There’s a distinction to be made between consensual and non-consensual PvP, though. Ultima Online made non-con work, somehow, and it’s good for EVE, but for most games in the EQ/WoW mold, it’s awful. Consensual PvP, on the other hand, is a good addition to a game. The only folks you can fight are those who want to fight, and the folks who don’t want anything to do with PvP can safely ignore them. It eliminates PKers (though, sadly, not griefers; someone who wants to ruin your fun can usually find a way to do it) and ensures that those who actually do want an honorable challenge can get it.
I’d tend to agree… but there’s another issue that even consensual PvP brings up:
If I fight you and win, it’s obviously because I’m the better player.
If I fight you and lose, it’s obviously because your class is overpowered.
WoW’s classes are in a constant state of flux, simply because it’s nearly impossible to balance such disparate class abilities. As a result, nerfs run rampant. As soon as someone is handily dispatched by another player, he immediately hops onto the forums and proclaims loudly that the other class is clearly broken and needs to be fixed. The constant crying and wailing on the forums taints the whole community.
Good point. In Planetside, the forums were a constant shrieking mess of “Weapon X is underpowered! Weapon Y is overpowered!” and so on. One of the deadliest infantry weapons in the game was always, always, always considered underpowered…by the people using it.
Age of Conan is actually working on a new system like the one you described in your post. The most entertaining thing about that, thus far, is the uproar that its caused in the AoC forums. The AoC Forums are quickly becoming just as bad or probably worse than the WoW forums in terms of juvenile behaviour, flames and insults. I’ve given up on having a discussion with most of the posters.
A similar system like that is in the works for AoC. Personally i’d rather have the jail system they spoke of earlier, but this is what the developers propose.
Many in the AoC forums have gone as far as to claim they’ll take advantage of loopholes in order to grief. Which is funny in a way. If you read the link I posted the details are a bit vague. Theres no telling how it will work. I would like to have high hopes because i like the game, but I’m not too sure how things will work now.
Too late for that now. But I am surprised the developers didn’t anticipate the griefing that higher levels can do to lower levels. One thing the people against any kind of deterrent for griefing don’t take in account is this: Funcom is out to make money. They want new customers and the want subscriptions. If a new customer wants to try out a pvp server and is constantly griefed by higher level players they’ll probably quit. So no matter how much some current player rant and rave about how any kind of “carebear” system will screw the game up, Funcom will probably look at it like “we’ve already got your subscription/money. But by griefing a level 10 with your level 25 character you’re keeping us from making more money, because the level 10 will decide the game sucks and quits.”.
Some people say if you don’t like the PvP roll on a non pvp server. Thats kind of a stupid statement but it does have merit. However, I rolled on a PVP server because I wanted to see what it was like. So far I don’t regret it much. I get ganked a lot, but as long as I 'm not so seriously outlevelled by an attacker I don’t think its unfair. I hate it, make no mistake, no one likes dying in a game, but I was a valid target and I understand that. I’ve never initiated combat with another player unless the kill me and I run into them again. Maybe I should just start attacking players. I’m tired of being the ganked.
I’m waiting to see how the new system will work. At least it will be of interest to see how many of the forum posters that claim they’ll quit will actually quit.
Welcome to the cycle. I have heard one justification from high level griefers more than any other -
“I had to level while I got ganked by higher characters*. Now I’m just getting revenge!”
I doubt that wheel will ever stop turning.
*higher meaning unstoppably leveled, not just a small difference
Reminds me of one of the first “lessons” from Infinity Hold, an SF novel about violent prisoners by Barry B. Longyear.
The problem that I’ve noticed with a lot of PvP people is that they do exploit the system. They have buddies help them power-level, twink gear from each other, use bugs to farm resources or gear, share information about glitches. It takes an impressive amount of cooperation and information gathering. The problem is that they use this to gain a ridiculous advantage over people who don’t devote the same amount of time and energy into networking with other players and studying the game.
In many cases the only way to avoid getting griefed is to copy the tactics of the PvP crowd. Most people just want to play the game, and couldn’t match the PvP players even if they wanted to just because of the massive amount of time investment needed. So unless the game world provides balancing rules, an in-game police/military force to protect lower level characters, or the players themselves organize militias of a sort, the inequity will remain and worsen.
