End-game content is not the ONLY content.

Tobold, MMOCrunch and Random Battle are three blogs which have recently talked about solo vs group play in an MMO, and everyone brings some good points to the table. One major issue during the leveling process is that far too often, grouping actually slows progress down, and hence players solo instead.

The quick fix to this would be to make grouping more rewarding than soloing, while not going as far as EQ1 with forced groups. Players avoid groups in WoW because they know they can accomplish more solo, and hit the level cap faster.

What stuck me however is not the group vs solo aspect, but the whole ‘rush to cap’ notion. Why do we just assume everyone want to hit the level cap as fast as possible?

The easy answer is, ‘Blizzard said so’. It’s no secret the ‘good’ stuff in WoW is at the level cap, at least according to Blizzard, which is in sharp contrast to what most people really like about WoW; the questing and fast paced progression.

Before WoW (yes, people played MMO’s before WoW), rushing head first to the level cap was not how most people played. No one rushed to 7x GM in UO. You blatantly could not rush to cap in EQ due to how long that whole process use to be. In Asheron’s Call, after a certain point, level gains were insignificant due to diminishing returns. DAoC had plenty of PvP pre-cap. The list goes on.

Yet today, in WoW/LoTRO/AoC (and I’m sure others), you have the ‘leveling game’ and the ‘end game’, and the two are usually night and day. Will that be the case with Warhammer Online as well? The reason I ask is because for months now, we have been reading about all these great Public Quests and PvP areas, which are zone/level specific. What if I really love doing a certain Public Quest, or enjoy how PvP works at a certain level? Will I still need to rush and hit cap, just so I can join the ‘official’ endgame of city sieges?

Unlike questing, PvP is almost endless content, and since WAR is built around PvP, who is to say people won’t slow down and enjoy each tier of PvP, instead of always looking at their XP bar and grinding out another level. Perhaps the whole ‘group vs solo’ issue will be a non-factor, as players instead focus on their current tier and battling the enemy, enjoying what is currently in front of them, instead of rushing towards the end-game carrot. One can hope, right?

Breaking down MMO burnout, and ways to avoid it.

Rick over at /random expressed concern that his longtime guild may not be as hyped for WAR as he is, and that their time together in the game may be rather limited due to general MMO veteran burnout, a legitimate concern for anyone hoping to find the next ‘it’ game to play with friends.

As someone with a great deal of MMO experience, having played Ultima Online heavily at release and MMO gaming ever since, Rick’s post got me thinking about the general idea of MMO burnout. On a somewhat recent podcast, Michael Zenke expressed his jealousy for anyone able to enjoy one MMO for great lengths of time, as he himself was unable to focus on any one game for long. This brings up the question, does the appeal of MMO gaming have a limited shelf life? Do we all reach a point where we are no longer entertained by ‘kill x’ quests, grinding another level, or killing a mob in the hopes it drops the item we desire? How many times can you hit max level in an MMO before all you see is the same formula with a few twists, instead of the rush to explore a new world and see what is around the next corner ?

I think part of what contributes to the burnout is that initially, an MMO is a very different beast than all other games, especially during the initial ‘big three’ era, before Xbox live and all computer games having an online component made multiplayer fairly common. Just the fact that you logged into a world populated by thousands of other real players was new and exciting. Seeing another real player, and not an NPC, run by you for the first time was special, as was the first time you got together with other players to tackle some common task. The very basics of MMO gaming are what hook us initially, but those same hooks exist in all MMOs, and are nothing new the 3^rd or 4th time around. Your first group experience in MMO 4 is much different than it was in MMO 1. In MMO 4, you know what to expect, you know exactly why you are in the group, and worst still, you know that joining a PUG could result in disaster; disaster you no longer have patience for. What you and everyone else could once laugh about now generally results in people leaving the group at best and a massive flame fest at worst.

