Smedy video demonstrates why TZVZ PvP was terrible

[wehrmacht]

Knuckle posted a long ass page of PvP videos and I started browsing through them earlier today and I stumbled upon the infamous Rexx fight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo1hmS4H5Rk


Yea, it's Rexx in the video dying, and everyone loves when Rexx dies but once you get over that fact, there are a few problems with how this plays out. First of all, it's the best geared warrior on the server and and he's being rooted, snared, and stunned like he's a naked level 1.

This makes it so if you're ever in a 1vs2 fight, no matter how terrible of players they are, they automatically win. One person just runs in circles while the other guy stands in place continuously spamming crowd control spells just like what happened in this video.

Now Rexx isn't the best player on the server but he's definitely not the worst. There's really nothing he could have done to change the outcome of this fight besides possibly running away the second it started. What you're looking at is a communist, welfare system of PvP.

You don't need to be good. All you need to do is show up and face roll your keyboard and you will probably kill someone or contribute to their death.

For anyone wanting a skill based PvP system, the problem with that video is pretty obvious. There is just too little chance of either person on the side with two people dying, and too high of a chance for the other guy dying no matter what the skill level is of the people involved.

The chain casting CC spells while another person kills you tactic has to be changed in order to have any paltry amount of skill involved in this game. You don't even have to remove them completely, they just can't function in a way that makes this skill-less tactic viable.

There are two ways of doing it, you can either make them land less, or you can make it so crowd control lands often but breaks much easier. DAoC for example is a game where crowd control lands very easily but they all break after taking only 1 damage (even snares). If you want crowd control to land in EQ, it needs to function in a similar way, either breaks after 1 damage or it breaks after you take X% of your total HP value, and it needs to be a small value.

If crowd control breaks after taking an extremely small amount of damage, that tactic will be much less viable and some amount of skill will be restored to this game. It would also add more skill to caster PvP since casters would have to time their spells and do whats called "sync dumps" (UO terminology) if they plan to try and use CC spells to kill people.

If you leave this system the way it currently is, if it was me personally faced with a fight like that, I wouldn't even bother fighting them. I'd just take off for the zone line and wait for a less inherently bad game design fight. Why implement a system that discourages PvP? It obviously needs to be changed to give people some incentive to stick around.