RE: Persistency and PvP

of course you can throw in various caps on abilities, which means eventually
even the players with less time can catch up.

my main concern with mmorpgs is that they seem to have an emphasis on graft
rather than fun.

j


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
Jaek Smith
Sent: 18 January 2003 10:14
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [GD-Design] Persistency and PvP


> For individual competition (i.e. not team based), this is even worse --
> what happens when you join the game late?  Do you rely on social
> engineering such as guilds (effectively informal teams) to protect you
> while you gain power?  Or are you just screwed?

The problem seems to be time vs experience.  It would be the same whether
you joined the game later than other players or whether you are unable to
play the game as much as other players.

In most of the current games you really spend 'time' to gain 'experience'.
Unfortunately the time you spend is real-world time (the time in which you
physically allocate to playing the game).

Even a player that does not spend every second of online time improving his
stats can still quickly out-rank a player that does if the first player is
online much more than the second player.

So:

-> We spend real-world time to gain in-game experience.

-> There is an imbalance in the amount of time various players have to spend
in game.

-> An imbalance in in-game experience is an imbalance in
character-capability.

This means that there is an imbalance (across time) in the ability of
players to gain in-game experience which leads to an imbalance (across time)
in character-capabilities.  (Thus, the effect is continuous).

If real-world time is the resource, then those of us with less real-world
time to spend are 'just screwed'. :P

An interesting comparison to make would be this:

Imagine a game where, instead, you spend real-world money to gain in-game
experience.  In this case, the imbalance would give more weight to those
that had more money.

I'd suggest that those with less time often have more money (think working
people vs non-working people).  Thus, the imbalance would be the same but
the opposite group (in general) would have the advantage!

So the problem seems to be that real-world based imbalances affect
persistent (continuous) world type games.  Is it possible to get rid of the
real-world based imbalances?

Possibly - though it would be game dependent.  For instance you could make a
game where, every so often everyone in the world gets X number of resources
that they can spend on various attributes.  A person that does not log on
for a week will just have a buildup to spend when they do finally log on.

This would (ideally) solve the time-based imbalance without relying on
another real-world resource (such as money) to replace it.  However, you
still have the late-comer problem...  (As well there are other problems -
experience is a major element of the RPG model, but becomes more or less
worthless in this design).

Theoretically the best thing to do would actually limit every player to
exactly the same amount of online game time - but in the end this would mean
that everyone gets no game time. ;)

Other possibilities have to do with limiting the interactions of imbalanced
players.  (This doesn't remove the overall imbalance, but might remove the
omni-powerful-player stomps newbie problem).

Tangentially: In my own mind, a get-stuff/do-stuff gaming model would be
much more fun than a work/do-stuff model...  I find that too many games
require un-fun tasks (i.e. work) in order to let you do fun tasks (i.e.
play).  (Interestingly a friend once told me that my ideas are not really
games... thus I guess I'm really looking for the virtual equivalent of toys
and activities (skiing is not a game either)). ;)

Later for now
--Jaek


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