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Player-vs-Player Systems Examined
Brendan Drain over at Massively has an in-depth look at PvP systems in general, using a comparison of two very different games in an attempt to find the ideal. EVE and Age of Conan are two very different games, yet each has their pros and cons to PvP. Is there a perfect middle ground to be had? "EVE Online and Age of Conan are both heavily PvP-oriented MMOs and while they take vastly different approaches to PvP, both approaches are successful in their own way. The high-consequence PvP in EVE leads to infrequent but meaningful conflicts with adrenaline pumping and guns blazing. In contrast, PvP in Conan is a fast-paced fantasy deathmatch where it's as fun to have your head chopped off as to burn someone alive. Where EVE Online would have me biting my nails nervously when attacked, Age of Conan has me laughing as a maniac smashes my head in with two clubs."
The old Wheel of Time game had the best, most nuanced and complicated deathmatch-style PvP of any game I've ever played.
As far as modern PvP goes, Guild Wars (for all the PvE problems of late) still has some of the best PvP action around.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I thought AoC was supposed to be an MMORPG and not a "third person shooter" ... obviously I was mistaken.
There are both good and bad aspects of making MMORPGs available to the public.
The worst being that it completely removes the magic from the games. At least for me.
No new MMO I've played has been able to beat the feeling of UO, simply because there's little to no immersion in them because of the playerbase.
It's just a competition to the top, and not an adventure/RPG anymore...
What's polyvinylpyrrolidine got to do with MMOs?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You talk about heads being chopped off or smashed in with two clubs, and you provide no screenshots?
Funk dat!
I liked the PVP system in Legend of the Red Dragon, these new fangled real time systems need to go! I liked the ANSI based graphics better as well. Also, I didn't need a broadband connection, my 1200 baud modem was lag free!
Why do MMOs get exclusive rights to the "PvP" concept? I've got this chess board and it has one of the best time-tested PvP systems ever. Turn-based all the way!
any game which incorporates level advancement, gear advancement, or delegates specific abilities to specific classes will always be fundamentally flawed when it comes to pvp.
differences in level and gear will almost always be the determining factor in the outcome of a pvp encounter, and certain abilities will always be more powerful than others. Since they will be limited to one class or a subset of classes you will always have one class which is "overpowered".
the only balanced pvp is accomplished through FPS games where everyone has the same abilities, stats, and the ability to equip any weapon in the game.
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Back in the day when I played Runescape, pvp was absolutely ridiculously stupid beyond words. Everyone threw logical, nice builds out the window for pvp optimized, basically cheating characters. They'd appear to be an overall level of like 60 when they like lvl 90 in just one skill that they used to kick your ass. The area where pvp was allowed was pretty much just someone regular characters couldn't go. It completely ruined the game but even if they made that system fair, you drop all but your 3 most valuable items if you die! THAT WAS A BIG MISTAKE! There was literally no way to put on all your best gear and go fight someone (except in the duel arena) without one of you losing pretty much your life savings. No matter what you'd drop food and runes that you spent like 2 hours making. And because of this rule, you could be some ultimate character of death and go around killing people and still only make about as much as you could have crafting for the same time cuz nobody ever dropped anything of value. It was an absolute waste of time and the worst way to do pvp ever.
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IMHO...Mud's still have the best pvp systems for MMO games. There are things you can do without graphics that you can't with them.
Hands down, UO had the best PVP. No modern mmo has yet to top it. The consequence of death - lose everything on your person. EVERYTHING. Its only when you have true consequences like that that people start taking PVP seriously. Its the only game where you can be hunted by two guys as you run through the woods and your heart is RACING in real life because you desperately don't want to die.
Everyone in that game had a macro for hide, you would spam it as you fled from a battle. Or better yet if you had UO extreme you had your emergency recall button, to make fast getaways before you were slaughtered. I have dozens of great stories in UO of back and forth PVP fighting, murdering, stealing houses and actually having an impact on other players. Its lame as shit when my friends play WoW and try to impress me with their PVP stories, none of which are interesting in the least bit, none of which have any lasting repercussions, and none of which hold the attention of the listener, unless you happen to play WoW. I'd tell my non- gamer friends some of my exploits in UO and they'd always get a good laugh out of it. All I ever get out of hearing WoW stories is total boredom, sometimes to the point that I can't help but mock them for being so into something so dreadfully unexciting.
