What Would Make PvP Better?
The most notable change in this area from Diablo I to its predecessor was the change from the persistent friendly fire of Diablo I, where any projectile could hurt your comrades or simply other players in the game, to the system of Diablo II, which required players to declare hostility against other players. With this came even further changes as the game grew older, including patching of some side affects that were not fully handled in the initial release of Diablo II. This included things like magical projectiles being cast before a player clicks the hostility button and then instantly killing other players unknowingly. Other restrictions included restricted access to Town Portals and Way Points.
Other issues which were still never addressed are some continuing aspects of griefing, which is often exploited by more powerful characters on the weak, the spamming of health, mana, and rejuvenation potions during duels, and the heavily controversial gift of Teleportation, an original skill of the Sorceress, which was allowed to be used with any character until the introduction of the Enigma runeword, which was introduced in patch 1.10.
What needs to be better with Diablo III's PvP system? What was bad about it in previous games? What new mechanics should be introduced to it to make it a more viable time-consumer in the end-game?
Get over yourself.
There are plenty of people, myself included, that almost never touched PvP because they hate and still love the PvM part all the way and even through years.
Not everyone need PvP for the game to last just because you say so.
I don't think anyone was saying that because no one has offered an absolute position on that, even me. I completely acknowledge that PvP was played in Diablo II. However, PvM is obviously much more common. I see more Baal, Chaos, Cow, Trist run, most of which are full or close to it, and so forth games, more rushing games (and when said are free are completely full most times), and more monster-milking games than I have ever seen of PvP.
PvP, though, is used and is nice filler in between finding crap, killing stuff, and levelling up.
However, I'd also argue that pvp is what has kept this game alive and so popular. D2jsp is without a doubt the most widely used trading/guide forum for D2. Log in and check it out. Notice how 99% of the content people post is related to pvp. Maybe...just maybe...there's a direct connection between pvp in the game being popular, and the most popular/useful/informative d2 site being so heavily focused around the pvp community.
Its not that the pvm in the game sucks, its just for, from the perspective I've gained from playing the game since it release, pvp is what people turn to when they have mastered pvm and its just boring and easy. I would have invested probably about 1/100th of the time in the game that I did, if it wasn't for such a loosely regulated pvp set up. Such a fun mixture of pk'ing, pub duels, and structured duels is what has kept meplaying for so long.
Correct. I have never used it, personally, because I can get what I want fine in-game, although I have made... I believe I am up to three accounts on it because I keep forgetting about it.
Let's analyze why, then. Why do you think there are not as many PvM posts? Because PvM issues are largely trade issues- services, like rushing and levelling, and gear-pedaling, which is directly a part of the PvM portion of the game. If you factor that in, PvP gets blown out of the water on that site. That is how I view it.
However, I would add that the majority of the people I play with do not talk about D2JSP when they want to trade with me or admit to having an account when I ask them. I seem to notice that it is a trend of the "elite" players, which would mean the smallest group of players in-game. This is balanced out by the fact that elite players do more trading than casual and require such a service. If there is anything I think Blizzard skimped on it was trading in Diablo II, which is the games second backbone, and I think they really missed out when they did not think of a trade solution like D2JSP first.
I've been on there for years, and most the people there are only there for 4 things primarily. The guides, trading to beef up their duelers, finding people to duel, and flaming eachother.
As I'm looking at the site right now, there are currently 1910 forum pages of pvp topics, and 490 of pvm. I'm not gonna bother counting up every guide but probably 90% of them are pvp guides.
To show the popularity of the site...
511,159 registered members
Most users ever online was 7,729 on Aug 2 2009
and even at an off time like right now...
online users: 3,006
I think a site of this size provides some pretty solid evidence more people are on d2 for PvP then PvM.
What I said in that quote was that since I believe trading is a direct child of PvM (without PvM, there would not be trading, whereas there would be trading even if there wasn't PvP, and collecting items is a part of PvM, MFing is an issue of PvM), and since the vast majority of the posts on D2JSP are for trading, PvM is more commonplace discussion on that board. Just because it's not under their PvM forum does not mean that it isn't PvM.
That is just how I personally view the relation, though, and I can understand if you don't agree.
Well lets expand Seth logic and see how it works out, since you cant pvp at level one...
You must PvM to PvP, therefore PvP = PvM
Sorry Seth, it doesn't make sense.
As far as d2jsp goes, the vast majority of the trading is going to gear pvp characters. If all the people who play primarily for pvp quit tomorrow, the trading boards would slow to a crawl.
If you really wanna get technical about it, trading is pvp, since you and some other player are both trying to get the best deal you can off each other, unless of course you do all your trading with Charsi.