What Went Wrong With PVP

Guild Message of the Day: All Raiders must be ready to PVP Saturday!

Mortigan's Translation: Prepare to be raped, ye squishy cowardly PVE lock!

I haven't always hated PVP.  Only since playing World of Warcraft really.  So what went wrong?  Mortigan digs up his previous selves to find the answer.

My first real taste of online PVP came from first-person shooters. Unreal, with its ground-breaking 3-D Accelerated images, was truly unreal to behold, and Mortigan was a trash-talking death-dealing bastard:

HEADSHOT!
"How do you like THEM apples?!"
HEADSHOT!
"OOOOOH that looked REAL painful!"
HEADSHOT!
"Sucks to be you!"
KILLING SPREE!
"You LIKE to die, don't you!"
"f**k you, Mortigan!"
"You're welcome! Uh Oh - look out!"
BLOODBATH!
"MUHAHAHA!"

Other PVP games came and went, like Tribes, Quake, etc. All of them had the same goals:

To crush your enemies
To see them driven before you
To hear the lamentation of their women
- Conan the Barbarian

During those times, much blood was spilled, and Mortigan was very happy. But there was generally no real fear of death. In many cases, death resulted in an immediate respawn, and the main thing that counted was to simply rack up more kills than anyone else.  There was no real need to be cautious about one's own health.

Then came America's Army, and Mortigan (using his last name "Davengeful" as is appropriate in the Military), was recruited into the Special Forces.  Many, many hours were spent in nerve-wrackingly intense combat situations.  Life MEANT something. Staying alive was important.  You didn't run all over the map like a fool - you CREPT through it cautiously. You listened for footsteps or the sound of a grenade pin being pulled. Knowing the map was crucial to survival: Know the hiding spots. Know the camp sites. And never, ever forget that your enemy only needed to hit you with one bullet to send you to the grave.

But as far as PVP goes, all those games - from Unreal to America's Army - are all the same, because there are no differences in the characters.  Sure, different weapons are available, but you generally can choose the weapon of your choice. There are no other differences between being one character or another. What REALLY matters in those games is how well you - the gamer - can play. It's about reflexes, instinct, experience, and yes, in some cases latency.  But one person really doesn't have any real advantage over another. 

Then along comes World of Warcraft, where the difference in classes can be HUGE - despite any attempts by Blizzard to level the field.  The wide variance in gear specs further expands the differences of one character over another.  Some combinations are simply FAR more deadly than others. And those differences result in an environment far too reminiscent of high school, where the bigger more powerful ones crush the smaller weaker ones. And that imbalance requires the weaker ones to invest more time in gearing for PVP and learning PVP strategies, roll an Alt that is more PVP deadly, or disengage and focus on PVE.  Mortigan chose the last.

And so when the guild message says "All Raiders must be ready to PVP Saturday!" Mortigan can't help but wonder, "What the hell am I doing on Daggerspine?!"

Mortigan the Introverted