Goblin Squad Member
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Is anyone else playing with the Alpha release of Shroud of the Avatar? I'm interested in the project as part of my general interest in solving the Theme Park problem. EQNext is trying to build one kind of sandbox/procedural innovation in gaming, PFO has a PvP sandbox w/ Theme Park element (the most coherent and plausible in my mind). And then SotA has this idea of selective multiplay.
It's kind of weird, but essentially you can play "online" single player, but more importantly "Friends Only Online," and "Open Multiplayer Online." In FOO you play with friends/guildies only, and it's basically a PvE sandbox. In OMP they have some kind of matching algorithm so that instead of a server's worth of players, the server only shows you "relevant" players, e.g. friends, people you've interacted with in conversation or trade, and "others" you may be interested in (which I think means potential PvP players).
I'm suspect of this--I think it sounds like Trammel Opt-Out, and I'm struggling to see how I can build up meaningful relationships prior to the algorith showing me who should be relevant.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You are correct, it sounds very much like an opt-out of non consensual and or meaningful PVP system.
Fallen Earth was one of the best communities I have experienced in an MMO. It used voluntary flagging for PVP and zones that were Auto Flagging. You only had to enter the "Red Zones" if you wanted rarer resources in nominally greater quantities or if you were taking a short cut.
The voluntary PVP flagging had a community cultural norm that was built to support it.
If you were in an Outlaw Biker club, Enforcers, or a Religious Zealot, you flagged when you were in numbers (2+). If you were seen not flagged in numbers you would / could be:
Reprimanded Verbally (chat)
Denied Invitation to Events
Denied support from your guild
Kicked out of your guild
In some cases, and I witnessed this a few times, the offending player was ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely. Many of the MC clubs had a black list of those we would not associate with and care bears within the organization types mentioned above were an example of those.
Some here might call that toxic griefing via chat, which might be true in another context, but not in Fallen Earth's sub cultures it wasn't.
The game models you mention above wouldn't even lead to a community understanding of non consensual PVP. They are all forms of Arena PVP, contrived and meaningless.
You are correct, it sounds very much like an opt-out of non consensual and or meaningful PVP system.
Fallen Earth was one of the best communities I have experienced in an MMO. It used voluntary flagging for PVP and zones that were Auto Flagging. You only had to enter the "Red Zones" if you wanted rarer resources in nominally greater quantities or if you were taking a short cut.
The voluntary PVP flagging had a community cultural norm that was built to support it.
If you were in an Outlaw Biker club, Enforcers, or a Religious Zealot, you flagged when you were in numbers (2+). If you were seen not flagged in numbers you would / could be:
Reprimanded Verbally (chat)
Denied Invitation to Events
Denied support from your guild
Kicked out of your guildIn some cases, and I witnessed this a few times, the offending player was ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely. Many of the MC clubs had a black list of those we would not associate with and care bears within the organization types mentioned above were an example of those.
Some here might call that toxic griefing via chat, which might be true in another context, but not in Fallen Earth's sub cultures it wasn't.
The game models you mention above wouldn't even lead to a community understanding of non consensual PVP. They are all forms of Arena PVP, contrived and meaningless.
THAT gives me a great idea. What if flagging gave some sort of benefit to Settlements' DI's? So, basically, the more people a Settlement had flagged, the more perks they would get.
This wouldn't necessarily have to just be DI, you could come up with all sorts of benefits for Settlements (more battle-hardened guards, stronger walls, etc).
I think this would work better if the PvP flagging system took longer to ramp up... so like 30 days instead of 10 hours (I think it was) which was originally selected. That way if someone flags up for 30 days, and just leaves it there, they help their Settlement the most, if they unflag, they'll have to start over from scratch and wait 30 more days till they're back up to the same place when they reflag.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In some cases, and I witnessed this a few times, the offending player was ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely.
Some here might call that toxic griefing via chat, which might be true in another context, but not in Fallen Earth's sub cultures it .
Other games are other games. Being abusive to other players via chat is never ok on paizo and I expect that anyone who make a habit of it in PFO will find themselves banned with little to no in game warning.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Other games are other games. Being abusive to other players via chat is never ok on paizo and I expect that anyone who make a habit of it in PFO will find themselves banned with little to no in game warning.
In some cases, and I witnessed this a few times, the offending player was ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely.
