You know you're going to say something embarrassing if I don't catch you off.
being ganked do you love ganking do you love the word gank do you just think that the word gank is something that exists inside your drains you need to get all that gank out no no that's not what we're talking today we're talking about pvp here in the massively op podcast episode 513 yes it's another theme show because i was on vacation and did not pay attention to the news all week so it actually wasn't that interesting
Like, all due respect, we had a lot of medium-ish kind of stories. And then the RuneScape stuff. But we covered the RuneScape stuff. We already talked about some of that. Yeah, so it's not that big a deal. Oh, he's back. So I said, can we talk about a theme show? She's like, what? How can I possibly put together a theme show in under an hour? I'm under so much stress, Justin.
And I said, well, you can do it. I believe in you. Why don't we pick the easiest thing in the world? She comes at me back at me with like a thousand word outline. For a PVP show. So I think she's a little into it. Honestly, I have picked it as a joke. And that'll teach you never to ask me to do a theme show again. If you want to add to this, I'm like, if we do every item on this list, it might be three and a half hours minimum. Good. I'd rather have too much than too little to talk about.
But it turns out, you know, there's actually kind of a lot to talk about. It's not as simple as just those three letters, right? Yeah, that's true. PvP, player versus player, one of the two big sides of... conflict in mmos and we of course talk a lot about pve and we do have a pvp columnist and we do we do cover this a fair bit
But it seems like it deserves its own show. You said that before we get into that, though, we want to talk about housing because it has nothing to do with any of this. But we want to talk about it anyway. So Lotra opened up its housing this past week. It did. I think we mentioned it on Monday, but neither of us had actually gone through the process. And now we both have.
And it wasn't, I mean, it was a little dramatic. I don't know. You came back. I came back days late. So I'm just like, whatever. But you still got the house you wanted, right? Yeah, I got the same one as you, I think. Yeah, I think we both have... We're roommates. I've forgotten what it's called already. I drew a line down the middle of the... One wending way. Yeah, the Shire smile and say, Smeal, smile. I don't know. Smeal!
I wanted to talk about it, and it actually is kind of related to what we're talking about today, because I have never wanted to PPP in LOTRO so badly as I did on Wednesday night when they opened up Lindleby, because... I had heard all of these stories from Monday and Tuesday where people were like, oh. the lowtro community is so wonderful everybody's
gathered in a circle around the brokers and everyone was cheerful and happy. And it was so great. I was like, oh man, I'm sure the River Hobbit one is going to be justice. I can't wait. It's going to be like a party. Nope. No, it was every troll on Glamdring was out for messing with River Hobbits. And there were in the broker in Bree, there were several players who had decided to bring Bjorning. For those of you who don't know, they're big giant bears with big giant bear butts.
Bare butts everywhere as far as the eye can see. Yes. So these guys crowded into the broker, which is not a big room to begin with. And they were standing on top of the spot, like jiggling around. So you couldn't really, you know, wiggle your way in there and like actually see it. where the the guy was gonna or lady i guess was gonna spawn and then people were in there spamming aoe's you know how there's some aoe's in the game that don't need a target yeah the ones that lag your whole screen
Didn't they set up, like, brokers out elsewhere, too? Like, temporarily? There were supposed to be, yeah. They were supposed to be spawning in a couple places. I think one was in Swan Fleet. Like, in the newbie area. but i didn't want to leave at that point because i was like okay well what if i'm wrong what if they don't spawn i don't want to miss it Plus I was just wishing very bad things at these players.
And in a way, I kind of wanted to witness just how trash they were being, because that's the kind of stuff I expect on like World of Warcraft PvP servers, not on a Tolkien server. I was really... really and i wasn't alone there were other people who were just completely ripping them a new one i saw one guy claim he was gonna record the whole thing and report it which as you guys know is not an easy thing to do in sssg's games they make it really hard to report anybody
How convenient. Almost no one ever gets action. But anyway, I just wanted to, maybe I'll do a daily grind on that. Later on this week or this month or something, because it really made me mad. I was so disappointed in that specific. I know it's not a lot of people. But it's enough of them that they're making an impact and it's pissing me off. It's ruining the game for me. Son, I am disappoint. I am. Get your bare butt out of my face. I'm your disappointed mom face over here.
I did get my house and I know you've started decorating. I finished my first pass at decorating last night. That was the last thing I did is I finally finished. And it took me like a long time, even though I'd taken pictures. of my whole house, my old one, so that I could try to recreate it. It still took me a while and it hurt the heck out of my hands. What were you doing? I swear. You know how like you have to...
When you're nudging things around, you end up pushing that mouse button down for kind of a while. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just days of doing that really wrecked up my finger. But anyway, I'm mostly done. I think my plan is to take one room at a time and just do a room and then just step away for a few days and then do another room. I mean, it'll be there. It's not. Yeah.
I don't even know why I care. I don't even use the interior that much. I use the exterior. The place where you pour it in, I put my boxes there and just run down the hill. I mostly use it as a port. I don't know what I'm thinking, why I care this much about decorating it, but... I guess I do. It's pretty! I have a hobbit hole! Yeah, it wasn't too bad. Like coming back late, I already resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be late to the party. And actually that was.
Probably a good thing. I wasn't stressed. I wasn't tied to my computer at a particular time. And guess what? I got the exact plot I wanted anyway, so... It wasn't like there was some sort of artificial shortage, at least that I could see. Not for those. I'm sure on, like, some of the big, big ones there probably were. Yeah, you're on Peregrine, and so...
It's a smaller server anyway, so you probably had a better chance. But even on Glamdring, there were still one-winding ways. I think I mentioned the SDS. What are they? The Stately Deluxe Meal. They're gone. They were gone almost right away. And I think most of the island ones in Belfalus are also gone. Everybody just gloms onto them. I didn't see that many kinship hauls left.
Yeah, it depends. I think SSG is going to have to rethink that. Maybe I hope they do that for like Rivendell and some of the future housing neighborhoods they're thinking about. People really want the special ones and the non-special ones, the small non-special ones. They don't get picked. They don't get used. They just sit there.
outside of like the rare kinship neighborhood where everybody wants to live in that hood right yeah in general people just don't care they're like no i want the cave i want the waterfall i want the island they need to make more of those like i know it would make them less special but that's what people want to live in or they need to make like more different special ones like there's a waterfall and a cave and an island one all in the same zone
Otherwise, it just seems like a lot of the housing is going to waste because a lot of it's just sitting there in neighborhoods where there's only one or two houses used. And yet all of those houses are gone. So people who would want those houses. can't get them at all it like it almost creates one of those final fantasy um 14 housing scenarios where i mean they can't some of them can't get houses at all
At least you can get one here. But if you really wanted it as a status thing or whatever, you can't have it. And that kind of sucks. There's no real need for that. They could have just made smaller neighborhoods and more of them. I don't know. I got what I wanted, but I feel sorry for people who were like, I've never even been inside of an SDS because they're always gone on every server, which that's crazy. It shouldn't be like that.
