Hey everyone! o7 o/ :slightly_smiling_face: I have been playing this game since 2013, and it's where I met my wife. And while I see PVP as a legitimate part of the game, the uptick in griefing...
The mechanics of having PVP in a game and balancing that against players that don't want to do it are difficult.
I firmly believe in having "zones" where PVP is possible vs safe areas, however I absolutely hate the implementation of just not even allowing people to attack each other.
I think the best approach is PVP anywhere but with zones where attempted murder sets you to a criminal status which is sufficiently negative enough to deter most people from it. Additionally this status should be enforced by a god-like NPC force so that there is still some fun in running from the NPCs and other players in the world get some emergent entertainment from seeing some marauders get chased by the all-powerful enforcers. Players should also have to mark themselves in some way as "pvp" status in order to engage (indicated by a red name colour change), this gives a very clear indicator to other players that a player is not friendly and may attempt to attack them, this should still be necessary in un-enforced lands so players can choose to run in advance if they wish.
This also enables changing zones of control with global story elements.
Not a suggestion for Star Citizen because I don't care, but I've always disliked locked pvp/non-pvp zones and think these kinds of systems make a world feel far more immersive. It gives pvp to people while also making it very possible for everyone else to avoid it.
I guess in a space game compared to a normal fantasy game the solution would be to ensure that players know the other players are a threat long before they're ever in range to engage, giving the player the choice to jump away. Choosing not to jump would be a decision to engage in pvp by choice.
I'm not that familiar with EVE's system, I play mmos for an immersive character roleplay experience. Whenever I looked at EVE I always saw ships and never people.
Everybody does have a character created using a surprisingly detailed and robust character editor, but you basically only see a portrait of that character in a menu sometimes. Otherwise, yeah, it's all ships and space maps.
Yeah that sucks for me I'm afraid, my character as an avatar for expression and playing around with other people is like the entire reason I play these games.
I've been waiting for someone to get really innovative and try mixing ideas from The Sims interactions with people's mmo characters. There are many similarities between the two games that haven't been explored.
Eve kind of tries this, but despite High Sec being "you commit crime, a death star warps in and fires the superlaser at specifically you" it didn't stop large orgs from making new players and peaceful player's lives hell in concerted kamikaze campaigns. And Eve is a niche game while SC has mainstream ambitions, as ridiculous as that seems.
Unfortunately, the only two options for maintaining a large PvE population are separate areas or separate servers. Otherwise things go Rust/Tarkov, fast.
That's why I think you need to be marked as a "criminal" and take further negative consequences. Not just in killing you but in the things you can physically do being limited until your criminal status effect as a result of the action has worn off.
This gets more serious of a problem in full loot loss games though, which is not strictly what I was thinking about.
I don't agree that those are the only two options. I've seen it work fine in the rather short-lived Revelation Online with pretty much the above mechanics, if you got "player killer" status you were free to kill by other players and would lose your equipment on death whereas you don't lose equipment normally. It was a significant enough deterrence for this issue to be a minor thing, and because players all fly and there was no air to air combat you could opt out of fighting people by just getting off the ground. It all worked rather well. The game was killed by being the most horrendous translation I've ever seen by My.com and by p2w shop content, it was a good game mechanically though in my opinion. Pvp was entirely decided by gear though which is not really how I picture proper implementation.
The thing about pvp is that it should be a threat that exists but ultimately be so unlikely to happen that players barely see it other than major world events. The existence of the threat adds tonnes of texture to the world that can't be replaced by anything else, it needs to be negative enough to engage in that griefers simply don't exist though. It also lets players kill anyone botting to resource farm which is a neat side-bonus.
In Ultima you had stat loss on death if you were a murderer. Griefers didn't care. They'd grind up their stats to whatever they could get in an hour then grab the highest damage per hit weapons and the cheapest armor, tame horses, and ride around in big gangs overwhelming and slaughtering non-combat players. The only way to counter it was big teams of pvp specced anti-pks, and they could only control the immediate area. And the situation was still ridiculously unbalanced in the favor of the player-killers. To reliably kill them you had to have enough players to negate their advantage in numbers and you needed enough gear to reliably kill them. All they needed to grief non-combat players was some grinding and the cheapest gear in the game. It was like trying to counter an insurgency of immortal suicide attackers and worked about that well.
