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PvP and Carebears in current MMOs.
aLeX666
Member Posts: 153
Why do carebears hate PvP?
Simply because they don't want to get killed, looted and do everything over again. So basicly, what is the problem? Time is the problem.
You don't want to lose your stuff, because it took you countless amount of time to gather it all and farming is a very boring process many people do to get the excitement of the new "ubb3r" item.
Again, any MMO that is PvP oriented doesn't get the support from the carebear community. What happens with these games? They become a griefing fest for anybody who wanders out the safe zone, since it's filled with PvPers, most of them PKers, just waiting for the perfect occasion to gank you. Therefore, without a Good and Evil axis, with organised groups on both sides (PKers and Anti-PKers), a game just becomes a boring DeathMatch.
So... how can we deal with carebears and PvPers and find the right compromise?
The first step is to remove unique items from unique monsters. What is Unique about a monster that pops back every 15 minutes with a very rare loot anyways? These kind of items just pushes you to farm for hours to get a better item than you already have. Once you have it, you just want to do it again and get something better, over and over. This is a big time consuming and frustrating process, and any carebear who does that just to get PKed 30 minutes later to lose that item is gonna pull his hair out and quit the game. Plus, a lot of groups would just run to that monster to see it camped aby another group... that just doesn't happen if there are no unique items. Plus, the idea of unique "ubb3r" items completly removes the crafters purposes. Every items in a game should be craftable, and crafting shouldn't force you to kill monsters. In UO, you could become a very succesful GrandMaster Smither from nothing. You created your character with some mining and smithing skills, ran to the neareast mountain and started to dig some ores, melt them into ingots and started to craft items depending on your skill level. Without killing a single monster, you could earn money to sell either ingots or armor to other players, because they relied on these items, not on some ubb3r farmed item giving an extremly good edge over competition. There should be items with magical properties, but they should never let you compensate your lack of skills.
Without unique items, when you die... you don't lose much. You lose common items that are easily available on the market. Is it bad enough to quit a game? No. The crafter/adventurer relation in a game creates a great solid community. But, what is the carebear purpose in such a game? Well, there a multiple ways to please a PvEr. Big hard monsters with more loot (but not unique of course), housing, community events, tournaments, important game events where what you do actually changes the world, lore and challenges. You don't see much of this anymore, except for some weird weddings that no one really cares about. Quests you do in current MMOs are doable by everyone else... there's nothing unique about them, they don't change the state of the game. Communities are very sad right now in such games.
Another important thing to do is to decrease the advantage of the grind, and the grind itself. Everyone hates to join in a game with a big disadvantage just to get killed over and over. You need a way to become relatively safely competitive. Just take UO for example, an Adept Archer (81% skills) could win against a GrandMaster (100%) if his technique was good. It was damn quick and easy to reach the Adept level and a little less easy to reach the Grandmaster level, but still, it wasn't that much time consuming... 10 hours would bring you from 50 to 81 easily. The advantage from Adept to Grandmaster wasn't much, but it gave you an edge, but that edge wasn't big enough to compensate a lack of skills (technique). Plus, the casual gamer doesn't need to grind to have fun, and most carebears are casual gamers.
What's left? Player Killing shouldn't be too easy or too hard to do. The victim should always have some degre of chance to escape. And if he doesn't, well he hasn't lost much, cause there's a very minimal grind and no farmed items. In other cases, he should be able to fight back without a big disadvantage, no matter what his encounter is... but that's balance.
I honestly think no MMO will make such a game. Most game companies have investissors to please, and that's with big money... they don't want to "waste" time creating a good game with a solid community, they just want you to be addicted and continue to play endlessly doing the same things.
Most PvE addicted casual gamers in games like WoW have no critical sens of the game they play... they just say "look at the numbers, million players are subscribed". It's selling so it must be good?
Geez, Tobaco companies are succesfull as well... is it any... good?
There are a tons of supplements companies making big profits selling a placebo effect... does it mean it's right to do so? Nope...
It's all Marketing... and they're good at it. That's the whole point : selling as much as possible of a cheap, badly done product.
Just like gambling, MMORPGs based on grind and farm the ubb3r items until a more ubb3r item comes out with a higher level cap are addictive. It's simply... they put you on this pattern. Everytime you get THAT better item you farmed, you're excited about it, happy that your character is better than it was and the serotonin is secreted in your brain. Then you want to get better again, as the serotonin concentration drops, what do you do? Farm the next item, get excited about it, and repeat and enless amount of time. IT IS ADDICTIVE!
Like any addiction, if you're not councious about it, you will never reject what you're doing and continue to do it.
Ever since EQ, more and more companies are thrilled to use the same marketing hype to get the big profits from a bad product. Hipefully, a good MMO with a lot of interaction will cast a shadow on these piece of c***.
"I am trying to see things from your perspective but I just can't get my head that far up my @$$."
Comments
Carebears don't hate PvP, they hate griefing PKing.
I'm probably what people would consider a carebear. But I enjoy a bit of fair PvP now and then, I join the Statue War in RYL once in a while, if someone duels me in Rubies of Eventide I'll usually accept.
