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That could be just because the trend in all fantasy-style MMORPGs has been to add more equipment slots. Not really related to PVP. And anyway, how would you compare? For current "hardcore" PVP games (excluding EVE beacuse we're talking fantasy RPG), there's... uh... yeah. Lineage II? Not anything recent, and who knows what WAR and Conan will turn out like in terms of equipment.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
I tried to read this post but I don't fucking understand it at all.
What is the formatting even supposed to mean?
edit: And why did you copy/paste and then bold parts of your shitty original post?
I think this is the nut of it. I just... don't get it. There are people in WoW who seem to have this mentality; they're the people who get on their level 70 merciless-geared rogues and camp flight points in lowbie areas for two hours, killing everything they see. They must be enjoying it, because there's no other reason to do it, but it doesn't make sense to me.
And because that doesn't seem fun to me, I don't usually want to play games where it has serious consequences, because I'm going to be on the receiving end the entire time. I like PvP just fine, even objective oriented PvP (fleet/small group stuff in EVE), but random ganking doesn't do anything for me, which leads me to dislike games that incentivize it.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
Quoted for truth.
And to the poster talking about lag, UO was out back before Cable was even around, lag was a fact of life. Yes, you lag now sometimes, but invest in a good connection and aside from server side issues, you will be fine.
Every game with PvP incentivizes, and even games without. It's about making people nerd rage. Reacting to it at all incentivizes it.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Or... in actuality, real competition is based on skills of even near level peers. And maybethen fun can be had for everyone, instead of encouraging players to feed off eachother's misfortune. Ask yourself, why would the average person pay 15 bucks a month to get manhandled by the biggest jerks?
Have fun playing "real" PVP on a dead game in an empty server. That's known as Player vs. Nothing.
Getting off on other people's misery is not a gameplay choice, it's a mental disease
This exactly the type of no brained response I had expected when I made the thread.
Please just do NOT understand. The thread isn't about wanting to gank lowbies all day long. Hell, the game I'm using as a base for this thread, UO, saw you able to reach a high "level" and be able to defend yourself/engage targets VERY fast.
You are using a game like Warcraft as a basis for a totally retarded statement. You can turn Warcraft into the type of game I am talking about, as others have said above me.
Have fun with yor meaningless pvp, I'll stick to doing things for a reason.
People die, lose their gear/gold/xp, whatever, and they've just wasted their time on top of humilation from e-peen players. Then what happens? They're stuck with a gimped character so that they can die in the same cycle of vampirism.
I hate to break it to you, but in any game there's the average player. And 50% of the population sucks worse than that average player. That person and half the population will be the ones getting punished, over and over. Sure, YOU might be able to defend yourself, but everyone else isn't going to even buy the game or will quit sooner or later; then you'll be back on this board wondering why there's no "real" PVP MMOs coming out. There's a large difference between having fear/tension in a game, and trying to make people fear playing the game or annoyed.
And your reasons for thinking that all other forms of PvP are inferior are...? You listed what you're looking for:
- Die and have your gear looted
- Group gank to ruin someone's day (your emphasis, not mine)
- Want to fear PKers
None of that describes meaningful PvP. It describes high-risk PvP. There is a huge difference. And, unsurprisingly, you want to gang up to make sure that the risk is all on the side of whoever you attack. That is the standard PKer modus operandi, after all: Kill the guy who is weaker, or unable to fight back, or who is doing something other than PvPing. No one wants to be the victim!
Face it, even a game like WoW adds more gameplay meaning (ie, consequences) to a PvP death than the UO-type game you say you want. Because WoW has a system (or more than one system, I guess) for making PvP kills/deaths "count" that goes beyond "oh I lost all my items and a lot of time." Even EVE does that, via corp/alliance wars. Those gameplay systems make PvP a competition, and you don't want a competition -- you just want bad consequences.
That's why I called what you described griefing-style PvP. Because historically there has been little or no in-game meaning to it beyond wrecking someone else's fun.
