Best posts made by Whisper

@Gothix said in The End of most Sandbox PVP Games-The losing side.:

And... things can always turn around... people just need to be taught that they need to work for it, rather then expect this to be gifted to them by game mechanics.

That's a great straw man fallacy tactic there. No one here said, "We all need to be gifted everything".

I have been in both sides of the coin. I have been in a small (40-60 guild) in a small alliance (150ish-250ish member alliance) that was out numbered by guilds that were 300+ in alliances that were 900+ (Atlas). And I have also been in the huge dominating alliance that steam rolls everyone (Shadowbane).

And it comes down to the same thing. One side winning, and no one ever having the chance to compete after that. As fun as it is to easily dominate a pvp game, where no one else can even pose a challenge to you, it kills the pvp game.

When one guild is allowed to dominate in a sanbox pvp game there is no way to come back from it. Even if you decided, "I know I will recruit mass amounts of people" you will not have the infrastructure or resources to compete and in your aim to get them-You get destroyed.

This isn't me saying, "Give everyone everything". It's me saying, "There needs to be a trade off for that dominance otherwise the game dies".

Some people here suggested taxes. I like that.
I suggested buffs/debuffs. I would probably prefer the taxes if it can be done right.
I noticed Znirf said that if people lose a settlement they can keep it if they pay taxes. That is a solution I haven't seen at all.

And lets not get it twisted. You can take a gander at my signature. I am in a guild that has ambitions to be one of those large and powerful guilds. This isn't me saying, "I am in a small guild and want all the things!".

This is me saying, "This PVP game looks awesome and I don't want it to die in the same way that most sandbox PVP games die even if they are crazy fun".

@Gothix said in The End of most Sandbox PVP Games-The losing side.:

It comes down to this...

Life isn't fair... nor should the game be. The more "safeguards" are in place, the more dull game becomes.

This is a game, not real life. Your second bolded comment that you try to pass as a fact is an extremely subjective opinion. And wildly off topic since I am not asking for safeguards for protection but for consequences from growing widely too big.

Like I said no rules or limitation makes for a fun pvp at the start sure but then the game ends and dies. Which is no fun for anyone. I guess if the FracturedMMO Devs just want a game that will last for a little while and then close down it is a fantastic idea for that though. Whenever a sandbox PVP game comes out I normally play it until that point (Atlas being a prime example).

@Gothix said in The End of most Sandbox PVP Games-The losing side.:

The fun is in risk, in expectation that anything can happen, and in knowing that that changes depend solely on you. The freedom and the risk, without limitations. This is the game as I want to play it. This is why i stay away from theme park MMOs that limit you with various mechanics.

There is no risk if you play the, "Just recruit everyone and attack smaller guilds since it is easy to win them and they either get absorbed, or stop playing". Then as you continue it gets easier and easier. That isn't fun, engaging, or risky. In fact it is the opposite of risky. It's extremely safe. Risky would be if there were mechanics that made every decision come with consequences.

People here come with arguments "But what if i need to leave the game for some time...?" .... well that's your own problem man. If you leave, then deal with the consequences, that's life. You can't have everything, you need to make choices.

I don't see how that pertains to this situation at all but okay. Again, this is a game. Not life. I would say perhaps you should join the army but then you will find there are indeed extremely strict limitation in real life. Perhaps a life of burglary? You will find even stricter limitations and consequences there. I think the, "Real life" comment you keep brandishing is in no way in your favor. In real life there are limitations and rules all around us to keep things going, and for people who try to ignore them there are extreme real consequences.

If i wanted a game that protects me, that safeguards me when I need to leave, that balances things for me regardless of what I do or where I go... I would go play Farmville.

Are you suggesting there is a Farmville Open world pvp game? Or are you trying to make a false false equivalency to this by misrepresenting reality in hopes that people don't see through your comment?

And... Fractured is already taking care of you in that regard. If you are worried about everything, simply play as Beastmen on Arboreus, and you are safe, from invasions, if you leave for few days,... you can play in peace.

