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Why Not Make World of PvPCraft and Shut Everyone Up?
By Cameron Sorden | February 27, 2008
My article today was going to be about how they should really split WoW into two separate games, but that sly devil Tobold from across the pond beat me to it, so instead I just wrote about how IGG is trying to buy off the media. Still, I wanted to throw in my two cents on the topic of WoW’s brand new e-sports focus, briefly.
A lot of the recent changes to the game seem to be centered on balancing the PvP aspects, and the outcry from raiders and PvE enthusiasts alike is considerable. Arena weapons have been the best in the game for a while now, to the chagrin of the raiding crowd, and as much as I’ve talked about how large-scale raiding isn’t really my thing, I also don’t think that WoW should be taking the heavy PvP route.
Doesn’t Blizzard realize that you can’t have your cake and eat it too? Or are they just mad with power and skipping along to the tune of, “What are you gonna do about it? Quit playing? Ahahahaha!”? You can’t have a balanced PvP environment that also works with the traditional class roles carried into WoW from other MMOGs. The D&D archetypes that we cherish and reproduce over and over have never been balanced to fight against each other. Try rolling up a level 1 fighter and a level 1 wizard in PnP and dueling them. Then try it again with a level 20 wizard and fighter. You’ll see what I mean.
World of Warcraft wasn’t built to be a competitive PvP game, anyway. Battlegrounds didn’t even make it into the game for a long time after launch. Most of what we know as PvP (on the PvP servers, no less) is just ganking. Retrofitting the entire game to fit a tournament-worthy balanced idea of PvP combat on the level of Starcraft is not going to happen without ruining or drastically changing the PvE environment. We’re talking game-altering changes on the scale of the NGE.
But if they want to make a truly balanced and fair PvP environment, that’s what’s going to have to happen. Why, oh why, don’t they just split the damn game into two properties? Think about the killing they could make by taking the codebase, tweaking it, re-branding it as a new game called “World of Warcraft: Elite PvP Edition,” and selling it as a separate game from regular WoW, aimed at serious PvPers. You could even have the option to import your character from the regular game.
The real point of doing it, however, would be that they could finally properly balance the classes without worrying what it did to PvE, specifically for that version of the game. Meanwhile, WoW would move back to more of a PvE focused game without such an emphasis on Arena and PvP that people are basically forced to PvP for the best gear, even if they don’t want to. I don’t know how many times in the last week I’ve heard people tell me to go do BGs so I can replace the green bracers I’m still wearing at 70. No amount of explaining that I find BGs boring and tedious helps me out (and the green bracers cost me a Gruul’s slot this week, too– nevermind my mongoose-enchanted purple weapons).
As someone pointed out in Tobold’s comments, they’re effectively making a separate game with the tournament realms anyway. From Blizzard’s site:
“On tournament realms, you can roam free on the original continents of Azeroth and Kalimdor. However, instance portals leading to dungeons and Battlegrounds will be deactivated, as will the Dark Portal - thus, Outland will not be accessible on tournament realms. There will also be no computer-controlled enemies anywhere in the world.”
So really, why aren’t they just taking the plunge and splitting the game? It’s not like they don’t have the resources. Raiders would be happy, PvP junkies would be happy, Blizzard runs happily to the bank to deposit all their shiny money, and people can have their choice of the game they want to play without having to worry about getting nerfed for some aspect of the game they don’t use and don’t want to use.
Topics: Blizzard, World of Warcraft, business, mmorpg, real money transactions |
February 28th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Because making 2 separate doesn’t necessarily mean doubling your market, in fact, it could very well be quite the opposite. No other game can offer deep PvE progression and very balanced PvP in one package.
Before you all jump at me because of this statement, let me say this: Most of the other MMORPGs have classes, that are usually free kills in PvP or close to useless in PvE. WoW has the only rogue class, that is useful in both PvE and PvP in the market and has some depth.
Are you enjoying your time spent in Azeroth? If the answer is yes, then there is no reason to kill the game.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:03 am
quote
Most of what we know as PvP (on the PvP servers, no less) is just ganking.
/quote
Very true and resounds larger than Blizzard will admit.
If arenas leave regular WoW it wont hurt my feelings.
WoW class imbalance is huge. With the ever present message “Resist” WoW will never be an e-sport that draws the true competitor.
WoW is a huge time grind to get gear for a random number generator to determine the outcome of my effort. NO THANKS. I’ll go to a CounterStrike e-sport event instead.
Get a clue Blizzard.
February 28th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I don’t think splitting the game is the answer but I do think there should be a better separation between PvP and PvE gear. A player’s equipment is very influential making it possible for developers to significantly balance the game by controlling what a player is able to equip.
