Originally Posted by
Sendra
A lot of good discussion going on here - I'm happy to see it.
I heard a lot about the old glory days of the Aquilonia server (I was on the US server Cimmeria - and we had our own glory days, in different ways). I'm sorry I missed the big glorious interguild wars full of RP.
But I don't think wars should be the only RP on an RP-PvP server. Personally, I dislike being "nameless guild soldier 1" all the time. But my characters can be their own individual selves, and still support their guild when it comes to wartime, to a large extent. But it does get complicated sometimes, and the only solution I found during some situations was to avoid RPing certain characters (except OOC for raids) during certain RP conflicts.
My attitude toward PvP and its role in RP is very different from a lot of the more aggressive PvP crowd. I think PvP is a terrible way of "settling" RP. The only thing settled with a PvP duel is that one player won the fight, or even that one player is better at PvP than another player. There is nothing about the RP settled by such a duel. Same with inter-guild battles.
I think of PvP more as one of the several tools we have for instigating or escalating RP conflict. If an RPer attacks another RPer out in the world, we have the beginning of a story to be played out. It can cause alliances to shift, relationships to form and break, lots of stuff. If it is used in that way, good things can happen. If it is instead used to simply grief one character (and a single attack is not griefing) whenever he/she appears in the world, then its purpose is to ruin their fun and try to stop them from playing, and definitely not to develop RP.
Of course, another reason to play on a PvP server and participate in PvP, unrelated to RP - is that, for many of us, battles - sieges, big guild vs. guild open world battles, smaller group vs. group battles - are FUN!. For that reason, preventing PvP, or condemning open-world PvP as harassment, harms the fun of many people who chose their server and game play quite deliberately and knowledgeably.