Players just dont like massive PVP.

filmoret

Personally I love massive pvp but for some reason its a niche thing that doesn't appear to be growing very well.  At first glance people usually just scream zergfest then cry and run away and goto a forum and write a post in utter despair.  Having played Rift's 180 person fights and actually paying attention to what was happening you could see group organization and tactics.  Same thing for GW2 but one can easily get bored of the player stacking that occurs.  But for someone to cry about ESO's cyrodiil just boggles my mind altogether.  What are people expecting from massive warfare?  You get rewards for winning and using strategies and tactics trump a mindless zerg any day.  Yet people will continually write articles about how zergy and crappy and pointless it all is.

GameboyMarc

I'm a player and I like massive pvp if it's something that I want to do. My best mmorpg pvp memories are from Dark Age Of Camelot. I like that pvp breaks thing up for me from questing and raiding. I feel it has and maybe even needs a place in a mmo. Though I could be very wrong. Today I enjoy the pvp World Of Warcraft offers, though I feel DAoC did it much better.

 

Boneserino

They like it ..... as long as they are winning.

Ramanadjinn

Originally posted by filmoret
strategies and tactics trump a mindless zerg any day.  

 

As long as that is true I can have fun with it.

When game design works against this though I have much less fun.

NorseGod

Originally posted by filmoret
Personally I love massive pvp but for some reason its a niche thing that doesn't appear to be growing very well.  At first glance people usually just scream zergfest then cry and run away and goto a forum and write a post in utter despair.  Having played Rift's 180 person fights and actually paying attention to what was happening you could see group organization and tactics.  Same thing for GW2 but one can easily get bored of the player stacking that occurs.  But for someone to cry about ESO's cyrodiil just boggles my mind altogether.  What are people expecting from massive warfare?  You get rewards for winning and using strategies and tactics trump a mindless zerg any day.  Yet people will continually write articles about how zergy and crappy and pointless it all is.

Yeah, there are people that strictly follow the zerg.

I liked to break off once in awhile solo or with small groups and ambush others. I liked having those options.

Sometimes its for strategic purposes, like slowing down another faction by assisting another faction, or just simple ganking asshattery.

At least you have something to show for it if you do well.

Squishydew

I can only speak for GW2, but i just think it hasn't been done well enough yet.

 

I don't think it'll really ever feel less zergy unless we get proper player collision.

Shieldwalls, healers in the back, making curved shots (bows, siege weaponry) serve a purpose besides just wallbashing, and making it important for tankier characters to be in the frontlines while others stay back.

 

Thats just some guessing though.

F0URTWENTY

People like large scale pvp when it works well. I have had 500+ player fights in darkfall 1 fighting for cities in a full loot game and nothing has ever come close to that fun gaming wise for me and won't until future sandbox games come out.

 

Guild wars 2 and ESO have popular large scale pvp, but they don't do them quite right and both ended up being non competitive due to off hours population imbalances. If ESO or Guild Wars 2 would instance their pvp to specific time zones or not allow sieges during off hours it would be great, or limit the population to the least populated side. In Guild Wars 2 many players asked for this in the form of timezone based servers but Anet didn't care that during off hours one server would have 2x the players and the other team would loose everything they worked on the whole day. In ESO right now it's the same thing. Even, fun fights during the NA primetime but after hours EP has more population every night and take everything.

 

TLDR. Games like Guild Wars 2 / ESO need to implement time zone based instances or sliding cap players during off hours to keep things competitive. Many people would stick to these games if everything they accomplished wasn't taken away from them when they were sleeping due to population imbalances. 

Amjoco

If no one likes it no one is doing it...it can't be too massive then.

Viper482

Originally posted by filmoret
Personally I love massive pvp but for some reason its a niche thing that doesn't appear to be growing very well.  At first glance people usually just scream zergfest then cry and run away and goto a forum and write a post in utter despair.  Having played Rift's 180 person fights and actually paying attention to what was happening you could see group organization and tactics.  Same thing for GW2 but one can easily get bored of the player stacking that occurs.  But for someone to cry about ESO's cyrodiil just boggles my mind altogether.  What are people expecting from massive warfare?  You get rewards for winning and using strategies and tactics trump a mindless zerg any day.  Yet people will continually write articles about how zergy and crappy and pointless it all is.

