The PvP Thread

[noel]

It's my assertion that while PvP is a novel concept, there hasn't been good, meaningful PvP in any MMOG game to date save FPSes. UO was arguably the first mainstream game to include PvP. In some ways they got the PvP right, but what they didn't realize is that the vast majority of players aren't interested in getting involved in PvP just so they can wave their virtual peens. Then again, you had a bunch of people in UO who wanted to sit around decorating their houses and baking bread... They didn't really appreciate hearing Corp Por from 7 different directions, and having all their shit stolen.

EQ came along and addressed this issue by allowing the player to choose if they want to participate or not. Though EQ got this part right, by all accounts they got the PvP all wrong. It was horribly unbalanced, and not chosen by the vast majority of EQ gamers. Of course the real reason that EQ got PvP wrong is because EQ isn't a PvP game. It's a PvE game with PvP added to grab market share.

I can't remember if DAoC or AO came next, but the PvP in each game certainly had it's flaws. Both of these games I really only played shortly after release (I played AO a bit longer, but not too much). PvP in AO involved standing at the edge of a small area, and waiting for someone to cross a virtual line so you could (as an agent) attempt to one-shot them. Basically it was lame. It might have changed in later releases... Miir and maybe Kyoukan can give better commentary than I can. DAoC had it's share of problems in PvP as well. Given that PvP was largely the end-game in DAoC, at least initially, the game was far more focused on PvP than EQ had been. It still had it's share of problems. The PvE shortly after release was FUCKING BORING, so basically you had to trudge through boredom to get to what was supposed to be THE FUN™. Janx can probably comment a bit more on whether or not they ever made the PvE fun. I have no idea.

Shadowbane, AC, AC2, WWIIOL... I never played it, and I maintain that I'm a better person for it. I have no idea of PvP was good or bad, but I do know that the games (save AC1) attracted a miniscule market share and had a metric ton of problems.

SWG has PvP if you want to call it that. It's largely so unbalanced and stupid, I only got involved in it a few times. The game is basically fucking Pokemon with AT-STs and giant Rancors or Grauls (think furry rancors). If you weren't a creature handler, commando, or imp with an AT-ST, you were largely wasting your time.

FFXI didn't even implement PvP. They've been knocked for it, but it's just not designed to be anything more than a PvE game with decent class interdependency.

The two major banes to meaningful PvP in MMOGs are balance and lack of testing. I have yet to see balance truly achieved in any game, ever. Planetside might have been the closest, but PS is a FPS, and there was honestly never any reason for the game to not be balanced. The devs should have pulled their heads out of their asses, and just set the dmg/dly of each class of weaponry to be exactly equal with different graphics. They tried to be creative, and balancing the empires has been a bitch ever since. The second major problem is testing. If you design a game where hundreds of people can battle together for extended periods of time, you need to have hundreds of people testing it... again, PS did a good job of this (I was there). They fucked up for other well-documented reasons... DAoC didn't do this and they paid for it.

Basically I'm of the opinion that PvP sounds nice in concept... if you're into that, but it has yet to be implemented in a meaningful way... at all. Unless you're talking about FPSes. PS came the closest, but then again it IS a FPS, so it really doesn't count. Discuss.

[Truant]

so far, the only time I've liked PvP in any game, is only in twitch games, FPS, etc.

The problem with PvP and MMOG is that I have no control over the fight. I'll accept defeat in a twitch match, because the victor obviously is more skilled. But in MMOG's you just press the all encompassing fight button, and just stand and watch. Fuck that.

[noel]

so far, the only time I've liked PvP in any game, is only in twitch games, FPS, etc.

The problem with PvP and MMOG is that I have no control over the fight. I'll accept defeat in a twitch match, because the victor obviously is more skilled. But in MMOG's you just press the all encompassing fight button, and just stand and watch. Fuck that.

Totally agree. In PS, at least we had a fighting chance.

[Sylvus]

I enjoyed a good clean fight in UO, it was the fucking griefers and exploiters that killed that game for me. But I had way more fun doing pk/anti in UO than I ever had playing EQ, provided it wasn't someone camping the mines when I was a naked noob just starting out.

[Aabidano]

Meridian 59 had PvP, it worked very well. It was a lot of work to be a griefer, though there were a few around. Easy to spot the bad ones too, as your name would turn red after a while, though it was fixable. Almost everyone I knew went out of their way to kill them on sight.

I was suprised when UO came out and PvP sucked so badly, and they refused to change it. And the rest of the world for that matter, UO was a cool idea, with a world implementation thought up by idealistic morons.

I didn't last too long in UO after the ninjas\griefers\morons hit a point where they could screw with me. That was about the time the "housing boom" started.

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

You need a "sometimes" option for this poll. Most of the games that people play in the vein of EQ are team oriented and do not lend themselves to being a PvP game. I like that they do at least give you limited options for being able to duel or use the arenas for PvP.

If I was to make a change ot EQ at this point, it would be to take one continent, or add one continent, and make the entire thing a PvP zone and put a starting city at opposite ends for light and dark. Ideally I would take Feydwer and add some dungeon content to it, both high and mid level, and turn the whole place PvP.

Turning a place into an unknown, dark, foreboding place would put some excitement back into the game for some and still leave people with the option of avoiding it.

I would never want to build a character and go through the tedious bullshit of leveling twice to have a character on a PvP server to mess around with. They should have just added a ton of content that was PvP only...similar to what DAoC did. Of course the mechanics of EQ are not truly going to play out if you are a solo player in a PvP world. EQ in its entirety is designed to be played as a group. If you approach PvP combat in EQ as being skilled or unskilled, you are fooling yourself. It is in group combat that you would either shine or get smoked.

