Darkfall Psychoanalytics

I’m sorry, but there’s nothing “sociopathic” about wanting to compete on a playing field that constantly shifts. And it’s only on the internet that this would be shocking to anyone.

I played soccer for 8 years, growing up. Was I terrible? Sure! I was a forward striker who scored 1 goal in those 8 years. But I loved it! It was good fun. I was generally on the poorer teams, and we didn’t win that much.

So?

It was about the fun of playing the game.

When talking to ‘normal’ people — people who’ve never heard of MMOs as a genre, and sometimes not even World of Warcraft, guys who’d rather play soccer or hit the gym than fire up the PC — when they *do* get intrigued by something I’m playing, it’s the full-world PvP games (Asheron’s Call DT, and back in the day, pre-Trammel UO) that attract them.

It’s the Skinner boxes they can’t understand. The ‘hit a box enough times and you get an imaginary pellet of advancement’ games. The games that aren’t really ‘games’ at all, just elaborate psychological devices; EQ, DAoC, AoC, WoW, etc.

Most ‘normal’ people understand that in games there’s usually a winner and a loser, and your win/loss ratio isn’t going to be at 50/50 unless you put some time in learning the skills.

But when there are repetitive, sometimes mindless activities to do in the real world that actually enrich you in some way — work, the gym, reading, learning, etc. — why on earth would you pay someone *else* for the privilege to accrue ‘fake’ enrichment in a ‘fake’ world like a DIKU?

This isn’t just about “Are Darktide players sociopaths, or are they not”.

There’s a very strong case to be made that full-world, FFA PvPers are the *normal* ones, and there’s something inherently sociopathic about the people who find DIKUs engaging and worthwhile.

Frankly, Scott’s ‘team’ should be playing on total defense in this debate. For all its flaws and annoyances and slap-dashedness, Adventurine has created a game that *normal* people are more likely to find interesting than anything Scott has ever worked on. The fact that these VERY BASIC real-world concepts (i.e. Games are usually about competition, you’re often going to go up against people better than you and lose a lot, the circumstances aren’t always fair, but it’s the game itself that’s fun, not just winning or losing, and you don’t take your ball and go home just because you lose more than you win) makes it so anathema to many MMO players should tell you something about the average MMO player, and it’s not pretty.

“”No. They have not. You can tell by the fact that eleven million is a very big number, and whatever Darkfall’s preorder figures are is a very small number. This is a VERY BASIC real-world concept called third grade math class.”"

PvE games are successful in a financial sense, sure. That doesn’t mean they’re successful in an artistic sense…

…But more importantly, it doesn’t follow from that that WoW players are ‘normal’. There are plenty more than 11 million strange people in America. Furthermore, plenty of people are ‘aberrant’ in ways that are numerically quite common – cheat on/beat their spouses, for instance. We would define these behaviors as pathologies even while admitting they’re relatively common.

If most normal people are driven away from playing MMOs in part due to the dominant mechanics, there’s no particular reason why a ‘mainstream’ MMO would attract more ‘normal’ people than a ‘niche’ MMO would.

Again, ‘normal’ isn’t World of Warcraft. ‘Normal’ is more like basketball, or football, or soccer. And the thought processes and values systems that those ‘normal’ games engender is much closer to what Darkfall entails than what WoW entails.

“”The average MMO player is playing World of Warcraft. Your theories fail.”"

‘Average MMO players’ isn’t a group I think you should be terribly proud to be a part of. I’ve met plenty of typical MMO players, of all stripes, in RL. Color me not terribly impressed.

“”I’m curious, do you find fairness despicable like Red Morgan? When you played soccer as a kid did your team have the same number of players as the opposing team? Did you use your hands as well as your feet to control and move the ball? Did you take the ball out of bounds to get around opposing players?”"

JuJutsu, your understanding of semantics in argument is limited at best.

“Fairness” is ultimately the wrong term to use here, since it’s arbitrarily defined as adherence to the rules of the playing field.

Soccer is ‘fair’ in the sense that both teams get the same number of players and abide by the same rules, but ‘unfair’ in the sense that different teams will have players of vastly different ability levels, natural aptitudes, practice regimens, etc.

Would I enjoy soccer more if I were playing against soccer players of a relatively equal skill level to myself? I highly doubt it. In fact, I think it’d get boring very quickly, if I didn’t also have matches against teams both much better and much worse than mine. It takes the full range to be interesting.

However, if the other team were allowed to use their hands as well as their feet, and I were just allowed to use my feet, and this was something we hadn’t agreed upon in advance? (i.e. hacks in a MMO?) I’d find that ‘unfair’, certainly.

But see, unlike Morgan, I see absolutely NOTHING that is ‘unfair’ about the Darkfall ruleset. I see no reason why battles should always involve people of similar skill levels, similar numbers, similar situations. That doesn’t strike me as ‘fairness’, it strikes me as an attempt to make the game more like a glorified matching service and less like a ‘world’. Darkfall is ‘fair’ in the sense, and to the extent, that those players are abiding by the same rules I’ve agreed to (i.e. not hacking).

Your definition of ‘fairness’ is completely different than his, and what Morgan was trying to communicate — perhaps ineptly, but your reading of his words was highly inaccurate — (or at least what he should have been trying to communicate) is that his concept of ‘fairness’ is ultimately so different than yours, and the play experience and structure he’s looking for is so different than what you’re looking for, that your attempt to use that as a foundational block of a shared understanding is completely in vain.

Now, where I’d take it further is to argue that depending on what sort of play experience you *are* looking for, you have nothing to look down on the average Darkfall player for — since what you want ranges from mundane and uninteresting (Non-FFA ‘sport’ PvP) to borderline sociopathic (DIKU-style gameplay).

“”Baaaaaw.”"

What’s the bawww about? I’ve finally got a MMO I’ve interested in, after classic Darktide gameplay was destroyed with the introduction of major safe zones and a few other major mistakes.

(And Darktide puts the lie to Scott’s comments about pre-trammel UO; there were plenty of non-PvP servers for Asheron’s Call players to play on, from day one, and Darktide was still plenty popular.)

Also, anyone who thinks that the defining feature of most players who want FFA-world-PvP is that they want to ‘pick on newbies’, rather than find ‘challenging fights’, is full of shit.

Anyone who responds to them by saying “Nuh uh, we really do want to find challenging fights!” is equally full of shit.

I’m pretty in tune with these playerbases, and the vast majority of people who end up on servers like this are attracted to unpredictability, and the feeling of a world that must be struggled against, that is never truly ‘safe’. Sometimes that results in fair fights, sometimes unfair ones, but it’s not the parity of the challengers in the fight *per se* that’s appealing. It’s the overall sense of being in a dangerous, dynamic, living world.

It’s not that fighting other players is inherently more awesome than PvE; it’s that PvE games these days tend to be very static, and centered around making the player feel like a hero, like he’s accomplishing something.

I will state this emphatically: I DO NOT WANT TO BE A HERO WHEN I PLAY MMOs.

