Splinter Topic: Micro-Competition vs Macro-Competition

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Yeah, simply put I don't care at all about the actual outcome of that aspect of it. If people want to believe 'PvE is boring', 'PvE players are selfish', 'PvE players are whiny', 'PvE players just don't give games like this a chance', or 'people just want to play in instanced content', then to me it's just another MMO sociology fail due to bias.

We're all entitled to our biases, until we need to make a game for people without them.

That's why Intrepid pays their Senior System Designer the big bucks.

Also, the reason why Survival games work is related to their sociology being better (less fiat protections, immortality, ability to just logout, etc) and the reason why people like PvP competitive games that aren't MMOs better is because they're more streamlined.

Just cut out or diminish all that unnecessary PvE and 'lifeskilling' when you're just gonna get killed or fall under the economic control of some megaguild anyway. Go straight to 'Guild V Guild fighting for castles for no real in-world reason'. Or all the way to a MOBA or Team Deathmatch game. Or EVE, that one works.

Halfassed worldsim with immortal monstrosities (that's us) killing each other over bear skins isn't even immersive.

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This is because you view MMOs as a game, and a very specific type of game.

Let's not even talk about PvE vs PvP enjoyers. Let's talk about people who like to progress and live in worldsim and people who moreso want to play games.

Ashes of Creation is supposed to be somewhat like a living world. That is a large part of the appeal of this game to some people.

In a living world, what would happen if a random fisherperson from a village went out to a coastline to fish and was murdered or even just knocked out (the equivalent of death for us immortals) is that their community now doesn't have fish, and they're mad about it. This part might happen.

But in a 'realer world' after the 2nd or 3rd time that person should reasonably go 'I'm not going to do that again until someone does something about the thing hurting me'. This is, assuming their focus in life is on fishing. So the villagers get their pitchforks and they go out looking for 'the thing that is hurting the fisherman' and they kill it. In a 'realer world' that ends there. The fisher is safe for now, they go back to fishing.

In Ashes, the thing that is hurting the fisherman just revives. You can easily argue this is what happens in PvE too, but in PvE, you generally know 'I have to get X strong to go there'. In Ashes, the threat comes to you. I'll skip the long ecology explanation. This is just another 'why PvE-enjoyers don't like living worlds that play too much like games'.

Not only does the thing hurting the fisherman just revive, it can randomly appear with zero warning right next to that fisherman at any time . It does not NEED to eat or sleep. It can randomly appear and disappear on demand, at the will of another totally innocent person standing there.

Even if the attacker did need to eat, it could simply 'wait for an accomplice to buy fried fish in the village, and bring it out, appear for long enough to receive the fish, eat it, and disappear again'.

Literally none of the premises of a 'living world' make sense in most MMORPGs, so some simulate the idea that you might not just randomly take people's stuff due to being immortal, by making it impossible to take their stuff.

Ashes doesn't. Potential immortal predators everywhere. This is the premise of most horror movies.

Maybe Intrepid DID remake MineCraft.

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This isn't a prisoners dilemma though. You don't have a reason to respond with hostility, you'd just get obliterated. They might in fact be friendly. The problem is that not every such group will be friendly, so you don't need to 'get scared', but you will still experience the situation where your PvE activity is taken away from you by a pure-PvP competition that you cannot defend through PvE means.

SongRune wrote: »

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This isn't a prisoners dilemma though. You don't have a reason to respond with hostility, you'd just get obliterated. They might in fact be friendly. The problem is that not every such group will be friendly, so you don't need to 'get scared', but you will still experience the situation where your PvE activity is taken away from you by a pure-PvP competition that you cannot defend through PvE means.

And once again, please all remember:

This is fine .

Just don't ask Dygz to play 'because he might like it' or go 'well maybe you should make some PvP friends'.

7PvP+Dygz vs 8PvP.

Obviously Dygz wins in this case because Dygz is probably more powerful than half the 8-team, but the average person is not at Dygz' level.

Right. So this thread gets very very close to the core reasons I don't bother much with posting on these forums and generally just let Azherae do it. I'm gonna try to break them down into simple chunks below.

All those people who meme about griefing PvE enjoyers, I find unbearably coddled by easy mode games and in my experience they just tend to run away when things get serious. There's too many of them on the forums. By all means, please attack whoever you want, but there's this conflation running around that for some mysterious reason PvE enjoyers aren't also hardcore PvP players. So let me introduce myself, I am a PvE enjoyer whose ambitions for Ashes are to own a shop where I sell all the jewelry I craft and to act as my group's enforcer/bodyguard by being so elite at PvP no one can touch my gatherers. Get that conflation out of here.

The second reason is that I strongly dislike Steven's design as presented so far, because Corruption as a system completely misses the point for a certain category of players in MMOs. The maniacs. Those people who get their jewelry shop looted once and then completely dedicate their entire remaining existence in that game to single mindedly chasing the offender wherever they go, with the purpose of griefing them until they quit playing. We all enjoy winning, but for these maniacs winning is secondary to the purer goal of making sure the only content their target gets is 'being chased'. The goal is seizing their target's time. I feel like Steven and people on these forums don't even believe those people exist. I know they do, because I am that maniac.

