Scars Of Honor’s PvP Fight Is Already A Bloodbath — March 31, 2026

If you wanted a quiet day in the Scars of Honor community, you picked the wrong tavern. General chat spent a good chunk of the day doing what MMO communities do best: turning one design question into a holy war, then somehow folding class fantasy, monetization ethics, healer theorycraft, and pig anatomy into the same argument.

The big one was PvP. Not whether the game has it — that part’s settled — but what kind of PvP a faction-based MMO ought to have. For one camp, a world split between Sacred Order and The Domination without constant danger feels toothless. For the other, always-on open-world PvP is the fastest route to a dead server, a miserable leveling experience, and a lot of lowbies getting farmed by people who call that “content.” The pushback was immediate, loud, and occasionally very funny.

A Faction War Without Constant Bloodshed?

The day’s central argument was simple enough to fit on a loading screen: if the game is built around two enemy factions, why can’t they just fight everywhere?

That question kept resurfacing in different forms. Some players wanted open-world conflict as a baseline, or at least enough danger that stepping into enemy territory feels like crossing a line. They weren’t all asking for full-loot chaos. A few were careful to draw the line between full loot and more limited inventory loot or zone-specific risk. Others said they’d settle for dedicated PvP zones, invasion events, or capitals that become dangerous by default when the opposite faction shows up.

The anti-gank camp, though, had receipts from basically every MMO graveyard. Their argument was less romantic and more practical: forced PvP sounds great until a level 40 parks in your starter zone and turns your evening into uninstall fuel. One player flatly said friends of theirs would just quit and go back to OSRS if they got ganked while trying to learn the game. Another put it more bluntly: if you need unwilling targets to enjoy PvP, maybe what you actually enjoy is bullying.

That split produced the day’s clearest fault line:

• pro-open-world players want stakes, territorial pressure, and reasons for factions to matter
• opt-in supporters want PvP to be meaningful without making the whole map miserable
• almost nobody seems to want true full-loot systems bolted onto a traditional MMO

The most practical middle ground in chat was zone-based PvP. That idea got the least resistance: dangerous areas, maybe better resources or more abundance there, maybe invasion-style events, maybe a war zone big enough to let casual players taste large-scale conflict without signing their life away to ranked guild warfare. A few players pointed to ESO Imperial City, GW2, and old WoW Alterac Valley as examples of PvP spaces that create stories without forcing everyone into permanent combat mode.

And yes, the FAQ got dragged into evidence. Players quoted the current line: open-world PvP zones are planned, but PvP won’t be active across the entire map, and players won’t drop loot on death. That didn’t end the debate so much as restart it with citations.

The Test Schedule Gives PvPers A Tease, Not The Whole Meal

One reason the argument got so heated is that the upcoming playtest seems set to offer only a slice of the PvP picture.

Players in chat repeated that the April 30 test will not be full open-world faction warfare from day one. Instead, PvP sounds limited early on, with open-world PvP appearing only in the last phase of the test — the last few days, according to people relaying what they’d heard. That was enough to annoy the “turn it on immediately” crowd, but it also gave more cautious players a reason to breathe.

There’s a practical logic to that rollout. Even some PvP fans admitted the team probably wants to test core stability, classes, and basic progression before they “burn the servers to the ground” with a proper faction brawl. That phrase pretty much captures the mood: even people arguing for more danger know a large-scale PvP switch changes the entire texture of a test.

The other wrinkle is server structure. Chat circled around the usual options:

• PvE and PvP servers
• opt-in flagging
• zone-based PvP
• “hardcore” servers later on

The strongest anti-toggle argument was that a toggle system often becomes PvE with extra steps. The strongest anti-forced-PvP argument was that splitting a small population too many ways is a great way to kill matchmaking, faction balance, and server health all at once. More than one player noted that healthy faction warfare depends less on ideals and more on boring, necessary population management: transfer locks, underdog incentives, maybe buffs for the weaker side, maybe caps in instanced war spaces.

That’s not sexy design talk, but it’s the stuff that decides whether faction PvP feels like a war or a queue simulator.

Class Locks Are Starting To Get Side-Eye

If PvP was the loudest fight, race/class combinations were the second. The newly circulated class lists had players squinting at faction parity, lore consistency, and some very specific aesthetic crimes.

