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Comment by Tyrant505 | Hacker News Reader

This is what makes games fun. Looting and losing loot is an essential and fundamental gameplay element which has been disappearing ever since Everquest(imagine WOW with prepatch UO rules) due to catering to crying and whining. I remember when I was playing Ultima 7 and 8 while talking on the phone with friends dreaming of the day would be able to walk down the same path together in real time. That dream was realized. While it was challenging to battle PK's on the pathway in UO(get paralyzed and fire balled), it only made me more determined to become stronger! There is so much potential for someone to create the killer mmorpg which doesn't nerf real economies and vilans. This real-life and direct dollar value loss is nothing compared to losing your house key and having your whole tower looted of a years worth of stuff because you were careless not to protect the transport.

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>>This is what makes games fun. Looting and losing loot is an essential and fundamental gameplay element which has been disappearing ever since Everquest(imagine WOW with prepatch UO rules) due to catering to crying and whining.

Hell yes. I play WoW in a moderately successful raiding guild (very roughly rank #250 worldwide), so a lot of the people that I play with played various MMOs and other various competitive games over the years, but they all act like I'm crazy when I bring up Runescape as a game that did some things right.

I played RS for a year or so when I was 15 (feels forever ago now, just turned 21). The game is totally different now than it used to be, but at the time the risk/reward aspects of RS Pking, dueling, and full scale clan wars made the game amazingly fun at the time. Now don't get me wrong, in retrospect the game was bad. Lots of the good things about the game came out of the player community, lots of the good things about the game were later nerfed or removed altogether, and last but certainly not least the gameplay itself was awful. Despite all this the risk aspect of dueling someone for a million gold or a rare item, or pking someone in the wilderness and taking their armor, or to encounter a 10-15 person group while roving as a 30 person clan in the deep wilderness and then finding out they were luring to another 30+ people just a little bit away was epic and a ton of fun.

WoW isn't really much better. The general gameplay in WoW is actually good and PvE in WoW can be really excellent, but there is no risk in anything, class balance is always a touchy subject , server communities are generally not big or if they are big they are usually horribly imbalanced to one faction, game lag is a problem when that ugly first M in MMO rears its head (for certain definitions of massive, 200 players in combat in the same place is near server crashing in WoW), and million other things are wrong with the game.

Long comment long, suffice it to say the "real" aspects of Eve are probably the most intriguing aspect of the game to me.

> There is so much potential for someone to create the killer mmorpg which doesn't nerf real economies and vilans.

Unfortunately, such an MMO would not be economically stable in the real world in the medium and long term. Most people who play games do so as an escape, not as a proxy for real life power politics. If nothing else, any game content dependent on loss mechanics tend to become avoided by players past a certain user base size, as they figure out which game content is lower risk. (Grinding boss runs and the like, for example.) Yes, for some players, this isn’t “fun,” but game designers have to focus on where the majority of gamers who provide the monthly fees or “freemium” content.

EVE is the only MMO I’m aware of that avoided this problem, but it has done so at the cost of being confined to a very tight user community with limited prospects for growth or mainstream awareness. EVE doesn’t sound very fun to me; the requirement to make corps (guilds in other games) and be beholden to your peers makes the social stress requirement worse than public school and megacorp office work in my mind.

I would consider WoW, EQ, and others(Perfect World), economic successes of course. It depends what do you want to create: shareholder value or a great game. Perhaps there is a middle ground!

Believe me when I say we are at the cusp of such online worlds. UO is still online. Guess how many years! But, how much profit is enough? When I "escape," I can/'t help but expect the basic rules of property and ownership to entail the possibility such property to be stolen or taken! (I would rather be subject to such in a game, rather than real-life of course.) What is the root of your escape? How do you need to do so? To me, giving real life attributes to a game allows people to choose different paths than they normally would which provides that escape you deem important. "Immersion" is of course the goal however.

Personally, I don't even like character level-ups. I much preferred UO's skill based numerics. I didn't even mind Stat-loss era when, if you died as a PK, you would be penalized 20% of your skills when it was heavily weighed at the higher end(it took just as long to get from 80 to 90 magery as 99 to 100.)

> I would consider WoW, EQ, and others(Perfect World), economic successes of course.

I wasn’t referring to MMOs in general, but those that assess the players various forms of "loss" for sloppy play. I played WoW for about a year, and for the most part, the game has mostly removed the "loss mechanics" that the original poster was complaining were absent in most modern MMOs. Originally, WoW had experience and even equipment loss penalties for dying too much. These have gone by the wayside, as well as making the crafting mechanics in the game more about personal buffs than creating goods for an economy, something that EVE is supposed to excel at.

In real life, you have prevention and recourse. I can buy insurance on the contents of my home and car, and I can put serial numbers on my stuff to substantially increase the chance of the police getting it back to me.

It's also a very unlikely thing in real life. In a game with penalties, it happens often (because there are no real life risks for doing it), and your only recourse is getting stronger and doing the same thing to the person who did it to you.

