Why full loot? -- (Dev) Replied

Hear Hear

 

@rschultzy80
You make some good points.

Basically you have very different motivations for PvP.

There are the achievers who do this for the reward.
There are people who enjoy the sport for the sake of the sport. The simply don't want to be punished for PvP.
There are people who <i>want</i> to ruin someone's day. If you gave them the token equiv of full loot but the other guy had minimal loss, they'd come up with some reason why this was terrible. Even if you made the PK drop full loot they would still do it.

And, of course, there are those who find PvP to be the worst thing imaginable. It's **** to them. There's no amount of incentive you can heap on them to make this fun. You have to find a very different path that they do enjoy which doesn't involve the face to face combat. Calling them a "********" is just blaming the victim.

15 year ago, all of those types were forced to play the same game. There were really no other MMOs. But whether this game chooses to cater to all types or other types of players play other games...you can never really create those dynamics again.

 

Ok. i am trying to do this with an analogy, i dont know if it will work, but we will see.

When i was younger i used to be a very succesfull football player (the real football you know, the one you play with your foot) in germany. I was very competitive, and winning a game was everything for me. I was a forward, so not only was it important to win the games, but i also wanted to be the guy who scored the goals.

But i would have never gotten the idea that winning the game would mean that the other teams would have to be punished for losing. We got points for winning, that was fine. why punish the other team, not getting the point was enough.

So WHY in the world is it necessary to not only make them lose but also take their ball home afterwards so they cant play? Right...it isnt.

 

@Primerib "15 year ago, all of those types were forced to play the same game. There were really no other MMOs. "

Everquest, Asheron's call...

I'm not saying and never will say people won't PK just to grief, as I previously stated, people would grief me just to try and kill my dragons. The % of the people who played just for that purpose (to grief) is a terribly small amount compared to PvP players. Some people who PK'd me repeatedly would actually take the time to help me once I made it further along and didn't just give up.

 

@rschultzy80 good job on making it thru the hazing so that they would welcome you in.


I never said you would never lose your gear, I did say however that it would degrade over time and possibly break(ie destroyed) and need to be replaced. The only differance between what you want and what I said was you didn't get the gear to sell or take.

Yes, I do know I mentioned this before but I don't think sticking to your guns 100% full loot and open pvp is going to work so start thinking of ways to make it work.

 

@Rune:

We get it, you want to live in candyland with invisible barriers and developer imposed restrictions. Considering the nature of this game being a sandbox game that is not going to happen. There will be full loot for players who want full loot. If you are not interested in that then please go play WoW or something similar and it wont be a problem.

 

@Ultima Aficionado Can you please despense with the ignorant comments like if you don't like it go play something else? I think it is very clear at this point that those do not help.

I gave an opinion to how I think things could work with a compromise, being rude and telling people to go away(which I notice you do a lot) will result with a very empty game for everyone.

 

@Rune:
The idea for gear degrading is not a very good one, it provides no incentive to the PVPer. It also has no risk whatsoever. It didn't work in WoW, I doubt it will work here. Full loot is the only option to go and if necessary then it should be an option that you can select. I don't like your idea and I think full loot is better, that's all.

 

We'll see soon enough. Simple fact is myself and many like me won't be playing the game if it doesn't offer this for the same reason we don't want to play WoW or any of the other crap that holds your hand all game. I don't want your loot, I want an emotional involvement in a game. If I didn't I'd play any other drivel already out there. UO fell apart when it tried to accommodate a populace the game wasn't made for. The original players simply left. I'm not saying this game can't be made for both sides, I'm just saying LB isn't going to just let his hardcore UO fan base walk away from this project.

 

@rschlultzy:

I know several players who are interested in returning to their roots from Ultima Online, many are not on the forums yet but I'm sure they will be soon enough. Some of them aren't even interested in playing because of the slider option, but at least it still gives those players a chance to enjoy their style of game.

There are some people who were posting on these forums that have already decided to walk away. I'm sure there will be more. Many players became interested in Ultima from Ultima Online and many fans of the Ultima series enjoyed Ultima Online. There's still a huge number of dedicated fans and I think if this game can revive that experience then those fans will come to SoTA. If not, they'll look for other games that can.

 

I think you was you that @Owain invited to check out KGB. I took the liberty of inviting myself. Problem is no game has satisfied that niche since UO, so what other games to we have to look to? We've been waiting for 10+ years for LB to reclaim his throne.

