They are games, you refuse to accept that for some reason even though that’s what the last letter in the name says. It is fundamentally correct, and the fact that you don’t want to accept that massively multiplayer online role playing GAMES are in fact games with rules and not much like a park at all. And the fact that the object of the game is not specific enough for you doesn’t allow you to make up your own rules and condemn other players for not following your personal rules is simply fact, no matter how much you try to twist definitions around.
If you don’t accept that MMORPGs are games, you’re never going to have any useful discussions about them.
I don’t think permanent death games are likely to be successful, since you either can come back in with a new account (so aren’t actually permanently dead) or you are forcing your playerbase to shrink over time. Your ‘market opportunity’ is going to be a niche game that requires very careful balance in the design stage and that will probably completely fall apart if you get it wrong. Meanwhile there are many successful games that focus on PVE, low-impact PVP, or optional PVP, which are much more popular and easier to implement.
What these games offer is something more than simple PvP. If you just wanted to do that, CoD and Battlefield more than fit the bill. But some people forget that there is ALSO PvP.
The challenge with those sort of open world games is that you want the “rules” loose enough that players can do their own thing. But you still need some sort of balance. There is a fine line between unexpected emergent behavior and exploiting loopholes.
Tough to do. In the virtual world, there are no consequences. Worst case, you just respawn. You don’t need other players to trust to watch your back while you sleep. You don’t desperately long for human companionship because you aren’t actually wandering a desolate wasteland by yourself for weeks at a time. So people in the virtual world might act more psychotic and antisocial than they would IRL.
PVP is at the core of the MMO survival genre. In Rust, other players are the primary threat to your survival by design. It offers more than Call of Duty in that you’re forced to try and find food, shelter and weapons while being constantly threatened by other players but that’s just a wider style of PVP than five minute shooting matches. As I remember, all of the official servers in Rust were PVP. The only variations were “primitive” servers where you killed each other with arrows and axes instead of assault rifles.
Ark has a bit more going on since you can get a legitimate single-player PVE experience out of taming dinosaurs and exploring the cave “dungeons” but it’s still very obviously designed with PVP at its core. For example, the official PVE servers are plagued with land/resource monopolizing by placing structures all over (“pillar spamming”). The answer to this is supposed to be “Knock down the other guy’s structure and if he complains have your dinosaur eat him” but that’s not an option in PVE since attacking another guy’s structure is “hostile”. On private servers, people handle it with metagame solutions – admins not allowing resource hogging but they have low populations so you can make “house rules” and enforce them. On the public servers, it can be just a mess and nearly impossible to find decent real estate not monopolized by others.
The last three letters are Role Playing Games, and I’ve spent the last thirty years of my life trying to explain these games to people who don’t play them, in large part because their objectives are fundamentally different from the objectives of regular games. Is that not your experience?
Are you seriously saying that role playing games aren’t regular games? Seems like the only games you like to play are word games.
We get it, you don’t like PvP. Despite comments from multiple other posters, you can’t accept that playing a game by the rules of the game is totally valid. Why are you still in this discussion?
Gosh, I’m still in it because I think you’re wrong, that’s why. For example, I’m not playing word games at all.
And no, role playing games are not “regular games,” if by that you mean they have the same sort of objectives as most of the games we think of, or even if you mean that they’re generally zero-sum games. Do you know what a zero-sum game is? Serious question. Most role-playing games are positive-sum games. I’ve never played a PNP RPG, with the possible exception of Fiasco, that wasn’t a positive-sum game (Fiasco is much more of a negative-sum game). When I played WOW, it was definitely a positive-sum game. The positive-sum-game nature of MMORPGs can be a real problem for the economy, in fact.
Many people play them in that manner. Some don’t. The objectives are not clear for them in the way that the objectives are clear for games like Tic Tac Toe.
That’s why I’m in the discussion. Gee, thanks for asking!
Let me get this straight, you’re objecting that because MMORPGS CAN be played as win-win/positive-sum games, that some people play them as win/lose or negative sum games?
That sounds to me like you’re trying to impose your own vision of how the game SHOULD be played onto everyone else just as much as you feel PKers are imposing their vision of how the game should be played.
And then you’re turning around and arguing that you’re right, and they’re wrong, because your idea is more feel-good and more namby-pamby than a more competitive conception of the game.
Is a word missing from this sentence? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here.
