MMOs Need More Bastards

[Althus]

So what makes the MMos different from one and other is the actual player in it?
Its us that play it, yes devs make the rules, but in the end it is up to us, to make choices.

Only if the devs offer us interesting choices to make, and the consequences of interesting choices often impact other players, who then whine to the devs, who then take away everybodies choices.

The choices players make will have a huge impact on the overall game, yes I agree whit you on that point.
But in a MMO you are mostly "free" to do things you probably will not do in real life, so you do not have fear to be a dick and "hurt" others. So if we all became dicks in a game is that really Fun?
I appreciate the idea of players decision and free choice, but I fear if we cant find a balance be-twin be good or evil.

EDIT: Yes most people have said something similar whit this.

 

[Disthron]

Firstly there is no fun with a capital F. Just becouse you find it entertaining to be a digital dooshbag dosen't mean that other people will. You know, some people find collecting stamps and playing solitare fun. Fun is a subjective term.

I have to agree with EmperorSubcutaneous that "sandbox" MMOs are a niche market, witch is why even if you only have a few more it would still saturate the market.

One thing I've noticed from reading the comments is this notion "it's not greefing, it's using my brain" As if those two are mutually exclusive. Just becouse someone is a greefer dosn't mean they are stupid, in fact the worst greefers are the smart ones. Ones that just come at you mindlessly are fearly easy to deal with in my experiance. Oh, and not wonting to play with dooshbags dosen't mean you're a brainless ideot ether.

Witch brings me to my next point witch many people seem to have forgotten, I'm not paying $20 a month to be greefed by assholes. Yea, most of these games are not free, you have to pay good hard erned money for them. Even if they are "Free-To-Play" they still require a huge investment of time and energy and by the same token, I've got better things to do.

I stopped playing MMO's years ago becouse the system you seem to think is so light on the screw-you-factor was still way to annoying for me to stand anymore.

I also noticed that a lot of the stories about "Sand-Box" MMOs are about ones that have failed.

 

[Althus]

Play EVE.

Nuff said really - plenty of bastards in that still!

That was exactly I was thinking, all the time i was reading this, and i have only played the free trial of EvE, but from what i read and saw about it this is pretty much your game there. Free to be a arse hole or a good doer.

It's not enough just to have free will. It also has to be a fun game. I'm not hating on Eve (to be fair I haven't given it too much of a chance) but its not for me. Everyone is saying Eve! Eve! Eve! in the comments, but that's akin to saying we never needed another FPS after Doom. Yeah, I get it, Eve offers many of the freedoms I'm looking for, but trust me, freedom isn't the only important factor of gameplay when I'm looking at what to spend time with.

Yes the free will its not the wining factor to you, like to me so we are both on agree there, but you probably like more Fantasy settings then space operas like me, so its a personal opinion at the end.
I understand your point of view, But I pointed EVE maybe because its the most known example or one of the most known player "influenced " MMO, but not the only one.

 

[Sprinal]

See in this article we have now established why the internet should never EVER be censored.

Because if you make it so the "mums and dads" are happy. It completely ruins the environment.

So as a result I agree.

More games like Ultima Online.

I did see an interesting approach to this recently. It was APBR

Sure if you saw asomeone on a street you couldn't shoot them outright (unless you saw them commiting a crime, they saw you commiting a crime, ur in a mission against them or they are killing everyone so the whole zone could shoot them). But it worked.

Sadly not to many people play that style game.

 

[strawberrycreme]

I think it goes a lot deeper than this.

There is very little that is more thrilling and cathartic than ganking another player. Especially when you know that you've completely ruined their day and possibly made them ragequit the game entirely. There's usually a bit of guilt that tinges that thrill, which just makes it all the sweeter.

There's also very little that is more thrilling and cathartic than narrowly escaping ganking, either by means of killing the ganker first, clever mechanics use, calling in your friends or the city brute squad, fleeing to town, or even just hiding and waiting for the ganker to go away. It means the "bad guy" loses and the "good guy" (you) wins.

On the flip side, there is very little that is worse than being ganked by another player, who kills you for no reason other than they can. Some people suck it up and chalk it up as a learning experience, but others become enraged and all too often they do stop playing in anger and disgust.

In both cases, ganking (or being ganked by) another real human being can be, by far, one of the best and/or worse experiences in online gaming. There's just something about it that amplifies emotions ten thousand fold, where the exact same thing done by a brainless NPC is forgettable within an hour but we often remember a particular ganking years and years later. The stakes are just so much higher for some reason.