Why don't we move over into taking your wish fulfillment over into PvP territory and we'll fill up the rest of the hour here. Yeah, we're going to talk about PvP today. And maybe that's not your cup of tea. And I'll tell you what, right up front, not mine either. Although I'm not a stranger to it, and I know you're certainly not. It seems like everybody, you know, there's like a spectrum, right? Yeah. You're not like.
Some people are like, yeah, I'm just totally PvE or I'm totally PvP. But sometimes people can be in the middle or dabble one way or the other. And I think I've always been a dab.
Once in a while, I'll be over here. One of my earliest memories in World of Warcraft, a few years into it, they opened up a... pvp rp server and the rp kind of got me on board like i had some friends going they're like hey come over here we're gonna role play getting ganked i don't know what the idea was here i thought well you know pvp servers have kind of this notorious reputation of
you know, being ruthless and bloodthirsty. But RP servers have kind of this reputation of being, you know, nurturing and enjoyable and a positive community. So maybe these two elements balance each other out. I think for the most part, I saw way more RP than PvP, but there was definitely moments where I'm in Stranglethorn and Rogue number 5222 comes out of the shadows. stun locks me and then kills me and then you know squats over my face for a few times because that's mature thank you very much
And I went like, oh, okay, I guess this is my life now because I don't have the reflexes. It's not like, you know, I've done a little bit of the Rathi base and I did a little bit of the Battlegrounds when they came out. It was always like, I think for me, like PVP was always way more stress than it was enjoyable. And so when it tips over to there, I go, I'm just not going to participate as much.
I'm, you know, but then again, I keep trying every once in a while, like when Warhammer Online was coming out and we were really, a bunch of us were really into this idea. of warhammer online and kind of you know part of that was like can you convince us that rvr combat you know pvp on a realm skill that this is truly enjoyable that there's structure and purpose and
Okay, I'll put one foot in the water, but as long as you promise me there's a lot of PvE content, I'll be okay as long as I don't have to completely dive in over there. And it was okay you know like i did a lot of pvp and warhammer online and i don't think most of it was that enjoyable it was just
something to do and you know some of the keep battles were performance wise they were pretty bad so a lot of slideshows and And you're just like, oh, okay, these are the much ballyhooed, you know, giant sieges that everybody would be talking about. I'm a little less impressed. I can't keep track of what's going on. I think a lot of times in my mind or when people are talking about these...
There's like the expectations of like very orderly, you know, organized castle sieges. And you've got bombard cannons and siege ladders going up. And instead, it's just like zergs, massive. crashing zergs into each other and just see what what falls out there so but yet i will say um one of my main games i play is marvel snap and i guess you could call that pvp i'm always playing against other people on you know on a daily basis and there's
No stress whatsoever. I do not mind winning. I do not mind losing. I just play for the fun of it and it is enjoyable. I will say that probably what keeps it enjoyable is that I can mute. My opponents, you can't talk in the game, but you can emote. And there are certain emotes that are spammed to be like middle finger emotes or this or that. And so I just automatically mute all of them.
So I don't actually have to have any social interaction. So they can't really get in my face and try to grief me through that means. Yeah, but you've had more experience with BVB by far. Yeah, I mean, I kind of cut my teeth on it, but I didn't intend to. It was just such a big part of Ultima Online, which was the first MMO I played. I played it a little bit after launch and then...
Kind of got swept away in it. Like I did not intend on becoming a PVP person. And I wasn't like big on like shooters or anything like that before that. It was just, I ended up with a group that was. very pvp centric and i really wanted to be with them and hang out with them they were so cool i was a teenager by the way so you know you kind of go with the flow and um yeah i ended up learning how to pvp and actually getting pretty good at it
partly aided by the fact that we had really good internet connections back then. So especially going to the college. Yeah, so we could kind of run circles around the gankers, literally, because the connections were so much better than whatever dial-up they were using. But yeah, that was where I started. I really loved it. We did Guild Wars. I did mostly anti-PK, which we'll talk about later, which isn't not PvPing.
fighting only gankers you know what i mean you're yeah you're pvp'ing but you're not randomly killing people even though you could be you're focusing specifically on the bad guys the people you have decided are the bad guys because they are picking on random But yeah, I moved on to, we didn't do much PvP in EverQuest, although it was there. And then we did, came after that. Asheron's Call, he had lots of PvP.
dark dark age dark age was the next one and that's that's an rvr game we did tons of that's like all pvp like that was the majority of what you were doing and then occasionally you'd remember oh yeah i should probably go level two and yeah star wars tef we did a lot of pvp there um and then world of warcraft we were we started out on a pvprp server um but it was so crowded we ended up leaving when blizzard let us leave and went to just a plain pvp server
You know, factional PvP, it's kind of a drag, but... It's very hard to get on servers where the balance is... Oh my gosh, yes. Right, you know, like, so it's usually... And we were alliance, so it was much harder. But yeah, no, I mean, I did a lot of PvP early on, I guess the first half of my MMO journey. And then as my guildies have wandered off, and I've just kind of lost interest. I like the idea of it. I can see when it can go well.
you know what i mean like i don't i haven't lost that thrill but i don't really want to be in an open gank box anymore i just i don't know maybe i'm too old for it or maybe i've just got that been there done that feeling And yet I can see how a really well done TEF PvP system would absolutely get me back because I like having PvP in an MMORPG. I don't necessarily want to go to a different genre entirely just to do, you know.
versus combat you know what i mean i want to do it as content in in an mmo and i want it to be there even if i'm not doing it for the people who do want to do it So I don't hate PvP and I'm not really even against it. I'm just against badly formatted PvP. That's my personal, my personal hot take. Okay, so what do we mean by PvP? A lot of things. Yeah, we need to drill down on this a little bit because it's such a catchall.
And yet it can, you know, there's, there's many sub genres or sub categories that are involved here.
So why don't you walk us through a few? Oh, gosh. I made a huge list. And then I separated it into a second list because there's a lot of stuff that's PvP. Because of course you did. It's not even combat. But it's still PvP. So if we just focus on like... the stock basic combat stuff the stuff you probably are thinking when you think of pvp the first one i wrote down was factional like factional free for all although that doesn't necessarily mean there's like looting it's more like
You're you're able to attack anybody from the any other from the other faction at any time anywhere that sort of thing So that would include a ton of MMOs. Like, I feel like this might actually be the most common from New World. EverQuest had that. Ion has that. Planetside 2 is literally the poster child for this. warhammer had factions world of warcraft obviously on a pvp server and actually the pve servers although it wasn't as free for all because there's like a flag system
I think anyway, but I would differentiate them from like a true free for all where there's no factions. You just can kill anybody you want. And that's what. you know uo and eve and even black desert there's a lot of games out there like that can you do that in albion too i guess you can i can't even remember now there are like like sides but i i think each we'll get to albion later albion is a whole nother game a whole nother system i think
And then there's the battleground stuff, right? And I, when was the first battleground I ever saw? I think it actually might've been World of Warcraft. when that really got like it became a thing these larger scale battlegrounds with 20 50 100 players where you're divided into sides for sure usually faction based But there's like some big objective. It almost feels like a game, like a team sport, as opposed to just rampant killing everybody in sight. There's usually some sort of objective.
