Mythic-EA shuts down Warhammer beta, tells players to come back later

[MarkJacobs]

Taz,

   I wish that there was a plan there.  We write those kind of letters up all the time and send them to the testers.  This is the first time that anyone has, to our knowledge, posted one of those letters publicly.  I was kinda caught between a rock and a hard place when TTH posted the letter.  If we let it go, then we can expect more of that kind of stuff in the future.  If we don't let it go, then we look paranoid or worse.  Our post to the Herald, and some of the things we've been saying on the beta boards, was in reaction to the letter getting posted. 

Mark

[MarkJacobs]

Montague,

   LOL.  Welcome to my world.

Mark

[dr_dre]

again soz for putting the letter here.. i shouldnt beleive what other say before getting it from the source itself.

[tazelbain]

I agree with this, although I'd say that instancing itself is not the culprit. Rather, it's the design choice to reset the instance. But that's largely semantics.

Sports games reset all the time and people still care.  The issue to me is if or not people care about the game surrounding instances.  But if people are sabotaging games as frequently as they do in WoW AV or GW, it is going to be pretty pointless.  Of course, then there is the problem that eldaec describes when people care too much.  I don't think something like this can be armchaired until it gets in the hands of the enemy.  But one thing is true there will be a ton people looking for a cheep path to achievement.  Harsh steps are needed to be punish/discourage Leechers and Saboteurs from the get-go.

[HRose]

Dave Rickey could tell you numbers about the DAoC RVR usage.

Dave Rickey would also tell you how to properly schedule beta phases ;)

[SnakeCharmer]

again soz for putting the letter here.. i shouldnt beleive what other say before getting it from the source itself.

What?

[Venkman]

And WoW has zero innovation over EQ or AC, it just has more polish

Personally, AC and EQ1 are pretty different. And WoW didn't copy EQ1 as much as it took many of the most popular features from the DIKU side of the genre and rolled them into one game. This has been discussed ad nauseum, but at EQ1's height, they didn't have stuff that WoW ripped off from the likes of DAoC and CoX, for merely a few examples.

I think this is worth noting because of what you said in that post about DAoC RvR. You quit if you didn't RvR and you RvR'ed when you hit the endgame. What percentage of the playerbase did that before the days of new capped players every 24 hours? The pace of advancement was more akin to EQ1 than it is to WoW. And what players weren't lost to that were lost to the downsides of persistent RvR (backing the wrong side, playing the wrong class, playing at the wrong time, not having a lot of time, etc and so on). Compare that to WoW where, sure, PvP is just another ladder, but at least it's accessible. And I'm openly wondering if that accessibility is intrinsically tied to the concept of sport PvP that makes it fundamentally more viable for a larger audience.

PvE is all about personal achievement. You may need friends to help occasionally, and you're there for them as well, but even after community, you're there to grow characters. It's not about owning the world, kicking other players out, waving your e-peen over others who are less fortunate. All that shit's been tried in other games and we know their comparative level of appeal. So if you've got a highly polished PvE game about achievement that unlocks further achievement potential, what sort of PvP is appropriate for it?

Further, in a game with no ongoing story, what sort of "immersion" is appropriate? That's what I never understood about the original persistent vision for AV in WoW. It seemed anathema to the premise of the game. You're not there to move along a story. You're not there to affect the outcome of a timeline. From a story standpoint, WoW is more about witnessing a single chapter in one of the books than actively partaking in the rolling storyline. RPG it is not and they seem to make no bones about it. So Sport PvP seems appropriate to the lack of immersiveness of WoW.

I'm sorta all over the place there, but this all is connected somehow. I swear it! :)

[Sjofn]

The only people I've spoken to that don't want instanced PvP in WAR are the people who played the "winning" realm (generally Albion, but I know Mid and Hib were the winners on a few servers). I played Midgard on a realm where we were incredibly underpopulated compared to the other two realms. Moral victories? Sure, once in a while that would make you feel a little better, but generally speaking, knowing the other realms could come and take every single one of your towers and there was not a single damn thing you can do about it because the guard spam is informing you that there are more people hitting your keeps than your entire realm has on /who? That sucked, and I am really not interested in experiencing that again.

