I was rethinking some parts of my dream mmorpg and considering the use on NPCs in the massive PvP. We have practical examples in DAoC and WoW, and they both suck.

But I remember that when Blizzard announced the possibility to fight in the battlegrounds along with the NPCs the idea sounded very cool and exciting. So I was trying to figure out if it was just a stupid idea or if it was the execution in both DAoC and WoW to make it awful.

I’m obviously leaning toward the second possibility. I believe that there’s one bigger problem that ruins the experience: the respawn. It may sound cool to have a role in a bigger battle and fight along squads of NPCs, but this situation suddenly becomes rather lame if you know that those NPCs will respawn two minutes later and will charge back on you as if you just kept fighting an army of unbeatable undeads. In this case the NPCs become just annoyances getting in the way. They ruin the PvP instead of adding to it.

So I make here a point. Having numerous NPCs contributing to a large battle with organized squads and even NPCs named heroes is all good and exciting. Something that has lots of potential to untap. But this work only if there is *persistence* in this scenario and if an NPC dying won’t respawn if not after a fair amount of time (from battle to battle, not from minute to minute). Killing NPCs should set a progress. Like when we moved in the classic games from the random, constant encounters to a finite number of baddies to beat in a level. In this case I believe the fun would return.

The problem is how you counterbalance the fact that the *players* will keep dying and coming back while the NPCs won’t. I’ll have to figure this out.