There has been a lot of talk here lately about PvP, griefing, and the differences between negative and positive sum PvP systems. As with most ‘hot button’ topics, the discussion tends to stray and generally degrades into a hardcore vs casual debate. So here is my attempt to bring things back into focus and attempt (likely poorly) to convince you why that 13 year old griefer actually enhances the MMO you play.
No one likes to lose. It’s never fun to get forced into a fight where you have no chance to win, or even escape. It’s even less fun if that encounter results in some tangible loss for you, be it items, gold, or xp. It’s also not much fun knowing you will never be able to close the gap between yourself and the ‘upper level’ players in a competitive environment. I think we can all agree on those base rules.
However I think it is short-sighted to simple say ‘I don’t like that, ban it’. I don’t think any game designer sits down and says “let’s make some rules that allow our player base to be abused by others, that will be fun”. What they do is create a system that will balance itself, and work in the long run. Too many games today are a simple arms race, with each expansion or update releasing bigger and flashier stuff. Take a look at Ironforge these days, instead of a medieval setting, it looks more like a bunch of Power Ranger rejects walking around. At what point do you reach the glowy spiky neon limit? And if you are a new players wearing your lowbie green quest gear, how do you compare standing in your chain mail next to a guy with six flaming skulls on each shoulder carrying a floating crystal mass which is listed as a mace?
In addition to looking beyond silly, all that previous time and effort spent creating the previous generations gear is lost, never to be seen again. Same goes with the instances and zones that provide that gear. How likely is anyone to ever craft Thunderfury in WoW again? Odds are slim.
So how exactly do you keep all this content relevant, how do you keep your players interested without constantly giving them bigger and better toys? You introduce a give-and-take situation. You don’t make a system of ‘once you have it, you have it forever’. The only way a player is going to go after the same item again is if he still wants it, but no longer has it, and the only way to get into that situation is to find a way for the player to loss his original item, or at worse to make having multiple copies beneficial.
I think that’s the side of item loss and death penalties people overlook when we talk about a PvP system. We don’t think about a fun way to lose things, we just think about fun ways to get them. But if you manage to keep content relevant, you not only encourage players to re-visit content, you also give them extra incentive to go back to a place they loved the first time around. If UBRS was your favorite instance in WoW, instead of it being a sightseeing tour now, you could go back and actually gain items with the same value to you as they had on your first trip. Of course the entire system would be different, so it would not be the same items, but I think you get the idea here.
In addition to keeping content relevant, item loss also solves the fundamental problem with crafting, in that crafting is only useful for the one or two ‘max power’ items, with everything else becoming useless. With item loss, crafting a cheap but decent sword still has value, as not everyone will always be using their prime gear, and will instead settle for average stuff when they know they will be entering a dangerous, and likely costly, situation. As an added bonus, at any time you do put on your grade A stuff you give yourself a noticeable boost in power, at the cost of increasing your chances of a larger loss. Now all of a sudden that glowing spiky shoulder actually has some real value behind it, some real menace. If you see a guy decked out in top-notch gear, and you are in your day to day stuff, you know it’s time to run unless you have support. At the same time, if you do have support, you could be in for a nice pay day should you take him down. Regardless, that player only interested in crafting knows his Iron Sword will still have buyers on a daily basis, even if a new instance or zone is released with slightly more powerful stuff. This keeps crafters crafting, and the economy rolling.
To me the problem is not whether to include such a system, but in finding a way to balance it. Yes I think you need item loss, but at the same time I don’t think we need to bring back UO’s ‘die and lose everything’ system. That was not a death hit; it was a death kick straight to the nuts. Asherons Call Darktide had a nice system, in that you would lose an item at random, but each item had a value, and the higher the value, the more likely it was to drop when you die. EVE has ship loss with insurance to help you recover, and ships are always available, with money being the only limiting factor on whether it takes you a few minutes or a few weeks to recover. At some point I believe you reach that nice balance of meaningful death, where you avoid it, but it does not ruin your entire day if it happens. Where reckless players are punished enough to either change or be left behind, but the casual player does not lose weeks of progress due to one unfortunate run-in with a PK. A tough nut to crack, but in my opinion a worthy goal to pursue.
edit: Credit to Swift Voyager for reminding me of this, but just to add to the above. Regardless of how severe a penalty you have, you have to protect players who are not ready to engage in certain activities, while also giving players great motivation to enter dangerous areas later. Starter areas should not be PvP areas, while at the same time it should be impossible to reach the upper levels of power without putting your neck out there.
Hardcore Casual 
Another aspect of having destroyable/stealable items is that it makes it meaningful for a player to be more wealthy than another player. In WoW, it would seem to me that you end up with a whole bunch of people who are maxed, who already have everything they need and are all kinda equal to each other. So, even though one of them has put in double the play time as the other and amassed a fortune in gold, he’s not really better off than the guy who just barely managed to make it there.
