Player Consequences: WAR games
The season of war has come upon us and we have not one, but two great fantasy war games out in the stores. I have to stress the term "fantasy" though since neither game is truly designed around anything remotely resembling real warfare. That kind of action can really only be found in the less structured gameplay of MMOs like EVE Online. Of course, in those games the side with the most money and the best equipment tend to always win. This makes it a little too similar to real life for most people and it can be a bit boring. Not many people want to worry about managing a supply chain when they can be clashing swords. This is why games like Warhammer and World of Warcraft with their resetting objectives and instances are much more popular. The rules for these games might not be realistic, but it's entertaining.
 | Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out our Warhammer guides: Massively's Character Creation Guide and our WoW Player's Guide to Warhammer. Plus, don't miss any of our ongoing coverage as Massively goes to WAR! |
One of the most important aspects of designing a war game is how the conditions for victory are set up. How do you decide which sides wins and what are the main objectives? Developers have to worry about making a "fair" system and still make sure the overall game is fun. World of Warcraft in particular has had problems with its PvP systems and Blizzard has had to redesigned them several times over the years. However, one thing that has remained constant is that Blizzard is very concerned with making sure it rewards players based on their relative success in PvP. It's not how good you are in war, but how good you are compared to everyone else. This is a sharp contrast to Mythic's philosophy, which rewards players on absolute rankings of renown and influence.
Warhammer has perhaps the more forgiving system and it's not a bad design for a war based MMO. Since MMOs are never ending, there is a strong chance that the winning side will start to attract more players over time. This can be devastating if the game overly depends on a relative reward system. Population imbalances effect queue times and the overall "fairness" of any open world PvP encounter. At the moment Warhammer may be criticized for making scenarios overly effective for leveling, but it's reward systems are much more resistant to imbalanced queue times. Anyone can put the time and effort into earning renown and reach most of the rewards in the game.
World of Warcraft on the other hand has consistently limited rewards for only the top performing players. In the early honor ranking days, this worked in the favor of the less populous factions. Since their performance was measured against a smaller number of players, it required a relatively shorter amount of time and effort to increase rank. The larger faction had to spend much more time to get the same sort of increase in rank and earn rewards. Eventually, World of Warcraft reworked their system and it now uses arena ratings to control rewards. This may have taken the advantage away from the less populated factions, but it has created almost as many problems.