[Chmee]

That is an interesting question. Generally speaking the PvP games I have enjoyed are either the FPS games, or the RTS (if you want to include them in PvP). So far, the attempts to make PvP a central element of a MMORPG have been somewhat mixed (although there are games out there that are still making money that incorporate it, like DAoC etc.). I think there are a few problems they run into.

Skill
In a lot of MMORPG PvP, twitch isn't that much of a factor. To what extent it is, it seems to mostly boil down to jousting or kiting. Also typically the number of things that you can possibly do to your opponent that are effective are fairly small, so there isn't a lot of thought in the process either. So the opportunity to beat your opponent with skill is lessened.

Leveling/gear differences.
In most MMORPGs you gain power as you level and get better gear. This can cause a problem in that generally speaking people won't like getting beat up by people that they have little chance of beating. If people don't have the time to invest to get to the higher levels of power and be competitive, they may get tired of it and leave.

Mixing PvE and PvP
I think that games like EQ that are mostly PVE can mix in a little PvP (in designated areas, or designated servers) more easily than the reverse. If you mainly play to PVE, but have the option to go off and try some PvP occasionally I think works since you aren't forced into it. Its just an option of something else you can do in the game. In the reverse situations, in most cases the PvP game forces you to engage in PvE to get to a power level to be competitive in PvP. In some games, like Shadowbane, that occurs pretty quickly, but its still something you have to go through with to get to the main aspect of the game (and even in shadowbane when you count the time it takes to get gear and runes etc., it can add up).

The grunt syndrome
Massively multiplayer games are, well, massively multiplayer. Which means there may be a lot of other people out there. This can be fun sometimes but in some cases people can feel to be just another grunt. Not many people's fantasy aspiration is to be orc #547.

A couple things that might be interesting to see in a massively multiplayer pvp game.

No character power changes over time
Basically have a game with no leveling, whatever power you have you get it at the beginning. You could still pick what class you would like. They could also even set it up to allow for some customization within those classes. Give the starting player a set amount of points that they can spend on skills or gear (you could have separate pools or a common pool). Let the players change characters if they want. Games that have time requirements to level a new character usually mean a player will only put in the time to try a couple different classes (or custimazations of given classes). If there isn't an initial cost you could try out more things. Variety is good.

Set timeframe games that allow changes to the world
Shadowbane tried to let players change the world by creating player made cities and for other players to be able to destroy them. A couple problems with this was that the cities took a sizable investment of time to build (time not spent pvping, and time that you might get to see get burnt to the ground) and for the most part the cities didn't have much sense of how they fit into the world, or an overall story (although some guilds did try to create their own roleplaying backstory). If they set up a game so that you could effect the pre-made world, conquer territories, sack cities, it could be interesting. The problem might develop though that you end up with all the cities burnt to the ground or all the territory conquered. If the game was set to restart every so often (probably on a far longer scale than that of a typical fps match, probably on the order of 1-4 weeks) then you could get around this. Maybe vary some starting conditions to try to keep things interesting. It would also add a win condition to a particular game, rather than just endless warfare (the game could restart early if a particular win condition is met).


Anyway, there are a few thoughts, rambled on far longer than I meant to.

[Aabidano]

Something I forgot about M59, now and then after a backup and before a patch, you'd get about 12 hours of unlimited, no consequences PvP. They'd turn the sky red in every zone as a signal of what was happening. It was a whole lot of fun.

After the patch everyone got rolled back.

[Janx]

DAoC PvP was pretty own. the only problem is its been largely left alone since it got put in. With all the new areas, skills etc..there is still only one place to pvp..the other realms frontiers, which havent changed at all. Other hten that I always enjoined the RvR(pvp whatever) in DAoC.

[miir]

PvP in AO involved standing at the edge of a small area, and waiting for someone to cross a virtual line so you could (as an agent) attempt to one-shot them. Basically it was lame. It might have changed in later releases... Miir and maybe Kyoukan can give better commentary than I can.

No more one-shot kills.
PvP in AO went through a lot of dramatic evolutions.

The first expansion (booster pack) was totally centered around team PvP and it did a good job on implementation....

Every profession was viable for PvP so long as you equipped them properly and spent your IPs correctly.

Funcom nerfed a lot of shit in the game strictly due to how overpowering it was in PvP (ie: Martial Artists + uber crit buffs + Assault Rifles) and ended up with a sort of balance.


I had a pretty pimped out fixer who was great fun to play in Tower battles... grid in, distract a few people, grid out... Distraction and hit/run tactics were pretty effective.

Even my Advent was useful... instacast parrot was very useful for sniping sissies in thier Yalmahas. Fun to piss people off accusing you of 'exploiting'.

My doctor was probably my best pvp character... by far. Instacast complete heal, nasty init debuffs and a rifle made for a deadly combo.



There are still a bunch of people who still 'duel' but Funcom basically ignores 1vs1 PvP balance and focuses instead on large-scale group PvP balance.

[Cotto]

DaoC PvP, especially in battlegrounds (mini realms) is very fun. The only problem with it that I ever saw, was the zerg factor. Im pretty sure theres no way to phase it out tho, sadly.

be nice if they implimented something in EQ, so long as it fitted with the game. I dont really think its possible tho, as EQ is a community game..unless we name one side protestant and one catholic, then itll be like home!