Venjenz said:Everyone knows what a camp is...
No they don't. There will be lots of players new to MMORPGs completely and certainly many that have never played EQ or any 'social' MMO.
Venjenz said:Self-policing by the players worked just fine for years in EQ1
No it didn't. There were frequent unpleasant issues and annoyances in most camping spots. Even in P99 which had relatively low player count and had some playnice rules, there were contention issues regularly.
VR need to make playnice rules, need to make sure everyone understands them and need to have CS backup to make sure people know that breaking the rules will not be tolerated and will have consequences.
Yes, most people in society behave, some are even nice, but how do you think the streets would be after dark if there were no laws and no police? But 'self-policing' would fix it, yeah?... No.
Luckily there was an encouraging recent comment from Joppa. Paraphrasing: -
"That will quickly become a CS issue. We will be keeping an eye on and will not tolerate it"
He was briefly talking about griefing behaviour, but what I took from that comment is there will be Customer Services and they will be active.
Though he did also say: -
"I'm expecting to see a lot of self... policing might not be the right word... but players will have to eat the consequences of their actions"
Which is not so encouraging. When you know something might well be a serious issue, hoping for the best is not a responsible policy.
Venjenz what you are describing is vigilantism and pseudo PvP, which have downsides. The most common form of pseudo PvP is training your enemies as you described, but not everyone has feign death to allow them to do that effectively. Would you so readily support that approach if you had played a paladin and had never been able to defend a camp against a class with feign death? Do we want all groups to require a feign death class to guard their camp against other players even in a PvE server?
I'm not saying your point is a bad one though. This may be what we see happening in Pantheon and maybe it will work fine, but it's a solution that has been brought up before and it has its issues. If pseudo PvP is the unspoken but accepted means of handling disputes, then I hope all classes get something to fight back with.
I read through most of this and on the side of less regulation.
In 10 years on EQ, the benefits of freedom.. including stories like fansy the famous bard, and epic guilds and need for alliances to be competitive, and the way certain camped loot drove the economy and prices.. these things made EQ great and memorable, and outweighed the negatives of getting jipped once in a blue moon.
The devs can reduce contention if they 1) have lots of alternate camps, and 2) make loot in tune for the level of PC required to attain it(ie dont attract high end toons to camp low end areas). Thats all we need from devs. Oh, and maybe the ability to 'rate' players like yelp or something so we can choose not to accept people to our groups or guilds based on other players interations with them.
Defector said:I read through most of this and on the side of less regulation.
In 10 years on EQ, the benefits of freedom.. including stories like fansy the famous bard, and epic guilds and need for alliances to be competitive, and the way certain camped loot drove the economy and prices.. these things made EQ great and memorable, and outweighed the negatives of getting jipped once in a blue moon.
The devs can reduce contention if they 1) have lots of alternate camps, and 2) make loot in tune for the level of PC required to attain it(ie dont attract high end toons to camp low end areas). Thats all we need from devs. Oh, and maybe the ability to 'rate' players like yelp or something so we can choose not to accept people to our groups or guilds based on other players interations with them.
I've been following it as well, and agree with this whole heartedly. I have yet to hear of any false mechanic that can be added to the game that wouldn't damage the game more than any good it could do.
I'm hoping they end up with a policy more like
There are no "camps".
First come first serve.
First to tag owns it, unless they die then next to tag has it.
And CS only step in under severe cases by giving both parties a temporary "cooling off" ban of a day or week or so until they can come back and work there problems out like adults.
disposalist said:Though he did also say: -
"I'm expecting to see a lot of self... policing might not be the right word... but players will have to eat the consequences of their actions"
Griefburgers confirmed!
I would say that the camp is taken until the other person or group leaves. You wait your turn and be patient because you too would not want to be rushed. The "camp party" should also take in consideration that there are people waiting. Diplomacy should be something to consider because reputation in this game will be important. Bad behavior deserves to get reported, so I think that covers it all really.
disposalist said:No they don't. There will be lots of players new to MMORPGs completely and certainly many that have never played EQ or any 'social' MMO.
Yeah, they do. By the time anyone playing an MMO makes it out of their starting area, they know what a camp is, what KS is, what griefing is, etc. And if they are truly ignorant MMO babe-in-the-woods, they'll need one KS or camp steal and the toxic spam from the person they griefed to know everything they'll ever need to.
