We Need a Sandbox PvP MMO Done 'Right'

Over on Broken Toys, Scott Jennings made a post stating that players don't really want hardcore PvP in an MMO.

While I agree that his basic arguments are correct, I think much of the crash that PvP-oriented MMOs have regularly suffered there is simply due to lackluster and/or half-assed implementations. There is definitely a lot to be said for doing a game 'right'. If someone would make a PvP-centric sandbox game, AND do a good job of it, there is plenty of room and interest for it to be successful. More thoughts through the link...

And if you lok back on the 'Holy Grail of games', as many old MMO players fondly remember Ultima Online, it wasn't ONLY about non-consensual, full-loot PvP. It had an extensive crafting system, tons of non-combat skills, semi-interactive environment, options for dying clothes, and the ability to have fun, experience the game and interact with other players without ever leaving your starting city. In fact, some players never even stepped into the wilderness or a dungeon in UO.

In my opinion, there are two very important factors that no PvP MMO should be without:

* Resources to fight over
* Non-PvP activities

Don't just say, here's Important Spot #1. Now fight! Important Spot #1 should actually be important beyond a developer attaching a flag to it and giving players points for interacting with that flag. Why is this spot worth more than that one down the road? Was it just arbitrarily chosen? If so, throw that idea out of the window.

Let the playerbase decide what is worth fighting over. Put one of a kind resources on the map. Plop a keep down onto a narrow pass that happens to be the only way through the mountains. If the players aren't fighting for the spots that the developers thought they would, then look at what they are fighting about, re-evaluate your premise and tweak your world as appropriate. Make those large battles meaningful. Let players affect the status of their world.

But even more important than that (if the combat is fun, players will fight even if there is nothing to gain or lose), is providing some alternatives to 24 /7 combat. Some players just don't enjoy PvP, and even those that do need some downtime occasionally. Crafting, PvE, mini-games, world interaction; these are all aspects that both increase the worldliness of your online world, and also provide alternate outlets of fun for your player base. Even something as seemingly superfluous as animated emotes can provide hours of entertainment.


As an example, lets look at Shadowbane, which was a game about guild vs guild PvP and city sieges. There wasn't even any crafting or other activities in the game. Spawns were exceedingly static and PvE was pretty boring overall. So ALL they had to rely on was their hardcore PvP selling point and their city building / destruction system, and they couldn't even do an effective job of implementing that limited feature set. Lacking in other areas, Shadowbane had all of its eggs in the PvP basket. IF they had delivered a polished, functional and fun city building and siege system, they would have likely had a lot more success. (And for any who are curious, I tried playing Shadowbane on three different occasions, dropping out after shorter periods each time.)

Eve is a good template to look at for how to make PvP combat meaningful and provide alternate forms of entertainment beyond blasting other players to space dust. Territory control and PvP are crux of the end-game for a lot of Eve Online players, but there's plenty of other things to do such as playing the market, mining, creating equipment and blueprints, salvaging, etc. There is a lot more to PvP than the PvP itself. An army doesn't run on fighting alone. It requires infrastructure and support. MMOs need to realize that this infrastructure can be as fun and interesting as the actual combat, and it should be just as important. And they didn't open up the game and then tell players that they had to go out and fight over 0.0 space. Instead they put the more valuable minerals out there and allowed players to decide on their own what to do about it.


Unfortunately, putting all of this together requires a lot of work. So far, all the studios that have tried going this route have been forced to cave into outside pressures and released half-baked games (Shadowbane, Horizons, Tabula Rosa, Roma Victor, just to name a few). I don't know about you, but eating something that is half-cooked is never a pleasant experience for me. And to continue the metaphor, once you've had that first, awful bite, its very hard for anyone to convince you to try it again.

Sadly, Darkfall is looking even less than half-baked and will likely join that long list of MMOs that had interesting ideas and great potential, but simply failed to deliver. And that, I think, is what results in the constant failures of the 'hardcore PvP' MMOs. Its much easier to build a successful themepark MMO. But I'm still holding out hope that one day, someone takes the time and money to look back on these failed trailblazer MMOs, learn from their mistakes and their successes, and build a truly enjoyable, PvP-oriented, sandbox MMO.

