What Was Your Experience Like In Peak PVP?

I began playing DCUO back in June, since then I've heard more than my fair share of how PvP is not as activate as it once was.

To the players that got to see DCUO PvP at it's peak, what was it like? Was it fun? Was it rewarding? How did it help you on optimizing your toon?

Played during 2012-2013, took a break, came back in 2015. I remember The Last Laugh DLC instances and 8v8s popping would be commonplace during the early years. There was an Australia 8v8 PvP level 10 mission that I was able to do with my toons with absolutely no issue. Getting the needed PvP marks wasn't nearly as grind-y as farming the old PvE stuff like Marks of Krypton/Distinction/Momentum and what have you. So getting the PvP gear to be competent wasn't much of an issue if you liked PvP. Honestly, I don't remember the combat system too much but it was far more balanced than what you call "PvP" today.

Open-world PvP was really fun too, then people started crying about noobs getting ganked.

I think the very last time I successfully popped for an 8v8 was in late 2016. New players today will probably never see an 8v8 and that's a shame. There was still PvP activity in 2015-2017 as I was able to get 4v4 and 5v5 instances very often. Nowadays, I can't get any of those to open. I'd love to see it come back, even at that stage.

We do get those weirdos who want to get rid of PvP for whatever reason (Reaction formation due to not being any good at it or just wanting handouts like free feats.) but just know that they don't speak for the majority The game population just don't want to bother getting violated by overpowered tanks and healers.

I started as a PvP player. But mostly open-world PvP. You know one of those guys who would waste hours upon hours standing on rooftop of Lil Bohemia Hospital and just talking and pvping. It was back in 2011-2014. Open world was populated. PvP ques used to pop really fast. My favourite was when we had Rock, Paper, Scissor mechanics in PvP.

Here is a bit of examples from PvP back in the day =)
FightClub on Helipad:

Rooftop:

Really interesting iEddy! Thanks for the info :3

When PVP was at its peak, that's ultimately when DCUO was at its best. See, I come from the true OG days having started into this game all the way back on February 17, 2011. And, at that time, every platform region was broken up into several different servers. On the USPS3 we had eight; five PVE and three PVP. Of those three PVP servers the names were Blood Will Run, The Killing Joke, and No Man's Land. I started on BWR, but transitioned to TKJ as I heard all of the best competition was there.

It wasn't until October 2011 when we had our very first server merge. It was just the respective servers among each platform region being merged together. We were still years away from PC and PS coming together. But, that's a very significant date because it's when things became very serious as everyone from each of those PVP servers were at war for bragging rights of who was the best. Those rivalries were real. And, I think it's fair to say those of us from TKJ won that.

We were definitely a much more disciplined PVP crowd back in the years from 2011-2014. The unwritten rules that we established among each other were taken very seriously, especially when it came down to how we gathered on Fight Club grounds. For those of us on USPS3, Metropolis Star Labs was the original site. The duel feature hadn't even existed during that first year. We were strictly doing 1v1s against players from the opposing faction and we had no gank rules during those moments.

This is how serious we took that no gank rule. If someone jumped in to do that during a 1v1 faceoff, everyone from that player's respective faction would step aside so that the players from the opposing faction could all step in to gank whoever that may have been as punishment. That's honestly how we learned integrity and respect among each other, and it worked. The funny thing about FC, the duel feature is in existence today because of what we started then. Talk about influence.

But, if you're to ask me my favorite all-time PVP moment, it will forever be the PVP war hosted by Mepps as Evil Mepps and Radar X to promote the Last Laugh DLC. They were our active generals, and the objective was whoever takes down the opposition's general first of course wins the war. You already know they were in God Mode. Yet, I've never seen a greater gathering of the DCUO community ever. It was simply all out war in the original Gotham, being too much for the servers to handle as they kept crashing, haha. But, it was the most fun and there will never be another moment in DCUO like it.

Real PVP died after 2014 because that's when the DEVS started catering to players who didn't put in the work to earn their keep and wanted things easy. And, it's made an absolute turn for the worst since then. We haven't had a proper PVP update since 2016, as the true potential of the mode has been completely killed off. It's a very weird PVP crowd now as there's no real discipline among them. Nobody respects the unwritten rules anymore, removal of ability to counter power abilities threw the balance off as players just rely on spamming now displaying no real skill, and on top of that PVP instances are no longer regularly queued, which basically forces players to boost for PVP feats now. That's a complete joke, smh.

It's been nearly 12 years; you know? And, the saddest part in all of this is, the newer generation of DCUO will NEVER get to experience PVP in the way us OGs did when the culture was at its peak. It's simply too far gone now with the majority of the PVP crowd having been lost over the years. If a lot of such players have stuck around, things would be different now, for sure. Once upon a time, the PVP phase was the most populated and active side. What does that tell you for how much PVP at its peak meant to this game? Yet, the DEVS failed to prioritize it and killed their own game's potential. I miss it...