However, PK griefing is NOT FUN. Just being killed when you're running around on a quest, or even when you're AFK.
I guess that explains it.
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No Userbar here, sorry to disappoint.
"I am trying to see things from your perspective but I just can't get my head that far up my @$$."
Yes, I wanted to comment on this thread so much, because of your inspiring first sentence.
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No Userbar here, sorry to disappoint.
I hear ya' Chronic.
I'm far from being a full-PvP fan, but I too am pretty much completely over the item-level-grind-and-auto-attack cookie cutter builds that are around at the moment.
I think you could have opened with 'Carebears hate PKer PvP'. I would definitely call myself a carebear, because I care as much about how much fun the stranger on my screen is having, as well as my own. I wouldn't consider ganking a player 20 levels below me when he's trying to mine iron as fun for him, and that aint fun for me. So yeah, call me carebear.
EQ2's PvP is something I'll probably try, not as I think it'll be everything PvP should, but to get into that PvP mindset more. WoW.. well.. that has PvP? I wouldn't have known to be honest...
Have you checked out Roma Victor? It's definitely not up there with the $25million budgets, ie graphics etc, but it has the no-uber-loots, no level grind element going strong.
All about your skills, all about working as a tribe and crafting, well just fricken surviving. It'll be pretty brutal I reckon, and I am really looking forward to giving it a try.
At least give it a chance I reckon.
MMOs at present, the big ones at least, seem to me to be more of the single player RPG lootfests made multiplayer, than a Massive Multiplayer Interactive World.
[Edit for spelling.. probably more mistakes too :P]
"(The) Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." - George W Bush.
Oh. My. God.
Witty saying to amuse you goes here.
removing special loot would completely remove the purpose of MMORPG's.. if you remove special items, and do the things you say in your post, the entire game gets turned into a battlefield. the game already exists, its called battlefield 2,Counterstrike and I could go on. MMORPG are there for people who want to raise a characters and improve them, not to compete with others in a pvp sense. FPS are for that.
MMORPG's are all about venturing into deep dungeons, defeating foes. not about some competition. don't come up with things like "I want to change the world"
it isn't happening and it will NOT happen, because they CAN'T let it happen.
you beat a big boss for a quest, and you want the boss to stay dead. fine,go play a singleplayer game because it CANNOT happen in an mmorpg because there are MORE people that have to do the quest. you can't expect you are the only one who can do that quest. or "I want to take over towns" not going to happen, altough maybe restricted to a small area (WoW is going to implant this, yes the big mmorpg you all hate will have controlled area's). the chance the game becomes unplayable for players on side A because side B conquered the entire world is too big.
Wait a minute, are you thinking that there are no Downsides to PKing?
So you're whole idea of progress is based on level? You hit lvl 10, go in a level 10 zone, get level 10 items? Then reach level 60, go in a level 60 zone and farm level 60 items? You really feel special with a Sword of Ubb3n3ss when 4000 other players are just waiting to camp it as well? I really feel for you if that is the way you like to play a game... like I said, it's addictive and addicted people like you will do anything to justify their habits. But let me explain my idea further, it should make things clearer for you.
There is no downside to dying in FPS, except you have to wait for the next round. Take UO for example. A griefer would get 1- bad reputation, not allowing you to go in any city, nor purchase from NPCs without getting 1-hit killed by a guard, thus limiting access to ressources 2- a bounty on his head, so Anti-PKers (PvPers that dont grief) would hunt them down to turn their head in for bounty. Plus Griefing wasn't that easy. I had a miner in UO, as most guarded mining spots close to a city would be overused, I had to go outsides the safezones to mine. Often, a PKer would run by me, trying to kill me to get my ingots, but it's not that easy you know, I could run and hide, I could simply use a rune to recall in town and voila, no harm done, except that I had to find another spot or simply take my mage and hunt him down or ask some bounty hunters in town to do it. Even if I had got PKed, I would have lost something like 1 hour of digging, since I would bank my ingots as they got too heavy on me and I wanted to reduce the loss if I got PKed. But let's say you are a lumberjacker/carpenter... you could stay in the city all day long, since all you needed is to gather wood from trees. I've seen blacksmithers never leave town, just buying ingots off miners to craft their stuff then sell their services to players who ran by to repair stuff or to get a new weapon armor, etc, since they could break from fighting. Then AGAIN, if it had been a monster, I would have done EXACTLY the same... running, hiding, recalling, or fighting, but because it's a griefer... ahhh now everything is personnal and different. Carebears want the element of surprise completly off their gaming experience, which is something I totally don't understand. How is a book interesting if you already know what is going to happen?
There was a perfect balance between PvPers and PvEers in UO. Most PvPers were not griefers. If you were a griefer, there was a lot more people that would try to kill you than people you could actually kill. This is why I said that PKing shouldn't be too easy, hence why a lvl 60 versus a lvl 1 is dumb in today's MMO allowing PvP. ShadowBane sucked for that reason... the grind wasn't much, but as you left a safezone, you'd get ganked by griefers and couldn't do anything about it. This isn't the case in what I'm trying to explain here.
