Dont we play these ONLINE games to compete against other players? A mmorpg is a mmorpg if it has lots of PVP interaction. I can sell you an item, steal that item from you, or chop your head off. Thats true RPG style, which is something lacking in the games these days. Carebears.

Most of the original programmers of Shadowbane’s main original code aren’t around WP/SBG any longer. The original Wolfpack programmers were gaming enthusiasts with marginal coding skills, hense the infamous sb.exe’s and other bugs. When UBI took over they slowly infused SB with better personnel and then out of nowhere cut them so they could create a competeing gaming company with the money they are getting paid to keep Shadowbane going. Figure out UBI’s logic on that one. o_0 The new company (SBG) was choosy and kept the good folk that were in WP and even brought in a guy from Sony Online Entertainment to run things as CEO/Pres.

http://www.straybulletgames.com/forums/index.php

“Shadowbane lasted longer than Asheron\’e2\’80\’99s Call 2 Jesse! Hah Hah! We won!”

That it did. However, since I didn’t join the AC2 team until months after the 2002 launch and had no part in the decision to shut it down (I wouldn’t have, for various reasons), I’m not sure what this says. I rather suspect that if Turbine had decided to offer it for free, it would still be alive, too; “no cost” is hard to beat. We’ll see what happens when the team has to charge for access in some manner.

Regardless, SB is still alive and I salute the current team for their valiant efforts.

Heehee

Shadowbane lasted longer than Asheron’s Call 2 Jesse! Hah Hah! We won!

You owe me a beer and we shall toast the sad (but timely) death of ‘true’ fanboyism, biting the hand, the Ashen/Vosx/J Goon Squads, Devs Posting unsupervised on well read forums, and all that good stuff. And when its all said and done… I’ll happily admit all the points where you were dead right.

But then I’ll also list all the MMO games that failed, flamed out, were cancelled, and died on the vine while Shadowbane somehow peristed against all claims and predictions. And at the end of the day there are a couple of truths about Shadowbane in which I take great pride:

1. It launched.
2. It covered all its development costs.
3. It made a profit for Ubisoft.
4. Its still alive and online.
5. It still has players.

Considering all the MMO games of the past decade (hell even the past year) very very few can claim all five for themselves. So despite all the horrors and ugly truths that occured about SB, there were some really good successes that would make any MMO professional pretty proud.

See you in Austin!

Actually, Joe, if you had read what was written in the two columns pertaining to Shadowbane, I don’t think you’d have made that statement.

From my August 31, 2000 Biting the Hand column:
—
At this point, acknowledging that the game is months away from Beta and serious load and features testing, I\’e2\’80\’99d have to rate Shadowbane:

Chances of being a Big Money Maker: Probably a Loser here. The game appeals to one of the smallest and hardest to please niches of MMOGs, a group of people that tend to drive other players away from the game and has the highest player-to-support cost ratio in the industry.

Cool Game Tools: Possibly a Winner, but we\’e2\’80\’99ll have to wait for public Beta and see how the interface actually handles to change that tone to Definitely, Probably or Loser. If they pull off the interface we see in the screenshots, Wolfpack might develop a cottage industry in licensing the tool set to other developers, and that s a Great Big Win in anybody\’e2\’80\’99s book.

Chances of being a customer service nightmare: Probable. Unless GoD or Wolfpack hires someone with MMOG player relations experience and puts that person in charge of live operations, I suspect the conflict won\’e2\’80\’99t stop at the game level, but will bleed over into public forums.
—

I think I scored fairly high on the predictive scale here.

From my October 6, 2000 column, in response to the same misunderstanding as you exhibit on my feelings about PvP:
—
Part of the problem seems to stem from differing interpretations of the terms “player versus player,” “player killer,” and “grief player,” and their effects on an online multiplayer game. Even among the Shadowbane devotees posting on the boards, the definition of just what constitutes PvP versus PKing versus being a grief player seems to vary from poster to poster. For further reference, here’s my take:

PvPers enjoy combat against others humans, because gray matter can provide an opponent that a silicon chip never could. While they don’t care if it is consensual or non-consensual, for the most part, they would prefer consensual play in the form of duels, and faction-versus-faction or guild-versus-guild conflict–something that gives greater meaning to the slaughter. It is not uncommon for a true PvP devotee to wax a victim and then guard the body so the victim can come back and retrieve the lost inventory.

PKers are looking for victims, pure and simple. If the game allows non-consensual PvP, PKers don’t care who they kill so long as the victim can’t fight back effectively. They are schoolyard bullies; if you turn out to be too good at fighting, they will go find someone else to steal lunch money from.

Grief players could care less about the niceties of PK, PvP, or the game; they are there to cause other people grief, hence the name. If they are successful enough and get banned from the game, they just move on to the next one and repeat the process. Their objectives are varied; the result – pissed-off customers -is not.

There is also a tendency to pass off the grief players as a small number of players unworthy of consideration in the larger scheme of things. While I agree that the overall number of grief players is small, their effect on the landscape is *not* small. The 80-20 rule applies, although maybe we should modify that here as the grief-player 80-1 rule: 80 percent of your problems will be caused by one percent of the player base. Problems take man-hours and staff to resolve. The more grief players, the more man-hours wasted. If your game attracts more grief players, you’ll waste more time resolving the problems they create.
—

Naturally, that was generally ignored, because the theme of \’e2\’80\’9cthe beyotch hates her some PvPers\’e2\’80\’9d plays so much better among the self-martyr crowd. It is all so ironic, since it was playing the PvP-only MMOs 20 years ago on the old proprietary online services that got me into the industry.

Finally, you can\’e2\’80\’99t compare a non-subscription game (Guild Wars) to the rest of the field in the US, which is overwhelmingly subscription-based. It might surprise you to know that Guild Wars tanked in South Korea, which is heavily a PvP market and which was a target market for the game. Why? I posit it was because they charged access fees to the game in Korea; what plays well for no subscription doesn\’e2\’80\’99t necessarily play well *with* a fee, especially in a competitive market. Give me a $10 million budget for a no-fee \’e2\’80\’98A\’e2\’80\’99 series MMO and I\’e2\’80\’99ll sell a million units in the US in the first year, too, assuming that free access doesn\’e2\’80\’99t become the prevailing model in the meantime.

-Jess

PvP ‘done right’ will have a lot of design considerations, and will require a very high level of execution. But when it is finally achieved, it will provide a level of involvement and emotion that MMOs fall short of now. For all it’s appalling failures, SB gave me the most powerful and profound emotional moments in what is now almost three decades of pen and paper, email, arcade, video, and computer gaming. Given the degree to which SB could have been improved, the future potential of PvP is as enormous as its pitfalls.

I would certainly hope not, you were wrong. Yes, shadowbane was a miserable failure. But not because “PvP are gankers and PvP games are for griefers” like you claimed. Lots of people wanted a game like that, and such a game could still do very well. Such a game can’t do well if its horribly broken and never shows any signs of being fixed though. Shadowbane failed in execution, not concept. You failed by thinking PvPers just want to gank and victimize people. Guildwars shows you are very, very wrong.

No argument that Shadowbane could have done with more experienced oversight, but the arrogance that got it pushed to completion in the first place was the same that would prevent those originally in charge from letting anyone tell them what to do.

And I got conned along with a lot of people. Because I wanted it to work.

(Translation: You should start writing again!)