PvP Currency

Alban

Most RPG's these days, MMO's in particular, have a form of PvP currency. WoW calls them honor points, but pretty much every game has them, and you use them to buy gear or items for your character.

I was thinking something like this could benefit Lusternia, both to encourage more PvP and give PvP'ers something to strive for.

I think the biggest PvP point rewards would to go winners of arena games like FFA and wargames. This would give people an incentive to use the queues for these, and also prevent the open world PvP fatigue that can occur from constant raiding. Large group PvP is also less skill based than arena games.

So, the things you would get points for

1. Killing someone (no points if opponent is < 10 levels below you, also no points if the kill gives the victim vengeance)

2. Participating in an arena game

3. Winning an arena game

#3 should give the most, 1 and 2 around the same amount, maybe a bit more for #1.

Then, with these points, you would be able to buy things in a special shop that just accepts that currency.

I was thinking that the majority of the items would be on the cheaper side, but offer temporary boosts. The point of the shop isn't to compete with artifacts that you would buy with credits, though a few expensive things that would take a longer length of time saving wouldn't be bad.

Some ideas:

1. Potions that give health, mana, ego blessing. Perhaps have tiers of strength that last longer periods of time

2. Potions that give Estarra favours

3. Potions that give a crit bonus

4. Potions that give XP bonus

5. Teasure chests that function like booster packs in a CCG - could have ikons, curios, credits, gold, coins, etc.

      5a. Could have different packs for different things. Like, an all curio pack, all ikon pack, etc.

6. Items that function like "skins" in other games - add ambient look, teleport, enter/exit messages.

7. Temporary race change potions

8. Props to set up in manses - could be styled to reflect their PvP nature, like an action figure of the person who buys it or a trophy. 

9. Let you rent certain artifacts (similar to how the artifact bandits work)

10. Runes that change the way certain items look, like weapons, staffs, daggers, etc. Basically let you skin your class weapons with preset descriptions.

11. Arena announcers - when you kill someone in the arena it would broadcast to everyone else in the arena with a stylized/colored text message.

I don't particularly like the idea of offering items that give damage buffs or resistances. I don't really like the arms race that those sort of things create. Player 1 buys new damage buff, player 2 buys resistance buff, we're essentially back to where we were before.

I don't think most of these rewards would impact game balance much at all, and would give people a reason to queue up for arenas. They also feed into other aspects of the game, like curios, ikons, or trying out artis that might lead to a person buying it. Personally, if I knew I could unlock things like this, the first thing I'd do upon logging in would be to queue up.

Alban

I actually hit the enter key while typing in tags and it submitted my post, which I can't edit. So hopefully I didn't make a ton of spelling and grammar mistakes - I didn't get a chance to proof read!

Ssaliss

A couple of thoughts here...

One: Only give people these rewards if it's in the arena. We don't need to give people reasons to grief; even loosely based limitations like "have to be within 10 levels" or "can't give vengeance" will, in the end, not be enough. Levels means very little for PvP; I'm level 100, and I'd die to a wet paper bag. Second, people bashing tend to get enemy status to those places; this would just give people a reason to actively hunt everyone bashing down.

Two: We don't need a case where the stronger get even stronger. If you're strong, that should be its own reward, we don't need to give you extra boosts just because you are already strong enough.

Alban

Yeah, just giving it to people in the arena is fine with me. 

As for your other point, none of the item rewards I listed make people stronger, other than the health/mana/ego blessing, which is something you can get a lot of different ways.

I was very explicit about that - I even said I didn't like the idea of damage/resistent buffs.

Ssaliss

Oh, and just to make sure (I'm sure it was your intent, but better safe than sorry): With arena games, I assume you mean everything but duels? Because if you get honor for duels, well, that's just opening for abuse. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying "only big arena games in the Klangratch Tournies".

Alban

Yeah, you could do it just for games started via the queue system.

Ssaliss

Even HME buffs, or Estarra TFs, or a crit bonus is making people stronger. Yes, they're available in other ways, but that's no reason to make them more available. I'd not be opposed to seeing flavor items as honor rewards though; perhaps an honors line, or the manse items you described, etc.

Kio

I like the idea of having actual, tangible rewards for winning arena events that aren't just achievement rewards.

However, we don't really need to add anything like this when we could just expand on what Lusternia already has.

