My thoughts on Looting

i have a question about quests (will there be open quests like in ultima online where you can do what you want and make your own quests go tressure hunting or in special dungeons to get stuff for your house)
or will you have to do quests for your character prgression ?? deep quests where we can decide what answers you will give like in dragonage or the witcher ??

in age of conan they made it so, in every instance you could fight the other peoples and there was a lotof
-open quests,
-raids,
-1000 sidequests

-but the main storyline quests you entered in an instance which was 1 person only , so you had to do it on your own which allowed the developers to add freedom to the quests "decissions you could make , more advanced boss fight and for sure the wanted movie sequences to get the real singleplayer feel too, and that in an mmo"

 

Silent i give up. i tried to see your point, your responses offer no stimulus and end with if it is not so i wont play.

I guess the greatest mystery is why are you in the pvp forum.

What we say means nothing, developer attitudes to pvp and looting have been crap at best. there is a reasonwhy Eve has been successful sovlong and why people played free UO servers years after peoplestopped playing on OSI. Engaged pvp players stay generally loyal to great games

 

If they are so engaged in PVP then why do they need loot?

You're stating that loot is the reason for PVP, SS (I believe) is stating the opposite.

 

Ok here's a couple ideas on looting in pvp, first of all let's say you're in the real world, you kill someone and want to take all their stuff (open looting) ok well, do you have a big enough bag to carry all their **** in? how long is it going to take you to search their pockets and strip their body? meanwhile you're in a dangerous zone so someone could sneak up on you while you're doing all this, plus if you do get it looted before someone else jumps you, you're carrying a big, probably heavy, bag of loot - you're going to need to set it down in order to fight or you'll be too encumbered...

so i think if you want open loot available there will need to be a more realistic time-delay effect for each piece you loot, and an encumbrance effect. That means, ok this guy has big bulky armor, that will take too much time so forget that - but hey this sword is cool and doesn't take much time to just pick up so i'll take that and not bother getting bogged down going through his pockets cause there's a roving gang of gankers coming.

Anyway.. well you said most likely no open looting will be taking place - so alternatively i think the ransom system is ok - it's really very similar to the insurance system in uo where each death costs you gold if your stuff is insured.

 

I could go for having all items unlootable. ONLY the items you take into the high risk PvP area though.... Any treasures, gold, jewels, magical weapons, ore, wood collected afterward is ALL lootable! So if you got a big pile of booty after adventuring around that meteor strike. You had best rush home before a gang of brigands discovers you!
Twill be perfectly fun and exciting. Your on a full loot PvP quest, its highly dangerous. But in actuality your losing nothing, your just accepting a challenge. So that powerful sword you had worked a whole year to acquire will NOT be looted. It stays with you upon ressurection. But the treasures you find on the full loot PvP quest, and the contraband you accepted or the magical ore you mine will be lootable till you exit the area.
So feel free to bring all the most powerful weapons and show them off/use them to your advantage on this dangerous, risky journey. Because these items are not at risk. Its just an obstacle course on the way out. Got killed and looted? Sad... At least your back where you started before you went on the quest in the first place, and you still have that amazing and powerful weapon. Maybe you will make it out before getting whacked next time.

Oh... and if your bringing in platemail with no special or magical attributes... just normal everyday iron plate or a set of normal everyday leather armour expect that to be lootable. Its a nice way for the brigands to gather some extra gold, they can sell it to an NPC smith. Or melt it down to iron ingots and leather hides. Same for potions, bandages, regs. No reason to protect these items.

 

I'm in the PvP forums for two reasons:

- I enjoy PvP. Really. But only as long as it's fully consensual and has little in the way of consequences for the loser (and absolutely no looting in any shape or form). I can easily spend a whole day just chaining PvP matches in DCUO and GW2, or roaming the map and engaging other players in Planetside 2, not to mention other non-MMO PvP games.

- I really want to avoid PvP ever becoming mandatory for accessing any PvE content or reward, so at the very least I would prowl those forums on the look out for any idea that could prevent a player that opts to completely avoid PvP from enjoying every single PvE aspect of the game.

What many people here seem to miss is that PvP is not just open world, full loot PvP. There is more than one kind of PvP, and likewise there are players that enjoy one kind of PvP but don't enjoy other kinds.

