Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Depends who you're pvping. I've fought AI chicken mobs that put up a better fight than some human players.
And then I've been slam dunked by someone I thought for sure I was about to walk all over.
....
That is exactly what I mean... @Mag7spy what he said, I don't need to know everything just the major trends. You probably do the same thing at some level yourself.
Most classes boil down to two/three optimal styles of play, if you see them enough, or know what to avoid, how to counter their play... Then yeah everytime you come across that class the fights are similar. There are of course people that look for outlier builds (a personal favorite thing to do for me as it makes things interesting). But often those offbrand builds aren't the meta for a reason and then just deal with it.
@Azherae you are continually much better with words than I am
😆
PvE can be tuned to ridiculously impossible levels, for sure. However, it can also be tuned to the point where - using your example above - it is impossible with 500 defense rating, but possible with 499. This is literally the kind of tuning top end encounters receive - however there is almost never more than one such encounter in a game at a time.
This kind of thing simply doesnt happen in PvP, it technically cant. Sure, in PvP you may come across someone that has better gear than you and you stand no chance then and there against them, but you are able to get better gear and beat them. There may be 20 of them vs 1 of you, but you can always come back with 30 friends.
In PvP, all combatants have access to the same class kits, gear, number of allies, strategies and tactics. As such, it is literally always a fair fight. If someone had better gear or more numbers than you, that doesnt make it impossible for you, it just means they beat you fair and square.
The other thing about both of the above scenarios, from the perspective of the player we are talking about, these things may seem impossible. However, from the perspective of their opponent, this is easy PvP.
Back to PvE, that encounter where the tuning of defense at 500 makes it impossible, but at 499 is possible - that tuning is assuming the maximum number of players possible are present, that assumes they all have the correct class (or near enough, most games have an amount of flexibility in this regard), and it also assumes they have the best gear available up until that point. The only variable that players have agency over is their skill and strategy.
As such, the challenge in PvP can literally always be met by getting more friends and/or better gear. In PvE, at the top end, it is assumed these things are already maxed.
Sure, there is arena PvP where you cant just get more friends, but again, neither side has access to anything the other side doesnt have access. Rather than it being impossible to beat an opponent that is significantly better geared than you, it simply means you need to get that better gear - an avenue that is already assumed in top end PvE.
Anyone that says "I got jumped by 20 players while I was out by myself, and that was an impossible to win situation" isnt taking in to account the point of a persistent world. Get 30 friends and go beat them up - it isnt impossible. Anything that simply requires better gear or more friends isnt even hard, let alone impossible- yet this is the only real claim to difficulty PvP content has.
Any real pvper knows the difficulties of siege and again the work that goes into having guild that can do it, maintaining the guild, maintaining the point and keeping up in gear and strategy. Like i honestly can't believe people are out like like managing 250 players and fighting 250 players is easier then following a guide and beating a boss.
Sieges in Ashes are PvX as of last design iteration. It's a different skill set. There is a firm difference between 'being able to fight someone in a scuffle' and 'protect an objective' or even 'know which objectives to let fall so that you can succeed at more important ones given the configuration of battle.'
Managing a guild successfully is a different skill set even still. The fact that you keep attributing certain things to pvp and 'pvp skill' just makes me think you haven't actually experienced it at high levels or that you are one of those oddly lucky yet ignorant people who manage to get to the top level of something without actually understanding why what you are doing works. Tank, DPS, or Support out of curiosity?
Sure, the "solving" aspect of the encounter is done with - this is why it becomes easier. However, there is still the technical aspects of the encounter, and these need to be overcome every single time.
While the design of some encounters puts more of the difficulty on the puzzle, some encounters do I feed put more of the difficulty on the technical execution.
I'll also point out that I have yet to see an MMO with the following three things: actual competition; open world mobs dropping top end gear; guides for killing top end content.
People tend to not give away the secret to content rival guilds aren't able to figure out if that means those guilds will then get better gear and challenge the first guild.
Its basic self-preservation.
This is why guides never existed for top end raid content in EQ2.
EQ2 was remembered for both its guild system and economy. Both were incredibly good. Since it didnt have sieging or PvP, you cant really hold that against it.
And yes, PvE content is a commitment from developers. Absolutely and without a doubt.
However, since it has been proven to be one developers can manage, there is no excuse to not manage it.
Actually, what I am asking for is a minimum viable product.