Improving RvR in Warhammer Online

Mark Jacobs made a big announcement yesterday about Mythic's plans to focus on changing and fixing the RvR portion of Warhammer Online. It sounds like their brains are moving in the right direction, but I think there needs to be some significant changes to RvR in WAR aside from simply adding in an influence system.

Below are some various thoughts and ideas I've had about Open RvR and Keep Sieges in particular. And no, this article doesn't discuss the maligned contribution system and the gold bag rewards. I really don't care so much about the items. Having fun is my focus when I play. This post will also not touch on any issues regarding scenarios.

Note: My babbling below comes from playing up to level 31 on an active server, participating in a handful of Tier 4 battles and sieges as well as too numerous to count fights in Tiers 1-3.

Second Note: Most of this was written long before the announcement from Mythic linked above. But this information did prompt me to finish up this post.


OPEN RvR

Lets start this off with some talk about Open RvR. Open RvR is combat in the RvR areas, usually centered around Battlefield Objectives or pushing the opposing side back into their warcamp.

One of the big issues with Open RvR is simply the large, empty spaces. Coupled with scattered objectives, awkward terrain (such as thousand foot high cliffs), and lack of anything else to do, makes it very easy to march in, capture the area and then march back out without ever seeing an enemy player.

Another issue is the lack of purpose regarding Battlefield Objectives. Aside from the experience and renown gain when capturing them, these spots really serve no strategic or tactical use. Give each side a reason for controlling these spots.

BOs should provide some advantage to RvR in the local area. The buffs from the guard captains at BOs can be nice (aside from the fact that the easiest BOs to get to always seem to have the merchant buff!), but give us something interesting and useful. Maybe a long-range siege battery that if controlled by your side, can be commanded to drop AoE catapult-type attacks on either the keep or the besieging force.

Or how about Bugman's Brewery in Blakfire Pass or the Tavern in Tabelecland? If Order controls this spot, then the NPCs in the BOs and keep in this zone have plenty of beer to drink and thus are emboldened to fight harder. Something small, but meaningful like making them do more damage. BOs could provide also provide a discount to owning a nearby keep. For each BO owned by your side near the keep, upkeep costs for claiming that keep are reduced by 5%.

Here are some other thoughts and ideas about Open RvR in general.

• Markers on the world map are not up to date. There have been a number of times where I've traveled to a land where I saw the enemy held a keep, only to find when I arrived that the keep had already been taken by my side.


• Keeps under attack should have better grading of how much of an attack is occuring. One player wandering by and getting one hit in on a guard is treated the same way as an assault by four warbands with siege equipment as far as the indicators are concerned.


• On a related note, the cryers in warcamps should speak up whenever ANY keep is under attack. Along with slightly varying messages, such as "The outer door has been breached by our foes at Gnol Baraz!"


• Battlefield objectives should have a little marker on the zone map indicating whether or not they are available to be captured. It sucks to spend time running to an objective only to find that you can't even try to capture it yet.


• There needs to be more points of interest in the RvR areas. Something else to fight over besides the one to four focus points that are currently there. (Just one example.)


• Ability to bind in a Warcamp. Making it difficult to get to the RvR areas was not a good decision. Why do I have to bind in a PvE area? (note: This was just added recently but since it was already in my list of things to improve, I figured I would leave it in for future reference)
  
• More Contested PQs. There seem to be only a handful of these, and they are awkwardly placed so that one side has a clear advantage to accessing them. Contested PQs should be everywhere. Give us a reason to engage in PvP outside of the RvR zones


• Add in more NPC patrols to the RvR area when one side controls all the objectives. And not just around the fort, but between the BOs as well.


• NPC 'scouts' that shout out warnings about enemy warbands. If they see more than XX number of enemy players, they make a zone-wide shout announcing their presence and where the enemies are located. So, in order to move through the area without drawing attention, you would want small, scout-killing parties out in front of your main force that can dispatch the scouts without causing them to raise a zone-wide alarm.