In a PvE game where monsters could march against the players’ cities and actively overtake them, where you could log in one day and find your empire in ruins because the monsters launched a devious invasion, where you have a sense of adrenaline and uncertainty and worry as you run around, where the monsters don’t just wait for you, they find out where you live and chase you down, where you generally had what AC Darktide famously called a “harsh existence”…

…I think most of the people who like FFA World PvP could find themselves at home in such a game, even if attacking the other players were completely off-limits.

FFA World PvP is more of a natural reaction to the absolute absurdities of modern PvP MMO design (“Wait, you want me to level up… why, exactly?”) than a desire for a specific type of ‘fight’.

Also, oddly enough (This doesn’t add up to 200%, so I think it’s some rounding error on the test), my Bartle Scores are perfectly balanced: 66% Explorer, 66% Socializer, 66% Killer, 0% Achiever.

For whatever that’s worth.

(It absolutely blows my mind that anyone would want to ‘achieve’ anything in an MMO. That’s what the real world is for. That’s the place to be a hero, if you want to be one.)

Err, sorry. In the sentence “FFA World PvP is more of a natural reaction to the absolute absurdities of modern PvP MMO design”, that last ‘PvP’ should be ‘PvE’.

“”Consider the practice of it. Fine, you’re free. So is the next guy, Leetkilladude1988 or any other name you wish. And he’s decided to bring his buddies and gank you. When he’s done, he camps your corpse.”"

Well, we had this scenario in Asheron’s Call Darktide.

And what happened?

What happened is that the size of the world matters a *lot*, and how ‘open’ the world is (i.e. how much of it is potentially ‘useful’ to you at your level range) matters a lot. In AC Darktide, you had a huge world, and it wasn’t strictly level-gated like in Diku games. And so, you could head out into the wilderness and not worry about LeetKillaDude so much.

What else matters? Well, how easily you can run from a fight, for starters. Good PvP mechanics usually start with making it easy for players to escape from fights they don’t want to have, if they decide early on to flee. Bindstone recall gems/spells in AC served this purpose nicely.

Darkfall has the same positive design traits — those people who are bitching right now about it taking an hour to chase someone down who’s actively fleeing early in a fight are missing the point; that’s how the incentives SHOULD be set up, for a world-PvP system.

And… corpse-camping? The number one rule of any PvP server is, “your corpse is gone”, and the ruleset should almost never encourage you to go back for your corpse.

Darkfall and AC-Darktide both stack up well in this regard.

“”He openly cheats and exploits, and when he’s called out on it, he either tells you to go back to WoW or “if people cheat, cheat back”.”"

This is a totally separate issue from any question of game mechanics. It’s an issue for every game on the internet, practically, right on down to Quake and CounterStrike.

“”But let’s say you persevere, get a few friends to play the game with you, and that you form a small guild.
Assuming you get a spot for a city, you start building it. You dedicate some time to put it up, you persevere despite getting killed by exploiters and ganksquads, and you get something decent going. Then the large guilds and their alliances show up and issue an ultimatum: Join us, or we level you to the ground, because you’re not part of us and we can’t risk letting someone else grab you.”"

So you tell them ‘go fuck yourself’, and run guerrilla warfare ops against them to make their life hell. They have the numbers, but you have the agility. You take more from them than they take from you, because they can only be so many places at once, and you prey on their members whenever they slip out of their main sphere of protection. And the bigger their guild is, the more chaff they’ve got, and the more potential gains you have from aggressively going after their weaker members.

This is how it works in good world-PvP systems; large guilds become unwieldy, coordination problems arise as you scale upwards, and small guilds/groups have plenty to gain by engaging in guerrilla warfare.

There should be benefits to making yourself a static target (otherwise, why would anyone even *want* a city?), but aside from whatever advantages the game assigns, the only real advantage to having a large guild on any given day is that more of the server are your guildmates, and thus fewer people want to target you. Thus, large guilds in world PvP scenarios inherently attract people who are poorer-skilled. The dichotomy between the poorer-skilled ‘chaff’ of these guilds and the elite ‘core’, usually the people who founded the guild, is another factor that causes them to oftentimes split apart from within.

I’ve played world-PvP before. There are few ways to get rich quicker than forming a small squad who lives ‘out in the wilderness’ and preys on the larger guilds that form the server’s ‘civilizations’ with asymmetrical tactics.

“”So you join a large alliance for protection.”"

No, you really, REALLY wouldn’t. See above.

“”But they don’t trust you, really. You might be a spy, you might betray them (as that guy in BoB), and even if you are none of those things and don’t plan on stabbing them in the back, you’re still a freeloader in their view because you joined the alliance purely so that you wouldn’t be wiped out. Those guys never respected people who joined out of cowardice, and never will.”"

To some extent, this is true. It inevitably boils over one day into intra-guild warfare. It is a healthy thing that keeps the server’s political life dynamic.

“”The guilds that matter — the large guilds — have been playing since UO, EVE, or Shadowbane. They know each other, they hate each other (without really bothering to flesh out their reasons), but they come with a superiority complex that leaves out small potatoes like your ten-person guild — and they really want nothing to do with minor-leaguers like you. They don’t care what you think. They only tolerate you around because you hold a city, but if they could get rid of you while keeping your land, they would.
And no matter how much you may try, you’ll never be trusted, never be accepted, never be consulted, while being told to just obey or be kicked out and then wiped out. You’re just a small loser guild. If you should join them as a full member, you’ll just be another low-life peon good for grinding materials and nothing else.
Tell that to your friends. See if they like that “total freedom” now.”"

Why on earth a small group of friends who play together would want to join a large alliance, instead of relentlessly preying on that alliance, is beyond me.

And a city? A *city*? WTF?

If you’re a small group, let me repeat, YOUR BIGGEST ADVANTAGE IS SUPERIOR AGILITY, SUPERIOR MOBILITY, SUPERIOR COORDINATION. Getting a city absolutely DESTROYS your inherent advantages in the first two of those categories, and does little to nothing for the third.

You don’t want a city. You want a nondescript hole in the ground that nobody can find easily, but that you and your friends know where it’s at.

Think Star Wars, Episode 4. (Star Trek is better, but think Star Wars anyways.)

The empire knows the rebels have a base, but they don’t know where. They’re trying to find it, you’re raiding them from there and trying to keep your base location a secret.

That’s exactly how it played out in AC1 Darktide, during the years when the game mechanics were right. Every. Single. Time.

IF THIS HYPOTHETICAL BIG GUILD KNOWS WHERE THE HELL YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS HANG OUT, YOU ARE DOING IT COMPLETELY, UTTERLY WRONG.

(Sorry if I’m being a bit blunt. I know you’re arguing in good faith, and I appreciate that, I know that’s a rarity in these sort of debates. But your post gets so much wrong about how World-PvP dynamics actually work that I felt ‘blunt’ was a useful tack to take.)

