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."
Older PvP (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as modern PvP goes, Guild Wars (for all the PvE problems of late) still has some of the best PvP action around.
Re:Older PvP (Score:4, Insightful)
World of Warcraft, as far as I know, is also much like Guild Wars / Conan in this regard.
I wonder how Guild Wars 2 is going to approach competitive PVP, given that they don't plan on having a real level cap. Maybe PVP will be even more removed from PVE than it is now, which I don't doubt given the bigger rift ArenaNet keeps on creating (now with the PVP-specific skill settings, etc.).
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How does it average out, though? I haven't played it, so I'm curious.
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polyvinylpyrrolidine (Score:3, Funny)
Re:polyvinylpyrrolidine (Score:4, Funny)
What a ripoff! (Score:2, Funny)
Funk dat!
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PvP === MMO? (Score:1)
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pvp in mmorpg's is fundamentally flawed. (Score:5, Insightful)
differences in level and gear will almost always be the determining factor in the outcome of a pvp encounter, and certain abilities will always be more powerful than others. Since they will be limited to one class or a subset of classes you will always have one class which is "overpowered".
the only balanced pvp is accomplished through FPS games where everyone has the same abilities, stats, and the ability to equip any weapon in the game.
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As for one class having to be "overpowered", that isn't necessarily true. It is possible to balance the different abilities so that no class has an advantage. You can also go with the rock, paper, scissors approach in that every class has another that it overpowers, but also has a class that overpowers it.
FPS games are usually incredibly well balanced, but even they have some a
Re:pvp in mmorpg's is fundamentally flawed. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like claiming "it is possible to make a drm system which is transparent to 'legitimate' users but actually does stop piracy'.
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Re:pvp in mmorpg's is fundamentally flawed. (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way that I really see PvP working correctly is to have a system where leveling isn't the goal, but is a factor. For example, after you complete so many dungeons, explore so many places in the world, have more personal experience playing the game rather than "xp points"...then you advance a level. The level's wouldn't increase your hit points, mana point, etc. Rather they would allow for new, more difficult game content to be unlocked and possibly alter enemy AI to be more difficult and loot to be scaled to be suitable for new encounters. Of course, you would also be able to learn new abilities at the new level that wouldn't necessarily raise your power to a huge degree over the previous levels spells but, instead, would increase your utility and efficiency.
The key thing that the new levels would do would be to protect low level opponents from being attacked by much higher level opponents. The game would also have to be much more strategy oriented than current games.
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Shadowbane with skills made me feel this way. I can max sword skill and hit like a max level, but I sure suck at other things. Same with planetside. I can use this one type of armor, and be a light vehicle driver. Later on I can drive my vehicle, hop out, put on a super max suit, and ground pound with the troops.
So again, leveling up == more versatility, rather then more power, tends
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In starcraft and warcraft3, you also have different forces from which to chose, and they manage (painstakingly) to make it balanced.
Btw, in guildwars they make weapons and level completly irrelevant too (by caping to an easy-to-reach cap), but they are the only ones I know to do it in an rpg.
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(my nerd creds are shining today, aren't they)
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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
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That's not very nice. Also, parent poster said, basically, PVP in MMORPGs is flawed because it takes into account things like level imbalance. You come back and say that Eve does not have any of those issues, but then you say
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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.
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Sure sounds a lot like levels to me, except that your level is associated with time youve spent in game...
As bad as Etrias is at describing EVE, and indeed probably referred to the skill system, in a given ship a younger player is able to specialize relatively quickly. Once your skills are trained to a reasonable level PvP in EVE comes down to your ship's fitting as well as the gang's makeup. That said, EVE has several balance problems (like Titans) but these are not limited to PvP alone. But this thread's parent sounds like an FPS/Guild Wars junkie who uses "flawed" in an ambiguous way.
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Next time, just don't talk about games you've never played. It's just embarrassing.
That's not very nice. Also, parent poster said, basically, PVP in MMORPGs is flawed because it takes into account things like level imbalance. You come back and say that Eve does not have any of those issues, but then you say.
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.
Sure sounds a lot like levels to me, except that your level is associated with time youve spent in game...
