"No Man's Sands". Did we learn nothing from Warhammer?

[Vibeth]

I do like the fact you compare it to PvE... for some reason developers don't seem to understand that PvPers like to have objectives to go for that are persistent. A real reason to care about the war going on and not just kill people.

 

This a million times.

 

Please, give some meaning to PvP, not just mindless fragging. Take a look at DAoC for example. Make some bases that we are able to take control of to control the whole zone or something.

 

[Slamz]

What most players consider when you say "PvE" is the end-game

I think your statement would start an epic battle on the general forum. I would bet that "most players" quit at the endgame because so many of them do not belong to or want to join epic end-game guilds.

 

Rift, for example, has a great endgame, really. Certainly the best of any game that launched since WOW, and they have been very aggressive in their content additions. Nevertheless, Rift is dying. I simply think the market for "endgamers" has been greatly overestimated.

 

Similarly, WOW launched a lot of 5-man content and moved away from 40-man content for the same reason. There just aren't these massive crowds of people standing around hoping to do end-game PvE. Most people buy the game for the story, the immersion and the campaign and when that peters out, they quit. (WOW has also aggressively added levels and lands -- they keep adding to the PvE campaign, which is probably why they are still around.)

 

 

Well a PvP campaign can run forever, so we're in luck there.

 

Unfortunately, game developers have yet to catch onto this, which is why the fields are strewn with the corpses of failed MMORPGs. They had no PvP campaign; their PvE campaign lasted 1-2 months. After that, 80% of their players quit.

 

You are the first poster I have ever seen ask for this unreasonable undertaking

Posts like mine get buried under the slew of nerf cries and minor mechanics complaints. Most people, developers included, are not asking the hard questions and are simply focused on the here-and-now.

 

And they'll mostly be gone 6 months from now. Devs included.

 

And I don't think it's "unreasonable" when other, far less funded game have done very similar things. Interestingly, those are the games that are still alive while their more expensive PvE buddies withered and died. (Who would have thought that Battleground Europe would survive for 10 years and still be going strong? Meanwhile, all the PvE focused games from that era are gone, or hanging on by a token sliver.)

Edited January 23, 2012 by Slamz

[DarthVarrak]

 

And I don't think it's "unreasonable" when other, far less funded game have done very similar things. Interestingly, those are the games that are still alive while their more expensive PvE buddies withered and died. (Who would have thought that Battleground Europe would survive for 10 years and still be going strong? Meanwhile, all the PvE focused games from that era are gone, or hanging on by a token sliver.)

 

Just a quick question, are these games you mention all F2P? Cause I have never heard of a game like what you describe.

 

A lot of people still do raids. Maybe not Hardmode raids, but they do raids. My guild is a small guild of friends that met in WoW that are on a first name basis and we have been doing raids together for a very long time, but never made it past much Hardmode content.

 

You're right, the leveling process doesn't last forever, nor can it. The writers need time to write more content. Level cap raises are saved for expansions as selling points and so the team can have time to actually do them. There is a MMO I remember from years ago called Conquer or Conqueror or something like that where you could reset your level to 1 and redo the leveling (akin to Prestiging in CoD), I believe it was F2P and it got boring really fast.

 

PvP content can last forever, this is true, but it can also get stale and boring which is why devs work on new stuff for that along with new FP and Ops for PvE. If the system you are talking came into play (a long drawn out process of questing and stuff but PvP oriented instead of PvE) it would still get dull and people would still be doing things like Ilum and Warzones and waiting for the next content patch.

 

It comes down to simplicity. PvE players and PvP players both exist on the same servers. They can't have a leveling process as defined by both you and I for both of the playerbases. They can have end-game for both, but leveling for both would take too much resources with too much risk involved. So they picked the logical one which is PvE. The reason that is the logical choice is because both PvE and PvP players are ok with it. Leveling is fun, whether you're just leveling to get to end-game (PvE or PvP) or just to get to the next bracket (if this game had level brackets for WZ), zone, gear, companion, mount training, whatever. A minority is exempt from this statement. So, this is the choice they (and most other P2P MMOs) went with.

