First day of PvP in WoW (Europe)

In spite of not being a big fan of PvP, of course I had to give it a try on the first day of the honor system. I racked up 15 honorable kills in a huge battle which was raging for hours between Tarren Mill and Southshore. Some observations:

- Remember Blizzard forbidding people to gather together at one place to start a protest, because the servers can't handle large gatherings? With the PvP honor system they have caused lots of these large gatherings, so of course the servers went down. While I was able to play for a while before that happened, lag was pretty bad.

- In the real world, from the ancient Greece to the first world war, the defending side was holding a position in a typical war between two armies, and the attacking side tried to storm this position. Combat occurred where the both sides met, because if you line up several armed men side by side, the attacker cannot simply break through. When two lines of men with swords fight each other, you effectively have a lot on one-on-one fights, because there simply isn't room for several attackers to fight one defender.

In World of Warcraft a battle looks very different. It basically becomes a lot of five-on-one combats, because people are in groups of five, and can easily use assist to all attack the same target. And there is no collision control, so there is no physical problem of five people attacking one. There is no influence of the terrain, no defensive bonus for holding a position. The side that *locally* has superior numbers and levels wins. That makes WoW PvP a horribly fluctuating affair. You spend a lot of time running all over the place in WoW PvP, because every side is trying to outnumber the other side locally.

I never got into a single one-on-one fight. If I attacked somebody, whether I was alone or in a group, other Horde players would attack the same target as me. And then sometimes I was the target of a combined Alliance attack, where I was rooted in place by a spell, and killed by several players at the same time in less than 10 seconds. I don't know what type of combat you like, but I prefer fighting monsters, where the fight is slower and has tactical options.

- The PvP honor system works reasonably well on the PvE servers. Okay, if you come across a battle you will be severely lagged, and if the server crashes you are out of luck. But other than that you mostly still have the option to ignore PvP and play however you want. On the PvP servers there is a huge amount of complaints on the WoW PvP forums: Quest NPC and windrider masters are constantly being killed. All zones over level 20 are "contested", and above level 20 you can't do anything without getting killed every 5 minutes. Lots of people wished they could switch servers to PvE right now, but of course they can't, unless they restart from scratch.

- PvP honor kills (HK) are pooled, and at the end of the week you get a share of the PvP points of your side. So if I have 15 honor kills and the Horde racks up 15,000 kills this week, I get 1/1000th of the reward. If they do 15 million kills, I only get one millionth of the reward. So especially this week, where everybody is doing PvP, the rewards for HK will be tiny.

We can only hope that the first excitement over the new system will cool down, and at least on the PvE servers the situation will get back to normal. I'm afraid that the players on the PvP servers will suffer a lot longer.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:35 AM Permanent Link