Why can't MMo's get World PvP right?

[FrostyDroid]

Topic is it really hard?

 

If it's an RPG, yes it's really hard (= impossible).

 

You need to either:

 

1) forget all about balance and fair fights. Life aint fair;

 

or

 

2) Remove the RPG elements from the game and give everyone standard ability avatars.

Edited March 25, 2012 by FrostyDroid

[Ozzone]

An MMO will never get it right if they use a bad engine and code design and hitching is the norm. That will stop them dead in the tracks conceiving any kind of playable large-scale PvP.

[Halifax]

The best PvP in my game plan has been either a completely spontaneous situation or a regular nightly event. In SWG, almost every night PvP could be had by going overt and jumping around the planets' starports. If there was no direct action you always knew where the faction grinding spots where and most people would crawl out there and stomp some people with TEFs. Because SWG had an open communication system the hilarious hate tells and ease of communication typically lead to even more battles afterwards. I remember destroying an entire guild 1 vs 10 in SWG after I had ganked both their players at their city and killed their doctor buffbot. It was all just because I was bored and wanted to see what was on Taris.

 

I also had quite a few awesome times in WoW, both leveling up (it took me a while to get my first 60) and even at L60. You still had to do things at L60 there was a ton to be done because things took a while. AVs went on for hours. You had to travel to instances; which is where I had one of my favorite battles. Myself as a shadow priest in rank 12 gear (half epic) and a friend in blue tanking gear were outside DM waiting for our group. A group of 5 zone dout in front of us and of course attacked us. I started doing damage and helped with the first kill before popping out of shadowform and healing my friend up. We kept the group under control and killed all 5 of them. It was so epic and spontaneous.

 

SWTOR gives no reason to be in the world. Its easier for me to send my companions out on missions than it is for me to actually go farm for resources in the world. All instances are accessed from safe locations. Warzones are accessible anywhere at anytime. The way the world's are designed they keep you from ever having any real interaction with the other faction. This game is sadly a huge carebear hand holding experience and it will inevitable fail because of this.

[davidpop]

Becauae people dont want to do world pvp, they say they do, but they dont.

 

MMO players today dont do jack all, unless there is a reward for it, and as soon as they get the reward they are out of there.

[Tyraelium]

Topic is it really hard?

 

Because every player has their own unique definition of "awesome World PvP".

[anticept]

Because the player base is not doing their job that is to create the world PVP. Tarren mills didn´t have any goals or rewards it was just a bunch of people whacking each other. For the new gaming generation there always has to be a carrot/cookie for them to do anything and if the goal is to do X amount of effort to gain that carrot they will find a way to do it in Y amount(which in this case is less).

 

Simplest way of getting people active is to create a smallish world where the balance shifts from the activity of the community gaining ground opens new vendors and buffs and pve content ie. town X gives faction A a damage buff of 5% and opening an certain raidboss and opening an vendor that sells chematics making faction/s B(/C) to go for a town Y that gives 5% less damage taken buff opens an different boss and opens a new vendor with similar schematics then making faction A either hinder their attack on that town while trying to keep an "garrison" in town X so they don´t lose groud there or lose the vendor because the schematics can only be made once and you have to buy a new one to make it again.

 

PVP and PVE rewards are similar no X stat to make it pvp just set bonuses that emphasise the purpose of the set ie. pvp set having shorter cd on CCbreaker and pve set going for less time on some pve oriented skill or cd . So you can pvp in pve gear or vise versa without your gear making too much of an difference.

[DarthMaulUK]

Star Wars Galaxies had excellent open world pvp at launch. 100s and I MEAN hundreds would battle outside either Anchorhead or Bestine - with AT-ST walkers, pets etc all locked in combat....why...because it was FUN.

 

No shame hole to be whisked away to, no 'exclusive' planet to engage in pvp and no stupid gear, coms, medals etc to grind.

 

The beauty was, if people didnt want to engage in pvp, they didnt have to - they could watch all the action. It was simply brilliant.

 

Since WoW, every developer thinks that pvp needs to be conducted in a stupid arena/warzone/planet etc which simply isnt the case. It would be nice if Bioware actually were creative for a change.

 

Six years for Ilum and look how wrong that was.

