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?

You can't go back to Ultima Online. *

If that's what Darkfall is designed to do, it will fail miserably.

I'm not talking about launch screwups (although they've probably unseated Anarchy Online for the distinction of worst MMO launch). I'm talking about gameplay.

Where Darkfall might succeed is in the differences. I haven't played it, and in fact I'd say nobody has played it in proper form yet. But their model isn't entirely a clone of UO's wild west 'glory days'.

Near as I can tell, they're going for the same feel, but that's a mistake too. It's chasing a ghost. UO's 'glory days' are some phantom PvP paradise that never really existed. It's been pumped as legendary, the bullshit stacks up and up and up. And that's why Darkfall is getting trashed by the likes of Lum the Mad. If that's what Aventurine is chasing, they're just adding another shovel to the pile.

I really hope they've had more than that planned. I can only assume there must be some kind of common sense at Aventurine, somewhere. It's just math, they can't all suck as much as whoever's in charge of servers and accounts.

* Technically you can go back to UO, it's still running, but in terms of going back to a mythical era, no you can't.

Maybe Darkfall is more of a social experiment in how far people will chase a cloud. It's as if someone wanted to reinvent the word vaporware to include an officially released game. Experiments in paradox?

Either that or someone at Aventurine thought that MMO players are such suckers for rare items that they'll try making the game itself rare.

This puts a whole new spin on MMO launch fuckups. It's the anti-launch.

Update: Apparently some people can actually play now. So I'm back to my wait-and-see in 6 months or so.