“”1) That’s completely incorrect, given that some of the earliest modern MMOs were FFA World PvP (pretty sure Meridian 59 was pretty close to full world PvP, as was UO). Current ‘modern’ PvP designs arise from players not liking open world FFA PvP and quitting because of it, leaving devs to think up other alternatives.”"

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant ‘the recent resurgence of interest in world-PvP’, rather than a trend in the ruleset. Most people who are interested in playing world-PvP today weren’t around for M59 or UO, they came into the genre through other means and quickly became disenchanted with the tripe on offer from the DIKU-crowd, but still saw the potential in the general ‘idea’ of MMOs.

As for ‘sport PvP’, I don’t view that as being in direct competition with world PvP — it’s designed for people who enjoy PvE primarily, and would like to play “other games” with their PvE characters from time to time. I don’t think there’s a substantially different ‘sport PvP’ mindset, separate from the ‘PvE preference’ mindset, whereas there are two very different and distinct mindsets for those who prefer ‘World PvP’, versus those who prefer PvE.

From Wikipedia, first sentence: “Semantics is the study of meaning in communication.”

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication.

As far as cheaters being more attracted to FFA PvP: I agree with you wholeheartedly, they are. The games provide more freedom, and more freedom means the benefits of cheating are higher.

This is why aimbots for CounterStrike are more popular than a hypothetical ‘bot’ to help you get a perfect score at Bejeweled!.

This doesn’t make Bejeweled a better game than CounterStrike. And, similarly, if the choice between a world-PvP game and a PvE game were a marginal one, more cheaters might tip me toward the latter.

But it’s not a marginal choice. Not even close.

As for ‘adherence to the rules’, even that is a grey area. Unattended macroing vastly improved Asheron’s Call Darktide, even though it was and is technically ‘against the rules’. It gave a ‘resource’ to fight over, and allowed for an organic sort of territory control in a game that (thankfully) didn’t have any hard-coded. The way XP is passed organically between characters in Asheron’s Call (it’s a complex system, but that phrase summarized the effect), many characters could directly benefit from the macroing of a small few, meaning that you weren’t ‘forced’ into macroing, some guy in Europe who left his home PC on during peak hours was doing it for you, and you benefited from it.

The ‘set-up cost’ of these macros was very low, meaning that you didn’t need a big guild to run them.

Of course, you had to defend your groups’ macros from getting killed, and you wanted to kill your opponents’ macros — so they’d get XP, and you wouldn’t. Something fun to fight over!

And at the end of the day, this all took place within a framework where XP and levels weren’t *nearly* as important as player skill, a total departure from most DIKU-systems, and I, at level 50, would often take out max-level (126) characters in 1vs1 combat (and I wasn’t even that *good*!)

So, it gave you something big enough to care to fight for, but more XP coming in didn’t necessarily mean a gigantic advantage in combat at the end of the day.

So, yes, macros were illegal in Asheron’s Call. Macros are illegal in Asheron’s Call. They also organically worked to improve the game experience for all of us in a multitude of ways, and the benefits were reaped almost as much by those who didn’t macro as by those who did.

I feel quite differently about unattended macros in AC1 than I do about speedhacks, for instance, even though they’re both in that same category entitled “illegal”.

“”For instance if you are found corking your bat in baseball, or putting pitch on your glove – you are banned… for life. Win traders (betting on the game you play?) – they are banned for life. Not just given a slap on the wrist.”"

Uh, yeah. Also known as ‘cheating’. Which is what will happen to anyone who tries speedhacking in Darkfall, we hope.

“”You continue to assert facts not in evidence, but then, we all know what lawyers say about pounding the table. Your arguments fall into sand and blow away the moment WoW and EQ attract a wide demographic including CEOs, students, musicians, retail sales workers, housewives, journalists, stand-up comedians, garbage handlers, Army veterans, and insurance salesmen.”"

Uh, since when are there not members of all those fields with serious problems?

Hell, I’d say that plenty of the fields you’ve named attract a *disproportionate* number of people with serious problems. How is this a plus, exactly?

“I’m a CEO, therefore I don’t have flaws as a person” is an almost comically flawed argument.

What strawman are you responding to? Did I call WoW players basement-dwellers or something? Oh, wait, I didn’t.

“”The ones I’ve met tend to be pretty hot stuff. For some reason, the vast majority of the girls in my circle who play WoW are really cute.”"

So your primary standard of judging the worth of people who happen to be female is their physical appearance? Seriously, what the fuck? Betty Friedan rolls over in her grave.

“”Wait. You just said that basketball, football, and soccer are FFA PvP games? Really?”"

Hi there, strawman! No, I didn’t. I said that the mindset that attunes one to pursuits such as those is *much more similar*, on average, to the mindset that’d lead you to enjoy FFA PvP, and tends to be very different from the mindset that’d appreciate the design philosophy behind World of Warcraft.

When you’re all done having giggly fits, you can address the actual point: Nobody is saying that FFA PvP is akin to ‘standard’ sports.

We’re making the claim that the mindset that allows you to enjoy FFA PvP is, *generally speaking and on average*, much closer to the mindset that allows you to enjoy said sports, and that the mindset that allows you to enjoy WoW is much less connected to either.

This is not about similarity of the rulesets themselves — but more about attitudes toward win and loss, attitudes to differences in aptitude and preparation among individuals, and attitudes toward the joy of doing something for its own sake versus the joy of ‘winning’ or ‘attaining’ something at the end.

A person that appreciates both FFA PvP and ‘normal’ sports would do so not because they’re “essentially the same thing” (they’re not), but would do so because they each fulfill different, yet complementary aspects of that mindset.

“”Turn up at 4am to score goals un-opposed.”"

This reminds me of one thing I actually HATE about Darkfall’s ruleset, and I think AC1 did far better; PvP isn’t nearly as fun when there’s ‘hard-coded’ control of cities.

In AC1, the cities were static, staffed entirely by NPCs who’d serve absolutely anybody who waltzed in. Control of the cities meant that you were a threat to anyone else who wanted to come into the city, and was predicated on your ability to kill them when they tried.

So, it solved the problem of 4AM raids entirely — the political map simply shifted to something completely different during the prime ‘Euro’ timeslots, and if you happened as an American to log in during that time, it was almost like you were entering an alternate universe. Interesting stuff.

It was, in my mind, a lot more adaptive and interesting than Darkfall or Shadowbane’s systems. ‘Organic’ systems tend to beat ‘fixed’ ones when it comes to producing good world PvP.

“”If you said that then you’re wrong by your own definitions. The mindset that attunes one to sports is a consequence-free PvP mindset with an underlying respect for mechanically-enforced rulesets.”"

Uh, no, you’ve completely failed to understand why people enjoy sports. Those aren’t the major factors that make sports appeal to people; sports actually have consequences (both in time taken away from other pursuits and in terms of potential physical damage to your body), but people still play them *despite* those consequences because they’re so enjoyable.