KEEP SIEGES

There are numerous problems and bugs related to keep sieges. The biggest defensive issue is getting to the keep before its taken. A full, prepared warband can tear down the outer doors in the time it takes me to recall to the nearest warcamp and run to the fort. The problem for attackers is the lack of options and strategy. Basically, there is only one. Bash down the doors, charge up the one ramp and kill the lord. There really is no strategy involved. And if there are player defenders, the ONLY way to succeed is to have them heavily outnumbered.


Step 1: The Initial Siege

First off, someone really needs to very carefully go through every single siege pad in and around every single keep and check their LOS, as well as actual visibility (ie what the player can see). Their are numerous places where siege engines have no LOS to other siege engines, or, they are out of range. A catapult placed on a siege pad should never be useless. I should be able to see and target all the enemy siege pads.

Secondly, move the guards back from the doors. Having them run in and out constantly getting in single hits is extremely annoying and just plain dumb. Or better yet, keep them from runing through the doors altogether. And on a similar note, increase the leash range for the guards and patrols. Too often I see them rubberband back and forth because they decide to attack a healer who is out of their leash range.

Next up, you need to stop the ability for defending players to run inside through a gauntlet of foes. If a player is in combat, they shouldn't be able to go in through the doors at all. This will give the attacking players incentive to defend the postern doors, and it will also provide incentive for those inside to make a sally outside in order to secure that door for their reinforcements. Getting in and out of the keep should be about control, not about who has the most lag-free connection.

Add in some interesting siege options such as the Orcapult (Greenskin special catapult that Black Orcs can use to try and launch themselves onto the walls. Sometimes they miss with disastrous results.) Allow the option to seize the gatehouse from the inside and open the gates (put a lever in the gatehouse with a long interaction time that can be used to open the gates).

Along with these changes to give more options to the attackers, you need to help out the defenders as well. The main issue I've found when defending keeps is simply that by the time I recalled to a warcamp and ran out to the keep that was under attack, the outer doors would already be down. So give the gates some more health and make it more resistant to spells and bleeds (in fact, I think that doors should be immune to all sorts of things, but that's another issue).

Also, put some NPC archers up on the walls! What kind of shoddy keep defense has noone on the walls!?


Step 2: Inside the Outer Walls

For Tier three keeps and up, we really need to some more points of interest inside the first keep walls. You have all of this area inside the walls that is virtually useless and generally ignored. The only points of interest are the gates, the walls and the postern doors. Much too narrowly focused.

Having such a single, narrow focal point throughout the entire keep assault really makes things boring. Here are a few random ideas that popped in my head.

1) A Barracks with a hero-level guard captain. If the attacking players don't go and kill this captain, he periodically spawns a full group of guards that head for the front door. Not enough to seriously hamper a sizable warband, but enough to be annoying and provide another point of conflict in the fight for the inner keep. Attackers have a reason to kill him, while defenders have a reason to defend him.

2) Magical teleporter - This provides another way for defending players to get inside aside from the postern door and also a way for the defenders to sally from an unexpected spot. Attackers will obviously want to destroy this.

3) Add-in the ability to break down a postern door. These are doors after all. However, they are generally small and placed in awkward attack locations so that a ram cant be used. However, if the attacking players want to try and beat it down with their swords, that should be an option. Inside the postern door should be a narrow, easily defended hallway. Not the best solution for storming a keep, but something to add another layer of potential strategy and tactics.


Step 3: The Final Assault

Once inside the keep, things really get ugly when you have defenders (and are simply boring when you don't). Trying to crowd up a single-narrow staircase that opens directly onto a tiny room with more narrow stairs up to the third floor is just annoying. In particular, a heavy mass of players combined with the decreased room for camera angles makes this fight not much fun. Make the room bigger and make the Lord and his guards move faster if you're worried about players kiting them.

Make the inside of the keeps interesting. Currently they are extremely plain.

Turrets and whatever else attacking through walls, floors an ceilings is a pretty awful bug. This really needs to be fixed ASAP. These bugs seem to result in lots of extra lag as well.

