Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

PVP is the money, with a hint of pve raid encounters for a nice relaxing break.

The game that can make it so damn cool for everyone to watch tournament battles from live pvp feeds will take it all. The other company is already walking down that path, but I still reckon it's up for grabs because of their graphical style making it all look so childish and immature.

Make the game not so much an MMO, but a battle for your sanity with greasy fast speed. Have your own YouTube type network playing scheduled team battles, have some annoying prick doing the commentary *the more annoying the better*. Throw in some slick dark spawn style graphics, with hardcore publicity of the none geek looking star players, draw out a couple of figurehead rival types for the drama, bring it all to a simmer and just watch it explode over the net.

On a more serious note, you have to admire Curt going down the path already well worn.

That type of competition just doesn"t work in MMOs.

The whole fun of PVP in an MMO is using your achievements and items you"ve obtained to decimate other players. This goes against the very ethics of competition, because a proper competition requires that both sides are equal. You couldn"t have proper hosted tournaments if Billy has better gear than Joe, otherwise fans just whine about how it wasn"t an even match.

This is why, now that they are going for the e-sport tournament stuff, you see WoW offering premade level 70s with a set of gear to choose from - they have to put everyone on an even playing field. In this way, it"s really not any different from Quake or Counter-Strike, and totally removes the MMO element from the game. What"s the point?

The reason UO was one of the best PVP games ever made was gear mattered very little. A good vanq weapon was about it for melee. As long as you had a bag full of reags you were good to go. But once you remove the gear aspect, you kill most of your PVE game. At that point, why not just make a fantasy FPS?

Your tournament characters would be set on a different server, only for events. Status and prestige points would be transferred over to your main character so you can buy equipment, titles, or whatever. You would still be able to pvp, and practise team work etc with that toon on the normal servers. Tournaments would be separate, and the toons pre-equipped, the only option you would have is your choice of class.

It wouldn"t negate the point of it being in an MMO, because you would still be progressing with your main character. Tournaments would just add a little bling and guild, player, team infamy.

Oh and then they could go the whole hog and allow sponsors, for tournament fatigues only, obviously. Pepsi, Coke, erectile dysfunction, Gatorade, and obviously every porn company known to man emblazoned in full pixel perfect colours.

The next day, the water cooler gossip would be sweet, ?you see that punk in the Viagra trunks get decapitated, blood was defiantly heading the wrong way that day.?

Maxxius said:

Then I submit you become niche if you make it pve centric. Kids want to kill each other. It"s the older crowd that probably prefers the pve path, but as said earlier that isn"t where the growth lies.

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This is rubbish man. You say this like it"s a proven fact when it comes to MMORPGs. People who like PvP are very vocal about their desire to have it in a game. We get it. To sit here and suggest that the average person looking to play these games is truly looking for a PvP-centric game is totally not true.

The money is in delivering a quality PVE game. Any company hankering to get lots of people interested in PvP without delivering a quality PvE game is instantly and permanently relegated to niche.

An important thing to keep in mind is the way that WoW handles PVP. It is the only guaranteed way to get epic loot of high quality with zero risk to your bank account or the rng screwing you. It also has the absolute lowest time requirement for the most part. (especially arena. 50 minutes max a week to get epix? hi.) The vast majority of the playerbase of that specific game wouldn"t engage in pvp nearly as often as currently if it either a) didn"t reward instantly or b) if pve rewarded instantly with no rng speedbumps.

So before the whole "lolz warcraft is marketed as pvp!" nonsense rears its head, stop. It"s not, it"s a pve game where for some reason the easiest way to get good gear is to not pve. The pvp is regulated in instances and there"s only a grand total of 7 of them. 3 arenas, 4 bgs. World PVP exists only on pvp specific servers and is 99.99% made up of max level players killing non-max level players. The PVE game however is on every server and available in -many- more instances and overland experiences.

PVE sells mmos, PVP is a fun side existence once it"s popular.

torrent495 said:

You can"t topple WoW with a WoW-clone, regardless of whether it"s "improved" or "tweaked" or whatever. Flat-out impossible. No market dominating product in the history of the world has ever been toppled in that way. What you need to do is not offer a "WoW plus," but figure out what people wantbut are not gettingfrom the current games on the market, and then build your design from there. WoW itself is a good example of this approach, and in its own way was actually an extremely innovative game. Before WoW nobody knew there was a massive untapped market for casual, user-friendly MMOs out there--in fact a lot of people, i.e. Brad McQuaid, thought the opposite. Blizzard made a huge bet that there was, they executed that design successfully, and the rest is history.

The next WoW-killer is going to have to be similarly innovative, or it won"t be a WoW-killer. Now I don"t know what that market-redefining innovation might be, or I"d be starting my own MMO company. But it should be obvious that "WoW, but better"will not workif you really want to shake up the genre. Something PvP-related is probably promising, but again, who knows?