I love battleground PvP. Like I think that might be my most favorite to actually play because I think it has less potential to go like dramatically off the rails and become a griefing nightmare scenario. But like, yeah, Warhammer, World of Warcraft. It's designed to have like an end or victory condition. There's a reset, so it doesn't just drag on forever. Usually. Original Alterac Valley notwithstanding. Yeah, Alterac Valley is 17 days into it.
I even wanted to point out City of Heroes, original City of Heroes. Well, I guess it does now, too. But once they added City of Villains, they had a really nice PvP system that nobody remembers, nobody did, nobody talks about. It was actually really fun. With villains. And then I sort of separated out RVR. I know it's really the same as factional free-for-all.
But the three-way PvP plays really differently and it usually involves some sort of like keep control or territory access. It feels different to me, but I guess maybe you'd consider it like a subcategory of factional. What else? Oh, yeah. I wrote down. Yeah. No, I was going to say like that was probably the first time I became really aware of.
pvp and mmos is when dark age of camelot came onto the scene yep and everybody was really talking about in 2001 it was like oh wow this is it's structured it's organized and it's not just this massive chaotic oh it was chaos well yeah but it wasn't like this lag and chaos combined prior to that i think ultima online would have been the title a lot of people would have pointed out and go like
there's pvp there but it probably just means somebody's gonna corpse luci and leave you naked and bleeding at the side of the road at least this feels like you know somewhat structured and and somewhat organized and you got a lot of people on your side and also you know it fits within a theme which is kind of nice like a lot of pvp it's not You want to fight for something like it's really important to fight.
for a side for a faction to have that team identity it binds people together it gets them organized gets them pointed in the same direction i mean yeah you can have free for all but It kind of lacks a little bit of that motivation. So I think that was a really good decision to kind of anchor it in kind of this medieval mythology and just say, here's your team. You can sort of. Go team sport! Except we're going to bash your head off.
Well, it also makes it feel less personal, right? When you're killed by somebody who's in the other randomly picked side. Or not always random, but you know what I mean. As opposed to being ganked when it's like, oh, they attacked me. They didn't just attack the other side. It leads to fewer bad feelings. It's still plenty of drama though, don't get me wrong.
uh let's see i wanted to mention zoned pvp i don't even know you guys tell me if you have a better name for this but like um places where like large chunks of the game don't have pvp like albion or like modern ultima online with trammel like you have to deliberately go to oh fractured also has this where you have to deliberately go to these big open PvP areas. Elder Scrolls Online, Cyrodiil. Yeah, there you go. Cyrodiil is exactly that.
So it's not really a battleground, even though it's separate, but it's also not true free for all. Didn't Rift have that too in the middle? Did it? Yeah, it had a big PvP zone right in the middle that people would go to. See, I actually don't mind that. I feel like that So I'm kind of a fan of it. I separated out arenas too because they feel, I know they might feel like smaller scale battlegrounds, but they tend to play more like.
pre-made teams like you're you're deliberately picking your team and going in versus a battleground where a lot of times you're just kind of pugging it with whoever else was in the queue arenas feel more like you're playing i don't even know what to what the right cognate is for that but that was the first time world of warcraft guild wars one was the first time i really saw that happening i don't mind those either i did a lot of arenas back in the day
in a world of warcraft i was not very good at it our team tried we were pretty we put in a lot of effort but it was really hard and the people who tend to go do those are like super competitive and really talented and so you're usually throwing yourself against really talented pvpers not people who dabble
That can be rough. Yeah, sometimes it's hard. Like, where do you get your starting, you know, ease yourself into PvP versus throwing yourself into the deep end of the pool? Because that can be so discouraging to just get.
absolutely floor mopped and go well i'm never doing that again versus you know something where you feel like oh that was fun you know sort of competitive like i i tried you know again i tried pvp like all over the place i tried fortnite when that originally came out and everybody's talking about it all all my teenagers were like oh you know pastor justin you gotta you gotta play fortnite i'm like okay i will i will play the fortnite
I will see what the Fortnites are all about. And I got in there and I was just sniped all over the place. I didn't know where these bullets were coming from. I just felt like I was a big fat moving target. Like, please shoot me. I saw you coming. Yeah. So I don't have to, you know, like, I don't know how you other than just force yourself to keep doing it until you're completely immersed and you're used to.
what's going on you have that situational awareness and it develops over time but um that that's a bit of a barrier like you know so So for game designers, like how do you ease people into it? And I think like battlegrounds are a good way to ease people into eventually arenas. And that was kind of the step there.
yeah i threw in also things like guild wars not the game but like actually wars between guilds and like war declarations and i guess really even dueling is part of this too where you can like Take your group and like specifically say, we're going to fight this group.
And this is going to be an open declaration of war. And sometimes you have to accept it. And sometimes it's just, you know, someone declares war on you. And now you've got a free for all between those groups or in a duel between two people.
And a lot of times that can spill over the whole game, even in places where you couldn't normally PvP. That seems a little separate to me because it's not isolated. It's like everywhere, but it's only just... those groups that can be really fun too we did a lot of that in like you will but like obviously this is like eve's bread and butter is Nod to Eve there. And then another one that is related to Eve is territorial PvP. And I was thinking of like Albion, Shadowbane, even New World.
where you may or may not have factions, or it may or may be based around large-scale alliances or whatever, but you're literally playing for space, playing for... whatever that territory is, a large chunk of space or a keep or whatever. That can be really fun. Dark Age, I guess, had that really, too, when you were fighting. Especially if, like, you got to conquer a place and you got to put up your banners or something like that. Even New World had that.
That's fun. Yeah, territory battles and suddenly you go into town and you're seeing all these banners. Yeah, and Guild owns it. Right. Yeah, some Guild, yeah. I like that stuff. I know it can be very unbalanced very quickly. but it can be really fun i stuck monster play in here justin because technically it is pvp and it isn't just a battleground right there's like a there's at least on glam drink i don't know if it's happening on on peregrine i would occasionally see it on landy but not a lot
But there's a lot of monster play action going on on Glamduring, which makes it kind of intrigued by that. Yes, in Lotro, sorry. EverQuest has monster play too. Does it really? I didn't know that. When did they add that?
uh it was with their underground expansion the one with the big mushrooms i remember doing an expansion right up a while back and i really oh yeah that's when they added monster play and i kind of looked into that it's a lot of the same thing like let you jump into the shoes of a typical you know like an enemy mob but instead like you're pitted against other players and i think that's really cool i i would like to see that
I don't know. I've often thought that that would be a really cool system to just... have not specifically focused on a zone but if i wanted to go into monster play say give me five tokens a week and every token i can use it'll just throw me into a monster that's sort of near
a random player on the map and suddenly that monster is a lot smarter than that player was ready for but i'm limited by you know the normal abilities and health meters of that monster i'm not like scaled up or anything like that it could actually be kind of fun like you know just throwing a little bit of unpredictability into your average player's life but
Not necessarily, you know, like, hey, here's the gank squad coming to kill you. I haven't ever seen anything quite like that. But I do like, you know, like Lotra designed entire. Like they couldn't do like an enemy faction for the whole game because that's not really how the lore is set up. But through PvP, it could at least offer players the opportunity to step into the shoes of. uh a warg or spider i mean how many games let you play a giant spider come on or an orc or something like that yeah
It's really cool. Like I said, if you're interested in that, there's like whole guilds on Glamdring. who play both sides of it and like plan we're gonna play on thursday night and whatever it's really it's fun i love that people have made it a thing even in low trooper where you wouldn't necessarily think of it as being a pvp game The last thing I stuck on here was like side modes where you kind of almost think of them as other genres but they actually started here first.
