Don’t PVP much any more but the experience helps in TB and whenever a 12 year old wants to gank. Bet he didn’t see THAT coming…

Do we all simply play the game because as humans we are suckered by sparkly baubles and that take these away and the game itself is rather bland and boring? :S

Not a pleasant thought.

Think I’ll go log my pvp toon and let some hordie beat me up.

:S

It is impossible to really improve at PVP, past a certain point, unless you are fighting people who are better than you and actively watching what they do. This is true of most competitive activities. Losing might be frustrating, but that’s the price of experience earned. You don’t have control over how good your opponent is, but you can control how quickly YOU improve.

The gear differentials are, I think, the biggest flaw of PVP, but they are slowly eroding.

I find that a lot of people get frustrated with PVP because they are entirely too emotionally invested in their success or failure, their honor/hour ratios and their achievement hunting. Certainly, if it’s not fun, don’t do it.

But that’s in a perfectly balanced game, and WoW isn’t balanced.
Assuming max level, you could lose an encounter for the following reasons:

You fought a better player.
You fought a better geared player.
You fought the wrong class (in 1v1).
Your teammates didn’t do their job (be it hold an objective or interrupting / controlling a healer).
You made a mistake in the fight.

The problem, and the reason I gave up on PvP as a whole, is that 4 of those things are completely out of your control.

There will ALWAYS be someone more skilled than you.
Ther will ALWAYS be someone more geared than you.
Blizzard flat out admits they don’t balance for 1v1 (or even 2v2).
You have ZERO control over what your teammates are doing.

The only thing you can directly improve is your own skill. But WoW doesn’t even offer tools to assist in that. There is no replay function. There is no report that generates detailing damage / healing in vs. damage / healing out. Hell, there isn’t even a notification when you try to interrupt a spell, but fail (either because you were too slow with your interrupt or because the other player “fake cast”).

So with so much of WoW’s PvP being out of my own control, I gave up on it.

Now lets look at another PvP game: StarCraft II.

Here we have a game that strives hard to be balanced, so I can expect to lose 50% of the time.
SC2 is primarily a 1v1 game, so I never have to worry about what my teammates are or are not doing.
AND SC2 provides a really, really good replay function so that, when I do lose, I can sit down and analyse what I did vs what my opponent did and hopefully learn and improve my game.

There is no gear incentive in SC2, though there are Achievements and ladder rankings (bragging rights).

The #1 driving difference is that *I* am in control of my winning or my losing.

Ironically, I found your site trying to learn how to be a PvE bear tank that didn’t get booted while trying to pull trash mobs :) We all learn from each other! Thanks for your help and good hunting!

Seems a touch like playing high school football, but college all Americans come in for plays every once in awhile.

After a few hours of that, you’ll stagger away so sorry and sore that they should mail you flowers and a nice card afterwards.”

Absolute Coke spew! LMAO!!!

“I’d probably suck at it too, some of those players hop about like ferrets on meth with a triple espresso shoved up their ass.”

You’ve nailed it here, though I have no knowledge of the meth habits of ferrets (thank you for the enlightenment, Sweet Bob and Miss Peachy…please release Cayro, now). I happen to KNOW for a fact that, in PvP, I am nothing but rogue-bait. Even when I try, I spend more time whirling in a circle trying to target the ferret who is killing me than I do killing them.

I admire their knowledge and ability. But the Spirit Healer is about to charge me rent, so I am sure there is a dragon around here I can kill, somewhere…