10/6/26
i would love to be wrong about wow forever, but
every mmo with world pvp of some sort always reduces down to: someone 1) higher level than you, 2) with better gear than you, 3) who specialized their character into pvp, 4) with way more time than you, and 5) has like minded friends, killing you. and others. over and over and over again. they live for this. if you take nothing else away from me, take the fact that there are many people who extract maximum enjoyment out of a game by making people who can't fight back miserable. it's gravity. it's the tide.
oh, wow forever will be different? no it won't.
oh you swear it will be? that we're all 40 year olds and past that now?
no, we aren't. we, royally, of course. i'm not that sort of pervert.
but i have been into the genre for over 20 years, have eyes, and a semi-functional sense of pattern recognition.
at best, wow forever maintains the approximate pvp curve vanilla had. you were horde and had a pvp experience where you bothered more and were bothered less, or you were alliance and you were bothered more and you bothered less. if you have pvp trauma, i am going to guess you were alliance. if you don't, well.
but that's the best anyone can hope for. there's no reason that history repeats. classic did not repeat vanilla. we had 20 years of genre experience, let alone game specific experience.
forever isn't literally classic or vanilla. sure. but it's approximate enough. we know how the game works. we know how the systems of the game works. we know how anti-social people act in mmos.
what will happens is: anyone who wants to be a wolf to the sheep is going to level incredibly fast. they are not going to slow down out of some duty to nostalgia. game systems may dissuade them from leveling quickly, but they are going to out level your average person. they will out gear them as well, not yet at this point on purpose but by the nature of out leveling anyone else. they are going to find a place in the world that 1) maximizes low level targets and 2) minimizes in game pushback. they are going to sit there until this balance changes. many will not respond to in game pressure to not do this, because the specific desire cannot be dissuaded without any material kind of loss (or the removal of the kinds of game systems that allow for this. there is a reason retail servers are all pve now).
this happened in vanilla but the timeline here is going to be incredibly compressed. nobody knew what they were doing in 2006. we're 20 years smarter and more resourceful now.
the wolves can't stop. the sheep will get tired of it. maybe they forgot about this aspect of the game (90% of you are here for nostalgia, let's not kid ourselves) but they will quickly remember. and not only will they remember that, it will remind them they are 40 and have kids and a job and don't have time for being corpse camped in stranglethorn vale for an entire weekend.
and then they quit and go back to whatever it was they were doing and the wolves have each other. and the wolves *hate* that. and that's when they quit. because their fun only comes at the expense of others.
it's why no pvp mmo has made big numbers since DAoC. nobody wants that.