Your "Best MMO PvP experience" so far.

[Wolf]

I'd have to say UO, but I don't remember any particular moment. Plus I never played on the official servers, so I prolly played some weird ass version of UO noone else did :) We always had Order vs Chaos tho, and that was major fun.

EVE has awesome PvP, but I still don't have that moment where you overcome overwhelming odds and just feel like you're the shit.

WoW brought some amazing open world pvp back in the day when there were no battle grounds. Me (Arcanite Reaper cheese ms warrior) and a friend ( dorf imba fearward priest) used to camp the roads to Scholomance in wpl and Stratholme in epl. There were two times where we killed a whole horde raid going for one of those instances. We later got bored and rerolled two druids on another server. For a week when we were going from 30 to 40 we were the kings of STV. There were times where more than 10-15 alliance were "traping" us, and we were killing half and running away.

[Comstar]

Conducting and leading a fallback out of a a doomed town in WW2OL, planning, excauting and finishing the counter attack, and rolling over the german defenders so well that we took the next took forward. Getting the air cover, air support, artillary, trucks, tanks and infantry (of players who are ussally as well co-ordinated as a barrel full of baby monkeys) working so well together it's like a muscial number.  One I rembember best was a north of Eindhoven, Boxtel and then kicking the germans out of Veghal afterwards. Calling in an air stike which was on time, on station and on target just as the tanks roll in to the army base and the infantry smoke the bunker.

Only possible in the last year or so, due to the increased amount of players you can track of, couldn't really "feel" as atmospheric as it can sometimes these days. And you won't get a WOW game like it because PvP where evreyone's playing a FPS just is not goint to happen.

Not very commen, and I havn't seen it happen in Eve yet, though I hope to one day. Though I have doubts anything like it is possible in Eve because the loses have too much to lose. WW2OL, a new rifle costs the *player* nothing, while losing a battlecruiser would hurt a lot. More relaistic (run away to be able to fight another day instead of "fight to the last bullet and last spawnable infantryman), but not as satisfing I suspect.

[Rhonstet]

Planetside. Hands down, no question, no debate, no hesitation.   

The standard click-wait-click of most MMOs works fine for PvE combat, since AI for MMOs is still crude.  But against a living, thinking opponent, I want action.  I want an FPS/RTS mechanic, not a RPG one.  And I don't want a game where losing a PvP fight means you have to engage a timesink to replace your losses: that is for suckers.

Planetside me some spectacular hopes for MMOFPS and 18 months of gameplay: it might not have been perfect, but it was good.  Definitely the best thing SOE ever ran.

[Vedi]

My first PvP experience was on a MUD called Kobra - a Star Wars based MUD with full factions and BHs and Jedi and personal combat droids. Total blast.

You played Kobra?? Amazing :). I was a wizard (called Jedi on Kobra) there for a couple of years, in the Force. I just googled it, and it appears it is still running. If you ever went to Kessel, got a black stormtrooper armor set or hiked with an annoyingly chatty cabdriver, that was me.

Anyway, best PvP experience was probably AO, when Notum Wars hit and everyone scrambled to get a decent area to put up those towers. Also, I was a scout for the strange Minotaur RP city north of Haemish & CO in Shadowbane beta. I think we were mostly peaceful to you, although I remember sneaking into your town now and then. Right now, Eve is fun, although I'm on the receiving end of PvP so far.

[Paelos]

I'd say DAOC, the first time I ever walked up to an Albion castle and plopped down a ram I'd made to shatter the doors. Then going inside, pillaging the place and repairing up the doors again like mad. We lasted about an hour in there before things went all to hell, but it was a great time of pvp and excitement that has yet to be copied in WoW. I look forward to it if they ever release siege weapon huge world frontier style BGs.

[Xanthippe]

I'd say DAOC, the first time I ever walked up to an Albion castle and plopped down a ram I'd made to shatter the doors. Then going inside, pillaging the place and repairing up the doors again like mad. We lasted about an hour in there before things went all to hell, but it was a great time of pvp and excitement that has yet to be copied in WoW. I look forward to it if they ever release siege weapon huge world frontier style BGs.

I enjoyed it a great deal before people starting farming rps in Emain.  I wasn't fond of the changes New Frontiers brought, either.  Realm Abilities just changed things too much, I think also.

[Llava]

My favorite experience has been documented in Lum's excellent book.

As is mine.

