Back in the day

[Morreion]

Player Perspectives: Seeing Red?

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing." - Friedrich Nietzsche

This week, we'll start with a history lesson. Once upon a time, there was a world in which happy-go-lucky gamers lived in fear. The nerf bat was not their tyrant; in fact, it had yet to grow in power. Patch days were dreadful, but sparse enough to endure the wait. Dragons and other beasts were frightening, but could be defeated. No, the worst enemies facing these gamers were their fellow gamers: player-killers. Eventually known as "PKs" or "reds," these players thrilled upon the hunt of player versus player combat, frequently catching many players unaccustomed to such open combat from their fellows with surprise. Two factions then rose up to challenge the PKs. The first were the Anti-PKs, players devoted to the side of "good" who sought out to respond to PK attacks by finding, hunting, and killing known PKers. The second group were tamer creatures in game, but had a vicious bark: they became known as the carebears. This group wanted PvP to be optional, not mandatory; wanted safeguards to prevent griefing and the loss of hours of game time; and, most importantly, wanted the powers that resided over the game to be the hand that offered protection and justice.

Any gaming article that starts with a quote from a philosopher is worth reading!

This column describes the original situation in UO back before things got stuck in their present rut. There were radically different types of players all together; the columnist makes the point that all of these different types needed each other for a rich gaming experience.

Think of it as Eden and our current situation as being cast out of there Yes, my rose-colored glasses are on...but the solution of that tension- removing players from danger- leads to unexciting predictable situations. Is that where we want to be? Finding the balance in a game that involves excitement is the key.

[Loendal]

Sorry, I have to disagree. I played UO back in those days and getting griefed after spending copious amounts of time trying to accomplish anything worth doing only to lose it all by some douchebag parking himself in a doorway and/or nailing you without a hint of remorse then being called a noob because I was killed is NOT a situation that is in any way "exciting" or "fun". Not even at the far end of the spectrum.

DOAC did it right, you chose to go out into the frontier and if you did, you took your chances. You were not, however, FORCED into the Frontier until you were expected to help with realm defense once you got into your 20's or so (Old school days) and even then it was only out of a sense of duty and responsibility, not because some developer decided it's ok to throw you to the wolves whenever you stepped out of town.

Completely open and available PvP at any time is a frustrating situation that will lead any game right into the crapper. Especially these days when people go out of their way to be obnoxious and irritating, or find exploits and bugs they can use to better their hand. Save that for the games that are devoted to it. Do not make me have to grind something to death to advance and then take it all away from me because someone who has 17 hours a day to play gets a wild hair and wants to whack me offhandedly as he goes to sell his "phat lewt" from the last grossly under matched victim he found.

In my time I've come to realize that you MUST have choice in PvP or it quickly devolves into an utter chaotic mess.

[Morreion]

No doubt that unrestrained free-for-all PvP is not my cup of tea, but I like UO's 'red' system where there were consequences for being a PKer- guards would attack you on sight, players could kill you with no penalty etc. Of course there were ways around things and so on, but I guess I was more attracted to the fact that there was an amount of uncertainty and thrill...and of course community grows up in such situations for people to protect themselves, rivalries happen, guild wars etc. This happened in a roleplay context for me there.

I'll move this away from a PvP discussion, because you can make a good case for consensual PvP. What I'm talking more about is the thrill of risk.

I'll compare 2 situations I've been in. I'm in a zone of a game I play that only allows PvE in 1 area of the game. I'm killing hundreds of mobs for a deed. I know with relative certainty what the outcome of those hundreds of fights will be (I win). The rare misstep or extra aggro is the only thing that will interrupt this foregone conclusion. If I die, there are slight inconveniences that can be shrugged off easily.

IN UO, I'd occasionally hunt liches. They were quite ferocious, but with a certain level of skill, you could kill them (even if you were seriously injured in the process). They had great loot, and killing them increased your fame. But if you died, they could loot you (I loved that, it's only fair!) of a good item, or camp your body, making recovery of your gear and weapons difficult. You woudl lose fame when you died. There were consequences. Gain or loss.

The second situation was not predictable. Was the outcome always victorious? Of course not. But it had a richness to it that PvE games today lack.

I guess the unpredictability, the risk, was a more intense experience. Of course there were frustrations. But today's bloodless games are so removed from any adverse consequences that they are pale shadows when comparing the experiences. Predictability is boring, lack of risk is trivial.

One fight with a lich in UO was more thrilling than a hundred fights with a no-risk-no-consequences mob in most games post-WoW. There was something at stake in the former; nothing at stake in the latter.

Setting aside the PvP issue...no risk, no thrill. That seems to sum up current gaming too often. It seems devs are afraid to slightly inconvenience anyone at anytime. OK...so how is it an interesting experience when there are no consequences to any outcome?

Heck, I'll turn this into a post tomorrow.

[Loendal]

Well ok, your lich scenario needs a sandbox game. They don't make those anymore The only thing comparable is trying to go somewhere other then the path they lead you down in WoW or whatever other game you are currently playing. You'll eventually run into a zone that outranks you by a mile. There's nothing really STOPPING you from going there, but the baddies therein don't exactly go on tour either. That's the part that needs solving... Big baddies need to move around more.

Even SWG, which had one of the best "Do as you like" themes going, got borked by adding the CU. The only sandbox game I can think of right now is A Tale in the Desert (No pun intended ) and it's nothing like the MMO we strive to play.

