Officers' Quarters: We PvP
by Scott Andrews 
Nov 3rd 2008 at 2:00PM
PvP is a controversial topic in the Warcraft community. For some, it's the only reason they play. With so little PvP content in the game compared to patch after patch of mostly PvE content, they can sometimes feel neglected. Others have zero interest in PvP and resent when their class gets nerfed in the name of competitive balance. As for me, I enjoy PvE far more overall, but I want PvP to be just as fun and rewarding. I'm hopeful that Blizzard will be able to achieve a tighter class balance this time around, even though historical evidence and even Blizzard's own words point to the contrary.
So what about PvP guilds? Why aren't there more of them? This week, one reader wants to know if a PvP guild can survive despite Warcraft's raid-focused endgame.
Dear Scott,
I recently went looking through your past articles, and I'm in need of some help. I'm looking to start my own guild -- specifically, a PvP guild. I know, that seems quite contrary to the majority of guild related issues you discuss, but a guild is a guild, right?
That's what I want to know. I'll give you some background. Two friends and myself recently got back into WoW, leveling new characters. We formed a guild with our alts and their 70s, and I am now almost 70 with my first character. These friends are about to go overseas for 3 months, and I'm thinking of forming a PvP guild in their absence. Of course, I will ask them and see if I can be GM and get some donations to start off. They PvP with their 70, so I don't think there will be any trouble when they come back. No problems so far.
The thing is that this is my first end game character, and when it comes to end game, raiding doesn't appeal. Winning a BG or Arena match, or dominating the other faction's leaders, is what appeals to me. I don't need to be in a guild for this, but I think a strong PvP guild would be great. I'm envisioning being feared by Alliance and cheered by Horde in our Battlegroup. I'm seeing the guild topping the Arena charts. Faction leaders will fall to our might, despite the enemy rallying to defend when they hear we are coming. Grand visions -- but are they unrealistic? Do people even want to join a semi-serious PvP guild?
Sincerely,
Lonelymage15
Hi, Lonelymage. First of all, hats off to you for having the guts and the vision to put your own guild together. It's never an easy thing, and I hope some of my past columns can be useful to you.
Right now I'd say you have some things working against you, but you also have some things working in your favor.
What will hold you back at this moment more than anything else would be your existing character. If it's an alt as you say and you can prove to people that you've got extensive PvP experience, that will certainly help. However, people you recruit are going to look you up in the armory and see that you barely have any Arena matches under your belt (if by that point you have any at all). They're going to inspect you and see that you have very few honorable kills. That's not going to inspire their confidence.
It would definitely help if your two friends were around for the first few months to help you get the ball rolling. So for you, the timing is not the best.
You've asked me if it's possible to run a guild like this. In general, my answer is a solid yes. There are several reasons why now is actually a great time to start up a PvP guild.
For starters, PvP achievements have heightened interest in PvP. I can't speak for everyone, but I've certainly found myself in battlegrounds more often than in the past. I could care less about honor at this point -- I'm there solely to earn achievements.
The more difficult achievements, like slaying a racial leader, are going to require a disciplined and coordinated team. A PvE guild could certainly dedicate some of its time to these goals and be successful, but it's not always easy to drum up interest for such a thing when players are spending so much time raiding (and farming for raids).
Another factor in your favor is that the WotLK expansion has a wealth of innovative PvP content: a new style of battleground, more dynamic arenas, more PvP dailies, and Lake Wintergrasp, the centerpiece that Blizzard hopes will finally bring real, active world PvP to Azeroth.
I fought in Wintergrasp for a bit in the beta. Initially it's pretty confusing, so I can't really say whether I liked it or not. But it certainly seems like coordinated teams are going to be much more effective there than your typical mindless zerg. Since the zone is noninstanced and populated purely with players from your own server, you can really make a name for yourself. Winning Wintergrasp has all sorts of benefits for your faction. With a forceful presence there, you could actually become the server-famous heroes you imagine.
But that will take serious dedication. When you recruit players, you have to do it with the intent that you will be that coordinated team. That means getting a Vent server and getting to know your teammates. That means using addons to schedule PvP events just like a raiding guild schedules raids -- and making sure the support is there so that you don't have to cancel them. That means every player you bring on board has to be dedicated to dominating.
That stuff doesn't happen overnight. So it's going to take a lot of patience on your part. You might have to start off just playing a ton of battlegrounds and trying to find those dedicated PvPers. The cross-server queues make finding those people on your own server much harder, so I recommend starting up some PuG teams to queue up with. Talk to them about what you have in mind.
It's a shot in the dark, but it's got more aim to it than spamming an ad in a chat channel or posting one on a forum. It also gives you the chance to back up your talk with some battleground wins.
Once you have the foundations of a solid guild, look up who the more successful Arena teams on your server are. If any of them are unguilded, recruit them. If they're in a guild, offer an alliance for some faction city attacks. Guild alliances might actually be your best bet in the early going.
