Full PvP with tiered mitigation in newbie areas

That's where much the of confusion is, What is a PK?

You have Honor, your view of a PK is that, the player has gone Red. My view is the same, but from a different era.

 

Here's a sloppy picture of what I would do: http://i.imgur.com/wM5wNK1.png

I wouldn't have a PVE region surrounded by PVP stuff, this is just a visual aid because they are nice to have.

• Stars are capital cities
• Large faded dots are major cities
• Dots with squares are small towns/villages with some kind of defensive structure

If you look at the picture up close, there is a bubble around the colored empires, this is pretty much a buffer zone where things like fortifications and outposts stand to discourage players from wandering into danger. Warning the player with a yes/no box is one way to protect players, but another is to have some kind of criteria for passing border guards, such as initial quests that show you the ropes or a tax that is prohibitively expensive for people that just started. PVE content is everywhere though. You can pretty much see everything in the safety of the interior kingdoms, but the unclaimed territories are unclaimed for a reason, and so there may be resources or items that are exclusive to those regions. Of course, the market is open between the interior and exterior kingdoms, assuming roads and waterways are clear of interference....

One of the things that I didn't put on the map was a cutting up of the interior kingdoms into provinces that Guilds/Factions fight a territory war over. To add onto that even more, there ought to be NPC armies moving around on regular campaigns that create opportunities for PVP between factions and their guilds. The capital is obviously unconquerable, but the major cities would have something very similar to how the capitals worked in Warhammer Online, where a city can be captured, but the home faction has a way to easily reconquer the city.

There are three layers for what that picture is trying to show.

1. PVE
2. Guild/Faction warfare
3. Player conquest in the uncolored areas

The first 2 layers are pretty straight forward, The first one is casual and free of risk, the next is controlled PVP, and then there is open PVP. Everything beyond the interior kingdoms is wild land. Player guilds are essentially creating their own personal kingdoms out there. They start from scratch and develop the entire territory. This includes doing things like cutting down forests, building roads and defensive structures, as well as maintaining safety and security by funding NPC patrols and settlement militia, and maybe even armies if they can afford it. Instead of letting players start wherever they want, I would probably just give territories 2 or 3 founding nodes that serve as starting points for the first village and then the new towns that are built if old is destroyed for some reason. Cities on the other hand are incredibly expensive to found but only have a single founder node to rebuild upon, and there would only be a few specific locations where they exist.

Player risk follows the same thought pattern

• PVE - You can't be ganked unless you enter a PVP area, and you can only lose items if you don't recover your body or pay a priest or something for your stuff.
• Guild/Faction PVP - Players can loot a single item for killing you by performing an action that takes time, and is interrupted by damage, but you can't pay a priest to recover your body until your PVP flag expires back into PVE
• Open PVP - Same as PVP in the Interior Kingdoms, but they can loot everything if given time.

I don't really like the idea of separating the PVP and PVE groups, games always die quickly when the hardcore crowd abandons ship, and giving them license to molest newbies is going to only encourage elitism and make it hard for new players to remain with the online community. Players can ease their way into what ever they are comfortable with under this format. Hell, even wandering out into open PVP lands is not necessarily a death sentence for roleplayers who know what to avoid and how to get around.

This stuff is not impossible for an expansion or at least some initial experimentation. There are all kinds of reference materials for the various mechanical attributes of what I'm talking about. Here is a small list of examples, the ones without bracketed comments have lots of stuff to add, but nothing particularly important enough to point out.

• Mount & Blade 1 and Warband (how NPC patrols and armies could work, combat too for that matter)
• Ultima Online
• Guild Wars 1-2
• Knights of Honor (conquering territories, improving them, empire building, and political intrigue)
• Total War Series
• Civilization Series (how city management could work)
• Warhammer Online
• Wurm Online (the strengths and weaknesses of player run worlds)
• Mortal Online
• EVE Online (the basis for the idea in general, stratification is a keyword here)
• Majesty Series
• Hegemony (a way to visualize open and faction/guild pvp on the map)

 

@Luitpold, the problem I have with a layered hierarchy such as you propose is that it is highly unrealistic. The thing that prevents open PvP outside of your player conquest area, or guild warfare outside of the area you allocate for that activity is an artificial game mechanism. If I am participating in a Guild War, for example, there may well be areas that are too dangerous for me to venture alone and places where I can travel freely, but that would be because those are areas are controlled by the rival guild and areas controlled by my guild, not because the game engine artificially designates the situation in any particular area.

People who don't want open PvP don't want to be shut out of the areas you allocate for open PvP, and people who want open PvP don't want artificial limits placed on where they can and cannot participate in that style of game play.

I think the currently proposed server matching mechanism is a much better solution. Open PvPers have the entire world outside of cities in which to operate, and PvE player have the entire world in which to operate as well.

