If you were following the Shroud of the Avatar forums during Release 3 last week and weekend, you may have taken note of this massive argument that sprung up around some comments that Starr Long made about player-versus-player combat — PvP, as it is more commonly known — in Shroud of the Avatar. It’s important to note, I think, that Long made his comments in-game, whilst wandering around one of the towns in Release 3 as his Darkstarr character.

Forum member Seir managed to grab screenshots of Long’s comments:

He also put together a short transcript thereof:

Greetings Avatars

Are you torturing OneAndOnly?

Imagine opinions about PvP

War will come for those who crave it

TTPvP

Yes danger for those who crave it or for those willing to take on some extra risk for greater reward

But for those who want a life of peace they can have it by avoiding those conflicts

Towns of course will be safe and much of the adventuring areas as well but there will likely be a few areas where open PvP happens. Those areas will have greater chances to find rarer resources and resources will spawn at higher rates to balance risk vs. reward

Remember seperate from PvP are the town seiges where NPCs will attack cities. Then NPC guard will be quite relevant. Also guards are there to police stealing from the NPCs

Dueling, Arenas, Guild vs. Guild will all allow you to play PvP at “any time” as you request

Or get to those open PvP zones

Guild warefare not faction based currently

Looting rules still being designed but we do want the ability for those in PvP to get items from each other

Killox why are they upset? (was blocked so I didn’t heard the question)

Ragnar: why disappointed?

(I like the feeling of danger in the world, if there is no other evil players then I won’t feel challenged)

(I want risk and danger everywhere – even though i will not be a murderer or thief myself)
(so do I…)

Hmm. I see that desire for full open PvP but a large segment of the audience don’t want that. We are trying to balance that and it is hard

The closest you will get to full PvP is in the PvP areas or Guild vs. Guild warfare which will be just about anywhere and anytime. Ideally even including attacking guild structures

Avatars I must depart for a tiny time to look at Release 4 maps. I shall return!

Your support means everything to us

Keep giving us feedback. Even the things we don’t want to hear. 🙂

Thank you all for being such an amazing community!

As you can well imagine, I had to spend — in my capacity as a moderator of the Shroud forums — a fair bit of my time cleaning up and trying (in vain) to manage the hostility in that and a number of other related discussions. And I use the word “hostility” deliberately, because Starr Long’s comments infuriated a number of people and touched off some bitter — epic, but bitter — debates between harder-core PvP proponents and…well…pretty much everyone else, but especially those who prefer to avoid PvP in favour of player-versus-environment (PvE) gameplay.

I’ve been mulling this over for a few days, and I still don’t get why the controversy erupted. Richard Garriott, Starr Long, and others on the Shroud of the Avatar development team have been relatively up front about the general design of the game’s PvP systems, or their intentions for it, from about the time the Kickstarter campaign launched nearly a year ago. Indeed, when I interviewed Richard Garriott at the time:

You know, UO was completely open PvP. The great joy was that…it was completely open PvP! You could go attack anybody you wanted. The great tragedy was that…it was completely open PvP, which meant that — generally speaking — people preyed on the newbies, which actually worked against the success of the game in many ways. But, you know, it was lots of fun if you were the guy perpetrating it.

So, in a lot of ways, few people have dared to do that again, and I think with good reason. On the other hand, the way people have tended to get around it is to make PvP fully consensual, or they put it in a…it only happens in certain raid conditions, or only happens on certain maps that you opt into. And the problem with that is, if you try to make it completely opt-in, only a handful of people opt in, and frankly it’s not very much fun to only PvP the people who have also only signed up to PvP. And it also leaves something a little lacking. So neither of those extremes really seem quite right yet.

And so our plan is to create a game where, nominally, you as a potential prey are safe from PvP; you’re not someone anybody can just walk up to and gank. However, there are story segments of the game, times and places in the game where you’ll be encouraged to do activities which will open you to be the target of PvP. And so…imagine, for example…I’ll give a hypothetical scenario. A hypothetical scenario would be that you’re really trying to earn a bunch of money in this game, and one of the ways it will be very profitable to make money in the game is to run a piece of what I would broadly describe as contraband across the country. Well, it might pay really well, but you also are explained to, well in advance, that by the way, this is contraband, and as soon as you pick up the contraband and start running across the world with it, you’ll be flagged as someone who is operating outside the law, is running this contraband, and in fact it will invoke other players — known to you or otherwise — they will be told “by the way, this player’s running contraband from the east coast to the west coast; look out…there’s a bounty if you manage to catch him.” And so now we’ve put you into the ‘fox and rabbit’ scenario, that now feels like fun PvP (I would hope), because you’re engaging in it in the proper spirit, which is that it’s now a ‘cops and robbers’ portion of the game, with real people instead of just NPCs.

Since this interview, Portalarium has more or less pitched the same ideas concerning PvP whenever the question has arisen. Some new features — guild-versus-guild PvP, for example — were added to the mix during the Kickstarter, and there has been some refinement in terms of how they’ve talked about these ideas…but in general, the thought behind PvP in Shroud of the Avatar has been consistent. PvP won’t be non-consensual, in the sense that all players in the game’s multiplayer modes are automatically and always available as PvP targets whether they want to be or not, nor will it be zoned off into tiny areas of the world, or to certain events. Players who don’t want to engage in PvE won’t be forced to isolate themselves in cities and other “safe zones”, venturing out into the wilds of Novia — and, later, New Britannia — only at great peril.

