Are open pvp + full loot SANDBOX mmorpg's still possible?
I would imagine that there should be something to encourage some people to settle down together, such as useful worthwile defenses that are multi-person projects, as well as shops and taverns to attract people. There should also be a simple way to track down PKers with your friends and gank them. Finally, however, there should be a prison system so that people can discourage someone they really dislike. If they have enough people to build a prison, they can jail people, but jailing people does not give you any rewards, so one would only do if out of revenge. Also, it would take multiple people to continously gaurd it, while the criminal can try to break out. As such, a group of sheep may band together to do it, but there would be no reason for a wolf to jail sheep. Also, the sheep can be broken out if he has friends.
Two options that come to mind, both have issues:
A) Jail = locked out of your character for X amount of time, % chance of breaking out early/probation. Consequence of breaking civil law is that you will be locked up for your crimes. Friends wouldn't turn friends heads in generally to keep them from being locked out. Can still be abused.
B) A constant bounty is placed on the head of a player, but the reward is not cash, sort of "item shop incentives" for not being a criminal. Item shop would not be pay to win, only non-beneficial things. If people want to pay players for these rewards once earned from turning in enough bounties, let the value be determined in game. Thus it isn't a one shot deal where the player's friend can nab the big bounty and then it is worthless to hunt the criminal. Potential to limit number of turn ins per set amount of time. Can still be abused.
Big Aid: Allow tracking. Promotes bounty hunting, but could also be used to track innocent players unless handled through a game mechanic that limits tracked targets to criminals.
A) Jail = locked out of your character for X amount of time, % chance of breaking out early/probation. Consequence of breaking civil law is that you will be locked up for your crimes. Friends wouldn't turn friends heads in generally to keep them from being locked out. Can still be abused.
B) A constant bounty is placed on the head of a player, but the reward is not cash, sort of "item shop incentives" for not being a criminal. Item shop would not be pay to win, only non-beneficial things. If people want to pay players for these rewards once earned from turning in enough bounties, let the value be determined in game. Thus it isn't a one shot deal where the player's friend can nab the big bounty and then it is worthless to hunt the criminal. Potential to limit number of turn ins per set amount of time. Can still be abused.
Big Aid: Allow tracking. Promotes bounty hunting, but could also be used to track innocent players unless handled through a game mechanic that limits tracked targets to criminals.
I love me some DayZ, and the reason I love it is that there's no "endgame" per se. It's a roguelike, like the adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress. You roll up a character, make a bad decision, get eaten by zombies, try again. Then you get to a weapon, kill some zombies, get sniped by a jerk on a catwalk a half-mile away, try again. Then you get geared up pretty well, meet up with a couple strangers, have an epic fight with bandits where you're the last man standing, load up with the spoils and head for the hills all alone. You survive a couple days, meet up with a guy from work, then break a leg falling down a glitchy ladder and have your partner shoot you in the face so you can respawn and try again. Bad decision, zombies eat you. You get some medical supplies and are running to a rendezvous, but the sun goes down and you get lost and starve to death with a backpack full of morphine. Then you get run over by a car full of jerks (true story). Then you decide to live off the land, hunting for meat and drinking water from a pond. That lasts a good week, then you get bored and go check a city and get machinegunned in the halls of an abandoned school.
And on and on and on. Many players are paranoid enough to shoot on sight, but I find that I'm almost always better off trying to make contact with people. Especially with the new patch reducing solo combat capabilities and making zombies more dangerous, it's usually worthwhile to team up, even with strangers. So the sheep get a little more organized and a little better equipped. A few days ago a friend and I were set upon by three bandits in a major city, and while my buddy bled in the street and the bandits moved into position to finish him off, I climbed an apartment building and shot all of them to death with a hunting rifle. Too late to save my chum, but we were new spawns with lame gear and the stuff I took off of the aggressors represented many hours of legitimate playtime.
