Guess you still have some gripe against me? I mean, why else even mention me or make the jibe? I am no one special in the gaming world these days. I kind of like it that way. I had my day in the gaming world and now I enjoy my time in the real world.

Thanks for the memories.

Hasta.

Well, I’d like to weigh in on this, if I may. This will be long, but I think really worth it.

First, I’d like to give kudo’s to who ever said this:

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A mistake I see in every PvP game is rewarding PvP victory with better PvP gear/abilities. This widens the gap very early in the game’s history, until what was a very small gap in the beginning becomes an unbeatable gap. We saw this problem with DAOC’s RP system and WoW’s arena PvP gear.

When designing a PvP game, make sure you don’t reward your victors so much that the downtrodden can’t compete. They’ll just quit instead. Give them titles, fluff, whatever, but don’t give them bigger guns.
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I agree with this whole heartedly.

Well, I’m here to pick on WoW. And relate my “lesson’s learned”. With hope, I would love to see blz apply fixes to their PvP, but that is perhaps a pipe-dream, until some other MMO comes out and eats their PvP lunch.

1) Blocking is EVERYTHING.
——- In PvP and PvE, blocking, where the game applies “collision” detection, is EVERYTHING. It drastically changes the game. WoW of course does not have blocking, and players can pass right through one another. And it has this, DESPITE that the actual game mechanics does in fact HAVE a blocing mechanism. To side track on this. In WoW, there are quests in Nagraand, where you plant flags into corpse of orcs and ogres to get the orcs and ogres to hate each other. When the flags are planted, they apply blocking to both Players and PvE mobs. I know, cause I tested this, and made a WALL after killing a bunch of the ogres in a NICE NEAT line, and then planting the flags. Sure enough, BLOCKING was there, and others mobs could not go through the FLAG-WALL I made.

OK, that said, without blocking in PvP, it is almost impossible to “BALANCE” squishy low armored characters. And the “atypical” squishy mage/wizard character suffers GREATLY if they can not keep the distance and/or have EFFECTIVE escape means. I won’t even start a discussion on WoW’s pathetic implementation of the Blink spell.

2) DO NOT BALANCE CLASSES BY POWER.
ONLY BALANCE CLASSES BY EXP NEEDED TO LEVEL AND COST OF LEVELING.

This is something that D&D taught us, LONG ago. The Mage class had a ton of NASTY, SURE-TO-KILL-YOU-DEAD spells in 1 shot, when used against other classes of the same level. They could keep the distance, have a HUGE range, and lots of means to escape. Their DOWNSIDE was they require like 30 times the effort to level in terms of EXP. And the costs of leveling was more like 1000 times greater. As result, no one complaimed when a level 10 Mage took on say a dozen fighters of the same level, and won.

WoW has made the HUGE mistake of BALANCING. And in PvP, you can not, nor should you try, to balance outcome based on class. That is a HUGE mistake, and it eventually leads to a loosing battle of doing-damage versus taking-damage where all other variables are so MUTED or out right removed, that the game becomes STALE, very fast.

For example, range. In WoW, the range of a Fireball from a level 15 Mage is the same as a level 70 Mage. In D&D, this was DRASTICALLY, not the case. The range would increase with level. But in WoW, to increase the range, would cause an IMBALANCE to outcome, letting mages have a greater chance to win. In WoW, spells like, so called Invisibility, Polymorph, are jokes. Polymorph HEALS the enemy. In D&D, polymorph PERMANENTLY transformed enemies into something else, and didn’t heal you. You were dead meat-puppy-feet if that happened to you. So in D&D, you would go out and get all kinds of protection from those spells, and YES it would take time and effort, but it was so worth it. This BALANCING outcome routine affects everything in WoW, from the EVADE BUG (sorry feature), to spells last SECONDS, to BoP on bags? Non-magical bags? To ridiculous effects like, the chance to kill a characters of Level X Mage with a Fireball to level X of any other class, is reduced as the characters level? It is a madness. And this leads to the next subject.

3) DO NOT BALANCE.

In WoW, the game is BALANCED, to ensure players play for as LONG as possible. Anything that would let a player get through content, too soon, too easily, is monitored, measured, and COUNTERED as soon as possible. This leads to why the PvP SUCKS. If blz makes there be NO REWARD to PvP, no one will do it. PERIOD. If they make PvP everywhere’s (including in instances), no raiding will be done. It will be too difficult to raid. Heck, it won’t be raiding anymore. So this leads to, “Well, we will make PvP rewards, and make them tough to get”. And that is why I posted that quote above, cause this leads to an early gap in gear for players at the beginning, which widens as time progresses.

4) Invisibility, Illusions, Fog, Terrain, and other NON-BALANCED tactics.

WoW basically does not allow any form of Invisibilty, Illusion, Fog, or the use of Terrain to the advantage of anything. Any of these would be deemed as IMBALANCED to the dev’s. In WoW, the supposed “Invisibility” spell is perhaps the most INSULTING aspect of how blz fails with PvP. The spell mages get at level 68, I have long since labeled INSULTABILITY. Invisibility is supposed to provide these 3 mechanisms:

Escape, Sneak Attack, Spy/Content-Bypassing.

