So... why aren't YOU pvp-ing?

I saw another thread about Zwil, and this made me wonder a bit as to why it is I never set foot into a PVP zone. Through word of mouth I hear only 5% of players ever go there. I can count myself as part of the 95% who don't, but I am starting to wonder what it is that makes me part of that 95%. I have very little experience in the matter, but nothing quite so concrete to make me shy away from PVP in the game...

Now, I can go and make some 3 page report on my thoughts as to why it is I never go slugging it out with someone else in the game, but who wants to read that? So, for now while I collect my thoughts I come to the players to ask why it is you don't PVP yourself.

I get no joy out of beating people, and I certainly get no joy out of being beaten by them.

I'll throw out the most common unspoken reason.

People grow quite attached to their characters in PvE, they're used to the fact that they can plow through hordes of baddies and for lack of a better expression, feel like superpowered heroes.

PvP game mechanics play vastly differently, and the whole experience tends to see people having their characters die frequently. It's like a feeling of betrayal contradicting everything they have been taught by PvE.

Unless one has a strong competitive streak, PvP has nothing appealing to such players.

I simply have zero interest in it. It does not appeal to me in any way.

Go to a PvP zone. Sit there for an hour and listen to the conversation. The venom you get there trumps anythign else you will find in the game, and I do not enjoy being a part of it. (You will find this most in RV, I've noticed Siren's Call to be a lot more civil, at least a lot of the time.)

I've also found that the type of people who PvP are the type of people I do not wish to associate with. People who have admitted to exploiting bugs for their own gain, and are happy to cause people genuine hardship (if you can call it that in a video game) over trivial, idiotic things.

It isn't pleasant, and I only PvP with friends in the arena, or when I need a badge.

i13.

I PvP'ed a ton from i7-i13, but i13 really killed it for me. People who haven't pvp'd before i13 won't really know how bad they made it, but if you did pvp prior to the changes, you'd see just how much better it was back then.

i13 sapped out so much of the fun, so much of the skill, so much of the diversity, the strategy, and the intenseness of matches. Not to mention that you could actually make pvp toons with pvp builds that would actually semi-function in pve also, now? Now it's just a mess, if you try pvping with a pve build or vice versa, it will fail, this also really hurt the ability for new pvpers to really get into pvp.

The mess they made of pvp with i13 was compounded by the fact that the developers at that time refused to take player input, refused to make changes, refused to revert to the old system, and overall refused to admit that they made a mistake.

There is (or should I say was) a few reasons to go a PvP zone for PvE reasons. To get shivan, to get nuke, to get badges etc. Most of the craftable temp powers and incarnate stuff made shivans and nukes unnecessary and badges are only a handful of peoples aim with one or two chacters in their accounts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreadShinobi i13. I PvP'ed a ton from i7-i13, but i13 really killed it for me. People who haven't pvp'd before i13 won't really know how bad they made it, but if you did pvp prior to the changes, you'd see just how much better it was back then. i13 sapped out so much of the fun, so much of the skill, so much of the diversity, the strategy, and the intenseness of matches. Not to mention that you could actually make pvp toons with pvp builds that would actually semi-function in pve also, now? Now it's just a mess, if you try pvping with a pve build or vice versa, it will fail, this also really hurt the ability for new pvpers to really get into pvp. The mess they made of pvp with i13 was compounded by the fact that the developers at that time refused to take player input, refused to make changes, refused to revert to the old system, and overall refused to admit that they made a mistake.

I remember strategy being means that a hidden flying stalker getting tp close AS and tp out to a random direction. Still I can't deny it was fun in RV and Sirens Call, I even remember the europe PvP event in Sirens Call it was the first time I learned about zones had a player limit and on defiant a zone reached to 4 instance for once.

I tested it when it was first put in the game, and then again when it went live. I found it to be the most frustrating thing I had ever done, because I play scrapers. There was also a ton of trash talk back then, and I was a lot younger. I preferred for those talking trash to me to be within arms reach so I could punch them in the moth.

Well, now I am older, wiser, and on another server. So tonight I go to hit on some pill boxes for a badge and end up in some pvp. First thing I realized was that my powers did not work the same. My end drain did not do what it was supposed to do! My lore pets were chumps, and my recharge seemed much slower.

Other than that, there was no trash talking. I won only one, but chased off a few. All in all it was a much better experience than I had before.

I think the main reason PvP never took off in this game was because how caustic the PvP community was at one point in time. They may still be that way for all I know, but I somehow doubt it. I think all the jerks left around i13 and the crazy changes. No one likes to lose and have their noses rubbed in it.

Sore winners are FAR worse than sore losers imo. I may try RV again at some point. I kinda had fun tonight, even though I was on a scrapper made for pve.

