In the wake of an underwhelming Blizzcon, I wanted to throw out an idea for criticism and analysis.
One of the main sources of arguments in the MMO blogosphere seems to be the differences between traditional old-school MMO values and modern WoW-espoused MMO values. MMO traditionalists put immersion before ease, and quality socialization before mass market appeal. Modern MMOers prefer to optimize their enjoyment -which is derived primarily out of advancement- but also respect the fact that MMO's are a business first, and thus are more likely to make concessions to immersion to support a broader audience. Neither the Traditionalists nor the Modernists are small enough to ignore -particularly because the blogosphere contains more vocal Traditionalists- so its a tough proposition for devs to fulfill the needs of both without failing on two fronts.
One form of compromise could be found in a system of Voluntary Difficulty Tradeoffs. During character creation (or possibly in game) a player would be able to customize the gameplay experience to meet their needs for immersion and difficulty, and rewarding sacrifices appropriately. The basic idea would be a two column menu, with sacrifices on the left side and benefits on the right. Sacrifices would include things like:
-Semi Realistic Inventory: a sword doesn’t fill the same amount of space in a bag as a scroll does
-Realistic inventory: you can’t carry five swords, period.
-Movement affected by inventory: the more you carry, the slower you move
-Language differences (Dwarves can’t understand Humans, etc)
-No Insta-travel
-Vendors only buy items that they would realistically need or want
-Increased enemy AI (or at least randomly varied responses)
-Racial drawbacks:
-Little types can’t carry much
-Large types can’t move very fast
-“Smart” types can’t learn physical skills as quickly
-“Dumb” types can’t learn magic as quickly
-Generic “+Difficulty” for combat: Monsters have higher stats, know more skills, react smarter
-And of course my favorite: Permadeath.
Each of these drawbacks would have an associated point value, so whichever combination you selected would allot you a total amount of points which you could then spend on Benefits such as:
-Better loot drop %
-Faster rate of advancement
-Extra tradeskill slot
-Access to Epic events, quest chains and locations
-Faster movement
-“Elite Flag” that serves no purpose other than to advertise that you’re a masochist
This allows players who still crave traditional “immersive” limitations on gameplay to scratch that itch and be rewarded for doing it old-school, while allowing modernists to play exactly as streamlined as they want.
This also plays into the idea of a difficulty slider, where a player can make combat more or less difficult at any time (outside of combat and dungeons), with an accompanying increase or decrease in rewards and experience. Group difficulty would simply be the average difficulty rating of the entire party.
Disclaimer: The bare bones outline for this idea has been sitting in my inbox since December 15, 2009, which means I don’t remember 100% if this is entirely my idea or is based on something someone else wrote. If this looks familiar to you, please let me know so I can give credit where its due.
Showing posts with label Loot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Loot. Show all posts
Monday, October 25, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Count to Five, Let the Fear In
Labels:
Difficulty,
Grouping,
Loot,
MMORPG,
Permadeath,
Player Killers,
PvP,
Raiding,
Risk vs. Reward
Permadeath. Reading that word these days is more likely to make you roll your eyes than crap your pants in fear, and that’s unfortunate. I’m not pro-pants-crapping, nor am I pro-death, but I do wish there was still respect and fear attached to the concept of permadeath in video games. Instead its now viewed as an MMO taboo that is simply ridiculous to consider viable. Why? Because when a player loses a character they’ve invested dozens and dozens of hours in, the game will lose that player, because they couldn’t possibly handle the stress of such a loss, nor would he be willing to start over anew?
Nonsense.
The level of achievement a person feels when they overcome a challenge is directly proportional to the level of risk taken. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. When the greatest risk you run in an MMO is a very temporary death (which equates to a corpse run time sink and relatively small maintenance costs for equipment), how sweet is any victory? When you defeat a dungeon boss, how rewarding is it when you know that if you had failed again you would have had an infinite number of chances to try again? What greater risk is there than losing your character forever? Now this is probably the line where people stop reading, thinking that I’m one of countless people on the far end of the permadeath ideology spectrum, but keep your shirt on for a second. Psychology aside, if you institute across the board permadeath, you’ll never have a playerbase. No one wants to HAVE to lose their character forever, especially in the normal course of the normal game for normal rewards.
