Scars of Honor’s PvP Dream Runs Into the Gank Wall — May 19, 2026

If you want to know what kind of MMO community Scars of Honor has right now, here’s the snapshot: half the room is trying to design a PvP system that creates memorable faction warfare without turning level 6 flower-picking into a public execution, and the other half is staring at the horizon waiting for the next real update. That tension — between big sandbox dreams and the very practical fear of being farmed into uninstalling — drove almost everything today.

The hottest thread by far circled a proposed notoriety system for open-world PvP. On paper, people clearly like the fantasy: the world reacting to your reputation, bounty-hunter energy, faction pride, maybe even a reason to hunt the hunters. In practice, the pushback was immediate. Players have seen this movie before, and they know exactly how fast “emergent PvP” can become “a geared guild turns lowbies into content.”

The Notoriety Pitch Sounds Cool Until the Graveyard Run Starts

The broad idea got a fair hearing. Some players compared it to World of Warcraft’s War Mode assassin-style systems or Ashes of Creation’s corruption model, with rewards for taking down high-notoriety players and penalties meant to discourage random murder sprees. The most charitable version of the argument was simple: give people a reason to fight in the open world, but make ganking costly enough that it doesn’t become the entire game.

That “costly enough” part is where the room split.

One side argued that any system like this is inherently exploitable. If rewards exist, organized guilds will optimize them. Friends will farm each other. The meta will calcify around whatever loophole pays out fastest, because that is what MMO players do when you hand them a machine with a lever on it. One player flatly said a coordinated guild would run the system “like a faucet,” which is a pretty good image for how quickly a clever playerbase can drain the fun out of a nice idea.

The other side didn’t deny the exploit risk so much as shrug at it. Every system in every MMO gets exploited somehow; that’s practically the genre’s second language. If something breaks, you patch it. If the minority abuses it, you don’t throw out the whole design. A few posters suggested obvious guardrails, like reduced or zero rewards for repeatedly killing the same players within a time window. That wouldn’t stop abuse entirely, but it would at least make the worst forms of win-trading more annoying to organize.

Still, the anti-gank camp kept dragging the conversation back to the same ugly scenario: low-level players trying to do basic quest content while high-level PvPers camp the route because they know exactly where the traffic is. One vivid example imagined a level 6 quest sending you to collect flowers from a place charmingly dubbed the Garden of Despair, only for the entrance to be packed with level 20 or 30 players waiting to erase you on sight. The sarcasm landed because everybody understood the point. If your “living world” means new players get body-blocked out of progression, you haven’t built danger. You’ve built churn.

The Real Fight Is Over Where PvP Belongs

Underneath the notoriety argument was a more fundamental disagreement: should open-world PvP be everywhere, somewhere, or mostly somewhere else?

A lot of players were fine with PvP existing in the world, but not with the idea of unrestricted flagging in any location. They wanted moderation: faction-controlled zones, contested regions, level-gap protections, starter areas that are permanently safe, and maybe the ability to toggle in your own territory while danger ramps up in borderlands. That version tries to preserve faction tension without turning every quest hub into a mugging.

Others took an even harder line: don’t force PvE players into PvP spaces at all, especially not for primary or secondary quests. If important content sits behind open-world PvP, then the game is effectively telling a chunk of its audience to either accept being prey or miss out. That was a non-starter for several people in chat, and honestly, it’s one of those lessons MMOs keep relearning with the enthusiasm of a goldfish.

But there was also a passionate defense of looser, messier world PvP. One player reminisced about getting farmed by a rogue-mage duo in early WoW, calling in a friend, still getting stomped, then rallying a dozen people through general chat to turn the whole thing into a faction skirmish. That memory — chaotic, unfair, social, and eventually triumphant — is exactly why some players don’t want PvP over-regulated into sterile queue content. For them, the point is not balance in the esports sense. The point is the story you tell afterward.

That’s the eternal MMO PvP split, really. One camp wants systems that prevent the worst player behavior. The other wants enough freedom for the best player stories to happen. Both are right, which is why this design problem keeps eating entire afternoons.

