Originally posted by Talin This system quickly and effectively removes the "solo" player from the game.
Good.
And honestly if the game is well designed it'd bring in people who would be willing to deal with it and learn a new game. The audience just doesn't like crap or old things.
FFA pvp done in a modern high quality MMO could work.
Because if we've learned anything: graphics and false-promoting "polish" can bring in people over any type of mechanic made.
I used to play MMOs like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
The problem with "full loot" is that in the ideal game that someone typically imagines when he discusses this subject, the "loot" in question represents a disproportionate amount of a player avatar's total value in the game world. In a game like EQ, WOW, or virtually any other fantasy MMO, the player character generally has his valuable possessions with him--since those possessions are directly related to his ability to progress in the world, and those possessions make up the bulk of his wealth. Compounded with this is the fact that those possessions tend to be un-interchangeable with wealth in general. They have to be crafted, quested, farmed, etc. That is, the player can't just go buy a replacement.
Full loot doesn't work in that kind of game because the ratio of fun to un-fun is skewed in the wrong direction. Robbing someone of something valuable, priceless, and irreplaceable is very satisfying, but the satisfaction of success isn't as emotionally gripping as the devastation of loss. Losing something valuable, priceless, and irreplaceable can be game-breaking. In a game like WOW, where the bulk of a character's statistic weight is in his gear, that would be the equivalent of losing the entire character and being in many instances literally unable to retrieve it absent help from other people.
Where full loot works is in games that have robust economies, where the bulk of a character's value need not be on his person all the time, and where a loss, no matter how devastating, is at least theoretically recoverable. This is essentially the Eve model, and while I WILL NEVER FORGET that the developers of Eve are the lowest slime-sucking scum of the earth, the model is the only one I can recall where I have been defeated in open PVP, been fully looted, and continued to play and enjoy myself thereafter. My gear (in my case usually a T2 fitted Domi) was replaceable, albeit expensive, and I had learned early on the wisdom of the policy that you don't fly what you can't afford to lose. Did losing my baby hurt? Sure; that represented hundreds of millions of isk down the drain. But I could buy another; in fact, I had backup parts at home--parts that were inaccessible to people attacking me in PVP.
This to me is the only place in which the appeal of full loot PVP can actually be realized. The premise of the original post is easy to answer: the appeal of full loot PVP is to make the other guy throw his keyboard across the room, foreswear gaming for the rest of his life, and join a monastery in order to get his rage under control. Let's face it; it's fun to be a dick. That's human nature. The trouble is that a game that does not check a person's ability to inspire those levels of frustration in others--or at least provide players with the options to insure for the risks they take in PVP--literally cannot be profitable. By definition, it has negative retention.
Many of the measures that made Eve successful as a PVP game could be translated to traditional fantasy--or rather, player-character-as-avatar--games. Removing item binding would be an easy first step. Losing all your gear in WOW isn't too bad if you can go to the AH and buy a replacement set. Secondly, to be frank, good gear has to be easier to get or make. This means there has to be a robust economy for things like crafting, and the disparity between good gear and best gear has to shrink significantly. If you have full loot PVP, you might as well not bother putting epic-omg-orange-loots in the game. Finally, you have to build the game so that a player's expected loss from a negative PVP outcome is predictable, measurable, and within the realm of contemplation of the player: I should be able to ascertain at a glance what my gear is worth, and it should be worth a portion of my total wealth that is probably somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. I should be able to increase my wealth, if I'm efficient, at a rate that would recover me from such a loss within the course of no more than a week and a few days at the highest levels of the game.