And the one I threw in was Battle Royales because there's a lot of MMOs out there, like even high profile ones that have either have Battle Royale like mini game type things or they used to. And the big one I was thinking of was World of Warcraft, right? Because they've got Plunderstorm. But also Trove has a really good battle royale that nobody plays. And then there's stuff like Black Desert and Ashes of Creation. They tried it and it didn't really go. Apocalypse.
Yes. So those are all the ones that I think are like standard. stock combat driven pvp i think that covers the field there that really does Then there's a whole separate list of non-traditional. Yeah. That's going on forever. And I think people would argue like some of these don't count. and i think we've talked about it before like when we did the economy show or the crafting show we talked about how economy is just pvp you're just not actually seeing the person you're fighting you're
You're playing some sort of money game. You're almost playing stonks. You know what I mean? You're trying to buy low and sell high and sell your stuff. at a better price than somebody else's or have the best vendor or whatever.
i think economy pvp is probably i mean if i if i were picking of all of the pvp types it's definitely my favorite because it's so low-key compared to like there's like no stress in it it's just casual sure well but i'll bet you most of the people coming to this this episode today probably just one of us to focus on the combat i want to list the other ones too okay because i think i think they're relevant i think i think here here's why like honestly i i want
mmo devs to think outside the box when it comes to pvp it does not have to just be murdering you know stabbing back and forth there are so many ways to make competitive gameplay in mmos and a lot of them just go overlooked which means a lot of player templates go, you know, underserved. I don't like that.
So I want to see things like minigames was one of the first things I came up with. There are lots of games out MMOs out there that have something in them where you can battle like car games like in Wizard 101 or whatever. Sure. A lot of the daybreakings. Triple triad in Final Fantasy XV. Yeah, perfect example. That stuff exists. It is PvP. You are just like with Marvel Snap, only it's inside of an MMO. I pulled out the races, since some of them in some games actually are, like Lotro.
And Guild Wars 2 especially, because you can literally join races and, you know, you can win. Oh, I thought you were talking about like the character races, not like speed races. Oh, no, I meant like... Racing, sorry. Yeah, they're racing. justin thinks i'm crazy like okay brie i know you guys don't like a hobbit pvp like where's she going with this one so yeah doing doing races i think that should be that should count
It is. It's a tricky thing to do in online games with lag and some games can handle it a little bit better than others. But yeah, I mean, if you look at like, I'm going deep cut here, Free Realms had a lot of these mini games.
and many of them were pvp in some way shape or form and you had you know you had the braces and you had you know fun little things that you could play against other people so yeah why not i think you know however it's been a while since i've seen a game implement racing against each other like a mario kart style race mostly it's just a here's a track try to go hit you know various checkpoints and you'll be timed but you're not really playing against other people so there's no
competitive element is really just a personal best kind of thing. So I haven't seen as many racing systems. It's not that common. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will jump in and say some games that we haven't played or don't play a lot have them too. guild wars 2 i think is the the best example their races are just so good um i stuck in the crafting challenges which i don't even know would you consider those races lotros you know their little crafting
It's competitive. You have those crafting events where you're... Or an event where you're competing against other people. I would say another one in Lotro would be like the spring. festival shrew stomping event oh yeah where everybody's scrambling to do the thing first because otherwise you take whatever that is the mob or the target or whatever and that's
You know, it's only one person who can get there first and whoever does that gets the point or whatever it is. I'm just laughing. Somebody out there is so mad that we're talking about shrews. I just love your voice. I put in IDOCs from you, and you guys are going to be like, what is... I don't know what any of those letters are. Hey, what is IDOC? An IDOC is the phrase for in danger of collapsing, which is the last and... absolute final tag that goes on a player house.
before it crumbles to the ground and everything inside spills out on the ground. And it is the most glorious free for all. And so IDOC camping is like a whole thing in UO where people will stand and they will camp for days. because they want to be there when this thing falls, either because they want the spot. And so they're going to put down a house, right?
put down a new lot so they can steal it. Well, take it, not steal it. And everybody else is there with mules and whatnot, because they want to take all this stuff and load it up and take off with it. And if it's in a danger zone, like in a baluca. You're also going to see PVP, but either way, you're definitely competing. It is, it is so much fun. It's a whole thing. There are people who do nothing but this because houses are constantly falling.
If people don't pay their subs, right? Oh my gosh. It's like just driving up and down the street and that person's getting evicted. I'm just going to go grab their junk.
Well, usually the people are long gone. And I will say there is a strong culture in Ultima Online where if something drops that is like... named or like specific to your account people will hold on to it and if you come back they'll give it back to you so in a way a lot of it is they're not going to give you back your regs but you're definitely going to get back your statue of yourself you know what i mean That's nice. A little touching. Why wouldn't you have a statue of yourself in your house?
Speaking of the gank box, I also put in espionage because I was specifically thinking of UO players who ghost around, which we've talked about before. But also, Eve Online. Yeah, Eve is just huge. Infiltrate. Yeah. They'll infiltrate corporations. They'll lie about who they are. They'll lie low for months and months and months. And then just. ransacked the place. It hurts my heart to even consider this PvP, but it 100% is.
It's a little outside of the game, the little meta. I don't know. I think you can steal like industrial, like you can steal blueprints. You can. Yes. do all sorts of shenanigans and
Yeah, I'm playing the long game. A lot of people don't suspect me here in EVE Online with my... uh level one frigate but oh i'm gonna take over some corporations someday and we used to see those big stories like these things would happen like oh yeah these cons would be in effect yeah yeah he wrote a whole a whole blog about how he did it and it changed my opinion of brendan like wow he is a lot more don't cross
You think he's going to be some nice... He's taking over massively OP. Some nice UK boy, but nope, he's... he's got it out for somebody i also checked in thievery itself i mean i realize we're just talking about thievery but there are some games where you can just steal stuff from players bodies like i don't mean looting i mean like pickpocketing that kind of thing or
breaking into their houses and stealing their stuff out of their houses some games allow this some don't you always like the poster child for literally thieves as a whole class that can do nothing but steal your stuff. Yeah, you see a lot of these systems. I can't imagine even being in a modern PvP game. Oh my gosh, can you imagine? Yeah, no, I can't because they're already, people are so brutal toward each other and it just seems like it's throwing a door open to...
