Killing thy neighbor.
It was late in coming, but the latest part to The Second Big Bang: a Glance into the Maelstrom, is now online. Focusing on PvP in MMORPGs, it touches on what’s missing in current PvP offerings, and where developers can go from here.
MMORPGs need to differentiate battlefields from the generic world; as World PvP shifts borders, NPC troops should move alongside them, and there should be constant struggle between opposing NPC factions.
The future of PvP in MMORPGs isn’t solo ganking in a world PvP atmosphere, but rather in the organized, strategic approach to massive confrontations. Check out the whole article for more.
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I want to say that Eve-Online hits a majority of the points that you make out for World PvP, although it doesn’t address the ganking issue - you gank newbies in Eve probably more easily than you gank them in other games. But the major point - that the world is dynamic, and there are large objectives for them to complete if they choose to be a part of that world is largely aligned along to the same goal. Although, I will say, the mechanics of how Eve operates with regard to skills is vastly different from most other MMORPGs that I have ever heard of (Eve is the only one I have played) in so far as skills progress in real time, so there is little “grinding” for the ability to use individual skills, although you may have to grind for in-game currency in order to take advantage of said skills.
The problem with Eve-Online is implementation - They have set themselves on a single shard model in order to foster that World PvP you talk about, but on the other hand, as more people join the game, lag becomes more of an issue that it should ever be. The server cluster hosts up to 30k people at some times during the weekends, and the effects of lag it creates hinders the efforts to make the game as dynamic as possible. As a quick example, there was a fleet battle where nearly 1000 people turned up to accomplish a gigantic goal: the destruction of an Titan (largest ship class) before it would be completed. Unfortunately, the node that hosted the solar system the battle would take place in could not handle that number of players, and it crashed.
-James