Scars of Honor’s Survey Starts a PvP Civil War — May 25, 2026

If you wanted a neat snapshot of where Scars of Honor sits in late May, the community handed you one with both fists. A survey meant to gauge player tastes instead detonated into the oldest MMO argument on Earth: how much PvP is too much, how much PvE is too safe, and whether the people making the game have a firm grip on their own compass.

That sounds dramatic, but the chat earned it. One minute players were joking that the questionnaire felt less like research and more like a “which fantasy archetype are you” quiz. The next, they were arguing over whether open-world PvP was ever part of the plan, whether it had been quietly walked back, and whether any of this matters when the game still feels years away. If nothing else, the server was awake.

The Survey That Called People Predators

The day’s biggest spark was the survey, and not because people hated the idea of being asked. They hated the framing. More than one player said the PvP questions flattened too many different tastes into one ugly pile: if you like danger, conflict, or competitive systems, does that really mean you want full-loot chaos and grief-friendly survival rules?

That pushback came fast and from multiple angles. One player said they answered with plenty of PvP-friendly preferences and still got labeled a “PvP predator,” despite disliking full-loot and what they saw as savage, unstructured PvP. Another said the survey seemed to force players into two caricatures: pure PvE tourist or hardcore survival ganker, with very little room for the large middle ground of people who enjoy faction warfare, battlegrounds, contested objectives, or balanced risk without turning every road into a mugging.

The wording itself became part of the joke. “Predator” and “ganker” are not exactly flattering class fantasies, and the community noticed. The mockery wrote itself.

One player basically summed it up as: the only PvP result seems to be “dirty ganker” or “full-loot predator,” which is a spectacular way to make your PvP audience sound like a public nuisance.

Others had a better experience. A few players said the results matched them pretty well, especially the outcome focused on tension, danger, harsh progression, and victories that feel earned. But even some of those players added a caveat: chill activities matter too, and MMO tastes are rarely one-note. That, again, fed the same complaint — the survey didn’t seem built for mixed appetites.

There were also practical issues. Some people never received their results email at all, even after trying multiple addresses. Players traded troubleshooting tips about webmail, spam folders, and local email domains, while others simply concluded the thing might be broken. That’s not fatal on its own, but it’s not exactly the kind of friction you want when your community is already suspicious of the exercise.

And suspicious they were. One of the sharper lines in chat called the whole thing less a survey than a personality quiz in MMO clothing. Another player went even harder, asking why a studio would need a survey to figure out what kind of game it’s making in the first place. That’s the sort of barb communities reach for when confidence is already shaky.

PvP Was Never the Plan — Except When It Was

Once the survey opened the wound, the old PvP versus PvE fight came roaring back. Not as a tidy design discussion, either. This was the messy version, where half the argument is about the game and the other half is about what people think the game used to be.

One side argued that pure PvE players are setting themselves up for disappointment if they expect a world with no meaningful PvP at all. Even a modest amount of faction conflict or PvP-zoned content, they said, will trigger complaints from players who want total safety. A few posters said they’d be perfectly happy if something like 30% of zones were open to PvP, especially if the rest of the world remained more accessible.

The counterargument was blunt: stop pretending Scars of Honor was ever meant to be a fully open-world PvP MMO. According to several regulars, including moderators clarifying the situation, forced world PvP was never the original design. What players saw in the technical test was described as a temporary workaround — a bandage while proper PvP zones weren’t ready — not a declaration of the game’s long-term identity.

That distinction mattered a lot in chat. Some players insisted PvP had been “removed” because a handful of complainers cried loud enough. Others shot that down immediately, saying nothing had been removed because it was never supposed to be the final structure in the first place. In their telling, the temporary implementation just produced the exact result you’d expect: stronger players camping weaker ones, the test environment turning hostile, and the broader playerbase getting chewed up.

It’s a familiar MMO story. Hardcore PvP advocates often describe open conflict as emergent gameplay. Everyone else describes it as getting farmed while trying to figure out the controls. The chat had both versions running at once.

What made this round more interesting is that some players weren’t arguing for “remove PvP” so much as “design it like adults are involved.” There were references to anti-grief systems, level brackets on old EverQuest PvP servers, and the idea that faction warfare or zone-based conflict can preserve danger without turning the whole game into a spawn-camping festival. That’s a much more useful conversation than the usual all-or-nothing trench war, even if the server kept trying its best to drag it back into one.

The Real Design Fear: A Game Pulled in Every Direction

Underneath the memes and sniping sat a more serious anxiety: that Scars of Honor could end up trying to please everybody and satisfying nobody.

One player put it plainly early on. Keep one vision. Don’t chase every audience with half-baked content. Make the grind meaningful, avoid time-gating, and remember that immersion and actual group play are what make an MMORPG feel like an MMORPG. That sentiment got echoed in different forms throughout the day, including by people who disagreed on PvP itself.

That’s the part worth paying attention to. The community’s split isn’t just “PvP good” versus “PvP bad.” It’s also “please decide what this game is.” When someone asks, half-joking and half-not, whether anyone at the studio even knows what the game is about, that’s not really about the survey. It’s about trust.

The push and pull over “original vision” showed how slippery that trust can be. One poster argued the studio should ignore the noise and stay true to its original plan. Another immediately fired back that the original vision was mobile, which is a pretty effective way to remind everyone that “stick to the vision” only sounds comforting if people actually like the vision they remember.

That tension is all over the chat log. Players want the team to listen, but not be steered by trolls. They want feedback to matter, but not if it turns the game into a committee project. They want flexibility, but not drift. In other words: they want the impossible MMO trick, a game with a strong identity that still somehow includes their personal wishlist.

