My opinion of what is wrong with PvP in a lot of games


Pathfinder Online

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Nihimon wrote:

@insorrow, if it's easy for people who enjoy alts to buy another account to get around this restriction, don't you think it will be easy for the others too?

To me, it's far more effective to provide very strong incentives for players to put all their characters on a single account, so that all of those characters can be banned en masse when the player gets out of line. If you combine that with a way for a player to demonstrate how much time he has invested in his account then that becomes a very reliable proxy for other players to judge how likely he is to be a griefer.

A good idea, but that will only really catch out the people who think access to the Internet grants them anonymity. Any griefer/spy/thief worth their salt will have a patsy account. And that's not counting whether Goblinworks will view 'corp theft' as punishable by the community or by them. Obviously things like harassment would be Goblinworks' remit.

Goblin Squad Member

Lictor Fedryn Mannorac wrote:
Any griefer/spy/thief worth their salt will have a patsy account.

Which is why I say it would be a very valuable tool if a player (Adam) could demonstrate to another player (Bob) that his account has at least X months of paid Skill Training. If Adam is unable to prove this, Bob has good cause to distrust him to an extent.

I'm imagining a command like "/showAccountSkillTraining" which shows the total number of months of skill training on the account. If the command is entered as "/showAccountSkillTraining 3", and the account has at least 3 months of skill training on it, then it would show that the character has at least 3 months of skill training on that account.

I could also see value in a command like "/showCharacterSkillTraining" that would work similarly but based on the Character's skill training time instead of the Account's.

The message that's displayed by this command should be something that can't be spoofed with emotes.

Goblin Squad Member

Nihimon wrote:
Lictor Fedryn Mannorac wrote:
Any griefer/spy/thief worth their salt will have a patsy account.

Which is why I say it would be a very valuable tool if a player (Adam) could demonstrate to another player (Bob) that his account has at least X months of paid Skill Training. If Adam is unable to prove this, Bob has good cause to distrust him to an extent.

I'm imagining a command like "/showAccountSkillTraining" which shows the total number of months of skill training on the account. If the command is entered as "/showAccountSkillTraining 3", and the account has at least 3 months of skill training on it, then it would show that the character has at least 3 months of skill training on that account.

I could also see value in a command like "/showCharacterSkillTraining" that would work similarly but based on the Character's skill training time instead of the Account's.

The message that's displayed by this command should be something that can't be spoofed with emotes.

Well even without that command it would be pretty easy for someone to prove, just use a skill that takes a long time to earn, or for a heavily multiclassed person, use whatever the strongest skill they have on each archtype.

I do have to say, at least based on what I hear of in eve, that generally could do little to nothing, for the most part only absolute beginers are fooled by short cons done on throw away characters/accounts, people who attempt big scams, go through long cons, where they are willing to use a character that has 8 months or so of skill training.

I honestly don't think GW should be out policing every blatent scam, but they should make the tools/displays in the game in ways that avoid confusion. (If I recall the biggest weakness in eve was commas, decimals etc... things almost intentionally made to be hard to read). Between contracts and other tools to clearly be able to make trades without question. Collateral up on guard/delivery contracts etc... they have more safety mechanisms in play than one can count. The concept of people intentionally removing all of the safety mechanisms (IE either undershooting the colateral for a delivery contract), leads to other issues.

Now if you are talking guild assets etc... how long that character has been active, is a non-factor. I don't care if someones been an active character for 2 years, or 1 month, if I haven't known him long enough to make any sane judgement of him personally, then I am not promoting him to a position that he can take things. Someones been paying for skill training for 2 years, he robbed his last charter for everything, and now he's joining yours to do the same. Skill training time means nothing, effects nothing and is worthless. OK so you check his reference at the charter he was in before, well if you are doing that anyway, then you also confirmed his characters age, either way I still fail to see what age accomplishes, it tells you, how much skill training he has to lose if he officially does a bannable offense, but as far as in game actions it says little to nothing.

I know several games where being an outlaw is nearly imposible before you become strong enough, IE even people who want to be criminal scum, start out law abiding and earn legitimately to build up their stregnth (gear level etc...), before turning evil after they feel they are strong enough.

The more I think of it, the less I see time played as an informative tool for anything other than ban-worthy offenses.

Goblin Squad Member

Onishi wrote:
The more I think of it, the less I see time played as an informative tool for anything other than ban-worthy offenses.

It's a tool. It's very simple to implement, and it complicates the ability of griefers to use free, throwaway accounts to accomplish their griefing goals.


What we're trying to emphasis here is that the big scammers, the ones you hear about in gaming news, do not use throwaway accounts. They play the long game and take you for all you are worth.

