It is a full loot system. Players drop everything when they die. If you die to a PK, they will loot everything. If you die to a monster, most likely they will just destroy everything. Gold coins are physical items ( like UO)... so any gold you have on you drops.
Full loot pvp?
Even with PK penalty, I doubt you will get much business. You will lose most players if you don't have an option. I suppose you are not shooting for the masses, but you want to at least recoup your investment right?
Well.. EvE works just well with full loot and/or full/partial destruction. It really depends on how the game, the economy, and gear is set up. And actually if your game should focus on economy, gathering, crafting it does better have item decay/destruction... and one way is when you get killed either from mobs or players (like EvE).
Without any decay/destruction you should not bother with crafting or economy.. and just make another raiding game aka WoW and Diablo.. games you like Nariu, but not everyone.
when you say "work just well", you mean "work just well" for only half a mil of players after so many many years of release.
There are certainly a lot more people who like WoW and Diablo, compared to Eve, so yeah ... if a dev want Eve numbers, go for FFA pvp. If a dev wants real success (heck, how about just GW2 or TOR level of financial success), give players an option.
Your arguement is flawed as always. A lot of developers tried WoW like game.. and most made not those 500k ppl.. to to take that EvE is long running. A one hit wonder is a one hit wonder.,. and not a trend and not legitimacy. But don't bother to reply.. i really don't care.
Generally speaking, I like the concept. You CAN do this...but you have to deal with the consequences.
However, on a side note, I fear your death penalty might be abit too much depending on how your stat system affects game play, especially with PVP. With a long duration penalty like that you will have much with the rage-quiting or people who die just log out til its over so that can do stuff...although I would lean more towards the rage quit. Perma-death sounds less annoying than this.
Just to point out, the death penalty is NOT 20% loss of skills for 12 hours, it is 20% lower skill gains. Your character does not become weaker after you die. For many players, 20% will not even be noticeable within the normal RNG of skill gains. You probably don´t want to smelt rare ore while you are under it´s effect, but certainly normal mob killing or even gathering would barely be effected by it. Skill gains for new players, especially on a server with experienced players is pretty fast, so even with the debuff they are still going to gain skills fast.
Also, and I don´t want to get into this too much. But our stamina/energy system is set up to where escaping death, even against a PK isn´t overwhemingly difficult. We want death to be meaningful and suck... but a part of that is finding a balance with a couple other things. The first is if you get into a decent fight with a mob, but things start to turn against you.. you should have time, and the abilities to create a situation where you can escape that combat once you feel you are going to lose. Also, combat against a single target will last longer than games like WOW or UO. In UO, a PK could ride in off screen, nail you with an ebolt for half your life, and once that hally-swing came, you were dead. Our combat is designed to be slower, which makes the ´surprise´ advantage of being a PK much less.
Generally speaking, I like the concept. You CAN do this...but you have to deal with the consequences.
However, on a side note, I fear your death penalty might be abit too much depending on how your stat system affects game play, especially with PVP. With a long duration penalty like that you will have much with the rage-quiting or people who die just log out til its over so that can do stuff...although I would lean more towards the rage quit. Perma-death sounds less annoying than this.
Just to point out, the death penalty is NOT 20% loss of skills for 12 hours, it is 20% lower skill gains. Your character does not become weaker after you die. For many players, 20% will not even be noticeable within the normal RNG of skill gains. You probably don´t want to smelt rare ore while you are under it´s effect, but certainly normal mob killing or even gathering would barely be effected by it. Skill gains for new players, especially on a server with experienced players is pretty fast, so even with the debuff they are still going to gain skills fast.
Also, and I don´t want to get into this too much. But our stamina/energy system is set up to where escaping death, even against a PK isn´t overwhemingly difficult. We want death to be meaningful and suck... but a part of that is finding a balance with a couple other things. The first is if you get into a decent fight with a mob, but things start to turn against you.. you should have time, and the abilities to create a situation where you can escape that combat once you feel you are going to lose. Also, combat against a single target will last longer than games like WOW or UO. In UO, a PK could ride in off screen, nail you with an ebolt for half your life, and once that hally-swing came, you were dead. Our combat is designed to be slower, which makes the ´surprise´ advantage of being a PK much less.
Apologies, I misread that. I do like where you are going with the second paragraph.
when you say "work just well", you mean "work just well" for only half a mil of players after so many many years of release.
There are certainly a lot more people who like WoW and Diablo, compared to Eve, so yeah ... if a dev want Eve numbers, go for FFA pvp. If a dev wants real success (heck, how about just GW2 or TOR level of financial success), give players an option.
It really depends on our goals and our costs. But I think the last 8 years have taught everyone that you aren´t going to be WOW just by making your game as close to WOW as possible. There are certainly things we learned from WOW, and I am still an active WOW player and love the game.. but it is foolish to just design your game based on what they did.
I don´t want to derail my own thread.. but if you think TOR was more successful than EVE, you might need a calculator. TOR cost between 300-500M ( depending on what is included) and is barely profitable on a month-to-month bases now. That 300M is long gone and not coming back. Imagine spending $100,000 to build a restaurant, and then have $200 in sales each day, and your food and labor is $190. Sure you are profitable, but that $100,000 could have been used somewhere else. Eve was basically a garage job with very little upfront costs that was always profitable. Right now, EVE and TOR are probably equally profitable on a month-to-month basis, the big difference is that TOR had to spend 300M to get there, EVE didn´t.
We joke all the time about our goals for $uccess of our project... but I think EVE would be the very upper end of our dreams, as it should be for any indie developer.
We have been talking today. One thing I am surprised about with this thread is that nobody has talked about the maze, which I think is a cool idea ( ok, it was mine, so yeah).. i think it adds a neat twist to have to ´escape´ as a PK and avoid hunters.
The thing we talked about today was the penalty for being a mass-pk. In our current system, nothing really escalates except your time being red, and well, if you are playing red, you probably want to be red, so adding on more time to the end doesn´t do much.
So an idea we are toying with today is that your murder count affects your time to respawn in the middle of the maze, this of course would give the hunters more time to organize before you could start escaping. Maybe 15 seconds per murder count.
It really depends on our goals and our costs. But I think the last 8 years have taught everyone that you aren´t going to be WOW just by making your game as close to WOW as possible. There are certainly things we learned from WOW, and I am still an active WOW player and love the game.. but it is foolish to just design your game based on what they did.
I don´t want to derail my own thread.. but if you think TOR was more successful than EVE, you might need a calculator. TOR cost between 300-500M ( depending on what is included) and is barely profitable on a month-to-month bases now. That 300M is long gone and not coming back. Imagine spending $100,000 to build a restaurant, and then have $200 in sales each day, and your food and labor is $190. Sure you are profitable, but that $100,000 could have been used somewhere else. Eve was basically a garage job with very little upfront costs that was always profitable. Right now, EVE and TOR are probably equally profitable on a month-to-month basis, the big difference is that TOR had to spend 300M to get there, EVE didn´t.
TOR made more than $200M in 2013 ... given that rate, it is breaking even in 1.5 years ($300M cost), a fantastic short period of time, and everything beyond is gravy.
It as the same number of sub of Eve, and it took much less time to achieve, and it makes lots more money via F2P cash shop.
And if TOR is not your cup of tea ... take LoL, or WoT, or even GW2. All are much more successful, in much shorter period of time. Eve is a slow moving niche game that most devs are not trying to recreate.