Also remember that every game needs non-PvPers to run. The "carebears" you and others insult and ignore are what keep MMOs going. A game full of only ganking PvPers would be quite interesting... in a terrible, boring, meaningless way. PvP of the type you describe does not make a game.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
I will admit in my haste to post I haven't been able to flesh out exactly what I want in an MMO's PvP portion.
You are right, EvE does do that, and I absolutely LOVE the way EvE does it!If you were to take the EvE style PvP, and in turn make it into a, I'm not sure how to put this, non space theme, I would gobble it up.
It's not that I just want to run around and snatch everyones shit ala Runescape. I just am so sick of PvPing to get "honor points" or in EQ's case to get "coins".
A competition is FINE! But to be able to give me the control over what I do as in a free PvP environment... In my mind, I would love to see this scenario-
Person X is walking along on a road to get to his next destination. You, being the Rogue you are, have been waiting patiently for a while for someone to mug. you attack him, kill him, and take your reward, be it everything on his body, such as Runescape or UO, or just one or two items, as in PvP EQ, or even some of his gold.
Does it suck to get killed? You bet your ass it does! When I use to get murdered in EQ by those level 70 bastards when Iwas level 25, it really upset me, I lost XP and items! But you know what, I really did enjoy it. I liked grinding my way up the level tree, seeing a level 70 Vashir (sp?) run up to me and wonder if I was gone for. More often than not, nothing came of it! Being polite and respectfull to the other factions usually worked for me, and I liked it. Had it not been a PvP server I wouldnt have thought twice about it though, oh some stupid cat, hope he doesnt steal my mobs.
I hope I made a better point here, I'm sorry its pretty late here and my mind is all over the place! I know I've been coming across like an elite bastard, and that's really not the way I want to sound. Yes, "carebears" make up a good portion of the population, and that is perfectly fine, dont join the PvP server then, thats pretty simple!
There's also three terms i'll use-ganks, meaning taking another player/group of player by surprise and fighting them, usually with victory pre-assured by the surprise; 'good fights', where the sides are even and ready for the fight, and territorial warfare-having your actions matter in the actual game by changing ownership of towns/stations and control of areas.
from those experiences, it's really clear that a lot of people like to run around a gank each other. I did this in shadowbane a huge amount, both solo and with two RL friends. We succesfully griefed people out of the game-after killing them daily they'd just stop logging in. But it had no real point so we got bored. While it did have ganks, good fights, and territorial war, the territorial war had no real purpose when you hit max level, so everyone just ran around ganking with the rare fight in between.
I didn't play another MMO until Guild Wars, which had 'balanced' PvP (generally). This I played for a long time competitively, but there wasn't any real thrill to it besides playoff matches that mattered (and I wasnt even in those). It was 'good fight' after good fight, but really, it got very repetitive.
I tried out UO-it was just like shadowbane . Spend a while levelling to what you want to be, then go look for ganks. I saw it for what it was and didn't spend any time on it. Ganks and good fights again, but no real acquisition.
EVE has done it the best, albeit very badly still. It manages to have ganks, 'good fights', AND territorial consequences that actually matter. The territorial consequences are what really matter, and it's on a very fine edge. If holding space was just a bit harder, the game would suck because the majority of people would just live in areas where you don't need to hold space, and roam around ganking / getting good fights, with no ultimate purpose.
Really, the good fights crowd is better served playing a FPS or RTS, and so is the ganking crowd.
Anyhow.
Player versus player in a game like Ultima Online was exciting. No matter what side you were on, who you were attacking, if you were being attacked, ganked, or ganking, etc. It just doesn't matter, because you never know when three other guys might pop up on the screen. It made it exciting, which I find other games lack these days when it comes to PvP.
When that happens in WoW, I'll shrug and lazily try to run off, throwing healing spells on myself and what have you. In Ultima Online? Suddenly your heart is pumping, because damnit, I don't want to die. In WoW? Oh well, I died, better spend 30 seconds running back.
Different strokes for different folks and all.
If you want that risk you're pretty much shit outta luck. Make your own game, and have fun never topping a thousand subscribers.