By all means, stop the small fry from doing what they can but protecting yourself against the guys who clean out your Company? Much more difficult.

Goblin Squad Member

It's a low trust environment. This tool would be a simple way to provide slightly elevated trust, to make it worthwhile to take slightly elevated risks.

Nothing is ever going to justify sending half your guild's treasure to a Nigerian prince.

Goblin Squad Member

I would not call the people who have the patience and discipline to run a long con scammers. Scammers are relying on a mistake due to bad design on our part - like a confusing decimal in a purchase price, or a confirmation dialog that can be changed between the acceptance of a deal and its execution.

The long con is an interesting and I think meaningful playstyle. I think it is only griefing if in the end the damage done comes through a crappy game mechanic that lets a person do something clearly against the wishes of most of the people affected - like disbanding a Settlement without any chance for the community to veto that action.

If you want to spend the time to infiltrate an organization, rise to a level of trust, and then manipulate them into giving you a bunch of assets, or sewing confusion in the midst of a war, I think there's nothing wrong with that per se.

Goblin Squad Member

Southraven wrote:

Interesting thread. I'm picking up one thing here, which is most people don't really actually understand what a Sandbox MMO is.

Asking "is PVP the focus of this MMO" is not something the game answers, it is something YOU answer.

Not a fan of PVP? Then don't. Stay in safe areas. Take up architecture or farming or somesuch. Travel in large well guarded convoys and stay in cities.

Love PVP to death? Then head out, join a gang roaming the northern wastes and get ready to smash heads against like-minded gangs all over the north marches!

I don't think anyone can help the one guy who stresses out over "the idea of someone ganking you" because well, as much as you'd like to remove yourself from people, there will still be actual people playing, so who knows if someone might try and kill you somewhere crazy.

What this discussion actually highlights is the gulf between the MMO communities and the Tabletop RPG community. It's not insurmountable, though some people will not like the game regardless of how much they gave to the Kickstarter.

Agree, pvp is a hot button. But sandbox context ie content inter-dependency deserves more emphasis and relevance whenever pvp is discussed; same as other game systems.

Still think it is worth 'banging on' about selection being important for how the game community develops and the best approach to limit large scale expoitations (the spammers, gold-farmers, gankers, griefers, ninja-looters, criminal fraudsters... et al.).


Again, difficult to do without hindering legitimate players. How can you guard against someone social engineering themselves into your Company and hoiking all of your materials? What about someone who wants to create a large trading Company that could be misconstrued as a gold-farming company?

Goblinworks will probably just have to be reactive and respond to tickets raised by the community. None of us are interested in seeing the game go to the dogs, so I think we'll be good at self-policing.

Goblin Squad Member

Lictor Fedryn Mannorac wrote:

Again, difficult to do without hindering legitimate players. How can you guard against someone social engineering themselves into your Company and hoiking all of your materials? What about someone who wants to create a large trading Company that could be misconstrued as a gold-farming company?

Goblinworks will probably just have to be reactive and respond to tickets raised by the community. None of us are interested in seeing the game go to the dogs, so I think we'll be good at self-policing.

What can you do about it, lots at least assuming that any item bank, has similar permissioning abilities to coin accounts. I'm pretty sure any storage account will not grant access beyond what you allow. At the very least you should be able to set your materials to be managed by trusted individuals from the start. Hopefully it will offer something like an approve as occours system, where you get a message "tim would like to take 10 iron bars from storage, approve or deny"

But if such a system dosn't exist, then at the worse case scenerio, you designate the absolute most trusted members as gatekeepers, who will take what is needed out of storage, and hand it over manually.

What particularly are you assuming tickets will be required for? Someone running away with things a guild explicitly gave them access to? That would be a long con, and something that should be permissable in the game mechanics, not an issue for the devs, judging by Ryans last post that sounds to be his stance on that as well.

Now if the interfaces aren't clear, as in you thought all you were giving him access to take 5lbs of iron ore, and instead he managed to unload your whole inventory, and you were unaware of what all was accessed, that is an interface issue. When changing the permissions the game should be clear of what you are giving access to it. If you told him he could take 3 items, but then knowingly gave him full access to the storage assuming he was honest, and he wasn't honest. That is not a GM issue, it was a bad decision on your end.

Goblinworks Founder

Ryan Dancey wrote:

I would not call the people who have the patience and discipline to run a long con scammers. Scammers are relying on a mistake due to bad design on our part - like a confusing decimal in a purchase price, or a confirmation dialog that can be changed between the acceptance of a deal and its execution.

The long con is an interesting and I think meaningful playstyle. I think it is only griefing if in the end the damage done comes through a crappy game mechanic that lets a person do something clearly against the wishes of most of the people affected - like disbanding a Settlement without any chance for the community to veto that action.