Thus there are three coMMOndments for Permadeath in MMO’s:
Thou shalt make all instances of Permadeath occur in optional endeavors
Thou shalt make the rewards for risking Permadeath phat and epic
Thou shalt make a big deal of Permadeath endeavors to the rest of the game world
What do these mean? The first coMMOndment means you should never ever force permadeath on someone. There should be no activity that a player must accept the risk of permadeath to take part in. Make a permadeath version of an activity, but never a simply permadeath activity.
The second coMMOndment is the simplest. Make the rewards match the risk. And don’t underestimate the aversion players have to losing a character forever. The rewards for permadeath risk don’t scale like other types of difficulty, this shoots it through the roof, so loot drop rates, experience, and any other rewards should flow like wine for the risk takers.
The third coMMOndment will justify Permadeath’s presence in the game explicitly (complementing the implicit justification that hardcore elite player’s won’t be able to whine about difficulty). We always hear people whining that their quests and actions have no significance because everyone is doing the same thing. But if the first person to achieve a major quest in permadeath mode closes that quest forever and moves the story forward, that would give significance to questing, and would allow for lots of people to try to be heroes, and only one to succeed.
So here are my five ideas for applications of Permadeath in MMOs:
1) Gladiators- Have your typical arena setup with teams, prizes, individual matches, rankings, etc. But offer the option for any player to enter the Big League, where they fight one on one with the loser dying permanently, and the winner getting huge rewards and fame. People could issue challenges, move up the rankings and gain real notoriety. Any Permadeath match should be prescheduled and publicized at least a day in advance, and any player would be able to watch the match live.
2) Difficulty Meter- Meter for each player that they can adjust any time out of battle, which determines their game difficulty and the rewards they get from battle. Highest level is permadeath. Groups play at the average difficulty level of each individual.
3) Dragonslayer- Taking a specific group quest and attempting to beat a dungeon and slay the final boss under threat of permadeath. Failing would mean permadeath, victory would result in that boss being gone forever and the story being advanced further to open new content. Even if there was success, any players lost in the attempt would be gone forever. Victors (even dead ones) would be immortalized in the history books of that server, and celebrated as heroes.
4) Highlander- Players can permanently designate themselves as “Chosen” once they reach a particular level/time played. A Chosen player can attack ANY other Chosen player, and when one kills another, that character is gone for good. The winner gets all of the loser’s equipment and money (Even bound items), a big portion of their experience/skill, and positive boosts to any factions that the loser was very friendly with.
5) Protector- This I saw on another person’s blog, if you’re reading this and it was your idea (you described it as trees), please email me so I can give you credit. A player can opt to sacrifice their character forever to create a permanent guardian for a city or town. The power of the guardian is directly related to the sacrificed character’s power. This would work best in a game with player towns and/or faction bases.
6) BONUS: Progeny. Inheritance is a concept sometimes linked with permadeath as a way of cushioning the blow, and while I haven’t heard of a system I like yet, I really believe there is a system out there somewhere that will work perfectly and make this a really fun mechanic.
So you see, Permadeath should not be shunned and laughed at, it has the potential to bring heroicism and significance back to MMOs, as long as its done right.
Nonsense.
The level of achievement a person feels when they overcome a challenge is directly proportional to the level of risk taken. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. When the greatest risk you run in an MMO is a very temporary death (which equates to a corpse run time sink and relatively small maintenance costs for equipment), how sweet is any victory? When you defeat a dungeon boss, how rewarding is it when you know that if you had failed again you would have had an infinite number of chances to try again? What greater risk is there than losing your character forever? Now this is probably the line where people stop reading, thinking that I’m one of countless people on the far end of the permadeath ideology spectrum, but keep your shirt on for a second. Psychology aside, if you institute across the board permadeath, you’ll never have a playerbase. No one wants to HAVE to lose their character forever, especially in the normal course of the normal game for normal rewards.
