Ok so yes pvp means you WILL get attacked. It is inevitable and it’s part of the whole shebang we like. However there has to be sport in it. Ok PvEer complains ‘you attacked me’…and? Forgive my toxic masculinity but grow a pair and I really don’t care if this education is done nice or not…but to consistently raid the same player every other week when clearly they are a solo…just because you are bored and there are clear equal clans on the server that you could contend with? Yeah come on that’s just pathetic…I think there is a grandma somewhere that needs to be swindled or a girl scout that could be robbed…and yes I’m equating it to these things because it’s leading sadistic behavior that is troubling to say the least that it’s just accepted and overlooked as part of gaming.
I think putting it as some sort of honor thing isn’t going to have the effect as just good sportsmanship. If it’s honor based, they can go all character and rpg to defend their actions but sportsmanship in gaming…there is no deflection in that…that is you, the player type of challenge.
It takes real experience to nail that one. I was raided everyday for awhile. I got to the point that only the gate is locked. That gave them no incentive (or honor) to bomb.
Oh yes, I studied attackers. Next time someone wants to raid me, I’d be sure to get the video of it!
Great. I usually see negative feedback about consoles. Since consoles were for quite some time playing catchup, empires were built, destroyed, rebuilt and wiped on the PC. All while evolving closer to what I say is a console playstyle and code, and what you say is also a console playstyle and code. It has taken a long time for PC to get here.
The interesting thing is the consoles themselves have diffrent cultures, in my experience. I found that xbox had a lot more “pvp bro” types. They were honourable in a rough way but uh… were not tolerant of weakness, and often mistook kindness for it. One clan took it upon themselves to drive every PVE-ish player off the server so they could have “a real fight” with no one online who wasn’t giving it their all.
My xbox broke and I inherited a PS and found the people had a similar honour code, but were more easygoing and had more of a live and let live attitude. I wonder if it’s because the flagship games of the xbox are often shooters and the PS are often JRPGs.
Anyway I understand why you are hesitant to lose the less toxic culture that’s developed on PC. I guess this whole thread is because I wish there was a PVP culture that played hard but fair, and wasn’t toxic. Is that even possible?
You might be right. Sportsmanship is unfashionable these days but by Crom I wish we had it back… in games in general. There seems to have been a society-wide shift towards taking games very seriously. That tends to make people into either unapologetic “hardcore” types, or people who want the whole environment to feel safe so they can play what they paid for without being griefed. Neither seems to feel like they have any personal responsibility to reign themselves in. I think you made a thread about responsibility a little while ago. It’s all connected.
Mauls should damage sandstone, torches should be throwable and set fire to thatch roofing, axes should be able to chop down doors. I feel that if low end raiding were possible for low level players it would be more fun and engaging. The fact that just to get into raiding requires a base capable of producing dragonfire is counter productive to the nature of the game.
We had it sorted out in the 1990s. “If its red, its dead.”
Here’s the issue people are having. We have people who claim not to want to PVP but want the danger of PVP. Well to have danger, they have to be on the list of targets. Because if they’re offlimits, they’re just playing PVE with people PVPing ‘overthere’. They can have that experience by playing on a PVE server and watching videos on YT of PVP.
But here’s my favorite so far…
Which translates to, “I want to PVP on my terms.” LostBrythunian, I am attacking the statement directly, and not you personally. Just giving a warning since I’m about to tear into it. And what I say isn’t a reflection on what I think of you, I’m assuming you’re paraphrasing a general mentality among a general group of people.
But I can’t begin to say how hypocritical this is. This is akin to someone wanting to play dodgeball, but they’re not allowed to be hit back. They want to make all the rules to protect themselves with little to no consequence to their own actions. This flies in the face of everything that PVP is, which I will get into in a moment.
This. Let me tell you all how ‘honor’ works in PVP. Back when I was playing MW3 (that’s MechWarrior 3 for you younger folks) there was a common honor rule about not legging another player’s BattleMech. Just so you all know, in the BattleTech universe, mechs have different locations with different armor values. That’s Head, Torso locations of Center, Left, Right, and Rear versions of those three, Left and Right Arms, and Left and Right Legs. In MW3, destruction of one leg is destruction of the mech, in normal BattleTech it would be debilitating but not total destruction.