 

I don't know much about Rift, but I played WoW since a couple of months after release and didn't quit until SWTOR came out and I can tell you 10mil subscribers is far from dying, and a lot of that is end-game raids/pvp (not that I care, only stuck around while waiting for this game )

[Madwooki]

The reason factions are so seperated on these planets is because the games engine can not handle more than 20 peeps in a small area. Hence why no world pvp. Only small scale.

[Laoi]

For those who haven't done it, there's a quest to go to the PvP zone in Tatooine. I went there.

 

There.

Is.

Nothing.

There.

 

No content what-so-ever.

 

Just basically an empty area. "Here you go, PvPers! Enjoy!"

 

 

 

Hey sarlacc-holes, PvPers like content too. You know, things to kill each other over? Some reason to be there? Would you create a PvE zone that was just a big open area with maybe a couple pointless mobs standing around? No, because that would suck and be boring.

 

And so it is for your open world PvP content. There is no content. It's just some dirt. Your content is bad and you should feel bad.

 

pls for the love of god dont listen to that guy, no we dont need some stupid domination points (like keeps f.e.) where all the roleplayers meet up and camp there with 80 ppl to "defend" it for the empire or w/e. just give actual rewards for killing ppl in opvp. (valor/ merc comms, cent comms) but seriously dont create another fail like warhammer....

[Slamz]

Just a quick question, are these games you mention all F2P? Cause I have never heard of a game like what you describe.

 

Battleground Europe (aka World War 2 Online) is not F2P. I think they recently added a F2P component (I think you can play basic infantry for free now) but from 2001-2010 at least it was pay-to-play, standard rates.

 

Pirates of the Burning Sea was pay-to-play until last year. They're actually growing again (apparently there are a lot of people who will pay a lot of money for a different looking hat).

 

 

The "problem" with these games is they aren't fantasy RPG or epic sci-fi like Star Wars. How many people are interested in 1700s era sailing ships? Some, apparently, but not millions of people. Fantasy-style RPGs bring the crowds but nobody has done a fantasy RPG with a major PvP campaign.

 

I have no idea why.

 

A lot of people still do raids. Maybe not Hardmode raids, but they do raids. My guild is a small guild of friends that met in WoW that are on a first name basis and we have been doing raids together for a very long time, but never made it past much Hardmode content.

For some values of "a lot of people", I agree. I think the problem with endgame PvE is that it requires scheduled, structured gameplay.

 

"Campaign" gameplay, whether PvP or PvE, does not require scheduled, structured gameplay. You log in, you play, you log out. And that, I think, is what the vast majority of players spend most of their time doing. What percentage of people do you think buys a game and takes it all the way to fully geared out with top tier endgame equipment? I'd bet 20% or less -- probably way less.

 

PvP content can last forever, this is true, but it can also get stale and boring which is why devs work on new stuff for that along with new FP and Ops for PvE.

I agree, actually.

 

The best game, I think, would be 50% PvE and 50% PvP. I think you can tie them closely together and have a game that lasts for years -- maybe forever (see: EVE).

 

So I'm not suggesting we commit to a 100% PvP game.

 

But 99% PvE and 1% PvP is not a balance I think leads to a stable, long term game. That's where you get Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, every game Crpytic ever made, Warhammer, Rift, etc -- these are the corpses strewn along the road of MMORPG design.

 

They probably all worked well enough in the sense that they released and made money, but they all lost the vast majority of their paying customers within the first 6 months and the majority of the dev teams got sent packing too.

 

I don't know much about Rift, but I played WoW since a couple of months after release and didn't quit until SWTOR came out and I can tell you 10mil subscribers is far from dying, and a lot of that is end-game raids/pvp (not that I care, only stuck around while waiting for this game )

 

As I recall, reaching max level in WOW was much slower than WAR, Rift or SWTOR. And that was only to level 50 -- max level now is 85!

 

WOW also kept adding to PvP as well, with some pretty epic scale open world PvP content. Their original focus was 100% PvE on launch, then maybe 1% focus on PvP and I think it has slowly ramped up to perhaps as much as 5% today. I think Blizzard has been made to realize the value of a good mix of PvP and PvE.

 

"Good mix" not meaning "here's some empty space; go fight". A good mix means you keep expanding your PvE campaign but you also put some resources into creating some epic PvP content as well. Blank spots on the map just don't cut it. "Team deathmatch" will only get you so far.

