(from Ubiq)
Having these terms is useful to us, as we try to have a dialog with each other and you guys about how to build these things. People who try to diffuse this by saying “There is no spoon” only impede these discussions.[…]
However – the key point is that if you expand that definition just a touch, every MMO is PvP. And the less freedom the game specfically gives you to gank thy neighbor, the more creative, and thus inherently nastier, the players will be in harming their fellow man.
[…]
You cannot prevent players from being little snits to each other. They will. No matter how much you try to code it out of your game, players will be little bastards to one another. The healthiest way to deal with this is to channel it into forms that can work for your game. Consensual PvP in all its various forms is a key part of this. Players want to fight each other? Fine, here’s how. And make damn sure that there’s enough checks and balances so that it’s always an opt-in mechanism on both sides. Mercantile PvP, which was the whole thesis of this post, is another key part of this. Economic warfare is inherently deeper than almost any other game system you can come up with, if only because it encapsulates neatly so much of our base motivation for doing things.
Related:
Calandryll:
As people consider designs from different angles, allowing words to shift in meaning is very important if we want to continue to grow the genre.[…]
For example, the EQ2 devs recognized spawn camping (or rather, kill stealing) as a form of PvP. So because they wanted to lessen the amount of PvP in the game, they introduced the locking system to remove the ability for players to use kill stealing as a form of PvP.
I’m sure this will be useful for the future.