"Meaningful" PvP

I have been giving this whole PvP business some recent thought as I am jumping headfirst into a game that is going to ease in/drown people into PvP the moment they cross the level 25 border.

Perhaps some would call me a carebear. I don't know, because I can be as ruthless as the next guy in an FPS (with less skill, perhaps) and I have a certain low down sneaky cunning when it comes to group PvP and getting out of bad situations (like running away screaming like a lil girl, ahem *tactically repositioning myself* though I still have to work on the calling for help aspect) and ganging up on people in mass brawls to chop them down.

I quite enjoyed myself in WAR RvR, though there were times when the outnumbered aspect got too much and it was far better to tactically reposition oneself elsewhere and/or quest in PvE for a while.

I think what bothers me about some types of PvP is the unmitigated glee some people show in blatantly unequal matchups and worse, any display of persistent bullying in an unequal matchup.

It shows off a side to certain people that I really dislike. I think it's linked to the need of certain people to feel better about themselves by putting others down (be it verbally, or virtually.) I detest that in real life, and I detest that in a game.

Fortunately, in a game you can always log off to deny these people their small e-peen thrills. But a game whose design which allows it as a common occurence without consequences is not a PvP game that I would enjoy.

Another thing that bothers me about PvP is trash-talking, which was one of the reasons I never fancied RoD PvP.

Yes, there is a certain tactical reason why trash-talking is important. If you put your opponent off-guard and out of sorts, you gain a minute advantage towards victory, especially if he's stuck in the chat window typing out a reply. It strikes me as a little bit over-the-top, such as the preponderence of teeny min-height toons in Aion in order to look lost in the crowd and make it fractionally harder to click-target.

But no worries, I know the truly competitive will do anything to min-max out that last decimal percentage of victory:loss chances. Sirlin explained the logic pretty well, and I can understand why some people would do that. Is cool. The onus is really on the game's designer to lay down rules to allow or disallow certain actions.

I like the whole language garbling aspect or no communication between factions rulesets of some PvP-focused MMOs. It takes out the trash-talking aspect entirely. Yeah, yeah, 'dshdf basdk naoiye askhdas' - whatever. :)

I did find it funny that some folks actually bothered to decode certain language garbles in order to macro a string of nonsensical characters into their own end, so that the opponents could understand their salt-in-the-wound insults. (Or so I hear, but I forget which MMO it was. I think that was where the whole korean 'kek' for LOL came from?)

And also a little bit sad, because that meant cutting down a cartoon avatar wasn't enough, they really wanted to HURT (at least somewhat) the other person, in order that they could feel good about their victory. Makes you feel depressed about the human condition when you encounter folks like those.

On the bright side, the ratio of those folks should generally be quite low, unless you're playing some weirdly designed game that funnels these folk together and encourages that type of behavior in others (*coughDarkfallcough*).

It's really all about the game design. (And a little bit about the population.)

Take WoW. I'm running around in a PvP server. Oooh, scary.

NOT.

For one thing, it's an aging game. Chat is generally dead. Few folks are leveling at any given time. The chance of encountering someone who might want to get you is quite low.

For another, it's a gear-focused Raid PvE/Arena PvP achievement-urge loot-whore rewarding game design. That means most people are doing one of the above, and are not running around empty lowbie zones stalking defenceless noobs to get their jollies.

(I heard that ganking was pretty bad in Aion Open Beta when lots of folks got to the level 30 cap and got bored and went trying out the rift system in their humongous legion groups.)

And most of all, death is kinda meaningless in WoW, and the gear/level disparity so great, it's not worth getting hot and bothered about.

Today, I had my first PvP server encounter. I was in the midst of destroying two grey mobs to complete a quest, so yes, I unfortunately had my mind off and my focus on the other screen's browser.

Hmm. Red damage ticks. I can't move. I think someone is hitting me. Oh. I get just about enough time to turn around to see a level ?? Mage, figure out that I'm rooted somehow, and ponder if I should try and shapeshift out of it and whether it's worth putting up a fight against someone who is most likely higher level than I, when I drop dead.

Hmm. Guess not.

To be on the safe side, I run back as a ghost and sit around for 5 minutes on the off-chance that the guy is around waiting to gank a rezzer, but I very much doubted it.

My guess is that WoW leveling PvP, even on a PvP server, is mostly a "Hey, I ran into a red named player in the middle of my questing. Hey, he's lower than me. Pew pew. Another 'mob' down. Vrrrooom, off to the next mob."

It's the whole exponential gear/stat disparity. Your average max level guy has hp in the tens of thousands. Your average lowbie has a couple thousand, and the really new ones have a few hundred hp.

The damage you do scales that way too.

I heard an exchange over the guildchat that was both a little funny and a little sad. Some level 80 rogue ran into a level 20 alliance mage. He "poked it with a dagger." Mage died in one hit because it critical'ed. Other guildies were going 'lol' and calling the guy 'so mean, so evil' in a casual manner.

I just hope the guy didn't wait around to poke the mage again. Probably not. Fly swatting is more of a meaningful challenge.

Little wonder why other more hardcore PvP games don't think much of WoW PvP. It's especially individualistic and gear/level-dependent at that.

