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?

Well that's one hope shattered.

It looks like Star Wars: The Old Republic will have you choosing sides when you create your character. I haven't been keeping up on details for TOR so I've been caught with wishful thinking that BioWare might let players reach their destiny through gameplay and story, but here you go: pick a class, pick a faction.

I'm not fond of the two-faction this-side-or-that system that's become the defacto norm for MMORPGs. Horde versus Alliance, Destruction versus Order (why couldn't Chaos be a third faction?), Freeps versus Creeps (okay that's mostly one faction), and now Republic versus Sith.

At the very least, I was thinking players might be able to switch sides, or have some sort of ambiguity, but that doesn't seem likely if your class choice also selects an allegiance.

This topic went 'round the blogosphere a few months back, but I'm revisiting it because the situation on the ground has changed.

I think Mark Jacobs was just playing the marketing game, it was a defensive 'WotLK won't hurt us' much like his recent 'layoffs won't hurt us'. He was just trying to put out fires.

I didn't buy into it. And if it was true, why should Mythic be proud of it?

MMORPGs encompass a variety of activities and gaming urges for the players. So if your game's population is taking time to play another MMO, then you've probably got some gaping holes in your content. In other words, if it was as compelling as it should be, they shouldn't be wandering so easily.

I understand playing other games, that makes sense. MMOs don't cover the same kind of gameplay as say Guitar Hero or Wii Fit. But to jump back and forth between two Diku-derived MMORPGs? These are time and focus consuming: Players invest in their characters.

So it probably wasn't true back in October, but it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know I clued in that WAR's PvE content lacked a good foundation. And Mythic's emphasis has shifted fully to RvR (PvP) since release. It's become the 'why would you come here for PvE?' game.

On the forums, on the blogs, on the channels in-game-- It's evident that a good deal of players are playing WoW (or EQ2 or LOTRO) for PvE and WAR for PvP. In the blogosphere alone it's getting hard to find WAR players that are solely for WAR, it seems like they've all re-subbed for WotLK. I could make a long list, but more effective is Tome of Knowledge's "A Tale of Two Hunters" comic:

(Note: Not my comic, it just illustrates this so well. Go visit Tome of Knowledge to fully appreciate it.)

The problem for Mythic is whether Blizzard clues in. I suspect it'd be a lot easier for WoW's PvP to get patched into something more compelling, than for Mythic to rework most of WAR's PvE. I'm of the opinion that PvP content is much easier to create, the players do much of the work for you. That's WAR's driving force altogether, in the masses of players.

And here's the bottom line:

I don't think players want to subscribe to multiple MMORPGs. They do it because they want both experiences to be great: PvE and PvP. If one of the games does both well, they wouldn't need the other.

For me at least.

Okay, I still have more than a month's worth of time paid up with Mythic, so I'll likely login to WAR now and then to chat with some peeps, take some last moment screenshots and check out any changes before I go.

Love:

I love the Scenarios. I love the PvP-balanced classes. I love the (Games Workshop inspired) art design. I love the interface. I love my Squig. I love calling Dwarves "Stunties" and Goblins "Gobbos".

And Love Lost:

I find the RvR just dullsville and the PvE even moreso. Public Quests were an illusion that crumbled. Grinding Influence is worse than any grind I've ever played. The questing is oddly too convenient. There's no quality small team content. I could list more disappointments, I could fill a few pages with them.

Primarily I feel the game suffers from misdirection. It's like they pretended to have a world, but much of it is like a cardboard movie set. Push it a little and it falls over. And where it does stand up, where Mythic put their serious effort in, doesn't quite work either. There are too many underlying fatal flaws.

So much potential, parts of the game are really good. It just doesn't hit the magical formula for me. I could go on about how Mythic could improve-- I'm almost compelled to do so, as insight from a critical 'almost-fan'.

Where is it going?

Mythic stubborning hammers away at their big feature (RvR Keep / City capturing), neglecting the rest. A portion of the fanbase is applauding them for doing so, much to my disbelief. I'm not sure Mythic realizes just how niche they've made their game.

I can see WAR improving, but I cannot see it growing.

It's not as disappointing as Age of Conan. Both have great elements that work, both have many that don't, but overall WAR is more playable as an MMO, while AoC plays like a single-player game. For me though, the frustrations are a bit the same. I feel they've built in a shallow pit and they're not willing to re-dig to make it deeper.

For anyone thinking of giving WAR a try, I'll give this advice:

If you like PvP and don't give two hoots about the rest of the game, then WAR can be okay. Parts of it are great, particularly the Scenarios. I could accept WAR as a PvP-only game if there was a greater variety of PvP activities that worked well, but it's mostly the Scenarios that bring the fun factor home.

For me, I don't see much point when I can play Team Fortress 2 (which is currently on sale at Steam for 10 bucks) without a monthly fee.

Keen has expressed his dislike for WoW's Arenas and I mostly agree. It's the ladder that irks me.

E-Sports are one of those things where you either like them or you don't. They're either enjoyed or they're intrusive.

I'd rather enjoy defeating an opponent player to player, or feel the agony of defeat one game at a time, rather than be rated based on my mouse clicking, or my accumulative scores over time. I especially don't wish to be graded on a bell curve / ladder on a variety of stats and performance meters.

It changes the nature of the game, absolutely.

It limits the use of alternate strategies and just plain having fun.

In any kind of game (RTS, FPS, etc.), it's painful and frustrating to see players take deteors to boost their stats, rather than take whatever means necessary to complete the objective at hand. I'm trying to enjoy myself in the moment, immerse myself in the game, and a couple clowns on my team are off kill-farming, greaaat.

