They're called Battlegrounds in WoW and the very name suggests action, bloodshed and mayhem. It suggests that the designers take them seriously. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning calls them Scenarios. Doesn't really sound awesome and... well, we all know what happened.
AoC simply titles them Minigames. What the fuck.
From a PvE point of view, AoC is an incredible game. They've only just announced yet another new raid and there are so many of those raids, hard mode dungeons and even level-scaling instances, it's Everquest 2 all over again. Thing is, I don't like that stuff. I don't like being forced into voice chat and having some 15 year old Croatian dude insult me in what he calls "English". And that leaves me with aforementioned Minigames for endgame progression.
I can't hate Craig Morrison. Whenever I see him in interviews, I feel the weird urge to go and have a beer with him. He's that kinda guy. But I do wonder. Does he play his own game? Ever? And why is there so little, if any, priority on pvp fixes, despite the community's loud cries all over the forums? Do they honestly believe it's all good the way it is? Or do they just not care?
Chances are, you have no idea what I'm talking about, so let's start with the basics: A Minigame works like the smaller BGs you know from WoW. If you don't know BGs from WoW, fuck you! What the hell are you doing here?
The majority of minigames are simple 6vs6 CTF setups. First team to cap three flags wins. There is a bigger one, which uses a domination scenario (think Arathi) and a 'destroy the enemy team and stop their respawn' kinda thing, but there is really nothing new or groundbreaking going on, which is perfectly fine.
As you kill enemy players and win Minigames, you will gain pvp experience and your pvp level will increase from rank 0 to rank 10 at the pace of the proverbial snail. With a bit of a limp. And crutches. And the snail isn't exactly in a hurry. The whole thing is fucking slow. A higher pvp rank means access to better pvp gear, meaning you'll kick more ass while your own ass will become more resistant to kicking. You will also gain so-called 'Prowess Points', which grant you special perks, making you a lot more powerful. Taking part in pvp is definitely worth the rewards and your character will become a lot stronger in the process. If only it wasn't so broken...
As you might imagine, a freshly-dinged level 80 with a pvp ranking of bullshit and zero prowess doesn't really stand a chance against a player of pvp rank awesome and tons of special perks. And that's putting it nicely. You will explode on sight. There's a high chance you will do zero damage whatsoever and the enemy will often take you down in just a single hit or two.
Logic suggests various pvp brackets divided by pvp ranks to make things even. But there is no such thing, meaning you will often end up in a CTF team with two or three low-ranked players, facing a group of rank 10s. In this case, it doesn't matter how good you are, how hard you try or how much you want to win. You can't. You won't. But the matchmaking system doesn't just give no shit about even pvp levels. It also doesn't care about class balance among teams. Three rangers and no healers on your team, two healers on the enemy team - congratulations, you're fucked. Again.
One might say you could simply go ahead and pre-make a team for this sort of thing. Alas, seeing as you start at the bottom of the pvp levels, you won't actually get a group in the first place, meaning you will have to random it like everybody else. Better still: You'll bump into the occasional premade, super powerful pvp group in those minigames and get slaughtered in seconds.
So what options do you have, when you know at the beginning of a match, that you will inevitably lose, get killed over and over again and receive absolutely no reward? The most obvious one would be leaving, but this causes you to receive a debuff, which bans you from all Minigames for the next ten minutes. Alternatively, and that's the worst part, you can just go afk and do nothing until the enemy team wins. In fact, the game supports that. If you don't move or attack after spawning, you will remain invulnerable, meaning the enemy team can't kill you. They won't care, of course, simply capturing your flag or all your bases and winning the game. But that doesn't stop this mechanic from fucking up your game: If one of your team mates, for whatever reason, decides to go AFK, he won't die, he won't be punished and you'll find yourself with 5 instead of 6 players. Chances are, the rest of the team will do the same and suddenly you'll find yourself in the middle of a battlefield with a half dozen opponents and no team mates whatsoever. Oh the fun!
