Originally posted by filmoret You think it has to do with the fact that you can just plug in and get fighting? In mmo's you have to actually build a character and gear before you can start fighting. Or maybe mmo's don't concentrate enough on the pvp gamer that they just goto the moba instead? But we cannot say that about GW series or ESO,WOW,RIFT,SWTOR can we.
Most MMOs combat isbasically made for PvE so I am not the least surprised here.
I played MMOs since M59 and while PvP can be really fun most fights are not. In far too many cases things like level and gear makes one player winner and another a loser no matter how good or bad they play.
Lets face it, the most fun fights are against someone equal or who have an advantage against you but you beat the odds. In MMOs there are usually far too much powergap between players for this to happen.
There are exceptions but the mechanics most MMOs use are bad to worse for PvP. Open world PvP isn't fun because how good you play only matters in a few of the fights while in FPS and MOBAs it matters in all of them.
MMOs need to fix that, either by seriously cutting the powergap between players or by downleveling you like in GW2. A good player with a new character should be a match for a lousy player with an old character.
LoL offers competition through leagues, same as counter strike and battlefield and call of duty. That's fun for people who look for thrill but don't want to grind their asses off to show their superiority.
Gear != Skill.
but in LoL you still need to grind like a madman to be competitive. First just to level your base talentpoints, then to learn every possible character you could face. Thats on par with any mmo grind, its just a different grind.
Even street fighter 4 expects you to do massive grinding just to learn the basics of the combo system.
And don't try to tell me people who play FPS don't grind, FPS players grind even harder then many mmo players do.
Its a matter of perspective i guess. I don't see that as grinding. Sure you do repetitive tasks but that's the moba. Small map, everybody knows what they have to do, do some decent PvP with 4-5 skills that doesn't turn into button mashup and overcrowded UI hack fest.
Again, playing to get better is not the same as grind. It could be seen as a grind if you are some 80 year old guy with dead man's reflexes. But for a young person, those combos come easily and its couple of hours at most to get into it.
And from my experience in Bf3 and Bf4 ... being in top sniper division and top jet pilot division, I wouldn't say I grinded through the game. Hell, in Bf3 (picked bf3 late so i didn't stand a chance) i bought the recon kit. In Bf4 i unlocked everything on my own and it wasn't a grind. I was scoring first places with shitty gear.
How do you think a level 60 would be able to defeat lvl 100 in WoW? That's impossible. And that's what differs MMOs from mobas. In mobas you have a chance and its based on your knowledge of the game + reflexes. Same goes for first person shooters. I can ace the best sniper in the game, i can ace the top scorer i can ace anyone if they are distracted for a second.
In WoW, or any other MMO ... that guy 30 levels over me would just do a single AoE attack and i'll have to run for my corpse.
I can't count the times when I was lvl 40 in Bf3 and killed lvl 100 jet pilots. And i didn't grind. I spend hours on YouTube watching them play. Applied my own style and BOOM. Only the freaking heat missiles could get me, but eventually i figured out how to do dodge those without using flares or EMP. It's all in the speed control and that is available to me right off the bat. In MMOs that's just not possible.
MMOs reward players for playing more, not for the ones playing better. If you have 10 hours a day to play MMO X and i only have 1 hour ... you'll basically kick my ass 99% of the time, no matter how good I am with my tactics and skills.
LoL offers competition through leagues, same as counter strike and battlefield and call of duty. That's fun for people who look for thrill but don't want to grind their asses off to show their superiority.
Gear != Skill.
but in LoL you still need to grind like a madman to be competitive. First just to level your base talentpoints, then to learn every possible character you could face. Thats on par with any mmo grind, its just a different grind.
Even street fighter 4 expects you to do massive grinding just to learn the basics of the combo system.
And don't try to tell me people who play FPS don't grind, FPS players grind even harder then many mmo players do.
Its a matter of perspective i guess. I don't see that as grinding. Sure you do repetitive tasks but that's the moba. Small map, everybody knows what they have to do, do some decent PvP with 4-5 skills that doesn't turn into button mashup and overcrowded UI hack fest.
Again, playing to get better is not the same as grind. It could be seen as a grind if you are some 80 year old guy with dead man's reflexes. But for a young person, those combos come easily and its couple of hours at most to get into it.
And from my experience in Bf3 and Bf4 ... being in top sniper division and top jet pilot division, I wouldn't say I grinded through the game. Hell, in Bf3 (picked bf3 late so i didn't stand a chance) i bought the recon kit. In Bf4 i unlocked everything on my own and it wasn't a grind. I was scoring first places with shitty gear.
How do you think a level 60 would be able to defeat lvl 100 in WoW? That's impossible. And that's what differs MMOs from mobas. In mobas you have a chance and its based on your knowledge of the game + reflexes. Same goes for first person shooters. I can ace the best sniper in the game, i can ace the top scorer i can ace anyone if they are distracted for a second.
In WoW, or any other MMO ... that guy 30 levels over me would just do a single AoE attack and i'll have to run for my corpse.
