Nephretiti and everyone els thanks for a great discussion!
Nephretiti i can understand your point with the enchanter situation. It would not be fun get get hit by nearfs over and over But it also seems to me that these elements, attacking guards in duel and you get full death penalty was not indented from the devs. point of view.
I don’t think a similar situation will accrue, we come along way the last 10 years of game development, so the most common mistakes have been made and devs should have learned to catch these mistakes before hand.
Riahuf22 what if your skill is always the same in PvE, But some skills will be nerfed for PvP? You have your awesome 30s cc and charm for nps's. But if you use these skills on a player, you wont see the same duration for example. Charm could last max 8s when target a player, same goes for extremely strong roots or damage abilities even heals could have reduced effect in PvP situation. Ofc its a work load, you cant avoid it, but a solution like this would be to prefer for me.
To answer the battleground PvP idea, i dont think VR will bring this to the table, personally i would not mind. But if goes in conflict with their open world setup and experience.
I rather see PvP in a dedicated zone, arena pit or both. Where PvPers can come and Bash the brains out of each other, for fun. Nothing special is gained for PvP other than bragging rights and ofc the thrill of it.
Maybe have an arena with a chest, the last man standing can loot this and get some sort of reward for their trouble, this chest should not give OP items it should give a descent item or currency loot.
I understand that many old school players reason, to not want the PvP aspect. Is that it disrupt and disturb their PvE experience, they got PTSD from last time they got ganked during a raid and would rather just not have this element in their game. To this I am in the same spot, i would not like to get trained or attacked while fighting a boss. I hope to see macanics that specify target these situations, you could lock the mobs to a player or grp. or maybe make the mobs return to their location before they can re-agro, if not directly attacked, something that protects the players a tiny bit from griefers.
Im exited to see what VR will bring :)
oneADseven said:I would 100% be down for battlegrounds. Two maps would be plenty ... something like WSG and AB (Capture the Flag map and Control Map) -- maybe this is something we'll see in a future expansion? Battlegrounds were my favorite part of WoW ... and if players had the option to que for those, it could definitely help with spreading the population out to prevent over-camping or crowded zones.
Same here. I mostly play PvE but I like to PvP quite a bit too, but only when it's a bit more fair. Open world PvP most often (in my experience anyway) horribly unbalanced, getting ganked while doing something else or run over by a zerg of friends. Very very rarely would I ever have an actual good fight of near equal footing.
I found with DAoC and later with WoW & Wildstar that I really enjoy being able to hop into battlegrounds for mostly balanced/equal PvP experiences with objectives to work toward. Old WoW Alterac Valley was a ton of fun (before they nerfed it to the ground) with all kinds of surprises and comebacks, some epic battles lasted well over 10 hours.
Someone said it fit in WoW but not Terminus yet they could easily find a way to have it work within the lore. A Tournament of Champions, Gauntlet of Battle, or Proving Grounds.
The problem with having battlegrounds as part of an open world thing is they won't be balanced nor as tense as instancing provides. WoW tried a number of times to make it work with a few open world PvP areas with objectives and everything but it never worked out, it turns into roaming gank squads and/or circle capping objectives. Who knows though, if down the line VR wants to add it maybe they will be the ones to find the key to make it work.
My anecdote regarding PvP in a PvE game is that I feel players really aren't playing the game when doing PvP. When I went live with EQ right after beta myself and friends actually started on Rallos Zek feeling that players as part of the environment would be great. Anyone that began on Rallos Zek upon release on Faydwere knows all about the Gnome/Elf war. Before there were any re-jigging of classes. It was horrible and really came down to spellcasters (Enchanters weren't leveling high enough to be very effective early on). Melee had a horrible time since spellcasters would root and nuke and that was it. It was horrible. Dwarves were an uneasy neutral to the Gnomes because they needed Butcherblock. But for the most part Dwraves didn't have any classes that could threaten the Gnomes and pretty much all the wood elves could muster were Druids. It was a horrible experience since the rule of the day (at that time) was simply kill whonever you could and kill as much as possible and threaten retribution for any and every slight or death. We left that server since that was not what we signed up for. People weren't really playing the game they were just killing each other and the environment be damned.
My anecdote doesn't stop there. Because a couple years later one friend (who still had a hate on for the experience) went back to Rallos Zek and created an enchanter. He didn't level him very high, just enough for charm. He ran him naked to Guk one evening. Bound himself in Guk and proceeded to roleplay an Elf who had come to protect the Frogloks of Guk from the slaughter done by Trolls and Ogres. He never killed a single Froglok so could run around Upper Guk and not worry about Frogloks hurting him (the default faction is just above neutral and he made sure to not damage that reputation). He would charm anyone he could and drag them down into the depths and whack them with his staff to remove charm and let the high level Frogloks destroy that guy. When the level restriction was introduced (I believe eight levels), it made it even better for him especially against necromances (of which many Dark Elves would be there). The necro pet was a potential eight levels below the player character (if I remember correctly). So even when high levels showed up to protect lower level characters or to do corpse recovery he would whack the necro pet in between fights and have it chase him. Unless the necro could get a bead to recall his pet he would soon have a score of angry Frogloks on his tail who would first attack the necro pet and then go after the master. Hitting a necro pet eight levels above him meant a player character up to 16 levels higher than him who could not hit him or do anything to him. Yet he could still whack their pet and cause all sorts of mayhem to that player.
