Is the goal truly PvX?

This is a general question on both how players interpret Intrepid Studio's vision, as well as what players actually desire.

I seem to see a general consensus that PvP is the main focus. But I'm wondering is PvE really even a big part of the game? Sure there are NPC mobs and bosses but their importance seems to be dwarfed by the ability to PvP around them. Most people seem to only want their PvE if it also has PvP.

Rust is a PvP game, just because PvE elements exist in Rust doesn't mean people call it a PvX game.

So is this game PvX? Or is it just a PvP game?

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Mag7spy

Noaani wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

Knowing mechanics and what to expect takes time, that does not mean they are difficult it simply means you need to spend time figuring it out and once you do it becomes easy, as well as muscle memory knowing and seeing the exact same mechanics.

Ever wonder why I keep saying I know you have never been involved in top end PvE?

It's because of comments like this.

Low end PvE sees you dealing with the same mechanics, and muscle memory is all it takes once you've killed a mob once and figured it our.

Top end PvE though, that doesn't work. You aren't facing the same mechanics, and muscle memory simply will not get you through.

Your comments also make me think you have never participated in top end PvP. You mentioned about about dueling in BDO - that isnt top end PvP. You also talked about learning from fighting a good player - that isnt top end PvP in an MMO either.

Top end PvP in an MMO is guild or faction based. You dont fight 1 on 1 in top end PvP. If you think you do, then not only do you not know what top end PvE is, but you also dont know what top end PvP is. All you know in regards to top end is your few days at the top end in one shit fighting game - easy to be top 10 when only 30 people are playing.

Going to debunk your post hard right now pretty easily

PVE

You are getting into the weeds pointlessly about terms used which does not make a lot of sense if you read my post. If you are doing PvE and you have seen mechs and understand them, have a good idea of the flow of the gameplay you are going to know what to do on command it is a skill thing.

IE Boss is doing this, that means you know to use whatever set of skills, or movements to solve the mech as you get use to it. Hense increasing your muscle memory on the boss you are fighting.

TOP End PvE bosses don't suddenly get new skills, when you have seen the mechs, understand the skills you know how to approach them and what to do as you are being affected under it based on the content. If you did not gain muscle memory, you are effectively not improving during the content.

IF you are assuming I'm saying all bosses do the exact same thing in the exact same pattern you are LITERRIALY putting words in my mouth. That is a bad faith argument to assume I'm saying something I'm not to fit your agenda.

