PvP Thoughts & Suggestions
Couple of things I just wanted to mention in the hopes FC might even think about it.
#1 Outside Buffs
The number one thing that stops the majority of people having consensual duels in arenas (or anywhere else) is outside buffs. Fighting a level 50 trader with a ql150+ essence, doc hp buff and HE is pretty much pointless :)
While I certainly think outside buffs are good for 'wars', they are definitely out of place in consensual duelling. There are two things I can think of that would fix that.
Number one - as soon as you step into an arena, you lose all outside buffs. This would fix it, although it would suck if you were specifically duelling to test some buff.
The second option (and the better one, I think) is to allow you to see what buffs someone is running if they consent to it. For example, if I target Cloudeh and type /buff he will get a screen saying 'Do you allow Shirow to examine your NCU?' (or whatever) with a yes/no/ignore.
If he says no or ignore, then I can be pretty sure hes running outside buffs :) If he says yes, then I can check out his buffs, see he only has enf buffs, and fight safe in the knowledge that it's a fair duel. This would mean running fair tournaments and one on one duels could be a reality (without having everyone terminate first!)
I'm sure there are other ways people can think of to do this, but the NCU examination seems like a good one to me. This may seem like a non issue to level 150+ pvpers (are outside buffs such a big deal at 150?), but there are a lot of people that make level 1-50 chars just to pvp, and regardless of your opinion of them, it would be really nice if there could be fair and consensual tournaments for anyone who wanted to pvp.
#2 Rooting and stuff
I know this subject has been done to death but hear me out.
I PvPed in DAOC a LOT, and the biggest problem a few patches ago was roots/mezzes. You'd stay rooted/mezzed for EVER and people could just whack you again straight afterwards. So Mythic added a new rule - if you'd just been mezzed, you couldn't be mezzed again for another minute.
This certainly made it a lot more fun for melee classes (95% of DaoC classes!!)
I think adding something similar to AO would be really helpful since 50% of AO classes can root, and a large number of AO classes are melee. Maybe not a minute, but at least 15-30 seconds (the period of time doesn't really matter, it's more just the idea that you can't be chain rooted. Even if it was 5 seconds, it'd be something). This would give rooters time to 'root and run' if they wanted to escape (damn zoners..) but would do away with chain rooting. Since roots cost so little nano, chain rooting is obviously a big problem for meleers, and I do think something needs to be done to curb it a little.
#3 A reason to PvP
Tarasque has become a fantastic reason to pvp for high levels, and rightly so.
PvP is always more fun if you're fighting to keep control of something, than fighting to win (or lose) a title. When a specific player has something to lose (their title) they're less likely to engage in a war because they're worried about losing it.
When a specific player has something to lose *as a team* (e.g. camelot castle) they are wayyy more likely to pvp because they don't want to lose the phat loot. To use another DAOC example, in DAOC you pvp over forts and relics. If you lose your relic, the opposing team becomes more powerful. Therefore, everyone pvps, because they don't want the other team to be stronger than them.
We need more things like this in AO - forts, locations, phat loot drops, whatever.. just something to fight over. Add some relics or something ;)
#4 Titles
Why do people zone? Why do people run when they're going to die?
Because they're afraid of losing their title.
With the current system it seems pretty hard to raise your title, and yet again I'm going to talk about DAOC (hey, the game sucked, but they did do pvp pretty well.)
In DAOC you get realm ranks/points. You can never lose a single point. In DAOC, the worst thing about dying is that you have to run for 15 minutes to get back to the fight.
While some people think there should be a huge risk vs reward for PvP, I disagree. Stuff like that puts casual players off pvp forever - who wants to go out and get ****ed repeatedly by a hardcore pvper so they can get their title - and then, when you finally ARE able to almost kill someone, they run and zone!
I think the titling system needs to be looked at - my first thought was that we should make it so that you can never lose the title you currently have, but that does bring up the potential for abuse from people just standing and killing each other over and over.
It could work, however, if you could only get points from killing the same person once every (1, 2, 3, 4, 5?) days. More people would pvp (and not run near death) because they wouldn't be scared of losing their title, and it would mean theres no point in ganking the same n00bs over and over again ;)
I think for this to work we need more reasons to pvp though - camelot castle was a good start, but it'd be nice if (for example) omnis could come break into the CoT to try and steal (some item) and we could go break into omni hq to try and steal (some item). Shades of DaoC perhaps, but it'd give people something to do. Of course, this would require making cities 25%, but that's a topic for another thread :) Maybe rather than CoT and Omni HQ we could have a specific 25% location with a city in it for clan and omni, and clanners/omnis could go raid those cities. There would be guards there obviously, and it should be REALLY hard to steal the item, but the item should be something really really really cool and definitely something team/side based (similar to DAOC where it powers up your whole 'realm' or something else..) otherwise everyone will be pissed they didn't grab it and <insert name here> did!
Anyway, thats it for now - I'm sure I'll think of some other stuff soon.
