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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.'"
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.
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."
Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP. And game developers generally don't care about that minority, as they cause other customers (the ones gang banged) to stop playing their game.
PvP is much better done as optional addon in controlled environments where all sides are fighting on even and clear terms. The idea of free world PvP is an antique that only ever satisfied griefers and the occasional masochist.
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly :)
...
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly :)
And the reason for the success of EVE is exactly because it aims to satisfy a very specific minority. :)
So using the word antique in my original post was perhaps an exaggeration. It is more a matter of what client group you aim at. I would however be very surprised to see any new high value production aimed at world PvP. At least any western production. I know that Asia seems to have a generally different mindset around the whole PvP subject.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.