Slashdot Mirror
ArenaNet's MMO Design Manifesto
An anonymous reader writes "ArenaNet studio head Mike O'Brien has posted his vision for a new type of MMORPG, which they used in developing Guild Wars 2. Quoting: 'MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I'm out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn't I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he's going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? ... [In Guild Wars 2], when someone kills a monster, not just that player's party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill. When an event is happening in the world – when the bandits are terrorizing a village – everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded.'"
Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun. I can see adding consequences to killing someone (or even taking it out of some games), but to say it should NEVER happen in any game is silly.
Qxe4
Even if your teammates stole kills and hoarded items, everyone at least obtained 100% of the money and XP earned from the fight. It's a great concept, and I'd like to see it carried even further in MMOs.
Sounds sort of like the open quests from Warhammer online. Show up in area, help out, get loot bag. True, there's a ranking system which means if your efforts weren't good enough you won't get anything immediate, but you still earn points which raise your rank in the chapter and (eventually) enable you to pick up useful, class-specific equipment.
everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill.
This makes no more sense when a game says it than when a Democrat promises it. With this logic a few players with a few pieces of gold could go off to a remote location and take turns teaming up against each other, and soon their few pieces of gold would grow to a vast sum (it work only take 30 or 40 such robberies). If the game is this sloppy with it's economy then inflation will keep everyone poor.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You're asking for communism?
It won't follow the existing model of Guild Wars 1.. a few short months of "experiencing the story", followed by years of title grinding for a bronze wall plaque in the sequel.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
What about pooled experience + extra experience, as I noticed used in 'Valthirian Arc':
50% of the experience gained is put into the shared pool (equal amount to all contributors), and the rest is distributed around based on proportional contributions.
e.g. two PCs, PC1 does a very small amount of damage, PC2 does almost all damage: PC1: 25% total experience, PC2: 75% total experience
Ask me about repetitive DNA
That it will use Aion's model, where whoever takes more than 50% of a mobs health gets the loot?
Mages and Rogue-like classes will have a field day.
To each their own. I realize that some people thrive on ganking and being an ass, but then a lot of people don't. And each game can choose their own niche, and decide if they want to cater to one category at the expense of losing another.
The griefer segment is kind of an easy choice, though, since you mention taking it to the point where you're trying to get people out of the game. A single unchecked griefer can lose them a hundred subscription of other people, so basically they're actually losing money by catering to those. They're not any sleep if you leave for lack of that kind of fun.
But, at any rate, each dev team and publisher ultimately makes choices to cater to market A at the expense of market B. E.g., Blizzard chose to cater to the medieval fantasy fans, at the expense of being less fun for some of us who'd have preferred a good SF MMO. (Say, World Of Starcraft;) E.g., they chose to have guns and explosives and helicopters, which actually was at the expense of losing some purists who'd have preferred a more Dark Ages kinda setting where the highest tech is maybe a crossbow. (Heck, much as I'm otherwise for SF, I'd prefer to keep medieval stuff medieval, if it had to be medieval in the first place.) E.g., they chose to have no xp penalty for death, even though that made some people cry bloody murder. E.g., they chose to have cartoonish graphics, even though for some people it causes them to cancel the subscription. Heck, it's still the #1 stated reason for not playing WoW. E.g., they chose to have separate servers, which some of us like, but then it made the fans of a more Guild Wars style instancing say it sucks. Etc.
Ultimately you can't please everyone. To make player group X happier, you have to make player group Y unhappier. You get to choose which group you want more.
E.g., to make medieval fantasy fans happier, you have to make strictly SF fans a lot less interested in the game. And, again, you can't please everyone. You can't make a game that's high fantasy with elves and horses _and_ SF with warp drives and tricorders, because you'll just annoy both groups instead of catering to both. (Though using SF as a backstory for a medieval game sometimes works.)
To some extent you can try to give group Y something else to do. But sometimes it's not easy to reconcile. You can't give griefers something else to do, because they need those unwilling victims. At some point you just have to just let go of group Y.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Doesn't he realize that current MMO model is already perfect as it is, as an endless revenue generating device? No other form of digital entertainment can top the inimitable success of World of Warcraft's eternal cash grind. The subtleties of the conflicts and drama caused by XP distribution rules based on real market economics serve a noble purpose: to increase the realism, immersion, and playtime of the subscriber to keep them coming back for more of the realpolitik of hamster-wheel mechanics month after month. By freeing up the restraints on rewards, he risks alienating those who play these games to develop their societical diplomacy skills in parallel with their real lives, which inevitably tend towards either tribalism or isolationism anyway.
