Most of these solutions seem to forget that there is a large segment of "loner" players in MMOs.
Whether because nobody wants to hang with them, because they don't want to hang with others, because they can't devote time enough to guild, or whatever.
The large, closely-knit guilds aren't usually in a position to BE "sheep" to begin with.
Some random dude out mining for fish on his lonesome?
Having read through this thread over the course of the day, I'd like to retract my earlier comment, and update it to reflect that this whole thread is full of people who are sterling examples of why I don't play on PVP realms.
No, it's not even the world pvp combat, or the ganking, or whatever... it's the closed minded, arrogent and inconsiderate attitude that is used to advocate such a game / gamestlye / gameplay experience. "Wah wah, words hurt me, go cry carebear" or whatever the response is; I don't have to. I have a game that caters to my gamestyle, and has a whole lot of people playing it that seem pretty content (when they're not barely literate rabble rousing on the official forums). No, the primary difference is that I agree that such a gamestyle might be found interesting, even though I recognize it's not for me.
I find no fault with wishing to have a different game experience than the one currently present, however, most of the points presented here have been simply "____ isn't hardcore enough", "__________ is for sissies and fags", etc.
We've heard plenty of what a vocal minority within a vocal minority don't want, and plenty of what they do, but not how to make it feasible. For all the "in a perfect world" suggestions can be made, the simple human factor is that it's not that easy to make something "meaningful" to thousands or millions of players, especially when many of the ideas suggested (harsher penalties on death, be it exp, looting of gear, or whatever) are negative reinforcement. WoW is a fine example of Positive Reinforcement in action; while the "best of the best" PVPers and PVEers have content that's exclusively their domain, a whole lot is open to a whole lot of people, and while not perfect, the appeal is clearly there.
And I'm by no means suggesting that the only viable gameplay options in the world are those that pander to the lowest common denomenator, but the next basic point of human nature we've touched on is here; MMO's are meant to make money. Yes, fun, exciting, grind, whatever, they are funded and continue to exist because they are financially viable, at least barely, or are easy/cheap enough to support even past the point of being viable that the companies involved don't mind hosting a few servers for a couple thousand old schooler's to dick around on (as I understand it, I just got into the MMO scene 4 years ago).
To me, a perfect PVP MMO would have to have minimal differences between the classes, at least in regards to PvP capability. Unless you can perfectly balance classes that can heal vs those that can't, or classes that have higher damage dealing vs those that have lower damage dealing abilities (but perhaps higher mitigation, or better range, or stealth, etc), you increase the chance that "class" or "____ ability" rather than skill will win fights, and then you have an abundance of that class because people want to have that edge.
"Hello to you, Flavour of the Month".
I don't fault people for wanting something different, but as presented (and in the most obnoxious terms available), I don't see how it'd be financially viable. And I'm not talking "9 million subscribers and growing", I'm talking "just paying for development, hosting, updates and GM staff" for a game almost intentionally catering to what appears to be a fairly small subsection of the MMO Pie as it is.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Sorry for interjecting into the midst of your discussion with something slightly unrelated but what exactly are people looking for in pvp? Because there certainly more kinds and styles of pvp than just hardcore and softcore.
From my limited experience in mmos, whenever the discussion of pvp comes up I always hear people clamoring for hardcore pvp like Ultima Online.
I think most people who wish for hardcore pvp have never experienced what its like to be curb stomped by a gang of players that won't let you do anything except die and respawn to be curb stomped again. I've been on both giving and receiving ends of this spectrum and I have to say that this kind of gameplay is just a plain bad idea. Everyone wants to be Lord Doomstrike, leader of the Knights of Chaos and the slaughterers of the Elysium Plains but that is impossible because that means no sheep and no prey. It is only natural that the most hardcore, skilled and equipped players will dominate everyone else, and this population is pretty tiny. But even if you were, to what end? To make another player's game time miserable? To gain satisfaction in crushing people who possess no means of defense?
I think a better system would be in group pvp. Not like in arenas in wow, more like full scale epic warfare. Where armies battle each other for cities/castles/objects of importance that would help in the overall strategic war. DaoC supposedly had a good system of siege warfare, castles and rewards, and the upcoming warhammer and conan game seem to have taken the hint. I wish them only the best of success. The most memorable moments of playing WoW for me was the endless battles of hillsbrad.
But even if you were, to what end? To make another player's game time miserable? To gain satisfaction in crushing people who possess no means of defense?
Sadly, yes, this does seem to be the appeal for some people.
As much as I respect another person's interests differing from mine, I feel that gameplay that is only rewarding in what it deprives another player of is inherantly flawed at best, and says unkind things about the mindset of the players thinking it at worst.
Honestly, low class disperity? Pure skill based gameplay? Is it even possible within the framework of an MMO? That really sounds more like the goal of many FPS's, where only your gun (that anyone else can get or start with) and your skills are what keep you alive, many with a ranking system that allows people / groups to know who is truly the best.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
As I said earlier, I play Oblivion to get my "Lord Doomstrike" fix out of my blood. Everyone gets those urges, but only a minority speak up about it and demand "hardcore" pvp.
It's an unsustainable model for reasons that have been repeated a dozen times in this thread, and yet, people still ask for it.
And I entertain myself pwning nub bandits in Cyrodiil.
Yes, low class disparity seems to be itching closer to an FPS game style. So in a fantasy mmo, you get to choose between a sword and axe or a mace. Minor differences in play style mean more reliance on "skill", tactics and teammates.
As I said earlier, I play Oblivion to get my "Lord Doomstrike" fix out of my blood. Everyone gets those urges, but only a minority speak up about it and demand "hardcore" pvp.
It's an unsustainable model for reasons that have been repeated a dozen times in this thread, and yet, people still ask for it.
And I entertain myself pwning nub bandits in Cyrodiil.
Yes that's it exactly.
Everyone wants to be Lord Doomstrike
You and almost everyone else however are going to be the nub bandits that get their shit ruined unless facing a blind monk who just wants to pick flowers in the country side.
I think to keep a game from being a total gank fest, you'd have to give players a strong incentive to not be complete arseholes.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
I think to keep a game from being a total gank fest, you'd have to give players a strong incentive to not be complete arseholes.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
I've envisioned an interesting idea for a mmo society where criminal/evil actions are player enforced by something akin to a bounty hunter guild. Players who choose to do evil (Which is perfectly a okay) can do so but accumulate a bounty on their heads related to the number of gankings they perform and travellers way laid.
Small time griefers, who kill people in the country side once in a while would suffer minor consequences and there would be outlets or opportunities for high bounty players to "work" off their bounty (Maybe escorting lowbie players through an ironically ganker filled forest). The really successful evil players however, the ones who cannot be taken down by even teams of bounty hunters, are kill on sight in all cities and most lands but should be granted their own evil "lair" providing some needs otherwise unattainable in cities. Thus it is up to the player to decide which alignment they should choose.
I think to keep a game from being a total gank fest, you'd have to give players a strong incentive to not be complete arseholes.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
We already went over this. If there was anything in high-sec that people with low security ratings wanted, they'd just use a mule character/account/player to ferry that stuff for them. Nothing short of a straight-up barring of the character even USING anything from high-sec would work.
[edit]Oh right, that wouldn't work either: you wouldn't actually be able to take items from high-sec players who wandered into low-sec, which basically takes a shit all over the whole "piracy" idea.