So understandable, the legs were quite vulnerable. Usually a BattleMech has to lose its head (pilot killed) or Center Torso (engine destruction) to be disabled. But in MW3, a single leg meant the mech fell over and the player had to respawn (or was out in the case of no respawn). So to have the idea of progressive damage (arms typically then left or right torso then center), the no-legging rule was generally followed by the community.
League play (where we used websites tracking standing in the old ladder based system, similar to how it was done in individual sports in the 80s and prior, may still be done but online too, and no I’m not quite THAT old, but my dad explained it to me when he played Racquetball semi-professionally in the Marine Corps in the 70s.) didn’t enforce no-legging, and neither did tournament play (where we’d play for cash prizes). But usually people refrained from it there too.
I noticed something though, see when you play MW3 and have another player targeted (required to hit them with a lock on missile, especially Streak SRMs which require locks to fire) you have their damage display shown. Default was a 3d model of their mech, showing each location getting more and more bright red as it takes damage. The second option shows a wire frame generic mech similar to MW2’s, where each section starts blue, goes green, yellow, orange, and then red, or black if destroyed. There was a third option I used, called HTAL (Head/Torso/Arms/Legs) that showed a bar graph of each location, a green bar for armor remaining, red for damage.
The benefit of HTAL is it showed how much armor they had installed in relation to other locations. I noticed the legs were missing a bar on many people I was fighting. This meant they were saving tonnage on their mech by putting most armor in their torso and arms, and using leftover space to install more or bigger weapons (more damage), more heatsinks (can fire more often), and more jumpjets or bigger engines (for more agility or speed respectively).
I began targeting legs specifically on these players. One or two shots was all it took to exploit their attempts to exploit others who were operating in good faith. Sure at first they would try to make a fuss about it, until screenshots were shown of their HTAL displays. See… HTAL wasn’t widely used. Either because people didn’t know it existed, or people preferred the nostalgic MW2 style wireframe. HTAL was a bit… mechanicky and sterile compared to the other two. But it did get definitive information. So these players relied on the fact most didn’t use it, or didn’t quite understand what they were looking at when they did.
Since it wasn’t really ever enforced in league play or tournaments. The honor went out the window before too long. And by the time MW4 rolled around, it had faded entirely. In MW4 you had some slight pockets that would complain when it was done. But in general, any part was fair game. By MWO no one but the most senior of MechWarriors even heard of such things.
This is hardly the only instance of honor exploitation I have seen over the last 25 years. But it is one of the earliest.
So let’s talk about what PVP actually is. Because believe it or not, most people don’t. You can have players who have played on PVP for decades and not know. What if I told you, WoW Battlegrounds were not PVP? What if I told you that games such as Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, and others are not actual PVP? You all would think I’m off my rocker.
Understandably so. PVP is an acronym for Player versus Player. Any time a player faces off in a competitive way against another player should be PVP right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider Bowling to be a PVP game. Or basketball. Or even American Football. What about Boxing, MMA, or even the sort of spots such as Paintball and Airsoft? No… no I don’t.
Here’s the criteria for PVP that I have established, and some of you older people might even agree with this if you’ve been a veteran of this style of play for a while.
Consequences. PVP needs to have consequences. See when you play in WoW’s Battlegrounds, you face off against people you’ve never seen before, in a controlled environment, usually meant to be ‘fair’ and equal for both sides, at least in theory and roughly works. But at the end of the match, no matter how well you did, or didn’t do. You leave and probably will never see those people again. And if you did happen to see them again, you likely wouldn’t remember (unless your battlegroup is really small). There’s no nuance to that. Thus no pressure either.
When you play a game like Conan (and I will state to get it out of the way that server transfers do lessen the impact of this, thankfully only on a minority of servers, if you want to talk about server transfers, there’s a dozen threads already on it, take it there). Every action you take, every action you don’t take (inaction), every decision you make, and every decision you don’t make (indecision) has a consequence to it.
Not all consequences are bad, sometimes you make friends, sometimes you make allies. Sometimes nothing happens at all. But every choice, every action, does matter. This includes the decision to play on the server. Your choices, actions, and decisions matter right on character creation. From choosing hairstyles, skin colors, gender, and name. Hell even seen endowment choices come into play (some guy said on discord once he would go around and demand all other men to drop their pants, anyone who had a bigger member then he would be killed, he decided to set his about a quarter above minimum, that was hilarious). All have an impact on how others will treat you. For good or ill.
