The Future of PvP 2

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'Let's put chilli on the menu!'
'This chilli is way too hot.'
'Look, only a few people are eating our chilli.'
'Hey, manager, could you fix this chilli?'
'No, we have to prioritise all our other dishes. Only a few of you are eating the chilli.'
'But the chilli is really hot.'
'Sorry, this wasn't a chilli restaurant when it opened.'
'But I like chilli. Could you just make it a little less hot?'
'Hey, are the managers catering to those obnoxious chilli eaters again?'
'I hear they nerfed the pizza because of the chilli. I hate chilli eaters. I ate chilli once and it was horrible.'


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That is a damn good way to sum it all up.

To Cathulu:

Honestly, how many people PvP with ALL of their toons, and how many players have alternate characters?

The PvE grind will always be the biggest part of this game due it being necessary to get ready to PvP. Not surpriseingly you found that few toons in PvE areas have PvP ranks.

Then there are the toons that had a high rank, but lost it due to time (they degrade you know) because many people are put off with the bugs in PvP. So there is again ANOTHER reason that PvP rankings are low due to something other than a lack of interest in PvP.

This means that your assumption that pvp ranks in a PvE zone have any meaning, lacks supporting evidence.

I PvP with ALL of my characters, even my MM that has an RP build >.>

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'Let's put chilli on the menu!'
'This chilli is way too hot.'
'Look, only a few people are eating our chilli.'
'Hey, manager, could you fix this chilli?'
'No, we have to prioritise all our other dishes. Only a few of you are eating the chilli.'
'But the chilli is really hot.'
'Sorry, this wasn't a chilli restaurant when it opened.'
'But I like chilli. Could you just make it a little less hot?'
'Hey, are the managers catering to those obnoxious chilli eaters again?'
'I hear they nerfed the pizza because of the chilli. I hate chilli eaters. I ate chilli once and it was horrible.'

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best. post. ever.

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'Let's put chilli on the menu!'
'This chilli is way too hot.'
'Look, only a few people are eating our chilli.'
'Hey, manager, could you fix this chilli?'
'No, we have to prioritise all our other dishes. Only a few of you are eating the chilli.'
'But the chilli is really hot.'
'Sorry, this wasn't a chilli restaurant when it opened.'
'But I like chilli. Could you just make it a little less hot?'
'Hey, are the managers catering to those obnoxious chilli eaters again?'
'I hear they nerfed the pizza because of the chilli. I hate chilli eaters. I ate chilli once and it was horrible.'

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That's simply awesome.

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'Let's put chilli on the menu!'
'This chilli is way too hot.'
'Look, only a few people are eating our chilli.'
'Hey, manager, could you fix this chilli?'
'No, we have to prioritise all our other dishes. Only a few of you are eating the chilli.'
'But the chilli is really hot.'
'Sorry, this wasn't a chilli restaurant when it opened.'
'But I like chilli. Could you just make it a little less hot?'
'Hey, are the managers catering to those obnoxious chilli eaters again?'
'I hear they nerfed the pizza because of the chilli. I hate chilli eaters. I ate chilli once and it was horrible.'

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That's simply awesome.

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QFT SO MUCH IT HURTS!!!

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Just becaus there is only 2-4% of people in PvP zones, doesn't mean that they are the entire makeup of PvPers in the game.

If PvP problems are fixed, I think that the PvP crowd will grow. Judging by this post alone, there is interest in doing this.

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so double it, triple it, (which would be a far stretch on the two servers I play on...) it still represents a minority of what the player base is here for, and thus (which I agree with) not significant resources going into it. Its a business, they are doing what makes sense to sustain it, which co-incidently makes the majority of the player base happy.

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so double it, triple it, (which would be a far stretch on the two servers I play on...) it still represents a minority of what the player base is here for

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You're not getting it. Enough with the segregation of players into 'pvp' and 'not pvp'. It simply doesn't WORK like that.

Yes, there is a hard core of 'I will never ever PvP' people out there. But that says absolutely nothing about all the players who PvP casually, or dip into it, or PvP part time, or who otherwise evade that neat, silly, non-representative segregation.

PvP is a FEATURE, not a side that you take.

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What percentage of current players do you think are heavily into PvP, and how do you derive that data?

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I'm not even going to try to answer that one, because I don't think it's relevant. You don't have to be 'heavily' into PvP to make use of the feature.

You wouldn't ask me what percentage of the player base was heavily into bases or heavily into playing Dominators, and yet both of these features are flawed, and need fixing, and will most likely get it.