Not at all. I’m saying that in a situation where everyone who enters has the same base objective, because the objective is built into the rules of the game, you can trust that everyone agrees on how to play, and PK away to your heart’s content. Anyone entering a Team Fortress game, or playing on a WOW PVP server, is consenting to be killed by a better player, since that’s the objective of the game.
But if you know that people are entering the game with vastly different objectives, due to the lack of explicit objectives for the game, you don’t have consent from other players to PK. You know for a fact that some people enter the game to engage in other activities. In fact, you depend on it: you think the normal way to get equipment is boring, so you’re depending on other people to do that boring work, so that you can kill them and take their stuff.
If everyone wanted to play via the adventuring path, that’d be possible. If everyone wanted to play via banditry, that wouldn’t be possible, because nobody would have anything to take.
Kantian ethics, baby.
Gosh, yeah, you got me. That’s exactly what I’m arguing :rolleyes:. Seriously, is that how you want the discussion to go?
Unlike a table top RPG that can be morphed into something beyond the developer’s intent complete with a game master or persuasive players that can enforce unwritten norms an online game is what the online game allows. If you are in a game that has non-consensual PvP your thoughts on PvP are irrelevant. You implicitly agreed when you chose to play. My thoughts and your thoughts of what the game should be are 100% irrelevant aside from what we can petition the developers to change.
In D&D if people want to play it completely contrary to it’s history of a derivative of a miniature based war-game they can. And those same folks can scrub all tactical combat out of the game even if 95% of the rules are combat. Intent doesn’t matter and can’t be enforced by the developer. The fact that an online game is designed to explicitly allow certain behaviors you must assume such behavior will be common.
What this really comes down to is frustration at lack of control over Gaming Vision that can usually be enforced within one’s group of relatively submissive real life friends.
How is this relevantly different from my implicit agreement when I enter a public park to have racial epithets shouted at me? If I know a park is a public park, I know that the first amendment will apply, and that covers racist speech. Them’s the rules. Does it therefore mean that someone who goes to a public park and starts shouting racist epithets at people is acting ethically?
Public parks don’t allow killing and games do. One is the real world where laws and social norms matter, to some degree. Laws and social norms are usually ignored if political advantage is at stake but I digress. In a game the developer sets the rules. Not society and not you and not me.
But let’s discuss the ethics. This is difficult because I can see it both ways and there are a lot of gray areas. We have a spectrum of games that have clear and well defined objectives where killing and mutilating your opponent is incontrovertibly accepted. On the other hand in games that are more sand box I don’t think players are entitled to standards of behavior that are not enforced either via GM intervention or the rule set. Now that doesn’t mean that certain behavior isn’t jerkish or assholish it’s just there’s no clear way to make that distinction that is universally acceptable.
In an MMO like WoW I’m not obligated to carry a sub-par player. Is it jerkish to exclude or boot that player from my group? Is it jerkish to outrace another player to a resource node? Is it jerkish to undercut an auction by 1c? We can argue that it is or isn’t and not be wrong.
That’s not entirely true. While some people engage in PVP to get loot (though some games restrict it to just coin or a single item, etc) the primary drive for most people is fighting opponents who require more skill than your average AI controlled mob. Combat in MMO’s is usually pretty rote stuff and once you figure out aggro mechanics, it’s easy to safely kill stuff.
Loot acquisition and fighting for sport are two different things. People on PVP servers (where presumably everyone is okay with PVP) still hunt monsters, clear dungeons, go on raids and acquire the usual gear in the process. After all, you’re not going to be killing anyone in a leather tunic and wielding a dull iron dagger.
As to the first thing, yes, public parks don’t allow killing–which is why I analogize it to an unpleasant behavior they DO allow, i.e., shouting racial epithets.
A game isn’t something apart from society. It is a subset of society. Killing isn’t allowed in games; pretend-killing is. This is an important distinction because we need to remember that they’re not separate institutions. Social norms matter in games in the same way they matter in other places in the real world.
Go back to Kantian ethics. If everyone excluded people from raiding groups at whim, would that work? Definitely so: people would remain in raiding groups if they were good enough, and be excluded if they weren’t. If everyone raced to a resource node, would that work? Definitely so.
If everyone decided not to kill monsters or craft, and instead to rob people for treasure, would that work? Nope. There’d be no treasure in that case. Unlike the other behaviors, the only way it’s possible to engage in this behavior is because other folks are engaging in more “productive” behavior. It depends on having people to victimize.
