Better writers than I have pontificated extensively about PvP in games, but I can’t help but echo Brian “Psychochild” Green’s comment on this recent post from the Elder Game writers:
Community Friendliness: Size Matters
Psychochild rightly notes that the social environment in his venerable Meridian 59 MMO is driven to toxicity by the guild-based PvP design.
Contrast that with the original “Horde vs. Alliance” design of World of Warcraft, and how it has changed over the years. Sometimes it seems that everyone is happy to be fighting the Big Bad of the series, even if it means ignoring the old “Us vs. Them” mentality for a new “Us and Them, ’til Undead Destruction do us part”. Sure, that plays havoc with the lore, but it does make for a somewhat less contentious social atmosphere for the game, with players united against the computer controlled bad guys. That’s probably no accident, and probably good design.
I really do think that game design can have a significant effect on the population of a game, and that a deep focus on PvP and “Us vs. Them” will naturally be more toxic. I also think that’s unhealthy.
Interestingly, as anyone who follows politics might note, “a house divided against itself cannot stand“. It’s always interesting to me when political debate is less about the Big Bad of economic or social situations, and more about name calling and hyperbolic caricaturing of the Other guys. Interesting, and sad.
So why do game devs persist in using such design mentality? Certainly the Soldier vs. Demo campaign stirred up by Valve for their Team Fortress 2 game caused a considerable stir in the fandom. It’s even lampshaded by the Valve guys at one point, with the Soldier noting that he doesn’t even know what the special weapon is that he gets if his team wins, but he WANTS it because it’s either him or the Demoman, and obviously, HE can’t have it. (I read this somewhere, but now I can’t find a citation… my search-fu is weak today.)
One almost has to wonder what might be behind the contentious curtain. In the TF2 case, probably nothing, and it’s just a self-aware clever PR stunt. Does factional warfare make games more interesting than they have any right to be? Did WoW benefit from the distractions of “Us vs. Them” when the daily gameplay was so… repetitive? Did Warhammer Online bank too much on it, only to falter when it didn’t have enough to carry the game? Is Darkfall (or any other heavy PvP game) worth playing? (The answer on that last one probably depends on whether or not you like Counterstrike or TF2, methinketh. There is a clear PvP mindset that you need for those games.)
Oh, and Allods Online makes me sad. I’ll just echo Randomessa on this one. I mean, I did already point out what I wanted out of my own ship… and that’s just not it. It sounds like it’ll be great for the “forced group” “us vs. them” crowd… that’s just not me.
And, perhaps most importantly, what exactly do the Democrats and Republicans want us paying attention to… and why? Could they be obfuscating anything really vital? Is the media doing their job at actually finding the truth? Could there perhaps be something more important than endless namecalling and gamesmanship, shallow “debates” and partisan hackery?
…nah.
I have games to play. Flonne keeps telling me that Angels, Demons and Humans should get past prejudice, after all, and I’d hate to disappoint her. Us and Them need to go storm heaven.
To be fair, I don’t think that PvP has to result in a toxic community. A more elegant design might lead to a better community. Having actual paid community managers helps as well, something that was out of our budget range, sadly.
But, I think the “us vs. them” mentality needs to be noticed by designers.
Very cool posting. I will keep my answer short this time, though this posting stirred up enough thoughts for an essay.
The idea of “othering” defines what we/our group are. For example, horde and alliance players alike came to the conclusion that the other faction consists of immature, whiney and whatever players.
The other faction gets always belittled, demonized and is the negative mirror image of our side.
Interestingly, the WAR between the factions in WoW in fact NEVER EVER existed. To the fact where Blizzard probably regrets that they simply did not play all players together, as World PvP is dead. They also did not let players pick various smaller competing factions to fight against each other.
PvP lost. It got banned to small arenas and battlegrounds.
But what about the US vs THEM mentality?
Allods seems to pick more heavily on it, as you will be fighting the other faction a lot. They provide content, just like the Asmodians and Elyos provide the pvp content for the other faction in Aion.
IMO you only need this kind of mentality in world pvp games. For other games it just cuts the playerbase in half.
I would hope there is a more elegant solution available for PVP. As a player, I do enjoy it. PVP minus veterans being able to gank and harass low-leveled players is something I don’t find toxic.
I still think original WOW open world PVP was the best I’ve seen. That had no rules in a contested zone and sure there was ganking but NOTHING like the roving gank squads in EQ2 that had rules up the butt for engagement, which I felt did more to obstruct a fair fight than actually create situations of equity.
Until mob AI gets considerably better, there isn’t the same level of thrill competing against a mob versus a live player.
As for Allods…sigh
I wish they were going to allow solo ship flight and combat. Group control should be optional, not required. You really should be able to have intelligent NPC hirelings to assist you. Honestly, I don’t think that design is going to pan out for them.