UO was able to get away with a LOT of issue in part because for 99% of the players, just being online was a source of newness and entertainment. When Warhammer Online goes live, what percentage of the players will view just connecting to a server and being in a virtual world as entertainment? It certainly won’t be 99%, or 50%, but will it even be 10%? Regardless of the actual number, it won’t be many, and as a result, WAR and all other future MMOs need to deliver compelling gameplay right out of the gate to satisfy the needs of a far more demanding MMO crowd. In addition, not only does that content need to be compelling day one, it also has to continue at a much more furious pace than in days past. We all want new surprises around every corner, and those corners better come at a far more rapid pace than before. MMO gamers today won’t be logging on to hit a practice dummy for hours in order to work up their sword skill high enough to kill field rats. They want awesome day one, day two, and expect that awesome to continue to deliver for months on end. In many ways, it’s an almost impossible task for today’s developers to satisfy the needs of veteran MMO gamers.

With all that said, is there any hope for all the old whiny bastards like Rick and I? Can any MMO today or in the future rekindle those types of feelings we had for our first MMO? Glass half full guy says yes, glass half empty guy is not so sure. On the one hand, playing with a great group of people in a solid environment will always be entertaining. Playing on a beer league softball team is just as fun today as playing baseball was in high school, even though the feeling of hitting your first homerun will never be eclipsed by another homerun in the future. The actual activity, while still fun, is greatly supplemented by the people you play with. In that regard, any solid MMO with good gameplay should be able to entertain us, as we hope WAR will. It won’t, however, bring the same rush you had during your first relic raid in DAoC, or the first time you tried to run away from a PK in UO. And perhaps our tolerance for the general MMO grind, something all MMO games feature in varying degrees, is a bit lower. To me, that just places an even greater importance on playing with quality people early and often, as without them, that burnout sets in hard and fast regardless of what MMO you are playing.

Warhammer Online and the queue issue, RELAX!

I really should not be getting this worked up about a pre-release MMO topic, but this just hit a nerve for some reason. Keen, and today Tobold, made posts about Mythic’s plans for realm balance, and that ONE tool they will use to achieve that balance is realm queues for logging in.

Well for some reason (nerd rage) some people are getting all doom and gloom with the possibility that they might face a queue when logging into an MMO. Dear god people, queues are nothing new. Remember WoW at launch, the two hour queues only to enter a server that lagged so badly it was unplayable? What about the everyday queue for Arena/BGs? Ever log out in Jita and try to log back on during prime time in EVE? Good luck with that. Queues exist all over the place, as does server downtime and massive patching. Welcome to MMO land, enjoy your stay.

Aside from queues being as common as gaining levels in MMOs, let’s really think hard on this particular issue. First of all, we don’t even know WHICH side is going to have the population issue. Sure fansite polls point to Destruction, but guess who follows an MMO pre-release? The hardcore. Is it really that surprising that the majority of the hardcore would gravitate towards the bad guys, the side with the cool lore and interesting mechanics? The ‘we are sick of cutesy elves’ crowd? Has WoW not shown us that the majority of casuals love to play elves and humans, and be the good guy, just for the sake of playing a role they naturally assume is what they ‘should’ do? Are we forgetting that unless something disastrous happens, WAR will be a huge MMO with millions of subs?

When we talk millions, we are talking large quantities of the ultra casual, the guy who never looks at a message board, never reads a blog, and just logs in for a few hours a week. He does not min/max, raid, or get super involved in guild drama. He just likes to enjoy himself in an online world during a limited amount of downtime in his life. Is that guy really going to bend over backwards to play on a certain server, or is he more concerned about getting in and playing asap? Picking a low pop server, or having to transfer over won’t matter much to that guy, as long as he can avoid a queue that could eat up a good chunk of his game time. My dad is that guy, and trust me, he would switch servers in a heartbeat to avoid a queue. He did it repeatedly in WoW, even midway into leveling a character. While the hardcore players get attached to what we play and with who, the casuals live a different MMO life, one that can be a bit difficult to understand from the outside.

