Understanding what makes PvP tick.

Watching people react to all the new info about AoC’s PvP model has been rather entertaining, while also frustrating and somewhat surprising. PvP seems to be an idea that most people ‘think’ they love in an MMO, but when you provided them with the details, it turns out they don’t want to play along.

One common issue seems to be gear, and how the ‘casual’ crowd favors games without an over-emphasis on gear. (funny considering the casual king, WoW, is 100% gear based) The problem however is that in order to limit the influence of gear, one of two systems must be in place. Either you are at risk of losing your gear, or your gear wears down and eventually must be replaced. Only by forcing the replacement of gear can you encourage players not to play with their top gear at all times, and only in that type of system can gear truly be balanced. Even the sword of instadeath has to be used with caution, since if you used it on every lowbie you see, it would eventually break. The other solution is to simply give everyone equal gear (hi WoW), but that just destroys a major facet of general MMO gameplay, power progression and character growth. The two MMOs with good PvP and generally no item issues, UO and EVE, both used the above method, although in drastically different ways, with good results.

Item risk also plays into another important factor of PvP, loss. The ‘everyone wins’ system works versus NPCs because NPCs don’t mind getting their heads kicked in daily; they will happily respawn and ask for more. In order to have PvP with any kind of resolution or winner, one side has to lose, and since we are talking PvP, that means a character controlled by a player, not an NPC. The key to the equation is that the smaller the loss, the smaller the victory. In WoW, you get basically nothing for killing a player in a BG, since at most you cost them 30 seconds of being a ghost before coming back in at 100%. In the arena, the cost of death goes up slightly, as a death might cost your team a win, setting you back a bit in rank. Even then, the cost is rather small, and as such, a win is not very memorable. No one really recalls the epic battles they waged versus memorable opponents in the battlegrounds, do they? Lets contrast that to a well set ambush in UO (pre UOR), or a Titan kill in EVE, events that players fondly remember and still talk about. The major thrill of being part of a titan kill comes from the fact that you are killing something of major value, something that your enemy worked hard to produce. With that kill, you make major progress in your war, boosting your Corps moral while killing your opponents. The kill would be near-meaningless if that Titan respawned after a short trip to a virtual graveyard, not to mention you would see Titans being flown around without a care.

Another common pre-launch idea in a PvP MMO is mercenaries. Since ‘casual’ players don’t want to join a huge guild and commit to something they can’t keep up with, they instead plan to play with a smaller group of friends with the idea of being hired out by the big guilds as mercenaries. The idea is that as a mercenary, you will still get to experience all the big time PvP stuff like siege warfare without having to deal with big guild politics. In how many MMOs has the concept of mercenaries worked? Has anyone ever hired a guild in WoW to go and corpse camp an enemy? Of course not, and the reason why is fairly clear. First off, the mercenaries can’t actually hard the enemy in any real meaningful way, as corpse camping is a minor annoyance at best, and easily countered. Second, there is no tangible loss, so what exactly do you pay for if you hire the mercs? And finally, what evidence would you have that the mercs completed their job? The idea of mercs only works in games where players stand to lose something, and in games where that loss can be quantified. Mercs are very common in EVE for exactly the reasons above. If you are in an industrial Corp, odds are you have a good amount of cash, but very low combat ability. Mercs provide the perfect tool as protection from rival Corps, enabling industrial Corps to remain viable in such a PvP focused environment. You are not likely to see a guild of crafters hire another guild to taking down the top arena team in WoW, now are you?

My overall point is that in order for PvP to actually work on the MMO scale (as opposed to how it works in Counter Strike or any other game with a quick in/out setup) you must have reason to fight, and more importantly, you must have reason to win. You don’t win anything if at the end of the day the winner and loser are left standing in the same spot. The greater the distance between winner and loser, the more ‘impact’ your PvP has. When your guild is cornered and facing extinction (hi BoB), that is when you truly see epic displays of resolve, when guild pride really kicks in. Those situations create the type of memories and stories PvP fans rave about, and outsiders read and get encouraged by. Just remember that for every epic victory, someone was on the other end, suffering a crushing defeat, because without that defeat, there would be no victory.

