The Anvil of Crom: In praise of forum PvP

Hello my fellow barbarians, and welcome back to The Anvil of Crom. The new year is but a babe at this point, but there's already a lot going on in the world of Funcom's Hyboria. If these first few days are any indication, I'm certainly not going to be hurting for column topics in 2011, and the Age of Conan community isn't going to be hurting for discussion items either.

As far as my in-game adventures are concerned, I'm plugging away at the Khitai content with my Demonologist and seriously considering making him my permanent main. I'm still waffling a bit as I love alts and love the way they allow me to experience different parts of the game, but the post-80 grind is simply too much to bear on multiple toons. I guess moving to a single-character playstyle is ultimately a good thing, but in past games I've been unable to shake the nagging suspicion that I'm missing something. Look for more on this in a future column (assuming I can make up my mind).

Anyhow, it's been quite a while since I took the community's pulse (mid-November to be exact), so what say we take a look at what's got Age of Conan's players (and developers) talking of late.

Craig Morrison reads forums(film at 11)

While it's not exactly news that Silirrion is an active member of the forum community, there's never been a better example of it. Also, in a rather eerie case of personal deja vu, an enterprising Age of Conan forum dweller by the name of soulvein started a thread thanking the Funcom game director for frequently taking the time to read (and post) on AoC's boards. The deja vu comes into play because of the link provided by soulvein in the opening post. It leads to an opinion piece by indie game developer Jeff Vogel that has also been the subject of an internal Massively discussion this past week due to its stance against wading into the thick of negative reader comments. In a nutshell, Vogel lays out why most developers shouldn't subject themselves to the often-hostile opinions of their customers and should instead delegate the responsibility of community feedback-gathering to trained support personnel.

While there's some wisdom in Vogel's comments, AoC community members should consider themselves fortunate that Morrison routinely disregards it (and often goes toe to toe with Funcom's most vocal critics on the game's free-for-all boards). Morrison chimes in on this thread in short order and offers up his take on why forum feedback is often divisive and difficult to process, stating that "the problem that anyone involved in an MMO also faces is that what is 'good' is subjective, and more importantly there are many, many different opinions out there as to what an MMO 'should be' or 'should include' or 'should focus on.' So it is always easy for there to be way more negativity than normal, and not everyone has the personality for that."

The PvP suggestion thread

Speaking of Craig Morrison reading forums, he also posts more often than not, and in this case he started a feedback thread that snowballed into a monstrous, inflammatory beast worthy of the PvP descriptor in its title. Silirrion starts things off by asking for content suggestions along four general PvP-centric lines: minigames, Border Kingdom objectives, sieges, or duels and arena systems.

As you would expect, opinions run the gamut from "no PvP" to "1.04 rollback" and varying points in between. One interesting exchange happens relatively early in the 23-page thread and deals with the fact that Morrison specifically omitted open-world PvP objectives from his list. The answer is multi-faceted but generally boils down to the fact that "they are very, very hard to actually get people to participate in. It is not that we are fundamentally against them, but we really struggle to see any way that they could work and offer something meaningful to the PVP game." Morrison also touches on the fact that Funcom would likely need to develop separate game types for PvP and PvE server rulesets. Finally, he drops an interesting factoid in that Age of Conan's population is split roughly 50/50 between the two shard types.

Though the thread does contain its share of negativity, there are also quite a lot of interesting suggestions to be found. A few of my favorites, in no particular order, were PvP armor stat reductions, server merges and subsequent PvP/PvE/epic instances of each zone, cross-server minigames, and increased T1 loot drops (to provide new 80s with competitive PvP gear).

Mykro's suggestion post

This last one might seem a bit dated (the original post went up on December 16th), but Mykro put such a huge amount of time and thought into his post that it bears highlighting (and it's still generating comments three weeks later). In a nutshell, he advocates a series of drastic changes focused on improving AoC's PvP implementation. What's new, you might be wondering? Surely a hundred other PvP-minded folks have started similar threads since 1.05. Well yes, some of Mykro's points have been made before, but never in such a lengthy and well-organized post.

The author does take a few thinly veiled pot shots at the Funcom dev team and even has the cojones to state that "if these suggestions are ignored by the game director, he really is not fit for directing the pvp side of this game." It's relatively easy to forgive the posturing, though, simply because Mykro's ideas make a lot of sense (and more importantly, they don't require a wholesale rewrite of game systems).

What exactly are the proposed changes? They basically break down as follows: implement a ranking system as well as a pre-made vs. pre-made minigame system, reduce the PvP XP required from levels 1 through 5, reduce the Khitai grind and thereby increase the viability of competitive alternate characters, implement a dueling arena, adjust crowd control immunity and stamina potion issues, and increase PvP XP from open-world kills (and add Bori reward tokens into the mix).

That's just the tip of the iceberg, really, and if you care about PvP in Age of Conan, you should take the time to read the full post. While I'm not the world's biggest PvP fan, I believe that Mykro's suggestions would increase the game's population without breaking the development budget or subjecting existing players to another 1.05-style revamp. His insights into the game's open-world PvP mess, and in particular, how and why it changed with regard to the Shrines of Bori implementation, are worth reading for anyone interested in an accurate assessment of one of AoC's longstanding issues.

That's about all I've got for you this week. Those three threads and the resulting discussions make for some pretty fascinating reading (as well as a possible indication of where the game may be heading in the new year). If you've seen some other noteworthy AoC discussions of recent vintage, feel free to share them in the comments. Until next week, I leave you with my favorite forum PvPers.

Jef Reahard is an Age of Conan beta and launch day veteran, as well as the creator of Massively's weekly Anvil of Crom. Feel free to suggest a column topic, propose a guide, or perform a verbal fatality via jef@massively.com.