6 ms·

It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.

by zionic 5y ago

cletus 5y ago
Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make. History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds). This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation. The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so. Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent. Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different". So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later. No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Agreed with all this. There was at one point a notion of a "PvP slider" that you could turn down to reduce encounters with other players (I assume via instancing) but it's gone away in favor of a totally in-universe "crime stat" and law system. Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone. I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.
- korse 5y ago
  What about Eve online?
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve player in high-sec.
    - kiksy 5y ago
      Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous. By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't afford to lose. The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me. I wish more games took a similar mature approach.
      - bserge 5y ago
        They would lose a lot of potential players. I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes. Basically, wasting a ton of time. That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life. EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.
  - bluescrn 5y ago
    It's a PvP game, and a brutal one. There's some token PvE, but mostly aimed at teaching new players the game.
- shadofx 5y ago
  Small studio MMORPGs focused on PvE don't exist because they can't compete with WoW and FFXIV on content generation, small studios don't have hundreds of artists, quest designers, and programmers needed to churn out enough content to compete in that field.
- afrodc_ 5y ago
  I would counter this and say that my greatest time playing MMOs in my youth was the UO days where outside of cities, everything was pretty lawless. In the early stages you might run into a player killer intermittently while out mining or harvesting whatever other material or in a dungeon but the community formed around that aspect was really cool. There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system. I think that whole aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of the game and felt so organic. Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly designed from head to toe in a game design doc.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. What stops a griefer from just putting cash on the head of someone they want to torment?
    - opencl 5y ago
      Bounties can only be placed on criminals in UO. Players are marked as criminals when they break the law, for example by attacking or stealing from a player who isn't a criminal.
    - afrodc_ 5y ago
      I remember you would explicitly be presented a screen after you were killed by a player where you could take your funds from the bank to put towards the bounty of the person who killed you.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        "Create a problem, sell a solution".
        afrodc_ 5y ago
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  > The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from acting upon other players and making other players miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them. That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution of how people self-describe themselves to the four quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of the number of people they can act upon ("grief"). I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased enough with single player games (and single player game design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these days is just as often left by game designs to fall through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or Discord.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    > I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. That's precisely correct. I've been in WoW from 2007 to 2012 and you could tell that the people who loved ruining the fun for everybody else were the most vocal in the forums. They also became quite good in painting it with innocent colors: "think of the roleplaying aspect, are you not an RPG anymore?", "the world feels more vibrant and live", "fights for resources happen in the real world, let's have a realistic game" etc. While in reality they simply enjoy obstructing other people's gaming. And this has been evident for so many years, and it has been known that these people are the minority -- it's truly puzzling why they haven't been shut down, hard, at least a decade ago. The only good explanation that I have ever found was: part of the game devs are those griefers, and they defend the open-world PvP on internal meetings. --- The other kinds of players are indeed much more quiet. I personally started playing WoW because I wanted an RPG and I didn't care about the MMO aspect for a long time. But it's what the market had available as the best game in the genre at the time. My regret from back then is that I didn't aggressively scan the market in more details. I surely would have found a single-player RPG to my liking.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Honestly I really enjoyed open PvP when I played WoW what now seems like ages ago. It really adds a lot of interesting tension when I'd encounter players from the opposing faction. Are they hostile? Do they see me? Should I try and stealth kill them? Are they just passing through? Eventually one learns to deal with the murderhobos and cope. Then it becomes even more fun.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    For 5 years in WoW I only learned to hate those who were ruining my idea of gaming fun. I wasn't marked PvP (PvE servers) but I occasionally found a quest hub that I needed and of course, all NPCs were killed. It's one of the reasons I left WoW. I don't want to be at the mercy of somebody like you who creatively invents a beautiful justification for stopping me to have my gaming fun. I am sure whatever it is you are telling to yourself makes sense. But not to me.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      I can only recall that happening to me maybe once or twice. I play SWTOR now, which is very similar to (as in copied a lot of design elements from) WoW (it feels like WoW in space), and I've never encountered all the NPCs being dead, even though the opposing faction is perfectly capable of raiding it. You don't need to be flippant about it, if you are so worried about others "ruining" your gaming fun, when why TF are you playing an MMO? That's just like setting yourself up for disappointment.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Sure, I left not only WoW but all MMOs because yes, apparently my expectations weren't aligned with the ideas of the creators. Much happier on the Switch these days.

