Blocking the despicable PK *-p-o-l-l-*

And my response is why should I worry about a hypothetical situation that I don't think will ever occur?

Tell me, what will you do if you go to town and when trying to access a vendor, a flash mob appears and performs "Cats" in it's entirety?

If you want to devote a lot of thought to that question, good for you.

 

I'd join in, honestly.

But, you've missed the point, so there is no point in continuing this discussion.

 

Now that you spoke it out loud that is so going to happen all the time.

 

So the real issue is answering Queues quicker and not designing a complex system that would add stress to the structure. The makeup of the game is placing people together in an instance if you have to start adding in people who block other people it changes the entire system. So I stick with Mute is a great thing but someone jumping around is not really worth wasting time to code a block function.

 

There are many other ways one can silently annoy the flying crap out of a player. Given that there is already going to be code existing to connect people, it won't really be much to have code that disconnects people, too.

 

What was that dude called in Spoony's Ultima 9 video? Avatar's Biggest Fan or something? Imagine that guy in your game 24x7.

 

As annoying as people can be in these games, I invite that interaction. It's all part of the experience for me. Call me crazy.

You're creating an artificial wall around you when you're blocking players left and right.

Just play the game, and see where it goes and who you meet.

 

Age of Conan started with a much higher focus on PvP than it currently does. The devs then moved towards a much more PvE friendly model due to player pressure.

After a while Funcom attempted to make a (much) smaller number of "Blood and Glory" PvP servers, with the kind of harsh PvP mechanics part of the player base was demanding, things like only having one character on the server and having some ways to avoid PvP removed. AFAIK they were an utter failure.

BTW, AAA publishers don't do hardcore PvP MMOs because they have seen too many indie hardcore PvP MMOs fail, and have seen UO - perhaps the only AAA hardcore PvP MMO ever made - forced to mostly remove non-consensual PvP to survive; most big MMOs released since UO seem to have ex-UO developers on their early teams, so they do have insider insight on how well hardcore PvP worked for UO. The guy responsible for originally developing WoW's PvP, for example, was an ex-UO dev.

Yeah, EVE is an exception. It's also a game that had an horrible launch and took years to maneuver into a good position, and every game that attempted to compete with it up to now either crashed and burned or became stuck at a tiny size. Also, I don't consider EVE, at the start, an AAA MMO; it was definitely an indie game back then, though now it has grown.

You decide what is hardcore PvP for you. Player, dev, and media consensus determine what is hardcore PvP for the industry as a whole, and it seems to be somehow different from your concept (or mine, for what matters; I don't find a number of so-called hardcore PvP games exactly hardcore, though I do not consider that a game needs player looting to be hardcore PvP, so my definition is different from yours).

 

I didnt expect our definitions of what is a hardcore PvP game to match. Full loot is a consequence needed to make it a hardcore PvP game. Without it there is no risk vs reward.

UO Renaissance that came after trammel was a huge success. The PvP players stayed in felucca and there were loads of them, might have been more in trammel, i dunno since there is no accurate numbers, but Renaissance proved that there is a AAA market for these kind of hardcore PvP game.

It might not be World of Warcraft successful but then again which other game is?

My personal view on why they implemented trammel is that they saw some easy money in that direction. If they had instead created even harder consequences for being a statloss PK or even a blue PK then im 100% sure it would have worked very well. Instead they decided to split the community in half.

It is developer decisions that make many believe that a hardcore AAA game wouldnt work, as trammel implementation. How can anyone have accurate estimations when it havent been tried for +10 years?
UO Renaissance is a proof of the opposite. Felucca hardcore gaming didnt die because of trammel or Renaissance, it died cause of Age of Shadows implemented february 2003.

 

There's no difference in the two. You are killing me, depriving me of my adventure while victimizing another player.

I can't wait to see how many folks actually opt into Open PvP (if that's even going to be an option). I bet it's going to be a mere handful of players and the outcry is going to be both sad and satisfying.

*Wrings Hands in Anticipation*

 

Just about every poll created here on SotA when it comes to full loot or hardcore PvP with consequences and risk vs reward tell me your wrong. The majority vote more often for the hardcore options.

Seems we the players that want a hardcore PvP game close to felucca UO are more in numbers then you imagined.

