Sheep tend to be timid, nervous and easily frightened. Having little natural means of defense, they instinctively join together in a group, called a flock, to run from perceived danger.
I kinda laughed when I read this account of a WoW player who decided to go Horde hunting at Tarren’s Mill and was soundly thrashed by players who were far better trained and equipped. The funniest bit was when he went into full sheeple mode and hoped that WAR wouldn’t give such an advantage to people with better gear and skills.
All members of the flock will follow any member of the flock that happens to lead. Whenever one animal is separated, it will frantically try to rejoin the flock.
Everyone *does* start out equally in WoW — level 1, 10 hit points, ploinking stuff walking randomly ten feet from where you were born. Sure, it’s not like a FPS game — it’s *harder*. How you spend the hundreds of hours to get to max level is up to you. Spend it getting great gear and lots of experience in PvP? Or spend it goofing off in instance runs and spending all your money leathercrafting?
When driving sheep, keep them together in one group rather than allowing two or three small groups to develop. (If the flock is split, the smaller groups will keep trying to get back together and more panic and chaotic movement will occur).
Any game with any sort of PvP focus has to fall into one of two camps. One is, all wolves. These are games like Shadowbane or Lineage. You’re a killer, everyone is a killer, you will die five times a minute and all your stuff will be taken until you learn how to run with wolves. Thinking you will somehow avoid PvP is silly.
The other sort is one with wolves and sheep.
Now, you have to raise your sheep to be good prey. You might do this by letting them run free in safety for awhile. As they get older, you make it a little more dangerous. They can still avoid it. Then a little more dangerous, the walls which seemed so distant now poke their tops above the horizon.
It is rare for the sheep to move away from the wall so the handler can anticipate the pathway of the sheep.
Time goes on, the sheep do some crafting, some roleplaying, compare the height of the spikes on their shoulderpads, and write pages and pages of fan fiction of the girl-meets-monster-with-heart-of-gold variety.
Levels go up, walls move closer, and the sheep realize that they are in a pen. They bleat a little. The only way left to go is through that dark gate into the wilderness beyond the walls. Where the wolves have been gathering, all this time. Hungering for sheep, and fighting each other for domination.
All goats and sheep with horns know how to use them and can be dangerous, especially to inexperienced people.
The producers of Warhammer have SAID this. PvE at the beginning, all PvP/RvR at the end. DAoC was like this. ALL PvP. And yet people still have this weird idea that Warhammer will be this casual, friendly, colorful, safe place like World of Warcraft where nothing bad can ever happen to you.
It’s those bright colors and cartoon-like characters that convince people that it will be like WoW, and I am certain it will start out that way.
Get people emotionally invested in their characters enough so they won’t quit when the wolves come calling. Then, it’s feeding time.
Usually, the other sheep will scatter away from the person and the “caught” sheep.
I was a guide briefly on one of EQ1’s Team PvP servers, Tallon Zek. Fully half of the petitions I got were from people who couldn’t understand why someone would want to HUNT THEM. They hadn’t done anything to deserve to be tracked down and killed by people they didn’t even know. They were just peacefully doing quests, or wanted to xp in the Plane of Innovation… we had to talk to every player, and each one knew they were on a PvP server, they just didn’t expect anyone to do it to *them*.
Warhammer players: If you’re not going to get in the game to be a wolf, don’t bother complaining when you realize you’re a sheep.
11 thoughts on “Warhammer: A note to wolves about sheep herding.”
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Well said.
-Hungry Wolf
What you forget is that the “sheep” of WoW pays Blizzards bills.
Also those sheep have things like “real life” and “kids” and “wife” that take precedence over getting hard to get gear.
What it comes down to is making a game that can be fun for all, not just fun for the people with deficient personalities (griefers). So far PvP in the majority of the MMOs are primitive.
MMOs can learn a lot from FPS games such as Teamfortress2, EnemyTerritory:quakewars since these are almost pure team games. How can a player enjoy his time even though he gets shot down by the pros? That player gets rewarded for trying. The player gets rewarded for doing objectives that dont involve killing everything. The player is not penalized for failing except for the respawn delay time.
I think your casting of his complain as a sheep complaining of its fate was misleading. One of the built-in characteristics of most MMORPGs is that investment of time generally trumps skill of play. A strategically sophisticated player with less time to invest in the game is substantially less powerful than an average tactician who has the time to grind for the best gear.
It is easy to dismiss this as “casual” players wanting to advance without the “hard work” of the dedicated players. But there is something else at work here. It’s the shift of emphasis from the development of the player to the development of their avatar.
This is a peculiar characteristic of MMORPGs not present in other games (video or otherwise). It’s also at odds with the lessons of real-life: 1) moving up the hierarchy in a company by working hard is not the same thing as advancing your career by developing your skills, 2) better golf clubs may help you a little against your friends, but tiger woods is still going to own you.
