If PvP is neither open and there is no loot, how do we make meaningful PvP.

Nearly every MMO I can think of had a way to turn unwanted gear into mats:
Warhammer and GuildWars - Salvage for mats (small % of what it took to craft)
Lineage - Crystallize (crystals were used for crafting)
Aion and TERA - Salvage for enchanting stones (to +1 gear)
WoW - Disenchant for enchanting mats

 

Make it open and full loot with draconian penalties for murderers if they fail. This will make them very rare and hunted.

How about full loot and open PvP with a similar blue/grey/red system as UO but instead of stat loss you have straight up perma death for Reds. Maybe 10+X number of lives to account for lag-death. That way you know when you take a Red's head you have impacted them greatly. Players will still fear loss but the existence of those players who they fear will be rare due to the consequences.

It would cause many who would normally grief or go red to flip and try to kill reds instead. There will still be a few who enjoy the thrill of perma death who will make things interesting for everyone else.

Add one char slot per account to this and you have a pretty good system.

 

I think more like ZtruK does. Keep things very open, but the path of going the murderer route has extreme risks. If not permadeath, a 50% loss of level. That will keep the wannabes from being Pkers.

 

I am very much against artificial 'I wish you were dead' game level punishments. If the behavior is worthy of punishment than put mechanisms in the hands of players to render those punishments. Make it part of the game, don't limit the the game artificially. The way to deter wannabes from becoming PKs is to permit Anti-PKs render Player Justice.

 

Full loot is just not going to work by itself. If a player can play SPO or FPO and make swords all day long with no risk what so ever the market will be flooded with the swords. This stuff needs to break and be removed from the game. I not saying it goes poof. You can still have the item in you bag, it's just broken beyond repair or use.

I'm with Owain just let players handle it. The whole red/blue is just more hand holding. I shouldn't know if their a pk/thief until its too late or I know of their reputation or the game has wanted posters for them. I would like a perma-death option if only for myself. If skills are truly not going to be a grind then so what if I lose items.

 

Make it like UO.... Trammel housing and non PVP for the carebears and Fellucia for the PVPers. Full loot system when you kill someone. Tram + Fel = Make both sides happy.

 

What I'm thinking would be nice for this game PvP is something like:

-player/guild areas like guild head quarters, thieves den, castle, pirate ship are built by players who invest time to build up the defenses to own somehow
-these areas provide targets for enemy alliances to conquer
-guilds and rivals sounds like a good start

 

I pointed this out elsewhere, but it deserves to be stated again. What happened in early MMOs like M59 and UO will never happen again. The experience that was full loot open PvP is gone for good. In the beginning, there were not many choices available for virtual worlds. Every player style was lumped together in UO...the PKers, the Anti-PKers, the crafters, the business folks, the PvE dungeon runners. It created a unique environment that will never happen again.

Why? Because the full loot open PvP systems benefit only the PK'ers. The crafter spends 30 minutes mining ore, only to have his 30 minutes of work stolen in 10 seconds by a PK'ers. Back then, the crafter had no choice. If he wanted a deep crafting game to play, he had to put with PK'ers and suck it up in UO. Now, once he gets ganked 3-4 times, he quits the game and goes to a game that lets him craft. Same for the PvE crowd. Could you imagine a WoW-style raiding kin working on finishing the toughest raid in the game, when a bunch of PK'ers port in and kill them? They go back to WoW in a heartbeat.

In short...people pick the game for their play style. There won't be innocent crafters, PvEers, in a full loot open pvp game. It will just be PvP'ers. Without innocents, there is no option to be truly evil. Without evil, there is no opportunity to be the noble anti-PK hero. It's just PvP'ers fighting and forum raging against each other.

Those days of UO are gone I'm afraid. If you were there to experience it, savor it. It was literally once in a life time.

 

I think this game needs some sort of loot drop. I always thought if the developers couldn't balance a full loot system(wish I hope they can) a system similar to what early EQ PvP servers did could work.

