Best Of

Azherae wrote: »

I think that line doesn't make sense on its own, but in this case, if the only reason a player has, to be in an area, is to look for someone else (not someone specific, just 'another person') to kill for the sake of killing them, I don't think one can call it 'meaningful conflict'.

What if we had smth like this?

• POI-based debuff for flagging up
• It would put a multiplier on your flagged state timer
• The multiplier would depend on the lvl of the debuff
• The lvl would go up with hits against a player (the amount of hits per lvl subject to tests)
• You can decrease the lvl by killing mobs in that POI (amount of mobs per lvl down is also stt)
• Killing harder mobs (named, bosses, quest-related ones) removes more lvls
• Killing a person gives you several lvls immediately
• BHs start seeing players who are above a certain threshold of the debuff on their map
• Mayors can set that threshold value for their local POIs
• BHs get, say, 1/10 a reward for hunting a player like that
• If you die with this debuff - you lose a few lvls of it (#stt)

The attackers get more pvp (supposedly what they came there for, right?). BHs have another reason to exist. Nodes can range in their riskiness. PvPers attract pvp onto themselves w/o being corrupted. Victims get defenders in the form of BHs, or even just other pvpers who were near and saw a shout in chat about someone who keeps flagging up on people (I've seen this countless times in L2).

And if these attacks were over the content itself - the attackers would immediately remove the buff, because the pvp was meaningful, or at the very least the pvxness of the encounter was upheld.

Dygz wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

What we have now is not a situation where two guilds are fighting for in game assets, rather, we have a situation where two guilds are fighting to get the other guild to leave the game.

That is obviously not a good situation for the game to be in.

Reminds me of the Forums for Revival 10 years ago. PvPers told me that the whole point of PvP is to enrage the other player(s).
I really don't want to be playing on the same server as gamers with that mentality. And I don't want to be playing on the same server as people who are trying to get other players so frustrated they leave the game.
I play RPGs to team up with players in order to defeat NPCs and mobs.

Sure, I kinda like the story of being a defender of towns - so I might do that for about an hour of one game session... and I won't care during that hour whether PvP is involved. And, I love the idea of Dwarves losing control of their Dwarven Village to Elves and then returning to Siege in order to try to turn that Elven Town into a Dwarven City.
To me, that is Meaningful Conflict.

Some game designs attract gamers (and exploiters) who push competition and greed way too far.

I agree with you here.

I've played games where myself and my guild had the goal of trying to get our rival guilds to leave the game - but only because that is what the games design dictated to be the optimal path.

After a period of being somewhat successful, our server was comparatively empty and so we started complaining about the low population (that we obviously had a hand in causing).

On the other hand, in EQ2 (and other similar games), the design of the game encourages you to support your servers population. You want to encourage people to stay, you want to help them get quests done, improve their abilities etc. You are better off and have more fun if there are more players in the game playing the game at the same level as you are.

I don't know if Intrepid have taken in to account what kind of behavior their game design will encourage players to engage in, but I can't see it being anything other than self-destructive.

Noaani wrote: »

What we have now is not a situation where two guilds are fighting for in game assets, rather, we have a situation where two guilds are fighting to get the other guild to leave the game.

That is obviously not a good situation for the game to be in.

Reminds me of the Forums for Revival 10 years ago. PvPers told me that the whole point of PvP is to enrage the other player(s).
I really don't want to be playing on the same server as gamers with that mentality. And I don't want to be playing on the same server as people who are trying to get other players so frustrated they leave the game.
I play RPGs to team up with players in order to defeat NPCs and mobs.

Sure, I kinda like the story of being a defender of towns - so I might do that for about an hour of one game session... and I won't care during that hour whether PvP is involved. And, I love the idea of Dwarves losing control of their Dwarven Village to Elves and then returning to Siege in order to try to turn that Elven Town into a Dwarven City.
To me, that is Meaningful Conflict.

Some game designs attract gamers (and exploiters) who push competition and greed way too far.

I knew I shoulda just linked wiki from the start.

That is exactly why I think soft cap will be more than enough and will be amazing for the game, because it'll slow down the progress of any dumbass who decides to spend more money just to be in the same node as their mates.

