I saw an interesting post at the mmorpg.com forums about why players fight on PvP servers.  On one side is a gamer who believes most people do it for the fun and on the other side is a dev who believes its for the loot or reward.

The problem with the Dev’s argument is that most PvP games today don’t have a looting system.  Most games do have some sort of indirect reward system like Lord of the Rings reputation system.  The more players you kill the more points you get which increases your PvP rank.  As your rank increases you get access to PvP only items, even though most of those items suck by the time you kill enough people to open them up.

Being on the Age of Conan PvP server, currently there is no looting or reward for killing someone, yet PvP fighting is rampant.  I think PvPers play on these servers first and formost for the challenge of fighting real people.  Any reward for killing someone is secondary.  Even PvE games have dueling to allow players to fight against each other even though there is no reward or frankly any reason to do so.  The simple fact of beating someone is enought for many if not most PvPers.

FPS are a perfect example of this.  Even though there is no reward when you frag someone, other than your kill count going up, there’s really no feeling like killing someone over and over.  Good times