Friendly fire as a game pitfall.

[Vanraw]

I want to throw risk of uncontrolled friendly fire into here. While I dont disagree with the whole self governance aspect of friendly fire, I think this can be a serious pt fall as well. I dont know the answer but here are the piut falls to unfettered friendly fire.

- One very small group of ass holes that get enjoyment from removing others enjoyment can ruin the game.

- Opposing teams can create alternate chars and easily turn the tide or destroy the experience for everyone else.

- Having unfettered friendly fire but also the will to not allow an asshat to destroy the game, means you have to have a strong GM system that works off of subjective directions / rules. We all know this doesn't work.

There are lots of examples of how one person can destroy a good game for everyone else.

[Dustie]

I liked the planetside friendly fire protection. You could do it, but you were penalized. If you continued to mow down friendlies, you were start shooting slower and eventually get full weapons lock which would then, only slowly, decay.

As far as rolling up on other teams, I think it's really important in these games to have accountability. I think that if you ruin your reputation, that should stick with you, at least until you create a new account.

[Slamz]

I think the options are:

1) Team game with no friendly fire (WOW/WAR/WW2O)
2) Team game with friendly fire (Planetside, some other shooters)
3) Free-for-all (UO?)

I'd prefer #2 or #3.

#2 can work if you use the Planetside system. Some people complained about it but I thought it was great, and the complainers were almost certainly noobs who needed to be banned for sheer incompetence anyway. You had to either really TRY to get weapons lock or you had to be blazing clumsy with your weapons. In the countless hours I played that game I never once got weapons lock and that was with reasonable doses of giving a teammate something he deserved. It was also very rare to get TK'd on purpose (without distinctively pissing someone off first).

For our "living world" game, I think #3 makes the most sense, although working out the faction hits may be tough. There has to be some allowance for a wizard to throw a fireball into a general melee, kill more of his own guys than the enemy and take a faction hit for it but there also has to be an allowance for him to throw a fireball into a melee, kill 2 friendlies and 4 bad guys and come out ahead.

[Alio]

The way most games do it is that friendly fire exists, but punishes the shooter. In COD5, you can TK up to 2, but the 3rd one, and you get removed from the game.

I remember faintly playing something where if you were the teamkiller, you died... and the friendly you shot went on without ever knowing he was shot at.

[Diggles]

Planetside has already shown to have a competant system that needs very little GM intervention

plus no friendly fire = AOE spam and skillless game

[Veraphim]

On of my favorite weapons in Planetside was the Thumper. I would seriously rack up some griefer points with that thing sometimes when trying to clear hallways for tower caps and such, but I never once in the time I've played planetside received a weapon lock.

I think that system worked great. If you were actually trying to grief, you would probably get shut down quick enough. But if you were just a demo-man using mass AE to clear hallways then even covering a few friendlies in plasma in the course of honest duty wouldn't get you shut down.

[Slamz]

Maybe the faction system could be used as an anti-griefer tool.

You kill someone who has -2000 orc faction, you gain 20 faction with orcs.
You kill someone who has +1500 orc faction, you lose 15 faction with orcs.

Or, similar to Planetside, you could base it on damage.

If you hit someone where the Orcs can see it, your faction changes:
Your_Orc_Faction += (Target's_Orc_Faction / 10000 * Damage_Dealt)


So he has 2000 orc faction. If orcs see you deal 100 points of damage, you lose 20 Orc faction.
If he had -2000 orc faction, you'd gain 20 Orc faction.


So you could fireball into a melee but it would be a crap shoot unless you were pretty sure you no orc champions were in there. Orcs wouldn't like it if you fireballed the local player character who is a hero to orcs everywhere and has like 50,000 faction with them.


I'm not even sure there should be a visual indication of who the orcs like, though, at least not readily apparent. Every game needs a story you can tell later that ends with, "...but I didn't know he was the Orc Chief's adopted son and top advisor!"


Although the downside of my idea is that the person with godly faction basically has license to do what he wants, at least for a while. But I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. Planetside was basically the same way. If you had 0 grief, that was basically a license to kill whoever you wanted with no penalty. The point was you couldn't KEEP doing it.

[Vllad]

The Planetside Grief system worked so well that I can't even imagine a better system. Just incase you didn't play it Maull you were allowed 1000 grief points. Kills were worth like a 150 however just hitting a friendly could give you 2, 10 or 50 grief. It decayed during real time so if you wanted to actually drive, move, shoot or operate anything you had to be unlocked. Racking up 1000 points of grief would take you a couple of days to decay. So while you could waste your own team the penalty was severe enough to make you watch yourself with out going unchecked. However it wasn't to severe that you couldn't police your own team.

