Laetitian wrote: » If someone can get their PvP fix out of WoW, they might not be a PvE-only player, but their preference is still heavily slanted towards sheltered conditions.
But how do you reconcile that with your fear about players leaving if they dislike the unfair PvP they're subjected to?
Laetitian wrote: » Noaani wrote: » Laetitian wrote: » You desperately need to get used to the idea that, even if ArcheAge and LineAge didn't turn into the dominant games on the market, game design for PvP-friendly games still needs to look different, and appeal to a different playerbase, than WoW or EQ2. In order for this to be true, one would need to assume that these two games only appeal to one type of MMO player. They do not. There are many people playing WoW that love PvP and get their PvP fix either on a PvP server or in the games arena. If someone can get their PvP fix out of WoW, they might not be a PvE-only player, but their preference is still heavily slanted towards sheltered conditions. Point is, not every player who can appreciate PvP should be catered to for every game that has PvP in it, and I still stand by my point that your suggestions encourage that a bit too much, and with too little of an awareness of the irreplaceability of player resilience in a functional, reasonably PvP-driven system. Noaani wrote: Does Wizard101 alert the entire server to where a a guild at, and is very slowly heading with some of the best loot in the game, in a battleground (removing corruption) so that others have the ability to attempt to ambush them? Because that is what I have suggested. But how do you reconcile that with your fear about players leaving if they dislike the unfair PvP they're subjected to? Are you fine with it if the people who might be ambushed are aware of it ahead of time (because they know others will get the announcement when they engage in certain activities?) I could actually be fine with that: Allow spontaneous sieges of a certain outposts, if enough citizens of the node in question (and perhaps its allied nodes; the specifics would have to be figured out, and numbers would have to be affected by character levels) are currently online. Then those outposts could be used to make an officially scheduled siege easier - but could be recaptured as long as enough citizens of the factions that captured it are online. And you make sure this doesn't lead to too much change-of-hands of territory and warlike conditions by just making outposts difficult to approach and capture. Bit of a clumsy suggestion, but there's probably a way to make it feel more organic. I'm having too much fun thinking about this, I'm setting myself up to be disappointed. =§
Noaani wrote: » Laetitian wrote: » You desperately need to get used to the idea that, even if ArcheAge and LineAge didn't turn into the dominant games on the market, game design for PvP-friendly games still needs to look different, and appeal to a different playerbase, than WoW or EQ2. In order for this to be true, one would need to assume that these two games only appeal to one type of MMO player. They do not. There are many people playing WoW that love PvP and get their PvP fix either on a PvP server or in the games arena.
Laetitian wrote: » You desperately need to get used to the idea that, even if ArcheAge and LineAge didn't turn into the dominant games on the market, game design for PvP-friendly games still needs to look different, and appeal to a different playerbase, than WoW or EQ2.
Noaani wrote: Does Wizard101 alert the entire server to where a a guild at, and is very slowly heading with some of the best loot in the game, in a battleground (removing corruption) so that others have the ability to attempt to ambush them? Because that is what I have suggested.
Azherae wrote: It's starting to be somewhat common around here that the stronger vocal PvP supporters other than NiKr, Veeshan and myself/my group (others can let me know if I forgot them) have a very specific perspective of what worthwhile PvP is, and I'm concerned 'for' them sorta. Because the PvP type that Ashes probably benefits most from is not that type, it's the type that they decry, and more importantly, it's the PvP type that Ashes' design probably leads to.
Azherae wrote: I find that your posts tend to devalue the PvP experience or desire of those who don't like the same type of PvP as you do. Is this intentional?