PS: My personally definition of casual is anyone who plays less than I do, and hardcore means anyone who plays more. No further debate about that definition today, please.

PPS: Keep in mind that just because you suffer a huge defeat, does not mean it ruins your day. It’s all too common to see a defeated Corp in EVE state they had a great time in whatever war they were involved in. It is a game at the end of the day, and we play to have fun. As long as the combat was exciting and interesting, everyone wins. If you simply plow over your opponent because of gear and not skill, even the winner is left feeling cheated in that system.

Camping for a beta spot… no thanks.

Open beta does not mean what it use to in the MMO world. Back in the day, open beta for an MMO was not a big deal, and for the most part was quite similar to the most recent closed beta period. Generally all the die-hard followers of a game were already in beta, and going to open beta did not generate a flood of new players. Most importantly, open beta was still recognized as a beta, so things like bugs and missing functions were the norm. To be honest, back in the day the first few months of release were also a beta period, with bugs and crashes being common, but yea… Open beta was not looked as a marketing tool, but rather as a final stress test before going live.

Today open beta is much different, and this is mainly due to the growth of the MMO space and the amount of interest any major MMO builds before its release. Games like AoC and WAR have massive followings long before release, with hundreds of thousands of players following the progress of each game, all dying for a chance to play.

Closed beta today looks far more like the open betas of old, with more players just playing rather than actually testing, and with beta leaks become big business. The developers no long just put up one server with the whole world open and ask people to run around and test it, today they ‘focus test’ in stages, herding the beta testers from one area to another in order to gather the data they need. It’s a very defined and orderly process, watched closely by all parties involved.

But by far the biggest change to the entire process is the period of open beta itself. No longer any kind of test, open beta today is a marketing scheme to drum up interest and get hype to a boiling point right before boxes hit the shelves. Since the market has changed, so have the rules. The ‘beta’ part of open beta no longer applies, as most players today will judge what they see in open beta as if it were the actual game. If a game is broken or has key features missing, which at the open beta stage should be viewed as a huge issue anyway, players will react and respond, spreading negative word-of-mouth about the game, beta tag or not.

Developers need to be aware that they no longer cater to a niche market of the hardcore; gamers who accept bugs, server crashes, and imbalance as a part of MMO life. Today in order to reach the numbers some studios target, they must cater to the general public; the five minute attention span, one bug and I’m out gamer who has four other MMOs to fall back on should your game not deliver immediately and completely.

This brings me to the most recent ‘open beta’ with AoC. While AoC has done a decent enough job generating buzz, most view it as a ‘maybe’ product, especially given its M rating, it’s setting, and the rumored ‘twitch’ combat with a PvP basis. AoC is exactly the type of game that would greatly benefit from a flawless open beta, something that turns all those maybe feelings into buyers, and something that generates enough positive buzz to reach those that have looked past it. Unfortunately that’s just not the case.

For starters, my own personal feelings about AoC are very meh. The screen shots don’t impress me, nothing that I have read has really jumped out as a game breaker, and most of my ‘upcoming MMO’ attention has been focused on WAR, a game with a much stronger setting and developer pedigree. But since I already had a FilePlanet account, I figured I would give AoC a shot and try out the open beta, thinking maybe something about AoC will warrant dropping $50 on a box; only to find out that the open beta is not exactly ‘open’, even to those that have already paid for the FilePlanet account. FilePlanet has instead opted to release beta keys in waves on a first come first server basis. If the current wave is out, you have to wait until the next one opens, which happens at random during the day. AoC is basically asking us to ‘camp’ a website in order to ‘loot’ a beta key, an OPEN beta key. Now as much fun as camping a mob for hours/days is, I think we are well beyond that stage in MMO history, not to mention the fact that we are being asked to jump through these hoops for a game most already consider passing on. I’m guessing I’m not alone in the ‘one and done’ category here.

