pvp vs pvp
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@Faraday it’s a damn shame it doesn’t because there’s so many features I like and which make things easy, and I wouldn’t have to relearn semaphores after years of trying to forget.
In terms of why I think it’s necessary, we all know that MU* players can be immature sadly. Certainly not all of them, but if I can remove the ability for people to see each others alts or staffers to not see jobs that don’t pertain to them, I’m going to do it rather than wonder about whether it happened when it comes up. That kind of granular control is important for me, for many different things. Ideally for me, players wouldn’t be able to communicate anywhere but ICly, not even in pages or @mail or OOC Bboards/channels. There would need to be other ways to facilitate RP that didn’t involve OOC communication, but that’s doable – +events for instance is fairly benign, or ‘Looking for RP’ tags.
Players would just log in to roleplay, and log out when they’re done. I’d make it against the rules to share any information, including alts, discord usernames, sheet information, or basically anything at all even about yourself to another player. Because in a PVP game, you don’t want people knowing that stuff. How much of that is accomplishable in Ares, I don’t know.
This is one of the things that Liberation did right by not having a Discord for their game. It breeds that kind of mean-girl stuff which is anathema to a game’s lifespan IMO.
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@catzilla You get a gun for free by signing up to play on a PVP-oriented game. It’s up to you whether to load it, but if you don’t, you shouldn’t be surprised when it doesn’t protect you. Your ‘gun’ could be socially influencing muscle-heads to protect you, getting actual retainers on your sheet, a fortified Haven/place of business, etc, rather than an actual gun. But just like I wouldn’t randomly walk down an alley alone at night in real life, I wouldn’t do so on a PVP game.
The fear of potentially getting ganked is part of what makes this exciting for some players. It’s not for everyone, and that’s ok. You don’t have to app in!
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@Cygnus said in The 3-Month Players:
There’s so many benefits to PVP in a game that have been outlined which are generally ignored by game-runners based on personal preference – the reason they’re the only people making text-based MU*s is because the PVPers have been driven away from the hobby due to a rather vocal minority and lack of gameplay which they find engaging.
You talk about game-runners making games based on their personal preferences like it’s a bad thing. But people have always run games that they’re going to enjoy playing on.
I remember a time in MUSHing where there were a lot more PVP games. There became fewer and fewer not because of some arbitrary exodus, but because the people willing to run games became less willing to play on PVP games.
Why is that? You blame a vocal minority, I blame the extra toxicity and headaches involved in running a PVP game amongst internet strangers.
How much of that is accomplishable in Ares, I don’t know.
I mean, anything’s possible. But Evennia gives you a pile of LEGO bricks and says “build what you want and have fun”. Ares gives you a LEGO castle and says “here’s a castle already built for you, have fun.” If you want a spaceship, it’s far more sensible IMHO to take Evennia and build a spaceship than it is to try to turn Ares’ castle into a spaceship.
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I remember when I joined a oWoD game for the first time as a mortal and was told “hey, try not to go out alone because there are a lot of assholes on the game who will just kill you”. As a result, the little RP I did get was inside a private room and ended up leaving the game pretty quickly.
Maybe that’s fun for some people, but it’s definitely not fun for me.
I’ve yet to see a situation in a game where PVP was solely an IC thing and there was 0 OOC influence involved in it. The problem with PVP games will always be players, and while there are bad players on PVE games too, at least they can’t just kill you for being in the same room with them.
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I sure wish there was an active PVP MUSH so people could just go there lol
Also maybe this is ignorance talking because it’s not my thing but aren’t RPIs generally pretty PVP-forward?
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@Faraday The exodus wasn’t arbitrary, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. PVP players went on to play PVP video games mostly because video games became a thing in the first place. It didn’t have anything to do with people being unwilling to run games, it’s that those early devs switched their medium and made extremely popular video games. Now many PVPers play Rivals, League of Legends, COD, etc, and for those who didn’t make the switch to video, they went to MUDs which have always been more popular than MUSHes.
What you’re describing is selection bias which has been building on itself for many years via the types of people who didn’t move on to begin with. But the PVP players have not disappeared, they still exist and many would be interested in a WoD game that had PVP especially with the recent resurgence in tabletop games. That’s really all I’m trying to get across with this post, that this playstyle is valid, liked, and is something players are looking for. Look no further than the millions of people across the world playing PVP games for an example. MU* could learn something from those genres rather than dealing with compounding blandification.
