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Hows the pvp?
EpicSuki
Member Posts: 11
How is the pvp? It'd be great if you really explained it. Im all about pvp and thinking about joining! 
Comments
Some people really enjoy it, but I didn't care for it. If they disabled travel powers in pvp zones I think it would have been a little better for me. Take into account that there is the vertical plane in play with fly, lots of stealth, and custom builds that are designed to kill you in 3 shots and get away if it fails. When the third or fourth time someone ran and logged when I chased them down.. eh I gave up and let the fruitcakes have their silly men-in-tights pvp. Yeah and don't get me started on the stupid Droning crap games they play.. it could be better now, I don't know. I'm sure someone who spends a lot of time in the PVP zones would have a different opinion than mine.
So what game would you think gives the best PVP experience. Ive tried GW but I no longer have the money. 15 Bucks a month will work for me. Ive tried WoW but I dont feel like leveling up for years! ANy suggestions!?
I have no clue what the best pvp game on the market is at this point. Honestly I don't game very much anymore. Both CoV and WoW have tiered pvp battlegrounds or zones so that you don't necessarily have to wait till max level to find good pvp. In each you're going to find twinks at lower levels, and a little less of it after you get past the mid point of the level grind.
CoV has its own version of gear grind before you run off to become the God of Pvp. It doesn't have gear, but it does have different rarities of enhancements you can slot in skills. The most powerful enhancements are out of reach if you don't do lots of farming, buy credits from the RMT, or run Strike Forces a few times a week. There are cheaper builds, but the thing about the more powerful skills is that they are on long timers, and through use of skills like Hasten, and enhancements set bonuses.. people build 'perma' whatever they want to throw beat down. Stacking defensive bonuses is also a bit helpful, and lots of inspirations. Too tedious and meaningless to be fun for me.
Eh yeah, forgot to mention that the Hero side has better patron abilities you can earn at high levels.. Villain side pvp is kinda lacking.
warhammer is the game that will deliever in pvp
just have to wait intil sept 18
Except for Warhammer you'll have to buy an entirely new computer even if you more than meet the requirements.
My PC is well over the minimum and right now the game runs like crap. And from what I hear every patch its causing more and more people graphical problems even when they have several thousand dollar PC's.
Not entirely true. I've played CoV for 3 months, when I left I had one level 44 toon (and no alts) with 300m infamy and another 200m+ worth of slotted enhancements. I've never bought infamy; I've never done a farm mission; I've maybe done 5 strike forces in those 3 months; and most of my in game time was spend pvp-ing. All my money came almost exclusively from working the market: flipping rare recipes and changing bought recipes into enhancements.
If you know how a market works and you know how to take advantage of impatient people, it's dead easy in CoX to make lots of money with only a minimal investment of time.
Don't know if you joined or not. but it is taking a serious hit. I13 is bringing changes that is driving the pvp community to other games, and it isn't even out in open beta yet LOL.
Played: WoW, CoX, SWG, Eve Online, DCUO, Rift
Playing: SW:TOR
what do you mean?
I actually have not tried the PvP in this game yet so perhaps there is something I'm missing, but I wasn't aware that any of the changes planned for I13 were going to effect PvP at all. They seem to be primarily PvE or general changes like the day jobs and such...
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
It is getting a complete overhaul. Movement supression everyone getting resistances to everything.
Played: WoW, CoX, SWG, Eve Online, DCUO, Rift
Playing: SW:TOR
Castle's I13 pvp changes
To me it reads like a recepy for disaster.
What's even worse is that after they'll alienate their existing pvp base, they won't draw in anymore players into pvp because none of those changes will take away the barrier of entry.
Quote from Castle:
Player vs. Player combat (PvP) is a fun topic. Currently, we have a small portion of our players actively engage in PvP on a regular basis. We think this is in part due to problems in how PvP is implemented in our game. We want to take some steps to help make Player vs. Player encounters more attractive to a larger group of players, while at the same time opening up more "character build" options for the existing dedicated PvP players. This is a challenging issue to tackle, given the scope of the proposed changes, but we feel the time is right to address these issues.