Your arguement is flawed as always. A lot of developers tried WoW like game.. and most made not those 500k ppl.. to to take that EvE is long running. A one hit wonder is a one hit wonder.,. and not a trend and not legitimacy. But don't bother to reply.. i really don't care.
GW2 is successful. GW1 is successful. TOR made >$200M in 2013. LoL and WoT are hugely successful.
But yea, Eve is a one hit wonder ... Dust 514 did not fly, and WoD got cancelled. So not even CCP can do much beyond a slow and limited niche MMO like Eve.
From a realistic point of view, your plan to announce the PKer's location/fort location seems pre-mature. How does everyone in the city know where this guy is? 90% chance that anyone bored will show up and wipe it clean making defense pointless. At least make them "look" for it. (I'm not even pro-pk or pvp and I think this).
Forts are forts. You can´t just show up and burn one down with a few players. Players and NPCs within a fort get a huge advantage.
To give rough numbers, skills being equal.
A player is 10x stronger than an NPC follower ( we are the heroes, they are the grunts)
A player or NPC inside a fort is 10x stronger than a player on the ground outside
This means that if you have 10 NPCs inside your fort, they will be able to cause big headaches for 10 players trying to burn down the fort. The attacking players would constantly have to retreat to heal, which gives the NPCs time to put out the fires. If you have more NPCs inside the fort than players attacking, the damage would be very minor. The NPCs could easily repair it, but it would cost the Red player resources. The red would have to be extremely notorious, and the attacking players would have to extremely outnumber the NPCs for serious damage to be done to the fort, and as long as the Red had resources stored, the damage would be repaired when the attackers leave.
Also, the world is big, even with coordinates.. a group would have to be very motivated to seek out that reds fort.
I don´t like bounty systems because they are exploited. You get your friend to kill you and split the reward.
Allowing PKing ( player killing) to happen in a MMORPG is a serious decision. There are usually two problems. First is that the PK usually has initiative, and secondly usually can avoid difficult sheep. Using UO as a reference... a PK would ride onto the screen with a precast ebolt and basically kill a fairly defenseless miner without any real threat. But the real problem came with the punishments ( changes to gameplay) that resulted in being Red, or should I say, the lack of much of any punishment. In early UO, it was just too easy, and too much fun to be Red.
As I am working my way through design docs for a new open world game. We have come to the issue of PKing. We absolutely, definitely want PKing to be an option. But at the same time, we want the game to be more of a cooperative survival game where players band together against an unrelenting environment. In that vein, we want to make life hard on PKs.
A couple quick systems we have in place that relate to our PK punishment system. The first is that any death, by any means results in a 20% reduction in skill gains for 12 hours. This stacks with multiple deaths, and 12 hours get tacked on. So if you die, and then 30 minutes later die again, you have 23.5 hours of 40% reduced skill gain. Death is meaningful, but at the same time combat is slow, and there are plenty of stuns/roots available to help you get away from a losing battle. PVE fights are slower than typical MMOs, where a slightly challenging mob may take 45 seconds to kill. In other words, even if you are losing badly halfway through the fight, you still have time to stun/root and get away.
The other significant thing is that our game is one character per server. This is mainly done to make crafting more meaningful, but also it makes PK punishments more meaningful also. In UO in the early days, almost everyone had a red on their account, which meant there were just too many of them in the world.
So here is out thought process of things that happen when you kill another player.
First, you will have to toggle-on pking. Once you push the button, any damage you do can hit other players. This expires after 30 minutes if you have not damaged another player. Other players will not know you toggled.
As soon as you kill another player, a shout goes out throughout the capital city with your name. Your character gets tinted red to other players and your fortress sign (housing) gets painted red. In the capital city, your name gets posted along with the coordinates to your fortress on a bulliten board, but there is no bounty system ( too easy to exploit). Each murder results in 15 days of being red. Once you are red, ANY time you kill another player results in 15 more days being added to the timer, this includes killing players who attack you first. As mentioned, there are plenty of stuns and roots which make it fairly easy to avoid killing a player.
You no longer have access to the city and the contents of your bank are confiscated ( players have storage in their fortress, city banks are only really used by homeless people and for storing some gear for post-rez). So it is fairly easy to empty your bank before going Red.
Housing works a little different. A big part of our game is building fairly disposible fortresses, and then gradually migrating your fortress further from the city. Monsters continually attack your fortresses, so you keep henchmen and followers inside to protect it and repair. Every few months you will be moving to a more dangerous area and building a bigger fortress. If a fortress is owned by a PK, other players can use fire and other means to help destroy the fortress. Once a fortress is destroyed, the henchman can be killed and the players stash looted. Completely destroying a fortress is a huge undertaking, but just damaging/burning it will result in substantial costs to the PK. It would take a handful of players about a day to completely burn down even a small fortress, and during that time they would be taking damage from the henchmen inside. The fortress of a one-time PK would probably be ignored for the most part, but a notorious PK would probably have teams of other players trying to root them out of their fortress.
The final piece would be ressing. All normal players rez at the temple in the city. Upon death, all items are lost ( the reason you want to keep backup armor in the bank). The game is crafting based, so losing armor/weapons is not a huge deal because gear has limited durability anyway. For PKs, they do not rez at the shrine (since they are barred from the city anyway). PKs rez at the center of the Maze of the Damned, an underground maze located under the city. The maze has one entrance/exit that is located just out the city. The maze also has 2 other exits that bring players to the forest just outside the city, those two are one way exits and allow the PK to escape the maze without using the visable entrance.. When a PK dies, a shout is given within the city announcing that justice has been brought to the PK.and the PK rezzes at the center of the maze. The PK of course will be in nothing but death robes. If players are in the city, and want to react, they can go and enter the maze from the outside entrance. The PK will need to find his way out of the maze, and avoid other players who may have entered the maze after hearing the city shout. Stealth is a trainable skill in the game ( and probably a good one to train if you know you will be pking), and also there are unarmed stuns and roots that will allow the PK to possibly get away even if they are found by a PK-hunter. The PK will need to find one of the 3 exits, and maybe be forced to skip the main exit if they believe that PK-hunters are waiting outside. The other two exits will be uncampable since PK-hunters will not know where they exit at..
Of course there is a possibility that a PK gets killed in the maze, and then the PK hunters make their way to the middle of the maze and camp the shrine, but that is all a part of PKing. The other thing we think could happen is that a handful of PKs work together. A group of them wait inside the entrance to the maze, then one of them gets killed on purpose, and then they slaughter the would-be PK-hunters as they enter the maze. We think there is a lot of gameplay in how the maze gets used. Also, we already have plans to alter the maze fairly regularly so that maps don´t appear outside the game.
This is our plans so far, what do you think?.. Before you say it
Without any other punishments or restrictions, PK-hunters alone are not enough to limit PKing. Just turning them red and kicking them out of town is not enough. Yes, there were PK-hunters in UO, but they weren´t a deterent at all. The costs of having your fortress burned and a small risk of having it completely destroyed, along with the very real possibility of suffering multiple and stackable -20% skill debuffs should really scare away people from PKing on a server with 1 character per account.
OP i would just like to comment on one thing you said early in your post, and it is in regards to pvp. here is what you said.