There needs to be unpredictability in the world, I completely agree with that. But the game that delivers on it is nowhere to be found. The shell of a game I'm working on plans to have such unpredictability built in, wherein places that the players abandon or don't visit as often become breeding grounds for the baddies.

"Surely a clan of goblins wants no business with an area that's being constantly supervised by mounted horsemen... But the ruins of that town that people have long since abandoned, that's home sweet home.."

It's in the numbers... Player interaction creates an "aura" of sorts that keeps building / maintaining itself as people pass through, as people abandon it, that aura begins to drop, and eventually goes into the negatives, which is when it starts looking favorable to baddies. The baddies sneak in, start settling in and suddenly there's a new clan of goblins that live next door and molest your livestock all because people didn't care about that town anymore. Ooops..

[Morreion]

The zone up the road is functionally off limits to me because the mobs are red or purple to me, and I can barely damage them- the typical game constrains me into following the path it wants me to take, the path that is predictable and easy, with no-fuss outcomes either way *yawns* Lots and lots of predictable boring has taken over from having one's pulse pound on a regular basis. A sandbox is one cure for this!

[Loendal]

That's what I meant. You have nothing stopping you from entering the uber-zone other than the knowledge that there are baddies up there that will spank you. You also don't have any reason to see what's beyond it either. I think I'm having trouble vocalizing the point I'm trying to make...

There is no risk because the big baddies don't ever leave the uber-zone. They roam about, look fierce and mean, but only fight with people who come into the Uber-zone. If you never entered the uber-zone you'd never even know they were there.

That's where my system is different. Monsters have no static "zone". They roam, they fight, they are motivated to do various things. It's entirely possibly as per the paperwork I have drawn up to have a roaming pack of Minotaurs stumble upon a player town and of course, the result would be Minotaurs rampaging down main street. There's the unpredictability and risk; you never know what's just over the next hill. Perhaps that's what's missing from current MMO's? The unknown is only unknown so far as the players are willing to find out. A better system is that the unknown could come looking for you instead.

No static building zones either. There is no "housing zone". Borrowing from A Tale in the Desert, you can build ANYWHERE. Places are only so safe as their builders are willing to make them safe. i.e. hiring guards and building protective structures such as walls and towers and so on and so forth. The wilderness is an untamed place (As it should be) until the players tame it.

[Morreion]

My point about the zone up the road was that you can't fight the mobs there by reason of game mechanics, you have to stay in line like everyone else and go where the devs tell you to

Mix things up, put in mob mobility, make it a tad less static for certain. Horizons had mob mobility in certain areas, which was good. Too many games just do the static thing, which gets old. I'm guessing predictable upsets less customers- after all, they can look it up on the internet and don't have to, you know, check it out themselves.

Yeah, I need a sandbox!

[Morreion]

Dawntide is a game I'm keeping an eye on...who knows what will happen, but, you gotta have hope

[Rakul]

I've played so many damn games I get them mixed up now. Horizons had the towns/buildings that the mobs could destroy? Or was that the defunct, never-made-it-out-of-Beta Wish. (It was funny, I got invited into Wish's Beta, after doing the Alpha... then before I had a chance to recreate my account, it closed). heh Sad, but funny.

[EchoVamper]

Oct 20, 2009 11:40:07 GMT -5 Loendal said:

That's what I meant. You have nothing stopping you from entering the uber-zone other than the knowledge that there are baddies up there that will spank you. You also don't have any reason to see what's beyond it either. I think I'm having trouble vocalizing the point I'm trying to make...

There is no risk because the big baddies don't ever leave the uber-zone. They roam about, look fierce and mean, but only fight with people who come into the Uber-zone. If you never entered the uber-zone you'd never even know they were there.

That's where my system is different. Monsters have no static "zone". They roam, they fight, they are motivated to do various things. It's entirely possibly as per the paperwork I have drawn up to have a roaming pack of Minotaurs stumble upon a player town and of course, the result would be Minotaurs rampaging down main street. There's the unpredictability and risk; you never know what's just over the next hill. Perhaps that's what's missing from current MMO's? The unknown is only unknown so far as the players are willing to find out. A better system is that the unknown could come looking for you instead.

No static building zones either. There is no "housing zone". Borrowing from A Tale in the Desert, you can build ANYWHERE. Places are only so safe as their builders are willing to make them safe. i.e. hiring guards and building protective structures such as walls and towers and so on and so forth. The wilderness is an untamed place (As it should be) until the players tame it.

This is a lot of it right here, and it's a pretty good synopsis of what I think both of you are saying. I don't think the MMO worlds need to be big, they need to be the "right size". And by this I mean big enough to accommodate the population but small enough to keep people interacting.

I always wished that DAoC would have done what you described above rather than spin off into Atlantis and the underworlds. They had a plenty big enough world. There are thousands of things they could have done to make it more vital, to make it grow, to make it more exciting and unpredictable. The world needs to be the right size and the design needs to allow for expansion or shrinkage to best accommodate the population playing.

The purpose of the world is to bring the population together, not spread them apart. That's what gives life to an MMO. I'm not talking about forced grouping, it's something more subtle than that...perhaps its just continuously evolving positive opportunities and rewards from cooperation and collaboration.

I will buy one of the first 10 pre-orders to your game Loendal. When can I do that?

P.S. - In this mighty age of solo-centric MMOs, it's fun to recall when a helping hand was more than welcome just to kill level 4-5 water beetles down at the river by Ardee; back when Spricket, Spracket, and Sprocket were a real adventure, and Muire Tomb could be a nightmare.