Dygz wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

What we have now is not a situation where two guilds are fighting for in game assets, rather, we have a situation where two guilds are fighting to get the other guild to leave the game.

That is obviously not a good situation for the game to be in.

Reminds me of the Forums for Revival 10 years ago. PvPers told me that the whole point of PvP is to enrage the other player(s).
I really don't want to be playing on the same server as gamers with that mentality. And I don't want to be playing on the same server as people who are trying to get other players so frustrated they leave the game.
I play RPGs to team up with players in order to defeat NPCs and mobs.

Sure, I kinda like the story of being a defender of towns - so I might do that for about an hour of one game session... and I won't care during that hour whether PvP is involved. And, I love the idea of Dwarves losing control of their Dwarven Village to Elves and then returning to Siege in order to try to turn that Elven Town into a Dwarven City.
To me, that is Meaningful Conflict.

Some game designs attract gamers (and exploiters) who push competition and greed way too far.

This one makes me think of something. I think that maybe there's a sort-of equivalent of this feeling for Econ-focused players, it's just so long/complex that I never want to try explaining it, but honestly this is probably the thread for a short-form.

"Not being able to even guess why someone/a small group is in an area."

I think that line doesn't make sense on its own, but in this case, if the only reason a player has, to be in an area, is to look for someone else (not someone specific, just 'another person') to kill for the sake of killing them, I don't think one can call it 'meaningful conflict'.

The next step normally is 'well maybe they are defending the territory and have a good reason to keep everyone out'. Ok, sure, that implies a reason why they do that, though. I don't have a problem with being fought or hunted while walking through a Py'Rai forest if I think they're protecting their trees or something.

I think this is actually somewhat a designer's responsibility. If your MMORPG is supposed to attract a bunch of players who just want to fight other players on the road, it's your job as a Dev to put a reason behind that in the world a decent portion of the time.

Most games I've played 'ignore' this or make it a loose enough connection, resulting in a higher population of players who are not there to play an MMORPG, they're there to play a combat sim where they can snowball or ego-check people who did, and the only win-condition for those is 'when the other player acknowledges defeat/the hierarchy'.

I don't like playing games with too many people who get mad at you for not giving up. Fortunately this works out for those players!

Githal wrote: »

JustVine wrote: »

"When you become a citizen you enter in at a certain citizenship due structure; and citizens pay taxes to their node in the form of both property taxes based on what type housing as well as citizenship dues, which are necessary. And as you enter later into the stage of a node's development, you will pay a higher value on the citizenship dues or vice-versa: if you own a property later, you will be entered into a property tax that is higher based on where you enter that property ownership within the node's history. So those help to form a soft cap. Now, if payers are willing to pay more to be a citizen of a particular node, they have that option, but at some point it becomes restrictive"
- Steven Sharif 2018
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsPR_a2n5SM&t=2508s
- https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Citizenship

After couple of months, when you see that i was right, come back and write that hard cap is indeed needed

Truly, an argument so powerful it ends the discussion.

Anyways, hard cap will be worse than soft cap and I think that maybe you're not interpreting the quote from Intrepid correctly or just don't understand incentives, so probably not much anyone can do or say. For the usual lurkers:

"A one-time entry fee style of enforcing a soft-cap would, in fact, probably not work great. A recurrent one related to tax brackets, particularly one that doesn't try to take into account 'Other citizens leaving' as the primary means of lowering that tax bracket, is stronger than a hard cap. There is a situation in which 'a different early citizen leaving to open up a slot' can lead to problematic manipulations of a soft-cap."

My 2 Cu.

Darkmerge wrote: »

is it not extremely not normal for an MMO to be in development this long and still people are saying its no where near launch?

It isn't normal, but only because Ashes is in a state of development where most projects wouldn't even have beenn announced to the public yet - so no one would have any comments to make at all on it.

The reality is that development of this actual game didn't really start until 2018/2019. They were working on some back end tech and design before that, but not really anything that was going to be the game itself.

An MMORPG from an experienced MMORPG developer takes 7 - 10 years currently. An inexperienced developer would be expected to take longer.