I think to keep a game from being a total gank fest, you'd have to give players a strong incentive to not be complete arseholes.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
I've envisioned an interesting idea for a mmo society where criminal/evil actions are player enforced by something akin to a bounty hunter guild. Players who choose to do evil (Which is perfectly a okay) can do so but accumulate a bounty on their heads related to the number of gankings they perform and travellers way laid.
Small time griefers, who kill people in the country side once in a while would suffer minor consequences and there would be outlets or opportunities for high bounty players to "work" off their bounty (Maybe escorting lowbie players through an ironically ganker filled forest). The really successful evil players however, the ones who cannot be taken down by even teams of bounty hunters, are kill on sight in all cities and most lands but should be granted their own evil "lair" providing some needs otherwise unattainable in cities. Thus it is up to the player to decide which alignment they should choose.
I think it's already been made clear that the number of people willing to be gankers far outweighs the number of people willing to hunt gankers. The very idea of ganking - that you kill whoever you see, whenever you see them - makes it much easier and more fun than anti-ganking, where you have to actively hunt down opponents that could be offline at the time, or in a totally inaccessible area, or completely out of your league. There's no "good" analogue to a gank-squad, because trying to hunt down gankers is necessarily a hundred times more frustrating than being a ganker.
Unless if you just have a button that you can press to immediately teleport to any available ganker. I can't imagine that working out well.
I think to keep a game from being a total gank fest, you'd have to give players a strong incentive to not be complete arseholes.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
I don't know if it would work in a game context, but I think the idea of complete rejection by society would be worth exploring.
That is, the guards learn to recognize you as your list of crimes grows, causing them to grab you and lock you up. Then your character rots in jail for some amount of real world time proportional to the severity of your crimes, before getting thrown out of the city with a warning not to come back. I envision a system like how Sims communication works, not literal words, but when you get witnessed doing something bad your description gets passed around.
Put in some kind of "thieves den" town somewhere where the pkers can hang out with their own, but without access to any of the services that the main city provides.
For the item thing Garthor, assuming we are going with a fantasy realm, we could make items alignment/deity locked.
So that holy crusader sword of + 8 smiting can only be used by someone who's behavior could be considered lawful good, because otherwise the sword would rebuke him or the deity who the sword represents would harm the person using it. Evil people could of course still sell the item or something for gold and whatnot.
There'd be items too for evil people, like a weapon of slaughter. Maybe the weapons could give bonuses based on the type of activities that evil and good people are supposed to be engaging in. You know, your sword does more damage if you are defending a lower level player from a higher level one if your a good guy. Or if your evil your sword does more damage based on the number of people you've killed in the last minute.
I guess it would be up to the Devs if they wanted the good items to be better or equal to the evil ones, to give players incentive to behave or not. If good items were better, evil characters would have to operate in packs.
I guess it would be up to the Devs if they wanted the good items to be better or equal to the evil ones, to give players incentive to behave or not. If good items were better, evil characters would have to operate in packs.
Which is funny, because then you just have a reversal of roles with the names remaining. An example of this would be SWG (at least, as several of my friends told it); the movies and books depict a Rebel Alliance of mixed races, philosophies and backgrounds as a necessity of survival in the face of the overwhelming power of their mutual foe; The Empire.
Whereas on these servers, you had the "Rebels" outnumbering the "Empire" 3 to 1, because everyone wants to be "the good guys", and so the Imperials became the hunted fugitives, on the run in the face of overwhelming foes with superior numbers and firepower.
Never overestimate people's drive to at least appear to be on the 'side of good', even if they're complete assholes about it.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I think to keep a game from being a total gank fest, you'd have to give players a strong incentive to not be complete arseholes.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
It needs a bit more than that, I think - depending on your setup, you can easily get around such things via alts or friends or simple self-sufficiency. What's needed is a way to ensure that EVERYBODY is at risk, that EVERYBODY can suffer consequences for their actions. Several people've said that one of the greatest things is that perpetual state of caution and risk they're in, not knowing if the next guy over isn't two clicks from leading a gank charge - the problem is that the gankers go out of their way to neutralize that, and there's nothing asides from a staff asskicking and your rare anti-PK brigade to challenge them. What's needed is a game that returns to players in kind the things they've given to others. Take a Star Wars MMO, for example:
Dude A is part of a group that's in a state of war with another group, and he and others regularly engage in scuffles with them for control of planets and systems and other resources. He and his fellows have the chance of getting some nice resources like mineral-rich asteroids, but run the equal risk of having it snatched away from them by the other group. Asides from this, perhaps the various police forces of systems where they clash don't like them fighting in their systems, so you get anything from fines to being chased out of the system in a hail of fire.
Dude B and a few of his friends are pirates: classy ones, but pirates nevertheless. They wait for a fat merchent vessel to pass by and then swoop in, disable the ship, and take as much of the bootey as they can before leaving: if it's a really nice ship or if it's owned by someone B and his friends have bad blood with like another pirate group, then they occasionally kick the pilot's ass into an escape pod and send him on his way to the nearest civilized planet. Among the things they risk running are (A) making a lot of guild enemies depending on how often they go a'huntin' and who they attack, (B) for all they know that stubby little pocket cruiser they want to raid has a full 12-man wing of high-performance fighters on board, and (C) if they've really started getting some good high-value hauls, the Imperial Navy might start paying attention, putting out a nice enticing bounty on B's head to encourage PC bounty hunters to start looking around and sending out a Star Destroyer or two to patrol areas B's frequently seen in the hopes of nabbing him and thus avoiding the matter of paying the bounty. What happens after this is a matter I've yet to address, honestly.
Dude C and his compatriots are your standard fuckstick griefers, the kind of guys who'll 10-man-swarm the crappy barebone shuttles newly-minted players might start with, fly the wrong way down an out-bound flight lane in a heavy cruiser ramming and shooting the fuck out of everything in sight before jumping away, and disable some random guy's freighter for the sole purpose of tractoring him in, jumping to five kilometers off the event horizon of a black hole, and booting their victim out an airlock in a space suit before leaving. They don't do it to control a resource, they don't do it for a great-if-risky profit, they do it just to piss people off. They're basically a bunch of hooligens in an SUV armed to the gills with guns and shooting at every damn vehicle they see as they speed down the freeway.
They're going to get the Star Wars equivilent of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Digital assets like bank accounts and the like or things stored on Imperial-controlled planets? Siezed by the Empire. The base they've got set up in the ass-end of nowhere? There's a damn good chance the Empire's going to go through systems sweeping for things like that (if they haven't already) and it's gonna' blow the fuck out of it and everything else they find belonging to C. Get spotted by the Empire? They're going to have a fucking swarm of TIE fighters chasing them down - and if they jump, it's only a matter of time until more Imperials show up. Happen to get caught in a system with a lot of players? The Empire certainely isn't going to mind announcing to every single person in the system the huge fucking bounty on C's head
The Imperials aren't going to be omnipotant demigods like the Ultima Online guards were, oh no - they can be fled from, and if an offender's really skilled or has the right resources, they can even be fought. But all that means is that the next time they show up (and there WILL always be a next time when circumstances get like this) that there'll be another ship to hunt the offender down, and then another, and another still until you've got a Death's Head-like task force specifically assigned to hunt their target down like the god damn animals they are, and they're going to have to spend the rest of their days always looking over their shoulder, always running away when the enemy shows up.