When you die a random item drops that is lootable. So you can bring all your awesome stuff to fight but there is always a chance that your really good stuff might be lost. Maybe the better the item, through some type of game calculation, the higher the chance the item will drop. Also anything such as gold/gems/valuable should always drop upon death.

If there is no real penalty for death people will just use the absolute best items they have all the time and that makes the game VERY boring.

 

Whatever they do I hope it works because not one game out now satisfies anyone who enjoyed the original UO ruleset.

Every game now just seems like a culmination of minigames. One for PVE, one for PVP, crafting, etc, whereas UO in it original form was the only one to have everything interrelated.

I know there are quite a few people who were not fans of that and like their games segmented, but hey there are 100s of games like that out there for them.

 

@Fantalio:

Having a risk of gear loss on death makes many players never, ever, use their good gear anywhere there is even a slight risk of death; instead, they use only boring, cheap, easily replaceable gear. For many players this makes all gear in the game absolutely boring, because anything worth getting excited about is not practical to use and anything practical is never exciting.

I'm not aware of any research on this, but I do believe this kind of player outnumbers the players that find the risk of losing their "good" gear exciting, judging by how in games like EVE few players use anything actually expensive or hard to replace unless they are absolutely certain they won't lose it; EVE players have elevated getting the most out of cheap gear to an art.

@Antalicus:

There are a few questions that might apply here:

- Are there enough players that want to mix full loot non-consensual PvP with PvE? Seems like every game that tried that either was planned from the start to work on a tiny budget or else failed hard, except for pre-Trammel UO and EVE Online. I'm not sure there are enough such players to keep afloat any medium or high budget MMO apart from EVE.

- Who is the target player base for SotA? Just early UO players? Post-Trammel UO Players? Fans of Ultima games as a whole? Not everyone has the same interests; apart from UO, every other Ultima game forcibly didn't have PvP or effective death penalties (because they were solo games and allowed players to load a previous save game at will), and many post-Trammel UO players played in Trammel where they usually didn't have to contend with non-consensual PvP.

- The game will have two solo modes, one offline and one online. Is it worth more to the game to shelter players in order to bring them to multiplayer, or will the game be able to afford pushing the more risk and PvP adverse players out of multiplayer, or even out of online play altogether? If the number of players willing to take the risks proposed for online multiplayer is underestimated there is a real chance of the online multiplayer modes having too few players, specially as the world grows.

As it is I'm not overly concerned about it because, if the risks are higher than what I'm willing to take (or if the incentives to engage in PvP become so high they make PvE players feel unwanted), I can just leave the online game altogether and keep to offline play. The game itself might suffer if many players do the same, though.

 

@Silent Strider

At first people only using cheap gear will happen but over time as the entire population becomes richer, which is inevitable, using better and better equipment will become viable. It happened in UO where your house would eventually become so full you'd need to start throwing away mid-level equipment to make space. It's also situational depending on what you are currently doing.

If you are just out making a loot/resource run you'd want to use your cheap replaceable gear, but if you are out looking for someone to kill, attacking a very powerful monster with a group, or attacking/defending your turf you're more apt to bring the good stuff. It's a total risk vs. reward system where you can risk nothing and have a chance at getting high end stuff from someone who has brought the good stuff to battle.

Whenever I hear about this topic everyone is always talking about how afraid they are of losing their stuff. I always look at it as an increased chance of gaining someone else's gear if you bring premium equipment. But as long as someone in low end gear has a 1/4 chance of beating someone with top tier gear the risk vs. reward system balances it out in the end and strategy and skill dictate your wealth. Any other system belongs in a single player game.

 

@Fantalio:

I <i>NEVER</i> attack another player unprovoked, no matter what, and I would also <i>NEVER</i> loot another player; I'm not a thief in real life, and I would never become a thief in a virtual game against player-controlled characters. I would rather stop playing the game than do this, even if my potential target player was a jerk. So making players lootable is a pure loss/loss proposition for me; a much higher risk I will lose, with no benefit whatsoever.

In other words, I'm a ******** in what is perhaps the purest sense, in that, to the utmost extent I can, I refuse to harm others. It's why I fixate so much on fully consensual PvP; if it's not fully consensual I end being only prey, since I refuse to ever start a PvP conflict because I feel bad harming other persons, and I do perceive causing a setback by attacking unprovoked as causing a setback.