Who can forget shit like running into someone between towns, paralyzing them, surrounding them with walls, and casting an elemental inside the death-box you created. Or going into the mining area where the RPers hang out, working on their blacksmithing. Casting an energy field on the exit of the mines and telling a group of 9 of them that you're going to murder them all. Watching as they scramble to exit the mine, only to see it sealed off as you go to town on them. For good measure you kill their pack animals too. Having huge battles in front of rival guild houses, the moment a guy drops everyone swarming the corpse and completely looting it of all its items. Taking down a guy with a tame White Wyrm walking around outside town, thinking he's hot shit. As the Wyrm is slowly killed he pleads with his attackers to stop and constantly spams "a follow" to get the creature into town and safety. Watching him whine and put up a fight out of anger for losing his prized possession, only to be cut down. And finally, kicking someone's ass so bad, making him lose such good items/so many reagents that the guy in his vitriol follows you around as a ghost just spamming your screen with lines and lines of OoooOoOOOOooo because he has no other recourse. Or even better, up and quitting the game because his loss was so devastating.
That's real PVP.
For me, the real pinnacle of Skill vs. Stat PVP continues to be Planetside.
The "Death Penalty" was measured not in the player's individual stats, but in the strength of the defending/attacking army. Thus one individual would not change the course of events, and would not be ruined by a single death, but the cumulative effect of a bad plan usually lead to the loss of an entire continent. Once that happened, *everyone* took the express bus back to Loserville, which meant that a bigger fight for territory was about to begin.
Of course, the fact that the game was a FPS-based twitch combat game was tempered by the rank and battle level system, which gave veteran players an advantage (But not an insurmountable one) over noobs. Being able to change your stat allocation almost at will meant you never had to grind for a certain fit, and the only real limitation was the empire selection which meant you couldn't spawn the weapons of the enemy (But you could loot them from vanquished foes -- until you got blown up, too)
It's a shame they had some early problems with lag, and made some very poor developmental decisions after the first expansion pack. I was really hoping Tabula Rasa would be the more advanced "spiritual successor" to it, but it wasn't meant to be.
Even nostalgia isn't what it used to be, eh? ;)
;)
Or in this case, are you sure you've played the same UO I've played?
You know, the one with exactly zero quests (the escort quests, dumb and boring as they were, got added later) and not much more to do than run around trying to get some species extinct? That is, if you got past the gangs of gankers camping the town exits for newbies to kill?
The one where you could max your strength by just dropping and picking a fucking coin all night? Or others by just assigning that skill to every single key on the keyboard? Where one skill (magic) did more than all other skills combined, so everyone maxed that one with a macro before going and doing anything else? And where by comparison, another skill (tinkering) was useless for anything other than trapping chests and leaving them around, hoping that some newbie would open them? Great balance there, eh?
The one where crafting was as freaking useless as to only be able to produce coloured versions of the bog-standard items that cost cents at any vendor? While any humanoid around the map dropped better ones and magical ones?
Yeah, that's got to be some great adventure/RPG. Misses all the idea of either adventure or RPG, any way you define RPG. It didn't have either the story of Japanese (and recently Bioware) CRPGs, nor the character advancement of traditional US RPGs, so I guess it must be great.
Or remember how the world got full of houses everywhere, including with a tree poking through the roof, filling every single bloody space, including where the game still pretended was some virgin-ish wood or mountain top? So you'd have wolves and ogres spawning and edging their way between houses, pretending that's their habitat? Yeah, very immersive world that.
Quality of the player base? You mean, how half of them were clones of the same ganker in a death shroud with the same a polearm and the same magic spells? Or how they camped the mines for anyone foolish enough to get encumbered with ore, so they can gank them right next to the town? Yeah, that was some inovative roleplaying there.
Remember the about a quarter of the population who even bought disposable accounts to scam and grief, and had whole website rings dedicated to sharing tips on how to drive a newbie off the game? Amazing idea to RP someone who can magically steal your items through walls, or who can abuse a bug to take your items in a trade without giving anything, by just dragging yours in a container before aborting the trade.