In addition to my brief but disappointing first experience related to AoC, we have the great reporting done by Keen and Graev. After reading their experience with AoC, it sounds like FilePlanet did me a favor and saved me however long it would take to download the 13gig beta. While they found some aspects of the game impressive, the general feeling I got from their site (which overall tends to have a glass half full take on most things) is that AoC has some serious issues, both in terms of bugs/balance and also with general design. When people comment that the PvP is broken during a PvP weekend, you have some issues.

It will be interesting to see what lessons are learned from the AoC beta experience. Tabula Rasa was crippled at release thanks in part to a poor showing in open beta, and is still trying to recover despite being a much better game now than it was back then. Pirate of the Burning Sea got a nice boost from positive open beta feedback, but then saw a crash a month or so after release when the shine wore off and the broken underbelly was exposed. The most famous open beta of course was the one for WoW, which played almost exactly like WoW did at release, and really generated a ton of positive buzz for the game (which already had a lot going for it, but open beta took that to a new level). It will be interesting to see how WAR handles open beta, considering the massive amount of interest for the game already. While a bad open beta might not cripple the game, an open beta on the polish level of WoW might catapult WAR and give it a fighting chance to hit the multi-million player level Mythic and EA are hoping for.

PvP theorycraft, and the lessons MMOs need to learn.

Playing as much DoTA as I have lately, it’s got me thinking about the general idea of PvP, and why most MMOs can’t seem to get it right. We have seen what happens when you make it too extreme in games like Ultima Online, with full corpse looting and setting the loser back hours if not days. We also know what the opposite of that looks like in WoW, where everyone wins, and hence many people play either half-assed, or totally afk, ruining any chance at getting a decent match going.

The first point is rather obvious; in DoTA you play a hero for about an hour, while in an MMO you play your character for months. If you have a horrible game in DoTA, you will likely be gimped for that game, but the next game everyone starts at level 1 all over again. This is just not the case in an MMO, where character growth is one of the key features that keeps players playing. An MMO simply can’t be as gear-dominated as WoW is and expect to have balanced PvP. However that topic is entirely game depended, so for now lets assuming we have good power balance, and that most players have a fighting chance against others.

The key balance issues that make DoTA work is it’s death penalty, and how it relates to the item/level balance. The death penalty is not as harsh as UO in that you don’t lose items but you do lose gold and time, which ultimately means each death delays you in getting more powerful items. In WoW, you do lose time when you die in a BG, but since that time is not as valuable (since you don’t level or collect gold for items), death has little meaning.

So the balance seems to lie someplace between UO (too extreme) and WoW (too light), but can’t be exactly what it is in DoTA, since it must be applied to an MMO. The factors of the penalty in DoTA can however be broken down and applied.

First the winner of a fight needs to be rewarded. The reward must be significant enough to make combat attractive, and also significant enough to offset the risk of defeat. If we are talking about team PvP, winning must have both a personal and team impact. In DoTA, the personal impact is the fact that you yourself get a gold bonus. The team impact is that whoever you killed is now a bit weaker, making your teammates stronger in comparison. This is an important factor, as you need to both motivate the individual to play, but also need to encourage and reward team play.

Next is the penalty for defeat. It must be severe enough that players actively avoid it, but not so harsh that it overwhelms the chance of a reward from victory. It also must impact your team in a negative way, but not in such a way that a few unlucky deaths ruin the entire experience.

Applied to WoW, it would work something like this. First off, the rate of death in a BG would need to decrease dramatically, as currently players die and rez at a silly rate, due mostly to the fact that death in a BG has zero meaning. This can be accomplished in two ways; first increase the spirit healers rez timer, both in total length and in its mechanic. The current method is a 30sec timing that runs continuously, meaning if you die at the right time, you might actually rez in 1-2 seconds. An easy fix would be to make everyone rez on an individual timer, and then to increase that timer to 1 minute (or whatever would work best for balance). Graveyards would need to be moved, or protected, to prevent camping, but again that would be a simple fix, perhaps raising the GY to a one way drop platform. This increase in rez timing would not only mean a player must wait longer to return to the action, but also mean that a player killed is not going to spring right back up and return to the fight seconds later. Picking off a character at midfield would now be a useful tactic, rather than a waste of time.