I guess it would be up to the Devs if they wanted the good items to be better or equal to the evil ones, to give players incentive to behave or not. If good items were better, evil characters would have to operate in packs.
Which is funny, because then you just have a reversal of roles with the names remaining. An example of this would be SWG (at least, as several of my friends told it); the movies and books depict a Rebel Alliance of mixed races, philosophies and backgrounds as a necessity of survival in the face of the overwhelming power of their mutual foe; The Empire.
Whereas on these servers, you had the "Rebels" outnumbering the "Empire" 3 to 1, because everyone wants to be "the good guys", and so the Imperials became the hunted fugitives, on the run in the face of overwhelming foes with superior numbers and firepower.
Never overestimate people's drive to at least appear to be on the 'side of good', even if they're complete assholes about it.
You could make aggressing be an evil act. Which would keep 'good' players from being total dicks.
You could make aggressing be an evil act. Which would keep 'good' players from being total dicks.
And that requires programming a game that can recognize "intent" without fail or flaw.
What if that person is rushing to save a lowbie from a higher level character?
What if they're of equal levels, but their gear isn't?
What if their gear is similar, but the 'defender' just sucks?
And then you have people abusing the system, using alts or other accounts to boost their "good" rating in order to get away with "bad acts" later, etc, etc.
Given that one person might account for two or five or fifty different characters, such a system could be easily abused.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I guess aggress was the wrong word. I was thinking more, attacking someone first, who isn't already in combat with another player, is always an evil act, always, no matter what, even if the person you are attacking is evil. Unless they are on your turf or a designated good guy/bad guy only area.
It's just an idea off the top of my head. As you pointed out, it's a rather complex issue, so I'm sure my idea won't deal effectively with all possibilities.
I guess it would be up to the Devs if they wanted the good items to be better or equal to the evil ones, to give players incentive to behave or not. If good items were better, evil characters would have to operate in packs.
Which is funny, because then you just have a reversal of roles with the names remaining. An example of this would be SWG (at least, as several of my friends told it); the movies and books depict a Rebel Alliance of mixed races, philosophies and backgrounds as a necessity of survival in the face of the overwhelming power of their mutual foe; The Empire.
Whereas on these servers, you had the "Rebels" outnumbering the "Empire" 3 to 1, because everyone wants to be "the good guys", and so the Imperials became the hunted fugitives, on the run in the face of overwhelming foes with superior numbers and firepower.
Never overestimate people's drive to at least appear to be on the 'side of good', even if they're complete assholes about it.
You could make aggressing be an evil act. Which would keep 'good' players from being total dicks.
One could argue that initiating first strike is justified against an evil player and could be seen as an act of good for dealing with them before any damage is done. Or maybe they're lying in wait behind an asteroid field or a bush for the next merchant, or what if they had just recently slew a bunch of lowbies. People will complain how because they did not want to mess with their alignment they could not take the fight to the enemy, forcing good players to be completely reactive in war. How would you respond to that?
Hmm, I guess we could make god sponsored crusades into the bandit lands a every so often event, to let good players take the fight.
Other then that, they'd have to stick to a ridiculously stuffy lawful good Paladin sense of morality. If they wanted to protect the people from an ambush, they'd have to babysit them until they got ambushed.
And, if good players got better gear for being good, then they could cope with having to be reactive in battles. Especially if they had better defensive abilities/gear.
How about a system where at any time, a character can appeal to the local authorities for protection? If someone appeals than NPC ships will be quickly dispatched to their location, and attacking them beyond a certain point (to account for accidents and attacks made during the appeal) would be a crime. However, if the appealer has a criminal record the authorities will take the chance to try to arrest them for it.
That way, if you're completely good or you only have a minor criminal record, you can protect yourself from everyone who cares about not having the authorities upset at them, but appealing would be worthless for major criminals.
Hmm, I guess we could make god sponsored crusades into the bandit lands a every so often event, to let good players take the fight.
Other then that, they'd have to stick to a ridiculously stuffy lawful good Paladin sense of morality. If they wanted to protect the people from an ambush, they'd have to babysit them until they got ambushed.
And, if good players got better gear for being good, then they could cope with having to be reactive in battles. Especially if they had better defensive abilities/gear.
And now you're making the problem even worse. To be evil you can just go out and have fun by ganking whoever you fucking see. If you want to be good, well, then you're fucked having to trek around in Bumfuck Newbiezone guarding some random fucking newbie in the off-chance that some ganker stupid enough to gank somebody being actively guarded will attack that newbie.
Fuck, why are you punishing the GOODLY players? They're the ones that are at a disadvantage ANYWAY!
How about a system where at any time, a character can appeal to the local authorities for protection? If someone appeals than NPC ships will be quickly dispatched to their location, and attacking them beyond a certain point (to account for accidents and attacks made during the appeal) would be a crime. However, if the appealer has a criminal record the authorities will take the chance to try to arrest them for it.
That way, if you're completely good or you only have a minor criminal record, you can protect yourself from everyone who cares about not having the authorities upset at them, but appealing would be worthless for major criminals.
There's the problem. Every random ganker is going to become a major criminal once they join the all-encompassing ganker mega-guild, because that's what they have to do to continue randomly ganking people.
How about conflicts requiring resources to fight over?
Like something of Xaolin Showdown or something...
You can go into combat, but only over actual resources....
Say you both want to tap a node of Mineral X... you both click on it, and you get the following options: Fight for it or give it up.
So long as you make enough Mineral X nodes to keep every single one from being perma-camped... you'd have optional combat that actually has a meaning... without the irritation of ganking.
Sure, it wouldn't get the whole adrenaline rush thing going... but at least the sadistic types get to do some bullying like they like.
Fuck, why are you punishing the GOODLY players? They're the ones that are at a disadvantage ANYWAY!
Actually the point of this entire off the cuff theory was that the good guys would be rewarded with better gear for being good. So, they'd have the advantage from that.
There'd also have to be safe zones of some kind, especially for low level players. Or, make it so players of a certain level gap can't fight each other.
Honestly, I can't see free roaming pvp working at all in the way current MMOs work. Combat would have to rely mostly on skill, instead of level and gear, to stop ganking. And even then numbers become an issue. You really just have to make pvp and non-pvp zones, or restict pvp by level ranges for certain areas, and have factions.
How about conflicts requiring resources to fight over?
Like something of Xaolin Showdown or something...
You can go into combat, but only over actual resources....
Say you both want to tap a node of Mineral X... you both click on it, and you get the following options: Fight for it or give it up.
So long as you make enough Mineral X nodes to keep every single one from being perma-camped... you'd have optional combat that actually has a meaning... without the irritation of ganking.
Sure, it wouldn't get the whole adrenaline rush thing going... but at least the sadistic types get to do some bullying like they like.
I was just thinking about how much I sort of would like a system where you have buildings or factories or territory and you could fight over that and that stuff might help make you better (by making better gear, part of my line of thinking comes from the bed of failed ideas that was SWG) but when you die you didn't die and you couldn't lose...you, your skills, or your gear (but fuck gear because my ideal MMO also has low gear emphasis, but that's probably a different thread). Just those things that are a combination of prestige and wealth acquisition (workers building tools for you, armies swelling to fight other armies etc. etc.)
