Forgive me for doing a big ol' groups response but there's so much here...!
It seems to me that you'd be giving power to the 1-3%, which they'd use
for control over the best resources in the game. If they can't have it,
they'll make it worthless by over-harvesting, and look for the next best
place. Rinse and repeat.
To harvest to that degree, they would need to actually own the planet. Which then ties them down to it. Which then means that they are hurting themselves when they do it.
This depends on whether there are areas of "best" resources
There aren't though there is resource quality variation, plus resources can be exhausted.
This is a total PVP move. Have the PVP planet in the area completely
gut all the resources from the PVE planets, just because they can.
They literally can't, if someone else owns the planet and doesn't let them. For that matter, gutting an entire planet is going to take pretty serious sustained effort over a length of time.
Some competitive PVE'er guild with lots of xx mineral on their planet goes around and wipes out any regional competitors.
And then they run out of it and start suffering a series of consequences.
Raph have your ever asked yourself how does this make the game more fun
for the players? Seriously, who do you think wants this anyway?
As
a designer, dont you think you need to put a tiny bit of thought into
thinking, why is this good for the game? What percentage of your
playerbase will say, Yes this makes the game more fun.
Funny enough, tomorrow's blog post is about what the game is and is not, which includes talking some about these concerns specifically.
Of course we spent time on thinking about who would find these things fun. This is a multimillion dollar project; we took that very seriously. I mean, it's kind of obvious to start with: hundreds of millions of people love Minecraft, add in an RPG system on top with a whole bunch of extremely popular game mechanics... not exactly oddball. We also spent money on market research to validate ideas, of course. It's not like we picked features out of a hat.
If anything, I often describe the game as cynically constructed to maximize audience!
I see absolutely no defense versus bad players. Whatever you invent, won't work or would harm normal population.
Lithuanian, if I take your post at face value, then no game which has any shared resource pool at all can be successful. Which would eliminate the entire MMORPG category.
In practice, your examples are a tad over the top. Take this first one:
Situation: Alpha is a bad person, player killer-griefer, nolifer. All he
wants is to destroy, since Alpha is not capable of creating. So -
Alpha targets planet and starts destroying. Burning forests. Poluting or
destroying rivers. Hunting everything huntable. If your planet has
health bar - Alpha would waste all his time to ensure that bar goes low
enough...and to see your planet turned into Mordor or debris.
Alpha will need *years* to do this by themselves. Their gear will break. They need other players to make it and fix it. The organic world grows back. When they tunnel in one place, they have to drop the rock somewhere else. Alpha will die constantly, because they're sure not going to survive solo in the wilderness against everything. Without a city, they won't even be able to replenish their gear on planet. And in the meantime, other people are either going to show up and decide to help Alpha (in which case, what's the conflict?) or prevent what he's doing, which they can do by claiming the planet and just kicking him off.
You're just hugely overestimating the power of one person here, and underestimating the fact that they will have economic dependencies and needs in order to make progress on the goal of eradicating everything on one world. They won't even be able to move the loot somewhere else by themselves -- we don't give people infinite inventory space.
The other examples are even farther removed from how the game works in practice. (BTW, modern research has cast a ton of doubt on the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the results have not been replicated).
I am actually not surprised that Raph (if I could just implement a 20th
patch, I could fix griefing) Koster, came up with this concept with no
thought of griefing at all.
He has always been unconcerned about griefing in his games.
This just says that you don't actually know my work or history past 1998. The rest of your post is not particularly on target as a result. There's a pretty obvious counterexample, in the form of SWG, a game which had an *extremely* popular PvP system and did not have a particularly noticeable griefing problem.
Believe me, if it takes 100s of hours to build a nice base - and it only take 4 hrs. to destroy a planet
It will not take 4 hours to destroy a planet. In fact, building the base is likely to cause more damage than the individual griefer is. Frankly, what we are aiming for is more like, the people who settle on the planet might cause this to happen. Periodic griefer visitors should not be able to.