Mortal Online, does it have thieving? somebody tell me i'm gonna go look that up i don't know if it does but that's the kind of Open free-for-all sandbox we're talking about modern-wise, but they have a lot more stopgaps in place. Yeah, anytime I see like a pickpocketing against a player, it usually just pulls from a random loot table. It's not actually pulling from their loot. Which isn't really PvP anymore. That's not really PvP. Yeah, I don't think so.
i stuck terrain pranging on the list i have a specific thing in mind it's stars reach specifically because i know they think it's a problem they would maybe consider it griefing but it's like all within the rules of the game The example is for like if you're using a certain river for farming your area and somebody up the river decides to screw with you by damming up your river. So now you don't have it anymore.
That's technically PvP. That's using the game mechanics, justified, fair game mechanics against you. And it's one of the things that Stars Reach is trying to deal with right now because it does not have open ganking as a general rule. Some planets might, depending on who takes them over. But that I think it doesn't happen. often i think in mmorpgs but definitely in certain sandboxes so anytime you know there's actually terrain or whatever that's something too i think that should count as pvp um
What else? Harvesting competition. I was thinking of like World of Warcraft where people are constantly trying to beat each other to nodes as they spawn. Back when it was a thing. Yeah. I was trying to think of what other games don't, they haven't upgraded to shared yet. A lot of people copied the Guild Wars 2 model. But I'm having a hard time remembering at this point. You always still like that. Of course. But lots of old games are.
I put Fashion Wars on there because I know there are some games that have Fashion Wars competitions. Like, I don't mean costume contests. Although you could. I meant like some of the in-game systems that WoW and Guild Wars 2 have. I know Fantasy have one also. My brain is saying it might. I can't remember. Politics.
My examples were places like A Tale in the Desert and even Asheron's Call, the first Asheron's Call, because you can't even fight people in A Tale in the Desert, but you are definitely playing this. You're playing a political game against other people. You're trying to get people to vote for you so that you can work your way up the tier and end up in charge of the game in that, what do they call it? It's not a phase.
I think they call it a tale or a telling or something. And Asheron's call was honestly kind of similar because of the monarchy system. You were constantly trying to get more and more people to follow you and then more and more people to follow them so that you had the biggest, most wealthy, most powerful. monarchy which all flooded up the chain to you the stuff they did you got a little you know ticket it was kind of a pyramid scheme honestly
But that's technically PvP because now you're trying to convince people to join your coalition as opposed to somebody else's. And it directly benefits you. So it's not like it's some... you know my guild is bigger than yours no no no this was this was built in you even got skill gain based on how many people were following you i stuck in uh toxicity and i had some specific things in mind like in everquest even on the non-pvp servers
um there were i've talked about this before there were all kinds of ways that guilds could mess with you like with plane jumping where they would just find out where your alliance was going to go get there 10 minutes first and steal the zone and there's only one zone so the first one there gets to do it and there was a lot of that kind of toxicity going on back in the day i think there's lots of instancing now so it's not nearly as big a problem but back then
And finally, roleplaying itself. Because there's all kinds of ways to do combat in a roleplaying system. I don't just mean people being catty and backstabbing and stuff. I mean, literally, roleplayers try to figure out ways where they can fight.
without actually engaging in combat and killing people and what do you do when you've been killed in roleplay but you still want to hang around and there's some pvp to that you have to cooperate a little bit but i think that should count but that's a huge freaking list i'm sure we could think of more if we had to
I just I love that there's like when you really sit down and think about it, it's not just making the combat system against a person instead of a mob. There's so much more out there that we could stick in competitively. And that would bring in so many more different kinds of players.
As opposed to just PVPers or gankers or whatever. MMOs are really rich and we're just not drawing from that wealth most of the time. I think that's something we're getting out of a lot of these theme shows is talking about like how...
How these games are just such a quilt of activities and interconnected parts. And when we start limiting them, we really start... kind of draining away the essence of what makes these games so special and sometimes we're just very You know, people get very myopic and we're just like, oh, over here in our little corner and we don't see everything else.
But we may still encounter a little bit of it. So it's kind of nice to just step back and look at the bigger picture. Like even how PvP, as you said, touches on so many different parts of these games. Yeah. Yeah, you said that you had a section here for interesting PvP systems. Yeah, just like weird random things that I haven't seen very often.
I stuck Darkness Falls on here. You guys remember Dark Age of Camelot. That was the competitive dungeon, right? Well, kind of. You only got access to it if you're... your realm was winning your or maybe had one for the week i don't remember the exact rules for it but it was like on a 24-hour cycle so whoever was winning then that that side could do the dungeon and i don't think anybody else could go
Somebody remind me the exact details. It has been literally 20 years. Yeah, I think they brought the same thing into Warhammer Online. Did they? Oh, I shouldn't be surprised. Yeah, because he was so big into. It was neat. It was an interesting way of rewarding PvP with like, you know, more PvE benefit. A lot of games don't do that. They try to keep everything really really separated.
Oh, I wanted to talk about UO, but there's other games that do this too, but they had that whole system of bounties that they added in. in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding of all the players who were leaving because they didn't want to be ganked 24-7. So they put in this bounty system that is like the foundation for bounty systems in a lot of sandboxes now.
um that allowed you to um if you've been killed so many times you could literally stake money on it and then the next person who killed your ganker would you know collect that bounty like it was a player design yeah that's a pretty cool revenge system i like that And then, of course, if you kill people, you cut their heads off and put them in a box like I did. I had some famous ganker pens by the end of it. You have issues. Listen, growing up in UO really definitely tainted my brain forever.
I feel like your first MMO might not be your favorite, but it definitely sets a standard of behavior that kind of stays with you forever. And that game, like, I feel so scarred by it. Like, it's really hard to... it's really hard to top how bad that was So everything else looks very tame by comparison. I wanted to point out how in Guild Wars 1, they solved one of the big problems of PvP, which I guess we can talk about that. After this, but they solved it by adding pre-made characters.
for pvp specifically so even if you just started the game and you hadn't really gotten very far your character was level four and you had garbage gear you could basically go to the pvp system and make a level 20 character that has everything unlocked And it only works in PvP. So granted, you might not be very good at it. You're gonna have to practice that a lot. But there were people who never got any further in PvE at all. They just did that forever. The PvP stuff.
with a pre-made character. I love it. I don't see that in a lot of games. People are like, no, I want to play the character I've been making. And it leads to all kinds of balance problems. Gilmore's One really actually did a good job trying to fix it. And then I'm going to send you directly to jail.
Archeage jail, that is. I thought that would be a fun system to point out. Tangential to the bounty system, sometimes games are like, no. we're gonna have a whole judicious judicial system words judicial system for dealing with you know errant ganker types and various miscreants I love jail systems. I know Arc Ages is routinely ridiculed for being completely useless, but I love the idea of it. I don't think it's an impossible idea to make work. It just didn't work there.
