Richard Garriott Looking for Input on UO-Style PvP, Housing, for Ultimate RPG
Richard Garriott is requesting player feedback about Player vs Player combat (PVP) and player housing. Those of you who played Ultima Online in its early years remember that PvP and player housing were very important parts of UO. In a couple of threads over at the Ultimate RPG forums at Stratics, Richard Garriott directly references UO’s early years and trying to strike a middle ground providing those systems while not letting them overwhelm the game.
You can follow the discussion, or join in, at the aptly-named Stratics threads below.
– Lord British needs your opinion on PvP!
We would like to provide an open UO style world, but we do not want to run off newbies. Please give me your ideas for and opinions about PvP in what you see as the Ultimate RPG.
– Lord British needs your opinion on Player Housing!
We would like to provide as close to the open housing methods that we provided in UO, but perhaps improving the “urban sprawl” issues. We definitely want player towns to be possible and worthwhile. Please give us your opinions and ideas about player housing.
There is also a story on his defense of mobile and social gaming.
The threads are interesting reads, partly because you have UO players joining in with their thoughts, but also because it makes you realize that the number of MMORPGs that have tried open-world PvP and player housing are few and far between. Unrestrained open-world PvP can in fact drive many players away, as it did with UO during its first few years, and customized/massive player housing can create a sort of urban sprawl that is unattractive and can kill the immersion factor.
Hopefully Garriott will immediately see which ideas are good and do an exceptional job implementing and integrating them into his code base. My takeaway is that ganking will happen intermittently, but it could largely be mitigated by the surrounding players and their perceived obligation to society. Despite that I’m sure an “invisible wall” will encircle players to designate them temporary noncombatants.
All bullshitting aside, PvP would best benefit from using the same mechanics as the rest of the game. Just create basic, instinctive gameplay mechanics and use them like Legos to build both PvP and mundane tasks like placing knives and forks on a tablecloth. If players don’t want to perform (or are limited by interface) the intricacies of daily living, basic tasks could be done automatically as necessary, offline or on. Player-customizable combinations of maintainer-supplied AI templates could be arranged to both ensure survival and maintain positive social status.
The film Back to the Future has some great inspirations for gameplay and related virtues by rewarding acts of truth, love, courage, falsehood, hatred and cowardice in kind. Review it again, Garriott. Time Bandits is not enough! Also Heat is pretty good if you’re an audiophile. Peruse the gunfire audio and think forest and town sounds.
PvP can totally ruin a game, such was my case in Fallout Online 2238. Basically an online version of F1 and F2 maps put together. Of course, it was incredibly brutal, and it added to the ‘post apocalyptic’ feeling of the game. Every time you meet someone in the wasteland it was shoot first and ask questions later. Sometimes I’d beg them to not kill me. Because obviously using your action points to run away was an invitation to rocket launcher your groin…
There should be more of a repercussion to PvP. There will always be PKers in a PvP environment. The goal being to cut down on high level players merking low-mid level players for the lawls day after day, hour after hour.
With that in mind, I would suggest locking off content to people who are specifically pking or pking noobs. Perhaps with a karma system you could make it so every time they dropped, transfered, bought or sold an item or pieces of gold, the item’s quality would degrade and the amount of gold given or taken would decrease. All determined by how low your PK karma is. Or perhaps the best items/spells in a certain class/level could get locked off from being used.
Perhaps a half hour ban for players who are found harassing low level players. Like straight up, if you initiate combat with 5-10 players in an hour or two that are exponentially lower levels than your are. Or exponentially worse gear worse abilities. There needs to be an objective negative repercussion to this.
How about any healing ability or walk speed degrading in quality the more and more you purposefully pk noobs. Perhaps the only way to get yourself to heal better or walk quicker, would be to group with others semi equal to your level, and when you help them get experience equal to the experience you’ve taken from players. Of course it would have to be done by percentage of exp you took and percentage of exp you’re helping to gain in conjunction with the person you’re helping. So for your hour of mass murder spree, you have an hour or two of helping others.
Perhaps then PvP players would be more discriminate in how and why they pk others. It’s one thing to get back stabbed by a player who you grouped with. Or fight a fair fight for the loot of an enemy you both killed. It’s quite another to see a group of dudes, just outside city limits, waiting for the next noob to come by.
