A View from Atlas Park: PvP = Posse Vs Posse
GhostofPowerleveler.
Freezeray.
Ars Moriendi.
Fire.
These are the names of my enemy. These are names of villains I shall not soon forget. These are the first characters I have attempted to PvP against in CoH / CoV and, frankly, I got my butt kicked.
It was in Siren’s Call and I was the only hero in the zone for some time. I was just exploring the zone, getting the badges and running into bugged missions – so, the usual for a new zone – while also being a bit curious about how PvP in CoH / CoV would work. A quick /whoall command and I can see a few villains in the zone, but not that many. (Also, everyone in the zone is the same combat lvl, so I don’t have to worry so much about being outplayed by higher level characters.) So I make a move towards my bounty target. He’s got a friend and I get my squishie Blaster butt handed to me as I lag enough not to be able to escape.
Okay, I’ve learned Lesson 2 of PvP: 2 on 1 = the 1 loses. Lesson 1 is, of course, don’t PvP unless you can accept losing. A PvP loss doesn’t give me any debt, so I’m not too fussed. I go back into Siren’s Call to get the badges and do some more exploring. After leaping around a bit and grabbing a badge, I lag, ending up frozen to the spot thanks to Freezeray’s hold. The other villains descend and I get to watch a slideshow of my death. Back to hospital. Lesson 3: lag will kill you. Back out into Siren’s Call. I stop to check out a plaque. Ars Morendi, who is a Stalker, critical hits me, with his descending team mates making short work of me yet again. Lesson 4: a solitary character in PvP is nothing more than badge bait. Lesson 5: always keep moving.
By now, some other heroes have appeared in Siren’s Call and are starting to get equally harassed by the Gang of Four. After a bit of broadcast chatter, we put together a team to fight off Freezeray et al. It’s four on four in the zone for all of 30 seconds until all the villains who were picking off solitary heroes leave Siren’s Call. Lesson 6: some people don’t like fair fights. My team of four, suddenly having reduced the number of targets available to us, goes and picks on the sole villain left in the zone. Lesson 7: PvP is at its best when you have no chance of losing. Lesson 8: it’s hard to feel heroic in a PvP victory when you massively outnumber your opponents. Sorry about that, Azreal Dark.
Shortly after, we ended up with a team of eight heroes, the few villains left in Siren’s Call running away / exiting the zone asap and not much PvP action at all. For me, it was a useful experience, teaching me very quickly some basic lessons about PvP. At the heart of it, it certainly seems that PvP in CoH / CoV is about gathering together a posse of your side’s guys / gals to go and fight their posse of guys / gals, with the easiest and therefore best battles being if you can overwhelm your opponents with sheer force of numbers. Now, how much fun you can have with this is a bit debateable, I think. I’ll wait on final judgement until I can get some more PvP experience under my belt, but for the moment I certainly think that soloing through missions is more my style.
Thanks to all those who sent emails – apparently CoV did go on sale here in Australia, but it kinda just appeared on the shelves one day, with the sales staff having no knowledge of its appearance until then. Plus I also apparently got some particularly unhelpful salespeople.
But I stand by my previous rant. Whoever did Cryptic’s distribution in this country doesn’t deserve the money they got if they can’t even tell stores that the game is arriving on a certain date.
– UnSub [email protected] 12 November 2005
