Right now we have a foul compromise – people want to pvp, but getting ganked in the world while questing, eventually even a death penalty that is more than a slightly annoying walk back to the corpse? The usual MMO player of today got so mollycoddled that he will feel like someone is mutilating him with a sledgehammer.

The mentioned foul compromises are Arena and Battleground PvP. The division is so strong that even different gear and totally different builds exist for PvE and PvP. Be it WoW, GW, whatever… Guild Wars had the problem that PvE and PvP shared the same skillset – overpowered PvP skills were useless in PvE, and useful PvE skills had no place in PvP. The problems came when PvP balance issues demanded nerfs to a skill – and suddenly it was crap on the PvE side or vice versa, mostly though it was PvP that dictated the balance.

They decided to split skills into pvp and pve versions – I so often was tempted to say, that’s nice, so let’s go on and make Guild Wars: Tournament (PvP) and World of Guild Wars (PvE)… hehe.

PvP then traditionally takes a backseat. Take a look at Age of Conan. Take a look at the separation of PvP and PvE in Guild Wars and WoW. It is diverging more and more, world pvp and unconsensual pvp is not wanted and frowned upon.

But I never liked the arenas and battlegrounds that much. BGs are better, I quite liked to play GW alliance arenas or WoW battlegrounds, but as Ferrel pointed out, they are disconnected from the world. Even designers feel that – the initial idea behind Wintergrasp was to bring PvP and PvE back together, nothing else.

Imagine how much better the PvE side of the game could be if no “balance” between pvping classes and their skills has to be taken in account. A naked rogue can probably still kill a PvE geared Warlock, or did they fix that by now? Many classes in many class based games are very hard counters to certain other classes, so I would say the level based class design is per se VERY BAD for open world PvP. But I still prefer this over Arenas or Battlegrounds.

So let’s take the same flawed system to level tiered battlegrounds and arenas? There are interesting statistics which classes and skill builds can be successfully played in certain 2vs2, 3vs3 etc. arenas in WoW. Min Maxing kicks in, some classes are simply excluded, others favored to no end.

Devs trying to balance that are trying to balance an inherently heavily unbalanced system. UO had meaningful pvp – and no class, but a skill system. DAOC had classes, but an interesting PvP system. DAOC’s RvR is still praised today.

My final gripe is people who want to PvP in MMOs, where combat mechanics are often outright primitive. Maybe it is about time to create a fantasy themed beat’em up or shooter for them. Open world PvP won’t probably return to the western MMO world soon.

Our western MMOs are totally safe carebear worlds. But we want PvP. This does not go together. It is really better to have PvE MMOs and Online Fantasy PvP games in this case. Or games focusing on dungeon/raid content – DDO for example does that.

But going to lump together PvE, PvP, casual gamers, hardcore gamers in one game too often results in many elements becoming foul compromises. Like making raids easy and accessible for everyone – not everyone wants to raid at all, and dedicated raiders have other wishes than Joe Casual who feels entitled to have his welfare epic.

PvE worlds with PvP tacked on for the apparent minority who wants to PvP causes friction between two groups with diverging interests, and often leads to foul design compromises.

I consider myself to be rather a carebear, but I am by no means a pvp hater or not interested in pvping at all. The interaction between PvE and PvP interests in MMOs is really a big problem, pidgeonholing PvP to arenas and battlegrounds is really a poor way of dealing with it. Give people a consensual PvP flag, or a choice between a pvp and a pve world (Trammel/Felucca), and suddenly far over 90% of your players are on the safe pve side of the world. Felucca was so dead on most servers, even on the supposedly most active servers it was dwarfed by the carebear population.

The separation is in fact so strong that I can only repeat what I said already, either make it open world pvp and integrate it into the world or be bold enough to forget about it.

But no, they even add PvP Battlegrounds to EverQuest II. The existing playerbase is mostly not enthusiast about it, and if they start balancing around PvP, they will make them even more furious. And I doubt the BGs will attract too many new players.

I also agree that BGs lead to more PVE play for most, but WoW is essentially a PVE game… yeah, there are some pvp servers, but they don’t service the bulk of players. Most MMOs are primarily PVE games, because that’s how the bulk of players feel most comfortable playing.

I don’t think people care that much about immersion. I think its something older players care about, but battlegrounds work pretty well.

For me BG’s can only add to a PVE game if done right, I enter into a BG when I want a break from questing, dungeon running, crafting etc. Playing a game in the BG is that break, although I’m not really in character and it doesn’t make sense from a game world perpsective (it would be cool if they put a story why you teleported there even if flimsy).

Hopefully BG’s will be that casual side game that you can jump into and enjoy, rated ones are fine but I’d prefer to see them sorted out to stop the problem WoW had of the gear disparity being so extreme that new people effectively couldn’t compete (classes are wide enough apart at times already).

In this you have my total agreement. Consensual PvP is still the way to go, I just feel like it either needs better integration or total exclusion. You’d have a better view at this than me. Does casting that wide net really yield long term customers? I have to imagine any PvP focused individual who picks up a game just for BGs and finds they’re pretty much an “add on” won’t last long.

The problem is in this case it’s adding a new feature to an established game. By this point, it’s unlikely that people will really be looking at EQ2 as a great PvP experience. I suspect this might be the case where the developer is trying to offer something new for people who might be otherwise getting bored with the game. I suspect that you (and the people you know) are not in this target audience since you’re currently happy with the raiding game.

My guess.