Why do we insist on pvp Zones?

Ok now you're getting to the bone...

You say you know what pvpers want, yet you are not one yourself, and they do seem not to agree with you at all, pretty much all the time.

Siege perilous sure took a few hours to setup, but is basically a copy of the world with a few tweaks, it was never updated, never patched differently than others, the modifiers are hard coded and apply automatically. It didn't even have event moderators like the other servers, it was basically left on its own, yet its the most powerful and deep community experience I have ever lived.

We didn't care that there was no PvE types around, we didn't care if most the time we played alone, cause the people we played with and the economy made sense for this ruleset.

I do not enjoy what we do have, exept the community, art direction and the music/music system, variety of roleplaying emotes etc... these are all applicable in either playstyles.

As it is right now I'm flagged PvP, I have no safe zones, even on siege perilous we had safe zones...

I can be ganked by PvE players anywhere, even when I'm modifying skills at the trainer, and they will unflag from PvP shortly after.

It's insult after insult after insult, because noone likes the "brutal" pvpers, right ?

You don't tell me what to do good sire, I stay flagged PvP since character creation, but I do NOT deal with it.

I think this ruleset is pure stupidity and I will keep saying it, its my opinion and feedback.

 

Then why in heaven would you think they don't have the "technology" to scale scenes ?! its not a technology its a few line of code for static scaling and a few pages for dynamic reactive algos that adjust to the different skillsets of participants.

We already have dynamic spawning to help with lag, its not a long stretch.

Did you just offer me a e-hug ? I'll take it as an apology

 

The consensual PvP argument is long gone

 

oh and of course they'll adjust as they get time... thats one thing Portalarium has been consistently very professional about !

We shouldn't even be mentioning it, kinda derails the thread...

 

That's like saying adding code to enable PvP makes PvP perfect. Wearing clothes vs matching vs being in style. Code isn't everything.

 

I don't care... I'm not long gone, although some would be very happy if I finally succumbed to that damn cancer.

Heck I flagged for consensual PvP, and I can be jumped by any player who chose NOT to have consensual PvP.

Fix this then we'll talk about the argument.

 

Which is why I said they need stats and finish the skill system before making adjustements of that nature, as you obviously know with your experience.

You have the strangest case of forum myopia my friend, I haven't even finished my first coffee of the day and I'm THAT LIT.

 

Of course you would play in both modes, but you're ignoring the cost of server hardware, database and OS Licensing costs for concurrent users, needing admins salaries to monitor additional hardware and keep revision control on both servers updated the same too. It adds more work and considerable yearly costs for what?

Right now, looking at UOGateway at the top three freeshards, none of them have more than 1,000 players active when I refreshed the page. Maybe they all get close to a few thousand active players at peak times. How many "paying" accounts are behind those daily numbers? Are all of those accounts still active enough to be considered "paying"? Let's add in all of the 88 tracked Freeshards. Those are the people we can assume would love to play an open world PvP UO spiritual successor. How many people are we saying? For UO, they'd probably be paying around $5 a month, for SOTA, closer to $10 a month?

For brevity, just guessing at the numbers, let's go with a nice, over inflated 25,000 paying accounts. I say over inflated because adding all of the max number of active players doesn't even approach that number, but let's be more than fair in this assumption.

25,000 accounts at roughly $10 a month would be $250,000 a month. Now... I can tell you, that doesn't go as far as you might think it does. I'm an executive in a small manufacturing concern based in the US. Our average wage is likely lower than Portalarium's wages, but we still need to bring in quite a bit more then that to cover all the bills and provide a profit, far smaller than you probably would think.

Making a game for a base of players around 25,000, hell even three times that amount is nonviable, it just isn't long term sustainable without laying off staff and moving to a primarily maintenance based, with occasional boosters for money to add something new. Portalarium, once SOTA goes live, will need to bring in somewhere around 150,000 to 250,000 active accounts paying an average of $10 a month to be not only viable, but quite viable, profitable and able to invest in new and better things.

Nobody wants to see SOTA release as a "maintenance mode" game. Everyone wants to see it be a commercially viable game. So, they have to keep costs manageable and they have to attract the greatest width of players as possible.

The thread in this conversation is going all over the place.

Anyone can check out the UOGateway website, review the numbers of players who want that kind of game, those same forums, reviewing active posting accounts and look at the past successes and failures of MMOs that launched with much ballyhooed anticipation of being a hit, because they openly advertised what they would be offering.