Judge how much a feature needs attention by how broken it is, not by how many people are using it.

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When you put money into something 5 times in a row, and fail all 5 times

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Fail?

The Arena isn't much used, true. But the Arena doesn't WORK right. It's bugged, and tournaments don't work, and you can't bet on matches, and IIRC the special Arena badges aren't even functioning.

As for the other zones 'failing' - they are being used, currently, DESPITE their flaws. That in itself suggests not that PvP is unsupported by the players, but that there are players still willing to PvP in CoX even though so much is wrong with it. Now, stop and consider how many more would participate if it worked as it should.

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None of those ways has managed to capture more then a handful of people.

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Did you see the test of RV when there was auto-levelling to 40? PvP still draws plenty of support, WHEN IT WORKS.

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Most people who might come to PvP couldn't care less about that.

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And many of the people who would otherwise be consistently PvPing DO care about it. What's the sense in alienating those of your playerbase who WANT to PvP, but find the feature too bugged to use?

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the only ones who will enjoy a fixed arena are 1-5% of the total game population.

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You're seriously wrong. You are basing your figures on a snapshot, and on your own inferences. You have no way of knowing how many people

- pvp a lot of the time
- pvp some of the time
- pvp very casually, but still appreciate the presence of pvp in COX
- would pvp a lot, but don't because of bugs
- want to try pvp but are scared off
- want to try pvp but don't know how to start

You're mistakenly assuming a static target market - a fixed percentage of the player base 'who PvP' - and not seeing PvP as what it is, which is an optional FEATURE of the game, and as deserving of attention as any other feature, be it task forces, Dominators, badges, or PvE content.

In short, you have the situation back to front. It's not that the PvPers are a small percentage of the population and so PvP doesn't warrant attention - it's about maintaining a feature that was introduced.

Don't try to divide up the player base into 'pvpers' and 'non-pvpers'. That's as arbitrary as dividing them into tankers and non-tankers, or base-builders and non-base-builders, or badge-positive and badge-indifferent. See the PvP features as FEATURES, which may or may not be used by players, and work from there. That gives a much clearer picture of what's happening and why.

Cryptic INSTIGATED PvP features in this game, and because of that, they have a responsibility to maintain them. It's not throwing good money after bad, it's patching up what was broken when you put it in.

Just look at RV, for heaven's sake. A lot about RV is magnificent, but consider how it actually plays out - you do the best by NOT winning, and putting off victory, until you have 1000 points! (And the temp power is mediocre, and it has only one use!) Where's the incentive to actually win? What's the point of introducing a PvP zone where the basic concept is so wonky that people don't play to win there?

Look at bases! Why are the rooms so big and airy? Because bases were designed primarily as a player-built PvP map. The Items of Power only existed to give people something to PvP over. And base raids are STILL borked.

Oh, and every time you get a salvage drop, think of PvP, because half the salvage recipes are for PvP items. Turrets, defences, widgets to rebuild broken stuff, defence screens. Now tell me that PvP is irrelevant.

It's all very well for Lighthouse to point out that this was developed as a PvE game, but you know, it wasn't US who put the PvP features in, it was the Devs, and since they opted to do that, we're well within our rights to ask them to make those features work.

Frankly, it doesn't matter how many people you or I might think PvP in this game. That's not important. What's important is that the Devs take care of what they introduced.

'Let's put chilli on the menu!'
'This chilli is way too hot.'
'Look, only a few people are eating our chilli.'
'Hey, manager, could you fix this chilli?'
'No, we have to prioritise all our other dishes. Only a few of you are eating the chilli.'
'But the chilli is really hot.'
'Sorry, this wasn't a chilli restaurant when it opened.'
'But I like chilli. Could you just make it a little less hot?'
'Hey, are the managers catering to those obnoxious chilli eaters again?'
'I hear they nerfed the pizza because of the chilli. I hate chilli eaters. I ate chilli once and it was horrible.'

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Well said. There is interest in PvP out there. The PvP in this game has some great potential, If only the devs would give it the time of day. People will not quit the game because they didn't get that pair of gloves or that one extra badge they wanted added to the game. People will quit the game if the PvP problems are ignored by the devs.

If you fix it, they will come. It will attract a whole new crowd to the game if it becomes well known for its PvP, as opposed to scaring them away, like it is now.

