EDIT: I'm putting this here because there seems to be a slight misunderstanding amongst my readers. I'm not saying in this post that PvP and PvE should never mix. I am referring to special short time events—like The Secret World Anniversary Event currently going on through the 15th of this month—that cause a lot of players who would not otherwise involve themselves in PvP to flood a PvP zone—Fusang in this case—in order to fulfill some PvE objective.
An interesting series of discussions has arisen surrounding the Guardian of Gaia in Fusang Projects.
From Twitter:
It turns out one of the fight mechanics involves the Guardian healing itself from an AoE attack, and few if any players in Klaus' fight group understood how to counter it. It probably didn't help that that PvPers continued to go about their business of killing other players.
"Gee, I'd like to have a major PvE event in the middle of a PvP battlezone," said no MMO player ever. It's always a mistake for the devs to insert a special PvE event into a PvP zone. You please no one. Looking at you this time, Funcom. Live and learn, as they say. But PvP and PvE do not taste great together.
An interesting series of discussions has arisen surrounding the Guardian of Gaia in Fusang Projects.
From Twitter:
((Four hours to get one Lunar Guardian dead. My god.))
— Klaus von Richter (@KlausvonRichter) July 9, 2013
It turns out one of the fight mechanics involves the Guardian healing itself from an AoE attack, and few if any players in Klaus' fight group understood how to counter it. It probably didn't help that that PvPers continued to go about their business of killing other players.
Even in the area where we're fighting the golem people are still killing other factions. Do they not understand that we're supposed to work together on this - this one time????Meanwhile Skye Harris of the TSW community on Google+ has a different perspective:
~~a BtV castmate
[I]t's full of PvE players expecting a PvE fight . . . whinging in chat that they were killed by other players (it IS a PvP zone after all). . . Personally though, I cannot wait till this ill-though-out event is over and Fusang is rid of people who want to camp a PvP zone without actually PvP'ing.I find myself agreeing somewhat with the sentiments of both PvPers and PvEers. I only want to get the Lore object to complete the achievement. I could care less about a 4-hour lagfest where I'm hindering and being hindered by other players, as well.
~~from comments to my post on G+
Aye. That's my biggest problem on the whole event, too: that not only somebody in the team failed to comprehend the players that badly, but that it even gets forwarded through the team and accpted.
ReplyDeleteNext to that, i consider those who can complain about how things turn out in the PvP zone to be lucky. According to the patch notes, the sign up to the PvP zones was fixed yesterday. If there was a fix, i was unable to locate it, things worked the same way as always the last days: sign up for Fusagn at login, play for a few hours, log off without Fusagn ever popping. No idea what yesterdays signup fix did actually fix, but the problem still exists.
I guess this lore will be the first, one and only lore in the game which i fail to get, despite being active several evenings during the event and trying hard to complete it, but the game just disallows me to do so.
I think if people are spending upwards of 4 hours in the zone—to which there finite instances—the queue will back up quickly. I spent the evening in the queue as well. At least I can do other things in the meantime, like try for green eyes.
DeleteYeah, I'm irked by the lore piece being there more than anything. Not that I'm anywhere near completing the lore achievements, which is why I'm personally happy enough to let that particular piece go. But I know plenty of people who care, and the way the event is now, it's really not fair to them. At least last I heard they took the boss out of the achievement, so now I have no reason to go in there.
ReplyDeleteI don't actually mind so much that the boss is in a PvP zone for the PvP players though; from the beginning, people on PvP servers have been dealing with stuff like ganking and competition while trying to do world bosses in MMOs, and some people even like the challenge. But damn, Funcom, keep stuff like collecting achievements out of it why don't you!
As I mentioned to Winin on G+, it's not so much the routine PvE mixed with PvP that irks me, it's the "special event" PvE. I had a similar problem with the Holiday PvP achievements in WoW, though at least those were actually PvP oriented (e.g. Kill players while under the influence of N.E.R.D.S.).