It’s pretty much like the real world in that whoever gets the resources first usually stays on top. But it’s even worse in a way because there’s no possibility of an assassination, guerilla war, or insurgent tactics to turn the tables. It sucks and keeps sucking until either the game makers tweak things or the gankees quit trying to play.
I think one of the earlier posters nailed it; the people who go after much lower-level characters or those who are weak from a battle with NPCs are operating in a predatory or criminal mode. They want the reward with little risk. It gets worse if there’s a kill ranking board with their guild that doesn’t take relative level into account.
I suppose one of the ways to prevent higher-level characters from killing lower-level ones with impunity would be to implement some kind of in-game acclaim system where you only get credit if your kill is higher in level than you. But even then, as was mentioned already, griefers would find some way to exploit that to be a pain in the ass too.
When I was flying through a PvP zone in City of Heroes with my blaster some obnoxious twit started demanding that I duel them. I was just there to pick up some non PvP stuff so I ignored him for a while but finally I decided to take him up on it. Rather than following his “rules” I unannounced turned on my powers that let me shoot something from the draw distance, powered up all my attacks and sniped him from the visibility limit right over his head. Then I turned off my flight so that I fell at almost the same rate as my attack, kicked it back in just before I hit the ground (easier than it sounds since in CoH there’s a command buffer just for this little trick) and finished him off before he could recover.
He started throwing a fit because I didn’t stand there and let his character hit me, something that would pretty much guarantee that he won given the nature of CoH where a blaster has almost no health and defense. If a blaster doesn’t stay out of reach then they lose. If a blaster does not initiate the combat they lose. If a blaster does not maintain their mobility advantage they lose.
And that covers the bulk of why I don’t like PvP in online games a whole lot: people trying to be bullies, often limited tactical options, and people who demand that PvP should only work one way. It’s almost like the game designs encourage budding sociopaths.
Its not just that. I find that i I personally lack some of the skill of siome gankers just because I can’t play 24/7 and don;t have time to absorb all of the minute details insome games.
Tonight inAoC another player sent me a tell asking me to join them in a team in the underhalls. I had one quest there, which nirmally would have taken me maybe 15 minutes. I declined because I just wanted to do my quest and haul ass outta there. So player name: dickhead actually came after me. Of course he wiated until I had finished fighting and was low on health. (He was a caster of some sort, I’m not sure what kind). He was shocked I’m sure when /i charged him and had him almost beaten, but he zoned through a dore to get away. Dickhead came back later nad did the same thing, this time he succeded. I died. I would have let it go, but he sent me a tell:
“Next time join.”
Well, that kida pissed me off. It is only a game but i don’t like being bossed around. So I replied how I would never join a team under a threat and that (as it was a role playing server) how I wouldn’;t trust a person that talks from both sides of their mouth. Then I went looking for him. Luckily I found him farily quickly. He had obviously pissed off a few otyher players since three others were attacking him at the same time. he tried to run and zone to another underhalls area, but I nailed him with a crossbow. Ah, sweet catharsis.
I ran into him later and ran from me again. Punk . 
Though the exploits are pretty unacceptable, your first complaint reads to me a lot like:
“That’s not fair that Tiger Woods could spit my course record because he practices more.”
It doesn’t really matter though, you’re not describing griefer behaviour. You are describing mainstream PvP attitudes though, there’s absoltuely nothing wrong with twinking or power leveling. It’s also not wrong to whack a lower level now and again, the main issue is camping. Specifically camping places you can’t fight back or get away from, i.e. res points AoC quest NPCs, or zone lines. The people who do this are a problem and the system tends to punish them for it, or at least make it as difficult as possible to do so. The thing is however, this type of thing CAN be good, in that it forces the victims can get around it and it facilitates a community to be formed to fight back griefers. Eventually anti gank-squad guilds form, as do gank guilds, it will eventually harden into bitter PvP. The ganking side using harassment tactics and the latter acting more like an organized nation with a generic code of honor (I’ve run a stricter one of these before, you got one warning if someone caught you griefing, ganking was fine, griefing was out even against KoS guilds If you saw someone locking down an area you were, if possible, to form a resistance and take out the people).