 

Simple solution. Don't flag for Open PvP, because that is how Open PvP will function. That's why it's called OPEN PVP.

 

Well, I don't know about you, but for my money the 52 votes on this particular poll are not reliably representative of the 41k members of this forum.

As in politics, I wouldn't put too much weight behind polls.

 

@Owain

Um, I wasn't aware that they had finalized the flag system yet. How are we to know how OPEN PVP works as of yet?

It's all speculation.

 

Well, since it DOES get to be cumbersome to always say, "Assuming the dev's implement Open PvP, and by whatever mechanism players might use to flag themselves for Open PvP", there's a lot less wear and tear on my keyboard to just say "Open PvP".

 

Or, there are just more of you vocal on the forum right now. A few polls on the forum aren't indicative of the population. Plenty of people simply aren't bothering to post.

 

I'm not so sure here. As you said, we have no data to know how well PvP fared when it became optional. Also, the player peak for UO happened after Age of Shadows launched - but then, so did the players peak for WoW happen after Cataclysm launched.

The charts I've seen tend to put UO's decline a bit later, though, more or less coinciding with the launches of EQII and WoW, so I'm not sure whether it's UO's direction or the suddenly increased competition that is to blame.

I believe part of the Portalarium team has first hand experience with what happened in UO and why it was decided to divide the game world, so I expect them to act more on their first hand knowledge in this than on hunches by individual players.

In my humble opinion, though, I believe dividing the world was the right decision to keep the PvE players while providing a place for unrestricted PvP; many players, and I include myself in that, won't settle for any PvE that can be interrupted by unwanted PvP, even if the consequences for whoever initiates the PvP are harsh.

It will likely not be tried by an AAA game again until an indie game attempts it and succeeds. With exceedingly rare exceptions AAA games don't innovate, they follow. Investors don't like betting tens of millions of dollars - which is what you can expect an AAA game to cost - on a hunch, they want the kind of assurance that only a previous and successful product can give.

It's how usually old genres get resurrected and new genres surface, BTW. Some indie company, with little to lose, decides to bet on a new or underrepresented genre they believe, and their success enables other developers to secure the required funding to release better funded and more polished games on the same genre.

 

There was a downfall in UO subscribers when WoW came out but hat was 2004 and EQ2 was in november that year.

And youre right players subs increased some months after AoS to then start decreasing in a rate never seen in UO subscriber history.

Reason for that is felucca players just about totally abandoned the game after they tried AoS for some months, i know i did and so did just about all felucca PvP guilds on Europe shard. There you have a strong reason why subscribers to the game so rapidly decreased some months after AoS.

Making the game more casual was what EA thought was the right way to go financially so they decided to create Age of Shadows, something that made UO very similar to the game released in 2004, World of Warcraft. And as you say it was lead designer of UO: Age of Shadows that designed WoW, Tom Shilton.

Developers never tried making consequences for red and blue PK:s harder then they were so they dont really know what would have happened with such a move. I believe it would have worked very well. And i do believe trammel was created to rapidly increase the number of subscribers and wash away the bad name felluca had given them. They gave an option for players to play the game casual in total safety. I believe that was bad for the game since it divided the community forever.

Indy companies just dont have the needed recscources to develop and market games. EvE online is an exception to this but i dont count EvE as a hardcore PvP game, i see it more as a space simulator.

I honestly believe if RG had the rights to UO and was releasing UO2 he would have made a fortune on that release.

 

And you might be misunderstanding me.
If you add ignore or block you might as well remove most PVP content from the game.
You can't have bounties on players if they can ignore the bounty hunter.
You can't have criminals if they can ignore the cops.
You can't have thieves if they are being ignored.
You can't catch a smuggler if the smuggler can ignore you.
You can't have missions to get past PK areas if all you need to do is ignore them.

The list goes on and on.
You might as well rid the game of PVP content if you add ignore or block.

If your having a problem with someone I say first try to find help inside the game to deal with the harasser if that don't work then record what is going on and send in a complaint.
But in a mode with player killers you should be able to get help killing him enough times to get him to leave you alone.

 

This really depends on the player. I hate asking for help in-game enough that I usually would rather stop playing a game altogether than ask for help. But that is me with my own stubbornness, I'm not sure how common that kind of feeling is.