Today, I want to talk about feelings of entitlement and expectations in games, and how things seem different from PvP and PvE perspectives, and muse about whether the WoW mindset has skewed an entire gamer generation to unrealistic demands or if it's just something more innate that stems from singleplayer game roots. And if WAR will reteach some new lessons to us players, or sink under the tidal wave of player tantrums.
Except I'm not really sure where to start. Just going to go for it and give it my best shot.
It all begins with the news that Destruction conducted an early morning 'city raid' into Altdorf and pretty much steamrolled over Order on the Averheim server. They apparently faced insufficient player defence, possibly due to the timing or the simple lack of numbers as not everyone is Tier 3-4 yet, and were only repelled from the city because one of the PvE challenges to take over the city was too tough for the organized Destruction alliance (over 300 on vent, comprised from multiple guilds) and stomped them into the ground. Possibly not yet quite balanced content yet, I'd say.
Yet the largest outcry came from Order players who were INCENSED that they had no chance to participate in the defence of the city because of a) timing or b) lack of levels, or c) lack of numbers, apparently equalling no guts to walk in and become a speedbump in the wake of the Destruction zerg, if there was no equal chance of winning.
I get the impression that they feel Mythic ought to do something for them, give them some sort of outnumbered player advantage in terms of stronger keep guards or more percentage bonuses to even things out.
There is also a subset of people who are just somewhat miffed that the whole city takeover seems to last only a quarter to half a day at most. They were expecting something epic and long-term, incremental progress or some such.
From the perspective of a Destruction player, my first impulse is to say, well QQ more, suck it up and so on. Destruction got the better of you this time around. I mean, they put in the effort to organize and muster 300+ people together at 7am on a Sunday, of course they are going to steamroll right through 30-100 Order people taken completely by surprise. What did you expect?
My second, more honest, introspective opinion is to muse about the expectations and entitlement issues of two kinds of players, PvE and PvP.
I mean, I am first and foremost a staunch PvE type of person at heart. I'm a frigging carebear. I'm finding some lessons in WAR a little tough to swallow (more on this later.) I chose Destruction not just because it looked cool and had races I wanted to play, but because I like to be on the winning side. And I'm pessimistic enough to believe that zerg-like numbers spell more chances at success, hence self-interest eggs me into joining the tidal wave of 'spikey ebil.'
I can indeed relate to some extent with those Order folk who are well and truly pissed that they got rolled, humiliated and dammit, lost.
On the Darklands server, I am guilty of getting discouraged if I'm playing an alt, just puttering around in a PUG scenario, and then this helluva-more-organized Order team just pounds our face into the dirt. Human nature. There's only so much defeat one can take, and sooner or later, you just give up if there's no foreseeable hope in the future and you're confident that your allies are a bunch of mutts self-interestedly looking up their arse and won't respond to a rally call.
I suspect this is because PvErs, and singleplayer gamers, are very used to railroaded experiences, not a sandbox in a playground.
We are looking for a challenge, that is within our skill levels. If one recalls the "Flow" diagrams, something that is too easy becomes boring (aka grind), and something that is too hard becomes frustrating, and tends to make us give up and start bitching and complaining.
That's all very well when you are the center of the universe in a singleplayer game, or in a MMO like WoW which tricks you into feeling like that until max level, but most multiplayer experiences with a bit of PvP are different, aren't they?
For every game of PvP, you have a winner and a loser. For someone to win and feel good, someone else must lose and feel bad.
The best you can say for it, is that a good PvP game would be exactly fair. A 50% chance for both parties to win or lose.
I think a lot of people have trouble dealing with this concept. Hence the ruckus. -I- have trouble coming to terms with it, from an emotional standpoint, though I am striving to, because I think there's valuable lessons to be learned from this.
See, PvE is not zero-sum like that. In PvE, two people can team up to defeat the computer, and both can feel good because they won together, and the computer doesn't feel anything.
But when we come to WAR, RvR is ultimately a PvP game at heart. It's just made a little more fair, and the overall win/loss is masked by lots of potential for individual mini-wins and good feelings and all the pushing/shoving that stems from getting to the win/loss.