Thus there are three coMMOndments for Permadeath in MMO’s:
Thou shalt make all instances of Permadeath occur in optional endeavors
Thou shalt make the rewards for risking Permadeath phat and epic
Thou shalt make a big deal of Permadeath endeavors to the rest of the game world
What do these mean? The first coMMOndment means you should never ever force permadeath on someone. There should be no activity that a player must accept the risk of permadeath to take part in. Make a permadeath version of an activity, but never a simply permadeath activity.
The second coMMOndment is the simplest. Make the rewards match the risk. And don’t underestimate the aversion players have to losing a character forever. The rewards for permadeath risk don’t scale like other types of difficulty, this shoots it through the roof, so loot drop rates, experience, and any other rewards should flow like wine for the risk takers.
The third coMMOndment will justify Permadeath’s presence in the game explicitly (complementing the implicit justification that hardcore elite player’s won’t be able to whine about difficulty). We always hear people whining that their quests and actions have no significance because everyone is doing the same thing. But if the first person to achieve a major quest in permadeath mode closes that quest forever and moves the story forward, that would give significance to questing, and would allow for lots of people to try to be heroes, and only one to succeed.
So here are my five ideas for applications of Permadeath in MMOs:
1) Gladiators- Have your typical arena setup with teams, prizes, individual matches, rankings, etc. But offer the option for any player to enter the Big League, where they fight one on one with the loser dying permanently, and the winner getting huge rewards and fame. People could issue challenges, move up the rankings and gain real notoriety. Any Permadeath match should be prescheduled and publicized at least a day in advance, and any player would be able to watch the match live.
2) Difficulty Meter- Meter for each player that they can adjust any time out of battle, which determines their game difficulty and the rewards they get from battle. Highest level is permadeath. Groups play at the average difficulty level of each individual.
3) Dragonslayer- Taking a specific group quest and attempting to beat a dungeon and slay the final boss under threat of permadeath. Failing would mean permadeath, victory would result in that boss being gone forever and the story being advanced further to open new content. Even if there was success, any players lost in the attempt would be gone forever. Victors (even dead ones) would be immortalized in the history books of that server, and celebrated as heroes.
4) Highlander- Players can permanently designate themselves as “Chosen” once they reach a particular level/time played. A Chosen player can attack ANY other Chosen player, and when one kills another, that character is gone for good. The winner gets all of the loser’s equipment and money (Even bound items), a big portion of their experience/skill, and positive boosts to any factions that the loser was very friendly with.
5) Protector- This I saw on another person’s blog, if you’re reading this and it was your idea (you described it as trees), please email me so I can give you credit. A player can opt to sacrifice their character forever to create a permanent guardian for a city or town. The power of the guardian is directly related to the sacrificed character’s power. This would work best in a game with player towns and/or faction bases.
6) BONUS: Progeny. Inheritance is a concept sometimes linked with permadeath as a way of cushioning the blow, and while I haven’t heard of a system I like yet, I really believe there is a system out there somewhere that will work perfectly and make this a really fun mechanic.
So you see, Permadeath should not be shunned and laughed at, it has the potential to bring heroicism and significance back to MMOs, as long as its done right.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
The Greatest Threat to the Economy: Ursus Americanus
Labels:
Auction House,
Economy,
Loot,
MMORPG
People wonder why MMO economies are fickle and screwy while also wondering why there are so many immature, selfish people in these games. What is the common answer to both of these questions? Dumbed down tradeskills on the developer’s backburner? A suboptimal auction house mechanic? A marked absence of quantum balancing systems mitigating the sinusoidal variance of markets in constant flux?
False. Black bears.