" and there are plenty of stuns/roots available to help you get away from a losing battle. "
Now this is somthing i have seen alot in pvp and why i think pvp in general has become even more of a gank fest than before. You are putting in plenty of stuns/roots thinking that this will help a player " get away " when all your doing is making sure he is royally screwed.
most pvp in a game isnt a fair 1v1 most pvp happens when the attackers are favored meaning at least 2v1, so 2 people with double the roots/stuns to make sure that one guy doesnt get away is whats really going to happen. not the other way around.
less CC means guys can actually get away from a battle if being ganked, other wise they are a pinata till death.
There are no battlegrounds or any instanced pvp of that sort, it just doesn´t fit into the world. It is very much a survival world where people are struggling to get a foothold. The game launches with a strong central leader, but factions may develop over time, but nothing to the point where there would be major war between the factions.
It is a PvE game through and through, but we do think PKs, especially ones who are played as murderers (and not just griefers) bring a lot to the game. We kinda want to get to where PKs are famous, and people know where they are, which UO had a little of... but really get away from just some guy randomly killing new players and miners just to be a jerk and then macroing off his hours inside his house where nobody can get to him.
As LIzard said it's pretty much go all the way or nothing if you're going for true PKers, anything else will be seen by the PVP community as restrictive to their preferred style of play. That's a headache you don't want if you're striving to offer a true PVE experience. A better alternative would be a TEF based opt in system like SWG had. It's the best of both worlds, PVE players do not have to partake, yet those who want PVP can do so any where at any time.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
If you want to "fix" PK systems, don't try it with punishments. Many have tried, and all of them have failed.
They have failed at least partially because they never made those punishments harsh enough. Why don't people kill each other in the streets (most of the times... =P) in "real world"? Because of the utterly harsh punishment resulting from it.
"In the real world" I'd like to believe most people do the right thing because it is the right thing to do (and right way to live) not because they would get punished if they didn't.
...or is it just me? Do I need to be worried?
Well, lets imagine a real life situation:
In some place in the world 100 ppl live without any organized law, all do the right things because its the right thing to do, but some day 10 decide to annoying others for fun. We still can say that most ppl do the right things... but we all know whats going to hapened to that 100 ppl.
That's not a real life situation. It's an imaginary situation with ideal conditions to support your point.
Quirhid is right about human development though. By about the age of 10 or so most humans understand "the rules" and are either following the rules because it's a better system, or ignoring the rules because they don't care. Punishment exists to illustrate where the lines are that people shouldn't cross, but punishment isn't the reason that most people follow the rules.
If we look at an actual real world situation, like the Wild West, and look at history instead of television shows and movies we find that most people did follow the rules, even though there was little or no law at most times. Most people carried guns, but they were for defense against critters, not people. Even Dodge City had very few murders, including gun fights. Far less than 10% of the average human population runs around "griefing" people.
The problems with games is that like your imaginary situation above, the scenarios and environments aren't real, and do not have all of the conditions that have developed over thousands of years that humans use to moderate their behavior. In the real world you won't punch more than a couple people in the face before your hand breaks, regardless of what happens to the people you punch. Stabbing people generally ends your game right there. Regardless of how a game is setup and regardless of the rules that are in place, it just isn't going to work like the real world, so any attempt at trying to moderate player behavior "like the real world" isn't going to work. Players will repeatedly show you all the holes in any system you setup to moderate their behavior.
In Eve a bunch of players decided that they were going to grief miners on a regular basis. Eve isn't generally known for this, but the rules of the game that make a large part of the game play possible also make this possible. CCP had the appropriate response. They accepted it. I think the OP's game, if it comes to the world will face a similar scenario. If the rules of the game making "griefing" possible, then it will happen and the people who play the game and who run the game either have to accept it or give up on the other aspects of the game that depend on the same mechanics.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
What stops people from burning down your fortress while you're offline? And if that can happen, then what will happen is not notorious PKers having their fortress burned down so much as big guilds forming and going around burning down fortresses of random newbies.
OP i would just like to comment on one thing you said early in your post, and it is in regards to pvp. here is what you said.
" and there are plenty of stuns/roots available to help you get away from a losing battle. "
Now this is somthing i have seen alot in pvp and why i think pvp in general has become even more of a gank fest than before. You are putting in plenty of stuns/roots thinking that this will help a player " get away " when all your doing is making sure he is royally screwed.
most pvp in a game isnt a fair 1v1 most pvp happens when the attackers are favored meaning at least 2v1, so 2 people with double the roots/stuns to make sure that one guy doesnt get away is whats really going to happen. not the other way around.
less CC means guys can actually get away from a battle if being ganked, other wise they are a pinata till death.
Great point and I agree completely. First a general comment. 2v1 is never going to be fair. The balance is that the PKs are getting half the loot and double the punishment.
Now about stuns and roots. When we started messing around with PvE combat, we really wanted to get away from the WOW model of ´rotations´.. where you automatically clicked your 4 spells in the same order every time and for best results needed to have your next spell queued before you even started the animation for your last spell. We wanted a system where you had to wait and see the result of one attack before you could best choose what to do next. We lengthened the GCD and put the feedback more into the middle of the attack so that players would have .5 to 1.0 seconds to interpret what happened before they could even queue the next attack. You are still going to have your ´ideal´ rotation, but every few attacks will have a fork where you will have to decide what to do. This is another reason we wanted to stretch 1v1 fights out to 30-45 seconds because it makes combat a little more like a chess match rather than spamming 1,2,3,4 in 12 seconds to kill an average mob.
So a big part of the forks are going to be stuns, and the length of stuns. In order to provide forks, there will be attacks that generally run the gamet of %damage vs stun duration. One attack may do 50% damage and provide a 2 sec stun, another attack does 0 damage but a 6 sec stun. And then within that, there is a % chance to miss. The skill system and our study system really plays into this. But as far as combat, if you hit with a stun, you then could follow-up with the big ´ high damage, high miss chance´ attack, because your chance to miss would be mostly removed vs a stunned target, or against humanoids go for a disarm.
So with all that in mind, the final piece is simply resource management. Stunlocking a mob, and definitely another player, is not a good thing to have happen... so the solution is pretty simple, stuns, especially longish stuns eat up a huge part of your resources. If a single PK comes up to you, you can hit him with an 8-sec stun with a 100% hit rate, but the only thing you can do after that is run away. If that same PK comes up to you and hits you with the 8-sec stun, he will stand there and look at you for 8 seconds, and when the stun is over, he is defenseless. You stick a dagger in his foot so he can´t run away, and then have at it.
There really isn´t a solution for 2v1 because there shouldn´t be. All things being equal, two monsters, or two players of equal level should have a good chance to kill a single player. The world we are creating is low magic, but we are thinking of adding something craftable, but expensive that you could use as an AOE stun in emergencies. I am not convinced it is needed.
If you want to "fix" PK systems, don't try it with punishments. Many have tried, and all of them have failed.
They have failed at least partially because they never made those punishments harsh enough. Why don't people kill each other in the streets (most of the times... =P) in "real world"? Because of the utterly harsh punishment resulting from it.
"In the real world" I'd like to believe most people do the right thing because it is the right thing to do (and right way to live) not because they would get punished if they didn't.
...or is it just me? Do I need to be worried?
Well, lets imagine a real life situation:
In some place in the world 100 ppl live without any organized law, all do the right things because its the right thing to do, but some day 10 decide to annoying others for fun. We still can say that most ppl do the right things... but we all know whats going to hapened to that 100 ppl.
