Best MMO PvP you ever played?

[Lejonkungen]

My vote goes to daoc as well.

 

 

People keep saying DAoC.

 

You know that game still exists right? People keep saying how great it was, but apparently none of you still play it. How is the greatest thing ever so great that you stopped?

 

Is it because it's a 10 year old game with a $15/month sub fee? I'm guessing it's that.

 

I actually do still play it from time to time. I love loging on my eldritch, head out in rvr, use my atlantis tablet and shapeshift in to a sobokite (during night time ingame they are hard to spot since they are green just like the grass) then jump a full group by mezzing them then kill a caster or 2 before they figure out where I am, so much fun. That is not the only thing I do of course. But me still playing it is because of the great pvp.

[Cruxe]

Meridian 59. Full on PvP with an outlaw system, and servers small enough that player enforcement was actually possible.

 

Second was DaoC.

[Vonrictus]

Daoc pvp sucks actually. They have the best RvR or open world pvp but the pvp mechanics are stupid.

 

Group VS Group comes down to whoever gets the first Group Mez. It is a crowd control that incapacitates your chars for 20-30 secs. So when one group hits the other, they will start killing people one by one. If the others wake up, they get aoe stunned. Game over. So people have to use maphacks. if your group do not have maphack, they will get killed easily.

 

I just like fighting for the relics and trying to take/defend a keep.

 

They fixed that six months in....it hasnt been that way for years and years and yes I just played it in November.

 

Determination, Purge etc all took care of that issue.

[Geney]

DAoC..hands down..no gear grind, once you had a template u were good to go...realm abilities...no two character were the same..

[kimmiekros]

Guild Wars 1.

 

It is PvP that's based on the player/team skill. No gear gap, gear grinding, and unlim no cost respecs/pre-made builds.

Edited January 26, 2012 by kimmiekros

[Flexplosion]

gladiator in WoW was my shining acheivement and had a LOT of fun doing it. I played pretty much every class composition in 3v3 available, but my favorite was ret pally/war/druid in season 3. started the season off as the only class without resilience (it was added later in the season) and managed to hit server first 2k for the season with a gorehowl. had my shoulders before some of the more established pvp'ers and that in turn got me a lot of attention when people were looking for a pally to partner with.

[Vonrictus]

DaOC retail.

DaOC Darkness Falls "Patch"

DaOC - Shrouded Isle expansion

 

Anything by Mythic after SI forget it. Frontier, Trials of Atlantis, etc - all of it failed after the SI part because they couldn't find a way to balance PvE with PvP and class abilities (see the connection to WoW by any chance?). The two really can't coexist regardless of how many companies try to, it just doesn't work.

 

Why DaOC worked which some of already said but I'll second is simply a reason to engage first and foremost. But more importantly risk and rewards. Reason is simple. Character statistics and abilities based on progression over time. Pace set by subscriber and progression could be done via group or solo.

 

Guilds and alliances could communicate - nothing so far comes close in most MMO's currently out. Guilds are more or less solo and band aids are built via grouping tools. In DaOC you had a guild, then you had an alliance - alliances are made up of more guilds which shared a common chat channel. Keeps controlled by guilds in the alliance all received alerts when keeps are attacked...

 

It goes on and on but if you played it it really is simple in all honesty. You pve behind a wall and can't be killed. You go beyond said wall to quest or kill mobs the exp and other rewards are greater, but the risk of getting killed / ganked is higher. Your guild, or alliance takes keeps or relics you get other rewards and after Darkness Falls content push you gained access to a new instance again with more rewards, faster exp, and what not. If you are inside said instance when your realm loses it - you have to make a decision. Stand and fight, log out and come back later, hide, or find one of the off shoot sides and make a stand. Some of the, if not most fun ever in any pvp game, happened here. Oh, and there was a super tough boss that pre ToA never died....no matter how many people tried to zerg it.