But for overall game, it's a tough call.  I think the PvP in Guild Wars is better balanced, more skillful, and overall more fun than the PvP in DAoC. However, DAoC's had a gravity, a meaning, to it that Guild Wars lacks.  I was really, really invested in fights when they occured in DAoC.

If someone could take Guild Wars' system and make it as meaningful as it was in DAoC, I'd be in Heaven.  They could even call it "Heaven Online".

[stray]

My favorite experience has been documented in Lum's excellent book.

As is mine.

Damn man. I remember when you just came out nowhere, started making not-so-worthless posts......Even became a blue name. All in short time. And now you're telling you're in Lum's book too?

[Llava]

My favorite experience has been documented in Lum's excellent book.

As is mine.

Damn man. I remember when you just came out nowhere, started making not-so-worthless posts......Even became a blue name. All in short time. And now you're telling you're in Lum's book too?

I resent that.  I never made a not-so-worthless post in my life.

(But yeah, back when he made the thread asking us for our favorite PvP experiences, he took from that for the book.)

EDIT

I'm wrong, it wasn't PvP experiences he asked for. Just MMO experiences.  Most just happened to involve PvP.

[Chinchilla]

For me it goes 100% to UO.  The feeling that you might be being "watched" while you were fighting that mob.  The feeling that at any moment people can show up and try to kick your ass is legendary.  Plus having my own house stock full of rares/loot/and who knows what else was great!  Someone got loaded with lots of rares when I quit UO.  UO was just pure carnage (until they put in craptastic Trammel).

Shadowbane gave me quite a few glimpses into my old UO days.  I was very well known on the Fear server as the dual wielding throwing hammer barbarian (name was Chinchilla DaKilla).  The only bad part about Shadowbane was all the damn politics.  I didn't go to school to become a politician for a reason.

[Falconeer]

At least I necro myself. PvP still has a spot (let's say two... or more) in my heart, and I found this article today.
Best PvP article ever. Comments (and anedoctes between those) included.

Makes me drop a tears or two as I know those days will never come back...

A sample: (about the EQ Discord server, the only one ever as I know of with PermaDeath):

   
Fastinyoh of Flowers of Happiness wrote:


Let me tell ye all a story!

There were two very well known hacking barbarian shamans on the server - Highlanderr and Landroverr. I still remember the names because of what these two guys represented for anyone online - nearly inescapable death. I constantly kept track of where they were, and if they were in a nearby zone I would just log off. If anonymous was enabled on Discord, I'm sure they would have wiped everyone out.

Anyway, apparently they could warp hack (which I didn't know was possible at the time), and so when they spawned on top of me in the middle of one of those insanely large karana zones, I nearly shit myself. The three of us were all around level 25. What followed was the most intense 20 seconds I've ever experienced on any game. They blinded me - now all I can see is a black screen. I mashed the gate button as fast as I could, hoping to get away. I could tell they were kicking me (both of them were barbarians, this is how they killed casters) because my gate wasn't working. I finally managed to gate with about 10 health left.

That was fun. Nothing else in any game has ever matched that.

Note - I died to spiders the next day (which happened to be Christmas morning! hurray!). I wasn't upset or even discouraged by it suprisingly - I was able to get back to where I was within a day or two.

[Furiously]

Sitting in a crane sniping with a machine gun and then a pistol in BF2. Then watching a commander drop arty and seeing a body fly up in the air to the same level I was at.

[Yegolev]

I have had a few close calls in the past nine months of EVE, but since I am an industrialist my combat PvP encounters generally result in me losing a ship.  I have dabbled with a combat character and I generally feel that the PvP implementation in EVE is better than UO-at-release.  The biggest reason for this is that I always know what I did wrong when I lose my ride or die in EVE.

Now, for non-combat PvP in EVE I think my favorite times are the ones where I perform an outstanding low-buy or high-sell.  Buying bulk items at one-tenth or one-twentieth market value just makes me all warm inside.  It's also tremendous fun to warp my mining barge into a highsec asteroid belt and hoover up all of the rocks from underneath some mining frigates.  That makes people mad.

[WayAbvPar]

Sitting in a crane sniping with a machine gun and then a pistol in BF2. Then watching a commander drop arty and seeing a body fly up in the air to the same level I was at.

Heh. That was classic.

I'm wrong, it wasn't PvP experiences he asked for. Just MMO experiences.  Most just happened to involve PvP.

I wish the all the folks working on  upcoming games take would take heed. PvP can be a hell of a lot of fun if you can balance it right.

[AcidCat]

PlanetSide has been by far my best PvP MMO experience.