People also seem to be ignoring the fact that while not announced, what’s to stop Mythic from offering free transfers from high pop servers to low pop ones almost immediately? Just because Blizzard waited months/years to do it, does that mean everyone is going to follow? In WoW population imbalance was a minor annoyance, while in WAR it could be game-breaking. Why would Mythic not react quickly to solve a game-breaking issue, one that can easily be remedied by something as simple as a character/guild transfer?

So while silly to state, everyone needs to relax a bit here. This is not Mythic’s first time dealing with the issue of realm balance, and they are planning pre-release on ways to deal with it. It will be addressed day one, and while I’m sure it will still be an issue, I highly doubt it will be a two hour queue issue like it was in WoW, or a constant 45 minute queue like we had in BGs. To not learn anything from those clear examples would be selling Mythic short, a foolish mistake.

Too WoW-like, a positive or negative?

Tobold has a post up today questioning the wisdom of designing an MMO with features too similar to WoW, speaking specifically about Age of Conan. His point is that why would someone play something WoW-like when they could just play WoW, which has 3+ years of development and refining behind it, not to mention the overall high quality polish and design that made it a hit to begin with.

While a good point, it makes me wonder how far we have to get away from WoW in order to be ‘different enough’, and what exactly are we aiming for here. The bottom line of course is to have a game that’s fun to play, regardless of which design you follow. Whether you go PvE, PvP, a mix, or something entirely different, the game has to just be plain old fun in order to work. It’s a bit of the EVE Online theory, in that EVE nails almost every design-related issue spot on, yet for many it’s missing that key component that makes it fun to log on and play consistently. For many EVE is more fun to read about than to actually play, which says a lot about the game, in both a positive and negative way.

But back to the original question; how much different does an MMO need to be in order to compete, and what does compete actually mean? As fans, I think we get too caught up in the numbers, looking at WoW and saying ‘the next MMO has to get 10 million subs in order to beat WoW’, forgetting that WoW has ‘only’ 4 million or so subs in the US/EU, and that the other 6 million or so are in Asia, where the profit margin is far, far lower on a pre-account basis. So are current developers focusing on that magic 10 million subs number, or are they just looking to make a quality game with enough subs to make a profit? After all, any game that makes a profit is a success right? The servers stay up, new content is produced, the company makes money, players continue to enjoy a world they like, and everyone wins.

Moving away from the bean counter aspect of MMO development, let’s talk about what really counts; what do fans want. Recent releases show us that WoW-like games (LoTRO) do well, while games that try to break the mold seem to struggle (PoTBS, TR), and that future releases (AoC, WAR) seem to be moving away from their original ideas and seem to be going the WoW-like route.

Now the above paragraph contains a slew of over-simplifications, and counter arguments can be made for almost all points, but the overall view of the current MMO space holds true, for whatever reason.

And finally, it’s important to note that everyone will have a different opinion on what ‘too WoW-like’ means. For example, many people wrote off LoTRO because they viewed it as WoW set in Middle Earth. Yet for Aria and I, we are really enjoying LoTRO right now (and did before when we played at launch), even though we still play WoW. While LoTRO is indeed similar to WoW, its difference enough to be fun, and in many ways (combat speed, graphics, community) it feels/plays better for us. The best thing of course is we have both; we raid casually in WoW, and quest/level in LoTRO, but if we had to cut one out, it would be WoW right now, simply due to having already done most of it.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m very excited for Warhammer Online, especially the PvP aspects. Am I worried that it will be too WoW-like to be fun? Not really. My one concern is that Mythic balances PvP on PvE and not PvP, but given Mythic’s track record and experience from DAoC, I doubt they will make that mistake, especially when WoW is giving them the perfect example of what a disaster PvP is with PvE balance, and what a hole that type of design puts you in. If WAR has WoW-like PvE elements, that will just be a plus in my book, as even PvP diehards like to take a PvE break once in a while.

