https://kotaku.com/blizzards-plan-to-take-wows-world-pvp-back-to-its-glory-1820311638
Soon, the WoW team will eliminate the longtime divide between PVP servers, where everybody’s fair game to attack, and PVE servers, where player-vs-player combat is much rarer. In its place, all servers will get an opt-in, opt-out system, with special incentives for opting in.
Players will only be able to turn PVP on and off while they’re in Azeroth’s major cities, so if a sneaky rogue starts rearranging your insides while you’re out adventuring, you can’t just render yourself incorporeal and skip merrily off into the sunset.
Hazzikostas hopes this will pump some much-needed lifeblood into world PVP’s heart, which has been inching ever closer to flat-lining since shortly after World of Warcraft first came out.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Well I've proudly never played WoW for even a second so what I'm about to say may be rife with ignorance but the very first problem I see with this is that if you can only turn PvP on and off while you're in the major cities then PvP will become meaningless in those cities precisely because you'll be able to "render yourself incorporeal and skip merrily off into the sunset" anytime you want in the cities. Also anyone who still hates PvP will simply keep it turned off 100% of the time so it's not going to "entice" anyone to try it "just because" it's easy to turn on.
My guess is that they'll have to come up with some pretty major "special incentives for opting in" and whatever those are will probably put the diehard anti-PvP players at a severe disadvantage for not opting in which is only going to piss those people off that much more. Really seems like this plan has far more negatives than positives.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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I guess the in-town only thing is good if you're not a pvper but there's some lowbie out there scraggin' yer dudes then you could switch and sort them out. But then again to get to opposite faction places takes a bit of doing so they wouldn't likely be very low anyway.
I'm pretty sure in WoW as it is now you can flag yourself for PvP anywhere... So this seems a step backwards in that regard. I guess this stops folks from hiding out unflagged and then switching... Which then makes it harder for opposing factions to mess up towns and such for if you go out into enemy territory and keep getting yourself killed you'd need to get to a friendly town to turn off your PvP settings... But then there's already a timer on unflagging yourself...
... I don't know what to make of this.
"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."
I look at this and see them saying, 'For the sake of one part of the community, we are making things inconvenient for everybody.' I tried WoW about a year after it came out, because a friend was There and not in CoH. I finished the tutorial and went out to the newbie-zone to kill (and be killed by) wolves, but when I went to town, I discovered that a vicious gang of PvPers had killed all of the merchants and gang Dueled any player that showed up. Not only could I not sell my junk, but I could barely Move for all of the Duel-Flags that were planted in my face. Complaining just earned me a flood of abuse on all of my channels and reporting it to the GMs? That got me a haughty 'working as intended' and 'how dare you interfere with their fun?'
Needless to say, I told my friend, who wasn't ever there, anyway, 'No Thanks' and hurried back to the friendly folks of CoH.
After CoH closed, my friend invited me back to WoW. Again, we were rarely playing at the same time, but PvP had been firmly screened away from the newbies and most of those PvP jerks were off doing other content anyway. So I made my happy-go-lucky Blood Elf Paladin and had a delightful LFG/Disney experience, only rarely being forced to notice that I was supposed to be 'evil'. But, after a while, I realized that everywhere I went was uglier and more wrecked than before, blasted deserts and planes where the 'gods' had destroyed or poisoned Everything, and I wasn't having fun anymore.
I roamed the game-iverse until a friend invited me to join them in GW2, offering the $10 discounted cost as an incentive. The upshot is, that's where I kill an hour a night, now. And I avoid the 'dead continent' of Orr whenever I can, because that place is UGLY!
Be Well!
Fireheart
If you get the Heart of Thorns expansion for GW2, you get to go deeper into the Maguuma jungle. Those areas are pretty, but deadly, and also can be a real pain to try to traverse.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Here's how I understand this will work for World of Warcraft ... and why it sounds so similar to what's planned for City of Titans.
So basically on any given WoW server, historically speaking, the servers were designated as being either PvE or PvP.