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T Tez referenced this topic
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
Look no further than the millions of people across the world playing PVP games for an example.
Oh yes please I want my MUSHes filled with dozens of teenagers calling me every slur in the book because I didn’t play right, please please please make my MUSHes more like these video games that are held in such high regard.
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@bear_necessities MU’s are already like this, just replace teenager with elderly romance novelists
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This is on Game Gab. We’re here to, in theory, be constructive. If you want people to have a reasonable conversation about PvP, maybe don’t call all PvE games bland games filled with elderly romance novelists. Like?? It’s not a PvP conversation. It’s a conversation about PvP.
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@bear_necessities said in pvp vs pvp:
Oh yes please I want my MUSHes filled with dozens of teenagers calling me every slur in the book because I didn’t play right, please please please make my MUSHes more like these video games that are held in such high regard.
So deliberately misrepresenting PVP games is ok? I was just throwing the ball back in their court and meeting their energy.
PVP games are not filled with teenagers throwing slurs. That’s nonsense. There’s huge communities of PVP gamers that aren’t like this.
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High-stakes competitive PvP isn’t really my thing, but I can see how it could be appealing if it were done in a way that made it easy to jump in, easy to come back after a character gets killed, easy to resolve conflicts between characters without needing staff intervention, and that had pretty even game balance so that the PvP fights were actually challenging rather than just one-sided gankfests, and so that no single character or group of characters remained “safe” for very long.
And WoD just seems like a really counterintuitive choice for something like that.
- It has complex and convoluted rules that often differ significantly between spheres and that are a frequent source of arguments among players.
- Character generation is complex and time-consuming.
- WoD game balance is legendarily poor, both between splats and even between individual characters in the same splat.
- WoD puts a heavy focus on personal storytelling, so players tend to get more invested in their individual characters, and losing them feels like more of a hit.
Some of these things could be fixed! You could trim down the number of available options into a much smaller set that were reasonably balanced against one another and that reduced the time needed for character creation and the need for significant staff oversight. You could excise or rewrite some of things that make combat time-consuming and complex. You could throw out the idea of personal storytelling entirely and approve or deny characters strictly on the basis of whether their math adds up. You could, in short, make the process of getting into the game, participating into the game, and getting back into the game a lot more like popular PvP video games.
I have never played Fortnite, but I really doubt that it (or any other popular PvP game) makes you sit out for several hours working on a new character when you get killed. When death is a frequent occurrence, then the amount of investment that death costs a player needs to be smaller. The more common it is, the easier it has to be to get back into things. WoD is the opposite of that.
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@Cygnus They are talking about the video games you noted such as CoD. They aren’t talking about PvP games.
she/they
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
PVP players went on to play PVP video games mostly because video games became a thing in the first place. I
And at the same time, PVE-inclined players went off to play solo or co-op video games. This is a red herring.
Literally nothing is stopping PVP-inclined individuals from running a PVP game. Seriously, you could make one tomorrow.
If your argument is that there’s some huge untapped mass of PVPers just waiting for a game, then it’ll be wildly successful. Maybe so successful that it spawns more.
I think it more likely that, at best, it’ll be a small niche game for a minority of players. But that’s still okay.
The only thing I take issue with is the argument that being anti-PVP is just some kind of unfounded bias. I have had nothing but negative experiences on PVP-MUs, going all the way back to my very first Star Wars game where some random guy shot my PC in the town square for no dang reason. I won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but that doesn’t mean nobody else should run one.
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@Tez Those games were just examples of where developers had went, first internationally popular PVP games that came to mind. I’m talking about PVP games in general, not the toxic COD lobbies of xbox past which is the worst possible representation of those communities.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
PVP games are not filled with teenagers throwing slurs. That’s nonsense. There’s huge communities of PVP gamers that aren’t like this.
I have played several online PVP games with my teen. I can assure you that many of them, in fact, are like this. Obviously I cannot speak to every single one so YMMV.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
OOC toxicity should be handled by staff, but let’s be real. That toxicity doesn’t usually happen in the open in ways that staff can easily handle. That’s assuming that the staff who made a game which caters to this type of thing isn’t in on it. Sadly that is often the case, see RetroMUX, Haunted Memories, Fallcoast, or the Reach for examples.
