PVP defaults and other questions answered ? (Dev) Replied

<i>
I think where your afraid is when the PvP goes from ?im a bandit holding you up and only kill if you dont give me what I want? to ?Hey there is someone, lets kill him?. </i>

The full loot drop is the problem here. Why would I ask you for 50 gold when I could kill you much quicker and get all of your stuff. The incentive shifts considerably. You're rewarded handsomely for being the serial killer, and if you try to RP the bandit, at best you get a fraction of the serial killer reward and at worse the guy teleports home before you finish typing your threat, leaving you with nothing.

Even games without full loot run into this problem. They track your "kill count" or give you special "pvp experience points" or some other incentive that only rewards the kill.

The mafia is far richer than any serial killer has been. That's because they make their money through intimidation and limit the killing to only prove a point. In MMORPGs, the opposite is true...the serial killers are the wealthiest.

So how do you put the incentive back into RPing an evil guy? How do you put the RPG part of MMORPG into the PvP content?

If RG can figure out an answer to that question, then he's got a legendary game on his hands here.

 

<i>The full loot drop is the problem here. Why would I ask you for 50 gold when I could kill you much quicker and get all of your stuff. The incentive shifts considerably. You?re rewarded handsomely for being the serial killer, and if you try to RP the bandit, at best you get a fraction of the serial killer reward and at worse the guy teleports home before you finish typing your threat, leaving you with nothing.</i>

Maybe that is the direction to take PvP then. Set some levels of PvP attacks.

Attack someone to a low level health then give them quarter: loot some gold
Attack someone to consciousnesses: loot gold and some items, add some penalty
Attack someone and murder them: full loot, very very heavy penalty

If the penalty is stiff enough that murder is a hard choice it would only happen when the murderer thinks the reward is worth it, or the murderer has been taunted into a state of rage.

This way the most common form of PvP only end in a slight delay in your personal plans and some gold loss.

 

@marthos

If you're playing a game where there's a PKer...i.e. someone who murders and goes against the story, they're going to build up bad karma of some kind which hurts them later. I've never seen a game where stacking PKs was a good thing.

If you're playing a game that rewards people for killing enemies with some kind of PvP points, then there's no murder. Everyone is opted in and flagged for PvP. You can both kill eachother. Generally rewards for killing a player is extremely low vs taking some kind of larger objective. The only reason to kill one player is so that he won't kill you first when your back is turned.

"Killer" is a losing proposition in any game. This is someone who's willing to bleed their resources for what to them is a sport.


I didn't play UO. If there was every a time where the most profitable path in life was to slaughter the masses on innocents, clearly that wont be the case here. Even if their weren't any other players involved, that was the difference between Ultima III and Ultima IV. Killing random people wasn't going to win you the game.

 

re: PvP in other games

I'm not sure about other games that have fulltime PvP (but no permadeath mechanic), but in the game I'm currently playing (Wizardry Online,) there isn't a problem with players killing other players (well there's two guilds that have that agenda, but so far they are almost never seen.) Even one of the hardcore criminal players, she makes a point of only killing other criminals. If you're in the town with Guards, the gaurds will kill-on-sight any criminals, but the guards have their own patrol schedule, which allows criminals to take a chance and either try to PK (can't loot in town) people who are AFK and aren't newbies. Some part of the storyline is only accessible in the town, so by going Criminal way too early, you actually make it substantially harder to progress.

There is game mechanic that limits the ability to kill new players (basically soul level 1, or maximum play level 7) this works enough I find, except for spam-robots, and people operating additional computers to take up space with shops in the town. So no newbie protection mechanism is perfect, as anything that protects newbies also protects abusive practices that can be done at low levels.

So in Shroud of the Avatar, it's my hope that, like Lord British in the Ultima games, there -must- be a way to kill all players, including newbies/bots/afk-shops, even <i>if it's impractical.</i>

Like one direct way to avoid the AFK-shop abuse on a level 1 character is that someone who wants to operate a shop, must "be a shop" in practical terms, like wearing shop gear, and that gear can't be worn at a low level. That gear can grant them a "call gaurds" button that must manually be pressed when a criminal succeeds/fails at anything involving the shop. A PK could only succeed if someone were actually AFK and a low level, where as someone who is actually playing the game would survive multiple hits and could call the guards.

