PVP & Death: Current Thinking Megapost

Way to ASSume. I want gear to be purposeful and not a treadmill like every other MMO. When I was playing by myself, it was great to go from a buster sword to the Masamune and I still want people to have that but if that is all it is why wouldn't I go and play Final Fantasy 15 instead of this?
I've never played Ultima anything so you're not going to sell me on that. Have fun trying to flame me because I want something better than a gear grind. Flaunting your ignorance about me is not going to make me want gear progression. I don't want it to be the deciding factor in my fights no matter how much you try to make me look like a naked pker out to rob people.

Sure, I am going to be pissed when I get ganked and someone takes my ice-sword because I was on my way to go kill some fire creatures but at least I can contact a blacksmith friend and commission another instead of being like "Oh noes! I lost my Masamune again!" Besides it's already going to suck to have everyone walking around with the Masamune if we play it your way.

 

+1.You will get pissed.Like i said everyone does.I was pissed every time i died and was looted no matter how many times i have done that to others.But that will make you as you said contact your blacksmith friend etc etc.Player interaction
You can always have the Masamune/Thunderfury experience from a bunch of games around.The opportunity of a game that a player trully affects it in every way?Now thats something no game offered from UO time till now with the exception of EVE which is a different matter...

 

What you should also mention is GETTING PISSED OFF IS AWESOME. it makes the game real and motivates you to learn to play better or hire people to exact your revenge! The game possibilities created by player driven worlds is limitless!

 

As for your first point: Re-read this thread and you can find MANY reasons for engaging in PvP other than full loot (or any loot for that matter). The majority of those revolve around the challenge. In fact, YOU have made the very same argument, that the challenge of working against humans vs. AI is a driving force for your desire for a different system. You are contradicting yourself a little here. If PvP held no lure other than full loot, I think that competitive games like Street Fighter or nearly every racing game in existence would NOT exist.

As to this second part. I'll give you a different outcome. I'll play this one. Of course that's not a huge deal in the scheme of things. I am, after all, only one person. However, I suggest you get used to the idea of only consensual PvP, because that is one of the few things we know is true and not a simple proposal.

IF, full, open, non-consensual PvP is the only thing that will satisfy you, I suggest you follow through with your threat and give up on this game. You are not going to get it. Or, you could take the route that many of our PvP lovers and loot lovers have taken and try to come up with a better system than the one proposed, so the devs have more to work with. The ball is in your court. Are you going to play the game, or are you gonna take your ball and go home?

 

Two things:

- EA acquired Origin in 1992. UO was released in 1997, and according to publicly available info, it's development started in 1995. UO was an EA product from the very start.

- You don't have to convince us forum posters about that. You have to convince the devs, many of them UO veterans, including one that has said on this very site that PK activity was the #1 reason players unsubscribed from UO. Anecdotes are very unlikely to sway someone that had first hand experience with what you are talking about.

In every pen and paper RPG group I know — and I know most groups in my city, since together with my brother I own the only local store that sells RPG books — a player that decides to harm his own group will be summarily kicked out, his actions likely reversed by the GM, unless the whole thing was either set up by the GM or done with the consent of every involved player. While I've heard that pen and paper groups where non-consensual PvP happens exist, I've never seen one.

Sincerely, the likeliest outcome would be for most PvE players to just leave the game, leaving it greatly diminished.

Ever heard of the Bartle Test? It's based on a paper by Richard Bartle dealing with, among other things, how activity by "killer" archetype players — think PK and Anti-PK — tends to kill MUDs by driving away every other kind of player.

In other words, this phenomena — PK players driving everyone away — has been studied since before graphical MMOs even existed, and it's quite real.

UO had another element that will never happen again: it didn't have strong competition. If the player wanted to try a graphical MMO, he had to put up with UO's PvP, player looting, etc. Thus, both "wolves" and "sheep" were forced into the same game.

This is not true anymore. Players that don't want that aspect of risk can just go play one of the dozens of other MMO games where it doesn't exist. If someone attempts to do a game like UO — like Darkfall and Mortal Online attempt, BTW — then the game will attract "wolves" almost exclusively, with only a few, very rare, "sheep" that actually enjoy being hunted joining.

