PvPing All Over Your Shoe

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Loading... PvPing all over your shoe!

First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Age of Conan - 200 BPM
World of Warcraft - 102 BPM
Lord of the Rings Online - 44 BPM
Lineage 2 - 32 BPM
EverQuest 2 - 30 BPM
Warhammer Online - 29 BPM
Dungeons and Dragons Online - 28 BPM
EVE Online - 24 BPM
Vanguard - 22 BPM
Guild Wars - 19 BPM

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Player versus Player combat (PvP) has been talked about more lately than some war that is apparently going on in the Middle-East. Player versus player gaming was a predominantly Asian phenomena with regards to MMOGs until World of Warcraft took Western standards out behind the shed and kicked them until purple spaulders came out. Every remotely successful MMOG since has tried to implement some form of PvP combat. To be fair, Ultima Online, the original high profile MMOG had PvP that was harsh and wide open. It is this writer's humble opinion that it was the way in which PvP was implemented that drove many potential customers away from UO. Getting killed over and over without being able to enjoy what the game had to offer was a turn off.

The big dogs pulling the 2008 release sled are both promising unique PvP experiences. We're all special, that's what makes us unique, or so the saying goes. Age of Conan and Warhammer Online both put great emphasis on their PvP combat, pointing out that it will be unlike that found in World of Warcraft. Crowds are forming behind the caution tape watching for the chalk outline of WoW, but they are going to have to hunker down for a while. It will be a lot like those lines that form to buy AAA games that go on sale at midnight. We'd all stand in that line if we were guaranteed not to see anyone that we knew.

Make no mistake, World of Warcraft does not make the act of PvP very enjoyable. WoW is a gear-centric game and though the PvP system is simple enough to learn that almost anyone can participate, it has serious flaws. Arenas, Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm and Alterac Valley are more a comparison of which player has acquired better gear than a test of skill. Sure, there are skilled players and they rise above some of the differences in gear, but for the most part the winners and losers are determined not by how skilled they are, but by how much time they have spent in the PvP venues accumulating points to spend on epic equipment. Imagine if a sport like tennis was setup like this. The more you played, the smaller your side of the court became and the harder it would be for another player to best you.

To make matters worse, the battlegrounds are all faction versus faction venues. Horde never plays versus Horde for instance. It's is always Horde versus Alliance. On the surface this seems reasonable, but it means that the maps had better be built to be perfectly fair to both factions since they will always start in the same spot and have to overcome any inconsistencies in the design. If one side is given an advantage, even by accident, then the battleground will allow one faction will be able to win and accumulate points towards better gear at a faster rate than the other. Better gear means more of an advantage, creating a vicious circle where one side continues to improve their gear while the other treads water. Let's compare this to hockey. What if the teams didn't change ends at the completion of each period and the rink was tilted towards the visitor's goal? The home team would always have an advantage.

Alterac Valley (AV) is probably the best example of a PvP battleground where the designers had the best of intentions, wishing only to make the game enjoyable, easy enough for the beginner, but with some complexities for the veteran. The original Alterac Valley where games lasted for hours is no more. We now have a PvP experience that consists of basic resurrection points, targets of opportunity, mini-bosses and a boss mob. The goal in this battleground is to kill the opposing faction's boss mob, alternately you can reduce the opponent's reinforcements (explained later) to zero.

Each team starts with 40 players and is allowed to have their players die 600 times in total. This death pool is aptly called reinforcements. Each time that you die you subtract one from your team's reinforcement total. If the total reaches zero then your team loses. In my battlegroup, Shadowburn, the Horde never starts the game with 40 players. Sometimes we start with 30, sometimes more, but never have I started a game with 40. Our faction has a disadvantage in this regard.

Teams gain bonus points (honor) for destroying targets of opportunity on their way to the boss mob. Destroying bunkers and killing the mini-boss both add bonus honor to your total. Alliance bunkers have open windows at the top, through which the NPC defenders can fire arrows at attackers trying to "cap" or capture their flag. Horde bunkers have a solid perimeter allowing Alliance players to run past the archers into the hut on the top and cap the flag unbothered by the pesky defenders.

I'm sure that there are advantages for the Horde, but as a Horde player I don't come up against them. Send them my way if they exist. The bottom line is that even were I an Alliance player, I would want the playing field to be even.

Though AV isn't a symmetrical or even a fair battleground it does deliver points to both winners and losers at a pace faster than any other BG, which encourages players to continue to play even though they are losing the majority of their matches. No company builds in rewards better than Blizzard and it is the promise of rewards that keep people playing the same BGs over and over again. I don't imagine that anyone is having great fun as they compete in their 50th or 100th battle in Alterac Valley, but I guarantee that they are all watching the scoreboard at the end to see how many points that they received.

Will AoC or WAR create an entertaining PvP experience or will it be another grind to epic gear? What would make PvP in MMOGs ore enjoyable? Can we learn some lessons from the First Person Shooter genre? The The Loading... forums await you.

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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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