Lol SB and UO dont even come close to what Asheron's call- darktide was dreamon with thinking SB or UO where as near as good as AC was.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Well by his own admission johnmmathias logged in DF, got killed a couple of times by goblins and some players and ragequit within hours.
He is like the DF mmorpg.com critics/naysayers of 04-09 that were widely silenced long ago. For some illogical reason he keeps coming back with opinions that anyone knowledgeable about pvp mmorpgs from 2000 onwards can disprove
but for some reason he still posts
o well I guess there is a benefit: he keeps threads going without much but sheer stubborness.
Lol SB and UO dont even come close to what Asheron's call- darktide was dreamon with thinking SB or UO where as near as good as AC was.
Pretty sure AC darktide was rather tough on newbs. So you basically did not address one of his major points.
Although I don't really see the OPs point at all. If he wants PvP viability quickly just go the GW route and let people start PvP with a maxed or 80% maxed character.
I personally do not like PvP with large tiered advancement schemes. Whether its based on powers or equipment. The "progression" means less skill and/or ability is invovled. Its a crutch that dumbs down the PvP.
I understand people want progression as that gives them somethign to strive but in the context of PvP it is just plain bad and has no upside. And PvP itself should provided something to strive for, either through winning and beating people or by capturing and taking objectives or both. PvP progression should not be based upon personal power. If it does you will always make the overall PvP environment inferior.
So you have Shadowbane with an engine that sucked bad, while DF's is very good (widely accepted).
Let me finish that sentence...
Widely accepted...among it's fans. To everyone else, everything about the game is an abomination. Have you heard the shit talk about the UI? That's part of the engine bud.
Don't get me started on the horrible optimization.
No it is widely accepted by people who actually play or played the game, while it is widely not accepted by people like you who didn't play the game and know nothing about it, but still like to talk non sense.
DF has the best engine of every game I played, both in stability and performance, I rarely hear players complaining about lag (apart when there are sieges) or the client crashing.
You won't believe it, but in 6 months of DF I never ever crashed once.
The only 2 times I got disconnected was because my ISP..............that's how reliable the engine and the netcode is.
AV did an amazing job with the engine, to be honest coming from a tiny indie developer in Greece, I would never ever expected they could build such a solid code, particularly because more "professional" and established developers seems like they are not able to build a cn engine crash proof.
Only WoW has the same level of stability, but even there I used to be kicked out every now and then.
Woah, woah woah, I love how people assume this every time. I played Darkfall. I hated it. It was a breath of fresh air for about a week and then straight back to the tedium with a community that doesn't know how to roleplay anything but gankers.
I understand it's a PvP game, but the point isn't to gank everyone. The point is to live a life in a world in the midsts of war. There aren't people going solo ganking untrained soldiers in real wartime.
Also, as far as the client goes, I got disconnected several times and not to mention the horrible special effects work where if you have shadows on in that game, it even has a nVidia 9800 down on its knees, all with not-nearly-impressive-enough-to-cause-that graphics.
Your exactly same as this eurogamer trash guy who played 20min Darkfall can't make head or tails how it works, to harsh pvp to difficult and base his opinion on that experience and with fact he loved themeparks hate pvp or sandbox.
Pls dont give opinion about something you dont have any clue what its about and hate.
You have not played Darkfall.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
In Eve or DF this is purposely left to the players for the most part. But think about it for a second. Patrol or watch duty is generally not considered "fun" by most soldiers. The good ones know it is vital but it is not a duty they want to do. ... So should this be part of the game? A good game designer should understand that this will be a necessary part of a FFA game designed to have large scale conflicts. If they do not understand that guard stations and patrolling will be necessary then they are not competent to design such a game.
Well you have to look at the whole "fun" equation. Patrols might not be fun, but the flipside isn't without problems either. Automated defenses aren't fun for the attacking force, and can seriously diminish the amount of PVP that happens in a game (and the amount of PVP that happens in the "PVP" MMORPGs you refer to is already extremely low frequency compared to real PVP games.)
I agree with your second statement: a good designer needs to understand the options they are providing for defense and offense. But I disagree with the conclusion you drew from it, that automated defenses are necessarily the best solution for the problem.
Games do not have to realistically simulate war to be fun. Realistically simulating war is in many ways undesireable. This is why the most successful PVP games are those which distill the experience down to the interesting decisions, avoiding the uninteresting aspects associated with real war.
When games focus on realism, they tend to move away from the fun activities that draw players to gaming, and dilute the experience with unnecessary tedium or otherwise boring activities.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I have to say for PVP, I really had more fun playing Shadowbane, then any other MMO. I don't really think it had anything to do with how fast you level, but rather how your character's skills were trained up, what runes you had, and what gear you had, along with how you fought someone with the skills you had. I never really saw a cookie cutter build in that game as being the best overall for any one class. Add to that the player created cities, and the wars between guilds during banes. It was always fun either hunting down someone or being attacked by someone and fighting them off. On the server I played on there were people who setup guild cities that were free for anyone to go into and purchase equipment from the stores with in, however they were usually heavily fortified with guards and did not tolerate pvp within their walls. You could still attack someone but it would retaliate a response from the guards attacking you, with results of you dying or fleeing the city.
I do hope that the people who created Shadowbane come up with another game that offerred the same thrill of an open world with full pvp like this. *on a side note, I know that some of them are at Stray Bullets and are working on something new, I hope they are able to bring the same kind of fun to MMOs again, as I haven't found that in a game since then. Sure there are other games that offer PVP of all sorts, but I think it was a combination of multiple things that SB offerred that made it soo great to play.
In Eve or DF this is purposely left to the players for the most part. But think about it for a second. Patrol or watch duty is generally not considered "fun" by most soldiers. The good ones know it is vital but it is not a duty they want to do. ... So should this be part of the game? A good game designer should understand that this will be a necessary part of a FFA game designed to have large scale conflicts. If they do not understand that guard stations and patrolling will be necessary then they are not competent to design such a game.
Well you have to look at the whole "fun" equation. Patrols might not be fun, but the flipside isn't without problems either. Automated defenses aren't fun for the attacking force, and can seriously diminish the amount of PVP that happens in a game (and the amount of PVP that happens in the "PVP" MMORPGs you refer to is already extremely low frequency compared to real PVP games.)
I agree with your second statement: a good designer needs to understand the options they are providing for defense and offense. But I disagree with the conclusion you drew from it, that automated defenses are necessarily the best solution for the problem.
Games do not have to realistically simulate war to be fun. Realistically simulating war is in many ways undesireable. This is why the most successful PVP games are those which distill the experience down to the interesting decisions, avoiding the uninteresting aspects associated with real war.
When games focus on realism, they tend to move away from the fun activities that draw players to gaming, and dilute the experience with unnecessary tedium or otherwise boring activities.
I agree that realism is generally a case of "be careful what you ask for". That is actually a major problem though. Because some thing are not part of "realism" they are simply constants you cannot get away from. Patrols are something that must exist or your "side" is simply not competent. In a mixed PvP/PvE environment no one wants to play in a non-competent area and it annoys them nd seems stupid. In a FFA environment like DF your clans gets destroyed as a result of the non-competence.
I also agree that FULL automated defense is not the answer. That is what my Aion example is meant to illustrate. But some amount of automation that is controlled by user input can be used to make it so that one or two people can do the patrol instead of 10 and the patrol need not be so comprehensive.
Or imagine this for a second. Imagine you are playing a game similar to Planetside. Suppose you have NPCs you can direct to some degree for example every five minutes you can direct some teams to take patrol routes designated by you however you please, imagine that in addition you get a map display of your sphere of influence with some fort. Suppose you could direct some NPCs along 3 or 4 patrol routes and if they spot or are attacked you can then see this on the map display as a hot spot. You then send in your kill team of real players. The teams themselves are not overly strong but not complete pushovers. You may even be able to tell them to retreat to base and only harass during their withdrawing action or stand and fight. Their main role is merely discovery and some harassingment ie. if you ignore them long enough you do die but an enemy player team of any competence will most likely kill them fairly quick.
In the absense of this you need about 20 players to do a siimilar thing and dominate a zone. With your NPC helpers You can have one field officer and an elite plauer strike team or two. And the mundane annoying part of covering ground is handled by the NPC "Grunts". In addition you can also have players cover ground if you want it doone especially well.
Yes automated defenses suck. They are a joke in most games. But if used as tools in the players arsenal they can work to make the "realism" of patrol and guard stations less of a burden. Because you can't get away from that.
In FFA game like DF everything is put on players. You cannot escape from some realism. Either there are players doing a mundane task or there is a free for all chaos in that area because that task is not being done. Unfortunately we cannot escape the consequence of this task. This has its good points and some people like those points. But it also has very bad points especially in the context of some progression based game.
