A few ideas of how to save D3

[Kevin]

Blizzard really should look at WHY games like Halo, Counter-strike, Team Fortress, HL2,etc have a large and dedicated PVP community. Frankly, I think it's because the "versus" is more Red v. Blue, where each class offers a strategic advantage to the current team. I would be more interested if it were team oriented, with PVP zone maps, with varied objective types (CTF, Rescue, onslaught, etc.). I wouldn't be so much into the free for all -- "every one for themselves" -- OMG he got my ear -- "Hey, friend, why'd you go hostile on me???" -- style from DII. To me that was less of a game and more like Id venting of our inner 12 year old psyche (without the strippers -- that was Duke Nukem).

Well I actually did like battlegrounds in WoW (warfronts in Rifts and whatever they were called in SW:TOR) for some of those reasons. Rift and SW:TOR had pretty solid implementations with character scaling for level diff and stuff. I also didn't mind arenas in WoW when I had time, but the bleed over effects into the PvM game that caused were pretty harsh.

Most PvP in D2 was griefing unless you specified a duel and then it was generally dominated by specialized builds that in some cases required a buddy to help you level up in the PvM game because they just weren't good at that. But I did duel with friends in D2 from time to time as well.

Arena or team style PvP in D3 could be quite fun but it could still impose a grinding burden where you win not because of being better at PvP but because you were better able to get gear.

That's the big one, the games you mentioned don't have gear. Well they do, but it's not like if I spent 1000 hours farming single player Halo that I would have a huge gear advantage over someone who only played 3 hours of single player. In most RPG style games that is not the case. But like I said there were ways around it in the MMO's. I was killing L50 SW:ToR toons at L12 in PvP matches. I was still handicapped by lack of some skills but it wasn't just a wafflestomp because I had good gear for my level. Rift was similar and I leveled a few characters pretty much from PvP in that before I stopped playing because I didn't really know too many other folks that were playing.

If D3 can get around some of that PvP could be a blast and not just "damn it this guy had so much more time to get gear than me!" though you will still likely run into "Oh great a hydra sorc that no one has a found a way to counter with a witch doctor" type of situations (classes in that example were just pulled out of thin air that specific example is likely never going to happen but people should get the point).

But the biggest issue compared to other PvP type games is the base design. Brink was one of the most "RPG-esque" PvP games I played but most of the gear and stuff you could unlock from single player stuff was a fairly minor change in power. I had fun with that one, but again stopped playing because I still prefer to play with people I know, not just random folks (it also has issues still with dual monitors and tends to crash if I don't disable the 2nd monitor which makes me feel like I'm back in 1995 when dual monitors were rare or least the ability to run two was rare, now every card out there can generally drive 4+ displays at the same time)