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There is a lot of hyperbole and bullshit speculation in this post.

Draegan said:

There is a lot of hyperbole and bullshit speculation in this post.

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Haha spot on. I must"ve missed that guy"s post when I woke up today.

Grave said:

That type of competition just doesn"t work in MMOs.

The whole fun of PVP in an MMO is using your achievements and items you"ve obtained to decimate other players. This goes against the very ethics of competition, because a proper competition requires that both sides are equal. You couldn"t have proper hosted tournaments if Billy has better gear than Joe, otherwise fans just whine about how it wasn"t an even match.

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You are confusing or completely unaware of a few idealogies.

The majorty of Pvpers from UO/Shadowbane type games aren"t interested in fair fights. Turning pvp into a sport isn"t as fun as turning as pvp into a war scenario.

The new breed of pvpers in WoW who came in after world pvp was mangled and some of the old guard who support arenas look as pvp as a sport where fair play is required and more fun turning pvp into a second job where you have to guard routes, gates and other crap just to wait for a random battle where you have to call in your guildmates to outblob your opponents.


Regardless of players having a preference for unbalanced (warlike) and balanced (sportlike) pvp neither of them require items to make themselves feel good. It just happens to be the simplest way of awarding for pvpers for their actions.

You could reward players with the ability to gain and develop territory.

You could reward players with control to access to progression mechanics (e.g. questing areas)

You can reward players with unique avatars/equipment that can be worn on top of their existing gear that shows off they are among the best.

You can do a lot of things but it all depends on what type of rules the MMO lives by.

mutantmagnet said:

Y

The new breed of pvpers in WoW who came in after world pvp was mangled and some of the old guard who support arenas look as pvp as a sport where fair play is required and more fun turning pvp into a second job where you have to guard routes, gates and other crap just to wait for a random battle where you have to call in your guildmates to outblob your opponents.

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The word that comes to mind here is Carebear.

mutantmagnet said:

Regardless of players having a preference for unbalanced (warlike) and balanced (sportlike) pvp neither of them require items to make themselves feel good. It just happens to be the simplest way of awarding for pvpers for their actions.

You could reward players with the ability to gain and develop territory.

You could reward players with control to access to progression mechanics (e.g. questing areas)

You can reward players with unique avatars/equipment that can be worn on top of their existing gear that shows off they are among the best.

You can do a lot of things but it all depends on what type of rules the MMO lives by.

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The thing about UO that is missing is danger. WOW PVP, even on the dedicated servers has no danger. Neither ultimately did DAOC.

The problem is many PVPers are nasty evil bastards who live their online persona by the mantra of schadenfreude. A large world needs to balance that danger and accomplishment with minimizing the overall pain in regards to how one deals with the extreme deviants of the PVP MMO landscape.

I do miss the days of The Dread Lord Gothmog on Pacific, but honestly new PVP will probably never go back to the type of openness as UO. Hopefully it"ll escalate the war and fighting portion closer to where it has danger, but also adequate repercussions for world actions.

PvP folks have one thing in common...they like to play against other players.

One does it because other players can add an aura of intelligence and unpredictability that isn"t available in AI.

The other does it because they want to drink the sweet, sweet tears of loss when they rampage across others.

The former is what WOW is shooting for while the latter is why the Zeks had such low populations and why most people were very much against PvP in any form. You won"t have fully open PvP with looting and no safe zones in anything aside from niche games.

ShroudedMist said:

This is rubbish man. You say this like it"s a proven fact when it comes to MMORPGs. People who like PvP are very vocal about their desire to have it in a game. We get it. To sit here and suggest that the average person looking to play these games is truly looking for a PvP-centric game is totally not true.

The money is in delivering a quality PVE game. Any company hankering to get lots of people interested in PvP without delivering a quality PvE game is instantly and permanently relegated to niche.

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I say it like it is true because it IS true. Name me ONE pure pve game that comes even close to WOW numbers. And don"t say WOW, because it is in essence a pvp game. The draw to WOW was never ever it"s raid end game, and if you think otherwise you are deluding yourself. You take away all the pvp in that game and just leave dueling and I guarantee you their sub numbers plunge.

But you see I don"t want just a pure pvp game. I do want a pve alternate path as well. Which is what WOW tries to give.

Rezz said:

. . .PVE sells mmos, PVP is a fun side existence once it"s popular.

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If pve sells MMOs then where are they? EQ? LOTRO? VG? Which ones are players looking at more, WAR and AOC. Go ahead make that PVE game and scratch your head when the subs stay low. I sure as hell didn"t buy WOW for its PVE. I bought it because I could do BOTH pve and pvp without being griefed to death. But in the end it was the pvp that was the draw for me.

