Playing with other people is the hallmark of internet gaming, and playing against those people is its pinnacle. Tapping into this, one of the most appealing aspects of World of Warcraft was that it granted the player the ability to take the fight between the Horde and Alliance to a more personal level. Developing a system to take advantage of that conflict has consumed much of Blizzards development time.

 Ignoring Blizzard’s problems with adjusting class balance, the mechanics on where when how and why to fight have always been problematic. In the beginning, you fought because you wanted to fight. You fought because you wanted to have fun competing with other players. Unfortunately others may not be spoiling for a fight when you are, and so the obvious solution was to create a situation where they needed to. Thus the players began raiding low level outposts near major cities with neutral terrain, the famed raids of Tarren Mill/Southshore and Cross Roads, to draw their opponents out. Of course, this resulted in great trials and tribulations in trying to use these locations as was Blizzard’s intention, to level. Blizzard would seek to address this later, to great success, and perhaps too much success.

Blizzard began tweaking the player’s motivations to fight when they introduced the honor system. The system itself was not thought through all the way, and tried to accomplish too much with too little. It tried to encourage play by providing rewards for PvP. It tried to acknowledge skill by granting powerful rewards. It tried to keep people playing by not letting them keep those rewards if their ranking slipped. It tried to discourage higher level players from picking on lower level players through the absence of reward. The most notable thing it did was fail. The ladder setup focused solely on volume of PvP rather than quality of PvP, by taking the rewards away from those who dropped below a certain volume no one could hope to maintain them, and the level range for what gave you ‘honor’ was so vast that you could engage in the wholesale slaughter of weaker players and get more benefit than you could in any honest fight. Blizzard quickly fixed the most obvious oversight, taking the gear away after it was earned, but the other flaws remained until BC.

Battle Grounds were introduced shortly after the honor system. These were to be the designated combat areas that would draw combat away from the leveling areas that were being hit so hard by world PvP. It succeeded. It drew PvP out of the world almost totally. Aside from reducing the difference between Player versus Environment and PvP realms to ganking (attacking players who have little to no chance to fight back), it also diminished the essence of the conflict. Capture the Flag is a classic, but it is not warfare. King of the Hill is a fun game, but it is just that, a game. Remember the veneer? By puncturing the veil in such a manner the “honor” system quickly devolves to just another loot system. One battle ground did boast a full on war, but it was nerfed into the ground because the time and dedication it took interfered with peoples attempt to maximize their loot rewards. Notice now, how the focus of WoW’s PvP combat, the pinnacle of human interaction in gaming, shifted away from that competition and into just another time sink/loot system?

Let’s not kid ourselves though; Blizzard is fully aware of this. It is one of the reasons that drove them into creating the Arena system. The Arena’s ladder system was designed very differently from the first incarnation of the honor system. It is intended to reward skill over time and not simply time itself, and, excepting a few massive but fixable flaws which allow exploitation, it does that. But why? What motivation do people have to fight in the area? While Blizzard has finally provided an avenue for people to prove themselves many of those in the arena play for the gear rewards and not the play itself. What is more, class balance issues, which we threw out the window earlier, comes into play heavily here. Now you finally have a place to compete where your skill can be acknowledged, but Blizzard purposely designed the game to be imbalanced at that small a scale. Compounding these issues is Blizzard’s desire to use the Arena as an E-sport to gather a larger audience. In a sport you try to emphasize homogeneity to the point where the only difference between the competitors is their fitness or skill. Not so in the Arena system, where any number of a variety of other factors such as gear or class composition comes into play.

 Through a continuing series of mistakes Blizzard has devalued Player versus Player interaction and in doing so undermines the value of that competitive social interaction. While flawed, the Arena does give a glimmer of hope that Blizzard is aware of that and is seeking to correctly address it. If not, the barren wastes of Icecrown glacier will be emptier than anyone may expect.