I can't count the times when I was lvl 40 in Bf3 and killed lvl 100 jet pilots. And i didn't grind. I spend hours on YouTube watching them play. Applied my own style and BOOM. Only the freaking heat missiles could get me, but eventually i figured out how to do dodge those without using flares or EMP. It's all in the speed control and that is available to me right off the bat. In MMOs that's just not possible.
MMOs reward players for playing more, not for the ones playing better. If you have 10 hours a day to play MMO X and i only have 1 hour ... you'll basically kick my ass 99% of the time, no matter how good I am with my tactics and skills.
Well, perspective, playing to become better is the grind... either your player skills get better or your ingame character gets better. its still time invested that counts. Someone just starting out in Counterstrike will have a steep learning curve to get into elite player skill level, so to compare someone who has played countterstrike for 10 years with someone who started yesterday would be like a lv100character in wow vs a newly created char.
Notice that I never once try to claim that MMOPvP is skill over gear, cause its not. But its time invested vs skill and that could be said for anything we do in life. Life is a grind.
LoL offers competition through leagues, same as counter strike and battlefield and call of duty. That's fun for people who look for thrill but don't want to grind their asses off to show their superiority.
Gear != Skill.
but in LoL you still need to grind like a madman to be competitive. First just to level your base talentpoints, then to learn every possible character you could face. Thats on par with any mmo grind, its just a different grind.
Even street fighter 4 expects you to do massive grinding just to learn the basics of the combo system.
And don't try to tell me people who play FPS don't grind, FPS players grind even harder then many mmo players do.
Its a matter of perspective i guess. I don't see that as grinding. Sure you do repetitive tasks but that's the moba. Small map, everybody knows what they have to do, do some decent PvP with 4-5 skills that doesn't turn into button mashup and overcrowded UI hack fest.
Again, playing to get better is not the same as grind. It could be seen as a grind if you are some 80 year old guy with dead man's reflexes. But for a young person, those combos come easily and its couple of hours at most to get into it.
And from my experience in Bf3 and Bf4 ... being in top sniper division and top jet pilot division, I wouldn't say I grinded through the game. Hell, in Bf3 (picked bf3 late so i didn't stand a chance) i bought the recon kit. In Bf4 i unlocked everything on my own and it wasn't a grind. I was scoring first places with shitty gear.
How do you think a level 60 would be able to defeat lvl 100 in WoW? That's impossible. And that's what differs MMOs from mobas. In mobas you have a chance and its based on your knowledge of the game + reflexes. Same goes for first person shooters. I can ace the best sniper in the game, i can ace the top scorer i can ace anyone if they are distracted for a second.
In WoW, or any other MMO ... that guy 30 levels over me would just do a single AoE attack and i'll have to run for my corpse.
I can't count the times when I was lvl 40 in Bf3 and killed lvl 100 jet pilots. And i didn't grind. I spend hours on YouTube watching them play. Applied my own style and BOOM. Only the freaking heat missiles could get me, but eventually i figured out how to do dodge those without using flares or EMP. It's all in the speed control and that is available to me right off the bat. In MMOs that's just not possible.
MMOs reward players for playing more, not for the ones playing better. If you have 10 hours a day to play MMO X and i only have 1 hour ... you'll basically kick my ass 99% of the time, no matter how good I am with my tactics and skills.
Well, perspective, playing to become better is the grind... either your player skills get better or your ingame character gets better. its still time invested that counts. Someone just starting out in Counterstrike will have a steep learning curve to get into elite player skill level, so to compare someone who has played countterstrike for 10 years with someone who started yesterday would be like a lv100character in wow vs a newly created char.
Notice that I never once try to claim that MMOPvP is skill over gear, cause its not. But its time invested vs skill and that could be said for anything we do in life. Life is a grind.
Even if i agree with you on some level, the simple truth is that MMOs are huge games in terms of endgame content. The amount of time to get the BiS gear beats everything you need to invest in a MOBA or FPS to be "good enough".
There is no "good enough" in MMOs. You either get stomped for not having BiS or you stomp. MMOs do not present the same combat dynamics. Hell, even in Starcraft you have to be a lot more reactive to be good.
Also the time to get pro player status for any type of thing, not just gaming, is a lot. However! There is a comfortable "good enough" zone.
My comfortable zone is being one of the best snipers in my country on Bf4. The comfortable zone of my friends is diamond and platinum leagues in LoL. That's where you get the most enjoyment of the game and it has nothing to do with gear.
My comfortable zone is to get home beat up from work, login my thief in Gw2 and wreck some people on (un)ranked matches. I have my own build that is not a meta build but it helps me kill most of my enemies and be the fastest player on the map to provide the most team assistance overall.
It's all about comfortable zone. I can stop playing Gw2 sPvP you can stop playing LoL, we go back to our games in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years ... there is no expack that nullified our progress. I'll need some time to get used again, but frankly from all the game hopping i've done through the years, its like riding a bicycle. So in couple of hours you'll get "good enough".
