Friendly Fire in a MMORPG: An invitation for tactics or griefing?

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It’s scary to think about friendly fire in a mmorpg.  Spells, arrows, and all sorts of projectiles flying.. swords, axes, halberds all flailing about.. it’s a recipe for disaster — or is it?  In Age of Conan PvP will have a very “Free-for-all” feeling even on the PvE servers.  PvP in the Border Kingdoms (Think DAOC Frontiers) will be guild vs guild, group vs group and not based on race or faction.  In a recent Ask the Devs at TTH, Athelan of Funcom had this to say:

Friendly Fire... mmm

“In an open PvP area you cannot attack your group, guild, or raid. Since we support raid groups of up to 4 parties this should be rather easy to accomplish. Beyond that we also have the mercenary system which would allow members of other guilds to go under contract to gain tickets for another guild. Thus making it possible for them to assist the other guild without taking tickets away from them. In addition the mechanic for acquiring tickets is surrounding a very small area and easily other groups could be assisting by defending approach areas or walls etc without interfering.

If you stand multiple groups of 24 people ontop of eachother and blast away, yes you will be AOEing your own people but that would be a tactical thing that the players themselves should be in control of.”

The part that interests me the most in all of this is that Funcom is expecting players to work together and make use of tactics.  I’ve always gotten into the whole idea of a massive siege battle with hundreds of players storming a city or keep.  That’s why I enjoy mmo PvP.  I have to admit that friendly fire could add another dimension to these massive battles.  If I have to worry about swinging my axe around because I might hit Bildo in the back of the head, that’s going to force me to be aware of my surroundings.  Very realistic and immersing.

There is also the chance that this could be opening the door for the worst griefing ever.   I could really dislike some guy in our attack group and “accidentally” lob a fireball at his face.  “oops!  sorry man!” all while secretly grinning to myself that I melted the face of some guy I didn’t like.  Or there’s also the opportunity for guild politics to play a huge role.  If Guild A’s city is under attack and their supposed ally Guild B shows up… what’s stopping Guild B from turning on Guild A and taking the city for themselves?  From my understanding, there’s nothing stopping them.  Griefing?  Yes.  Realistic and immersing?  Yes.  We’ll see how it plays out.

Mercenaries will be the huge unknown factor in all of this.  A defending city could have hired hundreds of mercenaries to fight for them and the attackers might not be aware of them.  A really weak guild in numbers could hire mercenaries and suddenly be a force to be reckoned with.  I wonder if there is anything stopping mercenaries from changing sides mid-battle.  Suddenly deciding to disband from the group and fight for the guild that will make your coin purse fatter… hah, that sounds good to me!

A lax approach to “sides” could be very fun.  I’m excited.

  • Friend fire in an MMO game worries me. If there is one thing i’ve learned through all my years of online games its this.

    People are reckless and they love to shoot/attack as much as they can.

    Very few people choose a shot carefully before firing it. I guess I am a skeptic and am usually not a fan of FF in any sort of game. I like to keep my mind on the enemy instead of on my mouse hand.

  • I think this will only be a true issue in the very large fights where more than a raid group per side is in attendance. As long as you are grouped/raid grouped, guilded, or mercenaried to others you won’t be damaging them.

    What interests me though is the opportunity to disband from a group and start slaughtering should I choose to do so. It will be nice to play a game where I can cut you down just because I don’t like you. 😉

  • That kind of griefing is enough to stop me from considering this game any further.

    I want my heat rate to increase because I’m enjoying myself not becase I’m stress or mad becasue some jerk want to go turn coat in the middle of a battle and back stab me only to do it again to someone else once he crossed the lines to his new friends.

    There are way to many ways to exploit this.

  • Being able to end an alliance and turn coat on your friends reminds me to much of RTS games that i’ve played in the past. There are people who make an account, join games and playing ONLY for the pleasure of turning on you and chopping you down.

    There are few things that piss me off faster than a backstabber that ruins my game.