I always hovered around 100 to 200 grief and only really got to 1000 once when I was in my pounder clearing a hallway.


You had to be able to kill someone at least once. Their is always one moron screwing up the game. I will say being able to friendly fire others does make people behaive better in general.


Vllad

[Vanraw]

I have not played Planet side, with the exception of demoing it a couple times. It sounds good.

One thought I had was to allow for friendly fire, but if you hit a friendly then you get the same damage you deal. So you head shoot someone and they die, you die. Do 200hp to a friendly, and you get hit 200 damage. this would be a very easy mechanic to implement.

Perhaps you could add a faction hit such as Slamz listed, or even a simple debuf that impacts damage and regeneration and stacks and last through death.

[Slamz]

The only problem with the Planetside system is that in a faction game like we've been discussing, who's "friendly"?

You have 2000 orc faction and -2000 dwarf faction.
Jim has 500 orc faction and 2000 dwarf faction.

Is he "friendly"? On one hand, he is a hated enemy dwarf lover. On the other hand, he's in good with the orcs, as are you. Maybe he's a turncoat and his orc faction hasn't gone negative yet, but if you fireball him, do you lose orc faction?


I'm not sure how best to handle it unless you make you actually "join" the desired faction, so that we know for sure who is on your team and who isn't -- then we can do the Planetside system.

The only other way I see to do it is a "flagging" system. But flagging systems always seem to have loopholes... Flagging meaning Jim attacks you and now he's flagged as "enemy" regardless of faction.

[Vllad]

The only problem with the Planetside system is that in a faction game like we've been discussing, who's "friendly"?

Good point. I guess in a faction based game you take a faction hit if you kill/hit(?) anything at anytime. Not only for NPC's but PC's as well.

So if guilds are their own faction and you have killed Fufu guilds players enough times their own faction hates you. Including guilds NPC guards etc.

If you kill/hit(?) members of your own guild you own NPC guards start to dislike you. Kill to man of your guild mates and you could find yourself KOS?

Hmmm... The Planetside system only works if you have teams not really factions.


Vllad

[Dustie]

Hmmm... The Planetside system only works if you have teams not really factions.


Vllad

Drat!

[Slamz]

Maybe the faction system could still work out...

So back to our example:
You: +2000 orc faction -2000 dwarf faction (orc faction player)
Jim: +500 orc faction +2000 dwarf faction (dwarf faction player / orc faction spy)
Fred: +500 orc faction, 0 dwarf faction (orc newbie)

As far as the Orcs are concerned, you attacking Jim is the same as attacking Fred. Orcs don't know that Jim is a dwarf-hugger, they just know that they kind of like him.

You would basically have to avoid fighting either of them (within sight of the orcs) unless you wanted to lose faction.

If we borrow from the Planetside system then it would work like this --

You're a griefer. You want Fred's sword. You attack Fred in plain sight. The Orcs see this and you lose faction with them. If Fred fights back, he loses faction too (perhaps at the same rate as you) but the bottom line is you still lose faction whether Fred fights back or not (just like you would wrack up grief in Planetside regardless of who started the fight).

If this was a one-off fight, you can get away with it.

If you make a habit of it, you'll quickly be KOS.


In the end, it will be very unsafe to "gank" anyone in a faction town. You can do it but too much will make you KOS to that faction. It will always be safe to gank in the wilderness where the factions have no witnesses.



Incidentally, I really like the idea of..."faction osmosis".


You don't actually have an "orc faction" in the EQ sense. Instead, you have faction with individual orcs which will go through the Orc community via osmosis.

Let's say Orc1 sees you kill Jim. You lose Orc faction with Orc1. You then kill Orc1. There were no other witnesses. No other orcs will hate you for your crimes because they don't know what you did.

You go to town and give a load of lumber to Orc2. This makes Orc2 like you, +50 orc faction. These 50 faction points will leak out of Orc2 and into the community until everyone likes you a little bit. (Mechanically, maybe every orc has two faction pools: "personal" and "community". When you handed the wood to Orc2, he gained 10 personal and 40 community faction points towards you. The 40 points will distribute to other orcs but he'll always keep his 10.)

