Crowfall

Draegan_sl said:

People who play elves and dwarves games always forget about EVE.

Click to expand...

Most people have been asking for Eve in fantasy land for years. But for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet.

It's a lot harder to translate the Eve experience to a rpg map than you realize. All kinds of basic gameplay elements are totally different and have to be redesigned. It isn't just "put Eve rules on a WoW map".

So it isn't a matter of forgetting but more a matter of "prove it".

Jackdaddio_sl said:

I do get anyone will playanywell-made game. By any chance, do you happen to know if water is wet, too?

I'm just trying to address the issue thatalwayskills PvP games and why most are shit because I think most are flawed from the start in how they build them; imbalance that's built in from the core with over-reliance on weapon/gear statting.

I think that at the endgame of PvP (keeps/territory/objectives) if all players skill is equal (being maxed) and all weapons are the same (no stats) and it's all about numbers/strategy/skill, then people would have a better sense of pride if they showed up in battles (or after them) looking like this:

Click to expand...

First I assume you mean just MMOs.

In the successful PVP games out there, and there are hardly any, gear inflation was not a huge issue. Every game that "always kills PVP" is basically a game that was designed to be a PVE game first. Even in a game like Archage, which is a terrible PVP game, it was designed to be a PvX type of game. Almost sandbox, with a lot of carebear stuff in it.

Yep, I agree. But until someone actually does manage to create the "Eve fantasy mmo", it's just term people throw out without thinking through the devilish details.

Grim1_sl said:

Most people have been asking for Eve in fantasy land for years. But for whatever reason it hasn't happened yet.

It's a lot harder to translate the Eve experience to a rpg map than you realize. All kinds of basic gameplay elements are totally different and have to be redesigned. It isn't just "put Eve rules on a WoW map".

So it isn't a matter of forgetting but more a matter of "prove it".

Click to expand...

The main reason that it hasn't happened yet is because quest treadmill/themepark MMOs were/are proven quantities. It's easy to design those games from a macro point of view because you already have a list of boxes to check off.

It's not that difficult the translate the Eve experience to a Fantasty Map. These guys did it with robots:PERPETUUMwhich is a nearly exact copy of EVE. It's harder to get money to do it because it's, like you said, not proven. Ultimately you need to duplicate EVE's tenants. Horizontal power, not vertical. Territory Control. Game play space for both casual and hardcore players. Crafters and PVPers and an economy that brings them all together. You need a space where the miners/pvers can play that doesn't effect the PVPers but they feed off each other.

And that is if you want it in a persistent world.

Crowfall is only interesting to me because of the Campaign system to be honest. That's the number one key feature for me.

Draegan_sl said:

First I assume you mean just MMOs.

In the successful PVP games out there, and there are hardly any, gear inflation was not a huge issue. Every game that "always kills PVP" is basically a game that was designed to be a PVE game first. Even in a game like Archage, which is a terrible PVP game, it was designed to be a PvX type of game. Almost sandbox, with a lot of carebear stuff in it.

Click to expand...

Yep. MMOs. PvP on any other scale is almost exactly suited for size so balance doesn't matter as much (meaning 3v3, 6v6, 12v12). Small scale battle maps are relatively easy to do outside of an MMO environment I think.

Now a disclosure: I'm primarily a PvE player in MMOs. PvP bores me partly because of how it's set up and partly because of how it almost always ends up; with 1 really good battle after sitting through 20 other shit battles of imba where dedicated PvPers flourish and only get stronger until there's really no reason for me to join just to be farmed. I know I'm not the only type of this player (also referred to lovingly as carebear).

What could possibly make me want to join any PvP centric game that's 90% built on this blueprint? None... at least that I would stay long term. And then I look at those PvP centric games and almost every one of them fail providing that 'hardcore' experience catering to PvP players. So these devs have no chance of ever making any real money off the sheeple (carebears) because we will leave or never buy the box in the first place, and then the people they target... the "Fuck Yeahs!" of the gaming world end up leaving their games in less than a year as well. They really need to re-think how to put a system where carebear/farmed players and the Ubermensch can co-exist. Problem I see is it always fails because 'strong man get stronger!' and that's because there's an initial race for weapons and a proliferation with each new update that's impossible to climb.