[Modern Angel]

And WoW has zero innovation over EQ or AC, it just has more polish

Personally, AC and EQ1 are pretty different. And WoW didn't copy EQ1 as much as it took many of the most popular features from the DIKU side of the genre and rolled them into one game. This has been discussed ad nauseum, but at EQ1's height, they didn't have stuff that WoW ripped off from the likes of DAoC and CoX, for merely a few examples.

I think this is worth noting because of what you said in that post about DAoC RvR. You quit if you didn't RvR and you RvR'ed when you hit the endgame. What percentage of the playerbase did that before the days of new capped players every 24 hours? The pace of advancement was more akin to EQ1 than it is to WoW. And what players weren't lost to that were lost to the downsides of persistent RvR (backing the wrong side, playing the wrong class, playing at the wrong time, not having a lot of time, etc and so on). Compare that to WoW where, sure, PvP is just another ladder, but at least it's accessible. And I'm openly wondering if that accessibility is intrinsically tied to the concept of sport PvP that makes it fundamentally more viable for a larger audience.

PvE is all about personal achievement. You may need friends to help occasionally, and you're there for them as well, but even after community, you're there to grow characters. It's not about owning the world, kicking other players out, waving your e-peen over others who are less fortunate. All that shit's been tried in other games and we know their comparative level of appeal. So if you've got a highly polished PvE game about achievement that unlocks further achievement potential, what sort of PvP is appropriate for it?



Further, in a game with no ongoing story, what sort of "immersion" is appropriate? That's what I never understood about the original persistent vision for AV in WoW. It seemed anathema to the premise of the game. You're not there to move along a story. You're not there to affect the outcome of a timeline. From a story standpoint, WoW is more about witnessing a single chapter in one of the books than actively partaking in the rolling storyline. RPG it is not and they seem to make no bones about it. So Sport PvP seems appropriate to the lack of immersiveness of WoW.

I'm sorta all over the place there, but this all is connected somehow. I swear it! :)

I know where you're going, darniaq. WoW is a game and it's self consciously so. Everything is tweaked to some super plastic level of balance. You can feel it when you're questing, how you nudge into the next zone at precisely the right moment. Guild Wars, while less 'perfect', is the same sort of thing: game first, second and third, world distant last. Sports pvp fits perfectly into both because they're the same sort of experience. You die, you rez, you go do it again for a fleeting honor that never ever changes anything or, at best, changes it for a few days.

When I bitch about sports pvp that's what I'm actually bitching about. It's not that I despise battleground pvp but more (maybe, I think, perhaps) that I'm tired of the sort of game that indicates. It's not war. I want war. I don't want touch football anymore. And other people do and that is perfectly fine. If the world can be changed by the pvp then that means it's fluid and not static.

[KyanMehwulfe]

The only people I've spoken to that don't want instanced PvP in WAR are the people who played the "winning" realm (generally Albion, but I know Mid and Hib were the winners on a few servers). I played Midgard on a realm where we were incredibly underpopulated compared to the other two realms. Moral victories? Sure, once in a while that would make you feel a little better, but generally speaking, knowing the other realms could come and take every single one of your towers and there was not a single damn thing you can do about it because the guard spam is informing you that there are more people hitting your keeps than your entire realm has on /who? That sucked, and I am really not interested in experiencing that again.

Aye, it's a sort of Utopian feature. Everyone loves the premise of non instancing on paper, when we're armcharing game design months before release or such. But at 6AM when you cannot find anyone to fight or when you're getting star bashed by an overwhelming zerg, it's a different story -- one that rarely gets cited in said design discussion. Which isn't to say it's the only possible solution [or part of a solution], and I'll certainly always be one of the first to support experimenting with ways to make as much non-instancing work as possible, but nonetheless it's something too often looked at as if its a perfect painting.

