Nils has been running with the question of why we automatically need PvP in a sandbox world with an interesting series of posts. The latest post and discussion is based around a comment he received on his blog. As if I’d give my own commentators such exposure – bah! Let them eat cake!
Anyhoo, a lot of discussion comes down to the fact that we can easily divide players into two groups – builders and destroyers. Builders are those who revel in the act of acquiring resources and carving a name for themselves through stint of their own efforts. Destroyers are those who revel in kicking your sandcastle in your face and building a name for themselves through fear and outright terror. The question is how to accomodate both types of player in an online sandbox universe. Not allowing any form of PvP in such a game would detract from the value of what you are building – how valuable is something that you can never lose? I remember once playing an early game of Civilization where I went up solo against the AI on an enormous map. Obviously I never saw my opponent and I was allowed to build and dally to my hearts content. Quite boring it was.
But having your careful creation smashed to pieces by someone much more powerful than you for no other reason than he can is enough to make many builder-type players quit the game in disgust. My solution to the problem would be to have such altercations heavily reliant on player level. To whit, a level 50 player can attack any player construction of similar level or higher with no restrictions. But as soon as he attacks a player of lower level then he begins to hit a wall of artificial restrictions. These could take one of two forms; a debuff to the players stats to bring him into line with the person he is attacking, or a series of game consequences heavy enough to make him have to really ask the question of whether or not this act of destruction is worth the longer term pain.
And this is the key point; the destroyer-type player never sees any real long term consequences for their actions. The key is not to make it impossible to be a destoyer, but to make it such that you would really have to think and plan how to carry out your attacks, and how to live with the consequences later. A player who carves a niche for himself as a bandit would not be able to waltz into town and pick up some supplies. And the bandit would need somewhere to store his ill-gotten gains, leaving himself open to attack and plunder by builder players who have finally had enough of his antics. Public execution would not be possible if he were captured, but banishment to another part of the would could be, as could the stripping of all his assets to be divided up amongst his victims.
There is one more key point to how this would work. If player buildings are to withstand attacks then they have to be strong, but it should take time and effort to construct them. This makes sense when you consider that builders are more likely to invest time in building. The more time that you invest the harder it is for destoyers to waltz along and knock it down. But is the time investment real time or game time? EVE online uses a real time investment process which requires players to log on once a day, set their training, and then leave. The advantage of this is that players who don’t have much time to play the game are not at a disadvantage to those who are able to devote countless hours per week to their hobby. The disadvantage to the EVE system is that it’s not much fun; click a few buttons and then log off. If you can combine this system with actually making the building process a joy to partake in then you would encourage players to be online more often, thus making it more probable that they are around when someone comes by who wants to kick sand in their face.
April 20, 2011 at 1:26 pm
I realize that I have very little actual PVP experience, so I apologize in advance if my words don’t immediately make sense or I sound as I’m grasping for straws here.
You had made a comment that a destroyer will never see any real long term consequences for their actions. I feel you may be right to a certain extent. To build off of that, I feel that each niche needs to branch off and develop elements if the other, if they’re going to really endure in the PVP landscape.
If a builder does nothing but build and re-build, but can’t defend or do a little destroying back to try and inhibit the destroyer from doing what they do, how are they really doing their part to prevent the destroyer from doing what they do best? I think a builder would need to develop some aspects of a destroyer in order to best protect their investment and what they have worked so hard to build.
Likewise, a destroyer who does nothing but destroy and who practices a “the best defense is a good offense” strategy and has nothing to fall back to or fortify risks being completely vulnerable a lot of the time and falling into a very narrow focus that could be seen as predictable. A destroyer would need to pick up characteristics of a builder to be smarter with regards to how they choose to destroy and to possibly even have something to lure other destroyers towards and then destroy them, too.
In short, I think it would serve each character archetype to develop traits of the other, so as to not fall into a lot of the obvious pitfalls that can affect PVP or affect each nice from not being as strong in the PVP sandbox as they could be.
Hopefully that made sense – lol
April 21, 2011 at 10:52 pm
Just because you mostly build doesn’t necessarily mean you’re nice. Nothing like a good trade war to upset people. Or withholding your goods from certain markets.
