[MUD-Dev] A Question on PvP and PK

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
> On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 szii at sziisoft.com wrote:

>> You couldn't get good at CS quickly...so you quit.  To most
>> pk-types I know, that's kinda funny. *shrug* We don't really care
>> whether you play or not, except that you're missing out on a
>> great game once you achieve a certain level of play...regardless
>> of the arena.  I could state that 'Go' is hard, too.  It's an
>> immensely challenging game that you never really can master.  But
>> once you get a feel for it, it's great.

> In Go and Chess and other games like that, you usually aren't
> playing against other masters, but when you play CS or PK in many
> games, you end up stuck against people with FAR more experience
> than you. If you had to play a Master every time you started
> playing chess, I bet it'd become unentertaining. Challenge is
> good. Feeling as if you are screwed from the start is not fun.

This is a core problem that is going to have to be solved before any
MMFPS game is going to succeed: Setting up fights between equal
opponents.  I eventually quit playing Tribes because the only place
I could consistently find a match where everyone there was as good
at the game as myself was in the OGL Top 100 tournaments, and I
didn't want to deal with the politics of that organization.

I call it the "Testosterone Trap", the best team with the best and
play against the best when they can, and the rest of the time they
drop into matches against vastly inferior opponents and use them for
target practice.  A player in the top 1% could join an ordinary
pickup game and, all by himself, determine the outcome.  Frequently
it was a humiliating walkover.

In an ordinary FPS, this isn't a problem, there are thousands of
servers and you can keep trying until you find one that is more
even.  The past doesn't matter because each match and each server is
a separate thing, with only the most tenuous of relationships to any
other.  In a persistent world, this is no longer true, and even if
what is persistant is no more than a win/loss ratio, such games
quickly turn into small clicques of extremely skilled players who
absolutely destroy any newcomers, and drive them away just by being
too *good*.

--Dave



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