I read it in another forum; basically, it's your character that's the badass, not his gear. It's a style of fantasy RPG where the innate character abilities are much stronger than a normal RPG and the gear is expendable.
wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Heroes
Quote: "You are not your magic weapon and armor. You are not your spell buffs. You are not how much gold you have, or how many times you've been raised from the dead. When a Big Bad Demon snaps your sword in two, you do not cry because that was your holy avenger. You leap onto its back, climb up to its head, and punch it in the eye, then get a new damn sword off of the next humanoid you headbutt to death."
Margaret Thatcher
He-- we'll call him Job, for convenience's sake-- immediately took a liking to the PvP of UO. He began completely ignoring me while we played, instead content to just wander the countryside ganking people. I became involved in the roleplaying community, and Job got banned before the month was up. C'est la vie.
The Ultima Online roleplaying community thrived -- and I will say that it thrived more heartily than any other MMO of the period, Everquest included -- in no small part due to the PvP system. This had nothing to do, though, with the fact your possessions could be looted; it had nothing to do with the griefing elements outlined here. What I enjoyed about Ultima Online's PvP, and what the rest of the community as well enjoyed and really needed, was that it was free-for-all and structure could be imposed upon it instead of the other way around.
I honestly spent more time playing in post-Trammel UO, and the PvP community only grew more thriving within the RP community after the split. Over the past few years, patches introduced guild alliances to overhaul the extant feature of guild wars -- conflicts which made it possible for non-consensual PvP to happen between willing combatants even in the non-PvP zones. Still, though, this wasn't really the perfect fit for our community and there were a few rules that managed to spontaneously and separately arise on all of the different servers; among which, unanimously, was "you shall not loot anything but replaceable items (reagents, bandages, gold) from those that you kill, unless you ask the player in question."
Now, admittedly, RP communities are not a market base that can sustain an MMO. It's rather unfortunate, too, because Ultima Online seems to be on its last legs (EA relocated their offices cross-country, again, and laid off the few remaining legacy employees from Origin after their 3D overhaul failed).
I think the real tenets of 'REAL' PvP are malleability, imperfect information, immersion, and openness. It's very hard for me to find any value in World of Warcraft roleplaying because when conflict arises between me and someone else, the only solutions are to go to the arena (and be ganked) or duel. Even then, because the World of Warcraft class-advancement system is so set in stone, even if I don't look the guy up on Armory I know already what to expect.
My ideal PvP game would feature the a la carte skill selection of Ultima Online; the ability to modify the environment around you as in Ultima Online (not necessarily player housing; even before we had housing, we could come up with makeshift barricades by dragging cabinets and chairs onto the roads); the ability to attack anyone at any time anywhere, but only through some manner of consent (guild conflict, enlisted faction conflict); and the lack of an automatic respawn every 20-30 seconds as we have in World of Warcraft battlegrounds.
Just the same, I think there should always be an option that allows players to advance their skills and gear in safety if that's what they want; it is not fun, for me, to always be looking over my shoulder. It is fun, sometimes, to be looking over my shoulder -- but when I am in that mood, I would prefer if I could toggle it on instead of being forced into it. Ultima Online has changed from its decade-old roots; gear has become more important (though still easily-accessible), and skills have by and large become even easier to train. In the 24 hours of in-game time that will get me to level 20, 25 in World of Warcraft, I can have a character completely viable for most of the PvE content and for any PvP content. Another few hours will cap the character out.
I don't know of any game coming out that boasts any or even most of these features, and I sort of don't expect there ever to be one. A lot of what made Ultima Online the roleplaying game of choice for me was only really possible due to its 2D interface -- simple but very realistic conversation (no chat box), a sprite-based world allowing you to litter the ground however you wanted / decorate however you wanted ... stuff like the remarkable skills system might make a return, which is good, but so much of Ultima Online just isn't salvageable in the current engines we see the MMOs running on.
Which is sad.
But anyway, I'm just waxing nostalgic now, so. The OP should play Ultima Online on a freeshard, along with many others in this thread, and the word "carebear" should be purged from the universe because there exists absolutely no reason why a pejorative should exist to describe people who have different gaming preferences. It's discrimination akin to 'cism, and it's sort of disgusting.
