Why do we insist on pvp Zones?

Once the game goes live and you run into crowds of players larger than you might see on a mid-Saturday afternoon these days, you'll start to have some additional PvP interaction.

 

I've had an Active account on SW:TOR since prior to the full/open launch. I have played in quite a few PvP events, Huttball, Starfighter and other pure arena battles. I never took part in any open world duels and yeah, and there's no real penalty in the game from PvP.

The concepts of separating PvP from PvE play and making that optional is a common thread among many MMO's, especially Triple A MMO's. They don't all execute that the same, but the concepts, the high level elements before you drill down to how to implement them, are very similar.

 

Which is basically my point, they are all very similar and I have played countless of these mmo's IMO they are all utter garbage and why I and many others still play two decade old games like Ultima Online / Tibia. After each release in SotA the game gets better I concur but after each release I see less and less of what I thought the game would be. I dont want/need what all those AAA titles have... then I would play them for a heck of a lot less than what SotA has run me this far.

meh I am not great at explaining myself so I'll leave it at that

 

Free Shards, Free versions of older MMOs are not commercial games. They do have a draw to people who do want those old game play experiences, I'll admit that I've been thinking about trying out that Star Wars Galaxy free server someday, if I can be bothered to dig out all the old install media... but, it's not going to be something that I'm willing to devote the same amount of time that I did back in the day.

It would be more like visiting a museum that could be closed at any moment and leave me just holding onto more memories of something that I still deeply miss, but I'm never going to get my character back, the guy I played for years and finally had unlocked Force Sensitivity on and started on that path of becoming a Jedi, almost six months before the Combat Upgrade was released and everyone was a Jedi... :-\ He's gone, that experience is gone and so much has changed since then too.

 

And thats the problem here... about my diplomacy diatribe : my problem is not that we cannot have the pvp functionality of pre-tram. It's that portalarium is on record saying that they will never change their minds on the issue.

It's the same problem for me ! I don't care if you tell me hey theres a medieval sims, it made sense to develop this first to have a nice beta and see whats possible.


What I would like to hear :

Well after much thought and design and seeing how the interest for a different ruleset is silently looming, we decided to announce that we will be making efforts within the next 4 years, to look at what is possible to create a siege perilous type ruleset which will essentially be a 4th game mode, a hybrid between hardcore/perma death/and full loot pvp that will attract as much RPvP than pure PvP, with a much slower advancement in skills, tighter economy with less ressources.

I'm not even looking for major ruleset changes which would affect dev capacity on the main server sims side of thing.

But what a statement like this tells us is that we were not crazy to ask for something that can be called a spiritual successor to ultima online, since we already admitted we're going for a MMO.

Right now, we're being told we are completely insane and that it wouldn't work, yet I can log on a freeshard right now and see hundreds of people at britain bank, 5 times more than on any official EA server, and not bank sitters, its crawling with activity, trade and passion.

So it dosen't work, yet we have proof to the contrary, you can't insult a nerd gamer much further than that.

So you see ?

We're basically asking for the right to "be ourself" and exist within this space.

If you tell me give us 4-5 years, I'll still play shroud and remain loyal.

If you tell me I'm a freakin old fart that is stuck in the past and basically stupid for thinking people would even play this, then you risk alienating alot of players that want to admire Richard Gariott because they still play his old game with old graphics and old technology 15 years later and LOVE it...

however to the russians and asians I have talked to, they do not admire RG anymore... to them its like he sold out to go to space, just go read around their forums, you can use google translate...

Theres a few of them that are saying : well its RG be nice to him he's the legend who brought you this game...

I'm not saying they are right in their "gut feeling" about RG, I think RG was forced out because of politics, he made a strategic decision about UO and tabula rasa because of the producers, but he is definately not a sellout.

But the perception remains... and telling tens of thousands of russians that still play UO that they are crazy for loving the old ruleset, is not helping at all !

In fact this community is not helping me at all in setting the truth back on track and silencing those accusations against RG and portalarium, in all the communities I mentioned.

 

Obviously we both put a different investment into the experiences we are seeking in a game. I'm way more of a story player, you are indicating that you are much more of a challenge versus other players kind of player. I hope Portalarium is able to make a good reason for people like me to want to flag PvP, because some of that CAN be fun, but not all the time and certainly not if I'm just going to be PK'd like a mouse to a cat, because someone just wants to slaughter a weaker character.