How often do you go into Walmart and see someone dumping a dozen or so Rotting Bear Carcasses on the checkout counter, asking the associate to give him dozens of pieces of silver in return? That’s essentially what happens thousands of times every day in WoW, and people have come to accept it as normal. If you told me I could go outside and kill every living thing in the woods and sell all the useless parts and scraps to Walmart (or Barnes and Noble, or Gamestop, or any other store because they all pay the same for everything) for loads of silver and maybe even gold, I might break out the old 12 gauge and use Bambi’s inedible parts to pay down my mortgage. WoW enables people to do just that, and we wonder why a certain kind of powerfantasizing selfish teenage demographic is attracted to the genre? When a consistent way of making money is wholesale slaughter for steady vendor trash, there are going to be problems with the playerbase.
Far more important is the effect this has on the economy. Lets review:
1) Killing animals rewards you with vendor trash, which serves no other purpose than generating money for players
2) Vendors will never stop buying vendor trash, and all vendors will all pay the same amount. That bread lady walking around between the Ironforge Mailbox and Auction House must be funded by a Goblin Trade Prince, because I can’t imagine how much crap she has bought from people looking for extra cash.
3) Animals respawn and multiply like Tribbles in heat, so the source of money is self replenishing and literally endless
Combine these three completely unrealistic elements and you have a recipe for financial disaster. People consider mudflation to be a problem with regards to expansions, but the problems obviously exist well before any expansions come out. So what is a designer to do?
(un)Realistically in most MMOs they will never make animals have perma death. There has to be fairly rapid respawning of mobs in order to allow more players to slaughter them. So Problem #3 is not going to change. What can change is what drops from these mobs. Vendor trash serves one purpose only, and in the end it is more of a detriment to the game than a benefit to the players, so axe it, and slightly increase drop rates for useful items. Players will enjoy the freed up inventory space and the less frequent trips back to town to offload inventory for money.
The other step that can be taken is to strive for a zero sum economy. Any time more money is introduced to a static population, the effects of inflation will haunt the economy, and the poor (new players) will suffer. Developers should try to make sure that if X people are playing in any given month, the total amount of money in the system is Y. If the population goes up or down by 25%, the total amount of wealth should follow suit. Sound impossible? Not at all, it just requires a little bit of creativity and unconventional thought (developers hiss and shield their eyes).
The first step is to make NPC buyers more realistic in their needs and wants. I have a hard time believing that a barkeeper has as much need for stacks of leather as a master leatherworker. I think that all NPCs should still be willing to buy any and all items, just at proportionally lower prices depending on the item and their own specialty.
The next step is to keep a serverwide tally of the number of active characters (not players) each week, and the total money amongst them. An optimal “wealth per character” number should be calculated ahead of time, and compared to the actual average wealth per character for each server each week. If the W/C figure for a server is too high, adjust vendor buying prices down accordingly, and vice versa if W/C is too low. This shouldn’t just effect vendor prices and sellback prices, but whatever other NPC moneysinks exist in the game as well. You could even do it on a per city/faction basis to make things fairer and to create a realistic sense of locale (“I’m going to Stormwind, I hear they’re selling Item X for cheap this week!”)
The last step is to manage NPC vendor inventory intelligently. If the auction house is flooded with Linen Cloth, don’t let NPCs sell any for a while so that players will buy from the auction house until supplies drop again and the price rises back up. If Mageroyal is selling at its usual perma-premium, allow more vendors to sell more of it, increasing supply and dropping the price. All this would require is calculated optimal price ranges for each major crafting component and a function that adjusts vendor inventory based on auction house quantity and price. At first glance this may sound too controlling and micromanaging, but realistically you’re just letting those NPC vendors act like real people, buying when they want to, paying as much as they see fair, and selling when the prices are high.
Sometimes realism can actually help a situation! Gasp.
False. Black bears.