Every word you say in chat, every stone you pick up, and every time you place a building piece, all has consequences. Of course everyone around you has the same standard. You may treat them as different as you wish depending on their actions, words, decisions, and actions not taken.
Of course how you deal with said consequences also has its own consequences down the road. This is what PVP is at its most basic level.
Note, I haven’t said anything about getting ganked, killed, targeted, raided, or anything like that. Believe it or not, they play only a fraction into the consequences you could suffer. They really do. As I said, consequences could be good as well as bad. Frequently they are simply benign. But the point is, it might not be, as anyone you meet may have a different standard.
There is no one honor rule here. You can have a dozen players with twenty different opinions. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? There is an answer to that. Someone has to be right, which means someone has to be wrong.
Who is right and who’s wrong is who can enforce their methods upon everyone else. This goes way beyond a might makes right mentality. I don’t want to go into the full story behind it, but back when I played Minecraft back in 2011 with some Army buddies of mine, they got me to play on this RP server. It also was a PVP server. I didn’t know a damn thing about playing Minecraft, and to this day I still kinda don’t.
But through my actions and choices, I didn’t need to. At the end of it, I controlled about one third of the useable map, and had little over a hundred players within my personal faction. I barely knew how to craft junk in that game and mostly helped build stuff, manage resources that we needed, and accounted for all the people who dwelled in our area. Let me tell you this, the spreadsheet is mightier than the diamond sword. Leadership and coordination goes a helluva lot further than someone’s prowess to click someone to their respawn point.
Think about this nightmare scenario, someone gets a crew of about twenty players and splits it up to 3-4 clans on a server and goes around being an antagonist for that server. That’s going to be nightmare fuel for most that are on the receiving end of it. But there’s not much you can do to stop it. And this isn’t an impossibility, some of you have seen it before. Also I’ll note that it was frequently common to run in groups much much larger than that in games like Archeage (50-200 was what I used to run in), and Planetside 2 (can be as much as 300 online at a time in an outfit back in the earlier days).
But numbers don’t always mean everything. They just look scary. Reputation can sometimes be enough. I’m sure many of you have seen that. Don’t mess with this clan over there… they’ll get ya. Or sometimes you simply don’t mess with a clan because of their benevolence. That’s PVP too believe it or not. Again… consequences are what matters.
But think about that. A benevolent clan can matter. A benevolent clan can make a difference. How do you do that in WoW BGs? When you’re forgotten the moment the timer ends? You don’t. Because that isn’t PVP. Choices, decisions, and actions have to matter for PVP.
But you can’t have the nice, without having the not so nice. The consequences have to matter. They have to have substance. Otherwise there isn’t really a point. Then its just PVE with extra steps.
Need to have a early game to matter first. Levels 1-59 fly by too quickly on 1x rates. They could start us all at level 60 and we wouldn’t even know the difference. You still have to get stone to get iron, and then steel for hardened steel. In the time it takes to gather the resources for all that, you hit 60 by proxy. Starting at 60 would shave maybe an hour tops off getting established accounting for ENC50. If they ever nerf that feat by changing it. 60 will be pointless outside needing it for Epic Weapons to craft Eldarium stuff and Epic Armor itself.
It has occurred to me that generations within the “stranger danger” and “pandemic” circles on the Venn diagram might just lose out on lessons one can learn from Sports. Participating in sports is how we take in a lot of these basic lessons. For instance, I’d have no clue about sportsmanship if I’d not had it literally beaten into my head during a long drive home after a terrible personal showing during a soccer match. I was 7.
In @Taemien’s post succeeding yours, he rather cavalierly says that the Conan ruleset is kill on sight. I’m not bagging on him for this, but this is not true. He’s entitled to his opinion, it’s just that any major player who’s spent a lot of time on Officials knows this is not how Conan Exiles is to be played.
Part of the majesty of this game is that when you step outside the internecine squabbles, between forum posters, or between consoles – when you look at the Big Picture, ALL of it is a Sandbox. We have fought and died and held siege for four years and made Conan Exiles what we want it to be, warts and all.
I’m not saying that “kill sandstone” doesn’t exist. My Captain is an example of “Kill All unless Barnaby has some Master Plan.” During the transfer times (since about January, Transfers In were significant and dangerous) Cap and I were pretty ruthless. It was a Papers Please sort of situation where we simply wouldn’t allow lethal transfers. During that time, a Level-60 Sleeper rezzed on/in my physical End Game Base. He was honest, did not steal or drop goodies when he could’ve. We became friends because he’d instantly earned my trust.
