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http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=8804891&tmp=1#post8804891
 (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=8804891&tmp=1#post8804891)

Posted 6/23/06:

Just when I thought I couldn't be less interested in PVP servers.

Well, it'll be interesting to see what they do.

Just as a data point, WoW's developers REALLY liked DAOC RVR. To the point that Bill Roper (when he still was at Blizzard) called Mark Jacobs frequently to complain about his thane. Not sure how relevant that is though since they've had a lot of turnover since launch.

Well, hope springs eternal.

They could be doing all kinds of complicated stuff.

They could just roll us back to the old days of TM/SS battles that littered a huge swatch of the map with corpses and skeletons.

Or they'll fuck it up horribly and the new system will cause additional stress on the new server hardware and bring back the Glorious Age of the Q.

Hehe....

Actually, I am really looking forward to hearing about this.  Even more so given Lum's recent addition to our discussion.

Wasn't the Thane one of the Zomgwtfpwn classes in DAOC?  If so that'd explain the blind spot for Shaman in PvP.  :-P

I expect another broken system that they'll 'improve' with a revamp and multiple nerfs/ patches and an expansion 18 months later.   Really, if you're looking for anything more meaningful than a few killsefs sessions, WoW PvP is horribly broken.  Not that it isn't fun, it just gets stale really quick.

Nope. The Thane was pretty gimp. For a long time anyway, dunno if they buffed it up later. Think offensive melee/caster hybrid with weak melee and lousy damage spells. Joy.

Now, if they had referenced early smite priest ~shudder~

Thank you for finally helping me figure out what WoW shaman feel similar to.

From the Under Development (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/) page (hasn't been updated since 1.11 came out I think):


Well, it could blow horribly, but it sounds kinda cool (especially with all the DAoC vibes coming of it). If it blows, at least the BG queues will be shorter :-P.

To me it all depends on how they handle population imbalance.  If World PVP ends up being all about who has more numbers I'd just as soon stick to the BG's.

It always is.

Amazingly, war in real life is often based on N. B. Forrest's maxim (http://www.tennessee-scv.org/ForrestHistSociety/quotes.html) as well.

My guess is they are going to plop down a tower or something similar in contested zones that you can take over for a small bonus.  My guess is higher exp in that particular zone, which will make them fairly meaningless before the expansion.

Real life isn't necessarily fun either.  Midnight raids work well in real life also.  But absolutely suck in games just like losing to overwhelming numbers.

Just pointing out that without attention to this in advance, players will inevitably use the same sort of "exploits" military forces use in RL.

No worries, we'll just assume you are genius of game design until your first game goes out.  Then, we'll string you up.

Why wait? Avoid the rush!

It's much more fun to hang a man with the rope he provides, than to hunt him down and use other people's.   :-D

The only part that Sun Tzu left out was going to the forums after the battle and bitching about Zerg tactics.

This thread is full of wisdom and wit in equal measures.

And I think that no matter what they do the world pvp will suck.

Can someone who's, er, played the game please enlighten me about DAoC ?

DAoC has possibly the best PvP of any MMORPG i've played (including SB due to that games instability and exploits). Basically the game has a PvE realm that you level up in and there are several Battlegrounds for PvP exposure as you level towards the cap (level 50). After the cap the PvP (called RvR - realm vs. realm) takes place in the Frontiers - an area that all 3 realms have access to. The 'goal' of RvR is to capture towers that then allow you to capture keeps that are throughout the frontier belonging to each realm. As you capture enemy keeps you eventually have the ability to capture relics that are in more fortified structures. These relics add bonuses to all players in your realm (+ spell damage or + melee damage depending). The keep sieges include Catapults, Rams, Trebuchets and Boiling oil to blow holes in the walls or smash down the doors. Large battles were pretty common last i played. Characters earn Realm Ranks through PvP that give them additional abiltiies.

Downsides:

Limited population now from what i hear - lots of servers had to be clustered to keep the populations up.
Class balance - it was never a well balanced game and from what i hear it's gotten worse, particularly for melee characters
Grind - getting to the level cap is pretty painful, although some changes were made to speed it up (instanced task dungeons that give good xp). There are servers that have an expansion called Trials of Antlantis disabled. These would be the place to play as ToA was a MASSIVE PvE grind - think having to run MC, BWL and ZG20 x 100.

It was a pretty good game to be honest, i only left cause all the people i played with did and i didn't have the energy to reroll.

If you have 8 people that regularly play together, DAoC is the best PvP mmog to date.  I've played them all and nothing seems to match the scale and level of strategy that a good 8v8 brings.  Even GW, a game built for skirmishes, cannot compare in detail and complexity to DAoC.  Now, if you don't have 8 people that play regularly, be prepared for frustration and anguish the likes you rarely see.  It is for this reason that many people fail to recognize the subtleties and complexity in the game. 

I think this was the biggest turnoff (for me) about WoW.  The fun was in the trip to the endgame and not the endgame itself.  Different strokes I guess.

I enjoyed the RvR more with the old frontiers, which weren't as big, and taking a keep was just taking a keep - no towers, just a keep.  The door could be fortified but that was about it.  I mean, after 2 hours a siege gets pretty boring.