I don’t see how this system could be gamed easily. As it depends on who initiates combat.
This system would be pretty complicated and would require fine tuning. But it should cut down on the players that take the most schadenfreude from pking.
With UO2, I believe it was going to have PvP restricted to certain areas, and while you could play the game without venturing into those areas, the risk was worth going into those areas. It was not going to be a dual-facet system like UO’s Trammel/Felucca.
With UO, they’ve tried making it worth it to venture into Felucca by making certain valuable items available there. They still believe this is the way, but there are two problems with this approach. The smaller problem is you end up with a situation where certain players/guilds end up farming these items and then selling them through vendors in Tram.
The bigger problem with UO in this regard is the lack of new players coming in and/or declining player populations. This means the market/demand for these items is small, so the motivation is just not there. Those valuable hard-to-get items I mentioned? Because so many players are veteran players and because so many acquired the ones they need years ago, these items are easy to find on vendors.
Many people these days aren’t going to PvP just to PvP. There needs to be something there that’s worth it.
As for players housing… if you’re going to have a lot of players on one map. It’s going to become urban. Perhaps limiting housing or creating an apartment system like in u6o. As the population grows, so does the height of the apartment complex.
Am I the only one who can’t help but think “what a shame he didn’t go back to his roots until after the fiasco that was Tabula Rasa”? >_>
I think some of the concepts for Tabula Rasa were good, and the lore was pretty engaging. The implementation was horrid. Using the Ultima roots for a science fiction game could work, it just didn’t work *here*.
As far as his questions, I really don’t think any MMO has gotten PvP or housing done correctly. The only way I see PvP working is if players and monsters use the same “rules”, and the same abilities you use in PvE work the same in PvP. Newbies need protection, but some artificial wall is the wrong way to do it. Instead, give each player one or more “experienced” NPCs that guide them through their first steps, introducting them to quests, crafting, PvP, etc, and protect them from those who are out of their league (scaling down their “help” to deal with players who are just above the level of the newbie). This gives a steady learning, where they get less and less help until they are ready to take it on their own at some point. Yes, still a glass wall, but one that works in-world as well as metagame. Housing, unfortunately, means you either have to pre-craft the environment for the housing, or suffer from the eyesore that is player housing (like UO). I always though if a city were constructed realistically, it would be easy to add dozens of homes that can be purchased in each city, and (if zones/areas properly instanced), provide housing for hundreds or thousands of players. That is still preferable to a simple “door” that leads to an instance, the way EQ2 and similar games handle it.
I think cloning UO’s way of working around renaissance (the part where you had lots of synergy skills like carpenter + alchemy(?) to make barrels and the likes) for crafting, Meditation for MP restoration (which heavy armor can reduce effectiveness), Perma-Red for ppl that over-PK honest folks, limits on thievery, etc, etc. is the way to go.
For the rest, it’s going to be very hard for me to let go of Britannia which I hold so dear. However, a similar world (perhaps based on the ultima 1 world, with the 4 continent) having LB’s castle will be very appealing.
As for housing, I liked UO’s system… There was cluttering at certain places that made them hard to navigate, so special steps have to be taken to mitigate that problem, maybe just add a minimum distance between buildings that varies on the size of it (the bigger the house, the more room you need between them).
Having 2-3 neutral cities where ppl can purchase houses might be good as well; think about it, in Ultima7 and 8 I did locate empty houses to make my home, so this might work. Or say a city named “Moon” could have a bunch of free spaces that are specificaly designed for a house of a specific type. Like you coudn’t place a small 5×5 house in the spot reserved for a 25×25 castle/keep. By reserving free spots in an otherwise empty town (beside the Bank, and basic merchants if even) you maximise the players than can use a said piece of land. For the more loner player (such as myself) I’ll probably want a mid-sized house in the equivalent of the Isle of the Avatar (remote area). But I like the Idea of the neutral towns that gets busier as player decides to build there; heck you could even have incentive for ppl to be nice with their townfolks.
One thing is for sure, I do not want everything to be instanced… I loved exploring player buildings and areas. Gave me ideas of my own for later when I had gotten the money =)
Good luck LB,
— Francois424
True, I would like to see Lord British creating a Britannia.But I guess LB is going to be putting virtues into Ultimate RPG. From previous interviews, he’s stated if he ever put virtues into a game, they would more closely resemble what he truly believes.