One of the worst things about the Lord room is the fact that the Lord and his bodyguards reset when they reach the top of the stairs. And where is the first place they make a beeline for when they get low on health? That's right, the top of the stairs. The easy (and sensible) solution is to just make it so that they don't try to run at all. They should stay and fight to the death once engaged.

The inside of keeps definitely need some love. Multiple stairs, larger interiors, hallways and passages to fight over. One room down, one room up is so boring and uninteresting. The rooms themselves should be larger to start with. Give us some room to maneuver and engage our foes rather than having everyone pile up into one big mass.

Step 4: The Aftermath

Killing a Keep Lord is a bit of a letdown after the crazy combat of an all-out assault. Insta-spawn guards and keep lords are boring. Have the new troops spawn slightly outside the keep and march inside, taking their assigned spots.

I understand that supposedly, keeps NPCs do upgrade after a while when a guild claims a keep and holds onto it for extended periods. However, I have never seen evidence of this in-game, nor have I seen any official info about this feature from Mythic. It sounds good in practice, but given the fact that a keep can go from completely safe to dead Keep Lord in 20 minutes, makes it pretty much impossible to ever maintain a claimed keep on servers with active, balanced populations (and even on those servers a late hours raid could easily make short work of any NPC defense).

Blizzard Still Clueless on How to Make World PvP Interesting

So this recent quote from Blizzard once again proves to me how little they understand the concept of meaningful PvP:

"Based on the information we already know, I think Lake Wintergrasp will be more active than Halaa because one of the things that hurt Halaa was the Diminishing Returns on honor points. With this removed in patch 2.4 people will be able to continue piling up honor points until they've had enough. I know rewards play a huge factor, so with the knowledge that people have now of items we've made available through honor points, I think it will continue to be a busy place for a long time."


Blizzard seems to somehow think this lack of interest in their oh-so-cleverly-designed World PvP Objectives is directly related to diminishing returns on honor gains for killing other players! Obviously, it has nothing at all to do with how worthless Halaa is as an objective. There is nothing there worth fighting over! A couple of vendors selling mostly junk and two quests involving gathering tokens/dust for items that are only interesting to a handful of players in the 66-67 level range.

How about making something worth fighting over for a change!? If they really wanted Halaa to be a point of contention they should have made it THE town in Nagrand. Give both sides small encampments with flightpaths where the current towns are, but move a majority of the quests and vendors into Halaa so there is a genuine reason to want to capture it. As it is, Halaa is just a novelty that quickly wears thin for all players, and thus, completely fails as a PvP objective. Give me a chance to actually make a difference or have an effect on the gameworld! Removing the diminishing returns on honor for killing other players will have no effect at all on the action around Halaa. And if Lake Winterspring is nothing more than a glorified battleground, well, hopefully by then I'll have better options for MMO PvP.

Halaa is by far the most active of their six outdoor PvP objectives, and even then its mostly just one side overpowering the two to three players on the other side. That should be a clear warning that something is seriously wrong with your world PvP designs. And let me give out a little hint: It's not due to diminishing honor returns!

The WoW Battlegrounds are popular due to the carrots available at the end of the racetrack. A lot of those carrots are rather nice and tasty. But the carrot rewards for World PvP are small, stringy things with no tastiness or lasting value, and for some of them (I'm looking at you Zangarmarsh and Hellfire towers), the measly little carrot can be taken away in mere minutes, before you even get a chance to take a bite. Even worse are the towers in Terrokar Forest. It's nice that the bonus from them last for several hours, but, someone then decided that you would also have to run through the local dungeons again, and again, and again, ad nauseum, to gather enough tokens (which are only available while your side controls the towers) to buy items that are also only useful to a very small percentage of players in a very strict, sub-70 level range! Insanity and stupidity all rolled into one!

So Blizzard either needs to come up with some better veggies for rewards from their World PvP Objectives, or completely retool the impact these objectives have on the game. I doubt that either will happen and battlegrounds and arena will remain the only semi-interesting points of PvP in WoW.

