Why Open PvP with full Loot worked in UO.

Here is why full loot worked well in UO and other games would struggle with the concept.

For starters, when you made a character his health could be near half the maximum health in the game if you specced him with full strength. In almost every other game out there the difference between maximum health when you are starting to maximum health when you are fully progressed is such a huge gap that you aren't even on the same playing field, and sometimes you aren't even on the same playing field until you are within 5-10% of the other players level. I think its important to have player interaction through all level/skill ranges and not divide your player base by skill/levels to such a large extent.

The other reason I think it worked particularly well was that for the most part PvP battles were more lengthy than they are in games today and there were not as many situation were you stood no chance to survive. It is very common in others games to find yourself dying at the drop of the hat. In UO if you ran into a group of PKers and you were solo you could at least stand a chance to escape. Part of this may have to do with the minimal amount of Crowd Control abilities such as stun, knockdown, root, etc. Today, there are so many forms of CC that you can just lock another player in place solidifying no escape. I hope they avoid crowd control to some extent.

Can you think of any other reasons that made it work?

 

I remember noobs in UO dieing pretty darn fast against experienced players, so I'm not sure that was as big a factor as you might think.

It worked in UO, at least temporarily, because no one had any expectations of anything else. UO was it, and that was the way it was, so you adapted.

Most MMOs today are designed with PvE in mind, so yes, squash that mob as fast as you can. As such, most MMOs have a very poor PvP capability, because PvP is an afterthought for most, and things that work will in PvE don't translate well to PvP.

It's requires a skilled touch as a dev. Hopefully SotA will be up to the challenge.

 

Well Newbies did die easily but they stood more chance than most other games would give them. I was looking at the hit point difference in TERA and you have like 100x the hit points when you reach level 60. Thats a pretty extreme case but I think every game when compared to UO is extreme.

 

I think open PvP with full look worked in UO primarily because loot was not worth very much. What could you possibly carry with you in a normal fight? Some reagents and minimal armor plus a weapon. All of this could be easily replenished. The characters' strength was more a measure of the level of their skills plus a large contributing factor of the player's own experience, rather than what items they were wielding. As a seasoned mage duelist and an avid pvper, in UO, I could take on 7x GMs with a 2 or 3x GM character.

There is no other MMORPG out there today where a more skilled but lower "level" player can even stand a chance, because the games today are all focused around super inflated stats on items. Items, items, items.. that is the focus of today's RPG genre and that's really sad. I hope SotA goes more in the route of UO and make items and reagents essential, but still focuses the strength of a character on the ability of the players to use his skills intelligently and skillfully.

 

I have to highly agree with Zelen. If SotA can pull off a player made market from crafting and not from raiding for items. Then I don't see why full loot would not work here. Full loot fails when a player's experience is determined by the items they have equipped and not from the skills that have worked to achieve. This worked well in UO because players had to work hard to GM a skill, unlike most games where people are hitting the level cap within days of launch.


I do hope open PVP w/ full loot is implemented into SotA. With housing already in and hopefully a player crafted drivin economy, SotA will make for a heck of a game. Just please no Auction House, but that it for another thread

 

Another big benefit of full loot open pvp is that we get to kill gold farmers and it also adds risk into the game limiting the amount of gold flowing into the system.

 

I just think it worked because players back then were not spoiled as today's kids.

"Call of Duty ?has almost ruined a generation of shooter players,? says Tripwire Interactive"

This is an interesting article about the same thing:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/13/call-of-duty-red-orchestra-2-interview/

WoW people just want to get handed everything and can't cope with any kind of setbacks :/

 

Fortunately for this game, the same players who are tainted by the current breed of RPGs are still living with their parents and unable to fund a kickstarter and provide opinions on what they want. Ever notice why the community seems better?

