WAR was probably for me the most extreme example since it actually had so much PVE content yet was obsoleted by the PVP at every step, well that and I felt that they automated what were already very linear quest mechanics (I thirst for a good old fashioned choice in a quest! there are a couple of real ones in EQ2, but for the most part it seems that the bean counters decide that content you don’t follow isn’t worth coding in).

Too many of these new MMO’s seem to have traded a well thought out storyline and end game for a couple of areas and some PVP, I’m not against PVP there, I think when having it does improve things but it should be only part of the end game.

The other thing most games seem to have ignored is the PVE+PVP type of gameplay, when one of the most popular battlegrounds in WoW (Alterac Valley) is PVE+PVP its odd that more companies haven’t taken this idea further, Aion says they have, it will be interesting to see what they have done with it when I can give it a honest go (I’m into EQ2 too much at the moment to be subjective about a new game).

Two of the games that go pretty much all the way with this PVP are Darkfall and Eve, while Darkfall is a fantasy MMO its actually a Fantasy FPS MMO so its not an easy one to directly compare. But with Eve I’m surprised that we’ve not see another company launch a credible competitor to the game, like EQ1 I think Eve’s success right now owes a lot to there being no one to compete with as much as the game itself.

If say David Braben came out with Elite the MMO which had a universe say with nano tech that has a game world without the heavy penalty of dying/losing a ship, would this theoretical MMO take a lot of Eve’s business?

The carebears occasionally lose a ship to creative gankers tricking them with game mechanics (beware wrecks floating in space labelled “Free stuff! Please take!”)

The pvpers lose a succession of ships based on what Kill Ten Rats described as an ante system. I can fly with a cheap Tech 1 Frigate and if it dies the insurance payout will just about cover the cost. It’s not a good ship and I probably will lose if solo but I can afford to risk these ships forever. More importantly any time I lose it’s because of the cheapness of the ship but any time I win its because of my awesome playing skills.

Alternatively I can fly an expensive ship that is quite likely to win but is a bigger hit to the wallet if I lose it. But that’s fun too and it allows people to have 10:1 kill ratios simply by spending game money. (A big part of this is the ability to legally buy game currency which is a big reason for Eve’s success).

But everyone loses ships all the time. In a sense Eve is a disguised permadeath system. You may think your character is the little face in the top corner that is infinitely clonable but actually your playing piece is your ship, not your character, and ships suffer permanent death.

Eve is a very clever game of smoke and mirrors. If I lose my ship I can find an excuse rather than face up to the cruel reality of “I’m maybe not all that good at this.” Fights are almost never even – variances in numbers, ship cost, and character age mean I can always find a justification why I lost that doesn’t include the demoralising issue of player skill.

I think Eve shows that games can run on players losing all the time provided you give them plenty of justification for believing “I would have won if the fight was fair….”

Val