Alterac Valley: The More It Changes, the More It Stays the Same

So it's been several weeks since the much lauded patch to fix Alterac Valley, and once again, we're back to the same old, zerg-the-enemy-base-ignore-opposing-players strategy. I blame both the developers for creating a crappy setup that promotes that sort of strategy, and the players who are too scared to actually engage the enemy in what is supposed to be a PvP instance!

WoW Patch 2.3: First Impressions

So the new patch has now been out for two days and I wanted to give my initial impressions.

A lot of the class changes I wont have any comments on since 90% of my WoW play time is spent on my level 70 orc warrior. But I have had a chance to investigate the new Daily Quests, the Guild Bank, the changes to Alterac Valley and more! Keep reading for details.


The Daily Battleground quests are great! A couple of guildmates and I picked up the Arathi Basin quest on Tuesday, fought and won, and I had over 1200 honor from that victory alone plus the bonus honor from the quest. And getting paid for it was just icing on the cake! This also helps to promote the various battlegrounds on days other than the bonus weekends, which is nice for those of us who like to PvP.

I also discovered that you can hold on to your daily quest and complete it at a later time. I did this last night with the Shattered Halls daily quest that I picked up on Tuesday. However, once completed, you can't get another until the next day. But it's still something useful to know.

I noticed that the Heroic versions of the daily quests give 2 Badges of Justice on completion, which is a nice bonus, especially for those of us who don't do a lot of dungeon runs. Getting three badges a week makes for a really long trek to acquire the Badges of Justice items! And the reduction of reputation requirements for entering heroic dungeons has dramatically increased the number of groups looking for heroic adventures!

The warrior changes are just all around good for me. I was already a nearly pure Arms warrior (46 points in that tree). Death Wish is pretty sweet, I just need to remember to use it more often. But then change that I really, really like is having access to improved intercept! With the additional cooldown bonus from my gladiator gear, I find that I almost always have intercept available when I need it. I'm eager to try it out in the Arena!

Alterac Valley is pretty sweet at the moment. It's almost all PvP now and Horde has won 3 out of 4 matches that I've played. Bonus honor total at the end can be as much as 500-600 if you keep your opponents from razing any towers. Unfortunately, losing an AV match that way can result in very little honor gain, which would be pretty frustrating. But the changes seem good at the moment. We'll have to see how things play out as different strategies develop. In the meantime it's nice to see towers and graveyards actually being defended!

The experience gains for under-60 quests have increased significantly. I've only played a little of that part, but easily gained most of a level by completing a handful of quests. I was also able to go back to Silithus and solo the Emissary quest that I had been carrying around in my quest log for eons since his difficulty had been significantly reduced (it was now listed as a two-player group quest rather than a raid quest).

The Guild Bank is awesome. This is a great guild tool and a useful community feature that should have been available two years ago!

There are quite a few UI changes. For example, when you mouseover an NPC, the icon will change to reflect what they can do for you. It changes to a question mark for quest givers, an anvil icon for those who can repair, etc. Also, questgivers are now marked on the minimap for you. Another change is that interactive quest objects have little sparkly glows around them. While not very immersive, it does make it a lot easier to find that elusive lost backpack or chest without having to run the mouse over everything. Since so much of the WoW world is non-interactive and simply just there for show, I have to give this change a thumbs-up.

Overall, I have no complaints at all, though several of my addons have been throwing errors due to changes with the User Interface API. Hopefully the mod authors will fix those soon.

Alterac Valley Redux: Can I get more 'v' in my PvP?

So my previous post about the Resurrection of Alterac Valley seems to have been a bit premature. Sure, there are more AV matches running now than there were before, but the PvP has quickly vanished in the wake of honor farming.

Alterac Valley has returned to how it was a year ago, both sides rushing the enemy base, with little to no contact between the 'warring' players. In fact, the players work so hard to avoid actual PvP, that finishing at the top of the scoreboard with a mere five killing blows is a common occurrence!

If I try to actually do something useful PvP-wise, such as defending Iceblood or slow down those who are riding past to Frostwolf graveyard, I invariably find myself alone and outnumbered.