[Drogo]

Instanced PvP may solve many of the problems of world PvP, but for many people it is still not as fun as world PvP. I am still looking forward to AoC more than WAR right now simply because of world PvP. I have a slim hope that one of them will produce a fun PvP game, but the cynic in me thinks I will continue to read about MMOs far more than I play them in 2008.

[Threash]

To me all world pvp means is "ganking people as they quest or run to instances" and is the most worthless/boring/annoying pvp there is.  If im not fighting even teams that are ready to fight back then its not worth it, and the best way to get that is instances.

[KyanMehwulfe]

Instanced PvP may solve many of the problems of world PvP, but for many people it is still not as fun as world PvP.

For sure, I can relate. I should of clarified that by "it's a different story", I meant "sometimes". There are certainly many examples of where being at the weak end of the spectrum can still be quite enjoyable simply because of the world persistent nature of it. Some of my best memories from WoW's [brief] world PvP periods were being vastly outnumbered at Tarren Mill, yet making heroic or at least admirable last stands in the town before we finally were fully overrun.

[Drogo]

To me all world pvp means is "ganking people as they quest or run to instances" and is the most worthless/boring/annoying pvp there is.  If im not fighting even teams that are ready to fight back then its not worth it, and the best way to get that is instances.

I enjoyed the Hillsbrad battles far more than I enjoyed playing in BGs. If you added actual meaning to taking over TM or SS then the game would have been perfect for me without any honor system, BGs or personal rewards for PvPing. Some people like to test their skill in evenly matched and prepared arenas, but I like to have fun in wild melees where I have no idea what will happen next. To each their own.

[Threash]

To me all world pvp means is "ganking people as they quest or run to instances" and is the most worthless/boring/annoying pvp there is.  If im not fighting even teams that are ready to fight back then its not worth it, and the best way to get that is instances.

I enjoyed the Hillsbrad battles far more than I enjoyed playing in BGs.

Me too, but the only difference between that and a bg is that occacionally tm turned into a zerg fest when one side way outnumbered the other.

[Venkman]

It's not that I despise battleground pvp but more (maybe, I think, perhaps) that I'm tired of the sort of game that indicates. It's not war. I want war.

I'm sorta in the same boat. I like that I can partake in PvP even on my crazy schedule. But I much prefer the concept of open war, ala Eve, ala SB, because I like how communities form from that.

The problem is how open war has been bootstrapped onto games that require a lot of setup just to enter the battle, and how setup means time, both cumulatively and per session. I think Eve is most forgiving as there's relevant roles even for the small ships. And SB became forgiving in the same way DAoC eventually did: the entire community is there to help your side grind out soft/hard-cap characters anyway, so just find ye an XP gravytrain. But both of those emerged from players solving the problem time itself caused.

Ideally I'd find a worldy PvP game with a SWG-style commerce back end supported by minigames to engage people who like to harvest stuff and build shit I use. Then I go off into battle using some light FPS type engine where my skill determines what I hit and my gear regulates by how much. Sorta like PS but with a point. Sorta like SWG with a working combat engine. Sorta like FPS was trying to be. Sorta like TR was theoretically going to be. Sorta like a whole bunch of promises never realized... but I can still dream :)

[BigBlack]

I think the problem is that hardcoded 'sides' in PvP just aren't interesting.  The games that have had an interesting PvP atmosphere - UO, AC1, Shadowbane, and EVE, IMHO - all allowed you to form your own sides and fight over scarce resources as you saw fit.  They provided the rules, stood back, and let human nature do the rest.  DAoC tried this too, but it was too little, too late, and the game rules just weren't as conducive to it.

