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Will the Mists fail like WAR's open world PvP?
Size-Twelve
Member UncommonPosts: 478
For those that never played Warhammer Online, WAR had open world PvP as well as Battlegrounds. The open world PvP was actually pretty well done.
They were large areas oconnected to the main PvE areas in each zone. They had Keeps to fight over and Objectives. There were PvP only quests. You could also level through PvP. They failed miserably.
Players chose the path of least resistance, and queued for Instanced battlegrounds, where they could PvE while waiting. This left the open world PvP zones empty. For those players who did venture out, the Keeps were a merry-go-round. Players would avoid other players, and go directly to the keeps to PvE the boss and reap the rewards around and around again.
Apart from the earliest levels, open world PvP went nowhere. I don't think this was a failure Mythic saw coming. I was surprised myself, and I'm still not exactly sure what happened. Some players blame the Instanced battlegrounds for being too convenient. Others say the players weren't properly incentivized etc.
Either way, this is eerily similar to how the Mists are being set up. What will make it different in GW2?
Comments
Did the instanced PvP in War give non-cosmetic rewards? Because the only mode of PvP giving non-cosmetic rewards in GW2 (xp, loot, server bonuses) is WvWvW. So people who like PvP but who want to achieve more than just titles, cosmetic items and recognition will have an incentive to play WvWvW. Also WvWvW plays very different from Structured PvP. The number of players is much larger, there is no equalizing of gear and skills, the PvE-version of skills is used, racial skills are available, guilds can take over, hold and upgrade keeps, dynamic events play out there etc etc. In the end though, we have to wait and see how it turns out and how the community responds to it.
The Mists will be three way and there will be an actual reason to fight with server pride being somewhat more important than trying to unlock pve events which was the case with WAR. Furthermore there will be no issue with "path of least resistance" as you will not be grinding levels in instanced pvp, you will be automatically boosted and gear will have little impact.
It is unlikely that the Mists will fail as hard as WARs lakes unless Anet bodge up keep design, add far too much emphasis on pve, reduce the "factions" to two sides only and totally balls up any notion of class balance and the issues surrounding CC.
There was sooo much wrong with how WAR approached the pvp lakes that it would be hard for a developer to make their "lake pvp" as bad.
For me there seems a great deal of difference.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
I am an av id pvper.
I will not play an mmo without open world pvp.
Warhammer made 4 huge glaring mistakes:
1. Instanced Scenarios - boring - takes away from open world pvp.
2. Too many multiple objectives in open world pvp where guilds could capture, keep and claim certain area's
3. 2 Factions instead of 3
4. No destructible assets in open world pvp
That's a good point on design. I think 3 faction PvP will help and same with Keep design. I was surprised though in WAR at the number of people who just...didn't want to do it. It was a ghost town.
@Diovidius - You did get actual loot rewards. Epics and rares that I think we're only available through Open world PvP. That's one reason people were more interested in fighting the PvE bosses than fighting each other.
WAR was 2 faction, and their was a point system for getting skills in pvp...It was very unbalanced, and the only way to do it efficiently was in scenarios...This was WARs fault and a bad overlook imo.
Also they kept having to tweak the reward system and the defense system, they made the game not 'worth' it to defend, so players wouldn't defend, just run around taking keeps, and leave when one was being taken, so they could take it back.
It fustrated me, people in a real situation wouldn't abandon their defense, especially when they could easily win, it was silly and poorly designed when I played.
So WARs problems were design, and I imagine, if they are smart, they have studied any of the games with open pvp and objectives and figured a better way to atleast start/base their play on.
Imo, you have to make open world pvp worth more or as much, for your time, if you have a reward system, otherwise, people will go the easy route....That is if you even have a level-up type system for pvp points, or loot. I myself greatly prefer open world pvp, and I look forward to some DAoC nastalgia, hopefully.
(red) Welcome to GW2, where Instanced arenas are going to be a major part of the game.
(Orange) Welcome to the Mists, where the PvP has lots of objectives for guilds or individuals to complete.
Just thought you might want to know...
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
GW2 only has one WvWvW part, thats accessible to all, much more like the very succesfull RvR in DAoC
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I don't think many pvper played War because of the instances. PVP and instance doesn't work very well. Most pvper stay away from War as it was the plague.