Of course, that's assuming they earned it legitimately. If you see a guy with a ghillie suit and a .50 caliber sniper rifle, you can bet dollars to doughnuts he didn't find that stuff on his own. More likely he either directly hacked it in or he abused loot farming mechanics and item duping glitches to get his kit. What's more, he likely keeps it by disconnecting from the game at the first sign of trouble. It's not uncommon for a bandit to take a shot at a survivor and then Alt+F4 if he misses, then join another server, run 300 meters to the other side of the valley, go back to the other server and try to kill his target again as they advance on his original position.
That kind of dirty play is why the game doesn't work right. If you had to earn your gear and defend it fair and square, you'd see fewer sociopaths in the game. It's not that they're bad people, usually. Even in single player games, the phenomenon can be seen. I know when I turned on the cheats in Goldeneye's story mode, I'd fight halfway through the level, get bored and start building elaborate mine traps to kill Natalya during cut scenes. My high-level characters in Skyrim or Fable turn into douches when the game stops challenging me and I start looking for puzzles to solve in the form of either killing hordes of city guards or trying to break the game by pushing the boundaries of what is allowed. So when a sandbox can be "beaten" and the winners are left with all the power and none of the challenge, they'll try to get a high kill count or a monopoly on all the server's vehicles, or they'll try to add gameplay by running a script that spawns a fighter jet into the game and strafing the hospital.
Griefing only happens when players have too much power and not enough to do. In EvE, people that have good combat skills and plenty of money but don't want to deal with the bureaucracy of organizations that do serious PvP get their fix by griefing, since it feels like combat and satisfies that urge without all the waiting for orders and choosing targets and getting killed all the time. In DayZ, players grief when they have an easy way to regain lost asset or avoid risk and thus no longer derive satisfaction from playing the game as intended.
And on and on and on. Many players are paranoid enough to shoot on sight, but I find that I'm almost always better off trying to make contact with people. Especially with the new patch reducing solo combat capabilities and making zombies more dangerous, it's usually worthwhile to team up, even with strangers. So the sheep get a little more organized and a little better equipped. A few days ago a friend and I were set upon by three bandits in a major city, and while my buddy bled in the street and the bandits moved into position to finish him off, I climbed an apartment building and shot all of them to death with a hunting rifle. Too late to save my chum, but we were new spawns with lame gear and the stuff I took off of the aggressors represented many hours of legitimate playtime.
Of course, that's assuming they earned it legitimately. If you see a guy with a ghillie suit and a .50 caliber sniper rifle, you can bet dollars to doughnuts he didn't find that stuff on his own. More likely he either directly hacked it in or he abused loot farming mechanics and item duping glitches to get his kit. What's more, he likely keeps it by disconnecting from the game at the first sign of trouble. It's not uncommon for a bandit to take a shot at a survivor and then Alt+F4 if he misses, then join another server, run 300 meters to the other side of the valley, go back to the other server and try to kill his target again as they advance on his original position.
That kind of dirty play is why the game doesn't work right. If you had to earn your gear and defend it fair and square, you'd see fewer sociopaths in the game. It's not that they're bad people, usually. Even in single player games, the phenomenon can be seen. I know when I turned on the cheats in Goldeneye's story mode, I'd fight halfway through the level, get bored and start building elaborate mine traps to kill Natalya during cut scenes. My high-level characters in Skyrim or Fable turn into douches when the game stops challenging me and I start looking for puzzles to solve in the form of either killing hordes of city guards or trying to break the game by pushing the boundaries of what is allowed. So when a sandbox can be "beaten" and the winners are left with all the power and none of the challenge, they'll try to get a high kill count or a monopoly on all the server's vehicles, or they'll try to add gameplay by running a script that spawns a fighter jet into the game and strafing the hospital.
