Archive:PVP proposal from Crush

This article collects information regarding the conceptualisation of the gameplay of The Mana World

This article is currently only a proposal

The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It has not been evaluated or accepted by the core development team yet. Feel free to add your personal opinion about them or make counter proposals.

People who approve this proposal	People who oppose this proposal
Pauan Crush Yosuhara jaxad0127 AtmoLaguuna Kage	Dr Wahl

My idea of PvP combat is to restrict PVP to personal duels and combat between guilds. Guilds can declare war on each other and then the members of the guilds can fight against each other whenever and wherever they want except in towns. To make pvp more attractive i propose a honor point concept.

The reason I favor this system is that i want to give players the possibility to stay completely out of pvp when they want while giving people who enjoy pvp a competitious and rewarding atmosphere. By focusing on guild vs. guild pvp i want to encourage team oriented pvp combat while avoiding unfair fights party vs. single players, avoid ganking (acting friendly until the other player is occupied, then attacking him. When someone is in an enemy guild you know you can't trust him) and give the players a group they identify with so that they know what they are fighting for.

Personal duels

When you want to fight someone, you can challenge him to a duel. He can then decide if he wants to fight you or not. When he doesn't it counts as an automatic win for you. When you win a duel against an opponent who is equally strong or stronger than you level-wise you gain some honor points. When you lose against a lower enemy you lose some honor point. When you win against a weaker enemy or lose against a stronger enemy (like it should be expected) nothing happens.

Guild war and peace

Every guildleader can declare war on other guilds. When he does so the members of both guilds receive a warning. About an hour after the guildleader declares war pvp is enabled between members of the two guilds everywhere except towns. The leaders of both guilds can offer peace at any time. When the offer is accepted pvp is immediately disabled between both guilds. Every kill of a member of an enemy guild gives an honor point for every guildmember and every death of a guildmember by the hands of an enemy guildmember means the lose of an honor point for every guildmember.

The idea is that when you are in a (wrong) guild you have the thrill of being attackable everywhere, but you know exactly who your enemies are. And when attacked by an overwhelming force you also know who to ask for help (that guys who lose honor points when they let you die). It also brings the interesting aspects of diplomacy (avoiding making the wrong enemies, threat other guilds with declaration of war, form alliances) and strategic warfare (keep members of enemy guilds away from key resources to weaken them) into the game.

When you are fed up with being attacked everywhere because your guild pissed off all the big pvp guilds you can still leave the guild and become a guildless player again.

Honor points

Collecting honor points in pvp combat should give both the individual character advantages as it gives the guild advantages when it got members with many honor points.

Players could have the following advantages when they collect enough honor points:

• A good position on a public scoreboard
• Access to special quests
• Access to prestige equipment
• Advances when dealing with npcs
• Of course they will be more popular in guilds because the guilds honor points are the sum of the honor points of their members.

Guilds could have the following advantages when the sum of the honor points of their members is high:

• A good position on a guild scoreboard
• The right to have a guild emblem
• Access to guild equipment (like shields or capes with the guild emblem visible)
• More organizational guild features
  • Giving guild members special tasks like recruiter, treasurer etc. that give them some privileges of the guild leader
  • higher member limit
  • creating private chat channels in which other people can be invited
  • option to form sub guilds
  • etc.
• Access to a private guild headquarter ranging from a little meeting hut to a huge castle (on an instanced map).
• Permission to attack other guilds headquarters.

Guild Headquarter Raid

Another idea to make guild wars more interesting. This idea is loosely inspired by the guild war system of Ragnarok Online.

General idea

The idea is that guilds can attempt to invade the guild headquarter (HQ) of an enemy guild and steal their guild flag to humiliate the guild and steal a lot of honor points from them. In contrary to the Ragnarok Online guild wars system this can be done at any time. The attacking guild will usually outnumber the defending guild because they will usually planed the attack in advance and arranged that as many people as possible take part while the defending guild is caught by surprise and there will usually only a few people be online that are scattered all over the world. To counterbalance this strategical disadvantage of the defending guild the following system is designed to give the defenders a big tactical advantage.

Preparation

To attack a HQ the attacking guild has to schedule the raid at an npc. Every guild can only raid another guild every 24 hours. Of course only guilds that have a guild HQ can be raided.

