MMO

The Tobold Effect

Yesterday was a strange day because every now and then one of my posts develops a life of its own.  I had gotten an email saying that I had a comment waiting in queue.  I keep my blog set to moderate new comments because for whatever reason I get a truly phenomenal amount of spam.  Every now and then one of them makes it through Akismet and ends up as a real comment.  So instead of letting these just sit out there without noticing them, I have my wordpress set to moderate the first comment from a specific poster, and once I have approved them they can comment from that point on freely.  So while in wordpress I happened to look at my Jetpack statistics page and saw something weird.

For a moment I thought the stats were completely borked or something, but upon closer inspection I was in fact having what looked to be a spike in readership.  When looking through the referrers I saw a name there that I had not seen before.  Apparently Tobold created a post with nothing but a link to my “Sandboxes and Sheep” post on ArcheAge, and then bam we were off to the races.  While I might be occasionally getting lambasted in his comment stream, I guess there is no such thing as bad publicity?  I mean I really did not write that post to be anything than me adding my counter point to the posts that were linked.  I was not trying to condemn pvp, but just present an alternate viewpoint to “there are no consequences”.

In any case on an average day I have around 150 readers, and that day I saw that number up up to be like 750ish.  Here is hoping that some of them might stick around for awhile, and if so welcome to the new folks who are reading me ramble.  I post something new every day, and you get my unfiltered thoughts as on the average morning I start writing around 6 am and write hard and fast for thirty minutes to an hour and produce the post you see each day.  I did not necessarily set out that day to write the post I ended up writing, but instead that is what happened to flow out when I put text to screen.  The only thing I would add to the comment stream, I was an Alpha player of ArcheAge so while my current character is only level 20, I have more experience than that would denote.

Less Toxic Community

I freely admit that most of my opinion of ArcheAge as a whole comes from early testing of the game.  I got into alpha testing back in May when a friend of mine hooked me up with an invite.  Overall I think my first impressions were favorable, but as I played it was the community that ended up grinding me down.  The griefing was prevalent, and most of it did not involve pvp combat at all to be truthful.  I’ve talked about some of my experiences before, but ultimately I detached myself from the game because of the toxic community.  With the games launch this was my number one detractor from giving it another shot, that and the fact that at 35 in Alpha I pretty much stalled out due to the constant pvp ganking while trying to quest.  Both of which were sad because the game still has quite a bit to offer players of all stripes.

Coming back I have been pleasantly surprised I guess is the best way to put it.  While the community is still fairly horrible when compared to say Final Fantasy XIV with their awesome pugging experience…  it is at least as good as say World of Warcraft, which is to say it is pretty much the norm for a massively multiplayer game these days.  While the public channels do sound a bit like /trade or barrens chat most of the time, they can be pretty easily ignored.   I am not sure if simply the worst offenders have moved on to other games, or have at least moved on to bigger content and are no longer in the areas I am in… but in any case I have not actually experienced the non-pvp griefing like I did in alpha.

I think maybe in alpha folks were just like a child testing the limits of their parents will.  So many of the things I think folks were doing just because they “could” do it.  The fact that most of those early invites were youtubers and streamers probably amplified this toxic nature.  There were a few awesome streamers like Kiwi, but also a lot of not so awesome ones whose streams consisted mostly of “watch me abuse these players”.  If you went afk in alpha… you were more than likely going to get pushed out of town by a tractor and find yourself dead in the countryside.  So it is all of these experiences that have so negatively colored my opinion of the game and left me not wanting to really give it a shot at launch.

Doomlords and Paladins

So I have watched this games progress and played the role of the grumpy curmudgeon as various friends decided to give it a shot.  I was fairly happy to ignore it until I realized something.  By some quirk almost all of the people I know and care about playing the game seemed to have ended up in the same location.  Firstly I noticed that most of the players were on the Naima server, and while I figured a lot of folks would end up playing the “catgirl” faction…  it turned out that almost all of them were on West the faction I actually preferred.  To make matters worse, I realized that almost everyone happened to be in the same guild.  This is the point at which I started to contemplate actually playing the game.  What makes it stranger is that several of the groups of friends, don’t actually really know each other.  So they all seemed to arrive there independently.