Anyone who was playing back then will know exactly who I am talking about. He had many discussions with the powers that be at Verant and he was not banned for his actions. He would tell players to leave the Frogloks alone and go hunt somewhere else. There were even shouts in the zone when he logged on he was known and hated that much. And if he died he didn't care. He had nothing to lose. He was bound deep in Upper Guk so no one was ever able to discover his bind point to corpse camp him. From a personal aspect when he tells me this (I had given up on EQ by this time) I laughed. However, I still know how much it sucked and I can only imagine how much it sucked for those trolls, ogres, and dark elves that were attempting to play in Upper Guk. Yes that was Rallos Zek and yes that was the ruleset. However the ruleset also leads to a certain playset and a certain frame of mind that I find (pronoun to illustrate a matter of opinion) to be one that just isn't there to enjoy the environment. Keep the servers separate and keep the separate mindset that exists for why they are playing the game separate.
I’m concerned with participating in a world where my actions are my merits. That is how I attracted a hardcore playerbase of like-minded individuals to form the PvP guild Ascending Dawn. I would like to experience the open world PvP lifestyle within the PvE gamestyle again. I do not need any instance battlegrounds or arenas to enjoy the chaos of gang (guild) warfare. I do not need objectives. I do not need to have my hand held, nor will I behave when told. The only thing I need is a PvP FFA Rallos Zek ruleset and free will. I will gladly do it again. The EQ PvP open world that I remember does not exist.
Oh jeez some of these ideas are terrible and would ruin PvP.
NO safe zones. No "oh I don't wanna PvP now" silly flags. You have PvP servers and you have PvE servers, thats it.
You can put PvP "arenas' on the PvE server but please DO NOT bring any carebear ideas to the PvP server.
Logging out of the game is an intrinsic "safe area". Rather than forcing people into a dichotomy of "play or log out" it seems like common sense to have non-combat areas, to me. I'm of the opinion that any game that forces you to log out to achieve an in-game objective (in this case, not dying) is absolutely terrible planning.
StrategicJER said:I would like to experience the open world PvP lifestyle within the PvE gamestyle again. I do not need any instance battlegrounds or arenas to enjoy the chaos of gang (guild) warfare. I do not need objectives.
You are not alone my friend. Is a game really considered PvP focused just because it has an arbitratry realm points system? Many such games limit real organization and instead implement mechanics that favor low skilled AOE zergs. In addition, these titles typically utilize campaign systems wich are significantly impacted by a faction's active playerbase during non-peak hours.
Liav said:Logging out of the game is an intrinsic "safe area". Rather than forcing people into a dichotomy of "play or log out" it seems like common sense to have non-combat areas, to me. I'm of the opinion that any game that forces you to log out to achieve an in-game objective (in this case, not dying) is absolutely terrible planning.
Logging out achieves an in-game objective? That is some weird type of thinking you do there.
Cynwulf said:If a game is not built from the ground up with pvp in mind i will pass. It does not sound like pantheon is doing this so will probably pass on playing on a pvp server.
This is the important part. If you're waiting for PvP in this game you will Most likely be disappointed. The focus seems to be largely on pve, and I don't think that will ever change.
I too, am a veteran of EQ1 Rallos Zek, and I would rather write in the defense of this, full PvP server experience. To give brief background, I also played on Tallon Zek and some vanilla server I don't remember. I played EQ2 when it launched, found it terrible, but came back to it years later to play on the Vox server for a long while before it was merged with Nagafen.
In 1998, on Tallon Zek, while learning the most basic aspects of the game and eventually wandering outside Surefall Glade, I was set upon by skeletons and managed to live just long enough to run too close to another character, who was sitting off a ways by the road. True to form, the skeletons changed targets and attacked this higher level character, who effortlessly and instantly destroyed them and then proceeded to /tell me off about how it is rude to train onto higher levels just to escape.
I did not know what I was doing, but I had my first taste of what was to become a constant, frequently kamikaze disruption attack upon my play experience... and I had inadvertantly done it to another player. (That player was a druid who eventually went on to become the leader of Pandemonium Guild.) Later, as I played and levelled, and battled the Merciless Midgets and other dedicated PvP guilds, I still encountered this problem with deliberate trains. These were the Wild West days of EverQuest and basically a GM had to be on and catch you in order to prosecute your misbehaviour. Worse yet, was when Kill Stealing, deliberate training and such were committed by members of your faction. Whole groups had very little recourse and though then most of us were kids and teenagers, we didn't have unlimmited time to play, so a camp / zone getting ruined for us by another player we could not even touch was a real killjoy. Waiting on /petitions turned Exploring Norrath into standing in line at the DMV, but with Trolls.
