Along with today's chunk of ESO information came the bad news for people like myself who were looking forward to open-world PvP. It appears as though all PvP is going to be instanced and take place in Cyrodiil. The descriptions make ESO sound a bit more lively than GW2's snooze-fest WvWvW, however it still essentially remains an oversized BG.

I believe the best part of PvP is spontaneity. Never knowing when you will cross paths with other players will keep you on the edge of your seat for hours on end. A mundane PvE quest may suddenly become a real challenge when your group finds the enemy questing in the same area. Your favorite farming or gathering locale may be invaded by the opposition, causing you to team up and oust them so you can continue to ply your trade. Occasionally just traveling from point A to point B along the road has the potential to waylay you for the entire night as more players show up unexpectedly and engage with/against you (also mentioned today was fast-travel, which btw is also detrimental to spontaneous PvP). The system described in ESO seems to eliminate all the fun and exciting aspects of PvP and replaces them with a grind.

This post is not about ganking or griefing other players, there are fairly simple mechanics that can placed to prevent that kind of abuse of open-world PvP (WARs chicken is a good example, but ideally a system that simply levels-down a higher player to whatever zone they are in would be best).

What this post IS about revolves around getting people excited to PvP again. Get them out of the habit of grinding repetivive content like BGs for vendor/token-bought PvP rewards. Force players to venture out of the main cities where they can't just wait in queues or fast travel to their destination. In MMOs, the game world has basically been turned into a lobby, and that just isn't right. The game world should be filled with secrets, resources, mobs, and most importantly, players.

Being a big fan of both Elder Scrolls and of MMOs, it saddens me deeply to see that ESO will not have the top tier PvP I have been aching for. I'm certain I'll still enjoy the game for a month or more simply because it's Elder Scrolls, but without spontaneous seat of your pants PvP, I don't think it will keep my interest much beyond that.

While this post is simply one fan's humble opinion, my guild has just under 70 like-minded players in it. And I would wager that there are many more similar guilds made of similar players who have been unsatisfied with the stagnation of PvP in MMOs.

Thanks for reading, and I'm eager to hear what the rest of the community thinks about how ESO's PvP is going to stack up, for better or worse.

-B

After reading the information released today I have lost a lot of interest in the game. No open world pvp means this will be a game I play to max level and then quit, and that is if I can even bring myself to buy it. Why ever leave town when we can just queue ourselves to pvp in the same area over and over. I have played mmo since Ultima online up to Rift, nearly everyone, sadly. There are tons of people looking for the same thing Benzin and myself are looking for. To me it seems as though developers just want to appease the people that cry over and over about everything. Open world pvp needs to be brought back. Mortal online and Darkfall are not good examples of open world pvp so please do not even bring them up. Everquest, Shadowbane, Original WoW have probably been some of the best mmos to ever come out. I do not want to kill people over and over to get the same damn items. I want to go out and kill some rare flying monkey that drops a rare glowing air crystal to make an item. Making a game that caters to people that do not have the time to play the game is dull and more of the "hardcoe" players such as myself see no point in playing it. Elder Scrolls Online had the potential to be one of the greatest mmos ever. I can not see that happening with the current plan on the game.

We've known all along that all the PvP/RvR takes place in Cyrodiil. and no its not instanced. Cyrodiil is an entire Open World zone.

It's true we knew Cyrodiil would be the major contested zone, and we knew some zone mechanics, but until today I had never seen anything that confirmed it would be the only place PvP could occur. While they call it an open world zone, it will have multiple instances of the zone of about 220 players each, and because it is the only place people can go to PvP, its really no better than a 'scaled up' BG imho.

We did not infact know that Cyrodiil PVP was the ONLY pvp option to the game. Cyrodiil being an "entire open world zone and not instanced" is a very deceiving comment as regardless of size (which we do not know yet) it is still a specific zone dedicated to PVP and still very much works like a giant Battleground (queing system, point based scoring system and "bolster" system). The point the OP seems to be making is that systems like this really shrink the overall game world, people end up sitting around in cities queuing up for their PVP instead of exploring and having both PVE and PVP fun together out in the world.

