PvP and faulty thinking - How to learn all the wrong lessons

Actually all of this is the reason I enjoy the level 19 and 29 BGs. The uber gear is easily obtainable and you can PvP just for fun.

If you doubt the popularity of the lowbie BGs check the prices of blue weapons in the level 15 to 19 range.

Even more in Europe than in the USA. This is in fact not surprising and there are deep cultural reasons that I'll examine another time. Another small proof of this is that, for example, DAoC is currently much more successful in Europe than how it is in the USA.

This is an interesting statement. You observation is right: PvP _is_ more popular in Europe than in the USA. What I disagree on is that there are cultural reasons for that.

I'd actually say that culturally Europeans are less inclined to prefer PvP. From my experience, Europeans are less competitive and more cooperative than Americans. Reaching consensus is more important than having your way. This is very apparent in corporate culture, for example. Europeans tend to see themselves more as part of a group effort rather than in direct competition with their co-workers. From my experience, Europeans are less driven to distinguish themselves, or "stand out" in a group, than Americans. That's why this "Employee of the Month" stuff doesn't really fly here, it is, in fact, resented.

The reason why DAoC has been so successful in Europe is not because of PvP. DAoC has been successful because it was the first major MMORPG that offered French and German localizations (IIRC DAoC had about 90k subscribers at one point in Germany alone). DAoC single-handedly _created_ the MMORPG market in Germany and France. Before DAoC, MMORPGs were a super-niche in continental Europe.

And that's IMO one of the main reasons why PvP gameplay in MMORPGs is so popular in Europe: the first game many European MMORPG gamers played was a PvP game.

Gamers without previous MMORPG experience may have picked a PvP server not because if a cultural inclination to PvP but because the theme of WoW clearly suggests PvP: Orcs vs Humans, Alliance vs Horde and so on. Combine the two reasons and you have a fairly substantial explanation for the popularity of PvP servers in Europe.

A third reason might be that gaming culture in Europe is quite a bit younger than in the USA. Video gaming is less mainstream in Europe than it is in the USA and the averge European gamer is probably younger than the average American gamer. In my opinion, cooperative gameplay appeals more to older gamers than to younger gamers, who are often less into the social aspects of online gaming but rather into the exciting competitive aspects.

Do you feel that world PvP is something Blizzard didn't originally plan for, wants to do, but can't really "patch in"?

You're cute :) And funny :) And like a lot of MMO designers you miss the fact that WoW isn't a game of vision. It's a game of units sold and subscriptions held.

These two universes have different math, algebra and geometry. That's why in your universe you can't compare PvPs. But in Blizzard's you categorically can. MMO PvP is consumed X much, CTF PvP is consumed Y much and since its addition subs have gone up and unsubs have gone down.

"Better" in WoW geometry means "holds more subscriptions".

It's been said that Eve has better PvP than WoW. Eve has five million, nine hundred thousand less subscribers than WoW. In WoW-heuristics, that's "YBetter" (Your Better) not "Bbetter" (Blizzard Better).

Your arguments are like hearing someone try to argue Marlboro's product line improvement based on observations of Hersheys. "Cover the Marlboro lites in caramel! The only reason people don't smoke caramel coated cigs is because nobody has had the balls to make them yet!". Worse, you don't seem to be open minded enough to see that they are two very different products with very different goals.

Whether or not you believe it, Blizzard's evaluation of PvP is that more traditional PvP sells less units, more deathmatch/CTF-like PvP sells more units.

Thankfully the designers and developers on Zen got my point - that if you want to make "better WoW" you have to sell your soul and think in terms of unit counts - the way counterstrike clone developers do. But the stats on WoW PvP consumption demonstrate that there are massive reserves of PvP players to be tapped into still, as long as you're willing to go into it recognizing that "Vision = bad" in anyone thinking in WoW terms.

Did you know that Raph said that given a $50m budget he would make a game in which the goal was to find a cure for cancer? If he said "$50,000" well then it wouldn't sound so lame.

WoW's model is to sell mush that touches on thousands of niches. Folks like us wind up on the periphery thinking "This is laaaaame PvP, it would be so much better if" WRONG. In their Universe better = more copies sold. As long as millions of people like it that way, its good. Moving it in the direction of any one niche makes it less common-denominator, loses subscriptions and is "worse".

