You will never see the name of the player you're facing off against. Blizzard wanted to minimize the "shame of defeat" that tends to be a barrier to entry in PvP -- nobody likes feeling bad when they lose. You will never know who you've lost to, and they can't trash talk you during or afterwards. While your statistics page will keep track of your number of wins, it will not track your losses.via WoW Insider.
You could shrug that off and sneer about how WoW is just progressively becoming more and more of a hyper-casual game meant for toddlers and housewives, but it's not just Blizzard.
Guild Wars 2 does not show enemy names in WvW. SWTOR refused to allow cross-faction dialogue, even though Star Wars is famous for fight scene dialogue.
So many games now just want you to be faceless, nameless, voiceless automatons ... you're literally just Green-colored Thing X fighting Orange-colored Thing Y. And that's not interesting.
Ali-Frazier was interesting. Rivalries are interesting. Personalities are interesting.
Red Player 1 vs. Blue Player 2 is not interesting.
And it's just odd to me when games don't record your losses. Does getting your ass kicked magically feel better because it's not on your permament record? Does knowing that you won 40 times mean anything if you're the '62 Mets that lost 120 times?
Blizzard wanted to minimize the "shame of defeat" that tends to be a barrier to entry in PvP
Aren't you supposed to be at least a little ashamed of losing? Losing makes us strive to get better. Hiding names, hiding losses, hiding dialogue, sweeping things under the rug doesn't really fix any problems, it makes new ones. It's ignoring the real problems and trying to blindly string along players instead of proactively trying to help them improve and win and enjoy the game more and make the game better for everyone playing.
There's lots of barriers to entry in PvP -- but losing should never be. PvPers are going to lose. That's a sad fact of our sad lives. Players need to accept that and work towards avoiding a 40-120 record.
A key part of that is just educating players more about your PvP and keeping it fun. I had no idea what was going on the first time I saw PvP action, I remember somebody jumped me and then /spat and /shat and reverse-cowgirled my corpse non-stop while I shook my head and wondered "What the fuck just happened and why?"
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| PvP is like this. Except Ali is now "Pwntubads Umadqq". And he's breakdancing for 15 minutes after the fight. |
And I didn't want to PvP for years after that. Why would I, it's fucking stupid. I wasn't ashamed, I just wasn't interested. I wasn't informed, and nothing about it was fun.
The horrible shame isn't in losing matches, it's being put into shitty, unfun situations and feeling helpless, hopelessly out-matched, bored, abused. The shame here is that MMO PvP is so shittily iterated, the shame is that they do such a pisspoor job of telling players what the fuck is going on, the shame is that they so often intentionally bring out the worst in people.
If the guys making MMO PvP invented PvP it would work like this:
You wouldn't be told what the rules are or how anything really works or why, you're just thrown in front of a chessboard with your pieces randomly dropped in your lap. Your first opponents are a bunch of angry Chess Club kids that know how to play but are furious at the world because they're dorky Chess Club kids. They cannot speak to you or shake your hand, but they know to laugh and dance after they humiliate you.
Chess is PvP, but I've never heard anyone say "Fuck that, I want nothing to do with a game that has chess in it" or "Chess is for angry trolls with little dicks." But you hear that about PvP all the time.
I'm embarrassed by losing, but the issues with PvP that people really have ... the things that are really shamefully disgraceful... are that so many games throw so many players into the fire and so many of us are gagged, blinded, muffled and generally treated like problem children that only get rewarded with Skittles if we just shut the fuck up and continually stay frozen in front of our idiot boxes.
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