eSport

very sad indeed...

from World of Warcraft to World of Skirmishcraft - one of the reasons why I lost all interest in PvP in this game =(

I've been disappointed, baffled, and skeptical of their vision many times over the last four years.

But those words... nothing previous has come close to killing my optimism like those words did.

It really drove home just how alien their vision of the game is to my own.

Wow, back when I played (right after it was released). There where no battle grounds and no honor or anything. In all honestly, I had a lot more fun on the massive battles that just sprung up randomly.

It was the kinda thing that as soon as someone in the guild found out about it, almost everyone else was on the way soon after. It was a ton of fun, and quite random, you never knew where a skirmish might turn into a massive battle.

After honor came out, it changed it for the worse, much, much worse. I'm sure anyone who was there remembers. There was a grid lock 24/7 at TM and SS. Everyone was just trying to farm honor.

Then once battlegrounds came out, those disappeared soon after. It become almost impossible to even get any type of world fighting going on. Me and a few friends could lock down a town completely killing every NPC, (flight masters, everything) and players. Most of the time, you where very lucky to get a couple of people to fight, let alone any decent amount. Sure it's kinda amusing to kill noobs but that looses it interest after a couple minutes max.

Needless to say I have not played the game for some time, so I don't really know how it is now. Not to mention, don't really care. :p

P.S. Why can't I log in from the main page anymore?

Tom Chilton: I'll tell you, it's been a slow evolution. When WoW first came out, we didn't really have any semblance of organized PvP. We had Tarren Mill versus Southshore...

GameSpy: Which was awesome!

Tom Chilton: That's nostalgia speaking! I remember you were interviewing me at E3 a couple years ago and you not thinking that it was so awesome.

We kind of slowly went from there, to trying to bring some organization to it with the Battlegrounds. Giving the game a little more capability for players to feel like it was a fair, controlled encounter. Then it was (the arenas) a natural evolution from that.

Nostalgia for a time when PVP was better than the current ePeen suckfest it now represents, undoubtedly.

Compared to the real PVP offering of many other games, WoW is still far behind even with this crappy Arena gimmick that only further to serve as proof of piss-poor class balance and obvious favoritism of the developers, and how gear can be used to supplement any form of skill (like Kalgan's rockin' S3 mace!) When WoW came out, PVP was craptacularly non-existent, meaningless, and unsupported by Blizzard, resulting in random but entertaining wars.

Wars, in a game called WARcraft.

It was only until Blizzard decided to "improve" upon things did people continually have problems with the PVP. Such as the honor system that has managed to again rear its ugly head from beyond death.

Then you add in 3 battlegrounds, only two of which have any semblance of map balance, and that's because they are ripped off from CTF and Domination FPS mechanics. The load of shit called Alterac Valley has been Alliance-favoring since it was released. I will give a brief explanation of how fucked up this map is.

Alliance and Horde have two fortresses separated by a long battlefield and several lieutenants, towers, etc. The object is to kill the opposite general by taking a series of spawn point flags leading up to the general's keep.

What Horde has to do:
This is where Horde has to run over a bridge (CC and MC fun!) to get into the Alliance keep, face a wide-open barrage of arrows from the towers on either side of the bridge, six archers at the same time, and then run through a massive mob of high-HP NPCs in order to reach the Aid Station (pretty much a requirement before you could face the Stormpike general). A handful of people could guard this with ease against the main Horde zerg. At least Horde no longer has to run through the asinine number of Stormpike NPCs out on the battlefield, which easily outnumbered the Frostwolf.

What Alliance has to do:
Due to the construction of Frostwolf keep, there is a handy snowbank you can use to bypass the Frostwolf keep defenses entirely by jumping over the wall, run up through the keep relatively unscathed by the NPCs (which are conveniently spread out), and then almost solo-cap the Frostwolf Relief hut. Some people CAN solo-cap it, because there's a handy alcove on the other side of the Frostwolf General's fortress you can use to drop aggro from the 1-2 NPCs you might pick up running through FW keep. At least a dozen Horde have to guard this else the Alliance can swarm right in while laughing at the Horde defenses. The archers in the towers? HA! They have crappy line of sight issues with the poor construction of the towers prevents them from being anywhere as effective as the Alliance ones. The Alliance archers have a series of open, good LOS structures that not only allow them to fire on the folks on the outside of the building, but they also prevent flag captures (to destroy the tower) by being able to fire on the enemy touching the flag. The Horde has a handful of archers stationed around the outside of an enclosed room, facing out, and unable to cover each other. Until Blizzard got off their lazy asses (or it became a problem that even Kalgan could see was fucked up), people could cap the tower flag THROUGH a wall or floor. As it stands right now, a single Alliance rogue can take a Horde tower without any contest or threat from the archers, which cannot be said about the Alliance bunkers, where you need to kill two or more archers. The Alliance can literally ninja right past any Horde NPC defenses. The Horde gets two complimentary elite wolf guardians to protect their general, but this is a laugh when you have paladin healers able to off-tank them with ease.

