To the devs; Borderlands P v P - New DlC Plea

[atreideslegend1]

To the Devs,

Thinking back across my gaming career two of the most rewarding online experiences that stand out above the crowd have to be the hours of dwarf slaying on Guildwars and the awesome, group-of-mates-getting-drunk-and-shooting-each-other fun of Team Fortress 2. Guildwars was particularly rewarding for me because of the interaction between the story based questing adventures and the max level P v P combat. The single player storylines of most rpgs can be great, but are in themselves, only a finite experience; once players have completed the game and reached max level it becomes redundant, rusting on the shelf until you have forgotten enough of the game to pick it up again. Here, Guildwars excelled; the single player game is great fun in and of itself, however, the single player is supported by frequent opportunities to involve your avatar in Player versus Player combat via enrolment in arenas spread throughout the map. This creates a great dynamic between the single player and multi-player experience; the P v P is intrinsically difficult (esp at the higher levels) and requires large amounts of skill, as well as the correct weapons, spells and build choices in order to succeed. In this sense, the player is compelled to play through the single player game thoroughly in order to be able to function well in the multi-player, whilst the motivation to play the multi-player is inspired by the enjoyment of the single player game.

As a Borderlands fanatic I am now at the top of my game. I have played each character to select my avatar of choice (Mordeccai FTW!), I have completed all missions and am at level 61, I have farmed for the best weapons from constant Crawmerax slaughtering and massacred bandits on mass for hours in the under-dome. I can remove the head of a bad-ass from one shot of my pistol whilst he is still on the horizon, and melt a lance trooper's face before he manages to find his trousers. Despite my skill and general badassitude AND my persistent love for the game, Borderlands is now dead to me. There is no rock left unturned, no where left for me to go. Another DLC would be great, maybe another ten levels, some extra build options could be nice, but lets face it, I'm just too awesome. No matter how much new content you publish I could finish it in hours. More to the point, it take me a HELL of a lot less time to blitz through a couple of thousand Spiderants than it does for you to come up with a whole new storyline, render environments, record voice actors etc etc.

The point is that us veterans need a new way to see Borderlands; we need a non-finite gaming experience. Somewhere we can really test our skill and the strength of our builds to the limits we wish. We need a thorough, well designed and magically executed P v P environment. If you think about it, the premise is already there; light-hearted graphics and interface, great fps mechanics, a large variety of player unique skills and strategies (can you say 'Team Fortress 2?'). The combination of different player styles and builds is akin to the great dynamics of team-player combinations seen in Guildwars P v P. Teams not only have to consider how to build their own characters, but how their choice of character attributes and build interacts with that of their team mates and the map/game mode. Mix this with the borderlands 'carnivalesque' sense of humour; the thrill of teasing your friends over voice chat as your Bloodwing tears out their eyes and you rush in to grab the flag and run laughing back to your own base, and you have an experience that dominates anything Guildwars or TF2 has to offer.

Give us Deathmatch, give us TDM, give us CTF, give us low-lag dedicated servers and a massive range of great game modes and maps. Do this and do it well, we don't care how long it takes you, have 6 months, have a year, charge $30 - $40 - $50 . We don't care, just give us a great multiplayer experience. If you fail to do this, we will lose interest, Borderlands will become another so-so game packed out in a cardboard box somewhere in the attic with Fallout 3, but if you do this and do it well, Borderlands will become one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time. I sincerely hope you take the time to read this mini essay and take it to heart, for all our sakes.

Yours,
An ever hopeful Borderlands fan.

P.S. If you are a forum member and Borderlands fan, please support my cause by signing your name below :-)

[primitiveworker]

I feel exactly as you.

I don't know what it would look like, but I imagine the Borderlands universe could totally support the kind of PvP replayability Guildwars and TF2 offer. Even if we start from 0 and level up our PvP-only characters, abilities and gear; that's more than fine by me.

/signed

[Firefli]

too tru need a pvp think how much more ppl wud play if there was a big reason to farm all those guns!!