That's not a real life situation. It's an imaginary situation with ideal conditions to support your point.
Quirhid is right about human development though. By about the age of 10 or so most humans understand "the rules" and are either following the rules because it's a better system, or ignoring the rules because they don't care. Punishment exists to illustrate where the lines are that people shouldn't cross, but punishment isn't the reason that most people follow the rules.
If we look at an actual real world situation, like the Wild West, and look at history instead of television shows and movies we find that most people did follow the rules, even though there was little or no law at most times. Most people carried guns, but they were for defense against critters, not people. Even Dodge City had very few murders, including gun fights. Far less than 10% of the average human population runs around "griefing" people.
The problems with games is that like your imaginary situation above, the scenarios and environments aren't real, and do not have all of the conditions that have developed over thousands of years that humans use to moderate their behavior. In the real world you won't punch more than a couple people in the face before your hand breaks, regardless of what happens to the people you punch. Stabbing people generally ends your game right there. Regardless of how a game is setup and regardless of the rules that are in place, it just isn't going to work like the real world, so any attempt at trying to moderate player behavior "like the real world" isn't going to work. Players will repeatedly show you all the holes in any system you setup to moderate their behavior.
In Eve a bunch of players decided that they were going to grief miners on a regular basis. Eve isn't generally known for this, but the rules of the game that make a large part of the game play possible also make this possible. CCP had the appropriate response. They accepted it. I think the OP's game, if it comes to the world will face a similar scenario. If the rules of the game making "griefing" possible, then it will happen and the people who play the game and who run the game either have to accept it or give up on the other aspects of the game that depend on the same mechanics.
I disagree about the society thing. If you think if all police and punishment went out the door that most societies would colapse on themselves... eh.
I fully believe that you need players to be able to police themselves beyond might makes right. If you rob a players of two hours of their time mining you should face the same amount of lost time. In most games you're just killed and respawn in no time. You kill and rob 8 more people and by the time your brought down you've just made 8x over the stuff you lose dying.
Now if you get slapped in jail and you're account is locked to that character it makes a difference. Even if you have more then one account you still can't kill or face the same treatment. It also makes the community want to be more involved. Its tough getting motivated to protect those who can't if the perps are right back over and over and over. That's why I support a system of locking players up who kill outside of the desired bounds.
You could have NPC guards or NPC bounty hunters of varying skill roam the lands, searching for PKs, if you want to create a sense of danger without a bounty system being exploitable.
This is the exact solution I had thought of, but also having PKing increase the death penalty somehow (drop more items or w/e is appropriate for your game).
Originally posted by Azrile
We lengthened the GCD and put the feedback more into the middle of the attack so that players would have .5 to 1.0 seconds to interpret what happened before they could even queue the next attack.
I'm really curious about this. What exactly do you mean by feedback in the middle of the attack? The attack goes off/lands half way through the animation or what?
If you want to "fix" PK systems, don't try it with punishments. Many have tried, and all of them have failed.
They have failed at least partially because they never made those punishments harsh enough. Why don't people kill each other in the streets (most of the times... =P) in "real world"? Because of the utterly harsh punishment resulting from it.
"In the real world" I'd like to believe most people do the right thing because it is the right thing to do (and right way to live) not because they would get punished if they didn't.
...or is it just me? Do I need to be worried?
Well, lets imagine a real life situation:
In some place in the world 100 ppl live without any organized law, all do the right things because its the right thing to do, but some day 10 decide to annoying others for fun. We still can say that most ppl do the right things... but we all know whats going to hapened to that 100 ppl.
That's not a real life situation. It's an imaginary situation with ideal conditions to support your point.
Yes, and if i read again what i wrote i find the world "imagine", was a example to use in my point. Is it wrong?
Quirhid is right about human development though. By about the age of 10 or so most humans understand "the rules" and are either following the rules because it's a better system, or ignoring the rules because they don't care. Punishment exists to illustrate where the lines are that people shouldn't cross, but punishment isn't the reason that most people follow the rules.
Right, i use a imagination situation where only 10% need rules.... dont get it your point.
If we look at an actual real world situation, like the Wild West, and look at history instead of television shows and movies we find that most people did follow the rules, even though there was little or no law at most times.
.... right. "real world situation" ?? and the history of wild west? really?
Most people carried guns, but they were for defense against critters, not people.
...yeah sure.
Even Dodge City had very few murders, including gun fights. Far less than 10% of the average human population runs around "griefing" people.
10% was a example, it can be 1% or even 0,1%, still work in my imaginary situation to explan a point.
My god, i dont want to convert this discuss in to a political history thing, but you bring the history of wild west as a example how we dont need rules because everyone is nice and know how to behave? this must be a really bad joke.
Originally posted by Quizzical What stops people from burning down your fortress while you're offline? And if that can happen, then what will happen is not notorious PKers having their fortress burned down so much as big guilds forming and going around burning down fortresses of random newbies.
Only the fortresses of reds can be burned down by players. Even reds cannot burn down the fortresses of other players.
Normal players fortresses can only be destroyed by AI attacks, but a huge part of the gameplay is to avoid that happening. You avoid your fortress being destroyed by clearing out the terrain around your fortress ( regularly sweeping caves, dungeons, AI forts and other spawn points for mobs). Another big part of gameplay is your troops. If you don´t clear out AI, they will form warbands and attack your fortress, at which point your troops will fight from within. Warbands attack if you are online or offline, the idea is to have your fort strong enough, with enough troops, and enough training of your troops to easily handle the types of mobs that would be coming from your location.
Basically the flow for protecting your fortress goes like this
1. As a player, clear out dungeons, caves and major spawn points near your fortress. Take special care to periodically wipe out any humanoid creatures living near you. Over the course of a few weeks, if you and other players keep killing the ogres in a cave, the ogres will leave and that cave will be filled with a non-intelligent type of creatures that do not form warbands. When you have basically reduced everything in your vicinity to spawning baby spiders, it is time to move your Fort further from the city into more dangerous areas. but first.
until that is accomplished, clear you vicinity as much as possible. The more you clean out humanoids, the less frequent, and smaller their warbands will be.
2. Collect resources and set your followers to increase the defensive value of your fort. Your followers work 24/7 with whatever tasks you set to them. One possible task is ´fortification´ which simply means they will keep using resources to make your fort stronger. Every follower has at least 3 skills, and possible more. The 3 skills that every NPC has are Archery, melee and fortificaion.
So, you failed to clear out an ogre cave, the ogre #s have grown and they have formed a warband that is about to attack your fort. Your NPCs have been hard at work though, and the defensive value of your fort is at 200
3. Warband attack phase1. The ogres attack your fort with fire. fire graduatlly reduces the defensive value of your fort. From 100% to 50%, your fort is totally secure. So your fort with 200 defense would have to go to 100 before the next step happens. But while your fort is above 50%, your NPCs use the archery skill against the ogres. The effectivness of this varies based on your NPCs.. all of them have the archery skill, and it will raise during this phase. Part of the decision on when it is time to move your fort to more dangerous areas is getting enough followers, and getting their archery skill up. If you are ingame you can control your actions during the attack, either by attacking with archery (best idea) or having fun and going outside the fort to play around. If you your logged off, but you logged off inside your fort (best idea) then your character will fight alongside your NPCs, but as I mentioned earlier, your character is 10x´s the strength of NPCs. This makes it a huge advantage in this fight, even if you aren´t logged in your character will crush the ogres.