Edit: This doesn't solve the "I wish I could stab anyone" problem, but I mention it because it's an extrapolation of the combat over resources idea you mentioned, and seems like a step in the right direction for the "I wish there was a reason to kill and not want to die but some people wish there isn't a reason to not want to die" problem.
You know, for all of the flak and hate we give PVPers who do it soley to ruin other folks' experiences, you have to admit that for all of the decency and class that some of us claim to have, there are just certain times when certain people piss us off to the point of where we want to go "fuck it" and mob him, hold him down, kick him in the teeth, stomp on his nads, snap his spine, bend him over, and leave him with the closest virtual approximation of being forced to fellate himself before being given the coup de grace, and doing this again and again and again until he finally figures out why he's regarded as a retard to be beaten mercilessly and stops being such.
I wonder how a game would work where you're basically "licensed" to engage in PVP with a certain group based on certain characteristics - whether they're of a particular race or class, whether they themselves are licensed to harry a particular race or class, whether their name is just one of a million retarded variations of Sephiroth/Legolas/whatnot - and then that's the only group you can aggress against. If you're going to piss someone off, piss off the people you have a legitimate hatred of, I say.
Edit: This doesn't solve the "I wish I could stab anyone" problem, but I mention it because it's an extrapolation of the combat over resources idea you mentioned, and seems like a step in the right direction for the "I wish there was a reason to kill and not want to die but some people wish there isn't a reason to not want to die" problem.
I don't think there is a proper solution for that.
The "oh man I could die any second!" thing is really something best left to single-player games, because who really cares if you're griefing head crabs.
--
Thing is, casual PVP isn't that big a deal. A random gank for laffs? No biggee. It's actively seeking to keep someone else from progressing that's an issue.
Take, for instance, the last time I was involved in world PVP in WoW. Lone mage or something, three of us, higher level to boot. We wacked her in half a second, snickered a bit, and kept an eye on the corpse. When she rezzed, we waved and let her go back to killing mobs, even helping her a bit by throwing a DoT or two after she gained agro, and pulling agro away from her when she got tangled up in too many mobs, and everyone cheerfully waved goodbye when we were done.
That's a pleasant kind of PVP scenario. A little bit of quick sadism, but nothing worse than throwing a snowball at a school chum.
This is in sharp contrast to the people who would send their level 70 friends to gank 50s who dared to grind the same mobs, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, that I had dealt with earlier that week.
The only time in World of Warcraft that I really engaged in unprovoked ganking was the one time I took my druid to Stormwind and starting beating the shit out of anybody that was flagged. Often they were much lower-level and basically got wrecked. However, also very often I would end up fighting people my own level (and one hilarious fight involving a couple of level 59 twinks). And one time when I took on two rogues of an equal level through clever use of the water (which was basically my escape mechanism whenever shit went bad).
Ganking people inside the Auction House itself was the best. They never see it coming.
I sort of wondered, after the fact, whether the whole thing would really be considered kosher. The people had flagged themselves for pvp - often by simply having flown into Stormwind recently - and I wasn't ganking low-level people solely to pick on them, but because that's all I had a reasonable chance of killing (except for the ones with stupid names, who I did the best to hunt down and kill).
I felt that it was more of a hilarious occurrence: that one time that crazy druid started wrecking shit up in Stormwind. Eventually I had a gang of about four or five people hunting me down, at which point I got a summon to that night's raid. All good fun.
The day my druid hit level 60 (my first level 60) I spent almost a full day lurking at Astranaar, protecting newbie alliance. I would merely hang out in stealth mode, and as long as the fights were even I'd let people do their thing. Soon as someone higher level showed up and started ganking, I'd pop out of nowhere and push their shit in.
It was best when it was someone in their 40's or 50's doing it and they got completely destroyed.
I used to pvp as a supportadin with a shadow priest and a horde undead rogue traitor as well as assorted other members.
Aside from the normal gankings in felwood, we would perform dastardly acts of luring horde players to the Felwood cliffs and then mind controlling them to jump off to near certain death into dark shore, where its impossible to get back to felwood and requires either a long ride or a hearth stone.
The only PvP I enjoyed in WoW was the epic fights between hillsbrad and southshore. Unfortunately, neither town could actually be held, so it was a neverending fight.
If towns actually could be taken over, shit would have been glorious.
The people had flagged themselves for pvp - often by simply having flown into Stormwind recently
Huh? Unless you have PVP - Enabled, hopping on a Gryphon (or the Horde equivelent) will actually automatically de-flag you the moment you take flight. At least, it does on PVE realms. Also, if they have PVP - Disabled set up, I'm pretty sure that once you're out of contested territory, shouldn't your pvp flag drop after 5 minutes unless you attack a foe inside the tower or heal someone who is flagged? Basically, unless you were camping the gryphon landing point itself, I don't see how you'd be a huge jackass for doing this.
I don't do it often, but I admit to having ocassionally participated in laying siege to capital cities, usually on my rogue or hunter.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
The people had flagged themselves for pvp - often by simply having flown into Stormwind recently
Huh? Unless you have PVP - Enabled, hopping on a Gryphon (or the Horde equivelent) will actually automatically de-flag you the moment you take flight. At least, it does on PVE realms. Also, if they have PVP - Disabled set up, I'm pretty sure that once you're out of contested territory, shouldn't your pvp flag drop after 5 minutes unless you attack a foe inside the tower or heal someone who is flagged? Basically, unless you were camping the gryphon landing point itself, I don't see how you'd be a huge jackass for doing this.
I don't do it often, but I admit to having ocassionally participated in laying siege to capital cities, usually on my rogue or hunter.
Most of the people he was catching flagged were people just coming out of Battlegrounds.
5 minutes is more then enough time to run out of the Keep, ride to your mailbox, zoom over to the AH and then visit the bank...
Or at least it is for me.
And the graveyards for capital cities aren't all that far away, so it isn't that big a deal.
PVP characters are Pirates that fight each other for resources. They "level" through kills, gear up through controlling different resources and the like. Kind of like EvE in the open ocean.
PVE Characters level the old fasioned traditional way by exploring and traversing and raiding.
And every once in awhile, the PVP characters can raid the PVE characters towns, for unique weapons/PVP titles and the like, while the PvE players that participate and do well get unique armor rewarded to them, maybe some Pirate only weapons and gear, or special armor given out by the govenor of the town.
And of course, you can transfer from PVE to PVP or the other way around maybe say, every 6 months, if you prefer.
I lust for an MMO with real PvP to come out. I'm talking REAL PvP here. Yes yes, I know Eve has a great PvP system, but Eve just isnt my cup of tea.
When I say real PvP, I mean Ultima online, before the PvP nerfs (Hell, even after). I want to die, and wonder who killed me, why, and where they are going with all of my items. I want to get a few friends and ruin someones day. I want to FEAR players that are known PKs. I want a REASON to kill another player!
Also, a player run economy. Wow, that would be something else.
Please, please, please PA Forum Goers, tell me there is a game like this being released.
I realize that I'm late, but I noted that you listed UO. I played UO for six years and tried the other MMOs; playing WoW, Shadowbane, etc. In the end, I moved back to pretrammel UO. It's free, and it's been up for like four or five years now: http://www.game-master.net
I played UO for years and years. I've been a PK an Anti a RPer and everything in between. I've played just about every MMO you can name and beta tested half of them. There's something about early Ultima Online that no one else can capture.
