The thing is that the percentage of people who are going to have to deal with rules lawyering or manastone camping is pretty low. So PVP 'fixing' those aspects of the game is too high of a price to pay for most people.
In the end I think for your average MMO PVP is about as popular as high end crafting or other really niche things, but it does well on twitch so it gets more attention from devs than it would in an otherwise fair system. There is always a really loud minority shouting for PVP but none of the really PVP focused things have much of a lifetime because it really relies on blackmailing people who hate PVP into joining up with some promise of a more perfect experience.
Two great examples I can think of are Tera where people clamored for PVP prior to level 45 (which was when pvp started on ktera) it of course was a mess of low level ganking because nothing about sub 45 stats was balanced for PVP and all the low level maps were awful choke points. Another one was some popular PVP streamer asking for open PVP in FFXIV of all places, which would have the same issues of choke point rich maps and stats that simply aren't designed for open PVP.
I'm willing to believe EQ PVP is somewhat different, but I've seen the same thing out of PVP'ers for years, it is the alpha and omega, it is the solution to every problem, it is the most enjoyable mode. Which is true for some people but not most. As if the crazy people who are asserting control through rules lawyering and superior numbers will somehow find themselves disadvantaged while PVP flagged.
|