The notions of balance, fair play, how to advance or now, they are all philosophy. As I said on Twitter, "As long as the eventual goal is to utterly crush your enemies, then use all the philosophy you want." Therefore, it is only logical that PvP should have gearing disparity. What is the point of winning if not to win harder the next time?
One might even argue that the point of war is to be able to win it. Look at how Israel fought, over control of the Golan Heights, an area which is felt was critical to its own defense, or the offense of an enemy. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in an attempt to protect itself from the US navy. Germany made a major push in the south of the USSR for the oil it needed to continue its war efforts. The notion of a preemptive strike is to start a war to prevent a war. When countries win wars they rarely decide to redraw the borders exactly as they were, but instead seek to increase their advantage, in anticipation of the next war.
Let's us consider this in the context of PvP. If I kill someone in WoW I do not do it out of a sense of malice. It is out of a sense of greed. I want a reward. That reward should exceed what I put into the fight, or it will not be worth doing. Simply getting gold might be nice, but would that actually get me anywhere? No. But gear, gear would help me to win the next time. I'd gladly forgo a bit of gold today for a victory tomorrow, and the next day, and forever after. That's called investment and it is the foundation of prosperity. It's also what wins wars. Any Starcraft player can tell you that.
Of course this has some side-effects. New players are in a tough position. Their gear is awful. In an open-world game they could try to compensate with numbers, in the manner of a hundred 0/0 marines taking on a 3/3 colossus. A brave gesture, perhaps even successful, but costly. Oddly, by trying to be fair and balance the numbers on each team, games often remove this possibility. The result is that new players may never join, or quit soon after.
Yet, is that not the point? If your enemy is too afraid to attack you, does that not mean that you have already won? And won forever? A long battleground queue is not a problem for a game; it is a victory. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot not stamping on a human face - forever.
One might even argue that the point of war is to be able to win it. Look at how Israel fought, over control of the Golan Heights, an area which is felt was critical to its own defense, or the offense of an enemy. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in an attempt to protect itself from the US navy. Germany made a major push in the south of the USSR for the oil it needed to continue its war efforts. The notion of a preemptive strike is to start a war to prevent a war. When countries win wars they rarely decide to redraw the borders exactly as they were, but instead seek to increase their advantage, in anticipation of the next war.
Let's us consider this in the context of PvP. If I kill someone in WoW I do not do it out of a sense of malice. It is out of a sense of greed. I want a reward. That reward should exceed what I put into the fight, or it will not be worth doing. Simply getting gold might be nice, but would that actually get me anywhere? No. But gear, gear would help me to win the next time. I'd gladly forgo a bit of gold today for a victory tomorrow, and the next day, and forever after. That's called investment and it is the foundation of prosperity. It's also what wins wars. Any Starcraft player can tell you that.
Of course this has some side-effects. New players are in a tough position. Their gear is awful. In an open-world game they could try to compensate with numbers, in the manner of a hundred 0/0 marines taking on a 3/3 colossus. A brave gesture, perhaps even successful, but costly. Oddly, by trying to be fair and balance the numbers on each team, games often remove this possibility. The result is that new players may never join, or quit soon after.
Yet, is that not the point? If your enemy is too afraid to attack you, does that not mean that you have already won? And won forever? A long battleground queue is not a problem for a game; it is a victory. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot not stamping on a human face - forever.
2 comments:
This makes no sense unless gear can be acquired by other means or of such trivial matter that a fully geared PvP person only has a 50% chance to win. As every single game has shown, this creates PvP plateaus that are un manageable and require a) gear reset through seasons or b) complete rework of stats.
Darkfall, supposedly the saving grace of the open PvP genre proved exactly that.
I think the point Marcleoseguin is that it never makes any sense. War is Hell. Or Self-Defeating. Or both.
PvPrs are protected from the truth by gear resets and mashing up the meta before everyone can realise someone has won and stop fighting altogether.
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