The dev quotes I hope I never hear again.

There are a number of developer quotes that I keep hearing in telethons and that I hope I will stop hearing because they're completely wrong.

Quote 1: "PVP will be fixed when we have more people to PVP."

No, unfortunately this is a very poor way to look at the current state of the game. Adding more people to a world that doesn't support what they're looking for will only make them more difficult to retain. They're not going to show up and say "Wow, this PVP is horrible. I think I'll wait 6 months longer and hope the developers make it better." That just doesn't happen. Ask Shadowbane, Darkfall, Age of Conan, and soon to be Albion Online how well that's working out for them.

Quote 2: "PVP is its own reward."

If this was true, we'd never have to design anything ever again. We'd just flip on the ability to attack each other and away we'd go. Which does make sense because we haven't had a whole lot of design since R9 when we literally flipped the switch and allowed players to attack each other.

Quote 3: "No we can't take out all the mobs from Shardfall's because then we'd have to take out all the resources too, and then why would anyone go there?"

Exactly! Why would they go there? Not because pvp was it's own reward. Not because there weren't enough people there. This is describing my PVP POT to a T, btw. There's no rewards for going there, there's only risk.

But at least if you took the mobs out of the Shardfall's then you'd have the reward of "easy" resources, with the risk of people trying to gank you. Right now you don't have the reward of easy resources because they're being guarded by mobs, and if you engage those mobs that only makes it easier for the people trying to gank you to find your location and accomplish their goal when you're low health.

We have all these awesome PVE scenes that are sitting in the middle of PVP zones. It's insane.

Quote 4: "But we made Blood Bay"

Yes, some community members wanted (and begged) for a new "Buc's Den". Yes, they said this would help PVP. But has it? I know there's more planned including player housing. But is it likely to produce more meaningful fighting? Or is it likely to produce a bunch of claimed housing (for bragging rights, "I have a house in Blood Bay!") that no one actually lives in?

Quote 5: "PVP is always unbalanced."

This one irks me the most. Not because I don't understand that creating a "perfect balance" is probably not going to be the goal for an MMO. But because it seems like this quote attempts to excuse major combat balance issues that have existed since the design of the combat system. Here's a few that have lasted from the very beginning...

1. Counters: There's a general lack of counters in the game. What's the counter to being tripped? What's the counter to being poisoned? What's the counter to being knocked down? Just to name a few...

2. There's also a general lack of balanced counters in the game. The counter to being stunned is that you can jump! But since you're already stunned and you need a second to jump and jumping might not work the first few times, this really isn't a counter as much as it is an annoying thing you do after you've been stunned. Meanwhile, guess what? Someone is going to stun you again.

3. Some of the counters we have to TOO effective.

Fire Magic does DOTs (Damage Over Time), yet we allow one spell in water magic "Douse" to completely eliminate DOTs with the press of a single button. This spell alone makes being a pure fire mage in PVP essentially just a nice roleplaying angle.

Celestial Blessing provides over 30% magic resistance at skill level 1! And that's for 4 schools of magic.

4. Artifacts are OP. Players are supposed to be making the best gear in the game, but artifacts are crazy OP! Yeah sure, they're cool, and of course they have a negative, don't forget that. But almost all of them can be used to create a near unstoppable imbalance at higher levels of play, and they are certainly better than whatever a player can make.

This isn't true for every artifact. But for the ones where it is true, it's obscene. For example. The Ankh of Wala allows the user to get +50 Sun Attunement and +2 Combat Focus Regen. What's the negative? Just that it requires 200% reagent. So if you have the extra money, why not put an Ankh in each hand and get +100 Sun Attunement with +4 Combat Regen?!

Remember how I said there was no counter to poison? Well that's because we have poisons that do immediate damage! So even if you use a potion of "cure poison", that's not going to stop the damage you already took. It's just going to be a funny footnote on your way to dying. But why not create an artifact that does 50% increased damage from poison? That's right, you can get that from the assassin blade! Yay!

There are many more examples...

5. Potions are crazy powerful. Especially the ones that last for 10 minutes and give +50 resistance to ALL magic schools, other than Chaos. If you're going to PVP, how can you afford NOT to use these? You really can't, and you really won't the more you rely on magic. Note there's no potion that gives you +50 resistance to ALL physical damage, so mages you're SOL.

