Warzones destroying PVP?

[LordSemaj]

Found this post about Ilum and battlegrounds in general. How do you think they affect PVP and should SWTOR shy away from making more of them to focus on open world content?

 

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I'm not saying "tear down what they have planned" but rather over the past few weeks while I toil away in SWTOR I got to thinking about PVP and PVP BG's in particular. As far as PVP systems I've expereinced it goes back to UO Pre/Post-Trammel and AC Darktide, AO, DAOC Guin/Modred both Pre and Post BG's and Frontiers and War/WoW/Aion.

 

I've done PVP in other games but those are the ones that really stuck with me. I started to think about how games went the route of BG/Open world pvp and did a brief moment in time. Now in UO you didn't have a choice outside of towns PVP was going on, AC you turned on PVP and had to go through some effort to turn it off. AO you had area's were Pvp was gonna happen. DAOC Guin you had the frontiers and later you had Battlegrounds that you could opt to go fight in your own fishbowl with people at your level range for as long as you wished. War you had Battlezones which you could get to at anytime and a open PVP combat zone. Wow You had contested area's on PVP server's and battlegrounds and later on Arena's. Aion you had the PVP zone and the potential to invade sections of your enemies leveling area's.

 

In short we've seen PVP evolve from wandering random haphazard fights to carefully orcastrated deathmatch style PVP. The thought started going to my mind as I sat on Illum (SWTORS open world PVP zone) where has all the PVP gone? The answer I came up wit was Battlezones, simply put its not battlezones themselves that killed world PVP, its Battlezones that you could get to from ANYWHERE at anytime. I actually think that DAOC had this idea right. In it you had to go to a area and use it to enter a battlezone, which was set for around your level. Battlezones were also not "matches" but rather just a area where you were assured that everyone you would encounter would be around your level. Since there was no instant teleporting to this area people had to make a choice to go PvP rather then PvE which helped build a PvP community and as time went on people gravitated toward the people they liked to play with creating friendships and rivalries.

 

Adding the "match" feeling to PvP gave rise to a new type of PvPer, the fairweather PvE'er whom just wants the PvP reward and doesn't actually care about the outcome, and since the match will eventually end and dole out rewards for everyone who was there at the time, they've taken to joining a match and then proceed to go hide in a corner and wait for the end and the reward.

 

So is it just me or does "Battlezones/grounds" on the go seem like its actually hurt PVP overall? Not only that but as long as it exsists then the only time you will see any open world PVP occur is when its heavily organized?

 

Just my two cents.

 

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