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So I was talking to my coworkers about Age of Conan today, perhaps you have heard of it.. New MMO featuring beheadings, skirts (for everyone! Big burly guy in a skirt!), and of course naked breasts to behold. The patch notes came up and the design decision that "Resistances from gear and/or feats do not apply in PvP".
So we launch into debate about if this is a good thing or not. We have 3 sides to this argument:
Side 1 - A coworker, we will call him Alden, with a history in WoW who is used to the 'gear dominates all' way that it works. He thinks this is a bad idea; I suspect since it is different from WoW.
Side 2 - A coworker, we will call him Kris, with a history in Eve who is playing AoC primarily for PvP. He thinks this is a good idea since he thinks this makes PvP more 'skill based'.
Side 3 - Me. I think this is a bad decision because I argue that AoC PvP is already not skill based and never will be; eliminating one area where you can invest time to increase your character's power (into getting gear) while obviously allowing other areas (gaining levels, getting gear that does shit other than resist) seems horribly inconstant, confusing, lazy, and all around poorly thought out.
So during this I drop that bombshell that "AoC PvP is not skill based" and the fucking torches and pitchforks come out. For the next half hour I am defending my stance, which I do not see why this is controversial at all, that MMOs (and indeed any game where time investment increases your character's power) are not skill based.. But that this is OK! MMOs are like the television of the game world; they are fun to just zone out in and mess around. But skill-based?
Amazing counter-arguments that come up:
1 - Time investment gives you more skill! It is called experience! (what?) Ok, so generally when you play a game you get better at it. So what? It is possible in a real skill-based game (SC, CS, Chess, whatever) for a beginner to be better at the game than someone who has played for longer. It is not possible for a Level 1 in an MMO defeat a Level 60.
2 - You can't compare a level 1 with a level 80, you have to start from a baseline of max level! (what?) This argument also comes from the #2 person; someone who apparently thinks it is OK to invest time for leveling, but investing time for gear somehow is a bad idea? How can you be ok with one and not the other?
3 - It is possible for 3 level 30s to kill a level 60, so therefore there is skill. (what?) I don't see how this is relevant to skill at all? It simply shows the game was balanced in such a way that 3 level 30s are stronger than 1 level 60.
4 - Ok I am bored with listing the arguments..
In the end I could not even receive the concession that PvP in AoC was less skill based than a 1v1 in Stacraft, or a game of CounterStrike, or anything else. Their final stand seemed to rely on "what you do in battle affects the outcome", something I never contested. But in a game where that is not the ONLY thing to affect the outcome, how can you say it is still skill-based in the same way as these other games?
Very frustrating. It just seems like I was intruding on some sort of sacred ground and somehow attacking them by my (what I thought was obvious and non-controversial) assertions that any MMO which rewards time investment (all of them) are not skill-based games.. They are time-investment based games. :\
So are there any MMO players who also disagree with this assertion? And do you find it offensive? I play MMOs and I don't find it offensive at all; it is just obvious.
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The WoW-way of resistance made things random - from that standpoint it does "increase skill involved"
On the other hand, why don't you guys just start working instead of discussing / playing MMOs instead of doing your job? 
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yea, you arent getting paid to talk about games ^^
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Meh
AoC pvp does require some sort of skill. The problem your having is a silly debate of which skills it requires without mentioning any specific skills.
MMO PvP in general is pretty meh. Some sort of sloppy corrolation of time invested, ability, and situational luck. Does that require skill? Absolutely?
If your co-workers are going to argue that "The PvP in AoC is not less skill based than 1v1 in SC" then I wish you luck, as that's just silly
Even if SC 1v1 is also a sloppy corrolation of time invested, natural ability, and situation luck. MMO PvP's time investmen, and luck variables in the correlation are greater than skill.
Sure the time investment variable in SC is quite large, however, it's influence is much weaker because there aren't items in SC.
meh ramblelblemlram
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On June 17 2008 05:28 kpcrew(Gg) wrote:
yea, you arent getting paid to talk about games ^^
Meh, we are game developers so we can say this is work related. 