EVE is, just like WoW, lightning in a bottle. No one has been able to get even close to replicating its success in a game with looting and PvP at its core. And, just like WoW, it seems to have already entered its decline phase; at least the third party sites that monitor the official concurrent players numbers seem to point to this, and CCP seems quite desperate in recent times to increase player retention.

And players desiring open world, full loot PvP have only themselves to blame. When every single commercial game that offers this and is not named EVE suffers from a too small player base, why would any large developer ever risk money catering to this niche?

 

Shouldnt have to risk any money at all to cater to this niche. They need to cater to this niche because it is supposed to be selective multiplayer which is as far as I know revolutionary and unlike anything ever done before. Why limit freedom for any niche? If your going to advertise the game as selective multiplayer, but leave out the option to do someting because most players just wont do it then as a developer your only creating a limited game. I guess if the developers want the player's choices to be limited, then fine. But it shouldn't be all too tough to program a full loot PvP option into the game.
If a player wants to toggle on full loot PvP let him/her. Not many others are going to do it. Most games that are full loot PvP perhaps do have a "too small player base" but theres obviously enough people out there willing to play this style of game because certain indie developers to make entire games dedicated to this style of play. Its not about the money for these developers, its about what they like.
Theres plenty of people here who will be happy to turn the knob all the way to full loot PvP with me. And it will be a blast.

 

you know why all games have a small player base which are full loot ???

because all of them were no budget publishers after ultima online !!!!! noone tried it

Mortal online, is buggy, but fantastic in terms of crafting and more
worm online
darkfall (didnt liked the combat with so much jumping and so)
upcomming games like
gloria victis
life is feudal

all with innovative or full loot pvp
because its the only option for a player driven economy and player crafted items

why no big company published a full loot game ??? (sandboxy with crafting)
maybe they thought ultima online was an excemple, they got more subscribers then before , after they added trammel


i still think it had something to do with the cheeper internet (the ammount of subscribers), have seen all my uo friends leaving the game after ea ruined it


in my opinion there are much much more people, than the big publishers think who like the thrill and crafting (noone write the support via a ticket "full loot is so awesome i looted a vanq sword" only massages of pve players who got grifed or stolen from thiefs true pvper woudnt cry about it and write the support

see rust a lot of players love it, even if it is a low budget game and hopefully developer see the trend going in this direction "back to the roots"

i think sota should do something with the innovative hex system freedom of your prefered game style

 

pure 100% speculation. Not one bit of that sounds like it has any basis in fact.

 

maybe yes, same as it is a speculation that a well programmed innovative game published by rich company would fail because noone tried it last game was ultima online which was succesfull

in my opinion its no speculation , like 60 percent of peoples are pve guys and other 40 are pvp guys, maybe numbers differ a bit but im sure there are not 98 percent pve liking guys and only 2 percent pvp likeing

all i can do as a long term mortal player is giving some feedback
i have seen so many player comming and go , and most of them i chated with only installed the game because they wanted an ultima like game not this crappy wow games without loot.

and noone except 1 person, out of like 100 people i have met in 2-3 years
left the game because of full loot , it was the reason they installed the game , but because it was buggy after every patch like an alpha for 2-3 weeks and dupe bugs appeared
thats a reason some developers might think its a niche game noone play but damn this game had tons of subscibers sometimes at its peaks and then a patch got released and it dropped to like 0

 

Hate to tell you this, but opinion notbased on facts is speculation.

 

Rune and Bowen do you even keep abreast of gaming developments?

Do you understand the industry?

Mortal Online offered alot of things but it wasnt polished, not optimised all these things are only fixed with time and money.

Hell worst example is Greed Monger that idiot offered a UO sandbox style play and raised over $300k in Kickstarter. He was a nobody!

 

How many games have you shipped? Gone to any GDCs? Have a game development related degree? Or do you think you know better because you think a couple of examples seem to support what you want to think?

It's pretty bold to imply that you know better because some guy raised 300k with a kickstarter. Hardly conclusive.

 

Actually all that sounds perfectly good to me! Even better than the ransom idea -- i vote YES!
lol

 

My ideal game is one where the odds are against me but I manage to figure out a way to snake out of an almost impossible situation rather than let myself lose.

A game that has heavy death stings, but difficult combat, I see like this: the whole game isn't combat, so there are other things to do than fight.. there are also different opponents, and ways to avoid battle, so you can avoid a fight if you aren't ready for it... if you do decide to go after a particularly challenging fight and you lose, you take a break, think about strategy, maybe retool.. and go back in the fight when you think you can win... you can also flee combat situations if you're losing... but you don't act like Sisyphus and re-enter the battle regardless of if you've learned anything.