And the reason I'm laboring to try and explain this is because I actually feel the same way as you about WoW's PvP. But if you think WoW are going to make PvP less like generic mulch, you've bought into the wrong product =( I want to get people to see that you *can* make better-than-WoW PvP, and that you don't have to wallow in the mire like WWII Online to do it. But you have to be willing to forgoe a few million customers to do it. Probably all million of them, and make do with hundreds of thousands. Budget accordingly, and make your Vision real.

Speaking exclusively about the WoW environment I thing Abalieno is right here.
Another little example comes from EQ2. They put "arenas" in september trying to mimick WoW battlegrounds and to give the PvP-interested population a bone. But they forgot to put in rewards for that. So EVERYONE ignored the arenas. And with everyone I mean both PvE oriented players (of course) and PvP-orphan, who kept on breaking the boredom dueling (consensually) on the wilderness.
As soon as the (world)PvP servers opened, lots of people transferred there, showing that lots were interested in PvP, even in the traditionally PvE oriented world of EverQuest.
Still, those PvPers never touched the arenas/battleground even with a 10 foot pole, nor did the PvErs, as there weren't items to get there.
WoW battlegrounds aren't succesful (are they?) cause they are fun. They are, for like 20 minutes.
After those 20 minutes, it's just another way to grind your way to the best equipment, wow-style. And I mean colourful, casual and harmless.

On another note: I guess Arthur Parker numbers are correct, but I would love to know if the PvE/PvP population ratio were the same when the game launched. I have the impression that as usual, PvE servers got more people in the beginning. But when it became clear that it was a vanilla PvP, and especially that the game could be darn boring on the PvE side (and there weren't battlegrounds in the early days), people started moving en masse to the PvP servers.
Just a feeling. I'll never know without a comparison between old and new numbers.

I am an hardcore PvPer, and I am sure there's a stronger demand than ever for PvP games, I completely agree. But I am afraid those WoW server numbers could be misleading. Even in a carebear PvP as WoW one, I have lots of friends that hate PvP but are on a PvP server because of the mild death penalties. Still, when they get ganked, curse the day they rolled on a PvP server.

--
the Falconeer
http://thefalconeer.blogspot.com (the M.U.L.E. journal, sadly in a dead language you can't read)

Me, I'm a hardcore roleplayer, having cut my teeth on tabletop RPG games and MUSHs before MMOs were around. However, when I signed up on WoW I still chose a PvP server over an RP server, for these reasons:

1. The idea of world PvP, Horde vs Alliance appealed to me. Of course, at that time I didn't know how futile world PvP was - no lasting changes made to the geographical or political landscape, next to no rewards provided for world PvP, hardly any way to use the environment to your advantage during combat (preventing guerilla fighting and sieges, for example), the level 60 shopkeeps and level 62 city guards and so on.

2. I thought the out-of-character restrictive rules governing PvP on Normal and RP servers were ridiculous. If I manage to sneak my way past the war front lines all the way into newbieland, I want to be able to do some damage - and vice versa. Also, I'm a big fan of Eve's freedom-with-consequences philosophy - if there is some reason I should not be able to kill you, I want that reason to be In-Character so I can refer to it in-game. The lumbering tree dudes in the Night Elf starting zones is such a reason - hardcoded Rules of Engagement and EULAs are not.

3. I could not fathom roleplaying in a world I cannot affect, where nothing is dynamic, and keeps reverting back to its original state without any explanation why. Everyone does the same quests for the same people, kills the same monsters (even uniques) and are constantly being resurrected from the dead. How are you supposed to suspend your disbelief and go In-Character under such conditions?

So if a harcore RPer can toss in his opinion, I chose a PvP server because under WoW's conditions, the environment presented on the PvP server was actually closer to an environment I could believe in than the Normal or RP servers were. It is ridiculously easy to see the underlying game abstract under WoW's "reality" compared to other MMOs, which led me to cancel my subscription as soon as PvE got boring and world PvP was ruled out. Frankly, Guild Wars does the Battlegrounds/CS type of PvP better and doesn't have a monthly charge.