Then why do t1 servers on GW2 have a queue to get in WvW? Why was Daoc so popular before MMO's even took off?

bcbully

I love Cyrodiil OP. There huge fights, small fights, and 1v1s.  At the same time I want a variety of different forms of pvp too. Massive war, arena, wpvp, duels, all of it is needed. Without any of these parts the whole is weakened imo. 

Kiyoris

open world PVP is dead, it always ends up in mindless zerging or ganking

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ArtificeVenatus

 

Kiyoris

Originally posted by Dren_Utogi

Is this why the Tera battlegrounds are popping ever 1.5 minutes ?

Aren't they like small fights of like 10 ppl on some far away PVP island removed from the rest of the world?

filmoret

I guess the reason I haven't tried any other games is because you are almost always required to be max level before you can begin to enjoy it.  I don't expect to be killing max levels when im only half way there, but I don't expect to be 2 shot either.   I made it to lvl 70 in WOW and quit because I didn't trust that it would be better at max level.  I just don't want to dump 200 hours into making a character only to find out that the end game massive pvp is crappy.  I just don't want to put up with endless pve content so I can enjoy myself with some PVP.  I think a lot of games messed up by making it a requirement.  Another thing I think happens with massive pvp is the individual is no longer elevated.  I can be a hero in a 5v5 moba but in a 100vs100 campaign war I'm just another face who did a job.

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General-Zod

Originally posted by Kiyoris
open world PVP is dead, it always ends up in mindless zerging or ganking

It's ok to have your own opinion but If you aren't going to contribute to the discussion I suggest you find another thread...

 

@ OP, I haven't seen full scale massive PvP done correctly since DaoC. I loved using tactics in DaoC however, the games today don't give the proper tools to preform these tactics.

Axehilt

Massive PVP is great when it's done right.  So far only Planetside games seem to do it right.

Good PVP is about eliminating non-skill factors.  Population imbalance is the most likely non-skill factor to impact massive PVP.

With Planetside games they have a very large server pop which is then divided across continents.  Continents have a per-faction population limit.  In PS2 this limit started very high, which led to frequently lopsided fights.  Later they lowered it, probably a result of my own forum posts which repeatedly pointed out how smaller buckets mathematically creates more fair fights, and also shifts innate population penalty to the high-pop faction.

A simple example would be a two-faction game with 2000 players on one faction, 1000 on the other.

• With no continent pop limits, this results in a 2000 vs. 1000 battle.  (0% of players experience a fair fight.)
• With a pop limit of 200, this results in five 200 vs. 200 battles, and 1000 players leftover on the high-pop faction.  (50% of players experience a fair fight, and it's the players on the high-pop faction who are penalized with a worse play experience (waiting in queues to get in a fight), not the ones on the low-pop faction.)

Maybe there's a MMORPG out there with large scale PVP that accounts for this, but I'm not aware of it.  Certainly it works all the time on a smaller scale (eg WOW Battlegrounds) and is accomplishing the same exact thing in the same exact way.

 

The result when you do large-scale PVP correctly is that any localized pop imbalances are the direct result of player decisions. If you join a battle and it's 50 vs. 150, then that's your own fault (and not always a mistake; because keep in mind it means you have 150 teammates beating 50 enemies elsewhere across the map.)  As long as everyone is working with the same pop across the continent, things are interesting and strategic.

 

But yeah, from what I understand most MMORPGs just let things be bad so it's unsurprising that some people might think it's not possible to do massive PVP well.  It is possible, it just isn't being done in MMORPGs.

BadSpock

I don't think massive scale PvP is really going to be as "popular" in MMOs as smaller solo/group engagements until the technology allows us to to include hundreds/thousands of NPC soldiers to serve as the "fodder" in a large fight.

