Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The problem with non-impact PvP

Meet Laserturken. I write his name to the story to back it up as it couldn't be screenshotted (how to screenshot myself vacuum-cleaning?), but anyone on the server can testify, that the story sounds exactly like him.

It happened about a month ago, I was still leveling archeology in Eastern Kingdoms. It was before the "free 1800 honor for joining Tol Barad or jumping on the bridge" hotfix, I had about 1000 resilience. WoW was in a window, I was writing the blog, reading news, and so on. I surveyed one dig site, flied to the nearest town, used the flightmaster and alt-tabbed back. When I returned to WoW, I was already in the next zone, close to the next digsite. This time it was Stranglethorn. I started surveying, this moron specimen appeared from stealth and killed me. Happened before, happens again, random annoyment. I ran back, ressed, bang, there he was again.

I alt-tabbed, continued writing the post, finished after 10-15 mins. Ran back, pressed resurrect and there he was instantly. Since I had nothing to do in WoW (that's why I was running archeology) and lot to do IRL, I went AFK another 10 mins. Ressed, there he was. After finishing 2 posts, emptying my mailbox, vacuum-cleaning the room, emptying and refilling the dishwasher, cleaning my shoes, spending more than 2 hours and about a dozen resses, I ressed once more and he was nowhere.

The reason why he did not make to the moron of the day is that I felt that something is really wrong with the system, but couldn't explain it. The moron posts are for idiots in a good system, like the guy at the end of this post. Laserturken was rather a moron in a moronic system.

I finally figured out what is totally messed up: if I would have been on enhancement (and could play it), WoW wouldn't be in small window and would have farmed more PvP gear, I could have won, corpsecamping him for 2 hours. Then my blogposts wouldn't be written, the mailbox would be full off viagra spam, my room, shoes and dishes would be dirty and I would have 50 more honor points. What a glorious victory!

I finally figured out that he is undefeatable as killing him only takes a little time away from him (and he did not get the handful honor points for killing), and he clearly displayed that he has lot of time to waste and honor is easy to farm in BGs.

This is why there is no open-world PvP: there is no point. You cannot win. You just waste time. Hell! You won't even win in the social space, as there are no peers around to embarrass him by corpsecamping. You can't take anything from him, so he is never-ever defeated.

Being pointless, PvP becomes annoyment instead of danger or challenge. Why should I bother fighting back? Releasing, ressing behind a tree and flying away is faster than actually winning!

Before you'd comment "go to PvE server", I'd like to point out that I came to PvP exactly to PvP. I just figured out that it's theoretically impossible. There is no objective to capture and no enemy to defeat. There isn't even pitiful social bragging rights. There is nothing more than the chance of making a little annoyment at the cost of lot of time investment.

Non-impact PvP simply makes no sense. PvP must have an impact to separate winners from losers. For example Tol Barad has a little impact: if you win, you get Problim! It's not much, but it's something. I'm fully aware that high-impact PvP games are commercial failures simply because good players can destroy the bad ones, stopping them from "progressing their character". In a PvE game like WoW, despite they are still bad and still locked out of any meaningful challenge, they can get shinies, making themselves believe that they are progressing.

But there must be some kind of middle way. For example PvP death could make 5% (half of PvE) durability lost. It would surely clean up the bridge of Arathi. Holding a base instantly will be "fun".

Or: there could be a 30-mins,, stacking debuff "defeated", that increases every time the player is PvP-killed, and decreases when he kills (if he kills in a group, the guy with the highest debuff gets credited for the kill). If the debuff reaches 5 or 10, he gets the debuff "pwned", making him unflagged from PvP, unable to engage PvP and changing his title to "the pwned". The debuff and the title stays for 2 hour logged-in time, like the resurrection sickness.

This way it would make sense to ask for reinforcements, to do battles against the enemy faction. Also, killing people in a BG would make sense, along with not dieing. The better one could win. It would have an effect, even if just a "Problim-sized" one. We would leave the battlefield victorious, knowing that the lolkids will have to walk with "pwned" title over their heads, making them think twice if they ever want to gank. Now we can only choose between corpserun and "I wasted 20 mins to get some idiot off me".


Ticklez from the guild found these wonderful specimen:
Material costs are around 10G by the way.

