Originally posted by Torik

What I am trying to get across is that for a pure PvEer your game would be strictly inferior to an almost identical game without the PvP.  Given a choice between the two a PvEer would not play yours unless he/she wanted to meddle in PvP as well.

You seem to be under the impression that the PvEers would want to join PvP factions out of team loyalty and to hang out with the 'cool kids'.  Any PvEer who simply wants to build and progress will see no benefit to that and will.  They will prefer to team up with other PvEers to better cooperate on PvE projects.

You are trying up to set up the game world in such a way that the pure PvEers benefit from the PvPers when in fact the biggest benefit for them would be to simply get rid of the PvPers.  They would have access to all the best resources unhindered and could build up their towns without fear of having all their hard work taken over by someone who did none of the work.

If that's your opinion, that's fine.  I figure that such a game could easily catch on like wildfire because PvE actions would no longer be performed in a motivation vacuum.  That's my opinion.  We'll just have to agree to disagree.

Originally posted by Torik

You forget that the old ways of doing this were just as silly.  The exclamation marks eliminated the need to click on every NPC looking for a quest when most of the were just scenary.  That was just a brain dead approach.   Exclamation marks is just a more honest way of doing the same thing. 

Yes, walking around and tapping every NPC on the shoulder was an annoying way to locate quests.  However, I'm not a fan of floating names - or of floating punctuation.  Even something as simple as a key that I can hold down to see the punctuation marks would be nice.  A key to be able to see floating names would be nice, too.  Each key would let me see stuff at a glance when I wanted to, but not be faced with it if I'm not interested.  Start out with it displayed all the time, with an option to display it on demand.

Originally posted by Torik

Generally, the person who controls access to resources is the one in charge.  If the PvPers can bar the PvEer from access to resources than they are in charge. 

The PvP guys fight over which faction controls a resource or asset, but it is the leaders within the faction that determine who gets access to what.  That's true whether they are PvE or PvP.

Originally posted by Torik

The question still remains why would the PvEer not simply settle in an NPC town.  An NPC town would not need an army of PvPers so the PvEer would not have to support them and could instead use all their resources on 'increasing the quality of life' for themselves.  In that setting PvPers are a complete waste to have around.

One reason is so that you're part of a faction in the game world; you're a participant in the grand game of empire building.  These are multiplayer games and the assumption is that you want to b part of a team that accomplishes something instead of simply accumulating stuff for yourself.  There are plenty of games for the latter.

Another reason is that, like EVE Online, the high value PvE is in PvP land.  If you want to craft the low end items and hunt low end game and such, stick with an NPC town.  If you want to craft the high end items and hunt high end game, you join a faction that controls the right resources and assets.

The same game systems exist in the NPC town as in a PvP town, but the PvP town has the potential for grander achievements.

Originally posted by Torik

Why would any sane PvEer choose not to work out of an NPC town where the 'fruits of their labour' are theirs to control and not taken at the whim of freeloading PvPers?

1. PvE work in an NPC town is turned over to the NPC town just as PvE work in a PvP town is turned over to the PvP town.  The goal of PvE gameplay is not to accumulate stuff for yourself, but for your team.  So everyone in an NPC town would be working to increase the quality of life in that town, making more PvE activities available, etc.  A PvE guild might take over a town to 'level it up'.

2. PvP players who treat their team members poorly will lose those team members.  PvE players will just go and work for another faction, boosting their infrastructure and making the PvP from that faction all the tougher.  PvP and PvE players cooperate to be most successful.

Edit: I should probably add that there's no real reason that the PvP guys have to be in charge.  PvE leaders are just as practical as PvP leaders.  I was just thinking in terms of medieval warlords and their peasants.  But it could just as easily be a modern nation with a professional army.  If the leaders of the nation take away access to PvP assets from their soldiers, the soldiers are just stuck.  If they don't like it, they can leave and join another faction.