The ‘respect for mechanically enforced rules’ is identical for both sports and FFA-PvP; you want speedhackers to be banned in Darkfall just like you want the guy who corks his bat to be banned from baseball. The dispute isn’t over whether the rules are respected, the dispute is over what the particular rules should be (Just like it is in sports).

Also, FFA-PvP *is* pretty ‘consequence free’, too — any time you want to turn off the computer, the game disappears, and the consequences to you are nil, other than the time lost. The same as when you walk away from a soccer match, for whatever that’s worth.

Getting killed and losing your in-game items isn’t a consequence at all, it’s just the natural ebb and flow of the game you’ve signed up to play. Saying that’s a ‘consequence’ is like saying it’s a ‘consequence’ when the opposing team has taken control of the ball from you in soccer.

“”Your idea of “guerrilla warfare” is fine, but what happens when you need gear that, frankly, isn’t available unless you join a large guild? I’m reminded here of Shadowbane. If I recall, you had four free cities (King’s Cross, and I forget the others), but the gear sold there was just garbage in comparison to what you could buy in the guild towns. What you could equip yourself with being inferior, it already put you at a disadvantage (and even though you might say that FFA PvP games aren’t gear-dependent, we all know that this isn’t exactly true…)”"

Well, yes, good FFA PvP games really aren’t that gear-dependent. I actually have major issues with a lot of Shadowbane’s design choices.

Though, assuming the game’s set up correctly, to get gear you want that only a large guild can produce, you would kill the people who have that gear and loot it from them. (And if owning that gear precludes you killing them to a serious degree, the game isn’t set up too well.)

“”The problem also with that is that playing guerrilla basically confines you to marginal status within the game world, because let’s face it, there is no chance whatsoever that you could ever topple one of those large guilds or alliances “”

Why is your goal to topple them? You’re making more off of them than they are off of you. That’s ‘winning’, in my book. Your definition of what’s ‘marginal’ and what’s ‘central’ in the game world is completely arbitrary; you’re taking the one task that requires a giant guild — managing a large empire — a task that’s often thankless and largely not where the ‘fun’ is, and putting it on a pedestal for no great reason, and then getting sad that with a small group you can’t pull off the one activity you’ve put on a pedestal.

You *can*, however, destroy such guilds indirectly. It happens all the time. Here’s how:

1. There’s a big guild. They’ve got a ton of people, some great, some not so great. They’re internally cohesive as long as times are good and they’re riding high.

2. You aggressively go after their ‘chaff’, the players who are just clinging to them for protection. Those players begin to whine more and more to the players who are skilled that they’re not getting enough defense, and if they’re not being defended, why should they stick with this stupid alliance anyways? Guild XYZ down the street is looking to expand, you know.

3. The elites in the big build begin to actively resent their newer ‘expanded’ membership. Rules get enacted like “If a core member teamkills you, you probably deserved it, so no whining.”

4. Through /tells, forums, and other social interaction, actively welcome the cores of the guild you’re targeting into your social circle. Show them how much fun you’re having. They’ll begin to root for you somewhat, become jealous of how much fun you’re having, oftentimes even feed you target lists of annoying people in their own guild they’d like you to ambush.

5. The grass looks progressively greener on the other side. The annoying new guildies who just joined for the protection of a large empire are getting increasingly whiny and demanding. The elites are becoming bored with running an empire, it’s not the fun and games they thought it’d be. And your playstyle looks *really* appealing by comparison.

6. Eventually, the guild leadership says ‘fuck this, we’re out’ and leaves to form their own small, asymmetrical guild. A built-in guild is a terrible thing to waste, so people from the B- and C-teams step up into leadership positions, but they don’t have the drive or talent of the people who built the organization. The small, asymmetrical guild that the elites have formed tends to relish their newfound freedom, and they’ll go after their former guildies aggressively.

7. The once-mighty guild collapses.

There are other ways, of course (I once did false-flag style ops to get two guilds who had an uneasy truce in a castle I liked to go to war with each other, at which point my guild, smaller than both of theirs, was able to harass them both into abandoning the territory.), but the above template is broadly applicable and tends to work.

If what you really, *really* want to do is build a city… well, play SimCity. I do. It’s fun. But it doesn’t sound like you really want to participate in a *world* scenario and organically find your niche within that world… it sounds more like you just happen to find one of the very specific roles in that world appealing.

When I’m playing Super Metroid (if you haven’t; PLAY SUPER METROID.), I like the Hyper Beam, it’s awesome to have, but I’m not playing just because *one day I’ll get the Hyper Beam*. I’m playing because the experience of the game itself is wonderful, and the fact that I eventually end up getting the Hyper Beam in the course of that experience is incidental. If I were spending the whole game upset that I didn’t have the Hyper Beam, I’d be missing the point, and maybe it’s not really the game for me.

“”The way you’re describing it, everything is subordinate to the PvP and guild warfare in a game like Darkfall, which perhaps pushed the idea to the extreme by leaving out everything else (such as the economy, which I hear is half-complete at best). I’m not about to be convinced to try it out if that’s the case.”"

Well, yes, exactly. I’m actually unhappy that there’s even *half* an economic game in Darkfall; I liked AC1 Darktide’s version better, which had virtually *no* economic metagame to speak of, and EVE’s spreadsheet-style economics are completely uninteresting to me. I don’t think it adds to their core appeal.

If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re not looking in the right place. And to the extent that Darkfall’s developers have marketed the economic part of the game as an actual selling point, rather than an incidental feature, well, fooey on them.

“”Hyu, your arguments baffle me. I played organized sports starting when I was 5 – I’m quite fond of them. However, I loathe FFA PVP, and in fact the only PVP in an MMO I’ve enjoyed was WoW’s battlegrounds – because it felt like a sporting match. So I’m not following you at all.”"

Well, I tossed in the phrase ‘generally speaking’ about 50 million times, so hopefully people wouldn’t think I’ve set out to explain every single person ever.

That said, it’s the principle of comparative advantage; if you want that sort of format — very restrictive rules on conduct, two sides of equal numbers meeting on a specified battlefield under specified conditions — you’d simply go and play real life sports, since they offer a kinetic physicality (as well as the practical benefits of healthy exercise, meeting people in the real world, etc.) that the virtual world can’t.

The only things that virtual worlds offer over real worlds is that it becomes feasible to have a much more open, extensible competition where those boundaries are broken. You can’t run anything like an open-world PvP match in the real world, in a way that’s feasible and fun. (The closest thing would be a college campus game of Assassin, which is awesomely fun.)

The behavior that WoW battleground-style sport PvP produces is done better by the real world (sports), and DIKU-style advancement is done better by the real world (life). FFA PvP is the only thing that the real world can’t do better.

Hence, why someone would play sports in RL but spurn WoW battlegrounds. They scratch the same itch, but one way scratches it far better (obligatory exception for the severely physically handicapped). Nothing in RL scratches the FFA-PvP itch like a game like AC1 Darktide or Darkfall does.