I doubt anyone will ever make a PvP game where the ultimate prize for killing other players in a fair battle is looting non-statted, great looking gear/weapons because group-think is that will never work. But I do think that if carebears (read: more potential cash for your game) understood that when they lose it's not because the other faction will always have better weapons than them and will rob their shit weapons after they die (thus further weakening them), they might start to turn an interest into trying it when they realize they only have 'looks' to lose when going after objectives.

I've been both a PVP player and a PVE player in my time with these online games. I think you just don't have the experience or the knowledge of the PVP player base to make some of these assumptions.

Your experience as you describe is at being farmed by PVPers that only get stronger is essentially what happens in games like Archeage where gear is not dropped and the more farmed you get the more powerful you get and the less riskier things become. A well designed PVP game allows for the undergeared or newer player have a role in any PVP fight. EVE does this really really well. Look up tacklers.

I can site some very old MUDs from the 90s that had some really great PVP design to them. If you're curious, try to find Owen Emlen's code base from back in the day. You might be able to find something if you google it with MPV (Mid POint Void) LOC (Lands of Chaos) ROP (Rites of Passage). Probably the best DIKU based pvp game I ever played and that was like 20 years ago.

I think your expectations for a game are completely not in sync with a PVP game. You want a totally different experience, which is fine because you have a lot of games out there to play around with.

If you want to make a good PVP game, then you have to design a game for player vs player and design the proper player experience. You fail once you ask "What can we do to bring PVE players in to this game to broaden our audience?" Once you do that you dilute your product and no one wants to play it.

Draegan_sl said:

I've been both a PVP player and a PVE player in my time with these online games. I think you just don't have the experience or the knowledge of the PVP player base to make some of these assumptions.

Click to expand...

As a novice, I wholeheartedly accept this premise.

That sad thing is even all the people with the 'experience and knowledge of the PvP playerbase' don't seem to be doing any better than I could based on the history of PvP mmos, save one or two. And that seems to be devs AND players apparently.

Save one or two, there haven't been any PVP mmos worth discussing because the games are shit on a fundamental level. Fundamental meaning their servers and engine sucked.

Tuco_sl said:

Well then come play with us in PRX in Crowfall and manage that bullshit!

Anytime you add a logistical burden it helps guilds like PRX that do organization really well. The reason I'm so against it is because I know what it's like to organize that stuff in many games and know that we'll organize it very carefully and robustly. I just don't want to spend time doing it.

The #1 solution to enabling small guilds to exist is to have small events that small groups of players can participate in that are competitive with large events in terms of reward.

If you make it so that Unobtanium allows crafting of the highest tier gear and it only comes from one place and the guild that owns it will be able to monopolize it, then there will be a lot of pressure on hardcore players to join that guild. The competing guilds will band together, then a massive war breaks out to fight over the Unobtanium mine and boom, your system has large guilds/alliances.

If instead you make it so there are many ways to get Unobtanium, then it's just a matter of finding the optimal time vs risk vs reward decision of where to go and who to group with. Large guilds have the problem where it can be hard to accomplish multiple goals at a time because often when a given clique finds some success everyone wants to pile in and split the resources thinly and when they refuse drama happens and that can drop cohesion. A small group of players can take on a small source of unobtanium and get rewarded a lot because they are splitting the resources only amongst a small number of people.

However you're never going to really enable small groups of players to compete with large guilds. You shouldn't focus on that but should focus on how to offer opportunities for hardcore players to gain competitively wealth and play in small groups.

Click to expand...

I disagree. You create small events or whatever for small guilds, that just means large guilds will zerg rush them and take them over.

In order to kill the large guild, you need a to be able to kill the zerg. There are a lot of "ifs" in this, but if the physics engine holds up, player collision holds up etc. Then zerging is just asking for trouble. Not only that, if you take away the ability to respawn and just pop back in to the fight with no problem, you'll see a lot less riskiness when it comes to fights.

To your point on Unobtanium, you're right. You have to have several methods to obtain it. If a guild manages to control all of them, good for that guild. But there cant be only one way.

Draegan_sl said:

Save one or two, there haven't been any PVP mmos worth discussing because the games are shit on a fundamental level. Fundamental meaning their servers and engine sucked.

Click to expand...

I think, even more fundamentally, they've been shitbecausethey're PvP MMOs. They're just too narrowly scoped for games in the worldy MMO category.

uniqueuser_sl said:

I think, even more fundamentally, they've been shitbecausethey're PvP MMOs. They're just too narrowly scoped for games in the worldy MMO category.

