As I’ve mentioned before, I did not play Dark Age of Camelot. Heck, I never played any MMOs prior to the release of City of Heroes in 2004. There was no PvP in that game when it released. Not being a long time gamer, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as PvP. I played WoW and LotRO before WAR came along. Yes, I was on a carebear server in WoW. I did play in some battlegrounds before I called it quits in WoW and found I did indeed like me some PvP. But not really battlegrounds. What I did like was when those notices would pop up and tell you someone was attacking your homelands. I enjoyed defending my own turf, even though lets face it, rarely did many people care in that game if their city was getting smacked.

So along came WAR. I admit I was worried if I would like a game based primarily on PvP. It didn’t take me long to realize that I did indeed love me some PvP. The first time I heard the complaint of WAR lacking “meaningful” PvP was back in beta. And resoundingly, this complaint was coming from the ever so passionate DAoC players. At the time, open RvR consisted of clickable objectives only. They looked like the herdstones. I can remember standing by one in T2 Empire/Chaos when someone in group broke out into a long diatribe about how this didn’t mean anything. He wanted the RvR objectives to mean something. Shortly thereafter, the beta was shut down for some redesign. When we came back, the keeps were added. So I thought, okay, this must be “meaningful” RvR.

But that didn’t seem to be the case. The lack of “meaningful” RvR continues to be a complaint. It took my recent return to WAR to finally get a better grasp on this concept. The keeps don’t really mean anything to us. It isn’t my keep. It isn’t your keep. It’s just a keep to be fought over with the anticipation that it is going to flip repeatedly. Therefore, it doesn’t really mean anything to anyone other than some phat lootz and some victory points in a very convoluted system that evidently my years of calculus are so far past I can’t figure it out.

So how do you fix it? Well, I have no idea or I reckon Mythic would give me a job. The question is: Is it too late to fix it? It appears Mythic should have stuck more closely to the mold that was DAoC. I have wondered that if instead of these open lake areas in T2 and T3 if it would not have been better to have the missing cities in their place (the capital cities they removed before release). Would there have been more realm pride if destruction was sacking the dwarf capital city instead of some keep designed to be flipped? What is your idea for “meaningful” RvR and how would you change WAR to make the RvR more meaningful to you?