Vetarnias: Check out this list.

http://darkfallonline.com/features/

Sure, there’s a bit on there about freedom, but looking at that, the “harsh existence” factor seems to be stressed pretty hard.

Either way, I think the argument that Adventurine is somehow tricking people into choosing Darkfall over My Little Pony Online, even if there were some grain of truth to it, is tangential to the debates here at best.

“”The behavior that WoW battleground-style sport PvP produces is done better by the real world (sports), and DIKU-style advancement is done better by the real world (life). FFA PvP is the only thing that the real world can’t do better.”"

I think this part of what I wrote perfectly answers the poster above who mentioned Uganda.

In the real world, Northern Uganda is an awful place to live. (Which is why I’ve devoted my real-world life to improving places like Uganda.) But as a virtual world, it’s an incredibly appealing concept, provided it all goes away when you click the little ‘x’ at the top-right.

The fact that an FFA-PvP environment, if translated into the real world, appears so awful, is *precisely* why a computer game has a comparative advantage at simulating it in a fun and interesting manner, rather than producing an experience that’s less fun than the RL alternative (i.e. World-PvP and DIKU-PvE).

Great, with these most recent replies I have the choice of veering the conversation toward Plato, libertarianism, or the Old Testament. Good times!

@Vetarnias
Whether the freedom is ‘complete’ or not, it’s pretty high, in that there are a number of appealing roles available to you even if you didn’t come in with any friends or prior ‘hardcoreness’ to draw upon, roles where you can come out a ‘winner’. The fact that not everybody can build a giant castle doesn’t mean that if you’re not in some giant uberguild, you’re an unwashed peon.

Also: Marketing for a videogame plays upon incomplete logic, film at 11.

Hell, even then: Marketing plays upon incomplete logic, film at 11.

@Delurm
This is exactly my point — engaging in FFA World-PvP isn’t antisocial at all, it’s simply taking a prudent philosophy of ‘everything in its proper place, which shuns both Sport-PvP and Diku-PvE as being done better and more interestingly by analogous systems in the real world. The inherent message of engaging in Sport-PvP and Diku-PvE in the *virtual* world, is that one prefers those essential activities (sport and life) in a lesser, virtual world that ultimately has no meaning, as opposed to in the Real World where it actually means something. If anything, that’s the more sociopathic and disturbing position — a person who logs into WoW battlegrounds when they could be playing real sports, or who grinds faction instead of spending that time building a better real-life for themselves.

When I play FFA PvP, I can explain that I’m doing so because there’s no analogous experience in RL that would be better. Sport-PvPers and Diku-PvEers can’t claim that.

Oh, and to follow up with Vetarnias, I’d say that the way Darkfall is presented to the consumer population hews far closer to the reality of the game than, say, every other major MMO.

“”Again, if you really think that sports are FFA PvP, then start tackling your own quarterback on every play in your next football game. Your teammates will quickly educate you in how very wrong you are.”"

Now we’re getting silly. When it’s a game with friends, I’ve been known to do that, and it’s oftentimes good fun. Sometimes we tackle people watching on the sidelines, too (with appropriate gentleness, of course). Just because you’re playing sports doesn’t mean you have to be boring and always play them properly.

“”And what could be more carebear than friends? There was even a Friend Bear, or something. Maybe it was Friendship Bear. Who cares? It’s fun either way.”"

Cute, but it’s quite the opposite in the gaming world — Game-friendships made on FFA PvP servers tend to be much stronger than their PvE counterparts.

Oh, and just to clarify — I think the closest thing to an FFA PvP MMO in the real world is gang warfare.

Now, assuming gang warfare in RL were consequence-free for all involved, wouldn’t it be fun to give it a shot?

Of course it would!

Grand Theft Auto games are popular for a reason.

But since the real world has all these pesky consequences, we have fun playing Gang Warfare in MMO form instead.

Anything that detracts heavily from that premise — such as DAoC/WoW/WAR’s artificially enforced sides — and moves things away from gang warfare, is unwelcome.

“Really.
Every single play.
And everybody laughs, and nobody tells you to stop screwing around and start playing the game.
That’s even better than the one about the Diku psychopaths.”

Uh, not every single play, but plenty of them? Though it’s not just that, we find new and creative ways to fuck around on a fairly regular basis.

And it’s ‘sociopaths’, not ‘psychopaths’.

Would you care to explain how playing a DIKU-PvE game *isn’t* maladaptive behavior?

“”Ignoring the general shitfest that this has become,(and my hand in making it, lols) anyone else see a resemblance on this comment section and the others that Scott linked? Oh and a 4 star award to Hyu, tell me though, If darkfall is so awesome…why are you here?”"

…Did I say definitively say Darkfall is awesome?

As for why I’m here:

Regardless of whether or not I end up enjoying Darkfall when I get the chance to play (I don’t think they’re taking new accounts at the moment, and either way, my net connection in China at the moment is absolutely AWFUL), I’ll still enjoy debating things on the internet plenty, as well.

Hell, at least I could draw some reasonable (though indirect) logic for how my posting here makes a positive difference; I want Darkfall to be a success, therefore if someone not involved in this argument were to read my posts and be swayed to give it a shot (as opposed to not, if they just read the unrelenting negativity) and enjoy it, that’s good for Darkfall, good for me, and good for that person. This is all pretty notional, but then again… why is ‘anyone’ here? Why are the people above me ranting about a game they don’t even *want* to play?

See previous statement about “debating on the internet is fun”.

gyrus :

Akjosch :
…
That’s what FFA PvP is all about, after all. Within what’s allowed in the game, fight because you have fun fighting.

It’s interesting though presented with a FFA PvP ruleset – how do players behave?
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/64581/page/2
…. what these players will do is wait for you to get jumped by more than one mob, then loot the tombstones (mobs become tombstones instead of corpses) while you’re fighting for your life. This is old school EverQuest ninja-looting brought back tenfold. I can’t count the amount of times this happened to me.
I’ve heard the problem becomes far less prevalent when you get out of the starting areas, but as it stands now, the system really, really irritates me. If you’re too much of a pansy to attack me (especially while I’m in the middle of fighting something else), then you do NOT deserve any of my loot.
The thing about 99% of the so-called “Hardcore” PvP players is that they are frauds.
I think the best thing about Darkfall is (if the Devs can keep it going?) it will expose that fact.

See, as a Jew, I find this hilarious. Because, believe it or not, the same whiny mindset of the TTH guy is what’s fed a lot of anti-Semitism over the years. Why have Jews been disproportionately so successful over the years?

Because we figured out one single, central lesson early on:

Cunning trumps strength.

That’s it.

It’s that simple.

Cunning trumps strength.

If I want to fight someone, in PvP or (hopefully not, but hypothetically) in real life, the cunning comes from when I’m stabbing them in the back, not stabbing them in the front.

The challenge comes in setting it up so I *get* that proverbial stab in the back, breaking through whatever obstacles, defenses, and strategies the guy has going on.

