Wolves, Sheep, and Missing the Point
So Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys has been pretty brutal on Darkfall over the past couple days. Syncaine from Hardcore casual has been one of the most vocal of the people vehemently disagreeing with him. Overall, while most of the arguing back and forth is entertaining to read, I have not felt much need to comment. I think today's post by Syncaine about Wolves and Sheep missed the point.
Syncaine seems to believe that everyone else talking about wolves and sheep simply classify wolves as hardcore PvPers and sheep as the carebear PvEers. He goes on to greatly expand upon this idea to whether you like high impact PvP or not, there is a place for you in the world and it can be more exciting because your actions can have a huge impact and often high risk.
I think that this misses this point of the "wolves and sheep" argument and Syncaine misunderstands the idea. The basic theory is that in an open world impact PvP game, you have the wolves that prey upon the sheep. After a while of being constantly kicked, the sheep will quit and then wolves will have nothing to do but to turn on each other. Wolves do not like being sheep so after a while the wolves quit too and your game is bleeding significant subscription numbers.
I think that Syncaine is wrong in believing that everyone just sees wolves as PvPers and sheep as PvEers. I see it as more of a situation of wolves being people who want to win no matter what and will grief and cheat to accomplish their goal. Sheep are just those that want to be in a fair fight. I do not mean 'fair' as in the exact same power on the exact same fighting grounds. A 'fair' fight could still have you being the underdog, but it is a fight where people are playing the game how it is meant to be played and not exploiting or cheating.
Losing a fight because someone is cheating, exploiting, or abusing some poorly implemented game mechanic is not fun. It is not fair. Sheep do not hate PvP. Sheep hate fights that they will lose 100% of the time. A sheep might attack you at low health or while you fight a mob, but they will not cheat, they will not abuse you. A wolf is someone who will come up to you, kill you, help you back up, kill you again, help you back up, only to kill you again. Sheep do not grief.
After being griefed and abused for so long, the sheep get fed up and go to somewhere where they can find a fair fight. Soon the griefer wolves can only grief each other and suddenly they do not always win and they do not like that.
While most PvP games fail because of terrible game mechanics, I think even those perfectly made would likely fail. It is not the fault of the developers. It is the fault of human nature while online gaming. There is a percentage of online players that live only to make other people miserable. These people claim to love the PvP games they play, but their actions only serve to destroy the games they claim to love.