WoW calls them Battlegrounds, Age of Conan calls them Minigames, on GW2 it's 'Structured PvP' or spvp in short. And, a quick visit during an early beta aside, I've been ignoring this portion of the game until recently. And that's due to some gaping flaws, which prevent this otherwise fun game mode from being as popular as it deserves to be. So let's start with the bad stuff:
spvp is completely disjointed from the rest of GW2. It's its own, seperate part of the game. When you enter spvp, you get a pvp level of 1, you get ugly noob gear, you're a complete nobody and if you play lots of matches and rise through the ranks, you won't earn any gold, pve levels or pve gear. You can leave after a long, hard day of spvp and you'll have absolutely nothing to show for it in the regular game world.
This is particularly mind-boggling, when you look at the server vs server vs server (aka 'world versus world') pvp where you jump right in and you retain your gear, looks, spec, everything. No such thing in spvp. You need to set up a completely new spec.
On the plus side, NPCs offer every single rune and sigil (armor & weapon upgrades) exotic gear and all the most powerful level 80 stuff for free. Which, of course, only works while in spvp. So not only is this area ('The Mists') the structured pvp zone, but you also get to create every build and spec you could possibly ever imagine for free and try it out against other players, dummies and sparring NPCs. Beats paying for a respec or buying 250 different weapons.
It also means that you can set up skills and traits especially for PvP, which you would never use in PvE, keep both of them seperate without one ever messing up the other. It's a bit awkward and puts off many newcomers, but once you accept the somewhat unusual environment, you'll get the fairest, most evenly matched playing field you'll ever see in any MMORPG. Everyone has the same level, the same item quality, access to the exact same items and upgrades. If some random 12 year old kicks your ass on here, it's because he's the more talented player and not because he's swinging a Legendary Hackmaster +12, which requires 800 hours of 56 player raids to obtain. Naturally, the obvious downside is that you won't be able to kill anyone by outleveling or outgearing them, either, should you happen to be said 12 year old yourself.
I know that lots of self-proclaimed pvp pros will disagree with how I feel about how the classes are balanced in spvp. But when you look at the class forums, you'll see that pretty much everyone considers their own class too weak and just about every other class overpowered. Just like it should be.
I used to play a warrior on WoW until the end of Cataclysm. And over the years I have seen retribution paladins one-shotting everything, followed by invincible blood-spec Death Knights, followed by thousands of frost mages dominating the arena above all other classes to completely invincible healers. Not only that, but every so often, certain classes would get a free talent reset, because the way they worked and had to be played had been completely revamped, particularly around the release of new expansions. I can't begin to imagine how difficult it must be to properly balance the classes in an MMORPG for pvp and satisfy everyone, so I don't want to knock WoW's definition of "balance". But to me, it always felt like their "it's rock-paper-scissors" mantra, as well as people stating it's balanced around 3vs3, not 1vs1, was a bit of a lame excuse. I have quit the game before Pandaria, I cannot say what pvp is like on there nowadays, but during my active days, some classes simpy couldn't defeat certain other classes if both players had equal gear and skill. Some classes would dominate the battlefield for months until they got nerfed into the ground or some other class got buffed to become even more overpowered and broken. Having to wait 10 minutes for a pair of rogues to appear in the 2vs2 arena wasn't fun. Chasing to an idiot mage, who runs laps around a pillar, wasn't fun. Being told that warriors aren't supposed to beat mages or that WoW isn't balanced around 2vs2 wasn't fun. The pvp simply wasn't fun. And I'm not even talking about shit like resilience, blue vs purple gear, level difference and all that crap GW2 has eliminated from the beginning.
Don't get me wrong: Joining a random battleground in full arena gear, plowing my way through legions of noobs and topping the scoreboards was fun for a while. But I won on gear and stats alone, not skill. If you look at my little video up there, I'm joining spvp as a complete newcomer and I'm still topping the charts. But this time, it's not because of some purple crap or because of some cookie cutter build or because my class is the current flavour of the month. It's because the players around me suck harder than I do. Some of the fights you can see in that video were incredibly tight, very exciting and impossible to predict. I fucking love it!
One small complaint, though - domination only? Why? What about CTF? I don't need siege-style pvp or vehicles, wvw is good enough for me, but I wouldn't mind a bit of mindless deathmatch action or something that goes a little beyond capturing and holding points on a map. On the plus side, once you've figured out how it works, you'll know it all. Same ruleset for each map, with only slight variations.
It doesn't offer the same variety other MMOs offer in this department. Having spvp specs and gear completely detached from the rest of the game is awkward and takes some getting used to. But it's fair, it's incredibly well-balanced and killing a bunch of random players for a few hours here and there feels incredibly rewarding. I don't think our little guild is ready for tournament-style pvp right now. But random matches are good fun. I'm happy.
-Cat
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