Star Wars had bounties too, but they had bounty hunters. So in the Jedi system, and this is also true on some of the Star Wars emulators now, they have various spinoffs of this.
where the bounty hunters in the game, the characters, player character bounty hunters, were incentivized to hunt the, at that time, brand new Jedi characters. And the Jedi had to like... stay quiet and lie low and like really hide out because there were dedicated bounty hunter characters chasing them all the time because they got huge payouts and whatnot and if you died as a jedi you were a blue glowy right forever you were dead
It was a really interesting mechanic. I don't see this in a lot of games where it's really just two classes involved. I think that's really neat. That is definitely PvP, definitely unique. And the last one was, yeah, I wanted to talk about. The concept of piquing versus anti-piquing versus noto-piquing. The first time I saw this was UO. Again, it's the idea of some people want to kill everybody and they'll especially prey on newbies or miners or whatever. People who can't fight back.
Then there's usually a class of players like anti-PKs. There's lots of names for them. PKKs, I think, is the other one I've seen where those people are like vigilantes who do nothing but hunt. the other guys over and over again. And then there was the Noto PK thing that has come up in a couple of games, but the big one is definitely UO. This is probably too granular, but it was possible to flag yourself if you were killing somebody.
who had it coming but wasn't necessarily recognized that way by the game because it was way too easy to cheat your way through that system. then people could kill you even though you were doing the right thing. But you had been flagged badly.
I guess any TEF system, any flag system can have this where people are only waiting for people to flag themselves accidentally or... you know for whatever reason and then ganking only people who miss flag wow honestly has this system or used to maybe it doesn't anymore but the pve servers were like that
where people would come in and they'd hang out like a whore dude level 60 or whatever would come and hang out in Westfall and wait for newbies to like accidentally attack them and then just gank the heck out of them. That's what I mean by Noto Peking. There's probably other names for it. Yeah, one of the things we've noticed is, especially covering MMO news as long as we have in a lot of upcoming games, is that we've certainly tracked how many studios look at PvP as a fast track.
adding a ton of content in your game like you don't handcrafted pve content and balancing that takes a lot of work So sometimes games go, well, the shortcut is just Let's really emphasize PvP or let's just make a PvP game. And let's just focus on that. And thereby the players make their own content with each other. And we can just step back and profit.
And it's not nearly that simple. PvP systems are not easy to put into the game. They're all integrated with everything else in the game. A lot of these different parts that are... present and pvp systems have their own unique set of challenges that must be identified solved hopefully
before they put you know the game into launch but you know sometimes these things just kind of come up and along the way and then the games have to deal with them the communities have to deal with these issues and then developers as well Sometimes nobody deals with any of this, and then these systems kind of collapse because it becomes too toxic or just too one-sided or just too unbalanced to deal with.
Before we go into the challenges, I meant to mention this earlier. My first PvP game, my favorite first PvP game, Atari 2600 Warlord. Do you remember that? Wait, how was the PVP? Were you playing the person next to you? Couch co-op. Like co-op PVP. Four, four player. I do not remember this. So it was one of the most amazing PvP games of the early 80s. And it was everybody had a castle in a corner of the screen.
So you had a king in the middle of the castle. The castle was surrounded by breakable walls. So if you know those breakout games where you hit a ball and it ping, ping, ping, this had the same thing, except all four people had paddles and your little... shield thing would go around your corner castle there. And so you could either deflect a ball or capture the ball and then quickly turn and then just put it on a new trajectory.
But the sheer fun of just sitting with other people and getting really way too into crushing each other's castles and being the last person standing, that was fun. co-op pvp is yeah a different sort of thing because you're with the people you can smack talk you're not you know doing this anonymously to strangers on the internet you're just with friends
And I think it has a completely different vibe. And I just wanted to mention that. No, it's worth it. I know we're talking about mostly MMORPGs, but... There's tons of games like that on the Switch. Sure. Spider Heck and Party Animals. Game Beasts. There's tons of those. Because people, you're right, people love that. It's funny.
You know, because you're not ganking somebody's super elite Warcraft character on the other side of the world. You're literally messing with your kid sister right next to you. And that's funny. All right, so back to some challenges. What are some of these challenges that have emerged and we've watched and documented some of the stumbling blocks with PvP over the years? What are some of these challenges that we've noted? I would say the number one thing is open looting because if you
Watch any of our threads whenever we talk about PvP. People are more upset about the idea of being looted than they are about being killed. Like, by far. so that's actually the sticking point with a lot of pvp systems and i think that's why a lot of devs are just like nah that's all right or they're like yeah you can have like one thing but you can't have this and this and this and this you can't have anything important you can have
you know, a potion, but that's it. And then that takes a lot of the thrill out of it for the kinds of people who wanted to play that game. So that is, it's really tricky. Well, if you make it full loot, after a while, nobody really wants to... To play who's going to be the dedicated loot finder, you know, people getting the loot. They're just going to be all the wolves, people prowling around trying to get some easy prey.
Yeah, that's a balance. That's a really hard thing to balance because, you know, so I can see a whole other system. You know, it requires loot. itself to be under important. super mortal mortal online i think was like it wasn't shadow bane as well like just designed like pick up and Use the loot, but don't get too attached to it. It's going to break. It's going to get stolen. It's all disposable generic dollar store loot. I don't mind that.
Some games have really screwed that up. And it's really scarred people. So they're just like, no, I don't. They're thinking about it like World of Warcraft, where this is a character I've spent five years building. All of these dungeon grinds and RNG and whatnot, there's no way I want to risk a character like that. It's my stuff, man. Yeah, I've been looted three times a day. I'm just going to toss some regs back in a bag and get back to it.
Maybe I'll win this one and get some stuff. I'll loot somebody else. And that's really hard for games like EVE Online where the maximum is like, don't fly anything you're not prepared to lose. That's right. Because these ships aren't, you know, yeah, you can get like your skill points back. There's certain insurance for your character, but your actual ship.
that's gone you know once it's destroyed it's just gone and you have to be okay with that loss because that you know in a way that's kind of the permadeath system in the game and how it's structured to be but some people it's just it's such a heavy blow especially if there's like ship that they spent way too much time building or saving up for or which the their little baby for so long and suddenly it was just yoink
by another player, you know, destroyed. And, you know, I can't play with that toy. You can't play with that toy. None of us can play with that toy. And yeah, I can see people just, you know, flipping the table and walking away and saying, forget this. That's not. It gets tiresome after a while. Yeah. I mean, you're making memories. Sure. You know, like you are. Is it good?
but are they ones you yeah it's a high price for a memory all right well that leads into the the ganking challenge honestly because i don't remember which i'm pretty sure it was jeff actually that invented the term gank box or maybe he got it from someplace else but that's where i got it from The idea of a game where basically you're going to go in and someone is going to kill you before you even saw them coming. Take all your stuff. And that's the game. Like over and over and over again.
