Why NO pvp.

Likewise, I don't get any enjoyment out of killing another players.

Seems we're <i>very</i> different types of players.

 

Everyone's different. That's the point.

Sometimes it's fun working with a group to kill a dragon the first time. Sometimes it's fun PvPing for the sake of PvP. But the most fun I've had is PvP where the winner gets the chance to fight the dragon. Or PvP withing the structure of a castle siege. There's a clear objective. This adds meaning to the PvP. But the fact that you had to fight for an otherwise boring castle or PvE raid makes them interesting as well.

I loved fighting the big dragon in L2, long after I had a http://l2wiki.com/Antharas%27s_Earring The value was in denying one to my enemies. And it wasn't just a fight because you had to outguess eachother on spawn times, get 40+ people doing an open world quest where someone was sure to notice. Camp and defend the spawn, you might have very different PvP teams than dragon killing teams. e.g. perhaps PvP is a lot more defensive or spells that work great against dragons are easily countered by players.

 

UO actually rewarded griefing and then didn?t provide any other outlet for those who might enjoy PvP as a sport. There was nothing strategic to the PvP. In most games, this is really just gate hopping ? people sitting near the edge of a safezone trying to get lucky and get a kill. Generally considered the lowest and most boring form of PvP that only exists if there?s nothing else to do. Many games since have experimented with solutions to these problems

@Primerib - A bit up you claim there was nothing strategic to UO PvP? There havent been a MMO game that demanded more PvP strategy then UO both 1vs1 and in teamfights, it was a very rewarding strategic PvP game.

 

Yeah, Primerib's comment kind of threw me for a loop too. PvP in UO was incredibly strategic if you were playing with people who knew what they were doing.

 

@ND3G:

I think it's quite obvious Primerib never even played UO. Anyway, this game is intended to be a spiritual successor and I wouldn't accept nor expect anything less.

 

@Ara, @ND3G, @Ultima Aficionado, I think what prime rib was saying is that there was no strategy for players who use only griefer tactics, because he then describes some admittedly lame griefer tactics. So, if you want to translate what he actually said, I think it was, "There is no strategy in UO PvP for players that use no strategy."

No kidding.

 

@Owain - I see, well there goes my bad english reading comphrehension again.

@Primerib - I agree, griefers didnt use much strategy in PvP.

 

I respect Primerib's thoughts and opinions, I just have to admit I have no idea where he's coming from -- probably because I haven't played those aforementioned games.

 

Pretty silly thread.

 

@PrimeRib:

<blockquote>PvP didn?t create trolls. I assure you?re they?re vastly more common in PvE zones. PvP is actually highly effective at removing them.</blockquote>

Depends on the game. If the game gives players the needed tools to troll other players, sure; PvE allows those players to troll others with impunity.

It's why some games nowadays remove those "trolling tools". The main example is, perhaps, Guild Wars 2, which adopted a no-grief development policy (it was even in their early official manifesto). Some examples from GW2:

- Stealing gathering nodes? Impossible because each player has his own personal nodes, he doesn't even see other player's gathering nodes (though the nodes for everyone are in the same place).

- Ninja looting? Doesn't exist because loot is always awarded individually. There's not a single loot roll in the whole game.

- Kill stealing? Doesn't work because everyone that helped kill a mob gets as much rewards - loot, gold, XP, etc - as if he had killed the mob solo. A "kill stealer" is, for all intents and purposes, helping the other players get rewards faster.

- Clearing wide swaths of mobs in lowbie areas with a high level character? Good luck with that, the game drops the character's power to something appropriate to the zone.

- Killing important NPCs? Not only players can't attack them, "killed" NPCs can be revived by any player in a few seconds.

- Interfering with questing? Apart from the instanced main questline, "quests" in GW2 take the shape of dynamic events that happen in the game world at the same time for all players, are open to everyone to participate regardless of grouping, and reward every participating player. Also, all events are designed in such a way that no player can intentionally cause the event to fail.

- Singling out a specific enemy in large scale PvP? The game doesn't show the names of enemy players, and players can easily "disguise" themselves by changing their clothes' color at will.

