Originally posted by ste2000

Originally posted by xDrac

You know what game hat absolute perfect Open World PVP? 

Vanilla WoW.

Never PvPed so much in my life.

 

Yeah but it was pointless!

Originally posted by Ausare
People do not have to adapt. Pve content could just improve.

OR, people need to realize there is room for many different games. PVE needs to improve in general, and PVP needs to be brought back for those who want it (me lol). 

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by GrumpyMel2

Well, the Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend (for now) has plenty of precedent. You need look no further then WWII and the relationship between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union for that.

It's not that the powers become all "buddy, buddy", it's that they recognize that without some level of cooperation they are going to be destroyed. They do it out of neccesity, not desire.  I don't play Secret World, but I think the way they have that dynamic setup between the factions is a very interesting aspect of the game.

In terms of  "OPT-IN" Open World PvP....I think there are some problems in that regard... more so for sandbox style games. Mostly this would be in terms of actions that support combat efforts but aren't directly combat actions themselves.

For example is a millitary force supposed to simply let someone they KNOW is working for the enemy stroll all around thier base or stanging areas scouting out positions for the enemy simply because they have thier "flag off"?  Even in the field, if you see someone that is freindly to the enemy, do you let them alone so they can provide combat intel about your forces and movements?

The other aspect is if the game includes any sort of economic/logistic aspects to warfare (as sandbox games often seek to incorporate). If someone is out gathering resources that you KNOW are going to be used to craft/construct weapons for the enemy...you just leave them alone because they are "unflagged" ?

By allowing the "OPT-IN" feature, you are taking very important elements out of warfare.

 

I'd vastly prefer systems where there were "free fire" and "non-agression" zones/area.  This allows players to choose to engage or not based upon the territory they entered. Once you enter a "free fire" zone you are fair game regardless of whether you really want to fight or not. By contrast "non agression zones" you don't allow fighting no matter what your faction is.

This both gets around some of the problems with the "OPT-IN" model and is more realistic. There are plenty of situations where hostile factions can't engage each other in neutral territory (e.g. Switzerland) or are restricted to brushfire/proxy wars in remote territories because they don't want to risk escalation by direct attacks on each others homeland (US/Soviet situation during the Cold War). YMMV

 

I'm 40 years old and I'm well schooled on world history.  (I actually read and stuff)

These aren't governments in TSW.  They are basically megalomaniacal cults.  The point wasn't about the viability of working together, it was about how easy it would have been to allow PvP in a game like TSW, and originally I believe it was part of the design.  It was changed very late in development.

I don't care about non-aggression zones because they segregate the population.  The point of opt-in PvP is to put it out there for anyone to experience, even if they are just bystanders.  I loved the battles that would happen in SWG cities, even when I was just watching.  There were also times when I joined in a fight because someone asked me for help, or because seeing everyone else fighting gave me the itch.  That wouldn't have happened much had the battles always been in some far away zone.

I understand your opinion, but I stil find opt-in to be the best of both worlds, while also inviting people who might otherwise only PvE to be a part of it all.  Look how dead and boring London and Seoule are in TSW.  It would have been a lot more fun to see fights on the streets, or out in the game world in my opinion.  The same goes for a lot of other boring games out there.

I could see opt in working for a game like TSW where the story could be explained by "rogue agents"!and such. it's less about mass strategic movements of armies and more about individual action. territories for pvp and safe zones might work better for large scale battles.  I like the idea of classes for the different pvp styles -- player killer, hunter, etc. 

i see so much more than classes for pvp styles though. Think about this:

look at how your guild works in any modern mmo. Now think about the old eq faction system. What if each one of those factions had all the upgrade options of a guild, with the difference that a npc controlled the top level instead of a player.

say you were in the "order of pacification" above for the pve only crowd. You join this order and you get a certain number of skills and protections to go with your race and class. You can then improve your protections by everyone in your order working toward "order" goals. As the order progresses more and more skills become available, and in this case they specialize in protection. Protecting you from getting ganked, protecting your items and gold, protecting your equipment.

you progress in the order independant of your other "organizations" i.e class, race etc and you can either do things like combat, salvage, gather materials, or help build the order hall (each order would have one) or even set up an order outpost. You can contribute on your own to gain faction and unlock the skills and abilities, or with a group or a zerg if thats your style.

It may be possible that you might have a chance of being killed by a killer type player, but joining this order gives you a plethora of tools to allow you to avoid it fairly easily. This orders focus is just that though. 

now if you add many more levels of this npc guild type faction, you can design in pvp rulesets tailored to the needs of the individual player the order of pacification being the most pve extreme order.

