Player-generated facilities and player-owned resources with player-funded NPC defenses, all with costs, all with value, and all with a reason behind it.
Puzzle Pirates has some system similar to this with player capturable islands. The problem comes that:
1) Islands are super expensive to buy or muster a fleet to take. Losing one, even in a fair fight is taking a few hundred peoples' work in the game and robbing them of the fruits of that labor/time.
2) Often facilities/resources allow for increased ability to take other facilities/resources; leading to a snowball effect and a high barrier of entry to playing the PvP game.
3) NPC defenses kinda suck. That 'ties' the defenders to be ready at any moment to defend. Or you provide some mechanism to alert 24-48 hours ahead of time that the attack is coming. That leads to griefing where attackers declare an attack. The defenders cancel their real lifes to defend their island/station and the attackers just don't show. If the defenders don't stop everything, we're back to #1.
As I said, this only applies to persistent MMOs. In a MMORTS or MMOFPS where the game resets after a set time or after one team 'wins', all these become moot.
I typed ten clumsy paragraphs trying to describe what I'm going for in abstract, and failed, so I'll fabricate an example:
Game: Goldwars
Every player is a Spirit. Each Spirit has a shrine in the wilderness, and workers spawn there. Workers dig up gold at the gold mine next door, and deposit it at the shrine. The nearest mine provides 10 gold per day.
You can get more workers and send them to other, more distant mines, each of which provides (10-distance) gold per day. Gold that's been delivered to the shrine is safe, but if the mines themselves are successfully attacked, then that day's gold yield is reduced by an amount equal to the amount that the invading force is able to carry away.
You can hire soldiers to defend your mines. For 8 gold per day, they make the mine impregnable. For 4 gold per day, they'll offer resistance. For 1 gold per day, they'll alert you of approaching attackers.
You can turn into a Hero unit at your shrine, with powers and abilities determined by the shrine's structures. As this hero unit, you can travel around, find troves of gold, and fight against enemy units, both soldiers and heroes.
You can ally with other spirits, and can travel in groups of heroes, but you can never have more than 10 heroes in a group, for whatever reason.
Thus, there world will be littered with gold mines, and they'll all have workers in them. Some will also have soldiers in them, and players of all types can explore them. If you're not supposed to be there, the workers will attack you, but a decent player can hack his way through them. If there are solders, it gets tougher, and if there are enemy players around, then it's almost suicide.
So you can raid low-level enemy mines with relative ease and safety, or you can party up and hit the big ones, stealing the day's yield from them, or you can play defense, managing your troops and meeting invading forces with your own little avatar dude, possibly with backup from allies.
That's roughly what I had in mind for PvP in an MMO setting. Adversarial, with opportunities for profit and loss, but insulated against scorched-earth griefing, since you can sustain a low-yield, zero-risk colony and build up your empire very slowly even if you get your ass kicked every day.
So you never go backward, but there's still something at stake.
Except if you get your ass kicked every day, the ass kickers are making a profit which leads to safer mines, which leads to more profit, which leads to more ass kicking, which...
You're not going backward, but you are going forward more slowly. Still losing the game. You can't make a new game because it's a MMO and for a new character you'd just start at the bottom again.
Well, it IS kind of difficult to discourage natural real-world behavior.
However, Even if it means putting up with stronger players and weaker players, I would still play Iron Chef Carnage's little game just because it sounds like fun. And I suppose therein lies another key:
If it's fun enough, I'll overlook some imbalance. And that's another difficulty because as a MMO, it has to cater to many people's different ideas of 'fun'.
Some parts of PvP that I think would be fun:
1) Give the gankers their own ganking-specific area. Make some shadowy, foggy marshland filled with tall reeds and small animals that make rustling noises everywhere. Now THAT's a ganking atmosphere. Even better, is if you have a system like AoC, where the level of light and cover plays somewhat in how well you cloak, and where every player can cloak to some extent.
2) Meaningful world PvP has held my interest, but disappeared as of late. Some of your suggestions help to bolster this agian.
3) A more 'anime' style of combat, where you're not just whacking through mob geometry over and over (AoC), but it's not auto-attack (everything else). It probably won't happen, but I would love to see two swords actually HIT eachother and CAUSE a block. Not just generated by random chance, and the mob sword still hits you anyways but does no damage.
There is no perfect PvP system, but there are plenty of other ways to implement it than has been done.
Original post by Telastyn Except if you get your ass kicked every day, the ass kickers are making a profit which leads to safer mines, which leads to more profit, which leads to more ass kicking, which...
You're not going backward, but you are going forward more slowly. Still losing the game. You can't make a new game because it's a MMO and for a new character you'd just start at the bottom again.
But the game balance could discourage that. For instance, if you're Johnny Nubcake, moving in next to Lord Uber, then sure, he's going to stomp your guts out in a stand-up fight, and if he wants to march his glowing, divine avatar over to your goldmine and take your lunch money, you can't stop him. But as such a massive powerhouse, he's got dozens of undefended mines. So all you have to do is spawn a man with a burlap sack, and you can wander over to his mines and gather up a week's worth of your puny profits, then take them back home. Assuming he doesn't catch you doing it, of course, but hey, he's got 37 mines to defend, and only one avatar. You'll be in more danger from the ten other guys who are pillaging.
He's still making more per day than anyone else, due to his infrastructure, but because you're a newb living next to him, you actually do better than a newb living alone out in the woods. So you get an accelerated start thanks to being grossly outgunned, and he gets a target-rich newb-ganking environment for his PvP avatar, and as time goes by, the playing field levels itself. You can turtle up and pay for shrine upgrades with plundered booty while constructing heavily fortified, low-yield mining sites, and then when you're big enough, you can cut your defense budget, start milking those mines, and get into PvP in a more serious way.