Humans are competitive, I DON'T want to help every Tom, Dick and Harry who I run across. I'll help guildies, but other than that, I'd prefer to be selfish and greedy in my MMO. Hell, if WoW allowed for same faction killing in the world enviro, I'd gank my own kind too... If they want a true care bear 'everyone can help everyone' game they shouldn't call it 'Guild Wars', 'Hello Kitty Island Adventure' seems more appropriate.
All the changes affecting world PVP in WoW have been _away_ from PvP.
Moved battlemasters to cities -> No BG entrance PvP anymore. (eg. Tarren Mill vs South Shore)
Flying mounts -> Opposing faction players don't meet each other anymore as everyone flies on _mostly dismount immune_ mounts.
Flagged PVP zones even on PVP servers. -> No PVP unless both want it.
Sancturay zones on neutral cities like Dalaran, Sathrath. -> No PvP.
Overkill, quickly respawning guards in neutral villages + dura penalty when killed by one. -> No PvP.
And probably many others I don't remember anymore. One would expect such limits on MMO PvE servers only, but with WoW these limits are on PvP servers!
Thank you for the insightful article that quite a few people on this site have actually read. I know all the comments so far don't indicate that.. and you really shouldn't hold out hope for some interesting comments. Guild Wars 2 looks like it will be awesome. I look forward to reading more articles about it, and will probably buy the game when it comes out.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Dungeons and dragons online already does this.
All XP and rewards you get are based around how you as a group finish the instance (you do get penalties and bonuses depending on how many times you die though, and if you left the dungeon), you always run around with a group and no other characters are visible outside of the cities and all characters in the cities interact with you as if you are on of the few heroes helping it.
No collecting wolves tails there, you help people from level 1 and forward with actual questing which feels like it's helping someone.
Otoh, the game started breaking at around level 8 or so when I played it, especially due to haven essentially eternal gold and quite simply too large monsters which made claustrophobic dungeons pretty much impossible.
Eve is tiny, on any chart it rides the bottom. Oh, it gets a LOT of attention but that is in no relation to its financial success.
Most MMO's aspire to higher subscription ratings with 1 million being considered the line between success and an "also ran".
I always find it amusing to see PK and PvP and twitch fans scream that their genre's are OH SO POPULAR and yet not a single game that gives them what they want is a success. Odd that. Why are PK and PvP and Twitch fans not playing the games aimed at them?
Meanwhile, the closest to WoW is Lotro and that is a distinct PvE game of the old mold.
It is like saying people LOVE FPS, when Quake sells 10 copies. The figures would not support the claims.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The obvious problem is that if everyone else actually liked hunting someone down in PvP, they'd already be on a PvP server anyway. You're proposing a system which basically asks some people to play the game how they don't like it, and not pursue the goals _they_ want, just to give some sad loser the attention he craves.
I suggest you start with reading Bartle's paper.
The achiever segment (those who'll just have to have more gold and reputation) and the killer segment are actually very distinct categories and natural enemies. They like different things in a game, play for different goals, and both tend to despise each other. Asking an achiever to play a killer role in that pose isn't giving him fun stuff to do, it's trying to convince him to do unfun (for him) stuff and ultimately conclude that the game sucks (he hasn't been doing what he likes, after all) and leave. It's akin to trying to make some gazelles hunt lions. Even if they could, they're not going to enjoy it.
It also does nothing whatsoever for the other categories. The socializers aren't even going to be motivated by that gold and fame to take a role they despise. The explorers won't find anything to discover in it either.
So essentially all that would happen is that some killers might be convinced to play with other killers... but that's something that's not much fun for them. Unwilling victims are where their fun is at.
And in the process you gave both free hand to ruin everyone else's fun.
Besides, the "player run justice" idiocy has been done to death before, and never worked. Letting the players deal with "bandits" so you don't have to, has been not just tried and failed on UO, it's been the holy grail on MUDs too and it failed abjectly there each time. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." I fail to see why an experiment which failed every single time before, should be hailed as _the_ solution that'll work this time.