Bottom line, if people KS/camp steal, they are griefing. Griefing should be punished by the community and done so with vigor. Only when the community cannot make the griefer pay adequately for their sins should CS get involved. As a necro or enchanter, I could counter grief no problem, and when I was on my magician, I just called friends to help handle any problem I got into. Bottom line, counter-griefing works and can be most effective, as can server blacklisting. In a group centric game that really does require having a decent reputation, playerbase self-policing is not that hard. The blacklist is a serious thing when you need others to get by.
But again, everyone knows what a camp is. They can respect play nice rules or not, but they know. If they are truly uneducated, they will be educated in due course, and if they are straight griefing, they should expect vigorous reply to their antics. I will defer to my guild leadership should anyone cross me, but at the very least, anyone who griefs me will make it onto the blacklist of everyone I know, and hopefully everyone all of those people know, and I will let griefer_01 understand that.
Venjenz said:disposalist said:No they don't. There will be lots of players new to MMORPGs completely and certainly many that have never played EQ or any 'social' MMO.
Yeah, they do. By the time anyone playing an MMO makes it out of their starting area, they know what a camp is, what KS is, what griefing is, etc. And if they are truly ignorant MMO babe-in-the-woods, they'll need one KS or camp steal and the toxic spam from the person they griefed to know everything they'll ever need to.
Bottom line, if people KS/camp steal, they are griefing. Griefing should be punished by the community and done so with vi
Since Pantheon will be most damage dealt, there is no such thing as kill-stealing. While VR has made mention of it, they have not defined it. Various people have different views and until VR defines what kill-stealing is, we are just speculating.
Even if we accept that community vigilantism is the approved method of countering kill or camp stealing, who is to say what defines those terms? One person's idea of rightfully camping is another person's idea of not sharing or overfarming. Even with written rules it is a gray area, but I would be in favor of VR indicating what their rough stance is. If enough of the community on server X decides that camps aren't the way to go, then will defending your camps by "counter-griefing" get you in trouble with CS? I would argue that going against server specific norms should result in CS punishment unless VR has a formal stance.
I don't particularly like griefing but the line between that and competition can get blurry. In any system there is competition for resources. It seems like a lot of people here would just like to separate the competition from the game mechanics themselves and make it a very formal process. All you're doing is removing the need to compete in-game for resources and using a third party to place you into a higher position on a resource-heirarchy. I can't for the life of me understand why there are so many people asking for an authoritative structure that extends far beyond the mechanics of the game and involves itself in the actual peer to peer experience of players. These things can be socially negotiated, and likewise though they may upset you sometimes, these things can be maturely managed without appealing to a higher power. Some of the suggestions I've seen here would set this game up in a way that players would have actual property rights in the game, temporal or not. An artifical heirarchy not decided by in-game mechanic competition but by out of game bureaucracy. Can you imagine the cooling effect that has on any new groups who would like to engage with content? I for one would like to play a game where devs have as little to do with things of this nature as possible. The 51% mechanic does just that. That's the law, the only law. If you get it you get it, if not then you don't. If you want special rights to a zone and to limit competion I hope you can socially negotiate that. Anything so direct as times zones can create an entirely different type of greifing, the type where top guilds and ruthlessly proactive memebers abuse the camp reservation system and block out competition. What constitutes a kill should be whatever VR decides and that should be the end of it. People will likely try to get kills that you want and that's actually a good thing. It means that something somewhere was done right and that there's incentive and value to locations.
I guess my main point is that the more authoritarianism in this game, no matter what virtueous guise if manifests itself under, the worse off we will all be. I want my freedom, and all the responsibility, pain and joy that comes with it.
Venjenz said:Bottom line, if people KS/camp steal, they are griefing. Griefing should be punished by the community and done so with vigor. Only when the community cannot make the griefer pay adequately for their sins should CS get involved. As a necro or enchanter, I could counter grief no problem, and when I was on my magician, I just called friends to help handle any problem I got into. Bottom line, counter-griefing works and can be most effective, as can server blacklisting. In a group centric game that really does require having a decent reputation, playerbase self-policing is not that hard. The blacklist is a serious thing when you need others to get by.