[Drogo]

To me all world pvp means is "ganking people as they quest or run to instances" and is the most worthless/boring/annoying pvp there is.  If im not fighting even teams that are ready to fight back then its not worth it, and the best way to get that is instances.

I enjoyed the Hillsbrad battles far more than I enjoyed playing in BGs.

Me too, but the only difference between that and a bg is that occacionally tm turned into a zerg fest when one side way outnumbered the other.

See I do not see how your two posts support the same idea. Your first post reduces world PvP to ganking, which is not fun for most people and is not what most world PvP advocates are asking for. Your second post admits how fun world PvP can be when large groups contest for territory against each other, but just laments that it can be lopsided. I am not arguing that world PvP is not lopsided, it almost always is and there is no easy fix for it without instancing. My point is that it is still a lot more fun for some people to have world PvP, even if it is lopsided and they are on the losing side, than it does to have instanced PvP.

It comes down to you seeing BGs and world PvP being the same, and preferring BGs because the are supposed to be evenly matched and somewhat fair. I prefer world PvP because it is not evenly matched and you never know what you are going to get. I like the randomness and anarchy of a wild melee, while you prefer to fight by a fair code of conduct. Your view may give you more even battles, but I still fall back on the belief that my battles are a lot more fun to me. I tend to think that given enough time and thought that developers should be able to come up with a way to make a game that is fun without forcing all of the PvP into instances.

edit: Fixed a typo and took out a lot of unnecessary examples of PvP

[Drogo]

I think the problem is that hardcoded 'sides' in PvP just aren't interesting.  The games that have had an interesting PvP atmosphere - UO, AC1, Shadowbane, and EVE, IMHO - all allowed you to form your own sides and fight over scarce resources as you saw fit.  They provided the rules, stood back, and let human nature do the rest.  DAoC tried this too, but it was too little, too late, and the game rules just weren't as conducive to it.

I agree that a good way to solve side imbalances in world PvP is to let the players group up by themselves. Guild vs. Guild is always more interesting than one faction against another. I have rarely wanted to kill another guild member in most MMOs I  have played, but I have never played a faction game when I did not want to kill at least a dozen members of my same faction. Forget about roleplaying or being true to the lore. In PvP games, let the PvPers create their own sides and sort it out themselves. Some restrictions need to be made to provide a safe haven for beaten guilds to rebuild and something should be done to limit the size of guilds so that one guild cannot outnumber the rest of the server, but otherwise it would be great to just give the PvPers the tools and let sort out their own diplomacy like in EvE.

[HRose]

Territorial control:

Two hardcoded factions, territories to conquer and control Risk-like and resources to collect (through NPCs, like an RTS).

Then you let players detach from the hardcoded faction and make their guild-driven one. But everyone fights in the same world at the same rules.

This is exactly how Eve-Online should have worked, the four empires being NPC driven factions and the players factions fighting on the same world. It was their plan with the Factional Warfare too and now they don't have the balls to do it and continue to delay it because they are too scared of its consequences (so they'll nerf it to a gimmick and then release it).

Players need hardcoded factions so that the world is kept accessible and doesn't become just a niche of elitists. But you can still let the players do their own thing if there's the desire to do so.

The hardcoded faction should be like a military career. The empire gives you all you need to fight and you participate to the battle. But if you want you can tell them to fuck up and fight your own war.

[Sjofn]

Aye, it's a sort of Utopian feature. Everyone loves the premise of non instancing on paper, when we're armcharing game design months before release or such. But at 6AM when you cannot find anyone to fight or when you're getting star bashed by an overwhelming zerg, it's a different story -- one that rarely gets cited in said design discussion. Which isn't to say it's the only possible solution [or part of a solution], and I'll certainly always be one of the first to support experimenting with ways to make as much non-instancing work as possible, but nonetheless it's something too often looked at as if its a perfect painting.

