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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Chess is largely played by patterns, but not a correct analogy. That's why the best players have a ton of routines memorized, for anything that might be used against them. Chess requires a memorized strategy to succeed, for the most part. The more you can retain, the more you can counter-play your opponent.

PS: You must PVP a lot, huh? They are the only ones who really get mad and won't concede that playing by design in the game to get someones hit points to zero before yours are takes no skill.

I mean, do you have more skill when you kill someone and you only had 800 HP left? Or must you remain above a certain percentage (80%?) for a kill to have required skill? I mean, what defines skill in PVP? Being able to simply kill an opponent, even though if their sap had not been resisted, or stun not worked, or that last sword swing parried, etc, they would have "beat" you? Regardless of your "skill" level? I don't get it...

Where does skill come in to play, that's not random luck by clicking a button and not having a nuke interrupted?

If they have better gear, stronger nukes than you, then no amount of supposed "skill" will make you defeat them.

THATS WHY PVP IN WOW REQUIRES ABSOLUTELY ZERO SKILL.

At the end, it's all decided by who can get off that nuke or sap fast enough and get your HP low. It takes button pushing to do that. There is no "skill"

heh.

Classic.

It is not a correct analogy due to the fact that there are some elements of luck, namely critical hits; fortunately the recent ~50% increase in hitpoints has largely marginalized that issue.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Re-read my post. I fleshed it out. PVP requires no skill in WoW because there will NEVER be a level playing field like you have in chess, checker, poker, whatever the fuck. There are elements of luck in almost everything.

So what happens in three months time when they declare the arena winners for the respective battlegroups? Will they have won because they have better gear than the other ~100,000 players in their battlegroup or because they have some keen ability to resist saps and polymorphs in clutch situations in spite of having played hundreds of matches?

Yes their margins of victory will be small in a lot of cases but I fail to see how that takes away from the skilled element of it all. Are basketball games no longer skilled competition by virtue of the fact that games are often decided by one or two points out of a hundred?

If I beat you once, we could call that luck, if I beat you ten times is that still luck?

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

I dunno what team you follow in the NBA but my team has an average winning marin of 10 pts per game! (Phoenix Suns)

At any rate, I'd say that gear is the most important factor in PVP, rather than any supposed "skill"

I mean... is it skill to use a class tool given to you by designer (pally bubble) to resist an effect? Or just luck? What if you are both to 10% HP and they use that, while another person comes up and owns you? Obviously that requires no skill, at all. I mean, you can agree to that -- at least -- right?

There are so many reasons why PVP requires no skill. Largely, because #1 there is no even playing field, #2, it's not focused on 1v1 balance, and #3 it's not balanced by a long shot. The only balance there is, is that most people can do the same burst damage and sustained damage, therefore making it a toss of the dice as to who is going to win...

I dunno. I mean, I have yet to see where "skill" comes in to play, regarding PVP.

What would it need to have in order to have "skill," Skycrasher?

Knowing and being able to react correctly to your opponents class and the environment around you (other players, when to engage, what possibilities are open to you) is certainly a skill, IMO. The fact that there are clearly people who suck at pvp and others who do not shows that there is an element of skill involved. Or is it your contention that those people who lose regularly simply have a huge string of bad luck, and everyone else is more lucky?

I think Drajeck answered this to some degree. You're getting smaller and smaller upgrades despite huge time investments at the endgame. To be clear, I think a casual could have been in a guild that say, cleared BWL and ended up getting some armor. Now look at Naxx gear. I think we're looking at about a 10 percent increase in overall stats(not looking at the effects, some of them are good but not all of them) - for a gargatuan amount of time investment in addition. Even if you look at tier 0.5 gear there's still a considerable amount of stats percentage-wise compared to Naxx gear. That takes only a fraction of the time to earn. This exponential softcap was definitely not the case in a number of different MMORPG's, where the softcaps still existed but they were much more lenient about rewarding gear with increased stats per time invested.

As for the expansion, we're going to have to see what the equivalent to the latest 0.5 gear is. I'm guessing the sets(and other gear) off the preliminary level 70 dungeons aren't the last we'll see of casually-earned gear.

As for Drajeck's presentation of the 2 arguments between casuals and hardcores - I would say the casual's argument of "it takes no skill just time investment" is the weaker argument. If you spend more time at something, it's only right that you should get something more out of it. Why should someone who plays less time have any say in deciding what someone with more time gets? Why does it effect them? Play your own game.

