PVP & Death: Current Thinking Megapost

ACtualy noone wants a nerfed down pve simple game, at least most that I have read, that didn't really add anything, sorry.

 

I don't know about the other PvPers on this thread, but my main objection is the looting mechanism....... The rest I can live with.

 

You will see that eventually pve nerfs will come if people think that hard monsters make their gameplay less enjoyable cause they die more.Same thing that happened to every Wow clone and with WoW included in it.
But if we start with such boundaries with player to player interaction lets have boundaries with monsters as well.I cant see why the same rule cant apply.And dont tell me its another thing thats why same rules dont apply.
Its the items that matters to people.So make item more easily replaced thus moving the play to the player to enhance his/her skills.This will make the crafter be a vital part of the economy.This will make vendors and housing
having a meaning besides decoration.This will make the thief actually play and feel like a thief character.
You have a game that players will be able to fill the villages with their houses,its totally un-realistic if not a lost opportunity not to have faction/clan/guild war for the control on them and in it the citizen to
take part like they would react in real-time occassions and so many tiny and big details that are around a game being player-fueled and not spoon-fed fueled.
Or like mentioned before we can all sit in a major city and observe our Thunderfurys and Hands Of Ragnaros and talk about raiding tactics by having a static non-recycled item oriented gameplay with some uber rocking pve events
(not) like GW,WoW or SW here and there to spice up our otherwise farming in-game life.
The questions here for me are in general(not only for you personally) Do you have your gameplay that much connected to your items?Would be that bad of a strike on your gameplay if for example after 1 hour of farming lets say 1000 gold you get robbed by a thief for 100 gold or after of 3 hours of farming you die once in a X dungeon and you lose 1/5 of what you have gained so you replace your equipment?Would you rather lose the same or more by being looted by a monster or by paying for repairing your shining items after some dungeon raid boss encounter wipes?
Would a gameplay ,of only gaining or a game that the damages can always be avoided ,satisfy you?Why cant you just improve your gameplay as you would in a real-time event to counter these unwanted encounters when you have all the equipment and software to do it:6 and 9 buttoned mouses,headsets,skype,ts etc,which wasnt the case back in UO time when you could only communicate via Mirc and you had a 3 button mouse and with a ball instead of infrared 2500 dpi eye at the best case scenario.

 

Not quite sure why I keep seeing PvE being mentioned here. PvP is optional and PvErs or RPers don't even have to go there.

PvPers should be using this thread to talk about PvP and the mechanism that is being proposed, not dragged into arguments with people who don't PvP or have little understanding about it.

 

Well, the thread is more than just PvP. I suppose it could be misinterpreted that way by having PvP leading the thread title. The Death mechanics are those being employed by both dying from PvE and PvP, and some of my concerns with the mechanics of death involve their use in the PvE worldset, such as using the rifts to skip deeper into zones. That in particular should be of concern to the PvP mindset as well, especially if players can use the 'getting pulled to the closest weak point' to yank themselves behind enemy lines, where they can wreak havoc or open doors from the other side.

 

Well, Envy that is an interesting way to look at it, or you know they could instead of blaming everything on PVEr’s and going on how it is them winning they work on way to make this work

 

You probably have never had a good dungeon master

Same here !

Loot system is so bad.

We're talking about PvP here and not pve.

Thank you.

 

It's kind of hard to keep suggesting things that get shouted down by people who are afraid to lose anything. Why do I worry that even PvE is going to be lame? PvP and death will heavily influence the way combat is handled whether is PvE or PvP. Combat is a huge part of the game even if you just plan on being a crafter. In Chris' post he even mentions that the XPdebt and debuff penalties won't be so much that it will make you want to delete your character and the game.

I am not arguing for this but that statement usually means in most games that they are going to hold your hand and make it all better. WoW and EQ2 were great when they launched. I stayed with EQ2 because they were more stubborn about making things easy. Now they lead the pack. When Portalarium talks about taking mechanics from games and making SotA a better experience, their proposal sounds like they looked at what Sony and Blizzard "learned" and are bypassing those mistakes. Some of those mistakes made a lot of fun.

I am all for making different mistakes but I can tell you that people weren't leaving EQ2 because they had to go back and get their body (you didn't even lose your equipment it was just damaged and you were trying to minimize a severe debuff) or the big chunk of XP debt that went away over time. Heck you could even go cool off by crafting and not miss out on any XP while playing. I don't want it to be ridiculous but SotA can really shine if this proposal were more of a compromise instead of a copy. I really see nothing wrong with letting those who want to go full loot opt in to that and have it only affect those who are into it. Let's really talk about freedom here. Don't make me bowl with the bumpers in the gutters. I suck at bowling but I would rather try to get the pins down on my own, thank you.

