Posts tagged pvp-balance 
Leaderboard: PvP power vs. PvP specialization
One of an MMO designer's biggest challenges seems to be reconciling PvP and PvE in a game with gear progression. Another example of such comes courtesy of Red 5 Studios latest Firefall dev blog, where the team basically says that it's doing away with both PvP gear and tiers because of balance ...
Warhammer Online rolls out patch 1.4.6 with major RvR changes
Warhammer Online isn't a strict PvP game, but the energy of RvR is one of the major draws that keeps players interested. That means a lot of balancing to maintain interest and avoid unfair matchups. The latest patch, 1.4.6, is aimed at revising several mechanics to do just that, keeping players ...
RIFT introducing some big PvP buffs in patch 1.7
Maybe you've been a fan of PvP in RIFT from day one. Or perhaps you eschewed it due to the slow rate of rewards and the awkwardness of needing PvP souls to make any real headway. The good news is that the game's upcoming patch 1.7 is taking aim at a variety of PvP issues, starting with a change ...
Behind the Mask: What does unbalanced even mean?
One of the major criticisms of Champions Online is a lack of game balance. People claim that the phrase "your own hero, your own story" doesn't cover the fact that your hero might be a gimp compared to someone else's. Although archetypes have their own balance issues (even among themselves), this ...
World PvP, dungeon experiences, and quality of life in Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 is a game that seemingly everyone is anticipating, helped along by the fact that very few people have gotten to play it and even fewer have played it extensively. So it's understandable that incGamers' recent interview with Eric Flannum and John Peters covers a lot of ground, ranging ...
Massively Exclusive: Age of Conan's Craig Morrison on Blood and Glory, grind, and the future
Interesting times are just over the horizon for Age of Conan, and whether it's due to the Dreamworld game engine upgrade or the recently announced Blood and Glory PvP servers, Funcom's sword and sorcery epic isn't standing still as it moves toward its third anniversary in May of 2011. On the ...
The Daily Grind: Why don't you like PvP?
When Ultima Online first launched, OSI understood that if you really want to give players a fully featured world, you have to give them the option to fight one another. Of course, that also resulted in players having (and exercising) the option to sneak up on defenseless players and introduce them ...
Aika's lead nation system kicks in without warning
With all of the major updates in Aika's first free expansion, Ashes of Betrayal, it might have been easy to miss the inclusion of an underdog system designed to help the lowest-ranked nation in the game's overarching PvP system. What the development team didn't discuss at the time was the other ...
The dangers of PvP-focused games
The trouble with PvP is... well, there are several problems with PvP. The problems of balance are always there, of course, as they are in every aspect of the game. There are the problems of making PvP both accessible to new players and rewarding for veterans, their are issues with keeping people ...