With all that said, what’s my stance on the whole issue? Make a fun game that on day 1 is ready to go. If it’s WoW-like, it better have enough to separate itself and offer compelling reasons to play. It could be just one difference in design; if that change is good enough, people will play it. If it’s not very WoW-like, it better live up to the standard WoW set, as no amount of good ideas will allow fans to see past glaring errors, like fans did in the late 90s, early 2000.

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.

To the time machine, we need to correct a grave mistake!

A good topic making the rounds in our blog community asks the question ‘what MMO would you unmake?’ The point being what game do you feel the MMO space would be better off without? Too many blogs to link here have already commented on the subject, yet I don’t believe anyone has mentioned the following game: (comment and correct me if I missed something)

Shadowbane.

Why would I unmake Shadowbane? Because at its core, Shadowbane is everything I dream about in an MMO, and in my opinion has the base structure to be an amazing game. It’s a PvP focused, dark fantasy, player controlled game that revolves around guilds laying siege to towns built by other guilds. Many other games have incorporated some aspects of those ideas, like DAoC with player controlled keeps and some siege weapon use, EVE Online with player built Outposts and Corp vs Corp focused PvP, the upcoming Warhammer Online and Age of Conan games featuring PvP, etc; yet no game before or since has focused on the guild vs guild, player build and controlled city vs city gameplay of Shadowbane.

So again, why would I unmake it? At launch, Shadowbane was a technical mess, released long before it was ready. It also never had the commercial backing of a major release. As a result, it was a commercial failure, and now resides in ‘free to play’ land with all the other failed MMOs. Developers looked at that failure and assumed a PvP-focused MMO was not commercially viable, and along with the success of the PvE friendly WoW, MMOs went away from PvP and into pure PvE (WoW, EQ2, DDO, AC2, LoTRO, the list goes on). Only recently are we seeing the return of PvP focused MMOs with WAR and AoC, along with the continued success of EVE Online.

In a world were Shadowbane never came out, perhaps it would not take as long for the PvP community to get some love. And perhaps we would actually see a quality PvP based fantasy game without the trappings of PvE elements like gear dependency, quest grinds, leveling treadmills, etc. It would also be tough to sell the idea of a dark fantasy, city vs city PvP game now to a major publisher, considering we supposedly already have that game and we see how that worked out.

Remove Shadowbane, use those core ideas, give a good studio enough money and time to actually finish the game, and I’ll be one happy MMO gamer.

Don’t blame the Deathknight, blame the creator.

Now that RMT promoter Tobold has returned (kidding), he linked some good blog posts about the upcoming Deathknight class, and what could possibly be done to implement them correctly without pissing off other classes, particularly warriors. All good reads, so head over and check them out.

My comment on the issue goes a little broader than talking about any one single class or skill tree. The main issue with WoW currently is that Blizzard is taking a PvE game and attempting to morph it into an e-sport PvP game. Warriors in a PvE setting were fine, as they were the optimal tank selection for raiding and the tougher 5 man stuff pre-BC. The reason this worked is that unless you went hardcore PvP and grinded out a high rank, all the best gear was only available though PvE. TBC changed all this, making top tier stuff available through PvP. Now anyone could solo their way into full epics without the need to join a guild or run any group content. Solo classes benefited most from this, while group dependent classes suffered; hence the abundance of hunters and warlocks and the shortage of tanks and healers.

As difficult as it is to balance PvP, it becomes impossible when you also have to consider PvE into that balance. The most successfully balanced PvP games (DAoC pre-ToA, EVE) succeeded more than most due in part to somewhat ignoring PvE balance. If PvP is your main focus, being overpowered compared to NPCs is a small price to pay. The NPC will never make a forum post complaining they are underpowered; they will happily respawn and get owned again and again. Blizzard continues to enrage both sides of their community by attempting to balance both PvP and PvE at the same time, and complicating the formula with a new class and more abilities won’t help.