Yes realism can in fact be bad. This is why Aion simply does not allow the enemy faction into the first starter zone at all. But when you attempt to implement something like the next Aion starter zone for people 20+ (Morhiem and Eltnen) it is equally bad to create something that is half-assed. In those zones the other side can Rift in and setup mobile rez points yet the zone itself is clearly dominated by by the side that owns. The guards are very high level and will one shot most enemy players yet they are only in a very few particular places.
Basically the defending faction is populated by complete morons. This is just as un fun as being over realistic and losing sight of the of the fun part of the conflict. If the designers had wanted a No-mans-lands like effect then they should have created the zone that way. They act like the people who rift in are infiltration/raiding teams, and it can work that way for some small teams, but it can also result in a full on assault or in some case extremely stupid permanent gank teams (for example the elyos ghost NPC that are allied to Elyos in the Asmodian zone, its a free pass for gankers). Is this fun? Sure it can be in the right context. In the context of Morhiem or eltnen the persistent raid teams are dumb. You have an entire city of guards who could one shot them just standing there with their thumbs up their asses while their country men get slaughtered over and over trying run some package some quest NPC gave them to some other quest NPC.
The consequences of the rift raiding are each fun in their own way, but when put into the context of the zone they can get really dumb. When I played Aion with my ranger I did not think it was dumb that some lone ranger or two man scount team was going around ganking. I would then use my ranger to counter them possibly with a few other people. In context and mechanics that was fitting and fun. But in the Aion Beta the server I was on, Morhiem was run by the Elyos due to lopsided population and faster elyos leveling and the level 30 level cap, this changed in the next round of Beta. And I mean completely run. Most Asmodian were getting killed so often and by such overhwhelming power that they simply went to the other non-pvp zone. It was so bad that a certain set of Elyos just sat outside the Fort gate for hours and hours killing anything that came close and occasionally running around the zone looking for people. Yet as soon as they came anywhere close to the gate they got annihilated by the NPCs. And i mean annihilated. This force of red names that essentially could lock down the upper part of the zone would all die in about a minute if they aggroed the guards.
Its assinine and its not fun. Not just because of the stupidity of an hours long gate camp. But because it has no real meaning. Its conflcit with no purpose and it gets in the way of other activities that zone was clearly meant and which do not mix with the raiding in anyway except to add some kind of edge to it. It is essentially random violence. But the entire game is meant to be about DIRECTED violence.
When put into its proper context they are not achieving what you wish. They are not streamling it into a better experience. They may have put some hard limits on certain things. But it is not about realism per se, it is about not being able to escape certain fundamentals of organized violent action and not creating a context that fits with those things
Well yeah, you basically described early WOW world PVP. Fun the 0.5% of the time where it's even-teams and mostly-even-levels, but pointless and boring the 99.5% of the time where it's meaningless slaughter that provides no real benefit to either side.
Two solutions exist for this: make world PVP matter, or relegate PVP to just those 0.5% fun fights (ie instance it and enforce level limitations.) The latter tends to be far more popular because it results in fun fights where your decisions matter, but the former isn't without it's niche following.
But staying in that middle-ground fails to satisfy anyone particularly well.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well yeah, you basically described early WOW world PVP. Fun the 0.5% of the time where it's even-teams and mostly-even-levels, but pointless and boring the 99.5% of the time where it's meaningless slaughter that provides no real benefit to either side. Two solutions exist for this: make world PVP matter, or relegate PVP to just those 0.5% fun fights (ie instance it and enforce level limitations.) The latter tends to be far more popular because it results in fun fights where your decisions matter, but the former isn't without it's niche following. But staying in that middle-ground fails to satisfy anyone particularly well.
Well if we talk in ideals for a second what would be nice is if a large Elyos force entered into Morhiem and did significant damage for a signficant period of time then the Morhiem NPCs would sally forth with an appropriate force and hunt them. Appropriate meaning not guards that one shot but a force that is most likely going to win, because you don't send out a force from a superior position that is inferior to the force in the field unless you are stupid.
This is both realistic and interesting and serves to balance things out. Also it should be a fun challenge. However for the sake of fun you do not want to just trigger a mass annihilation of enemy players in the zone once an hour or once every 30 minutes. Because that gives them no chance to fight back or escape.
Unfortunately how do you tell if that enemy force warrants a response from the fortress? That is much trickier than it sounds and most likely players will find some way around it. And how do you get the NPCs to "hunt" them down. Most likely they will either be stupidly ineffective or stupidly effective.
In real life this is how medieval peasants were kept "safe". They were not kept safe from neighboring armies by having vets come help them out or forming a posse, that was only done for criminals or bandits. They were kept safe by the threat of knights riding out of a castle at a moments notice and devstatnig a force in the field and then quickly riding back. Even if the force in the field was superior in numbers the knight perform quick and devastating strikes with few losses and then be well fed and warm while their eneimes were cold and sleeping on the ground.
There is a reason that the best defense is a good offense. Yet most of the non-FFA games have absolutely no attention paid to this. They have dumb guards that stay still and do nothing unless they enemy is really stupid. As soon as you move 10 feet you might as well be in an FFA game like DF without any of the advantages of an FFA game.
Morhiem and Eltnen should work the way a medieval castle work. But they do not, perhaps cannot I am not sure on that.
So what is a more realstic solution. I think the designers of Aion should have split it up the larger scale raiding PvP and small raiding PvP into two separate zones and that the larger scale raiding PvP should have had its PvE stuff radically altered in that zone.
Having hardcore grind spots in Morhiem is kind of stupid. You just get mowed down by red-names. Obviously a single person gank can and quite often will kill you when you are grinding mobs, but you have a chance. Mob grind with huge respawns and a large scale gank squad you get mowed down its poinltess.
The large scale raiding should be more of a no man's land and have PvP objectives with some kind of real meaning. It should have both skirmishes and behind enemy lines insertions. The "lines" would be fluid and controled by the PvP objectives. And respawn points would be very far from these lines, although possibly creepig up as terriotry is gained. The PvE here should not tie you down to any one spot for too long unless it very far behind your side's line and should give you some way of detectig and evading while doing that PvE inside territory currently owned by your side, something like NPC lookouts that can give a shout out to the zone (possibly killable). Inside the lines would have killable NPC patrols in a decent density but not overwhelming in number. Some PvE may involve killing these patrols.
Basically being inside your own territory gives you some qualitative advantages. Some extra intelligence to make a mow down gank harder to be a no contest and some ability to get some NPC support. But most conflict is handled by players and each side can advance or lose the amount of territory they have an advantage in. And the PvE itself is created in such a way that fits in with this type of behavior. That the terrain and mob spawns can be used against each other, but also that there are means of retreating and re-engaging an enemy gank squad and that the PvE itself is not some 1 hour long camp-fest that will never get done because of constant harassment. You can get in and get out.
This is one of the issues with WoW-like games. They create EQ style PvE. Whether its a mob grind game or a kill 10 rats quest. You stay in a place and MAKE YOURSELF A TARGET. Not because you want to but because the devs made you act stupid by creating content that has you act like the perfect pidgeon. Camping a location for 30 minutes in a PvP environment is asking to DIE. One of the rules of a sniper is take no more than 2 shots from the same position. Yet the PvE content itself in the mixed games PvE/PvP games essentially heavily penalizes you if you do not violate this rule. We all know that camping is a mainstay of MMOs. It is also suicide in a PvP situation. Yet in Aion they have quests to collect 100s of item drops from Elite mobs.
In other words they are setting you up to die and they are doing this in a zone your side suppoedly controls.
In UO you could make a brand new character and in 3 days time, without macroing and without exploiting, be PVP viable. I did that with my Blob character, 2 days on the bone knight wall and 1 day of resist training. Then I went out and killed a 5 man guild that was killing
Maybe you could do that OP, but I seriously doubt some noob is going to be able to do that on his own.
Your exactly same as this eurogamer trash guy who played 20min Darkfall can't make head or tails how it works, to harsh pvp to difficult and base his opinion on that experience and with fact he loved themeparks hate pvp or sandbox. Pls dont give opinion about something you dont have any clue what its about and hate. You have not played Darkfall.
I played Darkfall for the bloody free month. I decided not to stay after that. Don't tell me I haven't played that game.
And for the love of god, I do not like themeparks. I like a good mix. That way, you're not totally directionless but at the same time you're not being forced around every second of the way. I play Pirates of the Burning Sea and LOVE, mainly. How are those direct themeparks?
I'm done with you hyperactive fans saying I didn't play the game because I disagree with the opinion that Darkfall is the PvP game.
Unfortunately how do you tell if that enemy force warrants a response from the fortress? That is much trickier than it sounds and most likely players will find some way around it. And how do you get the NPCs to "hunt" them down. Most likely they will either be stupidly ineffective or stupidly effective.
...
So what is a more realstic solution. I think the designers of Aion should have split it up the larger scale raiding PvP and small raiding PvP into two separate zones and that the larger scale raiding PvP should have had its PvE stuff radically altered in that zone.