Our first step was to look at what archetypes (AT) were actually doing in PvP. What we found was there are two distinct different PvP categories: Zone PvP and Arena PvP. This isn’t very surprising, since we originally wanted there to be differences between the two. However, the actual differences were different from what we'd initially planned. Zone PvP was less hyper specialized and formulized than Arena PvP. Zone PvP is more open to new PvPers, but more likely to see the new PvPer 'griefed' and driven out of the playzone (often, never to return.) Arena PvP by contrast, is much more civil but has a huge barrier to entry -- if your character isn't up to par, you are not likely to contribute much.
We wanted to spend time working on revamps for the existing PvP zones; but due to the massive amount of work involved we’ll need to address this in a future release. That meant that we had to focus almost entirely on Base Raids and Arena PvP. We did a lot of work on Bases, Raiding and the Cathedral, but we have to save that for later -- those are all works in progress for a future update. Arena PvP, though, was a self contained area which could be isolated and worked with. It also provides an excellent testbed for Base Raids, since the two are at least in the most basic terms similar. That's where we focused our attention.
We began by looking at the disparities that existed, and discussed how to address them. Ultimately, we decided that in order to allow better competition between the AT's and powersets, we needed to take some drastic measures. We decided that a different rule set needed to apply in PvP than in PvE. By changing the basic rules, we hope to encourage a greater variety of character builds in Arena PvP, and ultimately in Base Raids and Zone PVP.
Currently you've got 2 game types in CoX pvp:
The zones, which are gankzones or deathmatch in practice: newcomers to pvp or pvers doing quests are usually sitting ducks. The changes will only make this worse, because you will have a much harder time getting away from group ganks.
The arenas, which in practice are pretty much dead for random matches on the live servers, with the only pvp ladder being on the test server: talk about a huge barrier of entry. On test this results in teams with extremely specialized builds that tear through any normal group in the blink of an eye. Castle's changes won't change that. The entire arena system is simply badly designed (and the game generated matches still bugged last time I played): there's nothing in place to match players with comparable ratings so that everyone (even the most ill-equiped noobies) can atleast fight fights they have a chance at winning, instead of joining up and being annihilated over and over again - preferably cross-server to make sure the population is large enough to make room for many different rating tiers.
Another thing that is missing from both zones and arenas is the incentive to go there, currently the only incentive to go to pvp zones are badges and quests which are just an invite to be ganked really. Arenas have no rewards other than some badges that can be gotten relatively fast (and no need to do real fights for it).
And now in an attempt to make pvp more popular, instead of first putting more goals and rewards into pvp zones or rethinking the arena system, Castle wants to change how powers act in pvp. His "fix" is simply completely besides the point.
It sounds like the PvP here has the same problems that Guild Wars had when I recently left that game. You either have one of a very small number of cookie cutter builds and have a shot at victory or you have a different build and you have no chance at all. From where I stand, it sounds like everyone understands the problems but nobody really has a good solution to fixing them.
After my last post I went a read a bit about Castle's PvP changes and saw a slightly different quote from him where he points out that PvE players hate it when their chracters are altered because of the way they might function on the PvP side of the game. This happened a lot back when I played Guild Wars. I could tell quite a few stories about it. There was even one time when warrior stances got nerfed hard because of the way people were using them in PvP and made all my current PvE builds at the time useless. I got into a really big fight with a guy in my guild over that who thought it wasn't a nerf and actually ended up quitting Guild Wars when I refused to agree with him. That kind of stuff causes major confusion and annoyance for players.
What Guild Wars eventually did was similar to what Caste wants to do: They made it so skills functioned differently in PvP than they did in PvE. That way they could tweak PvP skills to their hearts content without mucking up PvE. And thats all well and good. But it still never fixed the problems with PvP. It gave them more freedom to nerf skills that were overused in a vain attempt to force people to use more diverse builds, but all it really accomplished was a "build of the month" type of situation. At any time there would be one or two really popular builds that would dominate PvP. Then the developers would nerf those builds and the PvP crowd would invent new builds to take their place. Then you are right back where you started. The Guild Wars devs were like a dog chasing its own tail, never catching it and only wearing themselves out in the process.