The reason the old UO vets are so passionate about it is because there hasn't been anything else like it. Richard Garriot (UO's creator) created UO almost as a sociological experiment. He wanted a justice system based entirely on the players. The first step to doing this was inciting greed. Everything on your character is lootable. In other words, whenever you die, someone can double click your corpse, and take all the possessions you had on you. This led to a very utilitarian style of play. You never carried anything with you you didn't mind losing. Everything else, went in your secure bank box, which was left completely untouchable by the other players.
The reason people fawn for UO so much, honestly, is because it's skill based. Say what you will, but this isn't really an arguable point when compared to the other games out there. World of Warcraft is not skill based. This is coming from a dwarf shadow priest in full epics.
The reason UO is considered skill based is because in old school UO, there were really no magic weapons and armor that gave a distinct advantage. UOers call WoW an "item-based" PvP system, because it isn't about who has more skill, it's about who has the better gear and to some extent the Rock-Paper-Scissors mentality.
UO is also a skill based system because it actually uses skills. There are no levels. You don't go from 1-60 or 1-70 in UO. There are like 80 different skills ranging from magery to swordsmanship, and you get to choose seven of them and make a unique template. You create your characters abilities, it's not cookie cutter like WoW is.
I noticed the infraction post from the misguided but passionate guy on the second page. For those of you that don't know, the term Care-bear (as it relates to MMOs) comes from Ultima Online. When EA bought OSI (Garriot's company) they catered to the minority and put in a mirror land of the map called "Trammel". In Trammel, you were not attackable. It split the playerbase. It literally ruined the game. The effects were felt far and wide.
The economy was kept in balance because people were cautious and careful about getting gold from dungeons. PKs (player killers) would run in and sweep the dungeon every now and then and kill you and take your gold. Usually you'd only get like 2000-3000 gold before you made a bank run, because you didn't want to lose too much if you got killed.
When trammel came out, the people who wanted to be rich without risk all packed up and moved to it. They could farm dungeons literally for hours with no fear of reprecussion. In UO a ridiculously wealthy person had like eight to ten million gold. A couple months after trammel came out it wasn't rare to see a "care-bear" with fifty million or more. The people who stayed in the old land simply couldn't keep up with the money gains. So more and more people packed up and moved to trammel. Eventually, Felucca became a ghost world. Trammel was a glorified graphical chat room (no exaggeration here, that's really what it was. Ask someone who used to play UO what a "Bank-sitter" was).
When we say we want old-school "real" PvP, we mean that we want PvP that is skill based. We don't want GvP (gear vs player). It's not a matter of griefing or not griefing, it's a matter of playing to get better. It's a matter of risk vs reward. It's a matter of running out of town and having a rush of adrenaline because you never knew when a red name (PK) was gonna popup outta the woods and you'd be fighting (or running) for your life.
If the only games you've ever played are GvP, then you are missing out on how wonderful that experience can be. Don't take the word of the people who came after trammel. Things became legendary. Old UO was blown out of proportion as being an orgy of griefing and assholes. The people that tend to complain about UO are the ones that didn't stick around to adapt. They played two days, got killed and looted, and said "Well screw this game, then".
My first day in UO, I got killed and looted and lost all my newbie money. I was really pissed. I was like 13 at the time, and I remember being absolutely infuriated. But you know what I did? I wrote the guys name down, started a new character, trained up and went to kill him. And I did, and I looted him, and got a deep feeling of satisfaction and revenge. I never looked back.
Like I said, UO lost it's luster after trammel. But if you ever want to play a game that's skill based, and find out what real risk vs reward is, the client is free now, and you can play on a server with the oldschool ruleset and no trammel over on the Angel Island server.
The only PvP I enjoyed in WoW was the epic fights between hillsbrad and southshore. Unfortunately, neither town could actually be held, so it was a neverending fight.
If towns actually could be taken over, shit would have been glorious.
No it wouldn't. On 90% of the servers, one side would take all the holdable towns 95% of the time. Every couple days, the other side might form up an organized raid group to take one back... for the five minutes before the other side gathers up whatever random people are available and steamrolls it back.
Hillsbrad was only fun because neither side could take it. Also: seeing people chased by an ass-beating squad of about 50 guards.
Yep, thats the problem. What a game would need to make worthwhile objective based pvp would be a much more dynamic and LARGER game world.
Imagine skirmishing in a warzone for weeks, gathering bands of fellow adventurers to take an enemy tower only to be thrown back by enemy warbands backed by NPC strike squads. Eventually one side would gain enough leverage (strategic positions, kills, stationed troops, resources etc.) to make a final push against the enemies desperate last stand. Weeks of conflict ending in victory or defeat, and war stories enough to fill countless forum threads.
We aren't there yet by far, but with enough resources (say for instance, the piles of money made by WoW) it could be made reality with our current computer technology level.
Del: The thing with that is that people WILLINGLY moved to Trammel.
Which means they liked the carebear scenario better than the original.
So while it may have ruined it for the PVPers, it improved it, presumably, for the PVEers, unless there's some extra factor here you haven't mentioned for those who have never touched UO.
So, unless that extra factor is at work... this just shows, again, that UO-style PVP requires something of a captive audience. That audience hasn't been captive since Trammel, by the sound of it.
Posts
Whether because nobody wants to hang with them, because they don't want to hang with others, because they can't devote time enough to guild, or whatever.
The large, closely-knit guilds aren't usually in a position to BE "sheep" to begin with.
Some random dude out mining for fish on his lonesome?
Gank'd.
No, it's not even the world pvp combat, or the ganking, or whatever... it's the closed minded, arrogent and inconsiderate attitude that is used to advocate such a game / gamestlye / gameplay experience. "Wah wah, words hurt me, go cry carebear" or whatever the response is; I don't have to. I have a game that caters to my gamestyle, and has a whole lot of people playing it that seem pretty content (when they're not barely literate rabble rousing on the official forums). No, the primary difference is that I agree that such a gamestyle might be found interesting, even though I recognize it's not for me.
I find no fault with wishing to have a different game experience than the one currently present, however, most of the points presented here have been simply "____ isn't hardcore enough", "__________ is for sissies and fags", etc.
We've heard plenty of what a vocal minority within a vocal minority don't want, and plenty of what they do, but not how to make it feasible. For all the "in a perfect world" suggestions can be made, the simple human factor is that it's not that easy to make something "meaningful" to thousands or millions of players, especially when many of the ideas suggested (harsher penalties on death, be it exp, looting of gear, or whatever) are negative reinforcement. WoW is a fine example of Positive Reinforcement in action; while the "best of the best" PVPers and PVEers have content that's exclusively their domain, a whole lot is open to a whole lot of people, and while not perfect, the appeal is clearly there.
And I'm by no means suggesting that the only viable gameplay options in the world are those that pander to the lowest common denomenator, but the next basic point of human nature we've touched on is here; MMO's are meant to make money. Yes, fun, exciting, grind, whatever, they are funded and continue to exist because they are financially viable, at least barely, or are easy/cheap enough to support even past the point of being viable that the companies involved don't mind hosting a few servers for a couple thousand old schooler's to dick around on (as I understand it, I just got into the MMO scene 4 years ago).
To me, a perfect PVP MMO would have to have minimal differences between the classes, at least in regards to PvP capability. Unless you can perfectly balance classes that can heal vs those that can't, or classes that have higher damage dealing vs those that have lower damage dealing abilities (but perhaps higher mitigation, or better range, or stealth, etc), you increase the chance that "class" or "____ ability" rather than skill will win fights, and then you have an abundance of that class because people want to have that edge.