The ideal environment for a ganker is one where ganking is allowed, few other people gank, and many many people are around for other reasons. I believe this is why free-for-all PvP servers of any MMO tend to have much lower populations than regular servers. Everyone wants to be the ganker, but no one wants to be the gankee. PvP servers start out full of people wanting to be gankers, but no innocent population to prey on. Eventually, the bastards leave the PvP servers and try to figure out ways to gank people on normal servers, or go to different MMOs with a better balance between ganker and gankee.

MMO Companies have tried to deal with this aspect of online gaming in various ways, ever since the days of MUDs. Some ways are quite a lot more effective in others. A free-for-all like the writer wants is very dangerous, because you get people angrily quitting and eventually the place is a ghost town. Some smaller MMOs and MUDs have "regulated PvP" where players can complain to mommy if they got killed "inappropriately", but that takes a lot of resources to do. I'm personally a fan of having separate "sides" and free-for-all PvP zones where it's kosher to stomp on each others' faces and hunt them down but you can still do normal quests and the like. Entirely PvE MMOs like most of Everquest 2 can be nice, but even then there's still some ganking.

One thing I am very glad most MMOs have gotten rid of is the "lose all your stuff" mechanics. Getting ganked in PvP is painful enough without it.

 

[Bostur]

Apart from the obvious EvE Online there is also Darkfall a ground-based game based in a Fantasy setting.


I find it a little odd that the term 'bastard' is being used for engaging in competitive gameplay in MMOs. When a chessplayer tries to win we wouldn't call him a bastard, or when someone tries to kill you in CoD he isn't a bastard either, just a player following the normal objective of the game.
Maybe MMOs are too closely linked to pen and paper RPGs which are designed for non-competitive cooperative gameplay. I think there is something about the traditional linear progression seen in WoW or EQ that interferes with conflict. Adding player conflict to that kind of game will either result in a lack of consequence, or very harsh penalties for dying. EvE probably did this right by almost completely removing the traditional character build and progression element.

Unfortunately the idea that conflict is for bastards, tends to attract real bastards who use the mechanics of a game to act like jerks. There is a difference between killing someone for the purpose of a game objective, and killing someone with the purpose of trying to make the opponent miserable.
If we have more high quality competitive MMOs, players may get a more relaxed view of conflict, and thus less griefing and less real bastards.

 

[Locutus9956]

I wouldnt touch wow etc. with yours but Eve interested me for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article. Having said that the idea of playing and the act of playing were poles apart. It just felt like a second job without the pay, having to log in at set times to change skills, mining, etc.

Painful.

QFT man

Eve sounds great on paper and as a concept its superb but theres just too many things that are just not implemented in a way thats FUN for me to ever really get into it and believe me I've tried

 

[Ford-Prefect]

I am a veteran of Eve and often a victim, but I can understand the true adrenaline fix you can get when the stakes are high having experienced it, I have also experienced the crushing losses you can incur which can equate into real time losses.

I think that a deeper player interaction can only be a good thing for an MMO, if anything its the only true meaning of an MMO. With that I do feel their is a role for the bastard or evil player but often the game mechanics are in their favour.


1) Multiple character and accounts undermine any possible game inflicted consequences. In Eve if you kill lot of players you get negative standing and can't enter high sec systems. That isn't a problem as you have another character that can and you can freely trade with them.

Another aspect while you are camping that gate you other account is mining, trading building in high security space essentially funding you illegal behaviour. This anonymity reduces the effectiveness of player lead consequences. You corner a pirate in a station, they log out and into a different character and does some mining or something else. They can play the game while you stare at a station.

Essentially this point means that for players to stem the tide of crime they have to dedicated themselves to it. Where as the criminal can choose when and where they strike.

2) Risk assessment, nearly every MMO I have played has a means to establish how much better or poorer another player is compared to you. Level 5 versus 60. Ships they are flying etc. Eve actually does something to hide this fact but you don't require a great deal of experience to see that its a tech 2 frigate (and therefore what skills are required to fly it).

Again another mechanic that puts the lawful at a disadvantage, any thief, murderer, mugger worth his salt will pick out the weak and the easy. Why are pensioners and teenagers biggest victims of muggings? Because they are perceived as weaker I can't think of an MMO I have played where I can't tell my opponents abilities, at the very least have a decent understanding of my chances.

This all boils down to Risk-Reward importantly the perception of risk and reward. Two players can look upon an identical situation and have a differing Reward/Risk value. The more game mechanics make this ratio clearer the more it will encourage optimal behaviour, i.e killing noobs, camping spawns etc.