Here we get to the heart of the matter. For me, my personal gut reaction is that I like the push/shove experience. I like the battle. I like the fights. I love it when things are nice and long and strung out and there's this epic push towards victory or a final desperate last stand of "Not this day!"
And as a carebear, I like the mini-wins too cos they give me a little Skinner box buzz to keep playing.
In WAR as is, I find it perfectly reasonable how city sieges exist now. It takes the place of a hardcore raid game. It sounds rather fun to get a whole bunch of guilds working together in alliance to create a weekend to remember. There needs to be a reason for guilds to exist, after all. It encourages the ultimate teamwork.
To have someone insist that oh, a casual soloist should have a good chance of repelling an organized wave of attackers, by buffing up NPC guards just strikes me as "I am the center of the universe" syndrome. Heaven forbid they tried to take your city when you were sleeping. So you missed it. Big deal.
To some people, it seems to be the end of the world. I don't know if it's misplaced realm pride, or just plain unreasonable selfishness. So your side is fallible. Does this mean you quit because you lost? Or do you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and tell yourself, dammit, we're taking it back, we're doing better and we're going to push 'em back into their own city?
Seems like they're just going to surrender to the 'inevitable' "Oh noes, they have more numbers than us right now" and run away back to WoW where they can outnumber their raid mobs 25 to 1, give or take 15 or so.
I think the back-and-forth flow of PvP wins/losses is something many PvE players have yet to really wrap their heads around.
I admit that I hate losing. When I'm getting repeatedly pounded by a far-better organized team in a scenario, after a while, I decide that I will stop feeding them renown and go look for something else to do.
But I don't give up scenarios forever either. I do at least realize that the balance of power will always flow back and forth, so maybe try it again when the organized guild group finally logs off.
Or I look for solutions. For example, there was a point where all my late night teams had zero tanks. Lots of healers, some DPS, nada on tanks. This was just asking for Order tanks to rampage all over us squishies, and we were smashed against our own respawn and pretty much humiliated on point score. After 3-4 scenarios of this, I got frustrated enough to stop and start leveling a baby tank, since it seems all the late night PUG people weren't raising any tank characters.
Worse come to worse, I figured I would at least learn what it was like on the tank side of the equation. Personal benefit, at any rate.
I have indeed learned from keeps in the RvR lakes that a back-and-forth does happen. Some days, Order takes over everything and Destruction can't be bothered to take them back, and if you go in as a solo or small group, you can't do much. And some days, Destruction makes use of its generally superior numbers and overruns everything and Order runs off because they can't put up a fight either.
But I suppose my server is fortunate in that it's a mix of Aussies and Singaporeans and other Oceanic-timezone players, and both sides have strong guilds, and seem unwilling to throw in the towel without a fight.
Because I note that it's usually a guild who starts it off, and then randoms will join in and follow the zerg wave and take over things.
When both sides do it and clash, ah, then the epic battles begin.
If not, one side overruns the other. Sometimes with a fight, sometimes with a massacre, and the losers run off to fight another day.
Or another hour. Because the victors sweep through everything, get bored, and go looking for something else to do.
Then the next moment you look at the map... the losers have slunk back, licking their wounds, and taken back what you took back.
And normally you don't go back and do the same thing because the hour's late and people need to leave, so both sides end up feeling like they accomplished something, and even if you did, then the whole cycle would probably start again the next day or whatever.
But this back-and-forth is probably a good thing. After all, if the best loot comes from keep lords, the exchange of hands better happen enough so that we can all get some.
So I do see why it's a good idea to have a short city siege so that everything will reset in a few days at most, and no one will be affected too much over too long a time.
Yet I also wonder how it would be like if it were more strung out.
As mentioned before, there was a time playing Natural Selection when things were freaking epic, and I loved every single second because you just couldn't tell who was going to win, there was the chance for come-from-behind victory. But when things became predictable, an inexorable progress into unstoppable zerg victory or skull-raping defeat, I started to get depressed with it.
So if one side starts to feel that they have no hope, it may end up sliding into something horrible and not fun.
Well, I guess time will tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment