Why Hardcore Full Loot PVP MMO’s Fail

Hardcore full loot pvps are fun but they’re not as popular as you think and i can prove it ladies and gentlemen welcome i’m josh dryface not a week goes by without someone messaging me on youtube discord or twitch saying that they wish someone would make a hardcore full loop pvp mmorpg

The kind of game that doesn’t hold your hand where death is around every corner and they know that if a company made that every player would play it and i try and explain to people every single time that these games exist and they do not do very well

Because they don’t appeal to the casual player base and the hardcore full loot pvp mmo player base is not as big as you think let’s discuss before we begin a massive thank you to the patreon supporters and twit subs who keep this channel alive more and how you can support at the end

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Right back to the video so hardcore full loot pvp mmos what are they well they’re perpetually online adventure games where you can kill other players and take their stuff usually you can attack other people without their permission and this is what many players consider the hardcore part these are games with very little

Safety you are always at risk these games are usually sandbox in design and feature large open worlds with no central narrative or plot the focus is very rarely on an overarching story the focus is on the brutal player versus player combat and the risks that brings there are games like this out there

Right now the sci-fi space game eve online has its high sec and low sec areas allowing players to destroy others mortal online 2 is a game built around crafting your own weapons and then killing other players or hunting down npcs and the upcoming new world and ashes of creation are both

Putting heavy emphasis on the player versus player aspect allowing factions to control territory and fight others for dominance these types of hardcore pvp full loot mmo games do exist there is a market for it but it’s nowhere near as big as the vocal minority would have you believe it is the mmorpg

Genre is relatively niche within the gaming landscape in general and the hardcore pvp mmo players are even more of a specific niche within that fans of the hardcore full loot pvp design like to claim if only a big company made a good game in that style it would succeed

But let’s just have a look at some numbers against your claims let’s take activision blizzard and look at the 2020 finances this is the financial report available for all to read online on page 31 you can see the following yearly increases listed world of warcraft made 186 million dollars

More than last year due to shadowlands but look just above the call of duty franchise made 1.7 billion more than last year king games candy crush also owned by activision blizzard made more money than world of warcraft this table breaks down in millions the income from each source and the total

Blizzard are consistently the weakest aspect because world of warcraft one of the most profitable mmorpgs in the world is tiny compared to call of duty and candy crush the highest earning video game in 2020 was call of duty modern warfare raking in 1.9 billion dollars followed closely by fifa

At 1 billion then grand theft auto 5 at 911 million then you’ve got nba 2k 21 and nba 2k20 in fact there are no mmorpgs on the top 10 list but if you think that’s a lot it’s nothing compared to freemium games in the same year honor of kings a chinese mobile game

Made 2.45 billion dollars peacekeeper elite made 2.3 billion roblox pulled in 2.29 billion hell even gardenscapes made 1.4 billion gardenscapes made more money than call of duty which made more money than warcraft to put that into perspective jagex the company behind runescape 3 and old school runescape reported income of 110 million

In 2020. one of their most profitable years runescape made four per cent of what a freemium mobile game made mmos do not make that much money in the gaming world what mmorpg players tend to forget is that the mmorpg genre is actually relatively small within the greater gaming medium

You can even walk into a game shop and say mmo to someone and a regular gamer might not even know what you mean the bigger mmos like the elder scrolls online runescape or final fantasy 14 might attract millions of players but the more casual games like

Call of duty fifa or one of any battle royale games will attract hundreds of millions the mmo isn’t a casual genre even though it does have casual players despite being massively multiplayer it’s not massively popular and now let’s break the niche down even further into mmo players who specifically

Like hardcore full loot pvp games and you end up with even fewer people again i’m not saying there isn’t a market i’m seeing it’s not massive when a hardcore full loot game releases like life is feudal mortal online 2 or albion online we do see a

Surge of players at the start give it to go because novelty is interesting but these games then struggle to hold onto players because of some of the design issues with full loot design in an endless game the mmorpg is known as a forever game it’s designed to be played

Forever and because of this it needs to have gameplay loops that can be repeated but don’t actually change the game that much you cannot destroy a dungeon and prevent others from ever using it you cannot permanently kill an npc shop vendor and prevent other players from trading with

Them you cannot kill a player so hard their account deletes itself the world will reset to its standard equilibrium often enough for players to not get frustrated and because of this any change to the world is never permanent if permanent changes could be made to the world the game wouldn’t be

A forever game if it had the potential to break the game for every future player it wouldn’t survive long you wouldn’t get new future players this means pvp isn’t about total domination of a town forever or ownership of a mythical item forever the game needs to reset to standard equilibrium

For new players to be able to join which means the fight is the focus the moment-to-moment pvp battles they must be fun so in full loot pvp games you have players killing each other to get their stuff well where does this stuff come from because this is another design

Paradox if you spend hours and hours grinding dungeons and finally get the ultimate sword drop and then another player kills you and takes it you will become extremely demotivated and not really feel like getting it again but the player that killed you is now super happy he got a rare sword

One player is extremely saddened another is elated unfortunately for player retention this has been shown to lead to the defeated player quitting and the player base dropping now you might be saying the defeated player needs to just toughen up and go and grind again but player base drops over time have shown

The majority of gamers are not fans of hardcore design like this there is a market but it’s not massive most players will instead gravitate toward games which require less time investment and then contain less risk as mmorpg players either age find a job or have a family and have less time for gaming

