why is pvp not popular on nwn ee?
goglord
Unconfirmed, Member Posts: 3
In the original game back in mid 2000s, there were a number of popular pvp servers like nwknights, bastions of war, alestorm, life vs death. In this version some of these old pvp servers are back, but I see they are not popular. The only servers with lots of players are role playing servers. How come people aren't playing pvp?
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1. People on multi-player want a larger population, low population = dead. For many people this overrides everything else. Heavily time-invested communities, friend groups, signal boosts from devs/press, low barrier to entry, they're the primary factors to success.
2. No trickle down effect. People that dislike a popular server often say they dislike nwn. Possibly because some people talk as if popular equals the best nwn has to offer. The same logic applied to movies: Avatar is the best movie ever made? Probably not.
3. There are better games for competitions between players and nwn is really old now, people know it inside and out.
4. Risk aversion is encouraged and nurtured on many servers. Hence features like pvp and permadeath are shunned by most players.
5. Obfuscation of pvp with phrases like cvc teaches people to think of pvp as bad. While it also encourages social interaction and group formation to create one-sided pvp situations with no real risk and only fun for those in favor.
6. People that still regularly engage in pvp do so on other servers through things like arenas and sparring. If you can't have exciting large scale pvp you can still have regular pvp.
I think to get people interested in pvp again you would have to make a major overhaul to the formula. Even then it would be an uphill battle to draw people to the server, probably almost impossible to draw them away from their current server.
Could be just nostalgia but I think the character customisation and range of play styles you can get from multiclassing + feats + skills is generally unmatched by other pvp games.
In my experience, more popular format pvp games like first person shooter / battle royale / or MOBAs the only character customisation is in what kinds of items you can get, otherwise you're locked into a pretty restrictive style of play depending on what kind of character you choose, if you even get to choose characters. There's no sense of building a character, which is a shame, because character building makes for a great pvp experience!
I guess best hope of making nwn pvp popular again is to address your point 1.), maybe through some kind of 'advertising' strategy...the servers are out there, people just need to know about them
While I do agree with your general idea about customization I would also stress that most competitive games evolve to keep things interesting.
As for advertising I agree that more can and should be done to promote the multi-player aspects of NWN and all of the variations that exist. So that most posts across the internet don't only focus on the same two or three servers.
But since I have been tracking it, since November, then there was more servers than people, now it seems the player population has tripled. Most seem to be on 2 servers, the only 2 Beamdog will allow consoles to be on and they are not PVP servers.
The only bad thing of running, starting or playing a PVP server, is what FreshLemonBun said, you need a lot of people and people will only play the servers with all the people on it, no matter what it is, in my opinion.
The reason is that the content that these server offered was supplemented by newer games. While there is not much games where you can have a gameplay of Arelith or Ravenloft or w/e, there are lots of good games that offer the same kind of gameplay that these NWN servers offered and without drawbacks.
I was hosting 2 pvp arenas myself for a short time period and I was playing a lot on Ancient Rage (first one I believe), Bastions of War a shorly Antiworld as well. All these modules had a problem with balance, logging counters and low player base. When there was 30 players and every player had a few targets he could kills relatively easily it was fun as hell. But when the player count dropped under 10 all this failed because it was not fun to just run around and be a free kill for anyone without having chance to kill anyone yourself. Which lead to logging counters which was antifun as well.
Most players left these servers for Guild Wars, Counter Strike, Team Fortress, League of Legens, DOTA, Path of Exile etc. The more players left the less enjoyable these servers were and the remaining players were leaving too. So yeah, all players are gone and unlike other modules, these doesn't work at all without at least 10 players online.
The population has increased due to two major drivers since November. The first was winter sales which is when the yearly peak is expected. The second is Covid19 which has people house bound and has more impact on player population than anything else since NWN EE released. The main issue here is that the retention rate of online players has been pretty poor and it's possible almost all of the new players will leave again once things open up. Probably before most of them try less populated servers.