In Eve huge alliances would outfit hundreds of players with cheaply fitted out suicide ships and then assault economic systems. They'd only fet a handful of hits in before they were destroyed by security forces but the ships were so cheap and there were so many of them that they could destroy non-combat players from sheer volume of fire.
The only mmos i know of where unrestricted pvp actually works are games that solely focus on unrestricted pvp. And even those are extremely hit or miss, tending heavily towards miss, because skill + numbers + teamwork can provide and overwhelming, insurmountable advantage that leads to the smaller, less well equiped, or just less skilled side getting massacred over and over again until it's just farming.
Just do what elite does and have a solo play mode. I'm out here exploring the milky way, blissfully unaware of griefers. The only time I pop into open is for group events like the new thargoid war stuff
They added space legs about a year ago, but yea it definitely does give the vibe of being a sentient spaceship that sometimes has a pilotable android onboard
This is my main issue with the space games really. Also racing games to an extent. These are vehicles, there should be a walking person that exists who gets inside and then pilots/drives these vehicles. The disconnect feels very weird to me, I end up feeling like I am the vehicle itself and that's a very strange feeling.
That's why I think the Kerbals are a very nice touch in KSP. From a gameplay perspective, they weren't exactly necessary. You could still get like 95% of the gameplay to work fine without them. But being able to occasionally switch to their view in the cockpit and pop out to plant flags adds so much more to the immersion than one would think.
As a war thunder player I completely agree. I am the T34 :arm-L: :t34: :arm-R:
The only games that I feel integrate heavy vehicles well and maintain their scale are the large scale fps games like battlefield or hell let loose. I hate that tanks don't feel like tanks in war thunder because everyone's in a tank. In HLL even a light tank will shred through infantry and offer good protection so the vehicle actually feels like it has some weight to it (goofy game physics aside). It helps that I spend a solid third of my time tanking in that game crouched outside the vehicle trying to repair it with my shitty little blowtorch
I think Battlefield isn't bad at it but immersion is harmed by the instant in/out of vehicles, there needs to be animation for getting inside to really seal the whole package. If you want something to be REALLY immersive you need to have no animation and instead have the player physically swing the door/hatch open in the style that Amnesia has but this slows down interaction quite a bit.
In practice space legs always ends up being a gimmick that takes dev time from the core mechanics. If you can get up and walk around then what you've got is a space ship game and another, usually totally separate, fps game. And since the main reason anyone is playing is the space ships you often end up with a severely underfleshed fps game, or a dev team that struggles to do both.
Elite's space legs was a clusterfuck. Now you can walk around and complete simple missions and get in firefights, but it barely interacts with the space flight layer. It doesn't even interact well with the go-kart layer, since there's no real way to balance the foot combat against the go kart combat against the ship combat, so there are arbitrary phony feeling targetting restrictions and damgage mitigation between layers. Want to use your super-powerful war ship to bombard the surface? There's a variety of mechanisms to prevent you doing that so you can't wipe out a settlement from orbit then land to collect the loot.
EVE Online and BDO both do that. I liked Black Desert for a time, but the issue of PVP basically being a gear and level check kind of ruined the open world PVP anywhere part along with how any decent grind spots for a given level would always be monopolized by players that horribly overleveled it and who could farm an entire area as fast as enemy groups could respawn and would do this for hours at a time. Although even that had some hard safe zones, and coming up with ways to still kill people AFKing in them was a favorite pasttime of the community that included things like kidnapping fishermen by ramming them with boats and taking them out into the middle of the ocean, or shelling an event area from ships to kill anyone who strayed out of the safe zone.
Yeah you've gotta handle gear and level somehow in pvp. It shouldn't be a gear check, that shit is for people that are bad at games who want to make up for their terrible skill with the quantity of time they put into grinding. I think player to player combat should feel much more skill based, like Souls. Let players who have put more time in have some different abilities but ultimately keep the core lethality at a certain level so that there is still a very real threat of death if you lose "neutral" 3 or 4 times.
