You think you hate PvP, but you don't.

I don’t care if you think you hate PvP. You really like it. In your secret heart of hearts, you have more fun when you’re playing against other people.

Imagine Chess as implemented in a non-PvP MMO. You play the White pieces. The AI plays Black. Except, (this being an MMO), Black* always* moves the same way. And, this being an MMO, if you ever make the wrong move, you can take it back and start over. Eventually, you discover the way past the moves Black always makes, and you win! And then you play this same game a hundred more times, and proclaim yourself the Uber Grandmaster of Chess.

Then you post it on a Chess spoiler site, and everyone else downloads it, beats Black first time with your moves, and proclaim themselves Uber Grandmasters of Chess. Pretty soon, all you have are Uber Grandmasters and noobs, who haven’t heard about that website yet.

Noobs are pathetic idiots. If they were any good, they’d be Uber Grandmasters. Duh!

That’s the non-PvP, MMO version of Chess. Works the same way every time, the only challenge (and it wasn’t much of one) was faced by the first person to figure out Black’s moves, and the Chess MMO devs saved time by not having Black have to change what it does based on how White was moving.

Same with Backgammon, Poker, Baseball, Global Thermonuclear War… all the really fun games you play against other people.

Even the fun times in non-PvP MMOs are against other players, racing other groups or raids to a newly spawned mob, trying to be the first guild to 60 or the fastest to mobilize or whatever… That’s PvP.

Because PvP doesn’t mean, I kill you, take all your stuff, burn your house down, say bad things about you to your friends. It can mean that, but that’s just one definition.

Player vs Player is just that – you against another player, not some stupid AI following a script. It doesn’t have to mean the death of your character or anything more major than a little loss of prestige and bragging rights.

For that matter, MMOs don’t always have to be about killing. Along with the inherent dullness of memorizing scripted behaviors, the emphasis on continual, anonymous, meaningless death is a real barrier for the millions of people who would never play an MMO. It’s hard to make a believable world when the most humble farmer kills a hundred orcs before breakfast.

Being Uberest Grandmaster of Chess when your opponent wasn’t even really playing, means nothing. Likewise, beating Onyxia by following a script you got off the web, means nothing. And you will wonder why the game isn’t fulfilling, eventually get bored, maybe go back to playing chess or poker or running in the Boston Marathon or doing something – anything – with (against) other people.

Even if you think you don’t like to PvP, its presence in the world makes the world more interesting. Playing against the computer is dull. Playing against people is fun. All my best memories of MMOs is against other players – beating a tough encounter before someone else (the encounter was meh, but beating out Guild X – booyah!), being the first on the server to do something (I believe I was the first on Stromm to finish a quest charm in the revised Plane of Hate – OMG WHEE!), top ten mana across all servers with my cleric… it’s all about the competition.

Is it any wonder that, though I only played on PvE servers, all my best memories are from PvP? Competition without even having to kill anyone else.