Please don't get it twisted. I am not worried about my well being, or my items, or in game character. As I have repeatedly pointed out by now, I am worried about the game dying once a losing side is determined (I have no plans to be on the losing side by the way).

What more do you want?

For the game to last longer than a year, and not die because one side wins and the game stagnates and dies.

that is rethorical question, I know what you want, for Syndesia and Tartaros to conver to Arboreus as well... this is what you want in every MMO that's being created

Another false equivalency argument here I see.

give us safety.... I want to play solo, make others not touch me.

What are you rambling about? Nothing here remotely said anything similar to that.

@Althalus said in Empty World:

another game that has similar art style to Fractured but feels different b/c of the grass/ foliage that seems to make the game feel more occupied

As much as I enjoy foliage like that in my single player games. Am I the only one that always turns it all the way down in PVP games for that performance boost?

I think it would be a nice addition but I would put that pretty low in the priority list.

For me it is PVP.

PVP shines best with non-linear gear progression. PVP also shines best in sandbox games. Though those two are my opinion but I think most would agree.

With the ability to siege cities pvp is going to be on the forefront already. I wonder if individual players will be able to siege individual claims. There will also be PVP between planets.

Though that is the answer for me. I am sure others will find fun in other places. Looks like the game has a great system in place for people who like trading/being a merchant.

Can we get a forum feature to allow us to see what devs/admin have posted recently? Or allow a search option for it.

Either one would be nice.

Skip to the bottom for a too long didn't read.

I love PVP games.

My favorite was ShadowBane (Open World PVP with city building, and sieges), and most recently Tale of Toast (Ignore the name the game was bloody open world PVP with full loot drops) and a slew of games in between.

What I notice most often sandbox games that allow open PVP is someone comes out ahead. And when the tides turn in their favor the tides are near impossible to stop. You see people jump ship into the winning sides factions/teams and it makes matters worse. You see people get frustrated and stop playing and it makes the tides even more lop sided. Then once the game is too lopsided the game starts to cannibalize itself population wise.

This was really bad on Bless Online on my server. I was in the Top Guild on my factions side on my server and we constantly farmed/xped in the best spots and if the other faction tried to farm/xp there we destroyed them. After our first 2/3 groups hit max level the other factions top group just started reaching the last xp/farming area we were still there farming on our down time and help the slower members get there and pushed the other faction further down.

We had a grand time but the tides were too much in our favor. When they released the next content patch which included a larger pvp area and instance based pvp we had no one to play with. We literally had to let people run around taking objectives so we could take them back lol. The other faction didn't have enough people level appropriate to start the pvp instances (We only got an hour to do it so bad game design as well imo)

Same thing happened in ShadowBane but much worse. In Shadowbane you could occupy mines you need for resources for crafting and could port to your cities which meant the people in charge dominated the map and resources and you either joined them, or got squashed by them.

Seen the same thing in Tales of Toast. When it launched lots of people were PVPing and it was a fun time. One side ended up destroying the other and pretty much everyone in the destroyed guild would stop playing. It got to the point where even though it was a open world PVP game I could farm by myself without a worry because I knew no one in my level range (That would attack me) existed in the game. The only people in my level range in that game were guildmates.

I know Crowfall (the successor to ShadowBane plans on solving the problem with having end conditions for their map. Ie. Own the capital for x amount of time, and offering alternate server rule sets going on at the same time so if you lose your city you can just to a different server to have fun until the reset).

TLDR; Games that allow open PVP tend to get dominated by one group/faction and tend to be what ruins PVP games. Is there a mechanic to mitigate this in this game?

Crowsfall way is a simple one but I feel it is not the way I want to see a game do it. Any suggestions?

I don't believe I saw this addressed yet.

We see it in all sandbox pvp games. The first one I remember is.
ShadowBane-Amazing game. But eventually 1-2 factions gobble up all the smaller ones and then eventually one faction takes the lead and the server/gameplay stagnates.