4. Once your fort gets to 50%, the ogres are able to penetrate at places. This is very limited, however, and the ogres continue to focus on destroying your fort until it gets to 25%. The difference in this phase is that your troops are now forced to confront the ogres using melee attacks. This entire phase should never happen unless you, and your neighbors have been very negligent at clearing out the caves around you and/or you do not have enough followers. Under almost all normal situations, your NPCs should kill the ogres well before the fort gets to 50%.
5. Once the fort hits 25%, the next phase begins. This is the downward spiral. During the 100-50% phase, your NPCs are effectively 10x stronger because of fighting from on top of the fort. Now that the ogres are in the fort, your NPCs lose that advantage. Ogres also now begin engaging your NPCs directly. Dead NPCs are lost forever
6. If the Ogres get your fort to 0%, the fort is destroyed along with anything you were storing in it. If the ogres are destroyed, your NPC followers will go back to doing what they were doing, some fortifiying your fortress.
That is basically the simplied version of how the game works. As a player, your longterm goal is to keep moving your fortress into new, dangerous and unexplored areas of the map and secure that area before pushing further. For the most ambitious and intelligent players, we are designing that to happen about once a month. But it will depend on your actions and who comes with you. There is also some RNG involved with what spawns. You may move into a valley and find a type of monster living in a cave that you can´t easily sweep out.. so you will have to play defensively with your fort, maybe hire more NPCs until you have a few weeks to raise your skills enough to where you can control the spawn points around you.
We lengthened the GCD and put the feedback more into the middle of the attack so that players would have .5 to 1.0 seconds to interpret what happened before they could even queue the next attack.
I'm really curious about this. What exactly do you mean by feedback in the middle of the attack? The attack goes off/lands half way through the animation or what?
Of course. Think of it this way, I will use WOW as an example. WOW has a 1.5s GCD. Every melee animation takes 1.5s to occur ( or faster with rogues and cat druids and also with players where haste effects GCD.
So let´s do a 1 second GCD to make it easier. Everything needs to happen in 1.0s
You push a button to attack something. For WOW, at about the .7s mark of the animation, the sword actually touches the NPC, the other .3s is the backswing, or the completion of the loop. The point of contact occurs past the halfway point of the GCD.
Now the thing in WOW is that you can ( and should) queue your next attack. The queue time ( I believe, could be wrong) is .5 seconds before the end of the GCD. In other words, before your first attack has reached the target ( at .7s) if you hit another key, that new attack will queue and fire as soon as the first GCD is finished.
Pushskill1
.5 second later Pushskill2
.2 seconds later skill 1 strikes target
.3 seconds later animation complete for skill 1, skill2 animation begins
Even if the queue started exactly at the point where the weapon meets the target, your brain would still need time to process the feedback. It is why some specs, especially rogues, feel very ´mashy´.. You are stringing together so many GCDs without ever reacting to any of your attacks.
Where we are at is a 2.5s GCD, with the animation and feedback coming before the halfway point, and before you can queue your next abiltiy.
Push skill 1
1 second later sword hits target, SFX fires and target reacts to the hit.
.5 seconds later player can queue ability2
1 second later, animation for ability1 ends, animation for abiltiy2 begins.
You basically have 1.5 seconds AFTER the swords hits the mob to make your choice for ability2 without losing any DPS. In WOW, the only way you can react to one of your attacks is if you delay the second GCD, which is a DPS loss.
If you want to "fix" PK systems, don't try it with punishments. Many have tried, and all of them have failed.
They have failed at least partially because they never made those punishments harsh enough. Why don't people kill each other in the streets (most of the times... =P) in "real world"? Because of the utterly harsh punishment resulting from it.
"In the real world" I'd like to believe most people do the right thing because it is the right thing to do (and right way to live) not because they would get punished if they didn't.
...or is it just me? Do I need to be worried?
Well, lets imagine a real life situation:
In some place in the world 100 ppl live without any organized law, all do the right things because its the right thing to do, but some day 10 decide to annoying others for fun. We still can say that most ppl do the right things... but we all know whats going to hapened to that 100 ppl.
That's not a real life situation. It's an imaginary situation with ideal conditions to support your point.
Yes, and if i read again what i wrote i find the world "imagine", was a example to use in my point. Is it wrong?
Quirhid is right about human development though. By about the age of 10 or so most humans understand "the rules" and are either following the rules because it's a better system, or ignoring the rules because they don't care. Punishment exists to illustrate where the lines are that people shouldn't cross, but punishment isn't the reason that most people follow the rules.
Right, i use a imagination situation where only 10% need rules.... dont get it your point.
If we look at an actual real world situation, like the Wild West, and look at history instead of television shows and movies we find that most people did follow the rules, even though there was little or no law at most times.
.... right. "real world situation" ?? and the history of wild west? really?
Most people carried guns, but they were for defense against critters, not people.
...yeah sure.
Even Dodge City had very few murders, including gun fights. Far less than 10% of the average human population runs around "griefing" people.
10% was a example, it can be 1% or even 0,1%, still work in my imaginary situation to explan a point.
My god, i dont want to convert this discuss in to a political history thing, but you bring the history of wild west as a example how we dont need rules because everyone is nice and know how to behave? this must be a really bad joke.
Anyway, my post ends here.
You created an imaginary scenario, called it a real world scenario, which would not occur in the real world and which did not apply to the game the OP is talking about working on. The difference between the Western United States in the late 1800s and very early 1900s was that the "Wild West" actually existed, and illustrates actual human behavior in an environment that was inherently harsh (game's survival setting), and which had few, if any rules. Most punishers were inherent in the acts themselves. Punch people in the face and your hand breaks pretty quickly. Pull your gun and people around you pull their gun and then the game is over. A "Wild West" scenario also illustrates the very big difference between trying to create a scenario in a video game that is inherently unreal and the real world. In a video game it's never really game over. Your character will never permanently cripple their hand removing their ability to draw a weapon.
What was your point again? That some people will misbehave without rules in place? Of course they will. Some people will misbehave with rules in place. Some people will misbehave with rules in place and extreme punishments in place for breaking the rules.
If the game mechanics required for accepted activities make griefing possible, then the OP will need to accept that the griefing is going to happen, and get over it. It doesn't matter what kind of punishments are in place, unless the griefing is made impossible, some players are going to do it. There will be a higher rate of malcontents in a video game because the environment does not reinforce the rules very well.
Finally, has anyone notice that when some posters have little to say, rather than say something and be done, they break apart the post they are responding to to make it look like they are saying more than they are saying? Is that just me?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Now if you get slapped in jail and you're account is locked to that character it makes a difference. Even if you have more then one account you still can't kill or face the same treatment. It also makes the community want to be more involved. Its tough getting motivated to protect those who can't if the perps are right back over and over and over. That's why I support a system of locking players up who kill outside of the desired bounds.
To me that has always seemed like the most effective solution to this 'problem'. Unfortunately there are very few PvPers who are hardcore enough to want to play under that kind of system.
Finally, has anyone notice that when some posters have little to say, rather than say something and be done, they break apart the post they are responding to to make it look like they are saying more than they are saying? Is that just me?
I was going to reply to him, but decided against it because it would've derailed the thread somewhat. He really didn't say anything worthwhile in his last post.
