PVP

There is a bit of a buzz in the blogs I read about this post on the Warcry fansite for Darkfall. (vaporware?). After starting in on the comment threads at a couple of the blogs I thought I would comment on another aspect that surfaced.

PVP in MMORPG’s Really sucks. The problem here tho is it also very very fun. The way all MMO’s to date have measured player rewards goes all the way back to muds, hense the term mudflation. Players are rewarded in terms of level advancement, skill advancement, and equipment upgrades.

When you max out your level, all you have to look forward to are equipment upgrades. This is where PVP starts to really suck. Casual players and the hardcore will split into two different camps and the only place they have left to pvp each other is on the games forums.

In my opinion if you are going to have raids in an MMO there should not be raiding against in game content. The two really don’t belong in the same game. Lots of games try to facilitate raiding and pvp by having different server rules. Some servers have PVP rules, others have PVE only rules. WoW and EQ do this. I played Everquest and Everquest 2 for quite a long time. Playing Wow now. Everquest 2 is probably one of the best examples of how PVP can seriously screw up a good game.

PVP was not in the game when initially launched. BTW when it first came out it was not that great, they put a lot of work into fixing things and did a very good job. Then they introduced PVP servers and started rebalancing class abilities to accomodate PVP. They always denied that these changes were driven by PVP but it was obvious to anyone playing that was what was happening. It pissed off a lot of users, more users than were probably on the PVP servers to begin with.

So essentially what I am saying is if you are going to build a game with PVP, do that, not build a game and then slap on pvp rules.

Please excuse this post if it jumps around ( started it a while back and just found it to finish )