When People Say They Want Player Driven Content, What Do They Mean?

Came to mind because of something happening in Elite right now and that I've seen a parallel to when running a community a while back, so I'm asking to get a better answer spread than 'my friends' and 'a few others I know'.

I've heard quite a few people say that they want 'player driven content' and to not have the game hand them a story. But is this the minority of players? Outside of my own group, the people I've met who say this, then turn out to really just want 'an excuse or reason to start or participate in a conflict they can win'. Very explicitly just that (I've quite likely just had bad experiences?)

Elite has good options for storyline between factions, basically Nodes and Node War style stuff, it's all there. Yet players often seem to just ignore options for it, even when it starts. Is the 'content' most people are referring to just 'I want to fight some people' and therefore the reason why they just gravitate to Fortnite/MOBAs/etc now?

Is it that I'm misunderstanding 'Player Driven Content' to include types of RP or storyline due to my bias, that aren't actually important? This seems odd because a Sandbox game with just 'I want a reason to fight these guys' is still just a sandbox game and often might as well be an arena game.

Elite has many things that a player can do which aren't directly conflict/opposition related, but people who actually play in Open (basically the owPvP 'setting') don't seem to engage with most of them unless they expect that this will lead to a fight, particularly a fight they can win.

I used to think this was just me getting a data bias, because I 'already know all the people who would want more' and I already roll with those people, but after spending time in other PvP/PvX games, I'm no longer sure. I'm specifically talking about 'storyline', whatever that means to people, so if all that was just me jibbering, to you, I can bring it down to one question:

"Is Player Driven Storyline mostly just drama and conflict or things that will lead to it, for people you know?"

Azherae wrote: »

"Is Player Driven Storyline mostly just drama and conflict or things that will lead to it, for people you know?"

How I understand it - yes. It's the guild drama (both internal and between guilds), it's big sieges and any potential politics linked to them, it's sudden shifts in power (usually falls under guild drama, but could be just a new guild coming to the server) and to me some big scale market manipulations are also "player-driven content".

I remember server "histories" like this:

• Guild X dominated the first few weeks because they grinded like hell
• Guild Y and Z teamed up right before the siege to stop Guild X from getting a valuable castle
• Y/Z alliance managed to kill an Epic boss after winning a 5h-long pvp against X
• 2 parties from X got tired of losing to the zerg and made a deal with Z to create their own side
• X, Y and Z are now somewhat equal on the server and constantly fight for different bosses with anyone being able to come out on top in a fight
• Suddenly guild A appears with a ton of players that are rapidly growing in power and start winning some group pvps against all 3 sides here and there
• A and B group up to take a castle from one of the big sides
• There's some "public" (usually on the forums) drama between A and B over who deserves what in their deal
• Some groups from B leave to A because they see more potential there
• B dissolves
• A becomes the strongest guild on the server and manages to control several bosses and castles (through alt guilds)
• X/Y/Z might ally up in whatever combination to help each other
• Rinse/repeat that history until most players tire out or some side becomes just waaaay too strong and everyone else gives up, because they've been at it for months and months

That's mainly an overextended and extrapolated history, because most private servers didn't survive long enough to see the full list happen, but I've experienced multiple sequences from it and have heard roughly this exact story from some of the official servers as well, so I think it's the closest thing to a full "player-driven story content" from L2.

I'm sure there's people who'd call RP "player-driven content", but I think those are the minority, simply because it's way easier to say RP and people will immediately know what you're talking about.

As for "only in case where you'll win", I agree. I've seen a ton of servers where people would go hard for a week or two (depending on when the server starts) and then as soon as they lose a castle siege or don't grab a few Heroes at the end of the month - they quit. And with how the CIS private server culture works - L2 has kinda become a session-based game, where sessions are just 1-3 week long. So in a way they are playing an arena game, just based on L2's gameplay.

And official servers had huge problems with p2w/bots/rmt, so even while there were some big stories of "this party left the strongest guild on the server, created their own guild and then managed to rival their OG one", those were quite rare because top players would snowball way too hard through the combo of rmt and p2w.