Originally posted by rottN

Then you would need 4 factions ? 2 PVP factions and 2 PVE.. or else it dosent manke sence to me

The game would have many factions.  Each faction would consist of PvP combatants and their PvE support.  It's analogous to nations with soldiers and civilians.  Alternately, kingdoms with knights and peasants.

Originally posted by Torik 

If PvPers can only pillage the property of other PvPers than the PvEers would not care.  However, it would also mean that the PvEers really had no reason to support the PvPers beside team loyalty (kind like a person who never played college sports would donate money to their old school's sports teams). 

The PvE players care about the loss of PvP assets because they're using those assets.  To be more clear, asset ownership is controlled by the PvP guys while the PvE guys make use of those assets.  If PvP ownership changes, then the PvE guys are denied use.  The PvP guys are using certain assets as well, but they are entirely geared to PvP.  For example, a siege engine.  PvP personal gear can follow whatever rules you like because that gear vanishes when a given PvP player logs out.

As a PvE example, the smithy shop that my PvE character uses is a PvP asset.  PvE guys built it using the mine and forest controlled by the PvP guys, but my PvE character operates the smithy shop to manufacture armor and weapons for the PvP guys.  I can do so because I have been given access by the PvP guys.  If PvP enemies show up and capture the smithy shop, then my character can no longer use it.

If I want to, I can try to join the new owners in hopes of running the same shop.  They might welcome me with open arms and give me access to the shop - or they might tell me to hit the road.  If the PvP guys that I used to work with find out that I tried to change loyalties, they may kick me out of their organization.

At that point, I have to go and find a new PvP group to work for - or I can go off to a neutral town that is entirely NPC-based.  There I can do classic PvE work that goes into the town market.  I'm supporting the NPC town, but not a PvP group.

A variation on this where an asset becomes 'live' is having a bunch of PvE guys transport a bunch of goods or raw materials.  The PvE guys do all the transport work with horse and wagon, but PvP guys would be needed to protect the cargo.  If enemies show up, they can fight to gain the cargo.  If they win, the PvE guys that they brought along would then drive the cargo where they want it to go.

Because PvE guys can't leave the influence of their PvP lords, at least one attacking PvP character would have to stay with the PvE guys to make sure they don't run away.  So now you've got to defend your own PvE guys so that they aren't scattered and become unable to move the cargo.

Heck, a castle assault could require PvP guys to do the actual fighting and also have a bunch of PvE guys in support.  They'd be digging fortifications, building siege engines, transporting supplies and so on.  But they'd never fight, and they'd run away anytime a bad guy shows up.

I figure this would allow for FFA PvP while players interested in PvE could be right in the thick of things and contribute through PvE tasks.  But PvE players wouldn't be capable of directly influencing the outcome of any conflicts.  If they want to do that, they have to operate subject to the PvP rules.  An interesting question would be whether or not PvP characters could do PvE tasks.  I suspect that it would work out if they could.

Originally posted by Slapshot1188 

If you need a healer, recruit one.  It really is THAT simple. 

Exactly.  This is a leadership issue.  The leader needs to decide what his group is going to do and how they're going to do it.  He then recruits people who are appropriately skilled and enthusiastic about the goal.  After that, he relies on their specific skills and abilities to refine his plan so that it is optimal for that group of people.

Originally posted by rottN

Im one of the Daoc-lovers too and i dont understand why most games run with the wow-battleground concept.

I'd guess that battlegrounds grew out of people's enjoyment of Dark Age of Camelot's dueling system.  I recall more than one player bemoaning the fact that only individuals could duel.  Why not groups?  Next thing we know, battlegrounds show up.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

You need to enjoy MMO as it is today. Think of it as Diablo (a super fun game) with cities + AH.

That's the problem right there - MMOs are single-player games for a massive number of people to play simultaneously.  They've been stuck in the tank/dps/healer rut for a decade.  They're only slowly evolving into something that attempts to entertain lots of people simultaneously.  These guys reminiscing about old PnP gaming are saying that they want something that gets them involved in an adventure with friends.  Processing monsters really doesn't qualify as an adventure.