[Laylyn]

Guild Wars 2 will do the best job yet and the other games will rapidly copy it if successful. That's one of the reasons world pvp currently sucks. Massive gear and class imbalances were the result of WOW cloning across the market for years...

 

 

[Lt_Latency]

Because Getting balanced teams almost never happens. Now one wants to play all day when they are a group of 50 fighting a group of 80. Players get frustrated and move to a more equal playing field.

 

 

Big problem.

 

Zerging. As you add more and more players to a battle. There reaches a point where is all players target the same player they can kill him in the first global cooldown. This is sort of where PvP breaks. Large zergs just form burn groups and DPS people downin 1 or 2 globals and players no longer have a chance. They just exploded when they gt targeted by the burn group

[Rogozhi]

Whenever I hear discussion about world PvP I hear references to vanilla WoW, SWG, and DaOC. Launch dates for those games were 2004 for WoW and 2001 for the later two. Back then MMOs were a niche game: of all my gaming buddies maybe half actually played MMOs. Even broadband internet wasn't yet the standard so play wasn't even widely accessible.

 

The people that did play, well, PLAYED. All day, all night, all the time. They were also teenagers or in their early twenties, mostly males, and mostly geeks without much else to do. Successful MMOs were huge timesinks, but that is exactly the type of play that attracted people.

 

That was a decade ago and those players are now in their mid twenties and thirties. They have full-time jobs, families, and other responsibilities. When you only have 6 hours a week to play your MMO, you don't want to spend 4 of them roaming for fights, getting facerolled, or grinding in some fashion just to gear enough to compete. You want to log on, play, and have fun.

 

Bottom line: if you want niche play you're going to have to play a niche game. That means a game that looks like a niche game. Poor graphics, lots of bugs, and not very much content. SWTOR cost EA $200 million dollars to produce, so any further development will be focused on retaining and growing the largest amount of subs. And among today's MMO players world PvP just isn't what will do it anymore.

[saido]

I want to fight over planets. I want to fight over space. I want Gimps invading Carrack Station. I want to invade THEIRS. THAT is pvp. That is a galactic war. Fighting in carefully controlled little rooms, one of them as idiotic and NOT war fighting as Huttball is a minigame. A poorly conceived and executed minigame.

 

^^ This

[richardya]

I thought Ilum was well designed. The problem was the faction balance. World PvP will only work if they managed how many people zoned in to keep it even or allowed companions/bolster mechanic to even it out.

 

Ilum, had good rewards, quest and valor gain. Additionally, without valor meaning anything it's not great.

[Drack]

To answer the OP's question, I think it has to do with the current "conventional wisdom" mentality amongst MMO developers: Open world PVP is a SANDBOX mechanic. It means messy. It means unpredictable. It means things MIGHT NOT HAPPEN AS SCRIPTED.

 

Basically the themepark MMO (which SWTOR is one) is designed around the idea that players can't be trusted to play the game "correctly" and thus must be led down a carefully controlled path.

 

Their elimination of Ilum and shift to warzones exclusively for meaningful PVP (ie that raises your valor levels) is but a product of that mentality that we can't be allowed to do things on our own and must be "led" by moving it all into the confines of little rooms.

 

Fighting it out on Ilum is MUCH preferable, as broken and poorly conceived as it was, to doing 10 warzones a night most of them being told "quit trying to win it's better to lose quickly".

 

That may be so (and will continue to be so, as long as warzones are the only way to go, even if they nerf "rewards" to losers) but it's a sorry a-- game design.

 

I want to fight over planets. I want to fight over space. I want Gimps invading Carrack Station. I want to invade THEIRS. THAT is pvp. That is a galactic war. Fighting in carefully controlled little rooms, one of them as idiotic and NOT war fighting as Huttball is a minigame. A poorly conceived and executed minigame.

 

Will you marry me? You are correct in your statements sir.

[KLinnear]

I think the problem is rewarding the individual for world PvP.. Folks are more concerned with themselves and their next BiS, than their faction, and you get kill trading etc.

 

Perhaps rewarding the faction for world PvP somewhat like DAoC, would inspire some realm pride. Offer crafting bonuses, experience/valor bonuses, nothing too extreme, but enough to motivate. In the future allow it to open "dungeons" and the like.