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People will not quit the game because they didn't get that pair of gloves or that one extra badge they wanted added to the game. People will quit the game if the PvP problems are ignored by the devs.

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QFT and entire SGs have left the game.. it wasn't over gloves.

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The purpose of this post is to try to enlighten some people as to why PvP gets so little love from Cryptic compared to other areas. Not to bash PvP.

Cryptic is in Business to make money. This is achieved by making the maximum number of people happy with the lowest expenditure of their limited resources. So lets examine some of the possible Expenditures.

----snipped for brevity-----


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Very nice post. I am not a hardcore PvPer. I will casually PvP, but I tend to take team supported ATs (defenders, controllers, etc.) so I go to PvP very occasionally. I DO, however have 3 badge-hunting characters (2 heroes, 1 villain) Here are some of my thoughts...

Arena - Sadly, the arena is mostly empty, maybe because of bugs, maybe not, I couldn't even guess. However, I usually go there to do gladiator fights. The gladiator system is pretty fun, moreso if you're a badger, but still, when I log in to a terminal, there tends to be less than 20 people at most times. I usually go with friends, SG mates, and trusted players.

PvP Zones - Yes, I go for the badges, but more often than not, I end up doing some PvPing -- mostly, I'm ASed by stalkers, but hey... a villain's gotta live, right? Reputation is broken. Reputation should never deteriorate. It doesn't affect game mechanics at all, and if you happen to PvP when nobody else is there to, your rep decreases. Every battle is hard won for a squishy AT/powerset. seeing your 4 kills get wiped the next day is depressing (even if you died 35 times to get those 4... ).

Base Raids - Bases in and of themselves is what's truly broken... I have no theory as to why they're as bugged as they are, considering it was a selling point to buy City of Villains. I would LOVE to Base Raid, except for 3 little bumps:
--- Prestige is bloody hard to come by, in a medium-small SG. Every thousand of prestige is an uphill battle, which is escaleted by the fact that base items are ridiculously expensive. Add in that Base upkeep takes about 5-8% of your prestige every 2 weeks, and you have the setup for a rough situation. Our base isn't raid ready, simply because it costs so much to get a base up and functional, that making it raid ready is a largely distant second.
--- Losing destroyed items in a raid. Compounding on the previous bullet, you can lose prestige, and salvage in a base raid, both of which are hard to replace.
--- The highest level member of our SG is 43rd level, and the 2nd highest is 31. It goes down from there, but an SG with 10-12 50s online will summarily smear us off the map in seconds, since there's usually not more than 4 of us on at any given point in time. I haven't heard of any auto SK/exemp, but add this to the other 2 points, and it's pretty much a slam dunk.

I enjoy PvPing, but I don't consider myself a PvPer. I'd say casual PvPer, but there just doesn't seem to be a way to make PvP worth while, without opening the doors for exploit. As said, it's because in PvE, the E is always out for your utter destruction, with no ethics, and no morals. PvP is made of people, who can have ethics, and morals. Which means reason. You can't reason with a E, I'm open to reason with a P.

I do hope it gets a bit of attention. I understand why it doesn't, but broken is broken.

my $0.02
HS

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so double it, triple it, (which would be a far stretch on the two servers I play on...) it still represents a minority of what the player base is here for

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You're not getting it. Enough with the segregation of players into 'pvp' and 'not pvp'. It simply doesn't WORK like that.

Yes, there is a hard core of 'I will never ever PvP' people out there. But that says absolutely nothing about all the players who PvP casually, or dip into it, or PvP part time, or who otherwise evade that neat, silly, non-representative segregation.

PvP is a FEATURE, not a side that you take.

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I think you are reading into what I said - nowhere did I state its a side, the simple fact is the majority of players are here for PvE - many self included dabble in it, since its there - but we'd prefer that dev resources went into another FEATURE, which given what resources are available, was basically what Lighthouse stated, and was jumped on.

I don't disagree with you at all, but I don't think it changes their priorities nor justification.

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so double it, triple it, (which would be a far stretch on the two servers I play on...) it still represents a minority of what the player base is here for

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You're not getting it. Enough with the segregation of players into 'pvp' and 'not pvp'. It simply doesn't WORK like that.

Yes, there is a hard core of 'I will never ever PvP' people out there. But that says absolutely nothing about all the players who PvP casually, or dip into it, or PvP part time, or who otherwise evade that neat, silly, non-representative segregation.

PvP is a FEATURE, not a side that you take.

