It hasn't even been two weeks since the launch of the honour system and already Blizzard is arranging for the release of the next item that wasn't supposed to come out for a little while: battlegrounds. One can only surmise that this is a quick attempt at damage control during a time when thousands of players have realised that being stuck on a PvP server with several thousand enemies that have nothing better to do than farm you for honour at flight points is in fact not the best way to experience the game.
Yes, I'm being snarky, but I cannot help but feel that it's deserved. The sheer amount of times I've seen people be dismissive of PvE servers, saying that they don't provide the "real" Vanilla experience because "real gamers" always go PvP, blah blah blah - I do feel vindicated seeing those same people not really enjoying life on a PvP server either when push comes to shove.
Moving on from that... the battleground update is actually going to be interesting to me because while I figured out during my private server time that I'm not super keen on Vanilla PvP, I do like to visit Alterac Valley occasionally, not least because of its PvE component. I'm not sure I'll be able to get my hunter to sixty before it goes live, but that shouldn't matter anyway as you only need to be level fifty or so to join in.
For a hunter in particular there's also the Ice Barbed Spear to pick up from the quest to win a single game, which is a very nice melee weapon for non-raiders.
Warsong Gulch doesn't have me that excited, but I might give it a try in one of the lower-level brackets if there are enough people queueing to keep wait times at a reasonable level. The Classic devs have previously stated that battlegrounds will utilise cross-server queuing, but as far as I'm aware it hasn't been clarified whether this will involve all servers in a region or whether there'll be dedicated battlegroups like back in the day.
Another, less talked about feature that will be coming with the patch will be the elemental invasions, which I always thought were decent fun and should provide extra opportunities to farm certain elemental drops. Now that I think about it they were kind of proto public events in a way - that should provide an extra layer of entertainment in Azshara, Silithus, Un'goro and Winterspring.
Posts
Day Twenty-One - Nice
6 hours ago
It always puzzled me that there was so much demand for PvP servers when Classic started. I stil don't understand it. I have always thought of WoW as *the* leading PvE MMORPG - how else did it establish its easy-mode, casual-friendly, even your grannie will enjoy it reputation?
ReplyDeleteI guess, as usual, a lot of people like PvP when they're wining but not so many enjoy being the target. Anyway, I always enjoyed Battelgrounds so I'm expecting to be back for those. EQ2 is just so much more fun at the moment, though, and the expansion will drop around the same time Blizz get around to BGs, so I can;t be sure even of that.
It's a mystery to me as well. I guess it's fair to say that fans of open world PvP in MMOs have been underserved in recent years, and since it takes a certain kind of personality to be a huge fan of non-consensual PvP, I suppose it makes sense that they would emerge as a loud minority to dominate the conversation about Classic.
DeleteThe current situation says to me that they managed to lure in a lot of people with wrong expectations. I'm glad that I was forewarned by years of reading posts by players who regretted rolling on a PvP server; clearly a lot of others were not.
A big part of the demand for PvP servers was the fact that the mainline/retail version of Wow removed their traditional PvP server and simply substituted "War Mode". War Mode being a PvP toggle that put you in special zone shards with other PvP players. Of course it had teething problems with stability and balance. It was either 40 or 100 people per side that would lag out the zone, plus originally the zones were often hilariously one-sided.
DeleteI realize that War Mode was their attempt to deal with player complaints about rolling on a PvP server to play with friends, only to find out that their friends often weren't around to keep them from being killed. But with the bad 'first impression' War Mode made many gave up on it, thus creating even more balance issues.
There's also a lot of rose-colored nostalgia for Vanilla Wow's original open world PvP (Tarren Mill/Southshore). If you read the stuff written at the time, it wasn't considered all that great, but it was something different to do.
Add to that the endgame elitism about being on a PvP server (many world class raiding guilds are/were on a PvP server) and you get some group think about how much better it is, there.
As for me, I'm the stereotypical case of playing on a PvP server because all my friends and guildies chose to go there. While I can do ok on one (being ganked or beaten by a better player isn't a body blow to my ego), I've found that I just want to be a tourist. If they ever open up server transfers to PvE servers I'm moving a number of toons off. I'll keep one there to play with friends. I should have said "Have fun, I'm too much of a filthy casual carebear, these days to roll on a PvP server", but I didn't. Lesson learned. :)
All very true. :) Maybe I'll actually finish that "PvP servers are overrated" post in my drafts after all...
DeletePlease do. :)
DeleteI find it interesting that Wow Classic has so many PvP servers, especially servers pushing the limits of concurrent population. As far as I understand that's an outlier. Ever since Ultima Online added their PvE shard (Trammel) folks seem to have voted with their feet to be on PvE servers over PvP ones.
Ironically, I tend to be on the PvP shards in Swtor because I'm often the only person there (at least on the particular faction I'm playing at the time). It makes certain open world heroics go by much faster.
> I find it interesting that Wow Classic has so many PvP servers
ReplyDeleteThey told people to "not play on full servers", then only opened up new PvP servers. This would, of course, send the signal that the majority plays on PvP servers and it would snowball from there.
Well, I think all but one of the overloaded servers were PvP servers. It would make sense to open more of those for new players and moves.
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