Noob hunting refers to a situation where strong players have a tacit or explicit alliance and choose to target players of a lower skill level who are not in their circle. In the games where I have observed it, the players perpetuating this practice clearly find it an enjoyable past-time. That is to say, the activity has some kind of emotional benefit for the hunter.
My goal is to find an activity which yields the same benefits without ruining the experience for other players. It was a crucial component to an old Roblox game to which I intend to make a spiritual successor. This practice will need a proper replacement. However, that raises questions such as: What exact benefits does the player receive from noob hunting? And what other past-time (presumably combat-related) could evoke those same emotions?
This is a topic I have discussed at length with friends, and we have our own theories but none of them come close to a solution which is why I am now posting this here.
The feeling of power, is what drives players to pick on those who have played less than them.
It’s much easier to beat someone new to the game, than someone of your own skill level.
The obvious answer is to make it so players can only PVP players within a certain level of them. So that way no level 99 pwnr can rek a level 1 n00b. But I think a cool way to do it would be to just make it so level 1s or new people can only PVP other level 1s— Everyone else can PVP each other. This way players don’t get a bad first impression and your OP players can feel godly.
Perhaps you can try to defend the so-called “noobs”, maybe it’ll be your friend one day! Also, if you want to prevent it, you can try setting up certain variables to make it so that people in a certain level range may attack eachother, like what Intended_Pun said!
I’ve seen non-Roblox games often make areas where the levels are scaled down. This way anyone with level 100 trying to chase down level 3 or below will be scaled to about level 5. They’re still more powerful but it gives the lower players a much better chance to escape. The exact amount of scaling would need to be play-tested.
Make AI NPCs which can learn with the time, the way the player fights(if you can’t do this just simulate a player), after some time, let’s say player gets at a high level, make the npc fight the same way he did when he was when level 10, copy his actions and put in the NPC, so he can still feel being OP while also training and seeing his own evolution.
Equal XP, loot, kill stats, etc as if I killed a more experienced player
No end-game content to keep me busy combating equally-challenging opponents
Not sure if any of those apply to your situation though. Link the game - I can check it out and edit/add to this response to be more helpful
How do we move forward from it?
If you’re finding that very experienced players are kind of hanging out and picking on the newer players, obviously you can follow the many iterations of “don’t let the experienced players attack the new ones” or “level out the playing field so the new players do more damage/take less damage” but that doesn’t fill the void that removing that activity would leave.
My question for you is: what do experienced players do currently besides noob hunt? If the only answer is “fight other experienced players in the arena” then yea that can get boring. Can you add an objective into the mix? Like a King of the Hill that motivates experienced players to fight over a limited resource?
Elder Scrolls Online’s main PvP alliance war is a three-way battlefield with Capture the Flag (Elder Scrolls), King of the Hill offensive/defensive (Keeps/resources), and Deathmatch (Kill Enemy Player daily quests) along with other minor game variants. Basically, it’s still heavily PvP but with additional objectives so that it isn’t just PvP. I’m not saying you have to recreate a massive MMORPG PvP arena, but you can certainly take some ideas for giving your players stuff to do in addition to bashing each other’s heads in.
I found the post title a little humorous because I get noob-hunted quite often. Even by bacons.
I don’t really have anything to say about it’s purpose, but I can about a method of wrenching it.
To be truthful about it, there are many ways to put a wrench in noob hunting, but you can’t stop people from trying or doing so if such limitations are not in place.
Here are some ways I’ve stopped noob hunting on experimental grounds (some people already mentioned this in previous replies - excuse me for reposting):
PVP is disabled until a player reaches a certain level.
There are PVP areas and safe zones. Players can only fight in PVP areas. To prevent bad play, players can’t run to safe zones immediately during a fight to avoid being killed - they’ll still be vulnerable for some time.
Both players must have PVP on to fight.
Players can only be attacked if they’re within each other’s level range.
Scaling values down to the Target’s level so they’re on relatively the same playing field while still having obvious power differences.
NPCs, always a good solution.
no pvp at all lol
I don’t think “noob hunting” is something that anyone can move on from. You can take steps to stop it yourself, but it’ll always stick as a first-thought in games with PVP.
Say what you will about simulators, but this one has a solid gameplay loop and you should learn from it.
Noobs are hunted so hard in this game. It is so easy to instantly one-hit-kill players weaker than you. In fact, that’s most of the appeal. I spent many hours and more Robux than I’d like to admit just so I could one-hit-kill the other people in the server.
Noobs get a tiny “safe zone” box where they can play the game normally without being hurt. Recently, the developer also made a mid-level training area a safe zone, but there’s a huge distance of danger between the two.
Something cool the developer did to combat noob hunting even more is to reward killing noob hunters. If you kill enough people, you become a “Criminal” or even a “Supervillian”. Killing one of these players allows you to become a “Superhero”, and there’s even a leaderboard for the “goodest” players.
I would NEVER impose a “level difference limit”, because noob hunting is a very positive thing when it is implemented correctly, for reasons people above have already stated. Instead, try implementing safe zones or mechanics to reward high-level players for hunting the noob hunters.