And finally, well, I've heard the "provide some colour" excuse before. And the "I can't RP if I can't gank" and the "it's unrealistic" and "without someone ganking them those players will lack a challenge and leave in droves!!!!11eleventeen" In my brief days of coding for a MUD, you'd be surprised how many people felt a need to whine about why they should be allowed to drive others off the game, and how limited a repertoire of excuses they had.
In the end it's a non-sequitur. What matters isn't "colour" for its own sake. Nor "realism", nor "challenge", nor "RP" for their own sakes, for that matter. What matters is whether enough players like it or not. If the larger mass doesn't, well, take your colour somewhere else, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sounds like a great idea, and I wonder if they push it all the way through. Does rare loot also spawn for everyone? Or does everyone get their own "chest" with their own drop? Could be intresting but what are mobs going to be like that might be attacked by 500 low levels at once? There is a reason most games don't encourage grouping like this, it upsets the game balance. 500 lvl 1's could team up to defeat a lvl 10 monster and all get lvl 10 drops?
Mind you, I don't see that as a problem, that is smart thinking and the individual risk would be high because if you are the one stomped on... bye bye.
It is about time MMO's get a breath of fresh air and not just more twitch, more pk and more PvP because that has been proven to be a financial death end. Enough games tried and not a single one of them has managed to break the 1 million player barrier that is the line between success and being just another game that survives from month to month only to dwindle when players get fed up with slow updates because their is no money to pay for them.
GW's was/is a lot of fun, but in PvE its combat is to simple, if they can truly make something intresting out of this AND create a TRUE MMO (GW, is a hub game), then I am certainly buying it.
Oh, and boob jiggle, that is important too.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
But why is that?
Because they implemented PvP wrong.
Being invaded and killed could have been a thrilling experience. What makes it utterly dull for most people is that your options seems to be:
A) Respawn and die again.
B) Log out.
Imagine a game where lowlevel players that are killed in their home areas would be conscripted as local militia and set to control siege-like defensive installations. Instead of being spawnraped, the lowlevels getting killed would be given immense power - but limited in time and only usable to fight off the invaders.
It's all about creating win/win situations. A lot of people dislike PvP because it turns into repetetive, frustrating gameplay.
That is a design issue.
I lost my sig.
This is how MMO gaming should be, with nothing coming at the expense of another player. Unfortunately, there is a portion of the MMO population that will not be satisfied unless they can have their domination and bullying fantasies, and even though they ruin gaming for everyone else, they're big enough that few game makers have the guts to take them on.
The fact is that nevertheless some of us don't want to have anything to do with PvP at all. It's not a question of feeling stronger or weaker, it's simply a question of it not being what I want to do in a game. Conscripting me into some group that _has_ to do PvP is just going to piss me off more and make me cancel the subscription.
That's the kind of solution that presumes that everyone else too is a complexed idiot who's just there to feel powerful by ganking someone weaker. Some of us play for entirely different goals and reasons, though.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think the issue that the GP pointed was uncontrolled PvP environment.
What you describe is actually a controlled PvP environment.
Coordination between people in real life is hard. If you have a god like arbiter making everything fair it takes away a lot of the realism from social interactions.
And how many of those previously killed, now slaves to the overlords are going to want to keep playing and PAYING. I for one would just delete character and start over so I wasn't stuck as a conscript. The other problem with free-world PvP is that it is hard for new players to level and get any of the good stuff because all the veterans are killing them off.
What would be a reasonable PVP design change is that, if you killed a character in a controlled area (much like EVE secure areas) the killer would be caught, locked up and put in a penalty box for days or weeks (years game time) for murder. Or - as in EVE, the character is just killed - to respawn and start over. Wilderness areas (non-secure) would be much like EVE 0-security areas - venture there and you better be able to defend yourself or accept the consequences.
And eventually, everyone will know that is the type of game it is and there will be no one to attack except others, like yourself, who want to rob and kill. At that point, the game will shut down because there aren't enough people paying to play.
Am I the only one who looked at the RSS feed and read, "ArpaNets MMO Design Manifesto"? I should stop reading these things in the morning.
I see nothing in that article that is a concrete design choice the GW2 team has made to specifically address the "problems" of current MMOs. They simply provide out-of-context examples of potentially cool scenarios. Wouldn't it be cool if we fired through walls of fire!!!! Yes it would, the first 15 times.
