Sit me down with a beer or three and get me talking about what PvP is like on Sanctum of the Exalted and, more often than not, I will inadvertently start quoting the immortal Charles Dickens:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Why? Because PvP on our server is so incredibly hit and miss, you sometimes think you must be on another server, such is the difference — even between successive between play sessions.
And no, before you think it, I’m not drawing a comparison here between, say, Level 50 PvP and Level 10-49 PvP. What I’m about to relay is the same, regardless of the level of PvP at hand.
You see, you can hit a PvP match on our server and have the time of your life. There are healers healing, there are tanks tanking, there are DPS dealers smashing the enemy and, on top of it all, everyone knows what they’re doing. And no, it’s not a premade situation; this is a plain old PUG.
Then you sign up for the next match and, what the hell, it’s all completely wrong. The tanks are trying to DPS, the healers aren’t healing anyone (except themselves), and, to put it as simply as I can, you have people doing utterly crazy stuff. Here’s my favourite example from the past week.
Picture it. The Alderaan warzone. The fighting’s been tough for both sides. Then word emerges that the right turret only has one guy on it. Myself and another teammate break ranks and run for it. Two on one! Great odds! Suddenly, two more enemy unstealth. Three on two! Not so great odds, especially for attackers! So what does my colleague do? He runs the turret AND STARTS TRYING TO CAP IT. Huh? There are three enemy swarming us, and his first reaction is to CAP the turret? Suffice to say, the three of them stunned him on the spot, and within a matter of blows from each of them, he was through. Then they turned on me. Rinse and repeat. We were both on our way back to respawn.
So I said to this guy, “Hey mate, when it’s three on two, trying to cap the turret isn’t really our best course of action…” In response, the guy lost his mind at me. He claimed he wasn’t trying to cap anything. What the hell? I’d just seen him do it. Yet here he was, bold as brass, denying it. Perhaps because he realised it made him look stupid infront of the rest of the team, I don’t know, but I have a real problem with liars. I reminded him that I’d been next to him when he was trying to do it, and had been trying to stop him getting killed, but he wouldn’t have a bar of it. He denied it completely.
(I actually took a screenshot of all this, so I’d remember his name and guild, and I’m half tempted to, ‘name and shame’, but it’s not really the purpose of what I’m writing here.)
So what am I getting at? Well, I guess it’s just to vent a little. Our server has so many amazing gamers, whether in PvP or PvE, yet we have some complete morons, too. People who won’t play their class properly. People who do the wrong thing, then lie about it. People who spend entire Huttball matches chasing fights (ie: deathmatching), rather than following the ball and trying to score. It’s so frustrating and, as time goes by, it’s only going to push more and more guilded people into forming premades and ignoring PUGs altogether. And then what will happen? We’ll have PUGs crying that, even with multi server queues for PvP, they still can’t get a timely match. But you know what? They’re going to have brought it on themselves, by driving people — like me — away from using PUGs in PvP.