Love these discussions…Brings out the passion in people and their gaming experiences. In EQ I was on the Solusek Ro Server pre-merge. That group was not one to be trifled with when we had people hop on and express/employ the special kind of stupid if griefing and KS activity the community did deal with it and swiftly. GMs would be brought in if it got completely out of hand and then it was done. Ah the good old days. Fast forward to now and the old rules don’t seem to apply or at least that is and has been my observation for several years now. The communities do not seem to hold the old ways a coveted social norms and behaviors as we did then. I can completely agree with the approach of dealing with it yourself. Old school that is exactly what we did. Now, I think and as much as I hate to admit it we won’t have the luxury of a community that we started with back in the day. VR may have to think about restrictions and mechanics. Do I like that? No. It’s just the reality of todays gamers and MMO’s.
HierarchyHero said:The 51% mechanic does just that. That's the law, the only law. If you get it you get it, if not then you don't. If you want special rights to a zone and to limit competion I hope you can socially negotiate that. Anything so direct as times zones can create an entirely different type of greifing, the type where top guilds and ruthlessly proactive memebers abuse the camp reservation system and block out competition. What constitutes a kill should be whatever VR decides and that should be the end of it. People will likely try to get kills that you want and that's actually a good thing. It means that something somewhere was done right and that there's incentive and value to locations.
I guess my main point is that the more authoritarianism in this game, no matter what virtueous guise if manifests itself under, the worse off we will all be. I want my freedom, and all the responsibility, pain and joy that comes with it.
I fail to see how that solves things, in fact it creates MORE problems. No camp system doesn't mean top guilds can't/won't lock down certain mobs or that others have "equal" opportunity, all this means is those top guilds can stroll into any camp at any time and just steal it away. Those top guilds will very likely be far better geared than your average player and can outdamage any other "competition." It also means that level 50 players can wander into an area with a level 30 group and just steal their "camped" mob at will. The entire "well just bring your guild or friends to help compete" is a terrible stance and further encourages more mud slinging and griefing, it's also a slap to those who have small friend circles or prefer smaller guilds and also assumes that those friends/guild members are always free to drop everything to get into fights with other players over items.
Competition is at odds with cooperation and left to players things would get messy VERY quickly if kill stealing and camp stealing were allowed. I'd bet money it would drive more players out of the game than VR would lose by having a PNP requiring players respect of camp rights and enforcing no tolerance for kill stealing/training. One of the more stressed aspects of Pantheon is/has always been that of making a fun, social, and cooperative game with a strong sense of community. Driving a hard wedge between players/groups/guilds by going hard on competition produces the exact opposite effect. Far better to go about respecting camps etc and addressing problems like content blocking by groups/guilds as they arise with things like random spawn locations, means for crafters to craft similar items, and similar items in other zones. It already seems like VRs intent is to have multiple locations in the world to get near similar items and they also seem keen on allowing crafters to make almost any item (according to the FAQ).
Iksar said:HierarchyHero said:The 51% mechanic does just that. That's the law, the only law. If you get it you get it, if not then you don't. If you want special rights to a zone and to limit competion I hope you can socially negotiate that. Anything so direct as times zones can create an entirely different type of greifing, the type where top guilds and ruthlessly proactive memebers abuse the camp reservation system and block out competition. What constitutes a kill should be whatever VR decides and that should be the end of it. People will likely try to get kills that you want and that's actually a good thing. It means that something somewhere was done right and that there's incentive and value to locations.
I guess my main point is that the more authoritarianism in this game, no matter what virtueous guise if manifests itself under, the worse off we will all be. I want my freedom, and all the responsibility, pain and joy that comes with it.
I fail to see how that solves things, in fact it creates MORE problems. No camp system doesn't mean top guilds can't/won't lock down certain mobs or that others have "equal" opportunity, all this means is those top guilds can stroll into any camp at any time and just steal it away. Those top guilds will very likely be far better geared than your average player and can outdamage any other "competition." It also means that level 50 players can wander into an area with a level 30 group and just steal their "camped" mob at will. The entire "well just bring your guild or friends to help compete" is a terrible stance and further encourages more mud slinging and griefing, it's also a slap to those who have small friend circles or prefer smaller guilds and also assumes that those friends/guild members are always free to drop everything to get into fights with other players over items.
