Zach enjoys PvP in all its forms, thus celebrating when some form of PvP was introduced to the Facebook game Pirates Ahoy!

Let’s continue from last week’s handy guide which was titled intentionally to play on the various meanings of “good.” This week, we’ll go through a few pointers at how to win at everything. Or, at the very least, to put up a decent fight and not go down in a terribly embarrassing fashion. That’s all one can really ask for — that one puts up a fight. Note that in most cases, the victor won’t care because a win is a win, especially in PvP. There are no moral victories in PvP, but there are educational defeats. If you’re going to lose, at the very least learn from it, right?

The first rule to winning is to think you can win. If you don’t give yourself a chance to win by thinking you’re outmatched, then unless your opponent is a total buffoon, she’s already won. Don’t worry too much about class or your level differential. You must go into the battle thinking you can win or, if you’re a healer, at least survive indefinitely. It doesn’t matter if you can actually win or not, especially when you’re clearly outmatched, such as when you’re many levels below your opponent. In such cases, your opponents already expect to win, so if you surprise them with some resistance or maybe even bring them dangerously low, then you will have put some doubt into their heads. As I mentioned last week, most griefers don’t actually look for a challenge. So there, the most important rule: Believe you can win.

Hardware and connection

The harsh reality is that because World of Warcraft is a computer game — an MMORPG — your hardware and connection speed matters. You will need a computer that exceeds the minimum requirements of Wrath of the Lich King and, later on, Cataclysm. The game can be processor-intensive at times, and a hot processor simply bogs down and can sometimes create all sorts of havoc with your system — anything from crashing the application to slowing everything down. If you want to put up a fight, the last thing you want is WoW crashing on you, which will leave your opponents a target that’s running in place or standing still (basically, a free honorable kill).

It’s no surprise that most avid PvP players invest in their hardware, simply because it’s more critical than, say, handing the graphics output of a boss encounter. In fact, the regular event that demands the most resources in World of Warcraft both on the server and client sides is Wintergrasp, a PvP encounter. Tol Barad in Cataclysm will be demanding to your system, as well, albeit the map has been designed to spread players out.

One way to alleviate the demands of the game to your system is to set the video settings low. You won’t need any of the fancy graphics to kill an opponent, so if your computer isn’t up to snuff, then set your video quality to low, with the probable exceptions of View Distance, which allows you to see objects and opponents farther, and Projected Textures, which renders area-of-effect spells on surfaces. You should also turn down your resolution to 1x multi-sampling, which will make everything look jagged but will render much faster. Your game will look like crap, but you’ll see a significant jump in your game’s performance. Everything will feel snappier. Uglier, yes, but definitely snappier.

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