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.