I mean think about it, every great war movie or fantasy/sci-fi epic with these massive scale battles... every second the random Joe next to the hero is taken out, while the hero is plowing through the enemy with skill and grace...

Until they come up against that one "big guy" or whatever and they dance back and forth for a few minutes, looks like the hero is going to lose, but makes the come back win ahhh the drama, the feels...

That is what large scale PvP in MMOs should be.

But we, players are the hero - and the big "bad guy" you run into on the battle field for the "epic" finally is another player.

 

No one likes being the fodder - it's no fun. 

And in MMO large scale PvP encounters, so many players eat dirt in the first few seconds of a big engagement, it's no fun at all. 

It's only "fun" when your team steam rolls the other so everyone can actually enjoy the battle, reach the pinnacle and claim the castle.. etc. 

 

But allow we dozens/hundreds of players to be the "generals" or the "captains" of an army of thousands, giving us the satisfaction of being a bad ass - and the challenge of skillful combat against another human opponent - all at the same time.

(just don't make it too obvious who the players are, make some of the NPCs better than others, etc. and you'll have yourself a truly epic experience) 

Horusra

Originally posted by Ramanadjinn

Originally posted by filmoret
strategies and tactics trump a mindless zerg any day.  

 

As long as that is true I can have fun with it.

When game design works against this though I have much less fun.

Colonial British thought that of the Zulu too.

WarWitch

Daoc had a lot of tac to it.

It used a rock paper sis system so any one could probably kill at leas one other class  on the other side. You needed to think about who you attacked, not just tab target. You had perma stealth in it you could stealth say on you assissan climb up the walls of a keep and kill the mage casting down on the gate crashers. This would break stealth and then their would a massive chase might  start to kill the assissan sometimes turning into the group defending jumping out to make sure the assissan died. It had loot in dungons but at any time stealth team may pop in while you were in mid boss fight. So you needed a stealthier to find the strealthers and reveal them. The keeps had spots that a good caster could pretty much hold an entire zerg with aoe damage. A good healer class was like every man needs a wife. To move you needed a group speed class.  You could solo class A can take deffinatly take class b 75%. class A can take class c 50% of the time class a can take class d only 25% of the time etc. So this meant you hade to really think about group come as well like could 5 assissins kill a group of 5 warriors etc. Daoc was also made in the early daysby gamers who played what they were working on. They had dome several other game befor and played for fun. Today a lot models have a money guy a idea guy and a coder in another country that dosent even speak the same langue trying to put it it down. So in a nut shell every class was needed if your group - guild wanted be balanced, it game the players a sene of being needed and belonging.

Its all big business now days, its used to be gamers.

 

  

Axehilt

Originally posted by WarWitch

Daoc had a lot of tac to it.

It used a rock paper sis system so any one could probably kill at leas one other class  on the other side. You needed to think about who you attacked, not just tab target. You had perma stealth in it you could stealth say on you assissan climb up the walls of a keep and kill the mage casting down on the gate crashers. This would break stealth and then their would a massive chase might  start to kill the assissan sometimes turning into the group defending jumping out to make sure the assissan died. It had loot in dungons but at any time stealth team may pop in while you were in mid boss fight. So you needed a stealthier to find the strealthers and reveal them. The keeps had spots that a good caster could pretty much hold an entire zerg with aoe damage. A good healer class was like every man needs a wife. To move you needed a group speed class.  You could solo class A can take deffinatly take class b 75%. class A can take class c 50% of the time class a can take class d only 25% of the time etc. So this meant you hade to really think about group come as well like could 5 assissins kill a group of 5 warriors etc. Daoc was also made in the early daysby gamers who played what they were working on. They had dome several other game befor and played for fun. Today a lot models have a money guy a idea guy and a coder in another country that dosent even speak the same langue trying to put it it down. So in a nut shell every class was needed if your group - guild wanted be balanced, it game the players a sene of being needed and belonging.

Its all big business now days, its used to be gamers.  

Class Counters with fixed RPG classes is a terrible way to PVP.

