I can remember a few episodes from when I was in high school were we organised to meet the kids we didn’t like after school ‘behind the bike racks’. Your good old fashioned rumble. I was usually the one directing the action from beihd the scenes, calling out commands, manouvering my troops and keeping a sharp eye out for the school caretaker. Fun times. Wouldn’t it be great to have that type of antagonism in World of Warcraft? There’s bound to be some player that you don’t like on your faction. You don’t like him, he doesn’t like you, the stage is set for an epic battle. But lets take it a step further – what if you started to call out his fellow guildies?
“I see you’re in the same guild as Deathkiller. He’s such a moron, you must be a moron to hang around him.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Those are fighting words!”
“Yeah, so what are you going to do about it??”
Answer? Nothing, because there’s nothing that you can do. But what if there was …?
Imagine if your guild was able to declare war on another guild from the same faction. This would permanently enable pvp combat between the players of each guild at any time, anywhere. You would be able to stalk and harrass them, gang up on them, use espionage and infiltrate their guild, calling out their location to your own guildies. Imagine the real time battles that could happen in the streets of Stormwind – rumbles with real meaning. Epic battles outside the auction house or by the Onyxia summoning stone.
Yeah, yeah, that’s all well and good, I hear you say. But at the end of the day it doesn’t mean anything much apart from the risk of being ganked.
I suppose so, but what if we add another twist? What if you had a situation where if you killed a player from a rival guild you were able to take one item from them and equip it yourself?
Now it opens itself up to some interesting possibilities. You would have to walk around with an escort if you had some really nice gear, or else be really sure of your own pvp abilities. Or it would involve a lot of walking around naked. Either way it could definitely get the heart pumping. And a good deal of trash talking. And bring a level of diplomacy and political subterfuge into the game that is entirely missing. And of course, this would be possible on PvE servers. I think that it would be ten flavors of awesome. How else could we refine it?
February 18, 2010 at 12:59 am
Interesting idea but isn’t this going to lead to gang warfare, territories, no go areas ? The southern dalaran bank steps gang own this turf, better use the one at the north end of town. While you’re allowing pvp looting (or mugging might be a better description) why not go a step further and allow people to steal unattended Mekgineer choppers, you’d have to new profession of course, “hot wiring”… an extension of pick pocketing for rogues perhaps ?
After the earthquake when Cataclysm arrives it looks suspiciously like Miami… oh hang on, Grand Theft Auto…. damn it’s been done
February 18, 2010 at 8:27 am
The key is that you can only declare war on one guild at a time, and both guilds have to agree to a cease fire. So it’s not something that you can just throw around stupidly, though some guilds may do that.
February 18, 2010 at 2:39 pm
That game already exists. It’s called Darkfall.
February 19, 2010 at 11:15 am
This sort of thing happens a lot in games that offer FFA PvP and it could easily if WoW opened a free-for-all PvP server too (which would be kinda cool). The closet thing you’re looking for is probably in a game like EVE or Darkfall.
I experienced it in Dark Age of Camelot and it was great fun
February 19, 2010 at 1:14 pm
I think that it would be different from free for all pvp in the sense that you can only be at war with a single guild at any one time. I think that this would make it much more situational and strategic.