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?

Personally, I see the PvP MMORPG collapse problem as being indicative of specific flaws in the products:

Shadowbane was a game that couldn’t support the massively multiplayer PvP that was its whole thing. The moment you got a few hundred players together, the server would overload and crash, and this was an insurmountable problem.

Fury simply was far too obtuse and this killed the fun. The game design was built around a weird mechanic most players couldn’t get into. Many couldn’t even figure out how to get to a fight.

Darkfall was never AAA, and it’s clear from many decisions that the developers are new at this. The idea to have full loot on death is a step backwards: making ganking players more lucrative than fair play is as much suicide today as it was in old school UO.

Because the problems are unique to each game, the idea of having a PvP centric MMORPG is not necessarily a bad thing, and we know this because there are PvP centric games that have managed to turn it into a successful business model:

Guild Wars – You could argue this isn’t exactly an MMORPG (and the developers are fine with that) but Guild Wars brilliantly arranges PvP into matches that emphasize the fair play sorely absent on an open PvP game.

EVE Online – An interesting example in that (as was belabored extensively over the BoB ordeal) it proves that ‘spectacle value’ is a fair substitute for ‘fair gameplay value.’

Warhammer Online/World of Warcraft/Age of Conan – I’m not mentioning these so much because theres’ a certain line in which a game stops being “a PvP game” and starts being “a PvE game with an optional PvP side activity” and these are certainly there.

Guido Jones :

D-0ne :The problem with PvP is that it attracts sociopaths.

Why is it everytime someone talks about griefers or hardcore PvPers someone always says they’re sociopaths? While I’m sure theres a few in there, I’m pretty sure you’d be surprised at how many normal people would be mixed in there too.

You would be surprised by how many “normal” people are sociopaths. They keep their offline greifing to a minimum because there are consequenes. There are no real consequences online and they are free to be how they really are.

Akjosch :
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.

Carter: Do you understand your value to the organization, Resnick?
[pause]
Carter: You’re a sadist. You lack compunction. That comes in handy.

Mordred lasted for a lot longer than 3 months and it wasnt that hard to level. Yes there will always be more people who think they are more hardcore than they actually are and when faced with reality they won’t tough it out. You also have the problem that if the primary focus of the game is pvp, then some people will leave because they will lose more often then they win. Mobs in general don’t mind getting their ass kicked and seldom get discouraged. People on the other hand do tend to get discouraged.
There are more issues that PvP centric games face than PvE centric games but I don’t agree with the blanket statement that they cant work or are doomed to failure. There will be a smaller population base but I think you can keep enough of them around to keep your game going as long as you dont try to force the people who want a FFA PvP server to suddenly have to do a bunch of drawn out structured PvE in order to compete.

However what I think killed Mordred was the ToA expansion. Before ToA you had a game that didnt take that long to get to max level, had gear you could craft that you could pvp in. PvE was not a requirement to PvP effectively. The problem was that when ToA came out now there were all these PvE things you needed to do for gear, and quests you needed to do to get abilities that turned out to be required for PvP. The people who didnt mind dying and liked the chaotic FFA experience of Mordred didnt want to have to go camp rare spawns and do long quests to get new skills that were now required for PvP, like bodyguard.
If Mordred could have been frozen in time pre-ToA and with the old style realm keeps, I think most of the population would have stayed. Once the big mammoth keeps came out in their own instanced zones, keep warfare ended. Maybe the new keeps were good for the big RvR servers, but once they came out on Mordred all keep warfare stopped.

One more thought:

If the real problem is that players don’t know what they like, how can we design a game that allows them to find out their own tolerances a little bit more accurately?

I think EVE has done a great job of this, with a sliding scale of danger and PvP, rather than just a flag to flip on or off.

In order to keep from exhibiting this burnout curve that Scott is talking about, my suggestion would be to make server transfers to a place like Mordred by invitation only.

Establish some criteria that can predict how well-suited a player is for this type of environment, and require a certain profile of player kills, keep takedowns in normal gameplay.

