Section three, the big one.. This will cover my ideas for open world PVP, and a quick snippet on instanced battleground/scenario type play.
First off, a quick snippet on battleground/scenario PVP. At different points throughout the PVE world, you will find camps set up for some faction in the game. These will be factions independant of the factions used for the open PVP game. When you go to these camps, you'll be able to sign up for and participate in instanced, even team PVP matches.
Again, not going in to too much detail because we all know how these work. WAR has them, WoW has them. Things like capture the flag games, king of the hill / territories types, kill counters, etc. Even teams, time limits, made for quick, fun, objective based PVP. As you win you gain reputation with the faction, which allows you new titles, emblems, and other visual flair. You gain XP and gold for each kill, and for completing objectives such as flag capture, holding points, etc. At the end all players get Triumph points based off of their participation. Get very few kills, no objective captures, but lots of deaths? At least you still participated, and will get Triumph points. Sat there AFK the whole match, very, very few if any points awarded. Pretty standard stuff. As discussed before, Triumph points can be used to buy gear/runes, etc.
Ok, that's the easy stuff. Why put it in? It's become one of the new "standards" for MMORPGs to have these type of games. Between this and the Coliseum, tons of "casual" PVP options for players. Throw in the capturable Guild structures and you've already got lots of PVP options, more so then many games.
But I want more.
Open World PVP should NOT be an afterthought. More then just "throw a few control points here and there" kind of deal, a LOT more.
So this is what I propose...
All the PVP options I've listed before exist in the PVE world. I say PVE world because the PVP world is seperate. Like an alternate universe. Throughout the game world (both sides) there will be portals that allow you to travel between the PVE and PVP world. The PVE world is where you'll find all the quests and storyline and monsters and dungeons etc.
The PVP world will be mostly devoid of monsters, all the dungeons closed off, no quests that don't pertain to PVP, and no real "storyline." This alternate world is strictly for war between players.
First off, I imagine there will be three different factions. Players must choose to join up with one of these three factions, and will fight for that "team." There will be mechanics in place to allow players to switch factions, but not often, and not without consequence.
Each faction will have a "home city." This home city will contain a "safe zone" for players who have just traveled to the PVP world. Why? You don't want people zerging fresh recruits "just off the boat."
The entire city, of course, will not be safe. Not at all.
In addition to the 3 faction cities, there will be a number of structure, a nice odd (non-prime) number like 11 or 13 outposts. Things like forts, and other structures scattered about the PVP world. These will ALL be capturable by players. The same kind of siege mechanics that I discussed in the Guild structures post will be at play here. Throne rooms, layers of defense, siege weapons, etc. A fort or keep will have more defenses and be harder to capture then a tower or town or village,
Difference is, there is no player limit as it's NOT instanced. Also, you won't be able to "hire" player or NPC mercs because everyone will be part of one of the three factions (kind of.) The three factions are obviously at a state of war with each other, and a player of faction A will be able to freely attack and be attacked by players of faction B and C.
The capital cities won't be capturable, as each side needs a "rally point" but they can be sacked and sieged, just not controlled.
So players will pick their faction and fight in open PVP against the other two factions for control of these points. Players will be awarded gold and experience for PVP kills, and Triumph points for sieges and seige defenses. If you are fighting in and around the area that is under siege, you will get points. Because this is not instanced, and there is no time limit unlike the Guild battles, sieges can last for a long time, or be over very quickly. So the mechanics have to be a little different. You'll slowly accumulate Triumph points for fighting in and around the control points. If the outpost switches hands, if your faction ends up taking control of the outpost that you have recently been fighting in and around, you will gain extra experience, gold, and Triumph points. The defending faction will start to accumulate Triumph points faster as the siege beings to last longer and longer. That way, the attacking faction gets extra points for successfully capturing an enemy outpost, and the defense gains more for successfully holding off the attack for an extended period of time.