But for me if there is a lesson to learn form War is that its stupid to make a flat ground with a nice sky and nice trees, put few castles here and there and call this a pvp map. Mmo pvp maps suck balls since UO. You need to put some strategy in them, especially since gamers don't do the work anymore as they did in Uo. SO ye Warhammer had this right i guess. In any case i hope the Mist won't be the usual bared land with few castles here and there as are all the mmo pvp maps around. If they have no genuine mmo ideas like in Uo, at least use some fps or rts map tricks. Good pvp maps should have hot spots, meaningless cross roads, natural impassable barriers and soft barriers (terrains or mobs), ambush spots, maybe even some logistic need... but i guess i'm dreaming as always...
Ye Warhammer had few things right, put some strategy into land conquering certainly was one.
I think GW2 team are considering putting something like that as well in the Mist.
You must have not played WAR that much because you missed the major WAR pvp problem.
The 2 real problems with WAR pvp..................only 2 factions and RVR Lakes.
Rvr Lakes forced all pvp into ZERG vs ZERG fights and allowed the larger force to always dominate.
admittedly I quit WAR before I got to try anything past tier 2 near release so my experiences may be wrong, but I went back to war shortly before the addition of skaven for a few months and absolutely loved the game. While t3 was fairly sparse, there were certain nights that there was a lot of fun activity. Overall I really liked max level, though part of that may have been that I was on Badlands which had a good population at the time.
I didn't think the open world pvp really failed in WAR, I think WAR failed as a game near launch due to all the bugs and lack of polish. Had the game shipped with the polish it has now (not necessarily all the new features, just the fixes) I think this would be a very different MMO landscape.
Everyone wonders why WARs open PvP system failed.
Here's a simple question to ask yourself, that will explain it all. What was the point in taking a keep in WAR?
If you're going to have open world objectives, they have to have a point. The castles in L2 are very important to take, people wouldn't stop seiging if they had instanced battlegrounds in L2; in fact they kind of have their own version of them.
Battlegrounds didn't make people stop doing open world PvP in WoW, it was the lack of purpose. Battlgrounds gave rewards that could actually be obtained, open world didn't. Why do open world pvp, when you have structured pvp games that actually give you something for the time invested. It's not really the battlegrounds fault, it was the pointlesness of world pvp.
If you want an open world pvp system that works, you just have to make sure it serves a purpose as great or greater then your structured battlegrounds.
Yeah, I came back to WAR at some point and it was like that. A group of Order people was taking a keep, then moving to another keep, and so on. Rarely met Chaos. Plus you had 3 "continents" - so if Order was on 1 zone, Chaos could be on another zone... /facepalm
Big difference for me with GW2 PvP is that presumably there will be small objectives for smaller group of players. I.e. you won't just see Zerg vs Zerg, you can have a Zerg vs a small mobile group, and they can (hopefully) take some small objectives here and there to weaken the winning faction grasp over the whole zone.
This seems good to me because I know a lot of the time people just check if there is a zerg on their side in the zone, if not they just leave the zone. In this case, they will be able to affect the WvWvW even with a smaller group.
Mythic should have seen it coming; they did a ton of bad things to make the WAR world PvP fuck up.
1) They fucked up their populations with too many servers.
2) They spread out their PvP zones WAY too much and it just became one big chase
3) The backing math/mechanics was awful and nonsensical forcing thngs like grinding pve public quests to get a zone to turn over. It was so stupid people actually gave up turning zones for the campaign, they had everything and it still wouldn't turn. It completely underminded the 30+ world PvP.
4) They had terrible performence in sieges.
The player base really wanted to do World PvP the first 20 levels of world PvP were fun and worked ok although some of these problem started to be seen even then.
WAR world PvP could have succeeded just fine but Mythic fucked it up with bad decisions. According to many closed Beta/alpha players this is because they never really put out much design for it until the testers demanded it. They never really attempted to make it work right.
GW2 is doing the exact opposite WvWvW is something they have been working on from the beginning and have not even shown or seriously advertised yet because they are still testing it.
The 2 real problems with WAR pvp..................only 2 factions and RVR Lakes.
Rvr Lakes forced all pvp into ZERG vs ZERG fights and allowed the larger force to always dominate.
Lots of good points. I think there were flaws in the RvR lake design like everyone else, but I don't see that as the only problem.