There are countless nuances in the PvP playstyle. That’s what makes it so unique. The push and pull, the situational changes in posture, all of it. One last thing too, @Firecrow, I don’t know if you’ve ever been blessed to experience a Server Wipe. That frenetic first couple of months is pure, intoxicating mayhem. After that, it settles down into honor-based ways, usually to allow newcomers a fighting chance.
Forgive me for the paraphrasing. This was simply the thrust I wanted to highlight, and I didn’t want to rudely step on your post. A lot of people come to Officials and think (because they express it so) the place is KOS, and Wipe or Be Wiped. And while this may be true during the first few months of a server, as I said above, when servers settle out into “holding ground,” it is less common now to see all newcomers wiped, or even persecuted.
Furthermore, I held a server for about 10 months. As the Alpha, part of the challenge is “how to let opponents grow enough to be a fun, fair fight” when pop is low. Long Decay Times during Summer help drive people away. So it’s a real juggle of playstyles all the way around.
I would point that that if people choose to KOS everyone around them, that frequently those pesky consequences I mentioned earlier could come back to haunt them.
We used to have a term for people who KOS’d others, called PK for Player Killer. Eventually PKKs emerged, or Player Killer Killers in this case.
On an Official, like ours (aging and spavined), Cap and I instituted a policy of KOS due to the Transfers In. The insult is easily repaired once we’ve had a look at their loot.
Also, even low-level it is quite common to see KOS at first through fourth meetings. When it persists past some point and the non-fighting low-level entity is “ducking” (tea-bagging the empty soil), one of the tops on the server will usually intervene. We do have much less Boy Scouting on Conan though, because once one is branded a Care Bear, their rep is toast.
This one is not offended.
Nor does this one intend offense, but this one disagrees on two very sharp levels.
Hypocrisy:
Hypocrisy is wanting an option and not wanting another to have it. The choice to live in a world where everyone has an option, even if they do not desire to take it, is not hypocrisy. Nor is it PvP on their terms because there is nothing that lets them set server rules standards. If one does not like them, one can just slay and raid them at their convenience. Simply put, the one dictating terms is not a participant.
True PvP:
By your consequence driven definition, this game’s only non-PvP mode is offline. Every inch of land not claimed is claimable by another. Every boss or choice thrall not farmed may be snagged by another and lock one out of that resource until the next spawn period. Hostile architecture, even if within rules, is a near insurmountable obstacle wherein another player can dictate where you can build, especially in a “PvE” mode.
But that aside, this disagrees with what seems to be an ivory tower definition of PvP. This one can scream until the face is blue and the throat cracks that simple (or complex) pattern welded steel is not “Damascus Steel”. But it will not impact the common understanding of the term nor how it is used even in industry (steel work industry, and to an increasingly annoying level historical curation). That this one is correct makes it even more bitter. Damascus Steel is a specific form of pattern welded wootz with nano-tube inclusions blah blah blah no one cares. Just as not all pattern weld is Mokume.
Player vs Player is any situation where the primary deciding factor between success and it’s alternative is the actions of another non administrative (as in not administering the contest, they also shouldn’t be judging it) participant. Anytime one’s actions alone are not sufficient to achieve victory, when one’s performance is measured not against a set standard, but rather whether one is better or worse than another that is PvP. Regardless of whether the consequences are pure ego, monetary prize, or future standing at like or unrelated events. Mario Cart and MMA are equally PvP.
While this one becomes angry when all pattern welded steel is peddled as Damascus, it seems that you are saying that only Damascus is real pattern welded steel. Only those very specific consequence driven situations count as PvP, and on that this one must disagree.
Just as the specific term should not be used to refer to all of the general grouping, so to is the general grouping free of the particulars that denote the specific version.
Often this one chooses to agree to disagree, but on matters of terminology, this one often feels a deep compelling to take the field. Too many words have been manipulated and denatured through the actions of corner case pundits with an agenda other than erudition. It left this one with something of a pet peeve.