Most curious to me is why Blizzard feels the need to pursue a PvP focus. They have clearly shown that they can craft a masterful PvE experience, and through that mastery gain 10 million customers. Do they sense the next ‘big thing’ is PvP, and feel that if they don’t adapt now they will get left behind when AoC and WAR hit stores? Are they switching up WoW now in preparation of a PvE-heavy World of Starcraft? It’s a very risky gamble to think they will retain more players based on WoW e-PvP than they would if they continued to cater to their core base, the casual PvE crowd.

Luckily for all MMO fans, should WoW turn into the looming disaster that is e-PvP, we have some promising looking options coming out shortly, ones that will hopefully cater to everyone disillusioned by Blizzards new direction. Does Blizzard have some big surprise coming that will make sense of this new direction, or has WoW simply run its course and is being prepared for the MMO cash cow pastures?

A culture of losing; the WoW effect on PvP.

Over the weekend I played a good bit of 51-60 Alterac Valley. Over the span of however many games I played, I noticed some interesting trends. The overall trend that I noticed is that PvP skill is highly lacking in AV, and in BGs overall, both in 1v1 situations and in overall strategy. Generally all players follow the mob around the map, regardless of where it is headed, and all too often you will see 3-4 players break off to chase one enemy halfway across the map. Players will also stop and fight when they see an enemy, even if the plan is to ride past and fight at a flag. It’s not hard to realize that if you kill an enemy at the halfway point, by the time you reach the flag they will have respawned and will be at 100% to fight you again. Letting them ride past you, or better yet chase you, will remove one defender from your intended goal.

The map itself is highly flawed, not in that it favors one side over the other, but in that it tricks the sides into playing poorly. For instance, knowing that both sides follow herd mentality, it would be all too easy to allow the main attack force to surge ahead and tag towers/graveyards. Logic would dictate that the attackers would wait for the tower/gy to finishing before moving on, but herd mentality insists as soon as something goes gray you rush to the next target. Knowing this, a smart group will simply wait for the masses to move on, recap a forward gy, and catch the attackers in the middle without a close gy to respawns at. The enemy gets tossed all the way back, joining the defenders slowly as your attack force pushes them farther and farther back. Sadly that never actually happens. Instead both sides simply herd rush, and whichever side provides the greatest resistance wins. By removing almost all of the NPC resistance, Blizzard only encourages herd tactics to generally work. Since the brainless ‘charge forward’ tactic works more often than not, it’s no wonder most WoW players never actually bother to stop and think about better strategy.

What’s really sad is that back before TBC, winning AV in a reasonable amount of time did actually involve some planning and team work. The ‘herd vs herd’ games would be standstills, but given good leadership and coordination victory could be achieved in a short and satisfying manner, usually by coordinating NPC special attacks with your teams own GY push. Those victories, and the encouragement for strategy they provided, were far more beneficial than the mindless grind AV is now, and I think that the blame should be squarely placed on Blizzard. By rewarding everyone and encouraging games to end as quickly as possible win or lose, they have created a culture that cares more about the next queue time than actual results. The fact that most PvP participants in WoW are simply there for the item grind does not help matters much. This is one of the greatest downfalls of rewarding everyone, in that actually winning is only slightly more beneficial than losing, especially if you lose quickly.

Going forward, and making the now standard comparison, one would hope Mythic is already well aware of the downfalls of ‘everyone wins’ and implements a system in Warhammer that encourages and actually favors winning. WoW gets away with it because it’s a PvE (for now at least) game at its core, and PvP is a tacked on as an afterthought. WAR is a PvP based game, and can’t afford its primary gameplay to turn into the sad excuse it is in WoW. History will tell us that it won’t, simply based on the gameplay we had in DAoC, but DAoC is a pre-WoW game, and we have seen since what that means. Just another interesting concept to track and watch for when WAR finally drops the NDA and we are all able to discuss it in detail.