It was a feeble attempt to dis you. But I'm sure he walked away from the keyboard thinking "Man, am I awesome or am I awesome?"
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Now if you get slapped in jail and you're account is locked to that character it makes a difference. Even if you have more then one account you still can't kill or face the same treatment. It also makes the community want to be more involved. Its tough getting motivated to protect those who can't if the perps are right back over and over and over. That's why I support a system of locking players up who kill outside of the desired bounds.
To me that has always seemed like the most effective solution to this 'problem'. Unfortunately there are very few PvPers who are hardcore enough to want to play under that kind of system.
I know this has been asked a million times before but if you have to enforce such harsh punishments, why allow PK in the first place?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
I know this has been asked a million times before but if you have to enforce such harsh punishments, why allow PK in the first place?
This is still in the early stages, and we definitely have disagreement within our group. The common sense answer ( esp for a small dev team ) is why spend time developing a system that you hope will be used by a very small group of players and will probably require a lot of vigilence on the part of the devs. The other part, sorry for $$ talk, but then there is the debate whether potential players will trust you that the devs can really keep PKing minimalized and as a fringe activity. A lot of players will see ´pk and full loot´ and they will never read another thing, no matter how much dev time you spend making it extremely punitive, those words anywhere on your website will cost you a lot of players.
The reason why to do it? Because if you can tune it, and you can keep it on the fringes, it adds a lot of gamplay. And many of us have already seen it. There were sweet spots in the history of UO where they had Pking as a positive part of the game. You didn´t have bands of PKs killing newbs right outside of town, but you did get the bonuses that PKs bring. Unpredictable danger and the organic growth of dangerous areas of the map, where PKs live or like to hang out. Even if the punishment is so harsh that nobody ever goes red, the choice of it being there is a big turn-on for a lot of open world, sandbox players. Telling someone that you ´cannot do this in this game´ is a lot worse than saying ´you can do it, but here is the laundry list of consequences´....
Now if you get slapped in jail and you're account is locked to that character it makes a difference. Even if you have more then one account you still can't kill or face the same treatment. It also makes the community want to be more involved. Its tough getting motivated to protect those who can't if the perps are right back over and over and over. That's why I support a system of locking players up who kill outside of the desired bounds.
To me that has always seemed like the most effective solution to this 'problem'. Unfortunately there are very few PvPers who are hardcore enough to want to play under that kind of system.
If the only people who don't play are the people who aren't going to follow the rules with the spirit of the game in mind, wouldn't that mean the method was successful?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Comments
Your arguement is flawed as always. A lot of developers tried WoW like game.. and most made not those 500k ppl.. to to take that EvE is long running. A one hit wonder is a one hit wonder.,. and not a trend and not legitimacy. But don't bother to reply.. i really don't care.
Just to point out, the death penalty is NOT 20% loss of skills for 12 hours, it is 20% lower skill gains. Your character does not become weaker after you die. For many players, 20% will not even be noticeable within the normal RNG of skill gains. You probably don´t want to smelt rare ore while you are under it´s effect, but certainly normal mob killing or even gathering would barely be effected by it. Skill gains for new players, especially on a server with experienced players is pretty fast, so even with the debuff they are still going to gain skills fast.
Also, and I don´t want to get into this too much. But our stamina/energy system is set up to where escaping death, even against a PK isn´t overwhemingly difficult. We want death to be meaningful and suck... but a part of that is finding a balance with a couple other things. The first is if you get into a decent fight with a mob, but things start to turn against you.. you should have time, and the abilities to create a situation where you can escape that combat once you feel you are going to lose. Also, combat against a single target will last longer than games like WOW or UO. In UO, a PK could ride in off screen, nail you with an ebolt for half your life, and once that hally-swing came, you were dead. Our combat is designed to be slower, which makes the ´surprise´ advantage of being a PK much less.
Apologies, I misread that. I do like where you are going with the second paragraph.
~I am Many~
It really depends on our goals and our costs. But I think the last 8 years have taught everyone that you aren´t going to be WOW just by making your game as close to WOW as possible. There are certainly things we learned from WOW, and I am still an active WOW player and love the game.. but it is foolish to just design your game based on what they did.
I don´t want to derail my own thread.. but if you think TOR was more successful than EVE, you might need a calculator. TOR cost between 300-500M ( depending on what is included) and is barely profitable on a month-to-month bases now. That 300M is long gone and not coming back. Imagine spending $100,000 to build a restaurant, and then have $200 in sales each day, and your food and labor is $190. Sure you are profitable, but that $100,000 could have been used somewhere else. Eve was basically a garage job with very little upfront costs that was always profitable. Right now, EVE and TOR are probably equally profitable on a month-to-month basis, the big difference is that TOR had to spend 300M to get there, EVE didn´t.
We joke all the time about our goals for $uccess of our project... but I think EVE would be the very upper end of our dreams, as it should be for any indie developer.
We have been talking today. One thing I am surprised about with this thread is that nobody has talked about the maze, which I think is a cool idea ( ok, it was mine, so yeah).. i think it adds a neat twist to have to ´escape´ as a PK and avoid hunters.
The thing we talked about today was the penalty for being a mass-pk. In our current system, nothing really escalates except your time being red, and well, if you are playing red, you probably want to be red, so adding on more time to the end doesn´t do much.
So an idea we are toying with today is that your murder count affects your time to respawn in the middle of the maze, this of course would give the hunters more time to organize before you could start escaping. Maybe 15 seconds per murder count.
TOR made more than $200M in 2013 ... given that rate, it is breaking even in 1.5 years ($300M cost), a fantastic short period of time, and everything beyond is gravy.
It as the same number of sub of Eve, and it took much less time to achieve, and it makes lots more money via F2P cash shop.
And if TOR is not your cup of tea ... take LoL, or WoT, or even GW2. All are much more successful, in much shorter period of time. Eve is a slow moving niche game that most devs are not trying to recreate.
GW2 is successful. GW1 is successful. TOR made >$200M in 2013. LoL and WoT are hugely successful.
But yea, Eve is a one hit wonder ... Dust 514 did not fly, and WoD got cancelled. So not even CCP can do much beyond a slow and limited niche MMO like Eve.
Forts are forts. You can´t just show up and burn one down with a few players. Players and NPCs within a fort get a huge advantage.
To give rough numbers, skills being equal.
A player is 10x stronger than an NPC follower ( we are the heroes, they are the grunts)
A player or NPC inside a fort is 10x stronger than a player on the ground outside
This means that if you have 10 NPCs inside your fort, they will be able to cause big headaches for 10 players trying to burn down the fort. The attacking players would constantly have to retreat to heal, which gives the NPCs time to put out the fires. If you have more NPCs inside the fort than players attacking, the damage would be very minor. The NPCs could easily repair it, but it would cost the Red player resources. The red would have to be extremely notorious, and the attacking players would have to extremely outnumber the NPCs for serious damage to be done to the fort, and as long as the Red had resources stored, the damage would be repaired when the attackers leave.
Also, the world is big, even with coordinates.. a group would have to be very motivated to seek out that reds fort.
I don´t like bounty systems because they are exploited. You get your friend to kill you and split the reward.
OP i would just like to comment on one thing you said early in your post, and it is in regards to pvp. here is what you said.
