Black Desert

The game might swing more towards UO/EVE and not DIKU, losing stuff is part of the experience.

Furry_sl said:

people always say this shit in every game, and ive played hardcore pvp games a long time.

I'm gonna assume you don't play pvp games, because the majority of people who say this shit don't. What do you mean just design pvp to be more small scale? You fucking cant if its open world.

Nobody has ever come up with a system that both lets people participate in pvp freely (an absolute requirement of open world) and caters to small scale pvp. You -CAN NOT- combine the two. Its one or the other, unless you are a game design genius that surpasses all previous designers ever.

Click to expand...

Why not? Just create aoe's that punish zergs.

Furry_sl said:

people always say this shit in every game, and ive played hardcore pvp games a long time.

I'm gonna assume you don't play pvp games, because the majority of people who say this shit don't. What do you mean just design pvp to be more small scale? You fucking cant if its open world.

Nobody has ever come up with a system that both lets people participate in pvp freely (an absolute requirement of open world) and caters to small scale pvp. You -CAN NOT- combine the two. Its one or the other, unless you are a game design genius that surpasses all previous designers ever.

Click to expand...

Easy. First you design objectives that can be completed with small groups and ones that can only be handled by larger ones. A small group objective might be something like, sabotaging a stockpile to reduce the enemy faction's war resources. A large group objective would be to defend a keep from invasion.

Now to prevent the small groups from getting slaughtered by the zergs, you give players options to be able to be all stealthy and shit. Give them the ability to move silently, and quickly. The ability to wear appropriately colored clothing to blend into their surroundings. Regardless of what class they are. Also, give them an environment with all kinds of decent places to hide and navigate around. Make these stealth options have trade offs. You can't wear heavy armors, you can't cast giant flaming balls of death, You can't carry much weight for you inventory... ect. So you sacrifice combat prowess for the ability to go unnoticed.

Have the small scale missions potentially require lots of support and secondary skills. Lockpicking, scouting, whatever. So a team of players who decides they want to take on these missions are really going to have to plan their gear and skill load outs to make sure they have their bases covered.

This results in two major groups of players working together for their side. Small groups of highly coordinated commando types that take on special missions behind enemy lines, and general issue heroes that hold those lines by defending strategic points. That's small scale and large scale PvP occurring in the same open world simultaneously. Granted the large scale PvP is sort of the default pvp and the small scale stuff is for people who decide to specialize in it and organize for it. But I think that is the way it should be anyways.

if your going to make a game with an open world and open pvp, you dont want to design it around small groups. politics happens and becomes a big part of these games and has an effect on a large amount of the playerbase. its also the big equalizer for guilds that cant compete in these environments on their own. If your 10 people cant win enough fights to make it worthwhile, they need an out or they all leave the game.

Furry_sl said:

You say that like it works. It doesn't and hasn't. You can't tailor things to small groups. You say make these commando targets because they'd only be doable by small groups, WHY? why would only small groups be able to do them. If a 1-3 man command force can take them, why wouldn't a 40 man commando force want to go after them? The problem with ideas like you are saying is that the only way to stop a zerg from doing the exact same thing is to make these points entirely worthless beyond the satisfaction of having them, which defeats the entire purpose. Any other scenario makes it so an objective that takes 3 people to take is better done with 20, and thus 20 people will go do it.

That's why so many of these mmo pvp games end up being absolutely shit, there's nothing to fight over.

Games need to push toward the direction that PVP areas have importance, and this importance isn't some shitty buff. The best places to play, to farm, to do things are in the pvp areas, and the pve starting realms are worthless shit that lets you get into hobo gear for the real world. If you want pvp to matter, force people to go into it if they want to be good, make money. Forcing people who don't pvp to move around in the world provides targets for commando style players. These targets aren't objectives and they don't have some map objective value, but pvpers like to know they fuck some joe blow over, and thats exactly what you'd do killing them.

This is why darkness falls worked so damn wall in daoc, this is what made pvp on rallos zek relevant. This is an idea that eve latched onto. Unfortunately, most mmos have moved away from making pvp matter, and all this crap about SMALL GROUP OBJECTIVES WURRDUR is the wrong direction. You need to make pvp itself matter, then create enough chaos that small groups can create their own objectives, not try to ham fist something that you think should exist in for no real reason, especially since its intrinsically doomed to fail from conception.

