pvp vs pvp
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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.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
This is the kind of absolutism I’m talking about, I completely reject this.
I cannot tell if this was meant to be funny or not, but it made me giggle.
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I’d say…make a game. Make it how you want it, and hopefully it will attract the people that you want.
Currently, no one in the MU* community wants to run a strong PvP WoD game, and there are a whole lot of reasons for that, but only one cure: be the person who takes it on. If you don’t want that, or can’t find help to do that, then it sort of says its own story about whether that game is wanted by the community as it currently exists.
There are some PvP-heavy MUDs out there, there are, as you say, MMOs you can model design on. But the only time a game gets made is if someone has a real passion for doing the work of making that particular game. If you don’t like the games other people have passion for, then your only true remedy is to invest your own passion. Do it. Do it right. Create something you can be proud of.
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I have run a lot of PVP as a villain faction head! Some thoughts:
Death was not involved. We did what was called “cinematic defeat”, where you can lose a limb if you want to or fall down a reactor shaft or topple over a cliff. Whatever thing happens and just removes you from the action. “Full loot,” or losing all the items you had on you to the opposing party WAS possible, but rarely happened.
So even in this not-losing-your-char PVP environment, some observations:
- PVP is more exciting than PvNPC. It always is, full stop.
- PVP espionage is an unmitigated disaster. Even if you do everything perfectly in your secret covert actions, someone OOCly assumes you’ve cheated and raises hell about it, and it’s hard to speak to the accusations without blowing the successful spy’s cover. If you’re transparent about who the spy is from the start, no one will allow themselves to be spied upon.
- PVP “outside the box” actions that aren’t “direct attacks” are an unmitigated disaster. Trying to pin down exactly how much advantage a sneaky plan or trap gives and how to weight it is a losing game. People get mad when you don’t let them do their Super Genius Plan exactly the way they saw it, they get mad when it doesn’t obliterate the enemy, and the enemy gets mad when it has any effect on them whatsoever.
- Even when you plan specific events so that your own villain self will take an L, so that people can beat you up and capture you, people find something to be mad about and find a million things you did wrongly and badly. Even when you lose to them completely.
My PVPs were really successful, exciting, and fun. People did love beating me up and some loved the threat my group and I posed. Some gentle players participated in the PVP, and told me they were never brave enough to do PVP before mine. Some of them are still memorable to this day in a way PvNPC generally isn’t.
However
I recently cleaned out my discord and it was full of crazy abuse about how I suck, I’m a cheater, I’m a dick, I’m unfair, I interpreted the mechanics or rules wrong, I played favorites. That’s just the discord, never mind the smoke I got on-game, like people freaking out when I walked in a room or abusing me on channels and in pages for existing.
I would never, ever run a PVP game/faction again. The excitement is fun but the toll it takes on me just isn’t worth it.
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@Ashkuri’s experience squares with what I have observed and seen friends who ran more PVP focused games have experienced.
I feel like you can’t really run a game of any sort without having to deal with a certain amount of whiny, abusive (or attempting to be such) players. I actually think that it’s not that there are MORE of those on a PVP game, but you certainly don’t escape having the same amount.
The ability to kill off other PCs at relative will has never really seemed that I’ve ever seen to encourage politer, less toxic behavior the next time around. I don’t fault the playstyle for that, but human nature.
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@Ashkuri said in pvp vs pvp:
People did love beating me up and some loved the threat my group and I posed.
In my time playing a bad guy for a game there were a lot of really great players and then there were some people who were like-- super fixated on how they’d kill my NPC. To the point that I was at my keys like, are you guys okay?
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I’ll also say that you really do have to separate out two concepts:
In-character conflict, which may be between player characters
and
Player vs player conflict, where the PCs are mainly proxies for beating ‘the other guy’ on an ooc level.
I’ve had far more rich, rewarding, and intense conflict and competition between characters when there is no OOC masque, when players OOCly communicate about stakes, outcomes, desires, than when that conflict is treated as a competition between players. Like, I’ve had intrigue and espionage plots/scenes that could only happen BECAUSE we were talking OOC and cool with things happening. Also, being able to chat with people OOC about how we see this conflict helps me identify at a much earlier stage if this is a player who can handle conflict, or who it’s just not going to be fun trying to have these sorts of scenes with.
A secondary issue is something I learned as a newbie GM and which has never steered me wrong in the days since: “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.” If the problem is “this player is playing their character in a way that makes the game unfun for other people”, then punishing/beating up/demoting/killing their character is never the solution. Having an adult conversation with them OOC about the effect their play is having on others’ fun is, and if that conversation doesn’t go well, then removing them from the game is.
Killing someone’s character because you’re OOCly annoyed with the player is one of the ways PvP gets real toxic, real fast. It’s not ‘policing the community’, it’s just taking your frustration out on someone who you usually know that you can beat and have often taken every measure to make sure that fight is as one-sided and humiliating as possible, because you’re there to ‘teach the player a lesson’, not to have fun with them.
