LogFAQs > #958158931

Sahuagin posted...

you're engaging in the server-wide conflict. you're a victim of the other side, sure, but you're in a weak position and that's the consequence of being weak. whether it's a "waste of time" or not, it's not "just" a waste of time, it's a consequence and a situation to work your way out of. it's a challenge, even if it's a different challenge.

That consequence is just a waste of time, though. It takes regular game progression and makes it take longer for absolutely no reason. Making game progression take longer because I'm having fun fighting other people? That's cool, I'm trading efficiency for fun. Making game progression take longer because I keep getting one-shot by some bored dude? That's boring, because I'm trading efficiency for absolutely nothing.

Sahuagin posted...

it's not necessarily frustrating, that's your subjective opinion.

You're saying you genuinely enjoyed not actually getting to play the game in the time you had available because somebody decided they were bored enough to stop you from doing so?

Sahuagin posted...

I guess you're seeing the picture much narrower than me. you want local-pvp without global-pvp. I would actually want *more* global-pvp. if there are gankers on the opposing side at a certain level, then there should be corresponding counter-gankers on your side to deal with them, and in the near future you'll be one of those counter-gankers (assuming you actually want to PvP which it sounds like you don't actually).

That's where the issue of ideal populations comes in: I'd love more global PvP in which people would actually travel to hotspots to participate in skirmishes and deal with gankers. That just didn't happen on any of my servers, though. PvP was mostly limited to "hey look somebody from the opposite faction is also questing here I'll fight them" and "I just got one-shot by a level 60 camping a level 20 zone." There just wasn't the population density to support battles that would actually last longer than it took to ride a gryphon there (another major limiting factor: nobody wants to spend 15 minutes travelling to deal with a ganker that may or may not still be there when they arrive), so it was very rare to see anyone do that.

Sahuagin posted...

you're still acting like it's the game's job to "entertain" you

Yes, yes it is. That is why games exist, after all.

Sahuagin posted...

when what we're talking about is dynamic player interaction and global player versus player combat, rather than a pre-packaged hand-holding experience.

The other players didn't do a particularly good job of entertaining me either.

More than that, though, a well-designed PvP system guides that dynamic player interaction in such a way that it becomes fun. There's no reason the game couldn't have restricted high-level gankers to prevent them from wasting everyone else's time. In fact, that would probably actually have made for better world PvP, because people's experiences on PvP servers wouldn't be soured by gankers they have literally zero chance of beating. There could also have been some sort of bounty system to reward those that tracked down griefers that made a habit of killing lower-level players or quest NPC's, making that actually be a risky endeavour.

That last point touches on one of the biggest issues WoW's world PvP had, actually: There was virtually no reward for participating in it. In a genre that's built entirely around gradually rewarding people for the things they do, you can't expect an entire gameplay paradigm to sustain itself purely by the fun of participating. People are going to prefer to do other things that actually accomplish something, and get annoyed when people that are trying to PvP for PvP's sake interfere with that.

Sahuagin posted...

this is the brutal PvP server. embrace the brutality or go somewhere else.

I really wouldn't call it "brutality." Nothing about it is particularly hard. It's just tedious and annoying. I'm not sure why "I put up with being bored for longer than you were willing to" is supposed to be some kind of badge of honour (arguably, that's MMO progress in a nutshell, but I think we can identify a difference between enjoying the game's actual gameplay), but this definitely isn't a matter of throwing yourself against failure until you learn enough from those failures to overcome them (a la Dark Souls and the like). It's a matter of putting up with arbitrary, capricious losses that waste your time until eventually you don't have to worry about that anymore. Your growth is gated by game mechanics, rather than any actual personal accomplishment, and that means there's substantially less satisfaction involved in achieving that growth.

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