Ten Rules of PvP was RE: [MUD-Dev] Interesting DAoC Poll

[John Buehler]

Azeraab writes:

> Rule 10 is more about the horrors of a class/level system as it
> applies to forcing you to live forever with mistakes made before
> you knew anything about the game.  This is the real big one.  100%
> of the people I know who have quit list this as a major factor.

> Lets say you pick a Berserker on the first day you get the game.
> At level 5 you decide you are going to specialize in swords.  You
> spend the next 2 months chopping away at mobs, and dreaming about
> hacking through hordes of enemy players.  You are now level 40 and
> decide you can go join the fun.

>   You go to the battlefield at the ablion portal fort and stand
>   around.  Most fights occur at long range, you have no ranged
>   attacks.  Finally after an hour of doing nothing the albions
>   rush out of the fort and attack.  You face an orange con albion
>   armsman, he kills you taking less than half damage.  Your
>   friend, another level 40 Berserker, who specialized in hammers
>   kills the wounded armsman easily.  Over your corpse he says,
>   "Didn't you know that hammers do much more damage against armor
>   than swords?"

> Now you are faced with a choice.  Keep playing a character who is
> totally ineffective, and really not what you expected, and try to
> make due. Start over, with a hammer specialized thane, and spend
> another 2 months bashing monsters.  Or quit.  Most go with the
> first option with a while, then try the 2nd for about a week, then
> go with the 3rd.

> There are 2 ways the designer can avoid the problems with rule 10.
> Either make all of the classes similar.  If everyone was a mage
> variant the problems would be minimized.  The issue of no ranged
> attacks wouldn't exist, issues with spells being interruptible but
> melee attacks not being interruptible wouldn't exist, and so on.

> The other way is to allow players to make changes without having
> to restart.  Ala UO.  The berserker in our example should be
> allowed to at least toss aside his sword and pick up a hammer
> without penalty.

This particular rule is one that I think that ANY form of
entertainment should consider.  At the most basic form, this rule
is:

Do not provide barriers to entertainment

It's difficult to provide entertainment in games.  To provide
barriers to what entertainment there is dumbfounds me.

Irrevocable decisions seem to be all the rage these days.  EverQuest
does not permit reclassing.  Asheron's Call does not permit skill
point reallocation.  Dark Age of Camelot permits neither.  The only
argument that I hear from anyone in favor of this approach is that
it avoids the dreaded 'uber' character.  Players can't know how to
make the optimal character because they don't know the systems, so
everyone produces a more or less inefficient character.  And that's
in a game that is only about achievements, where efficiency is
everything.  I find this mindset laughably absurd.

Irrevocable decisions in character design and development by the
players are a massive barrier to entertainment.  This is obviously
due to the fact that if I am playing a Champion and find that Hero
is actually what I wanted, then I have to create a new character (a
Hero) and work him up in levels until I can resume the game as I was
playing it before.  Is there entertainment in reachieving those
levels?  For some, perhaps, but the social group that the Champion
was used to playing with must be left behind.  If not left behind,
then the Hero cannot contribute to the groups that it travels with.

If reclassing and skill point reallocation was permitted in Dark Age
of Camelot, we'd have the equivalent of an economic model, with a
supply and demand basis.  Players would be able to adapt to the
actual balance of the game, regardless of what it is, and regardless
of how it changes.  If a class is truly uninteresting or
superfluous, then nobody will play it - as opposed to the current
Hope Model, where players hope that a class is what they thought it
would be, and that it would permit them to experience certain
things.  If a class is truly 'uber', then everyone will play it and
nobody will successfully oppose it with other classes.  This will
indicate a problem in the game design.  But one that can be fixed,
and that the players can readapt to.

Classes are inherently limited in what they can do, and classes are
designed to possess counters to the capabilities of other classes.
Given this game of cat and mouse, there is no single class that
rules all others.  There is no single 'uber' character unless the
designers want it that way.

I'd like to see guilds decide to go entirely with rangers, and then
entirely with heros and then entirely with bards - just because
those guilds want to see how the game works with that structure in
PvP play.  Being able to play with different experiences through
different classes, and different skills within those classes would
add hugely to the entertainment value of Dark Age of Camelot.  I
consider that to be a far greater incentive to stay in the game as
opposed to the 'incentive' of developing my theoretical 'uber'
character by starting the game from scratch.  In the spirit of my
'entertainment density' notion, repetition of the entire game with a
slight twist contains a very low entertainment density.  Especially
when the player probably already knows much about the new class
anyway.

This would also stop much of the current whining on the message
boards - if game developers care about such things.  If a whiner
thinks that another class has a significant advantage, they can BE
that class and find out what it's like.

I'd like to see this implemented for one additional reason: those
who enjoy advancing characters will still be able to create
additional characters and advance them through the PvE game.  Other
than having a greater variety of simultaneous choices of high level
characters, there is no real incentive to repeating the PvE grind -
unless the PvE game is inherently entertaining.  I wonder how many
second characters would be created if reclassing and respecializing
were permitted a) instantaneously, b) quickly, c) slowly.  We
already have d) not at all.

JB

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