Broken Toys

The problem with PvP is that it attracts sociopaths. Sociopaths don’t work and lay well with other normal people who attempt to tolerate them. Sociopaths love hurting people and normal people have a hard time understanding this behavior and are very forgiving of it and require several instances of bad behavior to be acted out upon them before they will give up.

When you fill a server with sociopaths well, you get the curve Lum described because, sociopaths really hate dealing other sociopaths and they have zero tolerance for their own behaviors when they are reflected upon themselves. A sociopath will tolerate sociopathic behavior upon themselves until they discover they can’t gain 10X revenge… Once they learn they can’t humiliate others and are in fact the humiliated, they quit.

Right now in Warhammer Online an open PvP ruleset server, Dark Crag is the most popular. Many players from my low population core server rerolled there. It’ll be interesting to see how the population trends in the coming months, especially as two MDPS classes that’d appeal to gankers are released with patch 1.2.

Your argument doesn’t quiet make sense. You are saying all the complaints about FFA PvP are not unique to PvP games. PvP class balance is unique. If you design a PvE game and suddenly add a PvP server, it just doesn’t work. Will “Open servers” work in Warhammer which is a game that was designed for PvP? So far it’s the most popular server, we shall see what happens.

Shadowbane was more buggy than your typical MMO. It was so buggy that sb.exe has become a sort of meme.

I think a big part of whether the game crashes and burns will be how well a new player can compete with some-one that has more time invested. In a situation where a new player is utterly outclassed by a vet, not just in terms of skill but also in terms of statistical effectiveness, you absolutely have to have a “safe area” where new players can learn the basics and get up to par for the arena they wish to compete in. EVE certainly doesn’t have vast tracts of safe space by accident.

Put differently, if it is possible for a few idgits to ruin the experience of new players, they absolutely will. No question. So far I’m not seeing any systems in place in DF (based on previews) that will really prevent this.

Of course, if a naked newbie using their one unlootable weapon has a decent chance versus a well geared vet..then it’s not an issue. Once the game launches I’ll be waiting to see how that aspect plays out more than anything. None of the previews I’ve read seemed to reflect a mature (in the sense of fully developed) community.

I agree with you, Scott. Aside from seeing Mordred/Andred rise and fall while you were there, I also blame this phenomenon a bit for Age of Conan’s failure. Namely, the only RP servers for North America were RP-PvP. We begged and pleaded with Funcom for just one RP-PvE server, but were rebuffed by Gaute and his skewed view of what RP really was, I guess. My husband and I gamely played along on the Cimmeria server, and it was okay at first, but then the jerks dug in their heels, and roleplayers left in droves. I think the same thing happened in WoW with their RP-PvP servers, but thankfully I never gave those servers a second thought.

I think DrewC is on to something. All of my friends who quit playing Shadowbane told me they quit because their guild got totally destroyed and had no chance of ever catching up to the established guilds. Power in PvP games tends to crystallize (in about 3 months) into a small set of powerful guilds, and the game mechanics often make rebellion impossible.

I think a good solution to the 3-month problem is world resets. Every 3 months or so, they need to reset the world in some way that kills off the established power structures and brings it back to the free for all it was at launch. Lots of web-based PVP mmos, like travian or Utopia, do exactly this and it keeps the community fresh.

After 3 months the PVP players not only realize they’re not hardcore enough to be awesome, they also realize that the game mechanics are such that they have NO THEORETICAL CHANCE of ever actually being awesome, because everyone else is too entrenched. World Resets break this vicious cycle.

Lineage 2 very much displayed this curve in NA/Europe – strong initial interest which dropped off fast, a long stagnant period until the developers made some changes to make it more noob-friendly and clear out some of the botting, and then a gradual rise to a more healthy plateau. I’m not sure what they’re up to now, but the above describes the first three years.

Putting SB and DAoC in the same category is silly – the goals for the games simply aren’t the same. SB was/is about building an alliance that would rule the world (and take down everyone else in the process), where DAoC open PvP was about…epeen maybe?

Darkfall will be like SB, and it will follow the same pattern of massive initial activity followed by guilds being assimilated into the growing blob until one blob is the biggest of all. Then most players will quit because a PvP game without PvP is boring as hell. Then the guilds that got eaten earlier will come back, be able to fight off the remnants of the blob, and something approaching stability will happen. That’s when the endgame will start for darkfall. SB would have been a much greater success if not for sb.exe, which prevented many players from playing. Darkfall, from all reports, has been very stable in beta, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

@JZig
As much as map resets can be a good thing, in the case of a grind-heavy MMO I think the result is just the opposite of what you seek. I don’t doubt that your friends left Shadowbane because of the loss of their city, and in fact it’s one of the major problems of that game: Once a guild starts winning the server, they’re unstoppable.

