Yes, That's A Problem

When you make a game with only wolves, the wolves quickly devour their young, until nothing is left?

Shocking! Shocking, I tell you! I would have never guessed that.

Well, aside from the 20+ years of analysis that’s lying around the web talking explicitly about PvP MMOGs and this precise problem with them.

For the record Soulflame is a trammel loveing care bear. PvP is clearly the only way you prove your worthiness and skill at using hacks and flaws in the game mechanics to destroy people stupid enough to be new to the game.

It’s like people don’t even understand tactics anymore.

EvE is a niche game, that now is best known for PvPing your computer. Shadowbane was a joke, is still a joke, and will be the punchline of PvP MMOG jokes for years to come. On top of that, Shadowbane has the dubious distinction of proving, singlehandedly, that not only is the market not ready for a hardcore PvP MMOG, neither are the people who actually play them. Horizons? Failure. Roma Victor? Never heard of it. Failure. Vanguard? Faaaaaailure.

Want to talk about a game that has, I dunno, succeeded at pushing itself as a PvP MMOG? Take your time, it may be a while before you actually think of one that’s actually succeeded.

Second, you seriously are barking up the wrong tree. Scott is a dirty PK from way back when. I, myself, tend to play PvP type games, so do many, if not most, of the people in this community. We do not delude ourselves as to the flawed approach to PvP games up to now, unlike, apparently, some people do.

If Fury’s basic problems are pre-made teams that are abusing overpowered gear or builds, then it’s comically stupid to even think this is excusable. (And with the quick perusal of one of the threads Scott linked, I’d say that’s the biggest concern of many people who do play Fury – that there are teams that are for all intents and purposes “unbeatable”. Who wants to waste time when you know you’re going to get pulverized by “those guys” when it comes your turn to play against them?)

Persistent PvP MMOGs have several core problems – the biggest, in my opinion, is that persistence leads to players expecting that Time Spent In Game = Player Power. This freezes out anyone who’s even so much as a month late to the party, much less what it does to people who try to jump in years down the road. It’s like joining an Age of Empires game when everyone’s in Imperial, and you’re stuck in Feudal. Good luck with that, enjoy your assraping.

Fury’s problem is that they made a ‘Pure PvP game’ that is essentially just arenas, which most ‘hardcore’ PvP players hate, and on the off chance they don’t hate arenas, they’re playing WoW arenas.

So basically, they alienated two playerbases: hardcore PvPers, and well, everyone else.

One more comment:

“Sadly, too many players have only experienced a savage beating at the hands of veteran players.” How ‘veteran’ can players possibly be. The game has been out a whole… what, two months? He should have just said “My game sucks and no one wants to play it.”

You haven’t listed a single successful PvP MMOG yet.

Horizons? Give. Me. A. Break. The game was broken on release, a joke from the start of development til months after release, and no one, that I’m aware of, is still playing it. I’m surprised you would even _mention_ Horizons in a list of “successful” PvP MMOGs, as this game, above pretty much anything that is not Dawn, is a complete joke, failure, and an absurdity. FAIL

Vanguard? See Horizons response. With added fun that I personally know six people who tried this game, and canceled it before their free month was up, so they wouldn’t have to actually _pay_ for it. FAIL

Shadowbane? LOLOLOLOLOL Terrible movement scheme. Riddled with insane dupes and bugs that wolfpack never really banned people over. A “winnable” PvP MMOG that, shockingly, people won! And then got bored and quit, because surprisingly, when someone “wins” a persistent PvP MMOG, there’s no point in playing anymore!

Roma Victor? Still never heard of it. Let’s see what Wikipedia has about this “amazing” game that is so amazing, that I’ve never heard _word one_ about it.

Amusing. Another PvP MMOG that insists on Time Spent In Game = Player Power. FAIL

Guild Wars seems to be fairly successful. The impression I have of Fury from everything I’ve seen/people who have tried it is that “It is like Guild Wars – but shitty!”

Soulflame you seem to be pretty judgemental about everything posted. But what are your accolades? Why are you such a know it all when it comes to PvP? Have you ever been in the top tier? I highly doubt it. You can talk all the mess you want about what games are successful or not, but any game that still has users after being out for such a long time is a success, regardless if you have heard of it, liked it, whatever your excuse is. There have been plenty of solid PvP games out there, some of them fall short of the ideal one, but people continue to play it. It seems on your scale the only successful game has been WoW. Which in my opinion is a horrible display of the “nothing new, just polishing out other people’s ideas and making a huge treadmill to keep the sheep running and paying their subscriptions.”

Eve is a very successful game, as is many other ones who made it to release and turned a profit. In truth you can have all the grind you want, but without a solid end game PvP you have nothing but a treadmill. Since I seen your opinions on the other games listed, how do you feel about these?

DAoC, CoX and Guild Wars

“People love being underdogs.”

Thank you for demonstrating that you are oversimplifying the problem.

People love to be *successful* underdogs. The problem is that the overdogs got to be overdogs by ensuring that there were no other successful underdogs and, unlike fictional evil empires, haven’t forgotten how to do that as they’ve grown.

As a result, you have big, efficiently-run superguilds like BoB that nonetheless take time to meticulously crush rising guilds –sorry, corps– that are within reach.

Being an unsuccessful underdog *sucks*.

“Vanguard? See Horizons response. With added fun that I personally know six people who tried this game, and canceled it before their free month was up, so they wouldn’t have to actually _pay_ for it. FAIL”

Vanguard had like… 1 or 2 PvP servers out of a dozen or so. And on those servers, very little PvP happened. It was not a PvP game at ALL, and PvP has nothing to do with why that game failed. Bring up some more misinformation.

Which pure PvE games are successful?