How often do you go into Walmart and see someone dumping a dozen or so Rotting Bear Carcasses on the checkout counter, asking the associate to give him dozens of pieces of silver in return? That’s essentially what happens thousands of times every day in WoW, and people have come to accept it as normal. If you told me I could go outside and kill every living thing in the woods and sell all the useless parts and scraps to Walmart (or Barnes and Noble, or Gamestop, or any other store because they all pay the same for everything) for loads of silver and maybe even gold, I might break out the old 12 gauge and use Bambi’s inedible parts to pay down my mortgage. WoW enables people to do just that, and we wonder why a certain kind of powerfantasizing selfish teenage demographic is attracted to the genre? When a consistent way of making money is wholesale slaughter for steady vendor trash, there are going to be problems with the playerbase.
Far more important is the effect this has on the economy. Lets review:
1) Killing animals rewards you with vendor trash, which serves no other purpose than generating money for players
2) Vendors will never stop buying vendor trash, and all vendors will all pay the same amount. That bread lady walking around between the Ironforge Mailbox and Auction House must be funded by a Goblin Trade Prince, because I can’t imagine how much crap she has bought from people looking for extra cash.
3) Animals respawn and multiply like Tribbles in heat, so the source of money is self replenishing and literally endless
Combine these three completely unrealistic elements and you have a recipe for financial disaster. People consider mudflation to be a problem with regards to expansions, but the problems obviously exist well before any expansions come out. So what is a designer to do?
(un)Realistically in most MMOs they will never make animals have perma death. There has to be fairly rapid respawning of mobs in order to allow more players to slaughter them. So Problem #3 is not going to change. What can change is what drops from these mobs. Vendor trash serves one purpose only, and in the end it is more of a detriment to the game than a benefit to the players, so axe it, and slightly increase drop rates for useful items. Players will enjoy the freed up inventory space and the less frequent trips back to town to offload inventory for money.
The other step that can be taken is to strive for a zero sum economy. Any time more money is introduced to a static population, the effects of inflation will haunt the economy, and the poor (new players) will suffer. Developers should try to make sure that if X people are playing in any given month, the total amount of money in the system is Y. If the population goes up or down by 25%, the total amount of wealth should follow suit. Sound impossible? Not at all, it just requires a little bit of creativity and unconventional thought (developers hiss and shield their eyes).
The first step is to make NPC buyers more realistic in their needs and wants. I have a hard time believing that a barkeeper has as much need for stacks of leather as a master leatherworker. I think that all NPCs should still be willing to buy any and all items, just at proportionally lower prices depending on the item and their own specialty.
The next step is to keep a serverwide tally of the number of active characters (not players) each week, and the total money amongst them. An optimal “wealth per character” number should be calculated ahead of time, and compared to the actual average wealth per character for each server each week. If the W/C figure for a server is too high, adjust vendor buying prices down accordingly, and vice versa if W/C is too low. This shouldn’t just effect vendor prices and sellback prices, but whatever other NPC moneysinks exist in the game as well. You could even do it on a per city/faction basis to make things fairer and to create a realistic sense of locale (“I’m going to Stormwind, I hear they’re selling Item X for cheap this week!”)
The last step is to manage NPC vendor inventory intelligently. If the auction house is flooded with Linen Cloth, don’t let NPCs sell any for a while so that players will buy from the auction house until supplies drop again and the price rises back up. If Mageroyal is selling at its usual perma-premium, allow more vendors to sell more of it, increasing supply and dropping the price. All this would require is calculated optimal price ranges for each major crafting component and a function that adjusts vendor inventory based on auction house quantity and price. At first glance this may sound too controlling and micromanaging, but realistically you’re just letting those NPC vendors act like real people, buying when they want to, paying as much as they see fair, and selling when the prices are high.
Sometimes realism can actually help a situation! Gasp.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Recognizing Us for What We Are
Labels:
Gold Farming,
Human Nature,
Loot,
MMORPG,
Player Killers,
PvP,
Twinks
I love the mind of a typical programmer/designer/engineer. They are so used to dealing with logical programs and mechanical systems that they are deluded into believing that any problem can be fixed, patched, or worked around. This usually works for most things, but when it comes to human nature, these are temporary measures at best.
