Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
What happened to the pvp flag?
Jemcrystal
Member UncommonPosts: 1,988
Did I miss something? I remember mmorpg's back when they were all pve and everyone said, "Lets make it so we can kill each other instead of these boring predictable mobs!" I was with them in this voice. Did not see the downside at that time. Then world pvp came and more than half hated it because it kept interrupting their quests. Or troll gang bang groups formed so no one could do content. Then we said, "Lets have a flag. If my flag is turned on I'm ready to pvp. If my flag is off I am questing leave me alone." And someone else said, "Let's just give pvp it's own instanced zone(s) far away from the rest of us pve'ers." The instanced zone won obviously (which now causes the problem of constant pvp skill balancing nerfs for all players even those who pve - ruining some pve builds to keep pvp happy - but that's another subject). But what happened to flagging? What was the down side and why is it not used in mmorpg's anymore? Or was world pvp flagging ever implemented in any game at all?
Comments
Large zones where you go PVP when you feel like it beats flagging all to hell.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Trouble is, every approach considered has pluses and minuses in terms of costs and successfulness.
As mentioned above, flagging systems have been abused, due to an inherent design flaw or sloppy coding, I don't know.
I recall in Vanilla WOW playing on a PVE server once and almost no one ever flagged and the few who did usually just got ganked by someone turning on their flag just to catch them unawares.
Perhaps a timer could be required, where you had to wait some period of time before you could initiate a fight.
Still would have drawbacks, especially to those who enjoying ganking and remember, they're paying customers too.
Hard to keep it fun for everyone, we all have our favorite system.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
But the acronym MMMORPG now currently means Microscopic Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Kappa.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I don't really mind that the flagging system was abused sometimes. I believe it was in World of Warcraft, but some quests automatically flagged you for PvP I believe. People would be waiting to take advantage and kill you. This actually broke up the monotony of questing a bit.
I can see the appeal of instanced PvP as it's safe and setups up goals for people to achieve. Most people seem to get lost without some type of obvious goal laid out for them. That is why we end up with all these fairly dull (IMO) static quests.
No group of devs has EVER been able to design a system that covers all the angles. Once 500K players are let loose in the game, the loopholes are found quickly. Plugging all those holes is a never easy, and by the time some of them are "fixed", a whole chunk of players have already left in disgust.
How do you prevent an unflagged player from scouting for a group of flagged players ?
The more complex the rules become, the greater the chance of someone finding a way to exploit them, or to to "meta-game the system" in unforeseen ways.
Can you clarify and go into detail of how the flagging system was abused?
But the acronym MMMORPG now currently means Microscopic Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Kappa.
They could also pull mob trains on people while unflagged. Bard in EQ was famous for it because you couldn't be eligible for PVP until level 10 and he stayed forever at level 9. (not a flagging system but same concept)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
If I recall correctly (I played the game for a few years after it's initial release) there were some quests in World of Warcraft that were just like any other PvE quest you would do. You were sent to kill a mob, but at a certain point, you would be automatically flagged for PvP. People from the opposite faction new this and would wait around for an easy kill.
Dueling is still fun IMO. Not everyone is max level with the best build and equipment. It is also isn't a competition that is recorded for prestige. It is more of an activity for fun.
I remember flagging systems leading to lots of trashtalking and harassment. The pvp gankers would often troll pve parties by sending one seemingly weak flagged person to annoy the unflagged group by kill stealing, ninja looting their kills, insulting their mothers etc. Eventually the pve party has enough of this and decides they will kill this idiot. That's when almost an entire raidgroup of that idiot's higher leveled, pvp-geared friends show up and easily wipe out the entire unsuspecting pve party and act like it was a major accomplishment.
I also remember how there were glitches like if you used an aoe heal near someone who was flagged for pvp you would get flagged because you healed them (and then invariably you got ganked for it).. Hardly a challenge but anything to pad their kill count and try to look impressive to the other pvp trolls I suppose.
Another common thing was to hang out in a newbie area to trick newbies into flagging so they could be easily ganked. There were so many underhanded ways I remember that the ganker trolls would use to kill players that I can't list them all here.
The reason for this in the servers with flagging (called "carebear" servers at the time by some of the pvp'ers) was that most of these games also had a hardcore server with everyone permanently flagged for pvp. Those servers were where most of the good pvp'ers who enjoyed a real challenge went.
The normal flagged pvp servers were where the players who sucked at pvp and couldn't win unless they had overwhelming numbers or used dirty tricks would go to kill pve players who had very little interest in pvp. There they were mostly safe from any real skilled pvp'ers who could easily wipe their entire big ganking group with just a few people (unless the game was overly balanced to where only number of people matters in pvp of course).
That unflagged status they hated so much and called people "carebears" for using became convenient to them when they would encounter actual skilled pvp'ers who could destroy their entire ganking group. Then they stayed unflagged and called the good pvp'ers who pwned them a bunch of cheaters (in a not-so-nice way) and went on forums later and whined about how 'unbalanced' and 'unfair' the pvp is...
Anyway, that's how I remember the bad parts of flagged pvp.
Zone-based pvp is probably the best compromise so long as those zones can be completely avoided by pve players and not include parts of their main quests. Otherwise you can almost count on the ganker trolls hanging out at the pvp zone borders waiting for weaker pve groups or solo players to enter for their quests.
Open world pvp is also fine since it only attracts players who want to do pvp all the time. Ganker trolls tend to avoid these games since they lack the talent to be any good there (aka, they can't get way more kills than deaths easily so they brag about it and act like they are better than everyone else).
Although open world pvp games may be losing most of their player base because MOBAs put you right into evenly matched pvp without any of the hopeless low level, undergeared pve grinding in a hostile environment before you're able to actually compete.
Flagged pvp isn't entirely bad. Most people used it the way it was intended. What I described was how a minority of players (at the time, now likely the majority) would exploit the system to cause grief.
I've played and enjoyed flagged pvp games even with all the possible exploits. As others mentioned, the flag system makes it hard to prevent exploits and most developers are unwilling to put any time and effort into it.
Still.. I remember a lot of the early days of flagging and agree with several of the above posters, it was either relatively useless or too easy to abuse..
..because we're gamers, damn it!! - William Massachusetts (Log Horizon)
Once flagged you couldn't turn it off for 15min after, couldn't go into buildings etc....
I know there were a few times while minding my own business conducting war missions that I got my butt run over by the other side, but that was what playing in the war was about.
But there were those that whined and complained about it so it was done away with and replaced by just pvp zones.
SWG (pre-cu) - AoC (pre-f2p) - PotBS (pre-boarder) - DDO - LotRO (pre-f2p) - STO (pre-f2p) - GnH (beta tester) - SWTOR - Neverwinter
Many of those games force people to go in the pvp zones to get the best stuff.
The WAR system was interesting because it created level appropriate separate PvP areas that were literally one step away from the PvE areas.
That was the good part of the design. The bad part was also having instanced PVP battleground areas that you could queue for while playing in the non-instanced PvP areas. It was often ridiculous when a queue popped and half your army would disappear. All they needed to do was put restrictions on it and disable the queue while you were already flagged.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED