Open World PvP

[linayar]

It was very easy to force flag enemy players in WoW up until mid-MoP. There were dozens of little tricks to use so someone would end up flagged without their specific opt in. Even after Blizzard had addressed most of the tricks, new ones would be discovered or bugs would happen.

Let's say there are very specific PvP worlds created and open world PvP is only possible on those (which I doubt can happen considering how SE has to mirror everything world to world from the number of zone instances at expansion start to housing wards).

What about the player who just wants to get their MSQ progression or other content completed without being interrupted by PvP for a change? Tough for them, it's either PvP or don't play?

We saw what happened in WoW on PvP worlds. Players would migrate to majority faction so they didn't have to worry much about getting interrupted while doing other stuff. Those on the minority faction who didn't want to play the majority faction would abandon their characters or transfer to another world that either had their faction as the majority or was not a PvP world.

The majority faction had almost no one left to fight outside of a handful of diehards who were actually interested in world PvP. Cries of "Blizzard, do something! Make my world balanced again so I have someone to fight!" would fill the forums and yet those players who claimed they wanted to fight would never take the obivious step and change factions so they would have thousands of players to fight.

If world PvP doesn't work in the long run in a game that was supposedly designed for it, how well do you really think it's going to work in game that was not designed for world PvP at all?

Keep in mind we don't have factions as a basis for PvP here. SE had to pretty much give up on GCs for PvP and put everything into mercenary mode because players all flocked to what was perceived as the winning GC.

How many players are going to opt-in to participate when it's all FFA and any allies you recruit are subject to friendly fire?

So, I think that PVP servers are out of the question as any server they add would better serve the general player base rather than only part of it.

As for an opt-in method, FFXIV has the advantage of not having competing player factions out in the world that would flag you for PVP if you step into a competing faction's territory. I'm not sure what other methods WoW had for force flagging players for PVP, but FFXIV probably doesn't have them.

So if it's an entirely opt-in mode with no loophole, it should work well.

The other thing is there should be no other extrinsic reward for choosing to opt-in to OW-PVP, like increased exp. That way, people don't have to choose between wanting to do MSQ and gaining reward via opting in to that mode. Just like NG+, people would opt in to do PVP, not for other rewards.

So it's an entirely secluded mode where people have to choose, so events like unwanted wedding crashers can never happen unless people forgot to opt out, which would be their own fault. That said, the wedding itself is instanced and they could force no PVP in that area.