Still, there’s a fair criticism buried in the noise. If your survey language makes players feel misread, and your recent tests leave them confused about core systems, you don’t just get disagreement — you get people wondering whether the studio is improvising in public.

Small Features, Big Irritations

Not every useful point in chat was wrapped in the PvP war. A few practical issues cut through the shouting, and they matter because they’re the kind of quality-of-life details players notice instantly.

The clearest answer of the day was on controller support: there will be no official support at launch. That’s not shocking for a smaller MMO project, but it’s the sort of thing players want stated plainly, and at least here it was.

More revealing was the complaint about y-axis inversion. One player said they got into the test but couldn’t really play because inversion wasn’t included, which they considered crazy even at this stage. That’s the kind of feature some players barely think about and others absolutely require. If you’re in the second group, it’s not a preference slider; it’s the difference between playing and bouncing off immediately.

There was also some confusion around access and libraries, with at least one player asking whether others had issues seeing Scars of Honor appear after being accepted. Combined with the survey email hiccups, it added to the day’s general feeling that the rough edges are still very rough.

None of this is glamorous. Nobody starts a fan war over inversion settings. But these are the things that shape whether a technical test feels promisingly scrappy or just plain unready.

Players Want a World Worth Fighting In

Once the argument matured past “PvP yes or no,” the best discussion of the day was about what actually keeps an MMO alive after launch. And here, the chat got surprisingly sharp.

Several players argued that the real killer isn’t the presence of PvP or PvE. It’s when the open world stops mattering. They pointed to games where instanced content swallowed the spotlight, leaving the world itself feeling decorative — a lobby between queues, not a place. That, they said, is how MMOs become forgettable.

The examples came thick and fast. New World and Guild Wars 2 were brought up as cautionary tales for slow or unsatisfying PvP support. Throne and Liberty caught criticism for making open-world content feel pointless once best-in-slot rewards leaned too hard into instances. Black Desert Online sparked a whole side debate over whether it used to be a real PvP game, whether scheduled wars count as meaningful conflict, and whether its shift away from PvP was a betrayal or simply smart business.

Then there were the games that keep coming up whenever MMO players talk about successful PvP ecosystems: Albion Online and EVE Online. The argument there wasn’t that every MMO should copy them wholesale. It was that PvP-heavy games only seem to work when the entire structure is built around conflict from the ground up, with real stakes, real incentives, and a world that naturally pushes players into friction.

That led to one of the day’s strongest points: PvP players don’t just want the ability to fight. They want reasons to fight.

A contested world boss. Valuable resources. Dynamic events. Trade routes. Guild objectives. Territory. Something that makes conflict feel like part of the world rather than a side activity you visit on Tuesdays between 7 and 9 p.m. One player put it neatly by saying PvP players need content to look forward to too, not just PvE players. Another countered that in PvP, other players are the content, which is true right up until the rewards, stakes, and structure stop supporting that fantasy.

That’s where the conversation around ArcheAge got interesting. Players cited warzones, ocean conflict, pack runs, guild pressure, and honor-based progression as examples of a game where PvP and progression were genuinely intertwined. Not everyone agreed on the details, but the larger point stood: when the world itself creates opportunities for conflict, PvP stops feeling bolted on.

And that, more than the shouting, may be the most useful design note in the whole log. If Scars of Honor wants PvP at all, it can’t just sprinkle it in and hope the audience sorts itself out. It needs to answer the harder question: what in this world is worth contesting?

The Community Is Tired, But It’s Still Here

You could feel the fatigue in the room. People asked when the game releases. Repeatedly. Others answered with some variation of “not soon,” with one player saying they wouldn’t bank on release before 2028 at the earliest. There was the usual MMO waiting-room chatter too — people talking about Hades 2, Gunfire Reborn, Kingdom Hearts, Divinity: Original Sin 2, World of Warcraft, and whatever else is filling the gap while they wait for the next test.

That matters more than it seems. Communities in long development cycles survive on side conversations, recurring jokes, and the ability to turn frustration into banter. This server had all of that, plus a healthy amount of chaos. Moderators tried to keep things from tipping fully into nonsense, reined in the GIF flood, and joked their way through the mess. Players complained about trolls, blocked lists, and the same familiar provocateurs showing up to poke the nest. Then five minutes later the room was talking about mowing lawns in 100-degree heat and whether anyone still has the energy they had in their twenties.

It was messy, but not dead. That’s the key distinction.

Even the sharpest critics are still spending time here, still arguing about systems that barely exist in final form, still comparing the game to everything from EverQuest to BDO to ArcheAge. People don’t do that for projects they’ve fully written off. They do it for games sitting in the dangerous middle state: not trusted, not abandoned, still capable of becoming something.

What This Actually Means

The survey didn’t just produce a bad label or a few eye rolls. It exposed the exact fault line Scars of Honor needs to handle carefully from here on out. Players can live with rough tests. They can even live with long waits. What they struggle with is ambiguity — especially ambiguity around identity.

Right now, the community seems willing to forgive a lot if the game starts speaking more clearly. Not louder, not with more marketing gloss, just more clearly. What kind of PvP exists? Where does it happen? How does it avoid grief-fest nonsense? What makes the open world matter? Which conveniences are missing because it’s early, and which are deliberate? Those answers won’t end the arguments, but they would at least move them onto solid ground.

Because the loudest thing in this chat wasn’t hatred. It was impatience mixed with investment. And for a game still clawing its way through pre-alpha uncertainty, that’s both a warning and an opportunity.