 

The essentials of what I am proposing have pretty much seen practical use in unison and in part. EVE is the obvious one, and it has simply been successful. After all these years of using it they have managed to maintain and occasionally increase their subscriber base. If you haven't played that game, it's literally what I am proposing but bigger in scope. Conventional MMOs use geographic layering and level progression as sources for stratification. WoW used hills and such to contain players in relevant content even though low level areas were connected to high level areas, it managed to work. Also, WoW had PVP layering to a degree, and there were places that were compulsory PVP no matter what server, like the arena in Stranglethorn Vale. They had at one point intended for open world faction conquest stuff but it never materialized as was intended, you can see the remnants in Ashenvale and Barrens. So in terms of attainment of access under a flat or tall system like EVE compared to WoW, people still manage to adapt to 'artificial game mechanisms'. It's not unrealistic at all since it's been fundamentally proven.

I didn't really explain how player organizations work. Guild is being thrown around as a generic term, but there are a lot of different types of organizations going on here, they might as well be separate things. There are three types of organizations that players are involved in: confederates, factions, and guilds. Confederates are the groups that play the territory control game, they can be a single guild or a unity of two or more guilds to represent a common interest. Factions are the interior NPC kingdoms that are locked in eternal struggle, players and guilds can freely associate as they see fit. Guilds are basic organizations, they can build guild houses and remain independent and do as they please, or align with a faction or confederacy and fight their wars.

There are ways to give tools to the players so they can safely navigate hostile environments, such as the speed modifiers that factor numbers of people, mode of travel, geography, and weight. Mount & Blade did this and it worked fine, there were skills that made you travel faster, but a very large army of nothing but horses was slower than a very small group of people on foot or riding horses. Another thing that can be done is to put hills and border walls that keep people from wandering into danger. You can also put stuff in the territory control that pushes the player kingdoms desire regional security to avoid infractions to industry and commerce or some other things. Public transportation caravans are another possibility. There is also the tried and true power in numbers, where you don't wander into dangers unaware and alone.

I've only made sprite based games, but if the basis for creating a game-play mechanic is any similar, then it's all about knowing how different bits of code interact and then creating chains that result in the desired behavior. The devs have plenty of experience with stuff that is mechanically similar to the stuff I am talking about, so skill isn't an issue.

The problem that I have with matching servers, is that when you separate the PVP and RP communities, they become even worse than when they were forced to interact. On their own they're fickle and short-lived, and they splinter among themselves into petty little cabals because there is no way in hell that a fantasy RPer and some erotic RP schmuck are ever going to see eye to eye, nor casual PVPers and min-maxers. If healthy communities are even remotely important for the long term survival of this game, then we have to find a way to connect the various strands rather than enable the inevitable segregation. They'll sustain one another like tissue.

I paid $25, so this is as far as I will make my point. I'm sure the matching server will have that much moneys worth of entertainment. I'm just trying to make a case for something more compelling than the path of least resistance. It could be built up as the game receives expansions, so it'. In the end we will only discover what is necessary when they are happening in real time. My only concern at this point is that because of the pledge levels and need for player involvement, those that socked away enough money to pay rent for a month or two may begin to use bruteforce to impose their ideals and then kill motivation from others to contribute, because that kind of gerrymandering crap makes us useless to them and it's immensely selfish. It's the content rather than the rhetoric that they need most I suppose.

 

It works ok in Eve, because Eve is HUGE, with thousands of systems. The geography in SotA is more restrictive, so I think they have to allow everyone to make the best use of what is available. The best way to do that is to let everyone go everywhere, and let the server matching keep dissimilar player styles separate.

 

Luitpold, what you're describing is what Pathfinder Online is doing. Their target audience is 4000 players for launch, and they have publicly acknowledged that they will have a much smaller audience due to their PvP design, which is (as far as I can tell) exactly what you have outlined, but even more pvp focused.

It's been stated any time PvP has come up with SotA: It will be consensual, only.

In a broader sense, Shadowbane, Darkfall, Mortal Online, and even today, this very moment, UO, all have/had vastly more hardcore PvP than what SotA has described to date. Shadowbane failed, Mortal Online is not a runaway success, and Darkfall was shutdown and relaunched just a few months ago. PvP centric titles, in the persistent online multi-player genre, have a vastly smaller subscriber base, globally, compared to PvE centric titles.

This fact is not lost on Portalarium. Their current design has the potential to make both groups happy. Yes, it's a compromise, and as such, not the best solution for both sides. Within that compromise, though, may be just enough wisdom to build a community that sustains it's own population. For a niche title (which I think SotA absolutely is), that's all you can hope for.

To your recommendation of "There are ways to give tools to the players so they can safely navigate hostile environments". Unnecessary with SotA's PvP design. Pathfinder Online is banking on player conflict being the end game. In every persistent online multi-player game that I've played since Meridian59, player conflict becomes a repetitive boring pointless shell game. Even Warhammer which had the largest open-shared-world battles I've ever personally witnessed, became a shell game once players figured out the system.

Regarding your polarized examples of play styles, yes, they can and do fit all together in SotA, so far, as described. They will (hopefully) do that, much like real life, by choosing who to interact with, rather than having that interaction forced upon them.

 

Yes. Essentially all PvPers really want are hotspots to always find action.

 

The sorting engine starts with people on your friends list, and then their friends, and works it's way out. For many of us, this means that the game population we encounter will be a stable core of folks we like, with an ever shifting fringe of people who play kinda like we do.