While that is a funny point… on my own part, I would hesitate to tell others to do less than my lazy rump.
Surely, there are more concise and succinct ways to make a point. But… it is something I agree with that I wouldn’t put the effort in to make a thread about.
I mean, I think it would be fairly easy to narratively justify PvP in the current situation.
Both factions are still tired from the War, and have an official armistice. This is agreed upon between the two factions, and provisions of that include not sending armies into rivaling territory, not breaking out in open conflict, etc.
However, there can be a lot of ‘grey’ areas in Azeroth where neither faction has a solid claim (or both factions have a claim that was not resolved in the Armistice as achieving overall success was deemed more important than every ‘minor’ territorial dispute). Old tensions are still high, and there are a lot of wealth, influential, and hawkish enough people on both sides to still be able to fund small skirmish efforts.
To some extent, both factions are aware of these bad actors moving around, but both factions, in the interest of diplomacy have decided to silently close the matter. Refusing to send official supplies, soldiers, or material to any of those conflicts. Neither faction is officially participating, however small groups of motivated irregulars (i.e Adventurers) continue to help supply material and personnel to these conflicts, though in small enough numbers to keep the involved conflicts to little more than skirmishes. Things that can be safely ignored by the larger calculus of superpowers such as the Horde and Alliance.
The conflicts are happening far enough away from any ‘critical territory’ that no faction wants to risk the entire Armistice to argue them, and the back and forth sway of them keep them all locked in some form of stalemate. Skilled healing magic, and the Irregular’s own extreme resilience keep actual casualty counts extremely low, and both factions (quietly) have decided that the cost of raising an international issue, one that could end out in another World War, is too great compared to the insignificant impact of the skirmishes.
Still for many of the actors in such conflicts, the ability to make their enemies bleed, if only a tiny bit, is well worth the effort. Not to mention that engaging in such skirmishes keeps the Horde and Alliance’s elite honed to the deadly edge that makes the factions so fearsome, not to mention the Honor and Glory that can be won engaging in such affairs.
I’d sooner want them to just go radio silent on the story arc. They don’t have to do it to validate PVP. There are no BGs that are currently connected to the primary story as it is - they don’t have to go out of their way to fix it.
I don’t want a return to the exhausting, tired faction conflict story that, no matter what it does, objectively fails to please anyone.
I’m not really in favour of making the existing BGs ‘contemporary’ in lore, but I do think the general concept of tying PvP events into lore via questlines is a good one.
Take Stromgarde, for example. There should have been questlines leading up to the warfront event, taking place after the canonical conclusion of the warfront event, and I think there should have been more PvP in the zone during its off phases.
I haven’t thought a great deal how to do this for future zones, but I think there’s definitely going to be more faction conflict, and when there is, Blizzard ought to take the opportunity to update the Old World with all types of content - PvP, PvE events, questlines, etc. - to really sell it.
I actually wanted to touch on this because I found it while I was scrolling past;
I think this is functionally impossible in WoW, given how the racial bonuses skew towards Horde mechanically, as well as the communities that’ve congregated to that faction over time.
Extreme rebalancing would have to be done to not make it an effective curbstomp by the Horde.
As I consider games like Eve, I’m increasingly of the position that faction or clan issues would be best resolved using a more organic system. Rather than being laid down at the outset in factions, players would be capable of forming into informal alliances that could grow, get massive, get complacent, and then be overtaken by upstarts. You’d certainly have moments where large groups dominate the scene, and moments where an up and coming rival takes them down. Creative destruction I feel would be the absolute best way to approach that matter.
But, Warcraft can’t really support something like that because we have the factions, and because you can’t simply tell one side that they lost, and that rolling a given race is just going to be a subpar experience for them. That’s why I tack so heavily to a stalemate model. As for balancing, I think that things like mercenary mode do need to be removed, and there need to be some incentive structures that encourage faction equilibrium.
Those structures would have to be the topic of another thread though.
/thread
I’m going to try something new. To gauge reading comprehension, I am going to quiz people on their answers. Ready?
When I said “But, Warcraft can’t really support something like that”, was I referring to:
a. The sinking of the Lusitania
b. The model of competitive PVP that we find in Eve Online
c. PVP generally
d. None of the above.
What did the post state were the elements of the competitive system that Eve Online uses?
Name two suggestions included in this post.
Accepting that you can be wrong?
0/3 - oof. Not doing so well there, huh?
About as well as your PvP proposal.
We need an ice pack here for this burn.
Kyalin you really, really need to stick to Night Elf stuff. Your takes on Forsaken and Eastern Kingdoms stuff is some serious oof.
As we discussed before, you wouldn’t like my Night Elf stuff either given that you are on record as wanting to throw them under the bus for your pipe dream.
We are not going to agree, on anything. Save yourself the effort and stay away from my threads.
I’m actually of the position that the idea that gains and losses needing to be mirrored across the factions is incredibly stupid and unrealistic. You can propose whatever you want for Night Elves. It does not need to come at a cost to the rest of the Alliance.
Aren’t we then just lifting that mentality and foisting it onto someone else?