In the 4 days since my Legendary Leveling post-of-glee, I've leveled my starter staff to 17. I've looted numerous legendary items, including one Second Age Rune-Satchel which stands out in its blueness. I've collected and mostly disassembled legendary items for every class except my own. The inevitable luck of numbers dictates some sort of justification for bitching about drops. In particular I seem to be the magnet for Rune-Keeper legendaries. Hopefully Nelgdorf will be as lucky for me as I have been for him.

My legendary staff is so ugly that I couldn't bear to name it on reforging, as if doing so would invoke some unmentionable evil. Nazrin suggested "Swab", "Canal Cleaner" and a few other names appropriate to its appearance, so I may resign myself to giving it a mocking moniker.

I'm enjoying the Legendary system immensely, which isn't a surprise, it's been less than a week. Still, I think I'll be immune to the dread of grind that others have warned me about. I've been asking for this sort of thing for awhile now: rewards granted via persistence regardless of solo or group play. I'm so tired of the XX players formula for loot rewards, where small teams get shafted and large raids have epics rained upon them.

It's unlikely you'll catch me complaining about leveling these weapons, I'm quite careful of what I wish for and this is pretty close to the mark.

How do you want your PvP?

There's this perception, it may be correct: PvP'ers don't want obstacles between them and the action.

Are all PvP players like that? I don't think so. If I'm in the mood for deathmatch, I want to jump right in. For something strategic I'd prefer to take some time laying down foundations before the blood spills. And for tactical, I want good scenarios and tools / planning to coordinate inside my team.

Keen has highlighted his thoughts on the downsides of Darkfall and the summation seems to be that players aren't taking the time to build before the blood. So the PvP / gameplay is more shallow than it should be, players are skipping anything that looks like an obstacle.

Two things come to mind:

1. Darkfall isn't guiding players in the right directions. Maybe the balance is off and the grind is too much for things like battle ships. Sieges are too big, the world doesn't have enough sand or maybe it's too sandy? I haven't played the game so I won't pretend to go over the finer points, but it's not the PvP utopia we've all been waiting for. Just throwing players at each other and enabling PvP isn't automatically fun and fulfilling. As Jeremy T commented: "Good PvP doesn’t simply happen in a vacuum - the developers have to make it happen."
2. Many PvP players want all of their progression via PvP. They're not builders. This lends credence to Lum the Mad's persistent musings that you cannot go back to Ultima Online. A game where PvE worker bees ran around doing all of the grinding and PvP players farmed the honey from them. Can that be replicated? Should it? Maybe there's another formula that provides the honey, the deeply fulfilling and tasty honey of satisfaction that comes from taking someone else's stuff.

Number #2 is the bigger picture I think. Whatever you wish to call it, whether it be Hardcore PvP, Impact PvP, or Risk / Reward PvP, no matter how you want your PvP, if it's within an MMORPG it should be part of a bigger game. That includes *gasp* non-PvP activities and players too. Otherwise, why not just go play other non-MMO games? I can get instant action from Team Fortress 2 that's more entertaining to me than what I found in WAR or what I've seen from Darkfall, because Valve chose to concentrate on PvP directly rather than bullshit us with the pretense of creating a world.

Do you want all-PvP instant action? MMORPGs are probably the wrong place to get that. Especially if you want equal balancing.

Do you want territory claiming & defending, ala sieges? MMORPGs are still struggling to do this and frankly sliding backwards in the process. Probably because it doesn't work in a vacuum. There's not much incentive to defend something pre-built, that doesn't hold much relevance to anything else.

Do you want to be the Wasp that snatches honey from Worker Bees and other Wasps? We'd need an MMORPG with a great big outdoors of more than just bee hives and nests. It's got to have some flowers and fields, but preferably far more than that too. And there has to be some mechanics to keep both the Wasps and the Worker Bees happy and buzzing around, because if it's brutal on the Bees they'll just go elsewhere. Maybe my insectoid example is wrong here, but what I'm saying is I'd love to see some great PvP that matters within a full gameworld, complete with economy, exploration, mobs with decent AI, all of the trappings found in the glorious holy grail of MMOs.

It would be best to combine all three above. I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other PvP possibilities. How do you want your PvP?