That being said bosses have different stages and new things get introduced, and those things you under and again gain muscle memory for as you learn how to approach the new things the boss does and tackle the challenge making it much easier over time.

~~~~~ PVP ~~~~~

If you think thre isn't top end PvP from dueling you are mistaken, BDO literarily has tournaments for pvp 1v1. So right there you do not know what you are talking about, and that isn't even waht i was meaning to bring up....

What i mean when i know you haven't done top end BDO pvp is because you do not know what duel for spot means, which further goes towards you were not at any significant spot in BDO to make money and be competitive gear wise. If you are not at those spots, it means you are not doing node wars or siege or not competitive in the least in it with a lack of gear.

Long story short meaning you did not do any significant real large battles on BDO over the duration of the game. As it is impossible to not see duel for spot in BDO do to the karma system and mechanics in valencia, as it is again one of the most common things in the game. People even leave the dungeon to fight in BA and duel there away from mobs.

Mag7spy

Noaani wrote: »

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

To say PvP is harder is to say you dont understand top PvE - let alone that you have never participated in it.

I mean, to me that description sounds like my party trying to kill the enemy party that was holding a spot. The enemy was overgeared so we'd kill ourselves several times against them, but after trying different approaches we might be able to get a win, cause either rng was on our side or the enemy slipped up (which in pve's case would mainly just be ability/mechanic rng being more favorable towards players in a particular run).

I've had boss encounters that took over 1k attempts to kill the first time ( not many encounters fit this, but it is more than 1 encounter).

What's the most attempts at a single PvP situation you've had?

Then you have to consider that the harder it is for you, the easier it is for the other side. Top end PvP is thus - in aggregate - neutral in difficulty.

Dying 1000 times does not mean all those deaths were hard, the question is AFTER how many times you died to mechanics you had a full understanding on how they worked and a strong method for dealing with those mechanics.

Not understanding a mechanic can lead to many deaths as you try to figure out how it works and how to approach it. No one is going to argue against there being more unique encounters in a PvE experience in figuring things out. But arguing something being difficult because it is new is not a big thing to me, it is about the challenge after you understand it if its difficulty holds up. It's like fighting a new class you don't understand that is added, it has the same level of difficult as you don't know what to expect (unless you researched it already).

The unique challenges is what makes the PvE content fun and worthwhile though, eventually it becomes stale as I've said before.

akabear

A small thread with a poll ranking pvp vs pve in terms of difficulty. There was a pretty heavy weighting one way

https://reddit.com/r/classicwowtbc/comments/uhojgz/is_tbc_pve_harder_than_pvp/

Ludullu

akabear wrote: »

A small thread with a poll ranking pvp vs pve in terms of difficulty. There was a pretty heavy weighting one way

https://reddit.com/r/classicwowtbc/comments/uhojgz/is_tbc_pve_harder_than_pvp/

From what I've heard tbc pve was very easy, so no wonder the poll shows that.

Azherae

Just in case it somehow matters to y'all, at some point you switched from discussing 'variety' to discussing 'difficulty'.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Just in case it somehow matters to y'all, at some point you switched from discussing 'variety' to discussing 'difficulty'.

As we always do

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Just in case it somehow matters to y'all, at some point you switched from discussing 'variety' to discussing 'difficulty'.

As we always do

Well, things changed from Debate of Concepts to Debate of Opponents, so the variety would tend to go down.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Then you have to consider that the harder it is for you, the easier it is for the other side. Top end PvP is thus - in aggregate - neutral in difficulty.

Like I said, winning is subjective. I don't care for the aggregate, because if we were to take the aggregate - that boss saw you as the easiest content around. It's just that you don't respect AI rights

I mean, this is kind of my point.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

I mean, this is kind of my point.

And I addressed this point. Even when you come to the top, there's gonna be people doing their best to take you down. And if the game's design allows that, you gonna have a tough time being at the top. L2's private servers rarely allow that, which is why I've had cases where some people were completely unbeatable, but Ashes could design their classes in such a way that there are no unbeatable player opponents. RPS design will definitely help with that.

And when you then apply the zerg potential to the equation, you have yourself a never-ending fight for dominance. And in PvE you don't really have that kind of fight. Well, you do, but it's just a "fight" against rng and more about your ability to react/adapt to sudden changes in the encounter rather than a more wholistic skillset of controlling your enemy, knowing their reactions, triggering those reactions at correct times rather than just reacting yourself, and changing your party/raid composition to properly address your enemy's changes in composition (be it an increase in numbers or a changeup in classes).

Btw, were there any EQ2 bosses that changed their mechanics between fights so completely that they required a different set of classes or gear? That is, not while you were trying to figure out how to beat the boss, but after that.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

I mean, this is kind of my point.