I think there is an issue with just having a zone like the Mists or the Lakes to begin with. If I'm wandering about having fun doing public quests, I have to actively decide to leave to go to the Mists. Because I will level through RvR, that means I'm having to skip PvE content.
This is one of the issues that plagued WAR too IMO.
Actually, WARs RvR wasn't very well made. The maps/areas had bugs, numerous abilities were bugged and/or imbalanced, it had significant stability issues, the game turned into a slideshow at times, boss drop diceroll system was unfair etc.. It had quite a lot problems.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I'm not sure comparing this game to WAR is such a good idea.
For one, the failures of WAR had much more to do with incompetence on the company's part (rampant bugs, glitches, and a very slow response to design problems). Anet handled things much more efficiently in the first game, and they don't seem to have lost their edge w/ GW2.
For two, the design model of the 2 games are VERY different.
- WAR is trying to sandwich the old WoW-themepark model into their ideals of PvP.
- GW2 is fasioning their game around their design ideals for PvP. (this has a much better chance of working, because the whole game is being built for it).
For example, in WAR, the game was still primarily about loot, and EXP / RR farming to get better loot / rewards. In GW2, the rewards are more based on achievemenet, than exp gain (lateral rewards, instead of verticle). Also, if you look at the first game (up until recently) there was a really healthy mix of PvP across the board. People were doing guild battles, faction battles (which was the first iteration of the mysts), and random / team arenas.
The rewards for doing each varied slightly, with some overlap. As such, you could get new skills from doing any of them, but you could get special rewards for choosing a specific kind of PvP. In addition to this, the Mists seem to function more like an event system, than a standard PvP model. You could almost view them similarly to fortress / city sieges from WAR, rather than standard RvR lakes.
Basically, the RvR system's failings had less to do with it being RvR, and more to do with the game it was in. Ignoring the points that these two PvP models seem to have a few quite large differences, you can see that RvR wasn't really a failure in WAR, the game was a failure in many other areas, and the results of this effected it's PvP. If you were to play WAR today, you'd find almost noone does scenarios (except in T4), and the game is almost entirely RvR now.
We still don't have a ton of details about the mists, only the basic design concepts. However, Anet seems to have a pretty good handle on things, and I think it's a bit early to be talking fail. We only have the idea of the system, and almost no real details. Like with WAR, the system is good, it's really going to come down to how they manage the details. Mythic did so poorly, lets see how Anet does.
Well, there is always the possibility that the mists wont be so popular as regular instanced PvP but I don't think that WAR is a great methaphor.
WARs big problem with open world PvP is really that you get more rewards for instances, and the fact that instances were better made. Most players go where the rewards are best and easiest to get.
Hopefully have ANET made a better job that Mythic here, it seems like GW2 is closer to a E-sport than WAR. But only time will tell us what really will happen with the mists after release.
3 faction pvp sounds just great... but i'm really dissapointed at how removed this is from the game. I really would have preferred some kind of open world PvP, that worked within the whole lore of the game. This magical area where we fight ourselves from other worlds just like our own? Just lame, really.
WvWvW will keep one side from dominating all the time. However, the way it's designed, rivalries will not exist. It's all cross realm with a ladder system. Chances are the person you fight everyday for a week you won't see again. I have no doubts that it will be fun, I just wish we could move away from the cross realm stuff.
I think it will be very successful in what GW2 is trying to accomplish, Esport.
Guild Wars 2 WvWvW = rewards that matter for you, and every player on your server. it doesn't impede progression since you can level up through it.
Guild Wars 2 instanced PVP = you don't need to grind to become more competitive and the rewards are cosmetic.
looks like GW2 doesn't marginalize world pvp and heavily incentivise instance pvp like WoW, WAR, TOR, etc.
War didn't have open world pvp.
WARs RvR failed because it actually promoted NOT FIGHTING AT ALL.
Then theres the fact its instanced PvP gave better rewards, which just made it worse.
Bottom line is WAR and everything in it failed because it was designed terribly and created to a mediorce standard.
TOR doesn't marginalize either form of PvP a they both have the exact same incentives, gear. I commend GW2 for making progression cosmetic rather than stat based. However, I don't feel like WvWvW should be classified as anything other than a large BG (warzone, scenario, etc) because that's basically what it is. A large, instanced, PvP battlefield.
You obviously never played DAOC and RvR.....
It will be more like open world PvP then like instanced PvP...
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)