Competition is at odds with cooperation and left to players things would get messy VERY quickly if kill stealing and camp stealing were allowed. I'd bet money it would drive more players out of the game than VR would lose by having a PNP requiring players respect of camp rights and enforcing no tolerance for kill stealing/training. One of the more stressed aspects of Pantheon is/has always been that of making a fun, social, and cooperative game with a strong sense of community. Driving a hard wedge between players/groups/guilds by going hard on competition produces the exact opposite effect. Far better to go about respecting camps etc and addressing problems like content blocking by groups/guilds as they arise with things like random spawn locations, means for crafters to craft similar items, and similar items in other zones. It already seems like VRs intent is to have multiple locations in the world to get near similar items and they also seem keen on allowing crafters to make almost any item (according to the FAQ).
I understand the 51% mechanic HierarchyHero but Iksar has a great counter point and I have experienced this many times. Bots and folks that have far better ability to deal damage can run in with impunity and take what they want. As mentioned above scripting will be a problem and I know some intellectual giant will try it. Not a fan of the set damage rate to lock down the mob. The group dynamics as far as how that is determined also is a factor if the DPS is being done solo or grouped.
The competition piece in an interesting argument and valid I agree if you lock a mob down what will be the out come of the larger game environment? GW2 comes to mind with the open engagement features if it set up that way. The main thing that comes to mind is competition seems to run rough shot over etiquette and soft rules when applied. At least that has been my experience.
Great posts guys
Ox
Venjenz said:disposalist said:No they don't. There will be lots of players new to MMORPGs completely and certainly many that have never played EQ or any 'social' MMO.
Yeah, they do. By the time anyone playing an MMO makes it out of their starting area, they know what a camp is, what KS is, what griefing is, etc. And if they are truly ignorant MMO babe-in-the-woods, they'll need one KS or camp steal and the toxic spam from the person they griefed to know everything they'll ever need to.
No they don't hehe. Or at least even if they do, knowing what "a camp" *is* often isn't the issue. Even in an established game people disagree on which camps encompass which mobs and what counts as setting up or leaving or failing a camp blah blah. In a new game no one will know what the particular camps even *are* for quite a while and it's those first few chaotic months that people will decide whether they keep playing or not. I can't even imagine the arguments over people attempting to put their own stamp on what they think 'the camps' are...
I'm not trying to pick an argument, Venjenz, but I think we've had different experiences, want different things and have different opinions on it hehe.
Even in EQ P99 where people had played the game for many years before and there were supposedly 'established' and 'known' camps, there were disagreements over which mobs were in which camps especially when busy. I recently played in Karnor's Castle for many many hours because I needed a rare drop there for the Monk epic. There were *regular* arguments and instances of mob 'stealing' and groups attempting to push each other out of camps (being a Monk I got a good overview of it, but also got thrust into the middle of it, unfortunately). All it takes it a slight disagreement over who got where first or who wasn't controlling what camp or who pulled what wanderer or many many other little things and it could quickly escalate into an unpleasant situation where 'self policing' would lead to groups griefing each other where the slightly stronger or more lucky one would prevail, not the one who was 'in the right' even if there was a 'right' side to the argument.
I also camped for Quillmane for many days. Man, the arguments there were *horrible* because it was such a complex encounter and such a long, open camp.
Venjenz said:Bottom line, if people KS/camp steal, they are griefing. Griefing should be punished by the community and done so with vigor.
How? When there's a whole guild of griefers and botters who are proud of their 'accomplishments'? Or if the argument is pretty much 50/50? Or if no one but the arguing parties know who is 'in the right' and both shout as loud? I guess the one with the most friends 'wins' whether they were a baddie or not? Great community solution.
Venjenz said:Only when the community cannot make the griefer pay adequately for their sins should CS get involved
Yes, we need CS and lots of it. They will need very clearly defined rules and tools to look through logs and all that jazz in order to enforce anything. Even then, they will have an extremely difficult job when most problems could be avoided in the first place by some of the game mechanics others have suggested?
Venjenz said:As a necro or enchanter, I could counter grief no problem, and when I was on my magician, I just called friends to help handle any problem I got into
I think it's pretty well documented in society how well vigilante justice works. Not to mention if vigilante action is possible, the very same action can be used to grief in the first place (and the people you are griefing, whether or not you do so in retaliation, can call CS to get you sanctioned).
Venjenz said:Bottom line, counter-griefing works and can be most effective, as can server blacklisting. In a group centric game that really does require having a decent reputation, playerbase self-policing is not that hard. The blacklist is a serious thing when you need others to get by.
Nah. Even if there were not 'griefer guilds' for baddies to revel in, there will be a *lot* of players in Pantheon (hopefully) and always be people to play with for them.