My use of "Brutal" is based purely upon the marketing and advertising copies those many failed and reworked into PvP/PvE wall games put forward. It's not at all meant to be anything other then that. I apologize for coming across poorly on that point.

I'm an executive, in a mildly successful manufacturing business. I have spent a little time studying business and reading into market trends. If there were enough Pure PvP MMO players, Age of Conan and so many other MMOs never would have failed or been reworked into PvP/PvE walled off games. There's been a number of really great games that I'm sure you've heard about, were excited about and then... you stopped being excited because they changed direction on PvP, because the people asking for that are literally a small, minority of MMO gamers, which is already a small minority of gamers as it is.

 

...

PvP'ers keep saying what they want and guess what? It's not always the same thing between two different PvP'ers. Is that the problem with "going all over the place"?

 

Thanks for at least acknowledging my arguments... its the same server hardware, you see you can switch from friends online to MPO ? Thats called a game mode, it uses the same database, same assets, the differences are hard coded.

We need no admins, no monitoring, revision control maybe but we can do without, honestly, we don't even need a live story we'll make one for ourselves like we always did.

And if Portalarium can come up with a cost, cause you don't have the info about their server architecture, then let them kickstart it, and if it fails, it fails. I'll sober up and swallow the pill.

UOGateway is a very limited platform, and its mostly english servers, there are french, russian, korean, vietnamese, chinese, japanese servers with much higher playerbases that we hope to attract here, honestly I appreciate your effort but you're not helping your argument with those justifications.

Hey I have confidence in Portalarium, they will make the right choices and know about game longevity, they are not at their first run around the globe. You seem to doubt many things, and I think in the industry its wise to be careful... but how do you justify your extreme optimism... 250k players, here with that ruleset ?

I wish Ristra would gimme back my rose colored glasses so I could see what you see

Tried them all, they sucked compared to UO freeshards, and people who used to play UO and still do mostly agree.

They were really bad, those FFA games, indeed their logic was flawed, what I propose is NOWHERE close.

Not even the slightest bit.

Bring you back to my argument, UO freeshards attracted and kept those players for 15 years... without ANY budget, those games had big budgets and failed miserably, as you said.

Age of Conan... common... it was a joke.

They all want a commercially viable game first and foremost, and that is the biggest error you can make when building a living breathing world Lord British style.

They should want a commercially viable COMMUNITY. To have this you cannot have divisions, which is why they insisted SO MUCH on us all playing on one single server...

They are AWARE, what I'm saying is that everyone forgot about how AI can completely remove the need for moderation and allows us to create a TRUE RPG experience that honors its pioneers, not try to reinvent the wheel and theorize that OPEN PVP FULL LOOT will be enough to attract those players who had 15 years to collectively decide what they loved.

 

Agreed, but whichever way we want to take it, I'm still the original Avatar, the only one who was removed from the shards when Mondain cast his curse, and thus the only one who remember about the curse and is somewhat unaffected by it.

Mondain is a metaphor, think about it.

There are some concepts we ALL share, thats what Portalarium should focus upon.

For the rest, I'm here and I have the information necessary to make a game that will make all other games look like child play.

and beleive me I will get what I want before I die, sure call me anti-hero... people that decide not to work with me will be jealous of my success.

Being the Avatar is overrated, nobody cares and the visionary nature of RG shines through all the clouds like a thousand suns in that regard. (I take it you have played all Ultimas)

 

Being a simple soul, I'd have set out from the start that all zones are open to anyone, but resources gathered and gold from drops is slightly higher (can argue about the %) if you are pvp flagged, so you can have your 'risk vs reward' (whether there is really any 'risk' except to ego is a separate issue completely!) and an open world if you want it. You can still choose your play mode if you want to be solo or party, and still go anywhere if you don't want to be pvp flagged.

(Edited because I repeated myself and did not notice until I read this post being quoted in the next post down )

 

Always supported that idea, however its been noted that some of its implementation was prone to exploits. At first I argued that nobody is going to exploit the game that much, we're a niche game... I was proven wrong, RMT and bots and hackers were all over the place at first.

Then I argued that it wouldn't be that much of an exploit, but none of the detractors of this solution were able to explain to me how they would exploit such rules, and strangely devs seem to agree that this ruleset is final, probably because they'll introduce live story elements in the scenes later on, and want to filter the participants ? Maybe... its all very mysterious if you ask me, we weren't given any reasons, couldn't find anything of value in DEV+ as well...

