In Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game," a hunter bored with animals because they don't have the brain power to be a threat to him instead hunts people he has trapped on his island. This he finds exhilarating, especially when a big-game hunter lands on his shore.
In Pathfinder Online, the most dangerous game is played between two human-controlled characters. Even the most advanced AI cannot provide the challenge and unpredictability of battling another human-controlled character. Many MMO players crave the thrill of this Player-vs-Player challenge and seek out PvP in preference to fighting NPC monsters which can become predictable because of the limits of AI.
Arch enemies Phyllain and Nihimon square off in a duel to the death!
Our goal is to give players meaningful and focused outlets for PvP while disincentivizing the random player killing that plagues other open-world MMOs. In Pathfinder Online, settlements fight over territory and other valuable items. There's still a risk that anybody can attack anybody else at any time, which adds a sense of suspense to your encounters with other characters in the game, but in PFO, meaningless PvP comes with a cost to the aggressor, so the reality is that you will rarely (if ever) have this happen to you unless you are part of a group which is at war with another group.
Territory Warfare Is Here!
With the next patch to the game, players will be able to vie for control of hexes in the River Kingdoms. There are currently 603 claimable hexes in the game; as of the writing of this blog, 219 of them have been claimed by someone by putting down a holding and some outposts. Holdings and outposts produce the bulk goods that settlements will need to grow and thrive once that system starts to come online in a month or so. For the last few months, settlements have been putting down the holdings in anticipation of this. But until now, those holdings were impervious to attack.
A mass battle between Golgotha and Brighthaven over a tower.
In EE10.1, a company will be able to feud the owning company of a holding and then try to seize control of that holding's hex during the controlling company's PvP window, which that company sets. This will be a multiple-day affair. First, the invader will need to capture the hex's outposts. NPC guards will attempt to fight off the interlopers and will give the hex's current owner time to arrive in force to prevent the seizure. The more you upgrade your holdings and outpost, the better and more numerous the guards will be, giving you more time to arrive on the scene and beat back the attackers.
If the attacker is able to take all the outposts in the hex by killing all the guards and then accumulating enough capture points at the holding, the next day they will be able to try to do the same thing to that hex's holding. If they are successful, the attacker will take over ownership of those structures. Ownership of the holding gives ownership over the hex. This is the way that countries, kingdoms and empires will be built, hex by hex. And it all starts in a few days!
The Future of the Most Dangerous Game
Over the next year, new systems will be coming online to add more variety to PvP combat in the River Kingdoms.
First up will be the Faction System. In this system, players will be able to join one of several factions in the game and gain access to benefits from that association, including unique gear, training and locations. But all of these benefits come with a potential drawback: members of a faction opposed to yours can attack you without penalty whenever and wherever they find you. And you can do it to them as well. For instance, two of the first factions will be the Pathfinder Society and the Aspis Consortium. These two age-old enemies hate each other with a passion, and the lore of Golarion is full of stories of their fights against each other. In PFO, lower-tier members of these factions will have the option of flagging themselves for PvP with. members of the opposing faction, but as you rise through the ranks of your chosen faction, the flag for PVP will become non-optional.
Farther down the road, we will add factions such as the Echowood Bandits, the Crusader Knights (including the Eagle Knights of Andoran and the Knights of Iomedae), the Hellknights, and factions serving each of the major gods. Factions provide PFO players with a way to opt into consensual PVP that allows them to add to their character's backstory and purpose in the game.
Even farther on in the game's development, there will be settlement vs. settlement warfare, including siege engines and army-vs-army combat. But those details will have to wait for a future blog.
Player Profile: Nihimon Vhane'Sylvan
The first time I heard of Nihimon was in the earliest days of Pathfinder Online when we sent out a request for supporters to send us videos telling us why they were excited about our game, which we used during our first Kickstarter campaign. In the following years, Nihimon became a strong voice in our online community, helping us crowdforge the game into what it is today. His goblinary.com website has become an essential resource for players interested in studying the game design behind PFO. In-game, Nihimon is one of the leaders of the settlement of Phaeros, a community of wizards in the southern Echowood. Allied with Brighthaven and Keeper's Pass to form the Everbloom Alliance, the Phaerites have been in an almost constant battle with the evil city of Golgotha to their north. Both sides have dealt blows to each other in the last few months. It will be interesting to see how their war changes as new features are added to the game.
Nihimon takes a moment to rest outside the Phaeros library.
I first heard about Pathfinder Online when a friend of mine pointed me to Your Pathfinder Online Character on the Goblinworks blog. I immediately recognized the revolutionary potential of such a game and fell head-over-heels in love with it. The promise of being one of those first players let into the game lured me to become active on the forums. There, I worked hard to be helpful and informative and to push back against the "learn to use search, newb" mentality that plagues so many other game forums. What started with Guild Recruitment & Helpful Links gradually morphed into Pathfinder Online (Public) and culminated in the Goblinary.