 

The main thing to take away when people mention DaOC is that there was risk, rewards, and a reason to engage in PvP. The 3 r's more or less. You could play at your own pace and not fall far behind. It was built up around PvP. Guilds formed alliances. They communicated. You could be large or small. No restrictions on claiming keeps other than supporting the required points to keep it, or defend it. Crafters added value. Healers added value. Tanks added value.

 

Warzones, Bg's tie you to a confined space. The don't change. They get old. Larger zones like Ilum or say wintergrasp are a bit different but they bring in their own issues one if which may break this silly game - win trading. That is a bad thing, it is cheating, and it must be stopped.

 

Bottom line - give PvP a reason to happen and people WILL play. It doesn't havet o drop loot like skittles falling from the sky. But it needs to have risk, rewards, and a reason.

 

Edit 1: Most important above all is that a game engine which dates back to 2001 could support 300+ people in the same zone casting all abilities fighting over a relic and not stutter...

 

Are you my brother? I swear DAOC 2 would be the biggest hit in the industry since Wow. Build a game BASED on PVP where even PVE centric people can have fun and be part of the cause and they will come.

[Ahmrill]

Are you my brother? I swear DAOC 2 would be the biggest hit in the industry since Wow. Build a game BASED on PVP where even PVE centric people can have fun and be part of the cause and they will come.

 

Guild Wars 2... closest to DAOC coming out this year. I was hoping SWTOR will hold me over until GW2 is released but I've already canceled my SWTOR subscription.

 

Open world PvP here is not enjoyable, and the warzones are getting old.

[Bootcha]

Personally the one MMO I sank the most time into, and enjoyed, was City of Heroes/Villains. Very fast paced and skill dependent. Tiered warzones that always had action going on. Each AT had something going for them the others didn't, and didn't suffer because they either didn't have enough HP or do enough dps. There were plenty of utility powers for unconventional fights. If you were competent you could pick your fights while evading fights you were outmatched, and if you were REALLY skilled you could lay a path of destruction through a team.

 

I made it a habit of rolling strange toons builds that made absolutely no sense, against the grain of conventional PvP wisdom, and made them work in PvP through practice and mechanics. I really enjoyed turning a stone/stone brute, essentially an immobile and slow melee platform any other day, and turning it into a very mobile ambush and brawl WMD. This was during the time when blappers and pocket healers were the talk of the town. I guess that the selling point was you could be distinct and successful if you had the skill and tenacity in CoX PvP.

 

Then they had to ruin it by making defense/psi the undisputed face-roll king.

[LordFenixx]

My favorite MMO pvp was Warhammer Online because I couldn't be cc'd constantly so people actually had to think if they wanted to kill me. It is basically one cc and done for a bit.

[Dovahbrah]

Shadowbane.

[Incendergel]

Daoc pvp sucks actually. They have the best RvR or open world pvp but the pvp mechanics are stupid.

 

Group VS Group comes down to whoever gets the first Group Mez. It is a crowd control that incapacitates your chars for 20-30 secs. So when one group hits the other, they will start killing people one by one. If the others wake up, they get aoe stunned. Game over. So people have to use maphacks. if your group do not have maphack, they will get killed easily.

 

I just like fighting for the relics and trying to take/defend a keep.

 

Mez was fixed early on with the nerf to PAC healers and other realms AoE stuns via diminishing returns. Trust me it was a blast on the Midgard side to run with 2 PAC healers, 3 suppression spiritmasters, skald for speed and whatever else. Stun and let the spiritmasters destroy everything. Yet it was adjusted, rightly so, and we still found ways to make stuff happen.

 

People did what they are supposed to do in world pvp. Stealth groups try and control the gates, groups running would focus target / assist, and you moved. You didn't stay in one place, you turned off your tourch so you didn't draw attention. If you rolled a group you would move so not to get word out about your location. You used the landscape to your advantage. If you wanted a relic...well then you don't show your hand all at once. You fight keeps, coordinate killing of the lords, then have your main group ready to fight the relics while the others who just took the keeps guard the escape route via a gate.