Yeah, IC toxicity should totally be handled ICly as much as possible. However, there are plenty of people that I’ve run into in my 24 years of MUing that PVP solely for OOC reasons and play under the mindset of “How many characters can I kill?”
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@Autumn This is so very true, and why I loved RedRocket’s post about this so much RE: Darkmetal. It had a lot of those things, and I feel that’s why it became such a cornerstone of the hobby for a time. A PVP game would definitely need all these things, but I don’t think we should throw away the narrative aspects as well. Just maybe keep backgrounds to a page or so during approval so people manage their time better.
I know I’m guilty of writing long ass backgrounds for no reason even for PVP games, but I can totally understand how it could be super frustrating to lose that work and potential in a pvp setting.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
elderly romance novelists
I mean this accurately describes me so I ain’t even mad about it.
Anyway I think this whole conversation stemmed from stakes in a game and I go back to saying you don’t need PvP for there to be stakes. PVP games might not be my cup of elderly romance novelist tea but I do like my games to have stakes and tend to agree that most games don’t have those anymore and it’s a bummer.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
A PVP game would definitely need all these things, but I don’t think we should throw away the narrative aspects as well.
A major element of why no one is running a WoD game that does these things – aside from the fact that a lot of people who are capable of running them don’t want to, for whatever reason – is probably that it would be really hard, and would by its very nature make getting into the game more difficult for new players.
Just running a WoD game at all, by the books (as much as running WoD “by the books” is even possible, considering the number of things that are unclear, left out, or outright contradictory), is not an easy task. To make an PvP-focused WoD game that has fast and easy cgen, good game balance, and straightforward combat would add to that the need to radically rewrite and rebalance the whole WoD game system.
That’s a massive level of effort, and what you’d end up with is likely to be something that’s just enough like the WoD that potential players already know to be confusing and frustrating. (“What do you mean, Celerity doesn’t add additional actions?”). You’d basically be asking players to learn an entire new game system that’s kind of like WoD, but different enough that they can’t rely on their pre-existing knowledge of it. And at that point, why not just start with a game system that’s better at what you want it to do than WoD is?
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@Faraday It’s not that they don’t exist, but older gamers have PVP communities as well.
Stellaris comes to mind as a really good game with a competitive scene and older playerbase, with fighting games coming in close to strategy titles. MMOs are so big that there’s multiple groups in them, so they’re a bit of a microcosm in general. Many toxic WoW guilds for example, but just as many ‘gamer dad’ guilds. MMOs are also closest to MU*s, hell the WoW Classic and Everquest games were based on MUDs. Monsters and Memories, a new PvPvE MMO similar to EQ and WoW Classic, actually goes back towards MUDs with a MUD command panel which you can use to /listen in a room and /pry coins from between walls and stuff.
Case and point, MnM has a PVE and a PVP community which has remained fairly segregated but both supported. That game in general is less toxic than say, Pantheon, which largely supports PVE and PVP is an afterthought. In that community, PVE players have distinct hatred towards PVP players. All communities are different so it’s hard to put a pin in any one, but I think it’s all about how the devs approach things – if it’s handled correctly, PVP can work. If it’s ignored or tacked on, it sucks.
@Autumn I think this is close to the real center of things – the subjectivity of the WoD rules make it really tough. But power imbalances I don’t think are a bad thing inherently.
EVE Online, whose former owners I will never forgive for dropping the WoD MMO they were developing btw, really did things right in terms of PvP in a lopsided universe where people’s power levels are not equal. Sure you can fly the battlecruiser into low security space / take the elder into the streets, but you can get got by a group of frigates with warp scramblers / neonates looking for diablerie. There is also high security space for the people who just want to mine rocks all day / bar RP.
I think the dev time would be better spent on designing systems that allow players to hide/fight back with existing rules, and really support the creation of coteries and give people stuff to do. I always like the +map stuff on MU*s with territory control, that gave people stuff to do other than kill each other. Requiem for Kingsmouth also had an awesome influence system for more social/mental pvp, though that was not without problems too, it needed to be automated.
There’s also somewhat unique problems to MU*, like spawn camping someone who just apps in (that sucks), or the issue of people showing up randomly and brigading scenes, or just logging off the moment consequences or pvp starts to happen. These things would need to be accounted for somehow. In EVE there was a 30 second timer, but what’s the answer for MU*? Handing control to a staffer?