To avoid the gold-seller/spammer abuse, there should be a licence/permit for that zone that can be purchased that enables 'yelling' (zone/world chat), but renders them vulnerable to PK until the licence expires.

One related-abuse mechanic is the "logout to be a coward", in which as pointed above is the switch from OPO to SPO to avoid specific activity they in turn caused.

As for SPO/OPO PvP's, What I find annoying with full-time PvP is that sometimes you do run into someone who tries to erect a barricade to your progress, or something you did acts as that barricade (eg PK'ing the wrong people, and now those people chase you around) The question here is how do you allow this behavior while hindering the damage caused by it. IMO there should be a cooldown on SPO/OPO switching or on logout that prevents cowardly behavior by not removing the player from the OPO environment (eg, they always persist, but on logout are "returning home/town" on foot, which may result in additional dangerous situations, the farther they are from home/town.) Like if X kills Y, then X logsout, X still exists in OPO until they've "returned home", giving Y somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes to try and intercept them.

 

thanks for the clarification RG. so part of the express intent of the game is to encourage interaction between different groupings of kinds of players. no one is compelled to make that choice but a reward may lie at the end of the rainbow.

but at any rate, situations are being invented (largely in the other thread) which may or may not come to pass, about which people seem to be getting very agitated. and, despite what some people have claimed, all of these elements were made clear over the course of the kickstarter, so now to try to put a complete halt on any notion of any areas of value requiring open pvp is really quite disingenuous. i don't think that the desire to require every single element exactly the way you want it is going to bear fruit here.

instead, what would be more productive would be to accept the three main elements of great story, world interactivity, and emergent sandbox elements. think about the great possibilities, not the phantom fears. think about the new adventures in this new world, interacting with a range of players in new ways that none of us can predict. how can that world be crafted to appeal to a wide spectrum of players. try not to immediately dismiss elements which don't fit in with what you think your preferred mode is. try it, you might like it.

 

@ara: sorry, I can't discuss with anyone, that talks of "natural selection". This simply disgusts me

 

@Ara, natural selection is the process of preferring specific traits to confer to offspring, I believe you mean survival of the fittest, which everyone has the opportunity to survive regardless of PK intervention or PvP preference. In old UO pre-trammel days, individuals concentrated on how much they hated an idea rather than continuing to love the games ideal. Making the game appeal to a wider audience was widely accepted as the correct course of action for monetary concerns as well as casual player aspects.

If you want pre-trammel then play http://uosecondage.com/

otherwise, quit complaining about something that is clearly in the past. Risk vs reward is just as easily represented in PvE combat as well as PvP. As a matter of fact, it's harder to kill a monster than it is to fight one individual over and over for no particular reason other than bragging rights or shoddy armor and weapons. I'm not trying to down pvp at all, but it's a way to hone skills and become really really good at killing players in the heat of battle. However, to simply refer to quite a bit of contributors to this game as themepark is distasteful and needless to say unwarranted.

BTW your 5-6 years of online play would have gone unnoticed by the majority of individuals playing UO in the time of Felucca.

-Cheers-

 

I do not get the point, why PK is something that should be rewarded at all. It does not fit any rule in any country today, and also I did not hear anything, that the world of SotA will allow to kill others by law.

What we are talking about is:

1. Killing of others is a criminal act.
2. There could be licenses for hunting down criminals
3. the official forces will hunt you down.
4. The only reason for killing others should be connected to roleplay. It is the way you want to earn your money with (or you need to).

After reviewing that aspect of PvP, I asking myself what percentage of the overall online population will play that style anyhow. And to be quite clear, there should not be any reward on PK at all. If you want simply a matchmaking system where you fight other real players, than a roleplaying game might be not the right game. And I am not talking about the various RPGs in the last years, that actually does not contain any roleplay anymore but simply using the ruleset of the world to skill your avatar.

I believe that PK belongs to the world, but also it need to stay in balance. If PKing is a massive phenomena, it will kill the game. If it is more like a risk and you should protect yourself well or run in groups, then it will enhance the experience.

Rewarding PK should simply not happen at all. It should be penelized in a certain way, that has to be made up by Lord British and the dev team.