[Threash]

For me it was shadowbanes second expansion beta.  The population was so low by that point that roughly a third or more of the player base got into the beta and instantly divided along server lines.  Finally all those years of cross server trash talking finally came to a head as vengeance nation and mourning after faced off.  Fighting side by side with the same assholes ive been fighting against for years for nothing other than server bragging rights and finally tearing down mourning servers triple walled city after a few short weeks made that beta the most memorable pvp experience for me.

[Sunbury]

I was in a DAOC RvR guild from go-live for about 8 months.

The one I recall best was a massively organized prime-time relic raid with massive numbers on both sides.

We were Albion and hit all the Hib keeps at the same time, with yet another big group trying to block the defenders from entering the zone.

We took down all the keeps, and headed to the relic keep, took down the outer and  inner doors before the Hibs showed up in mass.  At that point so much lag set in, I could not even get my character up the steps to the relic.  We never did get it before being defeated.

[WindupAtheist]

Ultima Online, just last year.

I was in an RP guild, and we had some "allies" that weren't very helpful.  They roleplayed Drow (automatic points against in my book, but I wasn't making guild policy) and considered themselves "gatekeepers" of the incestuous little roleplay community on that shard.  Their roleplay appeared to consist entirely of standing around acting like arrogant asshats at every meeting, being as obstructionist as possible when anyone outside of their clique suggested anything, never showing their faces in PVP or anywhere outside of a meeting, and conspiring to split up our guild.

Oh man, they thought they were smart.  Little did they know that as they were trying to subvert some of our officers, we were taking screenshots and laughing our asses off.  We even played into it, with the GM killing one of the officers in question in an apparent fit of rage, while actually joking with the guy about it in Ventrilo.  Now normally I'm a huge carebear, but this wasn't some random d00d trying to gank me and steal my muffins.  These guys were pissing me off with their Drowish faggotry, snobby roleplayer attitudes, and general uselessness.  I was the first one to suggest that we quit playing detective and just fucking kill them.

Now their guild wasn't actually physically allied to ours, so we couldn't attack them in Trammel.  But strangely enough, they wanted to hold the next meeting at one of their houses, in Felucca.  We more than happily agreed, and left our snazzy uniforms behind in favor of fighting gear.  Ah, but these guys only wanted our officers to accompany them to Felucca.  The rest of us were supposed to stay behind.  Nevertheless, when the gate opened, all two dozen of us poured through it, much to their dismay.

Thinking ahead, one of our mages quickly marked a rune outside the house, and handed it to our GM.  This turned out to be critical, because once the officers were inside, the owner of the house set the doors and teleporters to "friends only" status.  That meant that non-friends were technically allowed to be inside the house, but in reality had no simple way of getting in.  So we all formed a big line outside of the house and waited.

They really didn't want us there.  They told us they had seen some people from the shard's big PK guild in the area.  We stuck around anyway and didn't see shit.  They told us to go ahead to some other spot and wait for them.  We stayed where we were.  I have to figure maybe they were planning to gank our leaders, based on their holding the meeting in Felucca and not wanting all our guys there.

In any case, our leader finished saying whatever he had to say to them, concluded with "And now I'm afraid you all have to die!" or something like that, and cast a gate to the location marked directly outside the house.  All of us poured through it and went on the attack before anyone knew what the hell hit them.  See, you can ban people from your house, but only while you're alive.  We smeared them quickly enough that they only had time to ban a handful of us.  The rest of us looted everything on their corpses, laughed hysterically, and then we all recalled out.

We posted screenshots of their lame attempts at skullduggery, our laughing at said attempts, and the kill itself.  And that was pretty much the last we had to do with the faggy roleplay community on that shard.

Ah Velturus, if the vagaries of the internet ever bring this story to your attention, know that while our guild has spread out and moved on between different shards and games, we all still talk.  And we still laugh about how we buttfucked your wannabe-schemer ass.  You dumb fuck.

[Rasix]

PlanetSide has been by far my best PvP MMO experience.

Nothing has really come close to PlanetSide for me.

 :-D

[Nebu]

PlanetSide has been by far my best PvP MMO experience.

Nothing has really come close to PlanetSide for me.

 :-D

So... how long did you guys actually last in Planetside?

[WayAbvPar]

PlanetSide has been by far my best PvP MMO experience.

Nothing has really come close to PlanetSide for me.

 :-D

You can't really blame him...I was | | this close to posting a link to Lum's book, but decided to go back and reread the earlier posts at the last minute  :-D

[Rasix]

So... how long did you guys actually last in Planetside?