 

Its a little more difficult than that, but its better than going out for another pair of boots in my opinion.

 

People demand more these days than just go kill, in both PvP, and PvE.

 

Agree with both. When I played SWG we pvped for the fun of it. Some of the large scale Coronet fights, or the battles between Anchorhead and Bestine were huge, and fun, and you didn't get any rewards for doing them, you fought because they were Imperials and you were Rebels, and that was the point. Yes you could gain things like planetary control, etc, but it was more about the fact that we wanted to pvp. Secondly they had things like Player bases, which was an objective in the hands of the players to fight over, which was also fun. I miss those days.

[gavlad]

Topic is it really hard?

 

RF Online was a great pvp game badly made but still a good pvp game chip war every 8 hours or so made for great pvp.

Problem many new games now days have is they make them far to big so you never really see other races that much.

Players will only do stuff if its worth it an open world pvp gains you nothing so thats why

[KLinnear]

Whenever I hear discussion about world PvP I hear references to vanilla WoW, SWG, and DaOC. Launch dates for those games were 2004 for WoW and 2001 for the later two. Back then MMOs were a niche game: of all my gaming buddies maybe half actually played MMOs. Even broadband internet wasn't yet the standard so play wasn't even widely accessible.

 

The people that did play, well, PLAYED. All day, all night, all the time. They were also teenagers or in their early twenties, mostly males, and mostly geeks without much else to do. Successful MMOs were huge timesinks, but that is exactly the type of play that attracted people.

 

That was a decade ago and those players are now in their mid twenties and thirties. They have full-time jobs, families, and other responsibilities. When you only have 6 hours a week to play your MMO, you don't want to spend 4 of them roaming for fights, getting facerolled, or grinding in some fashion just to gear enough to compete. You want to log on, play, and have fun.

Bottom line: if you want niche play you're going to have to play a niche game. That means a game that looks like a niche game. Poor graphics, lots of bugs, and not very much content. SWTOR cost EA $200 million dollars to produce, so any further development will be focused on retaining and growing the largest amount of subs. And among today's MMO players world PvP just isn't what will do it anymore.

 

Actually in SWG because there was a real player economy, where crafted gear was the most important you could simply buy your gear so you didn't have to Raid or PvP in warzones to get geared first before you could be competitive or have fun in PvP. Also you never had to search for 4 hours for a fight. It was pretty simple, go overt in a place like Anchorhead, Mos Eisley, Coronet, Theed, Bestine, and next thing you know someone else was going overt, and then another, and then another. Also with player bases and their vulnerability windows, you knew there would be some good fighting going on. I think the current systems take more of a time sink as far as getting geared before being able to have fun, not to mention they lead to things like kill trading, etc, because people want the gear so badly they don't care about having fun with the process.

[Wildcat]

Actually in SWG because there was a real player economy, where crafted gear was the most important you could simply buy your gear so you didn't have to Raid or PvP in warzones to get geared first before you could be competitive or have fun in PvP. Also you never had to search for 4 hours for a fight. It was pretty simple, go overt in a place like Anchorhead, Mos Eisley, Coronet, Theed, Bestine, and next thing you know someone else was going overt, and then another, and then another. Also with player bases and their vulnerability windows, you knew there would be some good fighting going on. I think the current systems take more of a time sink as far as getting geared before being able to have fun, not to mention they lead to things like kill trading, etc, because people want the gear so badly they don't care about having fun with the process.

 

In SWG all you had to do to get PVP, especially on a server like Bloodfin (and I am talking pre NGE) was show up in Theed overt. Gimps OWN Theed, so they thought. They'd show up...

 

Also, in SWG, to get Jedi meant a meaningful, time gated grind. And after getting it had SEVERE death penalties. But it was the PVP profession and the game's endgame..

 

I hate the idea of being on a gear grind treadmill for an endgame, which all themepark games have.

 

Even accepting that, I hate being pigeonholed into stupid warzones where I can't even bring a full group of guildmates (that makes the lazy cry about premades, a term I didn't even know before this game) who will ACTUALLY TRY TO FIGHT FOR A WIN AND OBJECTIVES rather than try to LOSE quickly...