And I addressed this point. Even when you come to the top, there's gonna be people doing their best to take you down. And if the game's design allows that, you gonna have a tough time being at the top. L2's private servers rarely allow that, which is why I've had cases where some people were completely unbeatable, but Ashes could design their classes in such a way that there are no unbeatable player opponents. RPS design will definitely help with that.

And when you then apply the zerg potential to the equation, you have yourself a never-ending fight for dominance. And in PvE you don't really have that kind of fight. Well, you do, but it's just a "fight" against rng and more about your ability to react/adapt to sudden changes in the encounter rather than a more wholistic skillset of controlling your enemy, knowing their reactions, triggering those reactions at correct times rather than just reacting yourself, and changing your party/raid composition to properly address your enemy's changes in composition (be it an increase in numbers or a changeup in classes).

Btw, were there any EQ2 bosses that changed their mechanics between fights so completely that they required a different set of classes or gear? That is, not while you were trying to figure out how to beat the boss, but after that.

There are many assumptions in this response that don't apply. It would take long to detail them all and derail yet another thread into 'You haven't actually fought hard PvE yet'.

But I can tell you that FFXI has multiple bosses where 'Which party composition you need to take to it depends on the weather, time of day, and which day of the week it is in game'.

Some depend on 'has anyone else killed this other boss recently'.

Very few, but some, are 'what phase of the Moon is it?'

Sometimes these things are entirely emergent, in ways I can barely even begin to describe. But things like:

"Ok it's Darksday so we have to bring a different Tank, but we can bring a different healer and we don't need the Bard for it on Darksday." are a thing.

And those don't always even depend on the BOSS changing. If the boss also changes (which they do), you have to factor it. To the point of 'KILL IT BEFORE SUNRISE, WE DON'T HAVE THE PERSON WE NEED TO BEAT IT IN THE DAYTIME'. And then realizing you can't kill it before sunrise because the weather just changed and your Black Mage's best spells all got 10% damage reduction.

RIP.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

There are many assumptions in this response that don't apply. It would take long to detail them all and derail yet another thread into 'You haven't actually fought hard PvE yet'.

But I can tell you that FFXI has multiple bosses where 'Which party composition you need to take to it depends on the weather, time of day, and which day of the week it is in game'.

So that just balances out the pvp side of everchanging enemies.

But am I wrong in equating a mass of players with boss rng? Noaani said that he considers mass pvp being the high end pvp content in an mmo (and I agree). With mass pvp you gotta know how to control your enemies on a granular scale, because some parties might not react to your baiting or might overreact and your slight bait would lead to a few deaths on your side which makes you overextend to res them, and so on and so on.

Obviously you can agro the boss and/or its adds, but unless the boss has rng agro stages/abilities/triggers - you'd be able to fully control the boss, which would let you do other things to the boss like maybe triggering new mechanics or just better react to incoming ones.

And I know that you've said that people can be controlled too, but from my experience out of, say, 50 people at the front of a moving crowd of enemies maybe 10-20 might do the same thing, while the other 30 will react in different ways. And then their counterreactions to your reaction would also be different because some of them might not be as well-coordinated with their PL and GL, so their responses are staggered which leads to pickoffs which leads to overextensions.

The flow of the battle can become quite chaotic even when you're attempting to properly control it. To me that sounds like a high end pve encounter. Am I wrong in that assumption?

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

There are many assumptions in this response that don't apply. It would take long to detail them all and derail yet another thread into 'You haven't actually fought hard PvE yet'.

But I can tell you that FFXI has multiple bosses where 'Which party composition you need to take to it depends on the weather, time of day, and which day of the week it is in game'.

So that just balances out the pvp side of everchanging enemies.

But am I wrong in equating a mass of players with boss rng? Noaani said that he considers mass pvp being the high end pvp content in an mmo (and I agree). With mass pvp you gotta know how to control your enemies on a granular scale, because some parties might not react to your baiting or might overreact and your slight bait would lead to a few deaths on your side which makes you overextend to res them, and so on and so on.

Obviously you can agro the boss and/or its adds, but unless the boss has rng agro stages/abilities/triggers - you'd be able to fully control the boss, which would let you do other things to the boss like maybe triggering new mechanics or just better react to incoming ones.

And I know that you've said that people can be controlled too, but from my experience out of, say, 50 people at the front of a moving crowd of enemies maybe 10-20 might do the same thing, while the other 30 will react in different ways. And then their counterreactions to your reaction would also be different because some of them might not be as well-coordinated with their PL and GL, so their responses are staggered which leads to pickoffs which leads to overextensions.

The flow of the battle can become quite chaotic even when you're attempting to properly control it. To me that sounds like a high end pve encounter. Am I wrong in that assumption?

You are.

For a reason that most will consider insulting or arrogant.

What you've described only happens if your opponents suck.

High end PvP is very mechanical.