Let's create an arbitrary scale of MMO players from PvP to PvE,100% - 0%. People that are 0% wont ever PvP, and wont play Ashes. People that are 100% wont ever play PvE and wont play Ashes.
Realistically, this leave the band from 80% to 20% as Ashes potential market. Anyone outside of that wont play for more than a few days or week.
What I am saying is essentially the minimum viable product to attract the 40-20% players. Since MMO populations in the west are traditionally skewed more towards PvE than PvP, this band could well be as much as half of the potential market for the game.
If literally all content needs to be fought over in PvP, then many players will skip over the game. If some content doesnt need to be fought over (even if the rewards need to be fought over), many of those players will still play the game.
Additionally, the way Ashes is designed, the game is at it's best with players that prefer PvE and are good at its and players that prefer PvP and are good at it. The more of these players that exists the easier it is for a PvP player to get by in the game without needing to PvE at all.
If I were indeed asking for what you were suggesting I am asking for, I would be asking for 5 or 6 multi-boss instanced raids and a dozen single boss instances, as well as a large open raid dungeon and several open world boss encounters.
I am not asking for most of that though, I am asking for what I believe is literally the minimum viable product to get people that are PvE first, but willing to PvP to actually play the game. Raiding is about other players - it's about those you are with rather than those you are against.
After 20 years of raiding, my most vivid memories are about the players I was raiding with. These are - in some cases - people I am still playing games with 20 years later. I am not in touch with anyone that I have only played Archeage with, as PvP just doesnt create those bonds - in my experience.
Again more fluff instantly by you post I can tell you haven't run a guild. The fact you think elements are separate when it comes to pvp is a huge red flag. Stop saying you don't know pvp when you are in fact the one that deosn't understand what territory pvp is.
Like i feel im talking to wow pve players that are talking about cycling the same skills and know that they can kill someone in a certain amount of time. If your experience with pvp is small scale tab target, pvp and pve don't really take that much skill it is both the same. If it is tab target with large scale, pvp takes more skill with everything that is included in it not just combat.
If you are talking about action based or hybrid, PvP takes far more skill then PvE. Stop trying to make pve and killing ai and puzzles like that is more difficult. That difficulty is capped within reason no dev is making an unbeatable boss as normal content.
You don't win fights without good plans, strong members, growing and maintaing the guild, dealing with the drama, doing the politics. Like get out of here with the bs trying to say "What class do you play" trying to make it out as some lame 1v1.
In pvp you don't always have the same number of allies as the enemy. You have access to it, as you put it. In the same way that the enemy has access to bringing in even more allies themselves. And we're not talking about the fairness of the fight, we're talking about the difficulty of it.
But none of that applies to the pvp encounter that's currently taking place. It's happening the way it's happening now, not the way it's happening next time. And you definitely can be so outnumbered or otherwise outmatched that it's impossible to win yet fair and square at the same time. Because that's how open world pvp works. Sometimes you get screwed. Nearly everyone at some point will run into pvp content that far exceeds what the numbers and composition of their group is designed for.
I ain't going 10 pages with you Nooani lol. I don't care enough about this topic. It's obscure...what even is top tier pvp, it varies from game to game and from person to person. The game I'm most referencing in my mind is the open world pvp of Cyrodiil in Eso. On a daily basis I ran into fights with my group that were impossible to win. It's uncontrolled compared to the controlled environment of a pve encounter.
I think I can confidently grant you this though. The first time the top tier pve group does a new piece of the highest difficulty pve content, and knows nothing about the mechanics, just goes in blindly...it may be nearly impossible to one shot. I dunno, don't know much about the history and trials and tribulations of top tier pve content over the years. But I know some pve encounters are insane. Barring some kind of lucky epiphany mid fight about the mechanics and how to do them correctly, you are in deep shit.
However, I find this an appropriate point to clarify, but am only going to talk about EQ2.
I killed all of the games group and raid content from it's original release, up until I quit about a decade later.
There wasn't a single encounter - or version of an encounter - that I didn't kill in that time.
Almost all encounters were managed as top 5 world wide, with a good number of world wide firsts in the mix.
So, from my perspective, I am absolutely talking from a perspective of fully understanding both PvE and PvP at the top end.
If the difficulty of your content is due to number of players or gear, then that is not difficulty. That is the game telling you that you are taking on the wrong enemies right now, and you should play the game to get more friends and better gear, then come back.
This exact scenario is possible in both PvE and PvP - yet somehow people only look at PvE in situations where the group or raid is prepared, geared and repaired.