 

It was all about team work. CC was a necessary evil but there are counters.

[bklynfinest]

Btw, UO pre-trammel into trammel is a great case study on how to lose a large percentage of a population by completely ignoring the playerbase and underestimating the amount of people that pvp.

[OatsRawr]

Ragnarok Online LOLOLOL

[rakhabit]

One other thing that Asheron's Call did that no other game did that completely changed the way PvP felt. Collision Detection. You couldn't stand inside of someone on Darktide. If you wanted to, you could back someone into a corner and they couldn't leave by running through you and your friends. They had to take their beating.

 

I don't think anything ever will match Darktide '99-'01. Those 2 years were the best, and unless some fans band together and have the ability create a new game it will never come back.

 

It's such a shame taht only a couple thousand people experienced what is the best PvP MMO of all time.

 

Hey who let you on the forums!

[Yazule]

Ultima Online

 

The fact there were no "factions" to begin with, and you would be 'good or bad' based on if you PK'd or killed PK's.

 

When the shrines started to get involved, and the gems and all that jazz... I lost interest personally. Stopped playing. Made free shards and tried to re-live the experience, but with only 150 people, it got boring fast.

 

I did like running tournaments. I found it quite enjoyable.

 

I never played DAoC religiously. I think only for a month or so, and I was back to other games. But from what I hear, the sieges were epic sauce.

 

/agree completely, trammel killed UO

 

oh but you didnt mention NO CLASSES, pick the skills you want and skill them up, no "class x is op" ... if you were OP then YOU were OP and that is 1337 before 1337 was leet

[Gidoru]

The ORIGINAL SWG was my first MMO and some of the most fun i had gaming. The PvP in the game, while flawed was amazingly fun.

[rakhabit]

oh but you didnt mention NO CLASSES, pick the skills you want and skill them up, no "class x is op" ... if you were OP then YOU were OP and that is 1337 before 1337 was leet

 

This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to The Secret World. No classes, take the skills you want.

[Arrys]

Don't forget Shadowbane. R.I.P.

 

agreed. But for the games stability issues....

 

Shadowbane and DAOC tops for me but missed UO and a few others I know would be contenders If I'ld played them.

[Narcolepsy]

I played Darkfall briefly but I absolutely loved it and the sandbox element; the ease to craft weapons and armor to counter the open looting. Also being in a guild ownign a castle working to strengthen it and upgrade it. Getting in to fights to stop raids or attempts to take it from you.

 

Lineage 2 for me as well. Aside from it being a Korean grind fest I felt the Castle and town control added a huge element to staying with a Guild. It gave you something to strive for and to protect as a group/team. I wish they had similar things in just about every game. That risk vs reward and gain/loss system adds more meaning to PvP (for me at least) than just grinding for gear.

 

And from everything I've heard from people that have played DAOC or Shadowbane I think I would have loved those games too, wish I had of gotten in on those at the time they were big.

[hidy]

Lots of ppl talking about DAoC. I might have to peep!

[zaknaphein]

Daoc pvp sucks actually. They have the best RvR or open world pvp but the pvp mechanics are stupid.

 

Group VS Group comes down to whoever gets the first Group Mez. It is a crowd control that incapacitates your chars for 20-30 secs. So when one group hits the other, they will start killing people one by one. If the others wake up, they get aoe stunned. Game over. So people have to use maphacks. if your group do not have maphack, they will get killed easily.

 

I just like fighting for the relics and trying to take/defend a keep.

 

A troll is a troll....Fyi thats what daoc was,yes first landing mezz, were you good and skilled at reacting, you had an advantage, were you slow and not skilled well you could have tried one of the carebear pvp games out there. And also it wasnt 100% win if you had the first mezz, but i'm sure with your experience you would know that there were mechanics to avoid this.

