Some people will spawn camp if they can simply because they know it's frustrating. "Griefers" are not a new thing to MMOs. And if it's a PvP sort of event where camping a spawn will help your team win, that in itself is incentive to camp.



This is a pretty silly statement and entirely untrue untrue.

World PvP, for me, is generally done poorly, so it devolves into ganking. Five players against one generally isn't too fun, so I can't argue with the "evens the playing field" argument.

But it's more than just an even playing field; it's objectives as well. People like a feeling of solid progress and connection to said progress. In large-scale PvP, the killing is fun, but the objectives tend to be set in such a way that a given person doesn't make much of a difference, creating a disconnect from the objective. Instanced PvP also generally has a preparation time, allowing a bunch of strangers to become a team.

What world PvP needs is to emulate instanced PvP. Create objectives in the real world, but make them in such a way that it feels like everyone is contributing. Perhaps a huge-scale escort, where a bunch of players need to be protected as they move toward the objective, and everyone else needs to keep the players safe.

I don't doubt world PvP can succeed in more than the stereotypical gank-and-be-ganked fashion, but it needs to be on such a scale that people feel like they are making a difference in the grand or relatively ungrand scheme of things.

Anyway, I'll write a bit more. First, people will spawn camp whether it's profitable or not. In every MMO I've ever played, I've played on a PvP server if there was one, and let me tell you, from UO to WoW pre-Honor to Darktide in AC to to Darkfall, there is no shortage of people who will happily camp you for a while without there being any reward at all for it.

Second, comparing anything with Warhammer Online is a bad idea. WAR is a bad game, with horrible design decisions, and the worst PvP I think I've ever played. Camping in WAR is so incredibly easy and common because if your team can't must the DPS to overcome the enemy healing well enough, you lose. Even if you manage to finally kill one of them, they'll be rezzed in seconds, healed to full in another second, at at full energy in another second. So using it as an example is a bad idea.

Ultimately I don't think spawn camping would really be such a big deal. People will do it if they can, but if they can often do it in PvP instances then it's really indicative of a bigger underlying issue. Is the matchmaker not balanced teams properly? Are people who quit not being replaced? Is there inadequate base defenses to disperse campers? Only one, easily camped exit out of the spawn? Although there might be something to making kills give no rewards in PvP instances, I think using that as a mechanism to discourage spawn camping is a bit overwrought and doesn't really address the underlying issue(s), whatever they may be -- which of course are unknowable without any context.

But just to use your WAR example, the problem was everyone had energy bars which regenerated to full in a few seconds, combat rezzing was totally risk-free and spammable and made getting kills on campers pointless in many cases (thus negating the fact that you were at your spawn and they were far from theirs, which ought to have been a big advantage), spawn guards sucked, and spawns themselves often had only one exit and was really easy to lock down. So fixing spawn camping was really a matter of tackling those issues. Of course, the energy issue itself would require a major game overhaul, but WAR was rotten to the very core, so nothing in that game would have been worth the effort it took to make it without even more work being done to un-fuck it. So there we have it.

Yeah, I agree with a lot of that, but I'd actual go with the opposite direction. Instead of a huge escort quest as you suggest, I'd go with numerous escorts occurring simultaneously. As you pointed out, population imbalances tend to make fighting uneven, and being one dude of a mass of dudes makes you feel like... well, like one dude in a mass of dudes. I think the solution is to make zerging ineffectual as a strategy. Rather, there should be numerous objectives on battlefields which are all important to overall success of the faction.

So, to use your escort idea, maybe instead of one huge escort mission, there are five convoys or whatever to be escorted winding their way through some big battlefield zone, and your team needs to secure 3 of them in order to "win" in some sense. However, the map would be big enough, the terrain treacherous enough and the convoys fast enough that the enemy could not hope to take out enough convoys for them to win by romping around as one big zerg and just plowing through it that way. Thus, both sides are forced to divide their forces. This makes overall strategy far more important (whereas zerging is by definition mindless brute force shit), makes individuals more important as rather than one guy out of a hundred, you're maybe one out of 20 now, and makes your objective far more apparent. So you get this sense of being a part of a larger war effort, and maybe off in the distance you'll see Imperial tanks clashing with orks and stuff, but for you, the conflict is much more personal and your objective much more tangible.

That, I think, is the better approach. Make stuff small scale, but make it many smaller scale engagements that add up to a big ol' waaagh. Zerg fights might be okay in some cases, but only if they're really going for an action game sort of MMO where it might resemble Planetside in its zerging. Certainly I'd say for general PvP that having numerous, equally important objectives to divide players into more manageable platoons or whatever is the key to making open world PvP more accessible and personal.

I like it. Convoy protection is a fun idea as long as it doesn't turn into "slow them down, don't kill them" like Strand of the Ancients in World of Warcraft. Boring!

I'd prefer the convoys be close enough to request backup from another convoy, but far enough away that it requires a bit of scouting to see where the enemy is massing the most. Any addition to the amount of teamwork and skill it takes will put it a step above all the other world PvP games out there.

Once they have a bunch of games that are actually fun and require each player to be something more than a retard in a mass of retards, the problem will be in incentive. Instances won't start until there are enough players, but World PvP will always be in progress. There needs to be incentive enough for people to want to travel to the action rather than queue up for it. Perhaps being able to travel or queue up, with the queue system doing a deep strike type method.

Meh, they'll probably screw it up. Instanced PvP will probably trump World PvP as usual, making World PvP servers pretty much a gankfest full of kids trying to make a name for themselves. But here's hoping!

Yeah, the details are probably left for another thread as it was mostly an arbitrary example, but the general idea is that, certainly, teamwork and strategy ought to be more important whilst traveling about in a big zerg swarm be made less important.

Really I keep coming back, mentally, to the Battlefield games when I think of how large-scale PvP ought to be in a sense. Battlefield games do it great in the sense of allowing a big battle to wage, yet keeping individual engagements generally fairly small. You can't win by controlling a single flag, for example, so even if you move from flag to flag to flag in a big swarm you'd still lose. There are some things it could do better, but in principle they really nailed it. A big overall battle with many smaller battles going on within it and, ideally, some real strategy to coordinate the smaller battles.