I had this discussion (again) recently with someone in charge of designing a fully PvP game and this hoary point came up - again. Myth One: "There are many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of players who want PvP in general, and unrestricted PvP in specific." In a non-pay game, players are willing to put up with just about anything, mainly because its easy to walk away from something if you dont have to invest any money in it.Īnd when I use the word non-consenting in this context, it means simply that at least one party to the combat has no choice of whether or not to fight he/she is involved whether they will or no. Note that the following is relevant mainly to for-pay games and especially large-scale subscription games. Why it worked in that game would take some pages to relate and that makes it fodder for another column. Except once: Bartles MUD II, which can be counted as the for-pay online adventure/RPG game that started the industry. In fact, every time Ive seen non-consenting PvP tried in various forms, it has been a miserable failure. Ive been hearing that since about 1989 and have yet to see it actually work in a persistent world. Game after game touts itself in development as the answer to PvP, that they are the ones that will do it right first. In fine examples of the old saw, "Hope springs eternal," each new designer and/or development team is just positive they have the one true solution that makes non-consenting PvP work. ![]() The issue or, I should say, the several and various critical issues of Player versus Player combat in persistent world role-playing games is coming to the fore again, in all its contentious glory.įor some strange reason, this seems to be another area where persistent world developers and, especially, designers refuse to learn the lessons of past failures.
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