So yeah, if there's no chance whatsoever that you will kill someone significantly higher leveled and better geared than you, it's not a PvP fight, is it? It's a one-sided roadkill encounter for the attacker and a minor positioning inconvenience for the other player. There's no sting. It's just kinda a befuddled *blink* and funny/interesting to muse about in retrospect.

Heck, I even learned something from my own encounter. Deadly curious to know what level this random attacker was, I finally located the WoW Armory and managed to search him up. (10 levels above me, by the way. Feels lots better to know that one really had a big disadvantage from the get go. No regret on, "should I have fought back?" questions.)

It also sates my curiousity to know where a certain attitude was coming from. Some posters to the Aion source forums who profess themselves highly PvE oriented were posting coping tactics for a guide that talked about "Getting newbies used to hardcore PvP."

Their version of coping tactic involved not fighting back or sitting down to let the aggressor kill them without resistance, to indicate they weren't interested and should be classified as 'lol, rp'er' in the aggressor's mind.

This kinda boggled me because my personal impulse is to either RLSG in a mismatched scenario or turn around and give a bloody good fight if I think I have a chance of denting the other guy.

But I guess I know where they're coming from now if their PvP experience is WoW PvP. A high-level root and the near-instant pace of battle would take the first option right out. And the second is negated, thanks to the game design.

I hope Aion is a little bit more balanced than that. I should think so. A PvP designed game generally gives both sides more of an fighting chance. Guild Wars and Warhammer Online were quite alright, no minutes-long cc there.

I guess WoW is showing its PvE roots, just as City of Heroes has some hilarious binary holds.

In contrast, I had a lot more PvP fun with Warsong Gulch. I'd just turned 19 (No point feeding the well-geared twinks in the Battlegrounds otherwise) so I jumped in to finish the daily quest, and I went around impeding other level 19s, sometimes winning when there was 2 or 3 on 1, and sometimes dying when the outnumbering was on the other shoe.

There was a goal. Get the flag. So there was room for tactical sneaking around, distracting people away from the flag runner with the run screaming like a little girl (henceforth christened RSLG for short) maneuver, mass zerging the defence, RSLG away from the opposition zerg, and so on and so forth.

Ditto RvR in WAR before folks got bored with the game and stopped logging in.

Disparities are not so great, and there's always a chance of winning, which is what makes people stop and fight back.

Even with a level disparity, I find the group type of PvP and land defence quite enjoyable. Or at least understandable.

In the Barrens, there's always the bored (or maybe sent on a quest?) level 40+ Alliance folks who keep hammering the Crossroads or some other place. WoW being what it is, they obviously pwn the noobs with little resistance. (Unless you're that unfortunate level 80 who made the news when 70 organised level 1s overran him like a Liliputian raid.)

But the shoe is on the other foot when the level 80 Horde guys come along to defend their territory and squish the attacker.

I think I'm generally cool with that. It builds up a certain sense of social rapport and there is 'group balance' where your 1 vs 1 fight might be uneven, but balanced in the larger scheme of things.

I gather that Aion has this as one of the components of their PvPvE game. I think the crucial make-or-break aspect is that of frequency. Alliance attacks are infrequent enough on the Thaurissan server right now that it's more of a welcome change to hear the announcements and know, oh, ok, better avoid this place for a while, and so on.

If it's going to impede leveling for days by having people rush me every 5 minutes for kicks, or bang me back and forth between corpse and spirit healer, then yeah, that's going to be unamusing in short order.

Part of controlling that is game design. Part of it is the population and community, which one will have to keep an eye on, and make network links to.

The other aspect which makes it alright for me in WoW is that I have a sneak skill. Psychologically, anyway. I don't actually know from what distance a level 80 could spot me and rape me with a casual spellcast, but when I spent some time in Booty Bay running some errands, I was mentally alert and prowled about on the boat and took evasive maneuvers like sneaking off into corners to minimize random attack chances.

Mental alertness helps, I think. Psychologically, you're prepared for a fight or for something to happen. Same with when you go off into an RvR zone or arena or battlegrounds or whatever, you're saying, ok, I'm ready to go bash some heads. Or ok, I know this zone is dangerous, I shall be on my guard, ready to kill or be killed.

Of course, all the mental alertness in the world will not help make a PvP game fun if there is no meaningful chance for each party to score some kind of victory - mental or physical, individually or grouped.

P.S. I just remembered another reason why RoD PvP was unappealing. Too LITTLE cc. Besides a lucky warrior stun, there's probably no way you're going to chase a guy down who spammed flee, quaffed heals and went off to buy more heals.

(Without chronic gear imbalances anyway (whee, clan) or outnumbering someone.
And with maybe the whole 'grapple' business and other deadly-only skills that got introduced at some point later down the road.)

There was a tiny bit more tactical potential in arena PvP in RoD, since it was about draining the guy out of carryable heals before the guy would deign to die.

But it mostly boiled down to waiting for the other guy to make a mistake, instead of something within your control.

There was the whole consequence hit of loss of equipment/time/effort too.

Presumably, that's why Eve folks try and minimize it by only flying ships they can afford to replace, backing up their clones, and what not, while Darkfall folks strip naked in order to go out and fight. :P