server pop

[Grobbok]

what happened?
I'm playing this game from the beginning, day by day, and must say that it is not far away from t1 at the beginning. You are fighting, sieging, killing an enemy, but there is no bigger goal, no true campaign. Next thing is that this game here, as on live, have a strange system of rewards: you can fight for 3-4 or more hours and get nothing (coz enemy took keep, or you must end the game) or you just staying on a flag and do nothing to get rewards.
So maybe this things and many more (like "magic of WL" ) forced people to leave the server.
day after day it's going to be more and more boring, sadly

[RuffRyder]

You are fighting, sieging, killing an enemy, but there is no bigger goal, no true campaign

Endless fighting sometimes is boring, but part of the same and there are alternatives like SCs, PvE, Gunbad, PQs, yadayada... there will be more PvE content plus fortresses coming, just takes time.

Next thing is that this game here, as on live, have a strange system of rewards: you can fight for 3-4 or more hours and get nothing (coz enemy took keep, or you must end the game) or you just staying on a flag and do nothing to get rewards.

You do not lose contribution and loot when logging out, just when xrealming. Plus consider this:
https://wiki.returnofreckoning.com/inde ... ntribution
I am RvR-leveling several toons and very rarely didn't get bag.

So maybe this things and many more (like "magic of WL" ) forced people to leave the server.

While blaming one carreer is pointless and just not true, there are issues with the class. I stopped playing mine when it used to get too much easymode though.

[Yaliskah]

Hi.

There are probably lot of reasons why population is lower atm, gonna try to list a lot :

Exam period.
Lot of student are preparing their exams atm, and their plyatime is reduced for obvious reasons

Summertime.
Weather is the enemy :p.

Boredom 1.
After 5 years, some ppl still dont understand we are a work in progress and wont understand things take time. We can't deploy Fort and Capi with associated tomorrow just because it takes time. There is no "CREATE" button by our side to make things. In the same period, CU isn't online and finished. Anyone to blame them?

New games.
Thats a player choice. We don't put a knife on their throat to stay . We will probably all test CU when up. Don't see the point.

Boredom2.
Some ppl have reached their maximum and dont see the point to play with others cause wont have anything more to win atm. Thats a curious point of view, according they complain it is hard to reach high rank and gear. Personnaly i understand they complain to have everything faster to finally stop playing. Odd.

Changes.
Lot of ppl fear changes and not even give a chance to see if our choices are reliable or not. Each patchnote is considered has a statement engraved in the stone. Better, according we are not a band of pro devs, expectations are disproportionate. Everybody expect we will make perfect choice, in the perfect direction, in the first shot. ahah . Sorry but we can't do that. We ahve to do mistakes, try, modify, test...

Bias.
We are often accused to be biased (Order or Destro, depends the hour of the day). Any change done on a class is considered as an agression. Each time we make a change, rain of tears starts. No need to test, better to stop or threaten to stop instead of testing and trying to have a global view. Conclusion lot of ppl don't look for any balance. They want influence over opposant. nothing else. If they haven't it anymore, or if things become hard, they will stop.

Limited Content.
See Boredom1, Boredom2 and Changes.

New ORvR system.
According i designed it, according i play it, the biggest difference between old system and newest is the dynamic even a part is missing to finish the general rework (supply drop on kills). This version is much more dynamic. Once again, many ppl complain about "zerg".
All my Warhammer Online experience has encountered the Zerg. Accusing the actual system of this is just dishonest. I don't remember to see the "Zorgbus" right here. So whatever the system, zerg will be around. It is a player choice. I play with 4-6 buddies in the lake and strangely, we find nice fights here and there. Some ppl would like to see the ORvR as a 1vs1 place maybe. They should take a look to check what ORvR means.

XRealm.
Lot of ppl are bored with XRealm. Fact is we can't do lot atm against it. Xrealm wont be a bad thing if some player change faction to reach the outnumbered one. 100% of comments i read about Xrealming on the forum tells me ppl are going to complete the outnumbered faction. When i am ingame, it is completeley the opposite. Lies? Without client control, we wont be able to limit XRealm direction.

