Originally Posted by
Alhuntrazeck
I swear, PvE is becoming more interesting than PvP these days. And this is coming from the guy who used to "lol@pve" to counter keikali's "lol@pvp"s. There are 2 main reasons:
1. Gear Discrepancies
Gone are the days when all one had to do to be good in PvP was to farm for decently atttainable gear, then practice, practice, practice until they got good at PvP. Right now, HOWEVER skilled you are, if you're geared out with mythic armor & helm with a legendary weapon, you'll get trashed 10 times out of 10 by a maxed out opponent. It is getting so pathetically ridiculous that people are beginning to not bother about PvP at all. Why would they, if every time they stepped into PvP, a frost bow, arcane ring, Planar amulet, imbued rogue comes along running from spawn to spawn 1 hitting them in TDM and camping outside waiting for the spawn bubble to run out in CTF?
The clear reason is this; the differences between the top-of-the-line gear and the second best gear is far too large. The elite players who spend real life money or pour hours and hours into this game to get the best gear deserve to have great gear! But not at the rate things are at the moment. Let's take a look at the gear discrepancies between an average-geared player and one who is maxed-out -
(From a rogue and mage POV. My warrior hasn't been geared out yet so I can't comment here)
The weapon: The difference between an Expedition Rifle and the Elondrian Rifle is a whopping 90+ damage and about 200-300 HP depending on gems!
Ring: The arcane ring gives an average boost of 300 HP and 40 damage over a Blood Ruby depending, again, on gems.
And amulet: The L41 mythic amulet is the strangest of all, giving a ground-breaking 600 HP increase over a Lunar or Fang!
Overall: a maxed out opponent versus an average, mythic armor & helm user has 1.1k HP more, and 130 damage more. And we're not even including the arcane pets here versus an average user's Slag or Malison!
Which wouldn't be as much of a problem if this top-of-the-line gear was actually obtainable. The reality? It sure as hell isn't! The total cost of completely gearing out your character including an arcane pet, say Nekro, actually exceeds the current gold cap. And gold in AL is hard to earn. The best Legendary items looted sell for hundred K's. So the only way of actually getting yourself geared up? Open Locked Grand Crates of the Watch.
In other words, PAY TO WIN. Clearly something is wrong here!
The consequences of this is far-reaching. When people begin to lose interest and turn to other sources of entertainment - PvE, or simply quitting the game - the number of players in PvP is reduced. There are far more empty rooms than there ever were before.
Next season provides an ideal opportunity to narrow gear discrepancies and make gear attainable. STS had the right idea by making certain things like Nekro, Imbueds and the mythic Amulet craftable.
In any MMORPG, gear should be obtainable in two ways, freemium and premium. The "premium way" should never become the norm! The best gear should be farmable a well as available in locked crates. If farmable is too easy (resulting in flooding the market), the way the Imbueds are crafted can be implemented. Unrefined gear can drop from bosses & chests & crates and have to be refined in certain ways. This will make people more interested in PvE and also increase player participation in PvP when people get good gear. The second step will be to narrow differences between top level gear and the second-best legendaries. Differences should be 20-30 damage for weapons and 200-300 HP for armor & helms.
But that's only solving one half of the problem.
2. PvP Isn't Being Played the Way Its Meant to Be
#1 is the Developers' job to fix. #2 is ours, the Player Base.
There are currently two PvP maps - Capture the Flag (CTF) and Team Deathmatch (TDM). I don't spend much time in TDM so I'm assuming things are fine over there, but its CTF where things are screwed up.
First of all, I don't believe many of the players actually know what Capture the Flag is. Its an incredibly fun game where each team has a flag to defend while at the same time trying to capture the other, opponent team's flag. The team must work as a cohesive unit to make sure their flag is safe while at the same time trying to sneak past opponents to grab their flag. The first team to reach 5 flags wins the game.
At the current way its being played, there are two groups of people in CTF - one, the people who're killing and being killed. The ones who ignore the flag and run from spawn to spawn trying to kill others while also being killed. This comprises the majority. #2 is the flaggers, the people who carry a crystal from one flag room to the other while being unhindered simply because they're "flagging". They do this to notch up the score on their screen, & to get the 10K Flags AP, and to get on the Leaderboards, whether AP or CTF Flags.
Awhile back a few players (most of whom have quit) including myself used to have CTF games which were tremendous fun, comprising strategy, technique, teamwork...sneakiness...and so on! Gear of course played a role but if a friendly game, teams were switched around to even out the discrepancies - or they'd simply gear down. But of course it is hardly practical to continuously host CTF games. Only a few people would be able to play and matches took a long time to organize. People themselves need to take the initiative to play the game the way its meant to be played.
And, of course, that requires motivation. Its a bit late in the game to change APs or the Leaderboards by removing the flag APs and the flags LB (which were a bad idea in the first place) - two years late, in fact. Many people have spent hours and hours flagging and it wouldn't be fair to make changes now.
So, the motivation. In place of the KDR box we have on our character screens, a button could be placed called Kills and Deaths or whatever, just an example. This would open a page which has 4 sections: the PvE KDR, CTF KDR, TDM KDR and a new counter called Wins and Losses - already been suggested before. The idea is, every time the game ends, the losing team would have one point added to their losses and the winning team would have one point added to their wins. This would motivate people to protect the flag and prevent their KDR from being ruined. Removing the existing KDR would be a bad idea because, just like for the flags, people have worked very hard for their kills.
If these 2 are fixed, PvP should become a much better place!
Just my $.02 and sorry for the long-wided post!
. And I also miss the Lv 10 PVP when there was no Paracelsus gem user.
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