If changing classes is part of the mid-battle decisions (Team Fortress 2) then class counters can work.  You died the second time to that Sniper because you kept respawning as Heavy Weapons Guy.  It was your mistake, and you paid for it, and that's good PVP.

But if classes can't be changed mid-fight, then class counters Class counters is a lousy system for PVP.  It sucks out all the potentially interesting decisions and replaces them with "Sorry, he's rock.  You lose."  It tries to replaces those decisions with strategic decisions of forming a team with more Paper players to counter Rocks, but that's (a) not very interesting and (b) often just a natural limit of who's online at any given time, which makes it a pretty lousy determinator of combat.

And I play my own game daily.

fivoroth

Originally posted by Axehilt

Massive PVP is great when it's done right.  So far only Planetside games seem to do it right.

Good PVP is about eliminating non-skill factors.  Population imbalance is the most likely non-skill factor to impact massive PVP.

With Planetside games they have a very large server pop which is then divided across continents.  Continents have a per-faction population limit.  In PS2 this limit started very high, which led to frequently lopsided fights.  Later they lowered it, probably a result of my own forum posts which repeatedly pointed out how smaller buckets mathematically creates more fair fights, and also shifts innate population penalty to the high-pop faction.

A simple example would be a two-faction game with 2000 players on one faction, 1000 on the other.

• With no continent pop limits, this results in a 2000 vs. 1000 battle.  (0% of players experience a fair fight.)
• With a pop limit of 200, this results in five 200 vs. 200 battles, and 1000 players leftover on the high-pop faction.  (50% of players experience a fair fight, and it's the players on the high-pop faction who are penalized with a worse play experience (waiting in queues to get in a fight), not the ones on the low-pop faction.)

Maybe there's a MMORPG out there with large scale PVP that accounts for this, but I'm not aware of it.  Certainly it works all the time on a smaller scale (eg WOW Battlegrounds) and is accomplishing the same exact thing in the same exact way.

 

The result when you do large-scale PVP correctly is that any localized pop imbalances are the direct result of player decisions. If you join a battle and it's 50 vs. 150, then that's your own fault (and not always a mistake; because keep in mind it means you have 150 teammates beating 50 enemies elsewhere across the map.)  As long as everyone is working with the same pop across the continent, things are interesting and strategic.

 

But yeah, from what I understand most MMORPGs just let things be bad so it's unsurprising that some people might think it's not possible to do massive PVP well.  It is possible, it just isn't being done in MMORPGs.

WoW did what you are suggesting with Wintergrasp. There was a cap on how many people can join the zone and people on the populated faction ended up waiting in long queues and not being able to get into the battle. I do think it was fair though because otherwise the horde would've gotten obliterated by sheer numbers

Axehilt

Originally posted by fivoroth

WoW did what you are suggesting with Wintergrasp. There was a cap on how many people can join the zone and people on the populated faction ended up waiting in long queues and not being able to get into the battle. I do think it was fair though because otherwise the horde would've gotten obliterated by sheer numbers

Ah, excellent.  Yeah last I played they were fiddling with stuff like massive player bonuses for being outnumbered, which I felt was a really bad solution (since I wasn't outplaying those people I was basically one-shotting; I just had some stupidly powerful buff because my faction was outnumbered.)

Admittedly that solution becomes worse relative to how long it takes to re-roll a character.  In Planetside 2 progression isn't totally horizontal, but you can literally create a character and switch factions in the ~45 seconds it takes to do that.  Whereas in WOW you actually need to level a new character.  So while it's obviously way better to have those PVP buckets than not have them, it's not quite as streamlined an experience.  (And like I said: PS2 has some vertical progression, so even it isn't perfect.)

Velifax

As others have said, I just don't think its been done properly yet. I only go for PVP in fps lobby games, but I'd be tempted with a credible attempt, like Planetside 2 from footage I've seen. Provided I could find proper teammates with vent, I'd be all over it.

Kyleran

Most people prefer PVP that is more akin to an organized team sport rather than open world warfare, something to do with fairness and all that.