ArenaNet's MMO Design Manifesto 178
An anonymous reader writes "ArenaNet studio head Mike O'Brien has posted his vision for a new type of MMORPG, which they used in developing Guild Wars 2. Quoting: 'MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I'm out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn't I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he's going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? ... [In Guild Wars 2], when someone kills a monster, not just that player's party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill. When an event is happening in the world – when the bandits are terrorizing a village – everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded.'"
Yeah, but.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hopefully... (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't follow the existing model of Guild Wars 1.. a few short months of "experiencing the story", followed by years of title grinding for a bronze wall plaque in the sequel.
Re:everyone gets 100% ???? (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, why has every single post so far been talking about how they'd rather just kill you? The article is obviously talking about PvE. Why does it take two anonymous cowards to point out the obvious?
Re:Yeah, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP. And game developers generally don't care about that minority, as they cause other customers (the ones gang banged) to stop playing their game.
PvP is much better done as optional addon in controlled environments where all sides are fighting on even and clear terms. The idea of free world PvP is an antique that only ever satisfied griefers and the occasional masochist.
Re:Yeah, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly :)
And the reason for the success of EVE is exactly because it aims to satisfy a very specific minority. :)
So using the word antique in my original post was perhaps an exaggeration. It is more a matter of what client group you aim at. I would however be very surprised to see any new high value production aimed at world PvP. At least any western production. I know that Asia seems to have a generally different mindset around the whole PvP subject.
To each their own (Score:5, Insightful)
To each their own. I realize that some people thrive on ganking and being an ass, but then a lot of people don't. And each game can choose their own niche, and decide if they want to cater to one category at the expense of losing another.
The griefer segment is kind of an easy choice, though, since you mention taking it to the point where you're trying to get people out of the game. A single unchecked griefer can lose them a hundred subscription of other people, so basically they're actually losing money by catering to those. They're not any sleep if you leave for lack of that kind of fun.
But, at any rate, each dev team and publisher ultimately makes choices to cater to market A at the expense of market B. E.g., Blizzard chose to cater to the medieval fantasy fans, at the expense of being less fun for some of us who'd have preferred a good SF MMO. (Say, World Of Starcraft;) E.g., they chose to have guns and explosives and helicopters, which actually was at the expense of losing some purists who'd have preferred a more Dark Ages kinda setting where the highest tech is maybe a crossbow. (Heck, much as I'm otherwise for SF, I'd prefer to keep medieval stuff medieval, if it had to be medieval in the first place.) E.g., they chose to have no xp penalty for death, even though that made some people cry bloody murder. E.g., they chose to have cartoonish graphics, even though for some people it causes them to cancel the subscription. Heck, it's still the #1 stated reason for not playing WoW. E.g., they chose to have separate servers, which some of us like, but then it made the fans of a more Guild Wars style instancing say it sucks. Etc.
Ultimately you can't please everyone. To make player group X happier, you have to make player group Y unhappier. You get to choose which group you want more.
E.g., to make medieval fantasy fans happier, you have to make strictly SF fans a lot less interested in the game. And, again, you can't please everyone. You can't make a game that's high fantasy with elves and horses _and_ SF with warp drives and tricorders, because you'll just annoy both groups instead of catering to both. (Though using SF as a backstory for a medieval game sometimes works.)
To some extent you can try to give group Y something else to do. But sometimes it's not easy to reconcile. You can't give griefers something else to do, because they need those unwilling victims. At some point you just have to just let go of group Y.
Still doesn't work (Score:4, Insightful)
The obvious problem is that if everyone else actually liked hunting someone down in PvP, they'd already be on a PvP server anyway. You're proposing a system which basically asks some people to play the game how they don't like it, and not pursue the goals _they_ want, just to give some sad loser the attention he craves.
I suggest you start with reading Bartle's paper.
The achiever segment (those who'll just have to have more gold and reputation) and the killer segment are actually very distinct categories and natural enemies. They like different things in a game, play for different goals, and both tend to despise each other. Asking an achiever to play a killer role in that pose isn't giving him fun stuff to do, it's trying to convince him to do unfun (for him) stuff and ultimately conclude that the game sucks (he hasn't been doing what he likes, after all) and leave. It's akin to trying to make some gazelles hunt lions. Even if they could, they're not going to enjoy it.
It also does nothing whatsoever for the other categories. The socializers aren't even going to be motivated by that gold and fame to take a role they despise. The explorers won't find anything to discover in it either.
So essentially all that would happen is that some killers might be convinced to play with other killers... but that's something that's not much fun for them. Unwilling victims are where their fun is at.
And in the process you gave both free hand to ruin everyone else's fun.
Besides, the "player run justice" idiocy has been done to death before, and never worked. Letting the players deal with "bandits" so you don't have to, has been not just tried and failed on UO, it's been the holy grail on MUDs too and it failed abjectly there each time. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." I fail to see why an experiment which failed every single time before, should be hailed as _the_ solution that'll work this time.
And finally, well, I've heard the "provide some colour" excuse before. And the "I can't RP if I can't gank" and the "it's unrealistic" and "without someone ganking them those players will lack a challenge and leave in droves!!!!11eleventeen" In my brief days of coding for a MUD, you'd be surprised how many people felt a need to whine about why they should be allowed to drive others off the game, and how limited a repertoire of excuses they had.
In the end it's a non-sequitur. What matters isn't "colour" for its own sake. Nor "realism", nor "challenge", nor "RP" for their own sakes, for that matter. What matters is whether enough players like it or not. If the larger mass doesn't, well, take your colour somewhere else, really.
PvP could be different - current designs are bad. (Score:2, Insightful)
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
But why is that?