The Seventh Veil organization officially announced itself on February 20, 2012, almost exactly two months after the first Goblinworks Blog. We have some of the most active longtime fans of PFO, and many of the players who came together on the forums back then are still actively participating in the community and have been playing PFO since Alpha. We set ourselves the goal of writing useful guides and spreading our knowledge to the rest of the community, and we have achieved those goals with many of the guides linked at Pathfinder Online (Public) having been written by our members.
Nihimon first appeared in the River Kingdoms in the form of an elf wizard. He holds divination magic in high esteem for its ability to lay bare the truths of the world around him. As a Steward of the Seventh Veil, he—along with Decius Brutus—is responsible for the well-being of the citizens of Phaeros, and to a lesser extent all of the Everbloom Alliance. This is a very diverse group consisting of peace-loving gatherers and crafters, hardy adventurers, and stalwart warriors. We have been victorious against several attacks by the Elves of the Mordant Spire, and against hordes of Elementals, but by far our most ruthless and relentless enemies are the raiders from the Empire of Xeilias who attack from the Northern Cragthorns. Although many of us have no love of war, we have answered the challenge. Our many victories do little to quell the attacks, or to give comfort to those who grow weary of endless war. And yet, we do what we must, guarding the precious candle-flame of hope which holds back the shadow of despair.
Player Profile: Phyllain
Every game needs a villain, and the Empire of Xeilias and Golgotha in particular have risen to the occasion, giving players a group to strive against while providing players who want active PvP an organization that funnels their needs into avenues that aren't toxic to the game. Leading this group of miscreants is Benevolent Dictator Phyllain, whose journey to leadership was less "carefully planned rise to power" and more "last man standing." But Phyllain took a situation he wasn't necessarily looking for and turned it into a powerful group in the game, an empire that players will be striving against for a long time to come.
Phyllain evades his enemies.
A brief backstory about Phyllain? This should be fun.
It all started back in the second Kickstarter. One of my buddies told me about it, describing it as "like EVE Online, with swords." I was hooked.
We originally started The Bloody Hand as an unaligned mercenary group of PvPers focused on assassinations and resource interdiction. That dream lasted until we learned about the support mechanic. At that point we needed to find a city that would be willing to support a bunch of Neutral Evil players, or we'd have to found our own. After deciding that it would be too much work to have our own city (oh, the irony!) we decided to join with House Karnath and Maelstrom to found Golgotha. We almost joined Phaeros at that point, but an actual evil city seemed more attractive than a neutral one.
So once we formed Golgotha we started talking to Callambea about an alliance. We would eventually add Auroral and Kreuz Bernstein to this alliance, forming the Empire of Xeilias. At this point I was supposed to just be in charge of small-group PvP—bandit-type stuff.
As Pathfinder Online got closer to Alpha, some of the leadership for the Empire decided the game wasn't for them. By the time we reached Early Enrollment, I was pretty much the only officer left. That's how I went from being the small-group PvP guy for one city to running four cities and an evil empire!
For the first couple of weeks I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, managing every aspect of everything. It was going ok, but I was burning out fast. At this point there was a sort of player intervention where I ended up promoting a bunch of people to manage specific aspects of running four cities. People were put in charge of recruiting, PvE, production and stuff like that. It reduced my workload significantly and let me focus on diplomacy and stabbing people.
Around this time we abandoned Callambea, Auroral and Kreuz Bernstein. We didn't need them and it wasn't worth the effort to do anything with them. We did everything out of Golgotha and consolidated. There were a few hold-outs in those cities, but for the most part, the people who started those settlements weren't playing the game any longer.
Eventually we turned that around. Quij joined us and picked up Callambea, making it an actual city that could stand on its own. We swapped to a coin economy inside Golgotha and recruited Clan Maugrimor, Dreamless, and Stach. Those three groups have made Kreuz Bernstein into the best-stocked and best-maintained market in the game.
That's where we stand today. Golgotha stands strong against the combined forces of the Everbloom Alliance. Kreuz Bernstein and Callambea are making money off that war handover fist. We keep the server interesting. We are pretty much the only group on the server that actually starts conflict. Every other group on the map responds to what we do. Whether it's coming up and taking us on directly or signing peace treaties and sending us bulk goods for continued peace, we are definitely the "bad guys" of the server. It's a role I love and want to continue.
So if you want to dive right into PvP, or provide for the war machine and get rich doing it, head on over to xeilias.com and put in an application—we will get you going!
Lisa Stevens
CEO
