It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.
History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds).
This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation.
The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so.
Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent.
Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different".
So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later.
No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.
Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone.
I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.
There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system. I think that whole aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of the game and felt so organic.
Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly designed from head to toe in a game design doc.
What stops a griefer from just putting cash on the head of someone they want to torment?
You cannot counter somebody's preference with another preference.
> Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system.
...and you are also missing the roleplay aspect of this -- "I am an outlaw!" -- that a lot of people enjoy and get deliberately flagged in order to experience it.
What you describe hasn't been happening in most MMORPGs that tried to have a world PvP. Maybe it happened where you were -- and I'd argue it happened for a limited time. But the points of your parent commenter still stand. It's a gaming dream that just never materializes due to human nature.
Game devs assume that the players will do things that make sense or reward them, and that assumption fails every single time.
What would be your preferred way of me bringing this up with a hot take to his hot take? Apparently a counter isn't valid or you're being pedantic.
> ...and you are also missing the roleplay aspect of this -- "I am an outlaw!" -- that a lot of people enjoy and get deliberately flagged in order to experience it.
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily. Also, you would be punished with a "jail" time after you died. Not a permanent death, but the time counter increased per murder. I specifically remember my friend having a player killer character that his own brother poisoned for the bounty. My buddy was quite furious and I believe even got into a fist fight with his brother about it given that character wouldn't be playable for weeks.
> What you describe hasn't been happening in most MMORPGs that tried to have a world PvP.
I mean at the time it was one of the largest MMORPGs on the market. Maybe because in the late 90's early 00's the market was smaller and there was less griefing online, which I don't believe to be true, but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around. Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.
Well, I don't know English idioms so saying "hot take" to me is netting you a blank stare. I suppose you are simply saying "my opinion differs from yours when it comes to..."? If so, then sorry for my remark, apparently it was misguided.
> It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily.
There are people who don't play for resources as a goal or, in general, follow the path that the game creators have outlined for the players. A role-playing "outlaw" experience is basically being a good citizen in the game until you farm enough gear and resources and then turn around and start griefing other players without caring you're denied access to towns because again, you want to roleplay an outlaw. Live in the open, be in constant danger of being killed by a bounty hunter, and not being allowed in the main hubs. Some people are into that.
Time and again, game creators have tried to discourage such behaviours but the thing they keep missing is that some people do things regardless of partially punishing mechanics. Game creators optimize the game flow for people who want to gain stuff with minimum (or reasonable) resistance. And there is no small amount of people whose motivation doesn't fall within those parameters at all.
> but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around
I cannot prove it but I'd wager this was due to smaller amount of players and gaming not being as mainstream as it is today. These limiting mechanics simply don't scale after more people start pouring in due to the huge diversity of needs and priorities of the players who joined.
The punishing mechanics are meant to discourage players of a certain state of mind and/or priorities and/or needs. But I've known people who sit at their PCs for 10 hours a day looking for whom to grief (in WoW) with a huge grin on their face during ALL of it. Bored people with comfy lives who had nothing better to do and they were happy to grief all day long. What can you do. Nothing, except leave the game (which I did).
My only conclusion or a fix is: make the punishments much more severe or if even that doesn't work, simply disallow certain behaviours to begin with, e.g. like with WoW's PvP and PvE servers. If you are on the latter, nobody can attack you no matter what (although they do still allow enemy players to kill your friendly NPCs so there griefing can take the form of them denying you quest givers or vendors which is still nasty).
> Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.
Yeah, I think so too (agreed with both your points). Most companies are too scared to change anything; the normal [MMO]RPGs make certain amounts of money and they are extremely risk-averse to try anything even slightly new, lest even this revenue dries up (and I'd argue the revenue is less than they want).
It's not like games can't be made to accommodate for all kinds of human nature IMO (and where they can't you can simply use opt-in mechanics, again like PvP or PvE servers). We simply have gotten to the very logical point in time where the market is cornered by several giants and several dozen hard-working smaller studios and it doesn't make financial sense for any company to experiment and look for a better formula.
The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from acting upon other players and making other players miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them.
That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution of how people self-describe themselves to the four quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of the number of people they can act upon ("grief").
I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased enough with single player games (and single player game design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these days is just as often left by game designs to fall through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or Discord.
That's precisely correct. I've been in WoW from 2007 to 2012 and you could tell that the people who loved ruining the fun for everybody else were the most vocal in the forums. They also became quite good in painting it with innocent colors: "think of the roleplaying aspect, are you not an RPG anymore?", "the world feels more vibrant and live", "fights for resources happen in the real world, let's have a realistic game" etc.
While in reality they simply enjoy obstructing other people's gaming. And this has been evident for so many years, and it has been known that these people are the minority -- it's truly puzzling why they haven't been shut down, hard, at least a decade ago.
The only good explanation that I have ever found was: part of the game devs are those griefers, and they defend the open-world PvP on internal meetings.
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The other kinds of players are indeed much more quiet. I personally started playing WoW because I wanted an RPG and I didn't care about the MMO aspect for a long time. But it's what the market had available as the best game in the genre at the time. My regret from back then is that I didn't aggressively scan the market in more details. I surely would have found a single-player RPG to my liking.
The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me.
I wish more games took a similar mature approach.
I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes.
Basically, wasting a ton of time.
That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life.
EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.
Are they hostile? Do they see me? Should I try and stealth kill them? Are they just passing through?
Eventually one learns to deal with the murderhobos and cope. Then it becomes even more fun.
It's one of the reasons I left WoW. I don't want to be at the mercy of somebody like you who creatively invents a beautiful justification for stopping me to have my gaming fun.
I am sure whatever it is you are telling to yourself makes sense. But not to me.
You don't need to be flippant about it, if you are so worried about others "ruining" your gaming fun, when why TF are you playing an MMO? That's just like setting yourself up for disappointment.
Much happier on the Switch these days.