P.S: Not every self-proclaimed PvPer is a tournament pro player! Nor they can keep up with those guys. Kinda like when you play soccer with your friends but you can't hold a candle to L.Messi while you single-handedly crush your friends with your ball techniques
Real PVPers like MOBA's as they are about as evenly matched as you can get. You dont have to worry that your opponent paid for extra armor and weapons that can two shot you like in Pay-to-Win MMO's like Archeage. Real PVPers like a challenge and want to test themselves. Posers like to group up and fight someone 5 on 2 in MMO's.
PvPers are the smallest class of gamers in MMO's which is why most PVP-centric MMO's have such a small population. Eve has the biggest population for a PVP-centric MMO but half the accounts are alts and a big chuck of the total population plays in high-sec. A lot of the real PVPers have moved on to MOBAs to get a real challenge and PVP in MMO's is dying.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
LoL offers competition through leagues, same as counter strike and battlefield and call of duty. That's fun for people who look for thrill but don't want to grind their asses off to show their superiority.
Gear != Skill.
but in LoL you still need to grind like a madman to be competitive. First just to level your base talentpoints, then to learn every possible character you could face. Thats on par with any mmo grind, its just a different grind.
Even street fighter 4 expects you to do massive grinding just to learn the basics of the combo system.
And don't try to tell me people who play FPS don't grind, FPS players grind even harder then many mmo players do.
Its a matter of perspective i guess. I don't see that as grinding. Sure you do repetitive tasks but that's the moba. Small map, everybody knows what they have to do, do some decent PvP with 4-5 skills that doesn't turn into button mashup and overcrowded UI hack fest.
Again, playing to get better is not the same as grind. It could be seen as a grind if you are some 80 year old guy with dead man's reflexes. But for a young person, those combos come easily and its couple of hours at most to get into it.
And from my experience in Bf3 and Bf4 ... being in top sniper division and top jet pilot division, I wouldn't say I grinded through the game. Hell, in Bf3 (picked bf3 late so i didn't stand a chance) i bought the recon kit. In Bf4 i unlocked everything on my own and it wasn't a grind. I was scoring first places with shitty gear.
How do you think a level 60 would be able to defeat lvl 100 in WoW? That's impossible. And that's what differs MMOs from mobas. In mobas you have a chance and its based on your knowledge of the game + reflexes. Same goes for first person shooters. I can ace the best sniper in the game, i can ace the top scorer i can ace anyone if they are distracted for a second.
In WoW, or any other MMO ... that guy 30 levels over me would just do a single AoE attack and i'll have to run for my corpse.
I can't count the times when I was lvl 40 in Bf3 and killed lvl 100 jet pilots. And i didn't grind. I spend hours on YouTube watching them play. Applied my own style and BOOM. Only the freaking heat missiles could get me, but eventually i figured out how to do dodge those without using flares or EMP. It's all in the speed control and that is available to me right off the bat. In MMOs that's just not possible.
MMOs reward players for playing more, not for the ones playing better. If you have 10 hours a day to play MMO X and i only have 1 hour ... you'll basically kick my ass 99% of the time, no matter how good I am with my tactics and skills.
Well, perspective, playing to become better is the grind... either your player skills get better or your ingame character gets better. its still time invested that counts. Someone just starting out in Counterstrike will have a steep learning curve to get into elite player skill level, so to compare someone who has played countterstrike for 10 years with someone who started yesterday would be like a lv100character in wow vs a newly created char.
Notice that I never once try to claim that MMOPvP is skill over gear, cause its not. But its time invested vs skill and that could be said for anything we do in life. Life is a grind.
Even if i agree with you on some level, the simple truth is that MMOs are huge games in terms of endgame content. The amount of time to get the BiS gear beats everything you need to invest in a MOBA or FPS to be "good enough".
There is no "good enough" in MMOs. You either get stomped for not having BiS or you stomp. MMOs do not present the same combat dynamics. Hell, even in Starcraft you have to be a lot more reactive to be good.
Also the time to get pro player status for any type of thing, not just gaming, is a lot. However! There is a comfortable "good enough" zone.
My comfortable zone is being one of the best snipers in my country on Bf4. The comfortable zone of my friends is diamond and platinum leagues in LoL. That's where you get the most enjoyment of the game and it has nothing to do with gear.
My comfortable zone is to get home beat up from work, login my thief in Gw2 and wreck some people on (un)ranked matches. I have my own build that is not a meta build but it helps me kill most of my enemies and be the fastest player on the map to provide the most team assistance overall.
It's all about comfortable zone. I can stop playing Gw2 sPvP you can stop playing LoL, we go back to our games in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years ... there is no expack that nullified our progress. I'll need some time to get used again, but frankly from all the game hopping i've done through the years, its like riding a bicycle. So in couple of hours you'll get "good enough".
P.S: Not every self-proclaimed PvPer is a tournament pro player! Nor they can keep up with those guys. Kinda like when you play soccer with your friends but you can't hold a candle to L.Messi while you single-handedly crush your friends with your ball techniques
I do not disagree with you, playerskill earned will stay like a bike to some degree, unless patches and whatnot. Soccer does not have patches and therefor L.Messi can be a more stable pro.. I like your "comfortable theory" and I agree with that, and I want to add to it my perspective.
