I LOATHE PvP!

Recently, the all mighty Penny Arcade parodied an application for Iphone that lets people check the World of Warcraft Auction House. In this they showed an app, where a rogue could click on people characterized by dots and simply kill them instantly.

This brings me to todays topic: PVP, not the awesome web comic, no, but an aspect of online gaming that I find to be the worst addition to gaming and a waste of bandwith. Picture this: you are standing in a quiet meadow, killing bunnies to satisfy some greedy sloth in a village nearby when a gigantic cow comes trampling towards you with flaming swords and the look of human hatred in their eyes. You quickly die of course since this person was twice as high level than you and to make things worse, he makes rude gestures to your smoldering and bloody remains and even has the audacity to follow me around the whole country until I give up and log out.

Such acts were not uncommon when I played WoW, it didn't, of course, make it better that I played on a PVP server, a whole world where the sole objective seemed to be the humiliation of your character. You could of course argue that I played on the wrong server, that I should have chosen a more peaceful and solemn realm where characters such as GANKMASTA and LOLWUTOWNEDBONKDIE are stuff of legend only. But this idea was defeated by one obstacle: all my friends played on that server, forcing me to endure people blasting my ass just so that I could have a social life.

Since that time I have despised everything that involves people banging at each other with swords, guns or arcana, every time I see the features of a new MMO and it says something along the line of: PVP extraordinaire it immediatly becomes a failure in my books. PVP is a blight upon the landscape of roleplaying and, sadly for me, it has become one of the most coveted aspects of the online gaming world.

Only MMO that I find to have ever created a smart way to implement a player versus player environment is the game called City of heroes (and its counterpart: City Of Villains). They first created the Arena, a place where heroes could spar and other could watch through small cameras. This place was not overly popular but some still use it to this day. When the aforementioned City Of Villains came out, a bunch of zones dedicated for player versus player interaction was introduced, bringing a whole new aspect to the game. Players could alter the control of the zone, help in securing a nuclear warhead or secure alien artefacts, all while being put against each other. This was not unlike the PVP of games like World of Warcraft BUT, it was voluntary and that is my ultimate request for game developers everywhere: make the fucking PVP VOLUNTARY!