What makes for good PvP?

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I can say that I would never want Ashes PvP to be primarily about 'military operations'.

So to go back. I began by talking about the way MOBAs are 'effectively really sped up versions of PvX MMORPG servers' and suggested that some efforts to be at least at the MOBA levels of retention would be good because the MOBAs have the retention advantage here through methods that aren't available in MMORPGs.

But I realize now that I have made an assumption in my arrogance, so I'll pinpoint where.

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The flow we started that led to that criticism was 'Noaani and I noting that you have to avoid the player retention problem in some way', and this came about because of MOBA stuff.

But here's the thing about that, MOBA Ranked queues often don't even let you queue with a full group. All coordination is on the fly, and both sides are at natural 'peak potential flow'. Similarly, it's often considerably better for a 'full stack' to train to fight together without any direct coordination at all.

And the issue is that this is exactly why dominant guilds remain dominant in PvP MMOs. We're talking people that don't have to discuss anything to be super effective. They just 'know' from experience with each other. They make mistakes, certainly, but not at the level that the 'ragtag alliance' normally can do anything about. This whole thing was my thought process going into it, so your response seemed weird to me.

MOBAs also do whatever they can to protect 'random group of 5 players queued together' from 'full stack of 5 who know each other's tactics perfectly', because the result from the Randoms is generally not 'hey guys let's be friends and work out our strategy to beat those guys'.

Your thoughts on this post were about 'scheduled PvP' and how it's not necessary, but I wasn't talking about any of that really. Because at '1/100th speed' a MOBA match doesn't have any scheduled PvP. But it does have enough structure to keep things somewhat fair to keep you from just getting beat on, or to let you know that if you are getting beat on, there's an upside somewhere else.

This is where PvP MMOs fall short, and where they have to work to get up to where MOBAs are.

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Then I'm glad, it seems that we got through all that and I can confirm we're on the same page in that regard. It is what I'm hoping for and expecting from Ashes. I have some other perspectives that I may share in another thread sometime relative to this (it's an Elite Dangerous thing, though, so it has too much preamble).

The tl;dr for if this thread is of any use to Intrepid is:

By implementing NPCs and 'Security Levels' and whatnot on 'both sides', Elite manages some 'True PvX' situations in its Conflict Zones without adding too many restrictions. I don't have to build 'the #1 PvP battleship' because the Conflict Zone will already contain some number of those on my 'side', I just have to figure out how to help them. At the same time, there's not going to be a lot I can do if a bunch of true enemy ace pilots show up to take them all out. I just won't need to think about 'how far I am from being able to 1v1 a Federal Corvette'.

I understand why scheduled PvP is a thing, I understand why 'no warning' PvP is a thing, and the current design seems to be 'building up toward benefits for the former' and 'discouraging the latter if not consensual'. I'm looking forward to Caravans and Dungeon clashes the most because those are the perfect 'inbetween' for me.