"Hello to you, Flavour of the Month".
I don't fault people for wanting something different, but as presented (and in the most obnoxious terms available), I don't see how it'd be financially viable. And I'm not talking "9 million subscribers and growing", I'm talking "just paying for development, hosting, updates and GM staff" for a game almost intentionally catering to what appears to be a fairly small subsection of the MMO Pie as it is.
From my limited experience in mmos, whenever the discussion of pvp comes up I always hear people clamoring for hardcore pvp like Ultima Online.
I think most people who wish for hardcore pvp have never experienced what its like to be curb stomped by a gang of players that won't let you do anything except die and respawn to be curb stomped again. I've been on both giving and receiving ends of this spectrum and I have to say that this kind of gameplay is just a plain bad idea. Everyone wants to be Lord Doomstrike, leader of the Knights of Chaos and the slaughterers of the Elysium Plains but that is impossible because that means no sheep and no prey. It is only natural that the most hardcore, skilled and equipped players will dominate everyone else, and this population is pretty tiny. But even if you were, to what end? To make another player's game time miserable? To gain satisfaction in crushing people who possess no means of defense?
I think a better system would be in group pvp. Not like in arenas in wow, more like full scale epic warfare. Where armies battle each other for cities/castles/objects of importance that would help in the overall strategic war. DaoC supposedly had a good system of siege warfare, castles and rewards, and the upcoming warhammer and conan game seem to have taken the hint. I wish them only the best of success. The most memorable moments of playing WoW for me was the endless battles of hillsbrad.
Sadly, yes, this does seem to be the appeal for some people.
As much as I respect another person's interests differing from mine, I feel that gameplay that is only rewarding in what it deprives another player of is inherantly flawed at best, and says unkind things about the mindset of the players thinking it at worst.
Honestly, low class disperity? Pure skill based gameplay? Is it even possible within the framework of an MMO? That really sounds more like the goal of many FPS's, where only your gun (that anyone else can get or start with) and your skills are what keep you alive, many with a ranking system that allows people / groups to know who is truly the best.
It's an unsustainable model for reasons that have been repeated a dozen times in this thread, and yet, people still ask for it.
And I entertain myself pwning nub bandits in Cyrodiil.
Yes that's it exactly.
Everyone wants to be Lord Doomstrike
You and almost everyone else however are going to be the nub bandits that get their shit ruined unless facing a blind monk who just wants to pick flowers in the country side.
Something like people with low sec rating not being able to go into high sec areas like EvE. Otherwise you'll have a society populated entirely of bandits.
I've envisioned an interesting idea for a mmo society where criminal/evil actions are player enforced by something akin to a bounty hunter guild. Players who choose to do evil (Which is perfectly a okay) can do so but accumulate a bounty on their heads related to the number of gankings they perform and travellers way laid.
Small time griefers, who kill people in the country side once in a while would suffer minor consequences and there would be outlets or opportunities for high bounty players to "work" off their bounty (Maybe escorting lowbie players through an ironically ganker filled forest). The really successful evil players however, the ones who cannot be taken down by even teams of bounty hunters, are kill on sight in all cities and most lands but should be granted their own evil "lair" providing some needs otherwise unattainable in cities. Thus it is up to the player to decide which alignment they should choose.
We already went over this. If there was anything in high-sec that people with low security ratings wanted, they'd just use a mule character/account/player to ferry that stuff for them. Nothing short of a straight-up barring of the character even USING anything from high-sec would work.
[edit]Oh right, that wouldn't work either: you wouldn't actually be able to take items from high-sec players who wandered into low-sec, which basically takes a shit all over the whole "piracy" idea.
I think it's already been made clear that the number of people willing to be gankers far outweighs the number of people willing to hunt gankers. The very idea of ganking - that you kill whoever you see, whenever you see them - makes it much easier and more fun than anti-ganking, where you have to actively hunt down opponents that could be offline at the time, or in a totally inaccessible area, or completely out of your league. There's no "good" analogue to a gank-squad, because trying to hunt down gankers is necessarily a hundred times more frustrating than being a ganker.
Unless if you just have a button that you can press to immediately teleport to any available ganker. I can't imagine that working out well.
I don't know if it would work in a game context, but I think the idea of complete rejection by society would be worth exploring.
That is, the guards learn to recognize you as your list of crimes grows, causing them to grab you and lock you up. Then your character rots in jail for some amount of real world time proportional to the severity of your crimes, before getting thrown out of the city with a warning not to come back. I envision a system like how Sims communication works, not literal words, but when you get witnessed doing something bad your description gets passed around.
Put in some kind of "thieves den" town somewhere where the pkers can hang out with their own, but without access to any of the services that the main city provides.
So that holy crusader sword of + 8 smiting can only be used by someone who's behavior could be considered lawful good, because otherwise the sword would rebuke him or the deity who the sword represents would harm the person using it. Evil people could of course still sell the item or something for gold and whatnot.
There'd be items too for evil people, like a weapon of slaughter. Maybe the weapons could give bonuses based on the type of activities that evil and good people are supposed to be engaging in. You know, your sword does more damage if you are defending a lower level player from a higher level one if your a good guy. Or if your evil your sword does more damage based on the number of people you've killed in the last minute.
I guess it would be up to the Devs if they wanted the good items to be better or equal to the evil ones, to give players incentive to behave or not. If good items were better, evil characters would have to operate in packs.
Which is funny, because then you just have a reversal of roles with the names remaining. An example of this would be SWG (at least, as several of my friends told it); the movies and books depict a Rebel Alliance of mixed races, philosophies and backgrounds as a necessity of survival in the face of the overwhelming power of their mutual foe; The Empire.
Whereas on these servers, you had the "Rebels" outnumbering the "Empire" 3 to 1, because everyone wants to be "the good guys", and so the Imperials became the hunted fugitives, on the run in the face of overwhelming foes with superior numbers and firepower.
Never overestimate people's drive to at least appear to be on the 'side of good', even if they're complete assholes about it.
Dude A is part of a group that's in a state of war with another group, and he and others regularly engage in scuffles with them for control of planets and systems and other resources. He and his fellows have the chance of getting some nice resources like mineral-rich asteroids, but run the equal risk of having it snatched away from them by the other group. Asides from this, perhaps the various police forces of systems where they clash don't like them fighting in their systems, so you get anything from fines to being chased out of the system in a hail of fire.
Dude B and a few of his friends are pirates: classy ones, but pirates nevertheless. They wait for a fat merchent vessel to pass by and then swoop in, disable the ship, and take as much of the bootey as they can before leaving: if it's a really nice ship or if it's owned by someone B and his friends have bad blood with like another pirate group, then they occasionally kick the pilot's ass into an escape pod and send him on his way to the nearest civilized planet. Among the things they risk running are (A) making a lot of guild enemies depending on how often they go a'huntin' and who they attack, (B) for all they know that stubby little pocket cruiser they want to raid has a full 12-man wing of high-performance fighters on board, and (C) if they've really started getting some good high-value hauls, the Imperial Navy might start paying attention, putting out a nice enticing bounty on B's head to encourage PC bounty hunters to start looking around and sending out a Star Destroyer or two to patrol areas B's frequently seen in the hopes of nabbing him and thus avoiding the matter of paying the bounty. What happens after this is a matter I've yet to address, honestly.