What if winning a public FFA (that is, in the Klangratch Tournies) meant power was given to your nexus?  The amount of power could even be variable depending on the amount of participants.

The same would go for wargames.  For every person entered, an amount of power is added to the prize pool.  The pot would be split among the winners and transfered to their respective nexi.  However, only winners who are left surviving get their share.  So, if a team has three members, each surviving member of that team would get 1/3 of the power pot transfered to their nexus.  Those who died would get nothing, but that would not mean their teammates get more.  This encourages better teamwork (for example, saving a teammate from an instant kill) while discouraging killing off your unnecessary  teammates for a bigger prize.

Karlach

I'm with Ssaliss on the fear that this will only make the strong stronger. Between skills and artifacts there's already a signficant gap for people getting into PK, this would just expand that further.

Alban

No, it wouldn't, because the stuff I listed doesn't make you stronger. You can eliminate the TF one if you want, but I trust the admin would do a good job balancing the cost of it so that you couldn't have it up 24/7. 

But yeah, everything else I listed would not make people stronger, and most of them are temporary, consumable things anyway.

Adding power to your nexus isn't going to get many people excited. For the most part people play RPG's to build their own character.

The idea behind the system and the rewards is giving people variety and toys. A temporary crit boost, for example, makes you a more efficient basher, it does not make you more powerful than someone else.

Alban

Also, it would probably have the long term affect of making the weak stronger, because with an incentive to actually participate in PvP stuff they would gradually become better at it.

The #1 factor to becoming stronger at PvP in an IRE game is practice. There's a certain amount of power you can buy, but without experience you will never be good.

Karlach

TFs, gold, curios, credits, coins. They all add to the "strong getting stronger" ethos, same with H/M/E blessings.

If it was just the purely flavour/look stuff then sure. But people don't need extra help in combat when they're at the top of the food chain.

Xenthos

I am not really a fan of rewarding "mindless" PvP; it is a roleplaying game, after all. What's the logic behind getting rewarded for teaming up with a band of your enemies in a wargames? Sure, you can bandaid an answer, but in the end it's always going to feel gimmicky.

You can also make the argument that there have been a number of gimmicky things recently (such as curios), but that in and of itself does not justify the addition of more.

In the end this system would most likely just boil down to people farming it for rewards. It might encourage a few people to pick up PvP, but I would posit those same individuals would have picked it up anyways even without this rewards system.

Caerulo

Aren't there already arena rewards in the form of achievements?

Elanorwen

I'm not entirely certain what the point of a PvP currency is. If it is all about trying to talk more people into joining PvP combat, there should be plenty of incentive provided with RP reasons. Less power gained by delivering essence, assisting loyal denizens that are being murdered, power quests or even major abilities of certain classes not working, etc, etc. If that can't talk people into fighting, I don't see how a potion of h/m/e blessing will. Plus, you need to also realize that it is not incredibly often that a specific individual will get a kill, much less the one that just recently started fighting.

That said, as a combatant and a credit hog myself, none of the rewards listed in the original post spark any kind of interest in me. If I feel like it, I can get an h/m/e blessing in 30-45 minutes, and that is pretty much the one thing that I might barely be interested in. The fluff, especially, holds absolutely no appeal. Special enter/leave/teleport messages? I'm a demi, I already have those things. An arena announcer for when I kill someone? Why? What good will that accomplish when there's already deathsight. An XP bonus tonic? Again, why? I could just go and grab a Harmony blessing and a set of lips and not have to bother farming anything to get there. Any kind of credit reward or a reward that might lead to credits (I.e. coins/curios) will just mean that everyone will get griefed as soon as they poke their nose away from Prime. Would you feel excited to get hunted down while leading a novice on their planar quest? Never mind the part where some of us pay attention to who the non-coms are and don't jump down their throats either. With such a reward system in place, the gloves will be very much off and even the nicest of us will just start bashing on anyone that is not from a friendly org. Don't believe me? Try and offer 10 credits to anyone who kills you without involving vengeance, then pop up to Astral during prime time and see how quickly it gets claimed.

Alban

First of all I think you missed this would just be for tournaments, not open world PvP. I would edit that out of my original post, but I'm too "inept," as the forum says. This reason also counters your first point about "RP" reasons - this is for arena games.

So what you all are saying is this will only serve to make the strongest people stronger, but the strongest people don't care about the rewards. 

