For me, MMORPGs tend to be a little dull when most of my character’s interaction is with non-playable-characters (NPC). For me, an MMORPG really shines once I get to Player vs. Player combat, or PVP (PVE meaning Player vs. Enemy, referring to NPCs) and with the Star Wars universe having such a clear good guy vs bad guy message, it would be a shame for Bioware to not include an awesome PVP system.

Now as anyone who has played an MMO in the past knows, a PVP system is not something that can just be slapped onto a game, it is a huge ordeal that requires a lot of thought and more importantly, balance. If a PVP system is unbalanced, you will have thousands of people creating characters of a class that is widely known as being overpowered, and the population of other classes will suffer. Also it is never any fun to be playing your favorite class when that class is in some way drastically less powerful than the others.

Of the many MMOs out there, I have only played Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, and World of Warcraft. Of those three the clear winner in PVP is World of Warcraft which has two forms, World and Battleground. World PVP ranges from your basic encounters with a member of the enemy team while out doing quests to full scale raids on major cities while Battlegrounds are smaller instanced worlds where there is a clear objective and each team has to fight to accomplish it first.

I believe that the battleground system in WoW would lend itself nicely to the Jedi vs. Sith conflict that is ever present in the time of TOR. But that does not mean that I think world PVP should be ignored, the system where both are present has worked in the past and will work in TOR. Also the issue of balance is very important, and since there are no details on the classes that are in the game, let alone a full class list, there is no way to predict what problems could arise.

Look for another post on the topic in the coming months as details start to emerge.