Aphyrax

Looking at the highest level of PvP (arena) and PvE (25 man raids), there are some clear differences in terms of design philosophy

- Large groups vs small groups
- Heavy consumable usage vs absolutely no consumables
- The requirement to put in long hours vs being able to get to the top quickly
- Time sinks (eg trash respawns) vs no time sinks
- Dedicatation vs skill being the most important factor in determining succes
- (edited in) Brick walls vs no brick walls. In PvP you can suck and still have fun. Perpetually wiping on the first 2 pulls in an instance because Blizzard put some of the hardest bosses first (hello BWL) can and has killed guilds or at least guild morale. Same goes for overtuned TBC content.

Now, some of the above might be explainable by intrinsic differences between the two play styles, but is it just me or did PvP get all the good stuff? Asked differently, how come Blizzard managed to get rid of almost all annoyances in PvP and constantly improves the PvP experience while repeating the same mistakes that have been made since EQ raiding?

Is it simply that endgame PvE must have some unfun parts to it for it to work in an MMO and that people who don't want to do those should not bother raiding, or is their PvP design team better?

 

Leto

I disagree with you there on some points...

both competitive arena play and pve take large amounts of dedication and skill.

Also, for arena teams, they don't just walk into arenas and beat everyone else... it takes a lot of pvping to gain the skill and knowledge of other classes and their abilities/counters. It also takes a while to get all of the non-arena pvp gear avialable to best gear your character for the challenge.

Rogue at heart.

 

Sapphrina

Maybe it's simply because pvp is more fun? xD

The only legitimate use of the BLINK tag:
Schrödinger's cat is [BLINK] not [/BLINK] dead.

 

Blinks

Arena Seasons are their new baby, of course they're going to polish it quite a bit. Focuses shift from time to time.

That said, the definite lack of attention regarding the raid game is beginning to make me dread logging on personally. Nothing is keeping me from playing other games.

 

◊ Vontre

Yeah, this is true... the pvp gear makes a huge difference, and takes quite a lot of farming to get.

www.magegraf.com
www.magegraf.com/deathknight

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

 

Aphyrax

Yes it takes time to master the arena, but the time investment is different. Getting good at PvP is like learning a boss for the first time, which most here agree is the fun part. The difference is, once you are good at PvP you stay good and don't have to clear trash and farm the boss another two dozen times.

And you can easily start the arena with crap gear and work your way up through the PvP system. You might not hit 2500 the first season but if gear is all that is holding you back the first few months you will hit the top pretty fast in future seasons. Going into SSC in greens, on the other hand?

And if we start from the premise that PvP is fun, then having to PvP some more to get the very best PvP gear isn't such a bad deal. And another advantage you have in PvP is that you don't have to be the best in PvP to have fun. You can have a 1300 rating and have a blast and get epics. If you are chain-wiping on Maulgar, the fun factor isnt really there.

 

Telesis

Coming from a medium-progression type raid guild (Gruul down, 2 Kara a week, Kara clear, 4 raid nights), and a higher-end arena team (5v5 2268 rating), the time invested is similar but distributed differently.

For the first few weeks of the arena, our team was scrambling to get heroic bloodfurnace runs in, along with any heroic in general to get Nethers. We'd pvp till people got on, in hopes to save up for the 2min PvP trinket, farm for Elunes and enchanting mats, and spend every minute of our time preparing for the arena.

The initial farming even for new PvE content is not nearly as intensive, but it's persistant. Gear for pvp needs only one socketing, one enchant, and you are set. While it's typically very expensive, PvE consumable requirements catch up before the boss goes onto the "Dont need elixirs even" list.

As time goes on, the preperation effort will start to tip in the favor of PvE raiding, depending on where your guild is.

 

• Sirloin

MMOs are evolving, but the genre itself (and all RPGs to an extent) are about rewarding time spent with progression, much much more so that all other video game styles. This doesn't jive with competitive systems where "pure skill" are deemed more important. Therefore, I always think the PVP aspect of the game is better suited to no-timestinks no farming, where the PVE aspect must always be.