The next generation MMO will be an adventure shared by a thousand people.

Originally posted by Torik

The main problem with this setup is that the PVE players would have no incentive to play this game since they would be merely serfs to be robbed by any PvP player.  They do all the real work and the PvPers just steal it or extort it.   I don't play video games to have the bully 'steal my lunch money'. 

PvP players don't attack or steal or extort PvE players.  They attack, steal or extort from PvP assets.  It's up to the PvP guys to protect their assets, their lines of supply and so forth.

I've played EVE Online pretty much in the way I just described.  I'm suggesting a formalization based on that experience that would allow PvE player to focus on PvE and allow PvP players to focus on PvP.  That seems to be what each group really wants to do.  By trusting their player group, they can specialize in the activity that they most enjoy.

I'd like to see a game that has FFA PvP everywhere, but where PvE and PvP characters don't directly interact.

For example, consider a game where the PvP players form into factions, similar to EVE Online.  They control territory that has resources, settlements and so on.  That constitutes their empire.  The PvP players fight to defend their territory and to expand it into neighboring territories. The PvE players operate within those empires to do all the PvE stuff.  Harvesting, manufacturing, researching, etc.  That could even include fighting NPCs.

The twist is that when a PvE character spots an enemy PvP character, it will automatically run away.  Or hide.  Or cower in fear.  A PvE character is a non-combatant from the standpoint of the PvP game.  If the enemy PvP guy wants to take stuff from the enemy empire's settlements, he can do that and he'll know that the PvE guys won't bother him while he does it.  It's the job of the PvP overlords to ensure that the enemy raids fail.  All the PvE guys can do is call their PvP overlords to come over and help.

The stuff that a PvP raider could take would be anything that has been warehoused by the PvE guys.  That could be raw materials, finished goods or anything else in the PvE game that supports the PvP guys.

Oh, I guess I left that out.  The success of the PvP players is dependent on the success of the PvE guys.  If the PvE guys can operate without interruption then they can supply their PvP overlords with the equipment that they need.  Perhaps one farm raising feed for war horses can support 2 war horses.  If you have 20 PvP players who want war horses, then their empire must have 10 feed farms.  The PvE guys manufacture the gear that their PvP guys use.  Because combat breaks gear, there's a constant need for new gear.

There are issues with such a system, but I offer it only as an illustration of the sort of interaction that I'd like to see.  EVE Online could implement something like this and I'd be happy to play it.  I want to play, and I'm willing to sacrifice the ability to fight back or even to leave my empire's territory if that means that I don't have to worry about other players attacking me.

Originally posted by atticusbc

But do you perform actions that, either for moral or logical reasons, you wouldn't do in real life? That was more what I was trying to ask.

I apply my morals in-game when the environment is sufficiently realistic.  For example, I don't play Crysis because it involves killing people that look and act far too realistic.  Similarly, I won't play games that involve crimes against people that are demonstrably innocent citizens.  But give me a big ol' monster that wants to kill me on sight or a sufficiently cartoonish human and I'm good to go.  Especially if the cartoonish human is demonstrably a bad guy.

I don't believe that I have any deep-seated violent or anarchistic tendencies that are waiting to be unleashed in my gaming.

My experience has been that roleplaying is not something that MMORPGs invite players to do.  That's because there aren't any roles to fill other than Leveling Monster Killer.  Perhaps Crafter.  EVE Online is much better about presenting roles to fill, but that game is pretty heavily focused on the min/max experience.  Folks are quite serious about achieving their goals, being efficient and so on.  Gotta get that next achievement.

Ultimately, I just play me.  The bulk of my time in MMORPGs has been spent with people who are playing a game.  It's like sitting in a room playing XBox with friends; you play the game, joke about things that happen, educate each other about how best to play the game and so on.

To see me naturally roleplaying would require a very high fidelity environment that is not focused on achievements but rather just experiencing that environment.  I may experience it as a blacksmith or as a woodsman, giving a particular angle to my roleplaying, but without the environment in which I can take the time to enjoy a role, I won't roleplay.  I'm too busy achieving.