An opponent 'doing something poorly' or 'reacting strangely' is nearly NEVER a reason to change your strategy. That's why you get those 'unbeatable people' in some games. They have learned 'the strategy that basically does not lose', but they're not even THINKING about you when they execute it.

Some people can do this in 16v16 combat. Some can go higher than that.

You see chaos, I don't. I see 'headless chickens' and switch to 'rounding up the chickens' mode, which doesn't require as much thought either.

Once again, top end gamers are INSANE and they are generally NOT doing or even thinking in the way that most people believe they are. So, complex PvE is added to push them more. Top end League players for example think so differently that they can't always even remember/understand why certain things are possible in the lower tiers of play.

It is possible for a thing that seems like a useful tool for a very long time while in the mid-levels to be 100% always a bad idea against a skilled enough opponent who has frame-perfect timing. And games WITHOUT frame-perfect timings literally make it so that those people don't even have to stress while doing it.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

An opponent 'doing something poorly' or 'reacting strangely' is nearly NEVER a reason to change your strategy. That's why you get those 'unbeatable people' in some games. They have learned 'the strategy that basically does not lose', but they're not even THINKING about you when they execute it.

Some people can do this in 16v16 combat. Some can go higher than that.

You see chaos, I don't. I see 'headless chickens' and switch to 'rounding up the chickens' mode, which doesn't require as much thought either.

Once again, top end gamers are INSANE and they are generally NOT doing or even thinking in the way that most people believe they are. So, complex PvE is added to push them more. Top end League players for example think so differently that they can't always even remember/understand why certain things are possible in the lower tiers of play.

So this is where we come back to Noaani's argument of "someone can always bring more people". How many "you"s are there in the mmo genre? And how many people can they realistically kill in 1v5-7 per each one of "you" fights.

I don't doubt that there're insanely skilled players out there and I'm sure they'd be able to beat a ton of people (like I said, I've seen that happen, though usually through overgearing on top of their skill, rather than pure skill). But what would be the limit?

PvE limits the amount of insane people you could bring to the encounter, while owpvp doesn't. And when we talk about subjective winning sides, the entirety of the zerg would've been attempting the hardest pvp content all up until they'd turn into a zerg big enough to overpower those "insane ones". At which point the insane ones would have to come up with ways to beat the zerg, which would now be a challenge to them and the difficulty of the challenge would depend on the quality and size of the zerg.

And another example I know from L2's history is of a highly skilled and geared party that broke off of the strongest guild on the official servers (pretty much pinnacle of L2's power scaling), made their own guild with a few other strong parties and started standing up to their original guild. And they were managing to win fights.

So again, even when you're at the top - someone will come for you in some shape or form. This is why I think that PvP can still be as difficult as PvE. It's just a different kind of difficult. Leading and tearing apart a zerg until they all die is somewhat different from trying to control a boss agro and managing his mechanics and abilities.

Though maybe I'm missing a yet another FF11 or EQ2 boss, where you had to pretty much fight a "zerg boss" with 40 mechanics and a 100 attacks of different kinds

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

An opponent 'doing something poorly' or 'reacting strangely' is nearly NEVER a reason to change your strategy. That's why you get those 'unbeatable people' in some games. They have learned 'the strategy that basically does not lose', but they're not even THINKING about you when they execute it.

Some people can do this in 16v16 combat. Some can go higher than that.

You see chaos, I don't. I see 'headless chickens' and switch to 'rounding up the chickens' mode, which doesn't require as much thought either.

Once again, top end gamers are INSANE and they are generally NOT doing or even thinking in the way that most people believe they are. So, complex PvE is added to push them more. Top end League players for example think so differently that they can't always even remember/understand why certain things are possible in the lower tiers of play.

So this is where we come back to Noaani's argument of "someone can always bring more people". How many "you"s are there in the mmo genre? And how many people can they realistically kill in 1v5-7 per each one of "you" fights.

I don't doubt that there're insanely skilled players out there and I'm sure they'd be able to beat a ton of people (like I said, I've seen that happen, though usually through overgearing on top of their skill, rather than pure skill). But what would be the limit?

PvE limits the amount of insane people you could bring to the encounter, while owpvp doesn't. And when we talk about subjective winning sides, the entirety of the zerg would've been attempting the hardest pvp content all up until they'd turn into a zerg big enough to overpower those "insane ones". At which point the insane ones would have to come up with ways to beat the zerg, which would now be a challenge to them and the difficulty of the challenge would depend on the quality and size of the zerg.

And another example I know from L2's history is of a highly skilled and geared party that broke off of the strongest guild on the official servers (pretty much pinnacle of L2's power scaling), made their own guild with a few other strong parties and started standing up to their original guild. And they were managing to win fights.

So again, even when you're at the top - someone will come for you in some shape or form. This is why I think that PvP can still be as difficult as PvE. It's just a different kind of difficult. Leading and tearing apart a zerg until they all die is somewhat different from trying to control a boss agro and managing his mechanics and abilities.

