Opposition

Conflict concerns opposition. Combat is the most obvious manifestation of this, but it occurs throughout virtual worlds. Two people wanting to get through the same turnstile at once are in conflict; two people aiming for the same job are in conflict; two merchants pitching to the same potential customers are in conflict. Combat may be one way to resolve this conflict, but others tend to work better.

In virtual worlds, conflict is typically categorized in terms of opposition: Who is in conflict with whom? There are three main possibilities:

• Player versus Environment (PvE). Players are opposed by the environment—that is, the virtual world. In a combat situation, this means player characters (PCs) fight monsters.

• Player versus Player (PvP). Players are opposed by other players. In a combat situation, this means PCs can fight each other.

• Group versus Group (GvG). Players are members of groups that are in conflict with other groups. In a combat situation, this means PCs can fight any PCs who are members of enemy groups but not those who are members of their own (or a neutral) group ¹.

PvP and GvG both assume PvE. GvG is a restricted version of PvP that will usually operate within other limits too, for reasons that we shall come to shortly.

The difference between PvE and PvP is central to virtual worlds. In a strictly PvE environment, PCs can do nothing to other PCs. In a strictly PvP environment, PCs can do to other PCs whatever they could do to NPCs or monsters—and potentially a lot more.

Why the distinction? The answer is, fundamentally, consensuality: Players don’t want other players doing things to their character without permission. It’s one thing for a trident-wielding NPC mermaid to attack you, but another thing entirely for a PC to do it. Hard role-playing virtual worlds solve this almost trivially: If a player wants to do something to another player’s character, they ask on an out-of-character channel first. Other virtual worlds don’t have this luxury.

In a pure PvP world, there is no consensuality: People can try to mess you about, whether or not you like it; they may run the risk of being attacked by you, your friends, and perhaps the local police force too as a result, but they can still try. In a PvE world, the world itself prevents anyone from messing you about in the first place (and you from messing them about).

In practice, absolute PvE is untenable. If I want to pick up some treasure lying on the ground and you get to it first, you have interfered with my enjoyment of the virtual world and I am entitled to feel peeved as a result (even more so if you did it deliberately just to annoy me). Weak forms of PvP such as this (looting) are always present in multi-player environments, otherwise there would be no way of knowing they were multi-player. The question is not whether to have PvP at all, but how much PvP to have?

The issue of consent becomes blurred here. Plainly, players have to put up with some degree of interference from other players merely by virtue of sharing the virtual world with them; in this sense, entering the virtual world can be regarded as offering implicit consent that a player is willing to accept the PvP it supports. Unfortunately for designers, players will still complain if they are the victims of what they see as a violation of their character, even if they knew it was a possibility when they signed up.

The problems are compounded by the fact that different players have different ideas of what’s okay and what’s not okay. Some players may think it’s fine that characters can’t walk through each other, because that’s how reality works; others may dislike it because it means access to locations through pinch-points (for example, doors) can be blocked. Then again, some of these people may relax their point of view in cases where 50 characters have just killed a monster then some non-combatant with maxed-out running skills races through the mob and steals whatever reward was dropped. Is a reasonable compromise solution to allow characters to move through other characters but at a greatly reduced speed? A gang could still totally surround someone and continually move around them so that wherever they were headed there would always be people in the way.

Some abuses of PvP can be stopped by giving people switches they can toggle. Generally, players are fine with allowing strangers to speak to them, but not if this is used as an offensive weapon (for example, spamming). Thus, some ability to squelch or gag incoming messages from other characters is often incorporated into virtual worlds. This works, but it’s not always realistic (if your character is asleep, then why would one person’s voice wake them up but not someone else’s?). Stopping people from spamming in the first place is a better answer, but one harder to implement.

This idea can be extended to a system of permission levels. Every character has a disposition to every other character, ranging from “they don’t exist as far as I’m concerned” to “they can mind-control me into doing anything they want.” The default for meeting a complete stranger might perhaps be to allow communication but no physical contact. Permissions can be changed either explicitly (using a “change permission” command) or implicitly (if I offer you my hand to shake, I am implicitly giving you permission to make formal physical contact with me). If someone tries to act beyond the permission level you have set for them, you get the option to turn them down (“Gilead declines to shake your hand”), to allow the individual action, or to raise the permission level (“You shake hands with Gilead”).

