As promised previously, I’m going to write a post about the game I want to make at some stage. However, before I get to that I’m going to start by giving a bit of a run down on WoW PvP. Until about 4 months ago I used to play WoW pretty heavily. At times this became pretty unhealthy. Not something I’m proud of, but that’s a discussion for another time (maybe). When I played, I PvPed exclusively. PvE completely bored me. At one stage I was pretty decent at PvP (not great, just decent). However, after a while I got sick of it as it wasn’t balanced, but I kept playing even after realising I was bored of it because I was kinda addicted :/ The point behind talking about WoW PvP is to give my game some context. I enjoyed some aspects of WoW PvP while hating others, but both aspects influenced me in equal amounts, and WoW PvP in general is the biggest influence on my gaming tastes at this stage (along with the other games mentioned in the earlier post).
Here is what I enjoyed about WoW PvP:
- Classes. I like the idea of classes and adapting to and learning different playstyles which can be equally effective.
- The large scale. The world PvP in WoW has been some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming, and it’s because the scale is large. You can get a hunter/prey situation going where each player is looking for the right opportunity to make the kill, and one player might follow another all over the map to eventually beat them.
- Unpredictability. The great thing about world PvP in WoW is that you don’t know what’s going to happen or when it will happen. Like when you get ganked by a warlock and just as you start to get the fight under control you get jumped by a rogue, but somehow you manage to beat them both.
- Skill. Some people don’t think WoW requires skill to play. They are wrong. As in the above scenario with the warlock and rogue, there’s something deliciously satisfying about getting ganked by several other players but coming out on top - knowing you outplayed them, knowing you played perfectly and pulled through despite being overmatched.
Having heard about why I liked WoW PvP, here’s what I didn’t like about it:
- DoTs. Or Damage over Time spells. These are just retarded, they allow a player to continually damage and grind down another player’s health without being vulnerable to attack themselves (by being out of range or line of sight).
- Random Number Generation (RNG). Nearly every spell or ability in WoW relies on random number generation to some extent. Whether spells/abilities hit or are resisted/dodged/parried. There are also many “on proc” abilities that have a chance to occur. For instance cast lightning bolt and have a 5% chance to have another lightning bolt cast immediately after it. There would be times when whoever you were fighting would get many lucky rolls in a row and just destroy you, no matter how well you played. Or you’d get unlucky rolls and your enemy would resist 5 spells in a row and you’d die.
- Crits (Critical strikes). This relates to RNG above too. More random rolls. Being the victim of 3 crits in a row and not being able to do anything about it and dying no matter how well you play. It’s no fun, and decreases the amount of skill needed to play, as long as you stack enough abilities that have random “on chance” effects. There’s critical strikes in TF2 as well, but it doesn’t matter so much because it’s much more a team game and the respawns are so fast and health is so low compared to damage.
- Balance. WoW PvP has never been balanced. And you’d be trapped into continually waiting for the next patch to fix it but it might fix some aspects while breaking others. There’s a big compromise for the WoW designers. It’s impossible to balance arena pvp with battleground pvp and world pvp. To fix this blizzard now just prioritises arena pvp at the expense of everything else. And this results in a poorer quality experience than if a game was to just focus on one aspect of pvp. Part of the reason it’s so hard to balance is also due to the huge number of variables. There’s so many stats in WoW (Intellect, strength, stamina, armor, critical chance, blah blah), and each class and player has different amounts of each that balancing becomes impossible. This is a gear issue. And gear is a big part of WoW, but wouldn’t it be nice if winning was more about skill than just how many hours you invested in getting the best gear for your character?
- Counters. There are some classes (or class combinations in the case of arena) that are hard counters to other classes. It’s almost impossible for a good mage to beat an equally good warlock, same with warrior v mage. It’s even worse in arena where only a very small subset of the potential class combinations are able to do well. This isn’t fun. Knowing you will never be able to beat another class in a fair fight is disheartening. Of course the reason one class is better than another class is down to what spells/abilities they have, which suggests that there are abilities that perhaps shouldn’t even be in the game because they render another class unable to do its job or perform effectively.
- Too many abilities/Steep learning curve. I predominantly played a mage when I played WoW. To be effective in pvp I used over 40 different abilities regularly. As I said before, I played fairly heavily and was therefore quite proficient in the use of abilities and did well. But more casual players have a hell of a hard time trying to do well in pvp with so many abilities.
After quitting WoW there’s been times when I felt like logging on and playing just to experience the fun of chasing someone all over Hillsbrad Foothills on my mount around Tarren Mill. However, looking at the list of what made PvP fun for me in WoW, I realised that the positive aspects outlined above are not WoW specific. If you could capture those things that make WoW fun in a game without the downsides you’d end up with much more enjoyable PvP. The interesting thing is that Blizzard has in some way recognised some of the unfair/less enjoyable aspects of WoW PvP and has tried to fix it by introducing resilience (and increasing the effect of resilience). Resilience is another stat (*sigh*) on some gear which reduces the chance to be crit, the damage done by crits, the damage done by DoTs, and the amount of mana drained by mana-drain spells/abilities. The DoT and mana drain effects of resilience were added after much lobbying by players to try and fix those aspects which spoiled the fun of PvP. Blizzard has also introduced PvP sets which to some extent homogenise the amount of health/damage each class has, which also makes things easier to balance. But wouldn’t it be nice if PvP was designed to be fun in the first place? That’s the goal for my game. Keep things simple stupid :P