I'm not trying to be nice. I'm trying to point out how ridiculous the OP sounded when he talks about balance in PvP when he's never played the game. You've not played EVE either I take it. So, I'll be nice on this.
There are no levels in EVE. There are skills. There are so many skills, it would be impossible to master them all. However, a new player can come into the game, train a few skills and be an important part of a group, perhaps the most vital part of that group. As a player, you can spread around your skills, be a jack of all trades, or you can focus and master a few things relatively quickly. Hate them or love them, Goonswarm proved that a bunch of cheap ships flown well can usually be devastating against large, well-armed ships. Actually, other responses to this are more eloquent than I'm being about the skill system, so I will refer you to them.
Now how does an older player have an advantage? Is it because he has a large ship or because he has the experience to use the skills he has? How is this much different than an FPS in that sense? An older player in an FPS knows each weapon, knows the maps, knows where to go and what to do. It's almost as if you are suggesting that I discount experience for the sake of some weird "balance". The OP was talking about how FPS was the only true measure of PvP skill because the weapons were all the same. I make the point that it's a rather narrow definition because 1) he's never played EVE and 2) there are other types of PvP other than simple pew-pew.
My example that I gave is that even though a player has a bigger and possibly better ship and weapons, it does not mean that they will win the fight, plain and simple. I do not see any other arguments to the other points I made, so I'll assume you agree with those.
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Sure sounds a lot like levels to me, except that your level is associated with time youve spent in game...
Not really. He's saying that an older player is more likely to know his options and the available strategies, and will be able to use that knowledge against the newbie. The same thing applies in all games. In Starcraft for example, figuring out a good build order can help immensely, and the ability to multitask effectively only comes with time. In FPS games, the ability to circle strafe and aim effectively at moving targets also takes time to build up.
Even board games require time and experience. Ta
Play Eve (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's what makes the pvp great: it take real-life skill to figure out what ship fits work best. And that has nothing to do with time spent in game. You can be in the game for 3-4 weeks and have a very nice pvp rig capable of taking on players 3, 4 years old (as long as the ships themselves are comparable). I've seen some really clever fits from newbies. And I've seen some crap fits from older players.
Once you have the ship fitted out for its intended role, then it comes down to player skill. The tactics you use in a fight make up the other 30% of the chances of success in pvp.
The best part about pvp in eve, though, is the finality of it. If you get a ship blown up, that's it, it's gone. Some of the mods might survive, but for the most part it's over. It makes for a very exciting time.
-B
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I've pondered this myself and have thought the best solution for a balanced PVP would simply to give the player the ability to create a end game player from the get go.
Say give the player 1500 points which he can build a character and purchase skills, abilities, and stats (similar to a Warhammer 40K or Fantasy Battle Game) where in theo
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PvP has no place in MMORPGs. The fundamental designs of exploration, achievement and socialization are contradictory to PvP. The first three have to do with making progress or friends.
I agree gear and levels have too much impact on PvP. Skill can only overcome so much. IMO every player entering a PvP zone/arena should be normalized so that everyone is equal. That way all those PvPers clamoring that they play PvP for a fair fight and the challenge of a
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Glass houses and stones and all that.
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Incorrect. By choosing to play a game that allows for this kind of PvP, they've already consented.
No one wants to get broken bones, but if you're a pro tackle football player, that risk comes with the territory. There's less violent/dangerous options out ther
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Of course, there is another point to PvP being fundamentally flawed when it comes to MMOs...
There is also the problem of the fact that zerg tactics can and do work in the regular game world with alarming frequency, and the inherent base human behavior of "mob rules".
Even in WoW on the PvE servers, you saw a definite move towards "might makes right" type behavior, especially at the Crossroads. There wasn't a night that went by once the so-called "honor system" was put in that the Alliance didn't swarm
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Since they will be limited to one class or a subset of classes you will always have one class which is "overpowered".
Yeah but I think anyone looking for PvP (more clearly 1v1 free for all) will either end up being too abusive (everyone is my enemy) or too hard to balance. It starts to get interesting when you change the dynamics from 1v1 to say... 2v2 or 5v5, or 100v100.