Players Want the World to Notice Their Violence, Not Just Count It

The most interesting detour in the PvP debate wasn’t about rewards at all. It was about presence.

One suggestion imagined a world where your faction reputation actually changes how NPCs behave. Rack up enough kills against the enemy, and opposing soldiers panic or flee unless they’re elite enough to stand their ground. Meanwhile, your own side salutes you as you pass. That’s not just a scoreboard with extra steps; it’s the world acknowledging that your character has become somebody.

A few people loved that immediately. One poster basically said if the world ignores what you’re doing, why bother? That’s a fair question, and not just for PvP. MMOs are full of systems that track your actions invisibly while the world itself remains weirdly indifferent. You can become a dragon-slaying war hero and still have the local guard treat you like a stranger who just wandered in asking where the mailbox is.

There was some skepticism, mostly around priorities. Fancy NPC reactions are cool, but they don’t solve the more pressing issue of max-level players deleting undergeared targets. Another player waved it off as a nice RP flourish rather than a core fix. Even so, the idea had legs. Someone even asked for a sample implementation, and the original poster insisted it wouldn’t be that hard to prototype.

That little exchange mattered because it showed what people actually want from a system like notoriety. Not just punishment. Not just tokens. They want texture. They want the world to feel less like a static map and more like a place that remembers what you’ve done there.

If Open-World PvP Gets Messy, Arena Looks Like the Safe Bet

For all the talk about faction warfare and contested zones, a lot of players still landed on the same practical answer: if you want PvP to feel fair, build around arena and use stat normalization.

Star Wars: The Old Republic came up as the model here, especially its bolster approach that narrows gear and level gaps so fights lean more on execution than on who no-lifed harder this week. That argument had a lot of support. Several posters were blunt that sweaty guilds will exploit any open-world reward structure they can touch, while a ranked arena with bolstered stats at least gives you a controlled environment where skill has a chance to matter.

That doesn’t mean people want arena instead of world PvP. More like arena as the reliable competitive pillar, with open-world conflict layered on top if — and this is doing a lot of work — it can be controlled enough not to poison the rest of the game. One player put it neatly: arena should be a big part of PvP content, but it would still be nice to have open-world PvP too.

That “too” is doing almost as much work as the “if.”

Waiting for News Has Turned Chat Into an MMO Bus Station

Once the PvP dust settled, the rest of the day had the unmistakable vibe of a community in holding pattern. Newcomers kept arriving with the same questions: when is the next test, how do you get access, where do you download the game, why is there Bulgarian support but not Polish, is anyone streaming it right now? The answers were consistent and not especially thrilling. There’s no firm date. The team is back at the workbench. Watch the announcements. Expect a while.

The more thoughtful version of that waiting-room conversation was about testing itself. Some players argued the best thing the developers can do after heavy feedback is disappear for a bit, fix the problems that matter, and come back only when the experience is dramatically better. Small fixes won’t cut it. Keep future testing under NDA, be selective, and avoid another round where a rough build gets mistaken for a near-release product.

Others pointed out the catch-22. Public tests create hype, but they also convince people the current build is the game. Closed tests avoid that, but then communities start worrying that mega guilds, influencers, or the usual well-connected suspects are steering development behind the scenes. As one poster basically summed it up: you can’t win. Test publicly and people misread the state of the game; test privately and people assume favoritism.

That bled into a side argument about whether access should ever be sold. The prevailing take in chat was no: don’t charge people for testing, because the second money changes hands, players treat the build like a finished product with a receipt attached. Sell the final game if you must. Sell cosmetics separately if that’s your model. But paid testing is a fast route to poisoned expectations.

It’s not a glamorous conversation, but it’s a real one. Communities don’t just wait for MMOs; they also build elaborate theories about the least damaging way to let humans touch them before launch.

The Tech Test Left Some Clear Bruises

Even with the broader “wait and see” mood, players did surface concrete feedback from the recent Scars of Honor playtest. The overall read was that there are good bones here, especially in gathering and crafting, but only a small slice of the game was really available to judge.

