Lords of Death Forums Lords of Death Forums LoD General Discussion SB vs. WoW

LoD was back and forth it seems, giving up SB for WoW, becoming disenfranchised, and then moving back to SB (at least some).
Watching those SB vids on main page really brought back the old memories of Death/Vengence pvp, and actually made me almost reach for the old dusty SB CD. But I'm still enjoying WoW, and was always curious why LoD lost interest in its pvp. Hear me out on this...
I am and have always been a hardcore pvp'er to the bone. In WoW I never stepped one foot in MC/BWL because my full blues/1-2 epics evened things out enough to where skill still mattered, even against toons with much better gear. Honestly that small extra portion of health/crit/dmg etc from devoting so much time into PvE just isn't that paramount to be able to pvp in WoW and be successfull, IMO. WoW is definitely a gear-dependant game, definitely moreso than SB, but you don't have to quit your job or tell your RL friends to fuck off and grind out the full epics to compete. You really don't.
In terms of skill, sure, 1v1's are all about blowing timers and who's jumping who. Big 40 on 40 raids are more about which side has the better or more of the big AoE'ing classes.
But 1-2 group fights could involve HEAVY use of skill. Fights in WoW are suppossed to be fast, and usually are. But something I've learned is that the more skilled and coordinated the teams fighting each other become, the longer the fights drag out. Hell I fondly remember some old WSG brawls between the top teams of each faction where a group vs group fight could grind out 10 minutes or more without a single death, people were that good at healing and protecting their healers.
And you can't say WoW is all numbers, myself and one other on our team in the past had absolutely steamrolled 4 or more people in BG's before single handedly, often with some rezzing and rejoining the fight before their friends had died. That's not all about gear either, as I was far from decked out. Not trying to brag here and say I'm the shit, just saying it is possible to do well against bad odds, same as in SB.
So what does SB really bring to the table? Bigger fights and seige for one. But I remember one thing that REALLY started to piss me off was exploitation of seige and the GMs totally not giving a shit about it. I remember punk ass guilds who didn't stand a chance in the fight could hold off bane after bane by hiding their seige engines far enough back to snipe the bane but be untargetable in the process.
I remember other underhanded shit like some guilds with assloads of duped/mined gold would dump so many stupid ass bulwarks all over their town that anyone approaching lags out and half their people crash. Not to mention due to shitty pathing there was almost no way to walk through the mess. I thought seige was cool at first, but really started to hate it after a while.
The bane wars could be fun, but you know that was really all about who's zerging with half the server. Smaller fights were often a bitch to find. I remember you'd form up your group of 10 and start running around the high lev areas lookin for groups to gank. When you found one, most likely half of them were afk macro'ing and not even there, and the other half weren't buffed or ready and dropped like fat kids in dodgeball. Like any other ganking, that's only fun for a while for me.
The most fun I would have in SB is when your organized group of 10 bumps into another organized group of 10, both of you fully buffed and looking for a fight. But how often did that happen? The above scenario happened 10x more often from my memories.
I dunno, watching those SB vids kind pushed me to the fence, but I think I'm still on WoW's side for now. Any LoD care to add some reasons why they left to retry SB? I'm not some WoW fanboy by any means, I really am just honestly curious.

NT

I find in WoW you lose nothing, things don't break, you get no real loot. It is PvP with harm resistant cushions attached to it.
In SB you could wack someone, take their toys and leave em butt nekkid.
Risk -vs- Reward, it's just there in many games.

The game is obviously more Pve based then Pvp. Many companys like to do it that way and i dont have a problem at all with it. Blizzard watns to make money and the money is in killing dragons for shiny purple items. I dont see how there doin anythign wrong or such. My problem is that wow is to shitty of a game for the fanbase of it has. To many people are playing this game for the shit pvp it offers. Its a mindless grind of items that will keep geting better. You will never have the best items and most of the time you spend in pvp its to get items then evantually wont be good anymore. Its to tedious and I just cant stand the game. What makes me even more mad is how there is no other friken game to play other then wow.

kinda like how LoD would bane their own cities so nobody else could bane them and set the timer for 5AM so nobody would show up?

That's true Arioch, well said. I totally forgot to consider risk vs reward.
But all you really suffer in SB from small scale pvp is loss of inventory(basically just gold and junk shit that would be sold for gold), and I remember all too well the first things out of someone's mouth when grinding up to r7 and some item actually worth a damn gets ID'ed:
"Ok, teleporting back to bank, who can summon me back?"
The most I ever got was gold from sacking xp'ers, minus the first DELICIOUS few months when I could take my thief and steal those big deeds of stupid guild leaders sometimes. Yeah once in a great while you find some Un'ided item that turns out to be sick, or some good stat rune that someone was too lazy to bank, but there wasn't much risk other than gold loss. At least from my recollections
The DOWNSIDE to RvR, which I think partly helped kill the game, was how noobs to the game were getting totally fucked over by griefers the minute they were off the island. Esp a while after release, no guild wanted to take in some clueless new-to-the-game lowbie, so these poor fools had to try to fight at the outskirts of safeholds and shop the public trees and were getting griefed hardcore until all their gear broke off their back and their bank runs dry from repairing it. They think "this game sucks ass" and there goes any chance to raise the server pop while they slowly become ghost towns.
WoW does need some form of RvR though. I shouldn't be able to take a trained monkey and put him in front of the keyboard for 18 hours a day and watch him get rank 14. But the "risk" of SB's noob levs for newer players was way too damn high, heh.

But most games are going to be geared to the PvE players, and the games that are not aren't going to appeal to the mass there for you will have outdated interfaces, outdated graphics, chars that are hard to control ect ect ect.
PVP in SB is not skill based, you will never be able to solo because everyone runs in groups. Too many button clicks involved with this game. The whole game idea is a good one though. You put that with an interface like WoWs and you have something good. It takes skill in a 1v1 in WoW. In SB its pretty much just walk up to someone and hope your clicks are better, and faster.
WoW is as close to UO in needing skill to win a battle as there has been since UO.

I frankly enjoy Arathi basin a lot right now. There is much skill involved especially in small group warfare. I think that Blizz is going to realize how good AB is and that they will come out with better stuff. I will continue to play WOW until something better comes out. I also won't go backwards in the future and play SB.

The thing I like about SB more than WoW is the fact that you can make a gimp template. You have to know wtf you're doing to play the game. Even then, there is no ultimate order you use for every fight.

The worst part of SB I find is the time to assemble, travel and get a good fight going. The time spent running as a pack to where ever puts anyone to sleep.
That is what made UO, the ability to gate a group around.
I agree on the small aspect of losing inventory, if you look at lineage (past the gay artwork), you lose XP, levels etc... so there is a higher risk involved.