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My take on Full Loot PvP games
snapfusion
Member Posts: 954
In my opinion the real reason games like Darkfall and Mortal Online are failing.
It’s not the skill level of the players
It’s not the gameworld
It’s not the crafting systems
It’s not the lack of PvP objectives
It’s not the skill grinds
It’s not the bugs
It’s not the graphics
It’s not the community
It’s not the learning curve
It’s not the economy
Games like Darkfall and Mortal Online provide plenty of things for players to do, and far more unique things than most themepark MMO’s whose entire business model is forcing people to regurgitate the same dailies and instanced PvP maps 1000’s of times over for gear or faction.
It’s simple, games like Darkfall and Mortal Online are destined for failure from the start because of one simple reason, full loot. DF is more polished than MO but it’s suffering the same fate for same reason. The few people playing them don’t see it because well because full loot doesn’t bother them. Therefore in their eyes it couldn’t possibly be the problem no one else plays. In their and the developers minds it’s all the other things I listed above that’s driving “the other” players away.
The simple fact is that there are just a handful of players that want to deal with it. Games like this just can’t gain any momentum when people live in fear that at any moment the efforts from their last 4 hours of gameplay can be wiped out. There is nothing that will change this, and these games will suffer indefinitely because of it. There is only a sliver of players that enjoy this element of the game but sadly millions of potential players that would enjoy playing in the sand.
People will spend 1000's of hours grinding for something they want, if they know its theirs and they can keep it, very few will want to spend their time grinding away for someones elses benefit.
I’m not advocating to change these games I’m simply pointing out these games will never really be profitable enough to support more than a handful of struggling developers.
Comments
I have never agreed with full loot and think you're completely right.
I do however agree to player looting, but I've always enjoyed the games where you drop your backpack and have a chance of dropping 1 or 2 random equipped items. FULL loot pushes the bar too far for me and I don't enjoy it one tiny bit. Especially in those games where developers seem to think that players will police themselves. It's not going to happen and it will never happen, they need to stop thinking it will.
Over the past 10yrs now, Darkfall has been my greatest disappointment(sp?) in gaming. At first it seemed awesome, then years and years went by with no updates to the development of the game which lead many ppl to believe it was vaporware, and then the pile of garbage that is the game was released that offered only 1 single thing that had been promised in those years and years of development: FFA Full Loot PVP.
i disagree.
there definately is a niche market for full loot pvp games, most of them just haven't been done right yet.
DF is failing because of the capless stats/skill level. the actual game is nothing but a blast, but knowing that you will never ever catch up to those that came before you is not cool. nobody likes to be handicaped forever by game mechanics. i hope they take a serious look at this in DF 2.0. it's the only thing that will save this game.
MO is failing simply because SV doesn't know how to code. the game i super fun, the combat is awesome, the skill system is pefect for a full loot mmo. what is not cool is how incredibly shitty this game preforms and how many game braking bugs still plague the game. there is nothing worse then getting killed in a full loot game because of stupid game bugs. it's the worst feeling ever.
EvE is full loot and it's pretty friken awesome. the genius of CCP of course was making the full loot pvp completely optional with high sec (low risk, low reward)/low sec (high risk, high reward). a perfect balance where nobody feels forced into the full loot pvp, but it is right there at your finger tips whenever you decided to do it.
wile i do agree full loot games are not for everyone, for those that want the added excitement of high risk combat there is nothing quite like it. fighting in full loot mmo is 10 times more thrilling then normal mmos.
I don't know Jak i have played EVE for 6 years and i don't consider it as a full loot game. Honestly, i haven't lost much over the years. I insure everything and 5 minutes after i am dead i hop into my new ship..rinse and repeat. EVE is a very safe game as long as one is alert and attentive.
and this is where i belive CCP nailed the it pefectly on the head. EvE IS full loot but it doesnt FEEL full loot, and that's simply because pvp isn't forced on anyone. it's all about risk vs reward, but you choose when to risk and when to do your own thing in relative safety.
i mean, the same argument can be made for DF: you die, you rez, you regear and you are back in the fight. exactly the same thing as EvE. the only diffence is DF doesnt have a high sec, it's 99% low sec.
pretty much every other full loot game forces pvp onto you the minute you walk out of town. you can't do anything without pvp being forced onto you, and frankly it gets annoying fast. that's a big mistake. there have to be places, even if the smaller part of the map, where those that dont feel like engaging in pvp can play and have fun in a high safety environment, and then other places where rewards are high but so is risk.
I'll never play a full loot PVP game. It attracts the worst kind of gamers.
I strongly disagree with what you said.
There are many reasons why Darkfall is failing and that is because there really is not much to do, unless you grind months (literally) to prepare yourself for PvP.
I honestly would love to a see take on merging "sandbox" with a "themepark" style game.
Give us some real open world dungeons, with scripted bosses similar to Rift, WoW, EQ2, SWTOR, etc.
