Sandbox MMOs Have A PvP Problem

PvP in sandbox MMOs is inherently fraught with an unsolved issue. Many PvP oriented MMOs have to shut down, after loosing most of their audience and mixed PvE/PvP games suffer from it as well. Some games have workarounds and mitigations, but no one has a true solution.

In order to explain why, I need to lay a bit of groundwork first.

Fair Play

Fair play is a central value that underlies competition in sports (including e-sports), most board games and many other areas as well. Team sports are especially effective at teaching teamwork and sportsmanship, because of how extremely important fair play is to them.

Competitive video games have the same capability in theory - but often fail to achieve this in practice. That’s a design issue though - and not an inherent limitation of the medium. Game design has a far stronger influence on player behavior (even social behavior) than you might think.

One-sided competitions are just boring to everyone involved. The stronger team or player faces no challenge and their victory is no achievement. The weaker team or player just gets destroyed and feels powerless to anything about it. The audience gets no interesting play, no exciting comebacks, no thrill - just a very predictable, clear outcome.

The most common way to achieve fair play is through symmetry: Two teams of same size, on a symmetric playing field, with exactly the same choices and options avilable to them. A setup where the best team is meant to win, and the influence of any outside factors is minimized.

The most common way of avoiding one-sided matches is through enforcing fair play and matching up opponents of similar strength and skill level. In sports this can happen through different tiers or leagues and other methods - in online play it’s quite common to use ELO-based match-making.

If you accidentially end up in any friendly match that’s heavily lopsided - the most sportsman-like thing to do, is to offer to mix up the teams to achieve a more balanced setup. That’s how you get the most fun and best training out of an otherwise pointless match. Competitive video games often fail at this, because joining the winning team and exploiting the one-sided-ness is often unintentionally incentivised through accumulating player points and statistics.

Matches are typically time-limited, have a clearly defined winner and looser, and are independent of each other: the winner of the previous match does not gain any material advantage in the current match. The board is fully reset between games, and each match starts with fresh and equal chances for all sides. Victories or points may accumulate and carry over to a season (or tournament) - but those too are time limited and completely reset when they end.

A few examples:

• Chess and Go both have a slight first move advantage - but are otherwise completely symmetric.
• Left 4 Dead has assymetric gameplay - but one match consists of two parts, and teams have to switch sides between those parts. Winner is who did better comparatively across both parts. Thus overall each match is fair and balanced again.
• Counterstrike gives the winning team more money, and thus an advantage in the subsequent round. It’s easy enough to turn the table though, and there is a full reset on each map-change. Thus over the entirety of a map, it’s fair and balanced again.

MMOs

A very central element of MMO gameplay is long-term power accumulation. Over continued play, the character gets stronger through XP, items, unlocks and other permanent power gains. There are no resets, no defined end or win-conditions, and the game just continues on forever. The character’s power continually increses, but can typically never decrease again. The power accumulation is permanent.

This accumulated power carries over to PvP, and stands in direct conflict with fair play: If one player starts with more accumulated power than the other, then the match-up is neither fair nor symmetric nor equal. The same is true for a match-up of two vs. one - or basically any difference in team size or team composition. This is a problem, which is typically solved in one of two ways:

Structured PvP

Structured PvP tries to solve the fairness problem, by turning PvP encounters into strictly regulated, symmetric match-ups of same-sized teams fighting each other on instanced, symmetric maps.

By having a level-cap and organising match-ups between all max-level players, any XP-based power difference is nullified. Differences in power between different skill builds can be removed by tweaking the skill balancing - often best done separately from PvE balance. Any gear based differences can be equalized through offering special PvP equipment, that’s simply stronger in PvP than any available PvE gear could be - and carefully balanced to not give any advantage.

Do all that, and you end up with perfectly fair, symmetric matches, where chances of winning are equal for both sides. This kind of PvP can be great fun (think of Hutt-Ball in SWTOR for example) - but it’s essentially like a completely separate game that just happens to use the same character. It’s also rather themepark-y and can by design not have much impact on the larger economy.

Sandbox PvP

Sandbox PvP embraces asymmetry and methods like espionage, betrayal, economic warfare and the use of overwhelming force or the element of surprise. Stacking the odds in your favor, laying ambushes and playing opposing groups against each other (through lies, propaganda, psychological warfare and manipulation) is considered skillful play and good strategy. EvE online is the most obvious example of embracing exactly this kind of gameplay.

This can and does lead to obviously highly unfair, completely lopsided individual combat encounters and very “un-sportsman-like” behavior - but is still considered “fair game” overall, as any side can do it, and wins and losses are measured at a far grander scale, than individual skirmishes. Wars typically are about larger scale power shifts between different player groups. Not about number of kills in a short match.