The idea that you spend your real-life time training or farming or grinding exp for your virtual character is what links people to their characters. I believe that this appeals to RPG players (and by extension, MMO players) and is comforting in that it is basically guaranteed reward. You spend 6 hours swinging a sword, picking flowers, killing rats, training spells, whatever, and your character is stronger. There is a barrier to entry in the form of a timesink. Warcraft has taken away almost all of the potential for negative consequences that could make your character weaker. You can't lose experience or equipment, the worst that can happen is you waste your time for no progress or lose some gold. PVE is not a zero-sum game, you can defeat endless waves of the machine every week. PVP is a zero sum game.

Contrast this with more traditionally competitive games like Counterstrike, Starcraft, even Mario Kary where everyone starts on an equal playing field, and there is no barrier to entry whatsoever other than the skill of the player.

Now lets look at WoW's pvp system.

1st gen: no honor system, no rewards, basically no reason to pvp at all, just raid towns and gank people.

2nd gen: added the honor system and rewards but no BG. Now we have progression but it is 100% timesink, zero skill, and heavily favored AOE classes who could blast Hillsbrad for hours, or rogues who could solo gank people all day.

3rd gen: added battleground. Certainly more fun, and players with skill could finally showcase their talent by steamrolling opposing teams, but ultimately gear progression was completely disconnected from skill and just another timesink. Any mouth breather with lots of time to kill could become a High Warlord. Players who pvp'ed for 3-4 hours a week and crush everything in their path would basically get nothing, ever.

4th gen: Removed ranks, earn Honor pts. Made progression accessible, but still tied 90% to time spent 10% to skill.

5th gen: Arena. A hugely improved competitive system. Progression is still required to excel (you need the best gear to win and your gear is always improving) but for the most part time spent is worthless beyond getting a decent baseline set of gear. Highly skilled players can rocket to the top without investing more than a few hours a week.

My Steam Profile (Aether) Cherish the difference between 58° and 59°.

 

• frmorrison

Well, Blizzard made sure to polish Arenas pre release, because once they made the two Arenas and designed the gear, the Players make the content, so the PvP devs didn't have to keep working on it once they finished a few months ago. Now there are a few bugs with Arena, but they are minor.

And the top PvP teams certainly had a lot of time invested at least initially (heroics for Tier 2 BS weapon), farming gold for blue gems, farming BGs for PvP items (biggest time sink), farming Kara for a few upgrades until they got their Gladiator gear, etc.

 

◊ Quigon

Ugh, perpetuating the myth that PvP doesn't take skill doesn't help anyone. This isn't quake 3, but you can tell the difference between good and bad players. The difference is once you get 5 or so "good" players, you're good enough to be tops with enough time... whereas stratification in a FPS'er goes way way beyond PvP in WoW. Still, skill is important, as is time and whatnot.

 

Aphyrax

Virtually anything you do requires skill of some form. People are often dismissive of skills that they have or that come easy to them but not others. So "PvE does not require skill, PvP does not require skill" arguments are all flawed. What people actually mean is that some activities display skill differences less prominently. That is a bad player actually has a chance to beat a better player. I would never win a game against a chess grand master but I could very well win a hand and even a match against the best poker player in the world, because while poker requires skill it also has a luck component.

WoW arena PvP actually has a big skill component. We faced a few high ranked teams and even though we are not totally horrible we got steamrolle every time. The outcome was not much different from me playing a top Quake player.

 

Nezralix

Virtually everyone who starts spouting this is basically saying "WoW doesn't require precision aiming with a railgun."

 

Bibdy

You can add 'predictability' to that list. PvP is always different and sometimes you can be surprised by the outcome. PvE on the other hand, if you know exactly what to do and when to do it you spend a horribly large amount of time, gold, effort etc. teaching everyone else of what to do and when to do it and then hoping they can repeat that week after week. Of course, I doubt any amount of PvP (short of winning the tournament?!) could be as rewarding as barely scraping a boss kill out of your arse, or downing the final boss of an instance after weeks of torture.

There's always free cheese in the mouse traps, but the mice there ain't happy.

 

torrent495

I still think large-scale PvP in this game would be absolutely kickass, unfortunately it was done wrong with Alterac Valley and Blizzard appears to have given up on the concept. In the next expansion perhaps.