What has he done to prove he
understands the mistakes of the past? If anything he is continuing
right where he left off, with a bunch of failing ideas.
Given
that I have been more open and documented more of this stuff than most
game devs do, there's quite a lot to go look at besides all the work
I've done since 1998. If you want to know how my thinking has evolved,
five years ago I published a 700 page book of postmortems of all my
online game work which goes into extreme detail on it. I would suggest
these two articles that are available online though:
From 2001 or 2002, I forget: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/essays/a-philosophical-statement-on-playerkilling/ Key takeaway: "I do not want to ever disappoint people in that way again. People will
come to SWG for those things, and I do not want them to discover that
they cannot stay and enjoy them because the very freedoms which allow
those cool, innovative, exciting features, also allow d00dspeaking
giggly jerks to dance roughshod jigs on their virtual corpses."
I would love to know where this statistic came from. I suspect we have different definitions of "watch it burn" types.
Active
trolls and griefers, not passive bystanders. It's a well understood
statistic across all of live game operations and social media operation.
I personally first saw it quantified from statistics from Ultima
Online, but similar numbers have appeared at every single online service
I have had knowledge of, and I have been doing this for thirty years
now.
That said, there are also dark patterns
which create more of this bad behavior, and positive prosocial patterns
which help reduce it. We know a lot more about this than we did in 1997.
You can just be selfish and uninterested in the goals of society.
Collect and hoard your resources for your own individual projects
without regard to what's necessary for the survival and well-being of
the community.
This is only possible if the
game is built to permit it. Which it does not have to be. If anything,
the same features that have enabled someone to have this sort of
isolation and yet still thrive are the ones that people scared of
griefers clamor for. "Everyone is a griefer, therefore I need complete
independence... which enables people to let the world burn."
The biggest secret to reducing griefing is to make people HAVE dependencies.
"Active trolls and griefers, not passive bystanders. It's a well understood statistic across all of live game operations and social media operation."
"That said, there are also dark patterns which create more of this bad behavior, and positive prosocial patterns which help reduce it. We know a lot more about this than we did in 1997."
Dark patterns? To me there is one cause: players think they have reasons for being a problem in a game. We disagree with those reasons or think that though they have a genuine grievance what they are doing goes too far, but they all feel that what they are doing is right.
I don't believe people behave like bastards just because they want to be bastards, they all have an at least somewhat rational motivation. But just because something is rational does not mean it cannot be misguided, make it true or indeed be an excuse for dubious behaviour.
Having said all that, some players simply cannot be reasoned with, ban them. On a forum I nearly always say "don't ban them" or at least "only do a temporary ban." In game I am quite the opposite, if the behaviour has happened a few times it is not accidental, ban them.
Forgive me for doing a big ol' groups response but there's so much here...!
It seems to me that you'd be giving power to the 1-3%, which they'd use
for control over the best resources in the game. If they can't have it,
they'll make it worthless by over-harvesting, and look for the next best
place. Rinse and repeat.
To harvest to that degree, they would need to actually own the planet. Which then ties them down to it. Which then means that they are hurting themselves when they do it.
This depends on whether there are areas of "best" resources
There aren't though there is resource quality variation, plus resources can be exhausted.
This is a total PVP move. Have the PVP planet in the area completely
gut all the resources from the PVE planets, just because they can.
They literally can't, if someone else owns the planet and doesn't let them. For that matter, gutting an entire planet is going to take pretty serious sustained effort over a length of time.
Some competitive PVE'er guild with lots of xx mineral on their planet goes around and wipes out any regional competitors.
And then they run out of it and start suffering a series of consequences.
Raph have your ever asked yourself how does this make the game more fun
for the players? Seriously, who do you think wants this anyway?
As
a designer, dont you think you need to put a tiny bit of thought into
thinking, why is this good for the game? What percentage of your
playerbase will say, Yes this makes the game more fun.
Funny enough, tomorrow's blog post is about what the game is and is not, which includes talking some about these concerns specifically.