I don't think they are going to do that though and the kind of experience you are looking for is probably never going to be in a new, commercial, for profit MMO, ever again. The closest thing to that will be FPS with RPG elements, like what EA is doing with Battlefront, that Destiny game and a handful of others. Interesting, but not what you're looking for, I believe.

 

aaand we decided not to go that path... no pvp server with an economy that makes sense to any experienced pvper...

we decided to put them all into one new world order and watch them fight and divide each other... then we conquer them with shiny ephemeral pixel stuff...

 

It doesn't work, commercially. It works for free, but it doesn't work on a commercial basis. That's the difference.

SOTA may end up with 250,000 subscribers with this PvP/PvE split, they may end up with only 50,000 subscribers with Open PvP, all the time. The RPG MMO market has spoken far to many times that while people do like PvP, they do not like being forced into it. They do not want to be forced into it and if they can avoid it, they will.

Therein lies the rub. Commercially viable games, need that wall, there's been to many "awesomely brutal PvP MMOs" released in the last 15 years that fail almost immediately at launch, because they achieved nowhere near the level of subscribers they needed to pay the bills, because... there just aren't enough pure PvP gamers who crave that experience who are willing or able to pay for it.

One thing I know, I have a friend who constantly talked about this or that upcoming MMO and how it was going to be brutal PvP, all the time... then he mentioned that it closed down soon after launch or they nearly immediately created a PvP/PvE wall to stem the loss of accounts. Great games just will not sustain themselves without this wall, there's to many other options that let players enjoy a game without fear of being insta-killed by higher level players who are the modern incarnation of GOON, who simply want to grief. This friend of mine, ONLY wants to grief people in games. When he finds out that he can no longer do that in a game, he loses interest. I know that interest exists, but it's anti-social and people's dollars are always going to be louder than that MUCH smaller portion of anti-social gamers.

 

Honestly, until we have AI that is literally good enough to create difficult to detect as false NPC Player accounts, you're not going to get your PvP, Open World Experience.

Even then, you'll won't be facing PvE players who will be right next to you, but you'll be chasing around an NPC that for all intents and purposes will act VERY similarly to a PC, in that he/she/it will have levels, gain levels, trade, login and logout, form friendships in game, etc., etc., but never post on the forum and not be real, aside that the character is not going to be static.

Think "Westworld", but in an MMO. (The HBO show is an incredible take on what a real life MMO with robots would be like...)

 

Thanks for distilling the topic back to its essence... you see that is part of the feedback we Rpvpers have been trying to give since the forum is live.

There ARE solutions that have been freely given by myself to protect new AND virtuous players from any of this type of activity, sure it requires some AI, and a tiiiny bit of moderation if the code isn't perfect.

But it wasn't only me, theres players on here, many of which we chased away, which gave solutions that made me applaud so simple and elegant they were...

but we dismissed them on the account of "this'll never happen"

well thats also what I thought about a new medieval Lord British MMO... and here we are... nothing is impossible.

 

A good number of people who are unhappy with the way things are, might not openly admit it in a thread like this, but will casually mention it in other threads, really just want to do the griefing thing. Like my real world friend who utterly despises the PvP/PvE wall in a game like this, because he ONLY wants to grief others.

 

I agree that is the problem at hand but not how it was presented, I was led to belive this game was for making dreams come true, get that feeling again that you cant get from todays cash cows. It's easy to get blinded by money however. "limited housing" according to the devs we have this because there aren't an infinite amount of lots... why did they allow so many POT's, blinded by money.

This wasnt supposed to be for maximum profit, this was to be for gamers who have wandered aimlessly for years due to there only being cash cows without soul on the market. (MY OWN VERY PERSONAL INTERPETATION)

 

Thats what we hear... it works for free...

Yet in your whole argument, you sidestep the fact that I'm speaking of a game mode, that does not affect the main server even the slightest (not even taking dev time away).

Everyone that wants to say "this is impossible" goes through the exact same series of arguments, ignoring the context.

People don't remember how to make PvP MMORPGs, period, thats why it has no success, its all math and no AI, its outdated and indeed leaves too many victims.

I am as much critical on the freeshard forums than I am here to tell you the truth, I'm even in bad terms with many, banned from others merely for saying how things should be done.

