WAR PVP…currently fails. (A guest article by Korrow)

Welcome to Epic Slant’s first Wednesday Wordsmiths article. We’re pleased to host differing (or similar) opinions from other players and guest articles. As always please allow me to dispense with the necessary disclaimer. The following article and author’s opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions and/or views of Epic Slant, Ferrel, or any staff writers. -Ferrel

PVP, love it or hate it, is the central focus of Warhammer online, but is this a good thing? The answer is a big fat NO.

First, PVP requires other people to PVP against. OMG, what did you say? To PVP you need someone to fights against. This is all fine and dandy at “prime time”. In Perfect (that’s the town in the Walgreen’s ads), everyone always logs in at the same time, and everything happens at that time. But this is not the town of Perfect, people have different lives and schedule. PVP can’t be guaranteed to happen at all times of the day. This makes it so it is a waste to play the game if you can’t play during the “prime time.”

Second, this is where Mythic failed in it’s game design. They got cocky; they thought ORVR would work in WAR like it did in DAoC. ORVR in DAoC worked well, heck it worked VERY WELL. Why? DAoC was focused PVP. The PVP happened in the Frontier. Notice I did not say frontiers? Because when the ORVR idea first started the PVP was all focus on one zone of contention with three keeps that were fought over. War has nine zones of contention (T4, not counting forts/city) with 54 points of contention. That is over cockiness, because they though it would be so popular that all the zones would have fighting going on all the time. EPIC FAIL.

Third, timed events sound great on paper. Create an event, complete x event in that time and y event happens. Wrong. All you create is a restraint that people have to follow. Boom capture two fortresses in x number hours to open the city, then complete city objectives to unlock the next step. So basically if your time is limited you will have no shot of seeing events unfold. It falls back on point one in the fact you might only see these things during “prime time” and then you most likely only have two or three hours to play.

Overall Mythic ORVR is fail [in its current form]. There are steps that can be taken to fix it. They are not radical, but they do limit people’s choice on what to do. Here is how I see the fix:

First, get rid of all timers on PVP events. Keep your victory points and contributions, but dump the timers.

Second, LIMIT PLAYER CHOICES. OMG what did I say? You heard it right. Instead of having three factions that have three separate war zones, make it so there is only one war zone.

Basically, start in the elf area. Dragonwake is the only zone you can PVP in. The sides fight and Order wins, pushing Destruction to Caledor and then to the fortress. Order then takes it. The fight then spills over to Thunder Mountain… Destruction rallies and takes TM and pushes to Karadrin Valley and caps the fortress there. Now the fight is on to Pragg and whoever controls this tier pushes to the enemy city.

That is the big one; limit the PVP to one zone instead of three. The Zerg™ is like water, it always takes the path of least resistance, and if there is focused resistance, limited to one spot, glorious battles happen.

With no timers, the battle could start early in the week and still be going by the weeks end.

With those two simple solutions you will fix 90% of the problems with PVP in WAR. Mythic don’t think about it. Do it! Do it!

Edit: I would like to point out an interesting article I discovered in recent days. I will link the article, but here is one particular excerpt that proves my points. Read the article, it is by Gordon Walton, of the Bioware Studio Directors. 

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15386

Lesson 10 

Moving on, Walton discussed an issue that comes up in many games — and one that generated a little debate in the audience. Suggesting you should direct your players’ experience of the game, he asked, “Are you Disneyland or are you a sandbox?” Noting “the interesting thing about sandbox games is that they tend to have a ton more griefing” he suggested “an accessible game is directed. You never leave them in a place where they go ‘what do I do next?’ The vast majority of customers — particularly when you get out of the hardcore — need the signposts.”

 

He suggested that too many choices are paralyzing. If a player sees 10, he thinks, “I can make nine bad choices!” According to studies Walton has read about the human mind, “If you want people to do well, give them two, no more than four choices.”

Here someone pointed out that it makes it easier for a developer to make the choices better. But according to Walton “a common developer mistake is to give people good choice, bad choice, medium choice. They need to all be good choices. People want to feel like things are complex, but they don’t really want them complex. You have to give them the illusion of complexity but keep it super-simple.”

Someone else pointed out that this is at odds with the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn’t seem that Walton is interested in the virtual world aspect of MMOs so much as providing an enjoyable experience for gamers. He advised the audience to “think about your quest chains in WOW. Think about how they drug you through stuff, but you didn’t feel like you were being drug through stuff. If you make it feel natural, most people will never notice that you’re doing it.”

[Minor spelling and formatting corrections. -Ferrel]