  • I think this is a great concept. Being more realistic is what I like. People having to think is better than just go in an aoe everyone. If someone so choses they can be Evil and kill everyone, then everyone would be after them. It would create real Player Villans which would make the game more interesting. I totally love the idea.

  • Friendly fire should never, ever be in a MMO, unless it’s for dueling purposes. As said, there’s way too many possibilities for griefing, misunderstandings and tempers, which outweighs any sense of hightened excitement as to possibly nuking your own teammate.

  • Since I haven’t experienced it yet I can’t say whether or not I like it… but the idea is what excites me. I want to give it a try and see how it turns out in implementation. In theory I think it’s a winner.

  • FF = anti-zerg? 😛

    I think it might work in a game like AoC where (as I am inferring from your post)it isn’t faction vs. faction, but rather guild vs. guild. In other words, somewhat controlled free-for-all.

    It would utterly fail in a traditional MMORPG like WoW or WAR unless they made special servers for it, where you knew what to expect going in and weren’t “surprised” by the griefing potential.

    One thing I notice from Team Fortress 2 is that I’ve never joined a server that had the Friendly Fire option turned on. People just want to blow shit up and don’t want to worry about harming their teammates in the process. If I were to play organized TF2, I would definitely turn it on. Unorganized TF2 would be a nightmare with it on.

  • You’ve understood my thoughts exactly Snafzg. In a game like Conan it is definitely more FFA, but controlled (Guilds, groups, raids, mercenaries, etc). It works in a situation like this. In WoW and WAR it would never work.

    It’s really quite different from most systems out there. It reminds me a lot of DAOC Mordred/Andred servers, but much more realistic.

  • It will be interesting to see how this goes.

    It does sound like a good idea to make combat more unpredictable. Teams that work well together will quickly top the rankings. On the other hand, PUGs might become more painful than ever.

    Regardless of how tactical friendly fire makes combat, it will be abused by griefers. And not by a little bit either. The one constant in MMOs is that they all have griefers, WAR won’t be any different.

    Thinking cynically, I expect this feature will be nerfed or removed completely in a future patch.

  • No friendly fire inside a group? Boo. If they’re going to have FF for some they should be consistent and have it for all. If a group can ignore the issue during non-allied operations, there’s going to be learning-curve comedy. Better it be an integrated part of the PvP combat model, than tacked-on just to allied-combat.

    I expect the feature is there to make alliances scale non-linearly, making it more difficult for large numbers of allied groups to nuke-blob their less numerous opponents. Interesting game-design idea.

  • When I play FPS games I only join Friendly Fire servers. Sure, there are griefers in FPS game who will just drop grenades at the beginning of each round, effectively tking the entire team. But, you know what happens? They get get booted or killed.

    MMOs really need to start making this push. It’s one of the only genres where the excuse of “but it will be too hard,” actually works. AoC already incorporates collision detection, which will require strategy in PvP, so why not FF?

    As far as the ability to change in mid-battle as a mercenary. I’m thinking that a guild will contract a mercenary prior to the battle, and that the merc will only get paid once they’ve completed the mission of supporting that guild, making it a financial waste of time to help out and then switch all of a sudden.

    Regardless of that, however, FF will only add more tactical elements to a genre that sorely needs it.

  • I am torn on this one.. I like realism but I know how there are always the 10% of people who seek to abuse power, and others continually so… Yeah if there is some kind of point/rep/honor system counting against them where they eventually get booted for killing their own people then it can work. If they can traipse about anonymously though they can last a long long time doing bad things to their own teammates. Still I like the physics and the strategy of having to be careful instead of everyone not really being there unless you AOE or target them.

  • It adds that feel of “who is really my ally” which can be scary going into battle. Server politics will be huge.

  • I am trying to remember how they did Friendly Fire in Shadow Bane – another guild vs guild game with lots of alliances and factions.

    I seem to remember that it sometimes got confusing in battles of big alliances vs other big alliances, trying to remember which guys were actually the enemy 🙂

    I played for about a year – but my brain seems foogy about this at the moment.

    Anyone care to remind us how it was implemented?