Game design lessons learned from World of Warcraft – Part 3: PvP and PvE

So I’ll be honest. I’ve had a huge rant building up for some time now on how Blizzard has royally screwed up WoW, and continues to do so, because they have a flawed look at how to balance PvP and PvE gameplay together.

I’m not going to write it because frankly, I’d never want to read it. So I’ve condensed my point into three simple words:

BALANCE

PVP

FIRST

You simply cannot have a PvE game and add PvP on top of it. PvP is player skill, PvE is just numbers. One could go to the extreme and say that they can’t co-exist, but I’m not quite convinced this is true. Close, but not quite.