PVP defaults and other questions answered ? (Dev) Replied

@rune_74

Let me clarify... I like open pvp and non-consensual pvp NOT because I can gank farmers.

I like open pvp and non-consensual pvp because of permanent feeling of danger. ?onstant possibility of pvp. I like it. PvPers like it, generally.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


@High Baron Elvish Dragon [-=UDIC=-] don't worry, I'm not ready for proper small gang warfare too.
But I do some low activity solo pvp, this is easier and much less demanding in all aspects.

 

@Regi you enjoy that, I don't...but that certainly doesn't make me a WoW person as you would say.

 

@Regi:

Depends on how you define a PvPer.

For example, if you count as a PvPer someone that plays consensual PvP on an almost daily basis, then I do qualify, despite despising non-consensual PvP.

On the other hand, if you consider playing non-consensual PvP as a requirement for being a PvPer, then you are considering most players of PvP MMOs as not PvPers; in a PvP-only MMO all PvP is consensual, since there is absolutely no other reason to log into the game.

 

<blockquote>
@High Baron Elvish Dragon [-=UDIC=-] don?t worry, I?m not ready for proper small gang warfare too.
But I do some low activity solo pvp, this is easier and much less demanding in all aspects.
</blockquote>

But that is the thing Regi... I was good at it, damn good. I ran fleets that good players wanted to be in, I was half decent as a scout/tackle and I was an awesome logistics pilot. I have destroyed 1000fold any losses I have sustained.

I left eve because small gang warfare got boring and stale because of the NAPfest that is sov 0.0. Good fights were few and far between, we would go literally 50+ systems before running across a group that would be willing to fight us without capitals (we didn't mind if they outnumbered us, but outnumbering us 100 to 1 is just plain stupid) I would run a fleet for hours and end up with one or maybe two good battles. That is just not fun.

0.0 is /broken/ in EVE... even CCP acknowledges it all the time, they are expending /vast/ amount of development time trying to fix it and resource distribution. This is not the rantings of a wow player that tried eve and didn't like it... I played eve since its early days and only last year quit it.

 

@Silent Strider

I want "more pvp, good and diverse" for the game and and its open-world and non-consensual part for me personally.
Key word is diverse probably

@High Baron Elvish Dragon [-=UDIC=-]

I agree that eve has lots of problems. And I agree that sometimes you may do 50 jumps and get nothing.
I disagree that a talented guy can't find proper pvp here. I'm russian, we have our russian forum and threads like "Lovely kills" and "Daily pvp activity". Both are filled with great kills/battlereports.
This is my killboard: http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/combat_record.php?type=player&amp;name=Captain+Nares
It will be cool to see yours coz you stated that you were "damn good"...

 

@ elvish yes c) a zone with more or different AI controlled enemies can be incorporated as well, so that both b) and c) grant better rewards than a), but some rewards from b) and c) must not be identical. the rewards will have to be different in order to foster the third pillar of the game, emergent multiplayer gameplay, otherwise two parallel paths would emerge when the stated concept is to intertwine the paths.

 

@Regi: I don't have a full killboard but I started using battleclinic near the end because other killboards were tweaking the hell out... which is I suppose beneficial since I don't have access to those other killboards anymore, the agony one is private except for the agony university one.

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/combat_record.php?type=player&amp;name=aelana+anais

Keep in mind that a good 80% of the time I was in a Guardian or Basilisk for most fleets (Unless I led them in which I usually used a t2 frigate for maneuvarabiity) [to those not familiar with EVE, I was primarily a healer ] So most of the fleet kills I was involved in weren't there [did they ever fix that, it always pissed me off that logistics pilots got the shaft when it came to killboards?]

Even ignoring fights I was in for logistics I had a 60+ to 1 ISK ratio. [granted it is over a pretty small sample time since as I said, I only started using battleclinic near the end] So as I said I was damn good, not top 10% of the server good, but damn good and I had a lot of fun.

And yes we got good fights... but when you spend most of your time trying to /find/ good fights instead of /having/ good fights the system is broken.

 

@Helicon: agreed, I don't think they should be orders of magnitude different and I think there should be a great deal of ... I can't think of the right word... the stuff coming out of pvp even if it is the same /value/ in terms of monetary should utilize things like sought after stylistic differences to help encourage people to try different gameplay types out... If they try them and don't like them there is always the auction house after all.

 

@High Baron Elvish Dragon [-=UDIC=-]

Thnx. Btw we discussed logistics a pair of days ago and one guy kept crying that corpmates must fly them only as a punishment coz it's boring in his opinion Never flew logistic ships myself, and probably he wasn't serious...

I'll try to stop discussing eve. It has good and bad sides (so bad that you can see me here), but I pretty much sure that it is revolutionary and something it-will-be-very-uselful-to-look-into compared to other MMOs. Especially in terms of pvp and pvp-related economy.

PS here in jabber guy says that there were less than 10 jumps for small gang pvp for you (to G-0).

 

@Regi - Indeed, as I said it has done some really interesting and admirable things... and even its shortcomings can teach lessons.

For an example of things we can learn, I was just discussing the game this AM with a friend over breakfast and he was telling me that that they are starting to work to fix the moon goo problem by changing it so it spanws dynamically instead of being at fixed spots. Meaning instead of just plopping a station at a resource point and keeping the fleets on standby, they will need to search it out and find it, mine it and do it again once it is depleted. They are also talking about including a mechanism by which the market for the goo is monitored and if the price goes too high, the game will start to spawn it in higher security spaces to increase supply and drop the price.