If there's any kind of gear looting, expect me to never, ever, engage in PvP. Even complete inventory destruction on death is more acceptable, for me, than player looting.

(I have no problem killing or looting NPCs, though; no real player behind them.)

 

@Silent Strider
You never have to attack a player unprovoked. When I played UO I remember there being plenty of anti-PKs running around protecting people that couldn't fight and killing murderers. This really stimulated the economy since the anti-PKs would buy almost all of their gear and supplies from the people who did not want to fight. Eventually the non-combat people would all start walking around with halberds and Heavy X-bows so that they could at least damage anyone that attacks them and that swayed the combat in their favor. If you do not allow the "bad guys" to be "bad guys" then part of this economical cycle is missing. Fighting monsters is fun but inevitably it becomes dull and boring once you've mastered it in any game. The only true challenge is to fight another person.

There is nothing wrong with being a ******** but I want to see a game that engages ALL types of players in one gaming circle, not compartmentalized gaming. If you make it so people can completely ignore most of the people in a game it becomes to similar to a single player game. If you completely shut off the PKs and the crafters from each other it becomes boring for both eventually. I personally dislike crafting but I do love combat and a good economy system. I tend to be more of a guard to people who have the ability to make lots of money. Without struggle there can be no triumph.

I doubt we will see eye to eye on this issue but just have to throw out my two cents to maybe shift the slider a little closer to the type of game me and my friends are looking to play. While I would love a full loot non consensual pvp system I could be happy with a hybrid of some sorts as long as I'm not put in an arena and fighting the same pool of 20 people day after day(WoW style).

 

@Fantalio:

What Portalarium / RG seems to aim for is what effectively allows all types of players to be in the same game world: allowing them to choose which aspects they want to engage. Otherwise you will never get part of the PvE crowd (myself included) in the same game world as the players that desire open PvP.

(Which, up to a point, is what RG learned from the early Ultima Online; that a large number of players would rather not play a game they otherwise love than be forced to engage in all aspects of said game, specifically the non-consensual PvP aspect.)

As for completely shutting off PKs from crafters: not really. The currently proposed system will only shut off PKs from the crafters <i>that don't want to expose themselves to the risk of getting PKed</i>, with the caveat that there will be some reward for taking that risk.

As for being put into an "arena" fighting the same pool of 20 persons over and over: this will only happen if PvP is really unpopular - in which case not having it forced on the players was definitely the right idea. You will have all the PvPers that purchased the game playing in the same "server", with the matchmaking system actively trying to put them in the same instances, so even if just 10% of the player base engage in PvP you should have a fairly good diversity.
(And even in WoW you typically have far more variety than that, at least if you also go for the Battlegrounds; as far as I know, Arenas aren't really that popular in WoW.)

 

Richard told us that he listen to us the players, so my guess is that nothing is set in stone yet and the game will continue to evolve.

I have a suggestion on PvP that will almost keep all playstyles happy.

Make PvP hardcore as before trammel or before Age of Shadows for the ones wanting that kind of game, that kind of thrill. Make it optional. If you dont want to participate then dont. Do your thing without fear getting dragged into something you want to avoid.

There will be guildwars and i would like to see an option for real consequences in the game. Remember it would be optional. The ones that enjoy a risk vs reward game, full loot and maybe even statloss for PK:s and while i think of it a bounty board could have those features that only affects them, noone else.

Such an option would suit a wider playerbase. All you guys have to remember that the really old UO players that experienced Ultima Online before trammel and Age of Shadows have been looking for a new similar MMO since 2003. These oldtimers that loved Richard Garriott old UO more then anything else would finally find a new home. And dont get me wrong i loved being a crafter, roleplay, tame and even planted flowers.=) A game need to be more then PvP.

This suggestion would not interfere with the casual player that dont want anything to do with PvP.
I really hope this fantastic developer team at least think about what i suggest. Feels like this might be my last hope getting my old game back, i miss it.