In my opinion, a guild that is entirely dedicated to PvP can be a powerful force on a server. It requires a strong leader to keep the organization active and relevant, and not just another chat channel for a few random Arena teams and BGers. I imagine it would be incredibly easy to let a PvP guild degenerate into precisely that.
What about you, WoW Insider readers? Would any of you out there be interested in a guild like this? Does anyone already lead such a guild? Tell us about it below!
/salute
Send Scott your guild-related questions, conundrums, ideas, and suggestions at scott.andrews@weblogsinc.com. You may find your question the subject of next week's Officers' Quarters! For more WoW Insider gameplay columns, click here.Filed under: Officers' Quarters (Guild Leadership)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
omni guy Nov 3rd 2008 2:14PM
50 dkp minus for including a group calendar reference. Obsolesced, much?
Verymad Nov 3rd 2008 2:22PM
Oh god, more pvp guilds?
My servers full of damn pvpers >.
Jane Gray Nov 3rd 2008 7:08PM
On my server PVP guilds last anywhere from a week to a month and there are between 1 and 3 of them going at any given time.
The major problem that pvp guilds face is that they dont offer much in the way of incentive to stick around when something unpleasant happens. In a PVE guild, people have a much higher tolerance for drama as long as things are progressing. But what can a pvp guild offer its members as an incentive to stick around? Arenas dont reward any alliance larger than five people.
One handicap seems to be the PVP players. They are in general more likely to be the kind of people that cannot succeed in PVE because of immaturity issues. They are often younger than the majority of players, with a "twitchy", hostile mentality that does them well in arenas but not playing in large groups.
What about premades? Premades have always seemed to be the key to a pvp guild that would actually become prominent.... but the dirty little secret is that PVP gear is actually inferior in BGs for many classes (I and another priest ran a really successful premade all summer, both of us usually specced holy and in pve gear) so long as you have the premade structure backing you up.
Maana Nov 3rd 2008 2:26PM
I absolutely hate PvP! Sure I will do an occasional BG but otherwise I avoid it. However there are a lot of people out there who do enjoy it, even high end raiders, I know a few that took advantage of PvE to PvP server transfers. If you put in the effort it could pay off, Good luck to you.
dAnixx Nov 3rd 2008 5:30PM
Imo PvP is funnier coz it's rly rewarding when u kill a actual player than when u kill a random elite mob. Ofc raiding is fun, but i dont like to raid much since it makes me addicted to WoW, and i like to control when i play and when i dont. When u raid u make promises to ur guildies, who r actual people that get angry when u dont raid much and require u to spend 3-4hours non stop raiding, and u cant stop in the middle. PvPing its different... u can choose when to stop if ur in a BG, and arenas dont require u to stay that much time online.
jbodar Nov 4th 2008 2:55AM
@dAnixx
I tried to read your post, despite being pretty "faded" by a thorough down-voting, I really did. Can we get a version that's in English, perhaps?
mk Nov 3rd 2008 2:35PM
sounds like this person should join an already-active pvp guild until they get gear, experience, arena rating, whatever that would attract others to join their own guild. it doesn't sound like they have a particularly different vision for their guild than most pvp guilds, so they shouldn't have a hard time joining someone else's guild. if they have trouble finding pure pvp guilds on their server they can always transfer to a high pop pvp server...
Captahab Nov 3rd 2008 2:37PM
I've actually been thinking about expanding my friend guild to being a start up PvP guild that was organized along these lines, and pulling some low gear PvPers and build up a strong base together rather than try to recruit the strongest and the best.
I would suggest this to you as well with your experience. Develop a team, recruit some people with little experience and some around yours and grow as a team.
Being a Guild Leader with authority is the only way to hold a group of PvPers together and I don't mean totalitarian, keep your ears open and take suggestions, just make the final decisions.
M Nov 3rd 2008 2:41PM
I actually find myself in BGs even less than before patch, though it's not because of the patch or achievements. I only PvP to get PvE gear, because for some reason Blizzard saw fit to make PvP gear (weapons specifically) better AND easier to get than "equivalent" PvE gear.
I have the items I need now, and for now, will never step foot in a BG again.
Blachand Nov 3rd 2008 3:00PM
Use an add-on for scheduling raid/pvp events?
How about we just utilize the new Blizzard in-game Calendar - not only is it easy to use but very effiective as well.
feldling Nov 3rd 2008 3:04PM
I really love battlegrounds. At this point, I am just banking honor. I got tired of raiding after long waits and the drama that went with. I find it more personally rewarding and more time efficient to do battle grounds.
Joining a dedicated Pvp guild would be fun though, because you can help coordinate coordinate attacks. Ever fought against a premade in Arathi Basin? I am really looking forward to some of the new PvP content in Wrath though and hope they continue offering nice rewards for taking part in battlegrounds / arena.
hold up Nov 3rd 2008 3:07PM
I know this only has to do with the opening of the article, but I needed to vent about something so I'm going to put it here.
