Ultima Online. Probably the first game I'd truly call an MMO that I loved. I started out playing a good guy, hunting down Dread Lords and other bad players. Then my neighbor pissed me off or something, I whacked him, then just went postal on everyone else and ran around killing innocents, turned out to be quite a lot of fun. And PvP felt like it had so much meaning. You die, the winner gets to loot your stuff (assuming someone doesn't steal it first). Freaking awesome. You could even rob other people's homes if you caught them with their house key. And they did such an excellent job with the criminal system. It allowed for player run justice and helped curb random mass grief killings that some PvP games have issues with.

This game had such simple 2D sprite graphics, but had such a real immersive feeling. I don't think I've ever played anything that has even come close to this. And it's such a tragedy that other attempts at this have failed so miserably.

Sadly Trammel came about, killed PvP. Then EA added elves and ninjas. Might as well put Pokemon in there too. It's been dead since about 2000 in my eyes (though I endured it a bit longer than that).


DAOC, I loved this game. It is second favorite. It's far behind UO in love. But it's a fair amount ahead of all the other crap I've played since. DAOC's PvP is nothing like UO. I don't even want to call it PvP, that word is wrong. It's an open world RvR, it's not meant to compare to real PvP games in my opinion. But as an RvR game, it's was just so freaking great for a while. I loved the large scale battles, relic raids, sieges. An open world RvR that had real meaningful impact to everyone on the server, even if they didn't participate. These things were pretty cool.

I think Mythic got greedy. They needed money to pay for their next projects (Imperator and later Warhammer). And I swear I believe Mythic intentionally went out of their way to make most expansion classes so ridiculously overpowered that everyone would feel compelled to buy it even if they didn't want to. And then Mythic was so freaking slow at recognizing problems and addressing them. Hibernia seem to run in god mode for what felt like two years. TOA was pissing off players and it took them years to fix that.

So glad to see 6 years of my subscription dollars pretty much went to pay for Warhammer Online. That was money well spent. Mythic are great people, but I really wish they'd made some better decisions. They had something good going there.


WOW, Warhammer Online, Rift, and now Star Wars (from my brief time) seem to pretty much have the same instanced type of PvP experience. You queue up, wait for teams to get established. You'll get dumped with a bunch of asshats and maybe one person that knows what day of the week it is and you'll be pitted against a max ranked pre-formed group on Ventrilo. You get ravaged without vaseline in a PvP scenario that has absolute no impact on the game for 15 minutes just so you can collect a few precious points. Repeat this 10,000 times and then one day you too can ravage newbs like you had been 9,999 times previously.


Please Guildwars 2. DO NOT SUCK!

This x1000!

I even started out exactly the same. I had built a very good rep as a defender of the weak when I finally snapped after having my house robbed for the umpteenth time and just went batcrap crazy on everyone. It got so good (see what I did there) that many of the players I used to defend grouped up to track me down and kill me. They even told me later that making the transition from sneak around timid types to brash run around with their hair on fire types was awesome

 

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As much as I agree UO pre-Trammel was a lot of fun, Trammel still saved the game, players were leaking like mad to other games like EQ because they got tired of the ganking. Even back then, "hardcore" PvP was a small niche. Darktide (AC1's PvP server) never passed 8% of the total game population when AC1 was in it's top years.
I think the bad decision was to include Trammel on the same server than Feluccia. They should have made separate PvE servers. But catering to the PvEers became an urgent priority to save the game as soon as a concurrent (EQ) came out with 100% PvE servers.

 

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They didnt do separate servers because they never expected the sheer scale of exodus that occurred, and they thought people might be more likely to visit if they just had to teleport their main character. I suspect they thought property would have some kind of anchoring effect. Even if 20% had stayed/vistted for land or resources alone, Felucca probably would have been OK.

The real problem was what plagued DaoC as well - tons of PvE focussed players coming to a supposedly PvP focussed game and becoming the primary customers. The problem largely disappeared as more game choices appeared and it was recognised that Open PvP was largely a niche activity at this stage of MMO's.

Otara

They didn't save nothing. It's dead I tell you.

Not sure about that, but if true, doesn't it ring a bell for you?
PvE players are the vast majority, and while many will also attend PvP as a "side game", most won't play a game that doesn't have good PvE first.

 

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Remember when Mythic stated that ToA would affect PvP in a minor way. Oh man did they get us HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I don't really care about PVP in Star Wars because it will be the usual lame crap that every other game has now (battlegrounds/scenarios).

Sometimes it can be fun for short bursts but overall, I think PVP has gone down the sh**er since WoW introduced Battlegrounds and every other Developer jumped in head first to copy it.


Eh, MMO's in general are boring the hell out of me. I want a First Person Shooter MMO with guns and ammo but that wont happen anytime soon. Firefall could be interesting though. I figure the PVP aspect of it will suck as it will take the scenario route that Huxley took, where you play in Arena's with 16-32 other people instead of just roaming the world, seeing some guy and ganking him.

 

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You mean, beside Ilum (faction vs faction entire planet dedicated to world PvP) and the FFA zone on Tatooine?

 

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Which is why WAR failed so badly IMO. If that game had good PvE and world design it would have been a huge game. I enjoyed PvP ( open world - not scenarios because of the group vs pug problem ) on my warrior priest but the PvE was soooooo bad that during down times ( especially after most everyone left ) I wouldnt even play.