This comes as a veteran of the large LAN events (used to attend Fragapalooza every year, among others). The shift of those events to e-sports is one reason I attend less often now. Local matches are great, competition is good and I loved the feeling of everyone in one big room. But once they start compiling worldwide ladders and pre-placing players in matches rather than take the players as they attend-- it sucked the fun right out. Oh, I don't qualify because I'm not a member of CPL or WCG? Ugh.

I'm also of the mind that no one should ever get 'paid' for their 'skillz' in a videogame. It's entertainment, it's a past time, it's an escape. It's not a sport.

In a real sport, the best dedicated players naturally rise to the top and join the pros. It takes years of training. Decades of game rules and regulation refinement.

In videogames, the 'pros' aren't the best, that was obvious at LAN events: outside of the official competitions these guys get defeated regularly in single matches by casual players (especially kids). No, these 'pros' are just the ones that seek the extra glory, that spend their time and attention on their stats. Granted, there are exceptions. Board games are a similar paradigm, but even tournament-style Chess is played much differently than personal games.

For Starcraft, the 'pros' are all under the age of 18 for mouse reflex sake. Korean teams even have mandatory age retirement at adulthood. It's hard to get past the limitations of the input devices and their relation to the speed of child reflexes.

For an MMORPG, where I love immersion and the feeling of a virtual world, e-sports are a big jab at suspension of disbelief (so is world raid kill tracking mind you). I welcome instancing and a bunch of other mechanics, especially for satisfying gameplay balance, but e-sports are taking it just a little too far for me. It breaks a central concept that the genre was built upon: With thousands (and now millions) of players, no one person should be 'the winner'.

That was one major disappointment with WoW for me, that some players became tracked and identified as the small number of winners in the game, whether it be Nihilum on the PvE Raiding side or whomever is on the top of the Arena ladders for PvP. Meh.

I'd like to see some sort of anti-zerg code put into WAR, because zergs just aren't much fun whether you're on the die-in-a-second recieving end or the I'm-just-another-robot zerging end.

Simple formula:

If more than 3 players attack a single targeted player, apply diminishing returns on further attackers. I'd suggest cutting it by 50% with each additional attacking player beyond 3.

This would put a stop to the abuse of automated focus-fire assist addons in Scenarios and overall it'll make RvR battles more balanced and require more tactical thinking. Warbands would divide into smaller groups, you'll see more flanking and clever strategies. Classes would have to rethink their pairings, whether they should stick with Tank, Heal & DPS or push for DPS, DPS, DPS or any combination in-between.

Preferably it should only affect damage. Leave holds, knockbacks, interrupts and other crowd-control or utility abilities to work as normal.

Heals may need to be adjusted similarly however.

Anti-zerg code should only be applied during PvP activities and should not affect PvE at all.

I'm aware that it's probably more difficult to implement than it sounds, but I think it's worth doing. It would would go a long way towards making RvR a lot more interesting.

If not this, then please come up with something.

Skereye is Rank 24 now, Renown 18. I took a break from Scenarios for awhile but the last two days I've put in some good hours at it to catch up my Renown.

Just like Tier 2, I think my natural tendency is to knee-jerk dislike a new Scenario until I've got the hang of it, heh. But I've been in all of these a number of times now and have had good times and bad in each. Here's my take:

Tier 3 Scenarios in order of preference:

1. Doomfist Crater - I loved the two Tier 1 maps with the stationary flags. It's great to fight around the flag pole without having to interact with it. Doomfist has one central stationary flag point, plus three pickup objects (sort of like Mourkin Temple).

   Doomfist Crater is my preferred Scenario by far. I also love the terrain, the elevated ramps are great, getting knocked off removes a player from the fray without destroying them either. There's also plenty of opportunity for line-of-sight tricks.

2. Black Fire Basin - Classic Capture-The-Flag. There's enough distance to bring mounts into play, which should disappoint me as a Squig Herder but I don't mind that so much. Maybe it's because I love getting up on the Order's ramparts and shoot down at them in their own flag base.
    
3. Highpass Cemetary - I like this one just because the esthetics are so good, the volumetric fog looks great amongst the tombstones. The game mechanic is similar to Khaine's Embrace in Tier 1, but it's a smaller map.
    
4. Tabalec Dam - I'm still lost on this map and I think I will be forever. It's large and I never feel involved in the whole blowing up of the Dam / Windmill. Still, it's not annoying either, as the most open map it's great for skirmishing.
    
5. Tor Anroc - I stand by my decades-long belief that throwing people into lava is the most overused and lame mechanic in all of videogamedom. Soooo tired of lava. Whether my side wins or loses, it's just not very entertaining to chase someone carrying the bauble on open ground surrounded by fiery pits of death.
    
6. Lost Temple of Isha - It's capture the temple then hold it. Great idea, I thought at first. Except it's so easy to defend with the layout. Whoever gets there first wins. I've never seen anyone lose the temple once they've got it and everytime I play someone else says so in scenario chat. This map desperately needs something like the ramparts I mentioned for Black Fire Basin.
    

Overall, I'll have to say, I still enjoyed Tier 1 Scenarios best. I wish Mythic had made Scenarios inclusive, added maps and still allow you to play the earlier ones (only within your Tier of course).

Tier 2 grew on me, maybe Tier 3 will, but even with more maps to choose from the Scenario quality IMHO is tapering off a bit. The variety is nice though, all of these maps are very unique choices.