(note that we are all programmers so the people I am talking about having questionable design ideas doesn't mean you should boycott my companies products!  )
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oh god we lost another one.
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If you learn something from playing a game and it makes you better at playing that game, it is to a certain degree skill based. Take someone who started a level 1 character and had him progress up to level 100 and worked hard to attain lots of nifty items and compare this individual to someone who bought an account on ebay with a level 100 character on it. There is a clear difference.
At the same time, MMOs are about as competitive as two people playing Sim City. An MMO has no set goal, no winning condition, no high score. You can't say that one person shows more skill than another unless you agree on some sort of quantification of what skill is and what makes one more skillful than another.
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I think PvPs in MMORPGs should always be considered as being fun, never as being a really competitive game. Like playing BGH vs. humans instead of comps, but it's still that stupid BGH...
I also think it's impossible to balance such games. Balancing PvM and PvP with all its aspects, all items, all character skills and so on is just crazy. Far too many variables. Dawn of War with its now 9 races or so also can never become as balanced as Starcraft which is very streamlined, and for good reason.
The characters in MMORPG PvPs also don't have the same starting stats, skills and items, don't they? Each character is different... so that's like playing SC on randomly generated maps which sometimes can be imbalanced for one player.
It's almost guaranteed that character A is very effective against character B but not at all against C. This is the case in Diablo 2 PvP, at least, but I guess it's also true for MMORPGs. So basically you always have some elements which are NOT based on skill that greatly influence the outcome of a battle.
Unfortunately, whether or not a game is a competitive success is mostly determined by its popularity, not its skill requirements or balance.
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Actually I think you don't understand what skill is 
I don't really know what AoC is, having never played it, but I'll just go along and talk from the perspective of a generic MMO, and you can translate that to AoC since the argument should be the same.
First, you have to admit that skill exists. Why?
Well, let's do a normal proof by contradiction. Let's assume skill doesn't exist in the game. Thus, give the same character to 2 people, let's call them A and B. A has never played video games before. B has spent his entire life playing this one game. They both have the same character. Given that there's no skill (in other words, it's all luck), A has a 50% chance of winning against B. Clearly that's not true; we have an incorrect assumption, thus there is at least some skill in the game. If you disagree with this part, I'd recommend you have a CAT scan to look for a tumor pressing on the cognitive processing centers of your brain.
Here's the main argument people come up with when they say that MMOs have no skill: no matter how good you are, a level 1 will always lose to a level 100/200/insert max level here.
Here's why this argument is wrong (and this refers to argument #2 in the OP, seen here:+ Show Spoiler [argument 2] +2 - You can't compare a level 1 with a level 80, you have to start from a baseline of max level! (what?) This argument also comes from the #2 person; someone who apparently thinks it is OK to invest time for leveling, but investing time for gear somehow is a bad idea? How can you be ok with one and not the other?
You assume a baseline of max level. Why? Because a person who is good at the game will have a max level character. I don't see how it can be any more obvious. A person who is bad at the game may also have a max level character. He may kill better players that use lower level characters right? Well, a better player will have a max level character. It's a given. It's the default assumption.
Allow me to give a starcraft analogy to help get this point across: everyone who is good knows good builds. People who are bad may know good builds also. A person who is bad at the game but uses a good build will beat a good person who is using a bad build right? Well, a better player will use a good build. It's a given. It's a default assumption. No matter how good you are in starcraft, give me a land map, start with nexus before 5/9 probe and have fun versus any rushing build. But if you're actually good in starcraft, this isn't a situation you'd be getting yourself in, because you know good builds.
This is also the counter to what happened to be your first argument, which makes me wonder why you split it into 2. The 3rd isn't really an argument, it's a statement that's easily provable or falsifiable so there's really nothing to argue about.
Note how I didn't say anything about the relative amount of skill within the games. If this were the arguing point, then it might actually be an interesting debate (although it would probably boil down to an argument over which skills are better/harder/etc - the ones found in playing an intense 1v1 of SC or the ones found in leading a raid on the bleeding edge content of any MMO)
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EPT
