Disclosure: I don’t own a gun, but I fully support the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. I think it’s crucial as an equalizer between citizens and a check on runaway government statist tendencies. If you want to debate that, well… this isn’t really the place, and I’ll moderate accordingly. I mention it first so you can get your prejudicial reflexive responses out of your system and move on. No, I’m not really talking politics, but there’s enough potential intersection that I wanted to get that out of the way.
I’m talking about PvP.
One of the things that bothers me most about PvP in most modern MMOs is the rather extreme power differential. It’s absurd to have level capped characters be orders of magnitude more powerful than rookies. Yes, PvP is all about exploiting imbalances and the whole Sun Tzu thing, but when you have a max level character who literally cannot be harmed by a newbie, and who can in return slaughter newbies by the score at whim, you’re not dealing with PvP any more, you’re dealing with bullying. That’s what “ganking” is, pure bullying, something corrosive to a gaming community.
I actually don’t mind class imbalances or other world-based spatial tactical advantages. That’s sort of the point of open world PvP. It seems to me that the venerable Sun Tzu would be all for taking advantage of whatever you can find. Still, I’m not convinced that he was imagining a world like we see in these fantasy games.
I’m not blaming players, either. The notion of ”fair play” is a squishy one, as is “honorable combat”. Players play with what they are given. No, I’m arguing that designers really should make PvP most about player skill and minimize leveling, gear and other influences as much as possible. Or maybe, just maybe… set up equalizers.
What about guns? According to some, they are the great equalizer out here in monkeyspace. Sure, a brute like Mike Tyson should be a clear winner in a PvP bout with a waif supermodel, but what if she’s packing heat? A .22 slug to the brainpan should stop even a bull like Tyson. As the old argument goes, “an armed society is a polite society”, and that’s even possible in a merely magical world, as I noted a while back.
How might that work in a game world? It’s not like gankers would sit back and agree to let their marks have teeth. That’s against their design. Maybe it has to be reactive. Maybe outclassed victims simply get a revenge mechanic. Bullies can be haunted by players they bother, and may be “shot” into incompetence at the most inopportune times. Maybe this means a root/snare, maybe it’s a nudge off a cliff, maybe it’s a stun that makes the bully drop to level 1 for a while in hostile territory. Maybe make it automatic and persistent, but victim-defined, so that the bully can’t just log out and clear it.
Maybe players always fight at the same level, no matter what. PvP fights are always based purely on class balance, and stats are normalized. How to do that on the fly might be tricksy, true.
…or maybe, just maybe, make your power differential smaller to start with. That’s what I’d do, but that’s really a “ground up” design, not something to adapt to midstream.
So why do I care about all of this? Well, if the newest WoW expansion is going to make war between factions more personal, it may well be more relevant in that game. For better or worse, as WoW goes, so goes a significant undercurrent of the MMO genre. PvP is a niche pursuit at best, I think, but if the goal is to get more players involved, it has to make sense and not be a frustrating mess. Open world PvP has the potential to make the world of an MMO interesting and exciting… but if it’s just a cycle of bullying, it’s really not much fun for anyone but the bullies. I find that… unfortunate.
Edited to add this sweet post by Shamus over at Twenty Sided from a while back, just as a tangential bit of great writing and game design philosophy:
The problem with all these systems is that it’s really hard to keep them from being exploited. For example, people used to use lower level characters as “bait” in the lower zones. Lower level enemy player attacks lower level character, and gets jumped by a hidden high level player who is “defending” the lower character.
Or imagine a system with your revenge gimmick. Instead of high-levels ganking, you’d have a swarm of lower-level players attacking the higher level one. If the high-level beat them off, they’d come back more powerful.
Even if you restricted PvP to fights between equal level players, waiting for a player to be at half health or ambushing with surprise or larger numbers is a time-honored tactic in the real world. Is that fair? How would you prevent it?
In my opinion, the PvE/PvP servers are the best options, or the least-worst. You have to consent to PvP, and as long as there is consent, fairness is a moot point.
Guild Wars PvP totally got it right here. If you want, you can roll a level 20 pvp toon out of the box. Rare skills to make the perfect build, however, are out in the open world.
WoW has an even bigger problem with gear, don’t they? I mean, an army of raid-gear purples always destroyed an army of open-world blues back in the day when I was playing WoW pvp.