Like WOW 40-man raids, it will end up excluding large portions of the population. Players won’t be able to complete having it built without doing the group instances required. And even once they achieve that, they can only fly it when other people they know/like/whatever are online and available?
These group only controlled ships are also going to stir up drama in guilds. Guild member A gets a ship built but Guild members B, C and D, helped with the required instances. A falls out with C and doesn’t want them on their ship. He now wants not in guild X and Z to come along for the “guild run” of some raid.
The fact that the ship belongs to a single person but others may have contributed to it being acquired, yet they have no rights to participating in its use, is going cause lots-o-drama. You wait and see.
P.S. Regardless, Allods for it’s PVE is worth the trip to the top. It will just be like WOW where I’ll ride off into the sunset after hitting max level, unless they add something equally compelling for me to do. If they fix the crafting, add housing or something else I can tinker with while doing PVP then, it could still hold me.
I should offer another point: I don’t mind PvP done right, and I think it’s possible. I loved Street Fighter 2, for example, and that’s all about PvP. (Beating on the computer just isn’t nearly as satisfying.)
That’s a good baseline, though. (And no, I’m not kissing up to Sirlin…) SF2 is a tightly tuned, fairly well balanced game that offers many options. Sure, there are the “classes” in the differences between grapplers like Zangief vs. the speedy plinkers like Cammy vs. the tactical fighters like Dhalsim. Even so, each character has several “rock, paper, scissors” options available to them in their library of moves. Short, quick attacks come out faster and can interrupt stronger moves, but special moves have higher priority at the cost of being harder to time and pull off. Blocks and throws interact tactically, providing those “yomi” layers of outguessing the opponent that I alluded to back in my Making Mistakes article (there citing Sirlin, as it happens).
Competition in SF2 is about player skill, not ganking. To be clear, in my book, ganking, whether level based or gang zerg tactics, is NOT good PvP design. To me, the playing field needs to be as even as possible, and player skill needs to be the deciding factor.
Guild Wars does this fairly well, from what I understand, but that’s because nearly everyone doing PvP is at the (easily attained) level cap (some created there out of the box), and player skill is paramount. At least, that’s the design ethic that it embraced at the start. I hear that it’s been undermined a bit by overpowered PvE skills that affect PvP in unintended ways.
Giving everyone the same choices (and letting them switch around without needing to grind a new alt to 80) is key to good PvP, I think. Let everyone have RPS mechanics within each “round”, so that Rogues don’t always lose to Warriors just by virtue of what they *are*. Let the game be decided on what they *do*.
To me, so much contention around the factional warfare is based on inequality, whether it’s roving bands of gankers, imbalanced class mechanics *coughWARcough*, or even just level and power band variances. It’s not fun to get stuck in the cycle of ganking, and it can create a toxic environment very easily. Factional warfare can be fun if it’s balanced and dependent on player skills, just like Sf2 can be fun. It won’t be for everyone, but for those who do want some good skill-testing PvP, it makes sense to me to level the playing field.
Longasc, very good points, and I wholly agree. It really is interesting to see the psychology of the playerbase. Devs really should know a fair dose of psychology to manage these things properly.
Oh, and Saylah, yes indeedy. I really hope the Allods crew sorts this out, the sooner the better. Drama kills games. (More of the “us” vs. “them” setup, as it happens.) I still say that small, personal ships (available earlier than the endgame) would be a huge boon to the game. It will be a fun romp through the leveling content, but it could be so much more.
I like open pvp as long as its not mixed with pve. Mixing the two areas just results in ganking and annoying corpse runs for the sheep(victims). Really I do like open pvp when its pure though. I do engage in it from time to time. Great post.
and I agree about small personal ships. Make them less powerful, fine. You’ll have to run away from anyone in a group ship. Fine. Unless you are working with a fleet of other personal ships…
Tesh wrote:
I don’t mind PvP done right, and I think it’s possible.
A lot of people don’t mind PvP “done right”, and there are plenty of examples of such: Counerstrike, Team Fortress 2, and Street Fighter like you mention.
The problems arise when you have persistence and a community. Street Fighter works well because if you lose, you throw in another credit and things are back to square one as far as the game is concerned. As Sirlin pointed out in his infamous WoW tirade article on Gamasutra, you don’t get to play a better (higher level) Chun Li just because you’ve played more than I do.
MMOs don’t exactly have that luxury. The reason why people (other than grumpy Tesh, of course) are willing to pay a monthly fee for MMOs is because you come back tomorrow and your character is (perhaps only marginally) better than it was today. Planetside, an otherwise fine game that was more FPS in focus, didn’t do very well because people didn’t see the value in paying a subscription fee for a game that didn’t seem to have more persistence. (It did, but the perception was reality.)