Give people roles, rather than just what's the hot pvp spec of the month, or maxed 100 in every single skill. Believe it or not, people actually like being able to define themselves as the "healer" or the "tank" or even the "blacksmith" (ultima online).
Give us the open world pvp, full loot game. Make items not matter as much and easier to get.
Give us experience and leveling, but points that are spent in skills. IE: Get 10 skill points per level, cap level at 70. Want to be a swordsman? Spend your points in it. Cap the amount of points you can get based on your max level, so you can not be 100 swordsman at level 10. Honestly, WoW did and Rift does it right. Imagine if you got 10 "talent points" per level and there was a skill system similar to Skyrim. A player could literally put their points in any tree. It would easily expand on what is currently offered in WoW/Rift where you're limited to 3 predefined trees in your spec, and what is offered in UO/MO/DF where a point just means you do it slightly better. Why not have a Skyrim style? You put 5 points in swords, and it increase the damage you do obviously, but you could choose what the 5 points do. Maybe... you could put 5 points in a bleed % chance, or a skill such as "Sword Strike".
Give us factions within the game, rather than "walls" when you create your character. This whole two faction crap, needs to go. If players want to join a faction, join a guild and that guild will pledge allegiance to a faction/city/monarch/whateverRP, otherwise let people interract without a wall between two sides.
Give us politics and drama. RP is not sitting in Goldshire or Silvermoon using "olde english". Real RP is actually taking your character, creating rivalries, wars, friends and adventures.
Give houses and social hubs, outside of major cities. Sure we'll always have the Sanctum, Brit or Orgrimmar, yet players want to be able to interact outside of these places. Let players own parts of the world. Is there a good spot with gold ore veins? Maybe the "sandbox" blacksmith will setup a house there. Is there a high level dungeon (think BRD in WoW) with lots of scripted monsters? Maybe the "themepark" healer will setup a house there for access.
Merge the genres. Give the "themepark" people something, give the FFA people something. But who cares. Developers won't take a chance until the market is saturated with so many WoW clones or "themepark" games that they simply can't make money anymore with the same old shit.
mmo's without full loot aren't even worth playing. you and most people against full loot fail to understand how these games are designed.
you DO NOT "spend 1000's of hours grinding for something" EVER
have you actually played darkfall or mortal?
anyway because of the above stupidity your main point is probably right, they will never be a huge sucess.
BUT unlike most of you guys I don't judge a how good a game is by how many people play it.
as long as there are enough people to fill 1 server I really don't care how few people play the game. I don't jerk off to subscription numbers like so many posters here.
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full loot is fine if the loot you have is not hard to attain , in darkfall if pve monster were actually hard people would think twice about going with their best gear but unfortunately being a indy game mob can be exploited fairly easily and people end up soloing dungeons... maybe thats why DF retained more people than mo i'm not sure .
The problem is Full Loot. And how there is no way to be safe at any moment.
I do think that if they had done it the same way as EVE Online then perhaps it could have gathered more players.
High security places: many npc soldier patrols this areas making it harder for a player to commit a crime. Not impossible, just harder.
Low security: very easy for player killings. Almost no soldier patrols or no soldier patrols.
High security could have been in some areas around cities while Low security could have been farther away from cities.
Hear, hear. The only thing that keeps a full loot game viable is an influx of players who don’t want to play full loot. The joy in full loot doesn’t come from the loot, it comes from inflicting pain and suffering on an un-willing victim.
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As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
All it takes at one game to see why full loot is not as popular. Asherons Call has 1 full loot PvP server and 7 PvE carebear servers. All you need to know.
I played Darkfall for about a week and I actually enjoyed it, that was untill I got ganked but some high level while I was killing trolls up on some deserted structure near the Dark Elf starter area and several hours worth of my time spent aquiring gear was looted from my corpse. Right then and there I said hell no. DF and MO if they really want to pull in some subscribers they need to make white non FFA PvP servers and their subscription numbers will soar.
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I dont agree with the OP. These games are just a couple of choices in the big world of MMO's that has bloomed over the last few years. No one buys Darkfall that doesnt want to put it all on the line. It's Hard Core. they want to think of themselves as being competitive, at the very top of the food chain. Hell If you can be consistantly sucessful in DF with all the bugs then I'll give you a golf clap.
The games you mention were built for niche markets. To say they are failing is to misrepresent their numbers. True, each has major major problems. But they do not have full teams of code/art/whatever working on the product. these games were cheaply (in the big scheme) produced and are only barely maintained.
Shadowbane, was clearly a good game with a less then adequate server code. It was guild driven with several major eays to play. But it was choppy as hell and needed better technology for its size.
UO is another example. Full serve UO, even after the Trammel invasion was still AWESOME on the Felucca (PvP) side. It got slow but it bounced back and still holds an audience base.
Full loot PvP games arent designed to get the WoW crowd but their infrastructure costs are lower and their continued subscription base obviously provides profit.
