J. :
“After a while of playing these games you gain a bit of experience.”
Maybe you do, but most players will not. Maybe that means you win a lot more than most, but that’s not any fun for most. Fact: UO did end up having classes, they were just things like “tank mage” and “dex monkey” and changed periodically with the patches.

QFT.

AC1 had classes, too:

Item/Life Mage with Sword/Bow/Dagger/Unarmed/Axe/Mace/Spear
Item/Life Mage with War Magic
Item/Life Mage with Creature Magic (IIRC, the infamous “Og spec”)
Gimp (any character missing Item Magic, Life Magic, or both)

I’m willing to bet even Darkfall will end up with “classes” somehow: combinations of skills that provide some sort of synergy and little to no “fluff” skills in order to maximize the efficiency of the skill-up grind.

Isildur had a very good observation:

isildur :
I’ve thought a lot about desiging a PvP game, mostly because I sort of stumbled into the realization that designing a PvP game was, in fact, what I was doing.
I think there are only three truly distinct MMO PvP rules

My three rules are: PvP needs to matter to your game world; PvP needs to involve a significant degree of player skill; PvP needs to be inclusive, not exclusive.

Fundamentally, you don’t PvP because the enemy P is the goal. You want something in the enemy territory — some sort of E (environment) in there that you want. Then the PvP comes because the enemy P are defending their E from you.

Pirates of the Burning Sea has just this set up — you have enemy controlled ports that you want to take over. You are fundamentally attacking the ports, or attacking the enemy players to defend your ports. And the ports aren’t just “pixels on the map” — controlling ports gives your side resources and the advantage in the economic game. The realization that you could let it go “way out of balance”, until one side dominates the map, was a stroke of genius — there was no need to put in-game stuff to balance the sides or stop a run-away. Instead, let the run-away happen, and then let “off-screen politicians” rebalance the world and start the fight again.

Now, granted, I’m horribly simplifying. I’m also way out of date — I followed the forums during beta, but once the game went live, you had to have an account to participate. (Hi there, this is “BehindCurtain”, if I remember my forum name correctly from way over there).

But this is the key fundamental point. If your goal in PvP is just to take out enemy P for no reason, it’s pointless, and it’s “My mob’s bigger than your mob”. You don’t engage in a 50/50 PvP battle if you can help it — you go for battles where you have the advantage.

Take a good look at almost every board war game, from Titan to SPI WW2 games. Heck, look at Steve Jackson’s UltraCorps (online wargame). You always want to fight with such overwhelming forces that you don’t get significantly hurt, and can keep on charging.

That means, fundamentally, that initiating a PvP battle needs to be the choice of the defense, not the attacker; there has to be some sort of home-field advantage; and the attacker ultimately doesn’t want to get into PvP.

If the attacker wants to get into PvP, then you’re back to “I want the bigger force, I want to steamroll you, and go past you to the real prize”. That’s the fail — your goal is the ports, the cities, the NPC leader, etc.

If the attacker can succeed as a really weak noob, then the game lacks believability — it needs a strong attacker to have a chance. That means that to stop the strong attacker, you either need for the defense to have strong people, or you need some sort of home-field advantage. If you don’t have the “home field advantage”, then the slightest gain for one side turns into a run-away; with the “home field advantage”, there’s a way for the map to go back-and-forth for a while before it falls over.

Now, there is one other point of PvP that I didn’t see mentioned. PvE fountains resources from the mobs you kill; PvP either has no resources fountained, or destroys resources, in almost every game I’ve seen. (No, I don’t consider WoW PvP gear to be fountaining.). If you have a game with a lot of PvP, you have to have a way for the PvP to generate resources. Now figure out how to do that without being gameable.

The player-skill comment is a big issue. Should someone with a relatively beginning character and a lot of player skill be able to take out a high-end character with average player skill? Is this an online role-playing game, where you start by playing a weak, beginning toon, and later on are playing a mean, lean, clobbering machine? Or is this an online roll playing game, where skill plus RNG is the only factor, and it doesn’t matter if your toon is supposed to be a massively destructive force of nature if you’re a slow, bumbling player with no “twitch-factor” response in your fingers?

Now consider that you might be playing on much slower equipment, that doesn’t have hardware acceleration for a lot of stuff. You know, like a level 10 druid trying to go into Moonglade only to find yourself killed before your screen even gets off the “Loading …” page.

If player skill really makes the difference, then how much does better computer equipment make player skill meaningless?

