Player-vs-Player Systems Examined 152
Brendan Drain over at Massively has an in-depth look at PvP systems in general, using a comparison of two very different games in an attempt to find the ideal. EVE and Age of Conan are two very different games, yet each has their pros and cons to PvP. Is there a perfect middle ground to be had? "EVE Online and Age of Conan are both heavily PvP-oriented MMOs and while they take vastly different approaches to PvP, both approaches are successful in their own way. The high-consequence PvP in EVE leads to infrequent but meaningful conflicts with adrenaline pumping and guns blazing. In contrast, PvP in Conan is a fast-paced fantasy deathmatch where it's as fun to have your head chopped off as to burn someone alive. Where EVE Online would have me biting my nails nervously when attacked, Age of Conan has me laughing as a maniac smashes my head in with two clubs."
Re:pvp in mmorpg's is fundamentally flawed. (Score:3, Informative)
I cannot say anything about Conan, although it sounds like it would be a laugh. EVE online, though, I can talk about.
Gear matters in FPS play too, don't say that it doesn't. You try to bring the right weapon to get the job done. Sure, there's some skill there, but chances are the right choice of weapon for the job helps more.
EVE online has a steep learning curve. It's a brutal game. Wander into the wrong star system and you will kiss your ship and likely your pod goodbye. But, even a new player can make an impact with a team. It's less about who has the bigger gun because there is no BFG that has endless bullets, there is no power-up that gives you invulnerability. It's just you, your teammates and the strategy you have. Cruisers can take out battleships if the pilot doesn't know what he's doing or is fitted wrong. Now, an older player has an advantage over a younger player. Give a younger player the biggest baddest ship he can fly against a seasoned pro in a less capable ship, the pro will come out ahead almost every time.
EVE's PvP isn't just about pew-pew either. It can also involve territorial disputes, wars between corporations, political positioning and negotiation, economic in-fighting, material and production disruption, to name a few. Does your FPS have that?
Next time, just don't talk about games you've never played. It's just embarrassing.
Re:pvp in mmorpg's is fundamentally flawed. (Score:5, Informative)
For example, a corporation had declared war on us once and several of us 'older' characters were flying battleships to fight them because of the firepower we needed in combat. However, battleships are slow and aren't necessarily good at 'tackling' (keeping an enemy ship from warping off, usually you need to close with the enemy fast and stick with them to prevent them from simply warping away from the fight). Some of our youngest members flew fast frigates with the sole purpose of tackling the enemy (warp jammers and webifiers to slow down their ships) so the battleships could bring the firepower onto the enemy's ships. Without our young players in tacklers, all of our firepower would have been useless as the enemy would have just warped away. However, since our younger players were able to tackle the enemy ships, our battleships were able to blow up the tackled enemy ships, almost completely due to the fact that our younger players tackled the targets.
Plus, the way skills work in EVE is that it may take a lot of time to train a skill to the 5th point (the highest any skill can go) but the 5th point only increases the bonus by 25% total (for example, Sharpshooting is 3% increased damage per point, so at 4 points in the skill, you're at 12% additional damage and at the 5th point, you have 15% bonus damage. However, going from 1 point in the skill to 4 points in the skill may take you a total of 5-ish days. The 5th point alone may take 20+ days to complete - of real time...)*. Plus, there are many skills that apply to only certain things. Battleship skill, for example, doesn't help you at all if you're flying something other than a battleship class vessel. If you have Battleship 5 and are flying a cruiser, that 40+ days that you used to train Battleship 1-5 doesn't give you *any* benefit for flying the cruiser. So, while character age does give you an idea of the versitility of a particular character, it isn't the end-all, be-all measurement of how powerful the character is.
*Skill progression in EVE is that each point costs 5x the real-time of the previous point. If the first point of a skill takes 1 hour to learn, the 2nd will take 5 hours, the 3rd will take 25 hours, the fourth will take 100 hours, and the 5th will take 500 hours. The bonuses for each point is linear, each point gives the same amount of bonus more. For example, if the 1st point gave you a 5% bonus, the 2nd point will give you 5% more bonus for a total of 10%, the 3rd will give a total of 15%, 4th is 20%, and 5th is 25%. A good thing to remember is that you can train 131 hours per 4 points in a skill like the one mentione before... you can train four skills to the 4th point in just a little longer as training that one 5th point for the skill. Sometimes it's better to have five skills at the 4th point than it is to have one skill at the 5th point.
Re:Hmm... What about L.O.R.D. (Score:4, Informative)
WoW versus Eve (Score:5, Informative)
In World of Warcraft, PVP is common on PVP servers, but it doesn't have any downside other than lost time. If you die 4 times because someone is being an asshole to you, then that's it, you lose the 20 minutes it takes to corpse run a couple times, and then you go on your way. Occasionally, your death might be to a mob, and then you have a 10% damage bill, so maybe a gold or three, no big deal usually for your level. Or, if you join a PVE server, you can opt out of PVP entirely, and never fight a single other player. You also have the option of fighting in the cross realm PVP areas, but you have to horde to win anything really. It's pretty unbalanced most of the time, with known requirements for what makes a good PVP team. In the end: Massive amounts of time and practice.
In Eve Online, PVP is inherent to the game. You can carebear in empire, and avoid the fringes of society, but occasionally a good marketing deal or a mission might take you into at least low sec. Even if you're flying an interceptor with warp and inertial stabs, you can be grabbed by a broadsword getting sensor boosted and infinite warp scrambling. Hell, those things can grab pods with enough people boosting them. And then everything you had on you, gone. You make a mistake in empire and grab a can you shouldn't have, someone aggros you, and you're gone. You join someone's gang to a mission, they have a war target after them, you're gone. You get deceived by someone, suck it up and deal princess.
Life in general in WoW is pretty mild on the low end. But Eve is all around brutal to people. Even if you play it safe 100% of the time, there are chances for something going horribly wrong. Plus, the one-universe view of Eve, and the TIME it takes to make a good character... If you have someone who wants to grief you hard, you cannot start over easily in Eve. You have to sacrifice a LOT if someone has it out for you. In WoW, you switch servers, make a new character, in a month you're running around at a high level doing the same things over again.
WoW is like going to any corporate theme park, their goal is to make you have fun, and even if you're upset by something, you waste some time, and you get your money back in the end. Eve Online is like going to downtown in a major city, and if you happen to get mugged, then you better not be carrying much money. Oh yeah, and the cops don't care if they didn't see it happen. And there are some areas you should just avoid entirely.
I've lived in 0.0 for a year at a time in Eve and have a Kara keyed Wow character, so I've been around. But this factional warfare thing that Eve is doing? Yeah, the low sec piracy is going to get worse and worse because of it. Should be fun. That is, if you don't mind the occasional loss of a couple months of work.