Let’s talk about “Net Fun” in PvP games. If your game is only fun when you win, you have a big problem.

Matchmaking can’t fix this. Given a 50% win rate, Humans still feel the impact of losses more intensely than we feel the benefit of gains (thanks “loss aversion”).

I think about it like this: if blowing up the opponent’s base is “+3 fun”, getting your own base blown up is more like “-5 fun”. Likewise, most players feel worse about losing ranks/rating on a pvp ladder than they feel happy about gaining them.

As PvP designers, our goal is to find ways to fix this problem. We need to increase our game’s “net fun” for a play session.

One good way is creating “micro-victories” along the way: objectives to complete in the middle of the match that you can feel good about completing. Each successful last-hit in League of Legends from Riot Games gets you bonus gold – it’s a micro-victory. The “mini-quest formula” I talked about in a recent post is perfect for designing these.

Other mobas try removing last-hitting for gold to let players focus on brawling, which players often say they prefer. This can work, but if you don’t replace that with other constant sources of micro-victories, the net fun goes down without players or devs fully realizing why.

Sure, fighting over the Dragon or Baron – huge neutral bosses with massive rewards for the team that kills it – is more exciting… But it’s also lower “net fun”. Losing a fight over a big objective and knowing your opponents now have a big buff on top of what they got for killing you is salt in a wound. By contrast, both you and your opponent can get cosntant last-hit gold rewards for killing minions in lane; a constant drip of micro victories that increases net fun.

By creating lots of micro-victories, great competitive games can raise the stakes on their most exciting moments. They sustain us as we chase those epic moments we tell our friends about. They mitigate the pain of losing and boost the satisfaction of winning. They maximize net fun.

Individual mechanics matter a lot too. Usually destroying resources, or action denial (stuns, cc, etc) is a big loss in net fun overall. As fun as it is to disempower an opponent, it feels far worse to be disempowered by your opponent.

Command and Conquer: Rivals, a shockingly smart mobile RTS, addressed that common problem this way: In C&C:R – blowing up an opponent’s worker give the destroyer bonus resources. For the victim, replacing the destroyed worker was free. Much less thematic, but higher net fun.

Assymetrical victory conditions are great for this too. In Albion Online, a full loot pvp mmo, many players have different definitions of winning. Maybe I like gathering rare resources, and you enjoy hunting other players. Gatherers have weaker combat gear, so whenever you find one you probably win (positive net fun) but if I’m succeeding in 3 out of 4 gathering runs overall without getting ganked, I’m positive net fun too.

Albion Online uses this technique so very often. If you care more about winning fights than being profitable, you can bring higher power gear to the full loot zones to win more often… But the risk/reward ratio is often out of whack, so even if your opponent sonly win 30% of the time the profits from your loot the few times they DO win will make them feel like winners overall. Meanwhile, you can feel like you’re winning overall because you’re defending territory, fame farming more efficiently, or whatever else you were priotizing over profit.

This is also why despite being a “hardcore, full loot” MMO at its core, Albion Online obsesses over “net fun”. Fame is the game’s version of XP, and you don’t lose any on death. The full loot zones in albion online give massive fame multipliers compared to the safer zones, so even if you ultimately get ganked before you can get out and bank your loot – you also get lots of micro-victories along the way.

Even more interesting, players don’t actually drop all the loot they’re carrying when they die. They drop the items they’re carrying, but not the silver pieces in their inventories. When you kill NPCs in Albion Online, they drop silver coins in addition to loot. This means that even if you die and lose all the items you were carrying, you might still make an overall profit on that run. It also adds a second micro-victory reward to each character.

In the above image, even when opening a chest, it contains bag os of silver that are non-tradeable. Opening them will give you silver that you cannot lose on death. The other loot in the chest will be lost if another player kills you out in the black zone, but your existing silver is safe.

Likewise, this explains why it was critical to change the cost of losing to an NPC. Originally, losing a fight to an NPC in a full loot zone meant losing all the items in your inventory. However, this meant suffering the intense pain of loss without another player getting any fun from the kill. This is a huge net fun imbalance. While the simple rule of “dying in a full loot zone means you lose your loot” sounds intuitive, paying close attention to the net fun of every moment reveals this is NOT a good design.

Albion Online’s current solution is better. Losing to an NPC leaves you stunned, helpless, and immobile for a period of time. Any player that finds you during this period can walk over and instantly execute you, taking your loot. However, if no players find you during this period, you regain your health and can go for round 2 vs the NPC or escape. This adds a high tension moment to the end of the experience, and ultimately either lets you escape death with loot intact or gives another player a positive moment to increase the game’s overall “net fun”.

The way I got new players to try out the “black zone” (highest risk full loot regions) was to point out how the “net fun” was on their side. If you bring gear that is only good at pve farming and not great at pvp, it’s often quite cheap to buy. The rewards from the black zone are so much bigger in fame and silver than in non-full-loot zones that even if you get killed – you’ll usually make back the cost of your equipment within 10 minutes of killing NPCs from the untradeable silver drops. If you do manage to get out alive, you make way more.

It’s a very fun experience. In fact, I had more fun dedicated pve-farming in Albion Online’s full loot pvp zones than I did in any pve-driven MMO that bans pvp. Gettting way more loot becase there was an extraction-like threat of being ganked and losing what I’d brought with me that run made the wins all the sweeter, and the micro-victories along the way plus the portion of loot that was untradeable silver drops pushed the “net fun” positive overall. That sustained me during the down moments, so I could expeirence the memorable “epic wins” when I managed to escape a swarm of gankers with a massive treasure haul.

A lot of designers think full loot pvp mmos are a cursed design problem, with no good solutions, because of the net fun issues caused by loss aversion. Albion Online succeeds because it attacks that problem directly, figuring out ways to increase net fun to counterbalance that disproportionate pain. It’s an excellent case study for any system designer.