My experience is that games in where you die every few minutes, people usually end up winning combat by luck .. by a lucky combination of the right moves at the right moment; and the only challenge is to try over and over until you get lucky.

 

You save your special gear for when you need it. You may use your lightning sword and fireproof armor against a dragon, but you don't use it to defeat bandits on the road. And it gives you an advantage: it lets you kill the dragon without a big party of high level characters. You're more able to solo it or go with lower level characters.

Whats the point of high-level gear when it becomes a necessity and just a form of level-gating? .. ie you need high-level gear to kill high-level monsters, so as you go forward in the game you naturally progress to better and better gear to fight bigger and bigger monsters... and all that's really happening is your gear is matching the monsters. I find that boring. I find it fun that you could lose to low level enemies even late in the game because you risked just bringing your cheap gear. Its also the versatility in strategies that makes a game fun.

 

Yes I do, thanks though. Wish I had your knowledge I guess

 

If players are trying those games over and over again until they succeed, then it's not just luck at play, but also practice.

After all, in a well designed game, while luck does make a difference, the player has to be good enough to be able to grab the opportunity provided by luck.

It's how old console games, from the NES / Master System generation, were typically made; stupidly hard, requiring a lot of practice to get everything right and beat the game, but they were short enough that having to restart the game meant losing just a few minutes, perhaps half an hour. Good times.

If I need it as in, "you can't pass without it," then it comes back to how losing that gear becomes too crippling, becoming a good reason for not having item loss affect those items.

If I need it as in, "it makes that enemy easier, but you can still beat it without," then it's just a different way to tell me that I don't need the gear; that being the case, if the better gear can be lost and takes more than a token effort to recover, I will simply ignore its very existence and do everything in the cheaper gear. I tend to welcome the added challenge, after all.

My preference is, actually, for better gear to not confer any advantage. For the gear that I can get nearly for free at the start to be just as powerful as the beat gear in the game. Harder to get gear should only increase the options available, allowing the player to vary his play style.

The ones that want gated content based on gear are Portalarium.

That being said, from the moment there is gear progression, and which gear the player has already acquired effectively matters in which content the player can access, then I want said gear to be permanent. No gear breakage, no looting, nothing that could remove from the player the gear he needs to access the content.

 

In my post I meant the market as a whole, and games that are open PvP with looting without a way to opt out of those. Like Mortal Online, for example.

More games in that niche (or, at least, games with reasonable budget) don't get made because devs and publishers want some guarantee of success before making a game; in a niche without many success cases, where nearly every game that attempted to cater to it ran into player attraction or retention issues, the chance of further games being made is slim.

Do you mean Wurm Online? That game with five PvP servers and seven PvE servers (including the humongous Xanadu server, which alone is larger than all PvP servers added together)?

As far as I can tell it's a game that replicated the results from UO, BTW; when they allowed players to opt out of PvP the player base increased.

Rust is a permadeath survival game, which is a completely different genre from MMOs, one where the average character life expectancy can be measured in hours (in the mod version of DayZ, according to the official data, each character stays alive just shy of 1h10m). It can't be compared with a MMO, the kind of challenge, the reward structure, everything is completely different.

BTW, Rust has PvE servers too, and as far as I know they are quite popular.

That game is focused on crafting, not PvP. PvP in it is planned to be completely optional.

 

Well, there are strategies that increase your chances of being lucky, because some ways of approaching a fight are just being stupid. :> Did it really just take a few minutes to beat a Super Mario game?

We are going to have increasing wear and expenses on maintaining gear aren't we? So I'm expecting people won't want to use your tough gear as much anyway.

But, if you'd be willing to take the chance to do everything in cheaper gear, then you're risking death more often, and if there's a heavy death penalty, you have to be willing to take it. And that's your choice.. willing to die over and over, taking heavy penalties versus wanting to win a cleaner fight.

In some cases, I'd imagine losing an item would be a setback in a certain solo situation (ie fighting a dragon by yourself), but you'd just take a time out from fighting the dragon, and work your way up to the point where you have that gear again. Or just choose to form a party or do something else.. its your choice. But taking a time out until you're ready again is not something I see as a major punishment if the game is done right. Then, there's a challenge to keeping and maintaining your gear, if that's what you want to do, too.