You could have orders for sentinels which give up some protections for other defensive pvp related abilities

you could have Rangers which dont have alot of protections but instead get tracking abilities and other useful tools for hunting the killer type players.

you can have many flavors and each flavor could have a mix of plusses and minuses chosable by the player depending on their play style.

at the bottom is the killers. Those who choose to kill other players who are not killers. Unlike all the other factions, the killer factions are seen as "evil" and are kos to all "good factions from above and are actually in league with the npc villians of the game. They look like the "evil" aka dark elf vs high elf version of the good side, but their factions are not concerned with protections, this extreme is only interested in power and control and thus all the skillls and abilities reflect that.

in these factions players compete for control of the upper ranks (maybe top 20 players online or something) ( read fight amongst themselves) and the top ranks get to initiate npc events that the "good" side would see as dynamic content.

the trick is to make the evil faction very difficult and unforgiving to play (focus on power not protection) such that the number of evil players would always be a small subset of the population (4-5%). Difficult and unforgiving usually easily accomplish this goal.

pvp can be integrated into a game. It does not have to be seperated.

Originally posted by maccarthur2004
Open World PVP is a "inevitable" and mandatory feature in sandbox mmos, since these mmos try to simulate a "realistic" competion between humans for political/geopolitical domains, ownerships, resources and etc. Without OWPvP, that competion and its social consequences (necessity of in-game alliances, friendships, political intrigues, tactics for self-defense, etc) ceases to exist.

Actualy I'm going to disagree with this, because it assumes that the players are the ONLY powers that exist in a sandbox game. That simply does not need to be true. "Sandbox" simply implies that the players have a significant creative role in shaping the game narrative/environment.  It does not imply that there are NO other powers in the game world that the players must deal with....or even that the players are by any stretch of the imagination the most powerfull entities in the game world. "Sandbox" certainly leaves room for other entities/powers to exist in the world that the players must deal with....including ones that the players may recognize as vastly more powerfull then themselves.

There are plenty of examples in real world history (and even greater room for them to exist in fiction) where individuals/groups/factions even nations had to abide by rules of engagement for where they could and could not conduct hostilities. Even if you would really like to cut down someone of an opposing faction, you simply aren't going to do so if it means violating the neutrality of a power that could crush you like a bug. Since most games don't have perma-death (and no creation of a new account if you are killed), one effective way to simulate this effect is "safe zones".

Having such a mechanic does not prevent the game from being a "sandbox"....even real world "sandboxes" have some basic boundaries and rules that control thier use.

Originally posted by GrumpyMel2

Originally posted by maccarthur2004
Open World PVP is a "inevitable" and mandatory feature in sandbox mmos, since these mmos try to simulate a "realistic" competion between humans for political/geopolitical domains, ownerships, resources and etc. Without OWPvP, that competion and its social consequences (necessity of in-game alliances, friendships, political intrigues, tactics for self-defense, etc) ceases to exist.

Actualy I'm going to disagree with this, because it assumes that the players are the ONLY powers that exist in a sandbox game. That simply does not need to be true. "Sandbox" simply implies that the players have a significant creative role in shaping the game narrative/environment.  It does not imply that there are NO other powers in the game world that the players must deal with....or even that the players are by any stretch of the imagination the most powerfull entities in the game world. "Sandbox" certainly leaves room for other entities/powers to exist in the world that the players must deal with....including ones that the players may recognize as vastly more powerfull then themselves.

There are plenty of examples in real world history (and even greater room for them to exist in fiction) where individuals/groups/factions even nations had to abide by rules of engagement for where they could and could not conduct hostilities. Even if you would really like to cut down someone of an opposing faction, you simply aren't going to do so if it means violating the neutrality of a power that could crush you like a bug. Since most games don't have perma-death (and no creation of a new account if you are killed), one effective way to simulate this effect is "safe zones".

Having such a mechanic does not prevent the game from being a "sandbox"....even real world "sandboxes" have some basic boundaries and rules that control thier use.

 

I agree with 95% that you said. My only disageement is: these "extern forces" that imposes laws occurs where are organized states or empires. The majority of the sandboxes mmos try to simulate precisely the situations of anarchy, where there is no established powers and the players are these powers in struggle for political domain.

And more: the forces os law CAN'T block the players from commiting crimes, but only punish them AFTER the crime happens. Therefore, a sandbox mmo aspiring to be "realistic" cant block pvp, only establish punishments to who engages in them.