But with map resets you get something entirely different. The grind appears futile if the aim towards which it goes is to be wiped away, not by actual military defeat (even if it’s a ninja attack at 4 AM) but by a server reset. And I’m not sure the resets change anything, because all that it does is restart a race the same guy will end up winning anyway.

I did play Utopia, and stopped playing when I realized that the kingdoms themselves were two-tiered: First, the “old” kingdoms, made up of dedicated players who had been around the game for years, knew how to play, and certainly didn’t break up at each reset (because the makers gave kingdoms an option to remain together), and the “new” kingdoms, with new players who didn’t know how to play, thought the game was SimCity, or just bothered logging in on weekends for a month or two before going inactive. With the old kingdoms having the same dedicated members round after round, and new kingdoms having turnover rates to rival McDonald’s, guess which kingdoms always rose to the top, round after round?

And since the kingdoms were allowed to remain together, what was your chance, as a new player, of landing in one of the better kingdoms if a spot ever became vacant? (I’ve even heard of cases where such a person was immediately attacked by other members of the kingdom who didn’t want somebody inexperienced around.) That’s how that played. Worse still, the better kingdoms set up alliances between them that they kept going round after round.

Sure, everyone restarted from the same point after a reset, but guess who quickly rose to the top every single time?

I know what you’re going to say, build up your own kingdom, get your members together, start being dedicated to the game and you’ll rise through the ranks. I can tell you, it’s impossible, not when you have maybe 5 or 6 members who know how to play (and would rather leave you because they see how pathetic you are), and the rest who either can’t play, don’t care, or both. At one point I ended up being king, apparently strictly on the ground that I posted a lot in the kingdom forums, because nobody else wanted the job. As such I could see the activity of other members and set diplomacy. In a nutshell: complete waste of time.

A few weeks within the new round, the “old” kingdoms had so outgrown everyone else that they treated the puny kingdoms such as ours as their farms. Develop yourself just so that these guys can take it (a lesson even more apparent in Tribal Wars). Build your troops as much as you’d want, you simply can’t defend against a guy who’s 5 times your size.

Consider also Pirates of the Burning Sea, which works on a similar idea. Once a nation wins X number of points, it wins the map, and the ports are reset to their original owners. Fine in theory. In practice, on almost every server it quickly led to a legacy of one side always winning the map, to the extent that I do remember reading something from a server I didn’t play, where the winning faction decided to take a break just to allow for some competition. On other servers, you had a more despicable variant of the same idea: Because the map win is useless and only gives junk rewards (rewards can’t be meaningful lest they build up and give the victor an advantage in the next rounds), take the other sides’ strategic ports and sit on them, while making absolutely no effort towards winning the map. On one server in particular, this led to one faction holding all the ports in which ships of the line — the most powerful vessels in the game — could be built.

It also didn’t address the question: What am I grinding for if the developers make me lose the end result in a month or two?

So, the idea of resets keeps a game dynamic in that it restarts the race. When people start figuring out that the same guys always win, the result will be almost identical to having a permanent world a la Shadowbane. Nobody can be expected to be content as Sisyphus in the knowledge that the boulder will be rolling back down the hill — especially if you can’t win the consolation prize of knowing you’ve pushed it higher than anyone else before it rolled down.

Lineage II (I’m playing on the EU Teon server) is showing a steady decline in all established markets (NCSoft licensed out the server software for a localised SEA and RU versions, though, and those are still on the rise, more or less). That’s more or less expected of a game its age, and NCSoft Korea is both busy promoting its next big game (Aion) as well as putting ArenaNet’s people in charge of NCSoft US in preparetions for GuildWars 2 sometime in the next two years.

Having played the game for the last few years, the last two of them being in nearly-constant war against people who out-level, out-gear and out-number my own clan significantly, I don’t think it’s the self-proclaimed whiny “hardcore” crowd which is a PvP server’s worst enemy. Neither are griefers, scammers and general assholes. Instead, it’s the cheaters. With preservance, politics and organisation skill, you can beat even the worst odds eventually. The only way to beat a cheater is to cheat yourself, which makes the game meaningless and dull. Unfortunatedly (for L2), that’s something NCSoft still isn’t able to fully grasp. Let’s hope Darkfall fares better here.

Darkfall looks like it might be a good game, though some downright silly decisions (like … one character per server and account? That’ll make planting a spy in an enemy clan that much harder, which works AGAINST a significant part of what the high-level organised PvP typically looks like …) need fixing, of course. In particular, I like the fact there is no level or item creep (… yet).

I’d like a pvp situation where the actual combat is a tool for when other methods of mediation fail. “I want this candy bar, you want the candy bar, can we work something out? No? Okay, let’s fight!”

