To answer your question yes they did implement a PK system of sorts towards the end of Alpha (Alpha 2 Maybe? can’t remeber)
If you were PK you would only drop mats but not gear. The PKer will be marked a criminal
If you died a criminal you drop both mats AND gear.
It didn’t help though - people were patrolling routes from beaches to settlements naked with wooden swords.
There were I think 2 guilds who were trying to be “law and order” - it didn’t help either because gankers would just respawn and run back
So with all that said, they didn’t exhaust anything, they sacrficed the latter stages PvP because…it wasn’t an authentic experience if they had just made it so people, say, under lvl 60 can’t PvP?
These are typical protocols done in Korean games with little to no fuss over them, in Lineage 2 you can acquire a buff that makes it so you can’t flag, in Archeage attacking a player 10 lvl’s under the cap immediately grants that player being struck a giga boost of defense and attack which puts the favourite to win right in the newbies hands, it’s almost impossible to even try and kill him although you could argue that there could be a group against that 1 person but there is no benefit to such thing, in some of these korean games you don’t focus on harassing because you simply don’t have the luxury of time, you gotta keep “building your dominance” (gear etc).
I’m not surprised by Amazon or any western leads lack of effort with this issue. @Synrec Amazon have tried and tested? dw I’ll say it for you
@Synrec has a point though. The PK system or the iteration of one was tried and failed in fact so much that the lead dev lost his job(or was demoted not sure).
It also showed two important poins:
-consequences don’t matter all that much (loss of gear didn’t deter anyone)
-relying on playerbase to police behavior is not a good strategy (gankers simply outlasted those who were trying to protect the new players)
Yes this system could have been improved, but ultimately I think it would never scale up to large enough nimbers to sustain a 300+ person studio.
Games don’t need Riot or Blizzard games policing, I could literally make a book on why people are upsetting others on League of Legends for instance, it’s 99% the systems faults.
Why even create a game or system in the first place if it needs controlling, that in itself is bad design. I’ll give you one simple example, when you win a Tekken match the winner is disabled from any actions afterward, so automatically, teabagging and any other actions are impossible (and you choose to opt out of that filter). This is one tiny example to something that sorts out a lot of problems, filters and deny systems can be expanded and evolved for many systems, I’m as solid as a brick mentally and I won’t need them but I would like the idea that it could accommodate more people who don’t want to interact with all or some of the different forms of immaturity in actions or verbally.
Turn off PvP before lvl 60, turn off seeing reactions, turn off whatever but denying the playerbase from eachother with opt in or out flag systems? It’s ridiculous, you’re hurting your game’s potential and making the playerbase as a whole more frustrated because when good supportive players like me quit (now I know you’ll find that hard to believe!) it will eventually lead to you being frustrated due to that deflated circle of a less dedicated player base.
These are all great ideas and you should write a book, but do you have any evidence that they actually work?
Sure the evidence that pvp mmos don’t work well is not scientific (there were no double blind studies with control groups etc), but there is a strong empirical evidence lasting over two decades.
As you pointed out in the other thread I am business person “why can’t he get better at his business to retire and play games hardcore” - so if somebody comes to me with great idea, that goes against 20 years of empirical evidence I would be extremely reticent to try it.
Prove your maturity, provide evidence that PvP servers will benefit Amazon despite years of evidence from other MMORPGs that have died, the fact that people can access PvP easier in other game genres and the fact that Amazon themselves have tested this and it failed spectacularly.
Well the gaming landscape is a difficult one, much like the competition landscape of the net, Youtube/Twitter/Facebook/Google/Reddit, anything else is cheese, how is it possible to successfully conclude enough evidence to strongly support that the majority of people only want a mainly tranquil and PvE co-op experience without any PvP to co-exist with it.
Korea is a part of the world where PvP mmo’s are succeeding, now we’re all human, I very much doubt our trains of thought are that much different and League of Legends and FPS are monster popular PvP franchises that succeeded in both NA and EU massively. There are lots of people who love fantasy, therefore with all this said there must be a lot of them who would like PvP or to play a competition/sport within the realm of fantasy,
I’m right on this anyway, nothing will convince me otherwise, people just need to believe in the evolution and “honest” production of games (you know, not bending to investor’s). I refuse to believe that WoW is still one of the pinnacle’s of the genre, at grandpa age and that FF14 is the top dog of it all, utterly ridiculous when critical thinking is applied.
They are brilliant convenience games, surviving comfortably in the competitive market as that is practically a desert and a tumbleweed most of the time!
It’s not ridiculous because numbers show your opinion is wrong. The companies earnings also show your opinion is wrong.
You don’t want to believe it because it’s not what you what. However, I don’t play WoW or FF14 but numbers say the type of game play loop presented is what a lot of people want.
I’m not speaking a foreign language here, so I’ll quote myself.
They are brilliant convenience games, surviving comfortably in the competitive market as that is practically a desert and a tumbleweed most of the time!
Cannot comment on Korean MMOs because I am jot familiar with any of them.
LoL and FPS are not MMOs with PERSISTENT worlds. That is the key difference - pvp can and does succeed in the situations where you have resets that let you try again. That’s why professional sports have seasons and not just carry on playing forever.
Lets for a moment assume you are right.
It is then the same argument as pop music vs classical music. I agree, people need to be exposed to classical music because otherwise they will never know it. The difference is though that by and large society determined that any form of “Artis Magna” be it music, theatre, ballet or painting are beneficial to society and these genres operate somewhat outside of market with government subsidies, otherwise ticket to philarmony or theatre would cost literally 10,000$+. That allows them to attrqct audiences who would otherwise never be interested in this and some of them stay behind so to speak.
But, obviously the same cannot be applied to pvp mmo, so pvp mmos are always going to be tiniest of minorities because just like most people would prefer Britney Spears to Shubert, most people will prefer safe and relaxing pve to stress inducing pvp
I’m right on this anyway, nothing will convince me otherwise, people just need to believe in the evolution and “honest” production of games (you know, not bending to investor’s). I refuse to believe that WoW is still one of the pinnacle’s of the genre, at grandpa age and that FF14 is the top dog of it all, utterly ridiculous when critical thinking is applied.
They are brilliant convenience games, surviving comfortably in the competitive market as that is practically a desert and a tumbleweed most of the time!
“I refuse to believe that WoW is still one of the pinnacle’s of the genre at grandpa age and that FF14 is the top dog of it all”
I am confused. How is this “damning preference”?
If WoW and FF didn’t exist, pvp mmos would still not have enough players. If other video games genres didn’t exist pvp mmos would still not have enough players. You seem to not understand that yoy cannot MAKE people play the game (unless you pay them) if they dont find the game to their tastes.