Edited January 23, 2012 by Slamz

[Laoi]

"Good mix" not meaning "here's some empty space; go fight". A good mix means you keep expanding your PvE campaign but you also put some resources into creating some epic PvP content as well. Blank spots on the map just don't cut it. "Team deathmatch" will only get you so far.

 

team deathmatch is exactly the definition of good pvp, everything else just creates idiots camping some stupid roleplayer spot with a zerg. that is NOT proper pvp. proper pvp = guild groups roaming an empty area fighting other guild groups in small scale combat so personal skill and teamplay actually matters and only the strongest ones survive while all the randoms get eaten.

[DarthVarrak]

As I recall, reaching max level in WOW was much slower than WAR, Rift or SWTOR. And that was only to level 50 -- max level now is 85!

 

WOW also kept adding to PvP as well, with some pretty epic scale open world PvP content. Their original focus was 100% PvE on launch, then maybe 1% focus on PvP and I think it has slowly ramped up to perhaps as much as 5% today. I think Blizzard has been made to realize the value of a good mix of PvP and PvE.

 

 

WoW was indeed a pretty slow grind until the end of Wrath. In Wrath they made heirloom gear which provided a pretty hefty experience increase. In Cata they furthered this by decreasing the amount of exp needed and added guild perks which gave experience increases (stackable with the heirloom gear) at which point it became child's play to level. I realize this is a moot point but I thought it should be known.

 

BW will continue to work on PvP, as well as PvE, as time progresses. There are interviews with Devs in which they say they are working on content as far in advance as March (or May, I forget which) and have plans for content much further than that. These include: New FPs, Ops, Warzones, PvP Planets, "Campaign" style Planets, etc. So this game still has quite a way to go.

 

This game was never claimed to be 50% PvE and 50% PvP (I'm not saying you are saying that it was, just pointing it out), but they still intend on ramping up both sections of gameplay. This game is only a month old. A lot of people say that isn't an excuse as far as game design goes, and maybe it's not, but as far as content release design goes a month is a very short time. SWTOR is still in its infancy and it will grow for as long as the playerbase supports it. My best and only suggestion is to put this idea (though I really don't see BW doing it due to resources) and any other suggestions you may have for PvP into the Suggestions sub-forum, accessible through the General Discussion forum.

 

I would love to continue our conversation because it is very refreshing to have an intelligent conversation on forums without being subjected to trolling or insults, but I get off work in 50 minutes (stupid night shifts) and I still have work to do, then I am going home and playing this game

 

Have a good day or night wherever you're from and please give the Devs some time and post suggestions where the Devs can see them.

 

Sincerely,

Vendri

Iron Citadel

[muradi]

chests are a good incentive to be there, similar to central ilum.

Merc commendations do not effect endgame gear either, so it's ok for farmers to camp them on alts imo.

The most I'll do with commendations past 60 is either gear up companion or get champ bags for mods I like in champ gear pieces...

And the slicing with money exploit... Money is worthless in this game. Let them farm it and provide pvpers with targets.

Edited January 23, 2012 by muradi

[EternalFinality]

I started to disagree with everything in your post except #1-2 right here. PvP is not about griefing and harassing other players. PvP is about skilled, tactical combat for your team, your guild, your faction, and your name.

 

Griefing and Harassing players may be fun for bads or children, but it leads to: Players quitting! Why would anyone in their right minds pay for a game in which they cannot progress at all? It is ridiculous, and it is the Griefer mentality that helped lead to all the trolls, idiots, racists, sexists, and bullies in WoW. Anyone who wants this system back either has serious mental issues, or needs to go back to WoW.

 

PvP at all leads to players quitting if they don't win. It's not griefing or harassment for a high level player to kill a low level one. Corpse camp him? Perhaps.

 

An environment where, as a lower level, you could be killed at any time is a rush for real PvP players. You creep around, dodge any roving killers and EARN your progression through cunning and skill. Anyone whining that they couldn't complete their quest so they couldn't progress because of PvP doesn't deserve to be there. They were never PvPers to begin with.

[Slamz]

team deathmatch is exactly the definition of good pvp

 

It's a good start, but it can't be the entire game.

 

Take Planetside, for example. The enemy owns a base, which your team can capture. In order to capture it, you need to push a button that starts a 10 minute timer. The enemy has 10 minutes to push the button again to re-secure the base or else it's yours.

