@Lonasc Love the comment. I don’t know much about Guild Wars but I’ve heard it is based around being pretty equal PvP. If the game is designed from that stand point it makes sense that more skill would be required vs a game that heavily focuses on the traditional RPG style.

@Tesh Absolutely! I made 52 the other night in LotRO. The only quest that could stop your progression is the opening quest to the expansion. I was able to solo it at appropriate level though. Beyond that, nothing has stopped me other than my desire to attack four mobs at once.

WoW has its own “level appropriate” group dungeons with concurrent quests, but they don’t bother me either, since they are tangential. They are just there if I want to group up, but I don’t have to play through them to move on in the world.

I wonder if Aion’s PvP will turn out. If mass or small group battles will work and keep people entertained despite the inherent “unfairness” of a level, gear and class based system with strong RPS component, which Aion has.

Regarding the forced grouping, you are right… I wonder if the modern view of MMOs is not that older MMOs “forced” grouping, but more that everything that requires a group is seen as a nuisance.

vekkth wrote a run-on sentence with a few periods sprinkled in including the phrase:
competitive PvP in wow is usually happen between more or less equally equipped teams.

Er, I haven’t played the most recent patch, but this was never my experience in PvP. The most important stat for PvP was resilience, and you mostly got gear that had resilience by engaging in PvP. Luckily you still got some rewards from PvP even if you lost, so eventually you could buy some “real” gear and get out of your scrub gear.

As the article shows, there are two different weapons available to PvP. One is obviously inferior (as measured by iLvl if you want). If one person can only afford the blue, but another person has earned the purple item, then the contest isn’t fair. Extend this over multiple pieces of equipment….

Now, it can be argued that PvP is about player skill and a skilled player can overcome numeric advantages. The problem is that WoW’s PvP tends to be a positive feedback loop. People who win more get more nifty items and have more power so they have a better chance of winning and therefore get more power….

You can go ahead and try to claim I don’t know PvP.

Ah yes, the traditional PvP arguement of “you clearly have never PvP’d.” It does a lot to reduce my credibility and raise your own! Only… it doesn’t. The Blue vs Purple comparison was there to prove a point. You’re suggesting that nobody would ever go into PvP without an inferior weapon. They have, will and continue to do so. It happens in the arena, battlegrounds and open world PvP. Why? You can’t magically just have the current arena season gear.

Which it also seems you didn’t continue to read past the item point. I did note that if you had equal items and equal levels there were still two disparities to over come. That is okay though ^_~

Tesh wrote:
I’m not sure if you can simply outlevel the quest and come back (much) later….

The one quest I wrote about is at the higher end of the mid levels. I don’t think you could effectively solo it at a higher level, but I don’t have a super high level character to test that theory. Trivial (gray) mobs in instances still aggro on a higher level player, so you can still overpull in LotRO if you’re sloppy.