In WoW, the dev’s manages to find a way to NOT do any of those aspects in the INSULTABILITY spell. And they HAD to. IF they allowed ANY of those, it would have allowed mages to get through content faster than other classes. Long before they added the INSULT spell, they had already made “Detect Invisibility” spells, potions, widely available. So countering the spell was already there for PvP. BUT, in PvE, that did not exists. And mages could have gone to high level dungeons using Invisibility to by pass content to solely focus on bosses.

Likewise, things like Fog, Illusions and use of Terrain to by pass content will NEVER be allowed in WoW. NEVER. And thus, back to PvP, the fun suffers. In D&D, the Fog spell was a seemingly useless spell, until you needed to escape or spy/bypass content. IT was not useful enough to make a sneak attack, as one could not discern friend from foe with it. But blz, can actually NOT allow this, cause in a dungeon, if players IN-MASS, could just bypass all the mobs before a boss encounter, the blz dev’s would have a COW.

Terrain is yet another super weak spot for blz. WoW actually has “castles” where the front door, and back door, are always open. Players can’t hide in turrets, or shoot through such seige mechanisms like murder-holes. All melee can always get to any place a ranged attacker can get to, no matter what. And of the most pathetic, is the STUPID, EVADE-BUG (sorry feature), where if the mob can get to you, you can’t get to it. WoW actually has it so that mobs will scale SHEER cliffs to get to you, or become INSTANTLY 100% healed, and INVULNERABLE if they can not get to you. Not in PvE or PvP can one use terrain to their advantage. This is stupid, and detracts for much fun the game could have.

5) Karma, Gear Destruction\Theft, and Level Draining.

Whoever made that post about PvP rewards is absolutely right. Left unchecked, a gap will appear early, and widen if PvP gives significant rewards to gear/power. But without some significant reward, people will not do the PvP. So how do you solve this?

D&D solved this LONG ago in several ways as such:

Gear Destruction\Theft) Your gear could be destroyed or stolen. Completely LOST. If one didn’t take measures to protect their gear, it could be destroyed, stolen. Things from disenchanting attacks, to Rust Monsters, to Shatter spells, to thieves in the night, made combat more interesting. But in a game with BALANCE, where making people play for as long as possible is goal #1, as is the case with WoW; This can not be allowed, because in PvP, if say gear could be destroyed, in fight, those classes not as dependent on gear, or less likely to have their gear be in combat itself, would be much more powerful, and thus win the PvP more often, and get the rewards sooner/faster. And thus, not be motivated to do content.

Level Draining) Nothing was more feared to players in D&D than loosing a level. If some one thought they were super BAD, the DM would throw a couple level draining Spectres on them.

Karma) D&D introduced the concept of Divine intervention with players as a game aspect. If one did too much of something to tick-off a God, that God would come down, and put hurt on them. Usually along the lines of Level Draining. If not, shifting them to a place of pain and suffering. WoW does not have Karma. Not for players, and certainly not for PvP. BUT STRANGELY, WoW does have Karma for BALANCE. GOOD GOD, if blz hasn’t demonstrated this time and time again. The most ridiculous showing of this was the raid/instance called ZG, where one boss, referred to as the “Blood Lord”, had terrain, which originally could be used to let raids take him down with ease. This so offended blz, that they spent many, many, MANY, man hours adding RAMPS, to anything and everything in the Blood Lord’s area so the terrain could NOT be used. Now that raid was not a PvP thing, but it illustrated what was FAR more important to blz, especially when compared to a PvP bug the game had in the EotS PvP battle ground, where mages could blink out of the start area, and begin the fight before the battle actually started. In that bug, it went on for MONTHS, and reappeared, and went away. That was not as big a deal to blz, as the ZG terrain exploit was.

6) World Based PvP.

WoW has “some” world based PvP. But it has no siginificant reward, and thus it is a complete FAILURE. WoW really needs to have a TON of world based PvP added, which means it needs a significant reward. Frankly, there should not be any “safe” zones. Not cities, not start up areas, nothing. Karma, Gear Destruction, and Level Draining, should be used to keep people out of start areas and would-be safety zones. World PvP should be EVERYWHERE, including instances.

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Conclusion
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WoW has trapped itself because of its endless pursuit of BALANCE. And thus I call them BALANCE MONGERS. To me, a good PvP system has blocking, illusions, TRUE invisibility (not the WoW INSULTABILITIY), spell/attack range increases SIGNIFICANTLY, with level. Classes are not BALANCED, and Wizard/Mages are at the top of the power-chain which they pay for by having to earn 10 times the EXP to level and 1000 times the gold. PvP is everywhere. PvP is checked (not BALANCED) by Karma, gear destruction/theft, and especially level draining. Thus there is no fear of the gear-gap. Also, terrain can be used to one’s advantage, from full scale seiges, to fighting in the tall grass.

“EvE is a niche game…” – Soulflame
“Oh! I missed EvE. FAIL FAIL FAIL” – Soulflame

1) EVE is the only MMOG steadily increasing in subs each year.