Some here might call that toxic griefing via chat, which might be true in another context, but not in Fallen Earth's sub cultures it .
That was not the point. The point was that the community came up with its own response and it became part of its culture.
PFO may eventually develop its own community culture and come up with a standard to end unwanted behavior. Those impacted by that negatively will see it as abusive, and those that agree with it will see it as protecting their culture.
We do not know what cultural norms PFO will have.
I get your point, but if you think that shaming someone to the point that they are unwelcome in the game will become the cultural norm then you will be mistaken.
According to your crystal ball?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Public approval and disapproval is endemic to human social behavior. It's the fundamental way we produce social structures (through the circulation and ordering of values) and I would point out that social judgments aren't inherently toxic. This process is particularly visible in communities that depend on cohesiveness (military, paramilitary, sports). Given that settlements will likely depend on cohesion, I think successful settlements will explicitly praise and damn behavior that affects the community.
There's a big difference between calling someone out over their conduct, and harassing someone because they're different/vulnerable.
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Goblin Squad Member
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According to your crystal ball?
According to these:
It is not our intention to create an "anything goes" world where players are subjected to endless scams, ganks, and immersion breaking behavior.
It is our intention to apply some of the real world lessons learned in our major cities by focusing on "broken windows" - that is, stopping minor transgressions of our social behavior policies before they escalate out of hand. It is my opinion that doing so will reduce antisocial behavior substantially. People who want to be anonymous jerks will not get much pleasure out of being quickly and unceremoniously silenced, booted, or banned. Without the ability to encite "rage & tears", those folks will have no good reason to haunt Pathfinder Online.
All three kinds of tools will be used to help enforce our social behavior policies. But the meta-rule will be: "If you're acting like a jerk, we'll feel free to give you a time-out lasting from minutes to forever without appeal and without warning." We'll be capricious and arbitrary, not bound by precedent or by clearly defined rules. ...
90% of our players will never have a problem. Maybe 5% will have a problem for a reason they didn't know about (maybe their made up nonsense name actually means something horribly offensive in Spanish, for example). The remainder will be the people who will either change their behavior or be severed from the community for their obstinacy. And their howls of protest about how unfair it all is will fall on deaf ears. You want to avoid getting banned for smack talk that goes a little off the rails?
Be awesome as a part of our community. Build good will with Goblinworks and your fellow players. Make it obvious that you're having a bad day, and that it's an anomoly not a pattern of behavior.
That's how societies work.
Just a few quotes on how Goblinworks will be steering the community. If those quotes make it seem like the kind of verbal abuse that was talked about will be tolerated, then you haven't been paying attention.
Unless Ryan is secretly God, then he doesn't have full control over player actions or how the community develops. He might try to do that stuff, he might try to make a game that's extremely profitable, but there's no guarantee it will succeed, and by the same token, there's no guarantee that the community won't develop in the way that BWolf suggests. Hence my crystal ball comment. Still, it's good to see he's putting some effort into developing a nice community.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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If there ends up being a horse-gang sub-community that has different standards regarding what groups of people who ride horses from town to town should do, then they have every opportunity to create meaningful interaction and content for other horse gangs. They don't even need to resort to toxic chat to do so.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What Bluddwulf was describing wasn't just "You f'ed up." It was the "ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely." That kind of behavior I take issue with. That kind of online behavior has been the trigger event in suicides. It has no place on paizo.com or in anything with the Pathfinder brand.
If Pathfinder online adopts a culture that that kind of behavior is acceptable and commonplace, and the people that engage in it are allowed to do so without consequence, then Goblinworks and Paizo has failed.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What Bluddwulf was describing wasn't just "You f'ed up." It was the "ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely." That kind of behavior I take issue with. That kind of online behavior has been the trigger event in suicides. It has no place on paizo.com or in anything with the Pathfinder brand.
If Pathfinder online adopts a culture that that kind of behavior is acceptable and commonplace, and the people that engage in it are allowed to do so without consequence, then Goblinworks and Paizo has failed.
Again, you are missing the point. The community of Fallen Earth had decided that that was an acceptable response. PFO's community will have its own acceptable responses to behaviors its community does not want to see.
No one, not even the devs of GW can predict what PFO's community culture will be.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Again, you are missing the point. The community of Fallen Earth had decided that that was an acceptable response. PFO's community will have its own acceptable responses to behaviors its community does not want to see.