The Bad Guy wishes he could give this post a second like. Good to see you are still around Lord Solar.

I have never been one for PvP with my toon. I really don't care for having to lug around two sets of armour on me. I did enjoy the Legends PvP. That was almost always fun!

PVP used to be the best part of the game hands down. I miss the rock paper scissors mechanic in larger matches and the strategy's that caused .
improving at PVP also helps you improve as a player. better able to read attacks and know counters.

I have one friend left from that era that logs maybe once a day for the rewards and logs right out. PvP was the best part of this game and encouraging to get skill points up. Now you just get a few allies and some cheese grated artifacts to do the fighting for you. PvP gear is nearly irrelevant nowadays. You can get the same amount of toughness from the lvl 23 and 28 gear from the hideouts as you get on 101 gear. Toughness is the same across all levels of pvp gear. So if you wanna duel or open world nowadays you only need five to seven pieces of 96 or 97 gear. Obviously you'd go for 97 because you can skip 96. Arenas used to be so much fun. Rip PvP

Well said man.
I've T-bagged, I've been T-bagged, not many can say that anymore lol.

That first couple of years PVP was absolutely glorious mayhem. Half of the participants didn't know what the objectives were, most of that same half were in PVE gear and dying in seconds, people were running around aimlessly, particle effects rendered the screen an incoherent mess, voice chat was a cacophony of screaming babies, rap music, and people shouting what idiots the other players were.

I've never had so much fun in my life.

I was playing pvp back in the days at its peak and then some. I played in matches where you had pvp role gear. You had tank, troll, healer and dps gear.
I remember when 1 ice tank could take on 8 people and win. Then they nerfed ice tank.
Lvpe used to be ran daily. Every day we would all do pvp for our daily loot.

Back then weapon skill mattered. It was laggy, it was buggy but it was fun.

This is hard without heavy nostalgia glasses. So take everything i say with good amount of sceptisism.
Back then 2011-2013 PvP was at its best. There were serious competition and healthy respect for other players. Even villains

I came to the game in late Alpha. I played all through the Beta, early release, and then Live. I played with the original servers, then the Megaserver introduction.

I'll hit the highlights of peak PVP.

There was no Suicide Squad function for mixing Heroes and Villains, so the game divided into two camps. PvE players, people who wanted to raid and do the endgame content, they almost all went to the Hero side. If the population split 50/50, finding groups was harder than if the population split 95/5. So one faction acquired almost all of the players, and they could raid any time day or night, while on villainside you could not get together a pick-up basically at all. You had to have a League with a dedicated group that was willing to do it, and they were not plentiful, because most of those players just made Hero characters and went where it was easier.

PvP was the opposite beast. When a game has a rigid faction system, and the split is something akin to 95/5, that means when players queue for PvP, there would be dozens of groups and hundreds of heroes queued up, but only that handful of villains. It had the opposite effect. The villains could get a PvP queue to pop instantly. The same group could run back-to-back-to-back. Heroes would get one single match, and then get cycled to the back of the line to wait while a hundred other heroes slowly got their turn. So if you were a PvP focused player, you primarily went to the villain side where you could PvP all day.

Contrary to what many players might say, the game was never two different games. There was not a PvE game and a PvP game. The game's resources were split largely along the same lines as the player base. It was a 95% PvE game, that had a small, optional PvP mini-game included for people who were interested, but that was ultimately optional. Saying "I'm a PvP Player in DCUO" was about the equivalent of saying "I play World of Warcraft, but all I do is Crafting". It's such a small portion of the game that it barely constitutes playing, even if you really loved it.

With a ton of players engaged in the PvP, it was legitimately really fun. My first character was a villain, and I had a blast with the PvP. But even at the time, I could see through the haze well enough to understand the hurdles.

- As a villain, I could play this all I wanted. It was fun. And since I got more experience than the players I played against (and my teammates were more experienced) we tended to be better. The villains largely steamrolled the PvP circuit. The waiting lines were too long for the Heroes, so while an individual group of heroes might organize and present a real challenge, they only cycled around about once in a blue moon, as other people also were waiting in line. So mostly it was experienced players crushing inexperienced players. While that is fun being on the winning side, you can see it being short-lived as well. There was a limit to how long the heroes were going to keep charging like lemmings to their death. Even within the first few months, their interest in PvP started to taper off, because they couldn't compete. And as fewer of them were interested in playing, villains lost their advantage of the faster queues and things started to even up a bit more.

- The gear disparity was real. By the time Fortress of Solitude was coming out, the gear had become an issue. The top end PvP gear was flatly inferior in almost every way to the top end PvE gear. They did their Toughness versus Defense split, but the Toughness mitigation on PvP armor just didn't mitigate enough damage to balance out the huge amounts of extra Might and Precision (and the raw Damage stat on weapons) that were coming out of the raids. Suddenly Heroes out-geared the villains and they were killing players easily because of a massive stat disparity. Villains were being forced to go run excessive amounts of PvE content to grind PvE gear so that they could use it in PvP. And that was something a lot of them had zero interest in doing, so when the pendulum swung too far and they were told they had to raid, they started either quitting or going heroside as well.