Oh, for sure, if some game makes it work and there isn't a side that the other ones all kick around because they're too small to effectively fight back (three realms was supposed to result in the two "weaker" ones ganging up on the third, and that did sometimes happen, but just as often the two bigger realms would just kick the crap out of us, because hey, we still gave precious RPs and were too stubborn to stop fighting a losing battle), I think that game would be hugely sucessful. I'm also sympathetic to the argument that instanced battlegrounds don't feel connected to the world at all, because they don't matter (this is completely and utterly true in WoW, and I would never argue otherwise). I do like my PvP to have some meaning ... but not too much, if that makes sense. That's probably left-over feeling of crabbiness from how utterly screwed my realm was in DAoC, though.

I guess my ideal PvP game would be DAoC's RvR without the suck (the population imbalance, the really horrible grind that made it so I couldn't REALLY try different classes in RvR without hating my life, the populate imbalance, the lack of things to do as a melee class while you waited for the keep doors to fall because trebuchets were heavy as hell, the goddamn spell interupt system, the population imbalance ...). I like having to go TO the PvP if I want to PvP, but I don't necessarily need it to be instanced.

WoW has turned me into a big ol' carebear, though, which I guess is a good thing, since all the games I look forward to either wind up sucking, being delayed for an eternity (and may still suck!), or suck just enough that my husband would rather play WoW, and I'd rather play WoW with him than a game I prefer without him. 

[eldaec]

To me all world pvp means is "ganking people as they quest or run to instances" and is the most worthless/boring/annoying pvp there is.  If im not fighting even teams that are ready to fight back then its not worth it, and the best way to get that is instances.

It is important to be clear that this is a problem that exists only in WoW.

It has been fixed elsewhere before and after WoW by having safe areas for pve grinding. Even EVE and UO solved this particular problem.

[Simond]

If you have PvE safe spots then ultimately all of your PvP areas are glorified battlegrounds as your opponents can quit fighting at any time and run back to Empire/Trammel/whatever.

The only difference is that battlegrounds reset (allowing everyone a chance to fight in them) whereas PvP areas will stay zerged under. Persistance isn't a good thing in and of itself - just having "persistant world PvP!!!111" in a game means that, on the whole, the strongest side gets stronger, and the weaker sides gets weaker.

Example: In one of the TBC zones for WoW, there's a city capturable by PvP in the middle of one of the PvE zones. Whoo, world PvP instead of that fake BG stuff, right?

Wrong. On normal servers, Alliance controls it 95%+ of the time. On PvP servers, Horde controls it 95%+ of the time. "Might makes right" doesn't make for fun games...and WoW has 9 million+ subs because it's a fun game most of the time to most of its players.

[Merusk]

It's usually more than 95% of the time on my server.  The only time Horde gets Halaa is when someone convinces the zone to let it fall.   "That way we can play with bombing runs for a few minutes, and get tokens for the takeover."

The towers in Terokkar are the same way.  Horde gets them for one cycle out of the weekend.. that one beetween Friday night and Saturday morning.  Better run your instances then, Hordies, because you're never getting Spirit Shards any other time.

World pvp of this nature means you'd better like being the underdog, or enjoy rerolling.  "World" and "immersion" are opposed to "fun" and "long-term subscribers."

[Arthur_Parker]

Example: In one of the TBC zones for WoW, there's a city capturable by PvP in the middle of one of the PvE zones. Whoo, world PvP instead of that fake BG stuff, right?

Wrong. On normal servers, Alliance controls it 95%+ of the time. On PvP servers, Horde controls it 95%+ of the time. "Might makes right" doesn't make for fun games...and WoW has 9 million+ subs because it's a fun game most of the time to most of its players.

This is a classic example of the problem Mythic have trying to develop a more involving pvp game than WoW while retaining WoW's sense of fun gameplay.  The WoW example you have given doesn't actually mean anything because there is no real world affecting pvp gameplay left in WoW.   Therefore you are either trapped into guessing what WoW players want and trying to invent a better WoW (good luck with that) or doing something different and appealing to as many players as possible.  WoW players find WoW's pvp acceptable, if they didn't they won't be WoW players.