Dude C and his compatriots are your standard fuckstick griefers, the kind of guys who'll 10-man-swarm the crappy barebone shuttles newly-minted players might start with, fly the wrong way down an out-bound flight lane in a heavy cruiser ramming and shooting the fuck out of everything in sight before jumping away, and disable some random guy's freighter for the sole purpose of tractoring him in, jumping to five kilometers off the event horizon of a black hole, and booting their victim out an airlock in a space suit before leaving. They don't do it to control a resource, they don't do it for a great-if-risky profit, they do it just to piss people off. They're basically a bunch of hooligens in an SUV armed to the gills with guns and shooting at every damn vehicle they see as they speed down the freeway.
They're going to get the Star Wars equivilent of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Digital assets like bank accounts and the like or things stored on Imperial-controlled planets? Siezed by the Empire. The base they've got set up in the ass-end of nowhere? There's a damn good chance the Empire's going to go through systems sweeping for things like that (if they haven't already) and it's gonna' blow the fuck out of it and everything else they find belonging to C. Get spotted by the Empire? They're going to have a fucking swarm of TIE fighters chasing them down - and if they jump, it's only a matter of time until more Imperials show up. Happen to get caught in a system with a lot of players? The Empire certainely isn't going to mind announcing to every single person in the system the huge fucking bounty on C's head
The Imperials aren't going to be omnipotant demigods like the Ultima Online guards were, oh no - they can be fled from, and if an offender's really skilled or has the right resources, they can even be fought. But all that means is that the next time they show up (and there WILL always be a next time when circumstances get like this) that there'll be another ship to hunt the offender down, and then another, and another still until you've got a Death's Head-like task force specifically assigned to hunt their target down like the god damn animals they are, and they're going to have to spend the rest of their days always looking over their shoulder, always running away when the enemy shows up.
But hey, that's what makes PVP so great, right?
You could make aggressing be an evil act. Which would keep 'good' players from being total dicks.
And that requires programming a game that can recognize "intent" without fail or flaw.
What if that person is rushing to save a lowbie from a higher level character?
What if they're of equal levels, but their gear isn't?
What if their gear is similar, but the 'defender' just sucks?
And then you have people abusing the system, using alts or other accounts to boost their "good" rating in order to get away with "bad acts" later, etc, etc.
Given that one person might account for two or five or fifty different characters, such a system could be easily abused.
It's just an idea off the top of my head. As you pointed out, it's a rather complex issue, so I'm sure my idea won't deal effectively with all possibilities.
One could argue that initiating first strike is justified against an evil player and could be seen as an act of good for dealing with them before any damage is done. Or maybe they're lying in wait behind an asteroid field or a bush for the next merchant, or what if they had just recently slew a bunch of lowbies. People will complain how because they did not want to mess with their alignment they could not take the fight to the enemy, forcing good players to be completely reactive in war. How would you respond to that?
Other then that, they'd have to stick to a ridiculously stuffy lawful good Paladin sense of morality. If they wanted to protect the people from an ambush, they'd have to babysit them until they got ambushed.
And, if good players got better gear for being good, then they could cope with having to be reactive in battles. Especially if they had better defensive abilities/gear.
That way, if you're completely good or you only have a minor criminal record, you can protect yourself from everyone who cares about not having the authorities upset at them, but appealing would be worthless for major criminals.
And now you're making the problem even worse. To be evil you can just go out and have fun by ganking whoever you fucking see. If you want to be good, well, then you're fucked having to trek around in Bumfuck Newbiezone guarding some random fucking newbie in the off-chance that some ganker stupid enough to gank somebody being actively guarded will attack that newbie.
Fuck, why are you punishing the GOODLY players? They're the ones that are at a disadvantage ANYWAY!
There's the problem. Every random ganker is going to become a major criminal once they join the all-encompassing ganker mega-guild, because that's what they have to do to continue randomly ganking people.
Like something of Xaolin Showdown or something...
You can go into combat, but only over actual resources....
Say you both want to tap a node of Mineral X... you both click on it, and you get the following options: Fight for it or give it up.
So long as you make enough Mineral X nodes to keep every single one from being perma-camped... you'd have optional combat that actually has a meaning... without the irritation of ganking.
Sure, it wouldn't get the whole adrenaline rush thing going... but at least the sadistic types get to do some bullying like they like.
Actually the point of this entire off the cuff theory was that the good guys would be rewarded with better gear for being good. So, they'd have the advantage from that.
There'd also have to be safe zones of some kind, especially for low level players. Or, make it so players of a certain level gap can't fight each other.
Honestly, I can't see free roaming pvp working at all in the way current MMOs work. Combat would have to rely mostly on skill, instead of level and gear, to stop ganking. And even then numbers become an issue. You really just have to make pvp and non-pvp zones, or restict pvp by level ranges for certain areas, and have factions.
I was just thinking about how much I sort of would like a system where you have buildings or factories or territory and you could fight over that and that stuff might help make you better (by making better gear, part of my line of thinking comes from the bed of failed ideas that was SWG) but when you die you didn't die and you couldn't lose...you, your skills, or your gear (but fuck gear because my ideal MMO also has low gear emphasis, but that's probably a different thread). Just those things that are a combination of prestige and wealth acquisition (workers building tools for you, armies swelling to fight other armies etc. etc.)
Edit: This doesn't solve the "I wish I could stab anyone" problem, but I mention it because it's an extrapolation of the combat over resources idea you mentioned, and seems like a step in the right direction for the "I wish there was a reason to kill and not want to die but some people wish there isn't a reason to not want to die" problem.
I wonder how a game would work where you're basically "licensed" to engage in PVP with a certain group based on certain characteristics - whether they're of a particular race or class, whether they themselves are licensed to harry a particular race or class, whether their name is just one of a million retarded variations of Sephiroth/Legolas/whatnot - and then that's the only group you can aggress against. If you're going to piss someone off, piss off the people you have a legitimate hatred of, I say.
I don't think there is a proper solution for that.
The "oh man I could die any second!" thing is really something best left to single-player games, because who really cares if you're griefing head crabs.
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Thing is, casual PVP isn't that big a deal. A random gank for laffs? No biggee. It's actively seeking to keep someone else from progressing that's an issue.
Take, for instance, the last time I was involved in world PVP in WoW. Lone mage or something, three of us, higher level to boot. We wacked her in half a second, snickered a bit, and kept an eye on the corpse. When she rezzed, we waved and let her go back to killing mobs, even helping her a bit by throwing a DoT or two after she gained agro, and pulling agro away from her when she got tangled up in too many mobs, and everyone cheerfully waved goodbye when we were done.
That's a pleasant kind of PVP scenario. A little bit of quick sadism, but nothing worse than throwing a snowball at a school chum.
This is in sharp contrast to the people who would send their level 70 friends to gank 50s who dared to grind the same mobs, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, that I had dealt with earlier that week.
Ganking people inside the Auction House itself was the best. They never see it coming.
I sort of wondered, after the fact, whether the whole thing would really be considered kosher. The people had flagged themselves for pvp - often by simply having flown into Stormwind recently - and I wasn't ganking low-level people solely to pick on them, but because that's all I had a reasonable chance of killing (except for the ones with stupid names, who I did the best to hunt down and kill).
