TTH Picks the Top Ten PvP MMOs

Lists, especially ranked lists, are always good for some attention.

In that vein, Ten Ton Hammer decided to stir the pot a bit by ranking what they consider to be the Top Ten PvP MMOs.

I’ll spoil the surprise and give you their list ranked top to bottom.  You’ll have to go read the article to get the justifications.

1. Dark Age of Camelot
2. Eve Online
3. Darkfall
4. Planetside
5. Warhammer Online
6. Aion
7. Lineage 2
8. Guild Wars
9. Age of Conan
10. Lord of the Rings Online

They used the phrase “out there” to describe their selections, by which I assume they mean they are measuring the PvP-ness you can get today from these games, as opposed to when they were at their peak.  So no Shadowbane.

That also might explain the lack of Ultima Online on the list.

But if you’re going to exclude UO for its current state of affairs, how do you justify keeping Planetside on the list?

A Small Victory

As I wrote the post on the Figure Prints pet offerings, I logged on Vikund to see if I had some that were less viable to be cast in resin and placed on my desk.  I was able to come up with three pretty easily.

But as I was flipping through my companion pets and then going through the list of pets on WoW Wiki, I noticed that I did not have the Westfall Chicken!

The quest to get the Westfall Chicken is one of the great goofy quests in WoW.

Vikund was in Ironforge (He was still doing Brewfest stuff last night.  He did eventually collect enough tokens to buy back his Brewfest regalia, so he has that going for him.) so I put him on the bird to Westfall and finished up the previous post.

When I went back to the WoW window, I was in Westfall and some horde guy was trying to kill the flight master.

Now, traditionally, I only see this happening when I am logged on with a low level alt and I have to sit there and take it or die quickly.

But this time around I had my level 80 retribution paladin out and the offender was a level 77 Tauren druid in cat form.  Time to attack!

I don’t know if this guy saw me there AFK or not, but he certainly noticed me when I jumped in with a consecrate.  He went to travel form and ran for it.  I jumped on my mount and chased him down, stunned him with the hammer of justice, and then started through my rotation until he was dead.  I didn’t even get to exorcism.

And, as a bonus, he waited a bit before he released, so I managed to get the Make Love, Not Warcraft achievement by giving him a /hug.

Then I went and got my Westfall chicken.

All in all a very satisfying run.

Darkfall Cometh?

As noted over at Keen & Graev’s, Darkfall is in the news again having announced they are accepting applications for beta testers and having released some game play videos that say “Coming 2008” near the end, apparently indicating that they are shooting for a release this year.

You can find the six game play videos here on YouTube.

Announced almost exactly seven years ago, Darkfall has promised a very ambitious feature set (from Wikipedia), which a friend of mine described as the merging of the best of EverQuest and Ultima Online (pre-Trammel).

• Unrestricted PvP, with no safe zones, only protection by NPC guards in racially controlled cities.
• Indiscriminate player killing results in changes in alignment (see alignment section below), which in turn has severe in-game consequences.
• A character advancement system devoid of player levels and classes. The majority of player capabilities are determined by the possession of skills, which improve in response to in-game use. For example, all weapon proficiencies, the ability to swim, cast spells, ride mounts, and climb various obstacles are all skills that can be learned and improved through in-game use.
• A real-time combat system that includes FPS-style manual aiming & blocking. Ranged combat and general play will be viewed from the first person perspective, while melee combat will be third person perspective. There will also be no ‘player radar’ or floating names with which to identify players or NPCs, and inflicted damage and the health status of actors are indicated through visible damage, blood-spray, and audio cues.
• Furthermore, friendly fire is always in effect, so missed melee attacks, misfired arrows, as well as area of effect offensive and healing spells affect both friends and enemies.
• Complete looting. All of a player’s items become world lootable on death (see looting section below), and virtually all props and items in the game will be player-craftable.
• Cities that can be built, sieged, captured and destroyed by players, as well as individual player housing.
• Player mounts and mounted combat, which can be captured and killed by players.
• Naval warfare, with the ability to create, board, capture and sink player controlled ships, including player-mediated ship-ship and land-ship combat.
• Real-world physics, including inter-character and projectile-character collision detection. Projectiles (spells, arrows, cannonballs etc.) can be evaded or blocked in real time. Players can be pushed or blocked by other players, NPCs and/or explosions.
• Dynamic, physical weather, including variable, directional winds. For example, foggy or rainy weather can severely limit sight range and high winds greatly influence tidal wave amplitude and ship movement. Day and night cycles are based on a realistic planetary system of 2 orbiting moons, producing dramatic sunrises and sunsets.
• Enhanced monster behavior and AI. Monsters do not simply stand and swing at players until dead; they may employ sophisticated combat tactics based on their capabilities, social behaviour, and intelligence level. For example, intelligent monsters will preferentially target healers, casters, and/or weakened players. Monsters do not have fixed spawn locations or sizes – monsters form their own communities, may construct buildings and/or may relocate to new areas in response to being hunted by players. Monsters may also fight other monsters in their region.
• A zoneless game world capable of supporting over 10,000 concurrent players per game instance,including explicit and dedicated support for large-scale (> 200 player) battles at playable frame-rates.