CoX can follow in the footsteps of Guild Wars but as you already pointed out, it won't solve the key problems with PvP. It won't attract new players to PvP and it won't stop existing players from abusing certain builds or griefing less expereinced players. It will however annoy the current PvPers and possibly cause them to start looking for a different game.
Heres where it gets hard though:
1. What actually would fix PvP at this point? I mean, really, its not like new players are flowing into CoX at this late stage of the game, so chances are all the people who have any interest in PvP are already doing it and everyone else just isn't interested.
2. If these chages go through and all the PvPers do decide to leave the game, where are they going to go? Seriously, name me another game which doesn't have the same problems concerning PvP. Are you going to go to Shadowbane, a broken, buggy and virtually unplayable mess? Are you going to go to Warhammer, where all the PvP is RvR? EvE maybe, where you can fight a desprate battle for some tiny patch of 0.0 space in the hope that pirates won't gank you into oblivion? Or are you going to wait for Darkfall to stop being vaoprware in the vain hope that it will actually deliver on its impossible list of claims the way most of the other hardcore PvPers are?
Really, there isn't anywhere else to go. All the MMOs on the market right now suck, even more so if you are looking for PvP. Leaving CoX won't help. It will just kill your super group or villian group or whatever when all their members suddenly disspear one day. Then you find yourself starting over in some new game with the same issues.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
I think you underestimate what decent pvp content can do for a game. It means a lot more content (which doesn't require constant new zones/raids whatever) and something else to do for a lot of people, keeping their interest longer. Accessible casual pvp would have a bigger draw than most people suspect imo.
As for not finding what I want in other games: what I was missing in CoX was casual pvp where I could log on, jump in and fight a somewhat balanced match. None of the current mmorpgs offer anything closely resembling to class balance, but they offer this kind of casual pvp: WAR, AoC, AO, WOW do and probably many more.
Okay, WAR I get, you can jump into some RvR stuff pretty easily and thats probably about as casual as it gets, if thats your thing. I would also support that Guild Wars has similar advantages in this area with several options to quickly jump into short and mostly pointless battles such as random arena or silly stuff like Fort Aspenwood. I can see the appeal of that sort of thing, every now and then.
But AoC, AO and WOW? You gotta be jerking my chain with this. Not only are these games not known for their PvP, what they are known for being pretty terrible games overall. AoC in perticular out of that group I can personally vouch for being quite awful.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
AoC has the mini-pvp games, which last I heard are active on large servers. AO got the battlestation (BS) with LE, which used to be pretty much always running at 210+ on Rimor (log in, join the queue, wait a bit if unlucky and then you can pvp with +- equal sides). And a friend, who was trying to convince me to join him in WOW, told me that there is some cross-server type of minigames: always running and a very short queue.
None of those pvp mini-games are very meaningful (or democratic, AO's battlestation for example only works at two levelranges), but I'dd love to have had a similar option in CoX.
My experience in CoX pve was that below level 40 I could log in almost any time of the day and get a team in minutes for pve missions (too many farmteams above 40 made real teams harder to find).
My usual experience with CoX pvp was as following: log on; check friendlist; get to St. Martial, then Warburg, check team interface, run through the zone in case everyone was hidden; get back to St., then Grandville, then Recluses Victory. Once arrived in RV, hopefully there would be actual pvp going on and not just one side camping the other sides base (or everyone left because one side had been dominating: the other side left and the first side got bored). If nothing was going on I would log off and check back an hour or two later.
Unbalanced powersets were the least of my worries, actually finding some pvp (other than ganking or one side zerging the other) was.
I understand that you are looking for some short simple PvP that is easy to jump into without a long wait or having to search for a group for hours on end. That makes perferct sense to me. Nobody wants to spend large amounts of time looking for something to do when they could actually be doing it.
BUT, what I'm trying to tell you here is that what you have "heard" about these games from "a friend" is not really a reliable excuse to ditch one game just to go to another game that will have the same issues or possibly even worse issues.