6. Open World PVP: We don't really have open world pvp. What we have is wolf vs. sheep PVP. There are only two ways to "open world" PVP in this game. Either you go out into the void looking for players to kill that are trying to level XP, or you go out looking to level XP and hope no one finds you that wants to kill you. That's not meaningful, that's not "open world", it's just silliness. There's no skill involved in killing people with low health engaged with mobs. And there's no meaning in being wtfowned!1!! by people that have every advantage in the world to kill you.

The Portalarium development team is full of extremely smart people, and I believe they're more than capable of doing whatever they want to do if they put their minds to it. But based on the quotes above, I'm not convinced that they put enough time into thinking about how PVP works and doesn't work. I'm not convinced that they will ever get PVP working unless they stop saying the above quotes and start thinking about reality.

We can balance this game. We can design it to be better. We can make PVP meaningful. But first we must stop making up excuses and logical fallacies. Let's get to work!

 

Sometimes you talk a lot of sense...this is one of those times

 

RE: changing mobs in Shardfalls.

I say changing, because removing is kind of dumb. Make pockets of mobs, guarding their own resources. So a group of flesh flayers that guards an obsidian chip node and a chest (or corpse) of random goodies. Take all the other mobs out, so there is plenty of room to PvP.

Now take all the uncontested nodes and spawn them proportionally by how many players are in the scene. Only one or two, no resources. Twenty or so, full normal spawn. Thirty or more, enhance respawn.

Since resources depends on players being present, it doesn't break anything if there are not enough players during slow periods. But even then, players can go challenge the mobs to get some resources.

 

Heh, three betas and they are actually launching. I guess time will tell. The argument has been that the game becomes a bit of a ghost town once a beta winds down because people don't want to invest in progressing something that will be wiped. I guess we will have to see...although, I bet the game will last for quite a while.

 

To be fair, it's your POT, so shouldn't you be providing the rewards? Just a thought. Not trying to attack you. For example, @Elgarion set up his POT for PvP and treasure hunting - you can find chests there with some "loot".

EDIT: Khali is located in the Hidden Vale and is meant for RP PvP.

 

I'm not wishing ill will toward Albion Online, I just think past is prologue here.

When you have full loot, you have people that don't want to go get more loot. If the loot doesn't matter, then you have people that say "why am I doing this?" Either way it results in less people playing over time. That's what I was hinting at there.

 

I think having PVE in the same scene gets in the way of PVP.

Why would anyone want to go kill "whatever" when it puts them in harms way of gankers? And if the answer is that they don't care if they are killed by gankers, then what's a byproduct of poor design, not a reason to go into a pvp area.

 

I've never been to Blood Bay... I have no reason to go there...

I don't think PvPers go there to gather resource... I used to go to Verdantis Shardfall but after getting killed a couple of times... it's not worth the hassle...

 

/ponder

This dev talk just goes to show that SotA is not a PvP focused MMO. This is disappointing given how PvP focused Ultima Online was. I like the idea that the further you go from safe and protected focal points, the more PvP you will encounter (e.g. town > road > dungeon > champion spawn). Alas, the design seems to be pretty set, at least for episode 1, so i might get my PvP rocks off somewhere else and just enjoy SotA for its aesthetics.

 

Hmmm, not sure this makes sense. I have NEVER heard anyone, when presented with the opportunity for more loot say "no". Not sure if I am misunderstanding, or if you simply mean that given the ability to get crappy loot, no one will be excited to go after more crappy loot. I suspect that's what you meant, so carry on.

The thing is, I rather like the loot system here. I can counter something being taken from me by having more of standard stuff (say, Wands that I crafted). So I can carry a bag of wands to offset the chance that something I cherish is looted. Hold on, hold on...before you say something, understand that the other day, using this technique, my chest piece with my Eternal Elven Mage Robe Pattern was selected. And this brings me to the other point about this loot system: I get to buy it back. Now, chances are the archer/thief who "would" have gotten that would not have considered the loot good (this, as an aside, brings up the subjectivity of loot, but that's a discussion for another time, I guess). So, for the archer/thief, yes, I paid the ransom. At least they got some gold. Yes, they got like 3 or 4 Wands as well, but in the end, it was fun for me and for them (I think!).

 

I'm aware of Khali, Elgarion has done a fine job there.