Or you could do like what has become fashionable now and just rush to the enemy's end flag (Stormpike Aid Station for Alliance, Frostwolf Relief Hut for Horde), completely missing the point of PVP entirely while you zerg the NPC boss. Destroying a tower or bunker in AV removes one of the elite guardians in the general's room, each starting with 4. It then becomes a rushing game, and unless Horde has some decent gear and people with a clue, Alliance tends to win almost every time because of the cheesy way the map was constructed.

Was that "natural evolution" too, Kalgan, or was it just more of your shitty design?

Then along comes "world PVP objectives", which number...TWO! The laughable "world PVP objectives" in Silithus and EPL that do nothing but give a zone-wide buff, and is STILL a steaming pile compared to DAoC's relics and fortresses. Nobody sees a reason to involve themselves with these unless they are going to personally go into the associated dungeons. Considering that the poor design of Blizzard makes those instances nearly worthless to go into anymore compared to TBC content, it was evidently a time-sink by Blizzard as filler content before TBC was released.

Outlands comes out, and Blizzard expands upon the "world PVP objectives" by adding...nothing new except for possibly Halaa. Buggy as hell when it was released, Halaa merely adds the ability to buy more things you farmed your ass off for, but really see little to no end game worth, or even realm worth. The same goes for the area in Terokkar Forest, where you can capture the spirit towers for a zone buff AND the ability to collect tokens to turn into the nearest convenient token salesman for some gear that is often skipped because either it's crap compared to welfare epics, or because getting the spirit towers is kind of futile when one side camps their timers.

When people DO show up and participate in any of these "world PVP" jokes, one side usually runs off, or there is nobody to be seen unless you wait 15 minutes for people to respond to the capture pings. So again nobody really sees a reason to participate in this laughable excuse for "PVP".

Outlands also introduced another battleground, Eye of the Storm. This garbage made it even more clear that your average WoW cattle who had problems holding control points of Domination gameplay of one pre-BC BG, and who also had problems ignoring the mid-field fighting of the CTF matches of another pre-BC BG, were helpless to contend with BOTH mechanics being presented to them at the same time.

Along come Arenas, and now the ePeen kiddies like Kalgan can stroke off to their class imbalance's content. "Class synergy" is the excusing buzz-word of combining Cheap Shit with Cheap Shit and being rewarded for it, as the classes are nowhere near balanced with each other. About the best display of "skill" in this asinine dance of douchedom is who can out-lame each other by matching one FOTM team against another FOTM team, each possessing the same stupid imbalances. The only class balance that exists in WoW lies solely in going up against another of the same class.

What is truly sad is that the assholes at Blizzard like Kalgan actually think this stuff is "clever", "innovative", and half a dozen other marketing buzz-words they can "Two Girls One Cup" with the press while most of the gaming press doesn't even have the courtesy to puke. Then you have ignorant cattle rushing to the media frenzy, and garbage like this is allowed to continue and is even PROMOTED because that's all these ignorant schmucks know, and how DARE other people piss in their punch by mentioning games that are clearly inferior in design. Just look at those UGLY graphics!

Where is WoW PVP now? You have some idiots paying to play this Arena gimmick in the hopes of winning something while the season PVP gear becomes even more imbalanced. Then you still have the crap of piss-poor battlegrounds that are still rivaled today by DAoC's keep sieges. You have crap world PVP, you have morons attacking lowbie towns to be annoying since they most often run off when defenders show up. Rogues and manglespammers tend to be the favorite of these folks, though you'll usually still find a 70 loladin bubble-hearthing after killing a few level 12 NPC questgivers to piss off the lowbies as well as ping the other realm's Defense channels. They aren't interested in a fight, or pvp. They're just interested in being assholes.

No wonder people fondly remember TM vs. Southshore. That was perhaps THE BEST PVP WoW ever had to offer, and looks like ruining fun is the extent of Blizzard's limited vision and abilities.

Tom Chilton is one of the most overglorified hacks in the industry, who couldn't even bother to rip off a good idea if it were booted up his ass a few times (and in several cases, they have been, repeatedly). Hell, he couldn't even learn from his mistakes in UO, or take notes from anyone else in the industry, does this stupid shit, and calls it "natural evolution"?

So when do we see Tom face a bit of "natural selection" and GTFO of this industry?