 

However, it's the enemy's base, so they spawn inside while your team has to spawn somewhere outside and run in. Therefore there are several side-objectives:

 

* The enemy wants to find and capture or destroy your exterior spawn points

* You want to hold the room with the switch AND/OR destroy the base's generator, which shuts down the enemy's spawn AND/OR destroy the base's spawn room (which is not an easy thing to do since that's where they all spawn in at)

 

So there's a lot of action going on. The team on defense has engineers trying to repair the spawn room and generator while they hold the room with the button. The team on offense is trying to bring in new spawn points closer to the base and hold them so that they can rush the base and take it over.

 

It's a basic component of Planetside and it's already more complex and more fun than Ilum.

 

 

It's a lot more fun than "running around in an empty zone looking for someone to kill".

 

 

PvP needs content, just like PvE.

[Kolbenito]

People actually played Warhammer?

[Llilium]

@OP

 

Warhammer has better pvp than any other game on the market. you try thinking up a game that has hundreds of people playing in mass pvp 100% of the time. 100%. of the time.

War failed because there WAS no easy way to get your shinies. War is the LAST traditional MMO and its far from dead right now.

 

 

no, sir. what you want is WoW. you should probably go back to it. i hear they have this really 'cool' generic wannabe version of what warhammer has and it only lasts 10 minutes and happens every 2 hours.

 

 

 

 

on a serious note, you just compared an MMO to an FPS. you DONT COMPARE DIFFERANT GENRES TO EACHOTHER. PERIOD.

 

if you want to see something in this game as far as mass pvp, you're going to have to suggest soemthing that only one game has been able to properly implement- Warhammer. and since you don't like it, sounds like you'll never be able to suggest anything worth listening to.

Edited January 23, 2012 by Llilium

[BattlePickle]

Ignoring for a moment the mechanics of class balance, expertise, healing...

 

Open World PVP generally sucks because the following will ALWAYS happen.

 

1. One side pushes other side to safe zone with turrets/un-killable guards etc.

 

2. Losing side will NOT move from safe spot until overwhelming numbers appear. (~ 2:1 odds minimum, 3 and 4 to 1 not uncommon)

 

3. (Optional) Previously camped Zerg rush pushes out from safe zone, obliterating camping team and proceeds to step 1.

 

Note:

- Game engines can't handle this many people in an area, rendering 80% of talents useless, and removing any chance of 'skill' making up for uneven numbers of people.

 

Conclusion:

Trying to fix Open world PVP without addressing population imbalance is pointless... (and yes i say that as an empire player)

 

Open world PVP can rarely be fun... and is almost never fun for BOTH sides at the same time.

 

I think the most intelligent comment(s) so far have been from those people saying to make PVP an intrinsic reward of beating people in fair combat, not a grind for better gear, expertise, and valor ranks. Unfortunately, that typically means instanced content (where there is still tremendous incentive to farm medals rather than play the map).

Edited January 23, 2012 by BattlePickle

[WarWidowX]

I hope they put in some bases to flip or something like that.

 

^Agree!

[Kolbenito]

Lol Warhammer was such a HUGE success that it's down to 2 servers and will most likely close down for good this year. That game was horrible and it died fast because of it.

 

The concept was great, a lot of the ideas were awesome. If another developer had made that game it might still be around on those strengths but it was completely ruined by all the fail design.

[Kolbenito]

Good world pvp has to be organic. That is all there is to it. The way you accomplish this is by putting players from opposite factions in the same area for a lot of quests and things both sides want to do like instances and raids.

 

The Isle of Quel'Danas (or Blackrock Mountain/Eastern Plaguelands/Silithus) in WoW had more world pvp than you could ask for because there were a lot of players in those zones running into each other constantly all day every day.

[Fiachsidhe]

team deathmatch is exactly the definition of good pvp, everything else just creates idiots camping some stupid roleplayer spot with a zerg. that is NOT proper pvp. proper pvp = guild groups roaming an empty area fighting other guild groups in small scale combat so personal skill and teamplay actually matters and only the strongest ones survive while all the randoms get eaten.

 

Then go play a first person shooter and not a ROLE PLAYING GAME.