I can't say much about the games described but I have experience of playing daoc for a few years. Daoc never implemented a good and balanced PvP system (everyone can be your enemy) but did implement probably the most successful "RvR" system. RvR is b
the hell that is Runescape (Score:2)
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Heh. I too played Runescape, and I can say that the one thing that kept me in the game, even when it had been overrun by grade-schoolers, was the finality of PvP death. Hell, I remember when you lost everything you were carrying when you died in PvP. It added risk and adventure to the game, and kept it engaging.
They'd appear to be an overall level of like 60 when they like lvl 90 in just one skill that they used to kick your ass.
So? Them's the breaks. As long as they built up those skills legitimately without cracking the system in some way, I don't see any problems with a strategy like that. It sounds like you're w
Ultima Online (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone in that game had a macro for hide, you would spam it as you fled from a battle. Or better yet if you had UO extreme you had your emergency recall button, to make fast getaways before you were slaughtered. I have dozens of great stories in UO of back and forth PVP fighting, murdering, stealing houses and actually having an impact on other players. Its lame as shit when my friends play WoW and try to impress me with their PVP stories, none of which are interesting in the least bit, none of which have any lasting repercussions, and none of which hold the attention of the listener, unless you happen to play WoW. I'd tell my non- gamer friends some of my exploits in UO and they'd always get a good laugh out of it. All I ever get out of hearing WoW stories is total boredom, sometimes to the point that I can't help but mock them for being so into something so dreadfully unexciting.
Who can forget shit like running into someone between towns, paralyzing them, surrounding them with walls, and casting an elemental inside the death-box you created. Or going into the mining area where the RPers hang out, working on their blacksmithing. Casting an energy field on the exit of the mines and telling a group of 9 of them that you're going to murder them all. Watching as they scramble to exit the mine, only to see it sealed off as you go to town on them. For good measure you kill their pack animals too. Having huge battles in front of rival guild houses, the moment a guy drops everyone swarming the corpse and completely looting it of all its items. Taking down a guy with a tame White Wyrm walking around outside town, thinking he's hot shit. As the Wyrm is slowly killed he pleads with his attackers to stop and constantly spams "a follow" to get the creature into town and safety. Watching him whine and put up a fight out of anger for losing his prized possession, only to be cut down. And finally, kicking someone's ass so bad, making him lose such good items/so many reagents that the guy in his vitriol follows you around as a ghost just spamming your screen with lines and lines of OoooOoOOOOooo because he has no other recourse. Or even better, up and quitting the game because his loss was so devastating.
That's real PVP.
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PVP goes where ever the hell players are willing to lose ships.
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EvE was written by UO PvPers, which explains why it is a grief heavy game. So much potential in EvE,.. ruined by side blinders.
Re:Ultima Online (Score:5, Insightful)
*rolls eyes*
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And that's what people did, which is why they changed UO, and is why no one else has ever done that again.
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You pretty much just described eve. Except you don't loose all the skills that took you 2 years of constant training(Assuming your clone level is high enough and you remembered to install a new one last time you died).
Who can forget shit like the guy who just bought himself a shiny new carrier decked it out in faction mods, undocked and before he could use the jump drive to get to a friendly system, a recon ship pops a cyno and 20 enemy caps jump in and he gets locked down to far from the station to red
Re:Ultima Online, or "How to be an ass" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's PvP alright. It's also why I don't play UO or similar games- I have a life, and so can't compete with a bunch of 14-year-old, 12+ hour-a-day playtime gankers and spawn campers who enjoy ruining the experience for others simple to prove how l33t they are. I get it, you're better than me at the game. That's nice, but I'm not going to play a game where I have to be the hardest of hardcore to even be allowed to join.
People like you are *why* WoW has 10 million+ subscribers and none of the MMOs catering to the hardcore PvP crowd have gone anywhere at all. (Ok, EVE seems to be doing fairly well)
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I think that is why it has worked.
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UO also has a well balanced and intricate murderer system - i.e. if you are a murderer anyone can attack you on sight and you are unable to go into towns or are killed on sight by town guards. Just like the real world, there's nothing stopping someone from killing just because they want to. But also like in the real world - and unlike every mmo out there - there are actual long term consequenc
Re:Ultima Online, or "How to be an ass" (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't think this is true. A lot, lot more gamers are looking for a more casual game. The kind they can play while watching "Grey's Anatomy" at the same time and if they screw up and die, hey, no big deal.