The headline complaint: Sacred Order looks stingier with caster options than The Domination. Players kept coming back to the same example — blue side having far fewer mage-style combinations, while red side appears to have much more caster variety through Mage, Mystic, and likely Necromancer access. Human-only Mage on one side drew a lot of disbelief, especially from players whose fantasy brain still insists elves and mages belong together like bread and butter.

Then there were the one-race locks. People were especially hung up on things like:

• Paladin access being limited in ways that feel uneven between factions
• Priest apparently being Orc-only on one side
• Necromancer landing on Dwarves for Sacred Order, which several players found hilarious even when lore explanations arrived

That lore explanation, to be fair, did arrive. One player laid out the in-world reasoning for dwarf necromancers: necromancy is broadly outlawed, but dwarven ancestor worship gives them enough cover that the Sacred Order looks the other way rather than make another enemy. It’s the kind of answer that makes sense on paper and still leaves people staring at the mental image of a dwarf necro and going, “Alright, but that’s still weird.”

The broader concern wasn’t just flavor. It was balance. If faction identity is strong but racials stay mostly cosmetic, uneven class distribution may be survivable. If racials or class access create real power imbalances, players are already bracing for one faction to become the obvious competitive choice. A few veterans immediately brought up the old WoW lesson: once one side gets the better PvP package, the migration starts and it doesn’t stop.

There was also some confusion over what applies to the playtest versus the final game. Several players noted that the test’s available classes and races won’t match the eventual launch plan, which softens some of the panic. But not all of it. MMO players can smell a future faction imbalance from three zones away, and they don’t wait for launch to start arguing about it.

Everyone Wants Healers, But Nobody Wants Boring Ones

Underneath the PvP shouting, one of the more interesting threads was about healers — specifically, what kind of healers players actually want to play.

A few people were already planning around mobility. One healer-minded player said they’d pick whichever class has the best speed buff or movement tools, with Justicar sounding promising from the description. Another was already mourning the possibility that Mystic might have weak mobility because of its damage-over-time and utility focus. Open-world PvP fans immediately connected that to survival: the fastest healer paired with the fastest DPS could be nasty in the field if terrain and kiting matter.

Then the chat got into the more fun question: how many healing styles are we really getting? People relayed that Mystic is expected to heal, and Necromancer healing has also been hinted at or outright mentioned in voice chat. That got a warm reception, because players are hungry for support classes that don’t just feel like “Priest, but with a different hat.”

One recurring anxiety was that the truly nontraditional healers will get all the interesting mechanics while Priest ends up as the generic backup option. A player looking at the class mood board thought the lack of visual and thematic detail around Priest made it feel like an afterthought. That sparked a miniature healer philosophy seminar, with WoW TBC priest fans arguing that a classic healer can still be deep if the toolkit is broad enough — triage, shields, buffs, dispels, aggressive PvP tools, the whole bag.

Another player cut to the heart of it:

Better to have one or two interesting healers than five dull ones.

That’s hard to argue with. The community doesn’t just want healers in the abstract. It wants healers with identity — traditional, hybrid, area-based, aggressive, weird, maybe even a little unholy. One player even brought up Warhammer: Age of Reckoning’s Archmage as the kind of damage-heal hybrid they still haven’t seen topped.

And because this is still general chat, the healer discussion eventually included a request for a dwarf support fantasy built around “erecting a dispenser” that shoots healing sodas. Honestly? Not the worst pitch in the channel.

Monetization: Bag Space Is Out, FOMO Is On Trial

Away from combat systems, monetization got its own serious stretch of discussion, and this was one of the more revealing conversations of the day.

The immediate spark was bag space. Someone asked whether the team had realized selling bag space counts as pay-to-win because it creates economic advantage. The answer from chat regulars was that it had been removed, even though a previous community vote reportedly leaned in favor of keeping it. That removal earned real approval. Even players willing to tolerate some convenience cash shop items said they were glad the game’s leadership seems wary of anything that leaves a “sniff” of pay-to-win.

That opened the usual MMO rabbit hole: what even counts as pay-to-win anymore?

Some argued that bag space, loot pets, and similar conveniences don’t feel like P2W. Others pushed back hard, saying the genre has simply spent years inventing softer labels for the same old pressure. If an item is functional and unavailable through normal play, plenty of players will still call it pay-to-win, even if it’s dressed up as convenience.

