Random aside before I get into the meat of the topic this morning. Apparently it is my 11th anniversary on Twitter this morning, or probably more likely later this afternoon. Twitter and blogging have forever been inextricably linked. I joined Twitter for better engagement with other bloggers and creators, and wound up staying there because I found a terribly interesting and engaging gaming community. Sure there was a challenge in trying to hold a conversation in what was then 144 characters at a time, but somehow we managed to string together some pretty interesting topics. Now that we have proper threading, longer character counts, and @ing in people not eating up all of the conversation space, it is staggering just how much easier it is to hold a proper discussion. Which leads me to a segue to the topic at hand, which actually came up yesterday in a Twitter thread but has also been something I have been discussing with the AggroChat folks. Each time I see a new game advertised as a massively multiplayer sandbox survival game, I have to resist rolling my eyes back into my head. This is a design pattern that budding designers seem to think they can make work, but so rarely does. They set out with this ideal of simulating a realistic world with consequences and one that forces interesting decisions to be made for the sake of survival. What ends up happening is either a barren wasteland that no one is playing or a brutal and toxic kill box that eats anyone who did not start on day one or does not have the fortitude to wade through a river of feces to get to a stable place.

There is a very vocal minority of players that will scream at devs about wanting the ability to kill other players and loot their corpses, but what they really mean is that they want to prey on the weak. So a new game is released with a bunch of tantalizing world building elements or intricate crafting systems, which draws in players like myself that have always wanted an interesting modern PVE sandbox experience. Then like blood in the water the gank squad shows up to ruin everyone’s day. My working theory is that this is effectively the same group of players that show up in every new game. Much like FPS players are fickle and will flock to whatever title has the most traction, the gank squad shows up in whatever environment they feel has the most hapless noobs. It begins a cycle of these player killers making life hell on the PVE populace until they ultimately log out never to return. I still remember the opening weekend for ArcheAge there was a quest that involved having to cross a bay in a rowboat to continue the storyline. Lined up were a bunch of players with massive ships that would do nothing but ram into the poor innocent rowboats and sink them. Eventually I logged out and decided that the game just wasn’t for me, and perpetuated the cycle. The gank squad flocks to these fertile hunting grounds and once their toxic behavior has turned them fallow, they move on to the next new hot game trying to make this design pattern work. The PVE player wanders off feeling frustrated and swearing that they will never go through this process again… only to be lured later by some killer feature in an otherwise frustrating game.

The funny thing is in my experience if you return to those same games six months later, what has grown up from the dead earth is often times a thriving oasis of cooperative players that more or less ignore the player versus player aspect of the game. Some two years after the launch of ArcheAge I returned to the game and found that I could roam freely and enjoy the world for what it was. Sure it was hell trying to find a plot of land since those had long ago been snapped up in the process, but I managed enjoy the leveling process without ever encountering another hostile player in the process. From what I understand from friends currently playing Sea of Thieves the same thing is happening there, and they ran treasure missions without encountering another hostile ship throughout the weekend. Ultimately my question is… why do companies keep trying to make the PVP and PVE elements work together? If it is actual player combat that folks are craving, then they are far better served by a game that ONLY supports player versus player engagement. However that is not what the gank squad wants. They want unfair fights where they roll in and “pwn noobs” and then laugh about how weak their prey ultimately is. So when I hear complaints on forums about there not being enough players engaging in a system like “war mode” from Battle for Azeroth, what I am actually hearing is that there are not enough lambs to slaughter for the gank squad to get their jollies. The players who actually care about challenging combat are off playing games that are solely focused on player versus player engagement. The folks that want to feel powerful as they dominate the weak… well they roam off to the next new game looking for victims.

To answer my own question, the reason why these games keep trying to make this work is that player versus player engagement is effectively free content. Story driven content is time consuming and thus costly to make. However dropping a bunch of players into a kill box looks enticing because the theory is that the players will ultimately create their own content. Visions of giant continent wide battles dance in the designers head as they envision players creating complex social structures as they duke it out in multi-tiered warfare. This didn’t even work in the games that folks hold up with praise like Dark Age of Camelot, because ultimately one faction became so dominant on a specific server that it forced a defacto alliance between the other two factions if they had any hopes of delaying the slaughter. Ultimately I welcome continent wide battles… but I want those battle to be waged with intricately crafted NPC factions and not a bunch of random players. Where I get hung up with playing games that have open flagging for player combat is that I could have a lovely evening where I get a bunch of things accomplished that I wanted to. However equally likely is that I will be minding my own business and wander across a band of player killers and wind up logging out of the game rather than trying to recover my body while dealing with the spawn camping. At its core, I don’t like the idea of having my fun impacted by other players. I realize in an PVE game I might have this sort of impact when I queue for a dungeon and people are assholes. However there are plenty of other activities I can do entirely solo that dilute those negative interactions. When engagement with the world alone paints a target on my back, I find it really hard to get hyped about going through those motions.

I would love to see some of these games that really no longer have active player killer populations simply remove that functionality from the game entirely. Taking your otherwise interesting game with PVE sandbox mechanics, and making it “safe” for players who want no part in the other aspects would be essentially igniting a beacon to those of us who had been avoiding it. Hell even having a PVE only server would go a long ways. I mentioned Dark Age of Camelot earlier, and the moment they opened Gaheris which was the co-op server I re-rolled there without a second thought. That server was an awesome thriving environment of folks who wanted to engage in the awesome PVE and raiding content in the game, but wanted nothing to do with the battleground experience. If it worked so well in the game that everyone holds up as the pinnacle of making a PVP game engaging, it can pretty much work in any game. I still feel like there is effectively a single loud mouthed PVP Gank Squad that roams from game to game, and an ocean of PVE only players that are turned off by them existing. It seems like it would make business sense to create those PVE only servers that players ask for. I admit a lot of my lack of excitement over the Fallout 76 changes are knowing that there is a slim chance of my enjoyment being adversely effected by some other player as I wander the wasteland. I was originally not interested at all in the New World until they took a massive uturn and moved away form the multiplayer kill box concept. I’ve avoided Sea of Thieves similarly because while I am fine with a piracy simulator, I want to be engaged with interesting NPCs and not running away from players. Similarly I have always been interested in the Dark Zone in The Division, but have avoided it like the plague because I don’t want to engage in combat with other players. Each time I bring up these points I realize how not alone in this line of thinking I am, as was the case on Twitter yesterday. Surely there is a market here that is more or less being ignored by the constant striving for a design pattern that doesn’t actually seem to work.