The Triumph points you get in this open world PVP will be the same as those from the Coliseum, from the battlegrounds/scenariors, and from Guild sieges (obviously not the Guild specifici points.) Why? I want players to be able to choose how they want to PVP. I don't want people to be forced into any of the different "flavors" of PVP. That being said, the open world PVP is the most hectic, dangerous, and difficult, given the fact that there are very few rules and it's a three way war. For that reason, you will receieve the most Triumph points (in comparison to other PVP methods) for open world PVP. For instance, an hour of Coliseum or battleground play may net you.. I dunno.. 500 Triumph points, where as an hour of open world PVP might get you 600. Not too much of a difference, but enough reward to justify the added danger.
As you gain Triumph points in open world PVP, you gain Rank in your faction. There will be many levels of Rank within the faction, with their own bonuses. The lower Ranks will grant you more asthetic things such as banners and emblems and crests, but the middle and high Ranks will grant you much more.
First off, players will receive an area of effect (AOE) buff to all their faction members around them based off of their rank. This buff will aid you and your comrades in combat. The higher the Rank, the better the buff and the larger the AOE. The highes Ranks will be able to deploy the factions Battle Standard (flag) to the field of battle you find yourself on, for an even greater buff to their faction members. This will be very useful and reflect on important combat stats like Momentum (more to come in combat section, and yes, it's different then WARs lol.)
As you gain higher Ranks not only does it require more and more Triumph points to achieve the next rank, but you will earn less per "tick" when fighting in and around control points.
So why the AOE buffs? It's like a leadership system, kind of like "hey, that guy is pretty high rank, I'm going to follow him!" Also, there will be a global chat channel for your faction, and only players with high enough rank can post in it. Because buffs from people of the same Rank do NOT stack, it'll be important for a faction to spread out their "leadership" to different areas of battle, to different outposts, in order to maximize the armies effectiveness. Hence, why only the towards-the-top ranks are allowed to talk on the global faction channel, to coordinate the battle effort. But, all member of the faction can see the chat so faction wide messages and order can be relayed.
Also, depending on your Rank, you will be able to spend Triumph points from the entire Factions "pool" of points. Every time the faction gains control of a new outpost, a certain number of Triumph points goes into the "faction bank" depending on the size of the outpost captured. Certain higher Ranks will allow players to spend from this faction-wide pool on things like siege weapons, defensive structures, and NPC defenders for your outposts.
So how is it controlled? How do you prevent these higher Rank players from wasting all the Triumph points from the Faction-wide pool? All purchases have to be approved by others of the same rank for one. Also, players of lower rank can initiate votes of "no confidence" that every faction member can vote on. This way they can vote out a bad "leader."
But why? To bring some control and democracy, as well as some leadership and responsibility to the open world PVP. War and politics are often intertwined.
An important note, is that all armor/weapons/gear is available to players of any and all Ranks. Rank doesn't determine the quality or Rune capability of your gear, Rank only effects the leadership, direction, and battlefield cohesion. Why? Because sometimes in order to lead, you have to follow. More then often it's the actions of a handful of talented soldiers, not their commanders, that turn the tide of battle. So you can't "gimp" anyone in terms of gear.
But what's the point? Mostly fun, and dominance. It's a constantly moving and adapting war, with outposts falling and being recaptured all the time. It's never the same "get flag A, run to B" that you see in the battlegrounds/scenarios. Some people enjoy doing that kind of stuff over and over, some do not. I'm just out to give choices.
The "end" objective is to dominate enough of the map to stage an assault on the enemy factions capital city. Same kind of siege mechanics, defenses and siege weapons etc, and you will have to assault the Throne Room in the same type of way as in the Guild battles. It's just things are much more chaotic and crazy because there is no time limit, nor limit on number of players that can participate. When you successfully siege an enemy faction's castle, you get the "best" available loot from the open world PVP game, though of course only marginally better then anything else you can get, but you also get the most Triumph points and gold and experience.
There are also many titles only available through open world PVP game play.
