Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Why is there no loss in PvE games?

In Monday's short EVE post, a reader commented that he'd play EVE if there was no PVP, and got several replies how EVE would be impossible without PvP, because PvP basically was the reason for the rest of the game. I do agree insofar as that if you simply took out PvP from EVE, it wouldn't work. But I do think that an economy in a virtual world could work without PvP, as long as there is another form of gear loss.

Sometimes I even wonder whether some of the fans of PvP are not actually fans of the design which has the possibility of losses more than they are fans of PvP itself, because usually they disdain the kind of positive sum PvP games like WAR or WoW have. Somehow the MMORPG market has evolved in a way where the losing your stuff nearly exclusively happens in hardcore PvP games. I don't really understand why that is so. Why would losing gear due to death from another player be any more acceptable than losing the same gear due to death from an AI monster?

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