32 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just gonna toss a quick link for you.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/87177/zylos-hand-a-glimpse-of-pvp-at-frostwhisper

Zylopfa or King Zylo from Frostwhisper-EU

When I used to play on the server he had claimed Tyr's Hand (The place people used to farm at in EPL) as his own. Him and his guild would be up there most of the time they were online. People knew there was pvp there and either farmed in fear or came to join in on the fight.

One of the things I remember him most for is that he was always in character when writing on the realm forums and such.

lancore said...

We can't really see if your moron bought a single fortune card for 125g or even a stack of 200 for 125g. My guess is 5 cards for 25g each, but no one could tell...
Stack sizes aren't displayed for sold auctions

Ritualst said...

There is nothing better than World PvP in WoW. Unfortunately introduction of of flying mounts killed that aspect of the game.

I think that your post is completly wrong this time. You forget that people have different goals both in life and while playing MMO games.

You call this guy a moroan because you don't understand his goals.
How do you know that he didn't make a bet with someone that he will kill Alliance Shaman couple of times during 2 hours? Or maybe he has some other aim in his mind.

Don't judge people 2 fast, especially if you don't know what's in their mind.

Regarding the titles and other stuff proposal, it's not needed. World PvP is all about fun. Killing people on sight only if they are from opposing faction IS fun and this is how this game should be played on PvP server.

This is how this game was played in Vanila. You wanted to do Blackrock instance? Unfortunately that was best place ever to do World PvP. This was the place that people who are involved in PvP a bit more than you dream about to return. Some of the most entertaining movies of Vanila PvP were made in Seering Gore and enteance to Blackrock.

Unfortunately blizzard introduced LFG system and Flying mounts making World PvP non existant (Wintergrasp and TB are a mare shadow of the amazing fights we had in Vanila).

I think that people got way to casual and soft these days ... oh! I do my quests or professions and someone is attacking me, how could he? He must be a moroan to do so! I tell you 1 thing - 5 years ago it would be more than normal and nobody would whine about it.... I miss those days ...

Anonymous said...

Open-world PvP was always more of a pointless affair. He kills a player to send him the message "I dominate you". You can either choose to respond with "No, you don't" by respawning and taking up the fight, or you can say "All right, you win" and spawn and fly away or just refrain from respawning until you think he's left.

This is all very social - the only effect this has is on other players. They are inconvenienced by lower access to digsites, but there's no reward to the ganker himself except the knowledge that his victims give up on the space until he leaves and chooses to let them have it.

As I said, this is exactly what you'd think of as social idiocy. It's by no means an effective way of earning honor, nor do you earn anything by it.

I was sort of surprised to hear that you've done Archaeology, though, as I'd think you would rate that too as social crap as useless as pet collecting. Indeed, wouldn't a project to upset the lolkids who farm archaeology perpetually for mounts and pets or whatever be claiming, say, four digsites in Northrend? Leaving three players on each, that's quite a big part of Northrend that Horde players can't do Archaeology in.

Zydell said...

I've got a few things I'd like to point out after reading your post

You are a PvE player, I am a PvP player, so we see this from completely different angles

I play PvP because I just like it, and you play PvP when you're bored

There's a big difference there. That's why, when i see you mention a durability loss in PvP, I think: "What?"

In PvP you SHOULD die. If you do not die in a WSG battle, you must have either won within 5 minutes, or you did a very bad job (as dps).

Good PvP players trying to win do so called "suicide missions". You run into 5 horde with 2 dps in WSG, and you kill the EFC. You return the flag, you die. If there would be a durability loss of 5%, you could only die 20 times in a single BG before having to repair.

That way, PvP will become a mindless HK farm, nuking 10 versus 10 (or 40 vs 40) as if it is arena battle.

And that is not the idea of PvP. I have 3500 resilience, and in a good battle i die about 5-10 times. Any less means i was either AFKing or my group was really good

Secondly, I don't think this guy is a moron. He was bored and as a PvPer, he decided not to do archeology, but to do some world PvP. It's not like he was just waiting for you all the time. He picked that specific place because thats the only place where loads of players come by, and dismount.
Thats not a stupid thing to do

Overall I think your business ideas and knowledge of the game etc is great, but PvP is not really your subject. If you would do some more serious PvP, you'd understand the mechanics of it better, and therefor make better posts.
And othwerwise you can just stick to the business posts and non-PvP related aspect of the game because that's what makes this blog interesting

Anonymous said...