MMO design needs to take a radical step away from "MMO combat mechanics" into other directions (some people suggested more social aspects which I do not like) in order to be innovative. These mechanics were spawned by old school D&D mechanics by way of MUDs, and honestly, these ideas are OLD. Not all are bad, either. Until they do innovate though, no amount of marketing by game studios will convince me to subscribe to their new games. Neither will it convince all the people currently playing WoW to switch to something else.
There is a reason millions are playing that game. It provides cheap entertainment value for them, through a myriad of activities that, although repetitive, are greatly enhanced through the social aspect that is provided by online connectivity to a context of a world. Combat is boring, UNLESS you have to orchestrate with 25 people. Crafting is boring UNLESS you can sell your wares to a market economy. And so on.
As soon as a game is created to provide the same or greater entertainment value to people, they will jump. It just has to be innovative enough to make them jump. And yeah, open world group quests already failed, with WAR. That game could have been a radical attempt to reforge the MMO landscape, but the designers instead opted to play it safe and re-create WoW. Who will be next? From what I have read it doesn't seem like GW2 is ready to take up that cup.
Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. Unrestricted PvP works in Eve (and I'd argue, pretty much only in EvE) because there are serious penalties. Lose a major ship, lose training time- it can take a while for things to get back to where you were. Even the gankers realize this, and avoid combat unless they know they are going to win, and they realize the guy may well be back with friends to stomp them into the ground.
Compare this to something like WoW. What's the penalty for dying? Running back to your corpse. Even in something like Darkfall with full looting you just have people run around naked, since there's no real penalty for dying otherwise.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
So a snake is going to drop 20 snake eyes on death? Experience makes sense- although 100% seems way overboard, you will just have mobs of people fighting trash and levelling like crazy. But wait, it's only if they "significantly" contribute- good luck with that. You will have people playing characters that can do the most damage. Or healers who just heal everyone who doesn't need it.. fighting for heals such that everyone just wastes mana. Loot does not make sense, and it was just lead to a world where everyone has everything. Fun. Player's wanting items/spells/skills others do not posses is what makes MMO's interesting. If you don't think so, then just use IRC.
Actually, WH40K doesn't pretend to be both medieval and SF at the same time, does it? I mean, sure, it has power armours and chain swords and whatnot, but, really, those are just as much SF props.
I wouldn't mind a WH40K MMO, to be honest. It has a metric buttload of lore and character by now.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
And you can also imagine that this game will be just as destitute in players as Darkfall. The vast majority of people aren't going to want to play that.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat.
Those would also effectively kill PvP in your PvP game.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
is that why uo has never took off ? is that why wow has been such a success ?
Read radical news here
indeed others should be a welcome sight, not something unwanted in mmo games. after all, what's the point of playing a mmo, if you are going to limit your social circle to some limited number of people in your play group or your guild ? LAN play already offers such gameplay, or games that have limited server capacity.
A mmo should aim for MASSIVE multiplayer. that is the whole point of it. it shouldnt encourage seclusion, isolation, animosity in between players.
Read radical news here
Eh, all these ideas that people throw out on solving PvP are always dumb. If you get to be powerful after you die, then people will just purposely die to become more powerful.
PvP in MMOs is not popular for a lot of different reasons. Some people don't like PvP. Generally, one person has a huge advantage over another based on gear. For Eve, it is that there are fairly harsh consequences to death that encourages people to stack the deck so that a normal player doesn't even have a chance as they warp in to a swarm. This causes people to take less risk and make PvP boring. People just fly around camping at gates hoping for hours that some poor guy will come through.
PvP is never going to appeal to some people. But to do it to appeal to the most, it simply needs to have a couple of qualities: small penalties for death and an even playing field. That's why online FPS's are popular. In general it is a fair fight with a simple respawn.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
FTA:
When you play an RPG, you want to experience a compelling and memorable storyline.
No. Common new-school mistake.
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
So a snake is going to drop 20 snake eyes on death?
Sure. Why not? Realism? Yeah cus that's less realistic than a snake dropping 0 or 1 eyes, or wolves with no liver. Or a single eye taking up the same amount of space in your backpack as a 20 gold gold bars, or... Yeah. Who cares.
But wait, it's only if they "significantly" contribute- good luck with that. You will have people playing characters that can do the most damage. Or healers who just heal everyone who doesn't need it.. fighting for heals such that everyone just wastes mana.