- Corpse camping? Defeat transports the player to a spawn point of his own choice, one that has to be uncontested (no enemy close by), and in the case of the PvP maps (the only place where corpse camping could ever happen) at least one spawn point per side is guarded by intentionally overpowered NPCs that one- or two-shot players.

I would think trolls leave GW2 out of boredom quite fast. In fact I have a GW2 character at max level and I've never personally seen any behavior that can be called "trolling", not even in PvP.

Other MMOs are slowly implementing some aspects of this, BTW. LotRO recently implemented individual loot and open mob tagging on most of it's content; WoW changed how loot works with part of the group content done through queues to reduce, or even remove, loot rolls, and made outdoor raid bosses both faction-tapped and awarding individual loot; many MMOs introduced in the last few years implement some features meant to reduce PvE griefing, such as automatic quest objective sharing without a group; and so on.

<blockquote>Sometimes it?s fun working with a group to kill a dragon the first time. Sometimes it?s fun PvPing for the sake of PvP. But the most fun I?ve had is PvP where the winner gets the chance to fight the dragon. Or PvP withing the structure of a castle siege. There?s a clear objective. This adds meaning to the PvP. But the fact that you had to fight for an otherwise boring castle or PvE raid makes them interesting as well.</blockquote>

For me it's the opposite; I enjoy PvP without actual rewards a lot more. All my best PvP experiences were in games without PvP rewards, to the point where whenever I look for a PvP game, I tend to shun any game with clear cut rewards to the winners and go with games where the PvP experience is supposed to be it's own reward.

What's more, I really dislike the concept of gating a piece of PvE content behind the results of a PvP match. If I actually desire to play that PvE content, my reaction is not to engage in the piece of enforced PvP, but to instead leave the game due to the devs trying to force me into a kind of game play I don't wish to partake in order to get access to some content I want.

@Rydel:

Why the highest population servers in WoW follow the PvP rules set has a more complicated story than that:

- In the first place WoW was originally advertised as a PvP-focused game, albeit with optional PvE servers for players not interested in PvP. PvE servers seemed like an afterthought at the time.

- At the start there was little to no instanced PvP, so, for the most part, if the player wanted to engage in PvP at all, he had to be in a PvP server. This is often lost to new WoW players, with the ubiquitous Arenas and BGs offering the same PvP options, and rewards, for players in PvP and PvE servers.

- As any PvP aficionado can tell you, PvP requires a certain "critical mass"; too few PvP players and the PvP never truly starts due to lack of opposition. As a result, most PvP players seem to congregate at the largest servers, with the flip side that low population PvP servers stay stuck at low population (see the lowest population two dozen or so WoW servers, for example; all, or almost all, of them are PvP servers).

- Servers where one faction has grown to a humongous size, and the other faction has all but disappeared: WoW has a limit on how many players can be logged at each server, with queues for the players above that limit. This would usually limit the number of active players in a single faction, but there's a catch: in a server where almost all players are from just one faction, the number of players in that faction can be twice as large as the usual limit before login queues start appearing. A larger player base in a single faction means every single group PvE activity - raiding, running instances, doing quests as a group, finding a guild, recruiting other players, etc - as well as group, but instanced, PvP activities - Arenas, Ranked BGs - becomes significantly easier, while (non-instanced) PvP activities cease to exist. For reasons I don't know most of those giant, "single faction" servers are PvP ones, and they include 6 out of the 10 top servers, including the largest one (a PvP server named Illidan)

When looking at all servers, though, about 60% of the WoW player base plays on PvE servers, while only about 40% of the player base chooses PvP servers. Most external sites that track the WoW player base echo those proportions, and Blizzard doesn't release the actual info.

 

Sorry if I insulted the UO crowd.

If the PK crew all got together and spent a few days hitting the smaller villages to draw all the anti-pk down there and then, on the third day make a massive coordinated to hit a big town and slaughter everything, rob the big banks, and otherwise hit targets that would otherwise have been unattainable if they hadn't worked together and if they hadn't pulled all the guards out of town, then clearly the did engage in strategic PvP.

There's nothing wrong with setting up ambushes and ganking. But that's tactical PvP - not strategic.