I think Meridian 59 was fairly well balanced for PvP given the MMO restrictions. M59 was an old-school game, though, which means it didn’t do a lot of hand-holding, especially for a new player. It had a brutal learning curve. But, if you understood the system it was rather elegant and lead to some pretty exciting battles. (Obviously I have my biases, but the fact that people stuck around an elderly game like M59 all these years show something was there.)
The problem is how you can capture this and have a good community. It’s hard to do when outsiders are seen as threats (potential spies from enemies). For all the bellyaching about “forced grouping”, it does have a very positive effect of helping to create a solid community as people are “forced” to interact with each other. Not that there will never be toxic elements, but I think it says something that EQ1 is still cranking out expansions for the game even though it hasn’t been king of the hill for over half a decade.
Some further thoughts.
It seems to me, then, that persistence as measured by an avatar’s advancement, runs contrary to fair PvP, unless there are equalizing mechanics. After all, PvP in my book is about *player* skill pitted against other *player* skill. Measuring an avatar’s progress and persistence isn’t about player skill at all, it’s about time, ultimately.
Time != skill.
So, can an MMO, taking persistence as a requisite, ever really have fair PvP?
I think it can, but it has to be equalized via an arena or sidekicking (enemykicking?) mechanics that simulate the instanced PvP combat found in a SF tournament. That, and more tactical options than a class-based system presents.
Do real PvP players want that, or do they really just want the ganking cycle when they call for PvP? To me, ganking takes no skill whatsoever, it’s just a mean-spirited measure of time investment, only “PvP” inasmuch as two players are involved. That will always lean more to the toxic side than something skill-based and as balanced as possible.
“Do real PvP players want that, or do they really just want the ganking cycle when they call for PvP?”
I certainly know which of these I prefer, and find it interesting that on the one hand you get people insisting that the only REAL PvP exists in open-world, high-risk scenarios where you can bring a zerg to a newbie if you so choose, and on the other hand, the ArenaNet team talks about Guild Wars 2 having both the arena-based PvP for “hardcore” players, and open-world PvP for “casuals”.
I feel that when players say they want the open-world high-risk ganking type of PvP, they mean they want war, not competition; war is nevever fair, and hardly resembles a competition. Competition is bringing your skills to a fight where you are no better equipped than your opponent; this is the only scenario where “may the best player win” has any meaning.
Of what I know, I’d have to agree that GW does PVP in a very balanced manner. I also forget about GW when discussing MMOs because it only marginally fits the bill in my book. Early on in the introduction of arenas in WOW people suggested a similar model. Everyone gets the same exact gear which keeps the playing field a bit more level and brings it down to class, spec and skill. That doesn’t resolve class in balance and forced spec issues but dual specs allow the option of arena only spec choices. Unfortunately, in WOW’s case, progression is so heavily predicated on obtaining new gear that not being able to use it in arena wouldn’t be acceptable to most players.
As for Allods, I like your idea of small single person ships for PVE and exploration. PVP enabled isn’t a necessity. Just something solo-able please!
Its a declaration of blind allegience, I like horde for example. It felt like I was allowed to hate the alliance for whatever reason (not gonn get that nerdy into details :P) but it was what made the game fun in my opinion.
Sure there are exceptions but what they need to do to make a game fun is make you feel like you feel the emotions your character would in his situation.
I think one of the things that would accentuate the “Us vs. Them” mentality in a game like WoW would be if they allowed cross faction relationships while fighting “the big bad.”
As it is, you have Sanctuaries where you can’t attack the other faction, which is fine and dandy, but you still can’t group with them, raid with them and even in ICC, after just vowing to work together with one another at the end of the Argent Tournament, one of the first battles you have is Horde vs. Alliance in their gunships as they try to enter the citadel!
I understand what they’re trying to do, but what they’re accomplishing is a viewpoint of having their cake and eating it too. They’re imposing a threat and wanting a work-together atmosphere, when at the same time they’re trying to keep the spirit of war with having the 2 factions still against one another.
I realize it’s lore. I realize that may be their point, but with current designs it’s not enough. I can’t go to Stormwind and raze it to the ground if I wish. I can’t gather an army and make any type of advance that would be meaningful to the outcome of the war. The war ends when Blizzard decides it ends. There’s no subterfuge or espionage or switching sides. I can’t defect as a Tauren and join the alliance.
Hell one of the quests in Borean Tundra has you returning an Alliance defector to his Captain. You, as one of the Horde, should have either tortured or killed him. But no, you just return him.
Anyway, no game currently fosters any kind of PVP that I wish to take part in, except EVE Online. EVE is perfect in its PVP because ANYONE can learn to fly a good ship with good weapons and the rest is tactics.