...
Having hardcore grind spots in Morhiem is kind of stupid. You just get mowed down by red-names. Obviously a single person gank can and quite often will kill you when you are grinding mobs, but you have a chance. Mob grind with huge respawns and a large scale gank squad you get mowed down its poinltess.
Well dynamically scaling constant attacks which issue forth from the town would be sufficient really. The only "tricky" part might be making sure they actually move to attack the enemy raid correctly (because who knows where they might be attacking from; on top of a building, from the other side of the zone..and in most games this is a challenge for NPCs.)
I sort of disagree with your solution. When PVP is intended to be massive warfare, fragmenting the community should only be done with extremely well laid-out plans. It was one of the failings of early WAR actually: the playerbase fragmented out to the lackluster PVE because RVR rewards weren't solid enough (and part of why they weren't solid enough was because nobody was out there fighting, either because of PVE or PVP Scenarios.)
Whereas Planetside had zero gamestyle fragmentation (there was only PVP), only zone fragmentation (200 player limit per faction per zone) which ended up being a solid solution. Even PS's solution isn't perfect though, as the spillover from the maxed-out zones tended to be uneven fights (one faction has 222 players, the other 275; now you have this continent with a 22 vs. 75 man battle, which isn't very fun.)
Lastly I agree with the "hardcore grind spots" comment. Ganks are some of the most one-sided (and therefore uninteresting) combat in games.
The main issue is that in resource control PVP games you have two activities for harvest the resources. One of which is enjoyable (farming mobs) but leaves you vulnerable (HP damage), and the other which is completely unenjoyable (AFK-mining) but doesn't leave you vulnerable (no damage.)
A partial solution would be to make Gathering (mining/woodchopping/etc) be an enjoyable and interactive gameplay activity, rather than "click button, chop wood." This at least keeps players interested in playing, and increases the likelihood of a gank being a fun, fair fight (but by no means does it "solve" this issue, since a gank squad is still 6 guys that you have no hope of taking on alone.)
There's no solid solution for the Mob Farming side of things, sadly. Most solutions are very abstract and have large problems players would take offense with:
Mob-farming could be done in instanced caves. Each cave has few mobs in it, and they don't respawn, forcing you to find another "fresh" cave every 5 minutes, forcing you to be vulnerable to world PVP outside the cave while you search for a new one. The key point being that you have the opportunity to heal to full before you exit a cave.
For MMORPGs with combat systems like Atlantica, combat can't be initiated with you until you're done with your current battle (making it functionally identical to the cave solution if you're able to heal up.)
Both solve the problem, but in ways that large numbers of players would likely find unsatisfactory.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'm fully aware it's bleeding players...but it was due to balance issues at launch, last I checked. I also hear talk that the bleeding is finally stopping with the pseudo-expansion they released. I don't know personally, just talk on the high seas. Not to mention, like I said, it has been said that you can be useful in PvP from level 15 (it took what...2 days for me to get to level 10?)which is about the time you could potentially have a fully unlocked skill set. If you want a fancy ship and all of that jazz, yeah, you're going to have to do PvE to reach that status. How is that any different from games like DAoC? Personally, I don't mind any of the leveling in PotBS as the combat is pretty engaging. Darkfall is far from that nature though. I only say this with quite a few people having said themselves here on the forum that the grind to become anywhere near useful in PvP is horrendous if you join currently. That's the last I'm saying about Darkfall.
I started up a character on DF (US) about a month ago. I have 7-8 kills the last time I checked, all legit and most of them solo. I'm not even a hardcore gamer, I play probably less than an hour and a half a day on average.
This nonsense about not being able to PvP for 2-3 months is ridiculous. You can get right in on the mass PvP and contribute... just don't go running into the melee pit and "spamming attack" like an idiot. If your opportunistic and willing to travel the the other races newbies lands yourself, you can and will get kills on players near the same skill level as yourself, and its a ridiculous amount of fun.
I even killed a dude in full bone/scale because I waited in the shadows for the right moment to pounce while he was fighting mobs. That guy probably had several months on me considering the spells he was using, and I came away with a fat haul, probably worth almost half of my entire bank. Talk about heart pumping, I felt like a lone lion stalking an elephant.
Most people don't want to take the time to bring PvP to their level. They simply want it handed to them on a silver platter. Go out and make fights that are fair to you happen, don't just wait for it to fall in your lap.
If you can't find your place in Darkfall PvP then its because your being retarded and trying to fight exceedingly more powerful characters head on. That's dumb, and you deserve to die. You keep applauding a tactical type of combat, yet when you played Darkfall you simply bashed your head against the wall.
I don't have much experience in Shadow Bane but i can speak on why UO was a great PvP game and why we may not every see it again.....
1. Keep it Simple Stupid
The genious of UO was its simplicity. FACT: Its much easier to balance a game (PvP in particular) when you have less variables to deal with. UO has 3 basic stats that effect 3 basic attributes. Your either some variation of a Mage or some variation of a Warrior.
UO didn't have to deal with all the stats, attributes, classes (and specs within each class) that all the new MMORPGs use as a selling point to differentiate their game from the previous. The trend seems to be to increase all these things to increase the perception of unique character individualization....not less.
The simplified structure of UO had much to do why it was one of the most balanced PvPing experiences in any MMO to date.
2. ItemLESS Centric System
Items in Ultima Online were things that gave you an "edge" in combat, not the main determinate of a PvP encounter. A undergeared player had an honest shot at killing a better geared player if the undergeared player knew how to play his/her toon better.
Player skill wasn't defined as your knowledge of what stat mods you needed for your gear....it was all about knowledge of your character and your ability to counter attacks.
Modern MMOs have put items and gear as the main focus and measuring stick for progression and as a result have put a HUGE emphesis on the items you have and less on your ability to play your toon vs. other class types.
3. Last but not least.....General Melee & Casting Mechanics
Casting mechanics were MUCH about putting together spell combos and countering combos with a focus on timing and interuptions.
If a player gets hit while casting, its interupted. You can't heal through poision (have to cure before you can heal). This keeps people from just healing through damage taken and just dumping tons of spells uninterupted on a player. You had to be VERY concious of what the other player is doing and react quickly and accordingly.
I don't have much experience in Shadow Bane but i can speak on why UO was a great PvP game and why we may not every see it again..... 1. Keep it Simple Stupid The genious of UO was its simplicity. FACT: Its much easier to balance a game (PvP in particular) when you have less variables to deal with. UO has 3 basic stats that effect 3 basic attributes. Your either some variation of a Mage or some variation of a Warrior. UO didn't have to deal with all the stats, attributes, classes (and specs within each class) that all the new MMORPGs use as a selling point to differentiate their game from the previous. The trend seems to be to increase all these things to increase the perception of unique character individualization....not less. The simplified structure of UO had much to do why it was one of the most balanced PvPing experiences in any MMO to date.
2. ItemLESS Centric System Items in Ultima Online were things that gave you an "edge" in combat, not the main determinate of a PvP encounter. A undergeared player had an honest shot at killing a better geared player if the undergeared player knew how to play his/her toon better. Player skill wasn't defined as your knowledge of what stat mods you needed for your gear....it was all about knowledge of your character and your ability to counter attacks. Modern MMOs have put items and gear as the main focus and measuring stick for progression and as a result have put a HUGE emphesis on the items you have and less on your ability to play your toon vs. other class types.
3. Last but not least.....General Melee & Casting Mechanics Casting mechanics were MUCH about putting together spell combos and countering combos with a focus on timing and interuptions. If a player gets hit while casting, its interupted. You can't heal through poision (have to cure before you can heal). This keeps people from just healing through damage taken and just dumping tons of spells uninterupted on a player. You had to be VERY concious of what the other player is doing and react quickly and accordingly.
Thanks for this. I think you nailed it. UO PvP was a masterpiece once you figured out how to play the game.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
Actually your wrong. The skill of the individual player did matter in Shadowbane. The only way we won outnumbered was because of our skill as a team. My guild had several battles where they had nearly double the numbers we had yet we won the battle (siege).
In UO there was no such thing as zerging as everyone was on equal footing quickly (progression and endgate was days, not years).
How can you call it wrong? Read it again:
"Non-skill factors like population (zerging) and verticle progression each have a weight they add to battle."
Note the emphasis.
"Weight" refers to the relative value of each factor, in terms of how important it is to winning:
Population (aka zerging), weight 5 (25%)
Skill, weight 5 (25%)
Gear, weight 5 (25%)
Progression, weight 5 (25%)So then you have WOW where things are mostly unchanged except population is removed: Population, weight 0 (0%) Skill, weight 5 (33%) Gear, weight 5 (33%) Progression, weight 5 (33%)
Notice how skill is now more important? Skill was not unimportant in the first example, but it's more important in the second. That's what I'm getting at.
