Success and failure in PvP gaming
May 7, 2006Its my opinion that "English" describes a language wherein the word for things like red, blue, green etc is "colour", that cars are fueled by "petrol", water comes out of "taps" and that we protect baby's nether regions with a "nappy".
But by most people's definition, it's generally accepted that "English" is the word that describes the language spoken in America and that red is a "color".
In the same way, when we are talking gaming-wide concepts, we need to understand that "PvP" is "Player vs Player". Nothing more, nothing less. This is why god created adjectives.
Many of us here – the Shadowbaners, EVErs, WWIIOLers – don't agree with that definition of PvP for ourselves – but this is why this is a discussion at all.
The same sort of problem then occurs with the word "success". As players, we define "success" by value judgements such as "do I like it". As developers, especially when thinking about a future game, we have to think "how many other people will like it".You may detest WoW's PvP, but millions of people apparently like it. Which version of "success" did Blizzard use? If they used the headcount method, then WoW deserves to be respected as a success on its own terms.
You can draw a headcount line through various games, starting with Aces High, past WWII Online, DAoC, through Eve, up to WoW and out beyond into games like Counterstrike etc, although I personally would split WoW into "MMO PvP Only" and "CTF PvP".
If a designer is tasked with making a "massively", single-player figures product, and they want to do PvP, they need to look at the counterstrike style of PvP. They need to be aware that folks like us may not buy into that style of PvP – heck some of us don't even accept that it is PvP. But we're the amoeba in that pond.
If, however, the designer wants to build a game with "serious" PvP and can get the money for something like Eve, then the graph provides a basis for building assumptions about what makes saleable PvP and what makes serious "niche" PvP.
DAoC combat is CTF-ish, but its on an MMO scale, and the battlegrounds were sparse and open. The "big" fights generally occurred in pocket areas.
Eve uses trickery to achieve large scale battles — their technology is based on their ability to keep fights small (on the whole) so that "big" fights are actually lots of small fights across a very large area, and actual "big" fights are rare enough not to bring the system to its knees. The use of things like guided missiles makes them "not PvP" by the standards of several groups of PvPers.
WWII Online, on the other hand, is focused on huge battles. It's not about dueling. There's no RPG layer (although its often argued our players are particularly roleplaying). The only NPCs are static, fixed position, fixed arc of fire, emplacements around towns, which get taken out early on.
Trouble is, our players become wary, and begin to try and evade each other. They try to avoid engagement without as huge a numerical advantage as possible, and ideally they try and get into a position where the enemy has absolute minimum time to see them and fire on them — i.e. pre-camp. (That its possible is the games fault)
#1 If you take your force to a town and the enemy isn't there, you win.
#2 If you take your force to a town and the enemy finds themselves outplayed, the enemy can just leave and you win without a full fight.
#3 If you take your force to a town and the enemy has prepared a defense, though, you can choose to give up the fight and go elsewhere in search of #1/#2.
With enough frequency, #3 makes any player reluctant to set up a defense in the hopes of the mysterious #4.
But when forces do clash (#4) the PvP in WWII Online is kick-ass, awesome, heart-pounding, adrenaline rushing, blood-pumping intense action. A seasoned WWIIOLers heart rate doubles at single, exclamationed statements like "Paras!" or "EI!" their brains kick up a gear when someone says "Bridge is down" or "EMSP!"
Eve has been successful (head-counting criteria) as a PvP game (generic definition), but nowhere near the scale of WoW.
How "successful" (HCC) would Eve be if you replaced its "wimpy" combat system with something like the Newtonian/relativistic physics in a CJ Cherryh story?
I think what my hypothetical headcount line would show is that a new development choosing to go the PvP route should start from either Counterstrike or CTF/Battleground PvP and build on that. That's what will get you the absolute most players, which is a pretty solid basis to build your visionary PvP game on.