April 20, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Your comments about builders and destroyers gave me flashbacks to playing Minecraft with my irl friends.
I am a builder.
They are destroyers. All of them.
It was not fun.
April 20, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Except, the average destroyer doesn’t want consequences. They just want the lulz, or, like the average Eve destroyer calls it, carebear tears. Anyone expecting a better crowd in games like Eve than in WoW is in for a surprise.
Why not increase the hostility of the E part of PVE. I’ll gladly play a builders game where the environment is much more dangerous and you can actually lose stuff. It’s the same reason why I always play single player games on the hardest mode, it’s fun and it’s challenging. You’ll still have to deal with setting up defense and recover from losses (together), but you won’t have to deal with annoying dickheads, errr, destroyers who proceed to teabag your dead face after they “pwn” you.
April 21, 2011 at 11:06 pm
That’s an interesting point.
April 22, 2011 at 12:50 am
I’m curious about ideas of making a “hard” PvE Sandbox game that doesn’t cycle back around and turn into WoW.
I’ll admit I haven’t looked into sandboxes much though, as they tend to be either too freeform for my liking, or too… well, exactly as Adam says, with people kicking my sand castles.
April 20, 2011 at 5:08 pm
I tend to fall into the destroyer camp (omg a wolf among the sheep..run!) but for me it was because of the challenge involved in pitting yourself against a person rather than the ai and yes, the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve defeated a real, live person at the other end. It’s about the rush.
Mobs are easy, and predictable- people are not. When I played EVE I wanted the challenge, not the tears, and died as often as I won such encounters during my roams through low-sec.
I think that yes, the AI, or the E, needs to be buffed. Darkfall has some intersting mobs which pull you, kite, and are generally tough which I liked.
There are plenty of people who like PVP but do not like griefing. It’s just that the griefers are so much more vocal, and a bit scary, if we were honest. They are always flapping their gums, and trolling, because that’s how they get their kicks.
I believe that gaming is long overdue for a fresh look at how to integrate the two worlds. Eve is pretty good at telling you where the danger is and letting you decide for yourself where to go and what risks to take. The ultimate problem is that Eve online has a terrible community and everyone is out to get you- or you feel like it in any case.
I do think that level restricitons (or buffs/de-buffs), as you said, are the way forward and I never understood why open world pvp doesn’t have them. Not everyone wants to ‘pwn’ noobs 24-7 and those that do are likely in the minority so why are we so afraid to tell them to piss off when designing games?
I’d enjoy the challenge of designing a strategy to overcome the handicap to destroy lower-levelled characters/structures or better yet, pitting myself against a better) opponent knowing I had a chance to pull off an upset!
April 22, 2011 at 12:41 am
I’m not sure you actually are a destroyer. There’s a big difference between looking for a challenge (and building yourself up to meet that challenge) and looking to destroy.
You go out to build yourself up, not to tear others down. I didn’t read anything that gave the impression that you go out to kill so the other person is killed, but instead so you gain the experience.
Related – Trying to prevent the community from being terrible vs trying to make the community better. When I was young, I was taught not to use double negatives. I think that actually causes people to think of everything as a spectrum, instead of separate values. Not being unhappy is not the same as being happy, and not being happy does not mean you are unhappy, etc.
Then again, maybe not.
April 21, 2011 at 5:04 am
If the builder is offline, are his structures defenseless? This seems like the big risk. If being offline makes them invulnerable, then it discourages play by advanced players. Or if they aren’t invincible, then it encourages destroyers simply waiting around until the builders log off.
NPC guards could help with this, giving defenses at night, but NPCs are notoriously hard to tune against players. Too weak and the builder is still too vulnerable. Too strong and he’s encouraged to be absent.
April 21, 2011 at 11:09 pm
My answer is that sieges should take time. Not only time to set up and execute but time to arrive at the point to be attacked with all the gear that will be required. A wise player will have good relationships with his neighbours who could also warn him when nasty forces are moving through their own borders.
April 22, 2011 at 1:28 am
Slow sieges, that’s a good idea. I wonder if this could also encourage in-game geographical grouping across time zones, since it would be pretty useful to have a neighbor who is awake when I’m sleeping and the reverse, so we can protect, or at least warn, each other.