Guys like TTH actually hurt the game for me, because it’s almost like they’re unwilling to play the game — rather than adapt, rather than say “Hey, if doing A naturally results in B, if leaving myself vulnerable to you results in a backstab when I’m weak, I should stop doing that”, they simply keep doing the same thing expecting a different result.

Seriously.

This is like whining that I started playing more aggressively in Chess during the times when you left your King undefended.

The lesson there is well, DON’T LEAVE YOUR KING UNDEFENDED.

The lesson in Darkfall terms is that if hanging around the starter cities leaves you excessively vulnerable after PvE battles, DON’T ENGAGE IN PVE AROUND THE STARTER CITIES. Or prey on those who do. Or get a trusted friend to watch your back. Or get a *stranger*, but establish a bond based on reciprocity (“I kill one, you watch my back while I do, you kill one, I watch your back while you do”), and make friends and connections that way.

These things require actual thought and basic foresight, though. Something too many people addled by the DIKU-PvE mindset can’t handle.

For anyone who thinks the above post is too long-winded, here’s the short version:

If you’re calling someone a ‘pansy’ because they’re attacking you in the way that is most advantageous to *them*, not most advantageous to *you* (within the hard-coded rules of the game, i.e. not speedhacking), YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT ENTIRELY.

JuJutsu :
“Oh, and just to clarify — I think the closest thing to an FFA PvP MMO in the real world is gang warfare.”
QFT
Well, we’re making progress. No more bunk about soccer and basketball.

So you don’t find the idea of gang warfare compelling and exciting, assuming real people aren’t actually getting hurt in the real world?

Never watched a Godfather movie, or The Warriors, or Mad Max, and wondered ‘Hmm, wouldn’t it be cool if…’?

“”I see… you are unhinged.”"

…As is everyone who’s ever enjoyed Fallout or Grand Theft Auto, apparently?

Or, hell, Urban Dead? Or Left 4 Dead?

Your idle fantasies sound pretty damn boring.

Uh, Viz, who do I need to convince, exactly? You? The ruleset of Darkfall is already appealing to anyone who’d be interested in such a game. The media, correctly, still tends to portray World of Warcraft as a maladaptive activity (which I believe the evidence bears out). Something like Darkfall doesn’t even make their radar.

Oh, and way to not respond to any of my points. Could that be because you’ve got nothing substantive to say?

“”Just once, I’d like to see someone banned from an MMO forum years ago grow up to be a decent person”"

Let’s see — I’m 22, I’ve finished my master’s already from the top school in my field, I’m on my 3rd language (hence, writing to you from Beijing), and all of the above is in service of the broader goal of making the world a better place, as opposed to mere personal enrichment. I have a good circle of friends, a good relationship with my family, and generally fit all the criteria for being a ‘good’ person.

I also happen to enjoy different MMO mechanics than you.

I’m an indecent person? Oh really? As compared to you? I’ll take that fucking Pepsi challenge, thanks.

Belsameth :
I haven’t read all comments so sorry if it’s already mentioned.
Anyway, I keep seeing people defend the sociopaths that generally play full PvP mmo’s, saying it’s honest competition and comparing it to real world sports like soccer. (Hyu for instance)
What the lot of you seems to be forgetting, however, is that FFA MMO’s are without any form of moral checks in place and people feel safe to be assholes because they’re anonymous. This generally brings out the worse in people (just look on any forum ) Darkfall caters exactly to these people by basically making it FFA without any form of restrain or check. They might as well call it Griefall because you *know* that’s what’s going to happen. While in real competition there’s referee’s and ones own moral or, lacking that, the fact that people know it’s you.

Your perceptions of what constitute moral or immoral activity in a MMO are deeply flawed.

Everyone who signs up for Darkfall is signing up for the game’s ruleset. There’s nothing immoral about playing within that ruleset, no moreso than when I capture your king in Chess in some especially effective way.

Getting attached to your video game character and its items, such that you feel somehow morally pained if they’re damaged or destroyed? Now THAT’S sociopathic behavior.

Vetarnias :
@Raad
That’s why they run everything. Banks. Movie studios. Synagogues.

Not exactly. But 23% of all Nobel prize winners (at 0.25% of the world population) and 37% of all US Nobel prize winners (at 37% of the world population) isn’t too shabby.

A big reason for Jewish success in such endeavors is the ‘question everything’ ethos of our culture, which leads to the smashing of widely-held yet incorrect assumptions. Also, our cultural emphasis on the attainment of knowledge, and knowledge as a form of power beyond physical strength.

In other words, cunning trumps strength.

Put in Darkfall terms, just because it’s a widely-held assumption that a fight consists of two people punching each other in the front, that doesn’t mean that assumption should hold. A more effective strategy is to wait for your opponent to be distracted o vulnerable, and then punch him in the back.

But the person getting punched in the back isn’t happy about this — because he’d spent all his time getting really good at punching you in the front. He’d valued strength over cunning.

Just like the WASPs who used to be mad about how overrepresented Jews were in successful institutions, the spots they earned even if they didn’t go to the “right” schools and the “right” clubs and do things the “right” way.

The dominant society’s description of the “right” way to do things is often “wrong”, and merely constitutes a way of privileging themselves.

The guy from Ten Ton Hammer wants to privilege himself by declaring the way of fighting he’s most accustomed to to be the “right” way of fighting.

Most games put artificial restrictions in place — such as battlegrounds, where you know the enemy’s got a force fielded against you in equal numbers, and you know where they’re coming from — to allow strength to artificially trump cunning.

Darkfall lets things simply work themselves out.

Darkfall lets cunning trump strength.

I like that.

(And if the Jewish example bothers you, there are plenty of others. For example, there were these revolutionaries once who stubbornly refused to fire at the British in a straight line, in the manner the British were accustomed to fighting in. The British found this entirely unfair and unsportsmanlike. You might have heard of them…)

Ack. The phrase “(at 37% of the world population)” should read (at ~2% of the US population).

“”You forgot to add the part about your awesome body, model-hot girlfriend and your close circle of illuminati-esque Jewish friends who control the world.”"

Except I’m not playing internet-tough-guy (the first two), or pretending to be powerful (the third). I’m simply saying that I’m a pretty fucking *good* person.

All of which I only brought up in direct response to someone claiming I wasn’t, based essentially on the fact that I like different types of MMOs than they do.

Try again?

I honestly can’t make heads or tails of anything you just said. None of what I said was abstract theorycraft, merely a historical reference with a bit of explanation attached. None of it depends on what nationality/ethnicity you happen to be.

I’m not saying “Jews are superior because they’re kicked down”. I’m not even saying that Jews as a whole are ‘superior’, whatever that means. I’m saying that Jews have integrated certain valuable concepts into their culture that many dominant cultures have lagged on figuring out, and that the dichotomy between the minority who’s figured it out and the majority who still doesn’t ‘get it’ is playing out with regard to the clash of playstyles within Darkfall, between people like the TTH guy who expect certain privileges (being attacked with strength, rather than cunning) that there’s no particular reason they should have. And it’s ironic that the issue in question — cunning vs strength — is the same in both cases.

