Saturday, April 16, 2011

A Counterattack

Introductory remark: To understand the context of this post it is helpful to have read the previous two.

1)
When trying to make the players behave in a specific way there are two basic methods.

- The elegant one and
- the messy one.

The elegant one consists of a few very-easy-to-understand rules that make players behave in the desired way. The messy one consists of a lot of rules that mostly exist to close loopholes and side-effects that wouldn't even exist without them.

Obviously, if anyhow possible a designer should always use elegant rule sets. An example for a non-elegant one would be World of Warcraft's arena rating system. Look it and its history up, if you are interested. I cannot explain it here, because it is too complex. Which is exactly the point.

Sometimes, unfortunately, there is no elegant solution, but you still want players to behave in a specific way. In these cases you can try to keep a messy rule set as un-messy as possible; how? By trying to have rules that work independently from each other. Never try to fix loopholes with rules that potentially open up other loopholes. This is most often a race to the bottom. In the end one loophole found out by one IQ:164 student, with enough time at his hands, is enough to destroy your entire system.

If there are some loopholes left, always consider to use a “It's not a bug, it's a feature” strategy. Be warned that any try to keep rules hidden will only work for a few weeks – if your game is successful.

2)
So, let's get to the meat: An open-PvP, full-loot MMORPG that makes players police themselves and makes them want to be nice to each other. *taking a deep breath*

The approach uses a lot of independent features and rules that each stands on their own. Each of these measures is meant to decrease the significance of the problem without solving it completely. What remains of the problem will be declared “not a bug, but a feature” and will be dealt with by expectation management.

Here's the list:

- Accountability: Just one character per account. You want another one, buy another account or delete your previous character. Paid name/appearance change possible once per account. Just one world-server.

- Strong horizontal character power progression. A very powerful player is at best 2x as strong as a relative newbie.

- No teleport.

- Restrictive weight limit. To take with you all the belongings (especially armor) of another player, requires that you didn't carry with you anything, but armor and weapon to begin with. If you want to transport more, use a cart (slow, requires a street/path).

- Impossible to figure out the 'power level' of another player before attacking him.

- Impossible to know who somebody is, unless he introduced himself to you or you recognize his face / shape (modern graphics ftw).

- Basic armor and weapons are cheap – especially the ones used for open-world resource gathering.

- Special mercenary/bandit skills to better track down players in combination with specific equipment that needs to be used to access and improve these skills. This equipment is expensive.

- Players don't automatically kill you. They first defeat you. To take your stuff, however, they need to kill you after you have been defeated. If they don't, you revive five minutes later with low health. If you want, you can kill yourself in that time.

- Should you be killed by a mob, it takes all your stuff / eat your body / tear you apart. You won't be able to get your stuff back.
Explanation: There's no hoping to not die by the hands of a mob. Mobs are meaner than players. Also, you are used to lose stuff. Mobs always attack non-defeated players first.

- Looting another player takes time during which you are very vulnerable.

- No teleport, except due to death: death means you resurrect near a holy place. You respawn with basic equipment.

These are the basics, now some special features:

- Parts of the map can be claimed as influence regions of groups of players. These regions are tied to central player-group-owned buildings, like castles. Within the influence region, the members of the owning-group receive a 10% combat bonus; enemies receive a 10% penalty. The leadership of the group can declare an infinite amount of players / other groups as "not-welcome", persona-non-Grata. Should one of them enter the influence region, all members of the group in control that are in the vicinity, are notified about who entered their region where. The whereabouts are broadcasted repeatedly while the intruder is in the region.
Player-employed guards attack non-welcome players on sight.

- After having been killed by a player in defeated mode, players can mark any player in their vicinity as "murderer". Marking a player 'murderer' has a seven-day cooldown. The mark is removed after half a year. You can remove the mark before half a year is up. Once somebody has been marked a murderer, he emits a frightening aura whenever he is in the vicinity of the location where he was marked. You cannot mark a player of a group that your group is at war with. You can only become member of a group once per week. (little race to the bottom, once again ..)
Effect of the aura: other players are notified that somebody scary has entered their vicinity. Nearby patrols are attracted to a marked player that enters the vicinity of the marking. These guards are hostile and not to be joked with.