Note: I realize Arena combat is a bit different, and that is clearly the direction Blizzard is heading with WoW, but like raiding, Arena’s are generally played by a small fraction of the population, and hence don’t really apply for the topic above.

Don’t put your PvE in my PvP, and vice versa.

SUWT 17 is out, and as always, it’s high quality podcast goodness, go check it out.

Near the end of the podcast a post of mine is linked and discussed, with the hosts talking a bit about PvP. I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure none of the participants are particularly huge fans of PvP, which made the discussion a bit more interesting for me, someone who has long since declared PvP gameplay the cream-of-the-crop in an MMO game if done right.

I think the best point made on the podcast on that topic was the comparison between WoW PvP and a first person shooter, and how FPS fans play their game for the simple fact of playing it, while WoW PvP players seem to play only for the end reward, or however many points they earn towards some reward. This brings up a very important point; WoW players are not PvP players. The appeal of WoW was never an amazing PvP experience (somewhat funny considering the lore WoW is based on, but yea), the appeal has always been a superb leveling game, one which is very solo friendly and accessible to the ‘common’ gamer, both in hardware requirements and game difficulty. Players played to grow a character, gaining levels and get new, better gear. Once you hit the level cap, you are left with only items to grow, and at some point, PvP became the best/easiest source of items, funneling the PvE community into battlegrounds in further pursuit of growth. You can’t blame the players, they are only doing what is available to them in order to play the game they want to play, that being the PvE game. PvP is currently a minor inconvenience, or grind, before they return to PvE.

The major problem with PvE-based players is that they bring the PvE mentality into PvP, and when the rules of PvP are placed upon them, they are not happy. In a raid or quest, if you kill something, you get rewarded. You don’t get rewarded sometimes, and rarely does something kill you without you expecting it. Monsters don’t gank you, quest givers don’t scam you, and quest items don’t run and hide to keep you from finding them. PvE has a defined time=reward ratio. You put your time in, you get the reward, guaranteed.

PvP does not work like that, or at least should not. Even the best plans fail, a ‘sure thing’ could be a trap, and that ever helpful player might be setting you up for the kill. In comparison to PvE, PvP is far more open in terms of possibilities and consequences. It’s not ‘point A to point B’ gameplay. Some days you win, some days you lose, and the separation between a good and bad player is in the ratio. Win 90/10, you are good; go 20/80 and you might need some work. But even that 90/10 player has bad days, days were you get constantly ganked, or a bad disconnect hits you at the wrong moment and proves very costly. It happens to everyone at one point or another. The PvP player knows and accepts this; the PvE player will find it unfair and harsh.

Now I’m not saying all PvE players should avoid PvP like the plague, if anything they should give it a shot, many might like it. But it has to be quality PvP, in a game build with PvP in mind, not an afterthought. If you base all PvP perceptions on a few ganks in UO and WoW’s battleground, I would agree with you that PvP does indeed suck. Base it on a relic raid done right in DAoC, an EVE tourney, or Asherons Call Darktide, and your opinion might change. And if it does not, that’s cool too, you are simply not a PvP fan, and no one is going to force you. Just like the best raid instances don’t convert everyone into a PvE fan, no matter the quality of the zone/instance.

At the same time, you should not force your PvE-based view on a PvP focused game. Don’t expect quest focused, item based, ‘play without interference’ gameplay, just like PvP fans should not expect much when they queue up for a BG.

That is really my biggest fear for Warhammer, that the PvE community will over-influence it, and what was once a PvP based game will instead be WoW 1.5. The greatest unknown right now is whether PvP can be the base for a mass market MMO. History will tell us ‘no’ if we focus on games like Shadowbane or Fury, but that would be like arguing that PvE is not mass market because of games like Vanguard or Asherons Call 2. The truth is in all of the above, it was not the type of game that made it a failure, but the simple fact that those games were not very good to start with. If Warhammer has WoW-like polish and execution, I see no reason why it can’t hit that magic ‘mass market’ level, even if it is based on PvP gameplay.