I was just being a snarky bastard but.. I didn't last very long in PlanetSide.  I'm just aweful at FPS games and if I'm going to play a FPS, I don't want to have to hunt around for the best action. 

UT2K4 was a better experience, until they expected me to actually go buy the game.

[AcidCat]

Haha, I guess I should actually start paying attention to what thead I'm posting in?  

And I played for about ... maybe a year and a half? It lasted me quite a while.

[Nebu]

My question was out of genuine interest (not to be snarky).  I really liked the way planetside was implemented, but it didn't really hold my attention long.  I just wondered if that sentiment was shared.

[tkinnun0]

Deciding to Shadow Word: Pain-Fear-kite a lone warrior to his death with our two undead priests while holding the Stables, just because we could. At that moment I knew that we had beaten the alliance team.

[DataGod]

Early On:

UO definately great stuff, until I became a counselor on Baja, I still enjoyed being a Red on Pacific back then but spent a lot more time in my counselor role, it was just really fun porting all over, seeing different communities, seeing the game from a global scale, PVP included.

EQ was good Necro PVP fun in a anti-pvp guild (remember those?) that same guild Ive been with like 10+ years now.

DAOC, were the dominating Mid guild, those great massive relic raids on prime time or the stealth raids at 4 am on a sunday on Galahad.....just awesome stuff....houndreds of players...man I loved solo PVP on my hunter back then too, that was awesome.

SWG was overall my best most engaging experiance, both as a member of one of the top PVP imperial guilds on Ahazi and as a pre-pub 9 Guardian, for individual PVP.

At one point my guild destroyed every rebel base on the server over a month and a half....people litterally stopped placing them.

As an early Jedi, even though I dislike games with godmode, being in that situation, with saber TEF, and only 3 lives to live (permadeath) now thats pretty much hardcore mode every time you log in it could be your last time you see that toon....that you killed yourself grinding.

And there was litterally no comparable feeling Ive ever had in a game than when a BH (pre-9 and even through the CU) or a group of BH, and later a group of BH and thier rebel Jedi friend came gunning for you.....thats serious adreniline...

Out in the middle of endor, you see a probot droid (sometimes the game mechanic worked actually) following you and you knew you were going to have a little action, and sometimes they just showed up....out of no where....

Some of those BH were so damn good too....I mean some of them you just feared them even as a guardian (and with a BH main) just because you know they had skills. But most...eh....90% were sent to the cloner, unless there were like 8 of em on you back in saber tef days.

I stayed in SWG until NGE, woulda stayed until they shut those servers down but mmm well *shrug* that was a galaxy far far away.....

WOW, I have yet to have anything more than a moment of above average PVP experiance. And god knows Ive tried...

[dwindlehop]

http://wotmud.org/ - Best memories for all the reasons that people liked UO. Evil raids on the newbie town were fascinating to watch as a newb. I finally hit 20 after weeks of half-assed playing and did a little dance on  the road with a trolloc who retreated down a path with a pile of trollocs mobs and one fade mob. I enjoyed the pursuit and the intelligence that my opponent demonstrated. Later, with a different low int RP newb character, I took out a newbie trolloc some high-level PvP player had rolled on a lark and taken down to Caemlyn. I was in the habit of killing deer by yelling "Narf!" and going berserk on them, eliminating the possiblity of retreat, and I did the same against the trolloc. I've never scraped out a win in a fight I'd expectedly to lose so badly before or since.

Eve - I've actually won some PvP fights, including a 2v1 that I didn't initiate, but so far nothing that has been truly epic. The best memory I have was when CHSN gave up sov in Tribute. I was docked in a conquorable station in Tribute when Dusk and Dawn took over the region. When I logged in, D2 owned the station and I had lost docking rights, fitting rights, and cloning facility rights. I waited until the afternoon and undocked to make a run for it, thinking that they'd tire of running their gatecamps, but no. I got podded, so I lost my clone, and I couldn't buy another while I was in a D2 station. At that point, something real was on the line: 5% of the skills I'd spent the last 3 months training. F13 tried asking for a 24-hour NAP to get our hangars and ships out of there, but they didn't bite. I waited a few more nights for the action to die down and bought a shuttle to fly out. I got out without taking any hits. Fun! I have never been quite as scared by a game before making that run with any intel on gatecamps nor as pumped by a game after completing it successfully. Flying point through a hostile-infested pipe in Great Wildlands with all of F13's blueprints in Yoru's cargo bay was also a blast.