So, sincerely, the feeling of the old UO will never return. Not even if a dev attempts to build a game faithful to those old concepts. The player base will be different, and the resulting atmosphere will likely be far closer to current Darkfall than to old UO.

(As an aside, following Archeage news was interesting. Seems like the devs originally wanted something akin to UO, with stealing, PvP in most places where playing was worthwhile, gear decay, and so on, but have been backing away from that due to players not enjoying it. And that is in Korea, a country where the player base seems to enjoy PvP more than US players.)

 

Nothing like a threat or a whine and sorry if it sounded like that.Its merely the logical outcome of a person (for this discussion is me) playing a game that offers more or less a same gameplay like a series of others that he played and at some point in the near future quiting it.And of course i will do several tries to find a gameplay that suits me if it exists

SilentStrider.I think the Ravenloft world had many in group aggresive/harm interactions.But i refered to DnD as an example.Vampire The Masquerade is a grand example of free pvp world at least when you do it in its live version.
And i know that the old UO feeling cant be reproduced.The thing iam pointing here is that there should be events that in a way, like i said an invasion forces citizens to react against the forthcoming tyrant,make even pve people pvp
active for a while like for example a pve monster invasion will enforce pvp characters in the area to pve for a while.
And yes full loot should be an option.A city grand siege for example or a massive in game event of lets say order vs chaos guilds
And you may have a point with Darkfall but check games like WoW,SW and so on and whats the trend?Always nerfing the fights and lower the difficulty
Why not have something less item oriented and more player fueled in terms of item crafting (less value in items)and resources?After all a crafter that really wants to be a crafter will make the char accordingly and will know the risks
But the risks will be also known to the customers so a craftsman will always be valued and make a living
A player could survive back then with no means of communication.You can now even have a bounty guild and set traps and communicate via Skype or you can hide if solo and call a friend via skype to assist you.I cant see where is the problem escaping a possible PK especially nowdays.And i fail to see your wolf and sheep gameplay in todays gamers.We got so many gadgets to help us game that i cant see how anyone can really be an undefended sheep.

 

I remember Richard acknowledging," it was a problem". Can you provide a link to this person who said it was the #1 problem please?

My little brother started playing when he was 12 years old, and he is still playing on free shards today. This is how we communicated while I was away at college from 1996-1999.

He has grown up to be a great person. He is competitive and NEVER a sore LOSER. His son is in grade school and already plays hard core games that are a part of his DnA.

Richard did a great thing for us, I can't believe that he would want to start creating weak minded children by sparing the educational rod in his game style.

 

If it wasn't the number one reason, I don't know what was number one. They didn't split Felucia and Trammel because the herding skill was just too damn unbalanced.

 

I left because the change was too much for me to handle. I know that you went to SP.

I don't think anyone can say what #1 is without an exit survey. Even then only a sample would have filled it out.

 

Well, before the split, I think PKing was the number one reason for players leaving UO. After the split, many left because of the split, but many stayed who would have left otherwise. WAY after the split, many (including myself) left because they kept throwing crap into the game, like ninjas and stuff.

But given that the Felucia/Trammel split was THE biggest one time change in UO from the period in which I played, I think that it is arguable that at least prior to the split, PKs were the number one problem in the game for many people.

 

I remember where I was standing when the patch went through. Mostly because I logged back into a patch of brambles that took me nearly an hour to get out of.

How is that more fun than outsmarting a PK?

 

PKs obviously weren't a big problem for either you or me, but you and I were not most UO players. I didn't like the split, but I figured Origin had a better feel for their problems than I did, so who was I to argue? People who objected had a few choices. Stay with the game, go to Siege Perilous, or quit.

It's hard to argue that Origin made the wrong choice, because after all, UO is still in operation, lo, these many years later. Not many games from the late 90's can say the same.

 

I have yet to meet any DM in a D&D game that would allow players to do what ever they want, total freedom style. That would be chaos and a crappy game session had by all. The real thing that is bothering erponxaos is that there will be no unwilling people to be able to slaughter. Making items not that valuable and basically canon fodder to fuel the combat makes for a very boring RPG game other then the combat. I personally want a lot of diversity in the things I can find. I like a lot of loot and shiny objects when I adventure through a dungeon, it helps add a facet to the game for me. I think it would get rather boring if the best you can find is a nice sharp sword. Something like that would totally kill the single player side. Granted the original ultima’s didn’t have a lot of items, but I think that was mainly due to the limitation of the programming back then and lack of memory access.