Now both guilds get a message and have a half hour to prepare for combat. The attacking guild meets on a special map while the defending guild meets in their HQ. After the half hour preparation time the attacking guildmembers are teleported onto the map of the HQ. The position of the attacking guild should be a random area outside of the HQ. Random to avoid spawn camping of the defending guild.

Setup and goal

While a smaller HQ got a simple layout and is difficult to defend, a large HQ should have a much more complex layout with many points that give the defending guild a tactical advantage. But all HQs got two important rooms.

The first is a spawn room. It should be close to the entrances. When the defenders die they respawn in this room a few seconds later. Attackers can not enter the spawn room nor can they attack the defenders that are in it.

The second is the flag room which is usually in a position that is hard to reach for the attackers but easy to reach from the spawn room. In the flag room is the flag of the defending guild which they have to protect. The flag is basically an item that can only be picked up by the attacking team and is dropped when the character who got it dies.

The mission of the attacking guild is to get into the flag room, take the flag and bring the flag out of the HQ. Guildmembers that die respawn at their usual spawn location in the normal game world and have no chance to get back into the combat.

The mission of the defending guild is to eliminate all attackers before they can bring the guild out of the HQ. When they die they respawn after some seconds in the spawn room.

Outcome

When one of the guilds reaches their goal a lot of honor points from the loser are transfered to the winner. The result could be that the defenders have to move into a smaller HQ or that the attackers lose the right to attack again.

When the defending guild lost they have to invest a minor sum of gold to buy a new guild flag for their HQ. They can't use the facilities of their guild HQ but they can not be attacked either until they did so. This is a precaution against inactive guilds serving as honor farms for active guilds or attacking the same guild over and over again with different guilds.

Strategies

The preferred strategy of the defenders should be to take out the attackers one by one so that they can use their ability to respawn to their advantage. The attackers should try to stay together and rush into the flag room as fast as possible to make use of their superiority. Besieging the spawn room to prevent the defenders from recapturing key positions while a task force captures the flag can also be a successful strategy.

Comments

This rules quite suites me, but i don't agree that player should automatically win, when his oponent refuse to accept challenge... What if he's busy, or he just don't want to fight? Should the challenger take advantage of this? --Yosuhara 15:18, 21 September 2006 (CEST)

I agree with Yosuhara. Why not have a third option, "declined"? If a player refuses your challenge it will add 1 to the "declined" option. This way you can easily see how many fights the person has undertaken while also providing an accurate assessment. Also, how will you calculate who won? Obviously it will be determined by who dies, but what about monsters, etc.? Perhaps while two players are dueling they cannot be targeted by ANY outside forces (monsters, friends, etc.)? This keeps things fair and prevents people from ganging up on others (except in party vs. party of course). -- Pauan 08:04, 23 December 2007 (CET)

The whole guild wars thing seems to open to abuse. I can imagine that some larger guilds might bully the smaller or weaker guilds by declaring war on them, ruining the game for anyone in those guilds because they are not strong enough either in statistics, numbers, or both to defend against the guild warring against them. I would suggest that guild leaders can only declare war against a guild that is roughly equal or greater in power and/or numbers to the other guild. -- Bobby Jim 14:36, 24 December 2007 (CET)

I've seen rules to prevent attacks from high level players/factions on low level players/factions in a lot of games of a lot of different genres. And these rules always left loopholes in practice or even had abuse potential on their own. But when you think that you can design any rules on this topic that really work then feel free to do so. --Crush 03:41, 25 December 2007 (CET)

Also, I can easily see abuse of the guild headquarter raid. A guild could quite easily gain honor points quickly by continually raid the guild HQ of another, weaker guild. -- Bobby Jim 14:36, 24 December 2007 (CET)

I fixed your concerns by 1. denying guilds to do more raids than one every 24 hours and 2. removing the defeated guild from both the benefits and disadvantages of guild HQs until they feel ready for it again. --Crush 03:41, 25 December 2007 (CET)

Also, what if a guild doesn't have or want an HQ? What then? -- Bobby Jim 14:36, 24 December 2007 (CET)

Having a guild HQ is purely optional and a guild without a guild HQ can not be raided. --Crush 03:41, 25 December 2007 (CET)

What are the advantages of having a guild HQ? Feline monstrosity 21:52, 15 May 2008 (CEST)

I wrote some ideas about this aspect here: http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2912&p=25354 --Crush 00:36, 16 May 2008 (CEST)