All I can say is: Hear! Hear!
PvP and games of character advancement don’t mix.
Leave the PvP for PvP games, like shooters and MOBAs, and keep MMORPGs about PvE, imho.
It’s a fair point about open world PvP; and for BGs too, I have been in favor of removing PvP-gear / making all PvP gear equal for everyone for a long time. even same level encounters should be about tactics and performance, not gear. as you said, there are still plenty of ‘differences’ as is, you have players with different specs, you have teams with different class setups etc. enough to leverage on.
As for open world…I still think UO did it pretty well with the PK-system. add to that the skill-based progression, rather than having levels and even fix classes: differences between character power become smaller. a higher skilled character has better spells and utilities, but in essence not more ‘life’ – and there are still ways the rookie can try and evade/counter attack. at the very least, the rookie should have a chance to flee in one piece. everything else is unbalanced.
Another approach might be an MMO where character powers rely heavily on gear, rather than level. assuming gear is available fairly quickly, and level only really adds extra abilities.
The aspect of player frustration is rather important too; it’s what I hear MMO players say about FPS often, where you get one-shotted easily and for a long time as a rookie. it’s pure frustration because the learning curve is so steep. it’s definitely more agreeable to learn PvP in an environment where you get a chance to actually play before you get pwned, easier to learn something that way.
it’s about finding the right balance here imo (I’ve also been advocating more fast-paced battle à la FPS on my blog lately, so I don’t wanna contradict myself too much lol!), or else install different server modes.
I’d start by equalizing the attack tables. Make it so that, excluding talents, everyone has the same crit, hit, dodge, etc. That won’t address the damage difference, but it will mean that a lowbie can still use many of their escape tricks, and could still be handy in groups.
Warhammer does it pretty well IMO.
1. if high enough level character goes into lower level zone? they are turned into a chicken and while they retain their hitpoints, they cannot attack anything, cannot fight back, cannot even heal themselves.
2. in pvp brackets – lower level characters brought up in power to the highest level characters. they might not have the same number of spells, but what they have hits hard enough to kill high levels. My SO, who pvps in Warhammer almost exclusively (meaning that’s what he levels through as well) routinely holds his own and often wins against opponents that are, in WoW terms – skull difficulty for him.
there’s still room for improvement of course, but I’d say its a pretty good start.
I think having an hours cooldown on how often your sent back to the graveyard on PVP loss might help (inside the hour, maybe your character does the beg animation ala duel loss).
In the end, was the whole thing supposed to be much like the idea in D&D where you might meet an ancient dragon anywhere. Here, you can’t do that in PVE, because…stuff. But in PVP terms you can run into an ancient dragon.
Maybe have a an option you can toggle, with either full world PVP (and some sort of bonuses based on time spent in PVP territory, not just on beating the other guy, because as noted that’s not going to happen in low/high level mashups). OR you can toggle over to some mechanism which scales you to within 3 levels of the opponent, but then the only way you get bonuses is by winning.
It looks like SWTOR does something similar to WAR, with HP and Damage normalized in the Warzones. The higher level players simply have more abilities. I didn’t know about open world PvP, having not experienced it.
I thought Games Workshop’s tabletop game Necromunda did a fair job with gunfights. Most characters had just one Hit Point, so if your characters took a hit there was a good chance they were killed. However, if you made the saving throw they weren’t wounded, per se, because it’s hard to be wounded when you only have a single Hit Point. Instead the Hit became a Near-Miss and that character was subsequently pinned down during their next turn. It’s a little harder to do this in the real-time environment of an MMO.
While a lot of the FPS games do a good job of staying true to the one shot, one kill principle, it’s also possible to take several less-than-fatal hits, continue fighting, and eliminate your foe with a single, well-placed head shot.
Which brings me to Golden Eye, the original N64 version, not the Wii game. I liked that targets reacted differently in Golden Eye depending on where they were hit. I may be misremembering, but characters shot in the butt would leap and grab their wounded derriere, characters hit in the leg would leap & hop around, and characters hit in the head would die instantly, usually. I hated the elite forces in Goldeneye who could not only take multiple hits to the head but could accurately return fire while doing so. I considered this especially cheap because when you were on the receiving end of a head shot both your rate of fire and accuracy were negatively affected.