The third reason is because I dislike the way Steven presents himself relative to his vision. I feel like someone who appears to have always been in a position of great privilege as the rich guild leader of big guilds cannot possibly empathize with or even understand half the things I am worried about with game systems like these, because it's never been a problem for them. Of course it hasn't. This is the problem with privilege. No one gets close enough to disrupt the guild leader fishing.

And finally, the 4th reason is that I am the enforcer/bodyguard for my group. I will rotate my sleep schedule just to derive enjoyment out of killing whoever messes with my friends (I've done this before). I take pleasure in knowing people assume Corruption will have an impact on my motivation. It has never meant nor will ever mean anything to me because it makes me feel good to perform this role for my group so the others don't have to get Corruption. I don't feel like people spend enough time considering the existence of people like me in games like Ashes.

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I pity the person who assumes that Carebears can't fight. But you do you.

And to roll on this a bit more...

Did you know that as a Farmer in Ashes on your own Freehold you can potentially be killed and looted for your crops?

This is very realistic.

You can even hire NPC guards that might be competent.

What you can't do is poison the thieves, dig sinkholes, or go set their apartment on fire so it never happens again.

So they have to succeed at raiding you once per harvest (it requires at least two of them, one to kill you and the other to pick up the loot, doesn't matter which is which).

Do you have a solution for this part? Unlike fishing, your crops and animals don't move. You have to defend them at that time.

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I only speak of flaws relative to 'combining the concept of a living world with similar social rules/appeal to cooperative players' and 'owPvP'.

As Dygz would say, 'people who don't perceive this as an issue will very likely enjoy Ashes, these are likely to be people who enjoyed L2, EVE, and ArcheAge'.

Now from my own perspective I can add this for any devs.

"Your world of Nodes is not appealing enough to me while it contains this flaw."

I don't necessarily think you (the devs) CARE about that, but this is still mostly a thread about 'why PvE players/worldsim enjoyers/microcompetition fans' might have opinions about Ashes that should get a little more respect than they sometimes do.

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You can feel whatever you like, it's why I don't talk to you.

We can go back to that. I engaged for clarification, if you don't wanna accept it because of your feelings, don't.

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I don't think anyone wants Intrepid to do that.

I think things are fine as they are.

If you want to have a fishing competition, first you need to have a PvP competition. And then maybe you need to keep having a PvP competition. And if you're not quite perfect enough at your PvP competition, your fishing competition is ruined, so you better be good at PvP.

PvX.

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Yes, I definitely expect it to work on you.

You are not the person that PvE-enjoyers don't want to share servers with. They don't want a 'big bad world'. What benefit is it, to them, to join it?

You're right, it's not a fishing game. Based on your 'big bad world' comment, one might say it is a PvP game.

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I don't care how you express it. The fact that your mind goes in that direction at all is the reason I don't interact with you. That's why the best course of action here is for me to not do that.

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I'm talking about my Rogue, who will forego sleep to hunt you, and stand like a Scarecrow on your Freehold so you don't know if it is safe to farm your crops, yes.

You have his explanation already. Remember what this thread is about.

People sometimes want their efforts in 'competition' or even cooperation to not 'become PvP competition whenever SunScript appears'.

But SunScript can appear and disappear whenever he likes. And getting more people to kill him to make him go away... won't make him go away. His goal is to change your behaviour.

We tend to be a bit nicer because we will clearly tell you what we want you to change, and then 'honorably' stop hunting you if you change it. There are people worse than us. Is there anything you care about 'forcing someone else to change' enough to hunt them for 2 weeks?

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I don't believe there should be anything in Ashes in a Safe Zone that has any economic impact. I don't perceive that to be a solution either, because you will get the other side, where optimizers abuse that fiat protection from PvP.

All I want is for people to understand why we should leave the PvP-averse-PvE-enjoyers who say they don't want to play because they don't want to get ganked, 'alone'. They have a valid reason. The game doesn't need to change for them. Tuning corruption to make it acceptable to them would be insufficient. We know this from Elite (another long story to tell).

I believe that any approach taken by Ashes to 'make content for those players' will negatively impact the game, except maybe the usual suggested 'PvE boss locked behind PvP chokepoint' and 'Your Freehold is a safer zone but you can't make any finished items on the Freehold'.

My 'farmer' would actually prefer that your crops could be stolen right off your Freehold, as long as the thief got Corruption for it. Because that would balance the game better in her eyes. I understand that adding safe zones would resolve the issue in a certain way though.

I'm personally saying that people don't care 'that there is no content designed around them'. Technically there is a lot of content designed around 'them'. They just lose access to that content sometimes to anyone who likes that content and is also better at them in PvP. If by 'content designed around them' you mean 'content that others can't interrupt', that's a whole different way of looking at it, from what I'm trying to address, hence the shift to splinter topic.