The most recent example. Atlas. Open world PVP Pirate game.

Started off extremely fun. But then the medium guilds took out the small guilds and then the large guilds took all the medium guilds. Then all the super/mega guilds took all the large guilds. And the game went from survival PVP pirate game that was fun to being surrounded by allies and having to travel/prep for hours if you want to PVP because everyone within an hour or so radius is an ally.

This is always the case in sandbox PVP games I play. I don't know if Fractured has a way to handle one side ending up dominating the server by just absorbing all other players/guilds.

I know Crowfall plans on finally beating this problem by reseting the game once a guild "wins". I don't feel like that is the way to do it though. There has to be a better way.

I recommend that each time a guild takes over an enemy city they either get a debuff per city they have taken, or their enemies get a buff per city that has been taken. This will do a few things. It stops one or two guilds from just dominating every single city/resource in the game. And more importantly it makes it so the best guilds don't just dominate low member guilds over and over before deciding to try and look at each other. It will make those elite guilds think, "We better attack our rivals before the debuff/buff stacks too high"

I brought up this topic a year ago but it is the Achilles hill of Sandbox PVP games. It is something if not looked at gives us an awesome PVP game that dies after a year or so as the game eats itself.

TL:DR PVP Sandbox Games tend to have one/two guilds who absorb/dominate the others and it ruins the game. How can we fix this?

One of my favorite parts of Atlas is the ability to have custom flags/ships. Nothing was more intimidating than seeing a fleet of ships with custom paint jobs, and flags. Though, it came with the drawback of giving anyone the ability to do this which is people doing crazy/dumb things with it.

I feel tabards, flags, carpets, etc would fit nicely in this world(s) and could be a way for FracturedMMO to make money. If I can pay a few dollars and have my guilds logo on my character via a tabard you know I will do it. If I can pay a few dollars and have my guild represented in our cities I will do it as well. If I could pay a few dollars to have something unique to me in my house 100% will do it. Multiple times.

It's the same as selling cosmetics in the cash shop but slightly better because it takes no work, time, or money from the devs.

I feel it would have to be behind a paywall to prevent people from abusing it, and/or maybe behind a level requirement. Though, I can't imagine many people will be willing to throw down money for something explicit just for it to be taken away lol. But still good to have safe guards against abuse.

Thoughts?

@Jetah said in Your favorite Dailies, or what you would like to see them as.:

@Gibbx

progression can happen without dailies though. this is a sandbox game and progression should be getting resources, defending your town/city, PvPing the enemy and looting their goods! knowledge already exist and the developers said they didn't like farming, which is what dailies are.

i haven't played eve online recently but when i played the only dailies they had were reputation with mission npc's. but you could predo much of them and keep the items in the hanger and the npc would take it from there to complete it.

I've been without internet at my new apartment so i haven't been on as much and have been forgetting about it when I'm on my phone. so i guess happy vacation from me

Dailies does not have to equal farming, or grind though. It could be as simple as checking in with your local/closest town for a daily ration for being a citizen there (I believe cities have a food/resource requirement so a daily works there as well being it is something people will need to do regardless). Or for just logging in.

The goal of a daily isn't to force people to grind for hours but to get people to login daily. The best dailies are incorporated with normal game play (Why I think city maintenance is a good fit for it). But they could be as simple as logging in.

Surprised I have not heard of it before!

Thanks for the welcome!

Obviously there should be a report button we can use, but in an area where they are relatively safe bots will thrive like they do.

Luckily we have a way to take care of them in the form of our demon friends. What I propose is a double, maybe triple, whammy of goodness.

Have a debuff that people can buy/exchange that they can use on bots (or people that they think are bots) and allow them to toggle it off if that person replies to them and ends up being a person.

And allow the debuff to act as a beacon to demon players. Maybe as a dot or arrow on their maps in their direction.

