PvP: It's Not Going To Kill You

This week brought several interesting posts about PvP. Wilhelm took Syp to task, in the mildest manner, over the commonly-held belief that EVE is "a gankbox". The biggest takeaway from the lengthy discussion there seemed to be that no-one really knows what a "gankbox" is. Or agrees on what costitutes "ganking" for that matter...

UltrViolet had something to say about PvP in FFXIV. Once I'd got over the shock of finding that FFXIV has PvP (who knew?) some of his observations had me re-assessing my own attitudes and assumptions.

Lastly, Jeromai had plenty to say about the recent, significant changes to GW2's World vs World. This is PvP I actually know, in some depth, from personal experience and yet at times he seemed almost to be describing a game I'd never played at all.

The crux of the problem seems to me to fall squarely where it usually does - on definitions. Like "MMO", the term "PvP" has become so stretched by overuse, so baggy and warped, that it can be fitted over almost anything. Badly.

I see Commander Chris Goes Deep in there so I'm guessing he ran off a cliff and we all followed. We'd follow him anywhere except to Jade Quarry, which is where he went :(

UltrViolet is uncomfortable with what he describes as "a pervasive attitude of what I’ll call … well, cowardice, for lack of a better term" among PvPers in MMORPGs, something he compares unfavorably with pre-MMO days, when "in a fight with someone in Quake, they usually fought back, and a duel ensued (a duel with rocket launchers)". It's apparent that what underpins his understanding of the term "PvP" is a literal stand-off, head to head, toe to toe, between individual players, conducted primarily, probably entirely, for the honor of a clean victory.

In Wilhelm's comment thread, however, Gevlon defines PvP in an utterly unromantic, purely functional fashion. PvP for the Greedy Goblin is "an in-game reason to fight, you seek to complete an in-game objective". When he says "...it’s competition" he means competition for resources.

Gevlon dismisses fighting other players for the sake of fighting them as merely a means of staving off boredom or promoting an out-of-game self-image. For him, and indeed for several other commenters in the thread, PvP is primarily a means to an economic or political end, not any kind of an end in itself.

Jeromai, meanwhile, in a series of lengthy, detailed and thoughtful essays, analyses both his actions and his motivations, which, unsurprisingly for any regular reader of "Why I Game", largely seem to revolve around testing and refining the limits of his own skill and ability.

The new reward system gives me the pip.

These three approaches, which most likely represent only the shallowest foothills of the mountain of nuance that exists to be scaled on the topic, amply demonstrate that, where any discussion of PvP is concerned, what we are most likely to see are people talking past each other. As in all negotiations, without agreed definitions at the outset, little progress can be made towards consensus.

It would help if, when we talk about PvP in MMORPGs, we made it clearer what kind of PvP we were talking about. There are well-established names for some of these subdivisions, after all.

Let's take Dueling, for example. Dueling is the apex of the consensual, one-on-one, "honorable" fight. Most MMOs offer it in some form or other.

I absolutely, utterly loathe dueling. It was the single aspect of EverQuest I most hated from the moment I began playing. In all the time I ever played, from 1999 to now, I only ever dueled once. That was in a Guild event, when I did it with extreme reluctance so as not to seem "difficult". I won, easily, as it happens. No-one was more surprised than me.

My objection to dueling has nothing whatsoever to do with whether I would or would not be any good at it. My issue is with the extreme intimacy. I find it skin-crawlingly creepy. To be locked in a virtual rope-fight to the death with another human being is just beyond anything I ever expected or wanted to discover in a fantasy world. I set all duel acceptances to "automatically decline" where the game allows and never accept or respond to them where it doesn't.

Left a bit..left a bit...right a bit...FIRE!

GW2's complete lack of a duel function is unexpected and also one of the very best things about the game. Unsurprisingly, I don't try to replicate dueling there in the kind of lone-wolf WvW roaming Jeromai describes.

I do, however, travel alone in WvW all the time, scouting, taking objectives, simply moving from place to place. I'm not remotely apprehensive about being alone and vulnerable because, as Hording says in Wilhelm's thread, in "games with no consequences you just shrug and continue from the graveyard or waypoint. Who killed you – who cares?".

If someone attacks me in when I'm alone in WvW I simply wait for them to kill me. Then I waypoint and get on with whatever I was doing. I have no skill as duelist and no interest in acquiring any. My interests and aptitudes lie in matchplay. I want our team to win. I want to do my part. Dueling harms not helps that objective so I feel virtuous for avoiding it.

