It isn’t the fight. It’s the chase.
What? You chase before you one shot?
Battleground PVP in WoW is pretty even in terms of level. Think the brackets span about 5 levels, and the gear is available to anyone willing to do what it takes to get it. Incidentally, in WoW, you buy high end PVP gear with honor or conquest points, which are earned by doing PVP.
You could easily enough make it so you get a penalty for killing someone too far below you except if they attack you first. Not too difficult. If it’s a relatively small penalty, reverse griefing wouldn’t be possible (you block someone? They suck up the penalty, one-shot you and move on.) Alternatively, as someone else suggested, you could make it so you can respawn wherever you like (or at least far, far away) without penalty if someone too many levels above you kills you.
I really think there are are pretty straightforward solutions.
Don’t these analogies blatantly fail?
Wouldn’t it be more to the point to discuss twenty-year-olds dunking on six-year-olds, for example?
Would you find that fun?
If not, then don’t you subscribe to the general principle “Winning games against woefully unprepared opponents is not fun in and of itself?”
Indeed–isn’t winning against a horribly unprepared opinion quite the opposite fun? Don’t you find it downright embarrassing?
Reflect on the number of kids who used to enjoy burning ants with a magnifying glass. They get older but they stay the same.
Anonymity.
How many would act in this manner if their identities were known or knowable?
Presumably DigitalC and others in this thread don’t intend here to identify with those kids.
BTW in my last post I should have said “Wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) you find it embarrasing” rather than “Don’t you find it embarrassing” since DigitalC did say he himself is not a griefer. He’s a griefer-defender, but not a griefer himself.
Incorrect. People choose PvP servers for many different reasons, including “my friends play on that server”. Remember the days when, if you were new and signed on to a PvP server before you knew any better you could NOT transfer your character to a PvE server? Sure, you could re-roll, but all that time gone to nothing…
I’ve met several people who were talked into a PvP server because everyone claimed it was “better” and they wound up utterly miserable. Two of them quit the game and to this day say what a horrible experience it was and they’ll never play any Blizzard game again - yeah, I’m sure that makes the marketing guys happy. Which might be why, now, you can transfer your toons from PvP to PvE, too many unhappy customers.
Those of us who are anti-ganking but remain on a PvP server like the challenge where half the other players are dangerous but still find the bullying and the justification used by folks like yourself to be nauseating. It is possible to enjoy the majority of the game without leaving in a huff over a defect, it would be like leaving because there are purple trees in Ashenvale and you think that’s offensive - there so much more to the game than Ashenvale trees, and so much more to high level and end game on a PvP server than just stabbing people 50 levels lower than you who have zero chance to fight back.
Really, I pity you, that you can’t see that, that you’re missing out on so much of a game you pay a monthly fee to play. You’re getting maybe a quarter of the end-game experience by sticking to just killing other players. The fact you choose to kill those who have no defense against just makes it more disgusting.
Kill people within 5 levels of you, though, and you get honor points, which actually are worth something. Even if you have top-end gear you can now use them to purchase crafting items for use or selling. So why aren’t you killing people you get something for, instead of defenseless lowbies?
That is, of course, assuming each and every lowbie you see actually is bait, and most them aren’t. A level 20 character shouldn’t have to hire a body guard to engage in level-appropriate quests and level up.
I have an awesomely powerful, raid-reading, battleground blasting level 85 shaman. She is a goddes, I tell you. Oddly enough, I still don’t feel a need to go around one-shotting people 50 levels lower than me. It’s not fun. Actually, anything 10levels or lower than me is safe as long as you don’t go out of your way to provoke me. Five levels lower? Maybe I’ll shoot you, maybe I won’t, depends on whether or not you’re going for “my” resources.
I’m honestly not interested in world PvP unless I can get at least honor points for it.
I love PvP. My favorite online game is Battleground: Europe. It is pure PvP in that PvP is all it is. There is nothing else.
I also play Eve. Now Eve likes to think they are PvP but they are not really. PvP in Eve means person versus people. While this is fine and all…the problem is - is that is all there is. Person versus People (or small mob to be raped mob versus larger mob). The problem I am getting to is it isn’t REALLY PvP because the outcome is never in doubt. It would be nice to have SOME somewhat close fights that are part of playing the game and not require special setup and trust.
Here is my perception of problems of PvP in games:
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PvP is too easy to escape from. City of Heroes is the stupid example here (Note, I haven’t played COH in a few years and it may have changed). You go into the PvP area and you can just hop around or fly away whenever a fight isn’t going your way. The problem is…so can the enemy so no real PvP gets done. A good PvP game would be one where you have to COMMIT to a battle…not flop in and out like some fish.
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PvP is too easy to ‘reinforce’. You get into a fight and it is ‘spoiled’ by other people coming into it. The joke phrase on Eve is ‘if you find yourself in a fair fight, that just means his friends haven’t quite gotten there yet’. Once a fight starts, it would be nice to have SOME time in which to enjoy it before disturbed by external factors.
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PvP it too conditional on numbers to determine who wins. He who has the most numbers usually wins. A smaller force cannot ‘nibble’ or skirmish against a larger force. The Blob always wins.
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PvP contains little or no consequences. You die…you just resurrect. Maybe you lost a little time. If PvP has no gain/loss what is the point?
So, you can see by my complaints that WoW and it’s clones (which is basically everything out there) has little appeal to me. I like PvP. I LOVE PvP. However, most people do not like PvP so they do not support the PvP games and do not support PvP within games that allow it.
In addition, the ones who say they love PvP only love one-sided PvP so there is no risk. They will ‘win’ but still feel they are uber.