After reading all of the new information released about this game in the past day or two it simply seems to be a carbon copy of Guild Wars 2 as far as its PVP system. I really don't see the point of making another game like that, especially so soon after Guild Wars 2's release so I am rather confused as to why it was taken in this direction.

Thanks for putting my thoughts into words, it was a bit difficult to explain that one. But yeah, thats exactly how I feel about it. It may be fine for some people, or those who lean casual and take it in small doses, but speaking for myself it's not what I would like to see.

I agree that this is sad and not a good approach.

I wish there was open-world PvP, not so much FFA, but at least how it's done in WoW on PvP servers.

I REALLY don't like the idea of "campaigns" - just sounds like a fancy word for more instancing.

I would encourage you to check out my interview with Brian Wheeler, Lead PvP Designer on TESO. I think the following question/answer might be interesting to you:


TF: So a lot of people love open world PvP, meaning you can roam around and find someone who is questing and you can ruin their day. I’ve heard that you are going to have quest areas in Cyrodiil so people who enjoy that type of PvP will be able to go and roam around and look for people who maybe aren’t necessarily expecting combat?

BW: Yeah, exactly. So there are Bruma, Cheydinhal, Chorrol, and two other towns, Cropsford and Hackdirt which are all places from TES4: Oblivion. We felt like we needed to give them some sort of purpose, so we have filled them with citizens from Cyrodiil who are living through this war going on all around them and they are trying to survive. They are like “please help us kill the raiders who keep attacking us”, or “just get rid of the bears that are raiding us at night” or “just collect some things for us”, so there are definitely PvE quests to do. Also, there are all the public dungeons; we have a lot of public dungeons in Cyrodiil as well.

You can check out the full interview here for a lot more answers specifically related to PvP: http://tamrielfoundry.com/2012/10/interview-brian-wheeler/


Furthermore, to react to a couple opinions which have been posted in this thread so far...

1) Saying PvP only in Cyrodiil is "no open world PvP" is completely ludicrous. Cyrodiil is an ENTIRE PROVINCE. This is an absolutely gigantic area, which according to the ZOS devs is "bigger than it was in Oblivion". The entire game is NOTHING BUT open world PvP.

2) Cyrodiil is much much more than just a "battleground", it has cities, keeps, quests, dungeons, everything that the normal PvE game has.

3) If you think that this system will cater more towards "softcoe" or "casual" pvpers you are dead wrong. You clearly didn't play DAoC, because nobody would accuse that game of featuring being casual pvp, and it uses the exact same system.

4) Campaigns are necessary because of the megaserver technology. They can't put 1 million+ people into the same instance of Cyrodiil, so they split it up by campaign. This acts as sort of your "home PvP server". It's a clever solution and will help to reinforce community formation through repeated PvP interaction with the same group of friends/enemies. Also, while the PR line is that the game's engine is designed to support "200+ people fighting each other in PvP" its important to realize that this means 200+ people ON SCREEN, not TOTAL. Each campaign instance of Cyrodiil will accomodate thousands of players at a time.


I really can't believe that anyone can possibly think of TESO as not taking a fully dedicated stance towards high quality PvP in light of this information.

I don't believe anyone is saying that TESO will not have "high quality PVP" as quality is a very subjective thing, instead we are talking about the TYPE of PVP system being put in place. Everything that has been talked about in interviews could be copy pasted from Guild wars 2 developer questions, the fact that Cyrodiil MAY be much larger than GW2's "Eternal Battlegrounds" does not change how the system works. Having to queue up for this "PVP province" and making it a completely seperate entinity from the PVE game is a design choice, it is one type of PVP and unfortunately it has been proven to hurt the overall spread of a games population. With this sort of PVP system in place entire zones become ghost towns after the first couple months of launch as players inevitably hit max level and stick to city camping while they wait to get into the same PVP battleground as their friends.

TESO could definitely have fun PVP, especially if the scale of Cyrodiil is as large as we are led to believe but it will not change the fact that this type of PVP system is being overused and does very little to create and maintain a competative PVP community. the idea that Cyrodiil will have a small amount of quests,dungeons and other PVE content does not change it either, this is again another thing present in Guild Wars 2.

I simply don't understand the continued use of this PVP system when it encourages the "disposable zone" phenomena, so much work gets put into all these zones just to be abandoned shortly into the games life.