This acts as a gold/resource sink, another way to encourage people to travel to Arboreus, and is a fun way to deal with bots. Maybe allow the person/bot the option to solve a few capcha's or whatever to remove it in case people try to use it to grief people.

Thoughts?

Come for the points, stay for the company! Hope to see you around!

One of the most respectable, and selfless things I have seen someone do in a gaming community in a long time.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing!

@roccandil said in Preventing Bots in Arboreus:

If I ever design a game, I've decided I'll do everything I can to balance it around the mechanic that player's toons are -always- skilling up, regardless of whether or not the players are actually on, and thus organically bypass the bot issue.

That sounds like a pretty awesome way to do it. But sounds like you would need a pretty robust skill system built around that concept.

I like it though.

@gothix said in The Tides of PVP:

@Whisper if you wish to completely avoid all PvP while wanting to experience full game content, you are out of luck i guess, because that can only be done in pure PvE game.
You said it yourself "PvP games".. the point is for PvP to happen and not to be avoided, lol.

Still Fractured is kind enough to offer you a whole PvE planet. So hopefully that will be enough for you, if it's not then I don't know what to tell you. Search "PvE MMO" in google next time.

There is plenty of PvE to be done in Fractured, and you can avoid PvP by raoming around PvE planet. But if you will chose to travel to another world, then you will just have to take a risk, like everyone else.

I fear you didn't read what I wrote, or strongly misunderstood it. I love PvP games. I don't intend to avoid it at all.

I listed multiple PVP games where I dominated among top (with the help from organized guilds of course). I am not saying, "How can we hide from it".

I am asking, "What is preventing one group from dominating with such an iron fist that others stop playing or switch sides".

Because I have seen what happens in PVP sandbox games when one side/faction dominates.

This won't be like instance pvp where matches are 50v50. If one sides dominates it skews things heavily. In Tales of Toast for example (Open World PVP with full inventory/loot drop mechanics) the game started off crazy fun. Lots of people everywhere. But then slowly it really became a game of two guilds. And then as one of those two guilds started losing it gave the winning guild an advantage the 2nd guild never could recover from since every victory made one side stronger and the other weaker. Eventually everyone in the 2nd guild stopped playing except maybe like 5-10 who then joined the other guild.

Because of that the top players on the server were all in the same guild and for us it was fantastic. We could go anywhere and do anything. We would do our exp grinds and then back track to other areas and just completely wipe people out, and then do a patrol of the resource areas to get the people trying to get resources for crafting. Because of this people fell further behind in both xp, and in crafting.

There was literally 0 way anyone could compete with us.

TLDR; You have no idea what you are talking about. I want PVP. I just don't want it to destroy a server/game to the point where there is no pvp anymore.

@pluto said in The Tides of PVP:

@gothix
I don't think the issue is avoiding PvP, but rather avoiding a game where it's all about who has the largest organization.

I've always liked PvP, but it also always seems to be about who has the most numbers. Leads to pretty boring gameplay imho. If I'm roaming around with a pack of 10, it's likely nothing less than 5 will be a threat. Etc.

Edit: I suppose I should clarify. Obviously territory control and such should be all organization play. However, it seems like standard PvP also gets lumped in as well.

I believe Shadowbane made it so if a group of 100 decided to siege a city (Destroy it/take it) and the group defending it only had 50 people the defenders got a buff relative to the ratio they were out numbered by (there was an upper limit to this obviously).

It is a decent way to fight off people just relying on a zerg. But still doesn't really address what happens if one group dominates the playing field.

@eurav said in The Tides of PVP:

As for why I think this won´t happen, has different reasons on each Planet. Also there is one uncertainty that we have... the max member count for Guilds. But let´s assume it´s somehwere around 100 - 200.