Toontown Online had about 110,000 subscribers the last time SirBruce had numbers, back in June ’06. If it’s a failure, then so is Eve, which had right around the same subscriber numbers at that time.

Jou, ask Hades who Soulflame is (lol)

Sounds like a game mechanics issue then, if unbeatable builds have stayed the same since beta.

“Nieves? Why are you bringing uopowergamers.com into this?”

As a former writer for UOPG, I can tell you he didn’t mistype. Nieves and naive mean approximately the same thing.

RE: Mist

Just wandered over to the WoW site and counted ‘em: total of 103 US PvP and 112 US Normal…so it ‘taint quite “a bit more than half.” Population numbers are average higher for the PvP ones (as far as high-medium-low gives accurate or useable number) but, given fewer servers, there should be a slight bias up on the PvP ones. Also, getting into a decent support group is far, far more important on a PvP server, so density is driven up further by ruleset.

As far as “more 70s in battlegrounds than raids/5-mans.” I would submit that WoW’s “loose your way to uber gear” battlegrounds/PvP rewards have more than a little to do with that. If you spend enough time getting embarrased by Horde pre-mades, you too can acquire the top end PvP rewards.

The time invested in gear and skill to get to the “Gee look! I looted the Axe o’ Awesomeness from a recently dead Gruul” point is substantial, and raid guilds have hardcore skill requirements. Or you can sit around IF annoying people in /Trade while waiting for the BG queue. And then rack up HKs by spamming AoEs without actually managing to KILL somethig…

Not that anyone does that kind of thing…

EVE tranquility(western server) “works” because their is only 1 server and the game has been developed over time in response to what the population does.

Its a rather narrow and specific method as evidensed by the failure of EVE China. It give an illussion of a more open world than actually exists. And even so there is always the possibility of a balance failure. All it would take is for about 10 or 15 key players to to decide on a new alliance. A lot of players might not like it but like real corperations little guys dont have much say in the game.

PvP vs Anti PvP. Here we go again. I’ve never bitched about my personal opinions on the subject, so here goes!

Rant on.

What really pisses me off about the “PvP is niche” debate is that it assumes that PvP is niche because of its lack of appeal.

Am I the only person who seems to notice that the number of PvE centric games with proper budgets number in the hundreds, and the number of PvP centric games with proper budgets can be counted on two hands? Is it possible that the reason PvP games are niche is simply because they’re hard?

I mean, pardon my language, but Jesus Fucking Christ, of course there are more successful PvE centric games than PvP centric games, there’s ten times as many of the bloody things! Now I’m not saying that PvP centric games are easy, but I hardly call the baby steps of UO, Shadowbane’s bug infested glory, a couple of PvE games shoe-horned into PvP, and EVE’s incredibly monotonous gameplay to be reasonable grounds for judgement on if the sub-genre has a chance or not.

And for the love of god, can we please stop calling games niche just because they don’t have nine million fucking subscribers? Because it’s really starting to piss me off.

Rant off.

lol, people are mentioning Horizons as a PvP MMO? o_O

The game has ONE PvP arena, added way after release, and 99% of the playerbase hates it, and PvP in general. The only thing people do in that game is grind crafts.

So… yeah. Not the greatest example to cite.

Thousands Hundreds Many angry Darkfall fanbois inc to tell you why their game will succeed where Fury failed. They’re still responding to the last post you made about that.

Anarchy Online was/is a reasonably successful PvP MMORPG.

So, umm…
when are we bringin’ back precasting?

Problem with AO was that overbloated abomination they called a skill system. As said before: throw in the implants and you just lost anyone with interests outside of the game.

Shadowbane’s downfall has more to do with the poor implementation of the game, graphics, etc. than whether it was a PvP MMO or not.

The idea was good. People wanted it and subscribed right from the start. Hell, the Beta community was huge. The desire was there. The playerbase was there.

Right away they drove off a huge number of people that just couldn’t get past crashing, freezing, sub-standard graphics, sub-standard animations, etc. It really was a piece of crap on publish.

Secondly, you had people that drove on because they happened to get a little bit of that feeling of CRUSHING. However, over time, more people quit because of bugs, so the downward spiral sucked them in too.

Then, you were left with the truly hardcore. You had those that held to the PvP extreme and wanted more of it. The game did start to improve, but it was really too late to be a market success. Of those left that were extreme and stayed, the next issue came. The game made it waaaaaay easier to tear stuff down than build it up. People got pissed and quit. Now, this could have been remedied and was slightly towards the end, but again, too little too late. I’m sure the development team was spending too much time trying to make the game playable than actually fixing some of the more foundational issues.

Lastly, the shear low number of players drove the rest away. How can you have epic battles with a handful of people on each side?

I truly believe the “idea” of Shadowbane was solid. It needed a HUGE number of balancing changes and it was on its way to do that, but it just was too late. Even if everything was fixed, those graphics were just painful. I tried the free play for a couple of nights and just never looked back.

I wanted it to work. A lot of other people wanted it to work. Is there a market? Yes, SB proved that. They couldn’t hold that tiger by the tail, but that tiger exists.

Just as MMO’s exposed comparatively minor errors and made them into huge problems (a dupe bug or ATM quest bug is no big deal in a CRPG), PvP in an MMO takes that up to another level. *Any* errors in balancing get thrown into sharp relief and become a major issue, any crash bugs become “I Win” buttons.

That being said, there are a few “bright line” things we’ve learned:

1) Every PvP’er thinks he’s hard core, but then he runs into the real freaks and finds out he’s really just another care bear.

2) Even the hard core aren’t hard core enough for an MMO where there’s nothing to do but PvP, all the time.

3) If you don’t actively design *against* the “Matthew Effect” (those that start ahead stay ahead), the first people to gain a significant advantage will never be defeated.

4) If it’s easier to destroy than to build, then nothing is worth building.

–Dave