 

We really should talk about both while the hood is up. This megapost is also about the consequences of dying and it is good to have everyone weigh in on it no matter how wrong I think they are.
If combat and the results of it aren't fun it doesn't matter whether it has PvP or not.

 

My 2 cents on how I want to PvP.

What I want in PvP is:
- PvP zones with a storyline that explains why we are having this war at this time in the story
- no full loot on death during those PvP battles
- similar to epic battles where Normans and Celtic tribes were battling for control of land in England.


What I don't want is:
- full loot
- being able to PK without consent
- res killing
- wandering in a murder zone having to be a trained fighter instead of a miner because everyone wants to prey off of untrained crafters.

 

Well, sounds like he proposed system is right up your alley!

It's good to see folk come and say things like this from time to time as it offers a little perspective.

 

Well good to see positive constructive thinks from Abydos, thank you. Lord G, good points.

 

Is there an absence of such games out there? I thought 99.9% of them are as described and i just expected ANYTHING different from SOTA (coming from UO myself)
But if things go as described (no real loot of any kind, just some little money from a kill) I don't see myself distinguishing this game out of other 100500 "no loot pve with some pvp" games out there

 

I think we're at the point where we really need to know how the murder/virtue system comes into play. I know you devs haven't completely fleshed that out yet but *cracks the whip* this stuff is really important.

Is it murder if we're in a lava area and player A comes over and attacks player B while he's mining or hunting rare animals but does not return fire (not just because he's being ganked?) Even though the PvP at this point is consensual, is it murder?

If guilds have marks on the heads of rival guild members, is it still murder as some of these people may still be citizens?

How does that tie into the virtue system? I can see 2 virtuous guilds having a dispute that they choose not to resolve via treaties and the like going to war. Legally the sovereign of that area could decide that either party has committed murder but could both warriors still be virtuous if they fought honorably? I know that is complex and can be convoluted for a game but I am just wondering how much of that would be left up to players. The word is that the Oracle is pretty judgmental. What are her views on it? or is it more like religion where people interpret what the Oracle wants and act accordingly only to be smitten when it is too late?

 

From the SoTA kickstarter (emphasis mine):

Shroud of the Avatar is the “spiritual successor” to Richard’s previous work in the FRP genre. Our primary objectives are to tell a story even more compelling than Ultimas IV-VII, create a virtual world more interactive than Ultima VII, develop deep rich multi-player capabilities beyond combat akin to Ultima Online, and offer a bold new approach to integrate them with “Selective Multi-Player”

I've bolded the element of your sig I want to question, I wont go as far as "not honoring" because I'm not sure people really understand or appreciate this connection; The open pvp is paradoxically what made UO a game "Beyond Combat" The threat presented by other players outside of the city walls is what forced people to come and work together, build economic and combat relationships which later develop into real friendships that go beyond the game, People dying and losing their armor and weapons created a continuous demand in the economy, making crafting a truly valuable profession rather than just a sideline reinforcing the connection between groups of players who in other games would not think twice of engaging with someone who prefers a different or even opposing play style. Peoples actions, their decisions, their behaviour, created the game, built a culture or even a set of cultures, reputations that were real and not just points in a progress bar for cheaper stuff with a bunch of AI. With consentual pvp and no loot this just doesn't work, sure you make friends you work together and beat the crap out of some uber boss, but the adrenaline and fear, the dissappointment and defeat, as well as the elated adrenaline high of victory just cannot be replicated against an AI, its almost like a Band of Brothers connection you make with people.

Now thats not to say I dont think PVE players should be pandered to AT ALL, quite the contrary, for the bonds and relationships I discussed above it is essential that we all get our fun, In our own way, but in one world. In UO none consentual pvp was impossible within the city limits (with the exception of the hilarious llama bomb for a brief period), guards spawned upon initiation that instakilled the aggressor and left his belongings free for everyone to loot, and often the town graveyard was within the guarded area. Outside the city limits dungeons were sometimes designed to make attacks from PKs difficult to near impossible.

The truth is there are tonnes of variables and i'm not a dev, and I dont know the reasons behind the decisions they make, and I know nothing at all about the other objectives stated in your quote. What I do know is they will fail to achieve their goal of "developing deep rich multi-player capabilities beyond combat akin to Ultima Online"without at least being able to loot goods and probably without open pvp, because it is all one system, an engine a cycle or whatever, and when you remove a key element of the cycle or part of the engine the whole thing breaks.