The second fix needed would be a change to how honor points (I’m assuming you keep the overall honor point system) are earned in a BG. Currently you get honor from each kill you are near, along with a bonus at the end. Neither the individual honor nor the bonus is impacted much by your performance. Someone going 20-0 and someone going 0-20 won’t see a major difference in honor gain, especially in relation to the bonus. To fix this, players should gain an increased amount of honor as they do battle in a BG per kill, but each death should cost them honor points. Kills must be worth more than deaths, but only by a slight margin. Each kill should also be split between individual honor and team honor. The players who contributed most to the kill would see a noticeable honor increase, but all other players would also get some amount of honor added to their total. Players reported afk would not only stop gaining honor, but also lose a certain amount of honor from their total.

The important factor in any good PvP game is player accountability. Players in DoTA don’t run around dying randomly because they know that not only will they gimp themselves, they are also likely throwing the game for their team. In WoW, players often run around at random, and while they might cost their team the game, they currently don’t see any noticeable impact on their personal honor gain. By combining both personal and team impact, you create a system and culture which encourages winning while not crushing the loser, which is exactly what a good PvP should do.

Understanding failure, the PoTBS story.

As has been well reported, Pirates of the Burning Sea is cutting down on servers, going from 11 to 4. While PR would like you to believe otherwise, it’s fairly clear that the game is underperforming, and the reduction in servers confirms this.

What’s most surprising to me about the news is people’s general take on the game, stating that it’s most similar to EVE Online, and that perhaps it could see an EVE-like growth rate in the future. The major problem with that growth prediction is that PoTBS is basically EVE-lite, attempting to keep the ‘fun’ aspects of EVE while removing some of the tedium. The recent server news confirms at least one thing; EVE-lite is not the game people want, nor does EVE-lite actually work as a game. The reason EVE itself works is because it’s amazingly balanced in all aspects of design. Crafting is balanced in regards to PvP, PvE is balanced in regards to the economy, character growth is well defined and a factor; it just all works. The problem for PoTBS is that it has 50% of the formula, removing the perceived ‘unfun’ 50% in an effort to improve the overall experience, and ultimately it fails. What the average game fan has trouble accepting is that while gate jumping 20 times itself is not fun, it’s necessary to ensure that the PvP remains balanced, and hence fun. When you mess with one side of the equation, you end up screwing both sides.

PoTBS is a great example of the overall complexity of an MMO, and why simply focusing on one or two aspects without consideration for others is a mistake. Sure zooming around the map almost instantly instead of having to travel for 30+ minutes sounds like a good idea, but how does that instant travel effect the economy, PvP, or PvE? Instancing everything does help with lag and leads to more controlled and balanced encounters, but what are its downfalls? How does instanced combat effect merchants, griefers, PvE players? Removing the tedium of sitting in an asteroid field and watching your mining laser go ‘voom, voom, voom’ for hours sounds like a huge plus, right? By removing the boring parts and letting players focus on the fun of buying/selling/trading sure sounds like a win/win on paper, does it not? Those are just a few of the perceived ‘advantages’ PoTBS implemented in order to make it a more friendly version of EVE, and yet each one is a cause for an overall broken formula with serious issues. The fact that PoTBS shipped with a primitive and somewhat broken avatar combat model did not help, but to think that is the major issue is incorrect. Players would deal with that system, flaws and all, if the overall game worked like it should. The major issues; a borked economy, completely broken PvP, a PvP game with an overemphasis on bland PvE, those are the issues that drive players away, and those are the issues that will take the greatest effort to fix.

You can’t have everything, sorry.

Keen has a post up about his recent experience in DAoC. The gist of it is that after the ‘newness’ of being back in DAoC wore off, the fact that the PvE in DAoC is not as on-rails as more recent MMOs was a deal breaker for him, and he could not get himself to play through the PvE portion just to get to the PvP part that he wanted.

Along with the post there are some great comments left by several people debating both sides of the issue. After posting one comment myself, I had another going until I realized it was getting lengthy, and when that happens, its blog post time.