Griefing only happens when players have too much power and not enough to do. In EvE, people that have good combat skills and plenty of money but don't want to deal with the bureaucracy of organizations that do serious PvP get their fix by griefing, since it feels like combat and satisfies that urge without all the waiting for orders and choosing targets and getting killed all the time. In DayZ, players grief when they have an easy way to regain lost asset or avoid risk and thus no longer derive satisfaction from playing the game as intended.
The only way full open PvP could work, in my opinion, is by providing incentive for people to actively hunt down active PK'ers. A reward system with built-in limitations related to the incentive to prevent exploitation or abuse (ie. preventing people from killing their friends over and over to "power-level" their rep. etc).
There also needs to be disincentives - actual in-game/lore-related penalties for someone being a PK'er. This requires there to be a distinction between someone who's engaged in PvP, and someone who's just running around ganking. L2 had a pretty straight-forward way of implementing this... If you attack someone, you go "aggressive". Someone attacking you back will also go "aggressive". If you're killed while in an "aggressive" state, there's no penalty for your assailant. It was PvP, plain and simple.
However, if you go aggressive on someone and that person doesn't fight back, and you drop them, you go "chaotic". Being chaotic brings with it certain penalties. Regular city merchants will not do business with you. City guards will attack you on sight. You are considered an "outlaw" and so others can attack you without penalty to themselves, or without flagging as "aggressive". A chaotic/outlaw player is basically a "mob" at that point.
What I always kind of get a kick out of is how against the idea of any kind of penalty for PK'ing/Ganking many self-described "hardcore" or "avid PvPer's" are. Most every suggestion they make always seems to involve piling all the risk and loss on the victims/sheep - such as full corpse looting, etc. However, they are typically completely against any kind of tangible risk or penalty to themselves for ganking/PK'ing, often citing it as "unfair" or "being punished for wanting to have fun", etc. That seems to be the opinion shared by glhf in this thread.
The suggested risk/penalties they put forth for themselves are typically quite "vaporous" and extremely situational. A common one, which again is shared by glhf, is the whole "players getting together to hunt down and take on the PK'ers/Gankers". It sounds reasonable right? Two main problems with it:
1. It requires others to band together to hunt down the ganker/griefer, so it's not a guaranteed penalty to begin with.
2. The griefer/ganker can - and usually will (as per the "hyena" analogy used earlier in the thread) - run, teleport, or force-log at the first sight of someone coming to deal with them. So even when item #1 does happen, they are gone. Because the typical ganker is not looking for actual PvP. They're looking for easy kills with little or no risk to themselves.
The only PvP system most so-called "pro-PvP'ers" will ever accept is one that places all guaranteed risk/loss on the victim - with the reward of "full loot" - while keeping any risk to themselves as conditional and avoidable as possible.
The only suggestions they seem to support in terms of lessening ganking/griefing is for the sheep to go somewhere else. Basically... run away and stroke the ganker's ego. Of course, when the sheep/victim leaves, they're regarded as a "carebear" for not standing there and being the willing victim.
Again, GLHF's arguments are so familiar, as I've seen them in thread after thread when this such discussion comes up.
I made a suggestion to balance the playing field for the PK'ers and non-PK'ers in TERA's forums some time back as, at the time anyway, it pretty much favored the chaotic players/griefers/gankers. You wouldn't believe the outrage and indignance that was hurled back at me for even suggesting that a PK'ers existence be a bit more dangerous than it was. The strongest arguments against my suggestions came from those who always argued for "more risk and danger". Of course, and as usual, the only "risk" or "danger" they're in favor of is that piled on their victims.
There also needs to be disincentives - actual in-game/lore-related penalties for someone being a PK'er. This requires there to be a distinction between someone who's engaged in PvP, and someone who's just running around ganking. L2 had a pretty straight-forward way of implementing this... If you attack someone, you go "aggressive". Someone attacking you back will also go "aggressive". If you're killed while in an "aggressive" state, there's no penalty for your assailant. It was PvP, plain and simple.
