Sunday, October 30, 2011

On gear based PVP progression

So i've been playing Rift since March this year as my main MMO. After taking a break for several months from MMOs since leaving WOW about a week before Cataclysm went live.

I was drawn into Rift's polish and ease of picking up for any previous WOW player and have been dipping in and out of the pvp that the game has to offer, never really able to commit to grinding out to the highest prestige rank and as i type this I am at rank 4, half way to rank 5, with rank 8 being the current maximum.

Now being generally a more PVE leaning player (rolling on PVE servers, raiding, avoiding flagging for pvp outside of instanced battlegrounds etc) I wouldn't cause to care much about the pvp in Rift, especially given the fairly widely accepted view that it was an afterthought to the game. However offsetting this is the feeling that Trion would like you to experience all parts of their game (and in so doing sub for longer because you have more to do) and one way for Trion to get pve players to pvp is by making PVP gear viable for PVE.

When i say viable this has to be explained with the caveat that a certain amount of hit/focus/toughness is required for each tier of pve endgame dungeon/raiding. So for instance a dps warrior has to use a combination of hit runes, pve head and shoulder pieces, rings and necklaces to make the 300 hit in order to raid in Hammerknell, but for every other piece it is worth grinding out Rank 8 pvp gear as this will be a significant stat boost to the raid tier 1 pieces you would otherwise bring on your first footsteps into the Tier 2 raid. Many R8 pieces are high on the Best in Slot lists for each calling and even R6 and 7 pieces will begin to be an upgrade to raid t1 options.

So coupled with my somewhat more casual guild struggling to have enough raid ready players to start 20man raiding and having moved my main into a guild that does raid 20mans but only at tier 1 level at present, my options for gear progression lie in pvp.

Of course this is an issue in itself (for another post ;) about the need for some kind of progression, as usual through shiny new gear.

So in Rift all pvp gear contains a stat called 'valor' which recently was normalised across all pvp ranks so that both a rank 1 and rank 8 in a full set of pvp gear would have the same levels of valor and consequently resistance to player attacks, the difference being that the R8 had gear with higher stats allowing their attacks to do more damage. This was an attempt to mitigate some of the complaints that lower ranked players were being 1 or 2 shotted, and were essentially worthless to their team. This still really remains to be very much the case, which leads me into the heart of my argument that Gear Based pvp, simply doesn't work.

A common request made by some players on the Rift forums is for the Warfronts (battlegrounds) to be broken up into r1-r4 and r5-r8 on the basis that this brings endgame pvp more into line with leveling pvp in that levels 20-29, 30-39 etc had separate warfronts, and no level 15 would be mismatched against a level 45. Of course if these players making these requests gave this some thought i think they'd realize that what they are actually arguing for is the removal of gear based advantage entirely.

If rank 1-4 are grouped, then why not r1-2, and ultimately separate matches for rank 8's. But the more you reduce the imbalance the more you negate the point of gear until ultimately you're left with essentially players with 1k health doing 200 damage at rank 1 on rank 1 players and players with 10k doing 2k damage at rank 8 against other rank 8s. Its a nonsense.

Ok its a kind of Reductio ad absurdum, but it does expose the flaw of its design. Its a design problem in many mmos that often a player has to progress to become in actuality weaker. A rank 4 dinging r5 would now be bottom of the pile in the r5-8 world, and through expansions like those of WOW where suddenly your tier 5/12/34 etc epics are suddenly worse than the random green item quest drop in the new expansion zone, and your epic sword of Lich King slaying is suddenly a bit underpowered against those fearsome new level 81 rats.

For any Warfront in Rift the winning team receives prestige and favor (each rank requiring progressively more prestige, favor being the currency for pvp items). The losing team also receives these rewards, to a lesser degree but enough to make it a viable option to alt tab afk a warfront, or at least ultimately to question the point of your efforts to win the wafront for your team. Given as previously stated its Time > skill.

Another common occurrence in Rift's warfronts is the postponement of victory by a winning team in order to 'farm' the opposing team for more favor and prestige. In Whitefall steps, a capture the flag type of warfront scenario a dominant team may hold the last flag next to their own safely based flag with one player while the rest camps the other team's respawn point, farming favor until either the other team refuses to come out and fight or time runs out.

Ultimately although the failure to win many warfronts might be depressing and lead you to curse your team/shard/battlegroup/faction it essentially doesn't matter as long as you keep queuing and putting the time in, and if alt-tabbing afk allows you to do something more fun in that time, then you may as well do it.

Which leads to my final point about gear based pvp. If its no fun to lose and be farmed, (and lose and be farmed you will be) while grinding up. Then is it any fun to stomp all over lower ranked players once you're r8? I would suggest that for a little while it would be. The power, the revenge, all very nice for a bit, then, what? what now? its over, there's no more challenge. How long will that last?

So if Rift's endgame pvp is frustrating and a sufferance until max or near maximum gear is reached and then ultimately boring due to no competition once you get there, where is the fun?

Will you eventually ask the question, "Can't we queue to compete against other rank 8 players and teams?"

Congratulations, you've grinded 8 levels of pvp gear to end up desiring a non-gear based pvp game.

And why am i personally doing pvp? for the gear...