Thursday, January 10, 2008

PvP taking the m out of mmo?

I have been dabbling in PvP as a filler, since raiding as pretty much become non-existent for me.

I'm not good. But its something I can do without sticking to 24 other people's schedule. I can stick with my own time zone for the most part.

I read alot about the state of PvP on the forums, once again not exactly the best barometer of what's going on. But reading rants is always fun.

The latest is about AV (Alterac Valley). In some battlegroups (several realms share these) Alliance kept losing, but instead of getting a fraction of the honor they got 0. So they boycotted AV and quit queueing. This lead to horde, used to instant or 5 or 10 minute queues, sitting and waiting in hour long queues. I'm biased, but Alliance didn't seem to complain as much about getting 0 honor, well not verbally. Horde claimed Alliance did this on purpose to punish them. But it's easy to see if you get zero honor you're not going to spend hours to accomplish essentially nothing.

Blizzard latest attempt to fix things was to make some of the npcs harder to kill for horde. And obviously horde are now complaining about that.

But the underlying complaints are what interest me most. That AV is just a place to honor farm. And that some say hardly anyone really wants to pvp there, they just want a place to gain honor, and buy their gear because, well the "real" pvp is in arenas. But arenas are only 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5.

And that leads me to this: Someone on the forums asked "What killed pvp?" and someone answered "That and making the most important aspect of PVP being small scale...in an mmo."

Do you agree? Did making arenas the be all and end all of World of Warcraft pvp ruin it?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

IMHO, the Arenas sorely need spectator mode. I just read issue #2 of the WoW comic, and the Arena system seems much more.. alive there. There's championships, cheering fans in the audience, official and unofficial bets are made as well as various backalley deals..

One possible solution would be to turn the existing in-the-world Arenas into "windows" into the instanced Arenas. For example, whenever you are in Gadgetzan you could watch Arena games take place in the cage, but couldn't interfere in any way.

Of course, the whole "window" concept is a major technical hurdle, and even if you spread the fights around all of the realms in the battlegroup, you'd still need more Arenas. Aside from the current three, Valley of Strength in Orgrimmar, Dire Maul in Feralas and the cage in Gadgetzan should be turned into full-scale Arenas.

As for Alterac Valley.. it seems to be working as intended in my battlegroup. Horde may win quite a few, but we also defend Capt. Galvangar while simultaneously have a few people in harassment/defense duty, people capturing bunkers and a few stealthers already on their way to Stormpike. By the time Galvangar finally bites the dust we have Stonehearth Bunker, Icewing Bunker, Stormpike Graveyard and Dun Baldar is about to fall.

Anonymous said...

You only get zero honour in AV if you keep playing as if 2.3 had never happened while the other side plays to the new system.

Downing the enemy captain, capping towers, recovering towers all net you significant bonus honour even if you lose, to the point that before the angst set in, it was not that rare to see the party losing due to an old-fashion general rush get more bonus honour than the winners.

Getting Galv down for alliance when you're going for points requires first storming IB GY and tower, Tower Point and Frostwolf. That should the game clock around 10-12 minutes, at that point the horde defending Galv tends to pack up and leave.

Seriously, it's not hard. But everyone just wants a free ride...

Yane (Yet another night elf) said...

It's not about wanting a free ride. Sure some players want that, well that may be the problem after all.

Because the number wanting to compete can't keep themselves separate from those wanting the free ride.

I am curious, have you ever played AV alliance side?

Yane (Yet another night elf) said...

The reason why I ask is, I'm always skeptical of someone who has never played horde commenting on how easy things should be for alliance and vice versa.

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