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I think you are reading into what I said - nowhere did I state its a side, the simple fact is the majority of players are here for PvE - many self included dabble in it, since its there - but we'd prefer that dev resources went into another FEATURE, which given what resources are available, was basically what Lighthouse stated, and was jumped on.

I don't disagree with you at all, but I don't think it changes their priorities nor justification.

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The problem here is, you say 'we' when the only person you can speak for is you. Much like anyone else with an opinion on the matter.

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we'd prefer that dev resources went into another FEATURE, which given what resources are available, was basically what Lighthouse stated, and was jumped on.

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I'd like Dev resources to go into fixing what we've already got as well as adding more new content. To quote what Lighthouse actually said:

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Long and the short of it, while there are some small PvP thingies getting some attention (like _Castle_ posting about Brute Fury in PvP a few days ago) there are not any big PvP issues on the nearer term feature lists.

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Emphasis mine. How 'big' an issue are the Arena bugs? How about functional base raids? Or the issues with RV that mean nobody uses the zone for what it's meant for (fighting to win the zone)?

New PvP stuff would be nice, but the priority is to get what we already have to WORK. Are you honestly saying we have to forego badly needed fixes to established features in order to free up time for new stuff?

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The problem here is, you say 'we' when the only person you can speak for is you. Much like anyone else with an opinion on the matter.

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Its true we post for ourselves. I don't throw 'we' around lightly - I am an active player here since launch who plays on 2 servers, runs large SGs, actively reads across forums; I draw it from interaction with friends SGs/VGs who I know have similar viewpoints, many non forum readers, as well as active canvassing of forums and global chats, and data points from rednames, repeated multiple times. And I regularly visit all PvP zones.

Does that mean I know what everyone thinks/wants - of course not, but I am pretty confident collaborated so many ways its close...

Sorry the PvPer don't like the stats, but good/bad or ugly, it is what it is today, and it appears NCSoft doesn't see enought potential in the short term that throwing a significant majority of resources at thus, which would require starving things promised since before pvp even existed here, would have to get pushed even further back.

I'd be all over it if NCSoft was willing to invest expansion of dev dollars in hopes of attracting additional players, where we all win, but in the short term, they aren't or can't. Lighthouse didn't say never, he said not by before i9, which is already underway. Wannna really [censored] up a development schedule - keep doing stop/starts on it when stuff is in process - end result is everything takes longer.

It will come, we have waited 3-4 releases for many things. If PvPers can't deal other MMOs exist until this is what they want.

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Emphasis mine. How 'big' an issue are the Arena bugs? How about functional base raids? Or the issues with RV that mean nobody uses the zone for what it's meant for (fighting to win the zone)?

New PvP stuff would be nice, but the priority is to get what we already have to WORK. Are you honestly saying we have to forego badly needed fixes to established features in order to free up time for new stuff?

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I don't think content and fixing bugs are necessarily in conflict. The coders are probably the ones who fix the bugs while the designers use the toolset to create the content. Now, of course, there is some overlap (e.g. Castle and the Fury fix).

So the real question, which I don't think anyone knows, are:

1) how hard is it to fix the bugs?
2) what PvE bugs also need fixing?
3) how should the devs prioritize the two?

Castle fixes some bugs and he also is the powers guy. So fixing the Fury PvP bug takes time away from Inventions, creating new power sets, designing villain power systems. Is that worth it? Well, I'd say yes but I don't think it is as easy a question as everyone suggests.

Castle could fix the Fury bug or balance sets that struggle in PvP. Which is more important? Brutes aren't the best in PvP, but they don't seem to be too bad based on my experience. So why does that get precedence?

Well it doesn't. Considering how long its taken to fix, I'd bet the devs are trying to deal with the low hanging fruit. Like giving Dominators and MMs some help first.

That's what seems to be missing in the arguments here. Everyone here is bickering about why THEIR pet issue should be fixed and NOW. But few are seriously considering whether their issue really should get primacy.

I've used the Arena probably about 50 times over the last year. Now that's not a lot at all, but still I've never seen any bugs. I'm quite sure they're there, but I haven't experienced them. I don't think I'm the only one. So perhaps this issue isn't the highest priority. That's just an example of how I think the issue could be analyzed differently. Some of these problems might need fixing, but they might not need fixing so badly that its worth holding back more critical fixes or content.

My 2 inf.

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Long and the short of it, while there are some small PvP thingies getting some attention (like _Castle_ posting about Brute Fury in PvP a few days ago) there are not any big PvP issues on the nearer term feature lists.