In EQ, which I played for many years and was in pretty big guilds, I never heard of someone with such a 'bad reputation' that they were shunned. Well, maybe one or two after a few years of bad behaviour! I would much more often hear people say "such-and-such is a baddie - don't group with them" when I knew very well they were fine and more likely the person saying it was the baddie that had had a run-in with them. Reputations can get sullied *by* baddies.
Honestly, I don't know the solution, but I am sure that leaving up to the community and hoping for the best is not it.
In the past I have suggested a social-media-style like/dislike system that everyone can view, though you would need something more sophisticated to avoid things like guilds abusing it (or simply being misled by a member) and block-disliking someone, but just leaving it for 'word to get around' when we are playing a game with a database and a UI built in seems crazy.
I think Disposalist is pretty well spot on from my own experience with MMOs over the years.
My own experience in the early days was with Dark Ages of Camelot which didn't come out *that* long after EQ. No rules at all protected "camps" although intentional griefing was sometimes punished. The concept of camp was player-driven not recognized in the Code of Conduct. The great majority of players were reasonably nice and it was typical to form a group if players were adventuring in the same area - this minimzed conflict.
We still do not know just how grouping will affect experience gain and loot. We also do not know respawn rates or "camp" populations. Perhaps in Pantheon typical camps won't give enough experience to support more than one player if a group gets nominal xp divided by group size per kill. But I hope the xp formulae do not work that way and instead encourage grouping. But the key point is we don't know yet.
So "first to engage" ..I've been in games where I'm working on a mob for a quest drop, along comes Joe Blow..tags my mob, runs off tags someone else's mob, runs around the whole zone doing the same thing to other people, gaining credit and possibly exps for every mob he's touched. Don't remember what game it was, could have been Warhammer or Wow..too many games, too many years. People like that irritate me..I usually tell them to go hunt their own mobs. Solution? Probably no solution to this. I am just putting this up as an example of what people do.
CanadinaXegony said: ... Solution? Probably no solution to this. ...
Of course there are solutions:
Leashes of reasonable length.
Encounter locking.
Cancellation of all movement buffs while voluntarily in combat.
Trivial loot code / anti-bottom feeding code.
Dynamic content difficulty based on attacker level.
Phasing.
Quest-spawn encounter locking.
MDM (Most Damage Done)
Pro-rated XP based on damage done.
Everyone on the hate list gets kill credit for quests
Personal quest loot.
Take your pick. Heck, make multiple chioces. Just don't expect the hardcore "There's only one way to do it" demographic to accept or like your choice. :)
Mathir said:Leave it to the community. Wouldn't be an awful thing to have a ban or kick option like FPS games sometimes have. If the majority of the zone or server believes an individual should be kicked for whatever reason, have a vote kick option in game that just bans them from that zone for X amount of time. People could make their case in /ooc , and the rest of the zone could vote. The exact parameters would need to be sorted, maybe fellow guildmates can't vote or something like that. But that generally limited the amount of jerks in CounterStrike.
This might very well be the worst suggestion I have seen on these forums, or heck about online gaming in general. In every game that has ever had a vote kick system it IS abused, and it is more abused than used in a just way. Chances are if a person doesn't see such a system as abuse they are part of the abusing party.
A recent example, no man's sea (that recent Xbox pirate game by rare) allows a group to put someone in a brig. Players are forming up crews and anyone who joins when trying to find a random group they put in the brig to froce them to quit. They are doing this just to harrass other players. Just because they can...
In Neverwinter online if you queued for PVP and if you were not what the rest of the group wanted, or they were trying to get a friend in, they would just vote kick over and over until they got what they wanted. This often led to very long queue times for people trying to get in solo.
In WoW when using group finder in numerous cases where I joined a group and 4 (all 4 a preformed group of friends or a guild) and I overlapped on gear with one of the other 4, I could count on a kick right before loot would be rolled on that the person I overlapped with wanted. This happened ALOT post BC. At one point I just gave up pugging. This really sucks when your play times dont line up with your guild or friends.
These are just a few examples, and not even remotely extreme cases. These are the average experience as reported by numerous people who were having a bad time related to this sort of system. While they wont be a direct anology to Pantheon, they are very indicitive of human nature when these systems are allowed.
If you let people vote kick from a zone you can garuntee one thing. A guild of a-holes will show up in that zone to vote kick people who are contesting the stuff the a-hole guild member wants.