Full loot games by design appeal only to a certain segment of the MMO playerbase. So if they can remain afloat for any length of time I suppose its a win.
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Heh, this comment unwittingly describes why full loot/open PVP games are so scarce.
No company in their right mind will spend millions of dollars on a MMORPG where one class of customers make it their business to drive off the rest of their customers.
UO Trammel was the first spawn of this sad situation. And the march of MMORPG theme parks on rails since then is due largely to this dynamic: companies have seen that if you give people freedom, a minority leaps to abuse it for their own selfish pleasure and end up collapsing the whole system.
Ironically, the griefers complain the loudest about lack of good sandbox games, not understanding how they have made this outcome inevitable. The griefers are like goldfish who can't help themselves - they eat and eat until they go belly up and its game over, lol.
If 1000 full loot pvp mmorpgs are created and all of them fail, you can say they weren't done right until the end of time. The usual measurement is that if a full loot game fails, it can't be because full loot is a failed approach therefore it must be something about the game. Full loot is a failure.
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I don't know if darkfall and MO are failing. But there is nothing wrong with full loot pvp.
You could say full loot pvp drive away alot of potential subscriber. But in the same way people play darkfall and MO because it's because of the full loot PvP. What I believe is the MMO market is big enough for different kind of game for different people.
I do wish, however, games like darkfall and MO would consider what Eve does with the high sec and low sec. But it's probably harder to implent due to different setting.
it's not hard to implement.
DF already has towers that "zap" aggressors in towns. all they would have to do is put a lot more towers in the "safe zones". very easy.
MO has guard zones where you immediately get killed if you are gray/red and some one types "guard". all they would have to do is make a few of those guard zones bigger.
the truth is, as you say, that they dont want a "high sec" like place because they define themselves as hard core games. adding safe places would make them less hard core. saddly the hard core comunity is very very small, and very very greefing.
It's a rediculous statement full loot pvp MMOs are failing because of full loot pvp. No scratch that it's an idiotic statement
A correct statement would be "Full loot PvP MMOs will never be popular with the mainstream gamers"
Failing is not meeting your goal. If your goal is to get 10000 subscribers and you meet that mark, then your game is a success and not a failure. I don't think indie developers wanting to make it in a niche market with a very limited budget, is thinking about dethroning WoW (yes i'm using hyperbole here)
Really? I think the Eve community is about 1000x better than the WoW community.
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Even better would be to have player owned cities and allow the players themselves to define the rules for the area surrounding their city that they govern.
Edit: Which was something I read Raph Koster wanted to put into starwars galaxies.
Personally, I agree that full-loot is a bad game design choice and I wont ever bother to try them. They are a niche-market, and I guess I just don't fit in the category of players that enjoy making huge riskes where any player can come around and obliterate everything you have on you.
Really? I think the Eve community is about 1000x better than the WoW community.
Yes, and 1000x more articulate and generally friendly and helpful (when not scamming or sploding you :-)I understand that you dont, my point is that grind is not the reason people stop playing games as long as they are having fun or progressing, People use that excuse all the time in DF, its tthe grind! What it boils down to is people grind for things, then lose all those things, that my friend is a receipe for failure, it gets old real quick and the sub numbers show it.
How do people combat this in DF, well they stand around naked by the bank "waiting" for an opportunity to go out and have fun, but not until they can do it hopely without deing and yes BEING DRY LOOTED, It is chocking the live out of this game, it is keeping people huddled around the bank and out of the gameworld, it is keeping wonderfull things like ships and warhulks in the bank and out of the gameworld. Its is keeping people hiding behind walls instead of fighiting It is the reason why all those things on my list are used as excuses to quit this game. "Ill be back if blaa blaa blaa". bullshit your not coming back. If full loot was removed from DF tommorrow I gaurentee you the servers would be overflowing with people in two weeks time.
And yes I have been playing DF since EU launch and still have an active NA sub. Its an amazing game saddled with a failing concept. Full loot, and too my original points the only major reason people stay away. You have to understand because of the items I mention in my list COUPLED with full loot, the game is unbearable for most, Remove full loot and people stay even with the list I presented.
Edit: I just have to comment on your last line. "I dont care how many people play this game". I want you to think long and hard about what you just said because it not only proves all my points but shows just how self desctructive your logic is. I can think of at least 5 reasons why you need to care but this post is too long as it is.
I do think that ships in DF should not be lootable. You would have much more action on the water.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"
And as another player pointed out the risk is 100% avoidale. Its only full loot if you allow it to be. You can die and retain all your items in Eve,
at this point in time with all the sub hemoraging problems they are having i actually thing DF should offer a "non full loot" server. you could make it so when you die your equipment takes a significant durability loss or something. or you drop only 1 item from your bag or something. or make it so you have to turn on a flag to pvp.
it really wouldn't hurt to have the option.