 

@ Karsh you said, 'Well to me it comes down to this. How many people do you want PVPing? Because it is a choice. Full loot, not many people are going to want to risk losing cool stuff or stuff they took a long time making/acquiring'.

There's a key element missing in this assessment though, and I think it's missing from a lot of the thinking on this topic. That element is the team's stated desire to have as many players as possible freely select the full open mode. You may think that, all other things being equal or similar to previous games, not many people will risk losing their cool stuff, but all other things are *not* equal - this game is not the same as previous games, just the existence of the slider between SPO, FPO, FOFPO (hope that becomes the official abbreviation!) and OPO already changes the dynamic away from previous frames of reference.

I see it a little like the higgs boson, or climate change - i don't need to understand the detail of the science to accept that those things exist and to accept the conclusions of the scientists - I just need to show a modicum of humility and accept that I'm not the expert here, and the fact that I may not be able to visualise the various knobs and levers the dev team have at their disposal, does not mean that they can't twiddle them and pull them and get an outcome I personally couldn't have predicted.

@ Lanatir with respect to the 'is it the loot or is it the besting an opponent' question, I think for most players in favour of the existence of gameplay in SOTA which involves pvp looting, there is a spectrum between the loot being king, and the besting being king, and for most players their crown is balanced pretty much in the middle between the two (bit of a mixed metaphor but you take my point). It's not just taking specific pieces of loot off a particular corpse as spoils of victory, which benefits you through increasing the resources at your disposal, it?s also **the fact that the loot is at risk**. This changes a whole host of player behaviours and creates an entirely different gaming experience, the most obvious difference being, you can be much more sure that the other player is doing his very best to win, or at least not to die (unless he has an absurd amount of gold, or a rather unusual psychological makeup) - much more so than if that player knows the only repercussion if he dies is finding an NPC healer or running back to his corpse.

Crucially - **that is why there are so many players who feel passionately about the elements they've seen described in full open mode in SOTA which hark back to the game dynamic in UO, which have been almost entirely missing from large scale games for a decade or more** - but now there is 15 more years of new tech to put to clever use, and 15 more years of game design and history to learn wise lessons from, in order to polish some of the old edges which were too blunt, to blunt some of the edges which were too sharp, and to create entirely new weapons none of us here can conceive of, maximising the appeal while maintaining that different game dynamic.

I firmly believe that it is all of that, which many people who perhaps came across some sharp edges in UO or elsewhere, mistake for a desire simply to mess with another player's gameplay for no other reason than to irritate that other player. When you jump to that conclusion based on poor evidence, you debase both the player and yourself. (Clearly there are similar truths at the other end of the spectrum of poor quality thinking, which can be considered read).

For what it's worth, my guess on looting is that most if not all of full open mode will involve the same level of loot rights, and I'd guess that level will be pretty high given that people won't be forced to enter that mode. Hard to be more specific than that, without there being more information about itemisation and gear acquisition out there - we just don't know how much of an item-based game this will be, there are too many unknowns to make a firm prediction about this one variable. If itemisation is similar to UO - and I think we can reasonably expect that as a minimum the game will not be as item-based as no-loot games such as WoW - then I would guess there will be a similar level of looting as existed in UO. I just get the impression they don't want to create too many different variations of rulesets within the full open mode, rather they prefer to seduce as many people as possible to accept that mode. It's early days and I could be mistaken, there's not a host of firm statements yet.

I would imagine, however, that separate to full open mode there might well be some mechanism for more formalised pvping, perhaps some kind of a dueling pit, where pvp might be allowed but looting not allowed, there are various options along those lines.

Anyway that is my slightly <b>more than</b> a ha'penny bit's worth.

 

@rshultzy80, everyone who is qualified for membership in the KGB is welcome to apply. However, there is a difference between registering for access to our forums and registering for citizenship. By registering for forum access, you can make posts on our public forums, but you are not a citizen, and you cannot access the private forums.

Further, we typically do not accept applications for games that have not yet been released, such as SotA. Darkfall went live recently, and the KGB is currently deploying forces to that theater of operations. That includes me, so my participation here may drop a bit as I spin up for Darkfall. If you were to join us in Darkfall, you could apply for citizenship there, and once accepted, you would be accepted for all games where there is a KGB presence. That would include SotA, if the KGB chooses to send forces here upon release. If the game develops according to current projections, I think the KGB will almost certainly maintain a strong presence in SotA.