" and there are plenty of stuns/roots available to help you get away from a losing battle. "
Now this is somthing i have seen alot in pvp and why i think pvp in general has become even more of a gank fest than before. You are putting in plenty of stuns/roots thinking that this will help a player " get away " when all your doing is making sure he is royally screwed.
most pvp in a game isnt a fair 1v1 most pvp happens when the attackers are favored meaning at least 2v1, so 2 people with double the roots/stuns to make sure that one guy doesnt get away is whats really going to happen. not the other way around.
less CC means guys can actually get away from a battle if being ganked, other wise they are a pinata till death.
As LIzard said it's pretty much go all the way or nothing if you're going for true PKers, anything else will be seen by the PVP community as restrictive to their preferred style of play. That's a headache you don't want if you're striving to offer a true PVE experience. A better alternative would be a TEF based opt in system like SWG had. It's the best of both worlds, PVE players do not have to partake, yet those who want PVP can do so any where at any time.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
That's not a real life situation. It's an imaginary situation with ideal conditions to support your point.
Quirhid is right about human development though. By about the age of 10 or so most humans understand "the rules" and are either following the rules because it's a better system, or ignoring the rules because they don't care. Punishment exists to illustrate where the lines are that people shouldn't cross, but punishment isn't the reason that most people follow the rules.
If we look at an actual real world situation, like the Wild West, and look at history instead of television shows and movies we find that most people did follow the rules, even though there was little or no law at most times. Most people carried guns, but they were for defense against critters, not people. Even Dodge City had very few murders, including gun fights. Far less than 10% of the average human population runs around "griefing" people.
The problems with games is that like your imaginary situation above, the scenarios and environments aren't real, and do not have all of the conditions that have developed over thousands of years that humans use to moderate their behavior. In the real world you won't punch more than a couple people in the face before your hand breaks, regardless of what happens to the people you punch. Stabbing people generally ends your game right there. Regardless of how a game is setup and regardless of the rules that are in place, it just isn't going to work like the real world, so any attempt at trying to moderate player behavior "like the real world" isn't going to work. Players will repeatedly show you all the holes in any system you setup to moderate their behavior.
In Eve a bunch of players decided that they were going to grief miners on a regular basis. Eve isn't generally known for this, but the rules of the game that make a large part of the game play possible also make this possible. CCP had the appropriate response. They accepted it. I think the OP's game, if it comes to the world will face a similar scenario. If the rules of the game making "griefing" possible, then it will happen and the people who play the game and who run the game either have to accept it or give up on the other aspects of the game that depend on the same mechanics.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Great point and I agree completely. First a general comment. 2v1 is never going to be fair. The balance is that the PKs are getting half the loot and double the punishment.
Now about stuns and roots. When we started messing around with PvE combat, we really wanted to get away from the WOW model of ´rotations´.. where you automatically clicked your 4 spells in the same order every time and for best results needed to have your next spell queued before you even started the animation for your last spell. We wanted a system where you had to wait and see the result of one attack before you could best choose what to do next. We lengthened the GCD and put the feedback more into the middle of the attack so that players would have .5 to 1.0 seconds to interpret what happened before they could even queue the next attack. You are still going to have your ´ideal´ rotation, but every few attacks will have a fork where you will have to decide what to do. This is another reason we wanted to stretch 1v1 fights out to 30-45 seconds because it makes combat a little more like a chess match rather than spamming 1,2,3,4 in 12 seconds to kill an average mob.
So a big part of the forks are going to be stuns, and the length of stuns. In order to provide forks, there will be attacks that generally run the gamet of %damage vs stun duration. One attack may do 50% damage and provide a 2 sec stun, another attack does 0 damage but a 6 sec stun. And then within that, there is a % chance to miss. The skill system and our study system really plays into this. But as far as combat, if you hit with a stun, you then could follow-up with the big ´ high damage, high miss chance´ attack, because your chance to miss would be mostly removed vs a stunned target, or against humanoids go for a disarm.
So with all that in mind, the final piece is simply resource management. Stunlocking a mob, and definitely another player, is not a good thing to have happen... so the solution is pretty simple, stuns, especially longish stuns eat up a huge part of your resources. If a single PK comes up to you, you can hit him with an 8-sec stun with a 100% hit rate, but the only thing you can do after that is run away. If that same PK comes up to you and hits you with the 8-sec stun, he will stand there and look at you for 8 seconds, and when the stun is over, he is defenseless. You stick a dagger in his foot so he can´t run away, and then have at it.
There really isn´t a solution for 2v1 because there shouldn´t be. All things being equal, two monsters, or two players of equal level should have a good chance to kill a single player. The world we are creating is low magic, but we are thinking of adding something craftable, but expensive that you could use as an AOE stun in emergencies. I am not convinced it is needed.
I disagree about the society thing. If you think if all police and punishment went out the door that most societies would colapse on themselves... eh.
I fully believe that you need players to be able to police themselves beyond might makes right. If you rob a players of two hours of their time mining you should face the same amount of lost time. In most games you're just killed and respawn in no time. You kill and rob 8 more people and by the time your brought down you've just made 8x over the stuff you lose dying.
Now if you get slapped in jail and you're account is locked to that character it makes a difference. Even if you have more then one account you still can't kill or face the same treatment. It also makes the community want to be more involved. Its tough getting motivated to protect those who can't if the perps are right back over and over and over. That's why I support a system of locking players up who kill outside of the desired bounds.
This is the exact solution I had thought of, but also having PKing increase the death penalty somehow (drop more items or w/e is appropriate for your game).
I'm really curious about this. What exactly do you mean by feedback in the middle of the attack? The attack goes off/lands half way through the animation or what?
Yes, and if i read again what i wrote i find the world "imagine", was a example to use in my point. Is it wrong?
Right, i use a imagination situation where only 10% need rules.... dont get it your point.
.... right. "real world situation" ?? and the history of wild west? really?
...yeah sure.
10% was a example, it can be 1% or even 0,1%, still work in my imaginary situation to explan a point.
My god, i dont want to convert this discuss in to a political history thing, but you bring the history of wild west as a example how we dont need rules because everyone is nice and know how to behave? this must be a really bad joke.
Anyway, my post ends here.
Only the fortresses of reds can be burned down by players. Even reds cannot burn down the fortresses of other players.
Normal players fortresses can only be destroyed by AI attacks, but a huge part of the gameplay is to avoid that happening. You avoid your fortress being destroyed by clearing out the terrain around your fortress ( regularly sweeping caves, dungeons, AI forts and other spawn points for mobs). Another big part of gameplay is your troops. If you don´t clear out AI, they will form warbands and attack your fortress, at which point your troops will fight from within. Warbands attack if you are online or offline, the idea is to have your fort strong enough, with enough troops, and enough training of your troops to easily handle the types of mobs that would be coming from your location.
Basically the flow for protecting your fortress goes like this
1. As a player, clear out dungeons, caves and major spawn points near your fortress. Take special care to periodically wipe out any humanoid creatures living near you. Over the course of a few weeks, if you and other players keep killing the ogres in a cave, the ogres will leave and that cave will be filled with a non-intelligent type of creatures that do not form warbands. When you have basically reduced everything in your vicinity to spawning baby spiders, it is time to move your Fort further from the city into more dangerous areas. but first.
until that is accomplished, clear you vicinity as much as possible. The more you clean out humanoids, the less frequent, and smaller their warbands will be.