It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.

by zionic 5y ago

It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.

cletus 5y ago

Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make. History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds). This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation. The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so. Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent. Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different". So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later. No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.

wlesieutre 5y ago
Agreed with all this. There was at one point a notion of a "PvP slider" that you could turn down to reduce encounters with other players (I assume via instancing) but it's gone away in favor of a totally in-universe "crime stat" and law system. Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone. I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.
korse 5y ago
What about Eve online?
- leetcrew 5y ago
  yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve player in high-sec.
  - kiksy 5y ago
    Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous. By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't afford to lose. The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me. I wish more games took a similar mature approach.
    - bserge 5y ago
      They would lose a lot of potential players. I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes. Basically, wasting a ton of time. That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life. EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  It's a PvP game, and a brutal one. There's some token PvE, but mostly aimed at teaching new players the game.
shadofx 5y ago
Small studio MMORPGs focused on PvE don't exist because they can't compete with WoW and FFXIV on content generation, small studios don't have hundreds of artists, quest designers, and programmers needed to churn out enough content to compete in that field.
afrodc_ 5y ago
I would counter this and say that my greatest time playing MMOs in my youth was the UO days where outside of cities, everything was pretty lawless. In the early stages you might run into a player killer intermittently while out mining or harvesting whatever other material or in a dungeon but the community formed around that aspect was really cool. There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system. I think that whole aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of the game and felt so organic. Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly designed from head to toe in a game design doc.
- vkou 5y ago
  > There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. What stops a griefer from just putting cash on the head of someone they want to torment?
  - opencl 5y ago
    Bounties can only be placed on criminals in UO. Players are marked as criminals when they break the law, for example by attacking or stealing from a player who isn't a criminal.
  - afrodc_ 5y ago
    I remember you would explicitly be presented a screen after you were killed by a player where you could take your funds from the bank to put towards the bounty of the person who killed you.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      "Create a problem, sell a solution".
      - afrodc_ 5y ago
WorldMaker 5y ago
> The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from acting upon other players and making other players miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them. That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution of how people self-describe themselves to the four quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of the number of people they can act upon ("grief"). I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased enough with single player games (and single player game design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these days is just as often left by game designs to fall through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or Discord.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  > I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. That's precisely correct. I've been in WoW from 2007 to 2012 and you could tell that the people who loved ruining the fun for everybody else were the most vocal in the forums. They also became quite good in painting it with innocent colors: "think of the roleplaying aspect, are you not an RPG anymore?", "the world feels more vibrant and live", "fights for resources happen in the real world, let's have a realistic game" etc. While in reality they simply enjoy obstructing other people's gaming. And this has been evident for so many years, and it has been known that these people are the minority -- it's truly puzzling why they haven't been shut down, hard, at least a decade ago. The only good explanation that I have ever found was: part of the game devs are those griefers, and they defend the open-world PvP on internal meetings. --- The other kinds of players are indeed much more quiet. I personally started playing WoW because I wanted an RPG and I didn't care about the MMO aspect for a long time. But it's what the market had available as the best game in the genre at the time. My regret from back then is that I didn't aggressively scan the market in more details. I surely would have found a single-player RPG to my liking.
tomc1985 5y ago
Honestly I really enjoyed open PvP when I played WoW what now seems like ages ago. It really adds a lot of interesting tension when I'd encounter players from the opposing faction. Are they hostile? Do they see me? Should I try and stealth kill them? Are they just passing through? Eventually one learns to deal with the murderhobos and cope. Then it becomes even more fun.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  For 5 years in WoW I only learned to hate those who were ruining my idea of gaming fun. I wasn't marked PvP (PvE servers) but I occasionally found a quest hub that I needed and of course, all NPCs were killed. It's one of the reasons I left WoW. I don't want to be at the mercy of somebody like you who creatively invents a beautiful justification for stopping me to have my gaming fun. I am sure whatever it is you are telling to yourself makes sense. But not to me.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    I can only recall that happening to me maybe once or twice. I play SWTOR now, which is very similar to (as in copied a lot of design elements from) WoW (it feels like WoW in space), and I've never encountered all the NPCs being dead, even though the opposing faction is perfectly capable of raiding it. You don't need to be flippant about it, if you are so worried about others "ruining" your gaming fun, when why TF are you playing an MMO? That's just like setting yourself up for disappointment.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Sure, I left not only WoW but all MMOs because yes, apparently my expectations weren't aligned with the ideas of the creators. Much happier on the Switch these days.