Staff Writer Steve Wilson returns with his Casual Play column. This week, he looks at PvP for the casual player.
Player versus player combat isn't for everyone. Some casual players forego it altogether for a number of reasons. Some never attain the full range of skills to become effective at killing anything other than badly scripted monsters. Others find having to rely on guilds and secondary programs too onerous. And others embrace it wholeheartedly even with the knowledge that there are severe PvP drawbacks that apply only to the casual gamer.
In the older games PvP was dominated by gank squads. The worlds would generally have open PvP throughout their entire environment. Players could attack each other at any time and in any numbers. This typically led to gangs of thugs interested only in killing others, teaming up when needed to outnumber smaller groups. Guilds formed to fight these gankers and the arms race was on to see who could field a bigger group at any given moment. Players without guilds were often fodder that represented about as much resistance as a speed bump. In this environment the casual player suffers greatly. They often lacked the time required to immerse themselves in a guild capable of fielding enough members in order to win a race out-mobbing other players. Ultima Online was the first big commercial game to try this style of PvP and the majority of customers complained bitterly.
Read the rest of this column here.