That is bound to create more drama, I know... :/ regardless thats what they are going to do.

 

It's all on one single piece of hardware. So, you're just asking to have a MPO-PVP-only mode. They could also do that, just by making it so that PvP flagged characters can only be attacked by fellow PvP Flagged characters. Anyone not flagged PvP would only be able to request a duel. Elegant, simple and it should serve your needs quite nicely.

I already vastly overestimated that number of active players that are on those in enough volume to conclude a steady monthly "subscription". If you added up all of the maximum number of players ever hosted on all of those 88 tracked shards, it just starts to go over 25,000 and they aren't anywhere near those max players anymore. Even going with numbers of 50,000, it still wouldn't be a viable return on investment.

I was under the impression that they would be running localized servers for different nations, to minimize the lag time. You wouldn't want to be seeing ping times of 250ms in Russia, fighting a US player with a ping time in the 20 to 30ms range. That adds up, pretty quick. Which means, they're already looking at new, full sets of hardware with different teams that will primarily be focused on localization and keeping server and database architecture operating. It's why they've partnered with a company operating in Russia for hosting the game there, already.

250k players isn't exactly that HUGE of a stretch, considering they already tote over 200,000 New Britannians on the main page. Yes, some of those are alts, but how many people are really running that many alts? Not enough to chop that number down to 30,000 players. Yes, I'm certain a good, large number of those are not fully active in the game accounts, maybe some of them are going to come back, maybe most won't, but it's not a terrible stretch to imagine a top end somewhere around 250k players. Maybe that's a bit to high, but is 150k to low? They're going to likely need somewhere around 100,000, give or take 25k accounts to keep this game viable, vibrant and in continual development.

Those populations are tiny, not commercially viable for a full development team. Those free shards picked up where EA/Origins left off, meaning every penny put into developing the game, the millions of dollars spent on UO's development IS the budget that those Freeshards have started with. The ones that stick around ask for donations, I don't know how much people have donated, but it's got to be enough to pay the bills, I know if I was running a freeshard and it costs me a $500 or more each month and I wouldn't be doing that for very long.

 

Almost but not quite, the main complaint is that PvP players also depend quite strongly on a huge item sink, or there is no interest for crafters to join the fun. As it is right now we basically have item insurance, in the form of ransom, that is wrong.

If that mode also keeps us from seeing vendors from non-pvp players, and that some tweaks would be added on the ressource loop (it needs to be harder, take longer to progress in skills, so we don't have people reaching 10 GM in mere months), then yes it would work out.

They've repeated time and again that this wouldn't be so, we will all play on one singular server, sure a secondary server can be used as a proxy, speeding up transit time, but russia is not hosting the game, only taking care of localization and marketting, PR, probably service too.

Sure, so adding 20-50k players with little additional dev time, simple change in rules would help us tremendously to remain over that viable limit.

You also underestimate how deep the pockets of some of our most active backers are... I know people with over 20 accounts.

Some people have invested 6 figures into this game... people still complain when they ask too many questions in telethons and take away "dev time"... I think this is silly to the extreme, we wouldn't have a game without those people.

We're going in circles but I'll indulge you... this is why I said we should not depend or give a deadline for the production of such a ruleset/playstyle. We should however OFFICIALLY announce that we are open to such gameplay in the future, and we should have done so way before pushing to russia and asia where their top game charts clearly indicate that they favor the rulesets I'm talking about, and quite consistently.

I'm sorry but your assumptions about freeshards is completely wrong, I have participated in programming sphere and other emulators, we tried to start where EA left off, but to be honest the code was a mess and it was open to thousands of exploits. We had to start from scratch, we only used the art, and the design, thats it...

You also underestimate the passion of the devs of such shards... I know many who paid that much or more from their pockets, even sometimes to hire specialized programmers to fix some issues, and even artists when they had a little more donation to make exclusive art.

There is people on here who are just fans of this game that have shelled more for an early access game, imagine what some are willing to pay for a game that has proven stability, is hack proof and has no lag and can handle 1000 concurrent players on a single subserver.

I'm also pretty sure you underestimate the FUN players are having on those shards... 200 ppl pvp tournaments with 500 spectators... yes you read that right, the arena fights are so well made, have such replay value that people are willing to sit and watch and comment on the fights, like a pro boxing match.