As such I have been trying to look at the game with somewhat fresh eyes, and give it a fair shake where I had not before.  The game itself is really fun, but at this point I am not really sure why.  I keep flipping back and forth between Paladin and Doomlord, because I am really not sure which one I prefer.  Paladin seems to be considerably better for pure survival, but Doomlord has a lot of fun toys.  Right now I have both a charge and a death grip attack, which makes me extremely happy.  The healing capabilities of Paladin sadly are not terribly useful in combat.  Like I can throw a heal over time on myself, but the amount of health it heals versus my hitpoint pool feels insignificant.

What I would love to find is a version of tank that plays like a Shadowknight or a Deathknight, where my attacks basically proc heals.  Not sure if such a beast exists and is still at the same time “tanky”.  The biggest surprise has been just how willing people are to group up for objectives.  The main difference with this game is that there is the ability to send out a group invite to anyone in the vicinity.  So many players do that by course before starting an encounter.  The negative is that there is no passive tagging system, so the first player to hit anything owns the encounter.  I realize this is an older game, but I find it hard to believe that any game would choose active tagging for mobs at this point.

Chief Concerns

My biggest concern for this game is the fact that Trion does not have any real control over it.  They run the servers, and can fiddle with bits in their databases…  but as far as the client and server code they do not have any access to that at all.  They are essentially a third party reseller of this game to the western markets.  There are a lot of things that players requested in Alpha that have come out as not being functionally possible, or XL Games was completely unwilling to consider them.  There are features that are just requirements for a modern game like the ability to invert the mouse axis, that are missing.  I know of at least one friend that simply cannot play the game because of this.  At the end of the day, while I have warm fuzzies about Trion…  I have to realize this is not their game.

If this changes I might have more hope, and I feel like they are doing their best to accommodate the play style of western gamers.  I have listened to a few discussions on this however, and so many of the things that we are requesting… just don’t make sense to XL Games who is entirely focused on the Korean MMO mindset.  What I would love to see is for the code to be forked in such a way as Trion had the ability to “improve” the game, but the problem there is that we then get cut off from the main trunk of the tree and it becomes extremely hard to obtain all of the expansion content.  The Korean version is considerably further along than the Western version, in that there are even additional races like the Dwarves.  It will be interesting to see how things shake out.

#ArcheAge

Defense of Open World

While I might dip my toes in the water of player versus player every so often just to see if I still don’t enjoy it… at my core I am very much a Carebear.  I’ve always assumed I simply lack the competitive streak needed to make the dance of “you kill me I hunt you down and kill you” enjoyable.  Even in the hallowed days of Doom multiplayer, I greatly preferred playing co-operatively with friends rather than playing a Deathmatch.  Generally speaking this wouldn’t effect me because I never willfully choose to expose myself to a PVP environment or mentality, however for some reason folks keep seeming to get hung up on requiring it to play in their sandbox.  I like the concept of a sandbox world where I can go anywhere and do anything…  but for a certain stripe of player that means that they can also grief and gank anyone as a result.

Yesterday there was a really good article talking about the psychology of a Carebear by Aywren that tries to delve into the reasons for not wanting open world PVP.  This article references several other really good articles, the first of which being “What’s So Bad About Open World PVP” over on Gaming Conjecture.  Later on during the article another post is referenced on Endgame Viable that takes a very similar stance.  Essentially the argument sums up to that in ArcheAge the game in question, there aren’t any real lasting consequences of PVP combat, so why should anyone have a problem with it.  I guess from a certain standpoint that is true, there are no lasting mechanical consequences to my character…  but that standpoint relies on someone actually seeing player versus player as a meaningful experience.

Wasting My Time

When I sit down to play any game, be it online or offline I generally have some broad overarching goals in mind, things that I want to accomplish for that night to feel like I actually did something.  Granted I allow myself to get side tracked all of the time, but that is generally tracing down various shiny bits that I happen across along the way.  These rabbit trails are entirely my choice and I allow myself to indulge them as I move around the world.  My key problem with open player versus player combat is the fact that someone is imposing their enjoyment on my playtime.  I am all about folks enjoying their game play until that enjoyment comes at my expense.  I am never going to be the type of player that attacks first, it is just not in my nature and I have waved and hugged countless “flagged” players during my time in World of Warcraft.  So if I get attacked and killed it will be done and over 90% of the time before I even get a shot in…  because I am not looking to fight other players.

