State of the Realms (A Community Discussion with the Devs)

[Gobtar]

On live, and in a state that was where it was relevant, Annihlator gear wasn't super easy to get, and most people didn't opt out. you tend to buy it with medallions, however with guild claims, you could make it work, and you fought to defend a zone that your guild claimed cause of that promise of loot.

If I could dream, I would desire this game to live up to its name. Warhammer Fantasy has enjoyed many epic campaigns and even in it's death-throes heralded a mighty campaign in and of itself. It's predecessor, for whatever you think about it, endeavors to live up to that promise.

I have made it quiet known that a huge over arching campaign would be fantastic. That is surely a long way from now, and I any stop-gap measure will probably be received with distaste, but the hardest thing Mythic has ever tried to do with a pvp game is get players to pvp, how can we expect it to be any easier on our Devs.

To many miniature wargamers, a campaign or league tends to be incentive enough to buy and paint new models, to craft might backstories for new heroes and armies and to get a bunch of friends together. Warhammer Online, leave much to be desired, it has the potential there and I believe that our Devs have the vision to reach that potential. Az said that there is no real RvR and I am inclined to agree with him, there is no over arching campaign just a glorified rinse and repeat gear grind.


I play in NA time, and I enjoyed some pretty big fights, knowing that taking an empty keep has no benefit is a huge incentive for me to not abandon my task. As much as I would love special treatment, and skirmish based zone incentives for when the player numbers dwindle, I can't expect the devs to put extra effort in for the needs of the few.

If I know that defending a keep yields rewards makes me more inclined to defend a keep, BUT I know players, if there is no incentive to defend a keep, I would be suspect that players would be less likely to go and defend a lost cause, for doing so might benefit the attacker.

[forge1995]

hi

[StormX2]

you gonna have to wait a while before forts and especially the city Instance..

i think recent changes, giving renown / medals for BO's will certainly help for us NA players. Hit or Miss though if there is enough population on either side to put up a fight,

Unfortunately, my general play time see's pretty bad results =./ We can easily, and i mean easily, tell when Order defends for a little, then switches over to there destro toons to finish off the keep take. Just amazing that people would rather resort to exploitation on a broken system rather than stay on your side for the day and rally the people.

Personally, I will be very happy once we get some Dungeons up and running =)

Londo FTW!

[Hotrailz]

As someone whos done promades, solo and zerg herding over the years i think there is too much whip and no carrot with the RVR. There needs to be rewards in rvr for all players its a delicate ecosystem. Lowbies flock to safety of wbs, soloers gank stragglers and promades help lock objectives against larger numbers.

The easiest thing and the lowest reward is to join a pug wb and go out in the lake and fight. Unfortunately compared to live the rewards are so minimal and the chances to get seal clubbed so great that even new players can figure this out after a few nights in t4. As a result there is no action for soloers and premades either.

When was the last time a premade went out into empty lakes to hunt another premade for high level pvp?

Anyway love the game and i will play this forever so dont take my view as criticism on current state of rvr.

[Akalukz]

That's all good and fine, but throws back to best defense is to not show up. Chicken and the Egg I assume.

That's because this game isn't yet a RvR game, it's a PvP game. Rewarding or punishing members of the realm more widely for their performance of lack of performance in RvR requires realm locking measures.

Renown and personal rewards for a battle are PvP. Progress in a meaningful campaign and punishment as a realm for refusing to fight are RvR.

THanks for this reply and the others. I am continuing to hope in the long term vision, just wish it were clearer for us. Totally hate the group that leaves to cap another zone that is undefended, but it is a vaiable strategy. Wonder if there is a way to increase the effectiveness of the keep lord/guards by AAO, the more aao a zone has, the tough the pve is, could discourage small groups trying to ninja keeps etc.



Another issue which I am sure you are all aware of is the single entry into the keep when the outter is down adn basically free rez inside the keep for the defending realm. This is what usually spurs the attackers to go to another zone, as there is currently very very limited chance of busting through keep. If properly defended.

Loser rewards would be tremendous help to fight cross realming. I understand that is on the way? hopefully they are worth staying for.

Again, thanks and I am remain hopeful.

EDIT: Could always make the game more linear, one zone open at a time.

[Zanilos]

For maybe, 6-9 months, Azas sig said that player experience doesn't matter to the team. In a player driven game it should be pretty much the only thing that mattered. This has had a detrimental effect on players over a period of time. I know a few people who stopped when they noticed that they were essentially being treated like mugs.

As for the loot system at keeps, people will only play to the path of least resistance, if you remove rewards for taking empty **** (i'm not totally against it) then all it takes is a few special characters to catch on, start telling people to leave zones, then the PvP dies. The attacking team have no will to attack, the defending team either swaps over or logs off. Without the campaign, who gives a **** if you lose zones? Its a vicious circle, we saw it in t3.

I still don't really understand why the term Alpha gets thrown about all the time by the devs/gms but you need to grind your tits off to test anything. This pushes people to push for rewards instead of game play experience. I really feel that we would see a lot more guilds actually doing **** if they could recruit people who were ready to play. Obviously then skill cap matters a bit more, even in this basic game.

We know that RR 1-60 works on all classes. That all the SC gear works. That all the Influence gear works. The trade skills work, PQ's are getting there. We have no sensible reason that anyone should have to grind Ruin gear now. Unless, you want to slow things down and treat it like its a live game and not an alpha.

My 2 cents. Give people max everything. Then wipe the **** out of the server when the new system is ready. You are way more likely to break **** when your making small changes and fiddling rather than changing the whole lot after testing it on your dev server.