And there you go again generalizing pvp players, that they might not be able to pay... lemme tell you I was invited here by the biggest freeshard lead dev, because he was HYPED and wanted to invest thousands in portalarium.

He had a merry band of followers, they became even more hyped, we had a thread with hundreds of posters saying they would put thousands as well, everyone was happy !

Finally we could move on from this old technology and join Lord British again !

Then he visited the freeshard, it was a catastrophe... then they came here, and many got banned for speaking their minds, the lead dev was yelling and ranting when he left.

He's one of the most intelligent programmers I know, his server is better than EA is with all the investment they put in it.

I get it, you had bad experiences, I really do its the 500th time I have this exact same conversation, noone can accuse me of being impatient or out of line.

 

Indeed.

Then they changed their minds and tried to go full international and commercial with it, because of the money they got.

my own very personal interpretations is that they went in blind, BIG error.

You always analyze markets before pushing into them...

 

It doesn't have to be for maximum profit to require enough players to pay the monthly bills in order to keep the game servers and support staff paid, thus making the game viable as an ongoing concern.

Business is business, profit is absolutely going to be part of that, but if you can't make a product that will draw enough people to even break even, you have to mold that product into something that will break even and produce some kind of profit.

 

Sorry to break it to you like that, but you're saying business is business, we're saying you can have both.

A pvp exclusive game mode with instances of the same world, same assets.

But since you already side-stepped twice, I assume nothing will convince you that your 250000 (PvE) + your very conservative 50000 (Pvp) = better business than either alone. Especially if we consider the fact that we're already using hybrid game modes.

 

All that will do is take the PvP players out of the main game and the game will otherwise be devoid of PvE types. Which is what happened to "destroy" so many shards in UO.

Not impossible and they do remember. Those are just commercially nonviable. There's been plenty of really cool, brutal PvP MMOs released since UO created Trammel. Those that survived, did so because they built in PvP walls.

Whoa bro... I openly stated unable or unwilling to pay, that's a tent that includes every single human being who likes PvP and plays PvP optioned MMOs. Everyone. There's just not enough Pure PvP MMO players to fully support commercial enterprises. If there were, Age of Conan wouldn't have built their PvP Wall, other MMOs wouldn't have floundered, all had nifty ideas about Brutal PvP, this is not new.

There's just not enough Pure Open World PvP players to fully support that kind of MMO. It's a very small subset, of an already small set of gamers. They all want different things and they get those things from way to many different games to pool together on one game to make that game be viable.

It sucks for you guys, but that's just the economic reality.

 

In this game, those who want to flag Open PvP can do that. They can do that all the time and they can get the experience they want, but they want that experience to include piles of players who the overwhelming bulk of which will be PvE players who might never flag PvP.

With a pure PvP server, it's only going to have just those people on it, it will require all of the same hardware, it too will need to be patched and tracked like the PvE server and it is going to have FAR fewer players on it. Economically nonviable. That's not a "free" thing to do, it's going to require additional resources to maintain.

Enjoy what we do have, all the economy that a larger, populated server will have and the ability to know who is and who isn't going to possibly attack you or be attackable by you, because you can have all the names and status pf PvP visible all of the time. If people REALLY want to have that old PvP experience of not knowing when they could be attacked, they can just do that, stay flagged PvP all of the time and deal with it.

 

So you think that pvp players such as myself wouldn't play both modes ? Sure I'm an adranalin junkie, but I don't wanna have an adrenal breakdown, and I still enjoy roleplay and community. The goal is to give players a choice so they can be satisfied by both playstyles.

The error that UO did is crystal clear... they should have opened PvP servers, and coagulate that playerbase into a few different rulesets, and let people chose. I know I did play both on siege perilous and atlantic/pacific.

As I said, I have a very different definition of a PvP wall... when the rules are arbitrary and you destroy the sandbox concept, noone will be satisfied.

I agree with you that even on a full PvP ruleset, there needs to be boundaries for new players and even virtuous players, am I not magnanimous ?

You seem to have all the answers, do you ?

Honestly this is pure conjecture... you do not even follow a complete logical pattern, you jump from one example that suits you to the next...

how do you know how many pure pvp players there are, if they are split and hidden on free servers all around the planet waiting for a game to reproduce the feeling they are looking for...

You're just being desperate in using terms like "brutal"... its quite obvious.