Overall it’s necessary in order for the body of PvP to form as a whole, not enough conflict and you get Age of Diplomacy, which is generally a pretty lame sounding game. Not that a game about diplomatic relations wouldn’t be fun, it’s just not what it was meant for.
Yeah, you killed him quite fairly. A lot of people have trouble parsing dueling from PvP. Stealth classes are often considered cheap because you can’t prepare, however the stealth IS that classes preparation. When you catch one of those classes out in the wilderness, even at full health they go down nicely.
Now some classes do need balancing (rangers in AoC can quite effectively beat anyone, even if the jump is gotten on them because of the trap system and other things), but as a general rule a “dirty fighter” is only a coward in RP terms.
This is what should happen, team up and kill him (even accidentally). If someone is an asshat, kill them. Nothing is wrong with that. What he did wasn’t exactly wrong either of course, unscrupulous maybe, but he got some nice justice, and even if he didn’t… grats, you got a free enemy!
I’ve played Ryzom and CoH. I’ve done some PvP. I like the fact that it is optional. I can decline if I want, and it is my option to go into a free-fight zone or not.
No, it’s being forced to play in a tournament with Tiger Woods, sans handicap. There is absolutely no question you will lose, the only question is how badly. There are weight classes, handicaps, and separate leagues in sports in order to make it competitive and so make it interesting for both high-level and low-level players.
Those protections don’t exist in many MMORPGs. It wouldn’t be much fun for you to play basketball if a couple of NBA players who were bored decided to crash your pick-up game, beat the snot out of you on points, and then steal the ball because you couldn’t stop them if you tried. That’s the equivalent of what happens when a higher level griefer/ganker or two rips through a group of low level characters.
Twinking and power leveling exploitations depend on having people to help you. If you don’t have people to help, or if you don’t want to depend on other people for it, then you’re automatically at a disadvantage. This is especially true of many newbies because they don’t have that network of online friends built yet, and they have a low-level character. If PvP protections in-game aren’t strong, these people are screwed from the beginning.
Thats pretty much what I meant when i started this thread. I don’t see the appeal in attacking a player in PvP when you outlevel them by so much that you just can’t lose. While AoC has gotten some mileage off of its PvP, the starting zone has 2 places that are gank/grief city…the underhalls and White Sands Isle. Especially White Sands. I’ve seen lvl 23 players running around there killing lvl 10s just for kicks. (After level 24 or 25 players can’t reenter the starting zone, but by level 19 or 20 you should be able to leave the zone…theres literally no reason for anyone over level 20 to really be on White Sands unless they’re there to grief lowbie characters.) My advice to anyone new to AoC on a PvP server is this
If you go to White Sands Isle alone do not engage any NPC enemies until you are reasonably sure theres no one else around. Even people your own level range. They’ll wait until you defeat your foes and then attack you before you can recover. If you see anyone of a higher level its best to avoid them. If they’re over level 18 avoid them at all costs.
If you’re in the Underhalls consider everyone to be your enemy. Even if you don’t initiate combat, most people there will attack you for the heck of it. If you see any class that can stealth in the underhalls or White Sands and they all of a sudden go into stealth mode, they are going to attack you.
Admittedly this guy was one level below me, but that doesn’t really give me any advantage. He wasn’t breaking any real or imagined rules, either. As i said if he hadn’t sent me that tell I would have just gone about my business. (The several guinesses I drank weren’t helping my reflexes, either). Once I got him back I lost interest in trying to find him, but I did keep in mind that if I ran into him again he was KOS. (Kill on sight). I just wanted to make sure that he knew better than to attack me in the future. 
. It must have worked, because as I said, when I did come across him later he wasted no time in getting away from me.
Yeah, I find PvP in CoX hilarious. I saty out of the PvP zones most of the time, myself. But most of my characters are controllers or Masterminds anyway, not really suited for PvP combat. Though once some dweeb told me to dismiss my mastermind pets so we could fight. Yeah, right. I just left the zone. CoX PvP was never that much fun in my opinion.
