If you are a developer and your game happens to be DIKU-clone (kill yourself now, and stop fagging up the industry) and you spent ZERO development time on PvP – don’t bother with PvP servers, it will be a whole lot more embarrassing than the time you get caught fucking your sister at her funeral.

Now if you actually have some idea of what PvP balance is, how to design goals and guild support and what are things PvPers want out of their game then you can give it a whirl. Still chances are you will end up with third-rate derivative and half-assed result since you will likely have \’e2\’80\’98mass appeal\’e2\’80\’99 aspirations. End result would not be that much different than the rest of your DIKU cloneware, just flaws will be that more obvious and harder to hide behind the mindless grind.

Moral of this story? Don’t bother with PvP unless you are willing to design your game with it in mind from the beginning. Also don\’e2\’80\’99t bother with PvP if you are not prepared to go for \’e2\’80\’98the niche\’e2\’80\’99 (and fuck everything else) and stick to it to the bitter end.

That’s what really got me back into DAoC after stalling out on Guinevere when my guild disintegrated back in the day. I almost hit th e level max and had a lot of fun. A whole lot of fun. I kept my account open over a year after City of Heroes lured me away. I bought the next expansion…but ultimately, the collapse of my alliance meant I never really went back.

But Gaheris was absolutely wonderful. My girlfriend and I keep talking about how neat a coop server would be in the other games we play. (Except Eve.)

Nothing quite approached the fun of being a part of a wave of tiny blue kobolds sweeping across the landscape demanding tribute from all in its path. Seeing the trolls run in horror /shouting WTF while being rooted and having dozens of kobolds /jumping all around them screaming for tribute.

Aaaaah, those were the days…

I prefer pvp servers to pve servers, and I’m anything but a 12 year old boy (I’m a 49yo mother of two). I like the social interactions on pvp servers because there’s more options, it seems. I rarely go out to gank lowbies (unless I have a grudge against their guild or I have pms, of course, and then it does wonders for my mood). I somehow missed the entire UO phenomenon, and EQ; DAOC was my first graphical although I played pk muds before that.

I don’t know about hardcore, though. I’m still waiting for my Perfect MMOG, which will of course include pvp. I’d also like to see more player-generated governance of the game, perhaps with politics (including jurisprudence). And a pony.

For WoW, I’m on a PvE server purely because of BG’s. Not that Stranglethorn dosn’t sometimes turn into a bit of a slaughter..

So there will never be true pvp server where it’s always that sense of paranoia that will ever last long. Because either: a. anti-pk guilds develop as the “order keepers” (which can only happen if there is incentive to do so, i.e. incentives not to die), or because b. the gankers drive everyone away and the server dies off. There is no middle ground. Millions and millions of iterations of prisoner’s dilemma have proven you can’t have a stable society of “always defect”.