The whole point is that this freedom in MMO must come at a price I would suggest that ways to pay for this price are single account-character presence, the world is persistent so why should you the player not be? (Okay you might want to have multiple characters just have a penalty in swapping, i.e you can only log in to a different character every 24 or 12 hours).

Remove mechanisms that easily identify players abilities, even allow for decoys and false information. How about a replica Excalibur everyone knows that sword is powerful and by extension its wielder so I buy a plastic one people might think twice about kicking my lvl 1 arse, equally calling your bluff can be interesting. My point here is let player infer risk from the environment and interaction with other players. Ultimately make the player conflict just as uncertain for all parties involved then at least you really have to be committed to been a bastard.

 

[Strazdas]

MMOs need less bastards. i dont know what kind of games you play but the earliers graphical mmo "tibia" (that came couple months before ultima online and is still working) is really full of it. you cant go a coupel hours without somone randomly killing you because "their bored". same goes for eve, peopel find enormous amount of ways to kill you bending the rules. it really is amazing.
ofc if you play wow you may say that, but wow players are the whole other race and arent really human to begin with.

Tibia was like that at first. Ultima's bastard son, seeing as it was made by a bunch of german dudes using the a modified ultima 6 engine.

Exept that tibia got there for online gameplay before. UO was already in the making by then though so could say they are brothers.

. Everyone is saying Eve! Eve! Eve! in the comments, but that's akin to saying we never needed another FPS after Doom. Yeah, I get it, Eve offers many of the freedoms I'm looking for, but trust me, freedom isn't the only important factor of gameplay when I'm looking at what to spend time with.

Eve is fun if you let it be fun. yes eve is not the only game like that and its not the only one we need. but eve is the biggest, most known game that does that, and as far as MMOs goes it is pretty darn unique.

 

[Arppis]

The biggest problem with games like these is the levels. Why shouldn't I be able to kill a warrior in his platemail with my rogue who doesn't have any armor? Instead make the combat more dynamic and action oriented to show real skill. Then I might consider playing. Too bad people still have this notion that levels are somehow needed and must have in games. They aren't.

 

[Mike Fang]

A lot of what this guy said makes sense. There's a real feeling of accomplishment if you manage to succeed at a genuine challenge and not just some artificial scenario that's practically designed to be beaten. Getting to beat a challenge that actually takes some forethought and cleverness, as opposed to just going through the motions that you know will inevitably lead to victory.

Hampering players from harming one another is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it prevents griefing and harassing, but on the other it also prevents true conflict from developing, and that takes away a lot of the challenge in a game. Now there's no doubt nobody likes getting one-shot by some asshole 40 times as powerful as you, but at the same time, you do have to accept that sometimes it will happen if you're to have the same personal freedoms. As Ben Franklin said "People who sacrifice freedom for personal safety deserve neither."

 

[Zakarath]

Don't worry, I'm not going to brain you with a mace... I'm just going to give you a broadside of six 1400mm artillery cannons in the middle of high-security space. Sure, the police will kill me, but by then it will be too late for you.

(Like everyone else, I'm talking about EVE.)

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

...the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world ...No one would accept the program ...

Over 12 million subscribers for WOW alone can hardly be considered a "no one accepting the program" occurrence.

I think the initial UO's system punishes players too much. Against a fully equipped warrior all a wizard had to do was cast paralysis and then spam fireballs... The funny thing is: a wizard risks nothing, but the reagents carried. A warrior risks everything, since a poorly equipped warrior is simply a poor warrior.

I agree with most of what you said, but I think that resource gathering should be made less tedious in that case. In UO you could literally spend weeks upon weeks mining for the best ore to make a full armor set, only for it to be taken away in few swift seconds by a PK'ing wizard.

The mining and crafting used in UO is a highly redundant system. It's tedious and mechanical, thus feels more like an actual mechanical job akin to pushing crates in a warehouse.

"Firefall" approaches this problem in a very clever manner. You have mining pods that you need to protect before the excavation is completed. Which already is a lot more fun than just clicking on rocks whole day long.

I would suggest another approach: engineering. Let players design and build their own mining installations, such as mining shafts. The said installations would then have to be outfitted with defenses against invaders, making it into a tower defense mini-game, essentially.

Automating production would be done in the same manner, minus the tower defense element possibly (it really depends on how much freedom in shaping the world you're willing to give to the player).

P.S.: yes, I do realize the whole world was macroing itself out of this kind of misery in UO, but what's the point, really? It's not much of a game if it's playing itself. In that way it's more close to an economic simulator than a game.

EDIT: spelling mistakes.