I completely agree, but we are discussing the expansion, and at this time it is easy to get. When WoW was 1st released I think PvP was the most hardcore thing of any MMO I've seen. The amount of constant playing it took to reach rank 14 made even Naxx look simple.




For the record, I was only posing the 2 common arguements, but I agree with neither. A good game has things to offer both the casual and the hard core gamer. I think WoW fits that description, but by the very nature of pleasing one, the other becomes disgruntled. There may be small tweaks to the system that could allow WoW to do it even better, but I think it's a lot harder than people think to produce content for such a wide audience. PvP only makes it that much harder, because you can't have such a power disparity between the raiders and the casuals that the casuals can't ever kill a raider in a BG. Most MMOs don't have that added issue to deal with.

Eve Online destroys any games presentation of pvp, including Monopoly, Clue and Risk.

I ran out of shit to do. Seriously, it wasn't even that there wasn't anything worth doing -- I did just about everything I could conceivably do short of BWL, which my guild was just getting into when BC opened. Then I had stuff to do again. :b

I've heard great things about Eve's PvP, but haven't tried it myself.

Eve is a great game, if you can last long enough to get to the pvp. Starting out it is very slow and boring. You will do more reading than shooting for a very long time. Then you fly around for a very long time before you shoot.

The learning curve is STEEP. And i'm not joking. You could play for a year and not even shead your newbie skin. There is a 14 day trial.

I played the 14 day trial and loved it. At the time I was deep into WoW though, and I didn't want to pay for two MMO's, so I let it drop.

Anyone who says it takes no skill to play a MMORPG is probably not very good at said MMORPG.

I was very good at EQ and I'm very good at WoW.

I just realize that when PVP in WoW boils down to who has better gear, there is no skill to be had. There is no level playing field. Anyone can dominate anyone, because of gear.

That's it. You can't refute that.

WoW PVP suffers the same problems many other games have. You eventually get to the point where you know exactly what to do and which buttons to press in almost any given PVP situation, and it comes down to who crits the most or who gets the upper end in the beginning.

It's really pointless to argue this point, but I'll bite. Suffice it to say, I am sure you've grouped/PVP'd with people who sucked and people who were really good, and you noticed which category they fit into.

Going back to EQ, there were some Monks who really knew how to pull in very sticky situations. Most of us know who the really good ones were, and the differences were obvious when Monk A wasn't there and we had to use Monk B to pull. This had very little to do with gear (although having more hitpoints/resists helped, of course). The same can be said for Enchanters. Every Enchanter had the same spells, but there was certainly a difference doing Hate/Fear/whatever with Crowde vs. Joe_Schmo_Enchanter05. I don't think anyone can dispute that. Was Crowde a top Enchanter on the server because he had better gear or was he a top Enchanter on the server because he was just a damn talented Enchanter?

In PVP in WoW, there are some people who are just better at it than others. Our server boards always have those retarded "who's the best PVPer omg?!" and some names simply come up over and over because people realize that when they see so and so across the playing field, they are in trouble. When everyone and their mother can agree that a certain player is "the best PVPer omg!" in his/her class, there is probably a reason. That reason is probably... shocker... skill at playing their class.

There is no ceiling on how good a person can get at playing his/her class. The best gear doesn't automatically mean a person will win. Hell, you are arguing that the top-end gear is only marginally better than the easy-to-acquire gear, so that would mean skill would play an even bigger role, wouldn't it? A top-end Wizard in EQ could have had twice the HP and Mana as an average Wizard (as well as some harder-to-get spells like EER, back in the day). A top-end Mage in WoW isn't going to be that far ahead, statistically speaking, versus an average Mage who has never stepped foot in Nax. Therefore, the skilled players will rise to the top.

I was a good enchanter you bastard.

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Whatever. Neesha is the only one in this thread close to having a point, but it's not exactly spot on because EQ never had "good" PVP, and his argument was mostly applying to PVE encounters.

You still haven't answered my question.

The lightbringer horde teams of old farmed their first High Warlords on BWL geared opponents, and the majority of them never set foot in Molten Core untill after their reigns.

Thats a pretty huge gap between gear right there.

The experience and reflexes to know exactly what to do are exactly what seperates the mediocre from great players. Is a chess grandmaster unskilled only because he has seen a situation before and knows how to react to it?

I've destroyed players in much better gear than myself and (unfortunately) I've had players with worse gear than me stomp all over my corpse. Just how skilled I am I don't exactly know, but there are definately people above and below me, so that must mean there is some way to measure skill in WoW.