[Rithrin]

I'd have to say there are two equal "best" experiences I've had. As much as I hate to admit it, one of them was on the PvP Diety server in EQ1, Sullen Zek I think it was. I was a low level good druid out with a group of relatively the same level from my guild. We went out to hunt mobs and in the middle of this realized that a group of evils was in the same building. Spent the next 20 or 30 minutes with our two groups ducking in and out of rooms, trying to keep the ravening hordes of mobs off of our own group, trying to rez fallen party members mid combat, etc all while trying to lure eachother's groups into the most unfavorable rooms to fight in. In between the smaller engagements there was a lot of tension, where we knew the other group could be around the corner waiting for us or trying to sneak around to a door behind us.

Fighting for "control" of different zones (zones with docks, the mobs we want to hunt, anything really) was an amazing experience.

The other was in DAoC. I was in the BGs right after they came out with my low level (see a trend here?) Ranger in a full PUG. While scouting out a good location to ambush from, we found a group of Mids doing the exact same thing... battle ensues. I'm not really sure what it was about that battle, but it was an exhilerating experience. I just remember flashbacks of it, standing on the top of a hill with bow drawn, people running in every which way around me. One second I'm watching a huge Troll chase down a Lurikeen, the next I see a stray fireball connect with a skinny caster knocking him out of the game. All the while trying to snipe important members of their group while protecting our own (Not much different from a regular fight). It was the amazing ambience that did it for me here combined with the fact that it wasn't a one-sided fight (Somehow both groups managed to have zero mezzers so there was no one just sitting around doing nothing for minutes at a time).

Boils down to: Back and forth fighting, combined with amazing ambience wins the day. For me at least.

This is not to say the form of PvP those games had was the best, those were just two amazing experiences. For me, even DAoC lost a little bit with nothing to lose except travel time.

[lamaros]

Medievia - the MUD.

Some great times in the CPK (lose experience, can be looted) areas of that game. Some great times in just the normal PK ones too.

I've had some ok times in WoW, back before BGs were in the game. Fondest was probably a long duel I fought with a group of enemies while passing through the mountains near wetlands. It was fun because the area was new to me at the time, and thus felt less game-like and more world like, and fun because I was being hunter by a few and managed to prevail (back when warlocks sucked!).

Had a good time in Achaea too, now that I remember. Stole the whole bank account from one of the cities there and fled to another one. Was hunted by everyone in my old city whenver I logged on. Eventually they got me and I got owned, but the chase was what made it fun.

But PvP w/o real consequences can never come close though... as much as I'm looking forward to Arena battles in WoW: TBC, and as much as I had some good times in Guild Wars beta, it just doesn't have the same feel. Fun, sometimes just as fun. But no "world" feel to it.

Some awesome times in BF2, too. But that's not a MMO...

[Viin]

But PvP w/o real consequences can never come close though... as much as I'm looking forward to Arena battles in WoW: TBC, and as much as I had some good times in Guild Wars beta, it just doesn't have the same feel. Fun, sometimes just as fun. But no "world" feel to it.

I can second that - playing in 'instanced' games certainly doesn't feel the same. I enjoy CounterStrike and BF2 and GuildWars, but I don't get the adrenaline rush like I do when trying to run away from some pirates in my brand new Tech2 Assault Frigate ($$$) that I hadn't fitted for fighting yet. Or when hunting pirates and trying to trap them in a system and catch them off guard. Something is missing in those instance-type games .. and I think it's because there's a big RESET button and everyone starts over.

If poker had a big RESET button and everyone got to start over with the money they originally had, no one would be all that excited about it either.

[geldonyetich]

"Best MMO PvP experience", eh?

Well, these aren't exactly MMOs, but I'd go with Battletech MU* and online Battletech Sims as one of my favorite forms of online PvP.   Especially when they've got some economics in place behind the action.  Second would be Guild Wars simply because of it's tactical sophistication and control of population keeping things fair.

Planetside would be the first true MMO PvP I can say I really enjoyed, but as I said, I've a requirement of the game having population control to keep things fair.  Planetside doesn't have such a control, and as such victory is actually more of a popularity contest most of the time.  This is the reason why I can't say I like most MMO PvP scenarios.

[damijin]

Oh Planetside! We knew ye well.

I played planetside from very early closed beta up until release, skipped a few months, then returned for about a year. After a while you were just playing to hang out on vent, shoot the shit, and try to make it onto those third party leader boards that people started to make (with all kinds of cool stats robbed from the servers).