The “they don’t exist” permission level raises an interesting question: If virtual hearing can be selectively filtered, what about other virtual senses? One very good way to annoy a player is to follow their character around. In a strongly PvE world, there’s no way to stop it except by running faster; it feels like an invasion of privacy (which of course it is), but the virtual world engine can’t distinguish between friends, stalkers, and strangers who just happen to be heading the same direction. Giving players the ability to squelch the images of other characters would sort the problem out, but again it stresses the fiction.

Fiction is the main enemy of PvE. If you can do something to NPCs, why (in the context of the virtual world) can’t you do it to PCs too? If I create a rogue-class character with high thieving skills, why can I apply them to any NPC from the lowest to the highest, but not to a single PC? The real answer is that NPCs won’t complain but PCs will, but in the virtual world NPCs and PCs are supposed to be the same thing (characters). Although it’s possible to make a formal, fictional distinction between them (for example, NPCs are “normal people” and PCs are somehow “gifted by the gods”), most virtual worlds that impose this kind of restraint don’t bother; it’s justified by its existence. If players moan that this is unrealistic, well, okay, so do they want to hold a vote on whether to allow PvP?

The extent to which PvP is permitted in virtual worlds is historically defined by three factors:

• How much freedom to be pains in the asses the prevailing culture of the majority of players allows.

• What the players say they want.

• What the community management staff can handle.

These are in increasing order of refinement. The real-world culture of players gives them notions of personal liberty in some kind of balance with the rights of other people; players are prepared, in principle, to accept these as the default for the virtual world. Virtual world culture is unlike real world culture, though, because of the anonymity that virtual worlds afford. Some behaviors that would be unwise in the real world because of the repercussions are “who cares?” issues in virtual worlds.

Therefore, the players will suggest changes. If this is the first virtual world they’ve played, they’ll immediately think of the most obvious (but not necessarily the best) solutions; if it’s everyone’s first virtual world, everyone will think of these same solutions and it will become a tidal wave of opinion that the live team will find hard to resist. The changes will be added—some for better, some for worse—and tinkering will take place until some kind of consensus is reached.

The tinkering will stop when the noise from players is down to sufficient levels that the live team can cope with (hopefully before the end of the open beta). Players will occasionally get into conflict, but not so frequently that the community managers can’t sort them out. This degree of PvP becomes the standard for the virtual world; designers of later virtual worlds will consider it as a prototype (or even a paradigm) for the “prevailing culture” of PvP/PvE with which they begin.

This would all be fine except for one thing: Virtual worlds with more PvP are manifestly more exciting than virtual worlds without it. There are two reasons for this: Players are more intelligent than mobiles; players have feelings and mobiles don’t. If you’re in conflict with an intelligent opponent, it makes success and failure more meaningful; if you win or lose to an opponent with emotions, your own emotions are affected.

PvP is “me against you;” PvE is “me against random number generator.” Which is the more thrilling?

Recognizing this, strongly PvE virtual worlds have tried to developed ways to have the good bits of PvP (the excitement) without the bad bits (lack of consensuality). There are basically two ways to do it: arenas and character flags ². With arenas, different locations of the virtual world have different PvP rules. To enter a location where the rules are different from the norm, you must give your consent. This will either be explicit (you won’t get into the gladiator pits unless you confirm you understand what could happen) or implicit (you should expect to be robbed if you walk into the thieves’ guildhouse). Arenas don’t have to be small: Huge swathes of Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane are effectively arenas, for example. With character flags, players elect to be PvP-able, and can therefore interact in PvP ways with any other players who have flagged their characters thus.

Neither of these solutions really works. One problem is that there’s no tangible reason to do it: Why accept full-blown PvP when you’re no better off than those who don’t? Sure, you get the extra intangible content that PvP delivers, but while PvPers are taking kit from each other PvEers are getting new kit from monsters with less effort. If everyone else has it easy, why not have it easy yourself?

The big virtual worlds tried to counter this attitude by devoting whole incarnations (shards) to PvP, so every character you met could be PvPed. This didn’t help, though, because players still advanced faster in the strongly PvE incarnations. PvPers felt they were taking on more opponents and being penalized for it. They might have been happier if they were compensated somehow—for example, by a higher level cap (even if it was only one level higher than a PvEer could get); the PvEers wouldn’t have accepted this, though. Besides, a virtual world designed for PvP has different requirements to one designed for PvE; they’re similar, but by no means identical ³.