On the PvE servers, PvP was entirely consensual and involved a "flagging" system where any interaction with a PvP flagged object or NPC would also flag your PC as PvP enabled, allowing any hostile PC to attack your PC. This PvP flagging could also be triggered by entering specific zone areas, such as enemy held capital cities, where simply ENTERING the area was sufficient to enforce a PvP flag on your character. After a set time of NOT engaging in any PvP flag "renewing" activities (I think it was like 5 minutes) the PvP flag would drop from your character and you could no longer be attacked by PCs of the enemy faction. Dueling was a separate "special" case outside of this system that allowed PCs of the same faction to consensually fight each other upon accepting a dueling challenge, and thus was always voluntary, with the "loser" of duels being defeated but not killed (think 1 Health remaining).
On the PvP servers, this "flagging" system was just turned ON ... and [b][i]NEVER turned off[/i][/b]. Everyone, at all times, was PvP enabled, and you could [b]NEVER[/b] turn that off. Everyone was ALWAYS vulnerable to being attacked by PCs of the opposing faction ... anywhere ... at any time ... for any reason (including ganking, curb stomping and just plain old griefing).
The unfortunate side effect of this system was that it functionally "segregated" the playerbase into different camps and communities (which a lot of people actually preferred) but due to various logistical issues meant that whatever server you rolled on you were "stuck" with, come what may. If all your friends left and you wanted to keep playing, you either had to find new friends or switch to a new server and start from scratch ... which in World of Warcraft was a HUGE PAIN. Well the problem was that Players were fickle and tended to migrate around, between different games, between different servers, and all kinds of population imbalances (some of which were self-reinforcing) could come into play. Some servers developed huge faction imbalances where either the Horde totally dominated or the Alliance totally dominated in population numbers, which then turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy for that particular server in terms of the stream of new characters that every server needed in order to maintain a healthy overall population and progression. It was a problem that was self reinforcing rather than self correcting. When your faction is outnumbered 5:1, it makes it very easy for griefers with level capped characters to go wreak havoc on the opposing faction's territories in ways that lowbies of that faction have no real defense against, compounding their frustration whenever they try to play. There was basically no refuge to be had from the griefing and ganking on a PvP server.
Over the years, the fortunes of the PvE vs PvP server community tended to wax and wane in cycles ... but the biggest problem with it was that because the community was SPLIT it made it hard to keep up with friends and keep playing with them. To put it in City of Heroes terms, the divide was an UNfriendly one, that put barriers between Players.
Still, some people loved PvE only while others loved PvP only, and reconciliation between the two camps seemed to be impossible.
And this is where it looks like Blizzard has been cribbing notes from Missing Worlds Media.
Going forward, it looks like Blizzard's idea is to basically have two different "shards" of their worlds ON THE SAME SERVER ... and which shard you're in (the PvE one or the PvP one) gets determined by flipping a toggle switch at an NPC found in a capital city. That way, if you're a low level character who doesn't want to be harassed by high level gankers hanging out in your lowbie zone, you can just go to the capital city and make sure you stay on the PvE side of things so you can get on with questing progressively without getting jumped by level capped griefers ruining your day with impunity. Conversely, if world PvP due to chance encounters is something you enjoy, you can play on the PvP side of things. The key here is that you aren't LOCKED into having only one or the other playing experience, but can CHOOSE which one you want to be a part of. The thing is, that changing that choice can only be done in an ostensible "safe zone" for your PC ... in this case, a capital city for your faction.
In a City of Heroes context, this would be like deciding if you want to be permanently flagged for PvP by going to City Hall in Atlas Park ... and if you do, you'll only be playing in PvP zone versions of the game world where everyone is flagged for PvP and Villains can venture into Paragon City and Heroes can go to the Rogue Isles and the two factions can fight each other anywhere at any time for any reason.
This sounds a LOT like what Missing Worlds Media is planning to do with City of Titans ... hence why I say that what Blizzard says they're going to be doing sounds awfully familiar ...
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Yes those are the similarities, just one detail you got wrong. I'm certain that Blizzard hasn't looked at MWM and CoT for this but rather at DCUO since they have had such a system of a single Megaserver since at least their F2P re-launch.
The important thing is that there's more than one company moving in this direction of putting PvE and PvP "adjacent" to each other on the same server.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Of course of course.
The only reason I can think of for game companies to still use separate servers in new games is that they use a ready-made solution (specialized MMO game engine/package?), maybe even one they've used in previous games. But for anything that is starting and building from scratch with minimal pre-package solutions I can't see any advantage of going with separate servers.