Comfortably you want to be one of the best snipers in your "instance area" but the time investment you need to get to the comfortable zone is a direct relation to your competition, if you would have had the equivalent of MessiSniper vs you, you would have a much harder time to reach your comfortable sniper zone. Now in a MMO the comfortable zone would be Pvping someone your own level that knows slightly less about their char then you do, this is comfortable challenge.
I would love it if more MMO games had scaleable NPC so that we get rid of vertical progressive level zones and can have a nice dynamic world with horizontal progression. Still though in such a system there would still be superior builds for PvP (cookie cutter, FotM and so on), thats where players start whining instead of adapting.
Right now I play DCUO for my PvP fix, even if its heavy instanced and I normally don't like instance games, its got a heavy focus on playerskill, but build management and skillpoints still do make things unfair? But isent part of MMOpvp the planning, theorycrafting and preparation?
I don't want to fall into a semantic trap here where it starts to sound like im protecting vertical progression so I'll just say that and stop here.
I think there's a general labeling issue here in that "PvPers" is a monolithic and unified group of gamers. We see the threads about PvE vs PvP and what people often overlook is that a large portion of those deemded "PvEers" are also very into PvP, they just don't like to mix it with their PvE. Those people enjoy instanced PvP very much and it would be safe to say that a sizable portion of them get their PvP fix in MOBAs.
A lot of these discussions regarding PvP in MMO's actually relates to a specific type of PvPer; the "OWPvPer" to be exact. I'm personally not an OWPvP fan, but I really enjoy PvP. I enjoy it when it's my objective. But when my objective is to accomplish some PvE, I don't want to be bothered by PvP, and that's where OWPvPers get confused. I'm more than happy to engage in PvP against them in a BG/Area format, but I don't particularly want anything to do with them when I'm trying to punch a dragon in the face or gather some ore.
So I wouldn't say "PvPers" prefer MOBA's over MMO's, but I would say that not all PvPers are interested in or care about OWPvP.
Best explanation I've read yet. While I enjoy BGs, I would never consider an OWPvP game because the "OW" part of the PvP conflicts with my goal-oriented brain.
OP, you have to consider that twitch TV is not by any stretch a proper polling form. There is a huge population of gamers who do not twitch, or even know what is or care. What you're really saying is that of the twitch watching gamer (and no one knows what percentage of over-all gamers that is) the majority prefer the entertainment of LOL. You can pull any damn supposition out of your hat you want based on that slight fact, but it doesn't make it meaningful.
I'm looking at twitch.tv and seeing that this probably represents the gaming market to some degree. IE viewers would represent an actual % of players who are currently playing these games. It's hard to say these people are more inclined to watch twitch streams about esports instead of their favorite mmo. Now before I go into the numbers we realize that any new game automatically has a ton of viewers because its brand spanking new and they are just checking it out. These games will fall into place within a month or so.
So current viewers are League of Legends 121k viewers meaning that there is at least 2 million people playing that game right now as we speak. This is a safe number considering that 5% of the players might be currently watching twitch.
LOL 121k
Counterstrike 44k
Hearthstone 36k
Random New game 29k
DOTA 28k
H1Z1 17k
Soccer 15k
Minecraft 13k
Warcraft 10k
Notice the top 6 games are PVP games and 5 of them are moba
They consist of more players then almost all other games combined.
There are more people playing LOL then WOW,Rift,SWTOR, and ESO combined right now.
So why would people rather play a moba PVP game then the Moba style instance pvp that MMO's offer?
Why would they rather play moba's over massive war games like ESO or GW2 or Planetside?
I don't give a shit what website full of attention whores plays. More people played other genres when MMORPG came out.
The problem has been for years,
MOST OF YOU ARE ON THE WRONG BOARD/IN THE WRONG GENRE, GTFO!
I love pvp, I hate league, I am completely fascinated though, I am fascinated because league along with a bunch of other pure shit games are popular and profitable. Absolutely mind boggling.
MOBAs are akin to televised spectator sports, so of course are highly viewed. PvP I prefer is more like watching a war documentary on the History channel.
When there is nothing really on the line to win or lose, you are just playing a game.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Never been a fan of WoW stype PvP even though I did it for years. Just because gear matters a lot in PvP balance. I much rather PvP in DAoC, GW2 where gear matters little and skill rains on high. Not all RPGs are about gear progression. Thats why games like that had a huge PvP following.
Yeah GW2 definitely eliminated gear and level as non-skill factors, which was a big plus. But population imbalances were still an issue.
Acceptable population imbalances are when they add to a game's interesting choices. If each faction on a WvWvW map has 300 players, and I find myself in a outnumbered 50 vs. 300 fight, then that's the result of a player mistake.