But this approach absolutely cannot work if the accumulated power of a player is permanent. In a structured PvP match you kill your opponent and win - then a reset happens. That your opponent respawns at full strength is an important part of that reset - otherwise you couldn’t have equal chances for the rematch. But if players just respawned at full strength in sandbox PvP - then no war could ever be won, and no power shift could ever happen (unless it’s caused by defections).

Sandbox PvP is not possible at all, if accumulated power cannot be destroyed. What form that destruction takes, depends on the game. If power accumulation happens mainly through XP gains and skills and character progression - then perma-death is needed to remove this power. If accumulated power is mainly present in gear and equipment - then some sort of full loot system is required. If that power mainly lies with expensive space-ships and space-stations - then those ships and stations have to be destructible. And by that I mean, perma-destructible. (Basically just another variant of perma-death.)

Players must be able to loose their power - forcing them to re-accumulate it - in order to make it possible for a conflict or war to have an end. But allowing for accumulated power to be destroyed is a huge change that influences all other parts of the game design. That’s not something you can simply add to a game later - this is something your game has to be designed for, from the ground up.

The Big Issue

Sandbox gameplay has grown in popularity over time, and there’s now a huge audience that a sandbox MMO can tap into. Adding structured PvP as another gameplay pillar will add to that audience. But adding sandbox PvP will instead replace that huge audience with a much smaller one. And that’s because sandbox PvP cannot be another equal game pillar next to others - instead it envelops all the other pillars.

If a player can attack another player and destroy their accumulated power - then everything becomes PVP. In EvE online, even if you play a miner who only ever mines the lowest value ores in high-sec space - you can still get ganked, and have your ship destroyed and your cargo taken. Destructability of accumulated power is a neccessity for sandbox PvP - but it’s also increasingly seen as a red flag and deemed unacceptable by many (non-PvP) sandbox players.

If your game can survive targeting only that limited, smaller PvP-only audience - and can also compete with EvE for that audience - then everything is fine†. But if you need even just a tiny sliver of that larger sandbox audience to survive - then you’re cooked.

†Everything might actually not be fine: EvE started building it’s audience at a time, when player tolerance for “destructible power” was still a lot higher, than it is today. EvE managed to attract not just PvP fighters, but also miners, traders, crafters and other roles needed for the economy.

But is there no way to have both groups of players co-exist? Some weird trick that lets you have sandbox PvP without loosing all the non-PVP players?

A Valiant Attempt

Crowfall was built on a promising concept, designed to achieve exactly that: Time-limited, repeating matches with clearly defined win-conditions and full resets inbetween. Each “match” (=campaign world) would last one to three months, and feature full sandbox PvP including a full-loot system for destruction of accumulated power.

At the same time, the Eternal Kingdom was a permanent safe space - no PvP, no resets - instead permanent accumulation of… well there was no real power in anything you could permanently accumulate there. And that might have been one big problem that contributed to the game’s downfall. Players didn’t like the resets, wanted more long-term power accumulation, and more useful/impactful stuff inside the safe space. With it’s focus on the campaign worlds, Crowfall still was a hardcore PvP game at it’s core - but because of the resets couldn’t really please that crowd either.

It tried to make both sides happy, but - because of the compromises required to enable co-existence - ended up appealing to no one.

Separation

There is a workaround though, that - imperfect as it might be - still does allow to please both sides. And the trick is, to simply keep them apart.

Hard Separation

Ultima online split their player base into a PvP population (Felucia) and a completely separate non-PvP population (Trammel). They had to, because without doing that, they would have lost the non-PvP population entirely. Not as quickly as the split happened - but eventually. (Remember: players back then still had higher tolerance for what was then considered “the price of admission to online play”.)

Separate servers, separate economy, separate everything - this kind of hard separation has since been copied by many other games. But I don’t think any of those actually had sandbox PvP on their PvP servers.

You totally could create an MMO that has sandbox PvP on it’s PvP servers only - and where destruction of accumulated power (perma-death or full loot) is disabled on PvE servers. But at that point, you are basically designing two different games in parallel. One with destructible power and one without. But the gap between those two is so great that you might be better off, picking just one and cancelling the other.

Soft Separation

There is a better way: SWG allowed players to flag themselves for PvP temporarily. That still kept PvP and non-PvP players seperate - but the boundary became permeable, and both sides existed within a shared economy.