Still in love with the game, I switched over to Rallos Zek with some of my close RL and in game friends. Where the mechanics and rulesets came up against a wall of inefficacy, the player COMMUNITY stepped in. In a world where anyone (within the level range, which was +/- 4) could attack you, that behaviour was policed by the players. There were notorious opportunistic murdering menaces on that server. Likewise, were there plenty of combat ready players who would in a moment's notice, go hunting for them to disuade them from being pests. I recall both being in a group specifically formed, laying in wait to serve justice (revenge), and being the object of other such groups. It added great spice to the experience of play and lots of horizontal, PLAYER-GENERATED content between game tiers.
... and anyone else here that recalls those days will note too, that we had to do all of it... battling each other, or battling hill giants, wearing the worst, most mis-matched no-drop equipment we could find and filling the other slots with what we could afford to lose, because there was ITEM LOOT upon death. I've come and gone in games across the years, and even within the EverQuest and EverQuest II groups and guilds I played in, no players were as needfully crafty, resourceful, or skilled as those who came from Rallos Zek. We new how to defeat each other AND mobs when we were even less sure of a scored hit, or triggered proc than PvE server players.
This, to my taste and that of at least several hundreds of others, made the game more immersive and enjoyable. It felt like a real fantasy, where friend could become foe on the (sometime literal) turn of a knife blade, or old enemies could find redemption and acceptance. The bastardized version of PvP play that we were handed in EverQuest II, with it's uncommunicating factions, specific PvP armors and items... the TOKENS... it was terrible. An absolute failure. It was like an asbestos condom draped over a problem that did not exist and poisoning the enjoyment it was intended to promote.
The technical tools available to the developers today can quite easily address the most obnoxious and exploitative behaviours of bad PvP Players: corpse camping, serial abusive killings of the same players within a duration, even repeated intentional training of aggro mobs. The heart of a PvP play server need not otherwise be overcomplicated - players, within the determined appropriate level / skill range, can kill each other. Simply that. A fantasy world where a single villain, or a group of rival opportunists cannot confront others in order to win the day away from them is like a Lord of the Rings episode of the Muppet Babies, where a bunch of different, horrible monsters all get along for no reason and clap each other on the back for killing Non-player monsters... instead of maybe a few of them deciding to eat each other the way nature intended.
And a PvP ruleset server need not be some internet-troll-ridden stew of toxic, abusive players. When anyone can seek justice, it will indeed be sought. With the appropriate anti-griefing mechanics in place, the PvP combat can be boiled down to a contest of in-game skill and player choices weighed against their player consequences. The game, as described by the Devs and Brad McQuaid from the get-go, is going to be content-rich, subscription based, zoned, and very environmentally difficult. The more immature and deliberately abusive player will have to make a deep commitment to paying for the privilege of churlishness, ignoring the majority of the game content, operating in a limited theater for their bad antics, and overcoming significant in-game hurdles meant to be traversed by a coordinated group... PLUS player retaliation. I'm not suggesting that there could not be someone so completely dedicated to misanthropy, but the Pantheon deck, even before any official depiction of what PvP might look like, is stacked against them. Built in, it thins the herd.
And so, by annecdote and positting, I hope that when the Developers consider and start working on PvP content, they stop to consider all that had been "got right," in original EverQuest. They have the tools to address game mechanic failures of the past, the ability to add a sprinkling of PvP to PvE servers via arenas, and at least my account and endorsement for getting back to the dirt-under-the-fingernails style of play we had on Rallos Zek. It could be improved, yes, but to date, no company has done it with the lighter touch that it only ever really needed.
Let at least one colony of us players get gritty fighting over each other's Blackened Iron Relics and loose change when the opportunity presents, or curse our misfortune when we take the chance of reprisal and are met only with Reserve Militia Tunics and fully-bagged inventory.
Shabadooda EQ release was not until 1999 so maybe you were in beta or limbo? In 1998, on Tallon Zek, while learning the most basic aspects of the game and eventually wandering outside Surefall Glade, I was set upon by skeletons and managed to live just long enough to run too close to another character, who was sitting off a ways by the road. True to form, the skeletons changed targets and attacked this higher level character, who effortlessly and instantly destroyed them and then proceeded to /tell me off about how it is rude to train onto higher levels just to escape.
Forgive me, I mistyped. I meant 1999, June 14th, to be exact as for when I so willingly got lost down the rabbit hole of EQ
Isaya said:Shabadooda EQ release was not until 1999 so maybe you were in beta or limbo? In 1998, on Tallon Zek, while learning the most basic aspects of the game and eventually wandering outside Surefall Glade, I was set upon by skeletons and managed to live just long enough to run too close to another character, who was sitting off a ways by the road. True to form, the skeletons changed targets and attacked this higher level character, who effortlessly and instantly destroyed them and then proceeded to /tell me off about how it is rude to train onto higher levels just to escape.
I always turn duelling off on a pve server ..extremely annoying if you are doing something else and some newbie spams you with duel requests. If I want to pvp I will make a character on a pvp ruleset server. Most of the games I played in the past were all about pvp. Done with that. :)
Cana