I love PVE, but I also enjoy the rush of winning an epic PVP fight, especially 1v1. Still not sure why theres no 1v1 arena. Probably because Priests would automatically lose :P
With that said I hate hearing that my Pally is getting nerfed because of a PVP problem. And they do it by nerfing PVE abilities.
I had a 39 ret pally kill my 45 disc priest just because there is so many 'oh s**t' and 'i win' pally buttons. I wont go into details because it was a 3 minute fight that was quite epic for some lowbies. After fighting a pally like that I realized that pallys really are PVP monsters. (As long as they havent used all their cooldowns). But then I started thinking, why are they nerfing our damage when its really about all the crazy tools pallys get without investing talent points. With the immune bubble and instant full health its like you have to beat a pally 3 times to actually win. I dont know why they dont remove the bubble and make Lay on Hands a holy talent you have to invest in.
And that's coming from a ret pally player. I would gladly keep my DPS in exchange for taking out those talents.
Noirwolf Nov 4th 2008 10:30AM
So you will glady screw over your prot and holy brothers. Thanks, but no thanks.
Most cloth wearers will burn out or burn a paladin down before he/she can close the melee gap for Nth time to try to win the fight.
Twystid Nov 3rd 2008 7:51PM
A major problem for a PVP Guild, at least on my server, would be the queue times. I play Horde on Earthen Ring, and due to the algorithm employed by Blizzard for BG matching, if I queue solo, I can get into most BGs in under 3 minutes. We've tried to group-queue quite a bit in the past few weeks, and even if we only have 3 people in the group queuing for EOTS, we'll stay in the queue for 40 minutes before getting a BG to pop - all the while the 'estimated time' will say 3 minutes.
We've been getting around this using an add-on called "Preform AV Enabler" which works for any BG, not just AV. It's still a chore to use, though; with 3-minute queues, we can use the Preform Enabler and all queue up almost at once, but when the queues finally pop, we'll have less than half of us queued for the same BG... so we cancel queues and wait another 3 minutes. It's incredibly tedious, and it's made most of us just give up on PVPing as a group - it's just much less frustrating to queue solo and deal with whatever PUG we get.
jbodar Nov 4th 2008 3:02AM
Well, I play Alliance on Earthen Ring and and least you get to win once the queue is over. My queues take just as long and then it's all over but the cryin'. Gains for losing are almost nonexistent when it's a massacre. At least we can win AV... most of the time. I've PVP'd in 3 different Battlegroups and I always seem to be on the side that has no clue.
Thorall Nov 3rd 2008 3:14PM
There is a guild here in Europe on the Ravenholdt server on the Horde Side that are a World PVP guild. And it really makes the server fun. They are a no holds barred guild that will attack any ally player. So I can be leveling a alt I get attacked by them, I call my guild for help and before you know it there is a full scale world PVP battle going on.
My guild have are now trying to put something similar togther so we can have battles across the world. So yes start a pvp guild they can add lots of fun and conflict on your server
Nate Nov 4th 2008 9:59AM
In my mind, the PVP aspect of the game is the closest the game has come to matching the stra-tegery aspect of the original Warcraft series. I can't wait to experience Wintergrasp and see what new PVP rewards they have in store.
There is something about the combination of skill and strategy (versus the potential of spamming a few buttons looking at monster crotch) that enthralls me.
Don't get me wrong, PVE can be challenging as well, but I prefer non-scripted encounters.
futurebiblehero Nov 3rd 2008 3:39PM
I've never understood why Blizzard removes skills to better PvP class balance when they could just refine how those skills work competitively. Why remove downranking entirely when you could, say, make a rank 1 Consecrate less likely to break stealth against a player?
Maybe it's obvious, but it's never made much sense to me.
Jane Gray Nov 3rd 2008 7:11PM
The downranking change wasn't about pvp balance, it was about making healers think more about mana conservation (especially shammies and paladins, who were basically able to spam forever using downranks)
Kevin Nov 3rd 2008 4:20PM
Yes you can start this guild, but accept (And hopefully have your soon to be guildies accept) that if this is your first endgame character you (And your guild) are going to suck. It's really that simple, unless you the Mozart of PvP your not going to learn this overnight, which is going to mean few well geared and experienced people are going to want to join. (Especially since IMO PvP is very much more about machismo and independence than PvP is)
So your going to get a lot of new players who may or may not actually plan on playing seriously, and may or may not actually be able to achieve that level of play, and may or may not groove with the guild socially. So your going to get a lot of chaff, and likely precious little wheat. If you plan on being feared and renowned then your going to need to be pretty aggressively sorting that wheat out, either by liberal gkicking or a probationary period or both.
All of which is once again compounded by the fact that you state you don't have much experience (Would be helpful to know exactly how much IMO) and thus won't necessarily know what to do. So in my opinion the first thing you want to do is go out and get some gear, some ratings and some knowledge. Once you've got those come back to the idea and it'll be far easier.