238. PvP and PvV Revisited

PvP and PvV were critical concepts for open world design during the MMO golden age from 1999 to 2005. But the skills are being lost to time, costing developers hundreds of millions of dollars.

This article was inspired by an analysis of Dune Awakening by nevlox. This title was an open world competitive survival MMO built by Funcom in Norway. Despite having gameplay that was highly rated by players, the game quickly imploded. According to nevlox, the primary culprit was how PvP was forced onto players in the endgame.

But not all PvP is the same, and there are critical distinctions that can make or break your game. My first experience with Funcom was in 2001 with the launch of their Anarchy Online MMO. I really liked the game but it had some rough edges at launch. A few months later Dark Ages of Camelot launched. Both were soon attacked by a hacker group called Blacksnow Interactive. I was a journalist at UnknownPlayer.com at the time and in order to protect both games from destruction I doxxed the members of BSI. This allowed them to be sued, resulting in the lawsuit BlackSnow v. Mythic Entertainment, which I followed closely. Ultimately it seems that the case decided who owned virtual goods and game assets.

I went into a lot of detail on this case and how it would end up ultimately causing a lot of the biggest problems in game development today. Here I apologized for my role.

During this period through 2005 when I was still a journalist, and doing MMO previews and reviews after a minimum guaranteed 200 hours in each world (that was my brand), I wrote a lot of articles on design elements that could torpedo these otherwise very creative works in that Golden Age of the MMO. Perhaps the biggest threat to gaming at the time was the emergence of Griefers who would go from game to game and just make life miserable for everyone.

They would convince developers to put unrestricted PvP in their worlds and then they would form teams and farm other players. In the early years this was motivated by more than malice: they could loot valuable gear and then sell it on ebay. So I coined the term “PvV” and wrote a lot of articles on it:

• PvP: Consensual battle between players.

• PvV: (Player vs. Victim) Non-consensual battle between a griefer and a victim.

From my personal observations and from statistical drop off and participation rates a good rule of thumb is that in open worlds 80% of players prefer PvE and 20% prefer PvP. Of that 20%, about 10% of those (so ~2% of players) prefer PvV.

I wrote extensively on this subject at UP through 2005. Then I caught Ubisoft embedding a full time employee at a sister publication, who wrote exclusive previews of their game in development, Shadowbane. I would be retaliated against and all my papers were scrubbed from our servers and from the internet. Thus no one, not even me, has access to my papers from 2001 to 2005.

I did bring up the distinction between PvP and PvV again in my 2012 Supremacy Goods paper which was widely read in game dev circles. Then in 2015 I went into further detail on how PvV was being used to force players to spend to avoid losing all their stuff. In particular I talked about how Supercell’s Clash of Clans game sold PvV shields which I dubbed “Pay to Sleep”. If you didn’t pay, you’d be up all night worrying because your resources were getting pillaged. This was especially problematic because a lot of children played CoC and children need their sleep. Sustained stress can also cause lifelong neurological and genetic damage.

Why Was PvV in Dune Awakening?

Funcom devs put almost the entire endgame area under full PvV. Players could loot their victims and take their best gear. They could even steal vehicles and destroy player bases. This is very stressful for players, especially if they sleep at all.

So if Funcom has been making high quality MMOs since 2001, why would they make such an obvious error? From the YouTube video it seems that the Chief Creative Officer, Joel Bylos, and the Chief LiveOps Officer, Scott Junior, were in the position to safeguard the project against this sort of hazard. It appears that both started at Funcom in 2008, so were likely too young to have read my earlier papers warning about PvV.

Since the 2012 and 2015 papers on Gamasutra were published in the USA, perhaps they were not circulated much in Norway. This is unfortunate as this oversight cost Funcom and ultimately TenCent hundreds of millions of dollars, at a minimum. Funcom would remove the PvV two years after launch, after initially ignoring the loud cries of their players for quite a while. By then it was a bit late as they had lost ~95% of their player base.

By industry standards, these 20 year veterans are considered senior talent. My concern is that most of the design and metadesign technology for open worlds was developed and deployed prior to 2005. Many devs over the last 5 years have been under the misconception that “Play to Earn” was a crypto thing and required blockchain. Nope, I was paying my bills in Everquest as early as 1999, and co-wrote the first mainstream article on Play to Earn in April of 2000 on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

MMOs during this period were extremely popular with consumers. In recent years some very ambitious open worlds were deployed, but seemingly without the knowledge that was earned the hard way during this period. Granted it might be just me and Raph Koster left from that period who were prolific writers/designers. His Ultima Online game was notorious for unrestricted PvV, and Star Wars Galaxies had PvV with some restrictions.

I worry that the tech of making successful open worlds will be lost if more of an effort to preserve it is not made. My papers were again erased from the internet in 2023, and quietly put back a year later after I recovered them from the community and started my substack. If I keep getting deplatformed, I’m not going to be the ideal custodian.

While I’m a huge proponent of open worlds, they are a lot of work and defending them from attack is a bit of a headache. What I call “Forever Games” are easier/faster to deploy, and ultimately generate more revenue. Thus I’d recommend going that path versus open world. As I’ve not managed to get any of my Forever designs to market, there is nothing to copy yet.

My series on Forever Games can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I’m a big fan of Funcom, so it’s a shame their latest game turned out the way it did. It seems they really nailed the survival aspect of rationing water, and players found it very engaging. At least until they added another mechanic that broke it. That’s a metadesign issue.