I fear, however, that this entire conversation may be moot. In my experience, the players who most zealously advocate for full loot PVP are the same players who would be dissatisfied with a system that attempted to reign in the consequences to a player killed and looted in PVP. Because it's not fun unless the other guy quits, is it? This is an issue of full loot and open-world PVP advocacy rather than any set of mechanics or design principles. The advocacy is essentially: It's not enough to win. This isn't an immersion or danger issue either--those are smokescreens. As I've said before, if you want the suspense and risk of open-world PVP, get a cat (or if you're allergic, you can simulate full loot PVP by deleting your gear any time you die in PVP). In my experience many advocates are actually asking for mechanics to be sanctioned which allow them to disproportionately punish, grief, or otherwise frustrate other players, for no other reason than the hope that that player would indeed quit, become angry, etc. For these kinds of players, there simply is no game, and there shouldn't be, because those players cannot financially support such a game by themselves--not for a lack of numbers or monetary commitment, but simply because the disproportionate relationship between fun and un-fun works both ways no matter who you are.
If you want a full loot, open world PVP game, you must advocate from mechanics from the original position, just as if you were building society: If you didn't know whether you'd be good at the game or bad at it, whether you'd be winning or losing, but only that you were going to play, how would you design it? The game has to be most forgiving to the least well-off.
Games are shallow without it, you need a sense of danger in the world or its just boring to hell.
I disagree. Most of the world in Runescape isn't FULL LOOT. You can have total fun in the game without ever touching PvP nor full loot. Same thing with WoW. I had total fun in Vanilla WoW -WoTLK. No full loot.
I think he means the fun is shallow since loss in game is not really loss. To pull an example from EVE (which has full loot pvp) lets say a PvE person is grinding NPCs with a ship worth 2 billion isk. With this 2 billion isk ship say he can grind out 200 million isk an hour from doing NPC instances in 0.0 space over and over.
In order to be able to grind these lucrative NPCs he has to pay a "landlord" alliance say 3 billion a month rent for use of that solar system. Everything he makes after he grinds the 3 bil is just pure profit.
Now lets say the landlord alliance is at war with another powerful alliance, as a war tactic this powerful alliance starts to attack these "renters" (a valid tactic under the principle of total war) in an attempt to stifle the income of the landlord. Innocent PvE person goes on his merry way to make some money and gets jumped by a small "raid" from the opposing alliance. They kill his 2 billion isk ship and loot whatever isn't destroyed in the attack.
Now this PvE person has several choices, he can replace this 2 billion isk ship in order to generate the same kind of income as before. But there is a fair chance this will happen again since his rented home has now become a "warzone." He can generate less income in a less expensive ship to mitigate the risk of grinding money in a warzone. The obvious drawback is having to work harder to generate the same amount of income. Or he can try to cut his losses and evacuate all his assets from the area, also highly risky given the hostile forces "roaming" around the area (they take a special interest in attacking evacuating convoys). The final option is to workout an agreement with the agressors to become their "renter" which would still require the attacking alliance to stablize the area first before you formally "switch sides."
IMO this makes for much more dynamic pvp than just a battleground that everyone walks away from with nothing lost, nothing gained.
Full loot in general made games more fun my guild in UO often times (10 years ago) we would have quests to retrieve a persons body before it became bones and someone could loot it in PVE and in pvp Hunting down attackers to get gear back.
and of course those pvpers who annoyed my guild we would loot thier gear and lock down to the gh floor Just to watch the ghosts "ooo" at you for a little while.
Full loot works when the game was less about "elite" gear on some mob 90 hours down some hole. When elite gear was was player Made. amd om a sence pvp supported the entier player econ on some level.
So yes some who has to spend a whole night down in some raid waiting for a mob to respawn is going to fill ripped off the moment he gets his uber swordz of ultimate whatever, gets shived int he back and looted by someone who did nothing besides train sneak and backstab
Full loot only works when it benefits everyone not just one side of the game.
Make made player gear Greater then looted gear turn on full loot and have fun.