Because they implemented PvP wrong.
Being invaded and killed could have been a thrilling experience. What makes it utterly dull for most people is that your options seems to be:
A) Respawn and die again.
B) Log out.
Imagine a game where lowlevel players that are killed in their home areas would be conscripted as local militia and set to control siege-like defensive installations. Instead of being spawnraped, the lowlevels getting killed would be given immense power - but limited in time and only usable to fight off the invaders.
It's all about creating win/win situations. A lot of people dislike PvP because it turns into repetetive, frustrating gameplay.
That is a design issue.
So forcing it upon them makes it better? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that nevertheless some of us don't want to have anything to do with PvP at all. It's not a question of feeling stronger or weaker, it's simply a question of it not being what I want to do in a game. Conscripting me into some group that _has_ to do PvP is just going to piss me off more and make me cancel the subscription.
That's the kind of solution that presumes that everyone else too is a complexed idiot who's just there to feel powerful by ganking someone weaker. Some of us play for entirely different goals and reasons, though.
Re:PvP could be different - current designs are ba (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the issue that the GP pointed was uncontrolled PvP environment.
What you describe is actually a controlled PvP environment.
Re:Still doesn't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for them.
Exactly, that is 100% the problem. The problem in creating a game which makes both griefers and non-pvp players happy is that any "incentive" for the non-pvp players to willingly go hunt down the griefer simply does not exist. Because hunting down the griefer would involve something the non-pvp players by definition do not want to do: pvp. If I log on and look forward to partying with my friends and xping in the dungeon of ultimate doom, I do not want to interrupt that to go hunt down some griefer for an hour. Not even if I get some reward for it. Simply because that is not what I wanted to do that evening. Even with some incentive for killing that bastard, he STILL managed to impose his way of playing the game onto me and forced me to do something I did not want to do. And if that happens too often, the non-pvp players will not find the game entertaining anymore and leave, causing the griefer to leave, too (because there are not enough victims anymore). That's why most western MMO with completely open pvp either fail or stay at low subscriber numbers. Not because the designers suck and cannot find a good system of making pvp players and non-pvp players both happy, but because it is not possible.
Also, there seems to be a problem with western gamers mentality. If you CAN do something (e.g. stand outside a newbie town with your uber char and simply kill anybody for hours who wants to go kill his lvl 1 mobs), someone WILL do it. You would not find something like that on e.g. Korean servers.
To those above who commented that "games with open pvp are a success in Korea" - consider e.g. Lineage 2 - a niche game with completely open pvp here on our western servers, and a huge success with millions of players in Korea. Here on the western servers you will find all kinds of griefers, gankers, whatever type lowlife you look for, you will find it. On the Korean servers, people are helpful, pve together in peace, party up with people from other clans and usually ONLY pvp during announced siege times. This seems to be because most players there play in internet cafes, so you cannot hide behind your online anonymity, and you usually also have others watching your screen over your shoulders, commenting on what you do. That simply works as some kind of "control". If you were to go and grief other players, it would not be unlikely to have your RL name on some messageboard soon afterwards, and somebody might come around to punch you in the face. So it's not that the players in Korea like open pvp more than us western players, it's that in Korea there is some kind of self-control, while around here in Europe/US, players can hide behind their online anonymity - and so the Korean games can get away with pvp rulesets which would lead to endless griefing if they had western players.
Re:PvP could be different - current designs are ba (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. Unrestricted PvP works in Eve (and I'd argue, pretty much only in EvE) because there are serious penalties. Lose a major ship, lose training time- it can take a while for things to get back to where you were. Even the gankers realize this, and avoid combat unless they know they are going to win, and they realize the guy may well be back with friends to stomp them into the ground.
Compare this to something like WoW. What's the penalty for dying? Running back to your corpse. Even in something like Darkfall with full looting you just have people run around naked, since there's no real penalty for dying otherwise.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
Someone finally got it right (Score:3, Insightful)
A mmo should aim for MASSIVE multiplayer. that is the whole point of it. it shouldnt encourage seclusion, isolation, animosity in between players.
Re:PvP could be different - current designs are ba (Score:3, Insightful)
PvP in MMOs is not popular for a lot of different reasons. Some people don't like PvP. Generally, one person has a huge advantage over another based on gear. For Eve, it is that there are fairly harsh consequences to death that encourages people to stack the deck so that a normal player doesn't even have a chance as they warp in to a swarm. This causes people to take less risk and make PvP boring. People just fly around camping at gates hoping for hours that some poor guy will come through.
PvP is never going to appeal to some people. But to do it to appeal to the most, it simply needs to have a couple of qualities: small penalties for death and an even playing field. That's why online FPS's are popular. In general it is a fair fight with a simple respawn.
This small minority has a name (Score:3, Insightful)
It reminds me of a discussion about griefing that I read about a few months ago on some internet forum. Naturally, the "real" players were mocking the "carebears" and the latter was levying the usual futile appeal to empathy.
Q: But don't you feel bad that you've just ruining someone else's experience?
A: Why should I feel bad?
Naturally, the "griefers" just couldn't understand this appeal to empathy. There's a reason for that. One of these "griefers" went on to try and reverse the appeal, arguing along these lines, "But you just don't understand the thrill of killing people in a game." It honestly made me think of a rapist. ("But you just don't understand the thrill I get from raping women.")
Honestly, I think that the biggest harm that we (those of us with empathy) do to ourselves is to diminish "griefers" by giving them a name like "griefers".
They already have a name. [wikipedia.org]
Re:The what of Even? (Score:3, Insightful)
Chart 2 is the "also ran" chart. Try chart 1: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html [mmogchart.com]