But Planetside... can't call that my best online PvP moment. I mean, it was laggy, ahead of it's time, and had some significant issues of balance at almost every stage of it's conception. As fun as knifing people with an infiltrator and making global chats to organize a beamer-only defense of a tower (12 cloaked infiltrators killing a scattermax with beamers is some funny shit. we made a vanguard run away too. AP mode ftw.) I can't call it my favorite.

Nope, best PvP moment was probably Discord server for Everquest. I've never been so fucking paranoid in my life. I eventually figured out that I could make a dwarf rogue, get up to level 12 or so in butcherblock then move to the less populated Ocean of Tears. I named myself LongJohnSilvers, threw in a healthy dose of sarcastic roleplaying, and joined a group of players who were playing exclusively in OoT. Since I was a melee class, I could use my skills on the boat. Mages (the flavor of the server, since they kick the most ass at low levels) could not.

So I'd log out in the belly of the boat, just before it arrived at freeport or butcherblock, then log back in 10 minutes or so later. The boat would be out in the middle of the ocean, no safety in sight. The people on the boat figured "Ok, I've made it onto the boat. I've checked the whole boat out, theres no one here to kill me. I'm safe."

Then out of nowhere (shifting back and forth and warping like crazy because that boat has been buggy ever since EQ beta), my pirate dwarf backstabs his victim! They start to freak out, running all over the boat warping around trying to avoid me. I give chase, while shouting things like "ARRR TRY MY DEEP FRIED SHRIMP POPPERS. THEY'RE TO DIE FOR!"

Eventually my victim would die, and I'd loot all their crap, or they'd jump overboard and I'd have to decide if they were weak enough for me to jump off and finish them. Getting in the water was dangerous since they could start to fight back.

Anyway, that was pretty much the most fun I've ever had PvPing.

[sinij]

Boat story sounds very much like griefing to me, not that there is anything wrong with it in my book. I personally prefer pwn of a clean fight but won't put creative ways of killing deserving people past me. Long ago in UO I managed to get a key to a house of a guy that would frequently PK my miner. I cleaned his house, leaving only single chest behind with deadly poison trap and a book named "if you can read this you are dead in 1.2.3" inside. Most fun I had PvPing was probably scout wars early in SB history, honorable mentions goes to kicking OPP ass in Occlo Pacific with my old crew.

[damijin]

Boat story sounds very much like griefing to me, not that there is anything wrong with it in my book. I personally prefer pwn of a clean fight but won't put creative ways of killing deserving people past me. Long ago in UO I managed to get a key to a house of a guy that would frequently PK my miner. I cleaned his house, leaving only single chest behind with deadly poison trap and a book named "if you can read this you are dead in 1.2.3" inside. Most fun I had PvPing was probably scout wars early in SB history, honorable mentions goes to kicking OPP ass in Occlo Pacific with my old crew.

It was griefing... but on a hardcore pvp server where there was a population of level 20+ people running around with ShowEQ to see everyone in the zone and PK them as soon as they hit level 6 (sending them back to level 1 with no gear).

The majority of players who did this played Mages, and if they made the mistake of getting on the boat, I could kill (or at least make them jump into the ocean) at level 15 or so against their level 20+.

So yes, griefing, but in the context it fit the server attitude and it was damn funny and creative I think.

For straight, non-grief PvP, my favorite game would probably be Lineage 2. Nothing compared to the first few months of Chronicle 1 when there were no known siege tactics. Being one of the people involved in developing the first siege tactics on my server was really cool. Going out to the siege fields the night before with the clan leaders and drawing lines on the ground with gold to show where our armies should line up, where our siege camps should be, and how we should defend against attackers. It was like playing an RTS except with real people, and the person in control of all the units could only be successful if his units listened to his orders very carefully and were disciplined to not act on their own ideas, but rather follow his.

One of my best online experiences i think, no other MMO has felt quite like "real battle" as that did. Even with all the explosions and fear of death in WWIIOL, L2 felt much more like a real war just because of the scale of battle, and the way the troops moved together.

[Sunbury]

My question was out of genuine interest (not to be snarky).  I really liked the way planetside was implemented, but it didn't really hold my attention long.  I just wondered if that sentiment was shared.

I was the same way.  I felt 'done' with it in beta, (month and a half, I forget). and cancelled my preorder.   Nothing wrong with the game per se, just that I had fought on every side, used every weapon, explored every continent, did combat drops, big base fights, etc etc.   I could not think of anything else to see or learn or experience that I hadn't already.  I guess I'm just the 'explorer' type.