P.S For the love of God stop asking for dungeons. They will **** over future PvP content as the PvE content is so damn limited. Legion just came out. The dungeons are great, go try it.

[Bluestreak2k5]

I don't necessarily agree with the strategy here from the developers, but I'll add some things that might help especially with the NA problem.

One of the biggest problems in NA is that there hardly enough for a WB on both sides and it's damn near impossible to take on a warband or multiple warbands without a full warband. You stand 0 chance of basically killing anyone unless your roaming trying to catch stragglers. If you actually want to attempt to solve this problem you need to increase the rewards for getting those kills at the keep when the enemy team is 40 versus your 6.

The biggest issue is medals, you give AAO but you recieve no medal bonus and given that your fighting against odds that are usually above 4:1 the enemy team is going to be getting more medals then you are simply due to the amount of deaths your going to have. If you really want us to defend then you should make AAO affect the number of medals dropped as well. If there is 400% AAO then every kill should drop 5 medals each and be rolled on separately.

You should also raise the max AAO from 400%, maybe as high as 800%. Again if your going to take away the rewards from being able to attack empty castles, then you need to incentivize the defend of said castles. If you can manage to defend and kill a few people and get more medals and more influence even though your outnumbered 8 to 1, well then I might be more inclined to fight. But as it stands now if I see anything above 150% AAO in a keep defense I will go and do something else simply because it's an impossible task when the healers on the enemy warbands outnumber your warband. I can barely walk around the keep with the number of invisible witches that would be walking around in groups. Making the Lord's stronger has helped with this, but that only encourages defense in the lord room, not at either door of the keep.

And on top of that if the loser rewards are multiplied by the AAO, well now it might be interesting defending outnumbered. Especially if the rewards also hand out medals the way the other objectives are doing.

[Bluestreak2k5]

I'd also add that defense rewards should scale with time, maybe your outnumbered but you manage to keep taking BO's and slow them down. If you spend 2 hours doing this then the reward for any player that was there for 2 hours should be much much higher then players been there 15 minutes.

[Arteker616]

I don't necessarily agree with the strategy here from the developers, but I'll add some things that might help especially with the NA problem.

One of the biggest problems in NA is that there hardly enough for a WB on both sides and it's damn near impossible to take on a warband or multiple warbands without a full warband. You stand 0 chance of basically killing anyone unless your roaming trying to catch stragglers. If you actually want to attempt to solve this problem you need to increase the rewards for getting those kills at the keep when the enemy team is 40 versus your 6.

The biggest issue is medals, you give AAO but you recieve no medal bonus and given that your fighting against odds that are usually above 4:1 the enemy team is going to be getting more medals then you are simply due to the amount of deaths your going to have. If you really want us to defend then you should make AAO affect the number of medals dropped as well. If there is 400% AAO then every kill should drop 5 medals each and be rolled on separately.

You should also raise the max AAO from 400%, maybe as high as 800%. Again if your going to take away the rewards from being able to attack empty castles, then you need to incentivize the defend of said castles. If you can manage to defend and kill a few people and get more medals and more influence even though your outnumbered 8 to 1, well then I might be more inclined to fight. But as it stands now if I see anything above 150% AAO in a keep defense I will go and do something else simply because it's an impossible task when the healers on the enemy warbands outnumber your warband. I can barely walk around the keep with the number of invisible witches that would be walking around in groups. Making the Lord's stronger has helped with this, but that only encourages defense in the lord room, not at either door of the keep.

And on top of that if the loser rewards are multiplied by the AAO, well now it might be interesting defending outnumbered. Especially if the rewards also hand out medals the way the other objectives are doing.

u havent done much rvr, currently in rvr most small grps do either gank or keep def when they got a few aao but they rarely attack ior compete for bos

this is where the system colapse , people want hugue battles and clash zerv vs zerg , because actualy the small scale warbands are what killed rvr, they good to chew few here and there poking a zerg but only when there is a wc or a postern nearby never in full open . and of course if their side gonna fall a swift change to either faction to leech .

[Arteker616]

For maybe, 6-9 months, Azas sig said that player experience doesn't matter to the team. In a player driven game it should be pretty much the only thing that mattered. This has had a detrimental effect on players over a period of time. I know a few people who stopped when they noticed that they were essentially being treated like mugs.

As for the loot system at keeps, people will only play to the path of least resistance, if you remove rewards for taking empty **** (i'm not totally against it) then all it takes is a few special characters to catch on, start telling people to leave zones, then the PvP dies. The attacking team have no will to attack, the defending team either swaps over or logs off. Without the campaign, who gives a **** if you lose zones? Its a vicious circle, we saw it in t3.

I still don't really understand why the term Alpha gets thrown about all the time by the devs/gms but you need to grind your tits off to test anything. This pushes people to push for rewards instead of game play experience. I really feel that we would see a lot more guilds actually doing **** if they could recruit people who were ready to play. Obviously then skill cap matters a bit more, even in this basic game.

We know that RR 1-60 works on all classes. That all the SC gear works. That all the Influence gear works. The trade skills work, PQ's are getting there. We have no sensible reason that anyone should have to grind Ruin gear now. Unless, you want to slow things down and treat it like its a live game and not an alpha.

My 2 cents. Give people max everything. Then wipe the **** out of the server when the new system is ready. You are way more likely to break **** when your making small changes and fiddling rather than changing the whole lot after testing it on your dev server.

P.S For the love of God stop asking for dungeons. They will **** over future PvP content as the PvE content is so damn limited. Legion just came out. The dungeons are great, go try it.

with no challange to get rewards ? just for the love of pvp? it would be like shooting urself because a fly is buzzing ur head .