“”Some people like to point out that sociopaths are attracted to FFA PvP, too fucking bad get over it already.”"

Except, that’s simply not so. As explained above, the general mentality for playing DIKU-PvE is far more sociopathic than the mentality of playing Darkfall.

@Phlis

Uh, who kidnapped you and forced you to play Darkfall?

Also, a good PvP ruleset allows you to accumulate some permanent gains no matter how much you lose; i.e., item loss but no XP loss. Darktide worked that way, Darkfall works that way, and both allow even poorer players to advance themselves and narrow the gap between themselves and the skilled over time. There’s a reason nobody is proposing that other players can ‘loot’ your XP when you die.

Also, in these games, world size is important. A tiny world with nowhere to hide is awful for World PvP; you want to have a world where you can strike out into the wilderness and not come into contact with much of anybody for a while if you want.

(Darktide nailed this perfectly, too. And it’d been out for… how many years when DAoC Mordred came out? For all his ranting in the LtM days about clueless devs, Scott and friends at Mythic weren’t terribly adept at learning the lessons of past PvP rulesets.)

Now, again — remind me who’s kidnapping you and forcing you to play Darkfall?

Scott Jennings :

Hyu :
As explained above, the general mentality for playing DIKU-PvE is far more sociopathic than the mentality of playing Darkfall.

Do you at least giggle a little when typing such obvious trolls?

I would, except, well, I REALLY DO BELIEVE THIS.

I really do think that WoW encourages sociopathic tendencies, and I think it’s a blight on our society. I look at WoW players like I look at my burned-out I-banking friends; people who are *doing it wrong*. At life.

It’s a Skinner Box with a nice coat of paint on it. Plain and simple. It caters to and nurtures people’s baser, unfortunate instincts.

I really do think the Bartle ‘Achiever’ metric is a decent measure of one form of sociopathy.

Oh, and substitute ‘Diablo’ for ‘WoW’ in the above sentence and it’s still doubleplus-true.

“”Amazingly, not everyone agrees with you that Darktide was the penultimate nirvana of PvP MMO gaming.”"

Apples to oranges; I was referring to FFA PvP specifically, not PvP more generally, which is why I didn’t mention WAR (which never attempted FFA PvP).

Mordred directly attempted the same sort of ruleset that Darktide offered. Darktide was superior in every respect.

This is an opinion shared by the vast majority of people who play FFA PvP.

It’s one thing to argue that many people don’t like FFA PvP, and so WAR was designed without it; fair enough.

But Mordred was put in specifically to provide an FFA PvP environment, and it didn’t incorporate any of the lessons of a superior, earlier product. That’s fail.

DAoC was a far more successful game than Asheron’s Call, for any number of reasons. But AC Darktide has nonetheless been far more resilient than Mordred, despite being tethered to a far less popular game.

That’s telling.

Scott Jennings :

Hawken :
C’mon Scott now people who like FFA PvP are scumbags? Trolling is fine I guess, but this guy is obviously bereft of any chance to have a normal conversation on the topic.

Well, Hyu is constantly going on about how people who like PvE are sociopaths, so it seems a balanced counterpoint!

Uh, where on earth did I say that? I said *DIKU-PvE*, specifically. And the playing-for-the-next-ding-not-playing-for-the-joy-of-playing-itself mentality that DIKUs encourage.

We’re not talking about PvE in Puzzle Pirates, here.

Scott Jennings :

Hyu :
It’s a Skinner Box with a nice coat of paint on it. Plain and simple. It caters to and nurtures people’s baser, unfortunate instincts.
I really do think the Bartle ‘Achiever’ metric is a decent measure of one form of sociopathy.

While that’s arguable (although Jonathan Blow makes that point far more eloquently than you have, and with much less trollish animosity) moving from that to how the Lord-of-the-Flies environment of no-rules PvP MMOs are somehow healthier is a leap of logic that you have yet to describe as you gracefully fly though it.

It’s healthy in that while it’s perfectly natural to fantasize about a Lord-of-the-Flies, Mad Max, The-whole-world’s-gone-to-hell style scenario and how interesting it might be to experience, it’d be a total catastrophe if you actually got to experience it in the real world.

And so, a virtual world to explore this scenario is a perfect supplement to the natural restraints of real life.

DIKU-PvE, by contrast, offers nothing that real life doesn’t — the ‘jolt’ of advancement can be attained in far more meaningful, superior ways in real life, without any catastrophic consequences (indeed, the benefits of participating more fully in real life are quite substantial, both for yourself and others). All it offers is an ‘escape’ from real life into an alternate, inferior facsimile, where you’re feeding the same needs — status, advancement — but not in a way that really benefits you or anyone else in the real world.

“”For YOU. For others, being curbstomped by bored exploiting higher level players seconds after character creation did not hold a great deal of attention.”"

Uh, in what way was Mordred any different than this? I’m not comparing the appeal of Darktide FFA PvP to Sport PvP, I’m comparing Darktide to Mordred. And the server numbers speak for themselves.

“”Then why isn’t it played by the vast majority of people who play FFA PvP?”"

Well, for a while… they did. Then, around late 2001, Turbine began to completely destroy the ruleset they’d created with changes that were targeted at the PvE servers and had unintended consequences for Darktide. Darktide hasn’t been operating under anything close to its ‘best face forward’ ruleset for 7+ years now.

“”No, you’re talking about a game that has locked up so much of the MMO market that the user base of all other games almost show up as rounding errors. Trying to say you’re not dismissing the MMO audience in general as sociopathic is specious.”"

Well, I *am* describing the majority of the MMO market as sociopathic to some degree. I admit that. And I’ll toss in fans of Diablo, as well, even if it’s not technically an MMO.

To add onto the above, I’m saying there’s nothing inherent about the idea of ‘PvE’ that’s sociopathic, just the dominant implementation of it. My critique of the DIKU-PvE psychology has nothing to do with the fact that some players would prefer to cooperate with one another and compete against the environment, rather than compete against one another. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that.

“”You could dismiss literally any entertainment in this fashion. “Watching a movie doesn’t benefit my life in any real way.” The argument’s irrelevant. Entertainment by its very nature is escapism. Are you arguing that advancement in a free-PvP game is somehow more meaningful than in a PvE game?”"

I’m arguing that in a free-PvP game, you’re not playing in order to advance, per se. You’re playing to *play*, because the actual playing is *fun*. The advancement is incidental to why you’re playing the game.

And this is precisely my point; there are good and bad kinds of escapism. I’m arguing that FFA PvP provides a ‘good’ kind of escapism, as per the logic outlined above, and DIKU-PvE is a ‘bad’ kind of escapism.

“”Yes, and that’s fine. However, when I play GTA4 and hijack a new sports car, I do not wreck 4 hours of work that someone else put into the game earning that sports car. This is something you gloss over neatly in your praise of free-form PvP neo-Darwinism.”"

