A few weeks back we saw the release anticipated patch 2.4.3 which will once again see the world (of Warcraft) turned on its head, however this is just one patch in many that have changed the pvp environment of World of Warcraft and that brings us to today’s musings...

As the World (of Warcraft) Turns.

Very few games have had the lifespan of World of Warcraft, so it should not be surprising that over the 5 years of the games existence it has gone through some huge changes, not least of which was the introduction of the player versus player honour system in patch 1.4 however this was just the beginning...

There have been 16 content patches so far, not to mention the countless minor changes and almost weekly small patches to fix game content, so in order to truly understand WoW you need to realise that it is an evolving game.

The initial Player vs. Player elements of the game were only really started in May of 2005 with the honour system, which rewarded players from each faction for killing a member of the opposite faction. This was a simple system... Too simple... So they quickly began patching and changing it.

The major issue for player versus player combat at the early stages of the game was that WoW was predominantly a player vs. environment game, the players were encouraged to kill virtual dragons and not each other, so the various classes had many imbalances against one another, in fact various classes had skills that where outright game destroying to other classes and so blizzard began to soften the edges of some skills, or as became the common term, to Nerf them.

However it was clear to the game designers that people were interested in destroying one another and in order to create a level of control over where people were going in the game, the next content patch saw the introduction of the Battleground. It is fun to point out at this point that prior to the existence of battlegrounds, groups of Horde and Alliance would often assemble in their hundreds at Tarren Mill, a small out of the way city for the Horde and Southshore a similar city for the alliance, There they would fight a swinging battle between each city for up to days at a time for no apparent reason and this often caused massive server lag in this area which is probably why Blizzard decided to step in and create special servers to satisfy the masses.

The first Battlegrounds were Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley, these glorious new shining servers allowed WoW players the opportunity to capture the flag from each other and also to have a simulated battle, however quickly Blizzard realised that certain skills that seemed to be fairly innocent when used under normal play were fairly game unbalancing when used by a skilled pvp’er so they began to dish out healthy doses of Nerf bat again.

Another Battleground was opened a month or two after the first two battlegrounds allowing players to have a base capturing game, once again well received by the player base and a welcome introduction to the pvp regime.

There were now 3 battlegrounds and also 2 armour sets available to the pvp player, it seemed that Blizzard was catering, in some small way at least to the players who were not as interested in killing the scripted bosses and more interested in killing their fellow players, truly though early days the pvp combat in WoW was starting to flourish.

However at this point there really was neither professional competition nor any sort of scope for one to exist. Players were stuck on their individual realms, cut off from further competition, so whilst individuals could rise to the top of their individual realm, they had no way of knowing who truly was the best.

However in August 2006, this was all to change, cross realm battlegrounds where created! This was a topic of great excitement for many WoW pvp’ers, mostly because they would be able to find a team to play against at all hours of the day who was not the same team they had come up against 100 times before on their own server. Also for those few who felt they were the greatest it was finally an opportunity to cross swords or staves or claws with their counter part from another realm and find out who would be... THE BEST!

Sadly Cross realm battlegrounds did not go far enough in this regard, it did not let people play against each other in a truly organised fashion, it was not until the Burning Crusade expansion that the arena was released and WoW pvp had the opportunity to turn in to something much more than it had ever been before. Now finally there was a system for teams of 2, 3 or 5 players to match their skills against similar skilled opponents and truly identify the best of the best! World of Warcraft had finally invented the vehicle to televised play and true event style gaming!

For the release of the new Arena’s once again Blizzard released A new armour set although with a twist this time, as characters in the game where becoming more powerful situations where arising that super powerful characters where able to one-shot (kill in a single spell or move) other players, so a new stat called resilience was created to prevent massive damage spikes and maintain a more balanced feel to pvp combat, this truly was the biggest step that had been taken to create a divide between pvp and pve play.

Which brings us to the current state of Play, suffice to say that the Arena’s are now not only an incredibly exciting playing alternative for the 9 million subscribers to the game, but they are also a big industry in the competitive gaming world, there is now a proper Tournament Realm that has been created for the sole purpose of championship play, the setting is already pretty exciting and one can only see it becoming more so in to the future!