvp” comunity. Sure it is smaller than the casual gamer community but it should not prevent developers to try and fill this niche.
K.
IMO, the problem with “hardcore” games is that most of them are designed to be the gaming equivalent of doing your homework every night. I hardly see why simply enjoying a game should be considered contempt-worthy. Different folks have different definitions of fun, and I think it’s great to have games out there that cater to the range of them. As a working, married adult with a social life and more than one hobby, the idea of considering a game to be good because it requires me to put in huge amounts of time on raiding or PvPing is laughable—but I know that’s the perfect recipe for success for those who want to spend such time on it. It doesn’t mean my way or their way is somehow less worthy; they’re just different.
JJC wrote: Chess has ladders too but I don’t think anyone would consider chess a MMO.
I didn’t claim Chess was a MMO, nor was I implying that a FPS is a MMO. Persistence is a component of what is MMO. FPS ladders are persistent. Is it therefore possible to combine the competition of FPS with persistence. Perhaps with a little creative thinking this example of persistence could be expanded to make something that is a lot more MMO like, yet still retain the hyper competitive nature of FPS.
JJC wrote: Part of the design of a FPS is knowing that any unbalancing content, a BFG perhaps, is going to reset every match. This is not the case of MMOs because of the persistant world.
So you’re saying that the concept of a hyper competitive MMO won’t work because of design errors (the BFG)? It certainly is a good caution (for both PvE or PvP game). Careful design and balance is always wise. But it doesn’t sound like a reason to believe that it’s not possible.
JJC wrote: To say that because people like FPS’s they would like an MMO based on that ruleset is to misunderstand MMOs, FPSs or people. Or all of the above.
There are those who enjoy PvP competition. There are those who enjoy the persistence, story and world-building that is MMO. The intersection of these two isn’t a tiny group. There are precious few games that really cater to this group. I’d love to see a capable company fill this market opportunity with a great game.
I don’t understand what the hardcore want that is missing in current games. WoW has pvp servers. Want to go gank noobs with 6 buddies? Go to the nearest contested zone. Want to pvp without much time investment levelling up? Level to 19 and play WSG matches. Want to advance your gear through pvp? Go earn and spend your honor and arena points. Want to have the glory and fame of being the best team around? Play arena till your team is #1 and then post on your server and battlegroup forum about how awesome your penis is. Want to have your pvp impact everyone? Go take the world pvp objectives and let everyone know they have you to thank for that 5% damage buff. So what’re you missing?
Wanderer wrote: Whether you are ranked first or last on the leader board has no influence, except perhaps psychological, on your abilities in-game. If I beat you in UT, we still start the next match on exactly equal terms, save for our skill.
Well, there is one difference of the boards (at least some of them) you’re neglecting.
If I beat you, you lose the chance to challenge the person or team that was above you, and you’re now open to being challenged by the person or team that was below me.
I’ll admit, the example is rudimentary. But it is persistent, it is there, and it could be expanded on.
“There are those who enjoy PvP competition. There are those who enjoy the persistence, story and world-building that is MMO. The intersection of these two isn’t a tiny group. There are precious few games that really cater to this group. I’d love to see a capable company fill this market opportunity with a great game.”
There are those that enjoy pepperoni pizzas. There are those who enjoy the luxurious comfort of overstuffed couches. the intersection of these two is not a tiny group. Clearly some company needs to make overstuffed couches made of pepperoni pizza.
“Because the people who want fun competitive PvP are already playing fun competitive PvP, in GW and in WoW and in EVE.”
Have you ever played EVE? It is about as gank-centric and ‘play to crush’ as any game ever has been. A friend of mine has as his signature “All PvP in EVE is consentual; you agree to it when you log on.”
And the only reason more hardcore PvPers don’t play THAT game is because the combat is like watching paint dry.
What “hardcore” players dont seem to get and developers dont comment on enough is that if you can actually build up an advantage in a PVP game over time the losers will quit. Even if you find 100,00 hardcore players after a 6 months half will have have to be losers and most of them will quit. And because the winners are now powerful no one wants to replace the losers.
Its not just about what people want like Scott ussually addresses. Its about the world dynamic.
And in games where the advanatage to being a long time player is limited(like Mordred) you have of course have the problem that their is less reason for the winners to stay.
EVE for all its problems with boring travel and questionable choices with expensive death penalties does definetly get 1 thing right. Security zones. You can be a carebear or a hardcore on the same server. Some players only live in the low security. Some only play it safe. Most spend some time in each depending on circumstance or what they want to do on a particular day.
JuJutsu wrote: There are those that enjoy pepperoni pizzas. There are those who enjoy the luxurious comfort of overstuffed couches. the intersection of these two is not a tiny group. Clearly some company needs to make overstuffed couches made of pepperoni pizza.
An excellent example of hyperbole.
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