To go back a few pages, you listed (the pre-honour system) Tarren Mill as a bad thing, there's no doubt a awful lot of people hated Tarren Mill.  But I do know at least one person (me) who thought it was the best zone in the game, I played Horde, maybe I would have been bored on the Alliance side.

[Simond]

This is a classic example of the problem Mythic have trying to develop a more involving pvp game than WoW while retaining WoW's sense of fun gameplay.

So you're admitting that world PvP isn't fun to most people? 

The WoW example you have given doesn't actually mean anything because there is no real world affecting pvp gameplay left in WoW.

Apart from the part where whoever controls Halaa gets all the rewards, quests & faction items from Halaa, you mean? It's exactly what the 'World PvP' people are asking for - whoever wins the fight controls the city until the other team can take it back. Or, more accurately, until the underdogs either capture it at ohgod o'clock in the morning or (as above) the dominant side let the underdogs win so that the zerg can farm some pvp tokens when they steamroller it back in fifteen minutes.

It's a failure, as are the Spirit Towers in Terrokar, as were the towers in EPL, as the new open PvP zone in WotLK will be. The two sides will be unbalanced, the more numerous side will win all the time, the losing side will not find this fun.

To go back a few pages, you listed (the pre-honour system) Tarren Mill as a bad thing, there's no doubt a awful lot of people hated Tarren Mill.  But I do know at least one person (me) who thought it was the best zone in the game, I played Horde, maybe I would have been bored on the Alliance side.

It was fun for most people for about a week, then it was just an honour grind mechanism after that. Note how quickly the TM fights stopped dead after WSG/AV/AB opened.

[Arthur_Parker]

So you're admitting that world PvP isn't fun to most people? 

Sure world pvp isn't popular as yet, just as when EQ was around pvp wasn't popular.

Apart from the part where whoever controls Halaa gets all the rewards, quests & faction items from Halaa, you mean? It's exactly what the 'World PvP' people are asking for - whoever wins the fight controls the city until the other team can take it back. Or, more accurately, until the underdogs either capture it at ohgod o'clock in the morning or (as above) the dominant side let the underdogs win so that the zerg can farm some pvp tokens when they steamroller it back in fifteen minutes.

It's a failure, as are the Spirit Towers in Terrokar, as were the towers in EPL, as the new open PvP zone in WotLK will be. The two sides will be unbalanced, the more numerous side will win all the time, the losing side will not find this fun.

It doesn't mean anything for designing a new game, even if the system wasn't broken.

It was fun for most people for about a week, then it was just an honour grind mechanism after that. Note how quickly the TM fights stopped dead after WSG/AV/AB opened.

I was referring to pre honour system, which was pre battleground. 

And again unless WAR is being aimed exclusively at WoW players, what WoW players like or dislike shouldn't dictate the WAR design, as it's the most popular game, it should only steer it.  DAoC succeeded because it ignored EQ and made pvp a central part of the game, if DAoC was a purely PVE clone of EQ it wouldn't have been as successful.  WoW succeeded because it ignored one of the central parts of DAoC and EQ (grind keeps subs) and made a fun game instead.  If WAR pays too much attention to how pvp is implemented in WoW it will make the same mistakes.

[Numtini]

On hardcoding side vs. dynamic, the problem with dynamic sides is that the single biggest innovation that DAOC brought to the table for mainstreaming PVP was that players can't talk to (insult, disparage, threaten sexual assault, engage in misogynist homophobic hate-speech, etc) one another.

Open alliances work in Eve because perhaps 5% of the WOW playerbase is intelligent enough and has the patience to play Eve. That cuts out 95% of the trash talkers. I never heard the kind of stupidity in Eve that I heard in UO, SB, or L2. That makes Eve very special, but it also limits its growth. Eve will never have two million players.

