The problem with these new UOs is that there are no victims, only hardcore players who enjoy this brutal setting. With UO people had no choice since the "care bear" alternatives didn't exist. This makes the new UOs with PK and full loot much less dynamic.
That's where MOBAs come in. It crystallizes the essence of PvP MMOs and gives them arena style gameplay like Quake. Another reason why they tend to be the most addicting of online games.
No way. Yes, MOBAs have their place, but confined arenas give a very good game experience from massive, sprawling, unstructured, player-driven worlds. Truly good PvP-focused MMOs are much closer to Minecraft than they are to MOBAs, RTSs, or FPSs. You can't really compare the two.
Exactly. But see my post above about predator/prey ratios.
And this gets to the other point, I'd argue that if a player (not character) only finds a game fun if there are 'victims' to exploit that they are in fact the problem. IMO a true fan of such things would enjoy the 'hardcore players who enjoy this brutal setting', but we've seen time and time again that these games fail because the majority of people who say they want these games really just want to be at the top of the food chain.
Random side note: The 'care bear' term erupted on the CoB board. The LS roleplayers tended to be very PvP heavy. The Chessie roleplayers were generally PvP averse. We called them care bears and they called us the biker gang. This lead to things like them making throwaway chars on LS to give us a "care bear invasion" at Silks, us making chars over there for impromptu events (some involving Koster himself), etc.
