Best MMO PvP you ever played?

Daoc was great for its time and I loved it. But honestly it has not aged well out of the hardcore circle....

Nobody in their right mind would sit on a teleport pad for 15 minutes, get teleported, realize the healer did not equip the teleport medal then wait another 15 minutes to get him.

After 30 minutes of standing you then run around in a pack hoping to avoid the zerg and find a equal sized group or smaller of enemies to gank (Taking on average 15-20 minutes per combat). Eventually die to the zerg or bad cc management, spend 30 minutes teleporting/buffing up. Rinse/repeat ad nauseum.

The combat mechanics themselves worked although were not closed to balanced, super crit teddy bears? ManaChanters? Entire classes completely useless if specced for buffs (Shammies?)

So I loved it, lived it and enjoyed the heck out of it. Its on my pedistle for the best, but anyone trying to launch with its mechanics is in for a painful lesson in what kids today find fun....

Eve - TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE balance. PvP comes down to griefing 90% of the time, hell the even suicide bomb people in High-sec I hear now. Yeah consequences are fun and all, but honeslty its a gank;/grief fest at the best of times... Still groundbreaking ideas for today, so I'll give it a nod, but the 60 day training plans that require you to log in 18 times a day just so you can tackle people.... Well I'd love to see the crying if SWTOR told everyone that to even start to PvP you will need to wait 3 months....

Warhammer - So many great ideas, such terrible execution... Leveling from instanced PvP pops? Yes please! Love the idea, chain cc, chain aoe's with no cast timers they are stackable? AOE Healing on insta cast timers? Yeah... AoE killed this game dead... Also the grind to RR60 at the start was beyond ridiculous, when you couldn't get RP's off of any 5 RR's lower than you! This meant in the first 5 months it was possible to do 25 scenarios in a day and earn 130 RP's (When you needed 10,000+ to move a single level). I can only imagine what tears would be shed on this board if it worked the same...

Its a tough choice because technology and ideas move and evolve completely changing players expectations and wants. All the games above were my favourites for a reason, but all of them had horrible, horrible issues.

Daoc was not made to be SOLO balanced. As a ranger I knew I would 1 shot or destroy a caster, I knew a heavy would destroy me if they found me. In DAOC you relied on your team knowing that you by yourself would look to certain group types.

Im talking about Vanilla DAOC too not the nonsense it ended up.

This X class should beat all other X classes is stupid. A healer should go down to a glass cannon, who should go down to a heavy armor. So and and so forth. These super balance cry babies who dont think like this get games nerfed beyond belief.

Rift had solid instanced pvp

GW was also fun

Wasn't a fan of DAOC

Rifts pvp was atrocious.

I was a really big fan of old school SWG PvP before broken mechanics (Jedi in general, defense stacking, OP buffs) started to take over. Unfortunately, that didn't take too long and I'm sure plenty of us know how well the "fix" worked out in the end...

Planetside wasn't really an MMORPG, but since somebody said it, I have to vouch for it too. A whole lot of fun, even if the development team post-release was incredibly incompetent and never accomplished anything. Still fun, just never really fulfilled its potential, in my opinion. I'm certain old school Planetside players will remember SOE promising us brand new base designs one year - and then we never got them and as far as I know, we are still waiting for them, several years later. This was, of course, only one of the literally dozens of broken and unfulfilled promises they made us over the years.

Good times. In case it wasn't obvious, I don't exactly think highly of how SOE chose to manage games post-release. The best part? I'm not actually in the minority!

They removed necks long ago (before NF).

PLenty of 8 man groups fought zergs to see how many they could kill it was fun when i did it.How it works now i have no idea.

Buffing classes used other things later in the game to make them useful. Buff shearing and rebuffing in combat where the mark of those classes as well as back up healing rezzing etc. Combat was adjusted at some point but then they made new classes that were just as op (BD Animist Warlocks etc).

I remember it fondly and still would put up with some of the **** that was in before the NF/RP overhaul (maybe not det tank groups and not the CC that lasted forever with no dr). However, even with all its imbalance and stupid nerfs that ruined classes i still say that it was the best open world pvp system ive seen.

guild wars all the way.

i cant think of a single complaint about it. there was ZERO ability delay... you were expected to interrupt 1/2 second cast skills with a 1/4 second cast interrupt. the fact that you could only have 8 skills at a time. no global cooldown. the ability to have a secondary class. all of it was amazing.

it wasnt like in WoW where a pvp match went on for hours because someone was running around a pillar in circles spam healing themself with instant casts and you couldnt get close enough to them or in their line of sight for long enough to make it stop. pvp matches went on forever because two teams were going head to head in the middle of a field and were full of legitimately amazing players. never before have i experienced such intense pvp as i have on guild wars.

also, in guild wars every skill bar you set up was a unique role. no healer was the same. no damage dealing build was the same. not even two people using the same primary and secondary class combo for the same role were identical because of the way the skills were limited. sure, there were a few cookie cutter builds that people used (spike teams, iway, etc) but those teams had the huge flaw of how easy they were to counter due to the fact that once you saw their team composition you knew exactly what to do to counter their critical abilities.

you had to coordinate between multiple people on your team before entering a match to make sure that any scenario encountered could be dealt with. you couldnt just team up and enter a match right away because you had every skill in the game at your disposal at any given time.

/end nostalgia rant

Shadowbane is the answer to the thread title.

EVE Online back before capitals.. Nothing stands close, that game reigns supreme in all aspects of MMO PvP.

All MMO's since have been glorified Unreal Tourny with more abilities.. Played wow for 5 years. It never ever gave me the rush that EvE pvp gave. Even fighting for the top spots on the bracket.

The folks that did early DAOC PvP worked really hard to do it. When i think on it now it blows my mind. It was so much work.
What daoc had going for it was a concept of a persistent PvP world seperate from the PvE world but slightly effecting the PvE world.
but its painfully obvious that they really did not have a clue how PvP would actually work from release and that affected the whole thing. Class and game balance. Pretending that they did understand PvP is not productive. But they did try new stuff and it was fun figuring it out especially for the hard core.

instanced PvP is the way to go. Planning what scenarios will be available from outside of PvP will make things a lot of fun if they have PvE effects. Its the logical step. EvE is essentially doing this with dust.