So ever since World of Warcraft came out the trend of all new mmorpg's have had some sort of factions with in the game. For example Tera Online has factions but these factions do not have any story revolving around the races in the game you actually would have to go online and read lore in order to actually find out information about them. But all of your newer mmorpg's all include factions, Blade & Soul, Yulgang 2, ect.
So the question comes down to whether the best pvp mmorpg would need to have factions. For the most part when it comes to story lines this is what determines races usually of course Tera Online is the kind of mmorpg that feels like factions are not really planned out.
When it comes to the actual PvP system while factions do provide some sort of mission for players. I don't think a games success comes down to having factions. The issue with factions is usually the imbalance of the player base since everyone usually wants to join a certain faction. A perfect example was World of Warcraft you had alliance and horde some servers it was 1 horde to every 100 alliance members and then some servers where more 1 alliance to every 100 horde.
The problem's that are caused by these imbalances is when it comes down to world pvp events or events in general. The lack of players during specific times makes it so there has to be some buff compensation in order to provide a good balanced playing field for both sides. But then theres always the abuse of the buffs and the constant shifting of people wanting to move from one server to another. That displacement means the communities are usually unstable which can be bad for an mmorpg.
Many of the mmorpg's before factions came out focused more on specific class quests rather then you being a different race like for example Ragnarok Online had many quests which revolved around skills and things based on the class of course some NPC's wouldn't talk to people outside outside of people of other classes or give other dialogs besides the ones for a certain class but it did provide something for players to do that was different each new character made.
Faction based systems according to World of Warcraft are supposed to be to help build story for different races and allows players to experience something that only certain races will come though. But with the older class based system it does the same thing. Ragnarok Online also incorporated some variations in storyline which allowed someone to experience a different outcome if they responded differently to something.
When we look at these ways of doing it faction's don't seem to really be all that important. A good mmorpg doesn't need to have factions you can incorporate multiple ways of allowing people to experience different content without needing to force factions on people.
The other thing which factions do kind of ruin is the guild system the reason for this is if you have a different faction race and lets say you got some elves and they hate humans for what ever reason that means that if you have human friends they can't join your elf guild that is gonna make you either start playing human or you'll have to make your friends play elf.
The guild system works better in many ways then the faction based system when its incorporated properly. I will go over more about that when I get into how the guild system should work and all. But from a PvP point of view factions only make things difficult. I think in some ways it would make more sense to have factions as a secondary event type thing.
What I mean by event type with factions is your faction doesn't effect anything in the open world other then maybe things like the vendors you can buy from stuff like that. The PvP part of factions could be a closed arena like a weekly faction war but outside of that area and war time factions have very little to almost no effect on the masses then your normal PvP and guild vs guild takes place.
That would not only make more sense but would provide more things for players to do. Cause the issue with open world and constant faction conflict is that some people will like it while others will feel like its boring or has no point. But if its some special event everyone will be likely to show up.
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