If you have any questions, let me know.

 

I can see why people would want full loot, and fairness suggests that it should be allowed in the game in some form. But there's clearly always going to be a disconnect between those people who want this and the people who don't - either because they don't like the idea of losing their gear or because it impacts far too much on their available time to be able to recover from it, or a variety of other reasons.

For those who want loot, is it really your actual opponents gear you are after, or would some other form of reward suffice? I can see that you want it to roleplay in some regard, and looting a corpse giving you a certificate of achievement would break immersion, but to maximize the numbers of PvP players, there clearly needs to be some sort of compromise.

There's also the secondary effect, that the full loot proponent might lose, and again I can see that this gives incentive through the risk associated with losing providing an adrenaline boost to the fight. Is it a problem that one participant in a fight is full loot and the other isn't, where the other side has the substitute given above? The idea of fairness is an obvious one, but if there is a reasonable substitute it could be addressed, or at least the disparity made so minimal that it really doesn't matter that much.

So, as I see it, there are three issues here:

1. The player for whom full loot is considered too much of a penalty for whatever reason needs different or lesser penalty.

2. The reward for the full loot proponent when he wins needs to be something immersive and valuable.

3. The penalty for the full loot proponent needs to be enough to create real feeling of risk for them, while not feeling unfair with regard to what players from 1. suffer.

Any thoughts on any of these three points, and how balancing them could be made to work, where those three are the defining points of this issue which need to work together? (Apologies if I've missed something similar earlier in the thread - I can't recall any such summation.)

 

@Sirinan:

Yes, it's called the "full loot" slider, sliders are great. Aren't they?

 

@Owain, I attempted to contact you there, either way cheers for the info mate

 

"There are people who want to ruin someone?s day. If you gave them the token equiv of full loot but the other guy had minimal loss, they?d come up with some reason why this was terrible."

@Primerib

I think it is much preferable that the victor simply loots the defeated player but if I absolutely had no choice but to compromise I would suggest that the victor get nothing (aside from the satisfaction that they bested another in combat) and everything the defeated player was carrying is destroyed.

The most important thing is that players fear death and try their very best to stay alive. Everything else is secondary.

Now I think my suggested compromise is a horrible idea but much preferable to the defeated player only suffering minimal loss.

Full loot makes infinitely more sense, not just for the victor of any particular fight but for everyone involved in PvP in the long run. I have been in many fights where a player fell in combat but there side ultimately won the battle and they were able to retrieve their stuff and more. I have also been in many fights where one side lost the battle one day only to turn around and win the next. Things have a surprising way of evening out over time, especially in guild on guild warfare.

The non-combatant lumberjack/miner type definitely got the short end of the stick in UO but given that SotA has sliders that problem is eliminated. If you just want to gather resources in peace than you can. If you want the added danger that flagging yourself open to PvP brings than so be it.

 

"but if I absolutely had no choice but to compromise I would suggest that the victor get nothing (aside from the satisfaction that they bested another in combat) and everything the loser was carrying is destroyed."

This is what breeds griefing for the sake of griefing.

 

@rschultzy80

I know. It is an absolutely horrible idea that would pretty much kill the game and those that partake in PvP would come off looking like total jerks to pretty much everyone but some are asking for alternatives to full loot. There is no good alternative, only really bad ones...

 

@firelotus: so a player can use language like "Bullshit" on a forum with children and that is ok, but using ******** which is my favorite cartoon as a child requires a warning because of something from urban dictionary? URBAN DICTIONARY? REALLY? please, please reconsider.

As a PK who has spent several thousand dollars on the ultima franchise and a person who has played Richard's games since 1990, knowing how he is and following the development of the communities that he has created I think there is a misunderstanding here about priorities. I am an adult and I don't care, but if I were a parent looking at this forum I would seriously question the judgement on this forum. I would prefer my children to see "care bear" over "bullshit" any day.

All that said, Care Bear just means someone who doesn't want player killing. there is no derogatory or inflammatory suggestion there. this is a standard in the industry that started with the modified ruleset servers that popped up with everquest. what should we refer to that school of thought as then?