But if the original 300-per-faction populations aren't even, then pop imbalance detracts significantly from the game's interesting choices, and that's bad. Seemed like GW2 didn't really control for population, so it had this bad sort of pop imbalance.
(Also worth noting there's a lot of nuance to the good types of population imbalance. If the base you're defending with 50 players is only worth 50 players, then the enemy tossing 300 at it means they're the ones making the mistake. In fact Planetside 2 does a fantastic job of balancing many objectives across the map in such a way that over-zerging a single base is strongly penalized (you can almost always force the victory by piling onto a base, but usually it'll cost you 2-4 other bases in the meantime and you'll lose ground overall.))
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Originally posted by TiamatRoar One major issue (and FAR from the only one) with integrating PvP with PvE is the inherent imbalance in it. Mainly, any SMART PvPer that doesn't care about fair play will wait for the PvEer to engage the monster first and THEN attack. Then you get a scenario where you got one guy that was PvEing a monster, and now suddenly has to PvE the monster AND deal with the PvPer at the SAME TIME.
This pretty much sums up the PvE thought process. When I'm engaging something in PvE I stay hyper focused on what is going on around me and I save any escape type skills i have. If I'm in a dangerous area I probably find a guild mate to group up with me for safety. If I see someone I don't know in the area I play things carefully and don't pull anything too difficult. To me PvP is never unfair. That is the gist of the PvP mindset. If you have to make things fair and clinical you are left with arena style PvP which is just boring. I want unpredictable and spontaneous, not cold and clinical.
Now I don't expect any major developer to release with open world PvP as the default. All I ask is the games go back to releasing with 1 server with the rule set. More than anything else this is what is killing this genre for me. PvE with absolutely no threat from other players is well, boring. There is no threat to leveling in these games. Killing poor AI for hours on hours isn't very fun in and of itself. For someone with a PvP mentality these games really need PvP in them. I might have kept playing GW2 if they had a single PvP server. Instead it took me 3 tries just to reach max level because I kept getting bored before I reached it.
It seems like in recent years devs have decided they can throw in some PvP zone and that will make the 'PvP crowd' happy. Well zoned PvP is for the PvE crowd, it isn't really aimed at the heavier PvP crowd at all, that is never going to make them happy.
Moba is just a technical term we used for LOL but they are actually the same thing as the 12vs12 shooter and the 1v1 card game. They fall into the same small group pvp category.
Term you're looking for is "instanced PVP" or "lobby PVP".
Closed, instanced, arena type of PVP was, is and will be most popular for of PVP.
In dawn of mutliplayer games - it was Quake and Unreal Tornament.
Later it was Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Starcraft and Warcraft 3
Now it is LoL, Dota, WoT, Battlefield and few other PvP games.
There is nothing new. Most PVPers always preferred closed arena PVP matches.
MMORPGs are losing lobby PVP population because MMORPG instanced arenas&battlegrounds cannot compete with specialized lobby game.
Originally posted by TiamatRoar One major issue (and FAR from the only one) with integrating PvP with PvE is the inherent imbalance in it. Mainly, any SMART PvPer that doesn't care about fair play will wait for the PvEer to engage the monster first and THEN attack. Then you get a scenario where you got one guy that was PvEing a monster, and now suddenly has to PvE the monster AND deal with the PvPer at the SAME TIME.
This pretty much sums up the PvE thought process. When I'm engaging something in PvE I stay hyper focused on what is going on around me and I save any escape type skills i have. If I'm in a dangerous area I probably find a guild mate to group up with me for safety. If I see someone I don't know in the area I play things carefully and don't pull anything too difficult. To me PvP is never unfair.
A situation where you have to focus on keeping your escape skills open, on what you're pulling, and on people you don't know in the area whereas the hunter only has to focus on you is the very definition of unfair.
And I'm only speaking in singulars to keep it simple. If you're going to drag "have a guild mate to group up with you" into it, you're basically either spending two people to defend against one hunter, and/or not taking into account the fact that bringing along his own guildmate (or five) is an option for the hunter as well. One where the hunter again has a bigger advantage because he and his friends know exactly what they're getting into while you don't. A hunter picks and chooses the battles while the PvEer doesn't. When a PvEer is fighting a monster, they can't choose whether or not the hunter will attack them. The same does not apply to the hunter, who gets the initiative of choice. You could very well be wasting your guildmate's time in an area that doesn't have enough spawn for two people while a lone hunter simply decides to move on and spend his time on something more worthwhile, for example. Alternatively you could opt to NOT waste your giuldmate's time and pull something more suited to the two of you to fight for more loot, in which case, the hunter, who again is the one with the initiative of choice, may choose to strike.
By nature, the player killer, not the PvEer, is the one with the initiative. That's what a player killer IS (one who takes the initiative to kill someone else). Because of this, any option a PvEer brings to the table is one a PKiller can also bring but in a more advantageous position. There's a reason why if player killing doesn't get strict penalties in any MMO, it tends to become rampant.
