There was a time in MMO where when you died your enemy could cut your corpse up, use your individual pieces as trophies in his house, take all your gear and inventory, and if you were stupid enough to have your house keys on you he could go into your house, and take all your items (UO)
There have been epic MMO games where players have been able to fight for territory, control, where loses meant something (Shadowbane, Lineage 2, DAOC).
And then we have the mother of all MMO, World of Warcraft, that for a time killed this vision of pvp. It took the massive scale world battles of old, and shoved them into tiny little instances where your loses meant nothing. Where you could log in whenever and have instant access to your pvp itch which was amazing at first, but eventually become like the rest of the game, a grind.
Blizzard knew this, and they introduced Arena's to try and bring back that competition into pvp. They have even taken this arena a step further, understanding that players want competitive pvp, and introduced rated battlegrounds.
There is a popular myth, that pvp'ers only with to gank.The fact is that players who actively engage in pvp, do so for the sake of winning/losing. The competition that comes from fighting others that are equal, or better skilled than you. A fact that the current trend in MMO's is taking away from the genre, even when claiming to follow the successful formula presented by Blizzard.
Take the two latest to come out, Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Both games claiming to follow Blizzard's WoW formula of success, but both failing to understand the formula. Like a fumbling chemist trying to reverse engineer the formula to red bull, missing the 'wings factor'.
While we do not know all of pvp announcements yet for SWTOR, we can at least look to Rift as an example of the worst pvp game to ever be introduced to the genre. A game whose world pvp meant absolutely nothing to the server or the game as a whole, killing or dieing literally did nothing other than satisfy a momentary itch, and whose instanced pvp was even worse.
No rating system, no, veteran max level's in full pvp gear being faced off against fresh 50s with no gear. Reducing the entire pvp system to a grind of epic boredom.
What Rift failed to understand, and that SWTOR needs to understand is that players need to be matched against other same skilled players.
Metrics need to be in place to measure skill. Casuals need to fight casuals, and veterans need to fight veterans. Veterans do not want to just steam roll over casuals, and vice versa casuals do not want to be steamed rolled by the Veterans.
Also Veterans want their world pvp to matter. We want things to take over. We want things to be taken from us so that we may defend them or win them back. We want our wars to be wars, and not mere senseless skirmishes that amount to nothing.
On the horizon we have Guild Wars 2 coming out, that appears to be the savior of the MMO world. A game with massive meaningful open world pvp. A game that has removed the instanced pvp, and given players something to fight about in their server vs server vs server battles. Giving meaning, and competition back to the pvps. The sense of accomplishment when you are done, not just a kill count.
I have hopes for SWTOR, with Gabe Amatangelo at the helm of pvp I have agreed with most everything in his vision of pvp for SWTOR (darthhater.com for interviews), but if SWTOR is the next game in a line of games that misses the mark for pvp and pve, then the pvp community will at least have Guild Wars 2 to look forward to, and possibly The Secret World if Funcom goes through with the Agartha system.
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