In World Of Warcraft, at least on the PvE servers you have turn on a Pvp flag that signifies you can be attacked by other players, but if you attack a pvp player you automatically gain the PvP flag.
Me and a friend co-rogue had a sweet PvP scam going. One of us would sit on the middle of the road with the PvP flag on (usually in Stranglehold Vail) and type /afk. The other rogue would hang around in stealth. Within a few minutes a Horde player would come down the road and see a single PvP enabled Away from Keyboard Alliance rogue. The horde player takes one hit at sitting rogue and the other rogue would decloak and backstab/stun him, the first rogue turns around and finishes the poor horde player, both rogues go in to stealth mode and wait until the angry horde player comes back to to be killed again, and again and again….until he summons his level 70 friends and then we return to the pub in stormwind
The funny thing is the scam was taught to me by a Horde rogue who was sitting AFK on the road to bootybay…….
There have been successful implementations of PvP in games which are roleplay-intensive, of course. A game where serious consequences are suffered by characters who are caught breaking the law makes PvP more rare and more carefully executed, and PvP tends not to happen unless the target character’s actions have made it necessary.
EvE Online definitely has the most ‘evil’ PvP of any game I’ve come across. There aren’t many games out these days where it is possible to lose all of your accumulated wealth in one fight (if you are daft enough to invest all your wealth in one ship and then put it in harms way of course) and where it’s possible to lose a portion of your XP if you die (if you are daft enough…or forgetful enough, not to update your medical clone).
As mentioned earlier the game universe is divided down into different security zones;
High Security (1 to 0.5) - relatively safe and patrolled by NPC police who will act in your defence if you are aggressed, but not necessarily quickly enough to save your ship, also assuming you have not been declared a war target by another corporation (if so you can be attacked in high security with no consequence).
Low Security (0.5 to 0.1) - unsafe and only gate sentry guns and station sentry guns will fire on aggressors (and it’s entirely possible for aggressors to tank this damage).
Null Security (0.0) - utterly unsafe, “anything goes” area.
Attacking someone in High or Low Sec will give you a security rating hit (-ve) and as you progress lower and lower in your rating it gets harder and harder to enter the higher security areas (the faction police will attack you and you are attackable by players without causing them to lose ratings). In null sec there are no security hits for attacking anyone.
The above is a simplification since there are a lot of variables that come into play. It’s even possible, and commonly done, to PvP on an economic level by playing the market!
Three rules of EvE (1) Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose, (2) You are not truly safe anywhere (well, unless you want to sit docked at an NPC station 100% of the time) and (3) Don’t trust anyone.
Well, rule three is a little bit of an overstatement, there are people I’ve played with for years that I do trust in game but there are also instances of people being scammed out of vast amounts of in game currency by people they have known for years as well.
Speaking of which, here’s a bit of reading about an assassination/heist that was carried out in game, planning for this was about a year or so long and the in game items “stolen” totalled around 16k USD at the time. I wouldn’t say this sort of thing is common place, but it’s certainly possible. There’s very little control on what the players can do in game by the game developers, occasionally something pops up that is borderline exploitation of the game environment that the developers have to weigh in on and fix but mostly it’s pretty open ended.
EvE is fun but incredibly unforgiving compared to most online games these days.
That is pure comedy. “Sure, I’ll dismiss my pets, if you agree to only use Brawl.”
CoX is not a PvP game. PvP’s in there only because it’s expected. Luckily I’ve never had an encounter in a PvP zone, and the few times I’ve been in the Arena it was so boring I don’t have an interest in doing more. Either fights are 10-minute stalemates or they’re over so quick there’s no point.
Yeah…as I said, I just left the zone, I was only there to look around anyway. The other player was a scrapper I believe, so what would be the point of dismissing my pets? To use my puny 2 or 3 offensive powers in a fight? Most MM’s secondary powersets are support so they can keep their minions in the fight.
But its no worse than the guy in Wow that kept begging me to duel him in Goldshire with my level 7 warlock. He was like level 20 something. Whats the point? Its not like I could beat him. But this guy begged and begged and begged so I finally agreed so he could kill me and get it over with. I was only there to buy a few things from the freakin’ vendor anyway.
