This lead to numerous supporting and opposing threads. Supporting threads touched on other aspects of "broken" pvp mechanics, such as twinks in full gold gear running around in lower level areas obliterating lower level players who are trying to quest. It also featured a report from one server where the losing faction was so demoralized and scarce, that the dominant faction can literally afford to "spawn camp" the losing faction at zone entrances, rifts, and virtually every pvp area possible with little consequence.
And of course, the general response amongst all those opposing where "u mad brah", "QQ moar" and other phrases brimming with insight. The systemic problem I found is that people seem to have the misconception that all of this is somehow the fault of the game designers - and while I agree that game designers can (and should) intervene on certain occasion to level the playing field, the absolute lack of personal accountability on the part of the players for their culture was astonishing, so I felt compelled to post.
All of this has also been going on amidst a controversial server merge in which NCSoft is temporarily allowing players to server-transfer their characters. Their reasoning is that since servers are merging, and since you cannot have opposing faction characters on the same server, you are to use this time to move conflicting characters to other servers. Unfortunately, people are instead using this as an opportunity to maximize dominance by moving their characters to servers where their chances for success as maximized. This would be like the NBA temporarily allowing players to pick their own teams during the 90's. Suddenly, everyone is a Chicago Bull.
So now, the competition gap is even worse. At the time of this writing, there is only one server where Asmodians (aka the "dark" faction) have even been successful, so as a result all of the failing Asmodian refugees are jumping ship on their servers to join the one winning server, further segregating the game in the negative direction:
Original Post:
"So, I really would hope by now that people who play MMOs and have played several over the past 5-10 years would realize that a discussion like this is the inevitable outcome of any game no matter how it is initially designed.
The problem, I hope you realize, is not a game design problem, it's a culture problem. It's not the game, it's us. It breaks down to a concept called Game Theory. In a nutshell, the theory describes that we, as humans, will naturally break things down into scenarios that yield the most advantageous results. And, as much as we'd like to pretend it's not the case, we're the strategic, ravenous idiots that are capable of ruining any number-based system.
Why do you think we have terms like "flavor of the month", or "OP class". Terms that have existed well before Aion and seem to magically follow us around from game to game?
Example 1: Who remembers the old days of single-server pvp in WoW? Remember how you felt when you found out that "High Warlord" titles were being handed out to people who would regularly do things like account sharing? Remember how you felt when you found out Horde and Alliance top-end guilds would coordinate outside of the game and arrange battlegrounds so they could trade honor dominance?
Example 2: Who remembers the days of faction-selling? Or the Jedi "fight club" cartels where players would agree to throw fights vs others under pre-determined conditions? What, you thought that only happens here in Aion?
Game developers spend countless hours having to change, correct, stop gap and otherwise ****** normally honorable game mechanics not because they suck at software development, but because they are constantly undermined by people who want to find every way to maximize their gains and virtually eliminate their losses. Which, as they will always tell you, is the smart way to be.
But as many others have eluded to, it creates an eventual culling of competition (read:prey) that is unrecoverable by normal means. Thus, the only solution for players long term is to literally roll alts or start new accounts and defect to the other side to artificially create "new" competition.
This is why games like WOW have had to introduce things like "Random" battleground queues, and cross server BGs. Much harder to cheat or run a cartel across multiple servers. Much harder to "predict" if the next fight your going to get into is going to cost you progress.
The conclusion on both sides is pretty straight forward:
1) You can't really blame people for playing an arbitrary number game to the best of their ability. That would amount to calling someone a coward for not going "all in" with every hand they are dealt in in poker. It is logical to not want to fight when the risk is losing progress. It is logical to arrange a controlled situation where you can advance to the gear you want with minimal risk. It's not the most "honorable" way to go about things, but the rankings aren't based on character or personality tests, it's based on the bottom line of the AP you earn vs. the AP you lose.
2) Likewise those at the top should not play the "QQ" card on those at the bottom. First off, progress is not linear as you'd like to believe. The more the upper tiers of people continue to progress, the disproportionally more difficult it becomes for someone to start at 0 to reach the same goal.