That does show one of the weaknesses of PVE doesn’t it? Think of PVE in the sense you have just described as a consequence free environment, one that is more restrictive and regulated. Its like playing basketball, if you’re dribbling down the court and someone steals the ball from you, your only recourse is to steal it back or wait for some other form of turnover. You can’t trip, push, shove, pull, or hold the opponent. However, it can still be quite competitive. And those of us who have played earlier forms of MMOs knows how competitive PVE can be in that sense. Which is why PVP was sometimes preferred so that actions can be inflicted to induce a level of consequence.
This is primarily what you mentioned before that some people wanted. I merely pointed out that PVP does grant that sort of means of inflicting those consequences. But those players should expect the same in return. Even for actions (or inaction) that they may not normally expect there to be consequences for. Logging in for example and creating a character may be the only reason another player needs to engage them. That should be accepted.
This one finds your argument disingenuous and to involve mobile goal posts. This one also finds your condescending pretense of some form of gaming seniority amusing at best.
Hypocrisy is advocating that all players should accept that someone’s existence on a PvP server constitutes casus belli, but then pooh poohing at those who enforce their ethical preferences on others who are on that same PvP server via the same in game method.
You protect predation on noobs while decrying when white knights ride in to prey upon the bullies.
As long as it stays within the context of the consequences in game. To clarify that, if someone acts in a way that you think you should use a PVP measure against, then it should remain as a PVP interaction. Not lead to drama in a forum or a discord channel.
I have personally gone and helped newbies in the past in PVP environments. But I’ve never called out their attackers for it. If they didn’t attack the newbies, then I wouldn’t have had the PVP encounter that ensued. I don’t believe those players were wrong for attacking the newbies. It was simply an action that didn’t align with my goals and standards.
The point here is there is always arbitrary conventions. We’re never going to agree on what those should be. Nor should we. We have our own opinions and our own differences. The great thing about PVP is we have multiple avenues on how to handle those definitions.
We can fight over them. We can compromise over them. We can section out parts of the map as if they were separate little demesnes, each with their different ‘laws’ or codes. We can even put aside differences of opinion for a temporary truce if someone else flagrantly opposes what things we happen to agree on.
But at the end of the day, it should simply be chalked up to PVP and not have hard feelings, real life grudges, and be taken too seriously.
Thanks everyone for such thoughtful replies. This has turned out to be an interesting discussion. I just have a couple of things to add, and then I gotta get back to Siptah while I have a window to play!
This is a neat rephrasing of the problem I want us to solve. I love early game PVP, because it’s the same as endgame PVP in its basics but is nowhere near as time consuming nor punishing in terms of losses. It’s been shown to my satisfaction in various other discussions that what’s happened is this: what is fun game progression in the PVE mode tips PVP dramatically towards the endgame.
What we haven’t worked out is how to fix this. Lots of people maybe don’t want to fix it but I do, so I’m asking the community. I doubt very much that endgame gear will be reduced in power, although that is my preferred solution as a selfish PVPer! So my suggestion here is that we as a community change our mindset. So that instead of thinking of early game raiding as “needlessly cruel” and extending someones grind, we think of it as just as much the point of the game as endgame raiding. It’s all just PVP with different tech. It’s just a fun game and we should laugh about it. I’d also argue that endgame grind sucks far more than early game - it takes way longer. But then, I value my time more than the stats on my virtual gear.
From what you wrote, perhaps you think adding better rewards early would encourage more early game PVP?
Taemien, that was long and interesting, and I liked the Battletech anecdote. I just wanted to say that there’s another way, which is what I’m attempting here. Honour codes don’t have to be created by enforcing an idea. They can be created by a group agreeing that something’s a good idea and abiding by it, and setting examples to influence others. No one has to be right or wrong - we can discuss, and decide on what’s a good enough idea to try for now. That’s how democracies works for example. They’ve existed in real life for thousands of years, and real life is the original PVP (in your sense of PVP). If enough people in a community adopt a code it becomes a norm. I don’t think “don’t raid sandstone” became a norm because it’s somehow objectively right. or someone forced everyone. It’s just what everyone settled on because they wanted to get to the good weapons at the end quicker. I’m the annoying mosquito telling everyone it’s maybe not great for the game
I have not, unfortunately. Though I had some good low-tech caveman fights back in the day. I can see why the honour codes emerge but I think the main effect they’ve had is to make people feel like the earlier stages are just annoying chores to be rushed through.
I guess what I’m trying to say with all if this, is that it would be more fun if we all appreciated the early game instead of just trying to get to the good part. The problem is that the good part makes you invulnerable and deadly to anyone who isn’t there already.