You’re right. Many classes in CoX just can’t function well in PvP. My fav character, Doctor Ghost, is an illusion/empath controller. (He’s my favorite because I made it a personal mission to level him to 50 doing solo 90% of the time…and it took a looong time). By the time he was in the 40 range of levels he could tear through enemies with the Phantasm Pet and the Phantom Army summoning power. Since I could heal myself it got easier for me then. So feeling cocky I went to the arena with a few friends and we took turns fighting each other. What a wake up. I got severely pwned because a live player knows to take me out before I can summon any pets…and that although the Phantom Army is invulnerable, they only last about 2 minutes. If you can get away from them long enough for the time to run out and have a few break-free inspirations an illusion controller is toast.
In AoC I never respond to getting ganked because it only makes the ganker want to gank you more. But once I slipped up. On White Sands Isle I had a task that required me to kill some Picts. I attacked a group in a camp near the mysterious house on the island in their camp but I was overwhelmed by another group that got aggro’d by accident. I rezzed, rested and went back. this time I managed to take all of them out (I was about lvl 17 or so but I dinged 18 in the fight…the picts were around level 16 or 17). I only had a sliver of health left when the fight was over and then a level 23 character (assassin? I don’t know the class) unstealthed right next to me and killed me. I couldn’t figure that one out. Was this person there the whole time just waiting for me to finish so they could gank me? So I asked in chat “Why did you do that? What was the point?”. They didnt respond, but it makes no difference. Its pvp, and I should have expected it. (I hate stealthed characters in AoC by the way…there is no defense against them that I know of). Its pointless to complain about it in game chat…it only draws a lot of nasty responses or more gankers…and as long as I’m not “grey” in levels to the ganker its fair game IMO. I just hate being snuck up on.
Although I did accidentally gank someone in the underhalls. they were fighting a mob and I jumped in to help. But I accidentally swung my sword at them when the last NPC was dead and they attacked back, forcing me to defend myself. It was the same character I had on White Sands, too, and the player I killed was under me by about 4 levels. I felt bad about it, but I didn’t say anything.
WoW did that a couple years back. Players don’t get honor for killing players much lower than themselves; they used to. It worked!
I’m not much into PvP, but dangit, PvP I can understand. Ganking, like our OP, I just don’t see the point beyond some sort of peeing contest. Only, it’s elephants vs fleas.
I played WoW exclusively from the night the servers went up until shortly after The Burning Crusade expansion. I played only on PvP servers and spent a TON of time PvPing. I loved it, every minute. I loved ganking, being ganked, hunting, griefing, battlegrounds, city assaults, dueling, and random PvP encounters. Sure, I spent plenty of time defeating big dragons and bugs, but when the raids were over it was time to PvP, and at the end of the day it was all I wanted to do when I logged in. In fact, the reason I stopped playing was because in order to keep up you had to spend too much time grinding for faction or aquiring dungeon keys and it was too annoying. I sold my character in November and got nearly 500 for it. At that time I had almost 200,000 honor kills, which was the highest on my server and 4th highest, IIRC, in the battlegroup.
My main motivations for griefing, which I did from time to time but never went out of my way to do, were to cause an annoyance for someone or create a bigger fight. If it was a slow night I’d find some lower level questers with a popular guild tag and harrass them until they called on some guildmates to come fight. If I wanted to get some good forum reactions I would grief some low level players for a while until they started a thread about me on the forums. All in all I concede it is pretty childish, but it is a game after all so the two go hand in hand. Griefing could be a lot of fun, and most of the times very funny. I don’t take it to the degree of kicking a puppy or being a bully or characterize it as being cruel to someone. I’m not going to say that I personally was immune to emotional reactions to the game or situations that happened in the game (as a point of reference, I met my current girlfriend whom I’ve been with for 2 years now IRL playing WoW), but I can honestly say I never questioned why someone did something in the game, or what motivated them to behave a certain way in the game. I believe the psychoanalyzations of griefers or PvPers is pretty naive.