Can PvP and PvE Coexist in the same game?

[GrimFinger]

If you do not want players to engage in a particular kind of behavior in-game, then you either prohibit it, punish it, ignore it, facilitate it, or reward it. You have to decide which, if any, of those paths that you want to take, as a response to the behavior in question.

Players are not the game world. They are forces outside of the game world that seek to take actions within the game world by proxy - their characters, units, and armies. Players will naturally look for advantage. Players will naturally push the envelope. Players will naturally exploit opportunities. In chess, a player gets to take one action, and then the other player has opportunity to respond. In your game, how many actions can a player take, before the other player(s) can respond?

A bear doesn't actually have to attack and kill a player for camping (or for other undesirable activity). It could simply appear, and scare off the player's unit. The player's unit may lose something, a sword for example, in their bid to flee. They would get no say in whether to flee or not. You simply chalk it up to instinct. Whose instinct? Their instinct.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

In this example, the player is impacted in an incremental way, rather than in one fell swoop. If you use a percentage-based chance, then they might get away with their behavior, or they might not. It is a risk that they incur by way of choice of their actions that they seek to take (but are not guaranteed to succeed by your game world).

I'm just trying to give you some feedback, per your original posting in this thread.

[Angerak]

This sort of feedback is really helpful. Most of Cohort's design has been in a vacuum, with very little input/critique from the outside world.

Some ideas, like an incremental threat assessment and/or random chance occurrence is not something I had considered. The game system isn't really geared to do that, but it's actually not a major change to implement it. The chance of being run off, for whatever reason, might increase each turn a player stays in a particular barony (unless they're allied with the barony's owner).

As I'm thinking about this, I can foresee some interesting implementation challenges - but interesting challenges are fun!

[Angerak]

In your game, how many actions can a player take, before the other player(s) can respond?

A player can move any/all of their playing pieces on any given turn.  What each piece can do depends on the type of piece and the skills (for characters and agents) the piece might have.  I fear that is an exceptionally vague answer, but a detailed answer might be too long for a single post.

[ixnay]

I'll chime in, here...

This thread reminds me of Ultima Online, one of the first successful MMOs (and one of the only ones I played.) To balance the load they put players on different servers ("shards"), some of which had different rules. On some shards, there was basically no PvP. On others, there were PvP areas, for special events and for guild wars. When it started, the standard setup was for there to be no PvP in towns, but once you went out into the wilderness anyone could attack you.

This was frustrating for newbies, who were easy meat and had no gangs or guilds to help them out. But it also made venturing out into the wilderness genuinely dangerous and interesting! In effect, players were the most dangerous kind of wandering monster you could encounter out there. Traveling from one town to the next became a significant task, with different tactics. Taking the main road would be fast, but would mean near-certain ambush. Taking the back ways might avoid attackers, but could also mean getting cornered somewhere far away from help.

I was killed many times, including once where my attackers resurrected me on the spot, as a way of making up for stealing my valuables. And I finished many trips with a mad dash into civilized areas, just barely escaping from some gang of griefers. I had fun! But there were enough complaints and issues that they started shifting the rules. They set up a reputation system, so that if you kept killing people, then you'd be flagged as a renegade and others could not only attack you on site (wherever you went), but they'd earn a bounty. Stuff like that.

And there was a "masters shard" where PvP was wide open, where monsters from the wilderness areas routinely wandered into town, and where skills took 10x as long to increase. Succeeding (or even just surviving) on that shard carried a lot of street cred.

[Angerak]

Ultima Online is an excellent analogy. The game mechanics are of course different, but the outcome where players get to pounce on other players to relieve them of their loot and equipment is the same. Or, in some cases, the attacks are a bit less aggressive and their designed to slow down the enemy and/or prevent them from completing quests or adventures in the area.

I hadn't really thought of the idea of bounties either. Again, I'm not sure how easy it would be to include that as a game mechanic, but it certainly adds some fun. hmm ... maybe making killing off other player's units gains "infamy" points. I'm not sure what to do with that, but it's a start.

[Blackwill]

My main concern in games with "safe zones" is the inevitable situation where griefers actually camp in the safe zone, rush out to put the hurt on someone en masse, and then retire back to the security of the safe zone. There is generally nothing you can do, and they will never submit to a "fair fight". I've seen it happen too many times in games with mixed PVP and PVE. Power bloc's build in the safe zones, boost each other, and wreak Holy Heck on everyone else (or, worse yet, perform nuisance attacks just tomscrew with you).

[Angerak]

My main concern in games with "safe zones" is the inevitable situation where griefers actually camp in the safe zone, rush out to put the hurt on someone en masse, and then retire back to the security of the safe zone.

I've tried to take that problem into consideration in Cohorts.

If you leave the safe zone to attack somebody, you're going to have to spend the rest of the turn exposed and vulnerable to a counter attack.  You cannot move out, strike and run back under cover in the same turn.  A player can do what you're suggesting, but it takes quite a bit of effort.  They'd have to open a stack, teleport into the stack, make the attack and then run away.

This might still cause a problem, but if a player is willing to commit their precious resources (stacks and character actions) to conduct these sorts of raids, perhaps it's not so bad.  

Not to mention, it's possible to trap these attackers through the use of good offensive/defensive strategies:

1. you can have allied backup stacks nearby that will immediately come to you're aid if attacked,
2. you could cast spells on the potential escape path to either bar the player's ability to run away or slow them down enough that they end their turn in the PvP zone (where they can be counter attacked).
3. don't move through PvP zones where you are close enough for the attacker to run & hide in a safe zone.

All this being said, this could potentially be a real problem and it's one that I might not have considered closely enough.  As I continue to refine the game world, I'll try to mitigate how many places this sort of tactic might be used.