So with all that being said, I do believe that the Node system might allow people who dislike losing too much kinda "restart" the game on their own terms w/o leaving it completely. Intrepid just gotta account for those people in their design I think.

Thanks all, I'll try to respond to at least some of these, if not all, with my thoughts, (was moreso waiting until the answers jolted or cleared my bias).

To avoid just swamping it and creating an interminably long post, it'll probably be one at a time, though, and probably not in order. For now, here's my baseline and why I had the issue (not related to Elite, more as a response to all the things said in aggregate).

I see 'player driven content' as anything that isn't instanced. The game doesn't need to be a sandbox, but if it isn't instanced and the economy... exists... most of the content is already 'player driven'.

I can see how someone might care about something providing a goal in a game, and then wishing for that goal to be defined by a player, which isn't a default in a PvE game, but it's not a default in a PvX game either. I'm an econ player obviously (or a group leader depending) and therefore it ends up looking like the following, to me in PvE/PvX.

"Player/group has economic/territory goal or positional tactical objective which requires some actions."
"Other players outside group can help or become obstacles to change those actions."

That's it.

In a PvE game without instances, the timing when the other group can become an obstacle might be limited, but just 'getting the looting rights' (through whatever means that game offers) to the economic goal or 'achieving the territory goal' is still managing part 2.

In a PvX game we add 'the ability to attack the other players too'.

That's the context of anything else I refer to.

We have not received permission from SamSlade to share the quoted post.

Here's Exhibit A, just to clarify, so that the E:D part can be fleshed out a tiny bit. This poster is right, but is also 'the point of the post'. It would take me a while to break down everything said here as to why it's a symptom and not the cause, but I'll try to do a bit of it.

Just ignore this entire post if you have no interest in the Elite Dangerous part, it's not particularly important to anything else.

So for context the PvX mode of Elite Dangerous is optional on login. You play in 'Open' to encounter other players, play Solo to encounter none, and play in your own group instances to encounter only members of that group. Your effects on the game's territory and economy are all still counted, and as far as I know, counted equally.

There are no restrictions on what activities you can undertake in any modes other than obviously group activities in Solo. This means that a large number of the game's players just don't play in Open, as the only thing it's adding is risk, not reward.

The post here posits that PvP players get bored because Traders never need to hire anyone for defense. While this is true, it also wouldn't actually work.

The strongest gankers enjoy harrassment and griefing (definitionally so, I'm saying that they are gankers because they enjoy that, not because they are the strongest PvP players). Unless you are being protected by the strongest defenders, you'll just all be destroyed.

If you were being protected by the strongest defenders, and no one attacked you, now you're just a trader with a protection convoy. This would be great for the Trader, but how is it not 'still boring' for the PvP player? Going by the principle that they are classed as a 'PvP player' and we know that they can get bored if not hired for defense, is it fair to assume that they want to be hired for defense so that they can fight? PvE enemies can be strong but due to the balance, certainly no match for 'strong PvP player' generally.

One of the more infamous stories (which I have reason to believe but you can ignore) is of an Explorer who explicitly decided "I'm going to play this game in full, I'm coming back with lots of exploration data, but I won't switch to solo mode to deliver this, I'm going to do what one is supposed to do and hire defenders."

They were escorted in, no one attacked them (the chances were low anyway, you have no reason to just jump an explorer unless you thought they were working against your 'Node', and NPC pirates can't steal exploration data), and at the very end, their defenders shot them down instead.

Why? Who knows. Maybe 'thought they were going to get more action than they got'. Maybe just griefers who took a contract.

The post posits 'it's a flawed system that kills PvP long term' but what does that mean ? And what does it matter if the rest of the content is still going? If people refuse to play in Open because they're just paying to be the 'caravan' while the PvP players are fighting each other, I see the flaw as being entirely unrelated to the 'not needing to hire PvP players and them getting bored', and similar.