Ror team : a band of assholes.
Seems we are a F***ing team of fashists who deserve to be stolen cause we are mean with players and disrecpectful with their opinions and will. Some say we ban anyone who disagree our choices. Have never banned anyone, have never been disrespectful. So...

Instead of this, i spend 2k€ per years to make this project alive, with the hope ads will cover my expense. Because of this, i could be disrespectfull, i could ban whoever i want, cause THIs place is mine. Instead of this, everybody is welcome. Please, just don't spread shits on my carpet .

You just have to play and enjoy. Afaik it is the purpose of a game. We are concerned with the game. We are not concerned with your personnal moods (no offense). Fact is some involved players are proposing things ( balance) and if the proposal seems to be viable, it is open for community discussion and then sometime deployed if seems fine. Not really a fachistic move IMO.

Roll/Drop system.
Lot of ppl haven't understood the mechanics behind it which is strange. Anyone here has already done a PQ, anyone here is confident with INF bar. New system is more or less the exact same thing. Still surprised ppl don't like it (some prefer to share randomly 3 gold bags with 400 players it seems...). Once again, some think they should have a gold bag just because they exist. This system is MUCH fair than any other system. Now, i admit we must enhance it, mostly in the contribution part. AND IT WILL BE ENHANCED. Looking for the "CREATE" button wait...

Conclusion.
Since Day one, a long way has been done. Sme will argue for the worst, some will say for the best. SInce day one expectations are high and pressure by our side even bigger. We are confident in our choices and we are mature enough to see/understand when we are wrong. We are glad when players are able to show us our mistakes on the base of a decent demonstration. Sadly 90% of time, they just leave a bitting sentence without a single explanation 'WL is op' 'DoK DPS is OP' 'ZERG ZERG ZERG is boring'...

We are not concerned with population fluctuation. Our goal atm is to deploy all content and we have a crazy amount of work to do. here is a little list of it :

- Patcher / client control
- Finishing ORvR
- Fortresses
- Capitals
- LOTD
- Dungeons
- Loot system
- Mass itemgenerator
- Leveling Progression
- Balance
- Balancing Scenarios
- Xrealm control
- Refining existant content
- Craft system
- Anti hack counter measures
- Guild system / Standard
- Mobs IA
- Pathfinding
- Server stability
- Events
- Fixing all bugtacked bugs
- Fixing all PQs
- Fixing pets
- Fixing LOS
- New content
- ..
- ..
-.

I probably forget tons of things....

[nat3s]

It's summer, Uthgard (a DAOC private server) has similarly dipped from an average of 1k peak to 800.

With that said, I do think the recent changes are a step in the wrong direction, zones can take 10+ hours to lock now which is really punishing, it's made the game a massive grindfest with no variety in terms of where you're fighting.

In an effort to be constructive, I think the following changes would make for some nice quality-of-life and gameplay changes:

1. Bring back draw timers.
2. Tone down WLs power, perhaps by making pounce a 20s CD.
3. Bring SH up to SW level. Currently a SH crits for what a SW hits non-crit. A couple of ways to do this would be to improve the SH pet to be as strong as WL or allow SH to reach SW levels of weapon skill.
4. Give AM/Shaman a penetration buff so they can land AP drain.
5. Reduce DoK melee damage.
6. Fix the Warband issues with range and player health so healers can heal properly again.

Just my 2p!

[Aurandilaz]

Regarding boredom+others, some personal thoughts;
Conqueror gear came out Feb 2017, thats about 16 months from now. My first char finished Conq in July 17, sure, kept playing it long afterwards to high 70s, but it eventually gets dull after 8-10 months of having about no real advancement on a char, in a game where char advancement is one of the core elements of the game. Then get 2nd char with Conq, okay, gets also dull to see limited advancement over months. Get 3rd char to full Conq, play it also some more months, starts feeling boring.
Gearing alts used to be a faster and "easier" process (easy xp from pve), now its certainly somewhat slower, which might demotivate many altoholics compared to previous state of affairs where leveling another alt was relatively less troublesome and less time consuming. Sure, it's not an impossible task, but it certainly used to be easier in the past to get another char to 40 and have it ready either with full Anni or Ruin and then ready to pvp.