Apologies for the walls of text.

 

That's an interesting take on it. Not sure I agree, but interesting. However, we DO have open PvP in the proposed system. If you flag yourself PvP, then you can do it anywhere, so open. What we don't have and will not have is non-consensual PvP. As for loot... I've said in the past... I'm pretty open to whatever system. If the PvP is consensual, then I don't have a problem with full loot. As long as we know, going in, what we're risking, it's all good for me.

 

Freedom in this conversation does have a very simple and clear meaning here which doesn't require any specifics at all; it means the ability to interact with player-controlled avatars with at least the same range of actions as with the computer-controlled NPCs and monsters.

I get the impression you (and others) may think that when people talk about freedom etc here they're talking euphemistically, and what they really want is the ability to kill and grief other players at will, with the freedom idea as just a cover. To anyone who does think that, you are wrong in the vast majority (99%+) of cases. I wish I could explain it to you, I really do, but people's opinions on this tend to calcify pretty quickly and it's almost impossible to get through. Especially after a decade where the big mainstream online games have coalesced around a very low risk world model, so that that model's become the norm from which it's considered deviation must indicate a game infested with 12 year old PKs TaLkInG iN aLtErNaTiNg CaPs out to ruin your day. But the boogeymen waiting there to ruin your day just aren't there. I used to think there were boogeymen too in about 1998, so I have a little sympathy. Then I decided to try out all the elements in UO rather than just a small subset, and my mind was opened to different playstyles and types of players. Anyway.

On another note, no matter how many quotations are made, it's disingenuous to try to suggest that this game has not been marketed as having a strong pvp/open world element similar to UO. Personally I'm still hopeful, but if in the end the devs decide to hobble those elements and overfocus on more workaday gameplay, then so be it and this will have been a missed opportunity. However, all the implications that people should have read the fine print from the start or whatever? No that's dishonest balderdash. There have been enough chats between RG and pvp and/or pk type folks like Fear that it is simply not reasonable to suggest that a significant portion of the marketing of this game wasn't aimed at those types of players. And that quote with the 'multiplayer capabilities beyond combat'? Stop trying to cling to that, as though 'beyond' means 'excluding', as though it proves the point hiding behind it that all the pvp players in this thread must be morons who can't read and write properly. Taken in context, it's clear that the 'beyond combat' implies including combat, but with other features on top of combat.

Looking again at ransoming in the context of the very small amount of the game in which open pvp will occur, I don't think it should be necessary to allow the possibility of item loss to be fully removed (albeit sometimes at a cost) in all areas. Perhaps that kind of ransoming could be used in more introductory open areas, with more standard looting in the more high end areas. Given that such areas would be a subset of another tiny subset, and that players can go their merry way in the vast majority of the world, I'm not convinced there's a good argument against looting going up all the way to full. I've certainly not seen an argument against it which doesn't revolve around a desire to control the playstyle in not just 95% of the world, but 100%, which just isn't a tenable or civilised position to take.

I'm still hopeful that a sensible arrangement which represents a real compromise can be achieved.

 

This thread is not in the PvP section of the forums. It is in 'Community Announcements'; PvP, PvE, Crafting, RP, etc. are all open to discussion as they relate to the topic.

As described in various video diaries, PvP can and will have a direct effect on PvE as zones will be shifting with castle sieges, sky fall items, volcanic eruptions and whatnot. It will affect crafting since there will be rare resources in those zones. It will affect RP to some extent as well, depending on how much people want to put into it.

Once again, I'm satisfied with the current system, although I certainly wouldn't be opposed to PvP flagged individuals having the option to also flag full loot. If you want to make yourself drop full loot then by all means, go for it. I hope there's some way to see the flag though, because I believe you are going to be target numero uno out there....

 

It's nice to hear an opinion on what somebody actually wants instead of just another argument about play styles. You say you don't want full loot. Do you have a problem with the idea of loot flags? Like say you don't want full loot so your flag is set at partial, or random, or something so you will never get fully looted. On the other hand, people who do want full loot can be flagged for that, and that way they will be able to fully loot others with the same flag.

 

I think we might be screwed on even having a full loot flag even if people will consent. Rumor is that Chris mentioned that is unworkable. I don't know why but it's not like he hasn't thought about it. I hope he comes in and talks to us about it.