SmedBlog (last year): NPC Enemies and Armies

[Malorn]

http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/11/13/bl...ere-a-mistake/

Here's what Blizzard's VP of game design had to say about Arenas

We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction.

This goes for ESports as well - having PS2 the massive epic game and PS2 the small squad esport will be just as straining as trying to do class balancing for PvE and PvP.

These two things will make for a lot of stress and the PvE & ESport aspect WILL affect the part of PlanetSide that people really care about. That's what we don't want. That's time and team energy not spent making the PlanetSide parts better and you're just sinking resources into making something it's not - that's a mistake Warhammer did and the result was that they half-assed their staple PvP story and put out an even more half-assed PvE story.

I am begging you Smed, do not repeat this mistake and instead learn from it. Build on the major themes that draw people to PlanetSide. Steer clear of PvE and ESports.