Additionally, as history has shown, most of the people at the top are actually terrible players who simply managed to surround themselves with the right people, and usually got there by exploiting one of two fundamental PVP progression concepts: A) Lack of Competition and B) Broken Game Mechanics.
Broken game mechanics are straight forward. They usually involve the fringe people who get up to maximum level first, and begin to reap the rewards of some mechanic that was previously not well tested. They purposely do not alert the authorities to this discovery, and use it to get as far as possible before it gets discovered. This usually carries with it, of course, the risk of getting banned, and you see it in every MMO that exists. Joe Badass who you used to respect for being the first dude to max level and the first dude to get all this sweet epic gear suddenly disappears one day, and you come to find out that it was for exploiting. Still, sadly, in many cases Joe Badass still somehow retains so much of his "street cred" and people give him undue respect, usually citing the exploit as a "****** game mechanic" and putting it on the developers for being stupid enough to let him get away with it.
But I digress. The one people don't usually focus on (because it hurts their insecurities) is the former. You see, in any game system, or really any MMO system where Gear and Levels have significant involvement in the potential of a character to do well in PVP, one of the most critical aspects of that game is to do everything in your power to achieve max level first, and immediately begin "grinding" PVP-type activities. Leveraging your level advantage first, the next strategic goal is to get key pvp items as soon as possible. These might be speed-increase boots, trinkets, or even just potions and consumables that give you the biggest advantages in combat.
The sooner you do this, the sooner you enter what I call the "Fighting preschoolers" phase where your complete lack of actual skill can be masked by the fact that your levels, consumables, and gear essentially mimic a full grown adult "pvping" against a class of pre-schoolers: There is no contest. This is the avenue most people take because unlike exploiting, there's no negative recourse to this behavior. It is simple food chain mechanics: The big fish eat the little fish. And, as I've seen here in Aion, people have gotten so good at this version of reality that by the time a server even *reaches* a level of maturity where legitimate competition is available, the bulk of these people have in their possession all the gear they could possibly need, and "retire" to the recesses of pretending like they had to fight hard for their gear. These "elite pvpers" can usually be found as permanent fixtures in popular towns or banks, or rolling around in very controlled posse's of people where their individual lack of skill won't be noticed.
The rest of the server in the 80% "normal" bell curve sees competition the entire way through, until you get to where games usually die: Locusts camping every fort spawn, maxed out twinks rampaging through newbie areas, all trying to scrape together morsels of AP.
I hate to use WOW as an example again, but this is why they do things that expressly raise the bar of the entire population whenever the game is ready to move to the next level. It ****** a lot of hard core people off, but without letting the bottom rung of competition bridge the gap in gear before moving on, you will quickly find yourself in a situation you find now: Everyone is either a super hero or a peasant with nothing in between.
So we reap what we sew. This is the way MMOs work until we can change our culture to be one that values genuine competition and honor over Min / Max calculated risk scenarios.
As an aside:
Why do you think FPS games work better for PVP? Because at the beginning of every level, the entire population is on the same page. Sure, some of them might know the map better, and therefore will have a head start, but even if that happens, after 15 or so minutes, someone is going to win, and the entire processes starts over again. Additionally, even if someone manages to get overpowered, their struggle to maintain that power is constantly shadowed by the knowledge that if he dies, he gets knocked back down to normalcy.
Both of these naturally limiting factors are not present in an MMO. The game never resets, people don't all lose their gear and start over. The penalty for death is not a loss of gear back down to a normalized level, it's just the annoying loss of time, money, or both."I hate not offering a solution to the problem when I post, but I made the basic assumption that people's eyes were going to glaze over 2 paragraphs in when they realized that everything I had to say either conflicted with their fucked up belief systems, triggered their cynicism to altruistic ramblings, or simply lost itself in a flash of ADHD when one of their friends posted a comment about them on Facebook in another window.
In reality, the sad truth is that the culture we live in will not be changing any time soon, thus game designers are bound to the exploitive behaviors of its users. I give World of Warcraft props for using creative randomization as an effective tool to combat this - it just sucks that it has to be this way.
- Logos aka Ronin
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