Click to expand...

I agree that pvp needs to be important, to the point where players are incapable of accomplishing any worthwhile goal without participating in it. In an open world pvp setting that is pretty crucial.

Now why would you send a small force and not a zerg for these alternative objectives? Because sending a zerg gets you and everyone you are zerging with noticed. Now you have a massive fight occurring over a minimally important node leaving the keeps, castles, or points of interest in the area, that require defending or attacking, vulnerable or under utilized. Any objective based pvp suffers greatly from zerg tactics, provided the populations are relatively even in distribution and participation. But even then, in a scenario that requires divided attention or forces... the zerg loses.

However there should be no hard restrictions on the maximum number people allowed to participate in any action. Only a minimum number should be contemplated. If players can achieve their goals using the minimum number, or by chance and skill a number less than that, then their forces are operating at peak efficiency; and efficiency is the heart of successful PvP. Why send 10 when 5 will do?

I think every objective can and should be broken down into parts. Many of these parts being completely optional. The more organized and coordinated the players are, the more quickly and efficiently they are able to perform these mini tasks, the better their overall chances of achieving their goal become. All pvp breaks down into small group actions when people are on their A game anyways, even when all of those groups are in the same vicinity. Being able to have people rapidly break off and spread out to find runners or stealthers or secure objectives and then group up again for a big defense or push is critical to efficient pvp.

So yes you can throw 100 people at every objective in the game if you like... But unless the sever populations are hideously unbalanced, the other side or sides will be doing the same, and then it all becomes moot as then you simply use the forces required to win the objective. But any smart game will want to figure out what is optimal for server population so they can then design for the averages that should result from that.

The more complex and involved the process of achieving victory becomes, the more organized and dedicated the people who wish to achieve it must become. Creating content for different sized forces that all leads to the same goal is a natural part of that.

This debate is an excellent reminder of how fucking hard it is to design an open world pvp system that works, is fun, and is popular. Especially in a fantasy mmo.

You really don't understand what I am trying to illustrate. So I will get slightly more specific.

Take the traditional keep siege. The way I see it, is the Keep should directly confer some benefit to the players that makes them want to hold it. Without this benefit, continued activity in the region becomes difficult to impossible. Holding the keep could allow players to respawn there when they die. Otherwise players respawn in the next nearest region or home city or whatever.

The keep is outfitted with several defenses the players can capitalize on. Namely walls, gates, murderholes, moats, siege equipment ect. Coupled with the ability to respawn right inside the keep and now you have this layered defense that needs to be picked away at. Maybe the keep has a throne room or some other device that conveys control to whoever manages to access it. Now, a sizeable force could simply throw themselves against the walls of the fortress in hopes of overwhelming the defenders, but this is an inefficient and crude method that will require vastly superior numbers to succeed. Or the attacking group can start whittling down the defenses of the keep until they have been stripped away, thus making victory much easier to achieve. That is what I meant by optional. It should never be a hard requirement to collapse all of the defenses of a keep in order to take it.

The process by which these various defenses are neutralized differ. Walls can be scaled, or tunneled under, or demolished. Siege equipment can be sabotaged or countered with other siege engines. Gate houses can be infiltrated or gates can be beaten down ect. If supply lines are cut off... then the available number of respawns/reinforcements will dwindle and eventually the defenders will wither. None of these actions are required to take the keep, but they can greatly increases the chances of victory for those who wish to adopt or counter these defenses.

This is all been done before and is rather straight forward. The benefits of performing these actions and the rate at which these events take place over the same ground are where people burn out. I really hate the concept of instanced BG's. It ensures mindless repetition. So I would rather see these control structures to exist right there in the game world. If people are out there fighting for control of a region, it's going to get hairy for anyone trying to operate in that region.

So the keep confers the benefit of being able to maintain a presence in a region. This allows the players of that faction to determine who is permitted to operate there. The actual benefit of controlling the region is essentially being able to play there, and engage in all the activities the region offers, relatively unmolested.

So everything a player can do and everywhere they can go, without having to be covert, is determined by this regional pvp combat. I don't think the other regions should ever be locked out, but I think it should be very difficult for players to be able to operate in them without first controlling them.