The biggest recurring complaints were not subtle:

• server stability needs work
• class balance sounded way off
• movement and UI still feel like priority-one problems
• crafting has some frustrating RNG around getting desired stats

Movement got the harshest wording. One player called out the inability to strafe and the way actions have to fully complete before you can fluidly turn or react, describing it as legacy baggage from the game’s mobile roots. That sort of stiffness isn’t a minor polish issue in an MMO; it changes how combat feels at the most basic level. If moving your character feels wrong, everything built on top of that starts wobbling.

Crafting feedback was more mixed. Some liked the foundation and compared it favorably to older games with stronger resource economies, especially Star Wars Galaxies, which got the usual reverent nod for having one of the best gathering and crafting systems the genre has ever produced. But there was concern about too many party-only nodes cluttering areas and about stat rolls turning crafting into a resource sink just to hit the result you actually want. MMO players will tolerate grind. They are much less charitable about grind plus slot machine.

There was also the familiar old-head lament that older MMOs often felt more innovative with fewer resources, while modern projects spend mountains of money and still struggle to produce systems with the same spark. You can call that nostalgia if you want, but when a room full of MMO players starts wistfully talking about SWG, WoW, and SWTOR budgets in the same breath, what they’re really saying is that they want ambition and coherence. Not just scale.

Casuals, Hardcores, and the Same Old MMO Civil War

No MMO chat would be complete without somebody reopening the casual-versus-hardcore trench war, and today’s version was at least entertaining.

The spark was big guilds and who really keeps a game alive. One player declared that mega guilds ruin everything before it’s even a thing. The immediate reply called that a casual noob opinion, which is about as classic an MMO response as “LF tank, must know fight.” From there, the argument widened into spending habits, login frequency, and who actually makes worlds feel populated.

The pro-casual side made the stronger social case. MMOs live and die on the casual crowd, one poster argued, because casual players are the ones making the world feel inhabited. They’re doing the ordinary stuff. They’re the background life. When the hardcore crowd can’t punch down, another player joked, all hell breaks loose.

The hardcore defense was more economic: dedicated players log in every day, spend more, and keep the game active over the long haul. That’s not wrong either. The funny part is that both sides were describing different kinds of necessity. Casuals make an MMO feel alive. Hardcores make it feel persistent. You usually need both, and they usually annoy each other on sight.

That tension also hovered over the PvP conversation. A system built for hardcore conflict can absolutely chew through casual goodwill if it isn’t fenced properly. And once the casual crowd leaves, the “alive world” fantasy starts looking a lot emptier.

The Waiting Game Is Starting to Show

The rest of the chat drifted the way waiting communities drift. People talked about whatever else they were playing — Farever, Winds of Valen, Bitcraft, Drakantos, Forza, Path of Exile 2, maybe even a return to WoW Classic TBC because the MMO cupboard feels a little bare right now. There were sidebars about AI in game development, console exclusives, Diablo difficulty unlocks, mocktails, basketball, and whether anyone should ever reply to certain posters. In other words, a normal day in a game community that doesn’t currently have fresh official news to chew on.

That doesn’t mean the interest is fading. If anything, the repeated “how do I get in?” messages suggest the opposite. People still want to play Scars of Honor. They’re still jealous when they think they’ve spotted someone streaming it. They’re still trying to piece together what the next phase looks like. The appetite is there. The problem is that appetite gets weird when it has nothing to eat.

What This Chat Actually Proved

The big takeaway from today is that Scars of Honor players are not asking for less ambition. They’re asking for ambition with brakes. They want faction warfare, open-world danger, reactive systems, strong crafting, meaningful testing, and a world with some actual personality. They just don’t want any of that delivered in the most predictable MMO-failure form possible.

And honestly, that’s healthy. The notoriety debate showed a community that can still get excited about the fantasy of world PvP, but no longer pretends that “freedom” automatically produces fun. If the developers are listening, the message is pretty clear: build the stories, yes — but don’t build a game where the first story every new player gets is being corpse-camped outside the Garden of Despair.