Some considered Scott Jennings’ How To Make A Game With `PvP Done Right´ a good read.
I like the article too – even though it’s biased and with some inconsistencies or just mistakes, but what isn’t? Yet, in my opinion it’s not a “design manifesto cleverly disguised as some incredibly obvious aphorism”, as the author writes, but an aphorism trying to disguise itself as a design manifesto.
Instead of putting down in writing the nth edition of The Ten Commandments, the author could have asked himself a simple question and kept the answer simple too:
When is PvP in an MMO good?
It’s good when it has an impact on the (virtual) world.
However the author prefers to call Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) a “PvP-centric” game.
It’s not. PvP in DAoC has almost no meaning to its world.
On DAoC
DAoC has more PvP-elements than other MMOGs, but it doesn’t make it “PvP-centric”. Saying it’s PvP-centric because it has more PvP in it than game x is a pretty obvious but weak statement. DAoC’s PvP lacks real consequences and as the author writes in the same article “consequences are part and parcel of meaningful PvP”.
In DAoC when your character dies you can release your character to the nearest border keep of the frontiers which are the battleground of three enemy realms who fight over towers, keeps and relics – or you can get resurrected at the death spot. Either there is no resurrection sickness or it can be cured with no monetary cost, your character doesn’t lose any equipment or other resources; there are also no real consequences to your character’s realm territory gains or losses since
- what has been achieved or lost by many with big effort can be destroyed or retaken by few with little effort, while you are at work or asleep (or both), there is no effective territory control
- towers, keeps, relics, port abilities and the bonuses resulting from holding structures are insignificant to a realm’s resources, they are almost fully decoupled from PvE
- realm skill and bounty points gained from fighting for your realm have insignificant impact on a realm’s strength, which is determined mostly by the quantity of players currently playing the realm.
Given that a realm has actually no resources to win or lose and given that holding territory is almost impossible leads me to the conclusion that DAoC’s PvP has no meaning as
- the conflict between the realms is never-ending, a realm can’t become extinct
- the current state of the conflict is just an iteration, due to the fixed amount of involved parties and the possible types of relationships between them
- it doesn’t affect homeland territory (PvE areas).
Players can have fun with DAoC’s PvP – I had plenty of it myself, but that’s just personal taste, all in all I don’t think that DAoC’s Realm versus Realm (RvR) has any meaning, while
- I know that 1 vs 1 is unbalanced
- and realize that most of the 8 vs 8 players are interested
- in a competitive ladder-style play for good fights
- or for big “epeens”
- or in racing for realm points versus causal gamers
- and only care about RvR when not equally distributed relics are unbalancing their way of playing.
Hasbro’s “Risk” has more PvP than DAoC.
The Ten Commandments
Like in The Ten Commandments, the author also mentions matters of course: a conflict needs a context, yet many players do not want to participate in a (permanent) conflict driven by humans in their spare time (when playing a video game), PvP shouldn’t be added to a game as an alibi.
Reading the classes part makes me exhausted:
Generally, the strongest advocates of skill-based systems are PvP players. Not much of a surprise, since PvP players tend to also be the more experienced MMO players who feel as though they want to play on “advanced” mode. Class based systems also breed a senseof entitlement and disillusionment, as the players feel as though their class is inferior to everyone else. (Note: in a class-based system game, check the message boards for that class – if there’s not several dozen pages of people complaining their class is underpowered, that’s a good sign that class is wildly overpowered.) Plus there’s always the allure of coming up with a “build” that no one else has (even though everyone else in a skill-based game is playing one of three builds – maybe two) and bragging about it on message boards.
PvP players might like skill-based systems more as they offer more variety than strict class-based systems (without any possibility to sub-class) and PvP players are not against class-based systems per se, they just don’t like systems that are unbalanced and don’t follow Rock, Paper, Scissors at least. There is nothing wrong with that – versatile character development is very needed for dynamic PvP. Why would someone taking himself seriously come up with a build that no one else has and brag about it? I would keep it secret or share among close friends only and exploit it instead of wearing a sign that says
I’m a threat, but this is how you can overcome me: …
If the game’s system is as limited as Scott Jennings’ sees the games then you’re indeed playing 2-3 variations of a character, but I haven’t played such a game for quite some time now.
You thought you just made gameplay
but you actually only stereotyped and never read or understood Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”.
If someone playing a magician wants to wear plate armor, let him, I can wear it too at a low proficiency level. If the one playing a magician wants to become super-proficient in plate armour, let him, I can do it too when spending time on it and focusing on it and in the meantime someone else will learn how to use halberds which can break plate armor. At some point the magician could know things one would attribute mainly to a different class, so what? He earned it and a halberd should still overcome his armour. When a class is overpowered it means that it can’t be overcome by any means, in terms of balance something overpowered is just horribly broken, usually either due to poor design or due to bugs or both.