- When Last Laugh came around, that was SOE's last ditch effort to monetize PvP, and it failed spectacularly. They introduced new PvP gear as an answer to the PvP players who needed potential gear upgrades that could be earned for PvP through PvP, but they put Loot Locks on PvP. You could only collect your marks from each map daily. So suddenly the players who wanted to spend all day PvP'ing could do it again... but they couldn't get rewards without spending oodles and oodles of Replay Badges. Pay money for each individual match you play. And here's the kicker, there was the lesser consolation prize for losing, so a loss also loot locked you from the map. Pay money to play a PvP game, and then MAYBE get your rewards. Or maybe you paid money for that match and some speed-hacker kills you with infinite grenades, and you just lose that money and have to pay again. And you still had PvE players in PvE gear with better stats than you, because you would have to PvP for 6 months at this new, slower rate in order to earn your PvP gear. And it introduced a bunch of new maps, but the maps were locked as a part of the content of the expansion, so anyone else who didn't buy Last Laugh couldn't be populated to those maps. Which meant, essentially, if you did buy the expansion, those maps never popped. The game would always be able to find 8 players for Australia or 5 players for Moon Base faster than it could find the players needed out of the smaller subsection that bought the DLC for the new maps, so it was only the old stuff popping. You paid for games that you didn't get to play, because other people didn't also want to pay for it.

- When Suicide Squad came around and everybody got mixed, this evened out the queues. Everyone had the same waiting period. That meant that Heroes finally didn't have to wait in line forever; they could play against themselves. That also basically killed the villainside of the game. Villains no longer had the instant-pops, because the heroes were playing against themselves. Now villains had the same wait as the heroes. Villains didn't have the numbers for PvE content, and they didn't have the pops for PvP. Suicide Squad was supposed to help the villains with PvE queues as well, but that only worked if you were using the random queue. So you could sit forever still waiting on a Tank or a Healer (back then, role optional buffs weren't a thing), or you could get stuck in random groups with idiots or griefers, but heroside PvP could actually put together organized groups and play fun matches against other organized groups of heroes. Suicide Squad for the villains was about letting them mix in with heroes that they weren't allowed to even talk to in chat; a zero communication effort to open up 95% of the game, that largely failed. For heroes? It was basically just allowing them to play AGAINST each other, so they could do the exact same thing they were already doing, but with less waiting.

It was a win for 95% of the players, but it was basically the death of PvP. The players who loved PvP and played it all day, quit because of the waiting lines. The players who remained were the players who enjoyed the other 95% of the game, the PvE players who understood that PvP was not intended to be it's own game, but rather just a small mini-game within the game, and could see that PvP was never going to get the resources that PvE did. So, as the remaining players checked off their feats they wanted, or unlocked the styles they were looking for, they exited PvP and never looked back.

Much the way a player who has every feat and drop from out of Batcave doesn't have to go back to Batcave ever again, PvP wasn't something the heroes did because it was fun. It was a checkbox they were trying to finish so that they could move forward and do something else.

Today? This is the something else. The players who remain are the players who understand it was never a PvP game to begin with, and that the system just isn't engaging enough to sustain a playerbase on that sliver of the content that is PvP.

shame non of us saved any open world fights with olympus. our one group vs like 25 of them. ah the good ood days.

Friday night fights(both PvP and PvE)..which was the precipice to Survival Mode.

PVP was never good. It was always full of exploits, OP powers/roles and cheaters.

PvP was good, until block break changes were pushed on me and my friends, now you have to hold to block break, and no one really uses hold block break because it is so predictable. revert block breaks to tap to block break and I'll play player vs player!

Peak PVP was 2011-2013 If that area of the game was left separate it would still be fine today. Many changes pvp experienced was changes nobody asked for. Reading through these Post Britt pointed out a huge problem was Queing and shes right on that front being a vil main at the time our Que was instant but we often while gearing you got into a match with a full hero premade and it was ruff to say the least gearing up as a vil was a long process, I guess the same can be said for heros looking back as how long it took them to get into a match. The Good point is pvp was very fun for me during that period, even 8v8 was fun in out back the fast paced content was very skill incentive and rewarding being able to take on multiple people at once. The entire RPS was amazing in dc it allowed many combinations of groups to be made and created a chess like feeling in comp pvp. The game when down hill for me when they slowed down everything changed blocking create the blue immunity which created a play style when grounds would have someone still in the pocket to hold block. Overall in 2012 they wasn't a game I rather play then Dc and to this day me and friends I met over the years still talk about what went wrong with this game and pvp and why was so much changed to that wasn't asked for.