I think two huge issues play into Keen’s feeling about his recent trip to DAoC. First off, he has a pre-set image of what he REMEMBERS DAoC being, and more importantly, he remembers DAoC as a max level character focused on RvR. DAoC was NEVER an amazing PvE game, because it was never designed to be. It’s a PvP game, and as with any GOOD PvP-focused game, you have to make sacrifices on the PvE end to get good PvP. I really don’t think that point is debatable either, games either get PvE or PvP right, or they try to do both and everything ends up meh. UO had good PvP, eh PvE. EQ1 had good PvE, trash PvP. AC Darktide was good PvP, no one cared about the PvE. WoW HAD good PvE, trash PvP, and is now stuck in ‘meh’ mode for both as it tries to become an e-sport. EVE has good PvP, eh PvE. The list goes on and on.

So issue one is that Keen has to accept the PvE aspect of DAoC in order to get to the PvP. This is not to say the PvE in DAoC is worthless, its not, but it’s not what sells the game. You can’t expect WoW 1-60 in DAoC, and then still expect the RvR game to be there as well. It’s similar to someone logging into EVE and expecting ‘!’ above the NPCs heads, while still hoping to get into fleet warfare later; it just does not work that way. The key is to know and accept that day 1. You don’t level a character in EQ2 to max so you can get to the sweet PvP at the end, right? So why expect that from DAoC?

The second issue, and I think this is the big one, is that too many people assume that what worked back in early 2000 won’t work today, because somehow WoW was this giant revolution in MMO design and made any idea before it obsolete. People make statements that things like open world PvP, death penalties, open-ended PvE are all dead, generally based on the fact that WoW does not have them, and since 10 million people play WoW, that must be the one and only way to design an MMO. The truth is almost any idea done well works. Open PvP works, just not in WoW. It works great in EVE, and removing it from EVE would basically be one step away from shutting off Tranquility. Same with death penalties, they don’t work in WoW, but done right they do. The death penalty of item loss was a major factor in AC Darktide working as well as it did, and without it the PvP would have suffered greatly. Or take a game like LoTRO, even being as close to a WoW clone as it is, it does open-ended PvE well in the form of deeds, giving you a reason, however small, to just go and grind away on mobs. The key is, if you hate grinding mobs, LoTRO does not force you to do it, as the deeds are somewhat minor. But the option is still there, and for many, it works really well.

As the next wave of big name titles is set for release, it’s very important to remember that those games are not WoW. If you want an on-rails ! chase, WoW has perfected it, so stick with perfection and enjoy it. But if you want something else, either because the ! chase is not your thing, or because you have been doing it for however long and want something else, you have to accept the give and take of design. The next game you play after WoW won’t do its thing PLUS everything WoW did, that’s just not possible. If it’s designed well, it will do its thing well, and hopefully that will be reason enough to play. But going into a game and comparing it constantly to WoW’s highlights, you will be forever disappointed, no matter how well the game hits its goals.

Fixing Alterac Valley.

This will be the last post about AV for now, I promise. All previous commentary was based on the 51-60 bracket, and having finally hit 61+, I’ve experienced 61-70 AV. As bad as the 60 bracket was, the 70 bracket AV is a complete joke 99% of the time. Not only do both sides avoid each other, they also avoid the entire map as well. From the start, both teams rush towards the other side’s base, skipping all towers and graveyards. You then tag the final graveyard and towers, wait for those to cap, and go kill the final boss. First team to kill the NPC wins.

At least in the 60 bracket, both teams stopped to cap/burn everything along the way, and some form of defense was usually present. In the 70 bracket that’s just not the case. It’s so bad that last night, in my attempt to hit exulted with the main factions, I was having a great deal of trouble just turning in armor/crystals/marks at our base 5 minutes into the game, the reason being it was already overrun with horde and most of the NPCs were dead.

The total lack of strategy is so much worse in the 70 bracket than it was in the 60 bracket, and it would be fairly easy to turn that around. The very obvious reason both sides avoid each other and rush the final NPC is that the shorter the game is, the faster you grind out honor/marks. A slow win gets you less reward than a few quick loses, and since the alliance in my battle group seem to lose 90% of all AV games, they figure they might as well lose quickly. This was most evident in one game where our side put up decent resistance, and the 10-15 people that recalled to defend our base were getting flamed in chat by the offense; that side telling us to stop defending and delaying the game. The fact that we ended up winning that game by buying our offense enough time to actually kill the final NPC seemed to not matter.

