Kreation’s Edge

Syncaine came up with a great discussion on Positive-Negative Sum PVP and compelling reasons for games to include Negative Sum in the context of an MMO.

Being an FPS gamer, I want to point out that in those titles they are Positive Sum. Positive Sum is that whether you win or lose, you get something.

Sandbox MMOs are a bit different because they focus on player dependency. There is suppose to be a dependency relationship between Crafter, Adventurer, and Pirate/Soldier. In real life, Soldiers depend on crafters to create their weapons, armor, and equipment. When this equipment becomes damaged, we depend on a crafter to repair or create us a new item.

When MMOs embrace Positive Sum PVP, we drop the “Poker” element and it quickly turns into a pointless PVP engagement in the absence of Victory Conditions. Now, in the case of World Of Warcraft, they do have Victory Conditions. However, these Victory Conditions are meaningless because they take place in “Instances”. So all of your accomplishments are wiped. Coincedently, Syncaine wrote up a blog on the lack of impact in MMOs of today too in his blog, You are not special.

I agree with all of his views however, I do think we can have satisfying PVP even if the game is all Positive Sum PVP but we must be able to make an Impact (which means No Instances in the literal sense). Correction- I believe in the context of an MMO we must have a bit of Negative Sum PVP as well so that we can make an actual impact whether it be on the individual, team, or faction level.

Is it no suprise that even though Syncaine is a Positive/Neg sum proponent, he also eagerly anticipates Warhammer Online? WAR will include “Impact” in the actual game world itself. So even though on the personal level in WAR it is all Positive Sum, on the global level there is a Pos/Negative Sum.

Off hand I would classify EVE Online as a Positive/Negative Sum PVP game surely and the PVP is definetly a lot more intense then what I’ve seen in many other MMOs. It feels like a true virtual world due to the risk of loss/gain. To an extent, I do believe we need Negative Sum if we are striving to make a Virtual World at least to get Crafters involved.

One thing I will point out- Positive/Negative Sum games that place risk/loss at the individual level excel at small skirmishes. Anywhere players deem worthy of fighting over we can have great gameplay. This more of a Sandbox element

Positive/Negative Sum PVP at the Group Level is more of a Developer controlled activity whereas the battles will happen at developer-defined locations. Small, random skimirshes take a hit here but big group battles is where the fun might be.

Game Design, MMO, PVP positive negative sum PVP, risk versus reward PVP