You not having played the game enough to have good enough gear or enough friends to take on what ever enemies you have does not mean PvP is difficult, it simply means you are not good enough at the game as a whole.
Get better gear, get more friends. It isn't that hard. Don't sit around and tell us all how hard your PvP is when you are outnumbered and over geared - just go out and deal with those two issues.
Since the assumption with top end PvE is that both of these factors are already at the maximum, they are non-factors there. Yeah, but if you took 10 times the number of people with you, then it would be the other side that found an "impossible" situation.
Again, if the issue you are having can be resolved by getting better gear (as in, better gear than what you have is available in the game you are playing) or by getting more people, then the situation you are in is not hard, you are just not prepared for it.
Since not being prepared can be a factor of both PvP and PvE, you can't use your lack of being prepared as proof that PvP is harder.
Ignoring catch up mechanics i feel the honest best way to protect casuals gear is making sure there are reasons to have them in guilds and such. That way higher end players can help them with crafting, doing content, etc.
I feel an alliance system will be important as well so there is a higher chance smaller more casual guilds can be included in them as well to keep a strong bond and good social element going. A lot of people always help power level their friends and get them gear and in this game where groups are the focus i see that happening a lot.
This is what I'm talking about. What we're talking about is so obscure that we're not on the same page. My definition of top tier pvp generally doesn't include "just bringing more people," or to zerg as I would put it. Zerging happens in open world pvp. If that is the primary way you pvp, you are not top tier pvping in my book. That is just my opinion, I don't mean to offend anyone. The definition of zerg varies from game to game. Ten people might be considered zerging in one game, 40 in another.
Most of the rest of your post doesn't apply to me. I'll echo what you just said in a post above about not wanting to talk about what I've done in previous games. It's usually a turn off for people. Sounds like bragging and no one cares what you did 8 years ago in a video game. But you're not really giving me a choice with what you're accusing me of.
Like I said in my last post, I'm referencing ESO primarily in my framing of top tier open world pvp. (Other games fit the bill too, DAOC, UO, any open world pvp game really.) But just for simplicity and to nail down what is "top tier pvp content" in one game, I'll stick to ESO.
You say I needed better gear or more friends, or that I was not prepared. I don't know how else to put this other than I was the best pvper on my server, or campaign as ESO called it. By the one metric there was to judge who's the best, I was the best. Alliance points that you got from killing people was the metric. And it wasn't really close. One guy was kind of keeping pace for awhile (there was a scoreboard, kept in real time) but he couldn't keep up. He did put the heat on me for awhile though before I had it (emperorship) locked up. This is back in the beginning, the first few months when getting emp actually meant something, before they added one week long campaigns where it was much easier to get emp.
I actually wasn't the best though. I played against SypherPk. My guild leader was a guy named Fengrush. They were both mechanically better than me. We never tested it in duels or anything. But they were, I could just tell. I'm sure they weren't the only ones either. But I was the best at what I did, which was just mass murder. SypherPk spent most of his time trying to lure groups of 3-5 into his 1vx traps, for the stream content lol. He was a beast.
Anyway, me getting emp was the least of it. As soon as I met Fengrush, and we had our little 5-6 man squad, pound for pound, we dominated our campaign. And it didn't matter whether I had emperor buffs or not, because I didn't always have them. I was dethroned multiple times because the enemy factions would take all of the center keeps on the map, and we'd have to retake them all for me to get emperor buffs back.
Blah blah blah. Right. Yep. But this was top tier pvping in ESO. We didn't run our 5-6 man squad because we were underprepared and had no friends. We did it because we could, for the challenge, for the fun. To push the limits of what we were capable of. The same reason Aceu runs solo squads on Apex Legends, and Ninja used to run solo squads on Fortnite. The same reason SypherPK used to go around trying to 1vX the whole server lol. We also just liked our tight knit group, same as other groups who like to keep it tight knit.
We didn't need better gear. It was the first few months of the game. We had gear competitive with what a lot of other people had. We did some crafting, ran some pve content.
But we did what was top tier pvp content in that game. We singlehandedly turned the tide of battles. We could siege a keep down faster than a zerg 10 times our number could. We could take out enemy groups much larger than our own. When appropriate we joined up with our faction's zerg. But most of the time we were collaborating with our faction in other ways. Diversions, being behind enemy lines, flanking, stalling reinforcements, hitting the weak spots in enemy zergs during zerg vs zerg fights and causing a collapse, and more. All the things that you don't need the whole zerg for, but a focused and well led smaller group.