Again, it's doesn't matter what is acceptable in other communities. They have no bearing here. What matters is THIS community. And that community will have to conform to the standards that goblinworks puts into place.
The player community doesn't own PFO. The social behavior policies will be set by goblinworks and will be approved by paizo. The community will need to work within those policies or they will be shown the door.
No one, not even the devs of GW can predict what PFO's community culture will be.
No, but we can safely assume that they will be held to the same standards as THIS community on paizo.com. The most important rule of paizo.com is "Don't be a jerk." It's at the bottom of every post you type.
Other games player communities degenerated into the crapsack worlds they are because their devs and GMs did not enforce a higher standard.
Nothing that anyone in GW has posted indicates that they are going to fall into the same trap.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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What Bluddwulf was describing wasn't just "You f'ed up." It was the "ridiculed verbally in chat and basically made to feel unwelcome in the game completely." That kind of behavior I take issue with. That kind of online behavior has been the trigger event in suicides. It has no place on paizo.com or in anything with the Pathfinder brand.
If Pathfinder online adopts a culture that that kind of behavior is acceptable and commonplace, and the people that engage in it are allowed to do so without consequence, then Goblinworks and Paizo has failed.
Again, you are missing the point. The community of Fallen Earth had decided that that was an acceptable response. PFO's community will have its own acceptable responses to behaviors its community does not want to see.
No one, not even the devs of GW can predict what PFO's community culture will be.
I'm very confused about HOW to hurt someone using FE chat. R-click: Ignore makes it so that they are only annoying other people, and the character collision system is nonexistent. Unless they could bring enough people together that they could keep me from even seeing a bank vault, there's no way they could be more that a mild inconvenience no matter how many there were. Even in that case, they would be hurting each of them just as much or more than they were hurting the person they were trying to sanction for not flagging.
And after spending a few hours in one of the PvP resource nodes sharing the VASTLY improved drop rates there, occasionally helping someone who got hit by one of the monster spawns, but with none of the players taking time off of gathering to kill each other, I don't think Fallen Earth has the characteristic Bluddwulf remembers it having.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't think Fallen Earth has the characteristic Bluddwulf remembers it having.
That depends on how it has changed since it went F2P a couple of years back.
I have only recently reinstalled it and created a new account. I'm hoping to find the same community I left there, but maybe it is no longer there with an influx of F2P players.
The social behavior policies will be set by goblinworks and will be approved by paizo. The community will need to work within those policies or they will be shown the door.
That's what they all say, until it involves $$$ and large numbers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not in the alpha and don't know enough to really know if it will work. I have considered the question for a while already however. I think it's closer to a single-player RPG + coop from a pool of players and a somewhat shared world via instances.
I think it's a better choice than a single-player RPG unless as with Betheseda or Rockstar you are awesome at doing that and you have a lot of money to do that; and even they are adding coop online options aren't they? So I think along with the ultima single-player RPG fans of yore it will do alright for itself.
Does it solve the themepark problem (which I take to be finite content?) No, but I'm would guess it delays or postpones it and having buying/selling items/real estate economic system seems a good motivator (and money-maker: Ppl have bought up slices of land in the kickstarter). Again it's in chapters so the PvE story develops in tandem.
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That is something it would be good to see PFO do, with GW updating general story arcs or at least input outputs aside/alongside our own petty River Kingdom squabbles from tiny to epic in arc and impact. Rifts were sort of along this idea in RIFT, but they were static Public Quests. They were not : "GW just spawns a small army of Hell Knights and manually operates them with objectives, interaction options with players, criteria for conditions predetermined for how to respond to players reactions and different players' reactions etc. Much more life-like and special instead of tedious automated content that Rifts were but were heading in the right direction of ideas).
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Goblin Squad Member
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The community of Fallen Earth had decided that that was an acceptable response. PFO's community will have its own acceptable responses to behaviors its community does not want to see.
No one, not even the devs of GW can predict what PFO's community culture will be.
Just as on these forums there are some folks who will not give much of a damn about what the community prefers, and all they have to do is be a loudmouth with deaf ears.
My recommendation is to limit text chat in-game to approximate earshot unless that character has a psychic or similar ability... and then others who do not have said ability will not hear them anyway.