Remember, WoW has five million, nine hundred thousand more players than Eve. It's easy to miss that when you're saying "10x as many" or "an order of magnitude". Think on those numbers for a second. And I'm ranting about this because I hope to see more niche games. I hope to see Raph build his game with curing cancer as the goal. I don't want to play it, and I don't think WoW will be threatened by it in the least. But,
Why do I care if it gets written? Because I want to play it? No, but so that the infrastructure for such games to continue being written and published and operated continues to exist – niche games should hope to amount to WoWs subscription base in aggregate, not individually.
It's OK to be a niche success, as long as you don't spend the budget of a WoW success getting there. Do that and the term is "failure", no matter how much a forum full of people would give their lifeblood to keep the game running.
It looks like whatever you use to cut’n'paste your entries into the blog occasionally misses words out. That, or you miss them as you’re typing because you’re already thinking about the next line – as a touch typist I do that occasionally. Eg “How “successful” (HCC) would Eve be if you replaced its “wimpy” combat system with something like the Newtonian/relativistic physics in a” – in a what?
It’s not really a key point in your argument, but saying 6 million WoW players prove that WoW-style PvP is popular does kind of omit that a significant proportion of those 6 million will have never gone near WoW’s PvP.
ARGH – I just went over that text, which I originally edited in a text editor, and there were a bunch of sentences truncated. I couldn’t see a pattern to it either.
WoW has at least 2.5 million PvPers – based on the people selecting PvP servers. Whether they play or not doesn’t – in WoW terms – stricly matter, because its not a quality assessment its a merchantability evaluation. They have at least double that who regularly play the CTF PvP. It’s apparently more merchantable. People who chose against PvP when they chose servers still choose to play CTF PvP.
I’m not saying game designers have/ought to make WoW clones nor disagreeing with anyone’s personal definition of “better”. Only that I think WoW deserves its own context so that people are more cautious about what they try to take from WoW vs what they try to take from the MMORPG genre.
Lets take an absolute. Lets say that someone proposed a compulsory WoW feature that would prevent level 60 players from smoking AND prevent them from getting lung cancer as long as they play. You couldn’t be level 60 and smoke, but neither would you be at risk of cancer. That would make it a “better” game, right? Unless you’re a smoker who likes to smoke.
Imagine – just for a second – that evidence is WoW would lose way more people from adding this feature than they would gain.
Do you think Blizzard would add the feature?
Well, I think it’s obvious that there’s no way Blizzard would add such a feature. The magic words are clearly “lose way more people [...] than they would gain”. I guess I’m surprised that this might be considered controversial – it seems self-evident to me. Obviously I don’t disagree with your central thesis. :) You’re obviously arguing that, from Blizzard’s POV, popularity matters far more than pretty much anything else.
… at least that I think the target audience for the product neccessitates such an outlook. So folks intending to develop A Vision ought to be wary of chasing the WoW dream, because its a $ dream, not a visionary dream.
WoW isn’t the game that everyone’s been waiting for, its just sans all the “crap” that puts them variously off different games.
Leading to the conclusion that just because something is in WoW doesn’t mean its bad – unless you aim to target 6 million people too.
WoW isn’t the game that everyone’s been waiting for, its just sans all the “crap” that puts them variously off different games.
While not necessarily inventive I don’t know why you’d not call it visionary. It’s not like they just re-packaged the good parts of other games without doing any work themselves.
With regard to niches:
I’m not sure not implementing something that would lose you customers is the hard question. I find it much more interesting to ponder implementing something that would hurt your ‘vision’ in favour of mass appeal/head-count.
Or even trickier, hurting your ‘vision’ (or uniqueness in your niche or whatever) in the uncertain hope for some future mass appeal.
At least I think that’s a more interesting question.
WoW is an unprecedented success – they managed to work out which bits of the MMORPG genre to put together in such a way as to sell to and retain over 6 million people. But it’s not Visionary with a capital V. “Vision” is what they cut hardest.
With regards to the more interesting question, that’s the direction I’m trying to encourage people to think. We have a lot of good MMO devs at the moment scratching their heads and wondering “how do I follow WoW”? Answer: you don’t neccessarily have to, if you can accept hundreds of thousands of subscribers instead of millions.
But I think that’s part of the way WoW is distorting the discussion. 18 months ago, hundreds of thousands of subscribers was massively successful.