I would go beyond "difficult" to "has never happened and is inherently contradictory". Most people who do PvP live for PvP. The skill gap between someone who is a dedicated pvp player and someone who isn't is almost always insurmountable. Given equal equipment the pvp player is probably going to win, easily, every time. Then whem you add ships/characters/whatever specced for pvp it becomes a completely one sided massacre.
Ultima Online tried all the things you suggested 25 years ago and the griefing was so bad it almost killed the game. The solution, in almost every mmo that isn't strongly pvp focused, is to not have non-consensual pvp bc there's no way to win the arms race against griefer shitstains who get off on making other people feel miserable and powerless.
I'm ok with that being the outcome provided that players are choosing to fight or not. What you're describing is not dissimilar to New World when I played that, being a fighting game player I adapted extremely easy to its systems and could win practically any 1v1 duel, things got different when scaled up of course but you're right about a fair fight, the better player always wins and the better player is the dedicated player who learns.
Pointing to Ultima Online seems a bit unnecessary, we have much newer games that have achieved varying degrees of success and failure in implementations, much much better than UO's extremely poor implementations. I have seen griefers practically eliminated just by making it a largely negative cost outcome.
is to not have non-consensual pvp
Well yes, that's largely the implementation that I've described here? The point is that the pvp becomes consensual by nature of the player not retreating from a fight when they had plenty of warning to do so.
Yes, a PvP marker and free withdrawal is also a method. WoW had this in most zones in PvP servers (though ultimately most people ended up turning the flag off due to PvP mostly involved being Rogue ganked and PvP servers population dropped rapidly)
The mechanics of having PVP in a game and balancing that against players that don't want to do it are difficult.
I firmly believe in having "zones" where PVP is possible vs safe areas, however I absolutely hate the implementation of just not even allowing people to attack each other.
I think the best approach is PVP anywhere but with zones where attempted murder sets you to a criminal status which is sufficiently negative enough to deter most people from it. Additionally this status should be enforced by a god-like NPC force so that there is still some fun in running from the NPCs and other players in the world get some emergent entertainment from seeing some marauders get chased by the all-powerful enforcers. Players should also have to mark themselves in some way as "pvp" status in order to engage (indicated by a red name colour change), this gives a very clear indicator to other players that a player is not friendly and may attempt to attack them, this should still be necessary in un-enforced lands so players can choose to run in advance if they wish.
This also enables changing zones of control with global story elements.
Not a suggestion for Star Citizen because I don't care, but I've always disliked locked pvp/non-pvp zones and think these kinds of systems make a world feel far more immersive. It gives pvp to people while also making it very possible for everyone else to avoid it.
I guess in a space game compared to a normal fantasy game the solution would be to ensure that players know the other players are a threat long before they're ever in range to engage, giving the player the choice to jump away. Choosing not to jump would be a decision to engage in pvp by choice.
But have you considered MMOs are for nerds. No I'm not paying 30 bucks a month to work in a virtual coal mine
:rage-cry:
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https://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/754/886/ea3.jpg
The system you describe sounds a lot like what Eve Online is doing :D
I'm not that familiar with EVE's system, I play mmos for an immersive character roleplay experience. Whenever I looked at EVE I always saw ships and never people.
Everybody does have a character created using a surprisingly detailed and robust character editor, but you basically only see a portrait of that character in a menu sometimes. Otherwise, yeah, it's all ships and space maps.
Yeah that sucks for me I'm afraid, my character as an avatar for expression and playing around with other people is like the entire reason I play these games.
I've been waiting for someone to get really innovative and try mixing ideas from The Sims interactions with people's mmo characters. There are many similarities between the two games that haven't been explored.
deleted by creator
Eve kind of tries this, but despite High Sec being "you commit crime, a death star warps in and fires the superlaser at specifically you" it didn't stop large orgs from making new players and peaceful player's lives hell in concerted kamikaze campaigns. And Eve is a niche game while SC has mainstream ambitions, as ridiculous as that seems.
Unfortunately, the only two options for maintaining a large PvE population are separate areas or separate servers. Otherwise things go Rust/Tarkov, fast.