I felt that it was more of a hilarious occurrence: that one time that crazy druid started wrecking shit up in Stormwind. Eventually I had a gang of about four or five people hunting me down, at which point I got a summon to that night's raid. All good fun.
It was best when it was someone in their 40's or 50's doing it and they got completely destroyed.
Aside from the normal gankings in felwood, we would perform dastardly acts of luring horde players to the Felwood cliffs and then mind controlling them to jump off to near certain death into dark shore, where its impossible to get back to felwood and requires either a long ride or a hearth stone.
If towns actually could be taken over, shit would have been glorious.
Huh? Unless you have PVP - Enabled, hopping on a Gryphon (or the Horde equivelent) will actually automatically de-flag you the moment you take flight. At least, it does on PVE realms. Also, if they have PVP - Disabled set up, I'm pretty sure that once you're out of contested territory, shouldn't your pvp flag drop after 5 minutes unless you attack a foe inside the tower or heal someone who is flagged? Basically, unless you were camping the gryphon landing point itself, I don't see how you'd be a huge jackass for doing this.
I don't do it often, but I admit to having ocassionally participated in laying siege to capital cities, usually on my rogue or hunter.
Most of the people he was catching flagged were people just coming out of Battlegrounds.
5 minutes is more then enough time to run out of the Keep, ride to your mailbox, zoom over to the AH and then visit the bank...
Or at least it is for me.
And the graveyards for capital cities aren't all that far away, so it isn't that big a deal.
PVP characters are Pirates that fight each other for resources. They "level" through kills, gear up through controlling different resources and the like. Kind of like EvE in the open ocean.
PVE Characters level the old fasioned traditional way by exploring and traversing and raiding.
And every once in awhile, the PVP characters can raid the PVE characters towns, for unique weapons/PVP titles and the like, while the PvE players that participate and do well get unique armor rewarded to them, maybe some Pirate only weapons and gear, or special armor given out by the govenor of the town.
And of course, you can transfer from PVE to PVP or the other way around maybe say, every 6 months, if you prefer.
I realize that I'm late, but I noted that you listed UO. I played UO for six years and tried the other MMOs; playing WoW, Shadowbane, etc. In the end, I moved back to pretrammel UO. It's free, and it's been up for like four or five years now: http://www.game-master.net
Your welcome, send me a PM if you join up.
I played UO for years and years. I've been a PK an Anti a RPer and everything in between. I've played just about every MMO you can name and beta tested half of them. There's something about early Ultima Online that no one else can capture.
The reason the old UO vets are so passionate about it is because there hasn't been anything else like it. Richard Garriot (UO's creator) created UO almost as a sociological experiment. He wanted a justice system based entirely on the players. The first step to doing this was inciting greed. Everything on your character is lootable. In other words, whenever you die, someone can double click your corpse, and take all the possessions you had on you. This led to a very utilitarian style of play. You never carried anything with you you didn't mind losing. Everything else, went in your secure bank box, which was left completely untouchable by the other players.
The reason people fawn for UO so much, honestly, is because it's skill based. Say what you will, but this isn't really an arguable point when compared to the other games out there. World of Warcraft is not skill based. This is coming from a dwarf shadow priest in full epics.
The reason UO is considered skill based is because in old school UO, there were really no magic weapons and armor that gave a distinct advantage. UOers call WoW an "item-based" PvP system, because it isn't about who has more skill, it's about who has the better gear and to some extent the Rock-Paper-Scissors mentality.
UO is also a skill based system because it actually uses skills. There are no levels. You don't go from 1-60 or 1-70 in UO. There are like 80 different skills ranging from magery to swordsmanship, and you get to choose seven of them and make a unique template. You create your characters abilities, it's not cookie cutter like WoW is.
I noticed the infraction post from the misguided but passionate guy on the second page. For those of you that don't know, the term Care-bear (as it relates to MMOs) comes from Ultima Online. When EA bought OSI (Garriot's company) they catered to the minority and put in a mirror land of the map called "Trammel". In Trammel, you were not attackable. It split the playerbase. It literally ruined the game. The effects were felt far and wide.
The economy was kept in balance because people were cautious and careful about getting gold from dungeons. PKs (player killers) would run in and sweep the dungeon every now and then and kill you and take your gold. Usually you'd only get like 2000-3000 gold before you made a bank run, because you didn't want to lose too much if you got killed.
When trammel came out, the people who wanted to be rich without risk all packed up and moved to it. They could farm dungeons literally for hours with no fear of reprecussion. In UO a ridiculously wealthy person had like eight to ten million gold. A couple months after trammel came out it wasn't rare to see a "care-bear" with fifty million or more. The people who stayed in the old land simply couldn't keep up with the money gains. So more and more people packed up and moved to trammel. Eventually, Felucca became a ghost world. Trammel was a glorified graphical chat room (no exaggeration here, that's really what it was. Ask someone who used to play UO what a "Bank-sitter" was).
When we say we want old-school "real" PvP, we mean that we want PvP that is skill based. We don't want GvP (gear vs player). It's not a matter of griefing or not griefing, it's a matter of playing to get better. It's a matter of risk vs reward. It's a matter of running out of town and having a rush of adrenaline because you never knew when a red name (PK) was gonna popup outta the woods and you'd be fighting (or running) for your life.
If the only games you've ever played are GvP, then you are missing out on how wonderful that experience can be. Don't take the word of the people who came after trammel. Things became legendary. Old UO was blown out of proportion as being an orgy of griefing and assholes. The people that tend to complain about UO are the ones that didn't stick around to adapt. They played two days, got killed and looted, and said "Well screw this game, then".
My first day in UO, I got killed and looted and lost all my newbie money. I was really pissed. I was like 13 at the time, and I remember being absolutely infuriated. But you know what I did? I wrote the guys name down, started a new character, trained up and went to kill him. And I did, and I looted him, and got a deep feeling of satisfaction and revenge. I never looked back.
Like I said, UO lost it's luster after trammel. But if you ever want to play a game that's skill based, and find out what real risk vs reward is, the client is free now, and you can play on a server with the oldschool ruleset and no trammel over on the Angel Island server.
-Eli Drachen, Great Lakes, 1998-2005
No it wouldn't. On 90% of the servers, one side would take all the holdable towns 95% of the time. Every couple days, the other side might form up an organized raid group to take one back... for the five minutes before the other side gathers up whatever random people are available and steamrolls it back.
Hillsbrad was only fun because neither side could take it. Also: seeing people chased by an ass-beating squad of about 50 guards.
Imagine skirmishing in a warzone for weeks, gathering bands of fellow adventurers to take an enemy tower only to be thrown back by enemy warbands backed by NPC strike squads. Eventually one side would gain enough leverage (strategic positions, kills, stationed troops, resources etc.) to make a final push against the enemies desperate last stand. Weeks of conflict ending in victory or defeat, and war stories enough to fill countless forum threads.
We aren't there yet by far, but with enough resources (say for instance, the piles of money made by WoW) it could be made reality with our current computer technology level.
Which means they liked the carebear scenario better than the original.
So while it may have ruined it for the PVPers, it improved it, presumably, for the PVEers, unless there's some extra factor here you haven't mentioned for those who have never touched UO.
So, unless that extra factor is at work... this just shows, again, that UO-style PVP requires something of a captive audience. That audience hasn't been captive since Trammel, by the sound of it.