Going from PvE to PvP in WoW

Like most World of Warcraft players I am incredibly bored at the moment with the game. My characters are at level 70 and I have done probably as much raid content as I can considering how god dammed difficult it is to get a 25 man run going when all anyone wants to do is run Karazahn for badges or get their 'Charity Purples' by playing Battlegrounds/Arenas. As such I have started to level a new character but this time I decided to go not on my usual PvE (players vs environment) server but on a PvP (player vs player) server.

I had always been curious to see how this would work out, and as luck would have it a few friends of mine were on a PvP server so it made the hop pretty easy. I entered into this server thinking I would need to watch my back, gain some new and interesting experiances in a game I already knew and have some fun in the process. However the real truth of the matter is far from what I stated.

For the most part PvP on WoW seems more about leveling your character as quick as they can to level 70 than it is about PvP. Once you hit level 70 you go and grief the hell out of everyone else in some vein attempt to make up for those times some level 70 asshole corpse camped your body in some low level town or zone.

Sorry but aside the some pre-pubescent kids living in his parents basement, who exactly thinks this is fun? Where are the raids on the enemy Captial Cities I had heard of, where factions would try their best to nuke off a Leader/Boss of one of the cities? Or the idea of Guilds taking on other Guilds. This is the same lame gametype from a PvE server but with the option of some cowardly player being able to kill you when your back is turned... lame.

Because of this experiance here is what I am finding are the unwritten rules of playing on a PvP Server:

- You do not really PvP until you hit level 70, until then its considered faux paux to PvP in the world against the other faction.
- Players are apparently afraid of karma biting them in the ass if they do PvP some guy on his own. So the general rule of thumb is don't attack someone if they are on their own.
- You never really want to PvP someone your own level, always pick on a guy lower level than you, in a low level town where the guards for the most part will ignore you.
- If your do PvP against someone your own level and lose you should immediately call all your friends for help, or conversely think that you are some sort of genious by bringing in your twinked out level 70 character to extract revenge.
- Never PvP unless you outnumber your opponent. 2 on 1 is always better than 1 on 1.
- If you do kill someone off easily, you should corpse camp them for the next 5 to 10 minutes to remind them of your vast superiority. Add in another 5 minutes if you are vastly higher level to the target you killed.
- Why PvP in the world when you can PvP in a battleground instead?


So what could Blizzard do to make PvP servers more enjoyable?

- Reward world PvP at a much higher rate than Battleground PvP. Give the player 5x more points for killing someone in the world since there is way more of a challenge and risk to do so.
- Create more of a reward for killing the city bosses. Maybe they should drop Badges of Justice, give a ton of honor points, vendors dont sell and/or increase the cost of buying items in towns aligned to that faction? Do something at least to encourage it.
- Make city/town guards smart. No one fucks around with PvP in the Goblin towns because those guards are tough as nails. They lock you down and then beat you stupid. Do the same with city/town guards as well since these places are supposed to be refuges for players not concentrated killing zones.
- Punish corpse camping by giving negative honor. You got the guy. There's no need to sit there and harass the player, there is no honor in that.
- If a player is 20 levels lower than you, make them a negative honor target as well unless they attack you first. With the way that level 70 gear is so grossly overpowered its not even considered unfair PvPing anyone lower than level 50. It's just inhumane.
- Create more PvP gear for characters level 1 thru 59 (Honor points only), nothing fancy just good green/weak blue level, and have one central location for all this gear. Currently players in this level range have to run about and try to find the vendors... something which I would bet 90% of the players in the game have no idea how to do.

iPhone, The First Weekend

I usually detest travelling because it means that I have to lug around a shit-ton of electronic equipment in order to stay connected. Worse yet I am paranoid about moving my equipment around for fear of losing information on the device, so if you saw me in the airport I am one of those guys cluthing the laptop bag as if it were my life... which isn't far from the fact since I work at home as an indie developer and don't necessarily have much for fancy backup systems, just a portable HDD and some DVD-Rs. As such I have been eyeing up PDA devices for the past few years, trying to find that perfect one that meets my needs.



Now I would like to say that I chose to get an iPhone because it's the best thing on the market. But the sad, honest truth of it all is that I really did not consider getting one until I saw that I could get the Torque Game Engine's running on the iPhone SDK. This really excited me because we use Torque a lot at work for the stuff we do, so not only as there a possibility that we could maybe put some of our stuff on the iPhone but now I could convince myself that buying the phone and writing it off was a good idea. All that I had to do was convince my wife, who reminded me that I was entitled to "treat myself" to new things once in a while... which translated from woman-speak meant "sure you can get one, just get one for me as well".

For the most part the phone is pretty sleek and easy to use. Though as a iPod virgin, the lack of any sort of instructions on how the dammed thing operates annoys me (bad Apple, for $350 could you try not to be a bunch of cheap fucks and put in a tiny 50 page booklet on the basics of the phone?), so I am still learning things about this phone today and will probably continue to do so for the next few week.

So here are some of my quick thoughts on the iPhone after using it for a weekend.
- On Syncing the phone to the PC: Using iTunes the device was able to quickly pull over all my bookmarks and contacts... which I then had to go and edit down (since most of my bookmarks and contacts are there for long term storage and not day to day usage) and then disable the syncing of bookmarks and contacts so I don't nuke anything on either device.
- iTunes: I hate it. Once again the lack of instructions here is rediculous (I spent a good hour or two doing the old "hunt and peck" approach of figuring out what the software does) and now I have an invasive Apple brand application trying to take priority of loading various files on my PC.
- The web feature is pretty cool and I like the fact that if there is wifi in the area the device will try to connect to it first. It's also completely WYSIWYG with only a few issues such as trying to type in a forum post when the screen isn't zoomed into the field in a PHP3BB board.
- The email functionality is pretty good too, though setting it all up to work, due to SMTP and POP configurations by the ISPs I use and having to remember my email passwords wasn't much fun but I cannot fault the device for this. Now that it is working its great.
- The app store for the phone is pretty lame. There is no real opportunity to look at demos or screenshots, so IMHO its pretty hit or miss what you are going to get. Though I will admit I am thinking of trying my hand at programming again to maybe create a little app of my own.

That's all for now... more later.