Come And Have A Go If You Think You're Hard Enough (Emotionally)

There's been something of a blogging roundtable on PvP going on recently. J3w3l has most of the links in these two posts as well as a thoughtful take on PvP as end-game content.

As must be plain from yesterday's breathless report on the current state of play in Yak's Bend's bid for Tourney glory, I'm far from averse to a little consensual PvP action, or indeed a lot, but I wasn't always quite as blase about being virtually murdered. I chose Everquest over Ultima Online as my first foray into online gaming specifically because of the horror stories I'd read. Spending two hours chopping wood only to be chopped down yourself the minute you stepped out of the forest. That sort of thing.

All the same, the idea retained some kind of sick fascination and I did make characters on EQ's Zek servers although I never really played any of them to any meaningful level. Actually, it was kind of hard to level up on Rallos Zek, the Free-for-All ruleset server, seeing as how a brand new character could be and usually was ganked on spawning into the game for the first time.  I don't believe I ever got my Ogre as far as his guildmaster even though he was probably standing only a few feet away.

When Dark Age Of Camelot arrived it was a very big deal. Western fantasy MMORPGs were not thick on the ground back then (I know, hard to believe...) and a new one was something quite special. As I recall, Mrs Bhagpuss and I were moderately apprehensive about the Realm vs Realm aspect but the draw of a new world to explore, not least one based on myths and legends we'd grown up with, was too much to resist.

DAOC was where I learned three things:

1. I enjoy PvP, in moderation.
2. PvP and PvE sit uncomfortably together.
3. Left to their own devices, other players make poor content providers.

Number One is largely a matter of personal taste and personality. For some people the entire concept of entertaining yourself by doing bad things to other people, even if the bad things are imaginary and the other people said they were up for it, is just morally wrong. For others there never comes a time when getting shanked by a player playing a rogue feels the same as getting shivved by a rogue running under AI.

Plenty of people, for all kinds of perfectly good reasons, don't like, and will never learn to like, fighting other players. Plenty more, while naturally nervous at the start, will soon get the hang of things and find that, like roughage, some PvP now and again makes for a healthy MMO diet.

PvE in the open world. It stands for Player vs Exhaustion.

 Number Three has been discussed here before. DAOC hadn't been out for very long at all before some of the shortcomings of the concept and design began to make themselves felt. Leaving aside the problems of my hardware, which turned large battles into slide-shows, DAOC fights could be both thrilling and entertaining but they were also utterly unreliable. If you come home from work on a Friday night ready for a little blood-letting, nothing sours the mood like spending two hours roaming an empty borderland looking for someone to fight.

Mythic didn't take long to recognize the problem, which is how we came to get instanced Battlegrounds. If you were looking for trouble you'd come to the right place. Except that even in Battlegrounds it turned out not everyone came just for the fight. Some people wanted to win. There were evenings where I spent two hours waiting in vain outside one of the other team's portal keeps for someone, anyone to come out because no-one wanted to move until they thought they had enough troops. Sometimes there just weren't even numbers so no-one fought anyone.

As time went on the process got refined and revised by other developers in other games. WoW, Warhammer, Rift, EQ2 - they all have automated matchmaking systems for their instanced PvP areas, drawing from a sufficiently large pool of people, usually cross-server, to ensure enough turn up to get a fight started. Specific objectives, often with timers and rewards, ensure that there's action, not just a staring contest. WoW with Wintergrasp, GW2 with The Mists and TESO with Cyrodiil combine the original "Frontier" concept with Battleground mechanics and spread the result across whole maps, zones or regions.

It's not End Game unless there's a Dragon in it somewhere

That leaves Number Three: mixed content. Some people swear by it, others swear about it. There's no question that it's not for everyone. I didn't play Vanilla WoW but it's notable how many of the rosy-tinted reveries I've read about those halcyon days come freighted with anecdotes about the running battles around Tarren Mill or the city invasions. Indeed, that's become such a predominant narrative that, not having been there myself, I just had to google to find out if WoW actually had any non-PvP servers at launch (it did).

Theme park MMOs, to use that less-than-helpful shorthand, rely very heavily on authored content. It's problematic enough when they allow players to kill NPCs in a kind of PvP proxy war; allowing one player to gank another just before she completes a long and difficult quest...well, you see the problem. Somehow I can't quite see revenge killings standing in for Heroic Dungeons as end-game content for PvE players.

Sandboxes, though, that's a different matter, isn't it? Somehow PvP and sandboxes have become almost inextricably linked in the minds of MMO players and developers, to the point where even Landmark purports to be heading down a road that might include non-consensual player versus player combat up to and including the destruction of players' homes and properties.

There's really no reason sandboxes have to be competitive. They could just as easily be co-operative. Xsyon, the little talked-about FFA PvP MMO once touted as a rival for the rather more talked-about Darkfall, recently chose to open a pure PvE server. Whether that was a flailing bid to keep a sinking ship afloat or a response to in-game demand I have no idea. It did, briefly, make me consider downloading the game though. Briefly.

Opinions are like tails. Everybody has one.

What's the point of all this rambling then? There isn't one as such. There's no right answer, no one true path. I have no great insight to bring to the debate. Mostly its that, much though I might enjoy it if it happened, I find the idea that any form of open world PvP could ever stand in for constructed, organized developer-led content quite hard to swallow.

The numbers of PvP servers and the size of their populations in what we might call mainstream MMOs suggests that both demand and take-up among players is relatively low. Even in large, successful MMOs that have easily accessible instanced PvP my guess is it goes unused by the majority of players. My guess is also that, expensive and time-consuming though it may be to produce, some form of top-down, provided content, be it dungeons, raids or narrative events, is likely to make up the bulk of end-game content for PvE MMOs for a good while yet. Player-made content like that found in Neverwinter's Foundry may carry some of the load but the real heavy lifting is still going to have to be done by paid professionals, much though their paymasters might prefer otherwise.

Unless someone can come up with some entirely new idea. That'd be nice.