Just nitpicking:
PvE durability loss is at 5% for quite a long time already (don't remember if it was still wotlk change or cata/4.0.1 one).

Jumina said...

But the point of any computer game is "I am the undefeatable one". Any computer game will either implement this principle or become an unprofitable project for a few dedicated players. And it's the same for both PvP and PvE.

Players in PvE avoid progress and go to farm. They want epics and development of their character but don't want to many wipes because it means they were defeated.

Ðesolate said...

I recall the PvP-Battles we had in Quel'Danas. Usually all active PvPers met there between 17 and 19 o'Clock to do their dailys and gank each other. Usually you always got a new opponent or a new challenge.

Usually we couldn't win honor nor our dailys (go there at 21 o'Clock and you'll be fine). We did it because of the challenge. But ganking someone for 2 hours who is no thread really is a waste of time. And as you say open - PvP is dead.

Why is open PvP dead? Because it has no benefit. BGs are there to farm honor, Arena / rated BGs for conquestpoints. Even HK-farmers prefer BGs a lot.

Faction Bosses? Yes everyone did that already.
PvP-Achievements? Not a part of the Metaachievements, so it's pure bonus and will be one "sometimes".
Challenge? Yes cool challenge when we calls for his 3+ Buddies or simply flies away. And yes killing someone in 2-3 GCDs s barely a challenge.

caerphoto said...

Maybe a simple, Goblinish fix for battlegrounds would be to have a gold charge for resurrecting if killed by a player in a BG, increasing each time that person is killed within, say, 30 seconds, but reducing by the same amount if they survive longer.

To make it even more interesting, any money collected via graveyard resurrections could be distributed amongst the winning side.

Ðesolate said...

PS: postreading I must say I got a bit far away from the main topic.

In BG you can prevent beeing killed by leaving the graveyards in ghost-form. I see leeching ghosts coming...

Maybe you should punish bad behaviour instead of dieing. Sometimes someones death is more worth than escaping and waiting for reenforcement. I think theese changes would guide to more zergs in BGs since defending alone maybe punished by dieing.

In open PvP, well it needs motivation. Punishment leads to 98%
camping hometown. That's it. I can lvl by BGS and LFD. Never have to leave home. Open PvP is punished enough for beeing annoying.

Grim said...

The real problem with world PvP is that there is no time for it.

To not fall behind, massive amounts of time must be invested in grinding.
1) Daily HC
2) Daily BG (if you didn't catch the 1800 honor freebies)
3) Weekly Argaloth
4) Weekly Arena for CP cap
5) Reputations
6) More HCs if you want to craft epics / grind gold in some other way if you want to buy them
7) Any other dailies you happen to be interested in

All of these chores have to be done simply to not fall behind the majority. To not be excluded from pugs and not get owned in PvP - this is what the average player does.

And as soon as the average player gets the carrot - is decked in epics and doesn't need VP, CP or gold anymore? Next tier! That's exactly what Blizzard aims for - to always keep the average player occupied with these grinds for fear of falling behind the wave.

And this takes a couple of hours every day. So how much playtime does it leave for the average player to goof around with world PvP?

Fuck all is how much.

And world PvP requires a critical mass, that cannot be achieved without the average player taking part.

I spent a good deal of late Wrath defending X-roads and Orgrimmar from Alliance. There is no sign of them since Cata...

Anonymous said...

Maybe the point of world pvp is that there is no reward. It isn't some lengthy grind that will take X hours. Just a bit of fun with your char.
Before I got a raid wep I spent many hours digging for Zin'Rok and if I saw someone that looked like a decent challenge I'd attack. This didn't make my digging any faster, and of course it ment that some people would also attack me on sight, but it made the whole experience far more enjoyable. There was one warrior who I fought with in most of the digsites in Eastern Kingdoms, it got to the point where we'd /hi each other before attacking.

Just because most of the game is goal/reward oriented we shouldn't forget that it is a game, and the aim is to have fun.

Ephemeron said...

A. Blizzard is very well aware of the Golden Rule of microeconomics: "People respond to incentives". They are perfectly willing to adjust said incentives to make given activities more or less popular. (Case in point: they just delayed the release of 2200 rating PvP weapons just so that players would not abandon their raid efforts and hit Arenas/rated BGs en masse).