Any game where you can gang up on players with uneven teams makes population a factor. I seriously doubt UO was this magical PVP eden where every battle was a fair 1v1, 2v2, etc fight. Maybe unfair fights were rare (the weight was low) but they still probably happened to a degree.
You seriously should try some real PvP game. Have you played anything else besides WoW?
I seriously doub that hehe
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Asherons Call is the king, then Lineage 2 and then Shadowbane maybe somewhere from 3rd to 6th place. UO is over rated because it was the best mmorpg to gank on. But UO combat was all about Precasting and killing the other guy in a few seconds. The interface was soo bad for UO that it highly favored people who could write scripts and whatnot. Like me for instance I had my own version of Autotarget, mouseroll tap tap dead. Its just that simple, UO does not cut it.
Shadowbane was ok but again mechanically inferior to, AC, hell im messing around on Spellborn right now and its got better mechanics than shadowbane.
I think what the poster meant to say is the best free for all gank mmorpgs. In that case the original UO wins hands down. But as far as pvp mechanics and skill is concerned its a console game.
I have to disagree with you a bit on the UO thing.....
Yes, Ultima "World PvP" was primarily group PvP. If you rolled out SOLO, you understood that odds weren't in your favor to start with and assumed all risks associated. As a result, players banned together and formed PvP clans. (In a MMORPG...go figure)
But even SOLO, I've seen players take on 2 or 3 at one time because they were just that good.
The interface wasn't much different than WOWs in that it was fully customizable and allowed you to put buttons for skills and spells anywhere on the screen that you wanted to. It wasn't very hotkey friendly and required more clicking (c'mon....its like 12 years old), but otherwise allowed for more customization than any other interface until World of Warcraft.
I don't know what your talking about as far as scripts go. The only legal 3rd party app that was allowed was UOAssist and its macroing capabilities were VERY limited and completely useless in PvP.
BTW: Lineage 2 PvP was one of the most imbalanced PvP games I've ever played. I loved its PvP Endgame with the Castle Siege and FFA system (Which coincidently was VERY similar to UO's faction system and FFA notiery system).
But the game was so heavily item based and had so many balance issues with classes that it was far from one of the better PvP games as far as actual fighting goes.
Having never touched UO at it's prime nor shadowbane (although it was a faint echo in my past when it actually made it to the eastern market).
PvP can't exist in a themepark without 'gear' dependence, which in turn requires alot of your time in order to get these said gear, then comes the fact that there is the endless feud that exists between rock and paper, paper and scissor, scissor and rock, paper and scissor... so on so on..
That system can goto hell, if one must rely on gear before skill, it simply defies the concept of equal oppurtunity for players, and without equality there comes a bigger rift than that from class disputes.
In sandbox, where skill comes before 'gear', I'd say people would have fair chance, only I have really not much experience in sandbox, but I'm sure there are alot of problems that plague sandbox pvp as well...
All in all, it comes down to the players, the dumb and the ones who can actually process cohesive thoughts.
Might want to go back to post 95 where I respond to his unnecessary personal jab, before adding your own personal jab.
Trying to get an accurate count of the hundreds/thousands of different PVP games I've played over the years would be a waste of my time. Inevitably if someone's shallow enough to think that argument matters, they're shallow enough that an exact game count (which would invariably be far superior to their own) would fail to convince them of their wrongness.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
AC1 Darktide had the best PvP in MMO's, and I do mean PvP not RvR or any other forms of PvP. You really had to have played AC1 during the early 2000's to know why it was so good.
The game was wide open, totally non-instanced. It had full item loot, fps-style combat, you as a player choose where to put your exp points into rather than have the game choose it for you.
Sadly those days are long gone, but I would love to play it again if they ever upgrade their engine, interface, graphics, and start a new PvP server.
Asherons Call is the king, then Lineage 2 and then Shadowbane maybe somewhere from 3rd to 6th place. UO is over rated because it was the best mmorpg to gank on. But UO combat was all about Precasting and killing the other guy in a few seconds. The interface was soo bad for UO that it highly favored people who could write scripts and whatnot. Like me for instance I had my own version of Autotarget, mouseroll tap tap dead. Its just that simple, UO does not cut it.
Shadowbane was ok but again mechanically inferior to, AC, hell im messing around on Spellborn right now and its got better mechanics than shadowbane.
I think what the poster meant to say is the best free for all gank mmorpgs. In that case the original UO wins hands down. But as far as pvp mechanics and skill is concerned its a console game.
I have to disagree with you a bit on the UO thing.....
Yes, Ultima "World PvP" was primarily group PvP. If you rolled out SOLO, you understood that odds weren't in your favor to start with and assumed all risks associated. As a result, players banned together and formed PvP clans. (In a MMORPG...go figure)
But even SOLO, I've seen players take on 2 or 3 at one time because they were just that good.
The interface wasn't much different than WOWs in that it was fully customizable and allowed you to put buttons for skills and spells anywhere on the screen that you wanted to. It wasn't very hotkey friendly and required more clicking (c'mon....its like 12 years old), but otherwise allowed for more customization than any other interface until World of Warcraft.
I don't know what your talking about as far as scripts go. The only legal 3rd party app that was allowed was UOAssist and its macroing capabilities were VERY limited and completely useless in PvP.
BTW: Lineage 2 PvP was one of the most imbalanced PvP games I've ever played. I loved its PvP Endgame with the Castle Siege and FFA system (Which coincidently was VERY similar to UO's faction system and FFA notiery system).
But the game was so heavily item based and had so many balance issues with classes that it was far from one of the better PvP games as far as actual fighting goes.
You could wrangle up some pretty interesting things with UO assist if you creative enough
PVP in UO came down to what you Knew and timing. In melee you were auto hits and once you had your target it was auto cast. So It really came down to the other guy being able to chain his stuff better than you could. Or just make a Lumber Axer and hack at them mindlessly. But honestly If I put it up against Guild Wars it pales in comparison. Guild Wars is my Personal choice for most skill, but most tend to think its AC or L2, either way having played UO I dont even think its as skill based as DAOC honestly.
But honestly on a 2d top down view game in which case most mages will walk right into sight of you long enough to precast, if your not on constant paranoia alert they will kill you by default unless your crappy magic resist kicks in ( hah hah hah). That just doesnt yell skill to me.
Guild wars on the other hand you could have a battle last seconds meanwhile everyone in the group has casted or done numerous skills or spells debuffed, rebuffed, dpsed, you name it. it is twitch reaction plus strategy and far more deminsional than UO ever was. So again UO pvp in my mind from experience is over rated by a long shot.
You could do some things in UOAssist if you knew before hand what your chain of skills/spells were going to be. Because UO PvP was very much a read-and-react type system....macroing made it kind of pointless because tactics were so easy to counter.
For instance...it wouldn't make much sense for me to create a macro that casted a combo of spells in succession because the person I'm fighting might counter it by interupting me or launching into a combo of their own that would require me to either cure or heal myself. You NEEDED the flexibility of doing things manually to react to whats coming at you the right way.
Also, alot of people are making a huge deal out of the precasting and crazy mage power. I was never dead by default when I fought mages LOL If you did a good enough job at forcing a mage to go on defence, the first precasted spell was trivial.....expecially if you were fighting with a group of people that understood the importance of CROSS HEALING.
Few points regarding the top-down look in UO. For all its faults, it had some benefits.
Considering that most combat was mounted, the limited top down look allowed players that were in a ganking situation escape if they were good enough at navigating through the trees and around houses. As soon as you got out of Line of Sight, it was REALLY easy to loose someone.....something that would have been MUCH harder to do in a modern 360 degree horizion POV.
It also allowed players (like I mentioned above) take on other players in a situation where they might be outnumbered. I can't tell you how many times I've seen one of my buddies take out a group of 2-3 guys by seperating them in a chase and then picking them apart.
I was watching a special on wolves last night where the camera guy was in a helecopter or something and the top down view allowed you to see how the pack of wolves used flanking tactics and applied pressure from certian directions to force the prey into range of one of the other wolves.
That reminded me of some experiences in UO. We hunted in groups and would have flankers that attempted to reign in the target we were chasing. Thats a whole area of tactical fighting that the new world of 360 degree camera views hasn't been able to reproduce.
Originally posted by Deestroy Yeh but I think that changes the subject, UO and AC had the best PVP ENVIRONEMENTS and sure AC Darktide was a great pvp game. But are we talking about freedom to pvp or the best pvp mechanics? I thought it was about the most competitive pvp combat system, at least thats how i was looking at it.
Well the OP made the post stating UO & SB were great because it took less time leveling....in a nutshell. While AC had tons of levels at launch, it didn't affect the PvP gameplay. In fact the PvP game mechanics actually worked in AC because a lvl 70 back in the days could kill a lvl 100+. When you have that in a PvP game, you know you did something right. I won't credit Turbine too much because they really didn't expect PvP to take off in AC. But here's a great example of how a game not exactly made for PvP ending up being one of the best PvP MMO's even to this date. It just sorta worked out.