2) EVE is the only MMOG experiencing *deflation* instead of inflation in its economy.

3) EVE has approximately 200k subscriptions which rivals most NA/EU MMOG subs. And the first answer that naysayers will puke out is “lolz everyone have five alt accts” or some other baseless horescrap because only 15% of the playerbase has multiple accounts. And even if it was one guy with 200,000 accounts to himself, I still think the bank deposit slips are a higher authority than you on whether the game is a success or not.

So, it would be interesting what data or facts you can present, Soulflame, that show EVE Online to be a niche game or a failure since pretty much everyone in the industry has considered it both a success story and model worth researching.

As a third-party content developer (Trainz Partner) and Trainz beta tester for years, you have just described in a nutshell the year of horror that we went through before the release of TRS2006. Trouble is, Auran got too used to the dev community coming up with workarounds and fixes, and a loyal fanbase providing free support to end users, and when that becomes part of the business plan a train wreck (!) is what you’re going to get. The experience pissed off so many people that a large chunk of the hard-core evangelists either left the genre entirely or disappeared from view. Certainly we weren’t going to be unpaid developers and support staff for Auran again.

Looks like absolutely no lessons were learned from the TRS2006 release. I feel for you LotD guys, I know precisely what you’ve been through. At least I got my assets in-game and name in the manual.

Charlie Lear

This game tried to emulate GW arena/tournament PVP and to appeal to MMORPG players who also played arena/tournament PVP in their games (CoV/WoW/etc). It also tried to appeal to FPS players.

There is a market for this type of game, but I’ll break down the reason Fury failed from a guild community point of view.

1. False Advertising

PVP games live or die on word of mouth. After the fiasco from guild wars of “skill is greater than time spent grinding”, people aren’t going to fall for the same crap twice. Fury heavily advertised “no ganking, no grinding, etc”.

Well there was a grind by retail: gear, gold, skills

2. Massive Technical Issues

During the beta, world premier event in July, Fury Challenge, and even into retail over 50% of people could hardly run the game for one reason or another. I mean there were folks with 600 dollar GF8800′s who had worse performance than people with GF 6600′s. The game constantly crashed, had long loading times which caused teams to lose fights, and had frequent disconnects during matches.

The bottom line here is that a majority of people who picked up this game couldn’t run it well enough to compete, and people hate losing to tech issues more than they do being PK’d and looted.

3. Game Based ADD – too much to absorb

In Fury you had 24 skills. In similar games you usually only deal with 5-8 skills that you constantly use. In Fury you pretty much needed to use all 24 skills regularly, and you had to execute within 1 second or die. Fury should have learned from its successful competitor and not have made people have more than 10 skills to have to worry about.

4. Too Fast Paced

Damage was insanely high in this game. Using the right combination of gear and damage boosting skills, a good player should spike for over 100% bonus damage. In a nutshell, most people died in Fury with less than a second to react. MMORPG players are used to a little slower combat, and so they got turned off big time.

5. Too many NPC’s/Skills, Too Confusing

We told them over and over and over to consolidate the NPC’s and that players shouldn’t have to run to 50 different NPC’s to get things. They didn’t listen, and got raked over the coals.

The skill system was also bad. We told them not to have more than 1 tier for skills, and to streamline their “trial/quest” system to be less confusing. They didn’t listen, and they created a system where people wasted time, gold, etc to unlock skills they didn’t need to get to the ones they did.

6. Confusing PVP Ladders

You win, you lose rank. You win, you stay the same. You win, you go up. They made their ladder so confusing that you needed to be a rocket scientist to understand it. People win and they want to see themselves move up a ladder, they lose and they expect to see themselves go down. Same line of thought for guild play. But instead, you could win 50 matches and never move up or down.

Additionally they launched the game with no ladders, and didn’t get the first ladders put in until a month after release. Then they reset the ladders weekly to make people have to grind ranking up all over again, and get virtually no reward.

7. Adding it all up

So the new player had to overcome a confusing game, with lots of skills, and massive technical issues just to be able to play. Then when they got past all that, they had to grind gold to buy gear and skills they needed to compete. Meanwhile they got owned by anyone who did have gold or more skills than they had.

The result is that few people advanced to a middle tier, the game got massive negative word of mouth, and it has since tanked.

The beta testing community, including LotD, warned them well in advance of all these issues. We all collectively signed off on a post asking them to delay the game. But virtually none of our feedback was ever heeded until they had done it their way and failed, and then wanted to come back to us for feedback.

So you all can sit here and theorize, postulate, and do whatever but those are the basic reasons that Fury failed from the viewpoint of a real guild. I wish more developers would actually listen to the advice of real guilds, and maybe some of these PVP games would actually have a chance to succeed.

These PVP games cannot survive if all they do is cater to the hardcore, and they have to build in a mechanism for people or guilds to graduate from beginner, to intermediate, to advanced, and to expert. Since guilds recruit people at all levels, they are constantly helping their members through each of these stages and can provide valuable insight on where the stumbling blocks are. Get off the dev high horse, and listen to your guild leaders if you expect guilds to be a major part of your game. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if your game fails.

–Dave