 

[bjj hero]

Don't worry, I'm not going to brain you with a mace... I'm just going to give you a broadside of six 1400mm artillery cannons in the middle of high-security space. Sure, the police will kill me, but by then it will be too late for you.

(Like everyone else, I'm talking about EVE.)

As The Duke of Wellington said in Blackadder:

"Real men fight with cannons!"

Why would you use any other weapon in EVE when you can have cannons?

 

[Mike Kayatta]

...the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world ...No one would accept the program ...

I think the initial UO's system punishes players too much. Against a fully equipped warrior all a wizard had to do was cast paralysis and then spam fireballs... The funny thing is: a wizard risks nothing, but the reagents carried. A warrior risks everything, since a poor equipped warrior is simply a poor warrior.

Yeah, I don't think UO was perfect or anything (though I will counter that the reagents needed to make spells to whack a good warrior were rare and expensive), my main complaint is that they nerfed the game's philosophy instead of working on balancing and refining it. I think gameplay adjustments could have been made that wouldn't have restricted free will. Remember, it's still a very old game by today's standards (and the technology and experience guiding WoW). I just want to see this idea used as the skeletal structure of a well-designed experience. I'm not claiming that by extension of allowing freedom you magically have a good product.

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

Yeah, I don't think UO was perfect or anything (though I will counter that the reagents needed to make spells to whack a good warrior were rare and expensive), my main complaint is that they nerfed the game's philosophy instead of working on balancing and refining it. I think gameplay adjustments could have been made that wouldn't have restricted free will. Remember, it's still a very old game by today's standards (and the technology and experience guiding WoW). I just want to see this idea used as the skeletal structure of a well-designed experience. I'm not claiming that by extension of allowing freedom you magically have a good product.

That was kind of my point, actually. I wasn't implying that you were putting UO on a pedestal of any kind. Still the truth is much closer to UO than to your everyday modern "mumorpuger". I actually don't even remember when I last had fun in a MMORPG. I remember UO for its incredible freedom and I remember "Ragnarok Online" for its novelty back in the days when the market wasn't flooded by bad korean diablo-clones. As of today, it's nothing substantial, just bells and whistles.

 

[Crystalgate]

Despite all the good points (and some bad ones as well), I think it all boils down to whether you want the kind of interaction present in the old UO. I suspect that most players simple don't want it, no matter how deep such a system becomes.

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

Despite all the good points (and some bad ones as well), I think it all boils down to whether you want the kind of interaction present in the old UO. I suspect that most players simple don't want it, no matter how deep such a system becomes.

They wouldn't mind it if getting items would be a lot easier, or at least a lot less tedious. I surely wouldn't and I myself quit UO because I was constantly getting killed by paralyzing wizards and deadly poisoning thieves.

 

[Sean Deli]

There is a fundamental problem with free-PVP sandboxes.
They encourage teamplay so strongly, that a person becomes virtually helpless alone. A team of friends will be stronger than a team of random strangers, more so than just a lone stranger. Meaning - they require a lot of dedication.

People, who mentioned Eve in this thread, should know the term "alarmclock ops". It's when players HAVE to wake up in the middle of the night (thus "alarmclock") or take sick leave from dayjob to protect some ingame asset. In its peaks Eve takes up as much time as a full fledged hobby, just without anything to show for it. Actually, scratch that - noone can spend as much time in a gym, or playing footbal, or even painting WH40k minis as a hardcore Eve-player spends playing Eve. Not humanly possible.

Sandboxes not only eat your time, they eat it anytime they like.
Again, several times Eve have been reffered as "your second job you have to pay for" by players. I quit it when I understood, I will literally never forgive myself all the time I've spent on it.

But that doesn't mean I don't play games anymore. I play games, that I can turn on for 2 hours, play and turn off after that.
Eve, good-old-competitive-PVP-boost-your-killboard Eve, just does not work that way.

 

[tetron]

Free world games like those have always failed and always will. That's because of the general attitude of the MMORPG player. They're more similar to farmville players but also screw that crappy facebook pos. I'll play a game that actually had developers. Not to mention that games with their fun based on the community typically have small communities. The largest community game I've played that had a free world style was Anarchy Online, game was great and fun but leveling was usually done in a group with one horribly twinked dps and a non grouped level capped healer making them immortal.

Nobody wants to deal with other players and their general asshole-ness because all you want to do while you're leveling is level. Modern MMOs are all about the grinding, if you want a break from that you que for a dungeon or a battleground. People want to be able to go to the danger, they don't want it springing up around them with a trollface and a "U mad son ?"

People who want danger typically play fps and moba style games. People who play games like WoW usually just wanna sit back and grind and/or socialize.