The problem with "full loot" is that in the ideal game that someone typically imagines when he discusses this subject, the "loot" in question represents a disproportionate amount of a player avatar's total value in the game world. In a game like EQ, WOW, or virtually any other fantasy MMO, the player character generally has his valuable possessions with him--since those possessions are directly related to his ability to progress in the world, and those possessions make up the bulk of his wealth. Compounded with this is the fact that those possessions tend to be un-interchangeable with wealth in general. They have to be crafted, quested, farmed, etc. That is, the player can't just go buy a replacement.
Full loot doesn't work in that kind of game because the ratio of fun to un-fun is skewed in the wrong direction. Robbing someone of something valuable, priceless, and irreplaceable is very satisfying, but the satisfaction of success isn't as emotionally gripping as the devastation of loss. Losing something valuable, priceless, and irreplaceable can be game-breaking. In a game like WOW, where the bulk of a character's statistic weight is in his gear, that would be the equivalent of losing the entire character and being in many instances literally unable to retrieve it absent help from other people.
Where full loot works is in games that have robust economies, where the bulk of a character's value need not be on his person all the time, and where a loss, no matter how devastating, is at least theoretically recoverable. This is essentially the Eve model, and while I WILL NEVER FORGET that the developers of Eve are the lowest slime-sucking scum of the earth, the model is the only one I can recall where I have been defeated in open PVP, been fully looted, and continued to play and enjoy myself thereafter. My gear (in my case usually a T2 fitted Domi) was replaceable, albeit expensive, and I had learned early on the wisdom of the policy that you don't fly what you can't afford to lose. Did losing my baby hurt? Sure; that represented hundreds of millions of isk down the drain. But I could buy another; in fact, I had backup parts at home--parts that were inaccessible to people attacking me in PVP.
This to me is the only place in which the appeal of full loot PVP can actually be realized. The premise of the original post is easy to answer: the appeal of full loot PVP is to make the other guy throw his keyboard across the room, foreswear gaming for the rest of his life, and join a monastery in order to get his rage under control. Let's face it; it's fun to be a dick. That's human nature. The trouble is that a game that does not check a person's ability to inspire those levels of frustration in others--or at least provide players with the options to insure for the risks they take in PVP--literally cannot be profitable. By definition, it has negative retention.
Many of the measures that made Eve successful as a PVP game could be translated to traditional fantasy--or rather, player-character-as-avatar--games. Removing item binding would be an easy first step. Losing all your gear in WOW isn't too bad if you can go to the AH and buy a replacement set. Secondly, to be frank, good gear has to be easier to get or make. This means there has to be a robust economy for things like crafting, and the disparity between good gear and best gear has to shrink significantly. If you have full loot PVP, you might as well not bother putting epic-omg-orange-loots in the game. Finally, you have to build the game so that a player's expected loss from a negative PVP outcome is predictable, measurable, and within the realm of contemplation of the player: I should be able to ascertain at a glance what my gear is worth, and it should be worth a portion of my total wealth that is probably somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. I should be able to increase my wealth, if I'm efficient, at a rate that would recover me from such a loss within the course of no more than a week and a few days at the highest levels of the game.
I fear, however, that this entire conversation may be moot. In my experience, the players who most zealously advocate for full loot PVP are the same players who would be dissatisfied with a system that attempted to reign in the consequences to a player killed and looted in PVP. Because it's not fun unless the other guy quits, is it? This is an issue of full loot and open-world PVP advocacy rather than any set of mechanics or design principles. The advocacy is essentially: It's not enough to win. This isn't an immersion or danger issue either--those are smokescreens. As I've said before, if you want the suspense and risk of open-world PVP, get a cat (or if you're allergic, you can simulate full loot PVP by deleting your gear any time you die in PVP). In my experience many advocates are actually asking for mechanics to be sanctioned which allow them to disproportionately punish, grief, or otherwise frustrate other players, for no other reason than the hope that that player would indeed quit, become angry, etc. For these kinds of players, there simply is no game, and there shouldn't be, because those players cannot financially support such a game by themselves--not for a lack of numbers or monetary commitment, but simply because the disproportionate relationship between fun and un-fun works both ways no matter who you are.