Sometimes we got dunked. Sometimes we bit off more than we could chew. Sometimes we didn't bite off anything and just got caught by surprise by an overwhelming force. Sometimes we were on a suicide mission where we knew we were going to be faced with an unwinnable battle, for a larger goal. Initially we were unstoppable pound for pound. Eventually there were a couple groups who caught up and could give us a run for our money at equalish numbers. Just how it goes.
This was top tier pvp in ESO. And the way we did it was by design, not because we were unprepared with no friends and gear. We knew the whole server and they knew us. There was no complaining about being outnumbered. We loved it, win or lose. Loved it more winning yeah. But even some of our losses were absolutely epic. And in some cases, the odds we faced were harder than a top tier pve encounter, because it was flat out statistically impossible to win.
No top end content in an MMORPG - PvE or PvE - relies on one person. I'm a damn good raider as well, but I know that without the rest of my raid being as good as me, I can't do anything.
As far as I remember, Cryodiil in ESO was open world, and there was no limit on how many people each side bought with them. If this is correct, and you are losing, you didn't bring enough people.
You may have bought the best people, but that doesn't matter. We are talking about Massively Multiplayer games, not Massively I'm-Better-Than-You games. Player skill is absolutely a factor, but it comes in third *at best* of all factors.
In literally any situation in an MMORPG, player numbers are all that matter - until you reach the cap of players allowed.
Call it a zerg if you like (which is a term I would only use if the people present are generally mindless), but it just is what it is.
If you want to play the game a different way, that's fine. Literally no one is stopping you.
However, that then means you can't complain about PvP being hard. You can't really even claim that it is hard, let alone complain. You are making a choice to only bring 5 or 6 people with you, instead of 50 or 60. That would be like me taking 4 people along to a 40 person raid and commenting about how hard it is.
Because that is literally what you are doing - taking too few people in to a situation, and then claiming it is the situation that is hard, rather than the artificial limit you have placed upon yourself that is what made it hard.
You seem to just be misunderstanding what I view as top tier pvp. This is getting kinda silly...but think Navy Seals. We were the special forces lol. There was no one else who could do what we did. The force multiplier we provided was much bigger, generally, in our independent operations, than it would have been being with the zerg, or taking manpower from the zerg. We were mobile. Elite. Our recon and intel alone was worth it even if we had just gotten absolutely zerged down. Because you respawn ya know lol. Back in the fight. It's not over just because you die.
I think at times we may have collaborated with other small pvp groups, this was 8 years ago, hard to remember. Mostly it was just us though.
Or maybe it's not me you're misunderstanding but the game, ESO. Did you play it? Cyrodiil was a huge battleground. There were objectives all over the map, literally all over. You didn't just form up in one zerg to be most effective. There were other things to do. There were losses we took that served a greater goal for the faction.
Like the 300 Spartans (plus the 6-7000 other Greek city state troops). They fought a battle against an overwhelming force for a greater goal. They didn't bring enough troops lol.
This is making us sound way more epic than we actually were but I'm just trying to think of examples that'll make you understand.
I get what you are saying, I had a similar core of players I would send to distract and divert during guild wars and such in Archeage.
The thing is, that isn't the point.
We are talking here about how PvP can not be harder than PvE, as you know.
You are saying that PvP can be hard because you can go in to it with not enough people for the task in front of you.
You are forgetting that you can do this in PvE as well - go walk up to any dragon in EQ2 by yourself and see how long you last.
This is literally the same argument - not enough people for the task.
This doesn't make the task hard, it just means you do not have the resources at present to complete it - and again, it applies equally to PvE and PvP.
No I'm saying that because of the unpredictable and dynamic nature of open world pvp, you can't ever truly know how many people you need for any task. It is not a controlled environment, populations of enemies and allies can vary widely.
Even if everyone from all 3 factions in ESO stayed zerged up in 3 respective zergs, one of those zergs is going to be the biggest and one will be the smallest. And what happens when you're in the zerg of your faction, fighting the zerg of the second faction, but the third faction rolls up behind you, and you're a sandwich dinner now for both factions.
That's just a simplistic example because I'm about to go to bed. But the possibilities of what happens in open world pvp are so endless that you really can't prepare for everything that could happen. You just wing it. Play the hand that is dealt you. There are patterns of open world pvp you can pick up on as you get better at it, but there is no formula or script. Anything can happen at all times.