However, if you go aggressive on someone and that person doesn't fight back, and you drop them, you go "chaotic". Being chaotic brings with it certain penalties. Regular city merchants will not do business with you. City guards will attack you on sight. You are considered an "outlaw" and so others can attack you without penalty to themselves, or without flagging as "aggressive". A chaotic/outlaw player is basically a "mob" at that point.
What I always kind of get a kick out of is how against the idea of any kind of penalty for PK'ing/Ganking many self-described "hardcore" or "avid PvPer's" are. Most every suggestion they make always seems to involve piling all the risk and loss on the victims/sheep - such as full corpse looting, etc. However, they are typically completely against any kind of tangible risk or penalty to themselves for ganking/PK'ing, often citing it as "unfair" or "being punished for wanting to have fun", etc. That seems to be the opinion shared by glhf in this thread.
The suggested risk/penalties they put forth for themselves are typically quite "vaporous" and extremely situational. A common one, which again is shared by glhf, is the whole "players getting together to hunt down and take on the PK'ers/Gankers". It sounds reasonable right? Two main problems with it:
1. It requires others to band together to hunt down the ganker/griefer, so it's not a guaranteed penalty to begin with.
2. The griefer/ganker can - and usually will (as per the "hyena" analogy used earlier in the thread) - run, teleport, or force-log at the first sight of someone coming to deal with them. So even when item #1 does happen, they are gone. Because the typical ganker is not looking for actual PvP. They're looking for easy kills with little or no risk to themselves.
The only PvP system most so-called "pro-PvP'ers" will ever accept is one that places all guaranteed risk/loss on the victim - with the reward of "full loot" - while keeping any risk to themselves as conditional and avoidable as possible.
The only suggestions they seem to support in terms of lessening ganking/griefing is for the sheep to go somewhere else. Basically... run away and stroke the ganker's ego. Of course, when the sheep/victim leaves, they're regarded as a "carebear" for not standing there and being the willing victim.
Again, GLHF's arguments are so familiar, as I've seen them in thread after thread when this such discussion comes up.
I made a suggestion to balance the playing field for the PK'ers and non-PK'ers in TERA's forums some time back as, at the time anyway, it pretty much favored the chaotic players/griefers/gankers. You wouldn't believe the outrage and indignance that was hurled back at me for even suggesting that a PK'ers existence be a bit more dangerous than it was. The strongest arguments against my suggestions came from those who always argued for "more risk and danger". Of course, and as usual, the only "risk" or "danger" they're in favor of is that piled on their victims.
I wonder how that mod became so successful tho.. being perma death and open pvp.. doesnt make sense!
Honestly, that's the only way it does make sense. If you die, you die. Everyone can kill and lose it all. If a player can't be "godly", open pvp makes the most sense in the whole design. Where is the fun if you can be epic and never die? Just for that one player. If there is no cost, only the first to reach the top can screw up every body else. That is not good design. IMHO (I have not played the game)
(I have played true open PvP 2d games in the past, for years. You got exp for killing, but couldn't take items away. It had a bounty system, it made you a target by increasing the amount of EXP and money you gave for being killed, and that was cool. I have been a "sheep" and a "wolf", but it becomes fun only after you are capped or near capped and if the game is real time based combat, otherwise it would just plainly and utterly suck.)~Personal Opinion.
I think that it depends on how much of a sandbox it is. If it's one where people band together in large cities that they make themselves, then it would be best to give the players themselves the responsibility of punishing the wicked.
There are a few reasons why the wolf/sheep thing is a tough nut to crack for game designers, and reason one is that people don't want to be sheep.
Everyone wants to be the wolf. Yet, for every wolf in a forest there are a ton of "sheep" (deer, rabbits, whatever). Being a wolf is hard. Dumb wolves die. Weak wolves die. Slow wolves die.