I don't like most of your views on how PvP should ideally be carried out (which you've outlined in previous posts), but I think that your analysis of WoW's World PvP vs BG PvP and the reasons why players engage in one and not the other is accurate.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on why Europeans like PvP more than Americans do. I've noticed a general difference of this type on battle.net in StarCraft: On US West and US East, everyone plays Big Game Hunters (newb map with lots of money), while on Europe Server there are many more comeptitive games available. I think this is a relevant observation.

Anyway, overall good post Abalieno.

Just a comment on the original article this is referring to...

Eve uses trickery to achieve large scale battles — their technology is based on their ability to keep fights small (on the whole) so that "big" fights are actually lots of small fights across a very large area, and actual "big" fights are rare enough not to bring the system to its knees.

It's not uncommon nowadays in EVE for multiple battles occur at the same time, with 100-300 people involved in each of these multiple conflicts, fighting in the same space of single "grid unit" in a single system... so that's up to few thousand players involved in these few 'hotspot' battles, pretty much daily, out of ~20 k on the server on average. There's no "trickery" to it, but simple consequence of growing playerbase packed into single instance of game world. It's one of main reasons EVE underwent the whole hardware upgrade, to keep up with size of fights growing.

I want to say this. If WoW didn't have battlegrounds... it would still have 6 million subscribers :) There is something outside PvP that people stick to WoW for. The points given by Abalieno is that of the two PvP styles in WoW there is definately one prefered... and thats world PvP. Even Blizzard has admitted this and thus canceled future battlegrounds and condensed those that they've released. Battlegrounds were great on paper, but reality they don't work out so well.

Can we draw the conclusion that there is a chunk of gamers out there that want a world PvP game? Yes. Is it as large as WoW's base? No. Oliver hit right on the fact that WoW sells because it gives a lot of playstyles something to do. On top of this Blizzard's business model is to sell boxes... not maintain subscriptions. That is why any massive improvements will be in the expansion... not in a patch.

It's easy to say "look at these numbers in WoW" and claim that there is a viable market for world PvP based games. However, to ignore all the OTHER things that attract players to WoW is ignorant.

What I get from this whole discussion is this... an MMORPG can't be built around one idea! Niche ideas result in niche titles. Niche titles are fine, but you will get a niche market share. To believe that an MMORPG that focuses on ONE SINGLE THING is going to be a wide success is newbish at best.

What Abalieno falls into is the trap of making the game he is playing into the game he wants to play instead of playing the game that offers all that he wants. I've read cesspit for a good bit and Abalieno is right on a lot of things... he just has to realize the big MMORPGs will never go after a niche and will always try to encompass as much as possible. The whole reason WoW became so big is because it finally broke out of the MMORPG niche mold and opened its gameplay to tons of playstyles.

Lets conclude this. World PvP is available in WoW and people have shown that of the PvP styles available that is their prominent choice. Players play WoW because of many reasons and partake in other areas they come to enjoy. It doesn't mean they are playing just for that reaason!

If you took all the people that play WoW *specifically* for World PvP and put them into a room you probably only put 250,000 players in that room. Same with hardcore raiding. Same with people that play to sell gold. Same with the people that play "because everyone else is playing" Add all these subgroups up and you have a 3 million total! Then multiply that by two for people that enjoy a little bit of each thing and you have your total! Blizzard gets it... do you?

And frankly... 100,000 players in EVE is more than enough for me. As long as a PvP game hits 100,000 its a success in my eyes. I suggest everyone stop looking in their current game for what is not there and start playing a game that has the things they are looking for. There is enough MMORPGs out to cover almost any playstyle wanted. Medieval fantasy PvP is about the only niche to completely filled yet... even then UO has it and has had it covered.

after a year of playing WoW, i quit...

1) PvP BG system is no fun at all
2) end-game raiding feels kinda as a second job - no more fun in that (more instances -> more raid days needed -> less sleep....etc)

i quit in february and now i'm considering a return, but not for the actual game, but for the guild i've been playing with...i miss the community...

however, i'm eagerly awaiting warhammer online from the creators of DAoC where the PvP system should kick some serious butt.

we'll see...