If you want a full loot, open world PVP game, you must advocate from mechanics from the original position, just as if you were building society: If you didn't know whether you'd be good at the game or bad at it, whether you'd be winning or losing, but only that you were going to play, how would you design it? The game has to be most forgiving to the least well-off.
I agree sorta. When you imagine full loot pvp its never you losing your gear. Its you being awesome and pwning.
I'm curious as to what makes this appealing to some people.
From my perspective, it sounds like it would be a real pain in the arse. You spend 'X' amount of hours crafting/finding "gear", someone/something kills you, you die, and someone takes all your stuff. Making the time you put into getting your "gear" useless.
Now, I know people say in these types of games to "only use what you can afford to lose." But, what then is the point to get anything better? If there's an "Epic Sword of Uber Doom" or a "Super Ship of Mega Awesomeness", that take days/weeks/months to aqquire, what's the point if you're never going to use it, or risk losing it if you do?
All that said, I could be looking at this all wrong and am just missing the point. But from where I'm standing, it seems like a huge time waster.
Thoughts?
-Z
I think it only appeals to less than 10% of the population. IMO, it's the type of people who could be declared sociopaths sadists. It sould be great to see a long term study on the personality types who are attracted to this type of game play and use it to identify risky people in society.
More like sociopaths ruin it for everyone else and otherwise its fine.
The Goonies will be with us forever it seems. There will always be people who get their jollies by ruining other peoples play experience. Thats just one of the reasons that FFA games will always be a limited niche market.
I'm curious as to what makes this appealing to some people.
From my perspective, it sounds like it would be a real pain in the arse. You spend 'X' amount of hours crafting/finding "gear", someone/something kills you, you die, and someone takes all your stuff. Making the time you put into getting your "gear" useless.
Now, I know people say in these types of games to "only use what you can afford to lose." But, what then is the point to get anything better? If there's an "Epic Sword of Uber Doom" or a "Super Ship of Mega Awesomeness", that take days/weeks/months to aqquire, what's the point if you're never going to use it, or risk losing it if you do?
All that said, I could be looking at this all wrong and am just missing the point. But from where I'm standing, it seems like a huge time waster.
Thoughts?
-Z
I think it only appeals to less than 10% of the population. IMO, it's the type of people who could be declared sociopaths sadists. It sould be great to see a long term study on the personality types who are attracted to this type of game play and use it to identify risky people in society.
More like sociopaths ruin it for everyone else and otherwise its fine.
The Goonies will be with us forever it seems. There will always be people who get their jollies by ruining other peoples play experience. Thats just one of the reasons that FFA games will always be a limited niche market.
pretty much thats how i feel. the idea of a sandbox open world with freedom sounds amazing until you realize ... players are a**holes and many will do everything in their power to ruin another players fun.
I played darkfall for a long time and to be honest I don’t like the idea of Non-consentual pvp. To me it seems fairly logical, why would someone want to fight someone who clearly is not intrested in fighting? One has to have a social disorder to WANT that.
So to me I have never seen the problem with full loot PvP between those who want to fight and or clans at war with each other. Seems fairly logical and simple to me. i fail to see the problem outside of what I mentioned, the lack of it being possible to go around and punk people who are not intrested in your aspect of the game.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
FFA PvP doesn't work because there is no consequences to being a murderous rampaging horde. It caters to zerg gulds that don't want to play any other part of the game.
Comments
Good.
And honestly if the game is well designed it'd bring in people who would be willing to deal with it and learn a new game. The audience just doesn't like crap or old things.
FFA pvp done in a modern high quality MMO could work.
Because if we've learned anything: graphics and false-promoting "polish" can bring in people over any type of mechanic made.