And grinding to achieve the biggest castle and the most status-symbol items, now that's _totally_ unlike the grind to the top of kids these days in WoW
Heh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And that's what makes the pvp great: it take real-life skill to figure out what ship fits work best. And that has nothing to do with time spent in game. You can be in the game for 3-4 weeks and have a very nice pvp rig capable of taking on players 3, 4 years old (as long as the ships themselves are comparable). I've seen some really clever fits from newbies. And I've seen some crap fits from older players.
Once you have the ship fitted out for its intended role, then it comes down to player skill. The tactics you use in a fight make up the other 30% of the chances of success in pvp.
The best part about pvp in eve, though, is the finality of it. If you get a ship blown up, that's it, it's gone. Some of the mods might survive, but for the most part it's over. It makes for a very exciting time.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
That's PvP alright. It's also why I don't play UO or similar games- I have a life, and so can't compete with a bunch of 14-year-old, 12+ hour-a-day playtime gankers and spawn campers who enjoy ruining the experience for others simple to prove how l33t they are. I get it, you're better than me at the game. That's nice, but I'm not going to play a game where I have to be the hardest of hardcore to even be allowed to join.
People like you are *why* WoW has 10 million+ subscribers and none of the MMOs catering to the hardcore PvP crowd have gone anywhere at all. (Ok, EVE seems to be doing fairly well)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Eve does provide "carebears" a place to go, and rewards pvp's and miners/indies for working together.
I think that is why it has worked.
You mad
And that "fantastic PVP" was a major reason why UO was left in rot. When newer games came along with fancier presentations, the only thing UO had left was its rules which wasn't enough to keep many. Many games that have come afterwards and tried to push these sort of free formed anarchy systems tend to do rather poorly. I too played UO and abandoned it immediately when Everquest released because I recognized the lack of general rules of engagement on all "shards" was going to attract a certain gamer population I didn't care to hang around.
I personally don't care for PVP (if I wanted that sort of "frag fest", I'd play something else) but if WoW is "lame" then many players out there really wants "lame". In the end, it looks like that many don't want "real PVP" if it behaves like UO. Only the hardest of the hardcore PVP/PK-er likes these "options". Why would anyone market to them since they make up such a small segment of the market?
Personally I think EVE has it the "most correct". If you are going to engage in PVP, make sure you mean it because there are all sorts of secondary consequences to just engaging in PVP combat let alone if you win. Since EVE has a small population and the game itself is structured to create strong interpersonal relationships (not all of them friendly), you will not get far if you PVP just to be a jerk because "your reputation proceeds you".
I think that the disparity between PVP in different MMOs cannot be more different between Eve Online and World of Warcraft, actually. Age of Conan isn't that different but it's not quite as different. Plus, half the content is not even there yet.
In World of Warcraft, PVP is common on PVP servers, but it doesn't have any downside other than lost time. If you die 4 times because someone is being an asshole to you, then that's it, you lose the 20 minutes it takes to corpse run a couple times, and then you go on your way. Occasionally, your death might be to a mob, and then you have a 10% damage bill, so maybe a gold or three, no big deal usually for your level. Or, if you join a PVE server, you can opt out of PVP entirely, and never fight a single other player. You also have the option of fighting in the cross realm PVP areas, but you have to horde to win anything really. It's pretty unbalanced most of the time, with known requirements for what makes a good PVP team. In the end: Massive amounts of time and practice.
In Eve Online, PVP is inherent to the game. You can carebear in empire, and avoid the fringes of society, but occasionally a good marketing deal or a mission might take you into at least low sec. Even if you're flying an interceptor with warp and inertial stabs, you can be grabbed by a broadsword getting sensor boosted and infinite warp scrambling. Hell, those things can grab pods with enough people boosting them. And then everything you had on you, gone. You make a mistake in empire and grab a can you shouldn't have, someone aggros you, and you're gone. You join someone's gang to a mission, they have a war target after them, you're gone. You get deceived by someone, suck it up and deal princess.
Life in general in WoW is pretty mild on the low end. But Eve is all around brutal to people. Even if you play it safe 100% of the time, there are chances for something going horribly wrong. Plus, the one-universe view of Eve, and the TIME it takes to make a good character... If you have someone who wants to grief you hard, you cannot start over easily in Eve. You have to sacrifice a LOT if someone has it out for you. In WoW, you switch servers, make a new character, in a month you're running around at a high level doing the same things over again.
