Time to get in my recliner and become an armchair game designer. Making a PvP focused MMO is tough. You have to make an engaging game that keeps players coming back but it also has to be balanced. There are two critical design aspects that a would-be PvP MMO must take into consideration: Scale and Ownership.
Scale
Scale means the amount of players it takes to accomplish a goal. Let's look at WoW's PvE Scale: 1+ (solo), 5 (dungeon), 10 (raid), 25 (raid) and 40 (old raids). Nice distribution from solo to a large group and provides stuff to do for everyone.
Now look at WAR's for the RvR lakes: 6++ (Battlefield Objective), 12+++ (Keeps), 100+ (Fortress) and 48 (city instance). It clearly skews toward a much larger scale. Defenders just increase the numbers further for B.O.'s and Keeps.
This has the effect of making players feel like grunts rather than heroes. The lack of small scale goals also leaves players feeling bored and teaches them to wait for the zerg. Even PvP games such as Eve and Darkfall provide content (in the form of players or NPC's) for small groups. To keep players engaged, you must provide a wide variety of scale.
Ownership
This would be the goal or objective piece of the PvP MMO. Why are the players fighting each other? In games like Eve, Darkfall and even DAoC guilds fight over ownership of objectives. By owning them, their guild gains benefits. They lose ownership when someone takes it from them.
In WAR you don't own a keep, you just lease it for a short time. It is hard for a player to get motivated when the scale of the objective is too big. They really don't have a stake in their city or taking the enemy city. It is all transient anyway, once someone gets to the city it will all be reset.
It is important to have that feeling of ownership in a PvP game. It is what drives many wars in real life and it carries over into MMO's too. Give players stuff to own, small and large scale, and players will create their own incentive to fight.
By combining a wide variety of scale and objectives that players can own, a PvP MMO will have a solid foundation.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
How to make a PvP MMO
7 comments:
You forgot 12 man scenarios.
I think T4 on every server should be changed to open PvP with the old standard of renown point rewards but kills in the RvR lakes count for 3-4x the renown.
Don't you think that the warband structure is a large cause of this problem of scale. In effect you have a minimum group size of 24.
So if your minimum group size is 24, that means you have a very hard time finding opposing units which match this high number, 24 v 18 is 6+, 24 vs 12, 12+ etc.
With a smaller warband size (or no warband at all), you would have more fragmentation of large groups of people.
Also in this game, we don't have the same concept of speed that DAOC had. Since different groups had significantly different levels of speed, this intern lead to greater fragmentation of large groups of people, so the zerg only travelled at the slowest speed.
As you said, certain objective are based on warband sizes, which means they grind their way an RVR tier, flipping them.
Speed and warband size have led to situation where size is everything. Though a 3rd faction does help ... but that's not so simple to fix at this late stage.
I forgot to add, the warband does make it very easy to accomodate extra players and spread people around to reflect changing numbers.
That's a very good point about ownership. I have to admit I never felt particularly invested in the keeps we "leased" back when I played. That said though, I think it's designed that way to fit in the with game's aim of depicting an ever-fluctuating war front. Whether that works or not is another issue.
Funny, I made a similar post on my blog talking about almost the same thing. It is nice to know that other players think the same thing.
This has the effect of making players feel like grunts rather than heroes. +1
It is hard for a player to get motivated when the scale of the objective is too big. +1
Give players stuff to own, small and large scale, and players will create their own incentive to fight. +1
THAT'S THREE, WE HAVE A WINNAH!!!!
It is quite simple... the developers should stop looking at WoW and start loking at L2... a game that has imo the best pvp/pk system ever.
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