I would like to jump in here and inject my opinion into the mix: Neither game had the best pvp in a RPG.
There, I said it. But why? Why would I think this? I enjoyed both games immensely. Simple. The best pvp has reason and motivation behind it. What do I mean by this? To clarify, lore driven pvp is the best. It creates the best player experience in my opinion. One of UO's problems was that anyone could just come up and kill you anywhere, any time for no damn reason. I dont consider this an optimal pvp field, you have no team, no affiliation unless you guild, no reason.
Therefore you have games like DAoC or WoW... game that say "here is the world, here is the affiliation you chose, now its on". You know who your enemies are, you know who your country men are, they might or might not help you, but at least you can feel safe in your own home. As a whole your side is motivated, through guild and faction to defeat your enemies. Its not one big anarchy run gank fest where you cannot trust anyone. If you had 4 kingdoms and you picked one, you would choose to fight for that kingdom against your enemies, the lore gives you the reason, you are not only helping your guild but the whole of your "race" or faction. Its multilayered, which is important and helps give your character a sense of identity.
This is a good pvp environment, RvR, faction vs faction, you have the arch-faction with guilds inside it, all working towards a global goal while also able to work in their individual goals. To me, this is more enjoyable than a FFA kill anyone you want just because you can fest. If i wanted that I would just load up unreal tournament in FFA mode.
Not completely true......most people didn't randomly kill other players for no reason.
There WERE people who had player killer characters that were flagged as murderers (Reds).......and as a result there were whole guilds of Anti-PKs that hunted down the PKs. (Blue vs Red Wars)
If that wasn't structured enough for you, there was an Order / Chaos faction system that allowed you to fight for the forces of Lord British (Order) or fight for Lord Blackthorn (Chaos). Once again, you had this Good vs. Evil faction like system.
If you needed MORE imersion into lore (and more meaningful PvP) there was the Faction System. 4 Factions that fought over control of the main cities; that yielded tangible rewards for your efforts (Access to special mounts, weapons, armor, traps, guards, vendors, etc.) Each faction had their own story and background into the Ultima Lore.
Hell....your guild could declare war on any other guild if you didn't want to have anything to do with all the other different types of team based PvP systems.
Most Random Blue on Blue PvPing (Two innocent players fighting eachother) happend because someome was griefing or running off at the mouth. And it didn't happen often for those people who didn't want to flag their character as a murderer because of the murder counts.
The reason I like the FFA PvP system is that it doesn't pigeon hole you into a specific box like the RvR or FvF games do. I create a Horde character and I have to put up with all the a-holes on the Horde faction who grief and talk smack because there is nothing I can do about it.
It also doesn't allow guilds to change sides if there are too many people fighting for one cause. One of the greatist things about Lineage 2 (who had a similar FFA system to UO) was all of the politics and struggles to hold alliances together......else they turn on you for a sweeter opprotunity. You can't do those things in WOW or Warhammer......your stuck with the team you initially joined.
I dont know why I came in here not expecting another lame "good old days" nostalgic post. Set myself up for disappointment, so let me get this straight. Those games are OUTDATED. They are no longer fun to today's standards, and PLENTY of mmo' have better PvP than them.
Lineage 2 and Shadowbane win this thread. Best pvp games imo always will be until they make sequels to said games. Or make a game incredibly similar to them.
Shadowbane is definitely on the winner list.
Lineage 2's only strong point was probably PvP. I constantly hear horror stories about the grind, lol.
That's the funny thing. Private servers were probably more successful then retail. Retail was amazing if you played from the start leveling and trying to catch up was what killed it. But If you took all of L2's private servers (high and low rates) which people played purely to pvp the player numbers would probably rival Wow's community.
Any credibility Lineage 2 had for PvP was a direct result of its Castle Siege Territory System (which is very similar to UO's Faction System) and its FFA system (which is very similar to UO's FFA notiery system).
As far as class balance and gear dependency goes.....TERRIBLE. NCSoft gave up on balancing all of the classes and just let one or two of all the classes have their 15 mintues of fame at the top of the hill until the next expansion rolled out.
XP loss on death was a terrible design considering that the PvE required to get the XP back was a BRUTAL grind. They essentially punished PvPers by making you PvE. And when I talk about PvE....I don't mean running some quests or dungeons. I mean sitting in a random field with level appropriate monsters and killing them OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER for hours.
With all that said, the PvP endgame was by far one of the better PvP experiences I've had since UO, despite the poor class design.
Comments
Lol SB and UO dont even come close to what Asheron's call- darktide was dreamon with thinking SB or UO where as near as good as AC was.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Well by his own admission johnmmathias logged in DF, got killed a couple of times by goblins and some players and ragequit within hours.
He is like the DF mmorpg.com critics/naysayers of 04-09 that were widely silenced long ago. For some illogical reason he keeps coming back with opinions that anyone knowledgeable about pvp mmorpgs from 2000 onwards can disprove
but for some reason he still posts
o well I guess there is a benefit: he keeps threads going without much but sheer stubborness.
Pretty sure AC darktide was rather tough on newbs. So you basically did not address one of his major points.
Although I don't really see the OPs point at all. If he wants PvP viability quickly just go the GW route and let people start PvP with a maxed or 80% maxed character.
I personally do not like PvP with large tiered advancement schemes. Whether its based on powers or equipment. The "progression" means less skill and/or ability is invovled. Its a crutch that dumbs down the PvP.
I understand people want progression as that gives them somethign to strive but in the context of PvP it is just plain bad and has no upside. And PvP itself should provided something to strive for, either through winning and beating people or by capturing and taking objectives or both. PvP progression should not be based upon personal power. If it does you will always make the overall PvP environment inferior.
Let me finish that sentence...
Widely accepted...among it's fans. To everyone else, everything about the game is an abomination. Have you heard the shit talk about the UI? That's part of the engine bud.
Don't get me started on the horrible optimization.
No it is widely accepted by people who actually play or played the game, while it is widely not accepted by people like you who didn't play the game and know nothing about it, but still like to talk non sense.
DF has the best engine of every game I played, both in stability and performance, I rarely hear players complaining about lag (apart when there are sieges) or the client crashing.
You won't believe it, but in 6 months of DF I never ever crashed once.
The only 2 times I got disconnected was because my ISP..............that's how reliable the engine and the netcode is.
AV did an amazing job with the engine, to be honest coming from a tiny indie developer in Greece, I would never ever expected they could build such a solid code, particularly because more "professional" and established developers seems like they are not able to build a cn engine crash proof.
Only WoW has the same level of stability, but even there I used to be kicked out every now and then.
Woah, woah woah, I love how people assume this every time. I played Darkfall. I hated it. It was a breath of fresh air for about a week and then straight back to the tedium with a community that doesn't know how to roleplay anything but gankers.
I understand it's a PvP game, but the point isn't to gank everyone. The point is to live a life in a world in the midsts of war. There aren't people going solo ganking untrained soldiers in real wartime.
Also, as far as the client goes, I got disconnected several times and not to mention the horrible special effects work where if you have shadows on in that game, it even has a nVidia 9800 down on its knees, all with not-nearly-impressive-enough-to-cause-that graphics.
Your exactly same as this eurogamer trash guy who played 20min Darkfall can't make head or tails how it works, to harsh pvp to difficult and base his opinion on that experience and with fact he loved themeparks hate pvp or sandbox.
Pls dont give opinion about something you dont have any clue what its about and hate.
You have not played Darkfall.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Well you have to look at the whole "fun" equation. Patrols might not be fun, but the flipside isn't without problems either. Automated defenses aren't fun for the attacking force, and can seriously diminish the amount of PVP that happens in a game (and the amount of PVP that happens in the "PVP" MMORPGs you refer to is already extremely low frequency compared to real PVP games.)
I agree with your second statement: a good designer needs to understand the options they are providing for defense and offense. But I disagree with the conclusion you drew from it, that automated defenses are necessarily the best solution for the problem.
Games do not have to realistically simulate war to be fun. Realistically simulating war is in many ways undesireable. This is why the most successful PVP games are those which distill the experience down to the interesting decisions, avoiding the uninteresting aspects associated with real war.
When games focus on realism, they tend to move away from the fun activities that draw players to gaming, and dilute the experience with unnecessary tedium or otherwise boring activities.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I have to say for PVP, I really had more fun playing Shadowbane, then any other MMO. I don't really think it had anything to do with how fast you level, but rather how your character's skills were trained up, what runes you had, and what gear you had, along with how you fought someone with the skills you had. I never really saw a cookie cutter build in that game as being the best overall for any one class. Add to that the player created cities, and the wars between guilds during banes. It was always fun either hunting down someone or being attacked by someone and fighting them off. On the server I played on there were people who setup guild cities that were free for anyone to go into and purchase equipment from the stores with in, however they were usually heavily fortified with guards and did not tolerate pvp within their walls. You could still attack someone but it would retaliate a response from the guards attacking you, with results of you dying or fleeing the city.