[Psyclosis]

daoc, enough said

 

wtb daoc 2

[Scotro]

Here's my official list...

 

1. DAOC

2. Asheron's Call (particularly, Darktide)

3. WOW

4. EVE

5. Reminiscing about PVPing in the aforementioned games

6. SWTOR warzones with friends

7. Watching paint dry

8. Bashing head against brick wall, or some other form of self inflicted pain

9. SWTOR Ilum

10. SWG after NGE

[Newsinz]

1: DAOC

2/3: Guild Wars (not really an MMO), Warhammer (the combat system was mostly good for most of the game's lifespan, despite the city / fort system being ****ed for equally as long)

 

 

DAOC commentary:

 

1. DAOC had an effective overarching system because there were 3 realms. Reasonably good internal balancing.

 

2. DAOC had good gameplay options because there were no "rails". The developers didn't add over-engineered microgoals here and tokens there to make you do specific things.

 

Look at how ****** Ilum is -- players want "TOKENS" and **** to drop in Ilum to make it "worthwhile". Players do Warzones only because they give commendation tokens. Everyone and their brother wants *********** tokens as a reason to PvP, instead of simply killing players because it's fun.

 

In DAOC, you simply got points for doing the one thing common to all PvP: killing *********** players. None of this clicking on chests in Tatooine ********. No retarded medal farming "hey let's stand in the acid pit more". No clicking gimmicky objectives on Alderaan.

 

You kill players, you get points. Period.

 

3. DAOC PvP had a greater purpose -- relics that mattered. No game since has implemented an overarching reason for your entire faction to cooperate to WIN THE GAME. Although it has to be said: relics had a significant impact on PvE. And this is probably why we will never see a similar system for WoW/Rift/SWTOR or any PvE-centric game.

 

4. Gear. DAOC gear, for a very long segment of its life, was easy as **** to get to a competitive level. During vanilla, you did your epic quest, gg. During SI, you talked to a crafter and paid a few hundred gold. During ToA (**** TOA) you ****ed your ******e with a sharp object. After they nerfed TOA, it was a short grind.

 

 

 

Additional note on #2: This is pretty significant IMO, because this may never change for MMOs in the future. Specifically, Mythic was lazy as **** and simply bad at making their "content". They were too haphazard to go and "MAKE RAILS" like Trion, BioWare, Blizzard.

 

Modern developers sink a lot of development and QA time into creating things like 47 different tokens, finely-tuned token acquisition rates and gear acceleration and titles and rewards and map markers and objective capture times and ... get the picture? Developers nowadays over-engineer the games.

 

They call it "features" and "content". What it does is force players to min/max their "TOKENS PER HOUR".

 

Back in DAOC's day, the devs were lazy *****es working out of their garage. Not really, but at that level. PvP in DAOC was barebones and simple: kill players, collect RP. Kill door, kill lord, take keep. Keep helps you kill players, collect RP. Did I mention killing players and collecting RP?

 

The system was absurdly simple. This means that players are the ones who decided how they wanted to play -- did they want to StealthZerg™? 8-man roam? Zerg that milegate? Camp Darkness Falls? Any of the above, because they all involved ... get this: KILLING PLAYERS, COLLECTING RP.

 

Nowadays, developers try to tune rewards for zerging, roaming, camping, ganking. If you played Warhammer, you saw this -- keep trading, because players try to optimize RP/hour. Because devs tried to "incentivize" keep warfare. What do we do in Ilum? Trade caps. What do we do in Huttball? Farm medals. We don't PvP anymore, because the developers give us "TOKENS" and micro-objectives, and zone quests.

 

None of which involve killing players.

 

Developers are trying too hard at all the wrong things.

 

Mythic didn't try hard when they made DAOC. They let the players try hard after they lucked out with a solid PvP system.

 

Sigh.

 

I didnt read all of this... but I saw GW up there and had to give props lol.