Originally posted by filmoret You think it has to do with the fact that you can just plug in and get fighting? In mmo's you have to actually build a character and gear before you can start fighting. Or maybe mmo's don't concentrate enough on the pvp gamer that they just goto the moba instead? But we cannot say that about GW series or ESO,WOW,RIFT,SWTOR can we.
[mod edit] They can be assed with something that does not deliver instant saticefaction on the action front, and right now, they are the ones with most time on thier hands to play games. Simple as that.
Originally posted by filmoret You think it has to do with the fact that you can just plug in and get fighting? In mmo's you have to actually build a character and gear before you can start fighting. Or maybe mmo's don't concentrate enough on the pvp gamer that they just goto the moba instead? But we cannot say that about GW series or ESO,WOW,RIFT,SWTOR can we.
Nope, it is all about the ADHD generation. They can be assed with something that does not deliver instant saticefaction on the action front, and right now, they are the ones with most time on thier hands to play games. Simple as that.
I personally find the idea of people with ADHD who just want a quick gaming fix in an entertainment medium that's meant to be just for fun to be more sensible than the idea of people addicted to the skinner box who click on a stone over and over again for hours on end to build a better suit of armour to give them an advantage over the guy that didn't.
(gets even more lame if wallet warriors are thrown into the equation)
but in LoL you still need to grind like a madman to be competitive. First just to level your base talentpoints, then to learn every possible character you could face. Thats on par with any mmo grind, its just a different grind.
Even street fighter 4 expects you to do massive grinding just to learn the basics of the combo system.
And don't try to tell me people who play FPS don't grind, FPS players grind even harder then many mmo players do.
Practicing to improve one's own skill isn't grinding.
Grinding is about some artificial game mechanic the game imposes on players.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
but in LoL you still need to grind like a madman to be competitive. First just to level your base talentpoints, then to learn every possible character you could face. Thats on par with any mmo grind, its just a different grind.
Even street fighter 4 expects you to do massive grinding just to learn the basics of the combo system.
And don't try to tell me people who play FPS don't grind, FPS players grind even harder then many mmo players do.
Practicing to improve one's own skill isn't grinding.
Grinding is about some artificial game mechanic the game imposes on players.
Also, twitch skills carry over at least in some form to other games. That +1 sword of infinity you grinded three thousand hamsters to get in Fantasy RPG Online? It's GONE when you go to play ArcheEra and need to grind five thousand harlequin sacks for the Red Dragon Sword. Those improved reflexes you got from playing Duke Nukem For Love over and over? They'll at least still be there in part when you start playing Unreal Tournament For Real.
Comments
Most MMOs combat isbasically made for PvE so I am not the least surprised here.
I played MMOs since M59 and while PvP can be really fun most fights are not. In far too many cases things like level and gear makes one player winner and another a loser no matter how good or bad they play.
Lets face it, the most fun fights are against someone equal or who have an advantage against you but you beat the odds. In MMOs there are usually far too much powergap between players for this to happen.
There are exceptions but the mechanics most MMOs use are bad to worse for PvP. Open world PvP isn't fun because how good you play only matters in a few of the fights while in FPS and MOBAs it matters in all of them.
MMOs need to fix that, either by seriously cutting the powergap between players or by downleveling you like in GW2. A good player with a new character should be a match for a lousy player with an old character.
Its a matter of perspective i guess. I don't see that as grinding. Sure you do repetitive tasks but that's the moba. Small map, everybody knows what they have to do, do some decent PvP with 4-5 skills that doesn't turn into button mashup and overcrowded UI hack fest.
Again, playing to get better is not the same as grind. It could be seen as a grind if you are some 80 year old guy with dead man's reflexes. But for a young person, those combos come easily and its couple of hours at most to get into it.
And from my experience in Bf3 and Bf4 ... being in top sniper division and top jet pilot division, I wouldn't say I grinded through the game. Hell, in Bf3 (picked bf3 late so i didn't stand a chance) i bought the recon kit. In Bf4 i unlocked everything on my own and it wasn't a grind. I was scoring first places with shitty gear.
How do you think a level 60 would be able to defeat lvl 100 in WoW? That's impossible. And that's what differs MMOs from mobas. In mobas you have a chance and its based on your knowledge of the game + reflexes. Same goes for first person shooters. I can ace the best sniper in the game, i can ace the top scorer i can ace anyone if they are distracted for a second.
In WoW, or any other MMO ... that guy 30 levels over me would just do a single AoE attack and i'll have to run for my corpse.
I can't count the times when I was lvl 40 in Bf3 and killed lvl 100 jet pilots. And i didn't grind. I spend hours on YouTube watching them play. Applied my own style and BOOM. Only the freaking heat missiles could get me, but eventually i figured out how to do dodge those without using flares or EMP. It's all in the speed control and that is available to me right off the bat. In MMOs that's just not possible.
MMOs reward players for playing more, not for the ones playing better. If you have 10 hours a day to play MMO X and i only have 1 hour ... you'll basically kick my ass 99% of the time, no matter how good I am with my tactics and skills.