 

@Daven....... - Risk vs reward is not represented as easily in PvE combat. Fighting the hardest mob in UO were not even closely as challenging as fighting skilled PvP players. Putting yourself into a situation where you had to fight skilled human controlled characters highly raised the risk. And highest rewards should come to the players that take the highest risk. Especially in full loot games where death actually means something.

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/an-examination-of-risk-in-mmo-design/#dfff

I quote - "As MMO players, we risk and face dangers because there is some kind of reward or payoff while we play and at the end of the play experience. If the reward is not adequate then we are less likely to participate and play. The quality of the reward is often the motivational carrot for why we risk.

So logically the following must be true: Risk without adequate reward is problematic; reward without adequate risk is likewise problematic" - end quote

Individual skill should also be promoted with better rewards. The better you become in any game the better the reward.

http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/an-examination-of-risk-in-mmo-design/#dfff

I quote - "In the example I gave of the video game I was scripting, we had a very simplistic and almost childish game suddenly become more enjoyable and engaging all due to the addition of the lives mechanic. I recall my lead programmer talking about how he had to start playing better in order to avoid losing those precious lives. The result was that he stopped being sloppy, started caring about his performance and began to make an effort to play better.

All good games have one characteristic in common: they all motivate the player to become better.

What we can see here is that for risk to be leveraged effectively as an element of game design, there has to be some way for the player to mitigate that risk or risk becomes an arbitrary punishment. The way to do this is to ensure that your game requires skill on the part of your players. Without the requirement for skill all you have left is a game of chance where luck or a random number generator determines the outcome ? not the abilities and choices of the player.

The art of game design is knowing how to calibrate the perfect balance between risk and reward to create adequate challenges that entice players to improve their skills." - end quote

So again, higher risks and better skills should deliver a better reward.

 

One suggestion from me: Allow apart from friend lists (people that get more likely put in the same shard as you) a black list and give some options to preconfigure this lists. So players that love to zerg other players can do what they want and won't be bothered by the "carebears", and I can put all PKs and other Zergers on my Blacklist.

When in a game PvP is considered higher risk than other game styles, it's just a sign for bad game design (stupid monster AI, bad quest difficulty adjustments, wrong balancing, etc.). As soon as players get rewarded for a specific playstyle and others get penalized, people will leave the game and surely won't recommend that game to other players.

When the best resources will only be gatherable in PvP areas, there will be permanent ganking and zerging in those areas. Beneficiaries will be the hardcore PvP players in their PvP guilds, that monopolize the rare resources. This results in balancing issues (lower equipped players can't get to the rare resources, because they stand no chance against organized PvP crowds; and since the overall content has to be adjusted in difficulty to the main crowd, the top equipped players will be over equipped and bored after a while from the standard content).

I experienced this phenomenon in a lot of MMOs, where a playstyle gets rewarded over the others (mostly raiders and instance players). This always resulted in balancing problems, in arrogance ("but my playstyle is so much better than yours and has to be higher rewarded", etc.) and lots of angry players, when the problems get addressed afterwards.

When I go chopping wood in a forrest alone, I expect off course, that I can be attacked by bandits. But those bandits don't have to be human players, that like to destroy the gaming experience of others, but can be computer controlled enemies as well. And a game with a good monster AI can achieve that. Other MMOs like WoW, Lord of the Rings online, Tera, even Ultima Online, failed terribly in this aspect by making even Boss Monsters deaf, blind and braindead.

My plead is: There must be a way for each playstyle, to achieve the same rewards as the other playstyles, without being seen as inferior by the others (my highlight this far is the "natural selection" nonsense, I only expect in a completely different context). Solo player content must be as challenging and rewarding as group play and as PvP content. As long as this works, a game is in the right balance. I know off course, that it's impossible to keep everyone happy and there will always be jealousy and criticism, but that cannot be a reason to stop trying.

Cheers,
Andreas

 

@PrimeRib:
It figures you would think that the name you give something matters at all.
I don't care what you call it, if I can't attack someone it already ruins immersion. If I can't attack a whole group of people because xyz BS reason it ruins it even more.

I would rather have no pvp AT ALL than some faction idiocy. That would honestly be less intrusive to my feeling of immersion into the game.

