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A
Few General Guidelines If
the perfect solution has yet to be implemented, then what is the answer
to managing PvP? A complete system design is beyond the scope of this
article, but here a few things to be considered when designing an
anti-PvP system. Reduce
overhead by minimizing staff intervention in player affairs. Minimizing
staff intervention in player affairs is a principle that should be
followed across all aspects of your game design, and it’s particularly
true for your game’s PvP controls. Players will always exploit loopholes
in your design to their advantage, and when they do, the best way
to resolve the problem is to alter your code to prevent the undesired
activity. A
good example of players using a system contrary to its intended design
is the process by which a character of the cleric class may resurrect
another character in Dragonrealms. When a character dies, a
counter starts tracking skill loss, and the longer a character has
been dead when resurrected, the larger the loss will be. Clerics are
able to cast a Soul Bond spell that will neutralize this skill loss,
and players generally expect that a cleric will do so before performing
the resurrection. In the early implementation of this system, however,
players used the process to force skill loss by intentionally resurrecting
characters without first casting the Soul Bond spell. Although
the system mechanics allowed such activity, it didn’t fall within
the behavior expected by the staff, and several clerics had their
ability to cast the spell temporarily taken away for abusing the loophole
before we coded changes to close it. Although our intervention took
care of the immediate problem and made the victims of the aggression
happy, it tended to make the players against whom we took action resentful.
A pattern of such staff interference can result in an antagonistic
relationship between your customers and staff and increased expenses
to cover the lost development time spent correcting player behavior.
It can also foster an environment in which players expect staff to
handle their disputes, generating an ever-increasing number of assistance
calls as your customer base grows. Whether you are willing to pay
such costs is up to you.
Make
all methods of PvP reportable to a hard-coded justice system. Players
should be able to report all forms of PvP to the game’s justice system.
Possible methods include presenting murder victims with a pop-up window,
such as the one Ultima Online display, or allowing players
to file complaints with NPC guards or magistrates. Whatever the reporting
mechanism, it’s important to include all forms of PvP, such as theft,
corpse looting, casting offensive spells, being harmed by an area-effect
spell, being attacked with a weapon, being killed, or having player-controlled
NPCs or creatures perform any of these offenses. The reporting mechanism
should be intuitive and easily accessible, but should involve some
effort on the part of the reporting player so only the truly important
attacks are reported. Extra
care must be taken with area-effect spells. (Area-effect magic spells
affect all characters within a certain radius of the character who
cast the spell.) A common player-killer tactic in Ultima Online
is to enter someone’s area-effect spell deliberately, then kill that
person after the system flags them as “criminal” because of the damage
the spell causes to the player-killer’s character. If you cannot detect
such behavior with your code, possible solutions are either not to
design such spells or to make them non-harmful to other player characters.
You’ll lose a bit of realism, but the loss will be vastly offset by
your closure of this common PvP loophole. Another
area of special attention should be your PvP theft-detection mechanism.
Here’s an all-too-common scenario: Character A has a pocket full of
coins, and encounters Character B. Character B steals the coins from
Character A, but Character A fails his skill check to notice the theft
attempt. The person playing Character A, however, notices the coins
are gone, and draws the very reasonable conclusion that they were
stolen by Character B. Under most game systems, however, Character
A has no recourse, and will be labeled criminal if he attacks the
thief in an attempt to recover the money. Such thefts are generally
the most frustrating for your customers, because the person playing
the thief will often use his immunity to taunt his victims. The solution
is to allow the victim to report anyone to the justice system, with
penalties for false accusations. Make
anti-PvP systems activate only upon player request. Only the victim
of an online crime truly knows whether the actions against his or
her character merit a reaction by the justice system. The person who
harmed the character, for example, may be engaged in a friendly duel,
or the violence may be a role-played conflict that the victim wishes
to avenge personally. Ultima
Online has an excellent implementation of player-initiated justice,
although it contains a few loopholes. If one attacks an innocent,
for example, one is automatically flagged “criminal,” even if the
attack were accidental or entirely consensual. A character of mine
was once killed and looted by a stranger for being “gray” (indicating
criminal status) after I accidentally hit a companion while in combat.