Click to expand...

That's pretty much not correct at all. Let's make a list of "PVP" MMOs and see where they stand

WAR - Aweful engine, server build, game design. Had some really good points but overall execution was dreadful.
AOC - Broken. Fun for the short term, but broken.
Aion - Crazy Korean game not designed well for the US. Also broke when there were a lot of people on the screen. Was more PVE anyway thatn PVP.
GW2 - Completely unsupported, partially broken, all dev time was put into the PVE end of things.
ESO - Heh, nameplates
Darkfall - Really shitty game. Had great and interesting elements, ultimately run by a shit company where the game was full of scripts and exploits and no one cared.

You can go on and on. A lot of these games where just shitty by design where the flaws were obvious from the get go. PVP games are extremely popular. 2 of the top 5 grossing games online last year were League of Legends and World of Tanks (1 and 5 respectfully) so that goes to show you that people like fighting against each other. We just haven't seen a well design pvp mmo yet. Has nothing to do with being a pvp mmo fundamentally.

Tuco_sl said:

The reason why small events can work is that if a large guild sends 50 people to collect a resource intended for 5 people, each person is generating 10% of the wealth they otherwise could. As the scarcity of the resource increases, the average number of players needed to collect the resource increases as well, but at some level a 5 man group that loses to a roaming zerg can still make more wealth per person than the players in the roaming zerg.

Click to expand...

That's bullshit though. When PRX was going for a castle in AA everyone was gathering stone and shit that didn't benefit them personally at all, it benefitted the guild as a whole. So if you're fighting in a resource heavy game, then all resources are valuable to the continued success of the guild. So they'll go after all of them no matter what.

God... archeage... what a terrible game.

Jackdaddio_sl said:

As a novice, I wholeheartedly accept this premise.

That sad thing is even all the people with the 'experience and knowledge of the PvP playerbase' don't seem to be doing any better than I could based on the history of PvP mmos, save one or two. And that seems to be devs AND players apparently.

Click to expand...

You're assuming Devs actually play these games. Let alone well enough to have educated opinions on things.

The only devs I've ever seen play their own game on a scale well enough to be recognized was Matt Higby over at Planetside 2 and the boyz at Path of Exile (GGG). Out of all the games I've played ever.

Most of the shitty games listed on this page are pushed by the Breakfast Club Dev group who literally don't give a fuck about what it takes to make a good game. Let alone be bothered to even make it to max level in one of them.

Tuco_sl said:

The castles in AA are a good instance of how large goals make large groups of people. Because the content is only available to large groups of people it's a motivating factor for people to gravitate together. The stone gathering was an extreme example of scarcity because you had some 800 people trying to mine nodes that you'd need 10 people minimum to mine effectively. Note that Teljair was mining those nodes like a boss and got like half our ore.

However, the small group activities, doing tradeship runs, doing instance runs, piracy etc give no reason to be in a large guild. And given that these activities make up the bulk of the time spent by players there is a lot less pressure on players to join a large guild in ArcheAge than in other games. That's why PRX is the only large guild on Kyrios, and I think one of the few large guilds in ArcheAge NA.

If the current large-group-requiring events like castles and a few PvE bosses didn't exist, you'd see even less pressure to group up, and the game would have an even higher distribution of small group sized players.

Click to expand...

My point is that winning a campaign is very much like building your castle. Especially when you're building your own castle inside the campaign! A guild like PRX is going to make sure they have coverage throughout the day through an alliance, fealty or whatever means they can to make sure as many resources are theirs and dominate the map. Valid way of playing btw and good for you if you can achieve that.

So how does a small guild succeed. Be good enough to be noticed by PRX and swear fealty and try to reap the benefits. That's all I can think of.

Vitality_sl said:

You're assuming Devs actually play these games. Let alone well enough to have educated opinions on things.

The only devs I've ever seen play their own game on a scale well enough to be recognized was Matt Higby over at Planetside 2 and the boyz at Path of Exile (GGG). Out of all the games I've played ever.

Click to expand...

I've never seen a lead dev or senior dev that was ultimately really good at the game. Maybe the original WOW team did a good job with their shit, but that's all I could think of. Maybe Riot too.