Tesh wrote:
After all, PvP in my book is about *player* skill pitted against other *player* skill.
The problem is that player skill is exclusionary. Look at FPSes, where most of the time you have a few really good people who dominate. Dave Rickey had a great post on his now defunct blog talking about how he spent an insane amount of time playing Tribes to get into the top 10% of all players. It mirrors the stories people told about getting high PvP ranks in WoW back in the day.
The cumulative character aspect of MMOs can help equalize things out; if I’m just not as skilled as you are, gaining a few levels or some better gear might be the edge I need to win. Given that the business model for most games works better with more players, it’s not good business sense to exclude people.
If you’re going to use the cumulative character model, I think the trick is to not have an exponential power curve like we see in most level-based games (where 50 first level characters have no chance against one 50th level character.) Advancement should focus on expanding options rather than merely increasing power. This is what a lot of people think Guild Wars did right.
Do real PvP players want that, or do they really just want the ganking cycle when they call for PvP?
There’s no monolithic group of “PvP players”, unfortunately. In my estimation, some of the more vocal do like the ganking aspect (more when they’re the ganker and not the gankee, though). On the other hand, some people definitely do want more of a sporting challenge.
My observation is that more people are focused on winning rather than a real competition, though. I think one of the dangers is to assume a market’s size based on how vocal its members are.
One more reason to get good feedback on what players really want, I guess… and to temper marketing expectations.
Brian, you’re in a position to speak from authority on this, more than any of the rest of us. What is it about the M59 design that made it as toxic as it is? You noted the guild-based PvP, how did that work, and what else may have contributed? Perhaps more importantly, how would you do it right?
Oh, and Wiqd, I’m with you. The only flavor of PvP I’m interested in is when it’s as balanced as possible. I want my skills to carry the day. If that means I don’t win much, so be it.
…I know well that I’m an outlier. I usually am. 😉
The EQ2 PvP server had an interesting us vs them mentality because players could (relatively) easily switch sides with their character. I did it about 7 times with my main 🙂 It was so odd because suddenly the guys you were fighting against became your comrades and your old allies became your enemies.
I used to laugh when people would generalise the opposing side and say something like “they’re all cowards” etc because half the faction based was mixed with so many people from the previous side 🙂
It was also interesting how quickly you would be accepted onto the opposing side when you switched. It was a real case of group mentality.
@Spitfires The camaraderie only exists because as a defector, there’s nothing you can do to inhibit your new faction, aside from not fighting or giving away position (which doesn’t matter) secretly over vent or something.
If a game were to include subterfuge and sabotage options into the PVP aspect, you’d see much more pride taken in scanning a new-comer. Couple corps in EVE found that out the hard way 😉 Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I love EVE. PVP isn’t just bound to shooting imaginary lasers at someone. You can get inside, infiltrate and accomplish your goals without ever firing a shot, all due to social engineering.
Tesh wrote:
What is it about the M59 design that made it as toxic as it is?
I think the design was just one piece of the puzzle. The larger issue was that the community was old and cranky and wary of outsiders. The community wasn’t welcoming in a game that was already pretty brutal for a new player.
The biggest design problem was that players were allowed to harm each other. For example, a person in your guild could turn off the defenses of the guild’s hall and cause the guild to lose ownership. Or, a player could open the front door and let an enemy into the guild hall.
Some problems you have no matter what. Players could steal items from the guild hall’s chests, but this is the same as players robbing the guild bank in other games.
The central issue is trust. I don’t think you should do anything that causes players not to trust each other, otherwise people become insular and cliquish. As an older game, M59 tried to allow for options that allowed players to betray each other to spice things up. But, that was harmful to the game in the long run. In reality, there are already plenty of ways for players to screw each other over in a typical game without designing it in.
An observation, in elderscrolls 4 (oblivion) to participate in arena matches (they are all ezmode but that’s another topic) you have to be wearing a specific arena suit.
Blizzard could adopt that model balancing gear with an arena outfit except at the very highest levels where it could be exempted. One could still obtain tangible rewards that can be used outside of the arena, and should they reach the king of the hill level of play, should be rewarded to be able to wear whatever they wanted at that point.
It would balance out much of the issues faced by new arena players faced with well geared opponents that have been doing it for a long time. the skill level will determine the outcome, not the fact they vets are wearing the season 7 suit, and the newbies are still in quest blues.
Blizzard could fine tune the suits so that each main spec of each class has a balanced stat set.
To make sure that it’s not unbalancing to pve play, make the arena suits unusable outside of the arena. Perhaps as a buff/usable item instead of a gear set. but when active (and only removable by top tiered contestants) sets your stats to a specific level.
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