If WAR delivers on all those PvP promises (a big if at this point), I get a bit worried when I hear PvE people talking about WAR, and how they hope it will be the next ‘it’ thing for them. If done right, it won’t be 100% safe, bad days will happen, and more often then not your gameplay will be based on the players around you. The ups and down in a PvP world are more extreme than those in a PvE world, and it’s those extremes that make it enjoyable for those that enjoy that style of gaming. It will be those same extremes that turn off others. I just hope the message is clear enough on day one for expectations to be set properly.

So try harder…

More PvP talky talk, only a bit more ranty this time!

Tobold made a post today talking about Raph’s PvP post, to which I responded to back here. Yes, confusing blog interlinking at its best here folks.

Tobold for some time now has taken the stance of ‘positive sum’ for PvP, meaning everyone involved has to come out ahead, winner and loser. His reasoning is that no one wants to pay $15 a month to be kicked around daily. He backs this up by quoting a fellow guild mate who was complaining about the recent changes to honor gain in Alterac Valley in WoW; the change being the loser gets far less honor then they did previously, in an effort to emphasize winning.

This made me wonder, at which point did we all get so soft that we can’t accept defeat, that we all expect a cookie for effort regardless of the outcome. This reminds me of the parents who want to put a scoring limit on high school sports, or who want to give every team a trophy at the end of the season regardless of the win/loss record. Hugs all around. Good thing the real world works like that too right, otherwise we might be setting our kids up for a harsh dose of reality whenever we finally expose them to it. Good luck with that speech when little Tommy gets cut from the team, even though you have been telling him he is a winner all along.

The sad result of carebearing PvP is that people stop caring. The reason people AFK in WoW PvP is that it works. You still get a cookie, so why put the effort in? It’s the same reason you see level 20 players queue up for the 20-29 battleground. Sure they can’t do a thing in the match, and more than likely lead to their sides defeat, but since they get points anyway, why not? You can be the biggest asshat in the world, and WoW will still reward you. You will eventually get your easy-mode epics just like everyone else, even if you have never actually won a single round of PvP, or ever bothered to work as a team, or learn actual strategy.

With EVE still growing, clearly there is a market for PvP that actually matters, where being an asshat has consequences. EVE has negative sum PvP, but it’s only negative to those that refuse to pay attention, or stop to think once in a while. If you fly out in your new battleship to low-sec, without scouting or knowing what you are doing, you should learn a pricy lesson. The next time you buy that expensive ship, maybe you will be a bit more careful, and actually respect the world around you. It’s an MMO, sorry, you are not the hero. If the only thing you can handle in a game is to be the center of attention at all times, I suggest a single player game.

And before anyone leaves the comment of ‘it’s a game, I play for fun’, I’ll counter with so does everyone else. If I queue up to PvP in WoW, it’s because I want to have fun and PvP. It’s not fun to finally get in only to see your side is half full with AFK and lowbie players. You know you are going to get rolled, and the only question left is whether the other side is going to farm you in the middle for a bit, or just run up and down the field to end the battle quickly. Give WoW a harsher penalty for death, and all of a sudden the afk and lowbie farmers are gone, and what is left is people that actually enjoy PvP for the competition, people that have half a clue to what they are doing. All of a sudden Tommy asshat either learns to play nice, or continues to get kicked around until he does.

I hope that Warhammer online does not take the ‘hugs all around’ approach to PvP. Not only would that bastardize the lore of Warhammer, but it would lead to the laughable PvP we see in WoW. Tobold wonders why players would bother to defend Keeps if they don’t get some personal reward for doing so, even in a losing effort. I wonder if that thought ever crossed the minds of DAoC players when they defended Keeps or raided for relics, or if EVE players ever bothered to consider some new shiny when they go out and risk a kitted ship in a PvP tourney…