Games that demand more time of them become less appealing some people have suggested one of the ways to balance this is to have the stats held on the character not within the items or to have weapons and armor be easily craftable or achievable so killed players can restock

Quickly but if this is the case the armor another player can drop now isn’t as valuable you’re not getting the super rare saw they spent days grinding for you’re getting the armor they spent 10 minutes crafting yes you’ve removed the sadness from losing valuable items but you’ve also removed the elation from gaining

Valuable items in a kill full loot hardcore pvp isn’t a bad design choice objectively it has its place and there are players that like it but the subset of players who enjoy this game design isn’t enough to sustain multiple mmos of the size they claim they could sustain there’s a post

On the new world forums which sums this up quite nicely the very first alpha tests were for loot and it was fun but crazy wild lord of the flies wild eventually it devolved into naked fights with epic wooden swords because you didn’t want to lose your

Over and over plus you could run fast so you would farm and run and when it was time to battle for town it was all tier 5 gear and after battle you loot the bodies well fun and a sense of danger all the time only safe inside outposts which were tiny

You couldn’t be a casual player it was all hardcore pvp all the time basically fantasy dayz dev’s got too many complaints and in 2019 it was completely rebuilt into its current style this last iteration waters combat down even more but we can adapt to it we’re capable of

That as we’ve seen casual players generate much more revenue than hardcore players and casual games generate much more than mmorpg games many people have said to me well you can make an mmo rpg that makes enough money focusing on just hardcore players and while i’m sure that’s true

If you have spent the money the time and the effort to make an mmorpg game you will not be happy with a small amount of profit if you have put in the capital to build an mmo rpg you will want a massive return on investment

This means you will need to cater to the casual audience as well as the hardcore the mmorpg genre is relatively niche within the greater gaming sphere and the hardcore pvp is niche within the mmo genre there are of course players there is a market people still play ultimate online

Eve mortal online 2 is releasing but there is nowhere near as many players as the vocal minorities of these games would have you believe now i’m probably going to get some hate in the comments saying we don’t want casual players go back to your casual theme park mmo we’re only for hardcore

Tough serious flute players and that’s another one of the issues with the hardcore full loot pvp demographic they tend to be incredibly aggressive and confrontational with anyone that doesn’t believe that genre is the best in order for a game to survive long term it needs to become more than just a game

It needs to become a community and communities in general founded on mutual cooperation and teamwork tend to form strong cooperative bonds and stick together much longer than communities founded on aggression and insults even strong guilds in pvp focused games like eve or mortal online 2 focus on cooperation rather than

Destruction the hardcore full loot pvp design style attracts players who value the aggression and destruction it allows and this bleeds into the general attitude of the community and often creates an extremely hostile environment for new players when your mmo doesn’t have a central story or pve content and a new player joins

That new player’s role within society instantly becomes target and they get killed and this happens as long as they try to level up for as long as that player remains anything less than the most powerful player they will repeatedly be a target and then hardcore full loot pvp players

Wonder why so few people stick around for such a long time because the majority of players are casual they are not hardcore so a new casual player joins your game and you will scare them off by killing them repeatedly a new hardcore player joins your game and they might stick around

But they are much rarer pvp is a great game design space and matches of skill and tactics are great but the mmo is designed to be a forever game and what this allows is an advantage to be gained and then held onto and expanded and grown over time

While the npcs and the physical world may reset the player base does not higher level rich players continue to gain more levels and get richer lower level new players continue to get curb stomped when you start playing a hardcore full loop pvp game on anything other than

Day one what you will see is the mmo equivalent of intergenerational wealth built up and compounded the strong gets stronger i know the mortal online 2 fandom disliked me but they need to realize i’m not saying mortal online 2 is a bad game i’m saying the hardcore full loot pvp design style

Isn’t mainstream enough to support multiple mmos there are players who like this style out there but not enough to supply multiple games with a consistent player base and this can be seen in the numbers of players in the majority of hardcore full root pvp mmos mortal online one peaked on steam with 1172

Players the life is feudal mmo shut down now some of you might be saying but the new world closed beta hit 200 000 players and that’s right it did i was one of them and you want to know what pretty major change they made from the alpha of the original design of

The hardcore full loot pvp mmo to now they’ve made the pvp opt in added a narrative story and removed the full loot bit you don’t lose items on death amazon looked at the alpha feedback for their hardcore full loot pvp mmo new world and what they decided was best for the future of

The game was to make it more narrative driven and casual friendly removing the hardcore equipment damage instead of drop on death removing the full loot and the chance to opt into pvp instead of forcing you they designed a hardcore full loot pvp mmo they released it for alpha testing

And the majority of the alpha feedback was don’t make a hardcore full loot pvp mmo hardcore full loot pvp mmos do have a market there is a demographic playing them however these games often have difficulty maintaining their player base even if they start with a surge of players mainly because of the novelty

They will slowly follow a downward trend they have trouble with player retention i hope if a hardcore pvp mmo releases it does well i don’t like seeing mmorpg games die but history has shown us that this design style is not casual friendly and it’s the casuals that really keep your mmo rpg alive

If hardcore players want to say a hardcore game would last they might need to face the reality that there are far more casual players than they would like to admit if you’re a fan of hardcore full loot pvp games and think i’m wrong or if you’ve played

Some hardcore full loot pvp games and just have any input that you’d like me to see either agreeing or disagreeing with me leave a comment below and we can discuss the future of full loot hardcore pvp games together another massive thank you to the patreon supporters and twit subs who keep the

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