Well, perspective, playing to become better is the grind... either your player skills get better or your ingame character gets better. its still time invested that counts. Someone just starting out in Counterstrike will have a steep learning curve to get into elite player skill level, so to compare someone who has played countterstrike for 10 years with someone who started yesterday would be like a lv100character in wow vs a newly created char.
Notice that I never once try to claim that MMOPvP is skill over gear, cause its not. But its time invested vs skill and that could be said for anything we do in life. Life is a grind.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!
Even if i agree with you on some level, the simple truth is that MMOs are huge games in terms of endgame content. The amount of time to get the BiS gear beats everything you need to invest in a MOBA or FPS to be "good enough".
There is no "good enough" in MMOs. You either get stomped for not having BiS or you stomp. MMOs do not present the same combat dynamics. Hell, even in Starcraft you have to be a lot more reactive to be good.
Also the time to get pro player status for any type of thing, not just gaming, is a lot. However! There is a comfortable "good enough" zone.
My comfortable zone is being one of the best snipers in my country on Bf4. The comfortable zone of my friends is diamond and platinum leagues in LoL. That's where you get the most enjoyment of the game and it has nothing to do with gear.
My comfortable zone is to get home beat up from work, login my thief in Gw2 and wreck some people on (un)ranked matches. I have my own build that is not a meta build but it helps me kill most of my enemies and be the fastest player on the map to provide the most team assistance overall.
It's all about comfortable zone. I can stop playing Gw2 sPvP you can stop playing LoL, we go back to our games in 6 months, 1 year, 2 years ... there is no expack that nullified our progress. I'll need some time to get used again, but frankly from all the game hopping i've done through the years, its like riding a bicycle. So in couple of hours you'll get "good enough".
P.S: Not every self-proclaimed PvPer is a tournament pro player! Nor they can keep up with those guys. Kinda like when you play soccer with your friends but you can't hold a candle to L.Messi while you single-handedly crush your friends with your ball techniques
Real PVPers like MOBA's as they are about as evenly matched as you can get. You dont have to worry that your opponent paid for extra armor and weapons that can two shot you like in Pay-to-Win MMO's like Archeage. Real PVPers like a challenge and want to test themselves. Posers like to group up and fight someone 5 on 2 in MMO's.
PvPers are the smallest class of gamers in MMO's which is why most PVP-centric MMO's have such a small population. Eve has the biggest population for a PVP-centric MMO but half the accounts are alts and a big chuck of the total population plays in high-sec. A lot of the real PVPers have moved on to MOBAs to get a real challenge and PVP in MMO's is dying.
I do not disagree with you, playerskill earned will stay like a bike to some degree, unless patches and whatnot. Soccer does not have patches and therefor L.Messi can be a more stable pro.. I like your "comfortable theory" and I agree with that, and I want to add to it my perspective.
Comfortably you want to be one of the best snipers in your "instance area" but the time investment you need to get to the comfortable zone is a direct relation to your competition, if you would have had the equivalent of MessiSniper vs you, you would have a much harder time to reach your comfortable sniper zone. Now in a MMO the comfortable zone would be Pvping someone your own level that knows slightly less about their char then you do, this is comfortable challenge.
I would love it if more MMO games had scaleable NPC so that we get rid of vertical progressive level zones and can have a nice dynamic world with horizontal progression. Still though in such a system there would still be superior builds for PvP (cookie cutter, FotM and so on), thats where players start whining instead of adapting.
Right now I play DCUO for my PvP fix, even if its heavy instanced and I normally don't like instance games, its got a heavy focus on playerskill, but build management and skillpoints still do make things unfair? But isent part of MMOpvp the planning, theorycrafting and preparation?
I don't want to fall into a semantic trap here where it starts to sound like im protecting vertical progression so I'll just say that and stop here.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!
i hate MOBA's and im a pvp'er.
Just because there's a lot of viewers...
Doesn't mean a game is "popular".
WoW is boring as HELL to watch, but many people love to play. (PVP as well)
League is fun to watch for many people, but not always the most fun to play.
Best explanation I've read yet. While I enjoy BGs, I would never consider an OWPvP game because the "OW" part of the PvP conflicts with my goal-oriented brain.
OP, you have to consider that twitch TV is not by any stretch a proper polling form. There is a huge population of gamers who do not twitch, or even know what is or care. What you're really saying is that of the twitch watching gamer (and no one knows what percentage of over-all gamers that is) the majority prefer the entertainment of LOL. You can pull any damn supposition out of your hat you want based on that slight fact, but it doesn't make it meaningful.
I don't give a shit what website full of attention whores plays. More people played other genres when MMORPG came out.
The problem has been for years,
MOST OF YOU ARE ON THE WRONG BOARD/IN THE WRONG GENRE, GTFO!
When there is nothing really on the line to win or lose, you are just playing a game.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
hmm .. there isn't really anything on the line for playing video games anyway.
And we are talking about video games, right? So what else can it be but "just playing a game" .. by definition.
Yeah GW2 definitely eliminated gear and level as non-skill factors, which was a big plus. But population imbalances were still an issue.
