Jump to content

Best MMO PvP you ever played?


Lazyllama

Recommended Posts

Making this thread to find out what the player base thinks is the best MMO PvP they have played and why. I know I personally have played MMORPGs for a long time and the appeal for me specifically has always been the PvP aspect of it. Include this game if you like aspects of it but I am looking at a perspective of ALL MMORPGs. Ill try to be as specific and objective as I can in my descriptions.

 

Ill start with the World PvP and who wins in my opinion. Hands down in my book was Ultima Online, we are going OLD school here. You could mark runes to the popular areas where you were sure to find a fight that was safe from any guards and when a guildie called for help, you recall there and help him out. One guy gets jumped by 2 from an enemy guild so you call your guildies and 2 of them show up and you kill them so they call their guildies and 4 more show up and before you know it there was an all out war. Why was this possible? Because traveling from one point to another did not take 20 minutes and you could feasibly help your teammates out within 30 seconds or a significant amount of time to put yourself in the fight.

 

Other part of UO World PvP that was awesome, the fight for scrolls. Scrolls would increase your stats to higher levels ala data crons here. But in order to get scrolls you had to down bosses that had them on their corpse as loot, these bosses were located in neutral zones with no guards or safety available and would only spawn at specific times. This meant you would sometimes have 4 groups or more all competing for this loot at the same time, massive wars and people pushing in to get to the boss and then once they got there they had to hold off the other groups long enough to kill the boss AND loot it, because loot was open to anyone, and then get away because if you died with the loot on you, it dropped too. Massively fun world PvP and I have not played a game since that has done it better yet.

 

How did they do it? Easy travel to zones where PvP will be happening, something for the sides to battle over that they could hold in their hand and walk off with, or use right there on the spot if they needed to that EVERYONE had incentive to possess and would fight over. After all if you didn't need it you could sell it.

 

Competitive group PvP 2v2 or greater I would go with WoW not only did you have the option of arena if your group was low but your larger battlegrounds were/are more fluid. I think this game is currently very close to it but there are still obvious tweaks to it. However for me specifically I like having a rating system in place, that being said I do not believe that the guys that are the better players and can get the ratings to get the better gear should have very significant gains in the gear they can get. Make it minor, after all the guys who can get higher level gear in PvP are already solid players, there should be a gain to their efforts be in visually by showing off their e-peen or minor adjustments to stats or maybe even the ability to make or sell something of value that will give them a benefit or more credits.

 

1 on 1 PvP, I have to go with UO again but I have to add a very specific caveat to it. When I played UO there was a specific class that was sculpted out to play as a PvP class. So when I cast one thing an intelligent opponent would cast a counter if he was quick enough, and the fight became either outplaying your opponent entirely and beating them quick or being able to dwindle them down until you could finally score a kill. The top players were ALWAYS the top players and it was very tough to take them down because the 1 on 1 PvP was purely about timing and not class ability. I understand how this kind of thing is not possible with current MMOs because there are so many classes. Only way I could see this working is if there was always a counter to something any class had to do. Besides I think a game should be built around group PvP experience and not 1 on 1.

 

So there you have it my take on the best MMO PvP. I know I have seen plenty of people suggest games I have not even played. Have you guys had the same experience as me or were they completely different and the things I said were so far off base of what you enjoy I am a noob for even suggesting it?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 1.1k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Guild Wars had the best instanced team-based PvP. The variety of skills and interplay between them made it much more cerebral than your typical mashfest.

 

DAoC and Planetside had the best open-world mechanics and terrain. It's not a coincidence that those games had 3 realms instead of 2 - it allows the 2 losing realms to team up and basically autobalance itself versus the winning realm.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Best one i ever played was Asherons Call.

 

It had a dynamic engine that allowed players to dodge incomeing magic and missle attacks from players and mobs. and im not talking a system like Darkfall were you have to aim the game aimed your attacks for you kind of like a aimbot in a shooter but the projectiles wernt instant you could see them coming and move out of the way it actually took skill.

 

also it had NO CC, so a skilled player could fight and win against multiple enemys, just because you were fighting 2 guys didnt mean you lost because you stand there stuned or rooted for ever, they still had to actually hit you so it gave you a chance.

 

plus it was a skill based game with no classes, you could be a fire ball throwing sword guy with cooking trained if you wanted, you earned XP by killing stuff but you also earned what was called unasigned XP that you saved up and spent on what skill YOU want to level up.

 

the pvp server was savage, there was not a single place on the entire map that was safe from pvp. when you went out hunting there was pvp, when you were in town selling there was pvp. there was huge epic wars over dungeons that guilds tried to control to level up, there was huge epic wars over towns that guilds tried to hold to sell items and call home.

 

YOU WERE NEVER SAFE it was real pvp.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I loved PVP in Eve Online because there was actual loss. It had a death penalty, you could actually hurt your enemy, cost them money. It forced people to play smart, improve themselves. It was also good for the player driven economy as new equipment/ships were then needed, materials were needed, blueprints were needed.

 

This game is a carebear's wet dream. There is NO death penalty what so ever. Nothing to force people to care about dying, no benefit to kill your enemy, no reason to kill anyone except just for the hell of it.

 

I have often killed myself rather than have to travel back somewhere just because its faster....any game that people will do this has way too soft a death penalty.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

DAOC. No contest. It's still better than anything else PvP wise. Most people that suggest something else probably didn't play it.