Whatever the case, top tier pvpers don't usually play in zergs anyway. Zergs sometimes can be more of a liability than anything. You're far more mobile and capable of most of the tasks you need to accomplish when you're in a well led and focused group. Not having to constantly slow down or alter plans or circle back for stragglers of your zerg. What we did is the ideal way to top tier pvp in ESO. The difficulty ranged from easy to impossible. Not sure what else to say about it except that our numbers spoke for themselves. We were doing it right.
Not the same argument. Not enough people for the task is a constant REALITY of open world pvp. Unless your zerg just overwhelmingly outnumbers the other zergs that day. To get emperorship in ESO your faction had to capture all of the center keeps in Cyrodiil. The enemy factions knew that that was what you were trying to do as you were trying to do it. Can't even begin to describe all the exotic strategies we had to use, splitting forces, diversions, feints...in order to get me emp again after being dethroned.
If we just zerged down each keep individually (I think there were 6 needed in total), both enemy factions would just meet us at the last keep we needed and it'd be virtually impossible to capture it. Because they are going to sit there, work together and hold out, no way in hell they were just going to let me get emp again. We usually made plans ahead of time on how to deal with this. Sometimes worked, sometimes didn't.
You're thinking of this as the static nature of a pve encounter. It's not, it's far more dynamic, far more strategies at play, far more randomness...and frankly just chaos.
Yes I'm fully aware that you can take off all your armor, or go under leveled, or go without the required numbers to a pve encounter. I'm not sure why anyone would do that tactically or strategically. It would be a good strategy in between content patches though. Just start the content over in an artificial hard mode.
Top tier pvers get extra props and kudos for that in my book. But if they beat it, it wasn't impossible. So they need to keep stripping off armor until it becomes impossible. Now we're talking baby.
Edit: gnight nooani im going to bed and i swear i'm not going 10 pages about this with you lol
That is where you START to get in to that realm.
In PvE, raids always start off with literally the most number of people possible. That is raiding 101 (assuming the content is expected to pose some sort of challenge).
From there, you move in to questions of "is everyone completely geared with exactly the best item in each slot that we have available to us right now?", "does literally everyone present know exactly what their role is, and what to do in any number of potential situations we may find ourselves in without needing direction?", "does everyone have the exact best spec for that player to be able to fulfil their assigned role to the absolute best of their and their characters ability?" and "are we all well versed in playing with each other to the point where we can anticipate each others thoughts?".
Once you have literally every player you are able to get, and have answers "yes" to all of the above questions, you are now at the point where a top end PvE raid would consider zoning in to a top end instance for anything other than information gathering. If even one of them is anything other than an outright "yes", there would be literally zero expectation of winning.
I doubt the above situation has ever actually happened in an open world PvP setting. I have no doubt it has happened in an arena setting - but absolutely not an open world one.
YOU JUST DONT GET IT ARRRGH FREAKING PVE PLAYERS.
All of this shit you do on a much higher level in PvP. In PvE that is 2 dimensional like some paper Mario. In PvP that is 3d mario if you aren't doing that you aren't going to survive in top tier pvp where there will be many points where you have less tiem to react and think of a counter plan quickly. Not just once but multiple tiems through a major fight that can be happening in multiple instances around the battlefield. It is exactly why you have multiple leads to manage things and its not just one person....
You just don't god damn get it PvP players are built differently, simply dealing with puzzles not not a issue. Dealing with the complexity of a war with a large amount of players its leagues above running a dungeon. You have shit on the line to lose, you need to get better every single fight, push yourself and grow. Learn far more scenarios and gain experience. Its not a PvE encounter where there is a guide up and you just practice the mechanics until you can do it well enough.
IF YOU have experienced real pvp you would know. If you just did some pvp and had someone tell you what to do or follow what you needed you wouldn't understand the whole picture...
I've done both, in multiple games, over the last 25 years... You're giving PvP waaay too much credit. I'll agree there is a learning curve to PvP, due to it not being the same as PvE... But there is most definitely a plateau that people rarely get better than.
And to argue with with your "having a guide and practice"... You can do that in any style game. I had a buddy that used to study heat maps of player activity on CoD MW/MW2 maps just so he would learn spots to yeet grenades into the distance and pick up kills on statistical guesses. People said he was cheating all the time because the kill cam would show him throwing grenades randomly and getting a double kill... But it just comes down to people are predictable.