I used to play MMOs like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
The problem with "full loot" is that in the ideal game that someone typically imagines when he discusses this subject, the "loot" in question represents a disproportionate amount of a player avatar's total value in the game world. In a game like EQ, WOW, or virtually any other fantasy MMO, the player character generally has his valuable possessions with him--since those possessions are directly related to his ability to progress in the world, and those possessions make up the bulk of his wealth. Compounded with this is the fact that those possessions tend to be un-interchangeable with wealth in general. They have to be crafted, quested, farmed, etc. That is, the player can't just go buy a replacement.
Full loot doesn't work in that kind of game because the ratio of fun to un-fun is skewed in the wrong direction. Robbing someone of something valuable, priceless, and irreplaceable is very satisfying, but the satisfaction of success isn't as emotionally gripping as the devastation of loss. Losing something valuable, priceless, and irreplaceable can be game-breaking. In a game like WOW, where the bulk of a character's statistic weight is in his gear, that would be the equivalent of losing the entire character and being in many instances literally unable to retrieve it absent help from other people.
Where full loot works is in games that have robust economies, where the bulk of a character's value need not be on his person all the time, and where a loss, no matter how devastating, is at least theoretically recoverable. This is essentially the Eve model, and while I WILL NEVER FORGET that the developers of Eve are the lowest slime-sucking scum of the earth, the model is the only one I can recall where I have been defeated in open PVP, been fully looted, and continued to play and enjoy myself thereafter. My gear (in my case usually a T2 fitted Domi) was replaceable, albeit expensive, and I had learned early on the wisdom of the policy that you don't fly what you can't afford to lose. Did losing my baby hurt? Sure; that represented hundreds of millions of isk down the drain. But I could buy another; in fact, I had backup parts at home--parts that were inaccessible to people attacking me in PVP.
This to me is the only place in which the appeal of full loot PVP can actually be realized. The premise of the original post is easy to answer: the appeal of full loot PVP is to make the other guy throw his keyboard across the room, foreswear gaming for the rest of his life, and join a monastery in order to get his rage under control. Let's face it; it's fun to be a dick. That's human nature. The trouble is that a game that does not check a person's ability to inspire those levels of frustration in others--or at least provide players with the options to insure for the risks they take in PVP--literally cannot be profitable. By definition, it has negative retention.
Many of the measures that made Eve successful as a PVP game could be translated to traditional fantasy--or rather, player-character-as-avatar--games. Removing item binding would be an easy first step. Losing all your gear in WOW isn't too bad if you can go to the AH and buy a replacement set. Secondly, to be frank, good gear has to be easier to get or make. This means there has to be a robust economy for things like crafting, and the disparity between good gear and best gear has to shrink significantly. If you have full loot PVP, you might as well not bother putting epic-omg-orange-loots in the game. Finally, you have to build the game so that a player's expected loss from a negative PVP outcome is predictable, measurable, and within the realm of contemplation of the player: I should be able to ascertain at a glance what my gear is worth, and it should be worth a portion of my total wealth that is probably somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. I should be able to increase my wealth, if I'm efficient, at a rate that would recover me from such a loss within the course of no more than a week and a few days at the highest levels of the game.
I fear, however, that this entire conversation may be moot. In my experience, the players who most zealously advocate for full loot PVP are the same players who would be dissatisfied with a system that attempted to reign in the consequences to a player killed and looted in PVP. Because it's not fun unless the other guy quits, is it? This is an issue of full loot and open-world PVP advocacy rather than any set of mechanics or design principles. The advocacy is essentially: It's not enough to win. This isn't an immersion or danger issue either--those are smokescreens. As I've said before, if you want the suspense and risk of open-world PVP, get a cat (or if you're allergic, you can simulate full loot PVP by deleting your gear any time you die in PVP). In my experience many advocates are actually asking for mechanics to be sanctioned which allow them to disproportionately punish, grief, or otherwise frustrate other players, for no other reason than the hope that that player would indeed quit, become angry, etc. For these kinds of players, there simply is no game, and there shouldn't be, because those players cannot financially support such a game by themselves--not for a lack of numbers or monetary commitment, but simply because the disproportionate relationship between fun and un-fun works both ways no matter who you are.
