12-21-2017, 03:44 PM
Vllad Wrote:The All Pally Meta, Pedernales and the Whiskey Drunk War
This is what keeps me gaming and I just don't think these experiences can be had without a live, open-world PvP environment with day to day continuity.
To expand upon your examples:
"All Pally Meta" -- we discover pretty much by accident that playing EQ2 with all paladins and shadow knights is an incredibly viable way to play, both PvP and PvE. We wrecked veteran teams of squishies, which were the real meta of the day: classes that sneak up and quickly stab other squishies to death. Hapless paladins can't help a group of squishies so they seem useless and are just the last to die but it turns out TWO paladins can support each other really well and a whole GROUP of Paladins turns out to be badass.
I love looking for the counter-meta and this is something tablet games can offer me but it's so much more satisfying to be able to deliver it in person, in real time, in head to head conflict with jerks.
Pedernales -- hordes of cocky pirates find their ruin against a much smaller and weaker French team with The Purge providing the strategy and the foundation to build on.
Really the great part of that whole contest was how important a role Purge ended up playing. I mean the French team was dead meat without us and we ultimately provided the pivot point that allowed the French team as a whole to leverage their way out and actually wrecked the pirate team. It was largely OMG that drove the point home but the French would never have reached that point to begin with had The Purge not picked a strategy that worked and held onto it with grim resolve.
This is a larger scale version of something I like about Purge in open world PvP in general: the times we have managed to "herd the zerg" or otherwise pivot a team to victory just by being the rock where a rock was needed. I've often said it's amazing what you can do when you just have a group of about a dozen people willing to coordinate. You don't need to control a whole zerg directly -- you just need enough to give them something solid to pivot around.
GW2 had its moments too but lacked the scale of strategy and rivalry that made Naval Action be a memorable experience. We had some good fights in GW2 (Pangloss Defense) but not to the epic (multi-week) level of what Pedernales turned into.
Whiskey Drunk War -- cheating shitheads meet their match against The Purge, mainly because we just...wouldn't...die... Once again we saw the meta, saw how the meta was killing us and found a way to survive outside of the meta and irritate the shitheads in the process.
I still find it amusing how Whiskey Drunk kept saying "we've been here since the game started, we're never going away" and as soon as the big patch hit, along with the reset which they wanted, those fuckers dried right up when the exploits they were using went way, which is exactly what I told them they'd do. Dumb mother fuckers.
I guess really what I love in gaming is that sense of encountering shitheads who abuse some meta (which may include outright cheating) and finding some way to either beat them or at least annoy the hell out of them. I am willing to endure quite a lot of questionable or dull gameplay if it can just deliver that type of epic moment that I don't think we can get anywhere else.
I recognize that to a lot of gamers, the pain isn't worth the payoff. Conan Exiles can be downright boring some days. Naval Action is slow paced on a good day. EQ2 required actual PvE grinding (blargh!) to even reach the good stuff.
But to me it's like McDonalds vs a fancy restaurant. I can get a quarter pounder right now and it's okay enough but if I endure sitting in a boring restaurant for a bit, I can get a much better and more satisfying and more memorable meal in the end. I'm always looking for that in the games we play. I love Rimworld and the stories it generates can be pretty amusing but I also know it's never going to bring me to another Pedernales.