The announcement of Shadowbane closing its servers has set off a lot of discussions regarding SB's design. Many people believe that the game closing on May 1st somehow validates their ranting that open PvP and siege rulesets will kill any game. As a UO and SB veteran I am compelled provide a counterpoint to these carebear ways. I still remember well how UO was ruined by a vocal carebear community, and I think it is important that the PvP community makes it's voice clear, in a organized and thoughtful manner. A good example is the comments section on Lum's Broken Toy's blog in here, it's worth a quick read but I'll recap my thoughts here.
One commenter wrote:
"A PvP game is essentially a limiting design. PvE means everyone gets to win. PvP means many players have to play the role of the loser. A well-done PvP game can find an audience, but it will always be a small subset of the audience that a popular game like WoW can command."
I beg to differ. PvE is more limiting, players are limited by the length of the roller coaster ride that the dev’s build. Take World of Warcraft for example. People hit level 80 and 90% of the game is obsolete. Soon they clear all the current raid dungeons and there is nothing left to do until more content is released. WoW is popular because it is easy and accessible to casual players.
On the flip side, I don’t believe that true open PvP games are limiting to players at all. If properly designed, it is quite the opposite. The additional risk from a game centered around open PvP yields far greater rewards. It is important here to remember the rewards are not only purple l33t phat lootz, but also the gameplay experience itself. UO veterans will know exactly what I am talking about. There were no scripted raid encounters back then or instanced x versus x PvP. We had complete freedom to do what we wanted, whether it be going into a dungeon to kill such and such hard mob or going out and warring other guilds or even simply hanging out on the roof of deceit, dueling other players to see who is the 'best'.
It’s like playing no-limit hold’em (PvP) vs playing slot machines (PvE). The one takes skill and a willingness to take risks. The other is mindless, caters to those with an aversion to risk and just feeds money to the Casino in the long run. In poker, even if I lose a hand, I still enjoy the experience greatly. I replay it in my head afterwards and adjust my strategy so that the next time maybe I will come out on top. Slots, well, slots is just boring.
I think even the WoW carebears are starting to understand this. Check out this post on Tobolds MMORPG Blog and read the comments. People are complaining that WoW is getting too easy, catering to casual players by dumbing down content for the sake of popularity. It's sad that it is taking them until now to realize how boring it is. Even the PvP gets old, I must have run warsong gulch a thousand times grinding honor. I probably would have done the same with the arenas if I hadn't quit after season 1. It's the same thing again and again, grind BGs/Arenas, get gear. New season starts, new raid dungeon released, old gear is outdated. Grind BGs/Arenas, get gear. Rinse, wash, repeat, tear out eyeballs.
Back on Lum's blog, Mike Darga left a comment and wonders where all the ex-Shadowbane players will go... WAR or DF. As a former SB diehard, I believe we'll be seeing an influx of former SB players into Darkfall in the coming weeks as accounts are made available. Warhammer is a themepark game, and is closer to WoW than SB. Darkfall, with its FFA PvP, city ownership, siege combat, etc is the new SB. Immediately after the SB announcement our guild, Evil Bastages, started getting more traffic in our forums from former SB players from various sub-guilds of our EB nation that dominated Scorn, Vengeance, etc.
I’d say, barring the difficulty of obtaining a copy of the game, the DF release has been much better than Shadowbane’s. They had a few issues where certain methods of raising certain skills that should have been squelched in Beta were left in for a few weeks on the live EU-1 server. Short term, this gives the players who got accounts in the first few weeks an advantage, but long term things will even out. It is a MMO after all, there will always be players with older characters that are more advanced. The game is still in the early stages, high level magic users are still rare and we are only now starting to see naval combat. With a lot of these small issues fixed in recent patches, I do hope that the Adventurine dev team starts taking a closer look at siege mechanics. There were many lessons SB’s devs learned the hard way, and they implemented solutions to combat things like 3 AM sieges, etc. Still, technically the game is 10x better than SB at launch. I can count on one hand the number of times my client has crashed in the past month and a half.
One thing that Tasos and co. needs to do ASAP - is go ahead and open up NA-1… some bastages are still using it as an excuse for not playing!
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