Yes, which works in a game like WoW where PvP means literally nothing and is merely a mini-game that provides some distraction when you’re bored of questing, raiding and grinding. Games like Eve, ShadowBane, and most old MUSHs uses PvP to produce dynamic content for the game – the ability to turn that functionality “off” on demand because you just want to strip mine some rocks in 0.0 and not be bothered defeats the purpose of the game. We’re talking about two entirely different beasts when discussing Eve vs WoW.

““there is simply no such thing as player-vs-player strife” is probably the opposite of ATITD’s design. The game is designed to promote strife, and various events have worked to instill it where it did not previously exist.”

This of a game renowned for being “THE collaborative MMO”. Yes, there is some measure of strife between factions in ATITD, but please do provide me with some examples other than simple “our city’s better than yours”, and mechanisms by which characters can find an outlet.
Eve has competition over resources, that have a rather lengthy respawn period. In ATITD, trees “restore” all their “wood” resource every 60 seconds.
Eve has competition over system sovereignty. ATITD has minor bickering over “you built your house too close to mine, it blocks out the sunlight and makes my front lawn look dreary”.
Eve has competition over new tech and research. In ATITD, once a tech has been unlocked at a University (at great expense of the people involved) the University freely teaches the skill to anyone who chooses to make the pilgrimage, even a Deep South Egyptian with a different skin tone and accent.
Eve has lore, and considerable tension (even war) between player races. ATITD has no lore, or features even really a hint as to what “roleplay” is. ATITD simply has no character identity at all, unless you choose to make one up, which is very uncommon and considered “weird”.
Most of all, Eve has a method by which to deliver swift death from the barrel of an artillery cannon. I don’t even recall if you can make rude gestures at each other in ATITD.

Don’t get me wrong – I like ATITD a lot, and its absence of PvP allows for some interesting mechanics, but by and large what turned me off the game was the drudgery (similar to Eve’s mining) mixed with the predictability of being left entirely alone if I so chose, not being harassed or interrupted, my resources being available when I needed them, most actions being so predetermined that I often felt more like a scripting language runtime engine rather than a player. As I said, in Eve Online I have to constantly look over my shoulder and plan ahead, an artifact of the unbridled PvP gameplay which makes the game worth playing, IMHO.

All in all I think I’m most partial to WoW’s implementation in non-PvP servers: Want to PvP? Then just /pvp. Don’t want to? Then don’t /pvp and don’t walk into enemy areas. Quite simple to grasp.

But if you don’t like the large scale fights, do something else in the game. The sandbox is plenty large enough to support the myriad of other game mechanics EVE presents to us players.

In a nutshell, what is presented is a mechanism for allowing “PvP” and “PvE” folks (although they’re described using different terminology in the document) to co-exist on the same server and in the same game world. It is likely the absolutely best attempt ever made to make that happen. Given the immense ambition of the system, it succeeded beyond expectations.

But it didn’t succeed – frankly, it was a mess. Staff members spent an ever-increasing chunk of their time trying to sort out various unintended side effects of the system – such as “I’m Fate 2, but a Fate 4 killed my girlfriend, who is Fate 3 but consented at the time – but I don’t consent, because I’m Fate 2, and I want my girlfriend back, because I can’t sleep at night knowing that my character’s girlfriend character died, so that scene has to be retconned” and blah blah blah. It is simply extremely difficult, even with the best intentions and system, to keep consent-only players happy while trying to ensure that the populace can perform actions on their own without constant baby sitting, and preserving some degree of suspension of disbelief and plotline integrity.

Personally, I think Eve does a great job of allowing non-consent PvP types and consent-only types to co-exist, due to the mechanisms of the game such as 0.0 vs Empire space, corporation and alliances for mutual support, the relatively large possibilities of station/POS-play, warp stabilizer modules and so on. I believe that if an MMO will cater to more people than a small group of friends, such mechanisms are a prerequisite since most people fall in somewhere on the scale of uber-sensitive carebear and full-scale PvP griefer, not often at one extreme or the other.

I have never attacked a player-owned ship or structure in Eve, and my alliance has been at war multiple times – during those times of war, I’ve been limiting myself to Empire or station based activities, I’ve been extra careful, and I’ve had escorts available. The few times I’ve been attacked, it’s been because of my own inexperience and/or stupidity, or because I’ve taken a high-payoff risk. I have never lost a ship while still planning and thinking ahead, though I have lost my fair share. To me, that’s a pretty good indicator of Eve’s mechanisms for handling player interactions – certainly more appealing to me than for example ATITD’s or LOTRO’s “there is simply no such thing as player-vs-player strife”.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070209152536/http://unreason.com/jfp/fate/

Read, and tremble in fear.

I was listening to a podcast tonight and in it the host was complaining about getting ganked by high level players. His response? I can’t wait until I am high level so I can go gank some low levels and get even.

Perfect example, the circle continues. Someone pisses you off? Make sure you come back later and piss off some other new player. Dumb.

I’m not much of a PvP player, but the curious thing is that if I’m a carebear, I’m a carebear on MMOs only. I enjoyed and had lots of fun playing straight up PvP games like UT and RTCW with a group of friends and later on semi-competitively in ad hoc leagues. I had no problem there, I enjoyed the action and the PvP thrill a lot.

But I can’t bring myself to do it in MMOs. It turns me off immediately and I think it has a lot to do with VanHemlock’s point: The balance of risk/reward for PvP in MMOs is generally out of whack for a lot of people. For a lot of folks like me, it’s just a couple of notches past acceptable, or past what I can bring myself to bear in the name of ‘fun’.

When I died, creamed to hell and back by other players in UT or RTCW, it was not an issue. I accepted it as part of the game, and moved on. There was no loss of anything other than tactical/positional momentum for the team and that was it. Even if you are being griefed in online FPSs, sure it’s annoying, but it’s a minor inconvenience at best. Things are fast-paced enough that a griefing/camping situation doesn’t last long often.

PvP/Griefing on MMOs is generally the opposite. With some deaths + the inevitable griefing and corpse camping that follows… a player can stand to lose hours of progress sometimes. Not to mention how pised off players can get when this PvP is non-consensual. You know how it goes, you get the idea.

I decided a few years back that, as a matter of principle, I wouldn’t play games that didn’t offer at least the option of consensual PvP. The only game I broke this promise for was EVE, briefly, because I wanted to check it. It’s a good game, the framework is there, but the rampant PvP just ruins it for me. I refuse to lose hours or even days of work because someone else needed to get a boner out of killing me for no reason other than killing me. I realize that there’s the thrill for a lot of people… hunting and being hunted, with no recourse for when the crap hits the fan one way or another. If that’s where their fun is coming from, I think that’s cool. I really do.

But it’s just not for me. PvP and PvE people just don’t mix. And games that don’t acknowledge this, to me, simply lack the vision and the balls to offer players a good way out in the shape of a consensual solution. I won’t play them.

Non-consensual PvP is not hardcore, it’s stupid. I don’t know why we even keep the concept around. IRL we call it bullying. I wonder how many of us geeks here (let’s face it, that’s who we are), support N-C PvP but hated it when they were bullied at school. Repressed feelings surfacing up anyone? ;)