Game Design Group Q&A, Part One
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Q: How do you balance a game that contains PvP and PvE, especially when changes made to one can easily affect the other? Should a game cater to both? Can it?
Dave Rickey: I think you can; we essentially did in Camelot. But it was very difficult to balance. That was essentially a full-time job for me for over a year after launch, as well as sucking up programmer and management time. The answer is that you can do both, but it's tricky, and you need to cleanly separate your PvE and PvP content.
As for whether you should, I personally think the benefits of having the two very different kinds of gameplay outweigh the drawbacks, as it gives you the near-infinite replayability of PvP, while still allowing people to say "I don't feel like getting ganked today" and doing something else.
John Feil: Balancing for PvP is much harder in games that have a leveling system, multiple classes, multiple races, and thousands of ways to enhance a player character. With that many variables, its almost impossible to make every single PvP encounter fun and rewarding. I think the best answer to this is to try and make PvP as fun as possible, and then try to communicate to players as best you can what they can expect if they enter PvP combat. People feel a lot less cheated when they have solid information and can plan for encounters ahead of time. If they try to plan using speculation and the somewhat erratic information they hear from the community, they can feel lied to and cheated.
Marc Scattergood: I think it is a huge challenge for an MMO to handle both in a very compelling and fun manner. Dark Age of Camelot is still the one game that has probably done this best - I'm excluding some, such as Lineage, Lineage II, etc. due to ignorance about them on my part - with fairly compelling PvE content throughout the game, but still providing an optional, factionally-oriented PvP element in the frontiers. I'm not the best person to talk about this, because I honestly don't like standard PvP fare. It just doesn't appeal to me. Factional PvP makes a lot more sense, and is something I can appreciate.