My killer wasn’t impressed with my explanation, and I signed off that
day much poorer than when I began. If I’d been murdered as “innocent,”
however, I would have been able to report the attacker and place a
bounty on his head. Ultima
Online also has a way to remove players entirely from the justice
system if they are members of a player-run guild. The guildmaster
of a guild may issue an official declaration of war on another guild,
and if the declaration is reciprocated, the two guilds enter into
a state of conflict in which members may attack, kill, steal from,
and loot each other freely without becoming criminals. A second level
of warfare offers even more uncontrolled PvP conflict. When a guild’s
leader becomes famous enough, he or she is given the power to declare
the guild an Order or Chaos guild. Upon doing so, the guild enters
a state of perpetual warfare with all guilds of the opposing type,
and members may fight with opposing guild members at any time, anywhere.
“This provides the ‘ambush around every corner’ feeling that this
type of player values,” says Raph. “The warfare system proved to be
very popular, with 10 percent of guilds converting over to the ‘free-for-all’
guild type as soon as it became available.”
Make
revenge an option. This section merits an entire article in itself,
so I‘ll mention it only for completeness and keep my comments brief.
The key idea here is that many players would prefer to fight back
when subjected to a PvP attack and wouldn’t enjoy reporting the activity
to an NPC system. When a character is the subject of aggression, the
aggressor should be flagged so the victim may fight back without penalty,
whether it be an immediate response or a later ambush. Ultima Online
has implemented this principle by flagging an aggressor attackable
for two minutes per attack. My experience suggests that this isn’t
enough time; for me, at least, my initial reaction to an attack was
to flee to heal myself. By the time I’d recovered from the initial
ambush, my aggressor was usually no longer eligible for a penalty-free
attack. Make
PvP much less profitable than player-vs.-game activity. A certain
percentage of those who kill or steal from other players do so simply
because player-characters tend to be far more wealthy relative to
the level of danger they present than NPCs or creatures. Take away
the profit from PvP, and you’ll curtail a certain percentage of it.
Ensure a stable supply of player-vs.-game activity, and you’ll decrease
it even more. The
most obvious way to lessen the profitability of player-killing is
to restrict looting of dead characters, without removing the ability
for players to help their fallen comrades. One method is to prevent
looting entirely, although a corresponding mechanism must be created
to allow recovery of stolen items if a thief is tracked down and slain.
Another is to allow looting only under specific circumstances. Ultima
Online flags looters as criminals, making them vulnerable to attacks
or having the NPC guards called to execute them. Everquest
had not yet finalized its corpse-looting restrictions at the time
I wrote this article, but Brad says that the developers are considering
several options. “…If you are -PK and you die, only you or someone
to whom you give consent may loot your corpse. If you are +PK and
come across the corpse of another +PK character, you currently are
free to loot it. We are, however, experimenting with some limitations
to make player killing more viable. We will test a system in which
the killer may loot his victim only once, and may take only one item
of choice from the corpse.” If
you implement such restrictions, provide enough monsters or NPCs to
meet player demand, and give players enough wealth for them to feel
they are making reasonable progress, you’ll drive player activity
towards the monsters. Make your monsters and NPCs too poor, or fail
to spawn enough of them, and your players will turn on each other.
Similarly, it’s important to give player thieves enough creature or
NPC targets to make the class economically viable, else a percentage
of those who would normally only steal from non-players will turn
to PvP stealing. Restrict
the ability of new characters to harm others. Players will always
use system loopholes to maximize their gains, and if a new character
is able to accomplish a highly dangerous task and realize the same
gain as an older character, then the use of the aforementioned throwaway
characters will abound. This is especially true when more than one
character is available to the customer on the same account, or if
free trial accounts are accessible to the players without the purchase
of a retail product. Stealing
and scamming are the most common uses for throwaway characters, and
is usually accomplished in a way that circumvents the system’s intended
design. In Dragonrealms, for example, throwaways are frequently
created to loot weapons dropped on the ground by dead adventurers.