Though maybe I'm missing a yet another FF11 or EQ2 boss, where you had to pretty much fight a "zerg boss" with 40 mechanics and a 100 attacks of different kinds

You are.

I don't really have a point to further make here.

I just don't agree that 'being outnumbered' is difficulty, because I'm a programmer.

I know there comes a point where you CANNOT do it. The code offers no way to do it.

I'm telling you that the top end gamers hit the 'code's limit' relatively easily. Zergs just bring that limit DOWN more in online games because latency is a thing.

The greatest enemy of a top Online fighting game/FPS player is the speed of light itself. Second is 'the amount of time their monitor takes to render the information received from VRAM'.

Anything less, they usually overcome about 3-6 months in. Some can do it in days. Xiaohai can do it in TWENTY MINUTES.

PvE can go beyond aspects of this because PvE only has the code limit on one side, and it's easier to get around it on that side (this is speaking from the Machine Code level of programming). Human input requires an input device.

If you want balance in PvP, you're not getting a higher challenge than PvE. If you don't mind throwing out balance entirely and allowing Kara cancels and Option Selects, you can get close, but then those would work in PvE too.

All PvE is dumbed down to be possible to non-superhumans. Adding more numbers to the PvP also dumbs it down unless you don't care about balance.

Azherae

Actually I think I know how to explain this, it MIGHT be the answer to your confusion.

There are things in hard PvE that the average player, if not TOLD or SHOWN that it is done, will conclude that they are PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

You don't get a lot of success in gaming these days by making things that the majority of people conclude 'this is physically impossible to do'. You give them something, you make it weaker, you give them gear to help, you give them power to overcome it faster so that they can win by luck.

The level at which most players conclude 'this is impossible to do' is the level where I start to pay attention.

Two levels higher is where I start to have fun.

Four levels more is where I start to think 'this is physically impossible for me to do if I don't practice for four months'. Which is also the point where a friend of mine starts to have fun.

I'm not saying that PvP is not all the things you said. I'm saying that PvE often goes way beyond that, but how would one even convince the average person 'this is where I start to enjoy it' after they've concluded that there 'must be another way' because the game cannot possibly expect a human being to do it?

Calibix

I can't be bothered to qote everything I read that I'd like to comment on since I'm on my phone but...

1) The guy who claimed PvE is more dynamic than PvP probably has never pvped more than getting ganked. I literally almost spit out my beer laughing. In my vast experience, Pvp is only somewhat static at higher levels of arena when people have full knowledge of their class and the meta. Using AA as an example, I'd win almost every single 1v1 I participated in, but owPvP whether solo or grouped, or fight at Kraken (can't remember what it was called) was always different because there were inherently more variables. The supercomputer analagy was accurate.

2) I don't understand why Dygz keeps posting. I understand he's "interested" in the development due to some personal relationships, but why keep posting? You can just lurk instead of posting your same old opinion with nothing new to contribute in any thread that mentions Pvp. Your obviously not going to play, so imo your borderline trolling at this point.

3) I understand why a lot of people don't understand this, but in most "top-end" Pvp guilds I've been in, roughly 80% of the people do all the content in the game including gathering/crafting. They just get the most enjoyment from Pvp. Myself included. If you think your just going to be a crafter and never Pvp, your not going to get the good stuff handed to you because there is going to be someone who likes to PvP who has just as high of a crafter level as you. No one is going to sell it to you until it's trivial for that guild.

4) To the dude who said he was a top end PvPer, then proceeded to list CS:Go and Lost Ark as his credentials. Lol ok. One isn't even an MMO, and Lost Ark is widely considered terrible PvP (the only positive PvP aspect it had was equalized arenas imo) . Having played LA for far longer than I should have, I can definitely attest to that statement. Calling LA a success is highly debatable as well considering the excessive bot problem inflating the numbers for the entire life time of when I played ( quit just before clown).

5) There was one more point, but I can't recall it at this point so I'll end with my 2 cp.

Noaani

Calibix wrote: »

1) The guy who claimed PvE is more dynamic than PvP probably has never pvped more than getting ganked. I literally almost spit out my beer laughing. In my vast experience, Pvp is only somewhat static at higher levels of arena when people have full knowledge of their class and the meta. Using AA as an example, I'd win almost every single 1v1 I participated in, but owPvP whether solo or grouped, or fight at Kraken (can't remember what it was called) was always different because there were inherently more variables. The supercomputer analagy was accurate.

The Kraken from Archeage is an interesting encounter for you to pick here.

My guild killed it early in Archeage, and as soon as we saw how pathetic it was as an encounter, more than 90% of the guild just quit the game on the spot.

Even when there is multiple raids worth of PvP present, it is a joke, a waste of space.

It is absolutely not "more dynamic" than top end PvE in a good PvE MMO.

People that come along to contest the encounter really only have two or three options, and which option they pick is basically up to how you set yourself up. It is absolutely possible (easy, in fact) to basically guarantee what any potential opponent will do - all you need to do is work out what you want them to do, and then figure out what it is you and your raid need to do in order to get them to do that thing.