- Guards in NPC-cities and other important places. In NPC-cities and many other places you need to sheathe your weapon / caster staff / etc. If you draw your weapon the guards give you a 10s warning. If you don't sheet the weapon in time, they attack you. Guards are about as powerful as a very powerful player. Guards can call for reinforcement that spawns quite far away. Players survive long enough that no single murderer can possibly kill another player before he has been killed by the guards himself. The guards snare the player and knock him down. The best option is to just not do anything if you are attacked.

- Expectation management: new players run through an extensive tutorial that explains the world and the consequences of one's actions.


So, what do you think? Overkill? Or still not enough? Do you see unwanted side-effects / loopholes? Or do you have an idea of an additional feature to fight Lunatic-PvP?


Edit:
This was a non-iterated brainstorming. I've already found two ways to abuse these rules. But I also have a few more nice ideas. For what its worth: I'm still interested in as much feedback as possible ;)

10 comments:

  1. I like that there is a difference between "kill" and "defeat". Is there a death penalty other than being open to being looted?

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  2. Aren't you putting the cart before the horse a bit here. I mean What kind of gameplay is it that your system is designed to facilitate? How would the rules you outline here lead to more interesting open world PvP (if they do) than say Warhammer's rules or the planned design for open world PvP in Guild Wars 2?

    Rather than having complex rules (6 month debuff!?) that are designed to stop allied players from killing each other, it's obviously simpler to just prohibit them from so doing - so there has to be some compelling gameplay reason (other than simulating the small % of real world murdering psycopaths) for allowing allies to kill each other and I just can't see what that is. As Shintar said about your last post "the biggest problem is the inherent contradiction of wanting people to PvP and yet not wanting people to PvP".

    Doesn't Darkfall have looting rules a bit like yours? I hear that it results in players mostly running around in their underwear :). Even if that didn't happen it doesn't seem that looting is going to be worth the candle since equipment is so cheap. Doesn't your system essentially remove most of the character and gear progression aspect, which is the core attraction of MMORPGs for many?

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  3. Gilded, you are also teleported away as a death penalthy. In a world without (other) teleports this can be quite inconvenient.


    Roq, I hope you don't make the mistake to think inside the framework of a WoW-like MMORPG. A lot of the features I would want independent from any PvP considerations.

    ---
    So there has to be some compelling gameplay reason (other than simulating the small % of real world murdering psycopaths) for allowing allies to kill each other and I just can't see what that is.

    Which allies? There are no factions in the world. Everybody is free to join any group that accepts him.

    ---
    Doesn't Darkfall have looting rules a bit like yours? I hear that it results in players mostly running around in their underwear :).

    Haven't played Darkfall much. But I'm pretty sure there are some similarities.

    Underwear would be a very unwanted side-effect. But in the post there are incentives to not wear underwear, if you read carefully.

    ---
    Even if that didn't happen it doesn't seem that looting is going to be worth the candle since equipment is so cheap.

    Depends on whose equipment you are talking about. The guy who hacks lumber: cheap equipment. The player killer: expensive equipment.

    ---
    Doesn't your system essentially remove most of the character and gear progression aspect, which is the core attraction of MMORPGs for many?

    I would want to do this anyway. Character progression should be mostly horizontal and with heavily diminishing returns in the vertical.
    Gear progression doesn't exist in the traditional way. You are as well equipped as you can financially afford.
    his is mostly dependent on how well your group is doing. Most stuff is crafted. You might find a rare weapon in some ruins, but everything decays with time and use.

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  4. "Depends on whose equipment you are talking about. The guy who hacks lumber: cheap equipment. The player killer: expensive equipment."

    Why would a PKer bother with expensive equipment? You've allowed players to be 2X as strong as other players. And if that isn't enough they can stooge around and catch other players when they've been weakened by a mob, which is the normal modus operandi of these despicable individuals...

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  5. Roq, the PKer wants to wear special equipment that allows him to access/train special PKer skills.

    Naked players or players who don't wear enough equipment are subject to serious penalties in combat.

    About attacking weakened players: It's not possible to prevent him from doing this and succeeding.

    The only thing that helps here is to allow the killed player some kind of revenge. And the only way to do this is the have a system that knows who was the bad guy.

