I think it all boils down to the point that they have better ideas of how to
better avoid the grief PK problem than they do on how to avoid the
predictable AI problem. Having real living people competing with you is
always more interesting so long as they aren't out just to cause grief.
Playing poker against a computer is way boring, playing against five,
influenceable real people is far more interesting and challenging.
I don't think anyone would be against PvP without the grief players, well
almost no one. If anybody can figure out how to get rid of the grief PK'ers
they will have one heck of a game on their hands. It's sort of the holy
grail of MMORPG's since long ago in the days where MUD's were all there was.
One point they are taking at Horizons that all the others have ignored is
this. They don't care if the anti-grief PK solution they implement is
unfair. In fact they hope it so grossly unfair as to make grief PK'ing
rapidly get to the point of you log in with your PK'er, you die.
Kit
-----Original Message-----
From:
jhenders@... [mailto:
jhenders@...]
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 2:47 PM
To:
eqbards@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [eqbards] Horizons (was Official confirmation from Ester)
Some interesting ideas, but it all devolves down to the basic problem
that grief players will dedicate way more time to figuring out the
loopholes in the system than any sane developer can spend or afford to
pay someone to spend conteracting them.
What really bothers me the most is that people have pretty well
overwhelmingly shown they don't like this kind of forced pvp, yet so
many of the new MMORPG developers seem to remain convinced that they
have the magic bullet that will convince people that they are wrong to
dislike it. This reminds me far too much of the same kind of arrogance
that we've seen from Verant, where they quite clearly seem to think
they've made a near perfect game if people would just play it the way
they were supposed to.
On Fri, Sep 08/00, "Kimes, Dean W." <dean_kimes@...> wrote:
> Yes, and no. I don't think they believe that their PvP environment will
be
> perfect, but they think it will be good. I like the concept behind it and
> generally I abhor PvP because it is all about PK for the most part. Two
> things they are doing will make a huge difference. Like the Team PvP
> servers, only races openly at war can PvP one another without consequence.
> The big difference is, there will not be a way to tell the difference
> between PC's and NPC's on sight. If you see an Orc on the road ahead and
> you are an elf, you know that he is dangerous to you, whether he is a
player
> or an npc.
>
> Their consequence system is brutal against PK'ers. If you kill a race
that
> you are not at war with, even a mere 5 or 6 times you will suffer enormous
> problems. These problems will include having npc bounty-hunters showing
up
> to kill you at random. Playing a PK character would rapidly become
> unplayable as every time you logged in you were ambush by these npc
> enforcers. Even if you kept your PK-ing to a race yours was at war with,
> you would always find yourself in enemy territory where few would feel any
> compunction against killing you.
>
> I wasn't really interested much in Horizons initailly due to it's PvP
> system, but they have convinced me to give it a chance. They feel their
PvP
> system will promote the 'risk game' like Player competition while severely
> punishing to the point of oblivion anyone who PK's for the joy of hurting
> others. Time will tell.
>
>
> Kit
>
> Please send submissions for the eqbards newsletter to lol@...
with the subject submissions.
>
>
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