Reports from the Test Server say that actual PvP has returned to the Valley with the upcoming 2.3 patch changes, but I'll reserve judgment for the moment. I've learned my lesson (at least until the next time) about making snap judgments on PvP features. Players tend to flow to the path of least resistance, so its probably best to let things settle out before claiming a 'resurrection' or some similarly profound statement!

WoW's 'Matchmaking' System is a Joke!

So a while back, Blizzard introduced a 'matchmaking' system for determining who you would fight against in the battlegrounds. This system was supposed to weigh your gear and whether or not you were joining in a group to determine the matchups.

I played some Arathi Basin today, joining by myself, and six out of six times, I was placed into a battleground with a bunch of random Horde from various servers against a full Alliance guild team!

More weight needs to be given to organized groups. That is much more valuable than gear! Blizzard really needs to pull their heads out of their asses in regards to understanding PvP.

The Resurrection of Alterac Valley

So Patch 2.2 for World of Warcraft is finally here, and with it the addition of the ability to report AFKers in the Battlegrounds. And I have to say, the immediate impact is pretty amazing!

I played seven matches last night, and there wasn't a single character idling in the cave. There were a couple of AFKers who tried to hide in other parts of the map, but they were quickly identified and marked so that they didn't receive any honor. I had thought they would be booted from the game as well, but that didn't seem to happen.

I've read some complaints on the forums about getting labeled AFK unfairly, though I havent seen that happen myself. But, I also tend to seek out the PvP, either rabidly defending an attack point or pushing the front line troops forward with charges into the midst of our foes.

I played defense mostly last night, focusing on killing wounded players at Galv (and thus sending them back to Stonehearth, or hopefully their cave), and falling back as slowly as possible. If there weren't enough defenders, or we pushed the Alliance completely out of the mid-map, or there were too many defenders (which actually happened in one match), I would switch to offense, taking point in the assault on the graveyards and base, trying to make sure that we kept our offensive momentum going.

The most obvious change is that now the Horde generally has some defenders at Galv/Iceblood. This seems to cause some turmoil with the Alliance attack, and numerous times we were able to fight them back with only a handful of defenders. Horde has been dealing with Alliance defense for the past year, so we have come to expect it, but until Tuesday, the defense for the Horde never amounted to more than one or two people, which just doesn't cut it. Conversely, the Alliance defense seems to wither away once the Horde assaults the Stonehearth graveyard. They used to be pretty tenacious in holding Stormpike and their base, but maybe that's also a side effect of more warm bodies on the Horde offense. Eventually, the Alliance players will develop some new strategies to counter the suddenly active Horde population, but for the moment, revenge is sweet! And both sides are reporting shorter queue times, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

But I have to wonder how we ever got in this situation to begin with. How did this state of affairs come to be so out of whack that Blizzard had to hardcode a AFK-Stick into the game that we can beat other players with it? Obviously, it's a self-perpetuating issue that has been growing over time. The more players that sit in the cave, the worse your team does, which becomes very frustrating and prompts even more to sit in the cave, etc etc. But, as seems obvious with the amount of player participation in the Valleys now, players are interested in actually playing the game rather than spending the whole match doing nothing. So where was the turning point? When did things get so bad that the Do-Nothing strategy became the preferred method of playing in AV matches? And why was it more of a problem for the Horde? What sort of infectious mob mentality resulted in as many as 20 of the 40 players on the Horde side doing nothing whatsoever to help their team!? I don't have the answers to these questions, but I'm sure there's some sort of sociology paper waiting to be written on the subject!

WoW Rant: Alterac Valley

And no, this post is not about imbalances in the map layout.

Ever since the advent of accumulated honor points (a concept that I fully support), Battlegrounds PvP in WoW has really gone downhill... especially in Alterac Valley.

Just yesterday I joined a match and heard someone say "Only seven AFK in the cave. That's pretty good!" Yes, that's right, having "only" 17% of your team sitting on their asses doing absolutely nothing is considered a good turnout! And even better, those 17% still get just as much bonus honor as the players who are out there actually trying to complete objectives and gather that honor. And I've seen as many as 20 of the 40 players choosing to simply absorb bonus honor rather than contribute in any way to their team!

