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> I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping

On its face, this seems like an obviously awful idea. Escaping from prison the first time sounds awesome. Escaping from prison the fifth time sounds super boring.




This is a question of gameplay. You could build entire games around escaping from prisons that people would totally enjoy playing. There have been far simpler ideas that people play even after a decade. Heck if you do it the right way I could see players want to go to prison just to play the escape thing.

So there is nothing inherent to the topic that makes or breaks this. On an very abstract level it is something that forces you into a different kind of gameplay as a punishment. Whether that different kind of gameplay is engaging or boring is a different can of beans.


I disagree. If it's a rewarding experience, then it's not a punishment. The difference is between making prison break levels, and actually implementing a prison system as a player punishment. The goals are conflicting. In general forcing a player to do content they don't want to do is not good.


It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.


Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make.

History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds).

This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation.

The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so.

Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent.

Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different".

So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later.

No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.


Agreed with all this. There was at one point a notion of a "PvP slider" that you could turn down to reduce encounters with other players (I assume via instancing) but it's gone away in favor of a totally in-universe "crime stat" and law system.

Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone.

I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.


I would counter this and say that my greatest time playing MMOs in my youth was the UO days where outside of cities, everything was pretty lawless. In the early stages you might run into a player killer intermittently while out mining or harvesting whatever other material or in a dungeon but the community formed around that aspect was really cool.

There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system. I think that whole aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of the game and felt so organic.

Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly designed from head to toe in a game design doc.


> There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer.

What stops a griefer from just putting cash on the head of someone they want to torment?


Bounties can only be placed on criminals in UO. Players are marked as criminals when they break the law, for example by attacking or stealing from a player who isn't a criminal.


I remember you would explicitly be presented a screen after you were killed by a player where you could take your funds from the bank to put towards the bounty of the person who killed you.


"Create a problem, sell a solution".


To be fair it wasn't like Origin was scalping the gold as back in the day the in game currency couldn't be purchased like with games these days. It was more of a game mechanic to address a problem.


> I would counter this and say that...

You cannot counter somebody's preference with another preference.

> Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system.

...and you are also missing the roleplay aspect of this -- "I am an outlaw!" -- that a lot of people enjoy and get deliberately flagged in order to experience it.

What you describe hasn't been happening in most MMORPGs that tried to have a world PvP. Maybe it happened where you were -- and I'd argue it happened for a limited time. But the points of your parent commenter still stand. It's a gaming dream that just never materializes due to human nature.

Game devs assume that the players will do things that make sense or reward them, and that assumption fails every single time.


> You cannot counter somebody's preference with another preference.

What would be your preferred way of me bringing this up with a hot take to his hot take? Apparently a counter isn't valid or you're being pedantic.

> ...and you are also missing the roleplay aspect of this -- "I am an outlaw!" -- that a lot of people enjoy and get deliberately flagged in order to experience it.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily. Also, you would be punished with a "jail" time after you died. Not a permanent death, but the time counter increased per murder. I specifically remember my friend having a player killer character that his own brother poisoned for the bounty. My buddy was quite furious and I believe even got into a fist fight with his brother about it given that character wouldn't be playable for weeks.

> What you describe hasn't been happening in most MMORPGs that tried to have a world PvP.

I mean at the time it was one of the largest MMORPGs on the market. Maybe because in the late 90's early 00's the market was smaller and there was less griefing online, which I don't believe to be true, but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around. Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.


> What would be your preferred way of me bringing this up with a hot take to his hot take? Apparently a counter isn't valid or you're being pedantic.

Well, I don't know English idioms so saying "hot take" to me is netting you a blank stare. I suppose you are simply saying "my opinion differs from yours when it comes to..."? If so, then sorry for my remark, apparently it was misguided.

> It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily.

There are people who don't play for resources as a goal or, in general, follow the path that the game creators have outlined for the players. A role-playing "outlaw" experience is basically being a good citizen in the game until you farm enough gear and resources and then turn around and start griefing other players without caring you're denied access to towns because again, you want to roleplay an outlaw. Live in the open, be in constant danger of being killed by a bounty hunter, and not being allowed in the main hubs. Some people are into that.

Time and again, game creators have tried to discourage such behaviours but the thing they keep missing is that some people do things regardless of partially punishing mechanics. Game creators optimize the game flow for people who want to gain stuff with minimum (or reasonable) resistance. And there is no small amount of people whose motivation doesn't fall within those parameters at all.

> but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around

I cannot prove it but I'd wager this was due to smaller amount of players and gaming not being as mainstream as it is today. These limiting mechanics simply don't scale after more people start pouring in due to the huge diversity of needs and priorities of the players who joined.

The punishing mechanics are meant to discourage players of a certain state of mind and/or priorities and/or needs. But I've known people who sit at their PCs for 10 hours a day looking for whom to grief (in WoW) with a huge grin on their face during ALL of it. Bored people with comfy lives who had nothing better to do and they were happy to grief all day long. What can you do. Nothing, except leave the game (which I did).

My only conclusion or a fix is: make the punishments much more severe or if even that doesn't work, simply disallow certain behaviours to begin with, e.g. like with WoW's PvP and PvE servers. If you are on the latter, nobody can attack you no matter what (although they do still allow enemy players to kill your friendly NPCs so there griefing can take the form of them denying you quest givers or vendors which is still nasty).

> Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.

Yeah, I think so too (agreed with both your points). Most companies are too scared to change anything; the normal [MMO]RPGs make certain amounts of money and they are extremely risk-averse to try anything even slightly new, lest even this revenue dries up (and I'd argue the revenue is less than they want).