EDIT: Also, how does a player-run economy run at all alongside the world you envision? The griefing climate does not lend itself to populations of crafter-players, which tend to shy away from conflict -- the only time you get crafter-players in the PvP population is when the crafting is easy or when you have a mechanic like WoW's bind-on-pickup that necessitates it. If player conflict becomes so rampant, structure will need to arise from the players in order to protect their resources -- i.e., EVE -- and, well.
That never happened in UO. It happened in EVE, but it never happened in UO, and I don't really know myself what the distinction is. I think, partly, it's that the EVE economy is mostly macroscale instead of microscale, and similarly that the tools already existed for corporations and territorial control whereas they were only later -- and shoddily -- attempted to be patched into UO.
Basically at anytime in any place anyone can kill you. There is no stealthing, and when you die you lose items.
And dying sends you to a lifestone, which is an area in the public, where a person can track you down and then camp you.
So if a small group of friends find someone they want to mug over and over, it is just a matter of scouting out their lifestone, setting 2 or 3 people up at the LS and then sending 2 or 3 people out to get the first kill.
And then they chase you and kill and loot you repeatedly.
But since in that game you will be the prey instead of the predator, I doubt you will ever go try it out.
Picking nits a little here, but back in the days of early UO, DSL and some cable lines were, in fact around. Just not nearly as much as today. The problem was, if you had cable (or lived reeeeally close to one of the servers), you actually got a mechanical advantage in that you moved faster than everyone else. If that uber guild that terrorized your server was on cable, you were basically fucked, since there was pretty much no way you could run.
But that is old and in the past. Anyway, yes, "high-stakes" PvP can be fun if the game is designed for it. Unfortunately, the games designed for and around it usually end up fucking sucking. If the dev teams don't manage to fuck up something, the harder-core members of the player base are usually more than happy to do it for them. Usually through short-term mass exploits or longer-term cannibalizing of the playerbase.
People will only willingly play as sheep for the wolves for so long, you know.
Edit: Yeah yeah, most of my points were made earlier in the thread, but I don't care.
Steam | TF2 inventory
Right, and that's why the market for such MMO's is at best tiny. EvE works by having an amazing Metagame. And unless you really recreate that metagame you can't simply clone EvE. The only other MMO aiming for that space is Darkfall which is still looking for a publisher. There simply isn't enough demand to support that kind of PvP.
I know those pushing this kind of "death has meaning cause I take your stuff, lololol" PvP like to see themselves as wolves. But for the most part they are more like jackals on the food chain. Weaker prey are attacked, but equal or greater prey is ran away from. There are exceptions to this (EvE in particular is good at encouraging it) but for the most part when you make a game of jackals....not even the jackals want to play.
It doesn't help that the Darkfall fanbase is rabid to the point of launching all-out raids against any blog or forum daring to suggest that Darkfall may not be the end-all, be-all, of pee vee pee games.
Steam | TF2 inventory
darkfall is literally just shadowbane with prettier graphics.
but i think that AoC has a legitimate shot at being the next MMO with good pvp - if they decide to make either partial loot/full loot servers.
heck, i'm fine with just looting an inventory. that's totally cool with me - that means i can run around to popular spawns and kill people and get lots of money and good items and whatnot.
people who haven't played MMOs where there's a consequence to death just don't get it. if they don't find it appealing, they'll never understand the argument for them. games like WoW are literally just like playing an FPS, like unreal tournament or something. ultima online was... it was pure adrenaline. when you were fighting or running, you felt it in your balls. it was scary as fuck, and if you got away, it was like this unbelievable sense of relief - or, if you killed somebody and looted a high selling item, it was just this great fucking sense of accomplishment
the element of danger really makes or breaks a game for me, which is why instanced pvp sucks balls.
i get the arguments for instanced pvp, blah blah, people think it's fun. but do you get the rush? to use shadowbane as an example here, do you get the insane feeling of danger when your tree has been baned, and everything you've spent time on has the potential to be torn the fuck down?
answer: no.
that shit was hardcore - your tree got destroyed, your guild got disbanded, and your city? it was now their city.
most of all, most of all
someone said true love was dead
but i'm bound to fall
bound to fall for you
oh what can i do
Now, you don't necessarily have to be able to loot the corpse of someone you kill, or grief, or whatever, to have a point. If killing someone was part of an over-arching goal like capturing a city (like how it is in the concept for the Warhammer MMO) then PvP has a point, and thus accomplishes something, giving it meaning and making it more exciting.
