Why Playing the "Good" faction sucks
For most of its 13 year history, LotD has played MMO's on the side of evil. When RvR and Instanced type PVP games started coming out, the lines between evil and good became sort of blurred so we had to take our best guess on selecting the faction that aligned with our play style. In WoW we were dead set on going Horde until it became obvious to us that the server population inbalances were tilted too heavily towards the Horde side. Since we wanted to "PVP" we figured rolling Alliance would give us more opponents to kill, and within a year that some other PVP game would come out (Darkfall??!!) so we could leave WoW behind us.
Well Darkfall stayed in the lands of vapor, Warhammer and Age of Conan have taken another 2 years to develop, and we've had a belly full of dealing with "good" factions in MMO's. In the next game we're going evil no matter how bad the server inbalances look. But I'll take a moment to explain to you all why the "Good" faction in MMO's is terrible to play, and why they get their asses handed to them in PVP.
Click on the read more to check out the rest of my thoughts on why the "Good" faction feels like you are gaming with a bunch of assclowns.
All the Goodies want to be a Hero
There seems to be this prevailing line of thought in people who play the "Good" faction that they can all be the hero in PVP. Since they spend so much time PVE'ing and slaying mobs to save the day, they think that this same line of thought applies in PVP. So when they think that they can be a hero in large scale PVP, they go charging in with their swords waved high only to get cut down in a matter of seconds. The sad part about this is that when enough of them go charging in like that, they aren't focused on a common target so they get slaughtered while doing minimal damage to the enemy players. Equally damaging is when they don't listen to advice and just go charging in 1 by 1 like lambs to the slaughter. Either way the remaining players on the good side are usually horribly outnumbered due to these antics, and end up getting wiped by the evil counter attack.
Some game mechanics that reward PVE and PVP character builds are partly to blame here as. Game mechanics that apply different damage values between PVE and PVP combat are also to blame. Yes the goodie is pretty stupid to go running in there spamming some AOE, but maybe he really did think he was going to do 500k damage to the enemy general.
Text Chat 4TL (teh luze)
I don't know what it is here, but its like the good faction people are allergic to using voice chat to communicate with pickup groups (PUG's). I mean if the game offers you the ability to use voice chat in an RvR or Battleground Instance, people who really want to win should use it. Instead you usually get some idiot goodie general wannabe who spams all this text during the fight in a vain attempt to issue orders.
There are reasons why PVP coordinated by text chat is an epic fail:
- It takes too dam long to type that crap out. Voice commands are relayed instantly.
- PVP combat is pretty fast paced, who the hell has time to read a wall of text while trying to stay alive in a large pvp battle?
- Too many other people (goodies) are usually too busy griping at one another in the chat so any meaninful text is usually lost
Valorious Bob Says "OMG You're an Idiot" Honorable Fred says "Suck it"
What truly amazes me is how fast the goodie faction people turn on one another at the first sign that things aren't going great. The next thing you know they are insulting people's moms, dads, sisters, calling each other idiots, etc. Before you know it, the text based PVP between the goodies is more interesting than the real PVP going on in the game. As the teamwork disintegrates and the insults fly, the goodies just stand around like a bunch of lemmings and wait for the battle to come to its miserable end.
Playing on the side of evil for all these years got me used to people just working together with a minimal amount of talk, but I LOL at these goodies almost every day.
Why Evil Wins
Evil players generally know the difference between PVE and PVP builds, and come prepared for the type of game they are about to play (PVE or PVP). They also usally have a good idea on the strengths and weaknesses of their class, and they prioritize their targets whereas the goodies just begin flailing at the first thing they see.
Whether evil faction players or guilds like one another or not, they usually win because they put aside their differences during the fight. Everyone's singular focus during PVP is to win, and to kill as many goodies as possible. To that end they will invite people into their vent servers, or utilize the game's voice chat option if there is one so that they don't depend on the slow text based command relays. Even if they do have to use text chat, each group will usually follow instructions if they are given specific assignments. Rarely do you see the evil faction players break down into stupid text arguments with one another to the extent that it costs them the game.
Conclusion
It doesn't matter if you are the most organized guild on the goodie side or not because you can't fix "stupid", and the goodie faction seems to have an abundance of those types. You can't compensate for 20 individual hero personalities in a 40+ man PVP scenario and hope to win most of the time. You can't win when the goodies give up after the first death and then stand around bitching and moaning at other people the rest of the fight.
LotD plays ORG PVP a few nights a week and we have fun when we do it, but when we are with PUG's on the goodie side we don't have high expectations anymore. When our time in WoW is done, I can certainly say that it was an eye opening experience playing within the goodie faction. Now I know why they can't seem to win unless they have an overwhelming numerical advantage that can overcome the idiotic things that they do to themselves.
This comic from MMORPG.Com reminds me of the typical zerg mentality of people playing the "Good" faction.
Lesson learned. To hell with faction balance, we'll never stray from the Evil Faction again.