 

For me it isn't even the RvR system. Don't get me wrong it's fantastic. What makes it great is the pace of it. Casters that can drop you in 3 seconds but suffer hard interupts. Massively powerfully CC but completely diminishing returns. 8 man groups with each player having a very specific role rather than each person having their own CC, healers that can DPS etc.

 

No global cooldown. None of this putting instant abilities on 30+ second cooldowns so any noob can come along and **** your entire group with a ridiculous ability (for example the "death grip"). The fact that 8 people can take on massive groups if they are well organised. Positioning being important.

 

Battlegrounds as you level up rather than being put in a random instance where whicherver team has the least mongs wins.

 

When will someone just copy it? :(

Edited by Skelitore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1: DAOC

2/3: Guild Wars (not really an MMO), Warhammer (the combat system was mostly good for most of the game's lifespan, despite the city / fort system being ****ed for equally as long)

 

 

DAOC commentary:

 

1. DAOC had an effective overarching system because there were 3 realms. Reasonably good internal balancing.

 

2. DAOC had good gameplay options because there were no "rails". The developers didn't add over-engineered microgoals here and tokens there to make you do specific things.

 

Look at how ****** Ilum is -- players want "TOKENS" and **** to drop in Ilum to make it "worthwhile". Players do Warzones only because they give commendation tokens. Everyone and their brother wants *********** tokens as a reason to PvP, instead of simply killing players because it's fun.

 

In DAOC, you simply got points for doing the one thing common to all PvP: killing *********** players. None of this clicking on chests in Tatooine ********. No retarded medal farming "hey let's stand in the acid pit more". No clicking gimmicky objectives on Alderaan.

 

You kill players, you get points. Period.

 

3. DAOC PvP had a greater purpose -- relics that mattered. No game since has implemented an overarching reason for your entire faction to cooperate to WIN THE GAME. Although it has to be said: relics had a significant impact on PvE. And this is probably why we will never see a similar system for WoW/Rift/SWTOR or any PvE-centric game.

 

4. Gear. DAOC gear, for a very long segment of its life, was easy as **** to get to a competitive level. During vanilla, you did your epic quest, gg. During SI, you talked to a crafter and paid a few hundred gold. During ToA (**** TOA) you ****ed your ******e with a sharp object. After they nerfed TOA, it was a short grind.

 

 

 

Additional note on #2: This is pretty significant IMO, because this may never change for MMOs in the future. Specifically, Mythic was lazy as **** and simply bad at making their "content". They were too haphazard to go and "MAKE RAILS" like Trion, BioWare, Blizzard.

 

Modern developers sink a lot of development and QA time into creating things like 47 different tokens, finely-tuned token acquisition rates and gear acceleration and titles and rewards and map markers and objective capture times and ... get the picture? Developers nowadays over-engineer the games.

 

They call it "features" and "content". What it does is force players to min/max their "TOKENS PER HOUR".

 

Back in DAOC's day, the devs were lazy *****es working out of their garage. Not really, but at that level. PvP in DAOC was barebones and simple: kill players, collect RP. Kill door, kill lord, take keep. Keep helps you kill players, collect RP. Did I mention killing players and collecting RP?

 

The system was absurdly simple. This means that players are the ones who decided how they wanted to play -- did they want to StealthZerg™? 8-man roam? Zerg that milegate? Camp Darkness Falls? Any of the above, because they all involved ... get this: KILLING PLAYERS, COLLECTING RP.

 

Nowadays, developers try to tune rewards for zerging, roaming, camping, ganking. If you played Warhammer, you saw this -- keep trading, because players try to optimize RP/hour. Because devs tried to "incentivize" keep warfare. What do we do in Ilum? Trade caps. What do we do in Huttball? Farm medals. We don't PvP anymore, because the developers give us "TOKENS" and micro-objectives, and zone quests.

 

None of which involve killing players.

 

Developers are trying too hard at all the wrong things.

 

Mythic didn't try hard when they made DAOC. They let the players try hard after they lucked out with a solid PvP system.

 

Sigh.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

EVE.

 

Everything in that game is PvP even the economy. Not to mention the massive fleet fights are pretty epic. There's a ton of customization and depth to the combat system and even a person that has only played the game for a couple hours can be extremely useful pvp. There isn't some crazy gear grind, everyones gear is equal unless you don't have all the support skills to fly a ship properly.

 

There is a real risk to fighting as well as reward and the most important:

 

INTERNET SPACESHIPS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS!

 

Honorable mentions to: Shadowbane, Darkfall(common DF2.0 don't suck!) and Guild Wars.

Edited by DrekorSilverfang
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1. Warhammer Ranks 1 to 10, any class, any faction.

2. Warhammer Rank 40+ before the nerf bats came out

3. Warhammer Rank 40+ before bioware got their hands on it and raised RR to 100.

 

To best pvp moments.

 

1. A 10 minute 1 on 1 fight, Chosen vs Iron Breaker

2. An 8+ hour battle in front of the Order camp in Reikland where over 200 people were involved at its peak and probably double that were involved at some point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Where it started is where it ended: Ultima Online launch - ~2000.

 

Honorable mention: EQ1, Shadowbane, AC, DAOC. As time went on the carebear aspect was more and more prevalent. Srsly I skipped WOW/WAR - very little skill involved. No wonder SWTOR turned out the way it did with those two as the precedents.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...