The fix for this would be to greatly increase the amount of honor gained for actually winning, and lower the amount for losing. I believe Blizzard did this recently, but clearly not enough. And if we are going to increase the amount of honor gained, we would need to increase the length of games to compensate for this. Patch 2.4 will make killing the final NPC more difficult without burning the towers first, which will hopefully have that effect, but I worry that aside from slowing the two sides down a bit, it won’t solve the ‘avoid and rush’ game. I’m not saying bring back the 6 hour+ games of AV, but if the honor reward was balanced, would an hour long game of AV really be that bad?

The other disappointing change to AV since TBC is that what was once a dynamic and interesting battle due to NPC specials is now just a standard no frills game. The flying NPCs, the cavalry charge, the armor upgrades, and the Ice Lord/Forest Guy are never seen and have zero impact on a game, which in my opinion is sad. Seeing the Ice Lord plowing his way into a base, or seeing a pitched battle broken up due to a cavalry charge was great stuff and made AV unique as a battleground. It was a mistake to remove so much of the NPC factor from AV, and it’s very likely too late to add it back in completely. This can perhaps be fixed somewhat by increasing the resource number in AV from 600 to say 1000 or 1200, and along with the 2.4 change, this will increase the length of games. Blizzard should also reduce the amount of turn-ins needed to initiate the NPC specials, so that even a small dedicated team of collectors could quickly accomplish their goal and deploy the special attacks.

If nothing else it would bring back a little bit of strategy to AV, and I think make it overall more enjoyable and different from the other three BGs currently available.

Will Warhammer be good enough to overcome the inevitable PvP shock?

The following is based on a few assumptions that are key to understanding my thinking here. Please keep them in mind when reading.

• Assumption one: Most MMO players have only played WoW.
• Assumption two: Most MMO players don’t know about MMO gaming outside of WoW.
• Assumption three: Many WoW players will be looking for another MMO to play.
• Assumption four: Many of those WoW players will try Warhammer Online.

I’m not looking to debate the above, as that’s not the point of this post. With that out of the way, here is today’s prediction: people will be shocked by the PvP in Warhammer, both in a good and bad way.

Using the above assumptions, we know most people consider PvP to be BG’s and perhaps Arena combat, with some amount of random PvP server zone ganking thrown in. If that is all you know of PvP, you are under the impression that PvP is mostly a queue up, run around in a forced group ignoring general chat, everyone gets a token at the end slugfest. You run to a few combat hotspots and mash your hotbar until either your target dies or you die. You get resurrected and you repeat until the game ends, at which point you queue up and repeat until you have whatever epic you are aiming for. Oversimplified, but I think that basic description covers a large base of the WoW community. I am fully aware of the premades and the PvP guilds, but those are the minority among the general WoW population.

So what’s going to happen when that WoW player base signs up for Warhammer and they find that not only is PvP emphasized far more than they are use to, but that it is also AT LEAST a bit more tactical than the ‘hotbar spam and die’ game they know? While we don’t know all the details of WAR PvP, we can safely say it will be at least a little deeper than WoW’s model, both in terms of actual gameplay types (not just instances BGs) and in terms of character skills and abilities.

My guess is that many will attempt to play it like WoW PvP, and slowly learn that such an approach is ineffective. At the same time a smaller community of PvP experienced gamers will rise up and become the example of PvP execution. Communication and group skills will overshadow the heavy gear influence players have grown accustomed to, and most players will be left with a choice, adapt or quit. What will determine the ratio of the adapt/quit population is exactly how good Warhammer Online is overall. If the game delivers on half the hype surrounding it and is overall a great game, players will find it good enough to shift focus and adapt. On the other hand if Warhammer is just another fantasy MMO, I believe many will find the ‘PvP shock’ too great and move back to WoW.