Persoanlly I find that a particularly interesting solution to the whole "node in one place, monopoly of big guilds form" problem. And it encourages dynamic, emergent play.

 

@Regi : RE-10 jumps... *shrug* what do I know it was a while ago, and I don't ahve access to my after action reports [wish I had saved a copy of those...]... point is it felt like a long time and I spent more time finding fights than fighting them.

 

I'm mentioned this before but PvP is three levels:
1) Strategic
2) Tactical
3) Execution

I haven't played Eve. But it sounds like one of the better games for strategic PvP. Humans out-thinking other humans for things that boil down to raw economics. I need to kill, so I can capture, so I can run an empire, so I can mine ore, so I can trade it and but the stuff I actually want. I would love to see this chain of motivation shaping the overall economy in SotA. Many, many roles here have nothing to do with combat. Heck, most jobs in the US Army are non-combat, and even counting none of the civilians.

The tactical game is all game theory. If I have 5 people how many stay on defense, how many hit the front door vs the side door, etc. Battlegrounds in WoW or MOBAs have a certain amount of this. It gets even more interesting if you fight the same players several times and people keep trying to alter their tactics. (Let's go all D and ambush them this time).

The execution part is just button mashing. Ofc course a computer can outplay you here. Even if it doesn't cheat at all, it has faster reflexes.


In my mind an MMO has a chance to be a good, strategic game. Most people who just want the lower two levels are playing LoL. I'm happy to see them incorporated into the game though. It's good for the casual player. And it's also the only thing people do play professionally. I think there a major role in a "PvP driven" game for lots of people who have no interest in fighting other players. Just as there's a role for people how have no interest in economics. And war's really all about economics at the end of the day.

 

@PrimeRib - The tactical tends to get lost, I agree... we used to talk about market PvP in eve... Personaly I think some of the Jita market folks were more bloodthirsty than I was

 

I think we need to put this "human is better than AI" belief to rest.

A little light reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_chess_matches

Since the 1960's people have been writing AI to defeat the human condition. As you can see in the case with chess, the modern AI rates at the master chess player level. SotA is not chess, chess has been studied for 1000+ years. We do not yet know the rules and theorem for combat in SotA

EGO aside, there could be an AI so strong that maybe 1-10 players could even last to the point of a stalemate. You could be one of the ten, is that the game we want made? But wait, this is what we suggest everyone be subjected to, the human condition, the lower skilled must compete against that group of players that can beat the best AI in the world.

With chess, tournaments are staged to rank players and AI alike. Lower ranked players must earn the right to play a master. Not only is this a matter of respect but also a matter of boredom for a master.

Richard Garriott and the team do not want to make a game full of master level AI. Some areas will be much easier while others will be difficult. Why would they throw that design off by unleashing the master PvP players into all areas of game play?

 

The way developers typically make up for deficient AI in games is to boost health points and attack rates above what an equivalent player character is capable of, so it is not that the AI is equivalent to a player character, the developers cheat.

I doubt that SotA will be employing a supercomputer to provide their AI, so while interesting, I think comparing a dedicated chess computer with the AI common to computer games is not particularly valid.

 

<i>Pocket Fritz 4 (2009)

In 2009 a chess engine running on slower hardware, a 528 MHz HTC Touch HD mobile phone, reached the grandmaster level. The mobile phone won a category 6 tournament with a performance rating 2898. The chess engine Hiarcs 13 runs inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD. Pocket Fritz 4 won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw on August 4?14, 2009.[29] Pocket Fritz 4 searches fewer than 20,000 positions per second.[30] This is in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue that searched 200 million positions per second. Pocket Fritz 4 achieves the same high performance as Deep Blue on a slow computer.
Pocket Fritz 3 using version 12.1 of Hiarcs won the same event the previous year with six wins and four draws, running on a 624 MHz iPaq hx2790. The 2008 Mercosur Cup was a category 7 tournament. Pocket Fritz 3 achieved a performance rating of 2690.[31]</i>

No super computer required.

 

Like I said, Ego aside, there might be some players that can beat a strong AI.

What is being ask is the game be open so the grand master PvP players have free reign to attack a low ranking PvP player.

How many people want to play chess with a friend that always best them. How long before that friend no longer wants to play chess knowing it will always be a win.

Eventually, there is no chess being played.

 

but the human element can always be combined with whatever AI for max challenge; then in order to have levelish options which do and don't include pvp, you have to choose to artificially simplify the AI in the open pvp area, as discussed above

 

Ristra 'What is being ask is the game be open so the grand master PvP players have free reign to attack a low ranking PvP player.'

i see very few voices asking for that. there are just as many demanding access to every single facet of the game and maximum reward for minimum risk.

i'm confident a middle ground will be found; that will be where the fun is for people who are willing to try something new, rather than recline in the sofachair of their mmo experiences of the past 10 years

 

@Ristra

Playing with a friend who is better than you is the only way to learn pvp. In other words, you don't want to learn (pvp).

You know, there are pvpers who enjoy easy pvp and those who enjoy hard pvp. Now you are on the side of first type, those who prefer to gank noobs, and sadly this isn't contradiction &gt;,&lt;

So, there are games with carebears and &quot;pvpers&quot; who gank them, and there are games with elite pvpers, and pvpers who learn to pvp

I&#039;d like to see a game of second type, but with pve players. You want to see a game of first type, but without pvpers