[MUD-Dev] PvP Systems

[John Buehler]

Matt Mihaly writes:

>> You're applying the analogy too literally.  What happens when the
>> king player decides that every firstborn player needs to be
>> executed?  He has the power and he can do it.  I consider this
>> equivalent of one park attendee deciding to close a ride.
>> Regardless of how the analogy is applied, I would hope that you
>> understand that I have a problem with inordinate power lying in the
>> hands of any player.

> Well, I can only really answer for Achaea, and if the leader of a
> city-state decided that, he'd not be the leader very long at all. I'd
> imagine he'd be out in a matter of a real-life hour or two. The power
> ultimately rests at the bottom of the pyramid as all city-states are
> democracies. In our 3 and a half years so far, we've never had the
> leader of a city-state do anything crazy like that. For the most part,
> they actually work really hard to make the cities they lead
> better. But, if one of them did go a bit off the deep end, the
> populace can simply remove him or her (through their elected
> representatives, who choose the leader and who can remove the leader
> (titles differ by city)).

In Ultima Online, there are whole 'gangs' of kids who form
organizations in order to PK others.  My greatest fear is having a
large scale game (e.g.  Ultima Online or EverQuest) with your
mechanisms such that all it takes is a whole bunch of kids to band
together and make others' lives miserable.  It may be that the
political PvP would keep such people busy enough that they wouldn't
feel the need to band together in order to create even more mayhem
than the current mainstream systems provide.

That matches my attitude about PvP in general: if you want to keep
people away from malicious PvP, give them something entertaining to
do.  In your case, you're focusing their PvP energies into something
that you and a bunch of other people find entertaining.  In my case, I
want to distract them from the very idea of PvP and get them enjoying
the world because it's a fun play to spend time.

Do most of your players engage in the political system, or is there a
spectrum of players?  Some who dive in loaded for bear and others who
generally ignore it?  Do you have a feel for the distribution?  I'd
hop into Achaea and find out for myself, but I prefer the horse's
mouth over dealing with a text game.

>> Total consentuality is boring to you.  It may be perfectly adequate
>> for us pansies, thank you.

> Ok, that's fair enough once again. I sometimes let the player in me
> speak rather than the designer. The player in me hates pansies and
> the designer in me tries to ignore the player as much as possible.

Note that the PvP switch mechanism that I came up with is totally
consentual just as your world is totally consentual.  Players
uninterested in your style of PvP don't play your game.  I'm just
claiming that there are multiple ways of engaging in PvP and that
players should be left to work that out amongst themselves.  It may be
that the juxtaposition of those multiple systems will cause lots of
bad feelings, but I suspect that if some opportunities for PvP were
officially incorporated into the game (perhaps including political
systems), then players might be able to effectively vent their PvP
energies.  What I do not want is to have players feeling obligated to
deal with PvP when they're just not interested.

Understand also that I'm hardly what one would consider a pansy.  Here
I am engaged in social PvP.  But I choose when and where I engage in
it.  Some days I'm interested in punching another character in the
nose and other days I'm not.  I see no reason why I should have to
stay out of the game world on days when I don't feel like punching
somebody in the nose.  It's a game after all.  Not a life.  Despite
the classic tirade of "It's not a game, it's..."

JB

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