To be skilled at PVP would have to include a level playing field. I'd guess you'd have to be able to kill other players even though they had a significant advantage over you. (Level, or Gear, or Spell / Talent Spec) and that just doesn't happen much.

I'm sorry but that does not make any sense whatsoever, not even a little bit.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

Yes, because trouncing your opponents by your being Level 70 and them being Level 30 makes sense and is a fair / balanced / a level playing field?

You god damn idiot. The field has to be as LEVEL AS POSSIBLE for it to even remotely be balanced / skilled combat.

What the fuck do you think the point of balancing classes is in the first place? What a moron.


Edit: Seriously man, your fucking stupidity boggles my mind.

You're arguing for balance, not skill. Just because something is not balanced and fair, does not mean there isn't skill involved.

Some NBA players have height, weight advantages over others. That doesn't mean what they do doesn't take skill. It might make things easier in some situations tho, which is a completely different argument.

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-Rileigh (aka Golliwog)

Almost!

PVP in WoW takes no SKILL because of the way the game is BALANCED currently.

Everyone can do the same shit. It's a matter of teaming up and outweighing the other by simply just doing more damage via lucky (random crits) faster than others do it to you.

"picking" fights isnt a skill, it's just knowing that you cant win because there is no skill involved. Just gear disparity and blurriness between class definition lines.

If you guys think different, that's fine. I'm just telling you my opinion.

There's no need for name calling.

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Kuwen Furyblades
Hunter of Memento Reejeryn
Champion of Faydark

If you really think PvP in WoW requires no skill then I have a hunter in my guild by the name of Luciennaro that you need to come try to kill. I don't care what gear you have and I'd be willing to bet even if he swapped out his Dragonstalker and GM gear (actual rank 14 gear btw) for all greens he would give you a solid ass whipping. In fact, I have already seen him do it with his warrior alt in sub-par gear against well geared players so I already know this to be true. The whole argument that PvP in WoW requires no skill is laughable. I have dueled this hunter with my hunter and we have very comparable gear (mine is arguably a bit better actually) and he totally wftwns me. I'm not the best at PvP so it's not necessarily the greatest accomplishment but it certainly points out a large skill gap considering we have equal gear and the same skill set to use. The only time I ever beat him was when he played his alt warrior and even then only once and it was VERY VERY close.

Now, if your argument is that there are lots of skill-less players (namely in AV) that just hide in plain site among a crowd just duking it out until one person keels over then I agree. That definitely happens but it is certainly not all PvP in WoW and certainly doesn't mean that ALL players have no skill. There are countless instances where a small number of skilled players repel a larger force of attackers or a single player manages to kill 2 or 3 players at once or countless other scenarios where skill is the ONLY explaination for the outcome. If you ever played WSG or even AB then you must know that your gear will likely NOT help you win if you suck and especially if you are not organized with a plan that you can execute.

You lose all credibility because hunters are fucking rigged.

Didn't someone say that gear would win out, almost all the time in this post between two people, especially of the same class?

Broke class or not, if one guy in said class shows a clear superiority over others in his own class, in relatively equal gear, then it indicates a differentiation in skill, if it's truly consistent.

Now whether or not previous posters comments are true or not... *shrug*

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"People sometimes say that ideas cannot be stamped out by force. The Albigensian Crusade proves them wrong. Ideas can be stamped out by the elimination of everyone who holds the ideas." - Quote :"Middle Ages" by Morris Bishop.

I know the hunter, and he's just as impressive on his warrior. That's kind of a rigged class too, IMO, but whatever. When the guy dominates every stat on the board in a BG, playing 2 different classes, he's got to be doing something right.

Hunters have an advantage in that they have a variety of responsive skills to shut down other class abilities, and they can deliver almost all of them at 41 yards.

That being said, Hunter vs. Hunter is more about skill than gear for that exact reason. In a class whose PvP survival hinges on predicting what the opponent is likely to do and neutralizing it, the margin in damage, HP and mana provided by gear isn't as big a factor as knowing what to do and when, or being able to intuit what your opponent will do with the exact same tools. The only exceptions I run into commonly are trinkets like Renataki's Charm of Beasts, which resets a couple of really long cooldowns and makes one Hunter's abilities far more accessible than the other's.

Add me to the list Naepil-Gnome Warlock on Llane!

Seems fun so far... got to Level 7 in 1 1/2 hours by doing the starting quests