It's glorious... noone is a bad loser because its so well balanced that you know exactly what made you lose the fight, and theres critics and commentators that analyse those. You don't even see drama like we see here with people slandering other because they got killed by some PK.

The economy is so well tuned that popular blacksmiths can hire escorts for their miners, have an anti-pk guild backing them in case of trouble and thus the PK population balances itself on its own.

I have only praise for those servers, I could go on all night about why its so great, yet I'm very critical about some mechanics which I think were incomplete in UO yet are used "as is" on those freeshards because they are conservative to the extreme.

It could be better sure, but I've seen no other game with that type of fun, passion and ambiance.

 

Those freeshards are self-selecting and they aren't "big name" games anymore.

They have self-selected people who all want that experience. Trying to get that same experience into a new commercial game that is going to widely advertise will bring in griefing groups like GOON. They won't care if there are big anti-PK guilds, because they will fight dirty to win their joy of bringing grief to the game.

Do freeshards interact with Something Awful affiliated groups that are there, only to disrupt and cause grief?

Small, self-selecting groups of gamers can definitely do the things that you are describing, SOTA isn't going to be a small self-selecting group of gamers. It's going to be as large of a tent as Portalarium can muster, bringing in as many paying players as possible.

 

Pvp zones allow gamers who who want to PVP to do so with like minded people. Some of us(me Included) Do Not want the entire Game to be PvP...

 

good point, more options !

 

I'm jumping into this late, but as someone who is generally not a PvPer, there are two things that would encourage me to participate:

1. PvP scenes that have a long-term goal, like a checkpoint that needs to be held constantly, and rewards that go beyond loot. Marginal bonuses to things (crafting? control over the forge? cheaper forge mats cost?) or visual displays (all the flags on LB's castle change color, a giant statue visible for miles holds your faction's flag) for your faction* so that it becomes something that everyone in that faction wants to work toward, even if they aren't holding a sword or healing combatants.
2. PvP scenes that have short-term goals, like timed games. Perhaps some with a team focus, and others with a single player focus. Loot not necessary, but perhaps optional.

Number two is probably a easier if only since you can put teams together from willing participants. Number one would require a faction system to be implemented. If we can assume we will eventually get factions, then it would be nice to get a road map that shows how we get from here to there. On the surface, TLC is a logical faction distributor, but maybe it goes against the Ethos, since people should strive to get along. Psychologically, there is an immediate bond when running into someone you don't know but share a faction with. I'd like to feel like I belong to something bigger than a guild; something that has an effect on the world.

I'm just not into the 1v1, losing-loot kind of PvP, and I will probably continue to avoid it.

 

Fair enough, I don't dispute that... in huge games without an active community, they have a chance to cause grief. However its hard to apply the same logic here. I know at the first hint of trouble, I can have a dozen people teleport to me.

Not only that, those "bad apples" would be limited to the PvP game mode to cause their grief, the people playing there are by definition much more resilient and much more likely to organize to balance the scales.

In fact groups like this pose a certain challenge, and when the community manages to completely destroy the guild, its a memorable thing that helps the community solidify. It's even wanted... such happened when LLTS completely obliterated the AoD army of darkness guild on UO atlantic, there is a memorium page on their website, they still brag about it to this day.

As RG said, talk good talk bad but talk about it, that certainly gets people talking

And no, it does not only require beating up the bad apples to make them quit, as you said some are only motivated by grief. The community or anti-pk guilds need to organize, make sure there are spare ressources to help players who were affected by such grief groups until they no longer feel they are causing grief.

Then the guild needs to harass them, camp their house, make them feel miserable.

Now that kind of conflict really empowers people who would otherwise only be quiet type players, they end up as leaders, preachers, teachers.

I have nothing against the SIMS game mode we currently have, but it will not transform or help ascend(evolve) people.

I speak for myself sure, but in the current game mode, I'm a nobody, there is nothing I can do except make gifts and create superficial friendships which will never be "tested" and made to feel immersive in the roleplaying context.

As I've said numerous times, who wants to play a LARP or a D&D game without negative alignements ?

It would make for a very, very boring game.

The best freeshards I know have GMs who are there to analyse situations like the grief guilds you speak of, if the situation is too unbalanced, the GMs will secretly give help to the "good guys".

That does not happen when the PK guilds are ethical, respect new players and untold rules of conduct.

There is also honor among thieves.

Common sense.