Mostly one reason. PvP plays like a different game with tons of sloppy restrictions tacked on. I miss the old pvp where zones flourished and the arena was busy. When you could hop into bloody bay, sirens call, RV... and maybe even a beach fight or two in warburg at almost any given time. When there wasn't one so called pvp server but several with strong pvp communities. Within months of i13 that was gone.

The fact that 3 of the 4 zones on freedom are pretty much ghost towns now and most servers pvp zones are completely dead tells me they screwed it up, big time. I loved pvp back then. Now its a inferior version of the original.

Multimedia Genius Submission

lack of easy entry

in the other game you could easily join battlegrounds. They were a game, not just pvp. A lot of people did it not just the hardcore so you didn't have to be hardcore to play and have fun.

I am not going to go sit around waiting for a hardcore player loaded with purples shows up to gank me.

Before I came to CoH, I spent about five years playing a couple of team combat FPSes that had no PvE component at all. Most of that five years was spent playing on leagues and in ladders, with time spent planning and practicing to hone individual skill, team cooperation, and overall strategy and tactics.

When I finally came to CoH, I was burned out on fighting other players seriously, and the complete lack of PvP in CoH was attractive to me for that reason. If I was going to play MMO, I wanted that feature from it.

By the time CoH added PvP, I found I didn't have the interest any more to get involved in it. I concluded that my approach to PvP was very binary - I either wanted to do it whole hog or not very much at all, and I couldn't be troubled to throw myself into doing it whole hog the way I had for so long.

I did poke at it casually a small amount, but it became obvious that some of my favorite builds, Dark/Dark Defenders and DM/Regen Scrappers, just were mechanically never going to be effective at PvP. Still, it was fun to poke my head into zones with friends, and I had a number of in-game friends who were pretty hard-core about PvP, which gave me both my main motivation to PvP at all and a nice cushion when I did so.

There were a lot of things about pre-I13 PvP that were not great, but I still enjoyed it. It was fast paced and exciting, if sometimes lopsided. I13 completely gutted everything I did like about it and replaced it with almost nothing I can appreciate. Those are my own subjective opinions of its mechanics, not opinions absorbed from other players. On top of that, I13's changes drove away every one of those PvPers I was friends with. So I don't play it now both because I intensely dislike how it now plays and because it removed the players who were my only real motivation to PvP in the first place.

Well for me it,s over an incident when I first started playing almost 6 years ago now,I went into Bloody Bay to get the badges and do some missions.First mission you get is the phone boxes,got the first 3 on the forth bang a pvp,er got me so ok that was acceptable but then the same person proceeded to do it another 4 times ,I sent him a message that you have got the point or what ever for the kill why keep doing it the answer I got was because I can.I left the area and now will very rarely go into pvp zones.I sometimes go in with friends but we take toons of equal strength a fight it out to see who,s tactics are best.

Why I don't pvp:

1. It has never been about skill. It has always been about uber builds and ganging up on one or two people (referencing zone pvp post issue 9)

2. The absolute adolescent trash talking is annoying after 5 minutes

3. In reference to above: the homophobic and racists remarks are disgusting and seen as funny and acceptable - I don't hang around racist or homophobes irl why would I do it in my leisure time?

4. The rewards - Hmm let's see - a minuscule chance at a worthless recipe drop - no thanks. Sure there are badges, but I honestly could care less about the pvp badges.

5. Stand and fight already - zone pvp is run run run run phase run run run run - boring.

Every now and then some friends and I get together and arena for fun - and it is fun because we don't treat it seriously or get angry and start trash talking each other.

I actually preferred pvp issue 7-9 with SOs when it actually took skill. And to those who whine that Issue 13 killed pvp - no the pvp community killed pvp. Back in the day pvp was about skill and people would actually gratz others when they were beaten - now it's all about slinging profanity and nothing more than a huge pissing contest.

If you want a sample of zone pvp - watch the Arena Chat channel for about an hour - the complete infantile "conversations" will show you the maturity level of the pvp community.

tldr;
the pvp community is rude and the lack of rewards make pvp not worthwhile.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

I tried CoH PvP and didn't much enjoy it. It's not that I dislike PvP in general - I've enjoyed PvP in some other MMOs, and play my share of online FPS games - nor is it the issue of trash talk and horrible attitudes - I'm used to just tuning out that part of internet behaviour - but in CoH the PvP experience just didn't grab me (fwiw, the same was true of PvP in CO when I was still playing that).

I haven't given a huge amount of thought as to why - I guess a mix of the balance issues inherent in having so many build choices (doesn't matter as much in PvE where you don't need to be stronger than everyone else, just stronger than the mobs) and that the combat and gameplay in CoH just didn't seem to mesh well with PvP to me (though I'd struggle to explain exactly why).

To be honest I don't really feel inclined to give any more thought to it than "nah, didn't like it" - I have lots of other games to go to when I want my PvP fix so I'm happy to just accept that I didn't enjoy it in CoH - no matter what (if anything) they do with it, I'll likely not bother trying it again.

