Hybrid PvE/PvP Server Idea

[Blockbuster]

Hello everyone and thanks for taking the time to read this forum post and please keep in mind this is just off the top of my head and not 100% thought out but the beginning of what I think could be a great idea.

 

Only a handful of you may know me, and that is probably because when I play on Nerd I only play for about the first month of a new revision before I quit and I think that happens to alot of players.  After taking a look at the graph below I feel that this is the case for a lot of the players that play here early on in the revisions.

 

 

When I play on PvE, after about a month I have accomplished everything that I have wanted to accomplish and with nothing else left to do, I get very bored of the game.  I feel like the same thing happened to S players.

 

This got me thinking about ways to help player retention and I came up with the idea of a Hybrid PvE / PvP server.  In my mind this type of server was always the server I wanted to play on because I feel like it would be the most fun and realistic and gives the best of both worlds.

 

Just to be clear I am in no way stating that we should turn PvE into this nor am I suggesting this as a “FIX” for Survival.  I am suggesting that we attempt this as a completely new server in addition to the current servers on nerd.nu.

 

So after reading my ideas below, if anyone has any constructive input to contribute, I would greatly appreciate it.

 

Obviously this type of server won’t appeal to certain PvE and certain PvP players, and I understand that.  If it doesn't appeal to you please don't post in this thread as that isn’t the intended purpose.

 

Anyway, here is my idea so far:

 

The hardest part and largest barrier that will come from this, is creating an effective balance of both play styles.

• Players can create towns.

• These players would then be allowed to claim land based on the amount of players in their town.

• While within the "claimed land" of their town or of a town they have an allegiance with they would be invulnerable to PvP damage.

• While outside in the wilderness or inside a town they are rivals with, they are vulnerable to PvP

• Players could self-designate PvP Zones within towns that would allow members of that town or allied members of that town the ability to PvP one another.

• If a player inside their town attacks an outside town member, the player would then be flagged for PvP for a variable amount of minutes removing their PvP vulnerabilities within their town.

• Players fighting within their town would be granted a slight bonus to damage output and damage reduction

• I also think making towns create PvP and Spleef arenas and then having server ran PvP and Spleef Leagues / Events would help with the longevity of the game.

• ALLIES, ENEMIES, and NEUTRAL

  • Declaring Enemies:

    • Declaring another town as an enemy means you are hostile towards them.  If both towns declare each other enemies then the PvE conditions of those towns cease to exist between members of those towns.  This would allow for strictly PvP oriented towns to attack one another at will.

  • Declaring Allies:

  • Declaring allies would protect you from other players when visiting allied towns

  • Declaring Neutral between two towns would set the flags back to the standard.

  • Declaring Neutral from Allied or Enemy would take a variable amount of time to prevent abuse

  • Declaring Neutral

 

Nerd has always traditionally been a vanilla based server which is respectable, however, the base game can only take you so far and ignoring additions that can accent the game I feel hurts the community overall.

 

I would want to add plugins like

• mcMMO – Is a plugin that adds RPG qualities, experience, and abilities to the game.  Everything about this plugin can be configured to suit the needs of the community and achieve balance in the game.  The plugin offers both PvP and PvE abilities.  The PvE abilities are nice. Take a look at “Tree Feller” for instance.  “Tree Feller” allows you to chop down an entire tree in one swing at the expense of the durability of your tool.  This ability can only be used so often (configurable) and recharges so often (configurable).  Also depending on the amount of EXP you have in the Tree Cutting ability, this allows you to chop down bigger and bigger trees at once.  For instance if you are level 0 and you try to chop down a large tree it won’t work.  Many of the PvE abilities are similar to this one.  There are PvP abilities too, however, I would disable them as they make the game very unbalanced due to the nature of the abilities.

One of the cool things I like about mcMMO is the fact you can view all of the stats of players on a website.  Below are a few of the pages from the site which I have access to the html files.

 

 

 

·         Statistics – is a plug that gives a ton of in depth stats about everything going on in the server a lot more than the current nerd.nu/usage stats.  For a sample of what it shows you can look at this link http://blockynights.com/stats/

·         An Economy Plugin – some type of an economy based plugin would be nice for various reasons and functions.  Maybe make iron the currency and disable Iron Golems from dropping Iron making it more valuable and not abundantly available.

·         A Player Chest Shop Plugin – I think allowing players to sell items for the above currency would make the game more interesting from a PvE perspective.

Those are the plugins I would 100 percent add in addition to the server and I can think of some others but for now am leaving them out of the initial discussion.

 

POSSIBILITIES:

 

Raiding:

I was thinking of some type of raiding aspects but I don’t know how to balance them especially with the fact that I doubt any PVE player would want it to be a possibility.

 

Personally  I think it is ridiculous that you can lock as many chests as you want but also don’t think it is fair for someone to just open yours and get everything, especially if you are not online to defend it.  