Less can be more; how Warhammer Online could benefit from fewer class options.

News that Warhammer online might not ship with all classes ready to go at release is making the rounds, which got me thinking about the possible impact that might have on the game. As most know the current system is set up so that each race has four classes, a tank, a healer, melee dps, and ranged dps. My initial reaction was that you can’t possibly remove any of those from certain races as it would cause balance issues in the RvR portion of the game.

Thinking about it a bit more however, I could see how changing the format to only three classes per side could actually be very beneficial. Instead of breaking down dps into range and melee, combining the two would actually solve a few general MMO issues. First off the game would be structured in the ‘holy trinity’ for each side, tank/healer/dps. Add in the fact that we have three races per side, you now give your players three types of tank/healer/dps, with each race being similar with slight differences. Then we toss in the mastery system, which gives each class three paths, and we have a huge range of diversity among our classes without running into the usual ‘hybrid class’ problem. What I mean by that is classes like the hunter in WoW, who is a great solo class due to having a pet as a tank, being able to heal a bit, and having ranged dps. Put the hunter in a group, especially in a raid, and now he is the ugly ducking; his pet is useless, gone is his ability to heal said pet, and his ranged dps is inferior to other classes. That really fun solo class is now unwanted by groups, causing end-game issues.

The mastery system itself could define the type of dps a player would prefer. One tree could be ranged heavy, the other melee, with perhaps a support or utility tree as a third option. With the option to respec, adapting to your groups needs or your currently availably items would be easy enough. Instead of loading up on ranged dps classes because encounter x caters to them, therefore forcing your melee dps classes to sit out, all that you would need to field an ‘optimal’ group is for a few of your players to respect, a much easier solution.

This also brings up another interesting point; do we really NEED that many classes? WoW has 9, and while many claim this is low and limits options, I would argue that it’s too many, creating both guild and encounter balance issues. Going back to the example above, a guild only needs so many hunters, and once you reach that amount you basically exclude all other hunters based on class alone. If instead WoW had only three classes, but then greater diversity in the talent tree system, guilds would have a much easier time getting a balanced group together without alienating it’s members. Too many ranged dps class specced people online tonight? No problem, just have one or two respec for the night and you are all set, no need to exclude anyone or field a weaker group just to keep all members happy.

By also defining the three basic rolls so heavily, you could avoid the general problem with hybrid classes. Using WoW as an example, we know warriors can be tanks, but we also know druids can tank, as can paladins. Now a warrior can’t heal, but a druid and paladin can, so what if you need more healing that night, but your druid really enjoys tanking. You either force him into a healer, or you run a healer short and field a weaker group. By defining the basic rolls from day one, you avoid such issues. You know anyone who plays a tank class in WAR understands that they will be asked to tank in one form or another. Same goes for dps and healing. Their exact method may differ due to the mastery options, but the basic class roll is filled without confusion, letting everyone play their way without creating a problem for guild or group.

Collision Detection, a key to smart PvP?

Ha, and just as I hit the ‘post’ button, something that I have been meaning to talk about pops into my head. Funny how that works…

A long time ago, Mythic announced that Warhammer Online will feature collision detection. Now at the time I glanced over that and really did not give it much thought. I mean how much of an impact can going around someone rather than through them have on a game, right? If anything I pictured getting trapped by a few NPCs in a town and getting annoyed at the whole thing, wishing I could just run through everything like you can in most MMOs.

Currently playing The Witcher, a game with collision detection sparked a few ideas, and seeing a gameplay video of WAR hit the point home. Collision detection in PvP is ’serious business’. All of a sudden forming an attack line or creating a wall becomes viable strategy. Formations, positioning, not running around like a loon; all important with the addition of a rather simple sounding feature.

What this also means is that now the PUG vs Pre-made distinction becomes even greater. A PUG will have great troubles holding formations and watching over each other, while a premade will execute tried and tested formations and battle plans. Tanks will position themselves correctly, ranged DPS will know where their LoS lies, healer will stick to safe spots away from the enemy. The possible amount of changes something like this brings could be immense. This means that a premade should be able to out-perform even a heavily over geared PUG, which serves only to reduce the importance of items and place more emphasis on smart thinking and organization.