So what prevents a single faction from steam-rolling the rest? Not much. This is on purpose. There will be soft "caps" on the number of players that can join each faction. Just like in Factions PVP system from UO. If you are in a "full" faction, you can switch for free to one of the less populated factions. However, only up to a certain number of people can switch for free in order to keep things as balanced as possible. Otherwise, you can switch factions if you wish to but only a certain number of times, like once a month or once every 3 weeks or something. When you switch (if it's not a population issue and thus free) you lose part of you Rank. Not any of your Triumph points, but you wall fall in Rank. The higher the Rank you are when you switch, the more your Rank will fall if you switch. If you are low in Rank and switch, you will not fall in Rank far, or at all.
The factions themselves are "ranked" based off of the number of outposts they control, the faction with the most controlled outposts receives a tiny buff to the amount of gold they get for kills and successful sieges. The faction in last place will receive a slight experience and Triumph point bonus for all actions. The faction in second place will receive a slight buff to the amount of Triumph points they get for all actions. I believe this will help to make things more competitive.
Also, each time a capital city is successfully sieged, the attacking faction that successfully sacks the enemy city with receive a Conquest point. After one of the factions receives enough Conquest points, they have "won" the war and every member of that faction will receive nice bonuses, experience, gold, Triumph points and more for the amount of time they have been in that faction. This is so new comers don't get as much as the people that have stuck with the faction throughout the war.
After this happens, the map resets and it starts all over. Players that are on the 'winning' side of the war enough times will receive very unique titles and armor/weapon models so that all can see how awesome they are. No uber weapons or armor or any other gear, the focus is on fun and bragging rights more then uber gear.
That's all I can think of now, I haven't editted or even spell / grammer checked this, so be kind! Please comment, and thanks for reading.
User Comments
oh yeah, no death penalties, the time you spend not fighting means no experience, no gold, no Triumph points and obviously if you die, you can't help bring victory to your faction. respawns will be a managable time.
but I don't want player to throw themselves blindly into combat with no fear of death. Each death will accumulate a 5% decrease to your overall combat effectiveness, to a maximum of 25%. This debuff wears off over time. High Rank players will be able to remove part of this debuff with their AOE aura.
You can't loot other players gear, but gear in this game doesn't matter as much as the Runes on the gear. The "spoils of war" will be the gold, experience, and Triumph points you get for slaughtering your enemies.
The game isn't designed to be heavily dependant on gear, so gear looting makes so sense. Everyone is on a semi-even level with gear, as the Runes and Focus Point Web will effect playstyle more then actual hard numbers, more to come in combat section :)
correction: "so gear looting makes NO sense."
I'm curious to see how the economy is going to work. Everything you have spoken of so far has been looting gear, upgrading through battle, etc. I'm curious as to how money will play a role. Will it be involved for NPC-vendors and things like buying your mount, the shitty normal armor choices, and paying travel fees? You won't have to pay for skills since it all comes from the web. I imagine money comes into retraining of course. But it sounds like the majority of money is going towards a player-based economy, or into automatic funds like guilds and factions. As you well know, player-based economies can go awry quickly without an enforced standard to go by.
As for what you actually posted today, it sounds pretty good. The only problem might be that servers get stretched too thin, or even have to support twice the normal player load to accompany the two worlds. Obviously you can make use of multiple "real" servers for each "game" server. But what about the multiple worlds. Are you leaving it at "Ya they're clones!" or are you going to tie the story into that, I imagine you will, but you didn't say much about it.
I'm not sure what else to say for right now, however. I agree with the separation of visual and stats on gear as you propose it.
i would like to know if the buldings could be upgrade like making the tower turning to a keep and to a castle in the pvp world, because you said the world restart after a time so there is no danger to having only castles on the world
WOw man you just stole the pretty much the whole pvp system for Dark age of camelot >:P
repeatskeet...he also borrowed heavily from WAR, hehe. Funny, same company.
Sounds kinda cool though.
D.
