I'd like to state that i am not a PvPer, in fact i tend to hate anything thats involved with PvP. I've played a great many MMOs in my life and there's only been one game where i've enjoyed playing against another players.
I prefer to play with others to accomplish things. Yes i fully realise you can play both with people and against people in PvP, but the reason i am disliking it, pretty much stems down a specific mentality those who do PvP tend to have. Not saying all do, but the great majority have it when i've tried PvP in other games.
Its the mentality that you end up being blamed by others for their mistakes. Without fail, every game and every time this has happened (except in one game, i'll get to that later).
When i played WoW my guild played on a PvE server, but decided to move to a PvP one later on. I moved with them since i did enjoy to play the PvE content with them. But on the PvP server the guilds mentality changed, it was suddenly survival of the fittest. I will readily admit i am not a good PvPer, and as such i was no longer fit to play with my guild maters. While they loved to group with me on the PvE server for my abilities i was suddently shunned, because i didn't want to spend 4 hours outside a dungeon camping some poor sods, i wanted to do the dungeon.
I left the server and moved back to a PvE server where i thought i could enjoy myself. Then the PvP rewards were introduced and suddenly to get the good stuff you had to do PvP. Well, i decided to give PvP another go and see how it would be, joined some battle grounds and it was the most awful PvP experience of my life.
People yelled and complained. I never got so many rude tells in such a short sitting. People from halfway across the zone would send me tells demanding to know why i wasn't healing then or such. And it was always my fault, never anyone elses.
I also played Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. And it was exaktly the same there. I played one of those melee-healer thingies, forgot their name. But the gimmick was the more i fought the more i healed my team, was really fun class. But again the people on my side split up into 2-3 groups and since i could only heal those around me, i started getting rude tells from those not near me why i wasn't healing... despite having the #1 position in healing done... sigh.
I also played Aion, for a single free month. The game was fun, until i got to level 20 and was suddenly forced to PvP, if i wanted to quest to gain levels i had to go to a zone where pvp could happen at any time. Was merrily fighting some enemies and suddenly there was a wall of red names coming towards me and i was dead. Not much fun that.
Theres been more games and the experienced have always been the same, no matter what class or what game. Except the one... i'll get to it now.
Planetside.
It was/is a game based on capturing bases and land. Three fighting factions that were pretty much the same but also diffrent. There was no PvE here, just PvP. You had levels, but the levels didn't make you stronger, just more versatile. A level 1 might be able to be a sniper, or an engineer, or a hacker, or a driver. While a level 20 could be a sniper, an engineer, a hacker and a driver.
I have two very memorable moments from this game.
The first was in beta, the very last day. My unit/guild was fighting against an overwhelming horde. I think we were a full squad of 10 and the enemy had 5 squads of 10, 50 people. They took our base and we were reduced to a tower in the middle of nowhere. The ten of us against all 50 of them, and we held... darnit all we held out. They bombarded us, bombed us, tried sneak past us, but our defenses held. They assaulted us for two whole hours and they couldn't take our tower. The devs had so much fun watching our last fight they extended the shutdown time by an hour just cause they wanted to see if we'd lose. We didn't. When the servers closed we still held our tower, but the enemy was diminished, only about 25 of em were remaining in the end.
The second one was after the game released and i had found a friend whom i clicked with fully. It was as if we shared a mental connection she and i. We never needed to tell the other what they should do, we just did it. At one point she and i went on a little duo cruise and we went to a remote base. Took its tower and that alerted the defense, a squad of ten came to defend it, we fought, snuck and trapped them, we got the base, lost the tower, retook the tower and destroyed their spawn vehicle.
The next day there was a post on the forum from the opposition congratulating us on our victory, they dubbed us the Damsel Duo of Doom
I played planetside for a couple of months and never during that time did i get any rude tells telling me how i should play, where i should play or who i should heal. It was just jolly good fun that.
Just sad they went an ruined the game with the stupid mecha robots, but thats another story.
I think what made planetside so much fun is there was no real goal to it all. No special drops, no points earned, you just played because it was fun to do so.
Noone got mad when you lost cause you didn't really lose anything, when you held a base you got access to diffrent vechicles. Like one base gave the ability to spawn a dropship, others gave ability to make tanks.
And everyone were the same, you didn't get one shotted by someone who plays 24/7 to get the uber sword of doom +5. Noone had a better gun than the other.
In WoW, WAR, Aion etc, there were rewards for pvp, even if you lost you'd get em, but if you won you'd get em faster. So people got more mad when you did lose, and it causes a bad attitude.
That was cool, except nuking a t shirt in a microwave will do NOTHING to a t shirt.