If you want to fix balance issues, how about neutrals? 2 red races, 2 blue races, and 4 neutral races (2 start blue, 2 start red). Or just separating race and side? What if on a server where the Albions were dominating (not mine LOL, we were perpetual losers), the Avalonians sign a treaty with Hibernia and begin to fight for them. The devs can pull the trigger on that one. And it makes the whole world semi-dynamic.

[Simond]

So you're admitting that world PvP isn't fun to most people? 

Sure world pvp isn't popular as yet, just as when EQ was around pvp wasn't popular.

And EQ had very limited PvP because UO had few limits to PvP. Origin thought world PvP was a good idea right up until about a month after EQ launched.  :-D

Apart from the part where whoever controls Halaa gets all the rewards, quests & faction items from Halaa, you mean? It's exactly what the 'World PvP' people are asking for - whoever wins the fight controls the city until the other team can take it back. Or, more accurately, until the underdogs either capture it at ohgod o'clock in the morning or (as above) the dominant side let the underdogs win so that the zerg can farm some pvp tokens when they steamroller it back in fifteen minutes.

It's a failure, as are the Spirit Towers in Terrokar, as were the towers in EPL, as the new open PvP zone in WotLK will be. The two sides will be unbalanced, the more numerous side will win all the time, the losing side will not find this fun.

It doesn't mean anything for designing a new game, even if the system wasn't broken.

No, sorry, you don't get to handwave that away as a problem with WoW's mechanics. WAR : WoW :: DAoC : EQ, except there was more difference between EQ (with its very limited PvP) and DAoC. WAR is a diku-derived game with two sides consisting of (pretty much) mirrored classes.

If WAR has world PvP, whichever team has more people on its side will win. If this imbalance is permanent, that side will win all the time. If there's no reset button, that will lead to stasis and upset customers. That's not an artefact of WoW's particular design, it's common sense.

It was fun for most people for about a week, then it was just an honour grind mechanism after that. Note how quickly the TM fights stopped dead after WSG/AV/AB opened.

I was referring to pre honour system, which was pre battleground. 

And again unless WAR is being aimed exclusively at WoW players, what WoW players like or dislike shouldn't dictate the WAR design, as it's the most popular game, it should only steer it.

*cough*EA*cough*

  DAoC succeeded because it ignored EQ and made pvp a central part of the game, if DAoC was a purely PVE clone of EQ it wouldn't have been as successful.  WoW succeeded because it ignored one of the central parts of DAoC and EQ (grind keeps subs) and made a fun game instead.  If WAR pays too much attention to how pvp is implemented in WoW it will make the same mistakes.

DAoC, at its peak, had less subscribers than the Verant/Sigil-designed EQ. What does that tell you?

And like you said, WoW succeeded because it was (on the whole) a fun game. On the whole, most people don't want world PvP with consequences. On the whole, that means most people don't think world PvP (with consequences) is fun.

Therefore, if you want a massively successful game, you have limited or no world pvp that has notable consequences. Duels? Sure. Random ganks that set you back five or ten minutes if you're caught out? Fine. Rolling melées that go on for an hour then just peter out without anything permanently happening? OK.

Massive battles that result in your side permanently losing territory? Not so hot.


Of course, this only applies when 'your side' is immutable, and there's nothing else to do. If you can retreat to PvE-land and move on, or it's guild-based/soft-coded teams/etc, or whatever...less of an issue. But a game with two hard-coded teams and where world PvP has far-reaching consequences?

Really bad idea.

[Kaa]

Ah, I see we gathered around this particular dead horse again :D

The basic issue is that people like to win and don't like to lose. Unfortunately and despite best efforts of kindergarten teachers, when someone wins someone must lose, too. Keeping losers content is the trick.

Oh, and by the way, in sports PvP the competition is not other MMORGs -- the competition is BF1942, Counterstrike, Unreal...