There's PvP?

But seriously, if there was a 50-50 chance to win against every minion I ran into on a mission, I wouldn't be playing this game at all.

I suppose my greatest issue with PVP is a mental wall that I have. I've come from quite a few online games where the penalties for death are harsh, the community so horrible that I can't even stand them, and to even be below average at PVP you need umpteen ridiculous items of incredible cost and rarity. I fear those issues may have carried over to pretty much every game. Somewhere along the line playing in PVP quit being about having fun in a competitive environment and instead became about taking out the frustrations of the world onto whomever they happen across. The toxic environment spreads. I remember being part of a game that was *only* PVP for awhile. Everything was great until they showed up, then suddenly it was all about being as rude as possible. It's like honor and shame just vanish in lieu of calling others a retard.

There are no harsh penalties for death in this game, but the power changes do put me off in a very similar manner. If I want to PVP, I have to go and make a PVP build, and I have to buy the IOs for that PVP build, and the worst part is since I don't know a thing about PVP I don't know if I'm even doing it right. Every mistake that needs to be corrected in the build equates to wasted respecs and wasted money. There isn't any environment to raise you up that will make PVP familiar. You either know it, or you don't. Due to the innate hostility of PVP in games, this isn't a good thing. With all of my powers essentially drained and working in ways that I am completely unfamiliar with, these two elements combine to form one off-putting area.

My third issue would be just how "elite" the PVP requires. I know there are FotM all over the place in PVP, but those are usually FotM because they're effective at what they do. Running into a zone that is full of nothing but psi-blasters and regen stalkers isn't fun, but if the environment calls for it then this is a big turnoff.

First of all, on the topic of "trash-talk" yeah it's going to be more prevalent in PvP zones because the loud minority outnumbers the silent majority. I don't remember the last time that NPC got a little heated and called me names because I killed his predictable little toon. The nature of people being in zones with other people pew pew'ing at other people just brings out the little trolls (guilty, fun times) And I respect that some people just don't like that. ( You can always turn chat off, I do it sometimes. You don't need chat to PvP... Some people just get too caught up in it. Words are Words. ) Also there are alot more PvPers that "participate" in PvP than you really think IMO, who came up with those random %'s anyways? Also I don't think much of the playerbase really even visits the forums, just a loud minority of PvErs.

You know, I'm just not totally sure I support the title of this Thread. "Why aren't people PvPing?" Should be pretty obvious, it's just not the playstyle they enjoy and it should be left at that. If anything you should also ask "What did/do LIKE about PvPing?" Then again, not sure you would get a ton of responses considering since after i13, PvP has been neglected to say the least, and we all know it has. Then again, that's a question the Devs should be asking themselves, i13=WhyAren'tYOUPvPing??

At this point though, i'm happy that you created a thread about pvp. It's definatly due some attention. Yeah, I play this game for the PvP still, and I know why... it's fun for me, I have came to the conclusion that PvP is just a side-game that for whatever reason you have to spend massive amounts of time PvEing to the MAX (Accolades, IO's, etc etc etc, Whatever else you can think of JUST to do what I originally came here to do: PvP)

And maybe, just maybe the Developers would throw us little PvPers a bone, or 2. Maybe make it a tad easier for those of us who like to PvP, be able to gain Incarnates through an "Award System" or a sirens call Bounty System that we could utilize. Or we could just start simple and let us get Incarnate Threads in zones/"Defeating" Players.

Can we have some new Arena Maps? You guys can't say there are some cool maps that could be made from alot of the newer stuff.

CoH PvP is still good, but to be realistic i13 killed alot of interest in the PvP community, and there has not been ample "support" after the fact, Travel Suppression/Speed of the game is what kept alot of people loving PvP, when that speed was taken... Alot of "interest" was as well.

To be honest I think I have met more rude random PvErs / Farmers than I have PvPers, (which have been IMO the most knowledgeable about game mechanics/builds/TF's/YouGetThePoint) Maybe it's just the similarities in interest, You tell me.

Don't blame the PvPers for using FOTM's, in the end it's about defeating other players, and some toons for whatever reason are just WAY better in PvP. Don't hate the Player, Hate the "Game/System". It should NOT be like this. Some combo's are just at a serious dis-advantage, and i'm sure most of you know that. I know I don't enjoy running around on my electric/fire blaster while I could be using a psi/energy blaster!

Again, Why can't I build my Character through PvP? I'm sure someone will complain about "exploiting and people just farming eachother for HOURS" Who cares, Don't enter a PvP zone, to be honest I don't understand why PvErs think they have to have a large say in anything having to do with PvP? Why not just stay out of it, or be supportive. PvP is not going anywhere, Just fix it.

Hopefully this thread takes a turn into something productive.