If I'm going to play a game where the combat has no point other then just combat for combat's sake and no tangible affect on the game world, I'll just play a game that has a combat system with depth and substance like Virtua Fighter instead of something shallow like WoW.
It was kinda funny when they went after Scott Jennings...I mean the guy might know just a little bit about MMO design and PvP. Just a tiny bit. To quote him for why this kind of game will fail:
The problem with hardcore PvP games is, as has been often said by myself and others, that while many think they are of the hardcore, few actually are. And while the spectre of being killed repeatedly with no recourse, your home sowed with salt and your guild banners used for tablecloths for the meal of human jerky you kindly donated to may sound nice at first, the bloom tends to fade from the rose when you realize that no, you’re probably never going to be the guys carving the jerky.
There is a serious market for more serious PVP games, someone just needs to make one worth playing.
age of conan! come on, it will do it!
if it doesn't, i will cry.
most of all, most of all
someone said true love was dead
but i'm bound to fall
bound to fall for you
oh what can i do
I'm happy I'll actually get to aim my bow in that game, but annoyed that the projectile physics seem like they are going to be very simplistic, and that the enemies will only posses one hit box.
But, I guess it's a latency thing.
The problem comes from "Persistent skill based PvP with Consequences" being somewhat contradictory in nature. Take gear looting. If gear provides any advantage then over time then the newbies will be driven away as the Griefers outgear them to the point of making it impossible for them to win or run away. If gear doesn't matter, then where do the consequences come into play?
Good luck getting a publisher to see it that way.
If you want any investment to make a game.. it has to be a WoW clone. That's the only thing that can get attention now. The manpower required to make and run a MMOG is far too much for a tiny company to get going on their own.
10,000 subscribers isn't even a blip on the radar anymore.
what does this even mean
are businesses not supposed to make money or something?
Shareholders win, gamers lose.
Thats cool i guess, money is money.
There are two issues that need to be ironed out before any PvP RPG can be successful. The first is the technical side. There needs to be rock-solid gameplay with as few bugs as possible, and certainly no ongoing exploits. The PvPers often look for every advantage that they can get, and they certainly have no qualms about using every advantage they can get. Even if you word your EULA carefully and ban the appropriate felons using hax and sploits, you can't catch everyone, and a few players will dominate.
The other is the roleplaying side. The game world has to be robust enough to handle PvPers. There have to be elements in the game that make it more than just "Deathmatch with Elves!" This means having cities that you can burn and pillage, but this also means having guards for the larger cities who can kill the stupid and unprepared. This means having ways to lose your loot, but also ways to get it back. If you have ways to mitigate death, there has to be rock-solid ways for people to continue to play. There needs to be a Police entity in the major cities. Most games right now split PvP and non-PvP zones in some fashion in order to compensate for the fact that there is no Government or Law Enforcement. There are not enough players in all MMOs (current or past) to form any long-standing upright citizens brigades, and often there are no "hooks" in game play for PCs to fill in those administrative and law enforcement roles (let alone NPCs). Also, people tend to join games to become a certain role, and this role is often heroic rather than administrative.
That's the real problem. No one has made one worth playing since UO. And UO was only good for it's time, it barely holds up today. EVE isn't even worth playing, it just has a playerbase that took their shitty game and turned it into something decent. Pretty much anything in the game that CCP has direct involvement with sucks hard, from the UI to netcode to the majority of game mechanics.
No publisher is going to say "So you want to make a game like Shadowbane and EVE Online, one a complete failure, and the other being an active MMO with the smallest marketshare" and think they've found a brilliant group of developers and start throwing money at them.