[Abanoth]

There's chests with merc commendations there now. I farmed about 140 of them before anyone else showed up. There's plenty of incentives to fight, I just think few people know about them.

 

Personally, I'd like to see ALL of tattooine turn into a big PvP zone outside the bases instead of just another questing planet. It's supposed to be the Somalia of Star Wars, and it's plenty big enough.

[Desgarden]

I don't go there because Ilum is f'n stupid.

 

Just some tragically simple goals set up in a straight line with no progression or sense of accomplishment between them. I knock down your walkers, you knock down my walkers, I knock down your walkers, you knock down my walkers and nobody really cares.

 

 

You call that PvP content? I call it lame. If PvE consisted of one zone with like 5 objectives in it and you had to go back and forth and do them over and over again, they'd say "This game sucks" and quit within a week. Yet somehow PvPers are supposed to do that

FOR MONTHS.

 

The red part is the really tragic thing. It is one of the main reasons Warhammer failed so miserably: people did not really care if their objectives (e.g. castles) were lost because the devs failed miserably to give the faction a common goal.

 

SWTOR copied much of WoW (which is not necessarily bad), however, they also copied the same old WZs and pvp system PLUS an even worse open world pvp battleground than one of Warhammer's "pvp pools".

I wonder why there are not 1-2 contested planets etc with real fronts.

 

 

The pvp is basically on the level of 2006. Too bad, I like the flow of the pvp...if my sniper's cover is not bugged

[Kardall]

They need to have zones where our bases are close enough to each other, so we can make our own PvP.

 

Tarren Mill vs. South Shore in Vanilla WoW

 

There were no objectives, there were no goals other than obliterating the entire opposing team. THAT was world PvP. Guilds and Alliances got together to defend and attack...

[Revanmug]

...

 

As I recall, reaching max level in WOW was much slower than WAR, Rift or SWTOR. And that was only to level 50 -- max level now is 85!

 

WOW also kept adding to PvP as well, with some pretty epic scale open world PvP content. Their original focus was 100% PvE on launch, then maybe 1% focus on PvP and I think it has slowly ramped up to perhaps as much as 5% today. I think Blizzard has been made to realize the value of a good mix of PvP and PvE.

....

 

 

 

You have no idea how lvling in wow is and it is probably best you stop talking about it. (hint, it is very very quick now on and the reason it was "longer" in vanilla was unfinish zone and farming mob)

 

And where the hell is yout "epic scale open world pvp" in wow?!?! Have you actually played that game? Wintergrasp was a trade win fortress zone and told barad was a collosal failure. Even WORSE than ilum considering how bad ilum is.

 

Wake up! vanilla was a few years ago... There is no such thing as world pvp on wow. It's all about doing your 10 arena games a week and you rated bgs all while staying in Orgrimmar or Stormwind.

[Slamz]

Warhammer has better pvp than any other game on the market. you try thinking up a game that has hundreds of people playing in mass pvp 100% of the time. 100%. of the time.

 

WAR has terrible PvP content.

 

And that's why WAR failed. As someone else said, almost all of their servers have closed. It was not a popular game. The mechanics were solid. The class design was good. The PvE content was meh and the PvP content was "big open areas with nothing to do". Everyone got bored and quit.

 

War failed because there WAS no easy way to get your shinies. War is the LAST traditional MMO and its far from dead right now.

Explain the success of every console game in the history of console games, then. Or every FPS. Or every RTS.

 

What shinies are you collecting by playing Starcraft online? What shinies are you getting from Battlefield or COD?

 

The problem isn't "shinies". The problem is piss-poor design. People will play things that are fun. They will not play things that are not fun, even if there are shinies.

 

on a serious note, you just compared an MMO to an FPS. you DONT COMPARE DIFFERANT GENRES TO EACHOTHER. PERIOD.

Why not?

 

What is it about "base assaults" that you think only works in shooters?

 

The only fundamental difference between a PvP-shooter and a PvP-RPG is the combat system. The content (base assaults, capture the flag, capture-and-hold, map takeovers, etc) can be the same.

 

 

You could take Team Fortress 2 maps, put them in SWTOR with SWTOR classes and they would be just as satisfying as they were in TF2.

 

Heck, they might even be better.

 

Yet TF2 has more maps and more map types than SWTOR. Why is that?