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Kestrel

I think the “I need to be winning” mindset isn’t discouraged by PvE at all, tbh.

There are toxic reasons why some players prefer PvP, but I also think there are toxic reasons why some players prefer PvE. Like, is it because they want to collaborate with other players? Or is it because their persistently obnoxious behaviour tends to invite challenge, and they’d prefer an environment where they won’t be, and the person doing that is the bad guy?

The type of toxic player I see on a PvP game is someone who needs to prove they can take out other players.

The type of toxic player I see on PvE games is a self-insert power fantasy who acts like if you don’t agree with everything their character says/does, and stroke their ego, you’re being rude.

The chill type of player I see on a PvP game is someone who separates themselves from their character, intentionally wrote in flaws and exploitable secrets, and looks forward to other players using those pressure points to drive the story forward.

The chill type of player I see on a PvE game is someone who enjoys being part of an ensemble cast working together to solve the main story’s problem.

But I just don’t really buy into the idea that PvP/PvE inherently inspires a higher calibre of players.

Pavel

@L.-B.-Heuschkel Is there a way to filter these people out purely through game design or community design, or is it a case of finding them and plucking them out like stray hairs with the tweezers of fuckoffitude?

Apos

@MisterBoring said:

@Apos That’s cool. Are there going to be parts of the Arx 2 backstory that will cause devout Arx 1 players to squee?

Probably, though I hadn’t really thought about it too much, and I think if it happens it is more a consequence of my creative process versus other people. A lot of people like to really be focused on the current setting, and then work backwards from explanations, keeping things vague until it would be story significant and needs to be defined. And that’s valid and I think there’s a lot of arguments for doing it that way, and I think it’s really helpful to keep narrative room to maneuver.

My process tends to be the other way, where I tend to start at the furthest back point and then work forwards and think of all the different pivot points in a history and the different decisions on the way, and how this resulted in things being the way they are. It lets me get an easier grip around it, and in some ways that’s why the interest in Arx 1’s lore caught me off guard, because at its heart it was honestly more for me just so I could keep things consistent in my head than for anyone else. So Arx’s reboot is a lot of the same way, where because of how things happened, that leads to other things, which led to other things again, which in turn created these different states and all these dark secrets waiting to be uncovered, and some would point back to different decision points that PCs made or brushed up against.

It let me learn a bit from what I saw as my mistakes in the first iteration of Arx, in how I could keep things clearer- like for example, breaking up the different time periods into ages, so it’s much easier to see what was contemporary of what. Not really a spoiler to say that Arx 1 happened during the 6th age of the world, and the game starts at the beginning of the 10th.

L. B. Heuschkel

Fighting main character syndrome seems like another kettle of fish entirely – one that cannot be solved by limiting competition. People like that will indeed find something to compete over because that’s what they’re looking for, and to hell with what anyone else thinks.

Prototart

two of the MUDs i used to play, Ancient Anguish and Bat, are still around and are both more than 30 and that’s kind of nuts

Pavel

@Faraday Amen. It’s getting weird in my practice, too, when empathetic statements and self-accountability start to sound like AI-level sycophancy.

“That must feel frustrating” or “I can see how that would be intolerable” or even “I think I remember you mentioning this before” have started to ping AI hypersensitivity.

MisterBoring

Yep. Main character syndrome all the way.

MisterBoring

@Apos That’s cool. Are there going to be parts of the Arx 2 backstory that will cause devout Arx 1 players to squee?

bear_necessities

It’s funny reading this IRE History because … they get it wrong. They said AOL had a “pay to play” model and IRE was the first one to do it for free. But AOL’s model (at least in so far as a few of their games, Modus Operandi comes to mind, and I think there was a dragon-something game too) originally WAS free to play, and then they switched to pay to play and THAT was a catastrophy. I was an early adopter of Achaea and played from the very beginning; that it was free to play is a bit of a joke, since you couldn’t walk out of safe rooms without getting killed repeatedly by people who spent hundreds of dollars on credits lol

ETA: Unless of course they meant AOL’s fee, which was per hour and then went to a monthly flat. I think that was around the time that the MUDs on the platform started doing pay-to-play.

Apos

@MisterBoring Yes, but not very directly.

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