I play games for fun, not to bring the negatives of life along for the ride. If you see the negatives as positives, you wouldn't understand why someone would think like I do. Revenge-based gameplay seems extremely boring (and frustrating) to me.

I think the success of games like WoW over games with significant death penalties shows which viewpoint is more common.

And yet, people also play a lot of games where they can lose, for example games like chess. Why shouldn't a "dangerous" MMORPG also be able to provide an escape from reality.

Another example of a "dangerous" CRPG would be nethack, which also is played by many people. ("dangerous" meaning permanent deaths and stuff like that).

Chess is a bad example, since the only thing you lose is maybe a few hours of time. There’s nothing stopping you from playing a new game with all your pieces back.

The roguelike games are a better example, though. However, they are for the most part very niche. (Full disclosure: heavy Moria/Angband player in college.) When such a game goes commercial, like Diablo or Torchlight, they invariably make “hardcore” an optional, unlockable mode instead of the default.

Technically you also only lose a few hours of time in a "dangerous" MMORPG. It's just that it might be a lot of hours :-)

I know, the odds don't look good. On the other hand, EVE seems to prevail, and there are people who long for that kind of environment.

I guess it is always the choice: create something really good, and hopefully survive making a decent dough, or target the masses with a less worthy product, but making more money.

In the end, the hurdles to overcome to build a game that is both player friendly and Pure PK are pretty high, but only because the players make it that way. On a basic level, if the consequences of PK are too high, it's not worth doing. If they're too low, new players are inherently punished by the (lack of a) system. If it's just right... well, EVE has probably come closer than any other modern MMO, and while I can't find subscriber stats, their most users online record was recently broken at ~60,000. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, boasted 11,500,000 active monthly subscriptions late last year. Any PK oriented game on the same grounds as WoW (in a world, have skills and equipment, etc) hasn't come even remotely close. Really, you might argue that the people have already spoken.

Is the only goal in game making to support the most people? What about those 60k? Should no one provide for their interests because they are a smaller group than the 11 million? I would say there is very little overlap between the two groups so you can't say WoW is servicing both.

While your point stands, note that 60K are the number of symultaneous online users. Active subscriptions are on the low hundreds of thousands. While not in the league of WoW, it's still very respectable.

You may argue that in music the people have already spoken and that Lady Gaga (or whoever is all the rage these days) is it, or that the Da Vinci Code had set the direction for literature a few years ago. But there's a whole universe of tastes out there. Not only the mainstream is worth catering to.

When the discrepancy in power between you and another player is so great that you can't possibly win, "challenging" isn't the right word. When griefers can lock new players out of the game, that game has a serious problem. Very few players think being bullied is any fun at all.

What's your highest score in Donkey Kong?(Billy Mitchell was once again certified as the world record holder(recent relevance)). Games used to be "challenging". Not to say these early games were the best way to monetize, but I believe you cannot discredit them as "good games," because they were fun to play! MMORPG's can find a player base larger then a "few" by providing a player initiated obstacle.

Is "player-initiated obstacle" a euphemism for murdering lower-level toons and taking all their loot? If so, I don't see where the fun comes in for most people.

The thing about games is that, even when they're challenging, there needs to be thought and care put into balancing the challenges. Griefers don't do this. That's why they're called "griefers" rather than "funners."

The reason this is an especially big problem in RPGs (more than, say, an FPS) is the defining quality of the genre — character progression. To my level 3 bard, your level 100 demon master is much more than an obstacle, he's the equivalent of the 256th level of Pac-Man. Game over, instantly.

I used to think the way you do, because it really does sound nice in theory. But it requires a very special kind of community to make work, and most gamers do not have a place there, and I don't know any way to apply the right kind of social pressure to make sure everybody is dedicated to making the game fun at the expense of winning.

Well, it comes down to what you would rather immerse yourself in: PvM or PVP. To me, now given our ability to create these worlds I would rather have the level 100 Demon master be a person instead of AI. Yes, that demon might lie in between to great cities which i need courier between, but never-the-less a villan to overcome.

Except it's not a choice between a level 100 demon master controlled by a person or an AI. The developers would not put a game-breaking, completely unbeatable opponent right at the start of the game. I mean, if that's really the experience you want, I'll write you a "challenging" RPG where you die in three turns no matter what you do.

As I said, I really like PVP. I wish it worked that way you're talking about, but it doesn't. When I used to play WOW, I played PVP, hoping for exactly the experience you're describing. But it didn't mean fun challenges to overcome, where enemy players are a great obstacle to overcome. It meant getting stunlocked and then finally killed by a rogue 30 levels above me. There's no overcoming that. The only winning move is not to play.

> I mean, if that's really the experience you want, I'll > write you a "challenging" RPG where you die in three turns > no matter what you do.

I guess you've never played nethack? ;-)

EVE handles it fairly well though; there's a large area that's mostly secure in the center of the game universe for Empire space. Players can stick to that area and be almost grief free the entire time (aside from the rare suicide attack).

Having said that, the most fun in EVE Online comes from playing in the less secure areas where the interactions are almost all player-driven.

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