Three letters can make a grown woman cower in fear…

PVP!!!!

Those three little letters usually make me groan and cringe in fear. Being placed into a PvP situation would cause my blood pressure to soar to unreasonable levels. My hands would shake. I’d be very irritable. One time, my desk suffered a nearly complete demise from my utter frustration with the situation!

PVP? “What is it?,” many of you would ask? It stands for Player versus Player in computer gaming terms. It’s you going up head to head against at least one other player. Sometimes it could be one-on-one; sometimes teams against teams.

I HATED it.

I avoided it at all costs!

Unless I was sitting in the gunner’s seat in an ARC-170, or the turret of a YT-1300 (think Star Wars Millenium Falcon.)

 

 

Love the ARC-170 the best!

I LOVED gunning. I was arguably one of the very best in all of the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) game. Just ask anyone from the Space Community about Sandarie. You are first likely to be told she was a beautiful blue Twi’lek and next a deadly gunner they never wanted to go up against.

   Recently, WoW incorporated an achievement system with titles and rewards for completing various tasks. Guess what!?! Several of the achievements had a PvP component. GROSS! But a few people took pity on me and a few others with sentiments similar to mine and took us into the 40 against 40 zones a few times to let us get what we needed for the achievements.

 Let’s transition to WoW. The World of Warcraft’s PvP environment didn’t have starships with turrets. It was you against other players. BLECH!!!!

 

That’s it, I was DONE! No more PvP! YAY!!!

Fast Forward to WoW’s new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. This brought Wintersgrasp and Strand of the Ancients.

Oh My GOSH!!!!

I’ve never experienced PvP with so many options. Not since playing SWG. I could defend the keep in a turret! I could grab up a rocket launcher! I could do massive magie goodness of damage from a distance!!!

I think that’s the key for me. I wasn’t up close and personal! I was away from the immediate action, I have better perspective.

But it’s more than that! It’s immersive in the story. I was defending something, it was measurable and had lasting effects. We got to keep control of the Keep or lose control of the keep and that directly effected game play in other areas.

It. Just. Feels. Real.

I go every chance I get to go with a group of friends. I know someone else who feels as I do about PvP and now he’s created a Hunter just for Wintersgrasp PvPing. I love it…

… now if only I could get my desk’s keyboard tray attached back on my desk again…

 

A Quick Note…

Halyn still hasn’t watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog!

I’m trying to play Morrowind and keep thinking it should be an MMO. For those of you who play Oblivion, you know what I mean.

I’m actually PvPing, kinda. On a spreadsheet mmo game called AstroEmpires.

I’m considering going back to WoW for awhile, if I can find the money for the subscription (danged school loans)

I’m loving my little Star Trek RP group. I’m a El-Arian Counselor on an Excelsior class starship (*giggles* is that nerdy enough for you?)

… and I have to remember to get Shadowcall’s DVD’s in the mail to Netflix tomorrow….

No really, it *is* an MMO…

After yesterday’s blog post, I had a little discussion with some friends about AOL chat rooms. *grins* this discussion took place in an IRC chat room, by the way. As I said yesterday, I felt playing games in chat rooms were much like MMO’s. AOL and IRC have thousands of people on at the same time, just being managed in smaller groups.

(Ugh, it’s not yesterday anymore. Now the discussion was four days ago…)

I had a run at Age of Empires several years ago.  Yes, I *know* it’s really not an MMO. Not in the purest sense of MMO, but it really is MMO like in the technical sense. You can play it solo, but could also connect online with other players to go head to head, either in teams or player-versus-player (PVP). Many games fall into this category. My cow game, Diablo II, can be solo or teams-PVP, or teams against the environment (PVE.)

I adore all games like Age of Empires. I hate PVP with a passion.

If you have other games like Age of Empires or Diablo II you enjoy, I’d love to hear about them!

P.S. Ooooooh! Just learned that you might actually get the early Age of Empires from a free download! I’m gonna see what I can find. If not, it is probably time to head to Wal-Mart. A friend told me they found it and the expansion for 5 bucks!