Also, giving normal players a watered-down version of hardcore rules that they could try out for a week before making the switch might also help. When players apply for transer to Mordred, have them play for 20 hours in a special mode where if they die they respawn naked. If they hate that, they’ll bail out early and prevent bloat/death of the special server. Players who do make it through that “trial period” are more likely to be the ones who actually have fun in the special ruleset.

What this really boils down to is that players are constantly trying to do things that they don’t find fun, but since designers are responsible for their fun, we need to find ways to try and keep people on track for gameplay they actually enjoy.

Mike

mikedarga.blogspot.com

There really isn’t interesting content in the frontiers aside from other players. That’s where DAoC failed in the large part, but in the lesser part they had DF which was both good content and good content to fight over. It’s also why the ~1.5 years when DF was both important and could change hands often were the most popular years for that game.

D-0ne :
The problem with PvP is that it attracts sociopaths.

I heard video games turn people into sociopaths…

Just like typical “why don’t you think of the children” mouth breather crowd you make cardinal mistake of confusing correlation and causation.

While I do agree to the Mordred effect for most MMOs going PVP, I don’t think Darkfall will be in this category for 2 key reasons:
- No leveling system
- Full looting

Mordred was designed to fail. The very concept of full PVP in a game relying so much on items and levels is stupid I think.
Shadowbane had way too much design flaws for a PVP game, including leveling, items and no set factions (to prevent total supremacy).

For Darkfall, it has pretty much all the base ingredients that made UO the game it was (missing some “community stuff” though). The fact that all items can be looted is the best thing that can happen in a PVP game as it means very little use for this or that “uber loot” making most combats based on the actual player and character, not the items he/she wears. No leveling system but a soft skill system is also a very good way to allow for a smooth beginner/long timer curve that can avoid the newbie ganking phenomena.

Personally I’ve been out of the MMO stuff for some time since they are all the frikking same nowdays but if they can pull this off with a little professionalism, Darkfall seems interesting enough for me to play it.

@Sinij

No, D-One never even implied any causation…that was you. Which game dou you think will attract the sociopaths, Darkfall or hello Kitty Online?

I agree with Twanni, but I’d venture a bit further and say that the other 90% won’t even show up. How many other MMO options did the original UO players have? Assuming the average player does not like being screwed and is playing the game in a constant state of fear, what are his other options at the time? Not a whole lot.

Today is quite a bit different. That guy who wants to test the waters for hardcore PVP has a lot of choices. He’ll go back to WoW or Warhammer or Guild Wars. Or he’ll just read the description of the game and say “wait, when I get killed in PVP, I lose all my stuff?”. And that’ll be that.

You can’t have a forest with all wolves.

I’m not saying such a game can’t be fun, but it has to move further away from the “build n hoard” method of MMO’s. It might be a hell of a lot of fun if it’s closer to an FPS. Or your gear doesn’t matter that much, can be easily replaced, and has no real value. I’m not sure where the stickiness would come from (skillups?), but it seems workable.

However, the game sounds like a regular DikuMUD with severe PVP impact from what I’ve seen. And that is going to suck. I disagree with Scott, I say it’s obvious as a flop within 30 days.

“Skill based system”, “items arent that important”, “you can choose up to 3 weapons that cant be taken from you”, “since beta it saids that 2-3 lowbies can kill a high level”, Christ try reading what others say first, this is basically the EVE gameplay with fantasy and more active combat.

And that can work if they do their job. It isnt “doomed to fail” and it isnt a DikuMUD. Im not a fanboy but the lack of reading skill that shows some posts is depressing.

And people in the internet arent sociopaths, they just can do wherever they want with no consequences see “internet fuckwad theory” for the scientific explanation .