But now we're talking about me as a POT owner paying for people to come PVP. If that's how it works, fine, but what's the benefit to me being a POT owner? Why isn't there a tax system that automatically collects? Why are there not more tools to make this more attractive to players? (like spawning mobs, etc..)

It's risk vs. reward, not a charity. Elgarion is doing that on his own for his own with whatever benefit he gets from it. We have different ideas about how much benefit that creates.

 

Ha! I wrote that oddly. What I meant was that once your gear is looted, you are going to make a choice to either get more or quit the game. This model creates self inflicted wounds on itself. No one ever loses a PVP battle, stands naked and says "yes! this is so wonderful that I was killed and lost all my best stuff!" Even the most hardcore players will at some point in time say "maybe I'll just log out for the night". And that's happening exponentially through the entire game.

 

I agree we (and you POT owners, especially) need some tools to incentivize things. And I can see your point about not wanting to "pay" for people to come over, although it's a weird position to take.

I liken this to throwing a party at my house. Now, I could theoretically just let people know to come to the party and have an empty house when they arrive. Or I can put out food and drinks, put on some music (or hire a DJ), etc.

What we seem to be stuck with is a BYOL (Bring Your Own Loot) party. And, like most parties of that nature, not many people show up. Not even moochers.

 

Yes, it's turned out to work exactly like that.

When I first began the concept of my POT, I thought this game would be designed for more organic growth. I thought the developers were thinking about the impact of POTS and how they'd gain players beyond just "you have to put your POT deed somewhere". And at a macro level, it makes some sense to think about the game from their point of view being "once we have more people here everything will fill up by default". I think that's a reasonable assumption to some degree. However, when we look at PVP POTs, the starting point for growth is way behind the non-PVP POTs and that's because (imo) PVP is so poorly designed.

I mean, most of the non-PVP POTs don't offere anything like Elgarion is offering, they're simply "close to Britanny" and people go there because it's a central hub, not becuase these are anything better than Khali.

This isn't about my POT though, it's about PVP in general. I feel that my POT offers just about everything someone could ask for, other than developer support of PVP.

 

Happens regardless of playstyle, moreso here because of the grind.

I think having PVP only scenes makes them easy to avoid, since without *any* other reason to go there renders them useless. Just bigger versions of Arena basements. Yay?

 

@Baron Drocis Fondorlatos
So what would you add/change in SotA that would make PvP "Meaningful" ?

 

Lots of stuff...
Lots of options....

Here's a single suggestion that by itself would not fix everything, but would fix important pieces of the puzzle.

I'd make control points something that needed to be controlled by players. Why? Because if you didn't control them then basic services might not function. Things like recall and teleport scrolls. (for that region)

I'd make it so that players that control a control point can make it a pvp zone. There would always be longer ways around the map that would be PVE, but this one spot would be PVP. Enter and it's PVP multiplayer time. This would allow players to fight over control of "basic services". That would be meaningful for even the people not involved in the fight.

 

Smelling salts. And supposedly 1 heavy armor skill.

Nothing yet

You said that one twice

Possible! But more balancing is on the way.

Doesn't this spell only eliminate 1 DoT at a time? used to elimiante all DoTs, then it was changed to only eliminate 1 at a time. Did it change back?
Also, if your a true purveyor of spells, there is a chaos spell that counteracts someones fire resistance and lowers it by 30%, if they happen to have any fire resistance.

A few are. The Walla one you mention makes sun rays super strong and increases regen alot. But doesnt attunment cap now? Should look into that and see if the sun attunment means mroe than crafted wand attunment if caps are involved, cuz that alone may have nerfed the walla.

There are people who do enjoy the huntign and killing folks off guard for their loot, Open world PvP is PvP that can occur openly in the world. We DID have that in the sense that someone could flag PvP, and then the whole world became dangerous to them. But that was eliminated because the PvP flagged people didnt like seeing others get prepared to fight them without being able to ambush them before they could prepare.



Also keep in mind they said they would begin focusing more on PvP early next year.

 

For being tripped?

I double dog dare someone to show me this is true. There's no way. Smelling salts don't have any type of lasting effect. They're instant. How would this even be possible?

 

Looking for the balance. What can PVE group do to control the PVP takeover? I am saying that if PVP can manipulate or control a local economy by commandeering a control point, what can PVE people do in kind that will inconvenience the PVP group?

In response to Baron's comments re pvp takeover of control points. (missed the quote copy and had to edit)