I can tell you as a beta tester for AoC that the game is awful on every possible level. If you go over to the AoC forums here on MMORPG right now you will find about half the people saying the game sucks and about half the people saying that its better now and you should give it a second chance. What I'm telling you is that even if the game is "improved" now that isn't a vaild excuse to go back for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the problems I personally had with the game were never about bugs or lack of content, I hated the game because it was a boring grindfest with an overhyped combat system. That part of the game has NOT changed, I can assure you. If anything has changed its that Funcom is wipping their fanboys into a big frenzy to get their friends to come back to the game after the mass exodus of people out of the game, which is a rather dishonest marketing tactic if you ask me. Fanboys are just spreading lies to promote the game because they don't want to admit that they are wrong about it but they are also tired of sitting on empty servers playing alone. Do NOT go to AoC. Its not worth it, trust me.
As for AO, thats also made by Funcom and I would personally warn aginst it myself for that reason alone. It sounds like you have already been there and done that in AO at some point in the past, so maybe it would be easy for you to return and quickly get back in the swing of things. But keep in mind that besides the fact that I would advise aginst trusting Funcom at this point, you also have to consdier that Funcom has been pulling people off of AO to work on AoC, inculding the head developer. Unless the graphics revamp they have been planning for the game somehow brings in a huge number of new players (and I don't see it happening, both because of the age of the game and the recent disasters with AoC) AO really has nowhere to go from here but down.
As for WOW... well, WoW is best describled as the Wal-Mart of MMORPGs. Huge, cheap and easy with a lot of stuff going on... but of highly questionable quality.
You can obviously ignore me and do what you want. I'm just trying to give you a heads up on the problems I know of concerning these games... because I just recently came here to CoX to get away from these other games. If you really want to ditch CoX for another game in hopes of better PvP, I suggest WAR. Guild Wars may also be a vaild option, but it is starting to show its age and in another year or two it may well be as desolate as CoX is now.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
Dunno how we ended up in this argument, but anyways ...
I've never spoken about which game I find having the best gameplay (from the mmorpgs I've played, CoX would win it hands down in both pve and pvp
), just that I was missing access to a quick pvp fix in CoX. If you can only play for one or two hours, finding action fast is important, CoX pve had that, CoX pvp hadn't. If I have to chose between a game with awesome gameplay but no pvp; and a game with bland gameplay but easily accessible pvp; then the choice is easy for me and I'dd go with the pvp.
That's why I don't understand NCSoft's approach to attempt to fix their pvp, they could make the powersets as balanced as Starcraft and pvp would still be only a marginal occurance, because there's no incentive to pvp and the pvp types that are there are either unbalanced (zones) or inaccessible (arenas). Instead of first providing some incentive to pvp and rethinking the pvp zones+arenas, they chose to risk alienating the people that do pvp now by doing a complete overhaul of the ATs for pvp. When I read about I13 I ended up further postponing resubbing with a couple more months. I'm going to wait and see where CoX ends up before I spend anymore money on it.
I thought we were fighting about which game you were going to go and play when the entire PvP community abandons CoX because of these changes. Maybe not.
Anyway, I can see your point about wanting accessable and quick PvP options in the game. I'm sure that would help atleast a little it terms of getting more people into PvP. But it would probably become boring in the long run. Guild Wars always had PvP like that and I honestly always found it annoying myself, because you had to blunder your way through the random and team areans before you could actually participate in HA, which was a much more interesting type of PvP in my opinion. And even if they did add such PvP options to CoX, maybe you would be willing to play them even with the current imbalance issues, but a lot of other people probably wouldn't.
I think if they want to save the PvP in this game, they need to both add incentive for people to participate and fix the balance issues at the same time. And that may take a lot more work than they are capable of putting in at this late stage of the game.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
Name one class-based mmorpg that has completely balanced pvp
. None of the other mmorpgs are balanced (one is more unbalanced than the next ofc), yet many of them have much more people participating (relatively speaking) in pvp than in CoX. Also, with the alt-culture of CoX, not all powersets being as viable in pvp is imo less of an issue than in games that require a ton more grinding just to be viable at all.
