In
order to build a successful online game, you must build a sense of community
among your players. One of the biggest challenges to successful community
building in online role-playing games is tempering the problems caused
by players killing or stealing from other players. Such problems
are known more generally as player-vs.-player conflict (PvP). Over the
course of time, different games developed by different companies have
sought to control this problem through a variety of methods. This article
touches upon PvP control strategies used by Simutronics Corp., where
I am currently employed, as well as strategies used by Origin Systems
in Ultima Online and by 989 Studios in its game Everquest.
While there is no single correct way to maintain order in an online
game, by examining these companies’ strategies for restraining nonconsensual
PvP, I have created a set of general guidelines that should be considered
when designing an online justice system.
The
Current Methods
While
existing systems for controlling PvP show some very creative design
solutions, each of the following strategies nonetheless suffers from
certain flaws that arise from the different priorities assigned to game
play elements.
Administrative
Control (Simutronics’ Gemstone and Dragonrealms)
Simutronics
gives its players wide leeway in resolving conflicts among themselves,
and generally limits its hard-coded restrictions on attacking other
characters. New players may not be attacked and are not strong enough
to harm one another. Stealing from a person’s inventory is limited to
coins and small gems, and corpse looting is either not possible (as
in Gemstone III) or has safeguards that allow careful players
to prevent it from happening (as is the case in Dragonrealms).
The leeway afforded the players allows the responsible players a great
degree of freedom in how they play their characters. To balance out
this freedom, though, Simutronics strictly polices its player base.
Its players’ terms and conditions agreement, for example, states, “What
is not acceptable is to initiate combat against unsuspecting victims.
Anyone exhibiting such behavior, especially one who chooses to prey
upon weaker players for his or her own enjoyment, may be in violation
of…policy.”
 |
Dragonrealms’
rogues’ gallery.
|
“Unsuspecting
victims” can be a difficult standard to enforce. It’s fairly obvious
when someone is on a mass-murder spree, and we remove such characters
from our games immediately. If the offender is an experienced player
who knows better, we generally penalize the account with official warnings
and restrictions from playing for a period of time. If the player is
new to our game, we explain our policies. If any player is unwilling
to abide by the rules, Simutronics usually recommends that he or she
try a product better suited to his or her tastes.
Simutronics’
methods are effective for controlling those players who understand the
rules and deliberately choose to violate them. The system’s main weakness,
however, is in handling conflicts in which the two parties disagree
over whether consent to violence was given. For example, if player A
makes a few choice comments about Player B’s suspected lineage, and
Player B attacks, is the conflict consensual? Some Simutronics staffers
would say consent was implicit in the insult, but others consider consent
to be something that must be explicitly stated by the victim prior to
any attack. When staff tread such nebulous ground, they’re fighting
a battle that is impossible to win. No matter how they handle the conflict,
their intervention often creates hard feelings among the players. Resolving
these squabbles also uses staff time that could be spent on game development,
requiring a higher developer-to-player ratio than would otherwise be
necessary. Simutronics has made the choice to incur these higher costs
in order to maintain games in which our customers may play in relative
safety from arbitrary attacks. Whether such a solution would be viable
in another game depends on the developers’ goals and budget.
Player
Policing (Origin Systems’ Ultima Online) Ultima Online’s
developers decided to forgo administrative policing and leave its justice
system entirely in the hands of the players. Raph Koster, Ultima
Online’s lead designer, said Origin designed the game this way in
the hopes that, “given the tools to police their own environment, [players]
would do so…. Our experience was that every method of administratively
imposed policing either failed or led to intense resentment of the administrators
of the game. We were particularly concerned because traditional models
on MUDs for enforcing social mores were very administrator-intensive,
requiring a large number of skilled administrators willing to devote
a lot of time to soothing ruffled feathers on the part of players who
felt wronged. In a commercial venture of a large scale, we didn’t think
this was sustainable.”
Allowing
your customers to police themselves is a noble goal, but one that is
difficult to implement. The most infamous result of the Ultima Online
hands-off policy was the gangs of player killers (PKs) that formed.
