MMORPG's and PvP: The Line

Part of the problem (at least with WoW) is that the game rewards ganking by giving HKs to foes 8 levels below you, who have no realistic chance of beating you.

You’re 48? Wander STV and pick off 40s. You get honor with low “risk”.

They just took the level gap math in place for PVE and laid it on PVP, and I really think it was a poor decision. Narrowing that gap won’t eliminate ganking over that level gap, but it would curtail it some.

I’ve gotten so fed up with it over the past few days, I flirt with the idea of quitting the PVP server. The other night, a group of 5-7 lvl 60 horde took over the boat from Menethil-Theramore. It was totally unuseable for over an hour, because there is no local defense to speak of on either side, and it’s not easy to get 5-7 lvl 60s to Menethil to reclaim a boat they weren’t going to use.

What reason is there for not putting 3-4 lvl 60+ NPCs on the boats? None. It’s just silly.

Enjoy it while you can. In another level, you’ll be green to 60s. I was in that early 50s range back when the honor system was first released. It wasn’t pretty.

I don’t regret my decision to play on a PvP server. It’s been fun far more than it’s been frustrating. To answer the original question, I don’t gank lowbies, even level 50 green ones. I find it distasteful to grief people. But I make an exception for Undead Rogues: Most of them are alts being leveled to grief others, and I do what I can to try and make them give up and go back to their mains. Or at least, I used to; I’ve found myself mellowing out about them recently, since all my friends have hit 60 and are no longer complaining about the Rogues.

I really wish Blizzard had done a better job with world PvP. I really enjoyed leveling up in a dangerous world, and participating in town raids before the Honor system. Even as a high 40s character in a group of 60s, it was still fun. I think PvP servers have lost something since the inclusion of dishonorable kills made town raids impossible. But then, I play on a pretty balanced server.

The solution to this is to not have a power curve so absurd. It just doesn’t make for a good PvP environment. In planetside, the curve is more of a versatility curve than a power curve, so a level 5 can kill a level 20, and you can get level 5 without ever getting into a fight. WoW has a power curve, so non-consensual PvP doesn’t work so well. Just making the curve a more realistic, health isn’t gained as you play more, and that problem is gone. The planetside system isn’t applicable to WoW for the same reason.

I don’t mind pvp servers too much right now, especially since I’ve been playing Ally lately…anyone playing Ally and complaining about pvp should try Horde for a real reaming.

It does bug me that the system is set up for zero ganking penalties right now. A few things I think would be cool if Blizz implemented:

  • Dishonor points that are tracked on the opposite faction, instead of your own. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that your own faction would care how many of the enemy you killed, but the enemy should. It would be cool if, when you clicked on an enemy player, you got some kind of ranking of how much ganking he’d done lately. I think this would be an effectively much higher penalty for serial gankers. Most of the time I try not to bother other players, especially if they’re a lot lower than me, or on a quest. But if I found one that had a high Gank Rank, I’d go after him repeatedly.
    This could also be turned into a quest, with a NPC in the towns handing out lists of top-10 gankers on the opposite side, and giving you a quest to bring back ears, or something like that. It would be consistent with all the other quests that go “Kill 10 baby foozles; now kill 10 elite foozles; now kill this one specific extra-evil foozle.”

  • Some spell or item which allows you to cons much lower than your actual level, i.e. “[Potion of Youth]” or something. Now you have to think twice about attacking the lvl 10; he might turn out to be a 60.

  • A high-damage chance-to-proc-on-death spell or Deadman’s switch engineering item. Maybe you’d need to be high-level before you could cast it on yourself or others.

Old school Ultima Online PVP is better than any of the crap that’s come since. Open PVP = freedom = virtual world = what every MMO should be, dammit.

Although Guild Wars is pretty damn good too.

-Ryan Scott
Reviews Editor, Computer Gaming World

My latest warlock toon is on a PvP server, and while I don’t consider ganking grays really to be against the spirit of the server, I do consider any lvl 60 that one-shots grays just out of boredom to be (at least socially) retaded.

When questing, I don’t usually initiate PvP if I don’t consider the opponent to be a risk. If the opposing player just seems to be questing too and doesn’t look interested in fight, I don’t really derive any fun from attacking him (and the honor rewards for kills are too small to really be an incentive). E.g. a few days ago I cleared the centaur cave in 1K Needles alongside with a human paladin. Both of us had a quest there, so why waste time? (I admit though, that this decision was emphasized by the fact that fights against paladins are long, drawn out and boring, even though I was confident I would’ve won :P).

Now let’s say I spot a rogue in stealth mode, that provokes an immediate attack from me, even against greens. Sure, he might be just stalking mobs, but it’s very probable that if I don’t attack first, I’ll get a dagger in my back. Also, a yellow/orange player running right towards me? I’ll probably DoT and Fear instead of waiting wether he /waves or not.

UO pvp was the best. The original rule amongst dread lords was that we didn’t kill people who were lower than expert (70 out of 100 points in a skill) unless they were magicians. Back then if you displayed the title mage and it was journeyman or higher, it meant you knew you could chain cast fireballs as fast as you could hold down your fireball macro.

Tradeskill characters didn’t get killed unless you were killing all the miners north of Britain to illustrate a point. (Don’t get caught mining when school gets out for the day.)

Characters below Expert in combat skills usually didn’t have the means to defend themselves, the means to replace their equipment, or any good equipment to take. We were of the opinion that we would let them be until they learned the game, had loot, and were more fun to kill.

After the notoriety system changed the first time, we couldn’t see the job skill levels of players who were less than, I think, Noble Lords, so we took to killing people based on the way they dressed for a week or so, until killing in a deathrobe became en vogue, at which point everyone but other dread lords were killed on sight. This allowed us to sort through everyone’s equipment to determine who was in fact a neophyte tailor and who was a cowardly rich player in disguise. The players we felt were too weak and poor to have been killed got ressurrected and or gated to safety.