Too often in game design discussions (particularly MMO discussions) people reach the conclusion that the main "problem" is some trait or another that people exhibit in game, whether its greed, sadism, selfishness or just the mindless pursuit of awards and power. The designers view these traits as problems to be solved or worked around using game features that simply preclude the players from indulging in this behavior. The perfect example is friendly fire in your own faction. In WoW a Horde player can't walk up to a Horde NPC or another Horde player and attack them. If this were allowed it would obviously give rise to massive player killing and an irritating plague of griefers in starting areas and cities, so immersion be damned, we're changing the rules of reality.
The same goes for Gold Farmers, Twinks, Loot Ninjas, Channel Spammers, and every other type of MMO degenerate. They are the result of a genuine human need for money, attention, and power. On the other hand, so are Hardcore Raiders, Powerlevelers, Arena Champs, Guildmasters, and basically anyone at level cap. The very needs that lead a minority to become MMO scum are the same needs that drive the majority of players to play and stay in the game. Therefore, any limitations to the pursuit of those needs will affect all players negatively. But that is the method of choice it seems.
Instead of viewing these flaws in Human Nature as obstacles to be avoided or overcome, why not face the fact that these unflattering characteristics are a part of every person's being, and since its been that way for thousands of years, we are not going to miraculously cure it with the next weekly patch. Why not embrace these traits and allow them to drive additional hours of entertainment for players?
Tired of player killers? Set them loose on each other with something like a Bounty Hunter job system. Kill a player? Their faction automatically puts a bounty on your head, which players with the Bounty Hunter profession can pursue by either offing you or capturing you for more money. Kill a lower level character and your bounty goes up exponentially. Player Killers would flock to this profession and regulate each other. Oh, and if you're captured instead of killed? Time in a public prison where you must spend a set amount of time (logged on) in the stocks, where free players can taunt you. You'll think twice about camping the new player villages. Oh and players and guilds with money can set their own bounties on other players, so if someone ninjas one of your guildmates, you better believe they need to watch their backs for that bounty hunter you sic on them.
Don't like Twinks? Well thats your fault for having levels in your game, but thats a discussion for another day. If a guy wants to dominate in low level PvP and uses ridiculously OP'ed gear to do so, he should have the right, but with great power comes yada yada yada. Assign the highest gearscored 15% of players on each side of a PvP instance/zone the rank of Leader, General, Commander, Squad Leader, Chief Corpse Teabagger, whatever you want to call it, and give them special group abilities like setting visual waypoints, drawing on the map, and chatting specific groups on the fly. Also give them the opportunity to earn more honor/reknown/points. The tradeoff? They're flagged as leaders to your opponents, and are worth super duper extra points for killing. Hope your gear is good enough now!
Gold Farmers are not a problem in and of themselves, but they do encourage two different bad meta-behaviors: Account Theft and Gold Buying. Both of these can be easily addressed by having the company that runs the game offer to sell gold to players. I can hear the wail of the Anti-RMT Police sirens coming to get me, but before they do, think about two guys standing in a capital city decked out in identical epic gear. If one knew that the other had bought his gear with RMT gold instead of grinding countless hours and dungeons to collect the set piece by piece, he would feel discouraged, outraged, and cheated. But who is going to admit that their gear is bought? Gold buying would still be the dirty little secret of MMOs, it would just be legal now. No matter how much you argue that gold buying is a heinous crime fitting for only the lowest and least skilled of noobs, some people are always going to want to take a shortcut, even if its illegal and indirectly results in another player being victimized. Just roll with it and mitigate damage to other players.
I hate that we humans are plagued with deep seeded greed, laziness, selfishness and power cravings. I wish we could somehow help everyone overcome these defects and form a more perfect society. But we can't, not even in an MMO. What we can do is harness the motivational force of these desires and use it to provide even more entertainment and balance for our players.
