Breakfast Topic: Does world PvP feel dishonorable?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.
I had a friend who would take every opportunity she was presented with to engage in world PvP. We could be in the middle of questing together and suddenly I would notice that her orc huntress was nowhere to be found. Come to find out that some poor Alliance player had wandered into her minimap and was being hunted down by her and her pet wolf.
In theory, world PvP works. Throw a bunch of people together in a big world and let them have at it. In practice, though, it isn't that cut and dried. The first toon I rolled was on a PvP server (because that was where my gaming friends were), and coming from a FPS gaming background, one of aspects of the game that excited me the most was the prospect of duking it out with the enemy in epic battles and guerilla hit-and-run skirmishes. Then reality hit me. What I thought was going to be honorable combat was actually more like gang warfare. Behind the veil of anonymity, players became bullies, targeting weaker players for their in-game gratification -- which in turn lessened others' gameplay experience and created the wrong kind of tension.
The flip side is the fact that people not interested in being targeted at every turn can roll toons on PvE servers. But what about toons that are already on PvP servers? Transferring off may be cost-prohibitive for some and others may not want to leave behind the friendships they have forged. Still others may see the problems with world PvP just an irritant and not worth the trouble of transferring.
As for my friend the orc? Well, being constantly ganked and griefed got too much for her and she transferred to a PvE server. So what is the solution? Should there be in-game consequences for dishonorable actions like ganking and griefing? Or is world PvP perfect just the way it is?
