Time to get in my recliner and become an armchair game designer. Making a PvP focused MMO is tough. You have to make an engaging game that keeps players coming back but it also has to be balanced. There are two critical design aspects that a would-be PvP MMO must take into consideration: Scale and Ownership.
Scale
Scale means the amount of players it takes to accomplish a goal. Let's look at WoW's PvE Scale: 1+ (solo), 5 (dungeon), 10 (raid), 25 (raid) and 40 (old raids). Nice distribution from solo to a large group and provides stuff to do for everyone.
Now look at WAR's for the RvR lakes: 6++ (Battlefield Objective), 12+++ (Keeps), 100+ (Fortress) and 48 (city instance). It clearly skews toward a much larger scale. Defenders just increase the numbers further for B.O.'s and Keeps.
This has the effect of making players feel like grunts rather than heroes. The lack of small scale goals also leaves players feeling bored and teaches them to wait for the zerg. Even PvP games such as Eve and Darkfall provide content (in the form of players or NPC's) for small groups. To keep players engaged, you must provide a wide variety of scale.
Ownership
This would be the goal or objective piece of the PvP MMO. Why are the players fighting each other? In games like Eve, Darkfall and even DAoC guilds fight over ownership of objectives. By owning them, their guild gains benefits. They lose ownership when someone takes it from them.
In WAR you don't own a keep, you just lease it for a short time. It is hard for a player to get motivated when the scale of the objective is too big. They really don't have a stake in their city or taking the enemy city. It is all transient anyway, once someone gets to the city it will all be reset.
It is important to have that feeling of ownership in a PvP game. It is what drives many wars in real life and it carries over into MMO's too. Give players stuff to own, small and large scale, and players will create their own incentive to fight.
By combining a wide variety of scale and objectives that players can own, a PvP MMO will have a solid foundation.
Gaming into the summer
1 day ago