Oh noes, people playing characters that deal the most damage! And the 'fighting for heals' only happens if you make several specific assumptions about what was meant by "seriously [the actual word used] contribute". Of course fighting for heals happens regardless when you have more healers than you need because otherwise they are just sitting there being bored. Hmm... the whole idea behind this idea is to make contributing to group efforts (without explicitly joining a group) serves a purpose, so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!
Loot does not make sense, and it was just lead to a world where everyone has everything.
Only if you assume it applies to all loot and not just crap like snake eyes that nobody is jealous of anyone for having, but rather simply gets pissed if someone else stymies their chance to get them and end the stupid quest. I highly doubt they meant that everyone who defeats a boss monster gets a copy of every piece of equipment the boss drops.
The enemies of Democracy are
In the old mud days we setup something like this. If you killed someone you paid for it. Granted the city guards were push overs. So no much of an issue. Then we changed the spawn code. 100, 500 push over guards are still going to hurt you. 1000 are going to kill you since you cannot hit all of them at once. When you PK'd your room wide attack skills were disabled. Also the greater the level difference the greater the response was. If the level difference was bigger then 50 levels, a really big guard (actually a mob with huge attack power, health, and nasty attacks) spawned and hunted you down. It could teleport to you and attack you, even in no fight rooms. So it could attack you there, but you could not fight back.
We did have a few towns were you could PK. No flag, no guards attacking you. It was well posted and below a certain level you could not get in there. That was by design. To stop the low level from being slaughtered by high levels.
What you are describing was implemented in Ultima Online. Kill a player, all the guards in cities mark you KoS (kill on sight). The solution was to not go to cities anymore. No banking, but there's plenty of killed player corpses to loot.
So, roving gangs of PKers hang out at the load points between areas, and kill your character while your computer is loading the next area's graphics. The solution for a while was the formation of anti PKers, who would descend in mass and swarm a PK group. But, now their characters were also flagged as PKers.
So yes, it ended up as a feudal system. Unfortunately, it was a world where the PK eventually won.
Sure. Why not? Realism?
Yes.
or wolves with no liver.
Because during the fight perhaps you injured the beast so much that parts weren't very useful. I'm not trying to say everything is realistic, but at least there is a vauge sense of realism. You don't find anything odd about a snake that drops 1 eye if 1 person kills it but drops 20 eyes if 20 people kill the same snake? Let's push that even further, you would have people getting in large groups to create an insane amount of loot because they are all doing the same small damage to a monster. Wacko possible effects on the economy. So yes, some sense of realism.
Oh noes, people playing characters that deal the most damage!
Yeah, because it's great when the main incentive is for everyone to play the same character. Who is going to play a buff/support class if your benefit from going about buffing everyone is zip. Or if you get "credit", then it invalidates your statement about design below.
so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!
What I was getting at is you will have people chain healing the tank for the sole purpose of trying to get the heal to hit as soon as they lose health so they can be getting credit for it. No one will be playing strategically, they will just be running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to contribute to everything at once so they can get the most of everything.
I highly doubt they meant that everyone who defeats a boss monster gets a copy of every piece of equipment the boss drops.
Nice assumption, too bad the article completely contradicts you.
when someone kills a monster, not just that player's party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill.
everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded.
I'm not trying to say everything is realistic, but at least there is a vauge sense of realism.
Haha, no there isn't. How realistic that spiders carry gold coins and swords, animal skins instantly turn to leather when cut from the body, you can carry 100 gold bars around and be as encumbered as if you were carrying 100 flowers, and so on. You can rationalize the behavior of the random number generator, but that's not realism. But who cares? Game mechanics before realism. When realism gets in the way of the game, realism gets out of the way. They didn't make wolves sometimes not drop a liver because it's "realistic" that your Decaptitate attack damaged its liver. They did it to stretch out how long it takes to collect N wolf livers.
Yeah, because it's great when the main incentive is for everyone to play the same character. Who is going to play a buff/support class if your benefit from going about buffing everyone is zip. Or if you get "credit", then it invalidates your statement about design below.
I take it you're talking about this statement: "so hey let's assume they'll design it so that you get nothing if you try to heal but it isn't needed!" That was about how you were assuming it would be designed, because it produced a negative outcome, rather than assume they do something smart.