It's not like games can't be made to accommodate for all kinds of human nature IMO (and where they can't you can simply use opt-in mechanics, again like PvP or PvE servers). We simply have gotten to the very logical point in time where the market is cornered by several giants and several dozen hard-working smaller studios and it doesn't make financial sense for any company to experiment and look for a better formula.


> The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences.

The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from acting upon other players and making other players miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them.

That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution of how people self-describe themselves to the four quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of the number of people they can act upon ("grief").

I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased enough with single player games (and single player game design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these days is just as often left by game designs to fall through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or Discord.


> I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts.

That's precisely correct. I've been in WoW from 2007 to 2012 and you could tell that the people who loved ruining the fun for everybody else were the most vocal in the forums. They also became quite good in painting it with innocent colors: "think of the roleplaying aspect, are you not an RPG anymore?", "the world feels more vibrant and live", "fights for resources happen in the real world, let's have a realistic game" etc.

While in reality they simply enjoy obstructing other people's gaming. And this has been evident for so many years, and it has been known that these people are the minority -- it's truly puzzling why they haven't been shut down, hard, at least a decade ago.

The only good explanation that I have ever found was: part of the game devs are those griefers, and they defend the open-world PvP on internal meetings.

---

The other kinds of players are indeed much more quiet. I personally started playing WoW because I wanted an RPG and I didn't care about the MMO aspect for a long time. But it's what the market had available as the best game in the genre at the time. My regret from back then is that I didn't aggressively scan the market in more details. I surely would have found a single-player RPG to my liking.


What about Eve online?


yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve player in high-sec.


Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous. By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't afford to lose.

The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me.

I wish more games took a similar mature approach.


They would lose a lot of potential players.

I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes.

Basically, wasting a ton of time.

That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life.

EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.


It's a PvP game, and a brutal one. There's some token PvE, but mostly aimed at teaching new players the game.


Small studio MMORPGs focused on PvE don't exist because they can't compete with WoW and FFXIV on content generation, small studios don't have hundreds of artists, quest designers, and programmers needed to churn out enough content to compete in that field.


Honestly I really enjoyed open PvP when I played WoW what now seems like ages ago. It really adds a lot of interesting tension when I'd encounter players from the opposing faction.

Are they hostile? Do they see me? Should I try and stealth kill them? Are they just passing through?

Eventually one learns to deal with the murderhobos and cope. Then it becomes even more fun.


For 5 years in WoW I only learned to hate those who were ruining my idea of gaming fun. I wasn't marked PvP (PvE servers) but I occasionally found a quest hub that I needed and of course, all NPCs were killed.

It's one of the reasons I left WoW. I don't want to be at the mercy of somebody like you who creatively invents a beautiful justification for stopping me to have my gaming fun.

I am sure whatever it is you are telling to yourself makes sense. But not to me.


I can only recall that happening to me maybe once or twice. I play SWTOR now, which is very similar to (as in copied a lot of design elements from) WoW (it feels like WoW in space), and I've never encountered all the NPCs being dead, even though the opposing faction is perfectly capable of raiding it.

You don't need to be flippant about it, if you are so worried about others "ruining" your gaming fun, when why TF are you playing an MMO? That's just like setting yourself up for disappointment.


Sure, I left not only WoW but all MMOs because yes, apparently my expectations weren't aligned with the ideas of the creators.

Much happier on the Switch these days.


Why? It's a mechanic in TES games like Skyrim; commit a crime, you get the option to either pay it off, go to jail (and lose some stats), or try and fight a whole town worth of guards.

I mean you start most TES games in prison.


I'm not very interested in TES, but how often do you choose to go to prison? I can't tell if you're saying going to prison is just lose stats and then cut to the end of it, or lose stats and have to break out.

If it's the former, maybe you tank the stat loss and deal with it. If it's the former, how many times are you actually going to tolerate going to prison rather than loading your save file from before you got caught? In a multiplayer game that's probably not an option. Breaking out of prison multiple times is both annoying and immersion breaking, especially if its the same prison over a short period.

Obviously the concept of a prison break is fine for gameplay. There are whole games dedicated to it. But implementing it as a punishment is by default going to be viewed as either not a punishment, due to it being rewarding, or tedious, because the player doesn't want to do it. Generally speaking, there's intrinsic loss to being put in prison already because you're forced to stop what you were actually trying to do already. Ocarina of Time had the gerudo sequence where you could get thrown into prison if caught, but then hookshot yourself out immediately. That's probably the better choice for most games because having to deal with consequences of prison are very boring. If the system to escape is easy, it should be very short. If it's not easy, you have to question how annoying it is to the player and whether it actually makes the game better.


Or go to jail, escape from jail, steal your equipment back, and assassinate a few guards on the way out.

Yeah, going to prison in video games can be quite fun and dynamic to the point where the scenario is replayable. Helps that there's a different jail in each major city in Skyrim as well.


They had a weekend of free ship flytesting or something. I wanted to check the game out so I configured my joystick but had a bit of trouble starting and ended up crashing and going to prison. I was annoyed at the quest, I just wanted to fly around not do an RPG, that should come way after youve had time to get hooked by core mechanics


Next time play the Arena Commander mode which is a game within the SC/Squadron42 games and functions as a simple ship combat sim and a great tutorial for folks like you who want to just mess around in a ship. There is a similar FPS mode for people who just want to try out the FPS combat.


Thanks!


>escaping from prison

Don't get caught. And yeah, that's an option, if you're leet enough ;)




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