Camping (gaming) - Online Role-playing Games

Online Role-playing Games

In massively multiplayer online role-playing games and MUDs, camping is commonly the practice where the camper stays in a location near where non-player characters or monsters spawn or otherwise enter the game world. In some games, these positions are easy to spot and once a player or group of players is capable of establishing their camp, they can gain more rewards with less risk to their player characters. Generally, it is accepted that camping enemies is just the way some games are, and by convention this is respected. There is no official rule granting players exclusive rights to a camp.

As with valuable items in non-MMO games, often particularly significant monsters will be made "rare" via the game engine allowing a long period of time to pass between the monster being defeated by one group of players and it reappearing for another group to fight. Many players, rather than repeatedly returning to an area in the hope of meeting the monster, chose instead to wait in the monster's lair for it to respawn. Because of the long periods of time involved - frequently hours or days - this can give rise to absurd situations in which long queues of adventuring parties wait outside a monster's lair for the monster to respawn so they can kill it. Players can utilize the information gathered from various Internet sites to identify and wait around the areas of these spawns. Sometimes players sit on these camps for days, waiting for the monster or NPC of interest.

The MMORPG EverQuest was the first game to truly make camping a common and widely accepted part of advancement in online RPGs. When first released, advancement through the game was painstakingly slow for most, requiring many hours of slaying NPCs to advance in level. As a result, players quickly realized that camping in one spot and having a single player, referred to as a "puller" because he or she would leave the group to "pull" a mob back to the group, was the most efficient way to gain experience. In fact, the prevalence of camping became so strong in EverQuest that some of the game's playerbase and critics jokingly refer to the game as "EverCamp".

The practice of camping in MMORPGs is distasteful to many. While camping is still possible in this game, much more experience and rewards can be had by performing quests, allowing the player to focus on something other than what some consider to be the monotony of camping.

Critics of this system say that it is the long, drawn out camping sessions that have helped build such a strong community in games like EverQuest. With so much idle time, it is surmised that most players will strike up conversations with fellow group and guild members as a way to pass the time, a practice that helps develop bonds.

In some MMORPGs which have PVP (Player-versus-player) elements (such as Diablo II and World of Warcraft), "corpse camping" is used to refer to a practice by an enemy player character (PC) kills another PC in player versus player combat and then loiters in the area of the dead player's corpse. The mechanics for recovering one's body differ per game, but generally a PC must return to the area where he died to recover his body or face severe penalties. Those who corpse camp take advantage of these rules by waiting for the dead character to return to life, usually in a weakened state, and then killing him again when his defenses, mana and hit points are not at full capacity.

Lineage II force groups of extremely experienced players in well known and often top ranked and sometimes disciplined (semi-military like) alliances to wait for long periods of time at an epic boss' lair while having to defeat all rivaling groups that have come for the same purpose in open PVP. For lower level epics, these groups use alternate characters maintained at the boss' level to wait and kill the boss while other members of the group stay on their mains to defend the lower level character. Camping such bosses using level one characters called cams summoned to or brought to the boss' lair entrance manually to camp instead of having the entire group camp is also not uncommon. These characters while may not have direct access to the inside of the lair use the ingame command /target to observe if the monster desired has spawned. Should a rival group party arrive and/or slay the cam, the group owning the cam character usually reacts by bringing parties of their own.

Certain circumstances may occur in which combat takes place and a player is killed, while the opposing player has a legitimate reason for staying in the immediate area of combat, such as questing or other in game events. This is not considered to be corpse camping, and in most cases game designers have incorporated alternate avenues for players to retrieve their bodies such as resurrecting at a graveyard for a nominal fee.

The practice is generally frowned upon, and, with the exception of PvP (Player versus Player) servers which allow players from opposing factions to kill one another, is usually not allowed. Certain games, such as World of Warcraft (WoW), seek to curb corpse camping by offering diminishing returns for killing the same character repeatedly. For example, WoW offers Honor Points, for a PvP kill of commensurate level, as a means to curb high level players from going into areas of lower level and killing low-level members of opposing factions, since such areas are usually far from the places where higher-level players would go to gain experience.

Another form of corpse camping is present in Starsiege: Tribes, and possibly other online first-person shooters. A player will kill another player, then either place a mine or satchel charge on the corpse, or take cover nearby. This sets up an ambush when someone arrives to retrieve valuable items from the body or revive a teammate. This is seen as unfair on most servers.

In Eve Online PVP fleets will often station themselves around the star gates which link the Eve universe together enabling some control over who may pass, in particular alliances use this technique to enforce controls on who can enter alliance Sovereign space. Eve provides a number of in game technologies to help enforce a blockade (warp jammers and bubbles) and to evade such blockades (cloaking devices and warp core stabilizers). Occasionally, hostile fleets may camp outposts and stations to keep an enemy bottled up, during the Goonswarm invasion of the Delve region the Goons scored a massive strategic victory by camping KenZoku (formerly known as BOB) fleet into a single station for an entire month. The battle to break the camp was one of the largest in Eve's history involving over 1000 players.