After, what? 20-30 years of using ethics systems in narrative and gameplay, it’d be interesting to see what he cooks up.
“There are three principles. Chattiness, Spendthriftness and Social Gameplay.
When Chattiness is present alone, you have the virtue of Spamming.
When Spendthriftness is present alone, you have the virtue of F2P.
When Social Gameplay alone is present, you have the virtue of Delay Based Gaming.
When Chattiness and Spendthriftness are both present, you have the virtue of of Character Reskin Shopping.
When Chattiness and Social Gameplay are both present, you have the virtue of Social Game Updating.
When Spendthriftness and Social Gameplay are both present, you have the virtue of Power Up Shopping.
When all are present, you have the virtue of Materialism, which is the denial of any soul the game might have.
When all are absent, you have the virtue of Loyalty, to your corporate overlords.”
As for PvP and it having a goal to exist (other than a superiority complex; which I am fine with). UO had a lot of crafting, and the more interesting stuff imho was the Weapons/Armors. Well in order to make these you needed rare material if you went for the rare colors (green, blue and the like, think they where called ‘valorite’ ? been a while). If you really dont go full world PvP (and I mean, why not ?) then you could put areas that gives more of the rare ressources.
You can go there to mine Valorite, but you also might get PK’ed. If you do manage to return home with a full bag of goodies, you get to make good money. As long as the rare mats aren’t essential, but quite desirable for vanity/power goals, it will bring people to the said areas.
Personally I’d say go with full world PvP, putting large safe zones near the ‘moongates’ and cities. If the next UO is anything like the original UO, you could make GrandMaster in many jobs without exiting these safe zones.
As for no-lifes that kills to kill (ie: for no reason, not even loot), the Perma-Red PK counter that was implemented late, just before Trammel/Felucca split was incredibly effective. It should curb these behaviors a lot.
— Francois424
The above are the best ideas I’ve seen for the Ultima series, ever. I miss informative discussions like these.
Permadeath and non-anonymous (but free) account registration (valid CC check) should cast a spell over most repeat griefing if you limit lives and spawn rate per account. Give players one life per 24 hour period for free. If they die early, they have to wait to play again. If they don’t die, they never have to wait and can choose to pay to create additional players for support and continuity (family, militia, cult, whatever). They can do the same without paying by forming social bonds (contracts, deeds, informal verbal and/or textual agreements) with other players.
What if players with high MPH (murders per hour) got diseases faster? Even justified killing could increase your chance of infection. Things like killing and cleaning animals, swimming, eating meat or veggies, sleeping on a flea bag or the forest floor. If however there was no special “murder” score, you might still embody sandbox ideals without sacrificing newbie-friendliness by ensuring that:
I. Players by -default- are friendly toward each other (online and offline disposition).
II. To kill another player you have to hit them many, many times with fists or another object. First they go unconscious, second you keep beating them, and third they finally die.
III. Ensure that the sound effects of human and animal injury progress linearly from healthy to dead in as many variations as possible with the goal of causing the maximum amount of empathy and remorse in the inflictor of wounds. This would also encourage hunters to be more accurate unless they were bored and wanted to hear the pain sounds.
IV. Humans organize and coalesce. People need council. Society begets government. A general fund for those in heavy armour with a watchful eye, with the implicit belief that they’ll protect us, is in order. The shadow of griefing is government crackdown: curfews, stop-and-frisks, warrantless searches and detainment. Kangaroo courts of online players could take you from your cell, pretend to give you a fair hearing, then beat you until you died. Yes.
Also, in case someone in power (for the next MMO) sees this: please no “class/level” system, the market is flooded with them. Go back to the beloved skill point system that made UO so unique.
Must have random attribute craftable items. Cant begin to explain how content forfilling this is (brsks etc)
For PVP. omg can you just duplicate Ultima Online. Precast eplos, variety of timed spells, and pls OH pls tell me your making this 2D birds eye view like UO thats the make or break IMO. And skillpoints yes like above poster said no class set crap. All you need to do it remake UO ok? UO2 we want, millions want no 3D crap. Theres alread world of warcraft fast paced action packed mage dumping 2D frenzy
really tired and grammer was horrible, last part was theres too many 3D mmorpgs like WOW, we need a remake of 2D style like UO