Because the CU and NGE changed things I can’t tell if that would have worked out long-term, but it seemed to mostly work while it lasted. If you disregard the fact that the flagging process and it’s edge cases were so confusing that it left many players vulnerable to getting tricked into flagging themselves accidentially, that is.

But there was a bigger trade-off to this system: there was no perma-death or full-loot system to make accumulated power destructible. Instead PvP power accumulation happened separately in the form of bases and outposts - which could be destroyed. But that means that there was no economic warfare. Even if the players driving the economic support of the enemy did flag themselves - killing them would not diminish their ability to provide the enemy with weapons, armors, healing, base-building materials and other stuff. That piece of accumulated power was permanent.

Now holding a base or outpost could provide access to high-end, pvp-exclusive resources. Destroying a base and denying the enemy access to those resources did have an economic impact - but compared to full sandbox PvP like in EvE, this approach is a lot more constrained. Power destruction is only partial, economic impacted limited. This is sandbox-style PvP, but a bit watered down in comparison.

But if that’s the price you have to pay for enabling co-existence, this form of soft separation still seems a lot more interesting and compelling than UO’s hard separation. At least PvP can still be a full-fledged contributor to the shared economy - and both groups of players are still part of the same virtual world. And the ability for players to join PvP for a while by flagging themselves temporarily, is a huge win in my book.

Problem solved then? Replace full sandbox PvP with more limited sandbox PVP, sprinkle some soft separation over it, and bake for two hours? Well, this solves the issue mechanically… but there still is something else that needs addressing.

The Bigger Issue

We have talked about fairness, symmetry and sportsmanship - and about how sandbox PvP is anything but. Judged by those value standards, sandbox PvP is unfair, underhanded, cut-throat, back-stabbing and dirty. Or, in other words - what the PvP players might consider excellent strategy and psychological warfare - the non-PVP players might consider griefing and toxic behavior.

The flagging system does prevent non-PvP players from getting attacked - and the power accumulated in characters through XP and equipment is not destructible. The soft separation reduces contact-points between groups, and thus makes it less likely for them to collide constantly. But there still is a considerable cultural divide and ideological gap. And if anything, that gap has only grown wider, over many years of hard separation. Value clashes are unavoidable - and did happen in SWG as well.

Ideas about fair play, sportsmanship, consent and what’s acceptable diverge. Values don’t align. In many ways, both sides don’t even speak the same langauge - metaphorically. They can’t agree on what is and isn’t griefing. What is, and isn’t fair. What should and shouldn’t be allowed by the game. One side expects PvP to be like a sports match - the other side wants to fight an all-out war, war-crimes included. And tolerance for what is considered griefing has diminished considerably over time.

SWG had both sides meet in player cities. Neutral hub areas, where “social” was the default. PvP was more limited to bases and outposts - but in order to get repairs and buffs, PvP-players had to enter social hubs, and kinda accept the different social norms prevalent there. Interdependence softened the extremes. PvP-fighters needed crafters for equipment and repairs - crafters needed those pvp-exclusive materials, and valued their PvP customers. All of that helped mitigate the issue - but a true solution it was not.

SWG had relatively small servers - much smaller than what is the norm today. And the game did initially only allow 1 character per account and server. There was very little anonymity, and your character would be known by name, and accumulate a reputation, that was a lot harder to escape from. These servers were very population stable, and highly socially persistent. If you became known as a “bad apple”, that would have consequences. This might be impossible to reproduce today, not only because servers are larger and anonomity is bigger - but also because users are a lot more savvy about online anonymity and what that lets them get away with. Also - due to internet culture - value clashes that DO happen (as they did in SWG as well) - will end up amplified and messier today, than back in SWG’s days.

In short: SWG may have been able to get away with not offering a true solution - but a current-day game might be required to provide one.

Conclusion

So how do you align the cultural values of sandbox MMO gameplay with the very different value set of sandbox PvP?

I am sorry for having to admit that I do not have an answer to that question - and thus no satisfying conclusion to offer. But I do feel that an answer is increasingly needed.

EvE sticks with the PvP values only - and accepts the more limited target audience that brings. It’s success does no longer seem reproducible today, though. Games that try marrying the two different subcultures, seem to all end up failing. Developers have been defaulting to hard separation for decades - which in return only increased the gap, as each side was kept in their own little bubble.

Understanding the underlying sources of the conflicts between:

• permanent power accumulation and fairness in competition
• power destruction (perma-death/full-loot) and other MMO core gameplay pillars
• sandbox gameplay and sandbox PvP
• cultural values in different subsets of players

hopefully helps bring us one step closer to an answer.

Without this answer, hard separation will have to stay in place.