Edited March 25, 2012 by Wildcat

[-Alma-]

Aion has good world pvp, just as long as you have a pair of balls and are not some carebear wow fanatic.

[Knockerz]

I don't think world pvp will be viable until technology gets better. What I mean is until you can eliminate servers and have only one super server or network cluster of servrs that can hold hundred of thousands or millions of players will world pvp be viable. The super server or net work servers will always have enough people to do pvp with large number of players, which is what you need for world pvp to be viable. The problem is there isn't enough players on any particular server to really have large scale pvp in any mmorpg due to both technological limitations of the server/game or lack of enough players. If an mmorpg could consolidate all of their players on one super server there would always be enough players for world pvp to viable through the day or night.

 

I will cite world of warcraft due to the games efficient graphics and fluid game mechanics, plus the low requirements to play wow make it ideal for world pvp. Even with a game like wow when wintergrasp was not a open world instance and allowed any number of players to participate, true world pvp, the servers and many player computers could not handle the 100-300 players. In fact, on illidan the server I played, the server crashed a few times due to the high concentration of players in wintergrasp. Thus, Blizzard dirty fix was to make it into an instance and limit the number of players who could enter. Effectively turning wintergrasp into a world pvp battleground that only be active every couple hours.

 

I doubt it GW2 will have hundreds of players fighting each other. All the videos I seen seems to be small scale pvp like 30 vs 40 players or some where in that ball park. I don't think any mmorpg's hardware can handle like 200 vs 150 players in a small area without crashing the server or having sever lag. Thus, until we advance in computation processing power large scale pvp is not possible. However, I GW2 will be the best attempt so far at making world pvp viable with our current technology.

Edited March 25, 2012 by Knockerz

[ceelaniri]

SWG (post nge)

 

as mentioned in previous posts

 

- Possibility to communicate with the other faction and even switch as much as someone would like.

 

- nothing beats attacking the base of the rival guilds in their own city.

 

- or defending yours against difficult odds (this ensure that PVP was not as repetitive as in a static area)

 

- roaming through different planets and getting starport fights (+thrills of the unexpected when on your own)

 

- no gear grinding meant more spontaneous pvp (although jedi killed the pvp at one point)

 

- TEF reinforced the spontaneity of the PVP.

 

In WAR,

 

the zones were static and will never really change whatever the impact of a faction on the server, it wasnt really lively to me.

[gofortheko]

Why world pvp cant work in mmos, is simply the players fault. You cant balance factions, because you cant force players into picking a certain faction, because then they would cry about not being able to pick the faction they wanted.

 

Todays mmorpgers are just whiny *****es who when they dont get exactly what they want regardless of how entertaining or fun the game is, they will ***** and cry, hence this thread.

[Theology]

Contested raid bosses really bring out the world PVP in MMOs.

[Izola]

I tried to tell all of you b4 the game came out and u all yelled at me...

 

PVP = Player Vs Player...and none of the good ones LIKE world PVP.

 

World PVP's idea of skill is PLUS 1 toons. Yay more of us showed up so we won! I'm so pro!

 

 

GO AWAY! World PVP died a long time ago, not Bcuz of Devs or BW or Blizz or anything but the fact that GOOD PVP players DON'T WORLD PVP unless it's an after thought!

[Slurmez]

Topic is it really hard?

 

Is it hard? No, Planetside did it exceptionally well as did warhammer before queen of the sea cows Carrie Gouskos ruined it.

 

Problem is devs, like "directors" dont like to take cues from other people, they think they know whats best and to hell with anyone else as a result we get crap

[gofortheko]

I tried to tell all of you b4 the game came out and u all yelled at me...

 

PVP = Player Vs Player...and none of the good ones LIKE world PVP.

 

World PVP's idea of skill is PLUS 1 toons. Yay more of us showed up so we won! I'm so pro!

 

 

GO AWAY! World PVP died a long time ago, not Bcuz of Devs or BW or Blizz or anything but the fact that GOOD PVP players DON'T WORLD PVP unless it's an after thought!

 

Exactly this! World pvp always amounted to who brought the bigger party. The best imho "world" pvp game ever was DAoC, and the best pvpers usually ended up in 8 man roaming parties and destroyed that way instead of trying to fight the zerg at the keeps.