When you come to the problem of players beings so-called wolves, you need to take into account that in most games they have no needs. Characters of high enough level can heal themselves and stay out away from population centers forever. Real bandits and thieves needed those centers because they, too, needed the benefits of society. Food, shelter, health care, etc. You might introduce a couple of these into a game to limit loner PvP activity.
If I ever designed anything approaching MMO status, it might not be hugely popular, but here's how I might go about the issue of 1v1 or small group PvP (wars are a different matter):
A) Players engaging in non-consensual PvP ("Wolves") open themselves up to permadeath situations, or at the very least increased corpse looting and loss due to death.
B) Wolves require supplies to survive (probably would be true of all players) such as food. They can't just go dormant for a long time to let people forget about them. They need to keep eating.
C) If a wolf is unsuccessful in a kill, or has witnesses for his crimes, local towns will know about him. The justice system will act accordingly depending on level of his actions. Also, guards are not cannon fodder. You don't want to screw with them unless you are pretty badass yourself.
D) Abilty to self-heal is limited.
Those are a few thoughts. Obviously the overall design is tied into a thousand and other games systems. The main point: You can't make being a wolf easy. You have to make it hard enough that most players won't bother. If they do and they don't have the smarts, they fail miserably. Only the strongest should be able to hack it playing this kind of game, and even then they face the possibility of a vigilante party coming for their ass.
Everyone wants to be the wolf. Yet, for every wolf in a forest there are a ton of "sheep" (deer, rabbits, whatever). Being a wolf is hard. Dumb wolves die. Weak wolves die. Slow wolves die.
When you come to the problem of players beings so-called wolves, you need to take into account that in most games they have no needs. Characters of high enough level can heal themselves and stay out away from population centers forever. Real bandits and thieves needed those centers because they, too, needed the benefits of society. Food, shelter, health care, etc. You might introduce a couple of these into a game to limit loner PvP activity.
If I ever designed anything approaching MMO status, it might not be hugely popular, but here's how I might go about the issue of 1v1 or small group PvP (wars are a different matter):
A) Players engaging in non-consensual PvP ("Wolves") open themselves up to permadeath situations, or at the very least increased corpse looting and loss due to death.
B) Wolves require supplies to survive (probably would be true of all players) such as food. They can't just go dormant for a long time to let people forget about them. They need to keep eating.
C) If a wolf is unsuccessful in a kill, or has witnesses for his crimes, local towns will know about him. The justice system will act accordingly depending on level of his actions. Also, guards are not cannon fodder. You don't want to screw with them unless you are pretty badass yourself.
D) Abilty to self-heal is limited.
Those are a few thoughts. Obviously the overall design is tied into a thousand and other games systems. The main point: You can't make being a wolf easy. You have to make it hard enough that most players won't bother. If they do and they don't have the smarts, they fail miserably. Only the strongest should be able to hack it playing this kind of game, and even then they face the possibility of a vigilante party coming for their ass.
Salem, its a new mmo..the character graphics annoy me, but sandbox open pvp with perma death. http://www.paradoxplaza.com/games/salem
yes. you give all power to advance to "sheep", and give them a way to revenge.
haven and heath: all exp gained through crafted items, pvper activity results in scents (tracking and summoning offline players), and perma death.
eve: sure everyone levels with time but real advancement is gaining the ability to replace loss, further the real game is a market simulation.
I really don't see any good design coming out of a post that sees builders, designers, networkers, and artisans as nothing more than prey. your goal is to design for the former... no one plays prey.
haven and heath: all exp gained through crafted items, pvper activity results in scents (tracking and summoning offline players), and perma death.
eve: sure everyone levels with time but real advancement is gaining the ability to replace loss, further the real game is a market simulation.
I really don't see any good design coming out of a post that sees builders, designers, networkers, and artisans as nothing more than prey. your goal is to design for the former... no one plays prey.
Ideally, if sheeps aren't careful, then wolves could kill them and the wolves would get more stuff than the sheep. However, if the sheep are careful, then they don't get killed and get all the stuff.
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