pvp vs pvp
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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?
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@bear_necessities Some say that elderly romance novelists are the best at PVP, book sales confirm this
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
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.
Those games are designed for PVP and not RP at all. It sounds like what you want is a MUD with background writing.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
It’s not that they don’t exist, but older gamers have PVP communities as well.
There are toxic older people too. My main point was not about age (my teen and their friends are quite decent little humans who are fun to play with) but just that going into an open lobby in many (most?) mainstream PVP games is opening yourself up to abuse. It’s pretty well-established that there’s a lot of toxicity in online multiplayer games, and it’s worse in some genres and settings.
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@MisterBoring I’d actually argue that of the MMOs I mentioned, EVE Online in particular maps really well to the MU* experience. It’s actually not a PVP game, it’s a single shard social sandbox with very strong PVP elements. You can be a miner, an industrialist, a spy, a propagandist, an admiral, a pirate, etc. Yes the devs do occasionally sprinkle in some lore, but it’s the players and the conflict between them that creates the engaging stories there. There is TONS of RP – when the Triglavians came out, people were talking to each other in triangle script and everything. Wars between thousands of players happen. Sometimes you go out looking for content. Sometimes you -are- the content. In the end, people are fairly chill with the people they’re fighting because it’s so easy to get back into the action.
What darkmetal and EVE Online had in common:
- Fast to remake characters/ships and get into play
- A large safe area for players to PVE in
- Relatively hands-off staff within the parameters of the game
- Player-driven storylines and plots
- Robust character-driven skills and stats to spend your XP/training time on
I think these similarities are touching upon what makes a good PVP game, and it’s my view that its why the EVE Online devs wanted to make a game with the World of Darkness IP so badly.
@Faraday No argument with this, but there is toxicity in PVE environments too that is well documented on many games. WoW is egregious for this. My point is that we shouldn’t shy away from pvp game elements just because of a percentage of bad actors that can be found in any sufficiently large hobby. I realize your experience with this has been bad and that really sucks. My only argument is that devs should learn from what makes a good PVP game and integrate it into MU* for those that enjoy PVP MU*s, not that everyone has to like it or that it’s always going to be a good experience. Just that it CAN be for the reasons RedRocket posted originally. Devs in the end can make whatever game they want after all, I just wish more wouldn’t shy away from what made early WoD games so special to so many of us.
