I would say Daoc at early release.

Attempts were made to have probably upwords of 250+ vs. 250+, but sadly the servers couldn't deal with that amount of people at launch in the same area and prompted server crashes.

I want my midgard keep that us lvl 5-30 hibbies took before the zone crashed!  Give it to us!

I have to say Darkfall, played the rest but the pvp in Darkfall once your able to partake after the grindcore, it is simply the best nothing is even close.  Eve in its own right for sci-fi mmos is probably #1, but Darkfall definitely takes the top of the mmo pack for large scale pvp.

agreeing about Planetside hands down

im yet to experience a large scale battle that is not only persistant, but contributes various dynamics being focused on one persistant goal.

some one can go on a ground battle, then minutes later be in the air, which transitions into a aerial drop to a inside interior (towers or base itself) or outside key location (steep AA position, large bridge) just to perhaps end it off back to a ground game of either driving vehicles, or ninja infiltration on 1 continent(planet) perhaps the size of half a average mmo world -- all this happening in 1 day, in the same battle.   no instances included.

Yeah, I'm sticking with Planetside. Second best PvP I ever had was in DAoC.

Planetside though is just unrivaled to me. The fact that even as a ground trooper your choice of tactics ranges from the usual shooter fare to the considerably more specialized, like the MAX suits and the full on hackers and engineers, lends itself greatly to freedom of gameplay. Then you stack on the more unique weapons, the plethora of different utility and warfare vehicles for land and air, facility network, and player enhancements and you have a sprawling and very varied battlefield raging across not just one base, but multiple in a bid for control of a continent or more.

The fact that this is a game that has full on mortar siege weapons, not just siege weapons like catapults (or in a modern/sci-fi case tanks) you have to park outside a base, but one's you park at an entirely different base and have to paint targets a mile or so away for it to fire at, makes it stand to show just how big the battles can get in Planetside.

EDIT: I loved being able to hop in a mossy and follow along with those huge blue energy balls those mortar vehicles lobbed. It was just awesome and daunting to see those looming in the sky right before they splattered the walls and open areas/courts of facilities.

Shadowrun just cuz it had such a great player built feel to it's wilds.

I literally saw people's months of work get systematically torn apart in 3 day long sieges. How cool is that?! It sounds awful and I was even on the losing end, but we rallied and stepped our game up in a new direction.

Truly, the larger the scale and the use of tactics to achieve victory or thwart such attempts as your personal stake has to be something desirable to those who are truly competitive in spirit.

It was beyond FPS as people who dislike pvp tend to say (just play counterstrike). The world was persistent, the work was real, and thousands of players were involved. 

So ahead of its time.

Going off of what the OP is asking it sounds as though he is asking what the CURRENT best MMO is for FPS type combat thus leaving out games such as WoW and EVE because they are more based around pressing 1 - 10 instead of literally controlling each and every attack with a mouse click.  

Keeping that in mind DARKFALL wins hands down.  Every movement, every click and even the direction you're facing / aiming matters.  One mistake could and can get you killed.

I am the leader of GPS, a clan at war with the whole server.  I spend every waking moment of my time playing in PVP... never gets boring or old... and no fight is ever the same.

lets see in eve I have been in a lag free 1000 vs 1000 battle and a faitly laggy but functional 2000+ vs each side. it was insane.

not sure if anyone gets that large besides eve.

And incase your wondering the direction your moving and speed count massivly in eve when it comes to tactics.

So if the OP is asking what game exactly like darkfall is the largest ofcourse his answer is going to be darkfall

Some of my best PvP memories are from DAoC and Planetside.  Both large scale and fun.  Relic battles were awesome in DAoC.  The sheer number of people needed to take a relic.  Planetside was always fun in the early days.  My best buddies and I would get on ventrillo and go to town.  We would take turns driving vehicles and gunning down people.

Of current games I've played....LOL and DCUO.  LOL is competitive and fun.  DCUO has provided some decent sized battles thus far.  Nothing huge, but there were at least very fun. 

If I played EvE or Darkfall I would probably think they were great for what they are...I just couldn't get into Eve.  I got bored mining and jumping back to base to try and make money.  I gave up after a couple weeks.  Logging in and mining for hours just wasn't fun.  I tried the trial for Darkfall.  It wasn't bad.  I just decided to play other games with friends.

Eve online, though amazingly fun, and possibly the best MMO in current existence simply isn't the prime example when you think of PvP. The battle are huge, and intense but don't function as a gladiator PvP game which is what we all talking about. When I originally read the post I understood why EvE would not be considered due to the nature of it's combat. Just as Auto Assault would not fit into the description. Technically it's true that players are fighting other players - but in the context of this thread we are talking about body to body WASD combat on a plain with gravity. That said, EvE is by far the best in terms server stability, and game balance. A person skill drives the strategy into a win or lose scenario 100% of the time.

