The following was posted on the Age of Conan forums by a user named Synthetic. The original post and thread can be found here and is quoted in its entirety.  I thought it did a good job of explaining some of the differences between blue and red (pve and pvp) players and why games need to provide a support structure for the non-pvpers, even when the game is “a pvp game.”

Why PvP must be regulated in modern MMO’s

With all the controversy in the player community over the new PvP Fugitive system, I’d like to add the input of a 10 year veteran to the MMO/PVP community.

In every MMO I’ve played, I’ve played on a PvP server because I am that type of player. From UO to EQ, DAoC, SB, Eve (I like 0.0 space :))..and yes even WoW. I’ve pvped in nearly every major MMO to date.

From years of experience, I can tell you that PVP Must be moderated by game mechanisms to keep the pvp system alive.

Now, although I’m opposed to PVP regulation of any kind, I do see its use in today’s MMO community.

The majority of players who makeup the community for games such as AoC are NOT PvP’ers by nature. In my research, I’ve found that hardcore PvPers make up a small percentage of player-base.

The majority of players are there to advance their character, get gear/cash and socialize. They like to PvP when they want to, or sometimes like World PVP for the danger.

These people keep the MMO alive. When these non-PvP centered players leave a game en-mass, it fails. Shadowbane and the DAoC PvP servers are a prime example of what happens when un-mitigated PvP is the game’s policy.

The majority of MMO players do not like being griefed, they don’t like being interrupted in the middle of a quest or raid, etc. Me, personally, I get pissed when I die in PVP, but I chalk it up to the fact I live on a PvP server, and I turn my anger into determination to exact revenge on the person. Not everyone is like this.

So you may ask yourself, how can I tell a PvPer from a non PvPer on a PVP server? Simple.. If you kill this person, and they send you hate mail/flames via /tell, you have killed a non-PvPer. People who play on PvP servers because they enjoy it will rarely bitch at you for killing them, even if you grief them. We know it just comes with the territory, and we make adjustments for that.

To validate my point, I’ll give you an example of the first instance of MMO PvP mitigation. Ultima Online was an awesome game for many years, and most of the people who played the game were computer geeks. Face it, UO started in the 90’s and was in its prime then. The people who played it were all D&D, or TextMUD veterans who liked the realistic environment of a world where you could kill anyone, anywhere. Just like real medieval life.

Fast forward a few years, what happened to UO once it became main stream? Normal people, i.e. people who had never been into the TextMUD or D&D seen start taking interest in this game.. and there are ALOT of them. They dislike the fact that they can be killed at anytime while mining, or hunting Wyrms or Lichs. So, Origin enacts the Facet system to please both sides of the community. UO had a PVP consequence system from the start.. kill someone and you get flagged grey for x amount of time, NPCs wont talk to you, and guards can be called on you. Also players can attack you in cities. Eventually, you become a murderer (flagged Red). You are KoS everywhere and people like to hunt you down.

Facets came into play, and now all the Red players are forced into the Felucca Facet, and all non-PvP people stay in Trammel. UO actually gained alot of strength after this system was enacted, because more normal players played the game.

Fast forward to Dark Ages of Camelot. Great game, and I believe the first MMO to utilize instanced dungeons and PvP battleground areas combined with elements of large-scale pvp battle. PvP server population was extremely high until the game got mainstream winds and when new MMO players were confronted with the reality of 24/7 un-mitigated PVP, they moved to blue servers. The PvP server population went so low they merged the servers together.

Move on to Shadowbane. Huge hype, alot of anticipation in the MMO community and it was very popular at first. Although Shadowbane failed due to more issues than just the PvP system, I believe the PvP had a large part to due with people’s intolerance for bugs and server issues. People realized they didn’t want to be ganked or robbed at any given time while camping a mob for a Discipline Rune, or while completing quests.

Come to modern day World of Warcraft. Love it or hate it, WoW is an extremely successful game. It combines alot of elements of modern MMO’s in a very good way. The WoW Battleground system is extremely popular in the game, as it allows players to PvP at their convenience. Also, the PvP servers in WoW are a bit.. lame for my tastes, but they run well with high populations. The system of Horde vs. Alliance helps to mitigate griefing and rampant PvP on these servers because it provides a system of checks and balances. And once again, even if you hate WoW you must admit it works.. 7million+ monthly subscribers world wide, last time I looked.. thats saying something.

This brings me to another point. World of Warcraft has brought the MMO to front of the media. It is because of WoW that the MMO industry is booming again and allows games like AoC to be developed and marketed effectively.

Also, you must remember that alot of people playing AoC are probably WoW veterans, and WoW may have been their first MMO experience.

Now we come to Age of Conan. So far, seems like a great game with a ton of potential for the future if it is tweaked right. Its doing a great job of providing all the fun elements of an MMO, even on the PvP servers. I think a fugitive system is the right direction for the PvP servers because it provides a safety net for those players who may play on a PvP server, but may not be totally committed PvP’ers. Having this system in place, if done correctly, will not ruin the game, but I think provide the PvP servers with more strength.