Seven years is a long time for a game to be in development.

To put that in date in context, in August 2001 Dark Age of Camelot was readying for release.  I was still playing EverQuest, which was on its second expansion (count now: 14), on my 400 MHz Pentium II system with a hot TNT2 based video card, having finally ditched the 3Dfx Voodoo2 configuration. And Duke Nukem Forever was only approachings its fifth year of not being available yet.

The game has a dedicated following that rivals the ferocity of the followers of Derek Smart during the height of his fame on Usenet, and who write things like:

Darkfall is going to be one of the biggest subscription-based MMORPGs over the next decade. It will rival and surpass EVE. Mark my words, you heard it from me first.

-Amonn777

with complete belief and conviction.

But is there really a sizable market for such a game?

Didn’t UO end up with Trammel because such a ruthless, winner-take-all world threatened to chase off a big chunk of their subscriber base?  Does not a game like that almost require a substantial subscriber base willing to be on the losing side, stripped of everything, yet willing to start over again?

Somebody will mention EVE Online naturally, but CCP is tightening down on high security killing with the Empyrean Age 1.1 release and they have published statistics that show that most players not only never venture into 0.0 space, what the hard core declare to be “the real game,” but they never even venture into low security space.  And EVE has its own crutches to take the sting out of loss such as the insurance system, which pays out a good 40% of the price of your ship even if you never bother to insure it.

I have often heard the opinion that the World of Warcraft playerbase will eventually seek to graduate to harder, more challenging games, but have yet to see any proof of that.

And doesn’t the PvP MMORPG community have a standard bearer coming up in the form of Warhammer Online?  Doesn’t that make the balance of 2008 something of a risky time to be launching Darkfall?

So with all that in mind, I just want to ask…

I am undecided, myself.

Drake Down

A story of foolishness… or forgetfulness… or both.

As I mentioned on Friday’s post, I started doing some NPC research in order to get datacores for the invention work I have been doing.

Unfortunately, the only research NPC I could find that would research the technology I needed, and thus provide the right datacores, was way out of my usual neighborhood, 19 jumps from Hageken, jumps that took me through a set of low security systems to my final destination.

I flew out there in the low rent Badger without a problem, started the research, and then headed home.

The next day I got an message from the R&D NPC saying there was a problem and she needed my help and blah blah blah.

I flew out there again, bought and handed her 900 units of tritanium, which solved her problem and got the research going again.

(I only found out later, from Eric and Kirith that the research goes on even when the research agent sends you awkwardly phrased messages like, “Our research has been fruitful, but I’ve encountered a snag and our research has been halted.”)

I flew back to my neighborhood.

And, two days later, I got the same message again. So I flew out there again, did the 900 tritanium shuffle, and got things going again. This time I decided to park out there.

And it was a good thing too, because the next day, I got the same “trouble in the lab” message. But I was there and ready, with 900 tritanium already in hand.

Then another message shows up.

It turned out that I had hit the magic 16 mission mark with Ishukone Corporation and it was time for a story line mission. Of course, the mission was available just one system away from the research NPC.

I looked at the mission. A kill mission. And there I was out in the middle of somewhere, 22 jumps from my only warship, flying the barge of low expectations, and now I needed to kill stuff.