>_>

I feel like mission accomplished with how I envisioned the idea, then. As a person who is not a credit hog, but more of a mid level person who has some artifacts and some resources, but not inexhaustible ones, the rewards listed sound pretty cool to me.  Like, the announcer thing. There isn't a point to it "power" wise - that's precisely the point. It's just funny and cool. If you think people don't care about this sort of thing I advise you to check out League of Legends or Dota2 - the entire business model is based on buying things for looks that don't provide a competitive advantage. Dota even sells announcer packs, which is where I got the idea, heh.

If the only thing you care about is doing things to be more powerful than the next guy, then no, this isn't for you. It's for people who find enjoyment in other aspects of the game, and would enjoy doing other things to earn it other than bashing. Gold is basically PvE points. 

As for achievements...yeah, those are cool, but only happen once. There's no reason to keep going back, except to get the super, super long term ones, which are such a distant reward it won't motivate most people.

@Xenthos:

1. Tournaments with prize rewards are a pretty old concept. This doesn't even require a "band-aid" explanation...combat tournaments are not a foreign concept even in the real world, and continue today in the form of modern sports. The game already has a "combat" ranking in it. It already has the concept of these tournaments. Why would you team up with a group of enemies? For great glory, honor, fame, and fortune.

2. The rewards offered are far more than the types of rewards generally offered to PvP-ers, which I think would encourage people who wouldn't normally get into PvP to try it. Things like ikons, manse toys, etc. The critical factor here is that you would get PvP points even if you didn't win the tournament, just for participating, same as how WoW battlegrounds or League IP works. So even if I know I'm going to lose every time, I can still queue up just to earn some points. You could also earn more points depending on how many kills you got during the event, or how long you stayed alive (to a point). So this would encourage people to actually try to do the best that they could. It would also be really cool if some form of assist system could be put in place, like if someone dies within 10 seconds of you using an ability on them, you get credit for an assist which would increase the # of points gained. I don't know how hard that would be to integrate into Lusternia's code, though.

3. Farming rewards - that's the entire point of the system. It could be argued that's the entire point of any RPG, including Lusternia. To farm rewards for your avatar. It's why we play. 

As evidenced by Elanorwen's post, you don't really have to worry about power players gaming the system, and again it would be up to the admins to balance the cost of rewards versus the efficiency of getting these points.

You could say that the joy of PvP should be it's own reward - which is a nice idea, but obviously not valid enough in practice. So much time and energy goes into Lusternia's PvP, it would be nice to encourage as many players as possible to participate, and if you want that than the system needs to be gamified (this is a game, after all.) And since a large portion of Lusternia's business model is buying some form of power, the more people who want to do PvP, the more people who will want to buy those things, the more money Lusternia can make, and the better Lusternia can be.

Kagato

The biggest issue in my opinion with this is the simple fact that you are comparing games that have player bases of several million people to a game that has an average peak of maybe 100 members or a little over, depending on the time of the year and if there is any big events going on.  Things like "more points for more kills or how long you stay alive" still favors those who have been around long enough to be able to get enough credits to purchase the appropriate artifacts or being rich enough to drop the money needed to buy them.

Personally I'm of the mindset 'It ain't broke, no need to fix it." - If anything, add fresh honor lines, maybe tweak the achievements since most of the arena-based ones give +XP boosts for 24 hours at present.

Alban

I think it is broken.

Again, does this benefit people who are better at PvP? Yes, absolutely. There is no way around that, it's a PvP system. The better people should get better rewards. That's not a problem, because just by playing and competing you are still earning something. I don't see how the number of players is relevant.

The point is not to make a super homogenized system where everyone is on an even playing field and the newbiest of newbies earns the same rewards as an experienced combatant. No one would play that, because then what's the point of getting better?

Karlach

At the same time any rewards should be purely cosmetic and not offer any in game advantage. Customised enter/entrance/teleport/look/typecasts/attack messages sure, manse decorations? Sure, and personally I love the idea of arena announcers, I'd go one further and have an NPC herald ent that follows you around and belts out an introduction whenever you greet someone with a custom greet emote.

Anything that gives a player or org further advantage than the game already rewards the better combative side however is a bad idea in my opinion.

Alban

All the ideas I posted were food for though, so I don't really care if they get changed up. I do think the h/m/e blessing is fine though, since it's so easy to get otherwise. Xp/crit bonuses don't really negatively affect other people.