2. Collect resources and set your followers to increase the defensive value of your fort. Your followers work 24/7 with whatever tasks you set to them. One possible task is ´fortification´ which simply means they will keep using resources to make your fort stronger. Every follower has at least 3 skills, and possible more. The 3 skills that every NPC has are Archery, melee and fortificaion.
So, you failed to clear out an ogre cave, the ogre #s have grown and they have formed a warband that is about to attack your fort. Your NPCs have been hard at work though, and the defensive value of your fort is at 200
3. Warband attack phase1. The ogres attack your fort with fire. fire graduatlly reduces the defensive value of your fort. From 100% to 50%, your fort is totally secure. So your fort with 200 defense would have to go to 100 before the next step happens. But while your fort is above 50%, your NPCs use the archery skill against the ogres. The effectivness of this varies based on your NPCs.. all of them have the archery skill, and it will raise during this phase. Part of the decision on when it is time to move your fort to more dangerous areas is getting enough followers, and getting their archery skill up. If you are ingame you can control your actions during the attack, either by attacking with archery (best idea) or having fun and going outside the fort to play around. If you your logged off, but you logged off inside your fort (best idea) then your character will fight alongside your NPCs, but as I mentioned earlier, your character is 10x´s the strength of NPCs. This makes it a huge advantage in this fight, even if you aren´t logged in your character will crush the ogres.
4. Once your fort gets to 50%, the ogres are able to penetrate at places. This is very limited, however, and the ogres continue to focus on destroying your fort until it gets to 25%. The difference in this phase is that your troops are now forced to confront the ogres using melee attacks. This entire phase should never happen unless you, and your neighbors have been very negligent at clearing out the caves around you and/or you do not have enough followers. Under almost all normal situations, your NPCs should kill the ogres well before the fort gets to 50%.
5. Once the fort hits 25%, the next phase begins. This is the downward spiral. During the 100-50% phase, your NPCs are effectively 10x stronger because of fighting from on top of the fort. Now that the ogres are in the fort, your NPCs lose that advantage. Ogres also now begin engaging your NPCs directly. Dead NPCs are lost forever
6. If the Ogres get your fort to 0%, the fort is destroyed along with anything you were storing in it. If the ogres are destroyed, your NPC followers will go back to doing what they were doing, some fortifiying your fortress.
That is basically the simplied version of how the game works. As a player, your longterm goal is to keep moving your fortress into new, dangerous and unexplored areas of the map and secure that area before pushing further. For the most ambitious and intelligent players, we are designing that to happen about once a month. But it will depend on your actions and who comes with you. There is also some RNG involved with what spawns. You may move into a valley and find a type of monster living in a cave that you can´t easily sweep out.. so you will have to play defensively with your fort, maybe hire more NPCs until you have a few weeks to raise your skills enough to where you can control the spawn points around you.
Of course. Think of it this way, I will use WOW as an example. WOW has a 1.5s GCD. Every melee animation takes 1.5s to occur ( or faster with rogues and cat druids and also with players where haste effects GCD.
So let´s do a 1 second GCD to make it easier. Everything needs to happen in 1.0s
You push a button to attack something. For WOW, at about the .7s mark of the animation, the sword actually touches the NPC, the other .3s is the backswing, or the completion of the loop. The point of contact occurs past the halfway point of the GCD.
Now the thing in WOW is that you can ( and should) queue your next attack. The queue time ( I believe, could be wrong) is .5 seconds before the end of the GCD. In other words, before your first attack has reached the target ( at .7s) if you hit another key, that new attack will queue and fire as soon as the first GCD is finished.
Pushskill1
.5 second later Pushskill2
.2 seconds later skill 1 strikes target
.3 seconds later animation complete for skill 1, skill2 animation begins
Even if the queue started exactly at the point where the weapon meets the target, your brain would still need time to process the feedback. It is why some specs, especially rogues, feel very ´mashy´.. You are stringing together so many GCDs without ever reacting to any of your attacks.
Where we are at is a 2.5s GCD, with the animation and feedback coming before the halfway point, and before you can queue your next abiltiy.
Push skill 1
1 second later sword hits target, SFX fires and target reacts to the hit.
.5 seconds later player can queue ability2
1 second later, animation for ability1 ends, animation for abiltiy2 begins.
You basically have 1.5 seconds AFTER the swords hits the mob to make your choice for ability2 without losing any DPS. In WOW, the only way you can react to one of your attacks is if you delay the second GCD, which is a DPS loss.
You created an imaginary scenario, called it a real world scenario, which would not occur in the real world and which did not apply to the game the OP is talking about working on. The difference between the Western United States in the late 1800s and very early 1900s was that the "Wild West" actually existed, and illustrates actual human behavior in an environment that was inherently harsh (game's survival setting), and which had few, if any rules. Most punishers were inherent in the acts themselves. Punch people in the face and your hand breaks pretty quickly. Pull your gun and people around you pull their gun and then the game is over. A "Wild West" scenario also illustrates the very big difference between trying to create a scenario in a video game that is inherently unreal and the real world. In a video game it's never really game over. Your character will never permanently cripple their hand removing their ability to draw a weapon.
What was your point again? That some people will misbehave without rules in place? Of course they will. Some people will misbehave with rules in place. Some people will misbehave with rules in place and extreme punishments in place for breaking the rules.
If the game mechanics required for accepted activities make griefing possible, then the OP will need to accept that the griefing is going to happen, and get over it. It doesn't matter what kind of punishments are in place, unless the griefing is made impossible, some players are going to do it. There will be a higher rate of malcontents in a video game because the environment does not reinforce the rules very well.
Finally, has anyone notice that when some posters have little to say, rather than say something and be done, they break apart the post they are responding to to make it look like they are saying more than they are saying? Is that just me?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
To me that has always seemed like the most effective solution to this 'problem'. Unfortunately there are very few PvPers who are hardcore enough to want to play under that kind of system.
I was going to reply to him, but decided against it because it would've derailed the thread somewhat. He really didn't say anything worthwhile in his last post.
It was a feeble attempt to dis you. But I'm sure he walked away from the keyboard thinking "Man, am I awesome or am I awesome?"
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I know this has been asked a million times before but if you have to enforce such harsh punishments, why allow PK in the first place?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
This is still in the early stages, and we definitely have disagreement within our group. The common sense answer ( esp for a small dev team ) is why spend time developing a system that you hope will be used by a very small group of players and will probably require a lot of vigilence on the part of the devs. The other part, sorry for $$ talk, but then there is the debate whether potential players will trust you that the devs can really keep PKing minimalized and as a fringe activity. A lot of players will see ´pk and full loot´ and they will never read another thing, no matter how much dev time you spend making it extremely punitive, those words anywhere on your website will cost you a lot of players.
The reason why to do it? Because if you can tune it, and you can keep it on the fringes, it adds a lot of gamplay. And many of us have already seen it. There were sweet spots in the history of UO where they had Pking as a positive part of the game. You didn´t have bands of PKs killing newbs right outside of town, but you did get the bonuses that PKs bring. Unpredictable danger and the organic growth of dangerous areas of the map, where PKs live or like to hang out. Even if the punishment is so harsh that nobody ever goes red, the choice of it being there is a big turn-on for a lot of open world, sandbox players. Telling someone that you ´cannot do this in this game´ is a lot worse than saying ´you can do it, but here is the laundry list of consequences´....
If the only people who don't play are the people who aren't going to follow the rules with the spirit of the game in mind, wouldn't that mean the method was successful?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.