Then I realized, hey, I have a jump clone back there! I’ll just use that, bring out big daddy battlecruiser, skate through the kill mission, fly it back home, and then just use the jump close transport system to cover the tritanium runs until I build up enough datacores to make it worth the trip back.

I almost appeared to be thinking!

So I did my first clone jump.

Easy. I figured out how to do it without having to search the net.

There was just one small hitch. After I jumped I got an in game mail from the insurance company about the loss of my ship.

Erm… was I suppose to leave my ship before I did the jump? When I finally got back out there, it seemed to be fine. I think the game was just foreshadowing.

But still, I was back in my home constellation. I picked up my Drake, the most symmetricalist ship in the Caldari fleet, and set course back to my start point.

For some reason, the navigation computer routed me through Jita this time. It had never done that before. Jita, the system of ill omen. I thought to myself that this was a sign that I should log off now.

I always make up things like that to amuse myself, and I am always annoyed when they seem to come to pass.

Sure enough, not too many jumps later, I landed in the Rancer system and saw this.

Well crap. I knew I was caught even as I saw them. A battlecruiser aligns for warp like old people drive.

They started shooting a little, so I shot back.

Then I got the convo request, which got lost in all the tabs I had on my chat window. (note to self: lose some chat channels)

Once I got the right tab forward, I had to wade through a lot of 18 point colored text about what badass pirates these guys were and how I had better heave to and do what they say or end up another notch on their blah blah blah.

(note to pirates: If you are demanding a quick reply, less garbage up front would help.)

Eventually I got to the “stop shooting and give us some money” part of the program. I was ready for that. I’d read Darren’s article on how he got hit up.

However, my pirates wanted a lot more money. More than I had, and I am not talking about off by a couple thousand ISK here.

Meanwhile they were chatting away, telling me to not be a fool and transfer the MONEY NOW 10, 9, 8, 7, 6…

So I said I didn’t have it. Heck, I didn’t have half of it.

That stopped the counting for a moment. Then they said to make an offer.

I didn’t think less than half was going to fly. I mean, if *I* were the pirate and somebody offered ME less than half, I’d blow them up.

My money was all tied up in buy orders, which, had I thought about it, I could have cancelled and come up with enough money to make a reasonable offer.

But I wasn’t thinking about that. Oh well.

I asked Debes, who was on another channel listening to me get held up, how to self destruct, thinking to at least be annoying and maybe not give them kill credit. He told me to right click on my ship, and sure enough, there it was.

However, it seems to take time to self destruct.

It also does not seem to be a secret to others when you select the self destruct option.

So the pirates opened up on me again and that was that, the ship was gone.

Now they wanted a ransom not to pod me. A 15% discount off of their first demand!

Well, at least I had a clear conscious this time around.

A jump clone with no implants! Pod me already, it will save me the trip home!

So I told them to “bite me.”

Only I wrote “bit me,” and had to correct myself. That always spoils the moment.

And “bite me” they did. I was podded.

Then their leader, still on a channel, started in on a lecture about how being stubborn doesn’t pay and have fun buying a new ship and I should just pay next time and blah blah blah….

“Hey,” I thought, “I didn’t have the money. Take your lecture and blow it out the airlock.”

But I just closed the channel instead. All they picked up from me, in the end, minus salvage, was:

• ‘Malkuth’ Assault Missile Launcher I, Qty: 2
• Widowmaker Heavy Missile, Qty: 52
• Shield Recharger II, Qty: 2
• Flameburst Light Missile, Qty: 55
• Advanced ‘Limos’ Heavy Missile Bay I, Qty: 2
• Large Shield Extender I, Qty: 2
• Hornet I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)

So that about did in my ability (or desire) for any *pew* *pew* in EVE for a while.

Some days it does not pay to leave your station.

Did I mention that my insurance expired about a month back? Yeah, it was one of those nights.

Still, I don’t fret over the ISK I’ve lost. I know I can make that much ISK again with a mild effort.

No, it is the time and effort it takes to fit out a ship. Time is always the one thing of which I am short.

I Didn’t Wreck Your Game, Honestly!

Syncaine has something of a rebut to some sentiments expressed in Shut Up We’re Talking #17. He started off by pointing out that for a group talking about PvP, we were pretty PvE oriented.