The throwaways then pass the weapons through friends and back to the
main character on the thief’s account, disguising the true identity
of the thief and making redress impossible. Throwaways also exploit
loopholes in our player-to-player item exchange mechanisms, tricking
adventurers out of their goods and then passing the profits to the
real character on the account. Simutronics
is not alone in facing problems with throwaway characters. One common
trick in Ultima Online used to be for two players to create
thief characters, stand near a bank, and steal items from adventurers.
If the victim detected the theft and called for the guards, the thief
was executed. The thief’s partner would then lift the item from the
dead body, and the original victim would have no way to get it back.
Origin recently fixed this exploit by having the guards return stolen
items to the victim if the thief were killed within city limits within
two minutes of the theft. Charge
players for PvP activity in a currency that is valuable to them. When
an activity has a perceived cost, the frequency of that activity will
always decrease. It’s a basic supply-and-demand formula; make PvP
more expensive, and fewer people will choose to purchase it. Those
who choose to engage in PvP activities will therefore have to decide
before every assault whether they are willing to pay the price. Scale
the cost of that activity as its frequency increases, you’ll prevent
repeated abuse by older, richer players. You
could, for example, make the tax a monetary one, and charge an aggressor
25 coins for his or her first reported murder, 50 for the next, then
200, 400, 800, and so on, allowing the character’s criminal past to
decay one fine level per week if he or she refrains from all criminal
activity. Characters who are unable to pay the fine could be restricted
to a debtors’ area from which they couldn’t leave until they had performed
enough low-paying menial tasks to pay off their debts. Preventing
someone from leaving until their fines are paid would stop savvy players
from offloading their valuables onto storage characters before going
on a killing spree; allowing them to perform work to escape would
prevent anyone but the worst cases from being trapped inside. A
tax doesn’t have to be a monetary one. A character could, for example,
lose an increasing number of experience points or skills with each
subsequent PvP report against him. If he or she reaches a certain
threshold, that character would be hit with a curse that prevents
all aggressive activity for extended periods of time. Another possibility
would be to toss characters in a jail cell for increasing periods
of time, where they must stay until their sentences are served. Whatever
you choose for your tax, the penalties should start at negligible
levels and scale up exponentially rather than linearly. Low initial
penalties, when combined with a slow decay of criminal histories,
will allow new players to learn the system, allow all players to make
the occasional mistake, and allow normally law-abiding characters
to take the occasional swing at someone who really, really deserves
it. Only those who try to make a career of harming other characters
without their consent will be subject to heavy fines. Balancing
Good and Bad There
is no magic bullet solution to solve all of the PvP problems inherent
to an online role-playing game community. No matter what methods one
uses, players will always find ways to harass, pester, and annoy each
other, so trying to eliminate all forms of aggression isn’t a realistic
goal. If, however, you give proper reporting tools to the victims
of non-consensual PvP, allow players outlets for consensual attacks,
and make everything else costly, you’ll find the problems reduced
to manageable levels. There is room for all styles of play in a properly
designed role-playing game, and finding the correct balance is key. Acknowledgements I wish to extend a special thanks to Raph Koster and Teresa Potts of Origin Systems, and to Brad McQuaid of 989 Studios for their timely assistance. This article would not have been possible without them. Thanks also to Simutronics designer Emily Jacobson for her ruthless editing. Derek Sanderson has held several design and customer service positions during his tenure with Simutronics, and has recently settled in as the company’s lead designer. He is currently pondering the career ramifications of commuting to work in a go-kart, and welcomes input on this subject at rpgvault@aol.com. ________________________________________________________
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