With destroyable items, it gives people a reason to use middle tier items so that they aren’t risking the loss of everything they own in a PvP encounter, but it also encourages them to have several backup sets of gear to replace losses. For example: I may not be able to beat the guy that’s twice my experience level, but if I have 10 sets of affordable backup gear, then I can keep coming back with my buddies till we catch him alone or off guard and get some payback. This actually gives some extended play value for the middle tier players who probably make up the majority of the player base.
If you combine that kind of system with “safe zones” for new players, then people can choose when where and what they are willing to risk in PvP. Safe zones are key in the equation though. Or maybe even better yet, some kind of tiered safe zone scheme where low level players can attack, but can’t BE attacked in certain areas?
Good points Swift, made me think of something to add to my post. And I fully agree about the gold issue. It’s similar to crafting, destructible items keep money relevant, which is also very important.
While Diablo 2 was not a MMO per se, playing it online on Hardcore mode did force the player to make this kind of tradeoffs. If you died, you lost everything. Unless of course you had dependable support that could reach your corpse and retrieve your items. And there was no rolling system. If an item dropped, the first to click it got it.
So you had to choose between wearing your top-of-the-line gear and take a major hit upon death (be it from PvP, careless play or plain bad luck), or stash your shinies away and get less profit with less risk. Likewise, you had to choose your friends carefully. Grouping up meant that you had a slightly easier time against the harder enemies, but you also get backstabbed or worse, backstabbed and robbed.
A destroyable item system is interesting, but as you said, the devil is in the details. Eventually players just found the optimal risk/reward ratio and started killing Pindleskin and Mephisto over and over. Those encounters were so easy that many players started unequipping the most useful(read: valuable) items they had and just wore items that increased their profits even more. To be applicable to WoW, a destroyable item system would have to rebalance all means of getting items. You’d never dare to use a Thunderfury in combat if getting a new one required farming Molten Core for months or even years for those minimal drop rate items required to start the questline. Or would you dare even try to fight Prince Malchezaar if defeat would send you back to nonheroic 70-mans? Likewise, EvE Online has similar problems with it’s Titan-class ships. They’re big and powerful, but you could also build a whole fleet with those same resources, and that fleet would be more durable, more easily replaceable and more viable than your Death Star. Even if the enemies did not have any pilots called Luke Skywalker in their ranks. ;-)
Exclusive zero-sum PvP is a lose-lose proposition. The players who can’t ‘dedicate’ enough time to ‘play’ end up behind in equipment and thus, end up losing more. People who are underskilled also end up in this downward spiral. Players who end up in this downward spiral don’t re-sub, and the game company loses due to diminishing base.
Niche market games can get away with it, Mass market games cannot.
Now, I love PvP, but I like to control exactly when and where it happens. I don’t find ganking to be particularly entertaining – if anything it shows a serious lack of mental development, but whatever – and I like getting ganked even less. If WAR is to be a commercial success, they have to come up with Consensual but Necessary PvP formats. Putting Zero-sum PvP in every aspect of the game will be a disaster.
My $0.02
from Roger: “Niche market games can get away with it, Mass market games cannot.”
Yeah, up to now, there hasn’t been a really good title that could capture mass market numbers with hardcore PvP. Increasing numbers of subscription service game players will continue to grow the market and allow more diverse types of games to succeed.
The question is: What would a game need in order to combine the best of WoW and the best of Eve so that one single game might appeal to both the casual 13 year old player, and the serious 45 year old player.
For example, wouldn’t it be cool if there was actually a part of Eve that my 11 year old daughter who plays webkins might enjoy? Imagine the market you could have with a game like that. All it takes is better game design.
Before the event horizon known as WoW came into the scene- any MMO that could hit 200k+ was considered a pretty good success. Consider EVE Online, made by a small independant and weigh it against other titles in its ‘weight division’ like City of Heroes, DDO, and maybe LOTRO. It can stand up with the best of them
Consider Asia where PVP Looting is the norm (lineage 2, ZT online, etc) and I would say its nonsense that hardcore looting cant make it. That’s the only way we will see an MMO last for the long haul ‘ideally’. I would say World of Warcraft has already fallen apart- with TBC introduction I believe the other instances like Molten Core and such like this author covered has went downhill
BTW, so great to have a blogger stand up for what’s right. Right on bro, right on
I enjoyed the solution Shadowbane used for this. Rather than losing all your items you lost what was in your backpack, including your gold. Usually you lost a few hours of farming items, but it could be mitigated by traveling back to town to deposit your current load. I found that I was less angry at the game and more mad at myself for not returning to town sooner when I was the victim of a PK. It put more responsibility on the player since you could almost completely control what you lost.