The WoW pacifist
(Visited 7290 times) Game talk
Jan 092008
How ironic is this? A player is attempting to level some characters all the way to 70 in WoW without ever killing anything. The only way to do it? PvP.
15 Minutes of Fame: Noor the pacifist – WOW Insider
It looks like PvP is a huge part of your strategy. Do you foresee continuing to PvP the whole way up? I have to; the repeatable daily battleground quests are the only way to “grind” XP if you aren’t going to kill mobs.
12 Responses to “The WoW pacifist”
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That’s not so much of a pacifist then, eh? 😉
Still, the idea of leveling up through other means beyond the norm of killing mobs all day is certainly interesting to see. The idea of advancing entirely through PvP (a competitive interaction between players) is also interesting, at least to me.
I believe EA/Mythic’s Warhammer will incorporate advancement through PvP in addition to PvE, and both will be important to the overall RvR system.
I played with Noor for a little bit when he was lower level. He not only does PvP, but for some quests he’ll buy items that other players have killed for. Like real life, it’s easy to say “I don’t believe in killing,” and then to go to the gas station/coffee shop/mall and purchase goods that came at the cost of other people’s lives. Our consumer culture does a good job of abstracting us away from ethical decisions. WoW, in some ways, represents a microcosm of the world we live in.
And don’t get me wrong: I’m a consumer too and don’t claim to be perfect.
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What struck me about this story – is the way it underlines just how narrow WoW’s design is. There’s only one rewarded verb in WoW and attempting to avoid it merely makes you reliant upon others to perform it in your stead.
Game/World is definitely a shades-of-gray classification – but at times like this I’m tempted to think this scale can be objectively measured as a count of rewarded verbs.
When EQ2 launched its PvP servers, I created a monk named Pacifist (see what I did there?) who was going to try to spearhead a peace movement to inspire people on the server not to fight each other.
I thought it was a funny idea, but once I realized that it would involve actual effort I gave up on the notion after a few /ooc messages to the zone. I was far more successful at convincing Blackguard how funny my idea was and getting him to form a guild with me, then conning him into carrying on the joke after I was bored with it.
“I believe EA/Mythic’s Warhammer will incorporate advancement through PvP in addition to PvE, and both will be important to the overall RvR system.”
As I recall, it was possible to advance all (or at least most) of the way to the level cap in Dark Age of Camelot through RvR/Battlegrounds, as well as on the PvP servers.
I’d be interested in seeing if any game had enough quests that didn’t mandate killing to succeed for a player to advance non-violently. In most level-based games, though, the chief reward for levelling up is increased combat prowess. somehow, becoming a veteran warrior without ever striking a blow in anger feels… wrong 🙂
If you actually read the interview, he doesn’t actually care about being a pacifist. He’s just making the game harder for the sake of challenging himself.
I think that is how most religions got started.
I’m exceedingly tempted to test this in eq2. There’s run-around quests, book quests for cataloging animals, exploration exp and collections. Assuming buying collection items is acceptable (and you don’t have to kill to them them, you just have to be high enough that the area is non-aggro), I suspect you could do it.
Back when I still played WoW, I gained about 5 levels on my gnome mage without killing anything. I was running around Ungoro Crater picking up piles of dirt and generating Morrowgrain from them. All the XP came from turning in the Morrowgrain to the questgiver. It took weeks for me to get exalted this way to buy the kitty mount. Let me tell you, I got *really really good* at running away from the big dinosaurs and other mobs in Ungoro Crater. 😛 I got so good at it I could navigate the whole crater, surrounded all the time by red mobs, for an entire day without getting killed. I set it as a sort of mini-goal for myself, to get through an entire day of grinding Morrowgrain without getting killed…
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