B. It is perfectly possible to offer all kinds of additional incentives for engaging in world PvP: extra honor, achievements, special world-drop blues and epics that can only be looted from corpses of opposing faction, cool titles for winners, enforced humiliating titles for losers, ability to harvest ears from fallen enemies (Diablo-style), and so forth.

C. Over the last several years, Blizzard has offered virtually no incentives that would encourage world PvP. If you participate in organized PvP (Arenas, BGs, Tol Barad, Wintergrasp, etc.), you get honor, epics, titles, mounts, rankings and achievements. If you do world PvP, you get some pitiful honor points, and possibly credit towards your daily quest to "kill 20 Hordies in zone X".

A + B + C equals D, where D is the conclusion that Blizzard doesn't want players to spend time on world PvP.

Anonymous said...

I really don't get the whole "you must farm 24/7 to get things!" attitude. Honor is still fairly easy to get, and with about 1 hour per day, at most, you can get enought money and itens to raid. Add to that 6 hour per week of raiding, and you realize that with 12-hour per week you can meet most of the game's contents (except Hard modes).

Gevlon said...

@Ephemeron: you are probably right, but then why do they ALLOW it. If they don't want World PvP, why do they leave the feature for morons to annoy us.

Anonymous said...

How long did it take you to figure this out chief? This is why I'm on a PVE server. I don't have to worry about some douche corpse camping me while I'm trying to get stuff done. I MIGHT consider a PVP server if:

1) there was a chance I could get that guys phat lewts if I beat him. Yes, HIS loot, right off his body. Whatever he/she's wearing, and/or GOLD right out of his coffers.

2) The above is only applicable if you're fighting someone with the same level AND a close enough PVP gearscore. Otherwise it'd be a slaughter and folks would be running around naked/penniless.

3) There is absolutely NO incentive or reward for ganking/corpsecamping. Pick a fight with somebody more than 1 level below you and you get a huge debuff and you lose gold when you win.

Ax said...

They allow it because it's already there. What reason would Blizzard have to change it? Spending a lot of money on development and testing then have a major rollout for what? To basically piss off a bunch of people on PvP realms who can claim the game is going downhill and the only reason they play is because of PvP servers, etc, etc. Spending a lot of time and money to lose customers and more money seems like a poor investment of resources as opposed to just leaving things as they are.

Ðesolate said...

@Gevlon:
Because we allow it. It's quite simple, we choose to be on PvP-Realms. If we choose not to have open-PvP we would transfer to a PvE-Realm.

Well of course we would have to pay 20 euro to transfer. But why should Blizzard make the transfer free if it costs some workhours /-minutes on a admin to check it?

Why don't they simply make PvP Realms into PvE Realms?
They can't risk the community reaction. I think they know quite well many would come up with the 13 euro hammer and stop their abo. And there was already enough trouble in the community, so why risk something by changing something what is already abandonned and hardly used.

And why do we allow open-PvP to be the least used and crappiest thing in WoW?
Because we don't care unless we loose it completely. If we would stand up for open-PvP they would possibly change something, but nobody does.

Okay there are some who do, but no more than thoose who stand up for classic servers. And you know how massive the community need for that idea is.

Michael said...

This is part of why I can never get into pvp. Fighting over rewards or for some sort of advantage makes sense, but wanting to hurt some random person you've never met but who happens to be of the opposite faction is just bizarre.

I think it also pushes people away from an activity they might enjoy, because it has such a horrible culture. The whole red=dead crowd just throw off an aura of people who psychotically attack even without advantage, who probably get off on setting baby animals on fire. I look at people like that, or read their posts, and it doesn't make me want to join in, not even as a way to stop or fight them. It just makes me wish they'd go away, to somewhere I don't have to deal with their unpleasantness.

Ephemeron said...

but then why do they ALLOW it

The combination of Blizzard's notorious convervatism and the aforementioned Golden Rule means that they won't axe a major feature without a solid incentive - and there simply isn't one. While they'd prefer us to participate in their shiny carnival rides instead of ganking each other in the bloodstained sandbox, their dislike for it isn't huge enough to warrant the removal of world PvP altogether.