Unbalanced powersets is really not the reason so few people participate in CoX pvp.
As for it being more work than they can handle, since NCSoft took over the dev team has been expanded and also cranked up their pace abit. Whether they can justify spending a great amount of their time on what is only a minority of their playerbase remains to be seen however.
I was browsing that thread from Castle and I came across a quote that sums up my main gripe with these changes pretty well:
"If you talked to PvPers, or if you talked to Ex who I know has talked to PvPers, you'd find that one of the things about people most praise CoX PvP for is it's pacing and movement. All the PvPers I know who came back to CoH from another game did so because they missed the speed. None of those accounts ever would've reactivated if they were told they were coming back to a game where we'd all now been perma-slowed. The dynamic feel of CoX PvP is unique and excellent and I think it's horrible that we're not going to have that any more. Taking away unsuppressed movement is really taking away the best part of PvP."
Meh, okay. I guess we just have to agree to disagree in this situation. I still don't beleive that "More people = better PvP" per say. But what I really wanted to debate was the issues of PvP on a larger scale. If those issues aren't a problem for you, then I guess there is really no debate.
The History of the Order of The Golden Shields
What kind of incentive(s) would you like to see, Brezjnev?
I could see being given a mission in one of the zones and a phase-shifting device/amulet to keep you safe while travelling (no interaction other than travelling).
Maybe a TF based in a PvP zone?
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The less you expect, the more you'll be surprised. Hopefully, pleasantly so.
What kind of incentive(s) would you like to see, Brezjnev?
I could see being given a mission in one of the zones and a phase-shifting device/amulet to keep you safe while travelling (no interaction other than travelling).
Maybe a TF based in a PvP zone?
I had made a post with some ideas on the official forums once, but looks like that thread got deleted
What I suggested then were lasting rewards that could be sold to other players, in order to provide a reason for people to keep coming back for more. Adding new missions or badges to the zones won't do much good.
Take BB as an example, currently the only reason I can think off to go that zone multiple times are Shivans. I made sure to only use them when absolutely necessary in pve, because of that I only had to grab new ones twice in 3 months -> the bad kind of incentive imo.
Another downside of missions in pvp zones is that they send the mission runner along a known path, making him an easy target for ganking (see the nukes in Warburg or the missions in BB as examples of how not to do it, the amount of complaining I've heard about these is staggering), ganking =/= pvp. A tf could work better because it implies having a team.
My idea for a lasting reward was the following:
Yeah, I see your point...
What would you think of a Bounty Hunty accolade (can't recall if there's a Bounty Hunter badge or not...)?Complete some set of criteria, get the accolade, and get some sort of bonus with it?
I know there are exploration badges in the PvP zones, and badges for time spent in them, and badges for defeating various PC and non-PC baddies. Maybe add them all up, include an additional requirement or two so that it'd take a while to earn, and give it some sort of uber-bonus?
Ooooooh - how about a 10% or 20% time/use extension on all temp powers? Instead of 5 Shivans, you now get 6. Self-rez that expires after 24 hours of game play now lasts for 28.8 hours. I wonder if that's possible...
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The less you expect, the more you'll be surprised. Hopefully, pleasantly so.
I'dd be against it
Currently most badges and all temp powers in pvp zones are obtained, not through pvp, but through pve (or afking
). Forcing pve-players to endure (yes endure, many don't like pvp and certainly don't like being ganker bait) the pvp zones, because in the end they can get some awesome reward, would be a bad move and lead to more hostility by CoX players against pvp (and there's already enough of that hostility as is 
). Another downside of badges is that once obtained, there's no more reason to come back for more.
Currently the only 2 badges that reward pvp directly depend on reputation. The fastest way to get reputation in pvp zones is ganking or killstealing. Imo CoX zones really need some good objectives and lasting rewards (money or drops) for winning objectives. So the gamestyle turns away from the ffa deathmatch it is now, towards something more goal oriented. Another benefit of having worthwhile objectives in a zone, is that it's no longer a constant pursuit: once you've driven away the enemy from an objective, you don't need to pursue them because they either come back or lose.