It’s fascinating to watch the people in the previous thread talk about how World of Warcraft’s PVP has no ’sting’ or consequence to it. This, to me, shows a profound failure to understand what it’s like to… well, not be very good. The penalty for a PK death in most games with ‘light’ penalties is more painful than most care to admit.

  • Time. Time spent running back to your corpse is time spent doing an extremely boring activity — excascerbated by seething.
  • Pride. “You may feel a slight sting. That’s pride fucking with you.” Losing is a shameful act. Losing repeatedly is even more so. This is lost on people who are used to winning.
  • Experience Disruption. Is it safe to go back to where you were adventuring? Heck, is it safe to get back to your corpse? Do we have to reassemble our raid group now that the priest was forced to quit?
  • Social Disruption. I’ve been part of two guilds that effectively came unravelled when they hit the 30s in WoW, where they felt they couldn’t complete a quest without being ganked 3 times. When those guildmates started to leave, my attention in the game started to unravel as well – PvP’s sting reached someone who wasn’t the one being ganked!

All powerful stings, even moreso if you are faced to deal with them a lot. One can never forget a large gap exists between those who have skill, and those who do not, and in many cases, people lack the innate talent to ever completely close that gap.

Does this mean that PvP isn’t worth doing? Not at all. The fact that WoW has more PVP servers than not is proof that there is a huge player demand for it – people THINK they want a dangerous world. However, as Brian pointed out in his comments in the previous thread, those servers are emptier than the PvE servers, which means that a significant number of people decided that WoW PVP had TOO MUCH sting, and chose to spend their time on the ‘Care Bear’ servers.

The matter to me comes down to fairness. Having consequences to a PVP death works so long as a PvP death is percieved a fair fight. And all too often, PvP becomes level 60s ganking level 30s at half health with 3 mobs aggroed on them. Which will never be percieved as a fair fight.

Original comments thread is here.