(no subject)

[demiurgent]

So, a City of Heroes player group called the PvP Event Committee has launched a PvP awareness campaign, to increase player involvement in PvP. And to that end they've announced a series of public events. and the development team was happy to give them advertising -- they've put a ton of money into PvP and most people don't... um... actually play it.

Well! They've announced their summer season, with both arena events and live PvP zone events taking place on "a server wide event' schedule called Uprising.

All of which is plenty cool... but I can't help but notice that the first event is an information seminar on all the different servers, and then all the PvP is on the test server.

Which is to say... they need to gather all the potentially interested players on all the different servers onto the one common server we have, in hopes of gathering a large enough crowd to really make these things really feel like events.

There's nothing wrong with any of this, of course. I can see the Test Server becoming kind of the home of PvP. But it really underscores how little the PvP strategy has paid off for City of Heroes in the end. I check the arenas every so often, and I never, ever see actual fights in progress. I've even taken to creating events now and again, to see if anyone's out there and wants to beat me like a four year old (I'm terrible at PvP). There are never any takers.

I'm willing to believe that dedicated PvPers have a schedule they follow, and some folks likely stalk the live PvP zones just waiting for the chance to bring their ultraviolence. But I can believe that casual PvP won't really take root except maybe on Test, where anyone with some interest can find anyone else who's thinking of giving it a spin.

Of course, if that's where the chumps like me end up going to try PvP on for size, it will eventually be the stalking ground for the ganker crowd, who want that sweet unskilled crowd to beat into painful paste.

Man, sometimes the only way to win really is not to play.

Comments

[cavalorn.livejournal.com]

The point of using the test server isn't that it's the only way to make the event large enough, it's that the test server is the only place where someone on Freedom can meet someone on Virtue and have a match. Until they implement character transfers or a cross-server Arena, Test is the only place to go for inter-server fights.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

Which is my point, more or less. The population isn't high enough on any of the individual servers to be pushing these things on live servers. The only way to get a critical mass is to draw off all the servers and do it on Test.

Which doesn't change the need for interserver transfers or a cross-server arena. ;)