D-0ne :
We all know normal people who are just seeking a challenge and who would enjoy a “good fight” are attracted to PvP. I also mentioned that normal players are more tolerant of the behaviors exhibited by sociopaths.
Anyway, Wiki does a much better job explaining why sociopaths are a problem where ever they go than I can here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

From that article you linked:

Characteristics of people with antisocial personality disorder may include:
Persistent lying or stealing
Superficial charm
Apparent lack of remorse or empathy; inability to care about hurting others
Inability to keep jobs or stay in school
Impulsivity and/or recklessness
Lack of realistic, long-term goals — an inability or persistent failure to develop and execute long-term plans and goals
Inability to make or keep friends, or maintain relationships such as marriage
Poor behavioral controls — expressions of irritability, annoyance, impatience, threats, aggression, and verbal abuse; inadequate control of anger and temper
Narcissism, elevated self-appraisal or a sense of extreme entitlement
A persistent agitated or depressed feeling (dysphoria)
A history of childhood conduct disorders
Recurring difficulties with the law
Tendency to violate the boundaries and “rights” of others
Substance abuse
Aggressive, often violent behavior; prone to getting involved in fights
Inability to tolerate boredom
Disregard for the safety of self or others
People with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder often experience difficulties with authority figures.
———-

As I read over that list, I was reminded of the thousands of calls I took as a GM for UO (1999-2001). Those criteria pretty accurately describe most of the scammers and griefers I dealt with. They saw nothing wrong with their behavior, and rarely apologized to the victim. One of these people in your game can scare off an alarming number of “good” customers. If your game caters to these people, well…. good luck with it

*koff*.

Icefang,

Scott’s memory is right on. Mordred and Andred absolutely exploded at first with 3+k population on either server in all but the most off-peak hours.

Server popluations dropped dramatically within the first 2 weeks settling to very low population at the 2-3 month mark. This was well in advance of ToA. Yes, ToA was a horrible expansion within the context of DAoC, but it wasnt what killed Andred and wounded Mordred. The hardcore PvP ruleset did that all on its own.

I posit that, at the end of the day, BG-style PVP and world-PVP are only fun for most players if you get something out of them that you get to keep for yourself. That is what MMOs are about: progressing your character in some fashion (items, skills, faction, or whatever).

In any game based on character progression, taking away all of the things you can put at risk (items, XP earned a la EQ1, what have you) means taking away the reason people play MMOs instead of FPSs.

Bodak :

As I read over that list, I was reminded of the thousands of calls I took as a GM for UO (1999-2001). Those criteria pretty accurately describe most of the scammers and griefers I dealt with.

Those criteria are so broad and imprecise (as the rest of psychology) that it won’t be a stretch to apply it to 2 out 3 gamers out there.

Ever lost a job? Ever told a lie? Ever felt at a loss what to do next in your life? Ever had couple too many beers? Ever felt bored? All these things can qualify you as a sociopath.

I think it is something else all together. Open PVP servers/game will be fun off the bat as people are all clustered together often griefers will not be prevalent during this phase of the game because there is almost immediate retaliation by others for that type of behavior but as the server matures that will change. New accounts, trial accounts, people leveling alts (not in darkfalls case as you are only allowed 1 per server) once the mass’s have left the newbe grounds, you will have the leet folks with the maxxed out gear and skills in the newbe zone, quest spots, popular low level skill up spots that will kill off the any chance of growing the server population once the game matures. These types of players cannot compete in fair fights with appropriate level/skill so they will opt to grief others. With games now you usually have a 2-5 month maturity time to get the majority of your game population in the “max” level skill range you have the bored factor that will also further encourages this type of behavior.

Most people do not mind a fair fight or the rush of fighting other players, what they mind is the griefing and abuse exploits in the game that promote this behavior. I am going by past experiences in other games (once server matures) where these people go through extra ordinary measures to ensure griefing. It happened in Ultima, it happened in EQ1 pvp server, EQ2 pvp servers, it happened in DAOC Mordred, it happened in Lineage 2 with constant noob griefing that stopped almost all new players from playing the game beyond the free time, and I sure had a lot of griefing in AOC as I did not play off the bat and was a decent amount behind the curve, with all the leet kiddies sending me I pwnd’ you tells after much higher levels one or 2 shotted me while solo; do not ever under estimate the drive of the leet to grief. Take you pick of other griefing from these games zone camping, portal camping, quest mob camping, graveyard camping, corpse camping, pvp flag baiting with a lower level toon to flag you pvp and then getting ganked by a near by max level….and lets not even talk about the wide spread nonstop fun Shadowbane was.

