I dont know if anyone reads this, or if there is going to be PvP in PS, but I will copy+paste some thoughts that were so eloquently stated by another Pvper.
He was talking about Shadowbane[SB] on the Darktide[DT] (DT is the Asheron\'s call pvp+ server) being the \"next big game\" since all of the pvp guilds and players were going to meet there and establish themselves therein.
\"i think a lot of DTers who think sb is gonna be the shit will be pretty disappointed..
First of all, it\'s gonna be a class system, which has both good and bad points going for it. The main \"bad\" thing is it doesn\'t lead to balanced 1vs1 pvp and they wont even try to balance it in that way. The good thing is it gives you lots of different character types to play.
The thing that made ac pvp so good was the lack of defined classes. All chars can heal themselves which is essential to good pvp and you don\'t see this in any other game unless you go back to uo. For pvp to be really good, you have to have do-it-all characters. They have to be able to deal a fair amount of damage, take some and heal themselves. Within that it doesnt matter if they\'re melees or mages or what but if they can\'t do that then it wont be as much fun.
After i left ac i played eq and then daoc. While the pvp in those games was generally fun, classes take out any skill factor associated with pvp and i suspect this will happen with sb too. i played a cleric in eq so i basically hit the heal key in pvp (i know it takes skill). In daoc i played a bard, so i mezzed, healed and did the occasional dd shout. Point is, everyone in the group was doing 1 or 2 things max and that\'s all they had to think about. Sure, some groups worked better together than others but in the end it was nothing like ac pvp.
The other thing that\'ll be kinda gay in sb is the numbers game. The devs tell us how they envision these huge battles etc. Well, having played daoc and seeing huge battles in that game i don\'t see how much different they could be in sb. I don\'t care what kinda engine or how leet it supposedly is, having 100 players on the screen casting spells is gonna cause massive client-side lag. I played daoc with a athlonXP 1800, 768megs of ddr and a geforce3 and i still got bad slowdowns at times. Ppl with 1ghz and geforce 2s were crying ;p
While these huge battles can be fun at times, there is nothing more satisfying that small-scale pvp. I dont care how good a gamer you are, in a battle with a couple hundred ppl in the immediate area, whether you get ganked or not has nothing to do with skill. All it takes is 1 caster out of the opposing 100 to pick u out of a crowd and hit the nuke key. That\'s why people didn\'t mind dying in that game, it had nothing to do with skill and the same will hold true in sb.
That\'s not to say sb won\'t be fun (for a while). But holding territory and castles for the sake of nothing else gets old after you\'ve proven you can do it for a while. The game is gonna have to have a lot more than that to keep people interested in it or it\'ll end up like daoc. I\'m actually more excited about ac2 than i am sb now...\"
-Scytale
Hope that was as enlightening to you game designers as it was to me. ^_^