For every hundred guys on WoW w
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Which Is Why UO Is A Shell Of It Former Self (Score:3, Insightful)
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They really weren't kidding when they told me it was the last corp I'd ever join.
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Who can forget shit like running into someone between towns, paralyzing them, surrounding them with walls, and casting an elemental inside the death-box you created. Or going into the mining area where the RPers hang out, working on their blacksmithing. Casting an energy field on the exit of the mines and telling a group of 9 of them that you're going to murder them all. Watching as they scramble to exit the mine, only to see it sealed off as you go to town on them. For good measure you kill their pack animals too. Having huge battles in front of rival guild houses, the moment a guy drops everyone swarming the corpse and completely looting it of all its items. Taking down a guy with a tame White Wyrm walking around outside town, thinking he's hot shit. As the Wyrm is slowly killed he pleads with his attackers to stop and constantly spams "a follow" to get the creature into town and safety. Watching him whine and put up a fight out of anger for losing his prized possession, only to be cut down. And finally, kicking someone's ass so bad, making him lose such good items/so many reagents that the guy in his vitriol follows you around as a ghost just spamming your screen with lines and lines of OoooOoOOOOooo because he has no other recourse. Or even better, up and quitting the game because his loss was so devastating. That's real PVP.
Wow that sounds totally awesome!! And maybe I'm crazy but I'd rather have a root canal than suffer through that crap. I play WoW on a RP-PVP server, and my guild practices world PvP - if I were to describe our policies, it'd boil down to Wil Wheaton's "Don't Be A Dick". We let our opponents corpse run, regroup, and then we have at each other. Why do all that sportsmanship stuff? Cause it's to further world PvP. To get the opponents to come out and play.
I realize I'm weird, but I'd rather fight in
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UO was very similar to EvE in a lot of respects. Back when it first started up, getting a single skill to grand master level was a feat th
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and how popular did UO become from that type of gameplay? I'm not about to criticise the pvp system in UO, I used to play UO before Coster implemented Chaos and Order, but getting constantly ganked was a PITA, and the majority of the intial subscribers felt that way too.
So much so that when OWO went over to EA the servers were split into both pvp and pve servers to appease both demographics. And if I recall the pvp servers were a bit on the empty side. From a player perspective the UO pvp was (to coin a po
Re:Ultima Online - everyone that was wrong with (Score:2)
Romanticize about it all you want but the real problem was that anarchy does not make a good mmorpg. That what it was for a big amount of time. Insta kill guards didn't help as many knew ways to exploit that and get unsuspecting players ganked by guards. Look, it does not parallel the real world because there
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Congratulations. You and your PvP jerk friends finally won. You drove so many people away from UO it was too late to save the game when PvP-choice play (Trammel) was created. You and your kind killed UO because you wanted the freedom to be anti-social pricks who robbed players of hours of effort. A GM sword/tactics master killing a GM miner. Ooh, big challenge.
Are you still pla
Best PvP? (Score:2)
It must have been hilarious when Trammel was released. Wish I was around for that.
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It was rather hilarious. On the boards, at the conventions and at RL events, we mostly heard about PvP this and PvP that. You'd have thought that UO was designed to be a PvP paradise and the total population were PvPers. When Trammel opened, an average 80% of the population of each shard moved to Trammel, the non-PvP side.
The masses spoke and said "we will not play your way." Obviously, PvPers are simply more vocal.
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In a way, they were correct. The only people that were playing UO at the time Trammel came out were mostly the hardcore PvP crowd. UO was dying a very painful death already, and the Devs were making a desperate move to stave off their loses to AC and EQ. It was way to late, however.
But yes, I saw the lack of players on the "dark side". I re-opened my account in the hopes that the game would b
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It's a zero sum game and when karma comes back around everybody ends up being the looser. Games are supposed to be fun even to those who don't win in a competitive setting.
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I played UO from literally day one, and it taught me that consequences don't matter nearly as much as
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In the simplest scenarios, yes. One day I had my fresh new tinker/lumberjack (no fighting skills) outside Minoc chopping trees. When my backpack was full of logs, I'd tinker them into clock frames. Rinse and repeat for about an hour before heading into town to sell them for profit. With my backpack full of nothing but an axe, a tool and clock frames a PK jumped out, killed me and complained about what lousy loot I had.