It's not clear to me how you would like to change the PvE game. I suppose you could ban consumables, remove trash respawns, take out a lot of trash, and make the content easier. That doesn't fundamentally change the nature of raiding, though, nor does it necessarily make the experience better.

Perhaps you just like Arena-style gameplay better than the raiding game? I personally do, though on the flip side not everyone likes to play deathmatches.

A larger point is that PvE is sort of played out, and in a sense WoW is the culmination of that "quest-level-raid" concept of gameplay. It's difficult to imagine another MMO that really extends rather than replicates what WoW has already achieved in this area. Conversely, the possibilities for future MMO PvP (I would generalize this to simply player interaction) are quite extensive, and exciting.

 

Morsexy

People always complained about the time requirements for pvp, and now theyve adjusted that somewhat - still roughly the same amount of time going from 0 gear to full geared as the old system, just less time per week.

Personally I dont like that theyve made the pvp gear equal or better than raiding gear just given drop rates. Setting aside skill or any other argument about which is harder, my main complaint is the pace at which you get items.

An "ok" guild can down Magtheridon. Thats 1 chest token. A 1710 rating in 5v5 in three weeks could net 10 people a chest\leg\helm slot.

So 25 pve people net 3 tokens and the pvp oriented people net 10. The simple solution is for 2 tokens to be dropped a la Thaddius\4hm which brings things much closer in line despite the obvious gap between a top 5 in the world guild and top 5 pvp item gain rates.

 

Dawme

Well, the whole arena system in its current incarnation is free epics, it's a bit sad. Especially compared to the massive failure which is the raid game right now.
I hate the idea that I just have to group 4 random guys, play 10 games (win or loose, same deal) and win 20% of a tier 5 weapon. It just seems ... a bit easy, imho.
The rating system is good, they should just modify the points distribution based on your ranking (like 1st wins 2500 pts, 2nd 2400 ...) or don't give points before a "correct" rating (1800 ?). You should deserve those items. I'll feel guilty next week with my spellblade earned just by grinding 500 pts / week in stupid random groups.

 

Andorien

These would both be great ways to get the vast majority of players to immediately stop playing arena. It would become a ghost city. (To say nothing of the problem when everyone below 1800 quits, the new worst players drop below 1800, etc.)

 

• Grogzor

I think 1800 is a bit high. I could understand if below 1500 points you wouldn't get points but its an MMO and that means Time > Skill so yeah. If someone is willing to put in the time and Not ABSOLUTELY suck, they should get epics. Even mediocre guilds got full of epics in MC and BWL.

 

• Beliandra

How about if they had a few tiers of gear, and as well as needing to spend the points, you also needed a certain (current or lifetime max) rating? e.g. blue gear (similar in power to the honor point rewards) that anyone can buy, lower epics that you need 1800 rating achieved to buy, and the current sweet epics needing 2000 rating (numbers completely made up).

 

Andorien

What is the problem that this solves?

As far as I can tell all of these proposed solutions solve the problem "I don't want everyone else to be able to get good items" which I think is way lower priority than "everyone wants to be able to get good items".

 

• Grogzor

But everyone can get good items. I mean, if they are not totally incompetent. You can get good items from Heroics, you can get good items from pvp, you can get good items from Raiding. You can buy good items, you can make good items...What problem is there with getting good items?

 

Cagalli

IIRC Corrz from Insomnia/Tich said Power Trip and his guidlies farmed over 200,000 honor from the time of the honor system change to a month ago (when he said the comment).

http://ctprofiles.net/37645

 

• Beliandra

The problem complained about by the person to whom I was replying - that losing a few arena games a week for some weeks will get you a tier 5 weapon.

The problem is that the arena, on the face of it, appeared to be a competitive system where skill was rewarded rather than time. That's why everyone was so enthusiastic about it, after the grind of the original honor system and then the 2.0 honor system. But in effect, it still gives extremely powerful rewards without any skill requirement.

Anyway, we're not really talking about good items here, but rather really great items. It breaks the progression of the game when one path to gear has a difficulty:reward ratio totally out of synch with the others. That's why, for example, the "Dungeon 2" sets were so reviled, they required a lot of effort, skill and expense, for a reward which was underwhelming compared to even the easiest raid loots. The Gladiator rewards are the opposite, but still a design error.

 

• Grogzor