If you want a full loot, open world PVP game, you must advocate from mechanics from the original position, just as if you were building society: If you didn't know whether you'd be good at the game or bad at it, whether you'd be winning or losing, but only that you were going to play, how would you design it? The game has to be most forgiving to the least well-off.
Peace and safety.
I think he means the fun is shallow since loss in game is not really loss. To pull an example from EVE (which has full loot pvp) lets say a PvE person is grinding NPCs with a ship worth 2 billion isk. With this 2 billion isk ship say he can grind out 200 million isk an hour from doing NPC instances in 0.0 space over and over.
In order to be able to grind these lucrative NPCs he has to pay a "landlord" alliance say 3 billion a month rent for use of that solar system. Everything he makes after he grinds the 3 bil is just pure profit.
Now lets say the landlord alliance is at war with another powerful alliance, as a war tactic this powerful alliance starts to attack these "renters" (a valid tactic under the principle of total war) in an attempt to stifle the income of the landlord. Innocent PvE person goes on his merry way to make some money and gets jumped by a small "raid" from the opposing alliance. They kill his 2 billion isk ship and loot whatever isn't destroyed in the attack.
Now this PvE person has several choices, he can replace this 2 billion isk ship in order to generate the same kind of income as before. But there is a fair chance this will happen again since his rented home has now become a "warzone." He can generate less income in a less expensive ship to mitigate the risk of grinding money in a warzone. The obvious drawback is having to work harder to generate the same amount of income. Or he can try to cut his losses and evacuate all his assets from the area, also highly risky given the hostile forces "roaming" around the area (they take a special interest in attacking evacuating convoys). The final option is to workout an agreement with the agressors to become their "renter" which would still require the attacking alliance to stablize the area first before you formally "switch sides."
IMO this makes for much more dynamic pvp than just a battleground that everyone walks away from with nothing lost, nothing gained.
Full loot in general made games more fun my guild in UO often times (10 years ago) we would have quests to retrieve a persons body before it became bones and someone could loot it in PVE and in pvp Hunting down attackers to get gear back.
and of course those pvpers who annoyed my guild we would loot thier gear and lock down to the gh floor Just to watch the ghosts "ooo" at you for a little while.
Full loot works when the game was less about "elite" gear on some mob 90 hours down some hole. When elite gear was was player Made. amd om a sence pvp supported the entier player econ on some level.
So yes some who has to spend a whole night down in some raid waiting for a mob to respawn is going to fill ripped off the moment he gets his uber swordz of ultimate whatever, gets shived int he back and looted by someone who did nothing besides train sneak and backstab
Full loot only works when it benefits everyone not just one side of the game.
Make made player gear Greater then looted gear turn on full loot and have fun.
I agree sorta. When you imagine full loot pvp its never you losing your gear. Its you being awesome and pwning.
The Goonies will be with us forever it seems. There will always be people who get their jollies by ruining other peoples play experience. Thats just one of the reasons that FFA games will always be a limited niche market.
pretty much thats how i feel. the idea of a sandbox open world with freedom sounds amazing until you realize ... players are a**holes and many will do everything in their power to ruin another players fun.
I played darkfall for a long time and to be honest I don’t like the idea of Non-consentual pvp. To me it seems fairly logical, why would someone want to fight someone who clearly is not intrested in fighting? One has to have a social disorder to WANT that.
So to me I have never seen the problem with full loot PvP between those who want to fight and or clans at war with each other. Seems fairly logical and simple to me. i fail to see the problem outside of what I mentioned, the lack of it being possible to go around and punk people who are not intrested in your aspect of the game.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
FFA PvP doesn't work because there is no consequences to being a murderous rampaging horde. It caters to zerg gulds that don't want to play any other part of the game.