(Let's face it: while the players and bloggers like to grumble about "ganker scum" or reminisce about "good old Tarren Mill/Southshore days", the truth is that there's currently no major outcry demanding such a change. Those who want more rewards from PvP are not-so-subtly nudged towards BGs, Arenas and Tol Barad; those who want to be free from gankers who waste their time have the option to reroll or transfer to a PvE realm.)

So, rather than risk public backlash and negative hype by removing world PvP, Blizzard prefers to turn the "incentive dial" to zero, and let the greedy human/goblin nature take its course.

Cyrell said...

There are many challenges in World PvP. Just because you can't see them it doesn't mean they aren't there.

1) Standing stealthed at a mining or herb node seeing how many farmers you can kill in one hour.
2) Killing players in town before the guards can kill you, or managing to kill players and then escaping from guards.
3) Making people fail hard group quests such as the Crucible of Carnage in Twilight Highlands.
4) Provoking high level players to come out of obscurity in Stormwind by mass killing places such as Darkshire.
5) Causing players to pay durability loss and forcing them to spirit res because you managed to kill them in hard to reach places.
6) Killing people while slow falling and levitating, showing them that they're not safe from you anywhere.
7) Killing people by using mechanics such as typhoon or thunderstorm to get them into places where they must either walk for 15 minutes to res or spirit res in the first place.
8) Killing people who are trying to take the same mining or herb node as you are.
9) Killing people who are trying to kill the same quest mobs that you are.

All of these are part and parcel of being on a PvP server. All of these and many, many more are reasons to gank and kill.

Perhaps you shouldn't simply dismiss "GO TO PVE SERVER CAREBEAR" as bad advice and actually take it for what it is: a protip.

Tonus said...

I think I've mentioned this in the past, but I played for some time on a PVP server because my friends wanted to, and I would rather go through the experience than not play with them. My experiences on a PVP server were not as bad as I had feared (I was never corpse camped, for example) and eventually we all moved to a PVE server.

The irony is that in our time on the PVP server, I learned to live with the occasional ganking. Heck I even won a few fights. But the real annoyance was that several of the same guildmates who were gung-ho about being on a PVP server were the same people who whined ALL THE TIME when they got ganked. It is kind of funny now to hear one of them complain on the PVE server, like this time that someone mined a ore vein while she fought off a nearby mob. She wished she was on a PVP server, she said. And I kept thinking, if you were on a PVP server, you would have complained that the other person ganked you while you fought a mob and still mined the ore!

I never saw the point in world PVP in WOW, aside from the grief factor and the occasional large-scale battles that were a lot of fun. But without a tangible and reasonable reward system, it eventually died out. People say that BGs killed it, but BGs became popular because they provided an actual path to rewards and a more balanced scenario for PVP.

Espoire said...

"8) Killing people who are trying to take the same mining or herb node as you are.
9) Killing people who are trying to kill the same quest mobs that you are."

As much as I disagree with most of the above points, these two are why I transferred to a PvP realm. Pity that PvP that is mismatched by 30+ levels is more common than valid world PvP like the above. =|

Vesoom said...

@Cyrell,

I agree with everthing you said. I enjoy many of the same activities on occasion. I think the issue is that when a player is out questing or whatever (anything other than pvp) there is really no incentive for him to fight back. Of course people will nerdrage and try to res and come after you, but that nerdrage is exactly what Blizz wants players to not experience. Everything should be pain-free from their perspective.

If there were consequences, many of which were articulated above very well, more people would fight back with a genuine desire for victory. That, in my opinion, would make a pvp server more fun.

(yes, some people fight back out of dignity or pro-ness or whatever, but in my experience on a pvp server most people want very little to do with world pvp)

Anonymous said...

World PvP is one of the last sandbox activities in WOW. There's no point to it. There are no external rewards and it doesn't tie in to Blizzard's idea of progression. It's a self-directed activity and the fact that there's so little of it just shows that most players can't bother to get out of the city without Blizzard giving them a cookie. What's "wrong" about it is that world PVP functions outside of the usual incentive structure that Blizzard has created. It's only a waste of time if those incentives are your definition of time well spent.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, do you remember why you chose to make The PuG on a PvP-server? Doesn't that contradict what you are saying now?

Kelindria said...

How hard would it be though to bring back world pvp. Imo it remains one of the most untapped potentials of wow.

Just add a weekly pvp objective of kill (named faction leader) and add an weekly quest for killing 50 players in any city. Offer 100 conquest points and 750 honor for each one.

