I've been trying to get some air time for my theory in the "State of Lusternia" thread, but there is a lot of finger pointing and not too many ideas. So I've decided to make a separate thread for my theory and to include an analogy to some of the other IRE games, without specifically mentioning anyone or anything, in the hopes that my idea can get discussed without any politicing or blame.

When I first started playing Achaea, my experience in PvP went like this:


Now the above may not have been for everyone, but I thought it was a pretty reasonable course for a game to follow, and I had a ton of fun for the time and money that I spent. I also really enjoy Lusternia. I like the setting, I like the PvP skills, I like a lot of the people. But the above experience, which I had in Achaea and Aetolia and Imperian, and which many others have had as well, never happened for me in Lusternia.

Here's how my PvP experiences in Lusternia have predominantly been:

The end result is that I did not have fun with Lusternia's PvP experience, and I watched countless new characters either disappear from the game or join the winning side, but mostly they just forego PvP entirely if they aren't on the winning team to begin with.

I honestly think that my above description is what PvP in Lusternia is like, and that it causes the winning side to snowball and the losing side to decline. Now consider this: I actually enjoy being on the losing side in other IRE games, and I'm not the only one.
This is because when I go and kill Badmonk and Goodmonk 15 times, I get treated like a hero. For even though Tranquility (let's call him "Artifactmonk" for those of you who never knew him) would always show up and kill me in the end when I was on the losing side, I was still a hero, the hope of my organization because I was standing up and wiping the floor with Badmonk and Goodmonk until it was Artifactmonk's turn and he would finally take me down.

You can't really be a hero and the hope of your organization in Lusternia because there is no 1v1 PvP outside of the arena. I have gone and fought people where I thought it was a 1v1 fight in Lusternia, even though they were much stronger than me, and then 3 minutes into the fight 10 of my opponent's team mates will roll in and wall of text me to death. Then they would say something like "good thing we got here in time" and "wow your team is pretty bad to not get here before us." There is no expectation to have 1v1 fights in Lusternia because of how the game mechanics work on the planes where the raiding (which is the PvP that "matters") takes place.

So what do people think? Do they agree with my description of Lusternian PvP? With my description of other PvP? Do you think the analogy is relevant?

Part II: A suggested change.

I think that with its ultra-high fantasy setting, Lusternia could easily enforce some 1v1 or small group PvP, including some loosely enforced brackets for character strength. If done correctly, I think that this could let weaker people get involved and feel like they were accomplishing something as individuals for their organization.

It's true that right now, you can sneak in by yourself, steal 3 dwarven miners at 3am, and get out before anyone shows up. But this isn't satisfying because you aren't really beating a human opponent and no one is going to talk about it later on. With the right environment, people who aren't a demigod with a cubix (yet) could feel like up-and-coming heroes of their organization because they could be provided with an environment where they can accomplish tangible things against human opponents. People like talking about who beat who at what, but no one says "X has been sneaking in and stealing some miners lately, did you hear?" because farming NPCs when no one is around isn't an interesting accomplishment, because it is isn't even PvP to begin with.

For an example of the solution I'm thinking of, let's break down the earth plane and consider how it could be turned into a better PvP zone.

You have the outer (lowbie) region with the grubs and lyndwyrms.
You have the middle region (mountains of madness) with the earthquakes that split up groups to a certain degree.
You have the inner region where the earthen lords are.

Now imagine that Lusternia used earthquakes to split up groups, making sure that there was 1v1 fighting between weak people in the outer (lowbie) region, 1v1 or small group fights between people of mid level strength in the middle region, and 1v1 or small group fights between the demigods and strongest people in the inner region that houses the earthen lords. If the lowbies win, they can do something in the outer region which weakens or strengthens the earthen lords in the inner region. The same would go for the middle region. And in the inner region, the strongest people would either repulse the attack against the earthen lords or the raiders would win and attack the earthen lords with their surviving members, and the strength of the earthen lords would depend on how the battles in the other regions went. If one side had more people, once one person in a bracket died the next attacker or defender would be allowed to enter until everyone had gotten to play and make their contribution.

With an approach like that, every single player would matter and be contributing. Just as importantly, they would understand what happened and see their own individual contribution right in front of them, unhidden by spam and not lost in what everyone else was doing.

Finally, this is not something that would need to be done everywhere at once. It could be done on a single class of planes or even just one plane as an experiment. People could choose which area they are going to fight in (inner, middle or outer) so the brackets would not be extremely artificial, but if you are strong enough to hack it in the middle plane and you choose the outer plane, you are going to be accomplishing less for your organization since the outer plane is less important. I think that players could adequately judge and create brackets for themselves under such a system, and with a 1v1 environement it wouldn't even matter that much if a really strong person went to an outer plane because then the weaker players would have "forced" that person to waste their potential on a comparatively unimportant objective for someone of their strength.