If you want to spend the time to infiltrate an organization, rise to a level of trust, and then manipulate them into giving you a bunch of assets, or sewing confusion in the midst of a war, I think there's nothing wrong with that per se.

This is good to hear your stance on long cons Ryan. While I don't think I would ever have the time or patience to do such a thing. The idea of someone putting in so much time and effort into such a thing knowing that they will be betraying the trust of people they would come to know and like over the course of such a con actually fits in well with a sandbox game. The sacrifice someone would have to make to become an infamous and renowned Thief of such stature would be worthy of applause in my book. I could never do such a thing but would have a healthy respect for those that do.


@Onishi Sorry, I'm playing Devil's Advocate in case anyone is trying to get Goblinworks to police against their own stupidity.

From what I've read, it appears that Goblinworks is intending to having appropriate controls and what I don't want to see is someone complaining because they gave a 'corp thief' access to their materials and then they went walkies.

At the same time, I don't want Goblinworks to bow to pressure from people who can't police their own materials and make it more onerous for the rest of us to administer these things.

Ideally, from a materials point of view, I'd like to see a system where I can set the amount of materials that can be moved (either by volume or value) and any transactions larger than that should require some form of authorisation. Obviously, everything should be logged so that I can see if someone is repeatedly removing materials below the limit.

I expect tickets to be used for bugs, etc. However, I can see someone who has their materials stolen raising a ticket expecting to get their materials back.


Ryan Dancey wrote:

I would not call the people who have the patience and discipline to run a long con scammers. Scammers are relying on a mistake due to bad design on our part - like a confusing decimal in a purchase price, or a confirmation dialog that can be changed between the acceptance of a deal and its execution.

The long con is an interesting and I think meaningful playstyle. I think it is only griefing if in the end the damage done comes through a crappy game mechanic that lets a person do something clearly against the wishes of most of the people affected - like disbanding a Settlement without any chance for the community to veto that action.

If you want to spend the time to infiltrate an organization, rise to a level of trust, and then manipulate them into giving you a bunch of assets, or sewing confusion in the midst of a war, I think there's nothing wrong with that per se.

What effect would this massive betrayal have on their alignment, or the victims' ability to seek retribution or recompense?

Obviously the player in question would be instantly blacklisted by a significant portion of the community, yet in a slow scaling alignment shift, his alignment would still be mostly intact.

Minimally, a long con would have to be recognizable by the system as a criminal act, and the con man would be subject to those consequences.


i favor the solution of one character per account for one reason only.

as mentioned earlier, any con worth his salt will go the extra mile and buy a second account if it is necessary. Spending 40+ dollars to buy an account and training time to set up an alt will give GW money .those money can be spent to hire an extra gm or two and help supervise these guys .

it is mostly an issue of resources. will GW have enough money to actively scan and ban those guys?making an alt in most games costs nothing ,while hiring a gm to check costs something .so the solution according to me is : making an alt costs something ,getting a gm costs something .go ahead and buy alt account while GW hires gm to shut them down .


Southraven wrote:
Interesting thread. I'm picking up one thing here, which is most people don't really actually understand what a Sandbox MMO is.

You're right, most people don't. Even if they do, they don't understand what PFO will be, because it won't be like other sandboxes. And why would people know? The only successful sandbox out there is EVE, and EVE is the perfect example of the lowest of online human behavior.

I've been reading the blogs, Ryan's posts, and most threads since this forum opened. I'm informed. Yet it took Ryan saying directly to me in this thread that PvP was not the primary focus of the game for me to understand and believe that.

Why? Simply because the majority of conversation revolves around it. People see "open pvp" and they assume "pvp game." They see "sandbox" and they think "UO/Darkfall." What will the new/casual observer think of PFO? They'll see "open pvp" and think "gankfest." That has been demonstrated in this thread as well. It is the first conclusion people will jump to, without fail.

To GW: don't expect people to know or understand what you're making. Be unsubtle about the fact that this isn't a PvP-centric game, or people will fixate on PvP (as we have shown). You want to discourage people from playing whose hearts grow three sizes when they think of ganking noobs in starting areas, while simultaneously encouraging people to come try your new kind of sandbox game (which happens to include pvp).

Goblin Squad Member

@insorrow, you don't have to force everyone to only have one character per account to get money for training additional characters. Ryan has already stated that we'll most likely be able to buy additional training for extra characters on the same account. I agree wholeheartedly with making alts "cost something", but that doesn't require forcing them on to separate accounts.

And again, making it easy and beneficial for most players to keep their alts on the same account as their main has the added benefit of making those players aware that their actions can have consequences on their other characters, making them less likely to be tempted into anti-social behavior.

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