2 ms·

> 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 possibl

> 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.

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.