But equally, players who want to engage in PvP won’t have to go out of their way to find it. There has been a fair bit of discussion about people being able to “flag” themselves as open to PvP, the idea being that PvP-flagged players would be able to engage each other everywhere in the world (outside of towns and whatnot, at least), whilst also being unable to engage PvE players who were not similarly flagged. Granted, much of the discussion surrounding this framework has been speculative and unofficial; Portalarium has remained tight-lipped on the specifics of PvP in Shroud of the Avatar to date.

Now, Long’s comments seem — on the surface — to perhaps contradict this thinking, but let’s unpack what he said:

…for those who want a life of peace they can have it by avoiding those conflicts

This statement simply confirms what has already been said, by Richard Garriott and others, concerning the ability of players to avoid being PvP targets.

Yes danger for those who crave it or for those willing to take on some extra risk for greater reward

…

Towns of course will be safe and much of the adventuring areas as well but there will likely be a few areas where open PvP happens. Those areas will have greater chances to find rarer resources and resources will spawn at higher rates to balance risk vs. reward

While this sounds like one of the things that Richard Garriott labeled an “extreme” that Portalarium would seek to avoid in designing Shroud of the Avatar’s PvP, it should be noted that what is being reffered to here is “open PvP”. As I understand it, “open PvP” is basically the first “extreme” from the Garriott interview; the unrestricted, anything-goes, any player can target any other player PvP of Ultima Online. Which, granted, is the kind of PvP that a fairly vocal group of folks on the Shroud of the Avatar forums have been asking for.

That kind of PvP, as Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings so expertly explained some years ago, will never happen again…not on a world-wide basis, at least. Which is the point of Long’s comments here: unrestricted PvP will have its place in Shroud of the Avatar, but that sort of thing will be limited to particular areas only, so that those who really, truly do not want to be targets of “ganking” won’t ever have to be, unless by choice or accident they wander into an open PvP area.

But this doesn’t mean that players won’t be able to engage in PvP everywhere else in the world, does it? It simply means that they won’t be able to target the players who don’t want to interact combatively with other players.

Long goes on to say:

Dueling, Arenas, Guild vs. Guild will all allow you to play PvP at “any time” as you request

…

The closest you will get to full PvP is in the PvP areas or Guild vs. Guild warfare which will be just about anywhere and anytime. Ideally even including attacking guild structures

Remember: per the $2 million stretch goal for the game’s crowdfunding campaign, a milestone that was in fact reached, player guilds will be able to declare as “full time PvP” in Shroud of the Avatar. Based on this and on Long’s comments, one obvious solution for those players that want to engage in PvP “full time” would be to join a guild of like-minded folks, and do battle with other guilds of similarly like-minded folks. Equally, there’s no reason that this system couldn’t be extended, per the speculation detailed above, to individual players. Either way, under these conditions, the majority of the world can be their battleground, and there could well be no shortage of risk (provided that Portalarium’s handling of matching up players works as advertised)…or, probably, reward given this:

Looting rules still being designed but we do want the ability for those in PvP to get items from each other

And all the while, those players who manifestly do not want to engage in PvP or be victimized thereby will be able to avoid the whole affair.

For some reason, Starr Long discussing these matters — in, granted, rather more terse terms — resulted in a massive explosion of argument and vitriol on the Shroud of the Avatar forums. A truly impressive battery of arguments got trotted out: any limits on PvP would be bad for the in-game economy, would drive away players, and would betray the desires of the however-many-thousand people have currently registered for the Shroud of the Avatar forums (because, as this last and rather baffling line of argument seemingly goes, there’s apparently no other reason people would sign up to discuss Shroud of the Avatar apart from being rabidly pro-PvP). This was, as various parties told it, “Trammel all over again”, a sign that the “carebears” (read: PvE players) had “won”.

Quoth Lum:

When you see a UO veteran spitting fire about “Trammel” or “Pre-UO:R”, they’re referring to that reaction — the rolling back of some of the more punishing full-PvP rules. No more were players vulnerable anywhere — half the world was now declared off limits to non-consensual PvP. Shortly thereafter, players could “bless” items and make them immune from theft and looting. Somewhat basic stuff in today’s MMOs. To some of UO’s players, this was the apocalypse, that they blamed for the end of their beloved game.

And again:

How viable do you think this game would be in today’s MMO marketplace? How many times do you think today’s MMO customer would meekly accept being killed and looted by someone whom they had no chance in fighting against. Losing their house. Abused after being killed verbally for being “carebear” (although that term came into vogue later, when choices began to appear in the market and said “carebears” opted out) and not part of the hard core elite. Entire skill trees devoted to allowing players to steal from each other.

How long do you think someone would pay a monthly fee to be a target?

Granted, Shroud of the Avatar won’t be a subscription game, but the point that Lum makes is (I think) still entirely valid: who would pay, given the plethora of multiplayer game options, to be an unwilling victim? It’s one thing to desire competitive gameplay against one’s fellow humans, and to seek out and pay for games that cater to this desire. It’s quite another to demand that a game which seeks to cater to a broader audience incorporate this mode of gameplay, the feelings and concerns of others be damned.

And really, it does seem like the ones who are most incensed about the direction that PvP in Shroud of the Avatar is headed are the ones who want the opportunity to grief other players. Some are actually quite open about this, whereas others try and hide behind buzz terminology like “risk vs. reward” and suchlike. Either way, the arguments distill down to a common theme: the desire for the opportunity to be able to engage and kill other players in combat whether those players similarly desire to be engaged in combat by another player. For some, it’s actually the explicit and acknowledge lack of the potential PvP victim’s consent that seems to be the motivating factor…which mentality, I confess, I find myself disgusted by.