WoW has the sub numbers it has for the reasons that have been stated numerous times: it"s the most polished, most well made, and most FUN mmo ever created.

It"s not just one thing that made them successful. You could say the opposite to what you said - remove the PVE game - and their subscriptions would plummet as well, probably even more.

They did both things very well, and a new game will have to do so as well. The difference is they have a chance to do one or the other BETTER than WoW, if enough dedication and smart design is put into it. It is in this area that I think they should focus on PVE.

The polish and well made aspect kept the players, but it was the pvp that drew all those kids from Bnet. That"s not to say that others didn"t come just for the PVE, but no way they pull the subs if it was advertised as a PVE game. You want to compete with WOW you HAVE to do both, but with emphasis on the pvp aspect simply because that is where the larger market is.

Curt is free to ignore this advice, but if he makes a PVE game, he winds up niche because the younguns don"t want that. And I say that with conviction.

Maxxius said:

I say it like it is true because it IS true. Name me ONE pure pve game that comes even close to WOW numbers. And don"t say WOW, because it is in essence a pvp game. The draw to WOW was never ever it"s raid end game, and if you think otherwise you are deluding yourself. You take away all the pvp in that game and just leave dueling and I guarantee you their sub numbers plunge.

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Oh, you mean like how it was on launch? Remind me how many people bought it and rolled characters (on PvE servers, even) in the first eight months, before any PvP-related content existed in the game besides dueling and opt-in world PvP. A million? Two million?

PvP was the red-headed stepchild of WoW for a full two years, until they added arenas. More and more quests and PvE zones got added with every content patch, while they struggled to tweak the honor system, battlegrounds, and loot to make them not suck. They never even bothered to put in the PvP-related ideas they already had sketched out for world PvP - remember town assaults and siege weapons, which are scheduled to finally make some kind of appearance now? The whole time, subscription numbers went straight up.

Most people play WoW because you can farm until eternity.

Most people are casual who maybe once or twice tackled arena or t5+ content. They are farming stuff for their personnal tradeskill, they farm karazhan, reputation, honor points, heroic badge, they are rerolling characters or building small scale guilds, etc.

Those people just dream about a few items that are better than what they currently have, and that"s mainly the reason why they keep playing. Most of these farming people just don"t care if they get their item from PvP, PvE, from a tradeskill or from reputation, they just want to get upgrades and to advance in the game (The Diablo Effect), that"s about it.

I don"t have the numbers, but it might be interesting to see at peak hour what is the percent of people doing arena, bgs, solo stuff, 5 man instances / quest and 10+ ppl raid. I"m sure the solo stuff takes most of that percentage, and that PvP only represents 15% at most.

WoW is not niche and is successful because it provides a wide range of different gameplay and let the player choose what they want to do.

Fog said:

Oh, you mean like how it was on launch? Remind me how many people bought it and rolled characters (on PvE servers, even) in the first eight months, before any PvP-related content existed in the game besides dueling and opt-in world PvP. A million? Two million? .

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What the heck are you talking about, half the servers at launch was pvp. And when a month or two passed the people on the pve servers were becoming bored. Enter BGs and then Arenas to entertain them. And what kept drawing new numbers? It sure as hell wasn"t the high level raid game since most didn"t do it.

Maxxius said:

What the heck are you talking about, half the servers at launch was pvp. And when a month or two passed the people on the pve servers were becoming bored.

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Can you cite some kind of evidence for this alleged boredom? I played from launch for the first year and did not hear people suddenly complaining about being "bored." I think you are conflating max-cutting-edge hardcore players with the majority, because neither I nor almost any of my friends were even 60 in two months.

And what kept drawing new numbers? It sure as hell wasn"t the high level raid game since most didn"t do it.

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I assume it was the same good solo and group content that has continued to draw new numbers through today.

I guess you forget all the whining on the WOW forums by people saying how there was nothing to do once they hit 60 huh? And yes the well made and polished game did continue drawing the kids who wanted to blow each other up.

I guess you forgot all the whining about dead PVP servers each time a new one opens up =/

WoW"s PVP is only nearly as "booming" as it is because it provides PVE enhancement for little to no risk or randomization to the player, and that"s it. The BGs were used less than half as often as they are now when there wasn"t boatloads of gear to be had from it as well the actual good gear only ever going to one person a week at most. World PVP on most servers was dead outside TM wars or asshattery in BRM, including PVP servers. Take the gear aspect away from Arena/BG and you will 100% see a massive decline in people doing either, and you can quote me on that as fact. Add in that a large portion of the PVP server player base is highly mobile in dealing with which server they play on, and you end up with a far different perspective.

WoW incorporates both, but its focus is PVE. I"m pretty sure that any developer from the company would say the same, except they"d cite "fun" first.