One reason, which is the same for all Planets, is:

One Guild can´t really control a lot of towns. Every account can only have one house per Planet. So the best, or worst, that could happen is that each Member of a guild is Governor of one Town. (The Pre - Alpha map as about ~ 40 Town Spots, so I think the whole currently planned complete map would be about 150 - 200). Now.. you need 5/10/20 residents to make a Town Spot into the first "level" of a town (called Hamlet; where it can then be declared a Guild Town). So you would either need 2000+ guild members, or you attract NPCs and you have to make sure every one from the Guild get´s voted for Governor. This would be a hell of a lot of work, and surely not desireableas it would surely be boring for that Guild anyway, to have no "enemy". But.. this will never happen because:

• Assuming all town spots are free, and the Guild tries to occupy every spot, other players could just go and build their house in those town spots and organize themselves to vote one of them as Governor.
• A Guild with a lot of Town Spots won´t be able to take over a Town from a Guild which has only one spot in a Siege, because that one Town Spot will be better advanced and have far better defences, more players to defend...

On Tartaros it´s all about full on PvP. So there is one additional reason I could think of which will prevent one Guild dominating the Planet:

• While guild members can still fight each other in open pvp, not having guilds as enemys takes away too much PvP fun

On the Human planet I would say an additional reason is the variety of gameplay one can choose from, which will automatically create different guilds with different goals.

On Arboreus I don´t really know... since it´s a full PvE Planet, are there even Town Sieges? If not then it´s most likely just first come first serve there? <- Which also leads to one guild won´t control all spots, unless you manage to get every governor to join your guild. But... since there is no pvp anyways, only having one Guild on Arborues does not seem to be a problem anyways.

I agree with you completely in regards to Arboreus. I don't think this will be an issue there at all.

On Tartaros your reason why it shouldn't happen is the reason I am bringing up this discussion. I want to maintain that fun.

And on the human side it still just takes one slightly large guild to get that edge to snow ball into more. And if one sides starts dominating it becomes easier. At a certain point I imagine they won't even need to fight to get some cities. They could just tell someone, "Join our guild and make your city guild only or we will take your city by force and you lose it".

I think two solutions come to mind. I don't know if anyone here has played Civilization 6 but they have these events called Emergencies that are triggered when a civilization takes another players capital and everyone else in the game is given the option to fight back that player and give back what they took. People who join in on the fight are given slight buffs. And if they win they are given a huge chunk of gold/rewards. I can see this working if Guild A keeps taking city after city and a server wide emergency is given and people who try to 'liberate' the last city are given a buff and an incentive to help in it. This encourages PVP and acts as a natural counter-balance for trying to control the whole map. If people lose the emergency in Civ 6 the player who triggered it gets rewards based on the people who joined to try and stop them. Not sure if that would be needed here but... Not a bad idea either.

Or.

Another decent solution if a guild takes a control of a whole planet. Maybe a GM event where the rules/limitations from other planets is removed on that planet and havoc is allowed against that specific guild and their cities. As you said a guild that takes control of a whole planet will be spread thin so the likely hood that they can defend against the two other planets AND their planet mates would not be a likely situation. So as they lose their cities/claims others from their planet can sprout up there. When the event is over I feel like they should be given a reward buff wise, or in game resource wise since triggering the event is akin to saying, "We won the game but don't want to destroy the game".

I think both of those scenarios would work pretty well to fix this issue.

@Gothix said in The End of most Sandbox PVP Games-The losing side.:

It's not because games are sandbox. It's because people are care bears, and seek the safety by joining the more powerful guilds.

I've always been in a guild where we went us vs. the rest of the world, no matter the odds. And we always had more than enough PvP and fun.

Solution: don't change the game, change your play style.

Well regardless of the reason, we should be looking for solutions.

I understand what you mean. I played Atlas and was part of the K4 Alliance (40ish members) and we had to fight CSTG (300+ Chinese) everyday for a month. Only for CSTG to merge with another Chinese/American guild and stomped us with 500+ member assaults.

But smaller guilds shouldn't accept that they will lose and enjoy fun pvp for a few months and let the game die. We should strive to find ways where PVP can last for years, or indefinitely.