 

It worked for the same reason it works now in Darkfall (a modern UO clone) it was based on player skill more than character skill. The ones it didn't work for were the less skillful types that get panicky. I beta tested Darkfall and played a few months and it was fun but too expensive and too slow with development. I think it may be better now they sent me an e-mail saying they have housing. They have an expansion coming out I may head back that way if this don't pan out. It's a bit more hardcore than old school UO the map is huge with no fast travel or recall. If you are into that sort of thing.

 

And runes helped alot escaping from groups of pkers i hope there are runes etc for teleporting to house towns caves etc was one of my favorite things ha just maybe make runes expensive so not everyone isnt camping rare spawns etc ha

 

I'll give you one reason that open pvp didn't work in UO. I don't think I went to one Festival, market, or other RP event that didn't end up in a big fight with most of the revelers being slain or logging off.

 

The system works. Uo scripters got lazy as the game evolved. They could have implemented more to keep the sides balanced rather than splitting the worlds. If you have a influx of pkers then you increase the difficulty of being a pker or increase the reward of killing pkers.

If they didnt have anyone to protect them then they should have been having their rp events in town. Common sense. Would be like going to iraq without the army to have a concert. Some of us want to live in a world of peril and mystery without open pvp it becomes calculated.

 

Old style UO does work. We have some of the most famous free player run shards to prove it.

 

You call a game working when a large portion of the player base should just "stay in town"? Is it really successful when that same large portion logs off because playing wasn't fun anymore?

 

aka EA:UO aka Runescape...

 

In all fairness, the subject was why it worked. Darkfall is an Indi development that makes it work. Not during a time when no one had a choice but right now. Right now people need a hard core game with no opt outs. The industry is begging for it. Dark souls and Demon souls are not mmo's but both have online elements and are hardcore and successful with no option to change difficulty.

If your going to argue why it did not work then the only difference between all these games is that UO caved in to the masses. The other three did not.

 

UO pk's = one douchebag with gm magery two spelling newbies at the graveyard.

imagine how many people quit because they couldnt get ahead due to pk's.

those people could have added something to the server as opposed to just another racial slur using teenager who griefs everyone.

 

There is always that possibility that in this game they will be able to implement such a system that none-pvpers get a thrill out of taking a chance they may be pk'ed every time they step out of town, -at least it was worth it feeling-. The same feeling the pk'er gets from looting your corpse.

Chances are that wont happen. Folks will just not stick around in games anymore to be abused by other players, and they will not be forced into none-consensual pvp.

 

@Abaregi:
"""WoW people just want to get handed everything and can?t cope with any kind of setbacks :/"""

I see this in a quite different light. I don't actually think WoW spoiled players; rather, it brought into the MMO genre a huge number of players that didn't accept the harsh reality of early MMOs.

Up to a point I'm one of those; I can't stand harsh death penalties (caveat: any game that allows saving and loading has next to no death penalty, no matter what), I didn't want to be locked out of progression when I had no friends online (WoW back at launch was perhaps the only big MMO that allowed players to progress all the way towards max level without groups), and from the start I really disliked the concept of non-consensual PvP (it's the main reason I never tried Ultima Online). WoW didn't spoil me; rather, it was the first MMO I tried that wasn't absurdly more punishing than the single player games I played at the time (which includes such things as BattleToads, the Ultima series, the Wing Commander series, among others).

(Do take into account that the most challenging single player game conceivable, as long as it is either reasonably short or allows the player to save and load, do fulfill all those items I mentioned before; little to no death penalty thanks to either the small size or being able to reload, no dependency on other players to advance, no PvP )

 

<blockquote>I didn?t want to be locked out of progression when I had no friends online </blockquote>

I think you can have a pvp system with full loot that still allows for progression even when you are alone and your friends are offline. UO did this to some extent in the sense that gear was de-emphasized on your overall characters ability. You could go out in your mix match mediocre gear and still get stuff done. If they avoid what games are doing now where when you have your gear on you are practically 1000x stronger then it will be ok.

Gear will still be desired even if the increments of their effects are smaller.

It is also a much easier task to balance a game for pvp when you player equipment is not such a huge factor. Most other games really struggle when they don't look at this.