I'm sorry, I'm not impressed by your feelings on PvP...
Do not even try on saying people are predictable and bring shooters into play as your argument on pvp you will lose. Stop trying to reference bad players or high skill level players fighting lower level ones to try to skew your answer to seeming right...
Back to the PvP talk
I'm unsure if you just want to defend pve because you feel your pride is being hurt or something knowing pvp players have it more rough. There is nothing wrong with PvP being more difficult, we are challenging ourselves against other real people. NO ONE wants to fight a ai that is unpredictable and does broken nonsense that isn't fun. Pve is a challenge in mmorpgs of solving puzzles and such, people aren't playing PvE for some impossible challenge as normal content (does not mean there aren't a few very very hard dungeons out there with hard puzzles).
End of the day normal AI content in a mmorpg does not equal to the unpredictable element of human nature. Could i designed a stupid hard Ai with a puzzle almost no one could beat, I could. And you know what, PvP would still be more challenging imo, because the skill set for solving a static puzzle is not something that can be applied to the minds of tons of other players. As every mind can come up with their own planning, grow and change in ways you can't predict.
Though the complexity and available options also depends how the content is designed. If there is objectives, multiple ways to take on a situation, etc it will add more creative options when it comes to sieges. If sieges are you have to enter through one gate only with no objectives (which i doubt they will make it extremely basic) then the skill cap would be lowered.
You main argument stems from the premise of "Devs told me that I can only bring 40 people into this instance, so I gotta work with those 40 people to beat the instance", while owPvP players who want to be seen as "the best pvpers" think along the lines of "what is the smallest amount of players I can bring to win in any given situation?" because that is what will get you called "Best PvPers" by other players. When you can win against higher numbers - you're highly skilled in pvp. When you can kill 5 people for every death of your team, even if you lose at the end - you're highly skilled (literally 5 times as skilled as your opponents).
To a owPvPer it's not a "Devs told me this is the limit so I must follow it", it's "Devs gave me these tools and I shall put as many limits onto myself as possible to prove that I'm better than all the people that don't have these limits". It is literally the "themepark" vs "sandbox" argument.
It's obvious that you prefer to go against the Devs rather than the players, while the owpvp enjoyers here prefer to go against the players instead of the Devs. Both ways are valid and both ways are difficult, except the difficulty is controlled by different people.
This last line of yours is mostly just about the numbers aspect again, right? The 'Dev limit' in question. Or is it your opinion/experience that Devs generally or always specifically script how groups should take on harder PvE content?
I'm trying to understand if you've only played or heard of 'PvE' games where the strategy is something the Devs explicitly decided and groups of players don't come up with their own specific group tactics based on their preferences.
It seems like a stretch to say 'Any PvE' if you're not referring to just the numbers, but I could see it based on experiences and anecdotes you might have heard from others?
There should be a variety of ways to defeat a dev designed challenge; not just "the right way".
Any tactic/strategy that defeats a challenge is correct.
First of all, I have said many times that game with guides are not the rule. You are taking the most basic version of PvE and applying it to all PvE.
Stop doing that.
Second, each encounter in PvE is it's own scenario. You need to learn each of them. In EQ2, I killed well over 300 different encounters, with different strategies, each of them notably different.
There are not that many scenarios in PvP that a player needs to learn. If you are running the defense of a siege, for example, there would only be two or three viable strategies the attacker could use that has any chance of success. As such, you only have two or three strategies you need to consider and plan for.
In terms of PvP in the open world (whether just open PvP, guild wars, what ever), various games have various strategies (Archeages mageball, for example), but there is usually only a small handful of these per game, and very little that actually needs high level consideration other than such strategies.
For sure, I agree with most of this.
However, if players are making things hard for them self, they have no right to say the thing they are doing is hard. They can say the way they are doing it is hard, but not the thing itself.
With PvE, players do everything they can to make it as easy as it can be - the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy. And yet it is still hard. If PvP players put that paradigm (the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy) in to PvP, then it would not be hard.
Those that find it hard find it hard because they make it hard, not because it is hard. This is kind of my point.
One small example of this that I have always found amusing, and I have seen it in multiple games, is PvP players thinking that using potions/consumables during a fight is cheating. No it isn't - it is using the tools the game has given you. If you want to make it harder for yourself by not using them, have at it, but that is you making it harder for yourself.