I guess I am a child of the 70’s…before computers… where you played war games against each other.
[Moderating]
This thread is for discussing the motivations of hardore PVPers, “griefers,” and the like. It is not for discussing the alleged limitatios of SDMB posters.
Some of the posts in the thread have been getting aggressive and are bordering on flaming. That will stop now.
If you dislike people playing MMORPGs in a particular way please ensure your more vehement objections are not directed at other posters or are moved to the Pit.
Thanks,
RickJay
Moderator
If it’s an MMO, and someone’s annoying you, grab a couple of your friends, get on your max level toons, and annoy him. This is, actually, fun. It’s even better if the instigator gets some of his friends, and the escalation continues, until you get the major guilds of one side or the other to come out some lowbie area and smash everything, but this is, sadly, rare. (those who go out causing trouble for lowbies, then whine when a group of max level toons wipes the floor with them, I don’t get)
Also entertaining is running across someone who’d annoyed you a few levels ago, but he hasn’t advanced…
As for anything else, well, I always prefer skilling up new trade skills in areas where I can actually kill the people I’m competing with for nodes. Though I do wish that resource denial was a more useful activity in most MMOs, it’s the kind of thing I like, the long slow whittling down of an opponent until he can be utterly crushed.
If ganking has absolutely no benefits, in terms of game play, for anybody, can’t Blzzard hard-code limitations into the game, like preventing a player from attacking another player X levels below them? I’m not a programmer, but that doesn’t sound too terribly difficult from a technical aspect and it would eliminate that unpleasant aspect of the game which a lot of people, including developers, obviously perceive as a big problem.
My paraphrase of Blizzard’s perspective: If in-game PvP behavior has a PvP response, it’s not prohibited. In this case, if your low-level toon is being camped by 25 bored max-level players who are playing a game of “tag the bunny”, the PvP response is to put out a rallying call to your guildmates and in-game friends to rescue you, sparking a huge and entirely enjoyable PvP pick-up battle.
In principle, it’s beautiful. I cordially dislike PvP, and I’m bad at it one-on-one, but there is something very awe-inspiring about several dozen PCs on each side battling back and forth on a neutral field. (Hillsbrad Foothills used to be like that: veritable armies raging back and forth between Tarren Mill and Southshore.)
Practically, it comes down to population and popularity. If you are in a small guild, or a non-PvP guild, or no guild, and don’t have very many friends on-line at that moment, you are completely checkmated. You can’t generally put out a call for assistance in public channels; if you’re a lowbie questing in a lowbie zone, almost everyone else who may hear you in that zone-specific chat channel will also be a lowbie, so there’s no help there. And if you do get a response, odds are it’ll be “Learn to PvP n00b” or comparable abuse, because The Greater Internet F—wad Theory applies to both sides of the PvP divide.
In general, I regret rolling on a PvP server, where (as I like to put it), PvP happens a lot like surprise buttseks when you’re busy doing something else you actually enjoy. But I’m invested in several 85s I am too cheap to pay transfer fees for, in exalted status in a level 24 (almost 25) guild that raids but isn’t humiliating or gruesomely hardcore about it. If I get sufficiently pissed off at the involuntary nature of PvP, I’ll probably do the sane thing and /ragequit rather than try to move to another server.
Because there is already the very reasonable solution of not playing in a pvp server. Also a game like WoW is extremely gear based, a level 84 stands just as little chance against a level 85 than a level 1. Hell, a guy who just hit 85 has no chance against someone who has been 85 for a few months.
That doesn’t help your argument, considering Monopoly is famous for causing everyone to hate each other by the end of the game.
If you do that, then you’ll have low-level characters attacking the high-level characters, knowing that they’re now effectively invulnerable.
If you say that you can only attack players within five levels of you, up or down, then you’ll have groups of gankers attacking players five levels below them.
I promise you- any artificial mechanism you come up with, the gankers will find a loophole.
In Rift, I specifically chose a non-PvP server. Around level ten, though, I got ganked by a level 50. How? He flagged himself for PvP and then stood in a rift in the opposing faction’s newbie zone. As soon as a newbie fired off an AoE spell, that newbie immediately became autoflagged for PvP… and then the ganker was able to easily slaughter entire groups of newbs. It turns out that the “autoflag” option was checked by default- most players didn’t even know they could turn it off. The annoyance, of course, is that if you do turn off the autoflag, then there are NPCs you can’t attack (or even defend yourself from, should they attack you first).
Half the fun for gankers is finding the loopholes that allow them to harass other players without ever opening themselves to the same.
Not just that but making a change assumes that this is a problem for most people. The people who whine about being killed on a pvp server are a small often derided minority, the rules don’t need to be changed to appease them.
Hardcore PvPers who are in it for the thrill of the ‘hunt’, as it were, are fine. I don’t see any illness in that.
People who like to gank lowbies and generally just grief people are assholes. They aren’t mentally ill, unless douchebaggery is going in the DSM V. In real life, I equate them to boys setting off cap guns to deliberately scare people, or aggressive soccer parents who yell and swear at 7 year olds on the field. I solve this by playing PvE servers, just like you can move to an adult community or join a more casual soccer league.
The phrase “for the lulz” is apropos here. It seems to me that trolling and associated phenomena are related to ganking and other forms of griefing or near-griefing. Factor in the meta-game of “getting away with it” (also prevalent in trolling and Anonymous-style hacking/defacing) as well.
And yeah, the best defense is not to volunteer to be these guys’ next victim; in WoW terms, roll your characters on RP or PvE realms and don’t flag yourself for PvP.