As with all things WAR however, it all depends on exactly how everything is implemented. The size of a character has to be great enough to enable blocking, LoS has to be defined enough to actually matter, and pathing difficulties have to be great enough to actually allow a healer to hide behind his friends. Hopefully collision detection delivers on all its possible potential, as it alone could bring a very distinct feel to PvP combat in Warhammer Online.

Just one more reason why that WAR beta invite can’t come soon enough…

Misunderstanding PvP.

I think ‘PvP’ is the new ‘nerf’. Remember back in the day anytime anything bad happened, it was called a nerf? And nerf was this dirty word you used to blame the developers for everything going wrong in your MMO? That’s the reaction to PvP now. As soon as it pops up, out comes the mob to burn it at the stake and save humanity from the horrors. Ah the fickle MMO crowd, how we love you.

In my post below I talked a bit about ‘impact PvP’ and my hopes for it in Warhammer. It looks like I should have defined ‘impact PvP’ first, as there seems to be some confusion about what exactly that means, and what it does NOT mean.

Impact PvP does not mean UO98, where I can go around and gank you at will, 24/7, and completely ruin your gaming experience while collecting your head to put on my vendor for the world to see. We all accept that what ‘worked’ in 98 will not work now. It does not mean AC Darktide either, another free-for-all PvP setup. No one is asking for a mass murder simulator when we ask for PvP.

I also don’t mean WoW PvP, which sadly consists of one meh form, and one trash form. The meh are the battlegrounds, where skill and common sense are thrown out in favor of a point grind for shiny epics that are eventually handed out to everyone who logs in. While not downright terrible, battlegrounds are a poorly tacked on feature in WoW that are terribly imbalanced due to WoW’s PvE focus. Fun little distractions, they are a poor representation of actual PvP.

The trash is the STV ganking, pointless for both the ganker and the victim, and the pinnacle of what PvP should NOT be. Sadly WoW PvP is the ONLY PvP experienced by a large portion of today’s MMO population, so it’s no wonder so many people hate it. Hell if WoW PvP was my only experience with it, I would jump right on the carebear* train as well.

What I do mean when I say impact PvP is what happens in a game like EVE, a game entirely driven by its PvP, a game where everyone is affected from its impact. The reason the miners and mission runners are able to profit is due to PvP, the reason the market works is due to PvP, and the reason players stick around for years, not months, is due to PvP. Even if you have never fired a single shot at another player, and never been shot yourself, PvP has impacted you.

And the groundwork for such a system has to be set early. Why else can CCP (the developer of EVE) manage to balance so many ships and fittings, keeping so many of them viable options, and Blizzard can’t seem to balance Paladins vs Shamans? Lets not kid ourselves here, the reason both sides have access to both classes now is because after many attempts, Blizzard caved in and gave up; the easiest way to balance anything is to make it identical. Warhammer has that chance now, with its multitude of classes. They don’t need (and should not) be equal, just balanced enough to make it work. Sounds simple, but its hard to nail down, yet not impossible.

So while I completely understand people’s apprehension about PvP, especially from the WoW-only crowd, I also think too many people are selling it short. Remember that an MMO is a virtual world, one that SHOULD be player driven, shaped not by the latest patch or update, but by the community that logs in each day. Don’t sell PvP short in the assumption that it’s only form is a 10 on 1 gank performed by a group of 13 year old kids, but rather the very basic nature of me vs you. Also don’t assume the only form of PvP is actual ‘physical’ combat, the ‘who has better gear or faster fingers’ stuff. PvP is just as effective in an economic sense, or something as simple as spreading rumors and distrust among your enemy. Illidan will never care that you undersell him in the market, or that you spread a false rumor about him, or that you just snuck in and took all his resources, but players will. They will care and react, and you will react back. It’s endless content without the need for a new instance every three months.

*Oh, and while I throw around the word carebear, it’s purely because I am entertained by the word and its UO-inspired context. Don’t get too caught up in it, I ‘carebear’ just as much as anyone else when I log in, even in EVE.