You mean it sounds like Planetside. But thats totally irrelivent, what matters is using proven formulas to make a good game. When World of Warcraft came out, many people cried that it was just a rip-off of Everquest...hear anyone still saying that today?
I look forward to more of these posts heerobya!
I just read your three articles about pvp (quite fast) and will give my opinion for them here.
Overall you are trying to create a pvp world for casual players and PVE players. The system you decribed is NOT true PVP. Sorry to say but I do not like your pvp ideas. I would call myself a hardcore pvper and your pvp system does not appeal to me.
First of all:
Your parallel pvp world is nothing else but a big battleground. You even have to enter it via a portal just like all other battlegrounds. The point of an open pvp world is to have both pvp-players and pve-players in the same world where anyone can attack everyone else. PvE and PvP are not exclusive and good game mechanics should make sure of it. In the end your described system is just a PVE world full of portals to pvp events. Nothing more.
Risk vs Reward:
This is an important factor for pvping. Your pvp system gives rewards but where is the risk ? Risk is: If things go wrong you will lose something equivalent in value. Example: In a battleground the winners get 10 triumph points and the losers lose 10 points. If you do not have something like this pvp will end up being a huge grind. Only the best players should get the highest ranks. Risk = death penalty.
Fairness:
Open pvp worlds with rivaling guilds is all but one thing: fair. Wars are unfair. To win a war you have to tip the balance to your side. You do this with quantity (players) and quality (strategy, technology, information warfare, degree of training). All you are trying to do is to create a toned done version of war.
What I want is: My guild should win because of above factors.
If we have 1000 players and they have 100? We should be able to slaughter them.
We have better equipment? We should be able to slaughter them.
We have a spy in their guild and know all of their movements? We should be able to slaughter them.
This is a MMO. Please do not try to create small scale wars (5v5, 10v10 duels). Try to think on a huge scale. Next problem would be that on a huge scale factions will be unbalanced because of player count. It has been shown again and again. One faction will have a lot more players than the others (because they are the only one with naked dancing elves for example). The only thing that works is making guilds compete with each other. Guilds can create alliances to balance the fight. Is this possible with a small number of factions? I think not.
I could go on and on about specific stuff but for me your world is nothing else but WoW II with a slightly different setup. Its carebear pseudo pvp.
ps: I endorse griefing and ganking btw. so I am not your typical pve casual player ;-). I would be glad to tell you why if you wish.
I endorse griefing and ganking, full looting, and harsh death penalties. I also think Faction pvp is inferior to FFA pvp.
well, ya gotta realize Inf666 and sullivanj69 that most MMO players are not into things like griefing, ganking, full looting, and harsh death penalties. Not saying it's a bad thing, like what you like and rock on, but many gamers are turned off by such ideas. I played many, many long hours in old school MMOs with those types of system, and I enjoyed them, but I'm also glad most games aren't made that way anymore.
What I've tried to create is a casual/friendly PVP system for those who want fun/simple/fair in the Coliseum and the scenariors.
But a more intense and unforgiving system with the open world PVP. What I forgot to cover in my post was the two "alternate" factions and their role... i'll now probably have to do it in a later post, but they will allow for much more FFA pvp
but, my ideas draw from the Ultima Online factions system of old. You have to remember, most everything else was ripped off from them :)
And I don't like the idea of upgrading a tower to a keep or a keep to a castle, why? It encourages "camping" in a sense. I want the war to be swift and moving, with the "front lines" constantly changing. If everyone is more focused on controling a point, then upgrading and holding it, that (in my opinion) will significantly draw away from the "feel" I'd be going for
I understand what you are trying to do and I am sure a lot of people will just love your ideas. Hell, even I would try out your game if it had a more extreme pvp ruleset. I agree with you that hardcore pvp players are a minority but I have to keep on pushing it so that maybe someday someone will develop my dream game ;-)
You are talking about an "unforgiving" system. Unforgiving means that you lose something on failure else it would be a forgiving system. How exactly is your game unforgiving ?