Laetitian wrote: » Azerhae wrote: It's starting to be somewhat common around here that the stronger vocal PvP supporters other than NiKr, Veeshan and myself/my group (others can let me know if I forgot them) have a very specific perspective of what worthwhile PvP is, and I'm concerned 'for' them sorta. Because the PvP type that Ashes probably benefits most from is not that type, it's the type that they decry, and more importantly, it's the PvP type that Ashes' design probably leads to. Is it? Or is that the assumption your past experience is orienting your perspective towards? I understand the connections made with Steven's vision. I don't necessarily disagree that they seem pretty clear and reasonable. But I do think it's worth digging a bit further and thinking about ways that it could turn out to be an even more cohesive and engaging experience. I can't speak for others like me, but I'm not demanding anything. I'm not demanding for Ashes to be a game i will enjoy playing, or insisting that the mechanics I'd envision for it would be the best match. If I have a provocative or entitled tone sometimes, it's not because I am convinced that my opinion or preference would be better for everyone, but just because I am confident enough that it works for me that I'd want others to give it an honest thought before being certain that their vision or their past experience would work out better for where the game is headed. If that leads to ideas being paid too much attention in the community/development that don't fit the game as well as the original vision, that would be too bad, but it's already so hard to have a single voice heard, I don't think it hurts to present it with a little confidence. Azerhae wrote: I find that your posts tend to devalue the PvP experience or desire of those who don't like the same type of PvP as you do. Is this intentional? I find strongly sheltered PvE (and arena PvP etc.) to be a mechanism that conflicts with some of the things that make MMOs great. I have the suspicion that some players who enjoy it mostly do so because WoW happened to dominate the market at the right time, and they might have had a few off-putting experiences in other games that made them jump to conclusions. So I like to make those types justify their view instead of just dogmatically sitting on it until the end of their generation. Back when I searched for my first PvP MMORPGs when I was 13-14, I had to search for a *long* time to find anything that was decent, and the niche I finally ended up in was *tiny.* I'd prefer it if others like me had better options. And I think that will require more daring development decisions than "let's add a MOBA lobby inside this MMO" (not trying to be confrontational here, just simplifying.)
Azerhae wrote: It's starting to be somewhat common around here that the stronger vocal PvP supporters other than NiKr, Veeshan and myself/my group (others can let me know if I forgot them) have a very specific perspective of what worthwhile PvP is, and I'm concerned 'for' them sorta. Because the PvP type that Ashes probably benefits most from is not that type, it's the type that they decry, and more importantly, it's the PvP type that Ashes' design probably leads to.
Azerhae wrote: I find that your posts tend to devalue the PvP experience or desire of those who don't like the same type of PvP as you do. Is this intentional?
Azherae wrote: Nothing else worked for me, though. So I have a set of 'things that I couldn't get to work' and from observing other games, no other games 'got to work' either. Before I go further, please let me know if your response to this is generally 'they didn't try hard enough (to make specific thing I like work for others, without changing it much)!' or you're closer to the type to just give the 'well this works for me and here's stuff I don't want you to change because without it this doesn't work for me'.
Laetitian wrote: » Are we talking primarily about what it feels like while playing the game and choosing the right game for yourself (in guilds with certain types of people), or purely about game design decisions, or both? Azerhae wrote: Nothing else worked for me, though. So I have a set of 'things that I couldn't get to work' and from observing other games, no other games 'got to work' either. Before I go further, please let me know if your response to this is generally 'they didn't try hard enough (to make specific thing I like work for others, without changing it much)!' or you're closer to the type to just give the 'well this works for me and here's stuff I don't want you to change because without it this doesn't work for me'. From a game design perspective I find the issue very challenging and I'd answer on a much more fundamental level: If you have to change your vision so much to fit a certain large playerbase, should you be making the game at all? And then, do you really have to adapt the way the game functions to make it more appealing, or should it be enough to *present* the idea in a way that makes it more apparent what the player is meant to do, and why it is entertaining/rewarding? I guess that's a bit closer to the second type than the first? I don't think it's realistic to expect that you should be able to adapt every game mechanic to be appealing to all tastes just because it's very intriguing to one group, which the first type seems to be convinced of. Sorry if my answer is missing the point in the original context of the thread, it might be getting a bit too abstract for me.
Azerhae wrote: Nothing else worked for me, though. So I have a set of 'things that I couldn't get to work' and from observing other games, no other games 'got to work' either. Before I go further, please let me know if your response to this is generally 'they didn't try hard enough (to make specific thing I like work for others, without changing it much)!' or you're closer to the type to just give the 'well this works for me and here's stuff I don't want you to change because without it this doesn't work for me'.