There are a couple of very easy ways to ameliorate the problem (I don't think it can ever be stamped out completely).

1) Simply not give honor to any characters in or near the cave. This would force the AFKers to at least go outside, where they might actually be engaged in some of the action, whether they want to or not.

2) As an alternative or addition to #1, remove the guards from in and around the starting caves.

3) Dump the caves altogether and make everyone start in their respective fortresses.

But as it is now, Blizzard is simply encouraging and supporting this self-first attitude in what is supposed to be team-oriented PvP combat. And its not as if they aren't aware of the issue.

It will be interesting to see how Warhammer handles their instanced PvP. I hope that their more PvP-orient

Note: Interestingly enough, I actually wrote this up before I ever read any notes from Blizzcon. I think that the whole 'other players can flag you for being AFK' idea wont work at all. For one, enough players have to take time out of their battle to figure out who's AFK and then flag them. Secondly, the flagged person just has to enter combat. Whats to stop them from sitting outside one of the mob caves and killing one every few minutes, or even just attacking one of the wolves/rams deep in their own territory? Most of the AFKers aren't actually AFK, they're just actively choosing not to participate, occasionally dancing or throwing out a smart-ass comment over BG chat. It's easy enough for them to reach out to their keyboard and 'enter combat' for a few seconds before alt-tabbing back to their porn/book/other game while still accumulating bonus honor from the sweat and blood of others!

The caves will still be a safe haven for honor suction.

So I applaud Blizzard for recognizing the problem. But I boo them for taking nearly a year to implement any solution, and curse them for coming up with a half-assed fix that really won't solve the problem.

Meaningless PvP: Recipe for a Losing Mentality

So I do a lot of PvP in WoW. It's something that has always interested me in gaming, and I rarely step foot into an MMO that doesn't have some sort of PvP.

However, in WoW, PvP is essentially meaningless. You're playing inside an isolated reality, for which there are anywhere from one to two dozen of the exact same scenario playing out at any given point, just with different players. When the match is over, everyone goes their own ways and nothing has changed. The only difference is that the losing team has accumulated slightly less points than the winning team. This has lead to what I dub a Losing Mentality amongst many of my fellow gamers who participate in the Battlegrounds.

I'm a competitor at heart. I enjoy pitting my skills and intelligence against other opponents, especially when we are evenly matched and/or they can throw new tactics and strategies at me, forcing me to think on my feet. And thus, in the battlegrounds, I often find myself yelling at my teammates (randomly assembled from other servers in my battlegroup, as my guild isn't active enough to form teams very often) about not guarding flags, or running around in a big blob of ten characters while the other five of us are getting slaughtered because we have no backup, or any other of the myriad just plain stupid things that players tend to do. And more and more lately, I've been getting flak from the other players telling me to 'relax' and 'its just a game' and other sundry comments, not all of which are so pleasant. After a recent bout of this, it suddenly occurred to me that many of my 'teammates' aren't playing to win, they're just playing to accumulate their points.

In other competitive games, losing is losing. You either go home or have a mark put on your permanent record. In WoW battlegrounds, if you lose, you still get points, and you just join in for the next match. So to many players, it doesn't matter if they never get near an objective or if they just sit around in the base and rack up bonus honor points while everyone else on their team is putting forth an effort.

Now I do have to say that I definitely appreciate the fact that honor points are cumulative these days. The old decaying honor grind was just exceedingly cumbersome. But the Losing Mentality makes many of the matches not fun for me. Is there a solution to this dilemma? Not when the battleground results are virtually meaningless in the larger scope. It will be interesting to see how the instanced PvP in Warhammer Online fares, since it's being designed to have an effect on the overall war effort. Will there still be players leeching off of those who are actually putting forth blood and sweat to try and win for their side? I certainly hope not!

The Horrors of Open PvP

PvP. One subject that is frequently discussed and argued about in the MMO world. It makes developers nervous, sends victms into fits, is associated with 'grief-play', and even gets an article about it in a print magazine.