I do hope that the people who created Shadowbane come up with another game that offerred the same thrill of an open world with full pvp like this. *on a side note, I know that some of them are at Stray Bullets and are working on something new, I hope they are able to bring the same kind of fun to MMOs again, as I haven't found that in a game since then. Sure there are other games that offer PVP of all sorts, but I think it was a combination of multiple things that SB offerred that made it soo great to play.
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
Well you have to look at the whole "fun" equation. Patrols might not be fun, but the flipside isn't without problems either. Automated defenses aren't fun for the attacking force, and can seriously diminish the amount of PVP that happens in a game (and the amount of PVP that happens in the "PVP" MMORPGs you refer to is already extremely low frequency compared to real PVP games.)
I agree with your second statement: a good designer needs to understand the options they are providing for defense and offense. But I disagree with the conclusion you drew from it, that automated defenses are necessarily the best solution for the problem.
Games do not have to realistically simulate war to be fun. Realistically simulating war is in many ways undesireable. This is why the most successful PVP games are those which distill the experience down to the interesting decisions, avoiding the uninteresting aspects associated with real war.
When games focus on realism, they tend to move away from the fun activities that draw players to gaming, and dilute the experience with unnecessary tedium or otherwise boring activities.
I agree that realism is generally a case of "be careful what you ask for". That is actually a major problem though. Because some thing are not part of "realism" they are simply constants you cannot get away from. Patrols are something that must exist or your "side" is simply not competent. In a mixed PvP/PvE environment no one wants to play in a non-competent area and it annoys them nd seems stupid. In a FFA environment like DF your clans gets destroyed as a result of the non-competence.
I also agree that FULL automated defense is not the answer. That is what my Aion example is meant to illustrate. But some amount of automation that is controlled by user input can be used to make it so that one or two people can do the patrol instead of 10 and the patrol need not be so comprehensive.
Or imagine this for a second. Imagine you are playing a game similar to Planetside. Suppose you have NPCs you can direct to some degree for example every five minutes you can direct some teams to take patrol routes designated by you however you please, imagine that in addition you get a map display of your sphere of influence with some fort. Suppose you could direct some NPCs along 3 or 4 patrol routes and if they spot or are attacked you can then see this on the map display as a hot spot. You then send in your kill team of real players. The teams themselves are not overly strong but not complete pushovers. You may even be able to tell them to retreat to base and only harass during their withdrawing action or stand and fight. Their main role is merely discovery and some harassingment ie. if you ignore them long enough you do die but an enemy player team of any competence will most likely kill them fairly quick.
In the absense of this you need about 20 players to do a siimilar thing and dominate a zone. With your NPC helpers You can have one field officer and an elite plauer strike team or two. And the mundane annoying part of covering ground is handled by the NPC "Grunts". In addition you can also have players cover ground if you want it doone especially well.
Yes automated defenses suck. They are a joke in most games. But if used as tools in the players arsenal they can work to make the "realism" of patrol and guard stations less of a burden. Because you can't get away from that.
In FFA game like DF everything is put on players. You cannot escape from some realism. Either there are players doing a mundane task or there is a free for all chaos in that area because that task is not being done. Unfortunately we cannot escape the consequence of this task. This has its good points and some people like those points. But it also has very bad points especially in the context of some progression based game.
Yes realism can in fact be bad. This is why Aion simply does not allow the enemy faction into the first starter zone at all. But when you attempt to implement something like the next Aion starter zone for people 20+ (Morhiem and Eltnen) it is equally bad to create something that is half-assed. In those zones the other side can Rift in and setup mobile rez points yet the zone itself is clearly dominated by by the side that owns. The guards are very high level and will one shot most enemy players yet they are only in a very few particular places.
Basically the defending faction is populated by complete morons. This is just as un fun as being over realistic and losing sight of the of the fun part of the conflict. If the designers had wanted a No-mans-lands like effect then they should have created the zone that way. They act like the people who rift in are infiltration/raiding teams, and it can work that way for some small teams, but it can also result in a full on assault or in some case extremely stupid permanent gank teams (for example the elyos ghost NPC that are allied to Elyos in the Asmodian zone, its a free pass for gankers). Is this fun? Sure it can be in the right context. In the context of Morhiem or eltnen the persistent raid teams are dumb. You have an entire city of guards who could one shot them just standing there with their thumbs up their asses while their country men get slaughtered over and over trying run some package some quest NPC gave them to some other quest NPC.
The consequences of the rift raiding are each fun in their own way, but when put into the context of the zone they can get really dumb. When I played Aion with my ranger I did not think it was dumb that some lone ranger or two man scount team was going around ganking. I would then use my ranger to counter them possibly with a few other people. In context and mechanics that was fitting and fun. But in the Aion Beta the server I was on, Morhiem was run by the Elyos due to lopsided population and faster elyos leveling and the level 30 level cap, this changed in the next round of Beta. And I mean completely run. Most Asmodian were getting killed so often and by such overhwhelming power that they simply went to the other non-pvp zone. It was so bad that a certain set of Elyos just sat outside the Fort gate for hours and hours killing anything that came close and occasionally running around the zone looking for people. Yet as soon as they came anywhere close to the gate they got annihilated by the NPCs. And i mean annihilated. This force of red names that essentially could lock down the upper part of the zone would all die in about a minute if they aggroed the guards.
Its assinine and its not fun. Not just because of the stupidity of an hours long gate camp. But because it has no real meaning. Its conflcit with no purpose and it gets in the way of other activities that zone was clearly meant and which do not mix with the raiding in anyway except to add some kind of edge to it. It is essentially random violence. But the entire game is meant to be about DIRECTED violence.
When put into its proper context they are not achieving what you wish. They are not streamling it into a better experience. They may have put some hard limits on certain things. But it is not about realism per se, it is about not being able to escape certain fundamentals of organized violent action and not creating a context that fits with those things
Well yeah, you basically described early WOW world PVP. Fun the 0.5% of the time where it's even-teams and mostly-even-levels, but pointless and boring the 99.5% of the time where it's meaningless slaughter that provides no real benefit to either side.
Two solutions exist for this: make world PVP matter, or relegate PVP to just those 0.5% fun fights (ie instance it and enforce level limitations.) The latter tends to be far more popular because it results in fun fights where your decisions matter, but the former isn't without it's niche following.
But staying in that middle-ground fails to satisfy anyone particularly well.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well if we talk in ideals for a second what would be nice is if a large Elyos force entered into Morhiem and did significant damage for a signficant period of time then the Morhiem NPCs would sally forth with an appropriate force and hunt them. Appropriate meaning not guards that one shot but a force that is most likely going to win, because you don't send out a force from a superior position that is inferior to the force in the field unless you are stupid.
This is both realistic and interesting and serves to balance things out. Also it should be a fun challenge. However for the sake of fun you do not want to just trigger a mass annihilation of enemy players in the zone once an hour or once every 30 minutes. Because that gives them no chance to fight back or escape.
Unfortunately how do you tell if that enemy force warrants a response from the fortress? That is much trickier than it sounds and most likely players will find some way around it. And how do you get the NPCs to "hunt" them down. Most likely they will either be stupidly ineffective or stupidly effective.
In real life this is how medieval peasants were kept "safe". They were not kept safe from neighboring armies by having vets come help them out or forming a posse, that was only done for criminals or bandits. They were kept safe by the threat of knights riding out of a castle at a moments notice and devstatnig a force in the field and then quickly riding back. Even if the force in the field was superior in numbers the knight perform quick and devastating strikes with few losses and then be well fed and warm while their eneimes were cold and sleeping on the ground.
There is a reason that the best defense is a good offense. Yet most of the non-FFA games have absolutely no attention paid to this. They have dumb guards that stay still and do nothing unless they enemy is really stupid. As soon as you move 10 feet you might as well be in an FFA game like DF without any of the advantages of an FFA game.
Morhiem and Eltnen should work the way a medieval castle work. But they do not, perhaps cannot I am not sure on that.
So what is a more realstic solution. I think the designers of Aion should have split it up the larger scale raiding PvP and small raiding PvP into two separate zones and that the larger scale raiding PvP should have had its PvE stuff radically altered in that zone.
Having hardcore grind spots in Morhiem is kind of stupid. You just get mowed down by red-names. Obviously a single person gank can and quite often will kill you when you are grinding mobs, but you have a chance. Mob grind with huge respawns and a large scale gank squad you get mowed down its poinltess.