But the whole Emain thing, I stayed away from (many people would go to rvr in Emain, the Hibernian frontier, to farm points so it was a constant battle).  On my server, the Mids defended their frontier for the most part, and often went to other frontiers to attack.  My guild was a defense guild.  It was fun, especially before my cave shaman was nerfed into unfun.  Then it wasn't fun, and I went to play in the little battlegrounds for the remainder of my time on DAOC, pretty much.

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/718/718310p1.html (http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/718/718310p1.html)


Asstastic.

Was it here that someone suggested they just increase the amount of honor you get for kills outside BGs? I think the idea has merit.

Agreed.

Mine (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/1153) still better :)

Btw, summary:

Complete and utter shit,  and a wonderful grief tool.

 Gather-up the required number of mats, arrange with the Horde-guild that all the Alliance in Sillithus will be flagged at X time.. and POOF, enjoy the slaughter!  What the fuck happened to consentual PVP, dum dums?

I can't wait to run the PvP gauntlet just trying to make it to zone-in on raid time.

That's not what I got from the article.  It seemed to imply that the one picking up the dust would be flagged, but I don't see anything in there that states that ALL players of your faction would be flagged.

You missed it then.  It says if you turn-in enough it will buff & flag all members of your faction that are in the zone. (Silithus only.)

I think you read the 'flag' part in your paranoia. They said that it will buff all faction members, not flag them. If the sky is falling, its because they keep adding more content to a couple of already overcrowded zones. The bulk of a server population tends to be level 60 and already farming those places.

That'll be good if it's the case, but the way the article's written it makes it seem otherwise.  Particularly when they throw this line in at the end:

That's probably meant to be read as something like: 'Just walking into one of the EPL towers won't flag you - you'll need to engage in PvP in the usual way (unlike Silithis where picking up the bug powder dust flags you)"

So, world pvp is going to come back strong because players can earn a  .. buff??! What a mindblowing concept. Am I missing something here? Because that is retarded.

And Cenarion faction points....If I read correctly?

I see "All your fellow faction members will gain a buff as well".  I don't see anything about "all your fellow faction members will get flagged".

This sounds like it will become a little pre-raid activity for guilds that gather in these zones at around prime-time.

Not a terrible idea, but not a fully-fleshed World PvP system by any means.

It's a start. At least they are trying something new with world pvp. I'll have to try it before I shit on it completely.

Leave it to Blizzard to stick resource farming in as a PvP objective.

You want world pvp?  Put in some new, small zones, all far away from one another.  Have the horde/alliance towns in close proximity.  Don't make the guards go into ass-kicking mode, spawning a hundred mobs when a town is taken.  Let town npc's drop some small amount of silver or something.  No random, aggro mobs in the wilderness, just passive level 48 animals.  Have nodes spawn randomly that warlocks can drail soul from for multiple soul shards, and fill the area with ore and plants, and maybe other materials.  The more people in the zone, and the more evenly balanced the population is between horde/alliance, the faster the resources spawn.

The crap they've come up with is laughable at best.

So basically, make it DAOC but slightly different.

You missed the 4 capturable/defendable towers in EPL for one. Isn't that what pvp players have been asking for like forever? I'm pretty sure I read that suggestion on this very board at least once.

I read the Silithus one as flagging when you pick up the dust too. It's IGN. You want crystal clear writing from them?

You can call it what you want.  I call it a PvP system that doesn't feltch ass.

There's alot left to be desired in WoW's BG system, and being instanced is actually low on my list of gripes.  Simply giving us another area to honor-grind for their crappy PvP gear, and some buff that noone will really care about doesn't sound like a good motivator to me.  The damn twilight camps are more of a reason to PvP in silithus than any node farming system they're going to come up with.

And wasn't the point of BG's to eliminate some of the mindless ganking while people were trying to level?  Where did that idea go?

Slithus and EPL are the the highest level zones in the game, so you'll be near-60 if you're doing anything in there apart from running for your life getting the flight path. That, and you'd need to do something intentional to flag either way, so no ganking if you're just minding your business leveling.

Of course, this stuff doesn't change a whole lot on PvP servers, apart from moving the gank-happy folks from Ashenvale/Hillsbrad to the high level zones (centralizing action is most welcome though, instead of running around zones looking for a fight). so that's a good thing. I'm personally looking forward to it as a diversion from the hopefully speedy cross-server BGs.

Sounds lame. Starting with Warcraft 3 Blizzard is obsessed with stupid side activities like farming resources and killing NPCs that having nothing to do with the main point of the experience.

So what they added here was - you can collect some dust to get a buff, and that helps your raiding buddies. Yay. I like how PVP is once again tied into raiding. Isn't the buff here basically pointless unless you want to raid? Otherwise I fail to see the purpose of collecting some shit just to get a temporary buff.

So this PvP is designed to appeal to people who want to raid and not PvP...nice.

What the fuck ever happened to simple, no-grind capture the flag/base style objectives?  It has served the FPS community for, like, forever, so why the fuck can't they do it here?  Grinding for world pvp?  Rob Pardo and his group of miscreants can kindly go fuck themselves.  This is fucking awful that my best hopes for actual PvP rpgs are in Darkfall and Age of Conan.