The idea that you’d put in ‘work’ to ‘earn’ things in a world that doesn’t actually exist is precisely what I’m describing as sociopathic. If you’re playing for the right reasons, the 4 hours to get that sports car wasn’t ‘work’, it was time spent playing a game you found fun, and the sports car was rather incidental; even if someone takes the sports car, they’re not taking the 4 hours of fun you had that happened to result in you getting it.

Saying someone should ‘work’ to ‘earn’ things in a video game is silly, the more you think about it. (XBox-Live achievement collectors display a similar maladaptive behavior, for what it’s worth)

“”I realize from your past postings that you don’t make a habit of actually being familiar with MMOs you critique, so I’ll note that unlike Darktide, Mordred/Andred did not permit new players to be PK’d unless they opted out of new user protection.”"

Believe it or not, I actually played DAoC, Mordred included. Was even active on the closed tester forums for a year or so post-release, as best I can recall. I just don’t happen to remember that rule.

But if this was truly such a giant change (And Darktide had something similar; new players lose almost nothing, whether loot or death penalty, on death), why was Mordred a comparative failure when compared with Darktide?

And how does that invalidate anything else I said about all the major ways Mordred failed to learn Darktide’s lessons, as opposed to the sort of minor issues that only matter for the first few levels?

Again, assuming you all ‘got it right’ with Mordred’s ruleset — why did Mordred, attached to a much more popular game, end up less successful than Darktide, attached to a much less popular game?

“”I’m sure Trammel was also involved.”"

AC released with all but one of its servers being PvE, and EQ was already another option for PvE-ers at that point. Nobody can claim they ended up on Darktide for lack of other options. Hell, the login screen clearly said in all caps, “PLEASE PICK ANOTHER SERVER IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED FOR A HARSH EXISTENCE.”

The whole ‘pre-Trammel UO’ thing isn’t at issue here. I’ve never advocated forcing anyone into PvP they don’t want.

“”And yet you neatly skip over how “working” to earn that sports car (the concept of trading time investment for advancement being part of literally almost every CRPG invented, btw) is somehow more sociopathic then beating another human being over the head and stealing it from him.”"

You’re not beating him in RL? You’re beating him in a video-game? If anything, it’s the opposite of sociopathic to know that beating someone up in real life and stealing their car is poor behavior, and so to try out experiencing a similar sensation in a video-game.

If you want to experience advancement, there’s no reason not to go ‘advance’ in real life, preferably in a way that benefits others more than it benefits yourself.

Also, most CRPGs (assuming you mean Console RPGs) attract some seriously flawed people. I have major issues with the Final Fantasy series and the people who ‘grind’ them, too. (Also, the god-awful storytelling. Quality-wise, it’s the videogame equivalent of a Dan Brown novel. But that’s a separate issue.)

“”There is something wrong with that: it’s boring. From what I know, the only people really enjoying it are people who freak at at the slightest occurence of PvP.
I don’t mind sitting on voice comms with friends and having a chat while killing some random mobs, maybe even singing and drinking together (been there, done that), but the damn PvE is still boring. It just serves the purpose of getting loot and levels, wow…
“”

EpicSquirt: We’re getting our definitions crossed. What you’re describing sounds to me like DIKU-PvE, which is what I’m railing against. But there’s no reason that the concept of ‘a player or players vs a computer’ has to work in the way you describe. I gave Puzzle Pirates as an example of a game where the PvE works very differently, for instance, to give a sense of what’s possible.

“”Oh, I remember your time there well, and how every post you made was about how DAOC would be so much better if it were identical to AC Darktide, and how you were finally kicked off when you let slip that not only had you never gotten a character past some ridiculously low level but that you no longer even had an active account. Unbelievably, this was not considered helpful feedback.”"

Okay, I’ll at least admit that making THOSE posts *definitely* put a silly grin on my face.

(Because, well, yes, DAoC would have been significantly better if it’d copied Asheron’s Call’s superior mechanics. And rarely do the devs offer such a golden opportunity to repeatedly rub their noses in their design faults like that. I mean, if I were you guys, *I* sure as hell wouldn’t have put up with a year of that from me. But it was quite satisfying, in that way that only telling people they’re wrong on the internet can be.)

The highest level I hit in DAoC was 30, I think. Getting past that required me to kill mobs repeatedly in the hopes of eventually finding something fun to do at a higher level. Quit CoH at the same level, for the same reason (though alts were more fun in CoH).

It’s not like DAoC PvE was ‘hard’. The fact that I only made it to level 30 before quitting was more a condemnation of your game design than anything else.

Scott Jennings :

Hyu :
You’re not beating him in RL? You’re beating him in a video-game?

The time investment said victim put in is real, which is why full-loot PvP games are somewhat more *HARDCORE* *EXTREME* than a kill in TF2.
Why do you have “major issues” with the entertainment of others (’oh my god, someone is enjoying a JRPG! They’re WRONG!’), yet object so strenuously when others express issues with the entertainment you enjoy? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I’m not objecting to the fact that they’re challenging my choice of entertainment; I’m simply pointing out that their objections are logically flawed. I can back up my arguments for the problems in the entertainment of others with sound logic.

Also, I don’t think full-loot PvP games are ‘hardcore’ or ‘extreme’ at all. They only feel that way if you have an unreasonable/vaguely pathological attachment to the items your character’s accumulated. I wouldn’t argue that AC Darktide or Darkfall are ‘hardcore’ or ‘extreme’ games, except if you mean ‘extreme’ in the very technical sense of being an outlier among the current crop of MMOs.

The guy I car-jacked in the game wasn’t “investing” time at all. He was simply playing the game, same as me.

If he saw it as an investment, well, that’s pathological, and I’m only so responsible for how pathological people approach a perfectly healthy game.

Saying it’s my fault if he’s bent out of shape about the car-jacking is like saying it’s my fault if someone cries after I beat them at chess. (I’m awful at chess, but hey, it’s an analogy.) He’s the one ‘doing it wrong’.

“”I know! I’m about at my limit after one day.”"

Well, at least this serves as a monument to anyone wondering why I get banned from most DIKU-friendly forums eventually. (The straw that broke the camel’s back over at F13 was making the argument that Diablo epitomizes everything wrong with a certain type of game, and points to something wrong with the people who play them.)

And as a post-mortem, since it seems we’re done for the day and I’m off to bed (Beijing time), I’ll leave with a link to this:

http://www.brokentoys.org/2001/01/03/one-shot-one-kill-author-lum-the-mad/

Old Lum was a lot more attuned to the relationship between the dominant paradigm of MMO design (with all the ways it caters to pathology) and prevalent flaws in the human psyche than New Lum.

“”It is a tremendous analogical failure to say people need to think of FFA PVP MMOs more like chess. Yikes.”"

Not in all respects, but in some? Sure. Their attachment to their loot which they might lose/gain on any given day should be about like a Chess-player’s attachment to his pieces.