DeleteI quite like PvE events in PvP areas and vice versa. I can think, just off the top of my head, of two MMOs where I've seen that happen and work really well.
ReplyDeleteIn Rift PvP is a flag-set, with some complications over how that defaults. When I used to do Stillmoor zone events regularly there would always be some players flagged for PvP intentionally, some accidentally (just healing someone who was flagged would flag you, for example) and obviously lots of PvE players who weren't flagged and stayed that way. That in itself was loads of fun, but at the end of the event even the players who'd been co-operating often flagged up for a massive PvP firefight. I loved it.
Then in GW2's WvW, which is a non-consensual PvP environment, you have several gigantic PvE events like the Grub and the Oakheart Spirit thing, which take a hell of a lot of killing. Sometimes if one of those is up all three factions will pile into it with the inevitable collateral damage sparking inter-faction PvP fights, while other times one faction will try to use the PvE monster as a weapon, dragging it to enemy territory.
Of course neither of those happens in an instanced Battleground. As for Fusang, I think I'll be skipping that one. I can't actually find many of the other Lore items anyway so it's no major loss.
Your examples are routine events, not special, as is the case with the anniversary event Golems here. I would also make the argument that GW2's WvW is thoroughly consensual and instanced, since it not something a player can wander into by accident. It's something you have to enter through a user interface rather than through a zone portal.
DeleteKilling the bosses in Alterac Valley could also be considered PvE mixing with PvP. However, they were not only a regular part of the battleground, the death of either was the win condition.
In effect, the community yesterday has shown to be better and more mature than the developers on this topic. As of yesterday, signing up for Fusang actually works, so i did join to collect the lore and kill the guardian.
ReplyDeleteThe community was aware of the high number of PvE players. Instead of exploiting the "easy prey", which anybody without PvP experience clearly is they granted free passage to anybody heading for the center. (With the warning, if you move towards any other objective, not related to the event, you'd of course be fair game. ) This info was repeated in general chat, and almost all people stuck to it.
Indeed when running to the center, one player did attack me, but he quickly was disposed off. As he clearly broke the temporary truce, his faction did not support him, so the stream of people running towards the center (where i even think some experienced PvP-players worked as escort for the PvE-people, although i can't have hard evidence to support that) was able to fend him off without losses. Thus i was able to get the lore without any issues.
Technical problems prevented me to score on the guardian. Players of all three factions sat on the ground (which was a way to show that you are not attacking anybody) in the center, near the bosses spawned point. Unfortunately my client crashed shortly before the boss supposedly was spawning and i had a weird effect when trying to enter Fusang again. I was caught in a loop, loading screen telling me i am on way to Fusang, when the loading screen was over i was in the Shadowy Forests again, and a second later the game noticed i was not in Fusang but am supposed to be there, so it gave me the loading screen again. I would guess that the zone had too high load, and with Fusang being the one zone which never has duplicates, the games infrastructure just was not able to handle me correctly any more after the crash. Playing was possible again after killing my client, but in the meanwhile the boss was killed, so i didn't bother to enter Fusang any more.
Still my kudos to the great community again, treating each otheir fair and with respect and thus compensating for the developers bad design decission on this part of the event.
That's a great story. I'm glad to hear that you at least had a good experience from the player interaction angle.
DeleteAye. Now, take a guess what would have happened in some other game, e.g. EVE or Darkfall, in such a situation? I really appreciate TSWs community a lot.
ReplyDeleteWell, as seen in Skye's comment above, not every PvPer thinks PvEers have any business at all in Fusang. But yes, in my prior post regarding the positives of this event, I mentioned how great this TSW community really is.
Deletei would like to think they, while maybe not the perfect flavour combination are something else rather obscure. With any flavour there are always going to be people who enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteThere are games that have work and do work with pve and pvp mixed together.. I actually think certain bigger events like this can work well as they create conflict and interesting encounters. But of course this is for a game designed for it where all the players in game, or on that server are aware of the rules.
I'm all for interesting encounters and conflict between characters, but the conflict between players I can do without.
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