The large scale raiding should be more of a no man's land and have PvP objectives with some kind of real meaning. It should have both skirmishes and behind enemy lines insertions. The "lines" would be fluid and controled by the PvP objectives. And respawn points would be very far from these lines, although possibly creepig up as terriotry is gained. The PvE here should not tie you down to any one spot for too long unless it very far behind your side's line and should give you some way of detectig and evading while doing that PvE inside territory currently owned by your side, something like NPC lookouts that can give a shout out to the zone (possibly killable). Inside the lines would have killable NPC patrols in a decent density but not overwhelming in number. Some PvE may involve killing these patrols.
Basically being inside your own territory gives you some qualitative advantages. Some extra intelligence to make a mow down gank harder to be a no contest and some ability to get some NPC support. But most conflict is handled by players and each side can advance or lose the amount of territory they have an advantage in. And the PvE itself is created in such a way that fits in with this type of behavior. That the terrain and mob spawns can be used against each other, but also that there are means of retreating and re-engaging an enemy gank squad and that the PvE itself is not some 1 hour long camp-fest that will never get done because of constant harassment. You can get in and get out.
This is one of the issues with WoW-like games. They create EQ style PvE. Whether its a mob grind game or a kill 10 rats quest. You stay in a place and MAKE YOURSELF A TARGET. Not because you want to but because the devs made you act stupid by creating content that has you act like the perfect pidgeon. Camping a location for 30 minutes in a PvP environment is asking to DIE. One of the rules of a sniper is take no more than 2 shots from the same position. Yet the PvE content itself in the mixed games PvE/PvP games essentially heavily penalizes you if you do not violate this rule. We all know that camping is a mainstay of MMOs. It is also suicide in a PvP situation. Yet in Aion they have quests to collect 100s of item drops from Elite mobs.
In other words they are setting you up to die and they are doing this in a zone your side suppoedly controls.
Maybe you could do that OP, but I seriously doubt some noob is going to be able to do that on his own.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
I played Darkfall for the bloody free month. I decided not to stay after that. Don't tell me I haven't played that game.
And for the love of god, I do not like themeparks. I like a good mix. That way, you're not totally directionless but at the same time you're not being forced around every second of the way. I play Pirates of the Burning Sea and LOVE, mainly. How are those direct themeparks?
I'm done with you hyperactive fans saying I didn't play the game because I disagree with the opinion that Darkfall is the PvP game.
Check out the MUD I'm making!
Well dynamically scaling constant attacks which issue forth from the town would be sufficient really. The only "tricky" part might be making sure they actually move to attack the enemy raid correctly (because who knows where they might be attacking from; on top of a building, from the other side of the zone..and in most games this is a challenge for NPCs.)
I sort of disagree with your solution. When PVP is intended to be massive warfare, fragmenting the community should only be done with extremely well laid-out plans. It was one of the failings of early WAR actually: the playerbase fragmented out to the lackluster PVE because RVR rewards weren't solid enough (and part of why they weren't solid enough was because nobody was out there fighting, either because of PVE or PVP Scenarios.)
Whereas Planetside had zero gamestyle fragmentation (there was only PVP), only zone fragmentation (200 player limit per faction per zone) which ended up being a solid solution. Even PS's solution isn't perfect though, as the spillover from the maxed-out zones tended to be uneven fights (one faction has 222 players, the other 275; now you have this continent with a 22 vs. 75 man battle, which isn't very fun.)
Lastly I agree with the "hardcore grind spots" comment. Ganks are some of the most one-sided (and therefore uninteresting) combat in games.
The main issue is that in resource control PVP games you have two activities for harvest the resources. One of which is enjoyable (farming mobs) but leaves you vulnerable (HP damage), and the other which is completely unenjoyable (AFK-mining) but doesn't leave you vulnerable (no damage.)
A partial solution would be to make Gathering (mining/woodchopping/etc) be an enjoyable and interactive gameplay activity, rather than "click button, chop wood." This at least keeps players interested in playing, and increases the likelihood of a gank being a fun, fair fight (but by no means does it "solve" this issue, since a gank squad is still 6 guys that you have no hope of taking on alone.)
There's no solid solution for the Mob Farming side of things, sadly. Most solutions are very abstract and have large problems players would take offense with:
Both solve the problem, but in ways that large numbers of players would likely find unsatisfactory.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I started up a character on DF (US) about a month ago. I have 7-8 kills the last time I checked, all legit and most of them solo. I'm not even a hardcore gamer, I play probably less than an hour and a half a day on average.
This nonsense about not being able to PvP for 2-3 months is ridiculous. You can get right in on the mass PvP and contribute... just don't go running into the melee pit and "spamming attack" like an idiot. If your opportunistic and willing to travel the the other races newbies lands yourself, you can and will get kills on players near the same skill level as yourself, and its a ridiculous amount of fun.
I even killed a dude in full bone/scale because I waited in the shadows for the right moment to pounce while he was fighting mobs. That guy probably had several months on me considering the spells he was using, and I came away with a fat haul, probably worth almost half of my entire bank. Talk about heart pumping, I felt like a lone lion stalking an elephant.
Most people don't want to take the time to bring PvP to their level. They simply want it handed to them on a silver platter. Go out and make fights that are fair to you happen, don't just wait for it to fall in your lap.
If you can't find your place in Darkfall PvP then its because your being retarded and trying to fight exceedingly more powerful characters head on. That's dumb, and you deserve to die. You keep applauding a tactical type of combat, yet when you played Darkfall you simply bashed your head against the wall.
I don't have much experience in Shadow Bane but i can speak on why UO was a great PvP game and why we may not every see it again.....
1. Keep it Simple Stupid
The genious of UO was its simplicity. FACT: Its much easier to balance a game (PvP in particular) when you have less variables to deal with. UO has 3 basic stats that effect 3 basic attributes. Your either some variation of a Mage or some variation of a Warrior.
UO didn't have to deal with all the stats, attributes, classes (and specs within each class) that all the new MMORPGs use as a selling point to differentiate their game from the previous. The trend seems to be to increase all these things to increase the perception of unique character individualization....not less.
The simplified structure of UO had much to do why it was one of the most balanced PvPing experiences in any MMO to date.
2. ItemLESS Centric System
Items in Ultima Online were things that gave you an "edge" in combat, not the main determinate of a PvP encounter. A undergeared player had an honest shot at killing a better geared player if the undergeared player knew how to play his/her toon better.
Player skill wasn't defined as your knowledge of what stat mods you needed for your gear....it was all about knowledge of your character and your ability to counter attacks.
Modern MMOs have put items and gear as the main focus and measuring stick for progression and as a result have put a HUGE emphesis on the items you have and less on your ability to play your toon vs. other class types.
3. Last but not least.....General Melee & Casting Mechanics
Casting mechanics were MUCH about putting together spell combos and countering combos with a focus on timing and interuptions.
If a player gets hit while casting, its interupted. You can't heal through poision (have to cure before you can heal). This keeps people from just healing through damage taken and just dumping tons of spells uninterupted on a player. You had to be VERY concious of what the other player is doing and react quickly and accordingly.
Thanks for this. I think you nailed it. UO PvP was a masterpiece once you figured out how to play the game.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
How can you call it wrong? Read it again:
"Non-skill factors like population (zerging) and verticle progression each have a weight they add to battle."
Note the emphasis.
"Weight" refers to the relative value of each factor, in terms of how important it is to winning:
Notice how skill is now more important? Skill was not unimportant in the first example, but it's more important in the second. That's what I'm getting at.
Any game where you can gang up on players with uneven teams makes population a factor. I seriously doubt UO was this magical PVP eden where every battle was a fair 1v1, 2v2, etc fight. Maybe unfair fights were rare (the weight was low) but they still probably happened to a degree.
You seriously should try some real PvP game. Have you played anything else besides WoW?
I seriously doub that hehe
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
I have to disagree with you a bit on the UO thing.....
Yes, Ultima "World PvP" was primarily group PvP. If you rolled out SOLO, you understood that odds weren't in your favor to start with and assumed all risks associated. As a result, players banned together and formed PvP clans. (In a MMORPG...go figure)
But even SOLO, I've seen players take on 2 or 3 at one time because they were just that good.
The interface wasn't much different than WOWs in that it was fully customizable and allowed you to put buttons for skills and spells anywhere on the screen that you wanted to. It wasn't very hotkey friendly and required more clicking (c'mon....its like 12 years old), but otherwise allowed for more customization than any other interface until World of Warcraft.
I don't know what your talking about as far as scripts go. The only legal 3rd party app that was allowed was UOAssist and its macroing capabilities were VERY limited and completely useless in PvP.
BTW: Lineage 2 PvP was one of the most imbalanced PvP games I've ever played. I loved its PvP Endgame with the Castle Siege and FFA system (Which coincidently was VERY similar to UO's faction system and FFA notiery system).
But the game was so heavily item based and had so many balance issues with classes that it was far from one of the better PvP games as far as actual fighting goes.
