Note: The same guy I mentioned who worked on Shadowbane gave an example of how Shadowbane failed. He compared it to a game of Risk which never ends and one player dominates forever. Because the other players cannot ever hope to win unless the dominating player quits, they go and do other things, like watch TV. Because it's human nature to dominate, it always ends this way.
Yeah, Vaarna called this the "Old Boys Club". It's a significant obstacle to the appeal of otherwise appealing WorldPvP games, when you know that just because you were late to the party, you've already lost the game. I have often pondered how to design around this problem. Wipes are, obviously, the most direct and ham-handed of these methods, and similarly one of the less appealing options.
Welll.... the plan in crowfal, I"m led to believe, is they wipe the landmass and the banks, but they don't wipe the characters.
So the problem still exists, it's just shrunken.
And even if you did erase everything, including the characters, you can't erase their knowledge they have of how to play the game. They will act much faster than new players and arrive quicker at end game. If faced with pvp while levelling up, their choices will be wiser and quicker, resulting in the deaths of many newer players. You can try to change the game so their knowledge is void, but recasting a game with different guts convincingly after each wipe is not a small task. So it's hard for me to se how you can remove any/all effects of older/veteran players who wipe the floor with the entrails of newer ones.
AFter each successive wipe, I expect more and more complaints from new players being killed in pvp. This is the result of the older players geting beter and better at the tactics they use to win in pvp. The only way I can see getting around this is restrict older players or to make it extremely simple, so that even a new player can win against an old one.
One way to possibly address the power divide is simply not allow powerful players to prey on the weak. Even in EQ on Rallos Zek they would not allow you to pvp outside of a 4 level range. However, this didn't prevent raid-geared players from preying on group-geared players. Neither did it prevent a level 70 from (only lightly) preying on a level 66. It didn't stop 6-man groups from zerging (or preying) on soloers or small groups. And not every group-geared ton was/is equal gear-wise. There were many group-geared toons who went to town with other underequipped or otherwise badly maintained group-geared toons. And because it happened in the open world, many unfair exchanges occurred, such as attacking someone when they're hurt or distracted. Other games, like WoW, solved this with instances. Essentially they enacted more controls to ensure fairness.
(i imagine making fights fair based on how long a player has played or on their "score" also works, if stats/gear is already dealt with.... this would be the concer in a game where gear/stats aren't the problem)
This business of controlling the PvP isn't confined to just combat. Like you say, economy can be pvp too. Was it here wher I stated Eve-Online had five full-time economists keeping it in balance, so it's not exploited or abused?
I have experience in all this. I've played lots of pvp MMORPGs (or sandboxes) with few restrictions.
I played on the infamous Sullon Zek. I also play on Chaos in Wurm Online. There's no level restrictions on pvp in these examples. So a high skill highly geared player can kill a new one and loot their stuff. There IS some attempt to address this in Wurm Online, via deed guards and guard towers and encouraging new players to join villages.
I also played Shadowbane. No level restrictiosn in that either. It does protect players when they're on the noob island and in a couple cities (safeholds) on the mainlad, but other than that it doesn't. Full-loot pvp. Joining a guild doesn't stop a more powerful guild from destroying you. It comes down to levels and numbers and knowledge employed.
It's very VERY unpopular for the reasons we're discussing.