 

What i was thinking would be

• Maybe some type of reinforcement system so it makes it harder to break / unlock the chest

• Offline protections so that it can’t be touched if no one was on to defend it

• A warning system to those online when a chest is being broken into

• Maybe only allow a variable amount of items to be removed from a raided chest per 24 hour period

 

Weekly Wars: (pez252 idea)

• At the start of each week towns could sign up to join the weekly war

• At the end of the week whichever town has the most kills against other weekly war towns could be given a prize

• Obviously this would have to be monitored to prevent abuse

 

Influence: (Waterslide’s idea)

• The amount of time you spend in an area the more influence you have in that area granting you more damage output and damage reduction up to a certain point.  This would allow players the ability to better protect themselves in areas the frequent the most.

 

The issue I see really comes down to the PvP aspects of the game.  I can’t think of a way to include PvP, in addition to what I have already stated, that would not make PvE players not want to play and I think that is where my idea needs the most help.

 

Thanks for reading my idea and as I stated before, if anyone had any constructive input to contribute I would greatly appreciate it.

 

Sincerely,

Blockbuster

Edited December 11, 2015 by Blockbuster

[WaterSlide]

My idea is probably not going to work, but one can imagine a lot of ways to protect those who simply wish to be left alone. In fact, it would be entirely possible to let players choose for extended periods of time how long they would like to remain non-PVP. Maybe each month, you would get the choice once more to go to the dark side, or remain a non-PVP player existing on the same map.

 

I started thinking about what you said about implementing an economy in which the players could enjoy the fruits of their slayings. The big question here is what valuable resource that can easily be spent that players would want to raid for. I don't have any idea how a complicated economy, credit, or stat system would work, but we could stick to more vanilla principals in this case. Honestly, I think it's safe to assume that players who choose the PVP life will be using some kind of enemy detection... we probably aren't going to be able to remedy that situation, but if you choose the way of PVP, you have the chance to lose everything that you are holding. The whole issue with too many chests could be somewhat mitigated by having good old fashioned regions like we already have on PVE. 

 

I'm sure there are a lot of other Survival issues that I've not even thought of. Maybe chat spam would be another issue? I really don't know if anything like this will ever be produced through Nerd, but it's fun to talk about anyway.

[tobylane]

How this discussion went in the past is that there are current PVE players who want what they have now - safety plus pvp arenas, and Survival players who want no safety outside of spawn. Any sort of compromise is undesirable to both. It's impossible to appeal to both, or at least to appeal to the vocal minority of S and the visible consensus of P.

 

I believe the best chance for overlap is what Junction were planning, which I think was one strip of PVP taking up the middle third of the map and two strips of pve either side of it. Use the tag plugin used now for logging to keep fights ongoing into the pve area, and a few other things like that. There's planning documents somewhere. PvE has their safe towns and wilderness, PvP has its towns and wilderness, and they have the PvE people crossing to the other side. It could still easily be preferred by one type of people and they'd lose out by not having the other type around. I still don't think this should be tried.

[Blockbuster]

How this discussion went in the past is that there are current PVE players who want what they have now - safety plus pvp arenas, and Survival players who want no safety outside of spawn. Any sort of compromise is undesirable to both. It's impossible to appeal to both, or at least to appeal to the vocal minority of S and the visible consensus of P.

 

I believe the best chance for overlap is what Junction were planning, which I think was one strip of PVP taking up the middle third of the map and two strips of pve either side of it. Use the tag plugin used now for logging to keep fights ongoing into the pve area, and a few other things like that. There's planning documents somewhere. PvE has their safe towns and wilderness, PvP has its towns and wilderness, and they have the PvE people crossing to the other side. It could still easily be preferred by one type of people and they'd lose out by not having the other type around. I still don't think this should be tried.

My intention and "end game" isn't to combine the two servers which is what I think you think I am thinking lol. 

 

It is instead to try and build a server where PvP can still be prevalent, but also a place that PvE players could enjoy without having to worry about being slaughtered and camped every second of everyday. Survival and its players were very toxic IMO and opening it up to let some PvE based players the ability to play there I think can be fun and can help prolong the longevity of the server so it doesn't die after a month like it usually did.

[tobylane]

I believe the limitations on PvP arenas on P have relaxed once or twice, and didn't go too far because they didn't want to encroach on S's thing. Is that still a limitation, or can we go for bigger, wilder PvP zones on P?

 

To put it another way, what benefit is there to do this on a new server rather than modify what P players can modreq for?

[Narissis]

This is a neat idea (though I see it more as a PvP server with a town system than as a "hybrid" server). However, I fail to see how it will address the problem of dwindling player numbers. That's a pattern that reliably occurs on any server, P or S or C, and it isn't related to players seeking out something to do - there's lots to do on the existing servers. One could argue there's actually more to do as a rev progresses, because players build lots of different activity places and arenas.

 

The reason why the player numbers plummet is because players value exploration in a vanilla server. They want to strike out across a fresh map and build something. Once they've built that thing, their activity level drops. The same would happen on a server like the one proposed - yes, town vs. town raids would add an extra dynamic, but players would probably become inactive once their towns were finished, and then there wouldn't be enough player concurrency to actually support the town-based PvP system.