Originally posted by Slapshot1188

 I'll just say again that I disagree with your basic concept that games should be balanced around archetypes.  It's certainly a valid point of view, but not one that I personally subscribe to nor want to see implemented.  I want to play a character.. thats my role.  I don't want to play a pre-determined role in a group. That's not what the R(ole) in RPG means.

While I agree with you, a major issue with current fantasy MMOs is that there is only one problem facing player characters - how to kill the monsters.  There are no crypts to sneak into, no locks to pick, no magical barriers to defeat, no guards to distract, just a bunch of monsters waiting to be processed in the most efficient way possible.

Players must have a variety of problems facing them if they are going to adopt a variety of roles.  Ideally, any given challenge has a bunch of different ways to approach it, allowing players to act in their favored roles.

The group of players wants to get into the castle, but the drawbridge is up.  Can they light a fire in the woods nearby to attract the attention of a guard?  Can the big strong guy throw a grapple across to try to drag down the drawbridge?  Can a nimble guy dump his gear and clamber across the rope to try to lower the drawbridge?  Can the mage do anything to modify any of those scenarios in the group's favor?  Can they build something that would allow all of them to enter the castle without being noticed?  Can they masquerade as a group of the castle's soldiers?

MMOs need more types of problems to solve in more and varied ways so that many different roles can be adopted by players.  Having only one problem to solve means that MMOs are manufacturing artificial divisions of labor.

Originally posted by Disdena

The tank-n-spankable AI works because it is a puzzle that needs to be solved, and the correct solution is for tanks to be good tanks, for healers to be good healers, and for dps to be good dps. If you come up with another AI, it has to have a solution (or else players will refuse to fight it) and that solution has to involve players performing MMO-like activities that are appropriate to their character.

You seem to be thinking in terms of set-piece scenarios where opponents are standing around in their usual placeholders, looking in their specific direction, doing absolutely nothing but waiting to be killed.  It makes for a specific setting that players can learn, break down, and solve.

Instead, consider that monsters would be moving around, looking around, engaged in this or that activity.  Show up on the wrong day and the goblin king is counting his money and all the guards are on edge.  Show up at goblin siesta time and the guards are leaning on their spears, half asleep.  Some guards are aggressive and determined while others are fairly wimpy.  Drop the tough sargeant and the wimpy privates might run.  There are a lot of factors that can change from encounter to encounter.  Such an AI can be beaten, but players have to stay on their toes.  Players don't beat the AI by reading about an encounter and preparing for it with the right team.  Instead, they go in and deal with whatever the game throws at them.

FPS games have a bit of this today.  I've been playing Red Faction: Guerrilla, a single-player shooter.  In it, the evil police show up and start maneuvering for cover.  Because the world has a destroyable environment, you never quite know where they're going to find cover - nor where you're going to be safe.  Some come straight at you.  Others will jump in any available vehicle with a gun and start shooting you.  Some will try to flank you.  More than once I've circled around a cargo container trying to get on the tail of a cop who was trying to get on my tail.  Where'd he go?

A destructible environment in an MMO would be a bear, but procedrually-generated environments would accomplish the same thing.  If a dungeon was never the same twice when a group entered it, they'd never know where the monsters were nor how the monsters were going to approach them.  Nor even where the throneroom was.  Or indeed if there was a throneroom at all.  Perhaps the royal goblin family didn't move in after all and this is a barracks.

Dump variety.  If you want to kill stuff, be a warrior.  If you want to make iron stuff, be a blacksmith.  If you want to catch fish, be a fisherman.  If you want to direct NPCs, be a mayor.  If you want to mess with the conditions under which other people operate, be a magician.

There's no reason not to have variety, but having a variety of ways to accomplish the same result is going to mean either true imbalance or the perception of imbalance.  The fact that there are five or six distict treatments for killing stuff is just plain silly.

