Another way to approach this is to even ask yourself if you need to fight Goliath at all.

You got your agon in my paideia! No, you got your paideia in my agon!

What I was originally getting at is this: unlike the real world, in the virtual world it’s sometimes impossible to change the tactical framework in your favor due to the game physics (barring cheats and exploits, which are undesirable on a number of levels).

If you’re David in that situation (the players at a major systemic disadvantage to Goliath) sometimes your best option is to nudge the dev team and get the rules fixed. And if they don’t respond quickly, go find a more balanced game.

I can’t remember that. :/ You guys grew up with UO; I only found out about it well after all the major phases had become history. I’m not aware of any wiki or book that actually records and gives context to all the major lessons learned from UO that I can go and buy.

Someone needs to make that.

Not the lessons, but the things players did and the tools the game gave them to allow them to do these things. The lessons were all handled wrong, at least the major lessons. A fresh look at solving the problems that arose from the marvelous mechanics is sorely needed.

Remember, the rampant pking and not the pvp system were what broke UO.

I can’t remember that. :/ You guys grew up with UO; I only found out about it well after all the major phases had become history. I’m not aware of any wiki or book that actually records and gives context to all the major lessons learned from UO that I can go and buy.

Someone needs to make that.

If Goliath’s an anti-social jerk that’s costing you subscriptions, there’s nothing wrong and a great deal right with the designer putting a rock right between his eyes. But if you want players to wield the sling, let’s talk pay and benefits package… ’cause hell will freeze over before it happens for free.

Would you accept that pay and benefits package in-game?

It can be a zone system, a flag system, or both in parallel. As long as the predators can’t gank random newbies minding their own business, it works.

UO could have done it better, in addition to doing it sooner. Rather than “mirroring” the existing land-mass, they could have given us a new continent (mirroring was an elegant use of limited resources, but ultimately unsatisfying from the player perspective). Had they designed such a region layout with the needs of player communities in mind, and allowed existing communities to relocate as unified entities, and run with the “city stone” concept, and prioritized a lot of really cool stuff that they added too late…

Then it would still be an isometric 2D title fighting against some damn sexy 3D eye candy. But it would have kept the solid, unique community focus that has, to this day, eluded those prettier games.

Not only can you have a dynamic and vibrant community without any PvP to speak of, you can have it without any combat system at all. There will still be inter-player conflict, because any time people are free to interact, there’ll inevitably be conflict. But it’s a lot easier to channel conflict in a controlled manner, one that will encourage the losers to learn, improve, and try again, if you don’t have random gank squads killing off your miners and lumberjacks. Give the citizens security and give the fighters a nice, fair, balanced tournament ladder in the city arena.

If Goliath’s an anti-social jerk that’s costing you subscriptions, there’s nothing wrong and a great deal right with the designer putting a rock right between his eyes. But if you want players to wield the sling, let’s talk pay and benefits package… ’cause hell will freeze over before it happens for free.

Eolirin:
Remember, the rampant pking and not the pvp system were what broke UO. The pvp system actually has some valid elements to it. Those were stripped out along with the bad parts because a workable solution to maintain those good points was never reached. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see a system that actually works for what UO was trying to do, and that’s the really sad part of this. Scale seems to break solutions that worked in MUDs, and not having a similar system changes the nature of the game into something else entirely. It really makes me think that games like UO just plain cannot function at the 100k plus users scale.

I think it can be done. But you have to add a few things that UO never placed in their game.

1) Real player communities. Player built cities. There’s two important aspects here, the community by itself and the community in relationship to others as part of a world. There needs to be reasons for the community to exist on it’s own, but each community also needs to interact with others.
So players need a benefit for belonging to a community, and at the same time be able to enhance that community. And each community needs to have reasons to interact with other communities, such as trade. Meaning territorial resources are important and need to be varied.

2) Players need to be able to pursue not only justice, but be able to reinforce their own safety through said justice. It doesn’t do any good to stop injustice on an individual event basis. Players need to be able to stop, or send reeling, the causes of injustice. laws must be in place and enforceable.

Only by combining these aspects together do you get the kind of cooperation and spirit required to make open PvP a viable option in an MMO.

And that’s kinda the problem. The solution was to invalidate the situation, not to actually solve it. And Trammel caused a number of issues in the long term as well, both in terms of community building an in terms of economy. UO actually needed PKs in some number in order to function the way it was designed, they just needed to be on the losing side, not the constantly winning side.

I’m also not sure that UO would have done better had there been a Trammel earlier on. UO’s pve game has always been horrible shallow, and the community ties wouldn’t have developed in the same way had Trammel been there from the start. I think they would’ve genuinely been weaker, and I think that would’ve caused it to spiral downwards much sooner. In order for sandbox games to have been bigger in the market place they would’ve needed to be more compelling on more levels than just not having to worry about getting ganked when you’re walking outside the guard zone.

@Michael, eh, no. I don’t have a method per se, because there was no method in UO. What ended up happening was segergation, not success. They took the conflict out of the game. So the people that didn’t want to play the PVP game had somewhere to go, but at the cost of the pvp game existing. The PKs won, and the devs surrendered and removed them from the game for the good of the overall playerbase. If the PKs had lost, Trammel would not have been necessary. In the article this is like the naval game people banning the guy who keeps winning by using computer generated models. The PKs were David, and Goliath “won” by contriving them out of existence. The ruleset didn’t change to account for that though, and it caused issues.

Remember, the rampant pking and not the pvp system were what broke UO. The pvp system actually has some valid elements to it. Those were stripped out along with the bad parts because a workable solution to maintain those good points was never reached. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see a system that actually works for what UO was trying to do, and that’s the really sad part of this. Scale seems to break solutions that worked in MUDs, and not having a similar system changes the nature of the game into something else entirely. It really makes me think that games like UO just plain cannot function at the 100k plus users scale.

@Michael, No that’s not even a solution, they’d be back the next day on a new rig with even better security!

Pft. You just have to do it more subtly. Finesse, sir! I’d give you details, but I’ve never played UO.

Also, see Yukon’s comment. The point is that you’re defining your method of winning as vital, which demands sticking to the rules of the currently dominant, which results in a staggering loss rate of 75.2%. That’s exactly what the article is saying is a bad idea.

If Trammel had come sooner rather than later, we might have a greater number of sandbox worlds descended from UO rather than theme-park worlds descended from EverQuest. But that’s another type of painful lesson.

UO has steadily moved more to the theme park style since Trammel. It’s still got the major part of “Sandbox”, but playing it and reading about it now feels quite Themeparkish. They have quests for achievements, certain places to get certain things, “end game” like content, etc. Some of this isn’t really different, just fortified 12 ways. All the while, the social structure has changed entirely.

This change was foreseeable. Not that it had to happen that way, but the mindset was obvious. Some people used to post on their forums that they are foolish to try to compete with WoW. But they did, and they lost that battle. Their boards are now gasping for air, their game world less active than some private servers, and the majority of their dwindling subs are on the other side of the world.

The biggest thing was exactly what this topic is about. They went orthodox, and relied on copying. It was so bad that even their major event at one point was found to be copied from an event on a private server (Belo Ondariva, if I remember the name right?). They had no initiative left while trying to play the same game as the big guys.