People are inherently predictable - and inherently susceptible. The more people involved in an action, the easier it is top predict what that action will be.

Beyolf

Noaani wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

PvP is far more difficult than any PvE, End game PvP is far more difficult than any end game pve raid.

Statistically incorrect.

In end game PvP, the side with the most players is most likely to win.

As such, there is a greater than 50% chance that any one player in a top end PvP fight will be on the winning side.

In top end PvE, that number goes down to single digits, if you want to talk about individual pulls as the resolution we are discussing rather than a full night, the winning percent for players in top end raiding g drops below 1%. Guilds will often spend months on a top end encounter, pulling it dozens of times a night, losing every time.

Then, when they finally get a kill, it is still fairly normal for any subsequent kill attempts to take a dozen or more attempts. It is not unusual to walk away unsuccessfully from a night of attempting a top end encounter that you have already killed, and in good games, they only have a few months of one per week kills before it is no longer top end content.

This means you will spend often 60 or more nights, each night with 25 or more pulls, trying to work out how to kill an encounter that you will then only kill perhaps 10 - 12 times, and will still die to it 10 or more times on subsequent kills.

To say PvP is harder is to say you dont understand top PvE - let alone that you have never participated in it.

End game PvP in most MMOS is instanced based and therefore size of groups is normalized and equal. So this whole thing is wrong.

PvP is harder than PvE because of multiple reasons:

1. your enemy are not scripted;
2. The compositions which you fight against can vary a lot so every match need different tactic in order to win depending on your team strength and weakness and your opponent strength and weaknesses
3. Usually objective driven pvp modes have multiple different ways to win so you have different options while in pve there is 1 kill the boss, so you just need to have the right gear and perform the scripted mechanics.

But this is very generalized. for Example in Open world massive PvP, the individual skills does not matter that much so ofcourse there the army with the bigger size will most probably win, same can be said for open world bosses the guild with most players will kill the boss easier and faster. But if we look at instanced content where you have strict limitations and equalizations then PvP is much more unpredictable therefore harder than PvE, because of the reasons mentioned above.

Beyolf

Noaani wrote: »

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

To say PvP is harder is to say you dont understand top PvE - let alone that you have never participated in it.

I mean, to me that description sounds like my party trying to kill the enemy party that was holding a spot. The enemy was overgeared so we'd kill ourselves several times against them, but after trying different approaches we might be able to get a win, cause either rng was on our side or the enemy slipped up (which in pve's case would mainly just be ability/mechanic rng being more favorable towards players in a particular run).

I've had boss encounters that took over 1k attempts to kill the first time ( not many encounters fit this, but it is more than 1 encounter).

What's the most attempts at a single PvP situation you've had?

Then you have to consider that the harder it is for you, the easier it is for the other side. Top end PvP is thus - in aggregate - neutral in difficulty.

Figuring out a fight does not make it hard. Ofcourse it will take tame to figure out what exactly you need to do if you didnt watched any guides and etc so you will die a lot during that time. What defines is a encounter hard is how hard is to execute the mechanics of that encounter not how hard is to figure them out.

Noaani

Beyolf wrote: »

End game PvP in most MMOS is instanced based and therefore size of groups is normalized and equal. So this whole thing is wrong.

While I agree that this may be the case, in the same way I don't consider all MMO's with PvE to have top end PvE, I don't consider all games with PvP to have top end PvP.

WoW doesn't have top end PvP, as an example.

Archeage, on the other hand, does - and it isn't the arena.

The thing is, instanced PvP still doesn't have all that much variation - because players are far more easily manipulated than scripts are. When you are talking about large scale PvP, if you know who is in charge, you probably know what they are going to do. More to the point, you can perform a few minor maneuvers to encourage them in to the thing you think they are going to do.

Archeages Mistmerrow was a great example of this. If I was running my faction for this, the first thing I would want to know is who was in charge of the main raid from the other faction. From there, I knew what the opposition were going to do down to either two or three options (usually 10%chance of one option, 90% chance of the other option, depending on who was leading).

I mean, I agree that PvP has more possible variation. It is possible that players can do the thing that they think will most likely result in them winning, buy it is also possible they could do something that they don't think will result in them winning.

However, of the above two options, the first is obviously far, far more likely to happen. This effectively limits (even if doesn't actually limit) the options that players are going to take.

I mean, it is perfectly possible that a player in PvP may just stop, strip off, look at the floor, spin to the left and continuously crouch then jump. It isn't a likely thing to happen, but it is possible. If we are going to include things like this, then there is absolutely more variety in PvP.

However, if we are talking about what players are likely to do - there is very little in the way of surprises in PvP.

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