Too often in game design discussions (particularly MMO discussions) people reach the conclusion that the main "problem" is some trait or another that people exhibit in game, whether its greed, sadism, selfishness or just the mindless pursuit of awards and power. The designers view these traits as problems to be solved or worked around using game features that simply preclude the players from indulging in this behavior. The perfect example is friendly fire in your own faction. In WoW a Horde player can't walk up to a Horde NPC or another Horde player and attack them. If this were allowed it would obviously give rise to massive player killing and an irritating plague of griefers in starting areas and cities, so immersion be damned, we're changing the rules of reality.
The same goes for Gold Farmers, Twinks, Loot Ninjas, Channel Spammers, and every other type of MMO degenerate. They are the result of a genuine human need for money, attention, and power. On the other hand, so are Hardcore Raiders, Powerlevelers, Arena Champs, Guildmasters, and basically anyone at level cap. The very needs that lead a minority to become MMO scum are the same needs that drive the majority of players to play and stay in the game. Therefore, any limitations to the pursuit of those needs will affect all players negatively. But that is the method of choice it seems.
Instead of viewing these flaws in Human Nature as obstacles to be avoided or overcome, why not face the fact that these unflattering characteristics are a part of every person's being, and since its been that way for thousands of years, we are not going to miraculously cure it with the next weekly patch. Why not embrace these traits and allow them to drive additional hours of entertainment for players?
Tired of player killers? Set them loose on each other with something like a Bounty Hunter job system. Kill a player? Their faction automatically puts a bounty on your head, which players with the Bounty Hunter profession can pursue by either offing you or capturing you for more money. Kill a lower level character and your bounty goes up exponentially. Player Killers would flock to this profession and regulate each other. Oh, and if you're captured instead of killed? Time in a public prison where you must spend a set amount of time (logged on) in the stocks, where free players can taunt you. You'll think twice about camping the new player villages. Oh and players and guilds with money can set their own bounties on other players, so if someone ninjas one of your guildmates, you better believe they need to watch their backs for that bounty hunter you sic on them.
Don't like Twinks? Well thats your fault for having levels in your game, but thats a discussion for another day. If a guy wants to dominate in low level PvP and uses ridiculously OP'ed gear to do so, he should have the right, but with great power comes yada yada yada. Assign the highest gearscored 15% of players on each side of a PvP instance/zone the rank of Leader, General, Commander, Squad Leader, Chief Corpse Teabagger, whatever you want to call it, and give them special group abilities like setting visual waypoints, drawing on the map, and chatting specific groups on the fly. Also give them the opportunity to earn more honor/reknown/points. The tradeoff? They're flagged as leaders to your opponents, and are worth super duper extra points for killing. Hope your gear is good enough now!
Gold Farmers are not a problem in and of themselves, but they do encourage two different bad meta-behaviors: Account Theft and Gold Buying. Both of these can be easily addressed by having the company that runs the game offer to sell gold to players. I can hear the wail of the Anti-RMT Police sirens coming to get me, but before they do, think about two guys standing in a capital city decked out in identical epic gear. If one knew that the other had bought his gear with RMT gold instead of grinding countless hours and dungeons to collect the set piece by piece, he would feel discouraged, outraged, and cheated. But who is going to admit that their gear is bought? Gold buying would still be the dirty little secret of MMOs, it would just be legal now. No matter how much you argue that gold buying is a heinous crime fitting for only the lowest and least skilled of noobs, some people are always going to want to take a shortcut, even if its illegal and indirectly results in another player being victimized. Just roll with it and mitigate damage to other players.
I hate that we humans are plagued with deep seeded greed, laziness, selfishness and power cravings. I wish we could somehow help everyone overcome these defects and form a more perfect society. But we can't, not even in an MMO. What we can do is harness the motivational force of these desires and use it to provide even more entertainment and balance for our players.
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