That's why I think you need to be marked as a "criminal" and take further negative consequences. Not just in killing you but in the things you can physically do being limited until your criminal status effect as a result of the action has worn off.
This gets more serious of a problem in full loot loss games though, which is not strictly what I was thinking about.
I don't agree that those are the only two options. I've seen it work fine in the rather short-lived Revelation Online with pretty much the above mechanics, if you got "player killer" status you were free to kill by other players and would lose your equipment on death whereas you don't lose equipment normally. It was a significant enough deterrence for this issue to be a minor thing, and because players all fly and there was no air to air combat you could opt out of fighting people by just getting off the ground. It all worked rather well. The game was killed by being the most horrendous translation I've ever seen by My.com and by p2w shop content, it was a good game mechanically though in my opinion. Pvp was entirely decided by gear though which is not really how I picture proper implementation.
The thing about pvp is that it should be a threat that exists but ultimately be so unlikely to happen that players barely see it other than major world events. The existence of the threat adds tonnes of texture to the world that can't be replaced by anything else, it needs to be negative enough to engage in that griefers simply don't exist though. It also lets players kill anyone botting to resource farm which is a neat side-bonus.
In Ultima you had stat loss on death if you were a murderer. Griefers didn't care. They'd grind up their stats to whatever they could get in an hour then grab the highest damage per hit weapons and the cheapest armor, tame horses, and ride around in big gangs overwhelming and slaughtering non-combat players. The only way to counter it was big teams of pvp specced anti-pks, and they could only control the immediate area. And the situation was still ridiculously unbalanced in the favor of the player-killers. To reliably kill them you had to have enough players to negate their advantage in numbers and you needed enough gear to reliably kill them. All they needed to grief non-combat players was some grinding and the cheapest gear in the game. It was like trying to counter an insurgency of immortal suicide attackers and worked about that well.
In Eve huge alliances would outfit hundreds of players with cheaply fitted out suicide ships and then assault economic systems. They'd only fet a handful of hits in before they were destroyed by security forces but the ships were so cheap and there were so many of them that they could destroy non-combat players from sheer volume of fire.
The only mmos i know of where unrestricted pvp actually works are games that solely focus on unrestricted pvp. And even those are extremely hit or miss, tending heavily towards miss, because skill + numbers + teamwork can provide and overwhelming, insurmountable advantage that leads to the smaller, less well equiped, or just less skilled side getting massacred over and over again until it's just farming.
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Just do what elite does and have a solo play mode. I'm out here exploring the milky way, blissfully unaware of griefers. The only time I pop into open is for group events like the new thargoid war stuff
Elite seems fun but as I said to someone else, I want to be a person, not a ship.
They added space legs about a year ago, but yea it definitely does give the vibe of being a sentient spaceship that sometimes has a pilotable android onboard
This is my main issue with the space games really. Also racing games to an extent. These are vehicles, there should be a walking person that exists who gets inside and then pilots/drives these vehicles. The disconnect feels very weird to me, I end up feeling like I am the vehicle itself and that's a very strange feeling.
That's why I think the Kerbals are a very nice touch in KSP. From a gameplay perspective, they weren't exactly necessary. You could still get like 95% of the gameplay to work fine without them. But being able to occasionally switch to their view in the cockpit and pop out to plant flags adds so much more to the immersion than one would think.
thats why i loved mods that made them more alive. stats, ribbons, pay, life support, etc.
As a war thunder player I completely agree. I am the T34 :arm-L: :t34: :arm-R:
The only games that I feel integrate heavy vehicles well and maintain their scale are the large scale fps games like battlefield or hell let loose. I hate that tanks don't feel like tanks in war thunder because everyone's in a tank. In HLL even a light tank will shred through infantry and offer good protection so the vehicle actually feels like it has some weight to it (goofy game physics aside). It helps that I spend a solid third of my time tanking in that game crouched outside the vehicle trying to repair it with my shitty little blowtorch
I think Battlefield isn't bad at it but immersion is harmed by the instant in/out of vehicles, there needs to be animation for getting inside to really seal the whole package. If you want something to be REALLY immersive you need to have no animation and instead have the player physically swing the door/hatch open in the style that Amnesia has but this slows down interaction quite a bit.