Similarly, there is no reason to assume that your reward scales directly with the amount of damage you do, ergo no reason to assume anyone would only focus on maximum damage classes and ignore support classes -- any more than they already do, simply because people like doing the most damage! It is trivial to think of ways to implement this mechanic so it doesn't encourage what you fear. But you choose to assume the opposite.
What I was getting at is you will have people chain healing the tank for the sole purpose of trying to get the heal to hit as soon as they lose health so they can be getting credit for it.
Yes that was perfectly clear. What I was getting at is that you're making a number of unsupported assumptions about what constitutes "seriously contributing", like that only effective healing counts and that you need enough of it that you'll have to continuously try to snipe heals in order to reach the threshold when not much healing is needed. You forgot to mention that under these bad assumptions, there are cases where no healer would get any credit at all!
Nice assumption, too bad the article completely contradicts you.
No, as with everything else you have assumed, it is possible to interpret it that way, but not necessarily the case. "Everyone gets rewarded" does not necessarily mean "every possible piece of loot is given to everyone". It could mean that each participant gets their own loot roll and thus different equipment, or any other number of possibilities before you even get to the concept that it may not apply unchanged for all encounters.
By consistently assuming the one possibility that would create the negative results you predict, you are simply begging the question.
The enemies of Democracy are
"think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. "
No, they would be much more clever to do it, but they would simply make sure to go a greater group and kill weaker target not belonging to guild or groups. Basically the lower level player not belonging to guild or groups would be easy prey.
There will ALWAYS be ganker no matter the penalty in open pvp.
Furthermore Why the FUCK wqould you want to impose PVP onto people which DO NOT WANT IT ? The only reason would be that you are a PVPer and need fresh victims...
I think it's about letting high level players kill low level players. I don't get that at all. High level player should either get huge penalties for killing lowbies or prevented from doing so in the first place (the chicken in WAR is great).
Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. [In a world without ganking, players] avoid combat unless they know they are going to win.
Sounds like ganking to me. I actually enjoy PvP with people close to my skill level and see no point in penalizing anyone for entering into a fair fight. If anything, penalize players for be dishonorable by entering into a not fair fight (maybe losing honor/arena points in WoW).
But hey, that's my whole issue with the vast majority of RPGs and RTSs -- crushing victories aren't nearly as much fun as nail-biting come-from-behind victories, but they're not designed around that experience (and you're even penalized for it!) -- they're designed around "don't fight unless you can win"...which is simply not fun.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The drawback is that the low level player is forced to do a certain thing here. I they log in and decide that today they're going to work on their crafting, but then some moron decides this is the day to raid the crafting center, the low level player is still stuck with bad choices: respawn and die again, be conscripted into some idiotic pvp thing, or log out.
PvP is competition. Many players want nothing to do with competition. PvP should always be consensual without any exceptions. If someone has a temporary excess of testosterone, there are better ways to use those hormones.
It reminds me of a discussion about griefing that I read about a few months ago on some internet forum. Naturally, the "real" players were mocking the "carebears" and the latter was levying the usual futile appeal to empathy.
Q: But don't you feel bad that you've just ruining someone else's experience?
A: Why should I feel bad?
Naturally, the "griefers" just couldn't understand this appeal to empathy. There's a reason for that. One of these "griefers" went on to try and reverse the appeal, arguing along these lines, "But you just don't understand the thrill of killing people in a game." It honestly made me think of a rapist. ("But you just don't understand the thrill I get from raping women.")
Honestly, I think that the biggest harm that we (those of us with empathy) do to ourselves is to diminish "griefers" by giving them a name like "griefers".
They already have a name.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Penalty for being ganked over and over in WoW? Not being able to play that day. And not being able to sell or turn in quests to dead NPCs. I consider denial of service to be a major drawback. And yes, you can get flagged pvp without intending it, it is very easy to do, until you're more experienced and learn to never invite anyone with a pvp flag to your group and never to do a drive by heal or buff or rez without checking if they're flagged or not.
They already have a name.
No.