Capture the flag is the point of one of the battlegrounds.  Another is capture and hold the resources.  The last one is capture and destroy towers and graveyards and ultimately, the big cheese NPC at the base.  Those are already in the game.

Are there any battlegrounds that don't have stupid side-quests in them?

Warsong Gultch is straight-up CTF and Arathi Basin is a straight Capture and Hold game. Alterac Valley has some side-stuff for reputation and such, but it's all done in the process of you killing other people (there's some NPC stuff, but it's 99% ignored since the last patch).

Battlegrounds are instanced areas, Xanthippe.  I want the ability to help my side capture and hold a town, and then prevent others from taking it.

How is "capture the EPL tower" not capture-and-hold?

I don't quite get what you want.  I mean, why do you want that?

What it comes down to for most people is that they want pvp to have an impact on the game. As it stands currently, pvp is completely seperated from everything else in the WoW universe. There are no visual symbols indicating which side is winning, no effective zones where the battle never stops, no goals other than grinding out points, and no real world-wide point to winning. Also, people hate waiting around in queues, and the population imbalance with instanced pvp actually HARMS the side with higher populations by increasing their wait time between matches.

World pvp with tradable objectives changes that. The battle rages on all hours of the day without queues, the population with the most people gets the advantage, there's a visual indicator of who is winning, and winning usually has some world-wide point. Good world pvp that is.

Yep, that's what people say they want. 

Until the Horde starts losing all the time on most servers, almost never gets the bennies and remembers what a suckfest the TM-SS days were.  Then they'll change their minds and demand it be less broken.

Yeah, that's basically the case on PvE servers. PvP servers are a bit more balanced in terms of population though so I'm personally looking forward to the stuff in EPL.

In the beginning stages, yes. When there are only two objectives it will be very very easy for the alliance to dominate the outdoor pvp. However, that happened all the time in DAOC with the Albion faction, and people played that game for years. I think it will work better than some believe.

My experience with DAOC was completely different.  On the server I played on (Kay) the balance of power seemed to shift every few months depending partly on who was leading the zergs and what classes were over-powered at the time.  Besides that, there are way too many differences between DAOC's RVR and WoW's PVP to make any comparisons worthwhile.

I played a Mid Thane on Kay.  What realm did you play?

probably trying to get some southshore/hillsbrad type fights again minus the guard zerg and with some more concrete objectives. could be interesting but i wouldn't get my hopes up ;/

Blizzard has shown an uncharacteristic complete lack of competence when it comes to PvP in WoW.  Sadly I'm a stupid fuck and I will be resubscribing sometime in Sept for this shit...  I hate my life, some of my favorite people to game with are still playing stupid ass WoW so I really have no choice.

NECROPOST

I was watching a friend play around in the Eastern Plaguelands and was favorably impressed. They're on a PvE server, so world PvP is pretty non-existant. That said, they got in a few solid fights and generally received positive remarks from all the faction farmers. I'm not sure the system couldn't be improved, but it has a lot of potential and (although a few of the better aspects were stolen from DAoC) I'd like to see something like this in another game.

Four towers. For each tower your side controls everybody in the Eastern Plaguelands gets a 1% damage bonus vs. undead. If you control all four, there's a bonus 1% making the total 5%. It's not a temporary buff, it's a constant effect. This makes the faction farmers happy and they say as much in general chat.

Towers are captured by standing inside them while PvP flagged. A scale marked from Alliance to Horde slowly shifts towards whomever has the most flagged players in immediate proximity. The scale has a small gray portion in the middle and as the scale slides along there the tower is neutral, so it looks something like =ALLIANCE=---==HORDE==. In short, the longer you stand around in a controlled tower the more difficult it becomes for the enemy to turn it later. THIS INVOLVES A LOT OF STANDING AROUND AND IS NOT FUN.

Each tower also has an additional unique effect:
- One has its own graveyard, under control of whomever captures it.
- Another has a ghostly griffon master who will fly you to any other tower your team controls.
- The third has an item which, when clicked, provides a 30 minute +5% hitpoints buff.
- The last sends a group of 5 level 60 NPCs of your faction to the hitpoint buff tower (whether you control it or not)

This is interesting stuff. This has potential. I'd like to see it implemented better.

I'm not resubscribing.

I went up and took out each of the four towers for the quest reward gold. After that I haven't been back. The experience was partly fun, I had to actually fight over one tower as a paladin was guarding it, and later a warrior came to try and stop me capping. Other than that though I basically rode into the towers and stood there until they capped. It could potentially be worthwhile if people actually participated more often and in larger numbers. To do that they'd need to make the rewards a lot more attractive I'd think, and especially make sure that holding towers is important otherwise you just get musical towers.

A big LOL to the silithus "pvp". It's basically combing the desert for a dust spawn and then trying to avoid all pvp on your way back to the dropoff. I didn't see a single other person while I was doing this. My brother got lucky and had to fight over a dust spawn, but only that once, the guy didn't bother coming back after him and probably just decided to look for a different dust spawn. Total failure.