But most people on “hardcore” pvp servers see it as a means to humiliate. Owning people is the sole motivation, the concept of glaring at each other from a distance never enters the equation. This is where I think the “sociopath” comments come from.

To me, the option to kill someone is far more engaging than actually doing it.. which is why I always sign up to new pvp servers and am later one of the people who disappear, disappointed that the thing has been reduced to a typical “king of the hill” scenario.

“You should play EvE” is the most common response to this type of comments, which I tried for a while, but it has the same basic problem.. enough of the population is there with the sole objective of humiliation that it saps all the fun out of it.

pure pvp servers are best enjoyed in brief doses unless you’re a psychopath

The Siege Perilous server in UO also had this dynamic. UO was a game that attracted “sheep” and tolerated “wolves”. But when there were no sheep, the majority of the wolves didn’t like playing solely with the other wolves.

Hi,

Try not to illogically jump to conclusions. Here is my response:

http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com/2009/02/pvp-qq-problem.html

All the best.

I have to agree with DrewC as well. I know from my own Mordred experience that the reason I stopped is not because I didn’t like it, but because I couldn’t play every day and eventually fell behind the level curve. Once that gap reaches a certain point it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try to close it. Continuing with DAoC as the example – sure the other guys cap out at level 50, but if I’m stuck at level 30 and have to fight those level 50 guys everywhere I go, I’m never going to get enough xp to make level 31.

Hardcore is not just about how you like your PvP rules, it’s also about how much time you spend maximizing your ability to take advantage of those rules.

I honestly wish the best for Darkfall and its players, but unless they’ve made the first RPG to effectively handle the issue of character skill (and equipment) vs player skill (and equipment), I probably won’t be one of them. Maybe a month or two just to check it out, but based on experience with other PvP games I doubt I’d stay. I just don’t have the time required to actually enjoy that anymore.

Viz :
Doesn’t the term griefer refer specifically to a person who in-game does things just to inconvenience other people?

Yes, and passionate griefers are a great asset to any organisation when allowed to work according to their strength – that is, denying the enemy new recruits by destroying their will to fight, killing them early and often, while shielding and defending your own “newbies” from enemy griefers trying to do the same.

No big game thinker here but I’ve always thought the problem with hardcore PVP is that killers need to kill, not BE KILLED. When they have to assume the role as sheep (bottom performers within their own hardcore PVP society) then what? Well killers don’t wanna be sheep, they need other sheep and care-bares aren’t there to offset them being killed so they start leaving their hardcore PVP dream world. True hardcore PVP is definitely niche. Even in EVE Online only a small percentage of the players are out there roughing it up in 0.0.

I am sure I am misquoting someone, but:

Hardcore pvp = 5% wolves, 95% sheep

And nobody wants to admit in the end that they are a sheep.

It’s amusing how the same old discussions always come back around. The faces change, but the arguments are always the same.

End result always winds up that the PKs are still out in the cold awaiting the light of the messiah MMO and really bitter.

Akjosch :

Viz :Doesn’t the term griefer refer specifically to a person who in-game does things just to inconvenience other people?

Yes, and passionate griefers are a great asset to any organisation when allowed to work according to their strength – that is, denying the enemy new recruits by destroying their will to fight, killing them early and often, while shielding and defending your own “newbies” from enemy griefers trying to do the same.

Sociopaths can be organizationally useful. That doesn’t mean they’re not sociopaths.

No harm to you all, but some of the comments in here are pretty embarrassing considering it’s 2009. If Darkfall only gets 3 months, let them have their fun, it’s 3 months more than anyone expected them to get.

I strongly believe that trying to shoehorn PvP into a PvE game is just as bad as trying to shoehorn PvE into a PvP game.

Mist :
Darkfall has no content, horrible animations, horrible ‘Benny Hill’ combat, and the worst UI to grace an MMO ever since… ever. That’s why it will fail, not because its a PvP game. No one has ever really MADE a AAA PvP game since UO, so you can’t point to the failures of so called PvP games as anything other than the fact that non AAA MMos fail.

UO’s FFA PvP model failed in the most important way: to keep players p(l)aying. Even when the option was play UO or play nothing else (sorry, all other MMOs that existed around the same time as UO), players preferred to play nothing else than get ganked, full-looted and have their house key stolen.

Darkfall is very much in this legacy, so it will be interesting to see if hardcore PvPers like being in a world populated entirely by people like themselves. Yes, the execution of the concept is one thing, but at some point the actual issue that hardcore FFA PvP doesn’t have a long shelf life has to be accepted.

I think Scott said it best a long time ago, one of the most important features of a PvP game should be that the game actually has fun things to do/fight over.

And that would be what in DAoC? A keep/relic I snatch back at 5 am in the morning?