If you wiped out the whole village, none of the other orcs in the world would even know (NPCs trying to run away would take on a whole new meaning. In most MMORPGs, they only sort-of run away because they're not actually meant to go anywhere. In this game, if an NPC runs away, he's going to take your -5000 orc faction from wiping out the lumber camp and go share it with everyone in the next town, where he was running to. And similarly, he probably has -500 personal faction and -4500 community faction. Your misdeeds will play on everyone's mind but the orc who saw you do it will have a deep hatred of you forever.)




Also, the server that's running this game needs 1 terabyte of memory.

[Vllad]

I guess technically speaking if you kill Jim and Fred its not griefing. Our faction game is an open pvp game so you would therefore only be pking them. The only people you could grief technically are people in your own guild. That is easily resolved.

It is possible all three of you were soloing and decided to group up to complete some quest for the orcs however in general just like other open pvp games you take your chances when grouping with strangers. Pking openly is allowed but the penalties are purely in faction hits.

When you think about it, this model isn't very appealing to your solo pve guy.


Their is one way to solve the faction by osmosis.

When killing solo Orcs in isolated locations if you can catch them alone that is one thing. However when you kill villages of orcs you can set up a formula for calculating the creation of runners.

For example I run over to Orc village1. If I catch a pat in the back of the village and I kill him out of site of others their is a good chance I can get away with it. Obviously maybe another pat saw me that I didn't see however since the towers we discussed earlier didn't sound any alarms and send 40 to kill me that is a good sign I got away with it.

However if I do get caught and start to slay many Orcs for every (put in number here) Orc I kill a runner is created. As we talked about earlier for larger cities and villages the towers automatically send runners out.

However lets assume for one second that the village I am killing at is its lone faction and their is no where to send runners for help. You can simulate the action that some Orcs got away as we were killing off this village. Those Orcs that got away get up and move away to join some other Orc village and they share what happened.

You can simulate this by spawning runners for every (put in your number here) Orc you kill. Instead of requiring them to run all over the map in game (tons of memory) you just keep them on the map for like 60 or 120 seconds. If they aren't caught and killed in 60/120 seconds it is assumed they got away. You despawn them and they are added to Orc Village2 up the road. The runner is assumed to have made it to Orc Village2 and the rumor of your deeds are now there. You don't really need to even spawn the runner at the new village. Once one gets away you can just write the faction in to the nearest faction the runner joins.


Vllad

[Ulfen]

I would like to add a forensics career in which the orcs may hire you to find out what might have happened to Jim because they haven't heard from him in sometime. You would have 24-48 hours to figure out where Jim died and how, if you are able to prove who killed him you would gain faction and the killer would lose faction.

[Diggles]

I would like to add a forensics career in which the orcs may hire you to find out what might have happened to Jim because they haven't heard from him in sometime. You would have 24-48 hours to figure out where Jim died and how, if you are able to prove who killed him you would gain faction and the killer would lose faction.

Jim was betrayed and murdered by Darth Noob, a pupil of mine until he turned to TK griefing.

[Slamz]

I would like to add a forensics career in which the orcs may hire you to find out what might have happened to Jim because they haven't heard from him in sometime. You would have 24-48 hours to figure out where Jim died and how, if you are able to prove who killed him you would gain faction and the killer would lose faction.

That would be amusing. UO had a "forensics" skill, though I forget exactly what it did / how it worked.

Would be funny if an orc from Village A went to do his usual supply run to Village B, found it destroyed, ran back home and Village A dispatched "Orc: CSI" to go investigate.

(Probably be easier to make that exclusively a player job though. Village A creates a quest that said, "investigate why we lost contact with Village B". Anyone could go walk there and bring back a report that says, "Orcs killed with these kinds of weapons", so that Village A knows how to adapt for a similar attack but with proper skills you might be able to finger who dunnit.)

[Vllad]

If you have high enough skill you find a broken necklace from a Purge member that is only visiable to people with Forensic skill. It disapears in 24 hours however if someone does run across it and turn it in. Bam! Faction hit.


Vllad

[Dustie]

I would like to add a forensics career in which the orcs may hire you to find out what might have happened to Jim because they haven't heard from him in sometime. You would have 24-48 hours to figure out where Jim died and how, if you are able to prove who killed him you would gain faction and the killer would lose faction.

That would be awesome. All players or NPCs could leave "trails" representing their last X hours of movement. After X hours, the trail starts to fade. If you have a "tracking" skill then you can see these trails (if you get their in time) and eventually track down the perps. Brilliant!