But I'm here to discuss someplace even darker, where few companies dare tread... open PvP. Basically, this means that anyone can be attacked anywhere. No artifical limitations that magically prevent combat in certain areas. No PvP 'flags' to turn on and off. Once you enter the gameworld, you have the potential to be killed anywhere at anytime.

Many, if not a large majority, of the MMO playerbase cringes at the thought of an open PvP system. And rightfully so. Griefers have made their presence felt in all games that support any form of PvP, and even in games that don't. The life of a griefer knows no bounds. And therein lies the rub! Griefers aren't an outgrowth of the PvP systems. They're there all the time, lurking in the shadows, just waiting to steal your kill or resource, block a doorway, cover the ground with profane drawings, on any of a myriad of creative harassment they can come up with. But players mistakenly associate these pariahs of online gaming with PvP.

The problem isn't in the PvP concept itself. Rather the problem stems from that group of players who enjoy having power over others at any cost, and the PvP systems that dont prepare for this sort of playstyle (or focus on it exclusively, to the detriment of everyone else).

Open PvP doesn't have to be the death-knell for an MMO (I think Eve Online has proved that already). I've actually found that players tend to be a lot more polite and respectful in open PvP enviroments. In general terms at least. You'll have the jerks who always find their way into these open, online enviroments, no matter what the system. But when there are potential, immediate reprecussions for being a jerk, people tend to be on better behaviour.

It is also an excellent tool for promoting strong communities. Nothing brings people closer together better than a strong external threat.

I think there are a few key features that would be vitally important to supporting a fun, open PvP enviroment.

1) No 'con' system for players. If you don't instantly know how strong another player is, you're much less likely to attack them without reason.

2) No levels. At least not as they are currently implemented in MMOs. Levels inherently create huge imbalances between players and are a very arbitrary and non-intuitive system.

3) Territorial control.
a)Bind players to an area. If a player has to travel far to grief someone outside their guild or circle of friends, they're less likely to make the effort. Especially if they get sent back home after they are defeated.
b) Give players the ability to control order in their towns via guards, banishment, black marks etc.

4) Relatively quick power gain. And once you hit that diminishing returns curve, power gains come more from adding new tricks to your arsenal rather than making your old tricks uber.

5) Create opportunities for meaningful PvP. The more reasons players have for engaging in PvP over useful objectives, the less likely it is that they will be preying on the new and weak.


Certainly, it's not an feature you can just throw in. It takes a lot of careful forethought and balancing. But it also opens up a lot of vistas that are currently locked behind instance portals or shuffled off into an obscure region of the world.

WoW, PvP and 'Twinks'

I have to talk a bit about PvP in World of Warcraft. There are many good things about it, and many bad, but there is one aspect I want to focus on for this post. Specifically, "twinks" (I really hate this term, but since its universally recognized in gaming circles, I don't really have any alternatives).

For those who are unfamiliar with gaming parlance, a "twink" is defined as a character who is more powerful than they should be because they have been given equipment, enchantments, buffs, etc by higher-level characters that they normally wouldn’t have access to. Normally, this is not really a big deal because the character will eventually level up and outgrow their equipment anyway. But, with the WoW Battlegrounds, this mentality has been taken to an extreme. It's virtually impossible to enter a lower-level battleground without having several of these uber-equipped characters on both sides. I would guesstimate that 90% of the time they are rogues. They can generally single-handedly engage and defeat several opponents at a time and are recognizable by their glowing weapons, or the simple fact that they'll charge straight into a large group of opponents without even bothering to stealth!

Not only does this make the battlegrounds less fun for the regular characters, but I have to wonder at the mentality that causes players to pursue this option. Are they seeking to compensate for their lack of skill, or are they simply reveling in the fact that they can 'win' when the odds are heavily balanced in their favor?

Of course, the whole twink-centric attitude is self-perpetuating, as being soundly thrashed by someone just because their equipment is so much better makes one want to similarly equip a character just to level the playing field!

Whatever the case may be, I have to give some negative points to any game that is designed in such a way that 'twinking' is even viable on such a scale. It just kind of proves to me that PvP was really an afterthought to the main game.