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Emphasis mine. How 'big' an issue are the Arena bugs? How about functional base raids? Or the issues with RV that mean nobody uses the zone for what it's meant for (fighting to win the zone)?

New PvP stuff would be nice, but the priority is to get what we already have to WORK. Are you honestly saying we have to forego badly needed fixes to established features in order to free up time for new stuff?

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great ideas and things I'd love to see as well, given the effort was already taken to create them, and one hopes its only incremental effort to fix them.

I guess what isn't clear to me now is how big an issue this each fix is, extropalating these perhaps can't be slated for an i8 patch from what Lighthouse said. But then things like fixing the SG limit and server transfer are long awaited and still not clear if they will make an i8 patch or be pushed to i9 either.

Lots of things to prioritize - perhaps the PvP community, and PvErs that dabble in PvP could help prioritize what gets done - 1-2 things might be better than zero.....

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Lots of things to prioritize - perhaps the PvP community, and PvErs that dabble in PvP could help prioritize what gets done - 1-2 things might be better than zero.....

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Which is exactly why (IMO) we need a Consolidated Bugs / Issues thread, like some of the AT forums have.

I simply don't understand why Cryptic wouldn't add a way to have player generated maps used in the arena. Make them a "base raid" via the arena, only allow one per character or what have you. Player generated content and/or PvP are required for the longevity of any game. Development time spent on generating player controlled content will yeild many more hours of play than creating another TF or badge. Take a look at chess it's a fairly successful PvP game.

Folks have started Bug lists here, then they peter out because:

A) Some tool comes in and starts arguing that the devs shouldn't "waste their time on them"
B) Some other tool comes in and starts quoteblocking and counterpointing each person's suggestion and saying how stupid it is
C) Another tool starts blabbing.
D) --Rarely-- Dev comes in and says "Everything is fine, have a look at this shiney new badge"

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PvP: PVPers make up 2-6% of the population and PvP changes would require a lot of resources from Cryptic.
I have done some random sampling on Protector and Virtue over the last few days and the results show between 1% and 4% (Average 2.54%) of online players are in the PvP zones at any given time.

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I did some random sampling as well:

At the time of this post:
There are exactly 596 threads in the "Badges" forum.
There are exactly 845 threads in the "PVP" forum.

This means that PVP is approximately 60% more popular than badges. Making badge hunters the minority.

So stop making new badges and fix PVP!

Seriously.

It makes me wonder why they are even doing the invention system if such a "small" portion of the community is even interested in pvp. You don't need the stuff we saw from the leaked invention system to be successful in pve. It would be like using a formula 1 race car to go to the market. The only people that are going to really care about putting the time and effort into getting an edge in this game through the invention system is pvpers.

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It makes me wonder why they are even doing the invention system if such a "small" portion of the community is even interested in pvp. You don't need the stuff we saw from the leaked invention system to be successful in pve. It would be like using a formula 1 race car to go to the market. The only people that are going to really care about putting the time and effort into getting an edge in this game through the invention system is pvpers.

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PvEers will be just as interested if not more than PvPers. Personally, I'm going to be looking for the most ridiculously broken combination of Inventions I can so that they can get nerfed and I can complain about it.

I think you believe this, because to you PvE is just a means to an end. It's not the game to you, it's a roadblock to PvP.

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PvP: PVPers make up 2-6% of the population and PvP changes would require a lot of resources from Cryptic.
I have done some random sampling on Protector and Virtue over the last few days and the results show between 1% and 4% (Average 2.54%) of online players are in the PvP zones at any given time.

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I did some random sampling as well:

At the time of this post:
There are exactly 596 threads in the "Badges" forum.
There are exactly 845 threads in the "PVP" forum.

This means that PVP is approximately 60% more popular than badges. Making badge hunters the minority.

So stop making new badges and fix PVP!

Seriously.

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Well one could interpret that to mean that PvPers love talking about PvP more than playing.

We have more to complain about than badgers do. We also have to come up wtih 100% more workarounds than badgers do.

Freedom also has less than 40% of the amount of posts the PvP forums have.

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We have more to complain about than badgers do. We also have to come up wtih 100% more workarounds than badgers do.

Freedom also has less than 40% of the amount of posts the PvP forums have.

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So what you're saying is that the devs should spend the majority of their time fixing badges since those incompetents haven't been able to come up with more than half of the solutions that PvPers have using peer research and discussion.

Good idea, Manchuwook!!!