The stronger consensus was less about definitions and more about trust. Players said avoiding functional cash shop power buys goodwill, and goodwill turns into cosmetic spending. If people believe the game won’t nickel-and-dime them into resentment, they’re more likely to support it with subs, dyes, outfits, name colors, and other harmless vanity perks.

Then came the FOMO debate. Seasonal cosmetics? Fine, maybe. A shop built almost entirely on rotating scarcity and regret? Much less fine. One player summed up the anti-FOMO stance cleanly: if your monetization is designed to make players feel bad so they spend money, you’ve already told them what you think of them.

That sentiment got support, though not unanimity. A few people admitted they like exclusive cosmetics and early-adopter rewards. But even those players seemed more comfortable with limited, special-event items than a store where almost everything disappears on a timer. The best pro-player version of this, according to chat, is simple: keep most items static, let people buy what they want when they can afford it, and use scarcity sparingly rather than as the whole business model.

For an MMO community, that’s a surprisingly healthy instinct.

The Playtest Hype Is Real, Even Through The Bickering

For all the fighting, there’s a current of genuine excitement running through the chat. Plenty of players are plainly just eager to get their hands on the thing on April 30, even if they know they’re walking into an unfinished build.

People traded links for class pages, old livestreams, Steam sign-up info, and reminders that the playtest is expected to run from April 30 to May 11. There was the usual anxiety over access buttons, rolling invites, and whether “open” really means open enough. A few early supporters already seem to have email confirmation or old supporter entitlements, which naturally made everyone else a little twitchy.

There’s also a realistic streak in the hype. Several players said outright that the game is still years away, with guesses landing around 2027 or 2028 for anything like release. Rather than treating that as doom, most of the regulars seemed to accept it as the price of not pretending an indie MMO alpha should feel like a finished blockbuster.

One player’s sarcastic line captured the mood perfectly: they were shocked that an indie MMO in early alpha might not have the polish of a $200 million AAA release. That’s the right energy, frankly. Communities kill promising games when they demand launch-day sheen from systems that are still learning how to stand up.

The more grounded optimism centered on leadership tone. Players praised the fact that the team, and Armegon in particular, seems willing to say “no,” even if he also changes his mind sometimes. That’s not a contradiction so much as game development in public: ideas move, plans shift, and communities hear every wobble in real time.

Gronthars, Pigomancy, And The Joy Of Being Extremely Online

No honest recap of this chat would skip the sillier stuff, because the sillier stuff is half the texture of the community.

The Gronthar campaign for chunkier pig-people was alive and well, complete with players begging for bigger bodies, joking about “skinny porkchops,” and mourning the apparent lack of a proper Gronthar mage. “Pigomancy” was floated as an obviously overpowered discipline. Someone wanted a “scholarly oink.” Another wanted to reserve every pig-themed character name before launch. This is what culture looks like.

There were also the usual MMO side quests into other games and hobbies: BDO enhancement pain, Albion PvP economics, Ashes of Creation comparisons, WoW housing temptation, Dead by Daylight chaos, audio setup troubleshooting, PC upgrade talk, and a brief but spirited salmon cooking tutorial. General chat is never one conversation; it’s six conversations in a trench coat.

That matters more than it sounds. The jokes, the sidebars, the weirdly specific class fantasies — they’re all signs of a community already trying to inhabit the game before it exists. Players aren’t just asking what systems are in. They’re imagining the kind of nonsense they’ll get up to inside them.

What This Fight Actually Means

Today’s chat mattered because it showed where Scars of Honor has real pressure on it. Not from trolls, and not from people asking for impossible miracles, but from the oldest MMO problem in the book: how do you make a world feel dangerous, factional, and alive without turning it into a griefing simulator for everyone who just wanted to fish, craft, or level in peace?

The encouraging part is that the community isn’t arguing over whether PvP should exist. It’s arguing over how it should matter. That’s a much healthier fight. If the game can land on PvP zones, faction events, battlegrounds, duels, and maybe a few truly tense border spaces without making the whole map a low-level slaughterhouse, it might thread the needle a lot of bigger games never managed.

And if it also gives the Gronthar a little more bulk while it’s at it? Well. That would just be good design.