Well... IMHO, themepark mmos are in nothing different from the single-player games, since that even these lasts, nowadays, can be played in multiplayer mode. Thus, to play a pure themepark mmo or a modern single-player is not so differente in concept. However, the "pve" content of the single-player games are a lot more complex, dinamic, rich and tangled with the story than the themepark mmos (more space and freedon to cmplex dinamics and events). Therefore, single-player games are better than themepark mmo if what you seek is only the story and "pve" content.

Originally posted by Horusra
but players have already given up realism in the fact that they can not be perma-killed for committing crimes or for those opposed to capital punishment having their character locked away for life.

Exactly!

The logical extension of a character that jeopordized a significant power blocks status by bringing down the ire of a major power on them would be that they would be ruthlessly hunted down and locked in a box for the rest of enternity or perma-killed. A game can't accurately simulate this by punishment, since the player could simply create a new account. The most "realistic" way to simulate that would actualy be to prevent the characters ability to engage in hostile actions in the first place.

Although I'm not completely adverse to situations where a "safe zone" is implimented simply by having NPC forces come and kill/arrest the offending character and remove them from gameplay/or forcibly eject them from the zone...and then establish Kill On Sight orders for that character from that point forward whenever they tried to enter that zone.

P.S. I wasn't really aware that situations of  anarchy were a requirement for "sandbox's" or even a scenario that most sandboxs sought to protray. I do agree though, in a situation where there was a complete breakdown of social order (e.g. "Lord of the Flies") there wouldn't be much in the way of "safe zones", at least not ones that owed thier existance to social institutions rather then supernatural forces.

I should note that I'm not ENTIRELY opposed to the idea of the entire game-world being a  "free fire zone" but I think it creates 3 rather significant problems:

1) It tends to make the game rather unwelcoming/unfreindly to newer players. Players that are brand new to the game (possibly even brand new to MMO's) generaly tend to NEED/WANT some space to LEARN the basics of how to play the game....possibly even such basic things as moving/communicating... exposing them to PvP at this point actualy PREVENTS them from learning how to play the game. This is especialy true since such areas will tend to draw gankers who stalk these areas looking for "easy kills".  This properly isn't PvP, it's Player vs Victem....if a player doesn't even know how to move or ready a weapon yet, they have ZERO chance to fight an attacker. If you allow this, the ONLY thing most of your new players are likely to learn is to NOT LOGIN TO YOUR GAME.  Despite the fact that many of them might have enjoyed the game if they had been given sufficient opportunity to learn the ropes a bit before being exposed to combat.  End result you'll end up having very few new players joining your game.

2) If PvP is allowed everywhere, it tends to trump all other activities....because it only takes on idiot to draw a gun to start the bullets flying. So you can pretty much forget about the RP-ers as they won't have any space/room to RP in. Again ALOT of these people (myself included in this) would actualy play a game that was heavly PvP focused... IF they knew they also had some space to RP in where they knew such activity wouldn't be interrupted.

3) You lose the people who actualy may actualy enjoy significant PvP but occasionaly want something else which is a bit less tense to do.

So, you are actualy cutting out (unneccesarly) pretty large swaths of players who actualy WOULD engage in the type of gameplay and game you enjoy playing if you just carved out a bit of space where they didn't have to deal with that if they didn't want to at that time. We aren't talking about creating a game that was mostly PVE with some ghetto'd (mostly instanced/battelground) PvP tacked on.... you could probably get away with only 10-20 percent of the game area being SAFE zones and easly avoid turning off those people.

"Flags" and open world PvP should never, ever mix.

Make your PvP optional by  restricting it to certain areas (DAoC) if you must, but as soon as you allow "flags" into the equation it has failed.  

What about servers? Those who want Open World PvP could all go to a specific server(s) set up for them. EQ1 did that. What is wrong with that solution? Does that not work very well? (I don't know. I never rolled on a PvP server.)

I'm what people would call a carebear... I play on pve and don't give much about pvp.

Yet I did pvp in the games I played, and wasn't crap at it either... Just did it for fun and not for ego (like most being obsessed about it :p).

But so far there hasn't been any game where I pvp'd as much as SWG. They did it right, the game lends itself wonderfull for pvp and most of all they didn't force me, who knew that made me more pvp enabled than in any other game out there :p

And like the OP I have wondered quite a lot of times why there aren't more developers going that way.

But in all honesty I wonder why they didn't copy and modernize quite some mechanics from SWG. Harvesting, crafting, housing and city building, mounts,... Them awsome Teras Kasi animations! xD No mather how many flaws it had, that game had massive potential. (and it was frustrating like hell to see what SOE did with it :p)