 

I just don't want PVP to be limited only to guilds. I like to be a loner sometimes, and it's not the same to be a warring guild with everyone all the time instead of singular targets out in dungeons and stuff.

 

@Riot
I think there are a lot of ways to align yourself with a faction which is neither as rigid as WoW nor forced you to be a tied to a player controlled guild. If you remember the original Ultima IV gypsy questions, both answers were morally justifiable. So you might be able to temporarily align yourself for the "shepherds vs farmers" conflict where you are having a meaningful fight against other players but both sides feel like they're in the right. Aligned with the farmers you might be allowed to kill/steal sheep, kill shepherds, kill players protecting them, etc. It's not truly open in that you can't attack the farmers or players associated with the farmers. There may be NPCs, merchants, and guards who favor one side or the other in the conflict and you will have consequences.

A good example of this might be "Sid Meier's Pirates!" Even though that was just a single player game.

 

I mentioned this in another thread, but I'll throw it out here to, in case anyone missed it:
Pathfinder Online is in development, and promises full, open loot pvp. It is the basis of their game.

As for the original question, meaningful is a matter of perspective.

 

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." -Benjamin Franklin (I think!)

I wasn't a PvPer, or PKer, in pre-Trammel UO. I was the victim everytime, and I lost every single fight. However, the introduction of Trammel made one point extremely salient: death must happen.

I was one of those who felt the inflation of the economy in post-Trammel. I dealt in commodities trade with ingots/hides/boards/regs. Before Trammel, I maintained a rather steady amount of cash around 1M gold easy. Within a year of Trammel's introduction, with UO:R, I couldn't store enough gold in my bank box. I was putting gold into my alt's banks just to keep it all. I know this evidence is anecdotal, but it speaks to me about the lack of meaningful loss of goods. PKers did tend to hoard loot (Clean Up Brittania campaign, anyone?), or at least allowed it to decay. People had more gold than they know what to do with post UO:R. It had an impact on crafts, people buying new equipment from player vendors, and many other fundamental aspects of what made UO.

Cheap, low-grade equipment IS what people should be using out there risking their lives (in a world where resurrection is taken for granted). In a perma-death world, one would use their best gear possible to stay alive. That isn't the world anyone wants; perma-death is everyone's least favorite option. Therefore, the equipment and gear must be made mortal to keep a steady balance of input-output in the general world economy. Anything less allows inflation to ride rampantly.

Non-consensual PvP kept the major dungeons, the true 'gold faucets', off limits to many players for fear of death and loss. This kept most people from gold creation. Once this check was taken out of the wild, inflation ran rampant all across Britannia and my guess still exists to this day in UO. Earth Elementals in Shame were an absolute gold mine in Trammel.

Exciting, 'good loot' should not be the object of the game in my opinion. While somebody may have had an 'indestructable plate chest of invulnerability' in pre-Trammel UO, the scarcity of such an object was too great alone to risk its loss much less the PvP aspects. Cheap, crappy equipment defined early UO and it kept the Britain blacksmiths at work at the northwest smithy. It kept gold flowing through player vendors. Once everyone had security, all they bought were commodities to powerlevel their skillsets.

In conclusion, I believe that if full looting options are not available then their *must* be some sink to a) take gold out of the economy and b) keep equipment from lasting forever. Otherwise it cancels any meaningful effect the crafters have on the economy. Nobody wants to RP a blacksmith if nobody is buying blacksmith goods because they never break and everyone is still using their first one / uber magical one that literally never breaks.

I am of the Knight level, however my Kickstarter title hasn't kicked in yet, but I plan to advocate full loot/complete decay options to the developers and at least mostly open world PvP in the Dev Forums. I can agree with towns being off limits, and perhaps some limited wild areas, but my opinion rests with the PvPers: consensual only PvP makes for a much less interesting game in the long run. Even if I suffer for it by not being a PvPer... I like having a challenge. PKers run the risks of being red, ostracized, and possibly penalized... shouldn't there be some reward for that? Especially with only one character per account? They also provide an object to crusade against... anti-PKs, anyone?