It was ok to sweep through a dungeon with your playerkilling characters, but it was not ok to stay there and kill people who arrived later. Mass gankage was par for the course, and it was understood that if you were not prepared to fight, you had better be prepared to flee. UO had a recall spell, which was an extremely quick way of extracting yourself from a dangerous situation that was open to anyone who wanted to spend around 50 of 700 possible points in the magery skill. Because of this, a good part of the playerkilling base sacrificed raw killing power for skills like snooping, stealing, and hiding, so that they could remove other players’ ability to flee at a moments notice by stealing the reagents used to cast recall from another player’s backpack.

As a defense mechanism to that, many players devised a series of nested and obscured packs in their inventory, as well as multiple smaller stacks of each reagent, so that not all of a player’s black pearl (Used for recall and energy bolt, the offensive magic spell of choice after the damage to fireball was reduced and casting time introduced.) could be taken in one fell swoop.

That was the funny and at the same time frustrating thing about the PvP system as I was in the same place. Before the system started I didn’t get ganked much at all. There were many times I hunted an area with an alliance around and we just left eachother alone to complete our quests. After though it was the opposite. I’ll even admit I did it myself when before I never attacked someone without them going after me first when out in the “wilds”.

E.g. a few days ago I cleared the centaur cave in 1K Needles alongside with a human paladin. Both of us had a quest there, so why waste time?

OMG CAREBEAR

Just kidding. :P

I think that in a lot of cases, it’s better to focus on rewarding people for behavior you want than to obsess about punishing them for behavior you dislike. In this case, I think ecnouraging people to kill player characters that are in their level range, and giving them no encouragement to kill those that aren’t, probably works best. You will never stop griefing, so working up elaborate schemes to punish it turns into a never-ending treadmill, usually.

The encouragement has to be tangible, though. If you get experience and gold from killing appropriate targets, and nothing at all from killing grays, that is a pretty good incentive for most players. It will not stop ganking, but then, I don’t necessarily think you should stop ganking on a PvP server. Toss in enough “realm-type” incentives to encourage people to help each other out–as well as a combat/skill system that lets four level 20s kill a level 40–and allow higher level toons to attack lower level toons who attack them first, and I think you have a good starting point.

But face it, if you play any sort of PvP, you will be harassed and ganked and griefed in some fashion. Goes with the territory.

Doh! Good point.

That was the final straw for me. When they introduced the “rewards for dishonorable ganking” system and had the nerve to call it the “honor” system it was a slap in the face. They talked so long about how the honor system would solve the endemic problem of idiots who just want to ruin other people’s fun, but instead they created a system to reward the behavior, genius!

Except that the whole system, which includes battlegrounds, has pretty much stopped the random ganking. It’s essentially stopped random PvP completely, which is a different problem.

I never understood PvP, frankly. It just allows all kinds of miscreants and juveniles to ruin your gaming time.

Actually on the PVE server where I played my Alliance level 60 hunter, the regular level 60 Hordies we PVP’ed against seemed pretty reasonable guys. We would /wave and /greet when we met in non-PVP situations. But that’s ‘carebears’ for you.

It’s a bit like that on Argent Dawn, too. There are three types of enemy:
1)The gankers (two guilds of immature players who kill anything PvP-flagged)
2)The business-minded (no response, showing no real interest in any form
of interaction with the other side, as they have quests to do)
3)The roleplayers (they wave back, and druid<->druid encounters are very
friendly :)

I abandoned a level 31 priest on Mannoroth when I realized that for the rest of the game I was going to have to deal with assholes attacking me while I was just trying to get quests done. PVE proved to be a much more pleasant experience, and there have been countless times I’ve been grateful I made the switch. I can only imagine how nightmarish Stranglethorn Vale would’ve been.

Signs point to the new areas added in Burning Crusade to be PVP free-for-all zones, which is disappointing. I for one am not interested in paying extra to be a target.

On Bronzebeard (PVE server) I would generally help alliance who were in a tough fight or whatever. I mean, why not… if neither of us is flagged there’s not much else to do. Otherwise I’d /dance and /cheer at them. Total carebear.

I’ve had a few of these friendly encounters on a (rp-)pvp server too. :) Knowing that the other player could attack if they wanted to, sort of makes them more meaningful in a way.

Even on the PVP server I was on there use to be a lot of waving before the honor thing came out. I would love running into alliance obviously doing the same quest as myself, wave and then go about our business. I must have saved a dozen alliance by jumping between them and other horde players and letting the horde players know that the alliance player was cool and had helped me out etc.

Personally I loved messing with lower level alliance. My friend and I would go up to the alliance town north of Stranglethorn and kill 20-30s on the road into stranglethorn. We’d hang out there until dozens of the 20s would come out and swarm us. I think it was as fun for them to group together and take down a couple of 60s. We would also avoid killing someone more than a couple times and the graveyard was really close.

To me, working hard to make my guy more powerful than the other players characters is the purpose of the game. Revelling in that power once in a while is very satisfying. I will also say that it’s just as fun to chase someone down, scare them, then let them go. It’s all about the power. When I was lvl20 my friend had a level 60 and it was so fun to see him role in with his badass character and help us out in a fight. I mean it’s a game, that’s why it’s so fun. You can choose to be a little sadistic sometimes and then you can turn around and be nice. It is Role playing supposedly so it’s fun to pretend that your an elite strike team sent by Thrall to infilitrate the alliance towns and take out as many of their fresh troops as possible. It’s these adventures that make the best stories and the ones we always recount (Will Wright is right). I’ve never recounted a stupid quest or LBRS run. Blizzard should keep things the way they are.