I don’t PvP.

The thing that attracted me to the original Everquest – that attracted a lot of people, actually – was that it was, in comparison to it’s predecessors, a mostly PvE game, where your enemy was the environment rather that other players. This was in direct contrast to its predecessor, Ultima Online, which was – by reputation, at least – an online “role playing game” where the two most common roles were “sociopath” and “victim”.

To be blunt, my opinion of PvP was that it was guaranteed to turn perfectly normal people into complete jerks – the bullies, if you will, on the playground – and that the best thing about PvP oriented games, or PvP servers in generally PvE games, was that they drew those types away so I didn’t have to run into them.

I may be stereotyping just a little.

That’s what I do around here.

Anyway, I’ve been playing Rift, which is primarily a PvE game but which has PvP servers for that sort of person and PvP arena things called “warfronts” that allow players to play, essentially, grade school gym class games – capture the flag, king of the hill, “kill the guy with the ball” and so forth.

They have more epic names in-game, of course.

Anyway, at one point I picked up a quest that sent me into one of these things, I left it sitting in my quest log for ages and ages until it had gone grey, and then I decided, well, what the hell, I will do one of these Warfront things and clear out the quest.

For reference, I was level 28 at this point, and warfronts work in 10-level brackets, so the one I got dropped into had an awful lot of characters in the 20-22 range, and I immediately realized that they were extremely easy to kill compared to picking on someone my own size.

So, apparently, PvP DOES bring out the worst in people, or at least in me.

Anyway, I finished that Warfront, and did a couple more, and then realized that I was having a tremendous amount of fun even though I was actually dying quite a bit when people my own level or a little higher came gunning for my head, so I kept right on with them for several hours…

…and then I leveled to 30 and got dropped into a 30-39 Warfront and suddenly _I_ was the cannon fodder…

…so it’s back to leveling for me. I’ll come back to these things when I’m 37 or 38. 🙂