Beyond that, having player skill figure into the successful use of character skills would help clean out a lot of the complaints.  When that's the case, a failure to compete implies a failure in the player's skills.

Originally posted by Xasapis

I don't know about that. While the frame rate is low, it doesn't dip at all when there is tons of action in your screen. Basically if you have something like 50 fps when standing alone somewhere, you'll have a couple fps drop with 100s mobs, 100s players and effects flying all over the place.

I would call this weirdly optimised.

I would call that properly optimized.  Why run a game at 200 Hz (FPS) on a monitor that operates at 50 Hz?  I can see running a simulation such that it performs multiple simulation passes per frame, but not software that generates more frames than the hardware can display.

Please, no night in my gaming, thanks.  For those like me who aren't interested in looking at a black screen, a regular darkening of the screen would be enough to leave the game.  I'm fairly sure that EverQuest had a day/night cycle, and I recall hating each nighttime period.  Squinting at pixels is not my cup of tea.

Darkness, like PvP, should be something that players seek out.  So have areas of the game world that are dark.  Players who enjoy dealing with darkness can go to those areas.  Underground areas are natural candidates for this.  Dense forests can also be of varying shades of darkness.  Just as PvP risk should be on a ramp, so too can the amount of darkness that a player wants to experience.

Consider that if you want an encounter in darkness, you'd be able to seek one out instead of having to wait for a couple hours for the sun to go down.

Originally posted by Ragnaven

For me it was always about the people, far less about the game or even the leveling.

I completely agree.  I penned a blog article similar to your post.  Mine was about a nostalgic return to EverQuest a while back.  I know that I'm not interested in rushing around a game world to accumulate items, levels and other gubbage.  I just want to do some interesting things with interesting people.  I'm after a much less frenetic experience, but given that even the game designers are dramatically younger than me, I don't hold out much hope of that happening.

Originally posted by SwampRob

It doesn't have to be levels, but my character must make meaningful progress.    I do not consider titles, cooler-looking gear, or non-beneficial game fame as progress.

Levels cannot be removed from existing fantasy MMORPGs because that's the base motivation of those games.  There are plenty of people here who seem to believe that RPG means leveling.  In fact, that's not the case.  I brought up EVE Online as a means of suggesting that games exist where leveling is not the focus of entertainment.  Unfortunately, it seems that most people haven't gotten around to trying EVE Online.

In EVE Online, the focus of gameplay is what you're trying to get done in a context of galactic warfare.  The economy supports that game of galactic warfare, which eats materiel like a teenage boy eats food.  So instead of having the game tell you that you are now level N, you tell yourself that today was a good day because you are now richer than you were yesterday.  Or that you picked up another two PvP kills.  Or you can now manufacture something that you couldn't yesterday.  Or that you filled three more orders for ships.  Or that you found a great PvE complex.  Many activities are spinoffs of the game of galactic warfare.

And those are just the little goals.  If you directly join in on the game of galactic conquest, you may pat yourself on the back for scouting out the enemy fleet.  Or for being a successful squadron commander.  Or even a fleet commander.  Perhaps you are the president of your corporation and just had a successful recruiting drive for members.  More substantially, perhaps your alliance just broke the back of an enemy and captured several systems.

It continues like that.  Instead of grinding monsters and raids to climb the ladder of levels and gear, you climg the ladder of gear and money so that you can accomplish your goals.  A sufficiently broad and deep game will allow you to pick from many possible personal goals.

One thing that EVE Online also underscores is that the game is a multiplayer game.  Much of the interesting stuff in EVE Online is focused on interactions wth other players.  It's that game of galactic conquest again, with its many spinoff activities.

I think the fantasy game to that came closest to that experience was Ultima Online.  In it, players could focus on many tasks and activities other than simply grinding up character abilities and power.  Once they had their abilities and power, they tried to do something with it.  That's the missing part - what to do with abilities and power.  If the game has things do with abilities and power then that game can discard the accrual of abilities and power and simply let players pursue their goals.