Of course we spent time on thinking about who would find these things fun. This is a multimillion dollar project; we took that very seriously. I mean, it's kind of obvious to start with: hundreds of millions of people love Minecraft, add in an RPG system on top with a whole bunch of extremely popular game mechanics... not exactly oddball. We also spent money on market research to validate ideas, of course. It's not like we picked features out of a hat.
If anything, I often describe the game as cynically constructed to maximize audience!
I see absolutely no defense versus bad players. Whatever you invent, won't work or would harm normal population.
Lithuanian, if I take your post at face value, then no game which has any shared resource pool at all can be successful. Which would eliminate the entire MMORPG category.
In practice, your examples are a tad over the top. Take this first one:
Situation: Alpha is a bad person, player killer-griefer, nolifer. All he
wants is to destroy, since Alpha is not capable of creating. So -
Alpha targets planet and starts destroying. Burning forests. Poluting or
destroying rivers. Hunting everything huntable. If your planet has
health bar - Alpha would waste all his time to ensure that bar goes low
enough...and to see your planet turned into Mordor or debris.
Alpha will need *years* to do this by themselves. Their gear will break. They need other players to make it and fix it. The organic world grows back. When they tunnel in one place, they have to drop the rock somewhere else. Alpha will die constantly, because they're sure not going to survive solo in the wilderness against everything. Without a city, they won't even be able to replenish their gear on planet. And in the meantime, other people are either going to show up and decide to help Alpha (in which case, what's the conflict?) or prevent what he's doing, which they can do by claiming the planet and just kicking him off.
You're just hugely overestimating the power of one person here, and underestimating the fact that they will have economic dependencies and needs in order to make progress on the goal of eradicating everything on one world. They won't even be able to move the loot somewhere else by themselves -- we don't give people infinite inventory space.
The other examples are even farther removed from how the game works in practice. (BTW, modern research has cast a ton of doubt on the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the results have not been replicated).
I am actually not surprised that Raph (if I could just implement a 20th
patch, I could fix griefing) Koster, came up with this concept with no
thought of griefing at all.
He has always been unconcerned about griefing in his games.
This just says that you don't actually know my work or history past 1998. The rest of your post is not particularly on target as a result. There's a pretty obvious counterexample, in the form of SWG, a game which had an *extremely* popular PvP system and did not have a particularly noticeable griefing problem.
Believe me, if it takes 100s of hours to build a nice base - and it only take 4 hrs. to destroy a planet
It will not take 4 hours to destroy a planet. In fact, building the base is likely to cause more damage than the individual griefer is. Frankly, what we are aiming for is more like, the people who settle on the planet might cause this to happen. Periodic griefer visitors should not be able to.
Well I will give you credit for one thing. It does seem you thought this through a bit more than most, so that is encouraging. In the end every system comes down to the details, so I suppose I will need to reserve some judgement and wait it out.
I do think you are taking a tremendous risk not having a full PVE separate server. I dont see any upside at all in not having one. As it limits both PVP players ability to have meaningful PVP and PVE players having to deal with all the asshat PVPers and all their antics.
Comments
"That said, there are also dark patterns which create more of this bad behavior, and positive prosocial patterns which help reduce it. We know a lot more about this than we did in 1997."
Dark patterns? To me there is one cause: players think they have reasons for being a problem in a game. We disagree with those reasons or think that though they have a genuine grievance what they are doing goes too far, but they all feel that what they are doing is right.
I don't believe people behave like bastards just because they want to be bastards, they all have an at least somewhat rational motivation. But just because something is rational does not mean it cannot be misguided, make it true or indeed be an excuse for dubious behaviour.
Having said all that, some players simply cannot be reasoned with, ban them. On a forum I nearly always say "don't ban them" or at least "only do a temporary ban." In game I am quite the opposite, if the behaviour has happened a few times it is not accidental, ban them.
I do think you are taking a tremendous risk not having a full PVE separate server. I dont see any upside at all in not having one. As it limits both PVP players ability to have meaningful PVP and PVE players having to deal with all the asshat PVPers and all their antics.