WoW is like going to any corporate theme park, their goal is to make you have fun, and even if you're upset by something, you waste some time, and you get your money back in the end. Eve Online is like going to downtown in a major city, and if you happen to get mugged, then you better not be carrying much money. Oh yeah, and the cops don't care if they didn't see it happen. And there are some areas you should just avoid entirely.
I've lived in 0.0 for a year at a time in Eve and have a Kara keyed Wow character, so I've been around. But this factional warfare thing that Eve is doing? Yeah, the low sec piracy is going to get worse and worse because of it. Should be fun. That is, if you don't mind the occasional loss of a couple months of work.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
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UO also showed everything wrong with PvP. I was there on day one and even before. If it wasn't a new exploit to gank people each week it must have been because servers were down too much to matter.
Romanticize about it all you want but the real problem was that anarchy does not make a good mmorpg. That what it was for a big amount of time. Insta kill guards didn't help as many knew ways to exploit that and get unsuspecting players ganked by guards. Look, it does not parallel the real world because there was no effective punishment system to prevent some of the stunts people would pull to gank people. They weren't doing it for money/profit, most did it to piss people off.
That is why real PvP isn't suitable to MMORPGs, there is no repercussion. Don't fall back on that excuse of "the players will make the repercussion" because unless the game designers give then a method nothing works. Characters were throw away. It wasn't hard to gear out and if you ran up a bad name you could just reroll. Newer games allow people to transfer off their server and rename themselves to avoid any black marks associated with their actions. Plus most weren't out for the challenge, hell they avoided any risk they could. Half the time I see PvP advocates crying over changes or such is because the risk went up.
Sorry, anarchy does not make for a good game. I know all the good stories of "good pvp" encounters in many a mmorpg but they are always out weighed by the bad examples, of people quitting over the harassment and such. When I want PvP I go to games created from the get go with real balance, none of this play for X levels totally protected, or just being better geared for being their six months.
Sorry, I didn't find UO's original PvP any better than any other MMORPG. It was just first compared to many and highlighted many problems upcoming MMORPGs had to counter to make sure they could retain players over the long term.
PvP in a mmorpg is like the short bus in the realm of PvP. It is much more challenging to play a FPS where your only benefit for playing a long time is skill with your character.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
UO doesn't have levels. Those blacksmiths could train their swordsmanship or magic or whatever to defend themselves.
UO also has a well balanced and intricate murderer system - i.e. if you are a murderer anyone can attack you on sight and you are unable to go into towns or are killed on sight by town guards. Just like the real world, there's nothing stopping someone from killing just because they want to. But also like in the real world - and unlike every mmo out there - there are actual long term consequences for your actions and you do become a murderer. Hell, UO even had a bounty system wherein mass murderers would eventually have massive bounties on their heads from the summation of all their victims. Mobs of people would go around trying to hunt them down since you would actually be rewarded for bringing someone to justice. All this of course involved PVP.
There were no spawn campers in UO because there were no spawns.
This game wasn't some shitty pre-WOW level grindfest - it was a living, breathing world with highway men, real danger, and real consequences. It forced people to work together for protection. From playing other mmos, none come close to the camaraderie that UO fostered by placing you into a dangerous world in which the biggest threat to your life weren't mindless computer controlled monsters but other adaptive real-life human beings.
So you don't want to get attacked by me and my buddy hiding in the woods waiting for you to walk by? Go with a friend and kick our ass, then loot all of our shit. Wear a shitty cloak over your awesome armor to make me and my friend over confident, then turn the tables on us. UO was a semi-real (I mean there were dragons and magic and shit) medieval simulation. There were only humans, doing human things - there's no elves or grinding on monsters, spawn camping or retarded raids. You wanna get better as a swordsman you use that skill either by killing some monsters or sparing with your friends. You wanted to make furniture, you could go ahead and do it. You needed wood, you could buy it off a lumberjack or go harvest some yourself.
WoW has 10 million subscribers for reasons other than people who kill other people. I won't go into it but its pretty obvious why WoW is successful. Those 10 million people, if they knew how much fun UO was - I can't attest to its current form - would switch in an instant. But its hard to get people to look at a 10+ year old game when they're content to sit and grind monster after monster so they can get more money to buy better weapons to kill more monsters and do same thing over and over - what fun!