Add in more large bg like fights similar to Tb and WG. Have there rewards be something like 10% less repair costs while your faction controls or 20% increase of gold looted.

The reason actual pvpers go and gank people is because there is nothing else to do except the same bgs they've done 1000 times. The reason your moron kills you is simply because you are of the opposite faction. In short you are his opposition and many people pvp for the sake of annoying the other player.

I play on a pve server so the only ganking spot was wg. The reasons I ganked people there was for how badly they were crushing us for wg control and as a way to farm honor in between bgs. I did however make up some sort of "code" for myself to follow in which if I was going to attack people I outgeared, I was also going to have to attack classes that usually beat me 1 vs 1 and people who outgeared me. The majority of people put up a good fight and kept me entertained in between bgs. I left fisherman alone because they usually can't put up any sort of a fight with a fishing rod in hand.

Anonymous said...

Yes, flying mounts is one reason world pvp doesn't exist.

Another thing is that there are now a lot more zones(space), so people are more spread out.

There is also a lot more to do than before. When people aren't raiding, instead of going out to do some world pvp, they prefer doing achievements, archaeology or something else.

There's also no real need to farm gold by killing mobs. Like back in the days in Tyr's Hand. There were always some pvp there. Now people go do dailies with their flying mounts, dungeons for the gold reward, etc.

Another reason, I think, is resilience. If I'm out doing dailies or something else that require me to fight mobs, I prefer my pve gear as I'll do more damage/have better mana regen, which means less time spent doing whatever I'm there to do.
So if someone that is out to do world pvp jumps me, I wont often bother to fight back when I ress.
Some classes+specces perform very poorly in pvp without resilience.

Sean said...

In the original vanilla WoW, world PvP added a lot of excitement to the game. You could meet a foe during questing and that made it dangerous. WoW has changed since those days. The advent of BGs essentially made world PvP unsustainable.

This is not saying that BGs are a bad thing - because the continual changes to WoW is what made it as long lasting as it has.

Azuriel said...

This post seems amazingly out of touch.

Unless you end up selling your account/gold, nothing you do in-game has any out-of-game benefit other than personal enjoyment. Obviously gankers receive enjoyment from the ganking itself, considering they receive nothing else as you stated. So your ultimate question as to why bother having this sort of "no-reward" system in place is bizarre. The ganker clearly got something from it: he disrupted your schedule, got you to make a borderline LiveJournal post about it, and probably relieved his own inner demons by kicking a virtual puppy.

Saying that he (or you) could get better honor/hour from BGs is completely besides the point. I almost wonder why you bother PvPing at all - it is as though you only care about "winning" in the vague sense, rather than the fast-paced do-or-die combat. I could lose horribly in a WSG and still have fun. Can you?

nightgerbil said...

"In BG you can prevent beeing killed by leaving the graveyards in ghost-form. I see leeching ghosts coming..."

It doesnt work, you dont get hks while a ghost. Reduces the total honour you get. I use ghost hiding sometimes in iretrively lost bgs where I am being graveyard camped with no chance to escape and they are removing my insignia. Its weak and yes its throwing in the towel, but when tits 5:1 and they have a healer, its utterly pointless to mindlessly ress, your just giving them free honour.

My experince of world pvp with the pug: hiding from level ??? on dragons doing archelogy. Feigning death while level ??? fly over my head on their dragons. Being one shotted while reading quest descriptions. Appearing through the portal at the "dark portal" to goto the outlands and being killed by a ??? and corpse camped. Being corpse camped. Logging of for days because they followed me to he graveyard where I spirit ressed and are camping me there. Being approached while doing a quest in hellfire by a lev61 belf priest (I was 67), I set my pet on her and spammed aracne shot until she nearly died. She ran out of my range and healed herself until oom. At 70% health with no mana she ran away and I called my pet back. I could have killed her, but I didnt slow,dot or stun her. She left me alone and thats all I wanted. In bgs we are (reasonably) fairly matched and we are all ready for it. World pvp itself seems to be purely about ruining someone elses leisure time.

orcstar said...

If you want impact pvp, go play Eve online. If you lose you lose your ships and your oppenent gets to pick up some of what was on it, which would equate in WoW that if you die, you lose the gear you're wearing and some of it drops for your opponent.

At first it was hard to get into that mindset but the thrill is so much better.