Having never touched UO at it's prime nor shadowbane (although it was a faint echo in my past when it actually made it to the eastern market).
PvP can't exist in a themepark without 'gear' dependence, which in turn requires alot of your time in order to get these said gear, then comes the fact that there is the endless feud that exists between rock and paper, paper and scissor, scissor and rock, paper and scissor... so on so on..
That system can goto hell, if one must rely on gear before skill, it simply defies the concept of equal oppurtunity for players, and without equality there comes a bigger rift than that from class disputes.
In sandbox, where skill comes before 'gear', I'd say people would have fair chance, only I have really not much experience in sandbox, but I'm sure there are alot of problems that plague sandbox pvp as well...
All in all, it comes down to the players, the dumb and the ones who can actually process cohesive thoughts.
I don't even know what I'm talking about now
Might want to go back to post 95 where I respond to his unnecessary personal jab, before adding your own personal jab.
Trying to get an accurate count of the hundreds/thousands of different PVP games I've played over the years would be a waste of my time. Inevitably if someone's shallow enough to think that argument matters, they're shallow enough that an exact game count (which would invariably be far superior to their own) would fail to convince them of their wrongness.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
AC1 Darktide had the best PvP in MMO's, and I do mean PvP not RvR or any other forms of PvP. You really had to have played AC1 during the early 2000's to know why it was so good.
The game was wide open, totally non-instanced. It had full item loot, fps-style combat, you as a player choose where to put your exp points into rather than have the game choose it for you.
Sadly those days are long gone, but I would love to play it again if they ever upgrade their engine, interface, graphics, and start a new PvP server.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
I have to disagree with you a bit on the UO thing.....
Yes, Ultima "World PvP" was primarily group PvP. If you rolled out SOLO, you understood that odds weren't in your favor to start with and assumed all risks associated. As a result, players banned together and formed PvP clans. (In a MMORPG...go figure)
But even SOLO, I've seen players take on 2 or 3 at one time because they were just that good.
The interface wasn't much different than WOWs in that it was fully customizable and allowed you to put buttons for skills and spells anywhere on the screen that you wanted to. It wasn't very hotkey friendly and required more clicking (c'mon....its like 12 years old), but otherwise allowed for more customization than any other interface until World of Warcraft.
I don't know what your talking about as far as scripts go. The only legal 3rd party app that was allowed was UOAssist and its macroing capabilities were VERY limited and completely useless in PvP.
BTW: Lineage 2 PvP was one of the most imbalanced PvP games I've ever played. I loved its PvP Endgame with the Castle Siege and FFA system (Which coincidently was VERY similar to UO's faction system and FFA notiery system).
But the game was so heavily item based and had so many balance issues with classes that it was far from one of the better PvP games as far as actual fighting goes.
You could wrangle up some pretty interesting things with UO assist if you creative enough
PVP in UO came down to what you Knew and timing. In melee you were auto hits and once you had your target it was auto cast. So It really came down to the other guy being able to chain his stuff better than you could. Or just make a Lumber Axer and hack at them mindlessly. But honestly If I put it up against Guild Wars it pales in comparison. Guild Wars is my Personal choice for most skill, but most tend to think its AC or L2, either way having played UO I dont even think its as skill based as DAOC honestly.
But honestly on a 2d top down view game in which case most mages will walk right into sight of you long enough to precast, if your not on constant paranoia alert they will kill you by default unless your crappy magic resist kicks in ( hah hah hah). That just doesnt yell skill to me.
Guild wars on the other hand you could have a battle last seconds meanwhile everyone in the group has casted or done numerous skills or spells debuffed, rebuffed, dpsed, you name it. it is twitch reaction plus strategy and far more deminsional than UO ever was. So again UO pvp in my mind from experience is over rated by a long shot.
You could do some things in UOAssist if you knew before hand what your chain of skills/spells were going to be. Because UO PvP was very much a read-and-react type system....macroing made it kind of pointless because tactics were so easy to counter.
For instance...it wouldn't make much sense for me to create a macro that casted a combo of spells in succession because the person I'm fighting might counter it by interupting me or launching into a combo of their own that would require me to either cure or heal myself. You NEEDED the flexibility of doing things manually to react to whats coming at you the right way.
Also, alot of people are making a huge deal out of the precasting and crazy mage power. I was never dead by default when I fought mages LOL If you did a good enough job at forcing a mage to go on defence, the first precasted spell was trivial.....expecially if you were fighting with a group of people that understood the importance of CROSS HEALING.
Few points regarding the top-down look in UO. For all its faults, it had some benefits.
Considering that most combat was mounted, the limited top down look allowed players that were in a ganking situation escape if they were good enough at navigating through the trees and around houses. As soon as you got out of Line of Sight, it was REALLY easy to loose someone.....something that would have been MUCH harder to do in a modern 360 degree horizion POV.
It also allowed players (like I mentioned above) take on other players in a situation where they might be outnumbered. I can't tell you how many times I've seen one of my buddies take out a group of 2-3 guys by seperating them in a chase and then picking them apart.
I was watching a special on wolves last night where the camera guy was in a helecopter or something and the top down view allowed you to see how the pack of wolves used flanking tactics and applied pressure from certian directions to force the prey into range of one of the other wolves.
That reminded me of some experiences in UO. We hunted in groups and would have flankers that attempted to reign in the target we were chasing. Thats a whole area of tactical fighting that the new world of 360 degree camera views hasn't been able to reproduce.
Well the OP made the post stating UO & SB were great because it took less time leveling....in a nutshell. While AC had tons of levels at launch, it didn't affect the PvP gameplay. In fact the PvP game mechanics actually worked in AC because a lvl 70 back in the days could kill a lvl 100+. When you have that in a PvP game, you know you did something right. I won't credit Turbine too much because they really didn't expect PvP to take off in AC. But here's a great example of how a game not exactly made for PvP ending up being one of the best PvP MMO's even to this date. It just sorta worked out.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
Not completely true......most people didn't randomly kill other players for no reason.
There WERE people who had player killer characters that were flagged as murderers (Reds).......and as a result there were whole guilds of Anti-PKs that hunted down the PKs. (Blue vs Red Wars)
If that wasn't structured enough for you, there was an Order / Chaos faction system that allowed you to fight for the forces of Lord British (Order) or fight for Lord Blackthorn (Chaos). Once again, you had this Good vs. Evil faction like system.
If you needed MORE imersion into lore (and more meaningful PvP) there was the Faction System. 4 Factions that fought over control of the main cities; that yielded tangible rewards for your efforts (Access to special mounts, weapons, armor, traps, guards, vendors, etc.) Each faction had their own story and background into the Ultima Lore.
Hell....your guild could declare war on any other guild if you didn't want to have anything to do with all the other different types of team based PvP systems.
Most Random Blue on Blue PvPing (Two innocent players fighting eachother) happend because someome was griefing or running off at the mouth. And it didn't happen often for those people who didn't want to flag their character as a murderer because of the murder counts.
The reason I like the FFA PvP system is that it doesn't pigeon hole you into a specific box like the RvR or FvF games do. I create a Horde character and I have to put up with all the a-holes on the Horde faction who grief and talk smack because there is nothing I can do about it.
It also doesn't allow guilds to change sides if there are too many people fighting for one cause. One of the greatist things about Lineage 2 (who had a similar FFA system to UO) was all of the politics and struggles to hold alliances together......else they turn on you for a sweeter opprotunity. You can't do those things in WOW or Warhammer......your stuck with the team you initially joined.
I dont know why I came in here not expecting another lame "good old days" nostalgic post. Set myself up for disappointment, so let me get this straight. Those games are OUTDATED. They are no longer fun to today's standards, and PLENTY of mmo' have better PvP than them.
Shadowbane is definitely on the winner list.
Lineage 2's only strong point was probably PvP. I constantly hear horror stories about the grind, lol.
That's the funny thing. Private servers were probably more successful then retail. Retail was amazing if you played from the start leveling and trying to catch up was what killed it. But If you took all of L2's private servers (high and low rates) which people played purely to pvp the player numbers would probably rival Wow's community.
Any credibility Lineage 2 had for PvP was a direct result of its Castle Siege Territory System (which is very similar to UO's Faction System) and its FFA system (which is very similar to UO's FFA notiery system).
As far as class balance and gear dependency goes.....TERRIBLE. NCSoft gave up on balancing all of the classes and just let one or two of all the classes have their 15 mintues of fame at the top of the hill until the next expansion rolled out.
XP loss on death was a terrible design considering that the PvE required to get the XP back was a BRUTAL grind. They essentially punished PvPers by making you PvE. And when I talk about PvE....I don't mean running some quests or dungeons. I mean sitting in a random field with level appropriate monsters and killing them OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER for hours.
With all that said, the PvP endgame was by far one of the better PvP experiences I've had since UO, despite the poor class design.