Such gangs would station themselves at key locations in the game and
ambush any poor soul foolish enough to travel with a group smaller than
a mob. “I just got PK’d,” was a refrain commonly heard outside the game’s
banks, where naked adventurers would come to beg for money to re-equip
themselves. Some players formed anti-PK militias, but, as Raph says,
they were “inadequate for handling the problem of player killing. The
actions of the few police were both insufficient in quantity and inadequate
in severity to curb the activity of the player killers and the player
thieves.”
 |
An
innocent is attacked in Ultima Online
|
In
response to the problem, Origin instituted a variety of tools to allow
the players even greater control over their environment. Under the current
system, all characters begin the game flagged as “innocent,” with their
names highlighted in a bright, happy blue. Steal from, attack, or loot
the dead body of an innocent — including an NPC — and your character’s
name will be highlight gray, branded a criminal and open to attack by
anyone. Kill an innocent player character, and that person is given
the option to report you as a murderer and place a bounty on your head.
Kill five or more innocents in a short period of time, and your character
is flagged a “murderer,” unable to use shops or access your bank account,
and subject to being slain on sight by other adventurers who wish to
collect the bounty on your head.
 |
Ultima
Online’s
facility for reporting crimes.
|
Ultima
Online’s greatest strength is that it places administration of PvP
entirely in the hands of its players, giving them an unrivaled sense
that they, and not the Origin staff, control their world. The benefit
of this feeling among players shouldn’t be underestimated; it’s a powerful
contributor to a sense of immersion in the game environment. The system
is weak, however, in controlling random aggression. Only after five
reported kills does PvP activity have any real repercussions for the
aggressor, and the game does little to track long-term aggressive behavior.
If a player waits just eight hours of online time between murders, he
can kill one player a day without ever reaching the murderer threshold.
No penalty exists (other than being flagged a “criminal” for a short
period of time) for attacking someone unless that person dies as a result
of his or her injuries. Harassment attacks that fall short of a murder
are still extremely common in Ultima Online. I was, for example,
attacked by total strangers an average of once a day over three weeks
of playing while writing this article, and killed three times. (Note
to game designers: other game designers get really grumpy when your
players kill them, especially when their colleagues make fun of their
poor fighting skills.)
Player-toggled
Flags (989 Studios’ Everquest) The developers of 989 Studio’s
Everquest implemented a flagging system that will mark characters
either as able to attack and be attacked by other players (+PK), or
completely unable to engage in such activities (-PK). The method is
a common one for controlling violence in small text-based MUDs, but
my experience suggests that in a large-scale game, where the community
is of sufficient size to allow true anonymity, the use of “throwaway”
(also known as “mule”) troublemaker characters with -PK flags will abound.
Such characters, immune from physical harm, can do many nonviolent but
extremely annoying things to other players, such as following another
character around wherever he goes, blocking entries to important areas,
attacking monsters other players are already fighting, engaging in verbal
harassment, holding goods stolen by +PK characters, running cons and
scams, refusing to leave someone’s home, and more.
Brad
McQuaid, Everquest’s producer, says his team is aware of the
PK flag’s potential abuses and is prepared to combat them. The game
will have a squelch command to combat verbal harassment, and out-of-context
(non-role–played) harassment will result in punitive measures against
the offender’s account. As for killing the creature another person is
fighting, Brad says, “…the player or group that does the most damage
to an NPC gets to loot it and receives the experience for the kill.
This stops the jerk who comes along and gives the killing blow to a
creature even though another person or group had engaged the NPC long
before. He’s welcome to deliver the killing blow, but he will receive
no experience for doing so.”
 |
In
Everquest, players who wish to attack other players must
be flagged +PK and even then
can only attack other +PK characters.
|
The
general principle behind the Everquest kill-stealing prevention
is sound, but what does one do about the high-level, -PK player who
goes to a low-level hunting ground and steals kills repeatedly, doing
more damage to creatures than the new players fighting them by virtue
of an incredible advantage in skill? Does one block entry to such areas
for high-level players? Does one prevent high-level players from attacking
low-level monsters? Does one simply warn the player for disruption?
The number of ways to get around the game design illustrates the greatest
danger to the PK flag solution, namely that it creates an invulnerable
subclass of character that players will be unable to police, thus shifting
the burden (read: increasing staffing costs) to the game administrators.
However, I suspect the flagging solution will be popular with a significant
portion of Everquest’s customer base, because it allows responsible
players who don’t enjoy PvP to play without interference from their
more aggressive cohorts.