When I play, even five years in, I care whether we hold all our own keeps. I care whether we win the Skirmish and the match. I care where we place in the table, even though everyone agrees the whole scoring system has been so broken for so long it's effectively meaningless.  

It doesn't much matter to me that it's all pointless, repetitive and silly. It's an MMO. Of course it is! I'm as easily able to suspend my disbelief to become immersed in the fortunes of my server as I am to believe that each battle against Tequatl is the only one needed to defeat him forever, even though I already killed him twice today and the moment he dies I can look up his next scheduled appearance on a website created for that purpose. If you can't believe, why play at all?

Personally, I'd "fix" WvW by removing every single "reward" other than the score. If that means only a hundred people left playing then at least it would be the right hundred.

GW2's mass combat - army against army, battling to take and hold territory - is perfect for me. It removes all of the uncomfortable intimacy while retaining a very strong sense of purpose and identity.

That same approach  - wanting to be an effective part of a team and to see the team prosper - scales well. I prefer the larger stage but I enjoy most types of instanced, group PvP. I liked all the various Battleground options in DAOC, Warhammer, Rift, WoW, and EQ2, but they come with a self-limiting factor that's absent from WvW, which I can and do play, quite literally, for hours at a stretch.

I find battleground matches exciting for a while but they come with diminishing returns - after an hour or so I begin to feel enervated. Still, I always go back, eager for more, once my synapses have had a chance to discharge.

When conflict-phobic players like Syp talk about PvP in terms of dread they generally don't mean the kind of sanitized, organized, structured - ultimately safe - play we see in instances, however large or small. The two things that terrify them, it seems, are the specter of loss and the prospect of becoming a target.

I'd keep the bags - I just wouldn't put anything in them.

I can see their point. No-one likes to lose stuff or have their time wasted. Even dedicated PvPers don't like a bully. Few rational voices will be raised to defend the handful of sociopaths who spend lonely evenings on their max-level characters or level-locked twinks, killing the same newbies at spawn over and over until they force the hapless neophytes to log off and uninstall.

Still, there's a world of difference between that kind of apocryphal abuse and real, open-world PVP as it actually happens, be it consensual or otherwise, with or without item or xp loss, level restricted or FFA.

Yes, in theory it can seem a bit more unsettling, certainly more personal, to be jumped by another player when you're alone in the wilds, especially if you're half-health and locked in a tough fight with a wyvern at the time. In practice, though, is it really very much different to being blindsided by a Sand Giant as you concentrate on killing a mummy, only to be rooted by a ghoul as you try to run away? Or, worse, being trampled by someone's train as they exit the dungeon just as you zone in?

Pre-WoW MMO worlds - even Vanilla WoW, by reputation - were dangerous places. You didn't need your PvP flag on to get ganked - a griffon or a werewolf would take you out without malice or mercy just as quickly as any player. You could lose a level or, worse, your corpse and everything on it.

They also serve, who only stand and scout.

We lived in fear every day of our gaming lives back then. And, yes, having players as predators did make it scarier still. But not orders of magnitude scarier, the way random, unconfined, unexpected, non-consensual PvP appears to so many MMO players today.

I'm not advocating a return to xp and item loss as standard. Nor am I nostalgic for the days of Zone Sweepers and corpse runs. I'm certainly not suggesting all MMOs are better with PvP in the mix. I don't, by and large, choose to play on open PvP servers, given the option, even now. Virtual life can be hard enough with just the A.I. on your case.

All I'm suggesting is that PvP comes in many flavors. A little taste of it, once in a while, can be delicious. A whole meal can be gloriously satisfying, provided you order from the right menu. It's an acquired taste, for sure, but, like most such, it's worth acquiring.

It's been a very, very long time since the letters "PvP" included anywhere in the description of an upcoming MMO caused me make the sign of the cross and back away. Now I take every case on merit. As Dire Necessity says about Syp's oft-repeated concerns over the risk of being ganked " He’s really not talking about EVE as typically played at all, he’s talking about the stories he hears about EVE."

In most MMOs these days the only thing to fear from PvP is the fear of PvP itself. Don't listen to scare stories. Try it out and see for yourself. What's the worst that could happen?