Again, this is entirely different from an accepted PVP scenario, in which everyone involved has the same goals. In that situation, everyone can engage in the behavior, and it works beautifully.
I have nothing against PVP. I used to play Team Fortress a lot, and I did some battleground stuff in WOW back in the day. My objection is to behavior that depends on taking advantage of other people, behavior that’s only possible when some people aren’t engaging in it. It’s not mutual, it’s not consensual, it’s not ethical.
Right–I’m talking specifically about bump’s motives as laid out above.
Here he explains that he thinks it’s boring and idiotic to get good stuff in the way that other people do, so instead, he’s decided to let them do the boring/idiotic stuff, then attack them and take their stuff. That’s the specific thing that I’m talking about when I say his behavior is not universalizable.
That’s not really the same thing. In an MMO, the ability to hunt and kill other players is a feature, not a loophole from some larger principle. Saying nasty things is something we tolerate as a function of a greater good. But PVP is coded into a game explicitly to allow players to kill players. And then advertised as a feature of that game.
MMO’s also aren’t public. They’re not owned for the common good but for the developers to make money. If you went to a private park advertising “Picnic tables! Trees! Shout racist remarks at people!” next to a sign that says there’s a $5 admission fee then you’d be kind of silly complaining that you paid $5 and now people are shouting at you while you sit at a picnic table.
The specific issue here, though, isn’t just “in an MMO,” but specifically, “in Ultima Online.” The game environment created by players like bump was not the environment intended by the devs, or one the majority of people who bought the game thought they were getting. A game that was supposed to encompass, say, five different play styles - including PvP - became only about PvP, because players like bump wouldn’t let anyone else play in a different way.
Sure, the devs own a lion’s share of the blame for that, because they didn’t anticipate the fundamentally anti-social nature of gamers, but that doesn’t excuse the behavior of those gamers.
I largely disagree. If I bought a game that said “you can fight and kill other players” then I expect to be able to do so within the rules of the game. Not “You can fight and kill other players but not those players because they don’t like it and killing that player would make you a jerk and those players just want to craft so leave them alone…”
Those players bought into a game advertising PVP so they could play that way. I don’t fault them for expecting to be able to do so. I pretty much entirely blame the developers (who admittedly are acting from inexperience this early in the genre’s life) for failing to properly accommodate different player types and objectives. I certainly don’t view it as unethical to engage in PVP when the game is advertising that as a feature.
That said, the OP in this thread cast a wider net than just player killing in UO so I was speaking more broadly as a response.
Right, but that was a problem in the early days of UO. The game wasn’t set up correctly and there weren’t enough monsters to fight. So instead of quitting, he and his friend became monsters.
And note that it wasn’t like they were invincible level 100 elites killing noobs. The players they attacked were equals, or potentially equals.
Let’s put it another way. Suppose the UO devs had put an elite boss in the game that could kill any players. And that elite boss would just hang out outside the city, and murderate players and take their stuff and make them lose XP.
And the players hated this boss, because it was unfair, there was no way to avoid it, there was no way to defeat it, and running away from it was annoying, and it didn’t add anything to the game.
Is the problem that the developers were non-consensually interfering with the player’s fun? Or is the problem that the developers created a bad game feature?
The problem is that the game has a bad feature. Maybe the devs thought the boss would be fun, but it wasn’t. Maybe they created the uber boss by accident and it was designed to have 1/10th the hit points but someone dropped a decimal point and the boss that was designed to be manageable was unkillable due to the bug. Or whatever.
The point is, the problem is that the game has a feature that is designed poorly. In this particular case, the feature is unlimited PvP, with a big advantage to the ambushing player, and a permanent penalty if your character dies (loss of XP and loot). The feature that the developers thought would limit PvP–a reputation system–didn’t work as intended.
So yes, in this case the unfun part of the game is controlled by other players, not the developers. But it can never work to insist that players shouldn’t PvP because other people don’t want to PvP. The only possible solution is to create game mechanics that allow players who don’t want PvP to skip most PvP. In UO this game mechanic was broken. In modern MMOs they work.
I don’t. If you’re doing something, and very nearly every single person you do it to says, “Don’t do that,” then you’re ethically obligated to stop doing it. There’s no special circumstance or exception to that. “The rules say it’s okay,” isn’t a justification for being a dick.