There should be readily available gear that is designed for PvE and attainable through PvE. I am a combat spec rogue and began raiding fall of last year. There is one viable main hand sword in Karazhan for me and it only has a 3% chance of dropping. After running Karazhan almost every week for months, I have never seen it drop. However, it only takes about a week of doing daily battle groups to earn the comparable S1 sword with 100% drop. The number of 1%-10% drops makes it unrealistic to get your raiding gear from dungeons, heroics, and raids. I dislike battle groups and have never tried the arena but I feel compelled to participate in order to progress and be viable for raiding. Why not increase drop % rates and the quantity of loot raid bosses drop? This would allow the raiders to exclude themselves from PvP and effectively separate the game. I know this is coming in the next patch but I think it’s too little too late. The only thing that could make it worse at this point would be to make all the good PvP gear only available through raiding. All the PvPers would be wiping the raid while the raiders were getting owned in PvP.
I would not completely separate the game because there are people that like both aspects of the game and you would be taking away part of their enjoyment. There are alternatives if balancing gear drops and availability doesn’t provide enough natural separation between PvP and PvE. Most people who raid and PvP have two sets of gear. Imagine having two separate equipment tabs, one for PvP and one for PvE. When you stepped into an arena or battle group your high end PvP gear was automatically equipped and your high end PvE gear was unequipable. Similarly, when you stepped into a raid all your high end PvE gear was automatically equipped and your high end PvP gear was unequipable. Equipment from quests, dungeons, crafting, … could be equipped in both tabs but certain high end gear would be PvP only or PvE only. In the persistent world you would have access to both tabs and be able to change your equipment in one click. It just makes sense to me that when you PvP you should get PvP rewards and when you raid you should get drops for raiding.
February 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
There is no reason you should have green bracers at 70 and there are plenty of alternatives that you can get rather than pvp. 5 man normals or heriocs or I’m sure there are craftables for whatever armor you wear.
No one said you have to pvp to get good gear. Besides resilience degrades the quality for dps classes.
February 28th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Sure there is. I dinged 70 less than two weeks ago, and none of the instances I’ve run have dropped a mail bracer for my spec better than the green I have.
I’ve been thinking about buying some felstalker bracers to tide me over until badges can rectify the bracer issue.
February 28th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
To one extent, the Guild Wars approach of being able to load builds (ie. “this is my PvE build, and this is my PvP build”) could help to a degree. Largely, WoW was always a gear-based game so why not take a cue from EQ2 and LOTRO’s vanity costumes, and add a tab to load up PvE and PvP armor/gear sets?
WoW may not have had any semblance whatsoever of meaningful PvP (WotLK *might* take a stride or two in that general direction) but I thought Blizz did a decent job of juggling PvP and PvE with the same character rather than separating them.
February 28th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
*mumbles something about clicking Submit buttons*
Anyway, while Blizzard is busy juggling the two, I also wouldn’t mind them going down the original road of having them very, very separate in terms of their gear. Originally the PvP armor was only good for PvP, you were fairly gimped for PvE. I didn’t stick around after TBC launch, but TBC made +Stamina mandatory, which was primarily what the PvP gear gave.
Find a way to both balance the two aspects so you can continue (mostly) easily using the same character for each, but split them further apart so “PvP Epixxx” don’t equate to “easy to obtain raid gear.”
WoW is all about the grind anyway, so grinding out the uber PvE *and* uber PvP gear is one more carrot in front of the players’ noses.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
There are a few dirty little secrets that no one seems to be mentioning in the continuing PvPification of WoW:
Blizzard has moved on and the A-Team is working on their Next Gen MMO. I suspect true new content generation for WoW will cease if not diminish drastically with WotLK.
PvP-centricity requires very little new content generation. Design an arena once and let the players reuse that content to their hearts content. Its infinitely replayable. WG, AB and AV have remained largely unchanged since they were added to the game in 2005.
New itemization of rewards and even new PvP arena games doesn’t take nearly the same amount of time or resources that scripting and tuning a new raid instance. This is the recipe for preserving the profitability of WoW until the new MMO is out. Season X rewards anyone? Collect them all!
February 29th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Blizzard failed early on to open their eyes and get pvp right. They just don’t get it.
Their continued blind and almost stumbling around in the dark approach towards finding their PvP niche is nauseating to watch. The only reason they are able to take this guess and check approach towards development is because they have a 10,000,000 player buffer. Losing a few hundred thousand people here or there isn’t going to hurt them. Had it been anyone else in their place the game would have been shut down by now.
Potshot is absolutely correct.
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