Kaa

[Venkman]

DAoC succeeded because it ignored EQ and made pvp a central part of the game

How long did it take for DAoC to go from Launch to the beloved RvR people remember so fondly?

[Dash]

Mark good luck to you and your team I sincerely hope you pull off something I'll enjoy playing.  You pretty much have my box money regardless at this point, but I'm scarred by Vanguard and hearing some negative NDA leaks so I'm concerned and expectations are low.  Take that for what it's worth.

As to the persistent world PvP vrs instanced, good discussion.  DAoC frontier was phenomenal when the game first opened.  Just dipping your toes in the frontier world was very exciting.  Our guild took the first keep for the Hibs on Bors... booyah.  No siege weapons either.  Fostered great realm vrs realm identity and we had an excellent friendly rivalry with the Midgard players, who were completely OP with their chain stuns by the way and yes I'm still bitter. ;)

Later on it devolved into elite groups and zergs and your class sucks ... I lost interest.  Many friends simply feared PvP all together and rarely ventured out.   I think WoW solved a lot of the PvP fear or at least mainstreamed it a bit.  It seems like WAR is providing PvP in both open world and instanced.  Will be interesting to see which is preferred.  I'm guessing it will depend on population balance.

[HaemishM]

Compare that to WoW where, sure, PvP is just another ladder, but at least it's accessible. And I'm openly wondering if that accessibility is intrinsically tied to the concept of sport PvP that makes it fundamentally more viable for a larger audience.

The answer to your question is YES.

I don't understand why this is such a hard concept to grasp for people. Sports PVP is popular because anyone can do it, anytime, with or without a guild, and feel mostly like they can compete. They don't get assraped doing other things (like questing, crafting, mining, yiffing). They make the choice to be involved in PVP, they can do it in little chunks without huge social attachments required and the level disparity is mostly flat.

WoW proved it. Guild Wars success added further proof. If you want mass market PVP, Sport PVP is the way to go. That's not to say it's the only way to do PVP or the best way, and surely WAR doesn't need to remake either game's PVP to have success. No one should need WoW level's of subscriptions to be successful if their business plan is solid. They just need to focus on the audience they are building for and make the game great for that audience.

[Sairon]

It's a large jump to say that WoW proved instanced PvP, when I played the instanced PvP in WoW was looked down upon by PvP veterans and was mostly just seen as another PvE grind for loot. Have you seen how for example AV is played? That can hardly be called PvP. Haven't actually played GW but I'm under the impression that it's a lot like the match making seen in WoW. Now that's like your average RTS, FPS, which sure has its advantages. But I think it's the easy way out and simply neglecting the whole point of MMOs, the persistent world. Non instanced PvP have a lot larger potential imo, even if it's easier to fuck up.

[Ningauble]

>>Sports PVP is popular because anyone can do it, anytime, with or without a guild, and feel mostly like they can compete.

This is true for the Battlegrounds, but not completely true for the Arena, in WoW.  Coordinating play times for even a 2v2 arena team is a hassle for me, if there was some way to participate in the Arena with Pug's I would prefer it over the current system.  BG's are quite pug friendly though, but WAR better have a much broader spectrum of BG experiences than WoW has or it will get old very fast.  I have like 55k HK's on a PvE server because prior to TBC, that was about the only way to get decent gear without raiding.  I enjoyed the BG's a ton at first, but 3 years down the road they are all the same thing over and over and over now.  Maybe I am strange, but I don't feel that same repetitive feeling in DaoC, even to this day, and I have been playing that game for twice as long.

The concept of in-game teams determined by choosing sides and collaborative objectives really appealed to me with camelot, I hope that they don't throw that away, even though after about 3-4 years people got sick of it and the "elite" players became more interested in creating their own sports-pvp type scenario and had more respect for their "elite" opponents than the other members of their realm.  Still, at least nominal interest in the communal objectives lasted alot longer in camelot than it did in EQ, and I feel almost no sense of community at all in WoW.