Acceptable population imbalances are when they add to a game's interesting choices. If each faction on a WvWvW map has 300 players, and I find myself in a outnumbered 50 vs. 300 fight, then that's the result of a player mistake.
But if the original 300-per-faction populations aren't even, then pop imbalance detracts significantly from the game's interesting choices, and that's bad. Seemed like GW2 didn't really control for population, so it had this bad sort of pop imbalance.
(Also worth noting there's a lot of nuance to the good types of population imbalance. If the base you're defending with 50 players is only worth 50 players, then the enemy tossing 300 at it means they're the ones making the mistake. In fact Planetside 2 does a fantastic job of balancing many objectives across the map in such a way that over-zerging a single base is strongly penalized (you can almost always force the victory by piling onto a base, but usually it'll cost you 2-4 other bases in the meantime and you'll lose ground overall.))
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Hey now, pixels are serious business!
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
This pretty much sums up the PvE thought process. When I'm engaging something in PvE I stay hyper focused on what is going on around me and I save any escape type skills i have. If I'm in a dangerous area I probably find a guild mate to group up with me for safety. If I see someone I don't know in the area I play things carefully and don't pull anything too difficult. To me PvP is never unfair. That is the gist of the PvP mindset. If you have to make things fair and clinical you are left with arena style PvP which is just boring. I want unpredictable and spontaneous, not cold and clinical.
Now I don't expect any major developer to release with open world PvP as the default. All I ask is the games go back to releasing with 1 server with the rule set. More than anything else this is what is killing this genre for me. PvE with absolutely no threat from other players is well, boring. There is no threat to leveling in these games. Killing poor AI for hours on hours isn't very fun in and of itself. For someone with a PvP mentality these games really need PvP in them. I might have kept playing GW2 if they had a single PvP server. Instead it took me 3 tries just to reach max level because I kept getting bored before I reached it.
It seems like in recent years devs have decided they can throw in some PvP zone and that will make the 'PvP crowd' happy. Well zoned PvP is for the PvE crowd, it isn't really aimed at the heavier PvP crowd at all, that is never going to make them happy.
Term you're looking for is "instanced PVP" or "lobby PVP".
Closed, instanced, arena type of PVP was, is and will be most popular for of PVP.
In dawn of mutliplayer games - it was Quake and Unreal Tornament.
Later it was Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Starcraft and Warcraft 3
Now it is LoL, Dota, WoT, Battlefield and few other PvP games.
There is nothing new. Most PVPers always preferred closed arena PVP matches.
MMORPGs are losing lobby PVP population because MMORPG instanced arenas&battlegrounds cannot compete with specialized lobby game.
A situation where you have to focus on keeping your escape skills open, on what you're pulling, and on people you don't know in the area whereas the hunter only has to focus on you is the very definition of unfair.
And I'm only speaking in singulars to keep it simple. If you're going to drag "have a guild mate to group up with you" into it, you're basically either spending two people to defend against one hunter, and/or not taking into account the fact that bringing along his own guildmate (or five) is an option for the hunter as well. One where the hunter again has a bigger advantage because he and his friends know exactly what they're getting into while you don't. A hunter picks and chooses the battles while the PvEer doesn't. When a PvEer is fighting a monster, they can't choose whether or not the hunter will attack them. The same does not apply to the hunter, who gets the initiative of choice. You could very well be wasting your guildmate's time in an area that doesn't have enough spawn for two people while a lone hunter simply decides to move on and spend his time on something more worthwhile, for example. Alternatively you could opt to NOT waste your giuldmate's time and pull something more suited to the two of you to fight for more loot, in which case, the hunter, who again is the one with the initiative of choice, may choose to strike.
By nature, the player killer, not the PvEer, is the one with the initiative. That's what a player killer IS (one who takes the initiative to kill someone else). Because of this, any option a PvEer brings to the table is one a PKiller can also bring but in a more advantageous position. There's a reason why if player killing doesn't get strict penalties in any MMO, it tends to become rampant.
[mod edit] They can be assed with something that does not deliver instant saticefaction on the action front, and right now, they are the ones with most time on thier hands to play games. Simple as that.
Are you sure you're a PvPer? Maybe you're a PKer?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I personally find the idea of people with ADHD who just want a quick gaming fix in an entertainment medium that's meant to be just for fun to be more sensible than the idea of people addicted to the skinner box who click on a stone over and over again for hours on end to build a better suit of armour to give them an advantage over the guy that didn't.
(gets even more lame if wallet warriors are thrown into the equation)
Practicing to improve one's own skill isn't grinding.
Grinding is about some artificial game mechanic the game imposes on players.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Also, twitch skills carry over at least in some form to other games. That +1 sword of infinity you grinded three thousand hamsters to get in Fantasy RPG Online? It's GONE when you go to play ArcheEra and need to grind five thousand harlequin sacks for the Red Dragon Sword. Those improved reflexes you got from playing Duke Nukem For Love over and over? They'll at least still be there in part when you start playing Unreal Tournament For Real.