Why PvP won't make WoW a better game

Blizzard's "under development" page for World of Warcraft is pretty clear about where the game is heading: World of Warcraft is going PvP. While many people are expecting PvP to solve WoW's perceived problems with longevity, I do not believe that more player vs. player combat will make WoW a better game. Here's why:

PvP is most fun when it is most fair. The winner is happy that he beat an opponent of equal strength, and the loser at least doesn't feel cheated. As soon as you move to any form of PvP combat where the result is a foregone conclusion, where the attacker nearly always wins, the whole thing becomes a lot less amusing. The winner doesn't feel he achieved something, and the loser is grumbling how unfair the whole thing was.

Unfortunately MMORPG combat is inherently unfair. And players have been trained to be unfair by PvE combat. Of 100 fair fights, you would expect to win 50 and lose 50. Of 100 MMORPG PvE fights, you win 99 and lose one, and then still think you died a lot that day. For PvE this is okay. The monsters never complain that they have been sneakily separated from their group and then overwhelmed five against one. But all this learned unfairness continues into PvP, and there it causes problems.

The first problem any level-based MMORPG has with PvP is that levels play a strong role in your chance to win a one-on-one PvP combat. Blizzard hopes to fix that with the concept of "honorable kills". If you kill somebody of around your level or above, you receive honor points, which you can spend for nice items. If you kill somebody lower level, you don't get any points. Problem solved, isn't it?

No, because MMORPG players have the same problem in PvE, where overly low-level monsters don't give much or any xp, and they have learned to work around it. One tactic is numerical superiority; if five people of one level attack one person of the same level, that person is obviously doomed. Another tactic is preparation; the attacker is usually much better prepared than the defender. A stealthed rogue can backstab a mage, stun him, and often kill him before the mage gets any chance to cast. If the same mage had been the attacker, meeting the same unsuspecting rogue, the mage would have rooted the rogue and blasted him with spells, and it would have been the rogue who wouldn't be able to do much.

Rewarding people for killing other players will bring out the worst in many of them. An honor system can never reflect whether a fight was really fair. On PvP servers, people will be attacked while they are fighting a monster (or just after finishing a fight), when they are low in hitpoints and mana. There will be lots of ambushes and unfair tactics of all sorts, and few really equal fights.

Blizzard's solution to this are the battlegrounds, about which they just revealed more details. That should provide for fights that are as fair a possible, by having both level restrictions and caps on the number of players on both sides. Quote: So we do have a cap on the number of people on each side that can enter a Battleground. Rest assured we want the two sides to be fairly matched. Instead of single players being ganked, there will be fights of two armies of equal strength.

Much better, but still problematic in the specific World of Warcraft context. How do you organize an equal fight between two unequal teams? Quote: However, if you have to wait for your turn to enter the Battleground, you can still adventure in the rest of the game world before you are summoned to fight. Yes, the beloved waiting queues are back, and for players of the Alliance they could be long.

While Blizzard refuses to discuss the numbers, beyond saying that the numbers on WoW census sites are not totally accurate, everybody agrees that there are much more Alliance players than Horde players. The ratio as determined by several census sites and samples taken by myself is about 2:1, although there are variations from server to server, ranging from a 3:2 to a 3:1 ratio. This means that any Horde player who wishes to enter a battleground will immediately find a place in one, while Alliance players will find themselves in a long waiting queue.

Now I'm far from doomcasting WoW; it will remain a very good PvE game, especially on the PvE servers. But I expect that both the introduction of PvP honor points and battlegrounds will lead to massive complaints, after the first excitement has dissipated. People on PvP servers will get ambushed and killed in unfair PvP fights a lot more often than before, because the attacker is now gaining points towards cool equipment for that. And Alliance players will loudly complain about battleground waiting queues. PvP will be popular with some players, but it will not catapult World of Warcraft to an even higher level of success. A real expansion set with a new continent would do more for the longevity of WoW than PvP ever will.

This article has been posted at Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 6:36 PM Permanent Link