I think this is a preference thing. I will say that upon further reflection and reading I agree that a somewhat shallower vertical progression would probably be okay but I also think that there will be plenty of people who will not look at two weeks of hiding and building up before emerging to compete as something that will hold their interest. I have no idea which type of player is the majority but like Jax said you get quite a lot of PvP players across several games crying out for a more level playing field and doing away with features that create such huge margins in relative player power.
Now I get that 7 Days to Die PvP doesn't have to be like the rest and this game can have its own brand of PvP that bucks the norm and maintains a strong player progression and if I am wrong that would be a cool distinction to have and our servers will be robust with 1000s of players. But if I'm not wrong then 7 Days to Die PvP will just be a niche experience that only caters to a small segment of all PvP players and our PvP community will stay small.
If they are hiding for two weeks before emerging to compete, they are playing a very conservative, boring, or perhaps a PVE-build-focused strategy. It's a common strategy for first timers on a PVP server and is somewhat more effective than it ought to be simply because of the steepness of the force multiplier. Which is a topic I think we have exhausted and can be addressed easily enough by Gazz's massaging. But I argue that is not a playstyle that a lot of experienced PVP players do. It's what a lot of PVE minded players do, and a prevalence of the current audience do because that's the type of players that has stuck around and still plays the game. Many true PVP players stock up on a bit of food/water, then gather a stack of arrows and set off hunting these types of players to kill and steal their mats they've been harvesting on Day 2. There just aren't very many of us left.
The reason 7DTD doesn't have a healthy PVP population is simply because of a few of the dev's and forum moderators past attitudes and blatant disregard (I do insist this is putting it mildly) towards maintaining a healthy multiplayer game environment over the alphas for the last 2 years. The PVPers were the first ones to be vocal about declines in stability, but it affected large cap PVE players the same. I'm not looking to dredge up a lot of old dirty laundry, but you even admit it in the title of this thread. "Eventually" they will come around to PVP. I love your optimism, but I'm not easily convinced. I'm engaging in this thread because I would like to see that happen. More importantly, I would like it done in intelligent ways that maintain the integrity and unique spark of the game. But I don't know where a lot of these new ideas and "problems" derived from (a separate PVP mode, invulnerable claims, perk claims, protecting griefers etc). Many of these problems aren't problems to begin with that have been vocalized by PVP players. Some of them appear to me as simple as trying to implement a system that makes players happy that got beat on a PVP server. Most have quite effective solutions currently supported in the game to counter. It just takes perseverence and learning-through-playing on a PVP server to learn how to survive. That lesson is far more lengthy and rewarding than learning how to survive against zombies in 7 days.
With regards to the PVP population, a few of us have stuck it out. It's sporadic at best though. But I've known hundreds of players, modders, server owners, and regular teammates and friends that quit for an array of reasons that ultimately boiled down to the fact that Madmole does not want a PVP game. He has stated it in no uncertain terms many times. A lot of them left when the switch to U5 came about, and it nuked the viability of servers with more than 8-10 people on them. When confronted with this evidence, the line was "we do not care about supporting multiplayer servers. this is a single player/coop game., go play rust". The forums exploded around supporting this sentiment, and people that wanted to play the game in a PVP way got the message. They left. Most of them for good.
As a couple posters in this thread have pointed out. It's not the land claims or experience curve that drive away PVP players. Heck, look at just about any MMORPG. You want to talk about grind. Look at WOW or EVE online... it takes forever to level and the risks can be devastating. As in thousands of real life dollars and hundreds of hours devastating. They have millions of players though. But they do have a perfectly stable game environment that protects players assets from needless waste (hacking/exploiting).
- - - Updated - - -
In my opinion, the following are what drives away PVP players from this game and should be TFP's primary focus on any "PVP Update". In order of relative importance.
#1 - Develop support for high population servers. 30+ is an abolute minimum. 50 is warmer. 100 is awesome. This has two aspects of it which are critical to building a playerbase of "1000's", regardless of whether it is PVE or PVP. These two aspects are attracting an audience to play a multiplayer game and also enabling the ability for people to adequately host sufficient large cap servers. This game world is pretty big, even at 10k limits. You can play for days and sometimes weeks irl without coming across another player on a 20 man server. On the 2nd aspect, the game's stability seems to be consistently getting better in the last year, but I'm not convinced that's for any pvp-minded reasons. I feel like it's more of a convenient side-effect of improving the game's code.
For example. It is uncommon but it's not impossible to get up to around a 30-man server and maintain stability for 1000's of days. BUT - it takes a hell of a good server, and a great server manager program to keep them afloat (regular scheduled restarts, backups, active admins to remove glitched bikes/suspended terrain, chunk restorations for corruption). I know the owners of several of the long-running large cap servers and have donated $ to several of them to keep them running. These guys are true lovers of the game and spend a lot of money to do this. Teammates and I have even rented our own 30-man server. It costs about $120/month to get a good enough box to host a 30-man, reliable server. That is simply cost prohibitive and the ultimate reason why no matter what you do to any of this game, PVP will not flourish until you can support enough people to play such that you can find each other in a persistent world environment.
- - - Updated - - -
#2 - The need to develop better admin tools so that owners & mods can identify and deal with the hacking/exploiting problems themselves. I'm convinced the game and server code can't eliminate hacking with the way it is currently setup and still provide the desired, moddable nature. And I'm not proposing to change that necessarily. But I think it's getting time to address this by building better server managment and admin tracking tools now that the core framework is largely in place (or seems to be). Currently, most server owners use 3rd party server managers to achieve stability and control who plays on their servers. There are a multitude of things they all do, and some implement systems that others don't have. The critical things they provide are supporting; region blocking, ping limits, inventory flagging with auto-banning, and adequately support entity removal (for all those bugged minibikes). Server owners that have been around the block know they must block China. The consequence is they will literally get 3-4 hackers per day that will teleport around and destroy/kill everything. It's just a cultural thing, but it has to be done. These players login and destroy PVP and PVE servers alike for the lulls. Some owners have developed techniques such as invulnerable claims, area zoning rulesets, and other systems to try and mitigate it. Some of the people that are asking for these things in the forums are doing so because they are not getting beat fair & square in a PVP server, but they have actually suffered from the hackers.
- - - Updated - - -
#3 - Reduce the number of exploits, trivial annoyances and needless grind. You can place minibike frames on claimed areas and scale people's walls! Projectile explosives do excessive block damage for their cost. I shouldn't have to explain that the dupes cheat the system in order to beat your competitors. Honest players face real consequences when they die and have to go farming for metal to make a new set of armor or spend 3 days looking for another decent sniper rifle. The grunts/sighs/broken legs/belly aches/temperature system are the low hanging fruit here for annoyances. What do these really add, honestly? Did someone wake up one day and say "ya know what would be fun? when I get warm in-game, I should suffer until I take off my coat". We should be setting our sights higher here. Build toggles for these into that server manager that doesn't exist yet.
This turned into way too long of a post. But my point is the vast majority of players want to play. Fewer will launch their own server. Most of those will do it from their own PC/home connection and can't support more than a few people. And an extremely low # will shell out $120/month for a dedicated server, learn to mod the game into something that supports large cap/PVP servers, and spend all of their free time on nights and weekends keeping the thing running. TFP have to improve these things, reduce the load, reduce exploiting, and make hosting a server easier in order to get the 1000's of PVP'ers into the game.
