Player Consequences: WAR games, part 2
It's not just the reward systems either, both games also have very different opinions on how to achieve class balance. World of Warcraft has increasingly been balancing its classes towards small-scale combat. Almost every class has methods of crowd control and ways of incapacitating other players. Warfare in the game has become more about timing your special abilities correctly to counter crowd control spells then about actually dealing damage. This may make arena combat more exciting, but it has the price of making larger scale encounters less balanced. Simply having that one extra person with a stun, fear, or root gives enough of an advantage to completely shut down the opposing side.
In Warhammer, combat seems more about large-scale combat and sticking with the basics: healing and dealing damage. The only crowd control abilities I have seen so far have been root spells which seem to be given only to cloth wearing casters. There are some interesting knock-back abilities, but these don't stun or incapacitate the target. If want to defeat an opponent then you are going to have to deal enough damage to kill them while they fight back. This would seem to be the better combat system, but it actually encourages running away in small-scale encounters. In particular, any sort of PvP system where the objective is simply to stay alive would last forever. This is probably why we won't be seeing arenas in Warhammer any time soon.
However, while Mythic and Blizzard may have different philosophies on how to design a fantasy war game, they still have many of the same problems. The one that seems to be plaguing both at the moment are horribly imbalanced populations. This is where games like Second Life and EVE Online get to snicker behind their hands about mainstream games and their addiction to "shards". Unfortunately, separate servers are probably the only viable method of supporting such a large amount of players online at the same time. World of Warcraft has managed to come up with work-a-rounds so that their population imbalances don't affect battle ground queues. However, cross server queues aren't going to prevent number advantages from popping up in Lake Wintergrasp.
This is probably why Blizzard has actually come up with a new strategy for dealing with population imbalances in open world combat. In the PvP panel at Blizzcon the developers revealed that Lake Wintergrasp would have a zone wide buff called Tenacity. This buff would grant an increase in damage and possibly other stats to the faction that was outnumbered. This is much better then Warhammer's attempt to fix population imbalances by giving temporary renown and experience bonuses. Initial reports do say that the bonuses are attracting new players to the servers, but I'm not sure if it's a long term solution. Rather than trying to herd players to different servers, I think a better idea is to design PvP systems that are less affected by a number advantage.
In any case, it should be obvious that both games bring different PvP specialties to the table. World of Warcraft
isn't just a PvE game like some people claim. It actually has a very good system of combat for small squad based skirmishes. There's a reason the arenas fit so well into an (e)sport format. Warhammer definitely takes the cake with large-scale battles and fighting over open world objectives. Unfortunately, their current reward system encourages players to ignore those parts of the game until they reach max level. Still it looks like Mythic will soon be balancing that part of the game to be more rewarding, which will hopefully attract players away from the scenarios. I would honestly recommend both games to anyone who considered themselves a fan of casual PvP. Though neither beats playing a nice game of chess.
 | Gabriel Runfeldt has been following MMOs ever since he stumbled onto an EverQuest addiction by accident. He eventually managed to fight it off but caught a case of armchair designer syndrome in the process. Now once a week you can catch his mad ravings here at Player Consequences. You can even contact him with any questions at gabriel.runfeldt AT weblogsinc.com |