As with most things, it's the most fun if you keep the caveats in mind:
- Heroes are overpowered compared to villains, just like in the comics
- There'll always be ganking or people teaming up on you, in my experience it just isn't that common or undefendable (you did choose to go in to a pvp zone after all)
- pvp is innately unfair. the coh devs do an ok job of balancing the unbalancable. just have fun with it.
Wait, so the best system is where unwilling people are forced into (unwinnable) PVP situations? And they lose hours of progress? I'm not sure I could be quite as antisocial as you.
It must have been hilarious when Trammel was released. Wish I was around for that.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
First thing pvp must have consequences, big ones. I like the concept of permadeath, it gives you more excitement and emotions. Now i hear all of you who say i'll not play a game where i will be killed by some kid who has all day to play and level up. And thats the second grates problem of RPG of today.
WT* is p with leveling and skilling? I don't know who invented this but IMHO mostly it sucks big time(at least for multiplayer for sure). Game becomes unbelievably hard to balance, you'll always get: more time on game - stronger. And that gives big and i'd say unfair advantage for teens who have lots of time. And because of what teens are like they effectively ruin the game for everyone else. And thats not good. Other thing the skilling leveling system doesn't reflect reality(it reflects movies or anime) (for those who say it doesn't have to IMHO better dont play PRG at all then) in life then you train some skill/"stat" and later on you don't use it, it worsens. Or if you were training for weight lifting and later started to to put all your time in studying you'll not lift same weight after a year of studying. (yea i know not very precise formulation but i hope you get the point) I think that by making leveles, classless RPG witch has skills that decrease over time, and also has permadeath it would be possible to make really interesting MMORPG (PvP vise).
Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death. - Major Motoko Kusanagi(Ghost in the Shell)
I still like Ultima Online's PVP system best, personally. Where it's less of a straigh-out PVP, and more of a PvE (Player versus Everything), where there's no distinction between monster, player and npc mobiles.
Pretty well, you're free to do as you please, to whom you please, as long as you can get away with it. It's always nice that you can go on a murdering spree without actually engaging in PvP (trapping players' backpacks, and boxes, setting exploding traps on dungeon chests, littering the ground with exploding boxen containing poisoned cake, etc). I've always appreciated the whole idea that although you're safe within the walls of guarded towns, you very much aren't, there are still plenty of indirect ways to get killed, and lots of old dirty tricks (planting things in people's sacks so they're too heavy to run away comes to mind). I don't see many other PvP systems that are as friendly to the rogue and thief as they are to the mage or warrior.
It's fallen quite some ways behind in many areas, but it's still lots of fun and a really good system, I haven't seen much of elsewhere.
Or make the douchebag maxed on strength your bitch when you gank him with a single well-placed pre-nerfed mindblast (used to do damage based on the gap between str and int). Christ, half the time you could take on a swarm barehanded if you knew to hit-and-run-and-hide-and-hit-again.
People went into unguarded areas unarmed, you don't need a lagspike to take down 9 miners. And you certainly don't need to worry about a single mine-raider when you're armed and trained, or at least remembered to mark a rune to a safe place. Unless they flood the shaft with summons, then you're fucked one way or another.
Even the most hardcore RPers leanred to remember that there's the asshole rogue hidden just outside the Ancient Wyrm lair waiting to gank them the second they slew the beast.
And It's not as if it didn't work both ways with all those Anti-PKs camping the chaos shrine. And it's not as if it was purely douchebaggery, I recall several occasions where I've ganked a wandering mage, looted nothing but his reagents and left him or her a lump of gold as compensation, due to being unable to get into town to restock, I've even rez'ed a few before recalling out. Of course, there were always the few who'd retaliate after their grace period, and got ganked, looted and dismembered on principal.
The whole point was that going out of guarded areas wasn't safe, unless you went prepared, it doesn't take 12-hours of grinding or being the most hardcore of hardcore just to join.
That was the appeal of the game, you have free reign over the unguarded areas, but so does everyone else. You're not safe. You get caught in an unsafe zone and you lose everything, worse for murderers with the stat-loss penalties. The challenge wasn't so much in the dungeon, but getting there and back, while keeping your loot, made things so much more satisfying.
Sure systems like that don't get player bases like WoW does, it isn't easy, you have to earn your shit, you have to learn the tricks of the trade, you have to learn tactics and strategy, that doesn't appeal to everyone, but those who do appreciate the added challenge as well as the added freedom, love it dearly.