If your like me though, you are looking for something with a faster pace. Something that feeds the hunger to spill the blood of your enemies. I have played most of the MMO's spoke of to max level, except for Lineage II (The grind, oh the grind) and I must say I am rather disappointed with all of them. Why is it so hard for these developers to give the gamers what they want? Planetside was damn close but even so it fell short. I was hoping with: Huxley, Mortal Online, APB, Global Agenda, Earthrise, Aion, Tera, Rift, Champions Online, and games like crime craft (lol) someone would hit the nail on the freaking head. So far I have played a majority of those games only to be disappointed with one angle or another. Global Agenda had the combat down but the rest of the game was a giant room (haven’t played in since the patches). Mortal was like playing a really bad oblivion multiplayer mod. APB almost made me throw my screen out of my window when I got stunned with a *shotgun* from so far away I had to turn up my viewing distance. I am a glass half full kind of guy, but most games that claimed to have good PvP have disappointed me when their shine wore off and the imbalances showed through. Champions was the worst, I played that game like Stevie wonder played the piano. After a month it was just like CoH, a giant chat room where people have super powers and the exact same build. I'm not saying these are bad games, just that in terms of PvP they didn't deliver the experience I and a lot of other people are looking for.

If you can't tell I am a huge fan of the MMO/Shooter hybrid when it comes to PvP. I can't wait to try Tera, and Earthrise. I hope they deliver on their promises but I have already seen footage of Earthrise, and it's performance is lacking, who makes a beta video with that much server lag?

Props to some of the games like DAoC,  Planetside and Darkfall for giving us glimpses at PvP eden. It will happen one day. 

p.s. anyone else remember FURY? 

i would say EvE

i remember that there was a large scale war going on destroying a Titan

around 500 players was on 1 screen, that's unforgetable, i was of course, disconnected

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Originally posted by Greymoor

Alterac Valley in the early WoW days was brilliant but they seemed to have fucked it up somehow.

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AV was so badass back at 60 and even in early BC...way to go blizz... I hear the new WG type thing in Cata is really good though. Would like to test it though I'm not sure about actually buying Cata to do that haha

Shadowbane hit the 1000 vs 1000 mark without crashing the server.  Everyone was lagged but could cast and move.  I don't think any game has even come close to that mark.

DAoC Old Frontiers, and Shadowbane hands down to me. Dark and Light was actually fun only because it was a few of us vs Euro players and the cheating GMs that helped them (giving them GM Weps and armor etc...).

darkfall hands down

biggest battle in darkfall  must have bin hyperion vs yssam alliance @ start of the server more then 1000 people where involved in that siege

another big moment would be the server vs cairn siege later on (where like everybody ganged up trying to take cairns holdings but failed due to the client crashing)

ehm day to day pvp id say the sea towers and every siege these days has around 200~people around wich is quite decent , current sieges of agenda vs sun on EU-1 have about 200 people + 50 ~roamers

Originally posted by -Zeno-

Shadowbane hit the 1000 vs 1000 mark without crashing the server.  Everyone was lagged but could cast and move.  I don't think any game has even come close to that mark.

 EVE beat it

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/10/30/the-largest-battle-ever-held-in-eve-online-is-going-on-right-now/

Aion... when a server fights for Divine. nothing matches the numbers

1v1 Aion is fun and one of my faves. GW, and WoW are also rly fun. Aion is very fast though and i like that, not alot of time to think, just have to know what to do. ( i do play ranger though )

Aion has no arenas or BG's, ( dredg doesnt count ) makes me hate the game.

Im going to ignor the "discount EvE" part (like most of us). The Economical side of EvE is my best pvp. Outsmarting the competition, making back room deals and undercutting the market with stolen goods :)

Clarification: PvP stands for Player versus Player. It does not have to be an orc in oversized korean peacock fantasy armor queing for battle grounds, its all about players competing against the other players. Most games today is RvR, though that is still a kind of PvP, wich is kind of sad.

Give the players control over the game, no more RvR.

Best large scale PvP which I have personally played would be a toss-up between Dark Age of Camelot and Planetside. Both games had phenomenal large scale battles and were extremely exciting to play, but both were very different games and it makes it hard to say which was better.

Coming in at a close second would be Shadowbane. Shadowbane large sieges were actually more exciting in a way than DAOC, but the SB engine failed badly at sieges and the resulting slide show stops me from placing SB first

And thirdly is one of my favourite games of all time - EvE Online. EvE does have some gloriously huge pvp battles, but it is quite easy to feel 'disconnected' from the large scale pvp action in comparison to a player controlled character game, whether it be fps or mmo, or at least that was my impressions after playing a char up to ~54m. The other reason I couldn't choose EvE is because it is dangerously addictive to a sci fi junkie like myself, and I don't want to encourage others to play it too much:P

There are quite a few other games which qualify as 'Medium Sized' pvp - Asherons call, The zek servers on EQ1, WoW, Darkfall, and plenty of miscellaneous online FPS such as BF2 etc.