Seen a few games

So in the past six months or so I've been taking a hiatus from World of WarCraft, and played RIFT, Star Wars the Old Republic, and League of Legends. It sounds a bit like a mismatch - two MMOs and a free to play PvP matchup game. Only one of the three has captured my interest, however.

Frankly, I'm tired of MMOs and their formula. Make a character. Do some quests to learn the lore. Acquire weapons and armor. Craft some things that are mostly useless. Get to max level. Group together to kill large enemies. Acquire more weapons and armor. Rinse. Repeat.

The PvP in most MMOs is trashy at best. You go in with the same character you use in PvE, with the same abilities designed to fight monsters, and use them against players. It almost always fails. The key to good PvP is pretty simple:

1. Quick response time. It doesn't matter what abilities I have if I can't access them quickly by keystroke, without moving my hands around on the keyboard to find them. And when I click an ability, it better happen now. Not three seconds from now, not when some graphic or collision is done being calculated, but now. Right now. Having a cooldown to prevent spamming an ability must in no way prevent, inhibit, or make difficult my ability to use it once. Your UI needs to be as responsive as a typewriter, or you fail.

2. Even odds going in. What should separate me from winning or losing should be my intelligence, experience, and expertise in the combat arena, not the acquisition of gear, points, race/class selection, or anything else outside the arena. Victory should be skill based, not based on time invested or long-term PvE choices. It is up to the game to figure out how to make it even, it's not my responsibility. My job is to have fun, and keep sticking quarters into the machine. Why do MMOs think they are immune to this requirement?

3. No formulas, no macros. There should not be a single best method to victory. Everything chosen should have a counter, every path should lead to both victory and disaster, depending on the player's ability to predict, adapt, and think. Being the fastest person to press the Q key isn't sufficient to be called good PvP - using strategy and multiple abilities in the best circumstances are what good PvP is about. No 3rd-party addons allowed - everyone uses the same UI, and your UI should be smart and simple.

SO WarCraft fails due to continual imbalances. RIFT fails due to formulas, imbalances, and response time. SWTOR is nastily unresponsive, and their are flagrant class imbalances that go unaddressed League of Legends has them all beat - every game is a fresh start with and against a different batch of players, and every game is a sum of the experiences in that match only. When you win or lose, you pretty much start over. Over time you can buy runes, but they do only a little bit in terms of helping your abilities. What you do in game affects the outcome of the game the most.

And I'm sick of MMOs not giving me what I want. I want to create things, not just destroy them. I'm less interested in killing raptors or enemy soldiers than I am in building a trading post or changing the politics and economy of a region. Combat isn't nearly as fun as you think it is. Focus more on the reason we do things, and less on the repetitive nature of doing them. Give me a reason to think. Occupy my creative mind, not just my reactive one.

There aren't any MMOs that do this. Minecraft is probably the closest, and it's almost a parody of an MMO. It's certainly heavy on the creation, but it completely lacks a reactive environment.

So another set of games go by, and I still don't have what I want. I guess I'll keep playing LoL until something really satisfying comes along. Something like SimCity, but open-ended and multiplayer. What SWTOR could have been... give me a universe to explore. Give me endless space to settle, and infinite variation to play with. With a simple, competitive PvP system.

Is that too much to ask for?