Our ambition has never been to create a PvP game. Our ambition has always been to create a game with PvP. There's a huge difference.
I have never claimed to be good at PvP, nor even particularly interested in it for its own, competitive, sake, but I love the fact that interacting with other players in game has a real sense of danger and adventure to it. I have had so many memorable moments of playing incognito, meeting other players, and the threat or actuality of violence has been very important to almost all of them.
(The stranger danger I've felt when encountering people while rummaging through old ruins, that time me and another guy stole eachother's boats and fired bows at eachother across a river, or even the hesitancy with which you interact even with the 90% of people who ultimately aren't out to kill you, &c).
That was always the vision, the game has always -- even with dumber rulesets than the ones in place now -- delivered on that, and that's why I have wanted to have
a game with PvP. My skillset is not primarily in balancing the exactitudes of how it plays out, and I do indeed lack both the experience to do that properly, the real, burning interest (as I do not use these systems much myself), and, frankly, the time. I do not really want to fight -- I want to play a fairly casual survival/gardening/walking simulator RPG with a touch of poetry -- but the potential for fighting is important to me, as it relates to the game having real, tangible consequences.
- I do not use the PvP systems often enough to have very informed opinions on the details of them.
- The set of possible PvP rulesets is almost boundless, and even very tiny adjustments within one particular paradigm (specific drying timers, specific soak values, specific targeting mechanics for e.g. archery towers, specific vulnerability windows, specific damge values, specific block values) can often have big consequences.
- If/when we have done the occasional deep dive on one of the two primary systems involved in this equation -- siege or normal PvP combat -- we find ourselves doing time consuming testing, implementation, and exploratory development, which has not always, historically, panned out to anything useful. The fair and legitimate criticism has then often been directed at us, after a month or so of that, "y u only work on pvp? only 1% cares at all". Both siege and pvp combat are large scope enough to be games entirely in their own right!
- The design problems involved are non-trivial to begin with, especially in the non-curated 24/7 365 MMO environment.
So, idk where I'm going with this, but, one thing I would love to stress is that we are very open to better ideas than the ones presently in place. If you present good cases for alternative rulesets entirely, I am fairly open to that, and I have no sacred cows, really. I just want a game with PvP, or at least real consequences.
Should do a stream this month so we can talk through all of this again for the umpteenth time. Eventually we'll strike gold!
Let there be no mistaking this much: The game's gonna make it. Give it another 15 years and I think the game could eventually become really good.