If I played Quake against Dennis Fong (aka Thresh), I would be in awe of his skills. He would pwn me, and that would be cool. Just seeing him in action would be the reward. If I get ganked in WoW by a player because they have better stuff, that’s not as cool. If that person has better stuff because they play the game 10 hours a day and I only play 2, that’s not cool at all. The difference between Dennis Fong, who turned video games into a career, and the loser who plays WoW 10 hours a day is that Dennis Fong made *himself* better, whereas getting loot only makes your character better.
Should time invested make your equipment/character better? Yes. Should the advantage it creates overwhelm the skills of the player? I don’t think so. It’s one of the reasons I play GuildWars. The return for obsessive play doesn’t outweigh good strategy.
just my 2 cents
-r
PvP will certainly be the end game focus of WAR. But that doesn’t mean that there will be no way to avoid PvP in Warhammer Online. After all, each sheep pays the same monthly fee to EA Mythic as a wolf. Designing a game with no safe areas where the sheep can graze without being bothered by wolves would be financially a catastrophe. There are far more sheep than wolves.
There wasn’t any way to avoid RvR whether in battlegrounds or keep/relic raids in DAoC at max level, unless you liked logging in and doing nothing. But everyone embraced RvR in DAoC; that’s why you played. That’s what set it apart from EverQuest. I fully expect Warhammer to follow that same path.
My concern is when I see people looking forward to Warhammer but not relishing the PvP aspect of it. All I can say to that is — Huh? If you’re gonna play Warhammer, your first goal as a level 1 whatever player should be to find a level 1 whatsit player of the opposing faction, and kill them.
If instead. you look for six legged whozits to grind levels on and wonder how many days it will take to get to level 50 so you can begin getting your epics, I have to wonder if you really chose the best game. Why not just do another alt in World of Warcraft?
I’m with Tobold on this one. I highly doubt they’ll eliminate PvE content at the max tiers of WAR if they truly want it to be financially successful. The majority of people interested in WAR are in fact wolves, but that doesn’t mean sheep shouldn’t be allowed to have their fun too.
And in DAOC you had plenty to do in PvE if that was your primary goal. You could travel from the highest sky fortress in ToA to the lowest reaches of Darkness Falls. Their end game was designed around RvR surely, but one shouldn’t have felt any more boxed in than they do in WoW. The reason why their game ultimately failed is because they forced too MUCH PvE upon the wolves and implemented it in such mind-numbingly stupid way.
Darkness Falls was a RvR area when I played. We had fun hunting down the Hibs and Mids and gathering seals. And ToA… I don’t think DAoC needed to ape EQ any more than they already did.
Warhammer is a game I am actually looking forward to playing, quite a lot. I’m not a sheep or a wolf. I guess I’m a snake. Leave me alone and I might leave you alone, but fight me and you will get more than you thought. I used to shock people all the time back in WoW — I went PvP flagged on my PvE server, which was actually a little unfair to my attackers, as I lived with PvP all the time, and they were usually new to it.
But you know sheep. They like the mindless, repetitive gameplay — it is calming, soothing. Give them the grind, the dailies, the unchanging, thought-stifling world, and they are happy. My fear is that so many will …flock… to Warhammer that EA/Mythic will listen to their bleating and tone down the PvP/RvR nature of the game to pacify the panicked crowd. I just want the sheep to stay in WoW.
DF was an RvR area at times but once the dust settled, it was one of the best PvE experiences you could get in DAOC (before expansions made the gear obsolete). It had an interesting dynamic because the desire to control it was driven by two purposes: 1) the want to kill enemy inhabitants (PvP) and 2) to grind out some XP, seals, and bosses (PvE). However, to control it, you had to participate in the open-world RvR, which gave you purpose.
I thought DF was the coolest and most original part of DAOC until they made it pointless for anyone to own it anymore… but I digress…
I played WoW on a PvP server (Shattered Hand) because I wanted to inject more PvP into it. While I had my fair share of open world fights, it still felt absolutely pointless because there was no real purpose to it (small reward and even smaller loss). I also played it like a snake. I wouldn’t outwardly attack people while they were XPing, however, I welcomed the opportunity for them to try jump me.
I am quite confident Mythic learned a lot of lessons from DAOC and will implement the best features from their past and other more recent competition. If a bunch of sheep come into the game hoping for a different kind of experience, I don’t think they’ll overhaul their game design. To reach the widest audience possible, they need to design their game like WoW with a twist, IMO. Offer a variety of content appealing to a wide audience but focus on an RvR endgame rather than PvE. As long as they keep RvR as their key driver for innovation and expansion, they should do well for themselves.
I’m looking forward to being able to level up from PvP very much. I loved doing early WSG in World of Warcraft but I didn’t like having to twink my guy out with 500gp to be even with everyone else. I hope there is some PvE content in the game also but the real thrill is going to be doing public quests which require you to kill or annoy players on the other faction. I think the zones have level ranges so it should be somewhat fair though I suspect PvP zones to be death for anyone trying to solo.
If you don’t like PVP don’t play warhammer.
Oh, I DO like PvP. I am just concerned that the people who don’t are being lrd by their own desires into thinking Warhammer will be just like WoW and PvP will mostly be shut away. And I am concerned EA/Mythic, wanting their money, will accommodate them.