I actually can't remember - do TF's from different gods stack? If they do, then yeah, probably want to avoid that, unless it's pretty expensive.

And yeah, you're getting the idea. Herald ent is really neat.

Also, when I said "broken" was probably a strong word. Arena tournaments and the queue system just isn't as good as it could be. Right now it's very rarely used.

Xenthos

What do you mean when you say that the queue system is rarely used? I see it kick off multiple times even during the short window each evening that I am online.

Alban

Since I've started playing I think I've seen it go off once. I'm usually on 7 - 10 pm EST, and on the weekends pretty frequently. Also sees like a lot of the time the trend is to get enough people to queue up to pop the queue and then a few actually join.

Kagato

Alban said:

I actually can't remember - do TF's from different gods stack? If they do, then yeah, probably want to avoid that, unless it's pretty expensive.

Yes they do.

I second what Xenthos said - every time I'm in the basin I see calls for FFA and other gamees go out on a regular basis.

Elanorwen

Very rarely used? Must be some other MUD we're talking about. I've seen wargames/FFAs going on for hours on end... literally 2+ hours with nothing but repeated Wargames/FFAs happening as soon as one finishes. Not sure how that's broken. Additionally, more often than not, you'll see the same people winning said Wargames/FFAs. What additional rewards will accomplish? You'll get certain people to join the queues for a bit to get the shiny stuff and then it'll go back to the way it was. You won't suddenly end up with Wargames with 15+ people on each team or FFAs with 30+ people in them.

The enter/look/teleport/typecast customs, umh... if we're making special ones for single individuals, how about we look into getting at least a couple for each existing guild first? Arena announcers are all fine and dandy... but this isn't a fast-paced action game where someone will be shouting things like "KILLING SPREE!" or "HOLY SH*T!" when you get a kill streak of 10 or whatever. The whole point of it being exciting comes from the fact that everyone in the game hears it... and it dates back to Unreal Tournament. In fact, the original DotA even used the sound files that were in Unreal Tournament. It tends to be even more fun when playing something of the "capture the flag" variety, hearing one of your base defenders getting a 20-kill streak, for instance, tends to be rather inspiring. In a text game, though? The effect will be quite likely lost as that will just be extra fluff that just scrolls across your screen during a fight. Plenty of people actually go as far as to gag stuff that they consider of low importance in a fight. An announcer is not low importance... an announcer is of NO importance, so imagine exactly where it will end up. It might be shiny for the first couple of times, but I'm willing to bet that after that, everyone will just be... 'meh' and it's just coding resources being thrown away for fluff and shinies that will rarely get used.

Kio

Alban said:

Since I've started playing I think I've seen it go off once. I'm usually on 7 - 10 pm EST, and on the weekends pretty frequently. Also sees like a lot of the time the trend is to get enough people to queue up to pop the queue and then a few actually join.

During my 6pm-12amish window when I don't get off work early, there's almost always at least one event. On Thursday and Friday evenings, there are routinely three or four at a minimum.

If you want people to queue, ask on market. I haven't heard anyone get I trouble for it, and it generally starts on up.

Xenthos

And now that I have a little more time to respond I will delve into the rest of your post a bit.

Yes, combat rankings exist. They are also -incredibly broken-. They are a prime example of a mechanic that is farmed mercilessly for the honours line and otherwise ignored. The people who win it do so not by competing but instead by refusing to try against anything but sure wins (okay, maybe not all the time, but a great deal of the time).

This is not a good or valid reason for introducing more. In fact, it is a far better argument to do exactly the opposite; delete combat rankings. You get a line, but as far as the playerbase is concerned that line is meaningless. It conveys zero fame and zero glory.

Beyond that, Lusternia is not built around the individual but instead around the organization / working together to achieve greater things. There is no real honour or fame to be garnered by working with those directly opposed to you, so you would indeed have to band-aid a reason in (or just say "woops what roleplay, we don't care about that any more").

PS: The queues are used so much currently that I actually wish there was a way to turn them off. They are just a bit annoying when they keep firing off back to back.

Dys

The only PvP currency is tears.

Nihta

Dys said:

The only PvP currency is tears.

And whine*!

Kagato

Nihta said:

Dys said:

The only PvP currency is tears.

And whine*!

You mean that they don't get cheese to go with their whine?  >_>