I no longer have the patience, nor willing to invest the amount of time these games take to play in this kind of sandbox. Past history has shown that it only takes a small percentage of people who find it more enjoyable to ruin others fun (only those that have no chance of beating them) as the highlight of their gaming experience. And this small percentage of folk as pointed out unchecked will have devastating effect on the average gamers and any chance of growing the game population to replace those that will leave.

If people played these games as intended then open pvp would be the most fun, I have never played a game where the open server/game was played that way or in the long term was “fun” and did not end up being on the short end of the stick with player population and most pvp games long term fun is keeping a robust player population and if you cut off new players from coming into your game then it is only a matter of time before the server game bleeds players that will in the end make the games fun for anyone.

I hope they attract the correct player mix if the do not it will be a short lived game.

Having a bubble of users at a game’s launch does not mean the game itself is not well-made (in fact the entire point of the post is that the bubble at launch is a result of misplaced user expectations), or a long-term failure.

Well written, I agree 100.3%

When Asheron’s Call was at it’s peak, servers would have an average of 2000-3000 online. Darktide on the other hand had 200-300.

Unfortunately, WoW players who happen to make up 90% of the gaming population, already feel they are hardcore PvP players. They do not realize that they actually play RvR, with little or no consequences. A 10% durability loss, is nothing, until all your gear even your pet polar bear, is wiped from your corpse and they are killed over and over, until absolutely NOTHING drops.

I miss PvP servers such as Darktide, for a little adventuring into them, but PvP rules remain… Level fast, and avoid all others until you are the highest level possible. Bring a friend, or better yet, a group of friends when you level. And constantly mule your riches.

I will of course check out Darkfall, but fear I will try out the PvE aspects, as I know I am not a hardcore PvP player.

On the other hand, I am sure I will have an impact in the design of the game, just as I have had in many mmo’s with my special skill sets.

rpg-exploiters.com

sinij :

JuJutsu :
@Sinij
No, D-One never even implied any causation…that was you. Which game dou you think will attract the sociopaths, Darkfall or hello Kitty Online?

Both in equal proportions. Show me any data that suggests otherwise.

Sorry. I can’t find a published dissertation on the subject. Would a study showing that anti-social people prefer and thrive in chaotic situations work?

Oh and I should mention that making RvR work requires some kind of Population Balance mechanism – but that is a whole separate subject… although Darkfall does not appear to have this?
Another strike against it.

I could not agree more to this article. To some people, hardcore PvP means they kill everyone else without much danger. So they really need some “sheep” to feed on, which unfortunately will not agree on playing such a game. And if Killers have to kill Killers, the lamentations begin. Getting killed almost as often as killing someone else yourself and our cool kid turns into a whiny kid…^^

WW2O is interesting in that “winning the game” also ends it. This is where it deviates from one of the more common feature of MMOs: It doesn’t have a persistent world.

“Ownership of part of the world” doesn’t mean “personal ownership”, by the way. For a PvP game, it’s better to only allow organisations to own significant parts of it. Though player housing is nice and all, owning a whole city or any other structure with significant in-game benefits should be better left to a guild, clan, corporation or similar. That way, people have to band together to achieve end-game goals; cliques form, politics between them develop, and (gang) wars start to be the dominating PvP of the game instead of petty griefing.

And yes, a PvP world should be downright huge. So you can walk away from the griefer and have a good chance never to see him again … but you still can’t walk away with your castle to avoid it getting captured by your enemies. Again, promote group vs. group warfare for desirable resources. Give the players something to fight for.