02.21.07
Baking Muffins to Crush?
In a recent post on Scott Jennings’ blog, Lum and his many avid readers have done a bang-up job of hitting upon most of the factors necessary to including successful and fun PvP into your (probably hypothetical) MMOG. In a thinly-veiled attempt at increasing this blog’s roll of content, however, I’d like to take a minute or two to illustrate what I believe are the two most important such points of this complex issue using everyone’s favorite descriptive tool… the metaphor.
Anyone with kids knows that it can be a struggle to get them to eat vegetables, especially ones that aren’t potatoes. Anyone with half a brain, however, can tell you that vegetables are an important part of a growing human’s diet; without them, after the final throes of puberty we’d all end up with the physique of… of… well, a computer programmer, but that’s neither here nor there. So what are we do to balance our future world leaders’ diets if they won’t even try just one bite of something that’s actually good for them?
We bake it into a muffin.
Specifically, a chocolate muffin. One trick that my mother swears by (but promises she never was heartless enough to pull on me when I was young) is getting additional vitamins and nutrients into a kid’s diet by baking them chocolate muffins with grated zucchini in them. The kid gets the delicious chocolate taste, the parents get the vegetables down their gullet, everybody wins.
And this is something most games have been missing from their PvP, and something that Scott adeptly caught on to when he suggested that ‘whatever you can do to “NPC-alize” enemy players, do so’. Puzzle Pirates (and I apologize for my bias) does this beautifully. The way battles at sea in our game are structured makes it nigh impossible for a new player to actually realize that they are participating in a PvP battle until it’s almost over. This is very good. If a player isn’t rudely jolted out of the style of gameplay they are already very comfortable with whenever they encounter another player to fight, they are definitely less likely to be pissed off that their opponent is now Joe from San Jose rather than angry_badger_76 or the dread NPC ship, the ‘Hot Cod’. We’ve effectively baked some PvP zucchini into their PvE muffin.
Note that PvPers can still communicate with each other in Y!PP, and I feel this sort of social interaction is not something that you necessarily have to curb; as more qualified gentlemen than myself have already posted to death, the emotion that can come from such communication can make PvP mean more the participating players and hey, if anyone ever gets out of line with the smack talk, there’s always the /ignore command.
So, we can see that baking the zucchini into the muffin is important to get everyone participating and content. But what about, as Psychochild went over repeatedly on his blog, incentive? No matter how well you bake the zucchini into the muffin, the kids still aren’t going to eat it if it tastes like boiled shit.
And this is where, I’m sorry to say, Puzzle Pirates fails its PvP audience. Victorious ships in PvP pillage a portion of the opposing ship’s booty, which can amount to anywhere from a significant sum if the loser was on a lengthy pillage prior to the engagement to, much more frequently, sweet scupper all. This is where the kids realize that we’ve tricked them with our enticing muffins. They expectthe run-of-the-mill, gold fountain Piece of Eight reward they always get from NPC ships, but generally end up disappointed and feeling like the encounter was a waste of time. Not only that, but the times when the victors do reap the spoils, the losers get horribly shafted, generally losing one or more hours of in-game work. Needless to say, this is bad, and has led a lot of our playerbase to equate PvP with griefing, completely invalidating all the good and hard work we did getting the damn zucchini into the muffin in the first place.
I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb here by saying that making the muffins taste good is probably the toughest part of making a viable PvP system for your game. A few solutions have been tossed around for Y!PP, but most of the obvious ideas for balancing PvP and PvE payouts are highly exploitable. Start using magic money fountain rewards for PvP, for example? They’ll get a friend with a ship and trade kills. Ain’t gonna work.
I fear I don’t have an answer to this global dilemma, but some other games out there have made admirable attempts at both baking the muffins AND making them taste good (EVE Online is probably the best at this so far, even if their finished product is a bit difficult to eat), and I have hope that some of the more enlightened folks out there will be able to incentivize PvP to the point where even unintentional carebears like myself and Y!PP’s player base will be more than happy to slit some PvP throats now and again (I have my eyes on you, Warhammer Online).
That said, I’ve already done my part to fight the good fight: I’ve given you the recipe.
Go forth, my friends, and bake the muffins.
And for the love of God, make sure they don’t taste like ass.