Could I possibly be any more crystal clear?

 

@flashburn yeah I think we get it, you want to be able to kill anyone at all regardless if they want you to or not to keep your immersion level there. This is of course all for the game and not your personal interest.


Keep posts like those coming, it is reinforcing not convincing my beliefs.

 

@Flashburn, if you go full time PvP, the only people you will see will be full time PvPers, so don't agonize over a problem that doesn't exist.

 

One major think people need to consider is this game is a complete redesign of what we know about online gaming.

Risk vs Reward is play style independent, what he have experienced so far is lacking AI that makes for no challenge. Ask yourself this; is Chris (and team) incapable of designing AI that you can't defeat? Would you want an AI in the game that is so challenging that you would not even both with PvP, no enough risk?

Population, with this Meta Shard we are all here together, 23,680 backers at the time of writing. The Sharding system will have no problem filling an area with like minded players. The number is going to grow greatly as the game picks up momentum of clarity.

Choose your play style, you will be surrounded by like minded players, never to see player of the complete opposite style (PvP slider dependent)

 

By all this talking about how wonderful and necessary PvP seems to be for many, please do not forget that we are talking about a RG story-driven RPG world. In my opinion constant fear of being attacked by some mad PK groups does not help feel at home in this world, and does not encourage anyone to find all the hidden story links, relationships between NPCs, woundrous places and whatsoever. Me it would possibly drive away. Fast.

The debate about PK or not is old and pre-dates the graphical MMOs like UO. We had that already in the text-only MUDs (anyone remembers? ^^). My preferred ones were all either completely non-PK, or PK was at least heavily fined in-game. Any type of constant or organized griefing would get you banned. This strengthened cooperative playing. I'd prefer that, non-PK MMO. And if you want to compete, well, go the the next arena for a work-out

 

A mother says to her children, "I have prepared an extraordinary feast". The youngest says, "Vegetables have touched my food, may I have cake instead"?

 

@acryluc it isn't helping to downplay others concerns because you don't agree with them.

 

@Ara -
<blockquote>Fighting the hardest mob in UO were not even closely as challenging as fighting skilled PvP players. Putting yourself into a situation where you had to fight skilled human controlled characters highly raised the risk. And highest rewards should come to the players that take the highest risk. Especially in full loot games where death actually means something.</blockquote>

But if that was the case in UO, that is not /always/ the case. NPC AIs have reached a point that when taken in context with the benefits the computer can give to them (ability to know where everything is 100% of the time, powers players don't have access to, etc) they can be more risk than PC...

As a simplistic example of this, look at Lord British... although sometimes there is a human behind him, he is basically an NPC (he even refers to the character as an NPC) he is invulnerable. Not even the best PvPer can claim that.

Although that is an extreme example, games make use of other examples of it all the time to create tougher NPCs than even the best PvPer. It has gotten a lot of flack as being to easy but I have yet to see even the most experienced PvPer throw themselves at Kephess in Explosive Conflict, Nightmare Mode in an experienced group and not end up dead in a smear. As far as I know there are only a small handful of people that have beaten that fight gamewide and they are all dedicated PvE progression players despite having had hundreds of people try many times. Can any experienced PvPer honestly tout a win/loss ratio that big?

Luckily we have the tools with modern databases to actually measure these things and tools in games to actually adjust the rewards appropriately. We can measure things like average player skill in dispatching foes, number of deaths at the hands of given NPCs, track it over time and figure out an appropriate risk level. We can also get that granular with PvP measuring relative risk between classes or skill distributions wins/losses how much people win by or lose by/etc.

With sufficient work, a system could easily be determined to track these things and come up with an appropriate rweard/risk scale in both scenarios (pve and pvp) so that both are rewarding and neither is inherently superior or inferior to the other.

 

@wyse It is not just a number is called an AI and if you make it dumb enough then your idea comes into play. But this is where we demand them to put the time into them to make them challenging. Not all PVP players are intelligent as well.

 

@rune_74

I led my little my little brother by the hand through UO and protected him. I am the oldest of six and have a degree in child psychology. I think people's play style may stem from birth order more than anything else.

I will tag along happily with anyone needing a big brother.