Azherae wrote: I've never personally understood the strong drive to 'make sure to have none of these systems', because the moment-to-moment PvP experiences, even the organic ones, are mostly the same if not better for them for me personally. Ashes has so many aspects that strongly imply to me that the game would be better with such systems than without them. My perspective is that these systems are what you referred to as 'sheltered conditions'. Why is it important for your experience for there to be no 'sheltered conditions' to the point where it causes you to have a seemingly lesser opinion of say, WoW PvP-ers? There's no indication that Ashes is a 'no sheltered conditions' game, or needs to be, in fact the recent 'concerns' have been that Steven's wishes for Corruption are creating more of them, and it is upsetting some people who are then blaming 'the carebears' or whoever.
Laetitian wrote: Scheduled 500v500 sieges, and scripted arena battles for 8v8s or 40v40s, are fun are fun for guilds to show off the obedience to their military drill sergeants once a week. They're not the PvP I want to log in for on the regular.
Azherae wrote: I am carebear enough to not get why this is important. How is the game meaningfully less fun as a whole across the playerbase because the 'sheltering' happens? And I'm speaking only in terms of PvP now. MOBA matches are not 'less fun' because of wards, catchup mechanics, etc. So let's please not take it in the 'Well PvE players would definitely have more fun with the shelters.' direction.
Laetitian wrote: » Noaani wrote: » Azherae wrote: » Usually this is where people surrender the match and go on to the next match or disconnect mid-match and stop for the night. PvX MMOs are the same, they just 'surrender' 100x slower. Oh, and there's no matchmaking in MMOs so good luck with that. While perhaps not the takeaway from your post that you may have wanted, it just occured to me that this is actually another example of the phenomenon of players leaving PvP games that I have been talking about for years on these forums. It actually is the same thing as people in a lobby game surrendering or dropping, the difference being that in a persistent world MMO,they dont have the option to just join another match. The carebear-pandering in the game you two would design with these assumptions would literally create Wizard 101. Minecraft has decade-old servers for 8-year-olds that have less loss aversion than you demand "for player retention." You desperately need to get used to the idea that, even if ArcheAge and LineAge didn't turn into the dominant games on the market, game design for PvP-friendly games still needs to look different, and appeal to a different playerbase, than WoW or EQ2. Eliminating imbalanced strength levels (zergs, scheduling advantage, let alone gear/levels) will just turn a PvP game into a stale arena. You can drastically reduce numbers imbalance for some events to give ample recognition to individual mastery of mechanics and character build achievements. But a good PvP MMO will still always reward spontaneous player coordination highly, even for high-stakes PvP objectives, because it combines all the great hallmarks of MMO social life. *Especially* if your MMO has sandbox-ish design features that should reward constant communication and shared goals among players with common enemies, so there's always something new and important to talk about and coordonate for.
Noaani wrote: » Azherae wrote: » Usually this is where people surrender the match and go on to the next match or disconnect mid-match and stop for the night. PvX MMOs are the same, they just 'surrender' 100x slower. Oh, and there's no matchmaking in MMOs so good luck with that. While perhaps not the takeaway from your post that you may have wanted, it just occured to me that this is actually another example of the phenomenon of players leaving PvP games that I have been talking about for years on these forums. It actually is the same thing as people in a lobby game surrendering or dropping, the difference being that in a persistent world MMO,they dont have the option to just join another match.
Azherae wrote: » Usually this is where people surrender the match and go on to the next match or disconnect mid-match and stop for the night. PvX MMOs are the same, they just 'surrender' 100x slower. Oh, and there's no matchmaking in MMOs so good luck with that.
Laetitian wrote: » It depends on the scope of what you demand/suggest/predict. If, for example, you agree with the sentiment I just quoted from myself in the last comment ("Scheduled 500v500 sieges [...]"), then I could say that my harsh criticism might mostly be my wrong interpretation of what you're vouching for. But if you can't really agree with that, then I do think there's still a disagreement that's worth discussing.
Laetitian wrote: » Since the coordination is on-the-fly, and both sides tend to be at the peak of their potential at the same time because of the natural flow of the game, there is a better chance of underdogs winning against a zerg by making better decisions in the moment.