On another note about your ranking system: Will you be able to get to the top with grinding away at pvp or are the top10 players on the list really the best players (as in player skill) on the server ?
i'm still thinking on what to do to answer your question about the ranks. I DON'T want a system like WoW had before, where the high ranks would have to grind battlegrounds to keep their high ranks so they didn't lose them. I don't want any system to "force" people to play. In WoW's old system, you could lose rank for not playing and getting honor, so the higher ups had to play constantly to keep their top spot.
My current idea is to have the upper ranks alternate between a state of "active" leadership and "inactive." You won't lose rank, but if you haven't been participating as much you'll become "inactive" and lose your rights to spend Faction bank resources. I'm also thinking to have "term limits" on how long one of the higher ranked players can keep their leadership powers before it transfers to another player. What do you think? That way, you won't lose rank but won't be active unless you put forth the effort to be a quality leader.
After much debate I'm thinking about taking away Triumph points for deaths in open world PVP. The points taken away will come out of your "total" which applies to gaining Ranks and Titles, but not from the "pool" of Triumph points from which you can buy gear and such. That way you can still "get better" even if you die a lot, but you may lose your Rank and title. What do you think of that?
That plus the 5% combat effectiveness (stackable to 25%) loss, I feel that would be a "proper" penalty for dying.
Thoughts?
I applaud the author I will read this one in more detail. I read over the others but it was painful too me. They are well written and I feel that the author would do well in mainstream. But alas, these ideas are not pushing the envelope. It is a regression infact from what the trendsetters like Ultima Online, etc have tried to do. I feel that what EVE/CCP did was a step in the right direction to create an atmosphere for everyone
I consider myself a 'sandbox' player or Virtual World fan. I want what's logical. I think things like friendly fire actually involve serious player skill. Aim and Dodge also take player skill. Integrate all three and strategic locations (bottlenecks) then small teams can acquire victory. What is better and more herioc- 25 vs 25 or 25 vs 50 and winning? In our history small armies have acquired victory. It is these fallen heroes we often deify- not the ones that had a "fair fight".
I do applaud this author and I will try to study this last one in greater detail. But I feel like I'm being segregated and treated like a second class citizen. Feels a lot like RvR here- controlled, restrictive, and comfortable for newbies.
Okay I will now comment on this article specifically. Yeah this is RvRvR but I like people can switch factions. That is good. Next, players can takeover outposts and get rewarded for time spent. That is good, short term good. long term bad. People are getting rewarded for anything they do. Sure, most may probably work hard but others can sitdown, use hacks, and absorb the Triumph points. I know my friend sends his 6 year old into WoW battlegrounds for him. but hey they are still paying customers right?
Next, rewarding people for just time spent. Not punishing bad gameplay. This equals zerg. newbies hate negative reinforement from long travel time and death penalty but how else can I make an impact? These battles will wage all night long and not end til people log out from being tired most likely. Suggest perhaps additional time limit. I beleive Blizzard employed Epic beasts to force the battles to end (which was very frustrating but I'm suggesting you might need ways to encourage these battles to end for max triumph points).
Reset the zone? That erases all of my impact
Triumph points? So it will be all positive reinforcement. Developers tend to really shy away from risk versus reward but we'd get more impact and wars that end.
I would suggest possibly adding a time limit to ensure this battle ends at a decent hour since you are going for this route.
Very well thought out ideas here I apologize for my bias in this regard. This is not something I would play most likely but it is a solid design you have I suppose.
I read your earlier ideas and liked few but with this one I have to say that you sound like wow addict that wants more epic for against the hours he suffered on battlegrounds.
Like you said the idea of making seperate pvp area reachable trought portal is a lot like wow battlegrounds. When taking look at the next expancion it comes even closer to this idea. But it doesnt make the fact that it rewards the losers in pvp to disapear.
If you ask me the pvp shouldnt be about new skills and items. Futher more it shouldnt be about spending many hours in certain area and running back from spawn point to hit as many enemies as possible. The pvp should cost to the loser and reward the winner. The problem in wow battlegrounds is that theres low level players who do nothing but die and they still get the one stone and honor points at the end.