WoW has 10 million subscribers for reasons other than people who kill other people. I won't go into it but its pretty obvious why WoW is successful. Those 10 million people, if they knew how much fun UO was - I can't attest to its current form - would switch in an instant.
I don't think this is true. A lot, lot more gamers are looking for a more casual game. The kind they can play while watching "Grey's Anatomy" at the same time and if they screw up and die, hey, no big deal.
For every hundred guys on WoW who thinks he's a bad-ass PvP'er, there's maybe five who would actually stick with a game like UO. People like to talk bigger than their inner carebear really is, so to speak.
Sadly, the truth is that the more prevalent PvP is and the more brutal the death penalty in a PvP game, the more niche the game would be. There's a reason almost all MMORPGs were modeled on the foofier MUDs. A MUD like a Carrion Fields or a Shattered Kingdoms where a PvP death can potentially be so much more than an inconvienience would be an even more niche game than UO even with modern graphics and user interface.
Switch "strategy" with "twitch" in your post and you have Call of Duty 4. The most powerful weapon in the game is probably the noob tube or M203 grenade launcher. Which has the unsavory characteristic of being able to wipe out a whole team in their spawn from your spawn on nearly every map in one shot (you get 2, after rank 38 up to 4). Also it still seems to be double xp weekend. Why work when you can get another hard to make out gay icon and sore hands?
See, this is why I've almost completely given up MMO's. Game's aren't supposed to be realistic. Fundamentally, they're supposed to be fun. Some sense of connection to reality as we know it can certainly help a game out. I tried Eve for a little while. I gave it up pretty quick, because I saw what that games becomes pretty quick. . . a second job. I play games when I'm not working, because I don't want to work. If I wanted to work more, I'd make *real* money by working a *real* job. Eve (and most MMOs) seemed like a lot of grinding to get Isk to buy up skills and equipment so you can make more Isk so you can buy up skills and still better equipment, to. . .
Sure, those are worthwhile grinds *in real life*. I'd rather spend time grinding my "programming skill", "car repair skill", or grinding up my Checking Account, Savings Account, and IRA, than grinding up skills and accounts in games. But, I don't want to work all the time, which is why I play games. You know, things that aren't work.
Games are most commonly used as an escape from reality. If a game imitates the annoying & shitty things about reality, why bother playing?
"So in other words you're a bully" I played UO for about 5 years (the first 3 pretty hardcore) and I can honestly say I never ganked ANYONE the only murder counts I took were when someone attacked my miner and I'd log on with my main for a little "justice". Having said that It's people like the OP that made UO exciting for me. Sure you lost everything sometimes but back in the early days of UO there was very little Uber gear and getting re-fitted wasn't that big of a deal. PvM won't ever have the thrill of good Pvp.
I wrote that article :D.
I've always wanted to be slashdotted.
I think the major downfall of PvP-based MMOs is the opt-in system that they tend to choose. Being able to choose not to play in a PvP server creates something an old EVE player once told me about called the cowboy effect. You end up with a server full of cowboys and nobody to play the indians. That is, the only people in the PvP servers are predators and they have no prey.
The idea of being able to completely overwhelm someone who's not prepared for PvP may seem sadistic but in reality it's very good for a game. As long as a player has the option to take appropriate steps to prevent being killed, it's entirely his fault if he's killed. Say you're ganked while mining in EVE - it was your fault that you weren't checking the scanner. In Age of Conan, it'd be like being killed by a hidden player's stealth attack while questing when you could have avoided it by moving around, using the search ability or using aoe abilities to unhide them.
Age of Conan sort of avoids the issue by making pvp open everywhere and forcing players to be vulnerable while questing or grinding. Because everyone can be caught unawares when questing or fighting monsters, everyone can be both predator or prey depending on momentary circumstances. It's and odd system that works because of the hide ability and because a PvP character build is essentially the same as a PvE build. Your character that's questing can turn around and start killing someone with no problem if the need arises. It becomes less about what you're prepared for and more about what you're doing at the moment an attacker comes into play.
Claiming to make an MMO PvP study when taking into account only two (2) games, including one that just started and is still evolving and experimenting with what its PvP rules will be (AoC), is not serious at all.
Depends how you define fairly well. Eve is doing fairly well compared to WoW in the sense that John Edwards did fairly well to Obama.
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