    I am almost inclined to say: Forget this post. I hope to have a better one soon :)

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  6. I would have some suggestions about two aspects of your rules.

    The murder label seems over powering in the fact that what happens if the attacker loses and then labels the defender a murder. Is the defender really a murderer if he was defending himself?

    The other one is the Alarm system to notify everyone in a area when an intruder has entered their area. This would in essence would eliminate some interesting game mechanics like spying, assassination, sneak attack and so forth. You might not like all the aspects that come along with no alarms, but the alternative is everyone hanging out in the castle waiting for the alarm to go off and not playing the game. I.E. watching their territory.

    Maybe a better idea would be to hire NPC sentinels to patrol the territory, that way you still get something of an alarm, but also gives the interloper a chance to avoid.

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  7. Just another thought that would be great to see you address in your revised design:

    A problem that arises in FFAPVP MMO designs and I haven't seen a good solution to is the tension between the in game economy and the fact that you really want players who meet each other in PvP (wherever that might be) to be roughly equivalent in power (well at least I would want that :)). If stuff is to have any value then it must make it's owner more awesome in combat and if it's going to be very valuable then it must have a significant effect. But this then means you have to make a choice - either you have an economy and combat isn't fair (WoW approach) or you have no economy, everyone has much the same gear, but combat is fair (Guild Wars 1 approach). Your current design seems to want to have it's cake and eat it, in this respect:

    For instance, in your current ideas giving PKers special skills and armor (presumably in order to have something of value in your game that people can work for) just exacerbates the imbalance in power, creating a fox/rabbit situation; but in practice who is going to want to play the rabbit? Certainly not me, I wouldn't touch a game where there was a class of super imba PK killers who could jump out on me at any time, whether there was some kind of bounty system or not.

    n reality, for many of us, annoyances happen in the here and now and, unless the wound is very deep, it's of little conseqence that the cause of our annoyance gets some debuff later. Further you can't really make debuffs too severe *or* long lasting, because then neither the rabbits nor the foxes will want to play your game.

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  8. Thanks for the lengthy comment, Roq.
    I want all players to be roughly equivalent in power.

    You write
    If stuff is to have any value then it must make it's owner more awesome in combat and if it's going to be very valuable then it must have a significant effect.

    ---
    I disagree. What you describe leads to exponential character power progression. This requires special regions, level ranges, friends that cannot play with friends, empty world, absurd PvP, gamey feeling and all this stuff that is no fun at all. The implications of it extreme.

    I think that players consider a 10% buff (which is just recogniseable) about as valueable as a 1% buff - if they don't compare it to the 10% one!

    I know that I and many others where trying to collect item sets classic WoW that would add some 3% crit chance. They were considered extremely powerful - and desireable. The fallacy of modern MMORPGs is the idea that players need to really become more powerful to consider an item worthwile. We do not!
    If you compress the entire game into a power range of factor 2, you
    still have people longing for updates. And you circumvent all those problems of exponential character power progression.

    I always want the cake and eat it, too ;). If you add item decay, you can have relatively powerful items (factor 2x is still a lot!) and a vibrant economy. Of course, the game cannot be about epics and itemlevels in this case. I think that's a good thing.

    The special skills for the PKer, I mentioned, would be non-combat related. They would make the PKer better at tracking people or finding out about busy trade routes. The items they would need to carry to acess/improve these skills would be non-combat, too. Some trinket of the mercenary association could be very expensive and lootable. This way the PKers play a high risk, high reward game, while the resource collecter plays a low risk, low reward game.

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  9. "The murder label seems over powering in the fact that what happens if the attacker loses and then labels the defender a murder. Is the defender really a murderer if he was defending himself?"

    As long as they aren't killing the attacker, they shouldn't be marked as a murderer. If I'm reading it correctly, you can defend yourself all you want, just so you're not killing to loot your attacker.

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  10. I know you've already thought through some loopholes, but I wanted to make sure you noticed this one:

    Player A and B don't like player C.

    Player A kills player B and player B labels player C a murderer.

    I can't imagine a way to make a game smart enough to recognize that this is what happened as opposed to player C actually being involved while still letting you mark everyone who is in a gang that decided to kill you. Player B could even attack player C and get some hits from him first if necessary.

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