I played game called anarchy online and it had land control wars. There was little places where you got plant these towers that gave you personal bonuses. These towers could be attacked from time to time and if your towers got destroyed you losed your bonuses.
In eve online corporations (guilds) combine their forces to alliances (factions) and take control of space areas. They build space stations there and they gather materials to fuel em and keep them running. They can be attacked and destroyed (and captured?). This is land control pvp at its prime. Your guild house and your bank posessions are in stake. Theres an chance of losing your home and your safe point to log out of game.
This is very good model since it provides content to end game and to guilds same time as it provides content to pvp. The flaw of it in eve is that it restricts some players from reaching the high end pve content completely. But this wouldnt have to be this way. There could be areas controlled by npc factions that would have same resources and content as the free pvp area but the pvp area just would have more of it and there would be more of pvp areas. This sounds that it favors the pvp players but you have to see the effort it takes to do something in the areas that have someone that wants to kill you and is stalking in the bushes 24h.
In short: there should be portal to pvp fields in pve world. There should be few safe spots in pvp world. The amount of safe spots should increase trought your guild pvp or political efforts. The amount of safe spots should decrease to minium trought your guild pvp failures. Coming unprepaired to pvp should penalize you. Coming prepaired and with team should reward you.
that's the plan, it's not a battleground. it's all open, and comparable to the size of the "main" game world, the PVE world.
it's not about gear, not about getting gear, nor using epic gear. I hate the gear system in WoW. Chasing a carrot is NOT for me.
the Guild ownership of castles/keeps/towers was alread discussed in another post, as was the Coliseum system.
the 5% decrease in combat effectiveness per death (stackable to 25% max) is in to prevent zerging.
as I said in one of my comments, i like the idea of taking Triumph points away for deaths, not points from the pool that can be "spent" by from the pool the effects your rank. Your rank won't "decay" over time like it did in WoW, but if you die too much you will de-Rank.
The reset will not happen often. A single faction has to acquire a specific number of Conquest Points for sacking other faction's capital cities before they "win" and the map is reset. This will not be daily or weekly, maybe not even monthly. It depends on the players. The faction switching and soft "cap" on enrollment is meant to keep one faction from constantly steamrolling the rest.
The number of safe spots will decrease if you and your faction don't defend your territory. No spot really will be 'safe' even the capitals, but ONLY a very small portion of the capital city where players will zone into when they make the switch from the PVE world to the PVP world.
Because of the way the AOE Rank buffs works (as discussed) and other abilities high ranking players will have, it'll be EXTREMELY helpful to form armies with people of different ranks spread out to maximize any and all bonuses. So coming prepared will greatly help you and your faction. Not coordinating the players and war effort of your faction will greatly hurt your chances at victory.
And with the auto-balancing effect of levels (as discussed) and the way combat will work (to come later) it wil be very possible for a smaller, more organized and skilled force to defeat a much larger force.
Man I wish I could be unbiased more you know? I can understand you are trying to create a system for 'everyone' to enjoy so I will try to put on my unbiased thinking cap here. t
Thoughts:
Still I worry about these triumph points -but- that is the model in both FPS and MMORPG games. I do believe in BF2142 the good performers get best experience points. So please if you stick with postive reinforcement thats fine but make sure the good players get very, very best points. please look at BF2142 just play it for a bit. you can make your system work. the danger here is that MMORPG has a vast crowd that might not have any skills whatsoever. so not getting triumph points will discourage them. I will leave it to readers to decide how to fine tune that of course heh. just depends on how hard you want to go
- okay to stop zerging. well, I will try to cover it in my upcming blog entry best as I can. I am not sure how applicable my ideas are to your interesting title that you got designed here. Penalties are just so problematic and the more harsh it is, the more newbies are turned off. even though you could limit the penalty to just this zone is the advantage you have in this concept- they might get discouraged from PVP
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