Steel Battalion might be up your alley. The original has a massive clunky but awesome analog control console that came with the game.
https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims?image_uri=https:%2F%2Fs3.amazonaws.com%2Fengadget-public-production%2Fproduct%2F23%2Fi09%2Fsteel-battalion-controller-2n1e.jpg&thumbnail=640%2C&client=49kdj93ncb8s938hkdo&signature=27900d61950253ba123d1454bf06fc2068c1d069
In practice space legs always ends up being a gimmick that takes dev time from the core mechanics. If you can get up and walk around then what you've got is a space ship game and another, usually totally separate, fps game. And since the main reason anyone is playing is the space ships you often end up with a severely underfleshed fps game, or a dev team that struggles to do both.
Elite's space legs was a clusterfuck. Now you can walk around and complete simple missions and get in firefights, but it barely interacts with the space flight layer. It doesn't even interact well with the go-kart layer, since there's no real way to balance the foot combat against the go kart combat against the ship combat, so there are arbitrary phony feeling targetting restrictions and damgage mitigation between layers. Want to use your super-powerful war ship to bombard the surface? There's a variety of mechanisms to prevent you doing that so you can't wipe out a settlement from orbit then land to collect the loot.
yes, but they still don't stop me from doing exactly that :sickarus:
that would be great, but they'll never implement it because they simply don't have the capability to.
Oh absolutely, I'm not talking Star Citizen here but generally my feeling on the correct balance for this in mmos in general.
EVE Online and BDO both do that. I liked Black Desert for a time, but the issue of PVP basically being a gear and level check kind of ruined the open world PVP anywhere part along with how any decent grind spots for a given level would always be monopolized by players that horribly overleveled it and who could farm an entire area as fast as enemy groups could respawn and would do this for hours at a time. Although even that had some hard safe zones, and coming up with ways to still kill people AFKing in them was a favorite pasttime of the community that included things like kidnapping fishermen by ramming them with boats and taking them out into the middle of the ocean, or shelling an event area from ships to kill anyone who strayed out of the safe zone.
Yeah you've gotta handle gear and level somehow in pvp. It shouldn't be a gear check, that shit is for people that are bad at games who want to make up for their terrible skill with the quantity of time they put into grinding. I think player to player combat should feel much more skill based, like Souls. Let players who have put more time in have some different abilities but ultimately keep the core lethality at a certain level so that there is still a very real threat of death if you lose "neutral" 3 or 4 times.
I would go beyond "difficult" to "has never happened and is inherently contradictory". Most people who do PvP live for PvP. The skill gap between someone who is a dedicated pvp player and someone who isn't is almost always insurmountable. Given equal equipment the pvp player is probably going to win, easily, every time. Then whem you add ships/characters/whatever specced for pvp it becomes a completely one sided massacre.
Ultima Online tried all the things you suggested 25 years ago and the griefing was so bad it almost killed the game. The solution, in almost every mmo that isn't strongly pvp focused, is to not have non-consensual pvp bc there's no way to win the arms race against griefer shitstains who get off on making other people feel miserable and powerless.
I'm ok with that being the outcome provided that players are choosing to fight or not. What you're describing is not dissimilar to New World when I played that, being a fighting game player I adapted extremely easy to its systems and could win practically any 1v1 duel, things got different when scaled up of course but you're right about a fair fight, the better player always wins and the better player is the dedicated player who learns.
Pointing to Ultima Online seems a bit unnecessary, we have much newer games that have achieved varying degrees of success and failure in implementations, much much better than UO's extremely poor implementations. I have seen griefers practically eliminated just by making it a largely negative cost outcome.
Well yes, that's largely the implementation that I've described here? The point is that the pvp becomes consensual by nature of the player not retreating from a fight when they had plenty of warning to do so.
Yes, a PvP marker and free withdrawal is also a method. WoW had this in most zones in PvP servers (though ultimately most people ended up turning the flag off due to PvP mostly involved being Rogue ganked and PvP servers population dropped rapidly)