Meowth wrote:
Having to play for hours, days, or weeks to get some set of standard gear is lame and mostly pointless. Bumping up your character to max level when pvping removes having to balance lower levels and keeps the entire community located in a single bracket. All of the pvp is in a set level or space so what world interaction are you really getting? Counter-Strike gives you everything available immediately and the only thing you manage is money so you can't buy everything. Games that force you to level up before unlocking weapons and basic stuff like scopes or skills is just non-sense when playing against others.
Then go play an FPS or something, because you clearly don't want to play a MMORPG.
RPGs are always going to be about questing, exploration, immersion and gradual development of both character and player. The un-fun of levelling is the result of bad design. If you fundamentally don't want to do any content in the game other than "endgame", then go play some genre that is entirely endgame (i.e., CS).
Successful MMOs are always going to be fundamentally PvE because PvP-based games will always be zero-sum. Zero-sum doesn't work in a MMO because of growth and diversity. Either the game will be so unforgiving that it will alienate the playerbase, or so forgiving that nothing has any point. It's no coincidence that WoW is more successful and has broader appeal than other MMOs but is also designed with PvP as a "tack on". And so everyone, PvPer or PvEer, play the game game, which is fundamentally PvE and designed with the understanding that the player wants what the genre is.
Basing an MMO around PvP is insane from a community point of view because MMO communities are diverse and many players simply don't enjoy head-to-head activities. So, you might say, okay, why not just have PvP and PvE be discrete? The answer is that doesn't work because of game balance. WoW has proved that beyond question. Short-circuiting the bulk of the game so that self-styled elitists can skip to owning face would only not unbalance the game if the arena for doing so was totally discrete from the PvE game (like tournament realms in WoW, which never attract more than a few thousand players a year). If the PvP content is to be totally discrete then what's the point of making it part of the same game, instead of a separate title?
If you want to play a Steam-type head-to-head game, then go do that. But please don't ask for MMORPGs to get fucked up because you can't or won't compete in the games and genres that are designed from the ground up for the kind of playstyle you say you want.