Now increasing the number of activities that can be engaged in that contribute to the regional pvp, and providing activities that cater to groups of varying sizes is not this impossible task. Setting up defenses, and performing covert operations to soften up targets ahead of a main assault force are both things that can be done by small groups or individuals. These are essentially pre combat actions. To try and undertake them in the middle of an conflict would not provide nearly as much benefit. The Zerg may never die, but the faction that lays traps for it or prepares the way for it will do much better overall.

Furry_sl said:

Beliefs like yours are what perpetuate the awful pvp games of the future.

You say you want to make targets for the little man, support pvp for the little man, yet your entire core concept is based around giving an established force a massive advantage, making it much harder for invaders, and designing around the idea that power is a crutch to be undone.

Ideas like this are why virtually every pvp game becomes worthless, or quickly stacked on one side. Make it so those in power keep power, and people will flood to the side that has the power. These sort of things do absolutely nothing to help the little man or make covert operations in any way better. The scenarios you described about weakening defenses. If 5 people could do it, why not 100 people doing it at once? The zerg always wins when they have objectives to fight over.

Click to expand...

So what you are saying is the perfect pvp game is a giant blank space, sort of like the construct in the Matrix, where 10,000 naked people beat the shit out of each other for no reason other than to say they did. The moment anything is introduced into this space, a tree, a rock, a pair of pants... this produces a clear and unfair advantage to whoever can utilize it best and dilutes the purity of the pvp experience.

My example gave no advantage to anyone, it presented some theoretical tools for defense AND tools for offense. If only one side decides to utilize the tools appropriate to their objective, then yes they will have a massive advantage, as they should. As I said earlier, PVP is about efficiency. If 5 people could do it, but you send 100, that's inefficient and the war effort for that faction is going to suffer greatly elsewhere, where those player resources could be better applied. This is assuming near even populations on all sides of a conflict.

Rolling around in a giant mob capping points is a basic tactic that is easily undermined. It's way too easy to out maneuver, back cap and marginalize in just about any objective based setting.

When holding territory or completing objectives becomes less efficient than an alternative method of resource acquisition, then players will shift tactics to maximize their time to reward ratio. If it becomes more efficient to continually cap points and recap them, rather than holding them, then players will run around in a zerg. If getting player kills is more efficient than holding territory, then players will constantly race each other to find the next enemy first. Reward structures, more than any other design element, will make or break the desire to zerg.

In my example I would go a step further than simply providing a static backdrop for players to squabble over. I would want to give the players some freedom in the placement of defenses, and design of structures. It would have to be limited, or there would have to be design considerations to prevent unassailable objectives and unsolvable challenges. But giving the players the ability to enhance their physical setting is no different than giving them ability to select appropriate skills or gear, provided the opposing force has access to appropriate counters.

And a last bit about designing for small groups and large groups in the same area; It is possible to simply design regions that are too confined or specialized in method of access to feasibly send 100 people. You wind up with a three stooges syndrome where everyone is trying to jam through the door at once and are constantly getting into each other's way. There are plenty of real world examples where having too many people in one spot reduces effectiveness. Adopting a few of these could naturally limit the number of players required for a specific objective.

dont punish groups for wanting a large playerbase. Give players control. They want to zerg up a bunch of points? Let them, that makes a lot of enemies and traditionally the enemy of my enemy is my friend thinking comes into play and dissolves the zerg slowly. The problem open world pvp games have is keeping the playerbase of that zerg once theyve been defeated.

If you remove mobility from potential defenders (which I agree is a good idea) in a keep setting, you end up with needing people to defend something that's not actually under attack, or at least watch over it Patrol the vicinity and what have you. How do you add entertainment to those tasks so they're actually done by players, instead of two zergs swapping empty keeps because nobody can be bothered to stand on a castle parapet watching tv. Hey maybe thats a niche for the old eq crowd.

You can replace keep with anything else of value though. Call it a mine if you want. It's something to fight over. Unless you have nothing to fight over at all, see matrix comment above.

That said to add a solution, if hamfisted, I would increases attack potency of at least some AEs against groups, like giving everyone buffs that detonate again 5-10 seconds later. A small team can deal with it, a zerg will just blow itself up. Not exactly subtle but works. So does AE mez with unlimited targets, but we're never seeing CC on that scale again. People would rather die then be CCed.

Simply adding friendly fire and not having tab targeting would be hilarious too, and naturally limit the amount of firepower both sides can bring to bear at least in melee. But then, friendly fire... yea.