The vast majority of what society calls "games" are not cooperative efforts against an automated opponent or towards completing a non-confrontational group challenge. They are mostly PVP. Chess is most often a PVP game (as are most board games). Racing (automotive, equine, on foot, whatever) is PVP. Poker is a PVP game (as are many card games). Boxing is a PVP game. Soccer is a PVP game (most sports, whether one-on-one or team-based, are competitive affairs -- PVP games). Most tabletop RPGs are, by default, PVP-enabled (whether your DM and playmates are receptive to the concept will differ depending on the table in question, but the rules are almost always in the book). Bringing it back to video games, most strategy games, fighting games, and FPS games made for multiple players are PVP. Puzzle games often have a PVP mode, going right back to the arcade release of Tetris. Many popular single-player focused games offer a head-to-head multiplayer mode, as well (even if you exclude games that favor largely uncompetitive "hot-seat" gameplay). Also, a fair number of PVP console-style RPGs exist, such as Pokemon. While I admit that video games offer a phenomenally broad selections of "Solitaire" amusements, and of late have offered some interesting and popular cooperative experiences (the rhythm-game phenomenon, for instance), the fact is that PVP gaming is widespread and not just the province of the morally deviant. Let's quash that little psychopathy meme.
All of that being said, in almost all these cases, PVP is an "opt-in" part of the experience. You know exactly what you're getting into when you start playing. You go to boxing classes, you take it absolutely for granted that you may get a broken nose. You play chess, you know you may lose, and you know that the other person might even be a dick about it. If your martial arts gym is full of punch-drunk idiots looking to hurt new students, you find another gym or go learn yoga instead; if some acquaintance is a boob about winning chess, you don't sit down at the board with them. Getting down to video games, if you can't stand the idea of being vulnerable to other players, you don't play that way. You play Pokemon alone (or only with friendly players looking to catchemall); you play on a PVE WoW server. Playing PVP doesn't mean you're immoral/amoral. I've played PVP RPGs since before UO, back in the MUD days, and my philosophy then is the same as it is now -- Tough but Fair. I don't start trouble, but I don't back down from a fight I can win. If you look like you're looking for a fight, I'll grease you, damn right, but if you're just running quests or traveling you probably don't have anything to fear from me. Assuming you don't target me repeatedly, you don't pester my allies, and you don't start pinching my spawns or otherwise crowding me out, then I'm fine co-existing. Go turn in your bear butts, go get your spiky pants. Does that make me a psychopath? No, it doesn't. It makes me an ordinary human who likes to play my games against other ordinary humans sometimes, and one who doesn't mind the experience of always being just a bit vulnerable to other human players. I also don't wander around in PVE servers and games moaning about the lack of PVP. I knew what I logged in to play. Mostly, I just don't play under PVE conditions.
If some group of devs state that they want to eschew PVP, fine. Don't expect me to be in the beta, or to be an early or long-term customer. I've bought a few PVE MMOs, but I've never played them for long. Why? Boring. Computer-driven critters are the same every time. Kill them once, they won't come back at you with a fresh playbook next time. Players do different things almost every time, and if you pound someone into the dirt today, bet on them coming back tomorrow (or in a month) as much sharper players. I can have fun playing with experienced OR mid-
That goes both ways, though. The bigger problem is by now that you can't even be in a PvE game by now, or even a game with PvE servers, without a horde of idiots coming and whining about how it totally sucks if it isn't turned into full unrestricted PvP, and how everyone needs some ridiculous penalties for the smallest mistake. STO for example almost had a rebellion and counter-rebellion over that. Plus, here we are in a game where they don't follow the Eve philosophy and we already have hordes of idiots whining about how much fun it is to ruin someone else's instance, and how it sucks if the game allows anyone to not be their unwilling victims.
So I could tell you your exact words in return: You obviously don't want to be on that PvE server. So why don't you just avoid it and leave us in peace?
You found Eve and obviously like it there. Fine by me. In fact, by now I'm happy that it exists. It keeps a certain kind of people there instead of ruining the other games I play. Huzzah. But then kindly stay there. I don't come over to demand that Eve sprouts a non-PvP flag, return the favour and don't come demanding that every single game out there be turned into a griefer paradise.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Come on, at least try. They created chart2 because WoW makes everyone else a brown line at the bottom. CHART 1, that is the secret to success.
Eve does alright but it the typical niche MMO. Nothing wrong with that, but Guild Wars aspires to more and has done more (although unfair to compare since GW is free after you buy the box). I do NOT dislike Eve, I just get upset when people try to pretend it is a contender to AAA titles. Respect it for what it is but accept that if gameplay of Eve was really what people want, it would have more subscribers.
My point is that subscription figures show that people do not like open PvP (PK) and twitch, at least not enough to pay for the games that provide it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.