Again, having special items that gives you an edge over those who don't just kills PvP. If you get your sword of Ubb3n3ss looted by a griefer, you're mad. If your items are unlootable but stays on your body, the griefer just camps it and kills you over and over, you're still mad. If the items are not that important, you just don't care that much. You hit the bank, take some gold, run to the nearest forge and ask blacksmiths to build a new set of armor, if there was none, you'd buy it off the NPC merchant but you wouldn't get the quality and the price you'd get from a Player GrandMaster crafter.
Then you say that it would remove the whole >purpose< of MMORPGs? Now I remember why I got 1200 bucks out of my EQ account
. I'm sorry, but you completly missed the fun. Raising money to buy your guild a Castle, having tailors sew your guild a uniform, having carpenters adding furniture to your house, going deep in a dungeon to defeat the Collector of Souls, going in a dragon nest to find treasures or just to tame one to become your pet. Geez, my guild even held a server-wide chess tournament in our castle, or PvP tournaments of any kind with no looting and prizes for the winners, that's not doable in today's MMOs. There were unique quests, done only once that affected the whole game storyline. For exemple, Lord British's daughter could have been kidnapped by a hordre of orcs you didn't know where there were, as bandit camps and orc camps weren't static. There were GM held events, like an Evil wizzard spawned magic gates filled with monsters to invade one city. Some people even wrote books! The world CHANGED because of the PLAYERS, not from expansions and patched craps. If you're whole idea of fun is getting that next ubb3r item that was discovered, or getting your entire guild to rush versus other guilds to get a mob that pops once a week, then you're simply addicted and unconcious about it.
"I am trying to see things from your perspective but I just can't get my head that far up my @$$."
correct. I do really enjoy going into dungeons to get gear, or level together with my friends.
however there is a misunderstanding in your last post, I also enjoy pvp. but trying to mix player vs player players and player vs enviroment players is not going to work. my biggest point of critism was your idea to remove special items and to remove the grind (the only way to do this is to entirely remove level/skill training, thus, your maxed out in a matter of days) because the game will be ALL about pvp. which results in nobody really cares about dieing. but those kind of games already exist. there are plenty of them, like WoW and suchs. what I'm afraid for with your plan is that nobody will ever do something else besides PvP.
Removing the Sword of Asskicking +1000 is just one step. The other steps include:
There are many factors that play into uniting the "carebears" and "Pkers" loot/farming is just one. as are aspects of griefing. PvP isnt inheriently bad, the the good ole days of UO werent always good. It was new, and refreshing, but as someone who was there when British fell, being jumped by someone who had been in game longer than me, or had friends to give him stuff didnt make me want to find that person again, it just made me want to quite in disgust.
I enjoy a good PvP match up. I even enjoy those times from DAOC when the ALB zerg steamrolled the Hib gate defense, but I am still waiting for a game to come along where he with the bigest toys dont matter and where a smart fighter is better than one who is older.
I think a lot of the way PvP is now compared to the "Good old days" is that the user base has changed a lot.
Most of the UO/EQ crowd where either PnP gamers moving to the comp world or from the world of Muds, where rping and imagination was a big part of the gaming experience.
Where as now there are a lot more people who've played FPS, where pking is just part of the game.
But I do agree that if the PvP wasn't so heavily gear based it would make it a lot more fun for the majority.
correct. I do really enjoy going into dungeons to get gear, or level together with my friends.
however there is a misunderstanding in your last post, I also enjoy pvp. but trying to mix player vs player players and player vs enviroment players is not going to work. my biggest point of critism was your idea to remove special items and to remove the grind (the only way to do this is to entirely remove level/skill training, thus, your maxed out in a matter of days) because the game will be ALL about pvp. which results in nobody really cares about dieing. but those kind of games already exist. there are plenty of them, like WoW and suchs. what I'm afraid for with your plan is that nobody will ever do something else besides PvP.
So you basicly tell me that you do a quest JUST BECAUSE of its reward? A game with no grind has nothing to do with a PvP fest, since there are plenty of other things you could actually do, like I mentionned in my previous post that you seem to have completly ignored. Nobody will ever do something else besides PvP? Wow, then I must have wasted tons of hours doing nothing *cough*. So all your fun revolves around the "ding" and the OMG I GOT A GODLY PLATE OF THE WHALES, I feel so Proud! NOw let's get a Godly Plate of Godly Ubb3n3$$ so I can be proud again! Lmao. I remember being the first monk in my EQ server to get a Shroud of Longevity... ahhh it felt good, so much pride. Then Luclin came out and it was another rushing fest to who gets what first. What was the point of killing the the Shrazea (sp?) Emperor to get into whatever zone I don't remember the name? Simply to get the next best thing. Then what? They released another expansion with more levels and you do the EXACT SAME THING, and you know you'll do it. It's that simple, no surprise, no sens of accomplishment, NOTHING. You'll realise it someday... it took my 4 years to realise it.
"I am trying to see things from your perspective but I just can't get my head that far up my @$$."