This is where GvG comes in. The idea here is that the virtual world is divided into sections (the “realms” of RvR), within which “normal” PvE rules apply. There is a further section to which these are connected, however, in which PvP rules are in force (except between characters hailing from the same realm). There is typically a reward for combat success in this area, which means that characters who enter it do get an advantage over those who don’t. Entry into the PvP arena isn’t mandatory—you don’t have to do it—but you’ll benefit in terms of increased stats or whatever if you do. The fact that you can enter with a bunch of guaranteed-trustworthy friends and stay there for only as long as you want makes it far more palatable.

The term RvR comes from Dark Age of Camelot, but it’s not the only virtual world to use this approach; indeed, it’s not the only big, graphical world to do so. Anarchy Online has characters divided into three groups, with people meeting in PvP areas for combat. Lineage has clan-like groups called bloodpledges ⁴, which can conquer castles from one another in (scheduled) sieges; success here has material results, in that owners of castles get tax income they can invest in preparing for the next siege. Shadowbane is trying something similar for western audiences with its guild versus guild mechanic: PCs can build cities, rule countries, lead armies against other countries, and so on.

GvG does add some of the features that PvP has but PvE lacks. It still misses out on an overall point, though, in that in most GvG virtual worlds it’s impossible for any side actually to be wiped out. In DAoC, for example, Midgard is never going to conquer Albion or Hibernia. This is for various reasons, the main two being content and balance.

Preventing defeat to keep content is understandable. If a virtual world has been advertising itself as having three realms, if strategy guides are out in the shops describing the three realms, if each realm has distinct styles of architecture and dress that took months to create, then yes, one realm’s annihilation of another would be a mite inconvenient.

Balance is not a good reason to keep realms from beating on one another too much. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t matter if one side completely conquers another as long as the resulting empire can split through civil war ⁵. If for content reasons you don’t want realms to be obliterated, though, the aim should still be equilibrium rather than balance. It doesn’t matter if one side can win some of another side’s home territory, so long as it becomes increasingly harder to do so the more they advance. It’s like two fencers dueling with bungee ropes tied to their waists: There comes a point when the elastic pulling on the better fencer is so strong that the worse fencer can win and push them back. They don’t even have to have the same strength elastic—equilibrium will eventually be reached.

A problem with GvG combat is what to do if one or more sides give up and don’t get involved in it. Does the virtual world save them, by not allowing enemies to pass a frontier? Does the live team save them, stepping in to avoid putting all that beautiful elf artwork to waste? Or does the opposition sweep through in an orgy of destruction and pillage?

The main problem with all these PvE solutions to PvP is that there are two levels of consensuality at work here: Consensuality in principle, and consensuality in fact. The former is when you accept that something may happen to you, but you’re not necessarily going to like it when it does happen and it had better not happen too often; the latter says that you expect something will happen to you and therefore won’t be too bothered when it does. Part of PvP’s appeal comes from the assumption that a foe has accepted the principle but won’t easily accept the fact unless they win; this is equally true for attackers and defenders—neither will be pleased if they lose, but both will be over the moon if they win. In PvE-based PvP solutions, consensuality is by fact; in full-blown PvP, it’s by principle. Unless players are prepared to accept the principle, they’ll have to make do with the fact.

Unfortunately, they may accept the principle but still have a justifiable grievance. This is best illustrated by what has come to be known as Marian’s tailor problem ⁶. If a rich virtual world offers characters careers in both non-adventuring and adventuring, how are the non-adventurers protected from the adventurers? Marian’s character is a tailor because Marian likes creating clothes for other characters and the opportunities for interaction that this affords. She understands that there are other players who prefer hacking monsters (and each other) to pieces with sharp weapons. She understands and accepts that other players may on occasion attack her. What she doesn’t accept is that they can do so indiscriminately, on a whim. She is completely unable to defend herself, so will always lose. Is her only recourse to take up arms? If so, what’s the point of putting in tailoring as a career if everyone is eventually forced to become a fighter anyway?

The issue of opposition (PvE, PvP, GvG) is wider than combat, but combat nevertheless is the litmus test that decides whether a virtual world “is” PvE or PvP. If you can attack other player characters, it’s PvP; if you can’t, it’s PvE. There may be other PvP elements—for example, casting nasty spells on characters, or nice ones on the mobiles they’re fighting—but combat is the issue that tips the scales. Who you fight, however, is only part of the issue. The arguments really begin in considering what happens if you lose.