Community Column: Open PvP

Sean Bulger's periodic community column today looks at the concept of Open PvP (player vs. player) and what it does to games and their communities.

A while back we talked about conflict between players and what sort of a role that it can play in a game and for communities. During this, it was noted that player competition can be implemented in numerous different ways. This week, I would like to revisit this discussion and talk about one of those particular methods: the open PvP world.

Open PvP is one of the more controversial topics in MMO circles and plenty of people have fairly strong opinions one way or the other on the subject. That said, I would like to explore both the positive impacts and negative ones on the player community. Open PvP has the potential to help bond a community fairly tightly, but it also has the potential to truly tear it apart as well.

Read more after the leap.

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While griefing as emergent gameplay may provide entertainment for some, it definitely interrupts the experience of its victims. There is a blurred line between griefing that merely makes things more exciting and is completely and utterly frustrating. Griefers camping my dead corpse does not make the game more exciting. It makes me quit playing. Forcing me to find someone to defend me is not going to make it any more appealing, either.

I enjoy playing games, even online games, alone and at my own pace. I do enjoy the excitement of PvP but only in situations free of harassment. If Open PvP can be designed to eliminate harassment (or at least mitigate it), then I'm all for it. Otherwise I want to control how I interact with other players, and not be forced into multiplayer gameplay, including grouping.

As an aspiring game designer, I think the solution to this lies in instancing based on smaller more personal social networks (perhaps based on friends lists, guilds, degrees of separation, etc.). This may take out the whole "massively-multiplayer" aspect, but is the MMO aspect what really makes these online games appealing? I don't play MMOs so I can play with hundreds/thousands/whatever of other players. I play them because they're immersive and because I can play them with my friends.

In this way I think MMOs can learn a lot from console games with online play.