PvP - One Hour or More Ban from Zone OnDeath()

I do not undetstand people who flag for pvp and do not want to actually fight other players.

It's hard enough to find rumbles to get in as it is without adding a one hour timer before you can even get a rematch.

If you want to farm xp uninterrupted can't you just not be flagged for pvp? It seems people just want to put pvp in a box.

 

Anyone that is happy with the current state of PvP in this game has never experienced properly done meaningful PvP. The best PvP I've experienced in MMO's is from early Everquest, when you would respawn at your bind point naked on death and your corpse would be left where you died. Anyone could loot one item from your corpse of their choosing and you had to run back to your corpse and loot it to retrieve the rest of your items. This is where corpse camping became a thing. So what did you do? you got friends together to help you get your corpse back! or you find a necromancer and pay them to summon your corpse to you. This is meaningful PvP.

You all would flip if something like that was introduced so I'm searching for a compromise to improve the terrible PvP system we currently are using but you all still want meaningless battles and a divided player base that is either xp'ing or pvp'ing. My solution is to encourage MORE PLAYERS TO FLAG PVP AT ALL TIMES not just when they feel like messing around fighting other players. If you like FPS PvP so bad, go play a FPS, they actually keep score and you can "win the battle."

If you think a zone ban is too harsh then entertain the return to bind point solution but don't for one second try to pretend that the current PvP system isn't terrible. Your only embarrassing yourselves.

@Armar
@Ancev
@Stundorn
@Korim Rackham
@MrBlight
@Audacity

 

No claim was made that this PVP was perfect.
Theres tons lacking, and ive been very vocal about it.

I assure you i know what good PVP is. That doesnt change the fact that this idea is simply bad, and no where near the solution to making PVP good in SOTA.

 

I don't think you do. You don't even know how to express yourself. "this idea is simply bad" says NOTHING. Try articulating when you speak or your not communicating.

 

In UO everyone could take all your loot. Did made for some adrenaline fueled runs back to your corpse if soloing.

Not at all... on the contrary...

After studying this forums i did arrive at the conclusion that a PvP+ and PvP- server is the only solution to this dillema. If one can learn one thing from this game-design its that you cant cater to too many playstyles at once.

See above. Create a PvP+ server, do a marketing campaign to try to get the old UO fanbase back and some new PvPers in. Get more hardcore PvE folks for the PvP- server.

IMO the zone ban will break the game. Especially with a well populated server. I am "ok" with the bind point solution but i can guaranty that this will lead to whining-storms on the forums. Like already mentioned, we had this concept in Shadowbane. You could either bind to an NPC town if not in a guild, or you would bind to your guilds town (or its "Tree of Life").

What happens with this concept is that every guild will try to place their town close to prime spawn zones. Which they will control and only will allow allied guilds to access those. This stirs up "meaningfull conflict" (?!) and wastes resources, which is good.

Downside is that you end up running up to one hour (!) to reach a different spawnzone which will most probably be controled by an enemy fraction/guild. If you make it to the spawn zone and wont get killed on the way. (Which isnt a big issue with the SotA overland map though). Then if you die, in PvP or PvE you can walk all the way back. You waste hours of game time running around. Thats nice in the beginning but gets boring as soon as you know the zones. If unluckily you walk 40-60 minutes to a spawn/PvP zone just to get killed after a couple of minutes.

This also has great implications on guild warfare because it extremely strengthens the defenders position. All defenders reincarnate right at the point of action while the attackers gets beamed away 40-60 minutes. Because of this we had to create and defend a binding point (VERY EXPENSIVE) close to enemy territory and had all members of the united guilds bind to it. (It had been a glorious battle though which lasted more than 24 hours and caused several server crashs )

// Armar

 

Thank you for a legitimate reply. I agree that a separate server that had a forced PvP flag would solve many problems and allow the developer team to make PvP more meaningful and fun however I do not believe SoTA has any intention of doing this. To much money has been invested by players to have exclusive content such as POTs. The developers do not want to dilute the value of this content out of respect for their high rolling backers (I assume.)

Players will whine on forums no matter what the game looks like, if there aren't players upset and whining then the game probably is not worth playing imo. Pandering to the whiners is what caused Sony to ruin Everquest, they didn't want to pay for the customer support and they wanted to appeal to as many players as possible.

Please explain to me why you believe that the one hour zone ban would break the game as you say.

 

Not only this. This initial concept of catering for "everyone" on the same server results in way too much development overhead and broken/complicated game-mechanics. Imagine you take all this overhead away and the Devs could put this energy in completing the "core" game, the story, etc. Its probably cheaper to run a second server than continue to put development time into the current philosophie.

Key problem is the low playerbase but there are still tons of players in hibernation waiting for "something to happen". And i bet that a PvP+ server together with a good marketing campaign can bring a lot of those players back as well as new ones.

Right, a rider on a dead horse comes to mind....

Right, but this is solveable. Players could choose to stay on the current PvE server or choose to migrate, with all their stuff and property to a pure PvP server where their invest might not be secure for eternity. Which will leave most high-end founders staying on the PvE server. I couldnt care less to be honest. Some of them will probably create accounts on the PvP+ server anyway.

Thats correct but i cant remember having this level of whining in "Shadowbane" or "Anarchy Online". Those are the only 2 persistent MMOs i played after UO.

Because it makes it too easy to control zones and wont be accepted anyway by most players. Imagine you get kicked out of 3 zones in a row. Which is realistic on a populated server. It results in just too much personal downtime.

// Armar

 

The option to migrate exclusive content to the new server would alleviate the concern of value dilution (imo at least.)

I see how on a very populated server this could be a concern if players are "camping" the zone entrance. A solution would be to allow players to enter the zone at five or six different locations just as they can currently leave the zone from different locations. The position of the character on the over world map would determine the characters zone in location. If the first three zones that the player enters are camped at all five zone entrances then its probably time to start a new server. Other than that, I would say that players would need to be more cautious when entering zones, IE only enter with a group, or allow players to zone in with invisibility effects maintained.