[Vllad]

I would like to add a forensics career in which the orcs may hire you to find out what might have happened to Jim because they haven't heard from him in sometime. You would have 24-48 hours to figure out where Jim died and how, if you are able to prove who killed him you would gain faction and the killer would lose faction.

That would be awesome. All players or NPCs could leave "trails" representing their last X hours of movement. After X hours, the trail starts to fade. If you have a "tracking" skill then you can see these trails (if you get their in time) and eventually track down the perps. Brilliant!

Mount and Blade had this concept. You ran across tracks if your skill was high enough. The better the skill the more it told you about who left the tracks.

You run across some tracks, put the cursor over it, you get things like, "level 30 male brigand wearing plate, carrying an Axe, has high agility skill".

If your skill sucks you just get, "Male wearing plate".

If your skill is super high you might get a random trinket to prove they were at a paticular place.



Vllad

[Dustie]

That would be cool. I would just add the part where you track them down and kill them or spy on them etc.

[1000xZero]

Getting back to Friendly Fire, I think it should be in game.

If you AoE an area, all people in that area should be effected.

For example in Warhammer without FF, you have casters who AoE an area and then MDPS go in without regard. The MDPS should think twice before entering an AoE area.

Maybe an idea that would work is to add to the faction system, an innate semi-resistance(i.e. - lesser damage) and unable to target friendlies to start an AoE or need to be a certain distance from friendlies to start an AoE.

[bonestomper]

on the friendly fire, i think it depends.

if it is magic based attacks, perhaps i can provide my guild mates with an amulet that would protect them from my own magic. perhaps the amulet is on a timer so that if it was ever looted someone could not be permanently immune to my attacks. perhaps i could do it as a spell of warding or something.

if it was a spell i could use it on Pugs, but have it expire if i die so that if they turn on me they can't CC me without recourse, something like guard in WAR.

if it is a shooter, go full out griefer and don't even do the locked up weapons. being able to control FF is a far more effective tool against the zerg if you have a well played smaller team. if we want a bit more skill than shear numbers to decide, make the fire fights a bit more realistic.

[Diggles]

on the friendly fire, i think it depends.

if it is magic based attacks, perhaps i can provide my guild mates with an amulet that would protect them from my own magic. perhaps the amulet is on a timer so that if it was ever looted someone could not be permanently immune to my attacks. perhaps i could do it as a spell of warding or something.

if it was a spell i could use it on Pugs, but have it expire if i die so that if they turn on me they can't CC me without recourse, something like guard in WAR.

if it is a shooter, go full out griefer and don't even do the locked up weapons. being able to control FF is a far more effective tool against the zerg if you have a well played smaller team. if we want a bit more skill than shear numbers to decide, make the fire fights a bit more realistic.

uncontrolled FF is the worse idea a multiplayer game can have. Nothing wrong with Planetside's system. Faction based hits in a fantasy game would not work on their own, as character reputation is not a big enough deterant to stop griefers.

D&D has already done what you are talking about Bone, play Balders Gate 2 or NeverWinter Nights.

Sure I can cast fireball on my teammates, but I better have given them protection from fire or resist fire or protection from elements, before hand

[Slamz]

I was playing Aion and thinking about the merits and pitfalls of friendly fire and area effect damage, as a combination.

Pretty much any game that is going to have any sort of mass PvP potential has to decide how it should work.

A) No friendly fire. Lots of AE. (Warhammer)
Good = Helps break up zergs.
Bad = "AE Spam" becomes the new trend and big clashes tend to be fairly mindless since there's no reason not to drop AE everywhere.

B) Friendly fire. Lots of AE. (Planetside)
Good = Helps break up zergs but makes you cautious about spamming it since you'll kill your own team.
Bad = people will complain about friendly fire. If you implement a really good anti-TK system, people will complain about that, too.

C) No friendly fire. Little or no AE. (Aion)
Good = No spamming of AE, no mass deaths.
Bad = WTFOMG zergfestivals that tend to result in lag and crashes, as there is nothing really stopping 400 players from clashing for extended periods of time

D) Friendly fire. Little or no AE. (Never been done?)
Good = No spamming of AE, no mass deaths and harder for a clumsy person to ruin the game for themselves or anyone else.
Bad = Zerg fests and complaints about friendly fire?



I think "D" might be interesting.

Mass zerg on zerg warfare would be difficult. Players would want to spread out more because they want a clean line of fire, but there's a lot less potential for total mayhem if nobody is firing explosives.