Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and World of Warcraft should never be put in the same article, and for SHAME Malygris for reporting what I see as inconsequential news. Really, it's only something that will end with hurt feelings and large, obtrusive expressions of nerd-rage on both sides; World of Warcraft takes things that have worked from other games, such as the Achievement system most prominently featured in Lord of the Rings Online and more recently introduced in Warhammer Online's Tome of Knowledge system. Their Player versus Player system has never been exemplary or spectacular either, with, at this rate, three battlegrounds in the beginning with a new one (usually an uncreative combination of systems already implemented in the game) every expansion (e.g. Eye of the Storm for Burning Crusade, Stand of the Ancients for Wrath). The few world objectives they had were nothing more than gimmicky time killers, like if Patrick's mom had called him up for dinner and the other four to nine basement-dwelling machildren were waiting for him to come back so they could finish Stratholme. Like previously mentioned, the most incentive EVER to accomplish these was the Spirit Shards awarded for the Tower control in the Bone Wastes, if only for more loot after the party. Which was and is all World of Warcraft's PvP system has been about; the only encouragement was easily-obtained "welfare" equipment from incredibly controlled, if not random and generally uncoordinated skirmishes in both Battlegrounds and the relatively recent Arena system.
Lake Wintergrasp is basically a claimed rip-off of the Keep system in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, where you strap down cannons and battering rams and pots of boiling oil, and piss away minutes to hours clobbering doors, knocking down emplacements, and beating the living hell out of each other; only to do it again a few hours later, different, stronger, and all the wiser for it. Now, the Siege mechanics as sold in Wrath are different, definitely; you get to jump into a Warthog and fill bipedal cows with flak, then burn down a building whole-heartedly. But the principle remains; up until now, PvP had been a entertainment in the game, not an actual focus and something that you participated in for bragging rights (well, everything is essentially bragging rights in THAT game, but regardless). This sudden interest and "revolutionizing" can clearly be seen as a retaliation. Though it may seem a little bit narcissistic for Mythic to react to it as either flattery or take offense by the action, it's a tad justified; it means the monopoly regards Mythic's brainchild as, to some extent, a threat, and one that must be crushed under the weight of thousands of megabytes of new content, or face competition in a market they industrialized upon.