What happens then is a series of things that take me out of the place where I was enjoying the game and force me to deal with the whims of another player.  Either I wait until the player gives up and stops camping my corpse, which could be any length of time.  I could allow myself to get drawn into a conflict and start trying to kill trade with that player until either of us gets bored.  More likely I just log out of the game and go find something else to do, because the groove that I was in is now lost thanks to someone interjecting themselves into my game play session.  Now the fans of PVP will talk about how much it enriches their game play experience, how much they enjoy the constant sense of fear of getting attacked.  For me I just view it as a waste of my time, and I don’t cherish or enjoy it any more than any other waste of time.  I don’t look longingly at waiting in a long line at the super market, nor do I think fondly of waiting in traffic because someone is gawking at an accident.  That thing you enjoy about the game, the pvp aspect…  I consider it about as meaningful as both of those things.

Sandboxes and Sheep

The biggest problem I have with the current generation of Sandbox games is that they attract two completely different types of players.  For me at least I love the intricate systems of the game and the fact that you can craft anything you can imagine and run huge trade cartels if you so choose.  I like that there are housing that are meaningful in the world and give you a physical foothold.  I like the fact that you can choose from a large number of combat classes and each mix and match of them offers meaningful gameplay results.  I like that there are interesting places in the world to explore, bosses to take down and events to conquer.  I am very much there to consume all the PVE goodness that the world can offer and experience the epic journey that it has to offer.  I feel like a lot of players want all of those things and more or less try to ignore the player versus player aspect.  We in essense are the sheep, and the fact that we are plays a necessary role for another type of players enjoyment.

In order for a ganker to have fun, they have to have someone to gank.  The ganker mentality doesn’t seek out a challenge, they seek out  the weakest link in the chain so they can exploit it and get their enjoyment out of making someone else feel weak.  It is going to be us sheep that get drawn into their power games, and us sheep that are inconvenienced by it.  Granted that is not to say that all PVPers are gankers and griefers, because that is very much not the case.  There are noble defenders that are there to engage in epic battles between factions for control of sections of the map.  These players aren’t the ones inconveniencing me, because chances are if I ignore them they will also ignore me.  They too are engaged in goal based play, and their goal is to seek out the competition and conquer it.  The folks that will find me, when I least expect it, when I am getting the most enjoyment out of the game are the folks who just want to ruin my night.

Living Breathing World

Yesterday I posted a very truncated version of this statement over on the Gaming Conjecture website.  I condensed the bulk of everything I wanted to say into two paragraphs, and for the most part folks seem to accept what I said at face value.  There was one response however.

But I’d like to ask whether you feel the gain can outweigh the loss? So for example, I might have my intended plan ruined by a PvP intervention, but does gaining a living breathing world make that a price worth paying?

Once again I think this question comes from a mindset of someone who feels that player versus player combat enriches their experience.  For me at least the fact that I can attack other players does not make it a living breathing world.  The fact that the world is populated with lots of things that I can interact with, harvest, plant, and build makes it a living breathing world.  What would make it MORE of a living world is if players were less focused on trying to kill each other, and somehow screw over each other… and more focused on collaborating on massive scale public works projects.  Once upon a time there was a game called Horizon.. that later on got rebranded as Istaria.  Unfortunately the current version is a mere shadow of what the original was like to play, and has mostly become a game for folks who desperately want to role-play a dragon.

That game was a sandbox environment before I even knew to call it a sandbox.  It had a rich crafting system, and an equally rich multi-classing combat system.  In truth it is everything that ArcheAge is, but a decade earlier.  What make the game so compelling to me is that on Dawn the role-playing server we had massive crafters unions that worked together on big projects.  The  game set these obstacles in our path that could only be solved by devoting both crafting and combat resources to them.  For example in order to access a brand new continent we had to build a bridge, and the construction of it was a month long project of crafters constantly applying materials to its construction.  The problem being that the nearest quarry was a considerable amount of distance away from the bridge, and the entire path was lined with enemies that could easily kill the players wearing their crafting gear.

As a result being primarily combat focused, I along with lots of other players took up the role of guarding players as they applied materials to the construction.  These huge public works projects, and entire player built communities gave the world a living breathing feel… and there was not a single amount of player versus player combat in that game.  I guess what I am saying is I don’t feel it adds anything to my experience, and doesn’t make a world any more real than anything else does.  My world is about collaborating with other players to do interesting things, not tearing down others so I can feel stronger.  That might be a dangerous oversimplification, but that is how I view forced PVP in an otherwise PVE rich setting.  I view it as a few players forcing themselves upon me so they can get their enjoyment at my expense.

#ArcheAge #PVP #Carebear