Hardcore Casual

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.