 

It's more likely that since RG was an old school D&D player, he didn't subscribe to the Monty Haul school of inflated items in role playing games, which I think is a degenerative trend.

 

Well we can just agree to disagree here. It had a lot to do with limitations at the time.

 

Also, I am not talking wow level amounts just a nice variety

 

The problem is, there are two main "types" of players, each of which represent roughly half of the community. There are those who play games for excitement... they love nothing more than a dangerous challenge, they love adrenaline and "getting pissed off". And then there are those who play games to relax; adrenaline and getting pissed off ruins their gaming experience. One group's play style being forced on the other group will make them abandon a game. Portalarium, I think, is doing a fabulous job of finding a system that provides both groups with what they "need" to enjoy the game, if they let go of the feeling of necessity that everyone plays the same way.

To be sure, I don't think the proposed system is anywhere near perfect. As someone who is somewhere between the two extremes, I do think the looting is a little too restrictive - it caters a bit too much to the 'relax' crowd in a system otherwise geared for the 'adrenaline' crowd. While I understand the intent of that is to try and get both groups playing together, and applaud that attempt, it's swung just a bit too far I think. However, overall, I LOVE the direction of the proposed system. I think it is a wonderful balance between the two extremes, and even allows for 'in between' options, which is a rare gem.

 

Really?

 

I meant to say I think in there.....which makes it make more sense.

 

Never did Mind's Eye Theater myself but, from what I hear, with the group that plays here, doing anything that can be even remotely labeled as griefing — the kind of thing that tends to be rampant in open world PvP — was the fastest ticket to have a blood hunt declared on the character, with his final death coming soon after. And likely to also be declared "persona non grata" for the next events.

There was character conflict, of course, but it was character conflict. The players themselves were in agreement about whether the conflict should happen.

If you want to lose those PvE players, sure.

If you want to keep PvE players playing, never force them into PvP. Many would rather permanently leave the game than be subject to unwanted PvP; I'm among them.

It's not that I dislike PvP per see; I quite enjoy playing against other players, but in a consensual way. But I simply won't play a game where another player can force me to engage in PvP.

Depends on what you call difficulty.

If you consider inconvenience to be difficulty, then yeah, it has been heavily nerfed - which is a good thing IMHO.

If you look just at the lowest difficulty at which content can be beaten, then you are also right. Those games have been reducing the barrier to reach the end and see the whole story. Which again is something I find good.

Now, if you look at the hardest difficulty available, most MMOs have actually increased them quite a bit. Hard mode raiding in WoW is currently far harder than anything that was available in Vanilla.

In other words, the games are allowing players to determine the difficulty level they want, while not preventing players that settle for a lower difficulty from "finishing" the game. They are only easier for the "lazy" players that only want to see the ending; for the players that actually want a challenge, they are usually far harder than before.

Are you asking about SotA specifically or about MMOs as a genre?

The main reason for MMOs to have crafting useless for increasing character power is to leave anything that actually grants power outside the economy. The typical reasoning is that a player that wants to have the best weapon should never be able to do so by farming huge numbers of weak opponents for gold and then purchasing said weapon; he should be forced to go face some suitably hard challenge and claim the weapon himself.

As for why have items be so important, it's to force players to look up towards them, extending the progression. It allows player growth after the "leveling" is done, and can be extended indefinitely.

I'm not saying that I agree with the above, mind you. I would actually prefer a game where gear was common, and — as long as obtaining said gear wasn't an issue — I wouldn't mind at all having it be supplied by players.

It would allow for the actually important element to be the character. That is one of the reasons I love playing the pen and paper RPG Mutants and Masterminds; no magic items, no artifacts, the items my character use are common, off the shelf equipment, but how I use them makes all the difference.

The issue isn't the possibility, or impossibility, of defending oneself, or being defended. The issue is whether that is fun or frustrating. For you it might be fun, but for many, likely most, PvE players it's not.

Little hint: people play games to have fun. If not having fun, it's better to not even play.