Ganking in Games: Is there a place for it?

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Originally Posted by Protonix

I love free for all PVP. Love it. That's why I played Shadowbane, an old MMO that most of you probably have never heard about let alone played. FFA PVP worked in SB though because there were consequences to your actions. If you died in PVP, someone could take your inventory loot. With enough deaths and some idiocy on your part, your equipment would break. The biggest reason why it worked in SB though was because there were player built cities that you could siege. Since most people joined guilds, there was accountability to PVP. If you ran through a zone and killed some lowbies, they go camp your city. You jump them at an open city, they go run through your lowbie zone nearest your city. You really piss someone off, they destroy your city. It was a very political game and the stakes were high. There were player built cities that lasted literally for years, some that only lasted for days, some that changed hands a dozen times over....all of them though took a lot of work to build, sometimes months for the smaller clans.

Alas however, for whatever reason no one really wants to make another game like that. Really don't know why, it was a great way to have "ganking", but people were held accountable for it.

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because shadowbane failed financially. nobody wanted to play it. just like how the ffa pvp servers for the original eq are pretty much gone. regardless of what YOU may think is fun in these games, you really are in the minority on this view and need to accept the following:

1) games need to sell to make money

2) mmorpg players are frequently played by overworked, underpaid western workers who are unwilling to let some unemployed kid take all of his stuff in real life let alone a game

3) nearly every single mmorpg with that type of pvp is no longer running. the couple that are continue to run because it was not their only focus or they are true sandboxes - like eve

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Originally Posted by Dixa

because shadowbane failed financially. nobody wanted to play it. just like how the ffa pvp servers for the original eq are pretty much gone. regardless of what YOU may think is fun in these games, you really are in the minority on this view and need to accept the following:

1) games need to sell to make money

2) mmorpg players are frequently played by overworked, underpaid western workers who are unwilling to let some unemployed kid take all of his stuff in real life let alone a game

3) nearly every single mmorpg with that type of pvp is no longer running. the couple that are continue to run because it was not their only focus or they are true sandboxes - like eve

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SB failed because of poor graphics, bad coding and abysmal stability. The game made money, had it lived up to its potential it would have continued making money. Even without making millions or having the subscribers, it still lasted from 2003 til like 2009. Unfortunately for SB, WoW came out and siphoned off a huge chunk of the player base.

Make a game with the same mechanics of SB but have wasd movement, better graphics and stability and there will be plenty of people to play it. Companies don't expect every game to have the 10+ million subscribers that WoW did, you can still make money with far less players.