And he was pretty much right. The cast was an older group and, while I cannot speak for everybody, it was mostly a group influenced heavily at some point by Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D is, of course, all about cooperative PvE (The DM is the environment), so go figure how we all ended up being about PvE.

Again, not speaking for the others, but for me computer role playing games, then MUDs, and now MMOs, were a way to get past the heavy lifting involved with table top role playing games, the throws of the die, the rule checks, the source books, and the need to get three to seven people together in a single room for at least a four hour stretch.

While some of the play flexibility (okay, a lot of the play flexibility) of those days is missing, it still gives me a taste of gaming adventure. And while the greatest amount of fun still seems to require getting five people together for 2-4 hours, at least we can be scattered across the country.

So yes, PvE at the core. That is me, and probably a lot of people like me.

Still I think as a group we had all had some PvP experiences we had enjoyed and none of us are die hard opposed to PvP in general. I even have a post here about how PvP should be the richest play experience available.

And while Syncaine’s article has some good points and some agreement with what we said, as well as some issues with PvE players that are valid, the whole thing lost me with the line, “…you should not force your PvE views on a PvP focused game.” The post then goes on to fret about how the PvE community might “ruin” Warhammer Online.

Not to go full slam on Syncaine, but this is one of my pet peeves.

I shake my head when I see somebody go on about how some other group, PvE’ers in this case, might “ruin the game” by expressing their opinions. (And I have seen this argument pointed at players who like to raid, solo, group, role play, not role play, and so on.)

Let’s face facts. In the end, it is the devs and the company at large creating the game in question which makes that choice. The company can say “no” to people. They often do.

Look at EverQuest. People have been screaming from day one for more solo oriented content. Go to Mobhunter and see what EverQuest Lead Designer Travis “Rashere” McGeathy had to say just a few months back when asked about solo content:

EverQuest is a group-based game, so we don’t specifically design content for soloing.

Holy Crap! In this day and age, in the era of World of Warcraft, when everybody seems to agree that to attract and keep players you need to give them something to do when they cannot find a group, the EverQuest team just says, “No.” Love it or hate it, they have a vision and have pretty much stuck to it for more than eight years now.

And, on the flip side, the team at Origin could have easily decided that Ulitma Online should have been all Felucca and no Trammel, a dark brooding world of danger. If that was the game they wanted to make and you were upset about being ganked every time you stepped out of a safe area, they probably would have told you that perhaps it wasn’t the game for you.

So with Warhammer Online, what it comes down to an essential: Does the team have a vision they believe in and will stick to, and will EA back them up on it?

And, of course, is that vision your PvP dream, my PvE desire, or some third route altogether?

But if it ends up being CareBearHammer Online, make sure you put the blame where it belongs:

On those furries in SecondLife!

On the people who made the game!

And Then I Lost a Battlecruiser

Level III missions can be a dangerous things.

As is my usual luck, the first level III mission I ran was a big one called “Massive Attack.”

Unlike my first level I (“Worlds Collide,” run in an Ibis) and level II missions (“Recon, Part I“), I actually survived to fight another day.

I learned a few things running this mission, including the value of bookmarking a location within the mission so that you can jump out, then jump back in at a range where you can lay in with the heavy missiles without taking too much damage in return.

Still, in EVE, learning is an ongoing process. As I ran through one level III mission after another, I became quite confident that I was up to the task. My Drake seemed to be well equipped for missions. The passive tank on it tune based on suggestions made here and other places. I also put very expensive rigs (they all seem to need alloyed tritanium bars) in place to enhance my shields, and even bought a shield recharge improving implant with my expanding loyalty point balance.

So it was time for me to learn something new.

A good portion of the level III missions I get take place in low security systems. The agent is in high security, but the target is not.

Still, no big deal, right? I enter the system then jump right away to the mission and I only have some NPCs to worry about.

I had not considered the idea that other players would be out there in low security actually hunting mission runners. That whole corporations would be dedicated to scanning systems known to be popular for missions for players and hunting them down when they found them.

I seem to forget from time to time that EVE is, first and foremost, a PvP game.

And so it came to pass, I received a mission that sent me to Nalvula. It was one I had run before and I was prepared for it with both the correct ammunition and correct shield resistances.