In conclusion, the above is a philosophy that a lot of MMOs have worked into their PvP systems with varying degrees of success. I think that in mainstream MMOs, the idea of completely unregulated PvP is not even considered being done anymore. If we were to compare Lusternia PvP to World of Warcraft Battlegrounds, WoW used to have no "gear matching" in battlegrounds and the PvP was a joke. After they started scaling players towards each other things started to go places. Achaea has also started to organize their city raid PvP to some good effect. Aetolia has made the strength of guards in a city scale based upon the number of strong players from that city who are online. Lusternia in comparison is way behind any of these games in terms of PvP structuring. Lusternia could create a loose system of brackets and discourage 15v10 team fights and the accompanying walls of text to its benefit. A more structured PvP environment would also make it easier to balance any perceived class balance issues that may or may not exist.

Thanks for reading

It won't make it more interesting to me. In fact I like team PvP, the cooperation and the different mechanics than 1v1's are quite fun.

Group PvP is often far more enjoyable than one-on-one, even just for the shared experience of it all. However, more could be done to balance the mechanics around the groups than is being done (i.e., many things could be toned down quite a bit).

I feel a key issue is that the admins don't really seem to have any direction with whether the focus should be more on group vs group or 1v1. We've had lots of conflict mechanics being added to the game, which seems to indicate they want to move towards the group vs group direction, but a lot of envoy reports addressing issues that do come up in group vs group are being dismissed, because it would make 1v1 useless/bad for some classes.

In my opinion, there should never be a requirement to have a group, you should always have the option of doing something on your own, if need b. If you can't kill anyone 1v1, how can you expect to disrupt a group?

I'm with Vadi, group fights vs single fighting bring their own unique tactics and strategy that makes the game more fun in my opinion. I was having fun fighting 4 serenwilders with just 1-2 Glommies backing me up the other day, and was having a good time besides my horrible sap timing.

But you can't justify having such an imbalance in group vs group because you need to balance solo vs solo. This is basically a group vs group game balanced around solo vs solo.

I also like group fighting, but it's not fun at all when you can get shut down immediately because of a combination of x and y skills.

I feel everyone has access to x and y skills to shut down anyone

Take a look at other games. Other games have support classes in which make a big difference in group versus group, but are horrible 1v1. LoL's Soraka is one such example, and while she can kill someone 1v1, she's obviously made for team fights. Guildwars' monk and mesmer classes. The mesmer, while capable of being a 1v1 type of guy, was more suited for team play and the best ones were able to increase the offense or defense of their team on the fly. 1v1, though, they would die.

I completely disagree that 1v1 must be just as viable as group vs group. Some classes should be better suited for one or the either, but sacrificing balance in EITHER aspect (1v1 or group v group) to preserve the other is unacceptable to the health of the game.

Also, web spamming can disrupt a group in some very key ways, and it's so easy, a novice can do it.

You can't have a class be "better suited for one or the other", because then you have an imbalance, by definition.

I think Rika had a good point in saying that this is a group vs group game balanced around 1v1. Part of the problem is, this will never be like games made for group vs group PvP. This is because of the spam and the fact that mobility, used to get out of dodge in any game, completely blinds you and your opponents to what the other is doing in a text game. Analogies to LoL and Guildwars etc. will never work because of this key difference. Your "mesmer" is on the same line as your warrior in Lusternia. Your Soraka cannot stay in the back.

The game's nature requires 1v1 or small group PvP, where you can't completely, immediately and unavoidably shut someone down at no significant cost. Successful games that allow a quick shutdown make that shutdown avoidable with good movement and positioning, but a text game can't do that. Lusternia is the best MUD in many ways but it has no idea what it wants to do with PvP and is out of touch with its own strengths and weaknesses as a game since it can never be balanced with large groups fighting in the same room as each other.

^ this

I think I've brought this same point up every time we talk about racial balance, armour changes, and the introduction of Bards. You can't be balanced around "squishy support class who hangs out in the back" because that archetype doesn't exist in IRE games, because you don't have any positioning game; you have a bunch of people standing next to each other in melee range. We have no tanks that can draw aggro, we have no healers that are going to keep someone alive through focus fire.

I'm not sure you're going to ever have a class that makes a group a ton better, but is worthless on their own; they're terribly unfun to play outside of a group. So we get the opposite end, where we balance 1v1 and then watch group dynamics twist that balance out of whack.