So, how's about them evil people?

Eniko

Cadet
So, thought up a new topic for discussion. One thing that's always gotten my goat about RP in many, many MMORPGs was that there was no way to be evil. Now, I don't know about anyone else but sitting in the tavern talking about the weather (which is always the same) and your exploits in PVE (which everyone has duplicated) just doesn't strike me as thrilling RP.

Good stories need conflict. For conflict, you need threats. You need bad people, and roleplayers to play them. In a lot of games you can't do that, take for instance WoW: you can't communicate in any reasonable fashion with the other faction, the first choice of antagonists because you can fight them. Meanwhile you can't fight the people you can talk to unless you duel. And if you duel, you cannot do it in many of the main social gathering locations.

I'm hoping Hero's Journey will throw us players who like to play evil characters a bone; I always much enjoyed being a target for the do-gooders in Ultima Online. The benifit of Ultima Online was that, in Trammel, you could screen out the griefers and asshats through guild versus guild consentual PVP. That way the roleplayers could pick and choose who was contributing to the story, and who just wanted to kill you and take your shoes.

Open PVP does allow players to be antagonists, but I feel it leaves the people who just want to ruin another player's game experience too free to ruin it for everyone. I know this is hardly the pervading opinion, but I thought Ultima Online's guild warring system was as close to a perfect solution as it got, for RP anyway.

Thoughts?
 
I want open pvp... but without looting. Or with only gold being able to be looted, which shouldnt be a huge problem... there are banks. For the same, yet opposite (huh?), reason you don't want it. So that I can ruin the gaming experience for all the idiots and jerks. :P


Partially limited PvP just feels silly to me. Either you can kill everyone, or you can't. Guild/race/faction/whatever shouldn't prevent people from being able to kill one another. It should prevent them from WANTING to kill one another, but it shouldn't prevent it from happening. There is no midway suspension of belief, for me. Gimme all, so that it feels normal, or gimme nothing so that I can just write it off and ignore my desires to kill gold farmers/kill stealers/idiots/etc.
 
Ah, reminds me of my time spent playing in an evil group on a PW server for nwn.
Too many "good" characters meta and power gamed us to quit our RPing as such a group.
Not sure if there's much to be done to balance technical side. I think the players themselves is what helps to make RPing evil work.
 
I plan to play a villain in HJ. A likeable one, hopefully. ;)

Besides, there are just never enough dark hearted Bards... we need more.
 
I like the idea of free open pvp... but the implementation would be sketchy.

Gemstone does it pretty well. You can't really get away with murder without someone noticing, getting thrown in jail, or getting your ass handed to you by their level 100 sorcerer friend. Know what i mean?

But in a larger scale game environment, think WoW or similar, how exactly does any of that matter? Truth is, if free open scale PvP was possible, people would just go around griefing with little to no remorse.

Though I can't say how many times I've been fighting a mob next to a copper mine or something similar and someone walks up to it and farms it while I fight off the bad guys. Those people I'd love to kill.
 
I like the idea of free open pvp... but the implementation would be sketchy.

Gemstone does it pretty well. You can't really get away with murder without someone noticing, getting thrown in jail, or getting your ass handed to you by their level 100 sorcerer friend. Know what i mean?

But in a larger scale game environment, think WoW or similar, how exactly does any of that matter? Truth is, if free open scale PvP was possible, people would just go around griefing with little to no remorse.

Though I can't say how many times I've been fighting a mob next to a copper mine or something similar and someone walks up to it and farms it while I fight off the bad guys. Those people I'd love to kill.



The first WoW server I played on was PvP. There is some griefing, but no where near UO pretrem, nor SB, nor Eve. For one, its very hard to call it "griefing" when the only thing you lose is 1-2 minutes of your play time when you run back to your body. And HJ wouldn't even have THAT problem, because you get a choice between which type of "rezz penalty" you want. Pretty sure one was to rezz at the death-spawn point, and take some stat lose or some such. You can do that in WoW as well, but it's far too costly to be effective.

The up-side to open pvp (though 0 looting), is that yeah... you get to kill the ninja's (you can't even do that in WoW!), as well as the idiots. Not to mention a chance at real RP. I loved GS's pvp system. Open pvp, but no looting.
 
The first WoW server I played on was PvP. There is some griefing, but no where near UO pretrem, nor SB, nor Eve. For one, its very hard to call it "griefing" when the only thing you lose is 1-2 minutes of your play time when you run back to your body. And HJ wouldn't even have THAT problem, because you get a choice between which type of "rezz penalty" you want. Pretty sure one was to rezz at the death-spawn point, and take some stat lose or some such. You can do that in WoW as well, but it's far too costly to be effective.

The up-side to open pvp (though 0 looting), is that yeah... you get to kill the ninja's (you can't even do that in WoW!), as well as the idiots. Not to mention a chance at real RP. I loved GS's pvp system. Open pvp, but no looting.

The community is what holds it together, like in Gemstone. I can walk up and blow anyone's head off, but I'd lose tons of reputation in game. It would be on the amulet, the forums, etc etc. It's an invisible faction... that really exists... between players.

In WoW there really is little of that, and so many people it just doesn't matter... I don't know, maybe just my opinion. But apply the amount of griefing in WoW between factions by 100 if it was inner-faction. There would need to be some kind of community and etiquette in place for that to work.

Blizzard was smart in knowing that wouldn't happen and that's why you can't yoink any ol' jerk who pisses you off.
 
The community is what holds it together, like in Gemstone. I can walk up and blow anyone's head off, but I'd lose tons of reputation in game. It would be on the amulet, the forums, etc etc. It's an invisible faction... that really exists... between players.

In WoW there really is little of that, and so many people it just doesn't matter... I don't know, maybe just my opinion. But apply the amount of griefing in WoW between factions by 100 if it was inner-faction. There would need to be some kind of community and etiquette in place for that to work.

Blizzard was smart in knowing that wouldn't happen and that's why you can't yoink any ol' jerk who pisses you off.



It was a good thing, and a bad thing. I would be on an alt sometimes, and have the most rude encounter with someone "popular" and I'd come off as the bad guy. Even though his/her actions would never be accepted had someone else done it. Small factions means there wouldn't be one huge cliq that magicly ignore all their friends faults.

"Aww Bobo was down pickpocketing and ambushing noobs in the cata's? He's so silly!"


People tend to have the amazing ability to completely and utterly ignore their friends faults, at all times. Or even worse, not saying something to someone because they're a friend of a friend. That used to happen alot too.



So yeah, I guess it's just personal choice. I prefer lots of differant people keeping lots of other people in check. Rather than one large group that, for the most part, acts only out of misguided friendships and loyalties.
 
Part of the reason why WoW is more decent on the open PVP front is that not everyone is your enemy. Only the other side is your enemy, and you're really usually only gonna bump into them much in contested territory.

Open PVP without a lot of places that mostly belong to a single faction, which can't attack it's own members, would probably be a lot worse. And not being able to attack your own faction members would also get in the way of RP.
 
Hmmmmm...
I would like to play a likeable common pickpocket...
I would aso like it if you could pickpocket money from people...
How COOL would that be?!
Evil is always more fun to play anyways...]:smiley: :D2
 
If I had my way, I'd say an RP open game like Gemstone is the way to go. You can't grief people, but you could fight them if there was an RP reason you were doing it. That also includes the pickpocket aspect and even detrimental spells and hurting somebody are allowed... things like that.
 
That's exactly what I'd like. AN open RP where you CAN fight people, but there needs to be reasons. I like the idea Val.
 
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