If player skill is supposed to be the difference, then consider the other things that make a difference:
0. Some classes are designed to do high DPS. If this dominates the PvP, then no other class need bother to apply.
1. Sometimes a “first-strike” attack gives you so much advantage that you win. Then it’s back to whoever has the best twitch and equipment.
2. Players tend to have abilities that monsters/npc’s don’t have. In some games, it’s a very rapid attack. Think rapid-fire bows, or moonstrike spam. If your game doesn’t keep players versus mob attacks under control, then it probably doesn’t keep player versus player attacks under control either. This leads to PvP attacks being very fast, very short, and your game becomes “Ambush and assassinate”. Again, it’s twitch. There’s no time to think, no time to plan, no time to react — so you, the player, have to be on edge constantly. Heck, if all the mobs in the area have to get close to attack me, and won’t fight or fire from a distance, then a design that lets other players fire from long distance means that I have to constantly be worried about long-distance attacks from nowhere.

That’s not fun. I don’t want to play where I’m constantly worried about being ambushed by someone that I can’t see. I don’t mind a game where I can get into a fair fight where I have a chance to defend myself, but again, the attacker doesn’t want to get me into a fair fight.

So, you either need incentives so that the attackers want to get into a fair fight with other P’s, and you need the fights to NOT be twitch fests, or you want incentives so that the attackers want to avoid the P’s and go after the E’s, and defending P’s want to stop the attacking P’s from taking the E’s.

If you want a good PvP fight game, then being attacked by an E or attacked by a P should not be different. PotBS and Puzzle Pirates both have this — the enemy ship has to engage your ship, and has the same fighting ability (the ship’s firing rate, cannons, etc) whether it’s a player or NPC. Heck, there’s no real “DPS” difference, unless your player skill (YPP) or toon ability (PotBS) lets you reload guns faster.

Or reminded me that I wonder that.

Larry Melon pointed out WW2OL’s fundamental flaw – they (not guilty!) shipped shit in a box. Granted, they were furthered hammered by a major breach of contract by their ISP the first 3 days and had to relocate their equipment to a different coloc and ISP which tied up people and cash resources that could otherwise have been spent on developing the game – but still the day 1 game was buggy and horribly hampered by a simulation-centric focus vs a gameplay focus.

So people tend to not want to use it as any kind of example.

But it has been around for 7 years, defying the traditional MMO subscription curve. It’s rife with lessons in How Not To Develop/Run an MMO, like any of its competitors – but: 7 continuous years and a pending Chinese franchise; many former WWIIOL devs are in significant positions at other MMOs. It all adds up to the fact that the concept and product, and those of us working on the product today, clearly have /something/ of value to say particularly for anyone wanting to understand PvP.

Take all those factors and throw them at another game and tell me it would produce 7 years of stable income? Heck, take just day 1-3 with the ISP providing 10Mb instead of the 10Gb they were billing for at launch, followed by 3 years fighting a $3M legal battle with them and apply that to /most/ 2000-2004 MMO launches and what would happen?

Those of us who joined the team and the things the team learned (much of which the industry as a whole has /also/ learned in those /same/ 7 years) have managed to increase revenues and profitability little by little. The fact we haven’t turned it into a success, or a mini-wow or major growth comes largely comes down to the launch and the resulting stigma it tarred the product with.

I honestly believe that WW2OL could pull off some kind of mini-eve or micro-eve style recovery if the imminent China franchise takes off and brings in even a relatively small surplus: there are a hell of a lot of licensable middleware options that my predecessors simply didn’t have access to that would allow us to reduce costs and better expose the PvP element that has actually been the life-support of the project and team. That’s what has kept me on the team for these last 5 years.

I’m seriously considering asking Scott and Damion to consider doing a “Why the f**k is WWIIOL not dead already?” session with me next year as a platform for getting across the message “hey, PvP really has some staying power”. It’s just not a well enough explored domain and having worked for part of the problem I’d love to try and be part of the solution encouraging MMO devs and suites to rethink the very negative spin we (WWIIOL) helped give PvP…

Oh and Hi Copper (For Da Beerz?)

nothing else even comes close

^^^^^^^
I would call that The Golden Rule of MMO PVP. Without the game adhering to the Golden Rule, it is just a PvE game.

DAOC largely obeyed the Golden Rule – when a relic was threatened, people would leave raids at times to come to the realms defense. And early evenings weren’t as much about prime raiding time as taking a keep or two and opening ports to the other realms home frontier territories.