This has been the key to literally every successful world PvP/large-scale PvP implementation in any MMO in the past 20 years. It’s mind-boggling how insular the current dev team seems to be with regards to PvP design.
There are so many resources they could learn from and they have rehashed the same old PvE nonsense that gets rolled out expansion after expansion. They honestly don’t seem to fundamentally understand their own game genre.
An example on the basics of a pretty standard PvP zone:
Titan Shard Crater
A huge crystalline meteor smashed into Azeroth and created a crater. On impact it split into 9 pieces, with the largest piece in the centre of the crater and 8 smaller shards dotted around the map.
Taking control of each of the 8 shards provides a temporary buff to that faction:
1 Tower - 5% movement speed
2 Towers - 5% honour gain
3 Towers - 5% rep gain
4 Towers - 5% damage buff
5 Towers - 5% less damage taken
6 Towers - 5% hp5/mp5
7 Towers - 5% honour gain
8 Towers - 5% movement speed
Each shard emanates a radiating power field that also provides a 5% honour gain within 50 yards.
The power that is emanated from each shard is harnessed by each faction and can be captured using a battery provided at camp. When in the vicinity of a shard this ticks full at 1/5 seconds and has a capacity of 60.
Once full the battery can be turned in at camp for rep.
Once enough batteries have been turned in to fuel a special contraption an NPC is spawned that moves to the central shard. Once there they use the contraption to crack the shard and let out a burst of power.
This NPC is elite and attackable, but can be buffed and healed, so needs to be protected.
The crack lets out 7-10 spirits that are only attackable by the faction whose NPC cracked the shard. They spawn in various locations around the map. They are shared tag and when killed everyone receives an orb.
This orb can be used to either:
- Hand in for rep
- Used as a reagent to craft one of the new recipes for this rep.
- Used as a buff on the player (5% change to proc a damage shield)
This ensures that no matter the life of the game and the stage of progress of the player, these orbs remain useful.
The key to all this is that there are no timers. These events roll on forever with no beginning or end.
So much is potentially going on in the zone at once, from small shard control, to handing in batteries, to protecting your NPC, to killing spirits, all the while travelling around the zone and generally PvPing.
You can also make standard gathering nodes continue to spawn so there is another layer to the chaos.
That’s just a rough 10 minute idea. If someone paid me to sit down for a day I could come up with 10 other ideas and actually finesse them. It’s really not that hard.
Oh, and make the zone interesting, with the small shards in cool places: one in a huge cave that is open to the sky (crashed through the earth), one on the side of the crater where there is a platform with a great view of the crater, one in a cleft that has three entrances and can be dropped into, but must be run out of.
Make knowledge of the zone and terrain a key advantage.