And the rest of the game ends up being superfluous. That's a big problem. People in our comments, a lot of MMO players, they just won't even touch a gank box. They see it coming and they're like, nah, I'm good. That's not, I didn't want to just play PvP and I didn't just want to be the victim. I don't even want to deal with being a victim for a long time to work my way up to where I'm.
the victor anymore i just don't want to play that there are so many other games that have pvp that isn't like that why would i do that that has always been a problem really since the first sandbox I don't really blame people. Often it goes from taking a game where it's competitive and what we talked earlier about like your personal feelings and and then flips it over into a very very personal space where that guy did something really mean to me. I really want to get back at him.
And either I'm going to spend the next hour trying to do that or I'm going to feel very impotent and just stomp away like a little kid going, I don't like this anymore. And both of those things aren't. healthy and they're not encouraging and yeah maybe you know one chance out of 100 you get that rare sweet sweet revenge And yet it's never quite enough, is it? Because there's always another ganker and there's always somebody who's looking to knock you off the top of your perk.
Some people, however, thrive on that. And I want to be very fair and just say some of this comes down to just your personality type. I've known people in real life that. They're just always competitive. Everything they do is super competitive. They really like doing that. If I'm hanging out with them and they go, hey, you want to play?
you know uno and i'm like no because i played uno with you it devolves into a fist fight at some point and you're grinning the whole time i i would rather not but you know for some people it's just like everything they have to just be the best I'm not that person. That's not what I'm always angling to do. I enjoy...
Doing competitive activities from time to time. It's fun. Like I was doing go-karting with my kids the other day. And we were with a bunch of other teenagers. And you could just see some of them were super competitive. I got to be first. And it was kind of fun trying to see what I could do to outrace them. But I know if I lost, they weren't going to take the contents of my wallet and run away and then come back and teabag me. No, that's not going to be a thing.
Having some sort of safeguards and protections in place from having the gankers go way too far into toxicity and... repeated ganking, I think is pretty important. I think it's nice if, I don't know if MMOs have like a safeguard system where you can't be repeatedly camped by the same character. within a certain time limit i think that's always a good safeguard to have but you know pvp players some people just be like you know suck it up you know just just it just goes with the territory no no
We don't want safeguards. We don't want rules. This is Outback. That's right. Oh, they want rules. They just, they want to control. They want to win, right? Exactly. Well, that's perfect. That, that leads into the next one, which is there's constantly. Skill and level and gear imbalances usually brought over from the PvE side of the game that affect the PvP side in a very bad way.
Right. It's possible in a lot of games for a character who's level 50 to gank a character who's level five. And there will be people who do that if you leave that door open. Even if there's no financial incentive. Right, right. There's no gear. They're just messing around. They just love to do it. Or people who have raiders. This happened to us all the time. This is one of the reasons it was such a chore in Arena.
You know, people who would raid at the highest end in the game would then put on their raid gear and come PvP. And all of the PvP gear in the world was not going to compete with the stuff they had from PvE. So that sucked. I'm talking about WoW specifically, but I know there's other games that have this problem. What else? I don't know. Guild Wars 1 tried to fix it, like I said, by normalizing everybody, by making everybody play.
um a non-pve character or they took skills and changed them in ppp to make them so that you couldn't just do all the pve stuff and then bring them into pvp with you and then wreck everybody else's faces That kind of sucks, but... I don't know. I guess I don't have a good solution for that other than just you have to normalize.
And people don't want to be normalized. Just to be clear, some people are like, well, I did all that. That's my character. I want that advantage. I worked hard for that advantage. That's my only advantage and I'm going to use it. So you're always going to have people fighting back on that. I just remember an article from Guild Wars 2's WVW or one of the arenas a while back where they weren't just trying to normalize gear. They were trying to normalize appearance.
where they didn't want people to kind of hide what kind of class they were. So anybody who went into whatever mode this was, they were just going to be given in generic, like you're a generic engineer. Like, you can't hide your gear. You can't. so that people would instantly visually be able to know, like, you're an engineer, you're a guardian, you're a mesmer.
And I can't disguise that until it's too late. I just saw an article. Did they call it appearance recognition or like silhouette recognition? There's like a phrase for this. I can't remember what it is. But that's basically what you're talking about. I can understand why they're trying to do that. Otherwise, you know, people are running in there with crazy particle effects and they don't look anything. Yeah, I get it.
But it takes away all the customization and individualization that you were doing with the character that you've been building again for dozens of years, a dozen years in this case. What else? These are brief. The territory time zone problem and the lag.
problems that happen because of real life that affect the game and that's something that the devs have to design for how do you deal with somebody who's ping is twice as high as somebody else's ping in pvp that's a nightmare how do you deal with it when you have a territory game where you could lose your territory in the middle of the night unless you...
Like bring in a bunch of players and your guild from the other side of the world so that they're awake when you're not and you're awake when they're not. Like that's what happened to Shadowbane. This is a real problem. It's not hypothetical. A lot of MMOs have gone to these. um, like schedules, like BDO and Albion where they're like, okay, here's the window for when these sieges can occur. And that's it. You're not going to be sneaking in there while somebody's at work.
That helps. You can kind of fix that. But it doesn't feel as organic. It doesn't feel as sandboxy anymore when it's not constantly on. Like in real life, it's constantly on. The three faction problem is another thing I wanted to talk about since we were talking about Dark Age of Camelot earlier. There's a lot of people who really think that three way RVR is destined to fail no matter what.
Because usually what happens if there's three people, two of them are going to team up against the other one. And you know what? People aren't wrong. That happens a lot. So you have to intentionally design it so that that doesn't happen or so that is super de-incentivized. Good luck. We haven't had a lot of successes on that one. Not yet. That's pretty much it from that. The rest of that is, you know. We got big questions at the bottom to answer.
Yeah, and we can move on. I'll let you pick the ones. Well, I think this next one is really important. We need to list what are some of the biggest PvP MMOs out there if this is something you're very interested in. where would we encourage you to go? I would say, first of all, check out our column, Fighter Kite.
because we have a pvp mmo column that's on a pretty regular basis that's that's sam's column by the way he covers a lot of pvp games not just mmo rpgs so like bear that in mind you might yeah you're gonna get you definitely want an mmo You might not like some of the shooters and stuff, but he does a lot. So sandboxes and whatnot. If you just want PVP, he's your guy. You know what I mean? He's got a lot of, a lot of games in there.