I'm not sure I would consider it a category specific issue either. Since many people use PotM and Arelith as action servers either way, meanwhile there are just as many RP servers as empty as action/pvp servers.
Something else I've been thinking about lately is that no matter how many players NWN EE gets it seems to translate in to an almost imperceptible difference in the amount of modding activity. I think a lot of people these days just aren't willing to make an effort for one thing. In that sense just selecting the most populated servers would also result from a lack of effort and long term investment in the game.
Others have rules that force you to chat regularly or other outlandish philosophies that nobody who worked in role playing games ever espoused. A lot of times those rules and systems miss the mark and don't achieve anything productive, and it just seems like they forgot what they were trying to achieve with them in the first place.
Action style servers don't suffer that as much because the desired behaviors are usually already built-in to the mechanics.
I would say that "action", "roleplay", and "campaign" would suffice as far as categories go. More than that and you would just spread things out too much.
This is of course just my opinion but it should be up to the player if they want to roleplay or not. Openness should be the name of the game, not strict enforcement. There is a reason roleplay is as niche as DnD and there are other places besides virtual video games where you can do that in person. Far more engaging that way having seen it in person.
I just want to be myself as the character I'm playing in a virtual world. I like to make characters, quest, level, pvp, pve, craft for and gear them, not worry if what I'm typing is in character or not. That's it.
Concerning pvp, most of the arena servers where pvp is the only thing to do, have long since been gone. Maybe since the gamespy days. As has been said there aren't too many servers that still support it but that number is not 0. Even so, there tend to be rules around certain aspects of those servers that just aren't enjoyable to me/friends.
I do think there's an opportunity for a no-RP NWN server that blends PVP and PVE. Possibly with roguelike and fast single session leveling features. Like a Battle Royale server with a mix of monsters to kill, loot to find, and players dropping items on death.
I am not sure if that was response to my post but PvP servers are something different to other servers. Obviously zero or low player count is a general detterent to players, the lower the numbers the less likely are players coming to try it which leads to vicious cycle that is hard to break.
But on most roleplay and action servers, player can still have a fun playing there solo or without many other players being logged in. There is usually enough content provided and another players are not neccessity but a bonus.
This is not the case for PvP Arenas like Bastions of War or others. There is no content other than testing builds. You need another players to even start the game and due to the NWN PvP nature of "rock-paper-scrissors", unless there are quite a lot players most of them will be just losing constantly without any chance. This is especially problematic because these servers don't offer coop it is always good vs evil or red vs blue so 4 players on server means there wil be 2v2 battle. Now if you are on a red team and you play fighter and your friend is playing dwarven defender, and another two players join and because they see what you play they choose cleric and mage, you will get into unfun slaughter. This always happened. Nobody wants to be losing so players either relog for counter to enemy counter, or just leave. And because relogging will only cause enemies to relog as well it always ended up with players leaving. These kind of servers absolutely need at minimum 10 players so at least 6 of them can have fun. Even if those 4 won't have, they can still contribute to the team play and have at least some satisfaction. But without 10 players these servers were never fun. So the low player count vicious cycle is much worse here.
This will not happen in newer games like MOBAs, Battle Royales etc. there is always enough players. I moved to MOBA as well after playing on Bastions of War. I stil think pvp in NWN has some merit, but without large player base that will cover all hours, it won't work anymore.
I really miss the times there were 30 players on BoW/Antiworld/Blood War.
While action has not had such a great foothold in NWN EE the server Higher Grounds for 1.69 still does quite well across all their servers despite not having the same stream of new players. Success is not left solely to roleplay servers but the offerings are a little skewed right not so that we don't get to see how each respective genre would do compared to each other.
My hypothesis is that with a better representation of genres players would have been more willing to try other servers. If players had found that the top five were all between 50 and 200 players, representing RP, Action, and Social, then players might have stuck around and been more keen to spread to smaller servers. Rather than assuming that NWN was not for them.
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