April News/Discussions

[Bolty]

I know there is a real person controlling that other toon. What if being beaten totally ruins their day? Sure, they put themselves into the game, but that doesn't mean they are emotionally good with it.

I can see where this feeling can come from, Loch. I think it's born of a perception of the aspect of "death" in the game that comes in PvE.

In PvE, when your character dies, it has impact. Right off the bat, any food/elixir buffs you had are lost. 10% of your items' durability is lost, which can add up to a serious amount of cash over the course of an evening - as any raider is fully aware of. Your character is spawned at a graveyard and you are forced to run back to your corpse, which in some cases can amount to several minutes' time lost. After ressing, you have to heal/mana back up and reapply buffs, which adds another significant time chunk. In short, it sucks. Yes, compared to old games like Everquest which gave you an experience penalty for dying, it's tame. But there's a reason why World of Warcraft's subscriber base is so much larger, isn't there? :)

In PvP, when your character dies, it has almost no impact whatsoever. You do not lose item durability. If you're in a battleground, you respawn at a graveyard within 30 seconds automatically, set to full health and mana, and given five seconds to apply whatever buffs you like at no mana cost. In short, the time between player death and player being back in the game is never more than roughly 30 seconds. This is not done as a penalty, but rather as a method for the other team to get a little bit of time after a kill to perform a task, namely grabbing a flag or taking a battleground node.

I haven't checked lately, but Cleoboltra has something like 30,000+ lifetime HK's. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot compared to anyone who has gone through the pre-TBC honor grind. Now, let's say for the sake of argument that I am the most amazingest PvP god ever, and for every 10 HKs I have, I've died once. If you play in battleground PuGs a lot, this would be a high and unlikely ratio. I wouldn't call it accurate at all in my case, from all the PuGs I've run in where the other side is smart enough to kill the healer first...

Even still, that would mean that I've died over three thousand times. In PvP, you kill a lot, and you die a lot. It's really not personal. Only the emotionally unstable get too tied up in who kills who and who is killed by who, unless they're dealing with the ultra-high-end arena PvP. As an example, when I'm PvPing, I don't notice players' names as much as I notice "Resto Druid, Hunter, SL/SL Warlock, Warrior, Shadowstep Rogue." It's akin to farming mobs in PvE - here comes Fire Elemental #4529, hopefully it'll have a Fire Mote this time. Who I'm fighting in PvP is irrelevant, and for 99% of the playerbase it's the same thing the other way. They don't go "woo hoo! I killed Cleoboltra, I rock!" They think "whew, annoying Discipline Priest finally down." 30 seconds later I'm back in the match and we're going at it all over again.

It's really more akin to a first-person shooter match. You kill someone, you get killed, everyone respawns, so what. This is exacerbated by the fact that a great majority of players who log in to a battleground are just looking to get honor or marks to buy another PvP item; they're not emotionally invested in who wins or loses, who kills or is killed, beyond allowing them to reach their target honor/marks faster. In fact, it's that soulless grind nature of battlegrounds that engenders the most complaints: nobody really cares, they just want honor. People will be apt to throw the game and let the other side win rather than play a long, drawn out close match, because ultimately they'll get more honor by losing quickly and queuing again than by playing an hour-long epic battle (which they may lose anyway).

I guess my conclusion is that you're not ruining someone else's day by killing them in PvP. It's happened to them a lot. A lot. And in turn, they've killed a lot. Matches are short, most everyone doesn't care who's who, and you find something you can enjoy with it, whether it's playing defense, charging into enemies, or just plain sheeping people like crazy. :) Meanwhile, you'll start learning a lot about other classes, and finding their strengths and weaknesses against you.

-Bolty