Azherae wrote: Your thoughts on this post were about 'scheduled PvP' and how it's not necessary, but I wasn't talking about any of that really. Because at '1/100th speed' a MOBA match doesn't have any scheduled PvP. But it does have enough structure to keep things somewhat fair to keep you from just getting beat on, or to let you know that if you are getting beat on, there's an upside somewhere else.
Azherae wrote: MOBAs also do whatever they can to protect 'random group of 5 players queued together' from 'full stack of 5 who know each other's tactics perfectly', because the result from the Randoms is generally not 'hey guys let's be friends and work out our strategy to beat those guys'.
Laetitian wrote: » Azherae wrote: Your thoughts on this post were about 'scheduled PvP' and how it's not necessary, but I wasn't talking about any of that really. Because at '1/100th speed' a MOBA match doesn't have any scheduled PvP. But it does have enough structure to keep things somewhat fair to keep you from just getting beat on, or to let you know that if you are getting beat on, there's an upside somewhere else. Regarding the first sentence: It was a big part of what the thread author talked about. Scheduling, balance, etc. You were still perfectly in your right to comment without taking scheduling/protection measures into account at all: The thread's title was definitely open to any ideas about what good PvP is comprised of in general. But that was why I interpreted your remarks to be related to that topic. I probably Occam's-razored too indiscriminately there, sorry. (Which is my copium-infused way of saying that I may have jumped to stereotypes.) I took your comparison to the 1/100th speed MOBA in a complex theoretical/ideological sense. In my vision, the level 4 Ryze was a group of PvE players doing their thing, and the roaming level 18 Darius at minute 5 was a bunch of zergers stealing their castle in the night, purely by merit of bad game balancing. And the way in which the balance of predictability, self-accountability for overextending, and general merit-rewarding nature of the MOBA would be introduced to that scene in your proposed game design change, was through scheduled sieges and Corruption. But now I think you meant it a bit more practically than that. In a more practical example, I really like the idea of directly managing this ambition of establishing the MOBA balance of "Correct play versus incorrect play = Advantage": If not pre-scheduled, this could be achieved through tasks that naturally need to happen at certain times in the game, so people would organically run into each other at certain natural hotspot times, in naturally balanced numbers (perhaps only a certain number of players can benefit from being at a certain location, or perhaps you do control how many people may go through a portal, or you increase the resource cost for every person who steps through), with advantages restricted by their success in the game up to that point. If this were to happen in the game without always requiring the formal "We'll attack your castle at 6pm in two days, be prepared" announcements, every time for every size of territory-related PvP objectives (Again, not saying the game has to have specifically forts and castles; it's just what I know that works better than just loot opportunities) then I would absolutely love it. Like literally sending a predictable number of players down "lanes" when the minions spawn, just at a larger scale and with a longer game clock. It's my intitial interpretation of "do whatever it takes to make it a 5v5 or a 20v20, with a pre-announced event timer" that I took issue with.
Azherae wrote: I understand why scheduled PvP is a thing, I understand why 'no warning' PvP is a thing, and the current design seems to be 'building up toward benefits for the former' and 'discouraging the latter if not consensual'. I'm looking forward to Caravans and Dungeon clashes the most because those are the perfect 'inbetween' for me.
hleV wrote: » In an MMORPG, one's PvP performance needs to depend on both skill and stats. Removing or reducing the stats part makes it a non-RPG game (as far as PvP goes). A trash well geared high level player shouldn't have much issue defeating a good low level player who hasn't yet put in the time and effort in progressing their character. OWPvP is a must, unexpected PvP encounters, as well as PvP where you're not bound by some gamemode victory conditions, to a lot of us are the most enjoyable content. High-rewarding group PvP gamemodes (sieges, etc.) are a good motivator for a PvPer to continue playing and progressing. Gamemodes where you can prove yourself individually and as a group (dueling/arenas) are the cup of tea for lots of PvPers. I think the only check AoC doesn't mark here is 1v1 dueling/arenas, due to rock-paper-scissors approach to classes. I suppose 1v1 arenas could be locked to your own class category.