And believe me - people go AFK for all kinds of reasons, especially when they have you, a lowly noob, on their team. People will openly tell you to stay the fuck out of pvp and to stop ruining their fun, because you're not entitled to mess with the big guys in Minigames, just because you're into pvp and possibly paying the same fees everyone else is paying. In fact, they tell you to get pvp experience by sacrificing resources at the Shrines of Bori.
Ahh yes. That fun new "pvp" content, which couldn't make any less sense if I tried to make it up. Imagine a raid group fo 24 people gathering resources. Picture yourself mining a shit ton of ore. Like crazy. Tons of it. Then you sacrifice it all at the Shrine of Bori and in return you get some pvp experience. Because mining makes you better at pvp in AoC. Makes perfect sense. Some smart people have calculated that it takes about 8 hours of non-stop gathering in a full raid to gain one pvp level. Apparently, you may also kill other players and simply take their resources from them instead of mining their own, but that's as far as the pvp aspect goes. And with people usually farming there in groups of 24, would you attack one of them? Yeah, right...
Your best bet is still the actual pvp servers, though they are nothing like the stuff you may be used to from WoW. There are no player factions here, everybody is a potential enemy and a whole bunch of gankers will happily wait right at the entrance of an area to tear you to shreds, dance on your corpse and taunt you with every single kill. They used to piss on you, too, but Funcom eventually removed that emote. I'm not making this up.
While those serves can be fun if you feel hardcore enough, they do come with their own flaws: In order to actually level up and get stronger, you still need to kill 20 wolves, collect 10 rat tails and pick 8 wild mushrooms. And that level 24 barbarian, who has been stalking your level 18 character for the past 3 hours, knows that and makes sure you won't get a single quest done. And since the best gear during the leveling phase comes from dungeons, that's even more pve you must do, whether you're actually interested or not.
It's sad. At its best moments, the pvp in Age of Conan is incredible, thanks to its fast-paced realtime combat, the class trees, which remain nice and complex while everyone else seems to be going the retard-friendly route, and the gory fatalities. It feels that much better to defeat another player, if you end up taking their head in the process. And it's awesome to score a narrow victory against an evenly-matched team, where everyone is fighting to the very last man. After countless hours of frustration, I'm finally reaching a point where pvp is fun and enjoyable and every victory feels like a major achievement!
Unfortunately, these moments of glory are way too rare. You will quite literally die a thousand times before your pvp rank and gear actually begin to matter at least in a way that lets you compete against other lower-tier combatants. Would it be so hard to divide the endgame pvp groups by rank? Would it be so hard to even out the amount of healers per team? Do we really need those +10% crit rate, +5-10% damage to everything, +5-10% resistance to everything perks in pvp, which make the already insanely powerful and overgeared veterans even more impossible to kill for newcomers?
Is it so unthinkable to actually level up by doing pvp on a pvp server? And why the fuck did they implement soul-crushingly boring resource-farming as a valid alternative to actual pvp?
And the recent changes to the game aren't helping. The supposed 200.000 new free players all get access to the Minigames now, facing a horde of blood-thirsty veterans, who kill kick the living shit out of them. They have merged the European servers with the Russian and Polish servers, making communication even more difficult, if not impossible. How do you talk to a guy, whose name you cannot even type, because it's all in Cyrillic? And what the fuck is he saying?
AoC, with its brutal setting and fast-paced combat, could be more relevant to the competitive pvp crowd than any other MMORPG out there. If you keep things fair and balanced, get teams on an even level and iron out the flaws, you could satisfy a whole new community. But right now, many players, especially the newcomers they've been luring with their new F2P model, are being alienated by crude, unfinished mechanics, which make little to no sense at all.
I'd still have that beer with Craig, because he's doing a good job. But then I'd ask him to play my toon for a bit, maybe join a Minigame or two. And tell me if he seriously believes this part of the game is really fun in its current state. If only life was that simple.
-Cat
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