/signed

[atreideslegend1]

Well in my head it works like this. Imagine the game mode design of TF2, usual TDM-Domination-CTF style job, now place your borderlands characters into this exact scenario, complete with their range of levels and choices of weapons. We have a couple of problems with this. Firstly characters of higher levels will obviously dominate the lower levels. This is easily fixed by a process of level stratification, say, each group of ten levels has its own arena/group of servers - with perhaps and extra one for level capped players (61!!!! It all makes sense!).

Whiney bitch player reaction (WBPR) #1: "AWWW man this sucks i'm playing against guys that are like 4 levels above me, how can I compete???"

Hugely Pimp Borderlands Pro respose (HPBPR) #1: "Dude, get your ass out into the single player and grind out bitch, you've got to stay competitive"

Second problem is a weapon issue:

WBPR # 2: "AWWW This game is GAY, I keep getting raped by this guy with a crazy shotgun that melts my face off"

HPBPR # 2: "Dude I already told you to stay competitive, get your ass down Craw-way with your clan mates and do some god damn farming, get yourself a pearl masher, and cover that guys bedroom wall with his own face"

Problem three is a biggie. It relates to the interaction between player skills.

WBPR #3: "FFS!!!!111!!! This NEWB Mordeccai has this crazy skill that means my shield is useless, how can I compete with that!!!"

Devs Response #1: "This never happened, because we did an awesome job of balancing the skills so that no one player has a latent advantage over another player. Massively imba skills like Trespass have their percentages nuked down to make sure the game is all about player build and skill. We spent a long time and a lot of effort on getting this just right because we knew you guys would appreciate it. These skill changes only take place when you move into the multi-player arenas, and leave single player and co-op unaffected. Also, the relationship between player health and weapon damage has been balanced on a percentage basis, meaning that it takes more than one shot to take down an opponent. This was not easy but we managed it and it works like a charm."

From here it's just a case of adding new game modes, maps etc etc and maybe adding some better mic support and friend software to facilitate clan communication + formation.

= Limitless hours of fun times with my friends.

[dwiguitar]

Anything that makes this piece of golden fun-fest better or more playable is awesome in my book

/signed


In b4 shagsbeard and others say "multiplayer is lame! it will ruin BL!"

[atreideslegend1]

How could it possibly make it worse? You don't have to play P v P if you don't want to.....?

P.s. That's not to you, that's just to pre-empt shagsbeard et al.

Never trust a man with Pogonophilia.

[Shagsbeard]

Multiplayer games are not "lame". The idea of taking a game which wasn't designed for PvP and trying to make it work for that application is totally lame.

You will have just as much luck getting microsoft to add PvP to Word and Excel.

[TheMaster]

I'll have to agree with Shags. The game was not meant to be used as competitive PVP and trying to do so would require heavy work on balancing skills and weapons to the point where it won't be enjoyable. Not to mention, that is a lot of guns to balance.

As for; "You don't have to play P v P if you don't want to.....?"

Yeah, but it also means they waste their time on dealing with this instead of new DLC everyone can enjoy and not a small group of people who for some reason think this game is capable of actually being competitive.

[primitiveworker]

Originally Posted by Shagsbeard

Multiplayer games are not "lame". The idea of taking a game which wasn't designed for PvP and trying to make it work for that application is totally lame.

You will have just as much luck getting microsoft to add PvP to Word and Excel.

I'd settle for some extremely challenging repeatable co-op missions. I think Resistance2 pulled that off pretty well.

[Blackie_Chan]

Shags stop being so pestimistic. I agree that they should not "rebalance" the classes in PVE to magically work in PVP. I think there are 2 "simple" solutions to this issue: (1) drop damage to PCs to 20% of what damage is done to an NPC, (2) create new or modify current arenas to buff/nerf classes while in them to balance them out. I think the second choice is harder but definitely more fun and more DLC'ish.

This is a PVE game regardless of how you feel about it. That said modifying the game in a way that doesn't change the PvE aspect of it would be great.

Oh and why we are at it, how about making lobbies be able to make a tourney against each other (ie multiple 4 person teams battling it out). Would be awesome.

/signed.