I mean, so I guess it kind of boils down to like, what are you looking for? Are you looking for smaller? team-based you know matches like jump in have some fun in the battleground or you're looking for the more widespread you know eve online style giant huge pvp space battles that get into like newspapers and stuff so different different games kind of specialize in that stuff um you know planet side too very always back and forth between the three factions you know if you like shooting
in mmos then that would be a good one like some people really like to you know pvp as a shooter style game versus like a fantasy style title
So those are two immediate ones. I think Black Desert has quite a bit of PvP, and it's always a good one. World of Warcraft, of course, specializes in many different types of PvP and even had... some big esports you know is investing in esports back in the day through the game and even though that's not so much of a thing anymore it still is very important to the game and and people are quite
interested in pvp and i will say that i don't know if we mentioned this like even world of warcraft has an optional pvp flagging mode Yeah, they called like the war mode. So you can just if you're on a server that people kind of do this, you can flag yourself, you get some extra experience.
doing any activity while you're in flag mode but you also may be ganked or find yourself in the middle of some conflict so it kind of just you know makes yourself vulnerable you know like optional pvp flagging Yeah, I don't think anybody's really done Battlegrounds as good as well. um today i know the pvp scene is not what it used to be and i know blizzard doesn't pay as much attention to it as it used to but they're still really well done battlegrounds they always were
Yeah, I guess to that I would add Albion Online. I think just because it's so well supported, it's so pretty. It's a really full-fledged sandbox. And you can start really light with the PVP. Like you'll, you'll work your way up through a couple of the early zones. You're pretty safe. And then you get to a zone where.
there's going to be people running around ganking each other and you can kind of jump in and start practicing. There's like small scale skirmishing you can do before you've even had to join a guild. Before you get to endgame, you will definitely want a guild. So bear that in mind. If you are a total owner, that's probably not your game. But if you're looking for... you know a really fleshed out pvp sandbox that is totally modern i think you might actually have more fun in something like that
um than in eve which is eve is kind of a thinker you know what i mean you're gonna spend a lot of time in eve not doing that so if pvp is what you want it has it but it's not primarily pvp you're going to do a lot of psychological warfare and auctioning and stuff too so bear that in mind Pay attention, I would say, to Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online. Both of them are... They have a lot of potential for their current PvP systems, and both of them are in the middle of major renovations.
for their PvP systems. Both ArenaNet and Zenimax clearly care about trying to revitalize PvP. I don't know how it's going to work. when Elder Scrolls is done. And I don't know whether WVW is actually going to be that great when ArenaNet is done, but they are working on it like right now. That's like literally been going on for the last year. I think those are worth at least watching if you're into PvP just to see how they go.
Star Wars The Old Republic has some PvP in it. Oh, I forgot about that. We haven't mentioned them at all. Oh, Huttball. That's a great example. Yeah, sport. sports slash pvp in fact um we can have also mentioned hobnanigans from lotro chicken soccer you know there's some weird pvp yeah so marrying Sports and PvP is a very interesting combination, but it's not unheard of.
And yeah, there's some PvP there. Although it seems to be in a bit of a broken state right now. There's a lot of people complaining about the PvP side of the game. So just be aware of that. Well, don't neglect the emulators and rogue servers either. I mean... I know that's going to sound crazy, but Star Wars Galaxies still has a really strong PvP system and a really strong PvP community, even in space.
Warhammer Online, I mean, we're teasing it a little bit, but it was bad. And a lot of people play it like that. That rogue server Return of Reckoning is huge. yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't give up on those kinds of games we don't really talk about the uo ones either but there's a ton of pvp oriented uo shards out there if you're into the private server scene. There's there's a lot of opportunity if you're looking for more of a throwback thing.
And there's a lot of MMOs that also have specific PvP servers. We didn't really talk about ruleset servers as much, but ones that really encourage and foster PvP conflict. Didn't New World just launch one? New World, um...
Well, they always had... Yeah, theirs is like a seasonal server. I don't think those are going to be permanent, right? But they have ongoing PvP anyway, so you could start there and see if you like it, and then... leave but the one i was going to mention was pantheon that literally just happened last week they've they've added their pvp servers so Does, I mean, Ashes obviously has. kinda ganky PvP coming. I don't know whether you can test it right now.
I'm not 100% sure how much of that is in. I mean, that's not a launch game, so I probably shouldn't mention it yet. Yeah, probably most of us are. There's plenty of opportunity out there. Yeah, most games, most MMOs will have some sort of PvP, not all. And not all to the same degree. But you can generally find it if you're looking hard enough. But some games do seem to... invest more into it and excel more into it so i think the ones we talked about probably are are some of your best bets yeah
So we're running really low on time. Is there any last? question that you want to cover? Star Wars Galaxies has the best PvP. I will not be taking more questions.
no i'll take questions i i am a huge fan of star wars flag system the tef system i always will be it is a it's the perfect combination of factional gameplay that is completely opt-in but it's like constantly opt in not like you make a choice once you pick a server no it's you can jump in at any time if you are on the right faction but you can't necessarily be ganked until you jump in like it
it created these really fun organic flash flashover incidents where like you would think everybody is being chill and then somebody would screw up and suddenly everybody would flag and boom you've got this gigantic fight going on and yet there's other people sitting around going this again really because they're completely neutral they can't be attacked they can't attack like it just beautifully mixed
The PvP with PvE players just brought it all together into one place instead of setting it off to the side in a battleground. in somebody's, you know, guild zone or whatever. I love that. I will always love that. I'm really glad that Koster is doing that or something similar to it in Star's Reach. I think it's like the best of all worlds. Maybe there's a better way out there, but I don't know what it is.
And I will say along the lines of rogue servers, there's a Warhammer, you know, Return of Reckoning. Yes. And that's up. And if you like, you know, that style PVP, you know, definitely avail yourself as well. But I will not claim it's the best. It's really sad that both of our favorites, by the way, are. I'm not saying that's my favorite. I'm just saying that's an exam. Yeah. I don't really have. I mean, if I had to pick one out of a hat, it would probably just be wow.
yeah i really think it's just solid yeah it always has been and it's got a good like we didn't get into like reward systems you know it has a pretty good reward system for that style of gameplay. If that's what you want to go down and pursue, you can actually gear your character up through just PvP and that's a good...
Good option to have. And not just that character. Like, I mean, I'm thinking back to, do they still have like heirloom gear on the PVP vendors? I used to farm that stuff all the time. It was fun. Because then you're PvPing for gear for your PvE alts. That was just fun. huge fan of that there are so many things in wow i miss Well, there's certainly and there's certainly more PvP topics we could continue to cover. I encourage you guys go down in the comments and let's get the conversation going.
What do you like? What do you hate about PvP and MMOs? Is it something you engage with? Is it something you've had a long history with? Are there particular games and systems that you recommend over others? These are things that I think are very important to share with our fellow players because it helps.
Other people are looking into PvP to give them some guidance. We're looking for games to avoid. I mean, let's be real. Some people are making a list of everything we've talked about, like not going there. And that's fair too. My general feeling is I don't care if my game has PvP. I just don't want it foisted upon me without my consent.
I think that's fair. And that's true of every game system. We don't even need to say PvP. That's every game system in the game. Don't force people into that. Give me multiple paths. Yeah, totally. All right. That's all the time we have for today's theme show. So this was fun talking about PVP and then thanks to my co-host for really organizing and constructing. The giant theme Bible that we went through there. But no, that was very helpful to go through all that.
So that's all we're going to talk about today. We will get back to our regular format next week. We'll talk more about news. And, of course, your podcast emails. Send those in. Check out, there's a link there in the show notes. You can click and send us in your topics and discussion. Maybe you will have a follow-up to today's show, and I'm sure we will not avoid talking more about PvP. Yeah, it's probably going to come up once.
Once or twice, I'm sure. There you go. All right, you guys take care and we'll talk to you again.