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@Pyrephox said in pvp vs pvp:
Player vs player conflict, where the PCs are mainly proxies for beating ‘the other guy’ on an ooc level.
I mean, this is what a lot of people who talk about PVP actually seem to want. Which is fine, I understand the rush, but when you look at the amount of code and real-life work that goes into adjudicating this on a pay-to-play AAA game…idk, my friends. Perhaps there are reasons this is less popular in our hobby of unpaid volunteers doing this for fun.
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@Pyrephox “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.”
From your lips to God’s ears. Perfectly crystallized.
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@Pyrephox I’ve been fiddling with Rhost in my spare time, I do have a cool concept for a game like this. But about halfway towards amping myself up to learn Rhost’s finer details, I started learning Unity for a video game and have put my creative juices there for the moment. This has been a constructive conversation about what is needed in a MU* with pvp though and I’m thankful for those that helped me notice some of the stuff I may have missed; I’ve scribbled various house rules trying to tackle many of the issues that were brought up today.
Maybe the ease of newer systems comparatively is why so many devs go towards those languages, or maybe from the various reasons Ashkuri posted. I do get the pain of doing it from the ST side of things, been there as a staffer and it’s not always fun and sometimes outright painful.
I do completely agree though that the game I want to exist cannot exist unless I make it a reality. I’ve basically given up on most games at this point because they don’t hit the way they used to. There are no turn-key solutions, I just have to get my hands dirty with the code and challenge myself past what I’m comfortable with code-wise. And making games is challenging no matter what it is you’re making.
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Generally, I enjoy conflict with other characters. I tend to shy away from the use of the term ‘pvp’ because when it’s done well it’s just the same as any other collaborative storytelling effort we do on these games, and while your characters may be in conflict the players aren’t. I’m with @Pyrephox’s points above. Having OOC communication available for these sorts of things heightens the experience for me.
I’d probably join a WoD game with a lot of ‘pvp’ in it just fine, but the idea presented earlier of having no OOC discussions at all would really turn me off. Half the appeal of being on a MU* for me in general is the OOC community, the chatter, and all of that. If all my games were just log on, role play, log off, then I wouldn’t have this cool group of online friends I’ve made over the decades, and I think that’d be unfortunate.
I know some people really like that entire OOC disconnect, that’s great but it’s certainly not for me, though I don’t tend to shy away from the confict with other PCs that much.
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It seems what our friend here is after is less of a modern MU and more a new version of something like Cybersphere, or Sindome. Where you can and will be shot, stabbed, mutilated, abused, assaulted (yes that kind too), etc, etc, etc all because you had the temerity to step outside of a safe zone.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Livia This is kind of where I fall too. I definitely did less OOC discussion/avoidance of it earlier when I was on a lot of WoD games, and it doesn’t bother me when people prefer less checking in. I’m neutral on it for myself.
But I personally have found that many people I run into now are a lot more relaxed and willing to change it up with RP/invite more and more diverse tension/conflict in RP when it’s okay to have that OOC check in, and a more overt understanding that saying “I’m into whatever RP,” does not mean that “and I am down with giving you whatever you want whenever you want it so go ahead and lay that assault and kidnapping scene on me 5 minutes after I walk into this upscale restaurant on grid/feel free to snipe me unseen because I forgot to change my clothing object before coming to the dive bar so I’m dressed inappropriately, since of course if I’m logged in I’m at your disposal.”
Sometimes I could do without the “and anyone who’s into gritty RP is obviously a psycho if I’m not in the mood–even if they’re not even remotely interacting with me or affecting my RP in anyway,” that I’ve seen too but again I think that’s just people peopling, and the desire to yuck other people’s yums that aren’t yours is not something I think is ever going to stop completely.
I enjoyed the thrill of non-consent-based places. But I think I’d only play on a private/invite only one where I trusted the people running it to vet and/or remove problem people from it these days. I’m just too old/low energy for that shit.
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One thing Requiem for Kingsmouth, a Vampire the Requiem game, did well was having tiers of characters not based on getting extra XP or having extra activity requirements, but based on what you wanted out of the game. If you wanted the full political-thriller-taking-power-fucking-over-your-friends game, then you came in as a so-called Political character that had a bit more stuff you had to do in your application. And that character was basically as Full Consent as it could be, you could be targeted for killing and all that jazz, all mediated through staff as per. Then there was a Support level where you got to do some political stuff, and you could be targeted for some PvP stuff. And then there were the lose-- I mean the non-political folks who just wanted to tell cute coffee-based stories with their friends. They couldn’t be targeted for anything, but at the same time couldn’t be involved in the political machinations of the game either.
My memory may be wonky so please feel free to correct me on the particulars, but this is in broad-strokes how I believe the game went and might serve as a model for future game runners.
