Saylah on LOTRO PvP

Saylah of Mystic Worlds has a short rant with interesting information on the PvP planned for Lord of the Rings Online. Why would PvP in a MMORPG be interesting to anyone? Because in LOTRO you can only play the good guys, so no orc vs. elves PvP possible, and Turbine had to come up with something else.

The solution is allowing players to turn into monsters, and then having Player versus Monster Players combat. Which, unlike Saylah, I think is basically a good idea. Transforming into a monster for some time is going to be popular. I *do* agree with Saylah that making PvMP both consensual *and* restricted to special PvMP zones is a bit silly. I'm no fan of unlimited PvP, but either restricting it to certain zones, or to turning a PvP flag on would suffice, both is overkill.

Unlike "normal" ganking in other PvP games, the monster variant automatically has more limited griefing potential, because it seems your power as a monster is determined by your monster points, not by the power of your character. What happens often in other games is that people play PvE for all its worth, get immensely powerful, then get immensely bored, and start ganking newbies using the powers they accumulated. Hey, even the South Park episode on World of Warcraft was like that. I would imagine that if your monster power is independant of your character level and power, you automatically get less of these bored high-level gankers.

You can often hear me saying that WoW PvP isn't very good. And in fact there are lots of things wrong with the current honor system in WoW. But World of Warcraft got one major thing right: PvP has to be an alternative occupation in a PvE game to be permanently successful. The basic idea of games like Archlord, where your standing in the game is defined by PvP, and PvE is only a means to the end of getting stronger for PvP, is flawed. In a PvE game everybody can win. In a PvP game by definition there have to be losers. And getting people to pay for playing losers is always going to be a hard sell. I think Lord of the Rings Online got this one right as well, but we'll have to see how it actually plays out.