Yes, in that case I bought a new axe and tools and went back to choppin
Planetside - System wide PvP (Score:2)
The "Death Penalty" was measured not in the player's individual stats, but in the strength of the defending/attacking army. Thus one individual would not change the course of events, and would not be ruined by a single death, but the cumulative effect of a bad plan usually lead to the loss of an entire continent. Once that happened, *everyone* took the express bus back to Loserville, which meant that a bigger fight for territory wa
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Sadly, all of my
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.
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Should be funny watching the forum whines from all the folks who use this but didn't take the time to read the patch notes.
Wait. . . is there a *game* in there somewhere? (Score:2)
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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.
Woot, patch day. I should have T2 Sentries for my Moros on the flip side of it; maybe I'll camp some stations in low sec, near where the agents are.
~Wx
Hello (Score:2)
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You have to enter paragraphs 'less than p greater than' or breaks 'less than br greater than' to separate text.
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Look at Bartle's four player types: explorer, achiever, socializer and PvP. By the grid, in a group of 100 players, you'd expect 25 of those would be PvP. That's not the case. Usually it's more like 2 in 10
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Absolutely I don't have to
Irrelevant (Score:2)
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Actually, come to think of it, there's a LOT of similarities between their views of foreplay and sub-uber game levels. Both take time, both are tedious, afterwards you get a short period of lots of fun followed by disappointment, and both can be bypassed if you've got enough cash and a willingness to deal with shady businessmen...
Even nostalgia isn't what it used to be ;) (Score:5, Insightful)
Or in this case, are you sure you've played the same UO I've played?
You know, the one with exactly zero quests (the escort quests, dumb and boring as they were, got added later) and not much more to do than run around trying to get some species extinct? That is, if you got past the gangs of gankers camping the town exits for newbies to kill?
The one where you could max your strength by just dropping and picking a fucking coin all night? Or others by just assigning that skill to every single key on the keyboard? Where one skill (magic) did more than all other skills combined, so everyone maxed that one with a macro before going and doing anything else? And where by comparison, another skill (tinkering) was useless for anything other than trapping chests and leaving them around, hoping that some newbie would open them? Great balance there, eh?
The one where crafting was as freaking useless as to only be able to produce coloured versions of the bog-standard items that cost cents at any vendor? While any humanoid around the map dropped better ones and magical ones?
Yeah, that's got to be some great adventure/RPG. Misses all the idea of either adventure or RPG, any way you define RPG. It didn't have either the story of Japanese (and recently Bioware) CRPGs, nor the character advancement of traditional US RPGs, so I guess it must be great.
Or remember how the world got full of houses everywhere, including with a tree poking through the roof, filling every single bloody space, including where the game still pretended was some virgin-ish wood or mountain top? So you'd have wolves and ogres spawning and edging their way between houses, pretending that's their habitat? Yeah, very immersive world that.
Quality of the player base? You mean, how half of them were clones of the same ganker in a death shroud with the same a polearm and the same magic spells? Or how they camped the mines for anyone foolish enough to get encumbered with ore, so they can gank them right next to the town? Yeah, that was some inovative roleplaying there.
Remember the about a quarter of the population who even bought disposable accounts to scam and grief, and had whole website rings dedicated to sharing tips on how to drive a newbie off the game? Amazing idea to RP someone who can magically steal your items through walls, or who can abuse a bug to take your items in a trade without giving anything, by just dragging yours in a container before aborting the trade.
And grinding to achieve the biggest castle and the most status-symbol items, now that's _totally_ unlike the grind to the top of kids these days in WoW
Heh.
Re: (Score:2)
It's amazing how so many people always call up UO as the greatest MMO ever, when it was basically a game for those who wanted to be more anti-social in game than they were in RL.
I almost didn't play another MMO after my experience in UO, it was that bad. I knew nobody going into the game, and only got to know some dude in Argentina that I helped save from a PK'er that attacked too close to town.
A stint in AC didn't really improve my views of MMOs, and it wasn't unti
Re:Hmm... What about L.O.R.D. (Score:4, Informative)