I'm bored at work and when I get bored, I want to dissect concepts and ideas; and since I spend more time on the ESO forums than I should, the idea popping into my head today is...

what are some of the fundamentals of including pvp in ANY MMO?

lots...and I mean LOTS...of posts on the ESO forums are about pvp - balancing skills, re-prioritizing pvp development, de-prioritizing pvp development, anger at lag (lots of that), itemization, time cost vs reward, etc, etc...

and it just gets me wondering - if we were going to try and design "perfect" pvp...what would we come up with. Now, the obvious answer, is of course, that there IS no "perfect" pvp - that even PVP'ers would be divided (passionately, probably violently) about what constituted what "perfect" pvp is, but still...I'm curious

so, the basic factors I'm *assuming* pvp'ers either want, or accept will be present due to the fundamentally competitive nature of pvp are...

1 - "balanced" battles - this term comes up a lot, a lot of people seem to consistently believe that most people won't want to play PVP, if any one person can get a stupidly overpowered advantage over another person. So, one of our fundamental ideals for perfect pvp, might be to ensure that pvp works so that everyone has a roughly equal chance to respond to an attack, meaning that health pools and outgoing damage should be roughly equal at ALL levels of pvp, then assuming that one players *skill* will determine their victory over another player - this is assuming equal numbers of people in an engagement (i.e. 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, etc...)

2 - "reward" for investment - this is nearly the complete opposite of the above idea, and also a fairly prevalent idea in pvp discussions. Some people believe that if they spend enough time pvp'ing, they should receive commensurate (i.e equal to the amount of time/effort/resources they put into it) rewards. So, a person that plays twice as often as another person feels they should receive roughly twice as much reward.

since the "reward" for pvp, in many people's minds, ought to be somehow related to "powering up" your character, this essentially means that there are people that believe that people that spend more time, effort and/or resources engaging in pvp should be commensurately more powerful than people in PVP that spend less time/effort.

3 - small scale battles - easy idea - some people prefer relatively small engagements - these are fairly personal battles, where people get to be very familiar with their opponents - realizing styles of combat, recognizing names, etc...

4 - large scale battles - of course, other people prefer large scale engagments. They like being part of the ebb and flow of a battle line, they like the idea of being carried along in a sea of chaotic battle, they like watching a large force overcome a large force and take a significant victory over a fortress or whatnot...etc...

5 - Ego - don't lie to yourself. A significant quantity of pvp discussions (and to be fair, quite a few pve discussions as well) revolve around various issues of perceived "prestige". small scale battles allow many players the opportunity to believe that they are superior (in skill, or perhaps just overall) to the people they beat - leaderboards throw fuel on that particular flame by putting their name up in a list against other people. Many discussions about rewards involve people being angry that *anyone* can get a particular something without having to *work for it*, and that this diminishes the perceived prestige for someone having acquired the item "the hard way"...etc...

so, I think we have to factor Ego into any discussion about developing "perfect" pvp - we either have to satisfy these requirements, or design pvp to avoid ego issues, or try and run some middle ground

6 - multi-faction engagments - while this *sort of* related to issues of "balance", for whatever reason, having more than 2 sides to a battle seems to be one of the raging experiments of some modern PVP. Now, virtually anyone that's ever played anything that can have more than 1v1 engagements knows that someone almost ALWAYS gets teamed up on until it gets boiled down to a 1v1 - so 3 faction and 5 faction and even 4 faction engagements are usually just 1v1's that someone else gets in the way of temporarily.

Now, that's not to say that an uneven faction zone is pointless. The whole point of having 1v1v1 is that red starts fighting blue - the battle establishes a pattern - then yellow shows up - the pattern gets upset, suddenly everything's in play - maybe blue leaves and it becomes yellow v red - maybe blue was winning but now red is winning once yellow leaves...having multiple factions DOES create a new factor of variation in engagements that can be quite rewarding. But it's almost never "balanced" in a traditional sense.



now, I'm not actually promoting any one of these ideas over another - they're just a few of the basic factors I see when I hear people arguing about what PVP should be like.

Eso Pvp is what it is. I don't have any expectation that there are going to be large, fundamental design changes to ESO cyrodill because of anything we say here - but the discussion COULD be valuable to the people that are going to play (and possibly design) the next big MMO pvp...so I'm mostly curious to hear...

A - have I missed any other fundamental building blocks of pvp? or, perhaps I should just say, WHICH fundamental building blocks of PVP have I missed or overlooked?

B - Which way do YOU swing as far as any of these particular ideas? Are you a big battle guy? do you like small engagements? are you all about the pretty-show-off-swag?...which factors of pvp are most important to YOU?

C - what other insights do you suddenly feel compelled to add?

there - that ate up almost a whole half hour of my day - only a half hour to lunch!