PvP Rewards 
04/09/2008 | Devlog | | Discuss
I’ve got a love-hate relationship with the economy in Pirates. On one hand, it’s a system that I designed from the ground up, and of every system in the game it’s the one that most closely matches my original design vision. I continue to be happy with its overall robustness, particularly given how player-driven economies are considered a horrifying design challenge in the MMO industry.
On the other hand, I admit to being really, really tired of discarding changes that I think would be positive for the game as a whole because they’d unbalance the economy in some subtle but important way. I am deeply envious of games that have the freedom to simply toss new rewards into their loot tables and create repeatable quests that are massively rewarding.
That’s the background for the current state of PvP rewards. On one hand, I’m wholly in agreement with players who hate grinding PvE to pay for their PvP. On the other hand, I know what happens to the economy if I just directly reward PvP with cash equal to the lost point of durability. It inflates.
The truth about the economy is that only a third of it is implemented. As originally designed, money entered from ship kills, and exited through three sinks. We only implemented one of those sinks: ship loss. The other two – port governance and social spaces – were postponed. They’re on the schedule, but won’t show up for quite a while. In the meantime, the economy is entirely balanced on one solitary leg, instead of the tripod it was supposed to have.
That means anything that makes ship loss less damaging is directly reducing the only significant sink in the current economy. So I resist it, because my instinct is to protect the economy at all costs.
We had a series of meetings about PvP risk and reward over the last week, and we’ve been building to a consensus on a few PvP-related issues. At the same time, I finally came to terms with a basic truth: I like the economy because I designed the entire economy personally. It’s not because it’s the best feature of the game – though I’d claim it’s in the top three – or because it’s the part of the game that’s the most fun for players. It’s purely because it’s my baby.
Keep the above in mind while I go into the details about what we’re doing, and why.
First, when you get marks of victory, you’ll also get another item: a Mark of Trade. You get those in equal quantities – if you got 3 MoVs you’ll also get 3 MoTs. The economic rewards in the exchange shops are acquired for Marks of Trade; the combat-focused rewards continue to be acquired from Marks of Victory.
You can also turn your Marks of Victory into Marks of Trade, at a rate of 5 MoVs = 5 MoTs. You can’t go back the other direction, though.
We came to this change by realizing the obvious: you don’t want to sell something you’re expecting to use yourself, either immediately or in your future plans. You’re saving for a refit; you don’t want to sell off your refit savings. If you have another currency – one that’s used for goods you’re less interested in – there’s less reason to hoard it.
The ongoing goal with this change is to move doubloons from economic players to PvP players. Right now, economic players are essentially a doubloon trap. Collectively, you’re accumulating more money than you’re spending. This means that while the overall currency supply in the game is growing, that growth is concentrated in only a few hands. As more money enters the game, it circulates around until it finally reaches a rest state somewhere in the economy, at which point it stops. This is the worst of both worlds: it’s inflation because the currency supply is rising, and it’s depression because the active currency supply is falling, or staying the same.
If I were still willing to believe that the economy must be protected at all costs, I’d stop here. However, our discussions about risk and reward have gotten me thinking about the game experience as a whole, rather than the game experience as defined by specific systems. Until we implement port governance, PvP is the current endgame in Pirates. And, to go along with that, PvP is not sustainable without doing other non-PvP activities. (Note that I’m not saying the other things to do in the game aren’t fun; I’m saying that if you find PvP to be the most fun, you’ll resent having to do anything else.)
Combine those two and you get a really unfortunate set of circumstances: in order to have fun in the endgame in Pirates, you have to go out and have not-fun. I’ve played games that do just that before, and they’ve made me very unhappy. Yet somehow I was fine with it in Pirates.
That brings me to the next change we’ve made: killing players will (for now) generate cash rewards identical to killing an NPC of the same ship level. This is on top of the marks, and it’s on top of any cargo the player might have been carrying. I say ‘for now’ because we’re talking internally about what would happen if killing players generated even more money than that.
See, we’re putting port governance in. If I had to predict when, I’d guess mid-2008 (I know a little more precisely than that, but I’m not allowed to share schedule details, especially more than 2 milestones in the future). Social spaces will follow thereafter. So we’re going to have the other two legs of the economy tripod. Why, then, does it make sense to continue to punish you for PvPing, for the weeks between now and the arrival of governance?
The answer is that it doesn’t. If we’re going to take the step of accepting that PvP is the current endgame of Pirates, and we’re going to take the step of committing to governance, we have a strong reason to make PvP more fun and accessible, and we also have no excuse for not doing so immediately.
This set of changes – the marks of trade and the doubloon drops – is step one of a process that begins in the 1.3 build and will continue throughout future milestones. Some items currently on the table, just to give you a preview of where our discussions are taking us, include ship insurance, increased durability on all ship deeds, rewards for port capture, tying some elements of economic production to port ownership and PvP generally, and many refinements to how ad-hocs work in the Open Sea. Beyond those short-term discussions we have even larger PvP systems to discuss, of which port governance is only the first step. Ultimately, my goal is to make PvP both exciting and inviting for veterans as well as total newbies.
Does this mean I’ve abandoned the economy? Of course not. It is still my baby. It means that we’re willing to accept more inflation in the short term to help make other systems viable. In the long term, I expect the economy to be just as important as ever. The same is true of our various PvE initiatives – revisions to the Open Sea spawns as well as the Epic Missions like Bey’s Retreat and the forthcoming Forteleza de Luz. We’re not abandoning those projects. We still see Pirates as a game that supports many play-styles. What we are doing is making more aggressive moves to ensure that the playstyle that currently defines our high-end gameplay is actually fun.
04/09/2008 | Devlog | | Discuss