You PvP’ers may hate Carebears, I know I do, but face the facts.. they’re growing and they’re here to stay, and unless we can bring these players into the PvP realm and have them realize that it is enjoyable to be in World-PvP, us Hardcore-PVPers will eventually be extinct in the MMO realm. The only way to accomplish this is by providing them a gentle pillow to fall on in a game based on PvP combat.. that Pillow is the fugitive system (hopefully).

Man. Some of the bugs in Age of Conan are just downright stupid funny. In addition to a bug that reduced the breast size of female AoC avatars, there is also a bug (or code by design) that makes female avatars do less damage / DPS than male ones.

The following excerpt is from a post on Massively that details the status of a fix for this bug.

A few weeks back our own Adrian Bott took a close look at a very … unique … bug in Age of Conan. It seems that differing animation cycles in the game have resulted in an unforseen side effect: female avatars do less damage then male ones. At the time, the Funcom developers said they’d let us know as soon as they could about a fix. Today they let us know, but the news is mixed. The good news is that ’straight damage’ (what they call white damage) has been fixed. Simple autoattack routines use few animations and they’ve all been fixed and pushed to the live servers.

Too funny. What retarded shit will Age of Conan do next? Stay tuned to find out!

As much as it pains me to admit it, Hedron has been right about PvP and the MMO end-game for a long freaking time.

I’m not sure what game he was talking about at the time, but player vs player (PvP) interaction and combat is the best end-game possible for an MMO because it is always different and always smarter than a scripted and repetitive PvE encounter.

Maybe someday the PvPers will outnumber the PvEers and we’ll end up with a PvP game as entertaining as Ultima Online was when it first came out.

PVP IS the game by Hedron

THE GAME WILL DIE!

What you, and many others seeking to “balance” pvp in this game by limiting it fail to connect with (IMO) is that PVP IS the game.

The designers don’t seem to know this yet, and the newbie players don’t seem to know this yet. But I guarantee you it’s true.

When you’re maxxed, and at the top of the game, you WILL be bored by fighting the game. Right now, everyone is complaining about PVP because they just want to be left alone in peace to level up so they can max, and they don’t want to loose hard earned stuff to cheap kills. That’s FINE. But if your solution to allowing people to max without undue hassle makes it so that AFTER you max, PVP is still undesirable, then this game will DIE.

And NO, increasing the level cap is NOT the solution to keeping the game fun. When you’re at 50, you’re not going to want someone to push reset so that you have to climb another 25 levels doing the same boring crap you did to get to 50. You will have earned being king of the world, and you’ll like it that way. Maybe 2 years after you max, you’ll want more levels. Not before. What you’ll want to do as a 50th level player is fight other people, role play, help others, found a guild. And you’ll LOVE your time in game doing these things. Hell, you may even voluntarily start a new character and max it, but you’ll always have your level 50 stud to go back to, and you’ll love that fact.

But the problem with limiting PVP in ANY way is that everything about the game becomes less amusing if you can’t at level 50 just go out and fight some damn battles! Who wants to found a guild and fight a war with it, or help a group of newbies, or go on a killing rampage is the results of any of those things will be a significant, time consuming game set back. DON’T WE WANT TO HAVE FUN HERE?

Limit PVP and this game will die.

It’s a fact. Write it down so that if/when it happens, I can say I told you so way back when.

Everyone seems to think that the solution to solving PKs is to make PKing mean more, be more intense, etc. WRONG. The solution is to make it mean LESS! Take the profit motive out, take the loss of items out, and voila… pvp becomse a FUN aspect of the game rather than a chore.

Remember this is a game! What we all want to be able to do is to have fun and make progress. The reason that PVP impedes that right now is because it results in the loss of significant items, and doesn’t involve enough skill. I don’t want to play pass-the-potato with every good item on the server! I want to square off against people and fight them in a level playing field, and earn and lose BRAGGING RIGHTS! And if I lose, I want to get up and do it again. I want to do it in the context of my guild’s role play, and I want to do it against people I know and who know me within the community formed by the game.

WHY DON’T PEOPLE RECOGNIZE THIS? MAKING DEATH INTENSE MEANS MAKING PEOPLE PISSED OFF AT THE GAME. IT MEANS MAKING PEOPLE PISSED OFF AT OTHER PLAYERS. IT MEANS MAKING PEOPLE AFRAID TO PLAY. And it’s annoying. So stop it.

Hedron
The False Prophet
KAAOS

In an attempt to build a community portal for the Deathwhisper PvP server in Age of Conan, Blayloc has launched a new site and forums dedicated to Deathwhisper. It’s goal is to provide a central location for Deathwhisper specific chat, trash talk, and other bullshit.

I’m sure it will be just as Free For All as the actual server is.

The new site and forums can be found at http://www.deathwhisper.net.

As we have progressed into more massive online games, we have quickly lost one of the most fun and entertaining parts of PvP (second behind the actual slaughtering).

Due to the amount of players, the kiddie mentality of most of those players, the chat systems, the fragmentation of community, and some game design components… we have almost totally lost the in game (and to some extent, the out of game) aspect of trash talking.

The current state of trash talking is World of Warcraft or Age of Conan is someone doing a /spit emote on a corpse or /saying ‘Haha pwned.’ Really, it is a sad state of affairs.

What do current games have that has led to this? Continue reading.