Tales of the PvP server!

[malphigian]

For me, the best moments of playing WoW were all on the PvP server in beta.  When you engage in quality combat against a fairly-leveled player and win, it provides much better memories than hours of mob killing.  My favorite moment of the entire WoW beta was blasting a Shaman 6 levels higher than my Warlock after he jumped me on the Shimmering Flats.

It's just too bad those moments are too far in between the gankings.  :(

-Bolty
Waiting for Battlegrounds for further PvP action

I know this isn't something that works well to debate, but I'm going to plow ahead anyway.

Fun, challenging, and winnable PvP situations really aren't few and far between, they are very common. The gankings also become increasingly rare as you level up. Levels ~22 to ~34 are the hard times, but even then, it's pretty much restricted to a few key areas you can learn to avoid or just blitz through the hot spots to do what you need to. For example, in Ashenvale stonetalon is frequently camped with rogue gankers. There's definitely a real risk of getting ganked in there, but once you get out into any of the quest areas, it's almost entirely peaceful or even level PvP. So, you occasionally lose a minute on corpse recovery when turning in a quest. Sure, it's frustrating, but it's really not a big deal. As an aside, increasingly now people seem to be keeping their newly minted 60's around while leveling alts, so you usually see some very quick and nasty revenge happening after your level 25 gets steamrolled by someone. I enjoy the lower level pvp, and masochist that I am, I even find the hunted-feeling of avoiding gankers sorta enjoyable.

After that, it gets better as you go up. My priest has been attacked a total of 2 times while fighting a mob since level 45, and I spend most of my time questing in areas packed with alliance questers as well. I've had fights near quest areas, for sure, but there's very little going on I would describe as ganking (people hitting you on a mob, packs of people hitting you when you're solo minding your own business). I've also never been successfully corpse camped (a little perperation can help here, but even without, almost any class does fine).

I find the constant risk of PvP when traveling and in quest areas adds a lot of excitement to the game and a nice tension to my questing. I also spend a good bit of my time lately (while waiting for instances groups and such) running anti-ganker "patrols" in ganker-rich areas like stonetalon and ashenvale. Heck of a lot of fun to destroy those guys and help my fellow horde get their questing done, it gives you a real questing hero feeling, even without any quests at all :). None of this is possible on the Normal servers, and this is all distinct from what I hope to get from the battlegrounds.

That said, if all you want is consistent, dependably even footing fights, and uninterrupted questing and grinding, then yes, the PvP server is a bad idea. The price of PvP is the occasional gank, and I can totally see how people wouldn't want to deal with it. But I do have to object when people imply (which some people do a lot) that the PvP server is only or mostly about ganking. It's just not the case, even on a crowded mess of a server like Tich.