I entered the system, jumped to the start of the mission, and began taking apart NPC ships.

I did not give much notice to when another player ship dropped into range, just for a moment, then jumped away. That sort of thing happens all the time when you are mining.

It wasn’t until a battleship and a battle cruiser dropped into the middle of my running battle with the NPCs that I figured out that something was amiss. Or as somebody foreshadowed in local just a while before:

They locked on, warp scrambled, and chopped up one of my battle cruisers.

One of my battle cruisers?

Yes, I had decided that I needed to start working on standings with my miner. I thought that the easiest way would be to bring him along with Wilhelm on missions.

His skills were pretty meager when it came to combat. I bought him a Ferox, put some very simple equipment on it, armed it with 75mm Gatling Rails and a pair of ‘Malkuth’ Standard Missile Launchers, all of which I had laying around in storage. I figured that with him in tow, he could take care of swatting those annoying tech II NPC frigates with their annoyingly high resistances. I hate having to throw magazine after magazine of heavy missiles at them, scoring 15-20 points of damage, trying to wear them down.

As a bonus, my miner can control five drones, so I figured that would help out as well.

And so it was, when the pair jumped in. Wilhelm’s Drake and my miner’s Ferox were fighting away.

I was actually not quite as oblivious as I said above. Somebody dropping into my mission made me suspicious. So when the wrecking crew showed up, I immediately clicked on a station in the overview and sent the Drake off into warp. Just in time too, as the logs show they were trying to warp scramble Wilhelm right away.

Switching windows, I tried to send my miner off to a station as well, but it was too late, he was scrambled.

I put up what fight I could. I doubt either of them even noticed, but I put my drones and all my guns and missile bays on the Drake. As expected, the result was:

Destroyed: Ferox
System: Nalvula
Security: 0.4

Involved parties:

Name: Goyda (laid the final blow)
Security: -8.2
Alliance: SMASH Alliance
Corp: Veni Vidi Vici.
Ship: Raven
Weapon: Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo

Name: tchamp2
Security: -7.8
Alliance: SMASH Alliance
Corp: Veni Vidi Vici.
Ship: Drake
Weapon: Hornet II

Destroyed items:

‘Malkuth’ Standard Missile Launcher I
‘Malkuth’ Standard Missile Launcher I
75mm Gatling Rail I
75mm Gatling Rail I
Large Shield Extender I
Shield Power Relay I
Power Diagnostic System I
Power Diagnostic System I
Antimatter Charge S, Qty: 186
Flameburst Light Missile, Qty: 37
Antimatter Charge S, Qty: 183
Antimatter Charge S, Qty: 185

That was the most expensive equipment, such that I had, destroyed with the ship. The missiles they expended probably cost them more than they could get for the pieces that remained.

Then, as my miner sat there in his pod, I learned that you can, in fact, warp scramble pods. I had not considered the idea up until that point and I had assumed, somewhere in the back of my mind, that pods ought to be at least somewhat immune to warp scrambled. Another illusion crushed.

Then came the offer to chat from one of them. I knew this was going to be the extortion round and they were not going to buy into how little ISK I keep on my miner, so I declined and they zapped me.

Destroyed: Capsule
System: Nalvula
Security: 0.4

Involved parties:

Name: tchamp2 (laid the final blow)
Security: -8.1
Alliance: SMASH Alliance
Corp: Veni Vidi Vici.
Ship: Drake
Weapon: Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile

The pod, that was the expensive part. I had implants in my miner, and replacing them was going to cost me. Fortunately, Wilhelm had a stockpile of loyalty points. Still, even from the LP store, a +3 implant runs 12 million ISK.

Of course, it was only later that I read this in local:

Self destruct? I did not even know that was an option.

Well, at least I got off… well, not cheaply. But it could have been much worse. Had I lost the Drake and all of Wilhelm’s implants, or worse, both ships and both pods, I might have just called it a day for EVE, cancelled my account, and gone off to other games.  Not that I couldn’t afford to replace the items lost, but it is such a pain to go out an re-equip a ship with so many fitting

This demonstrates again that there really is not much of a PvE game in EVE. If anybody says you can just run missions, feel free to point out that any mission that strays into low security space, something that starts with level II missions, is essentially PvP enabled.

That is EVE Online.