Tactical transparency and contingency plans are nice buzzwords, I hold tactical opaqueness and deception against. I don’t agree that a “player should always be able to figure out the odds” – an inferior one deserves to figure them out in his game character’s afterlife, so he is hopefully better at the calculation next time. Strategy is essential and having a set of strategies makes a player and the fights more versatile, yet a good player will use deception to make the situation less transparent, he will fool you into one of your supposedly safe plans and you will fight him being confident of your victory. Your alter ego will die though as you didn’t realize that your enemy was on 50% armor on purpose or because you didn’t realize that he was your enemy at all.
Experiencing the unthought of, being thrilled is gameplay. Wearing a cloth cap as a magician and knowing all answers due to an easily predictable system is not, it’s stereotyped routine.
Screwing dairy cows royally
Nobody needs grinding. The author should know best how badly his former employer Mythic Entertainment damaged DAoC by releasing the Trials of Atlantis (ToA) expansion. ToA introduced the necessity to participate in a series of stupefying raids which
- made PvE mandatory for best potential in PvP,
- created a keen gap between more causal players and players willing to participate in all kinds of raids up to 12 hours long.
ToA was a disaster, imagine you have
- to go through a series of raids (Master Levels) to get credit for abilities that impact PvP severely
- to get Master Level experience so you can use the Master Level abilities
- to kill (mostly hard to kill epic) mobs with a long rebirth time to get credit for items (Artifacts) that impact PvP severely
- to win that Artifact in a lotto
- to get a set of scrolls needed for the activation of the Artifact so your character can use it
- to level the Artifact so your character can use its abilities
- to be in a big groups in order to get the credits
- repeat some of the above steps as didn’t get credit due to bugs.
Eventually three years later Mythic Entertainment “fixed” ToA and most of the other PvE content, by allowing to achieve it through PvP. Before, Mythic launched “classic” servers without ToA and made the raids easier, by reducing the needed group size and easing restrictions in regard to the needed raid order.
The damage was done though, maybe because Scott Jennings mixed up grinding with “character persistence and improvement”.
“A game is a series of interesting choices.” – Sid Meier
A cow with the choice of how it’s being milked is a happier cow than the one without a choice. Players don’t want “some form of grinding”, they want to dictate the grinding conditions, they want fancy-free grinding and they’re right. The design of a game shouldn’t limit the player’s choices so tightly of how to achieve something and how to present and develop a character and it should never force a player into something like ToA was.
Retaliation versus chaperoning and for separation
If “A Juvenile Little Brat” wants to shoot a new player in a supposedly safe area, let him. Before EVE Online introduced a deliberate retaliation system to MMOs there were solutions; the pen & paper role-playing game Shadowrun thought us that although brats are annoying, they offer valuable opportunities as well:
- you can try to reason with them (negotiation, consensual agreement between players)
- you can fight back (later) or at some point hire someone to fight back (remaining conflict between players)
- put them in jail (NPC retaliation)
- you can ruin their reputation (NPC retaliation)
- give them bad karma (NPC retaliation)
- take it out on their (NPC) contacts (NPC retaliation)
- take away their toys (NPC retaliation)
- give them what they want (NPC retaliation).
Make sure that there are negative consequences for the brat and partially positive for the victim (e.g., some of the brat’s assets being handed out by the NPC police to the victim as a compensation).
A similar system works quite good in EVE Online, even if CCP did some manually operated chaperoning when players like Tank CEO or corporations like Zombies killed other (not necessarily new) players in supposedly safe zones (solar systems with 1.0 security rating). Ideally a retaliation system is sophisticated and highly automated.
Either you can mother new players as you don’t want to fragment the player base among servers with different rules or you want a game with `PvP done right´ where you create one world with the same rules and where you allow initial freedom of action or freedom with consequences. An all-in-one device suitable for every purpose to keep everyone happy doesn’t exist but I guess that when you look at Vivendi’s revenues from World of Warcraft you’re tempted to believe that.
Separation
Battleground-like separation doesn’t work, it doesn’t separate new players from experienced players, it brings newbies with bad gear, random class with random skills and experienced players with the best gear and the best class with the best skills together. At some point it might even bring n random newbies and n guild (group) players together, who are most likely using voice communication.
Battlegrounds are good for causal PvP.
I agree that a MMOG should have a geographically based PvP-switch, combined with a retaliation system.
On Skill
Nothing to add, he is absolutly right.