Tuesday, November 25, 2008

You gotta fight for your right to party

On City of Heroes there have been a few fight night type things organised. Tanker Tuesdays on Champion, Golden Giza nights on Virtue, Supergroup clashes (iirc) on Test server. The community which has had years to grow pulls together in various different ways to play together.

At the moment in WAR, people are pointing out a lack of cohesion thus far. Guilds are taking care of their own sure (Or at least one hopes they are and that Oathkeepers Legacy isn't an abberation). The realms have a rough identity as well.

However it seems that a good stand up scrap is elusive. Werit has lamented the lack of non primetime action. Snaffy over on the Greenskin also talks about how many MMOs suffer from a lack of critical numbers at other times of the day. I, myself, have commented many times on Ostermark servers seeming tendancy towards early bird Order and night owl Destruction, with the zone control swinging after some seemingly invisible watershed time.

Another good point from Snaf is that there are no current "go to" areas. Or if there are, we either don't all know about them, or I just don't because Im in the bottom end of T3 and haven't played much recently (due to Girlfriend rather than lack of desire).

We can lament the fact that the roleplaying on Roleplay servers seems not be as prevalent as some other games, but I won't because I prefer roleplay lite. We could decry the fact that late afternoon/early evening EST isn't primetime but being on GMT myself I've long since accepted the fact.
We could hope that once the server gets enough of a mature population (in the sense of levels rather than maturity) that the campaign will coalese along the lines laid out for us and the fight will begin in earnest.

Many things could be hoped or said or wished for. I, however, am going to try an experiment.

God willing my fickle attention span will hold out long enough to see it to fruition and that I will put as much energy into its dawn as I used to into the blog.

I want to organise a completely out of character fight night on Ostermark.
In my own teeny opinion, nothing will bring a server together better than having rivals. While the other realm is a faceless mass seemingly bent on opposing us and taking the best bits of geography (Bregel has much to say on this, but rightly so) there's no real sense of connection. We already can't talk to one another except by going outside the game. The seeming solution is to then forge a connection. For the first few attempts, I am going to try organise a well behaved and informal fight night. People or teams will sign up. There may be themed battles (I've a few bad puns for that).

Basically until we get to know one another, we can't really get to rival one another.
When Norri, my engineer, came up through T2 I ran alot of Mourkain Temple scenarios. Not because I was grinding xp/money/rp but because I genuinely enjoyed the experience. In doing so I started to recognise names. Maybe they were grinding, maybe they were just enjoying the play. Maybe they prefer scenarios. At any rate, I could have my own rivalry. I could yell "That guy, I know him, let's kill him". The war became personal, but still fun.

Hopefully Fight Night will get off the ground and hopefully it will do the same for a few people that scenarios did for me. So expect me to try to infiltrate forums and blogs this coming weekend.

I'm not looking to hate the other side, but I am looking to get to know people so caving their heads in will be that bit more personal and fun. A friendly rivalry now is tomorrows guild on guild keep battle.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your biggest hurdle will be the lack of a central, common forums. I understand and agree with Mythic's reasoning for not having one, but one reason such things worked so well in CoX is because of the relatively mature forum going public.

It would go over as well as a turkey stuff with dead rats someplace like the WoW forums, because that populace sucks.

I'd suggest the WHA forums, because that seems to be where most of the successful events have got their start.

Kammorremae said...

You touched on it briefly; I believe that one of the best ways to establish "rivals" is maintaining a presence in an area, forcing repeated conflict with the same person or person.

When I still played CoH, I rarely visited the arena, I prefered zone PvP. The people who I knew as dedicated PvPers, I knew from the zones. They were people I fought and dueled with dozens of times a day.

I find organized PvP events to be very fun, even if they lack the spontaneity of zone/realm/world PvP.

Anonymous said...

That's a great idea. I also love to have rivals in scenarios. It's challenging. On the more populated servers there are even rivaling guilds. Anyway, good luck with organizing an event. You could also do chicken fights;)