New RvR; its good in some ways and it feels bad in some ways. Keep Lords... can be challenging at times, and sometimes you just feel like this is not the WAR that I enjoyed in the past. Massive PVE encounter in RvR lake, in a keep structure that somehow makes lag even worse, and there's too damn often some guy who makes resets happen... so the PVE spanking continues far longer than anyone would want to.
Obviously its good that defenders have chance to regroup and decent amount of time to organize counterattack, sometimes it happens and leads to solid actual PVP, but often not, resulting in just a long pve session versus the lord.

BOs, flags, supplies, zone lock... I personally miss the system where you needed to cap BOs, lock them down, carry supplies and then accumulate Victory Points, where there existed a chance for a losing side to simply play smart and prevent larger side from winning by hitting and ninjaing flags behind the zergs back. Current AFKing on BOs... it has its benefits for getting easy renown for basically just standing in a place in the game, and makes for easy prey for roaming gankers and it helps knowing where to find enemies. But locking BOs down was something that mattered when it to fighting against bigger numbers, because you could play smart and succeed despite having that large AAO. Classic hunting of the supply carriers was kinda fun as you had usual supply routes and chance to steal resources from larger side. And yes I know you have something planned for player supply drops with the RvR redesign, hopefully those make RvR again more dynamic.

Server lag; its been getting worse over the months. And despite primetime numbers slowly shrinking, lag isn't. Obviously you would have fixeds it if you were able to figure how-to, but still, it makes the RvR at times close to unplayable. Abilities not firing, targets not in range, broken party UIs... well it certainly explains some of the player numbers decline.

Class balance; few good steps forward, some weird steps sideways and sometimes just few steps backwards. It's messy as always and its hard to find perfect balance especially due to lacking client control, yet some of the balance decisions have caused damage to the community. WLs being OP for months was "Destro whining" until you could hardly have a SC without 2-3 WLs being present. Reduced moral gains, well big blow to organized warbands, good for pugs that now don't get moral bombed as often, big blow to Order that doesn't have Chsn/BO pumps, yay for BW that retains M2 bomb, rest of the classes, maybe better luck next year? SW/SH being "fixed" to the point where they lost warband spots, Marauder retaining same moral drain as before despite moral gains being now -75% of what they were on live, Choppa-Sorc synergy removed from game, SM Heavens Blade change turning class into meh, SW Init debuffing going full bonkers, AM/Shaman going from toptier healers to mystery pick, Disrupts turning magical dps into "cant touch this"-McHammertime when vs healers, DoK/WP gaining charge-like ability (lack of mobility being their former Achilles heel), BW Flashfire changes (-50% cast doesnt help if its too laggy to launch a cast - higher ICD and 0s cast was nerf enough). [I play Sorc-WE-BW-Kotb-AM-WP-WL-BG-DoK-Chosen-BO-SW-SM-WH in T4 so I'm certainly biased]
Obviously there have been many good balance changes and game is far from the broken balance of live servers, yet sometimes it feels like if the balance decisions are made from perspective of someone who doesn't play in organized warbands or organized 6mans. Maybe in the future the "Feedback" section of Balance Discussion forums gains more traffic. We know criticising changes in patch notes is unwanted, so often finding the right venue for offering feedback regarding changes is troublesome.


Sorry for any spelling mistakes or if someone finds my choice of words weird, English isn't my native language and some idioms or meanings might be lost in translation. The Dev team does an excellent job in providing us with this game, just using this thread as a chance to offer feedback, I have nothing against anyone and hopefully my thoughts don't come out as offensive or are not against the rules.

[Yaliskah]

1. Bring back draw timers.
2. Tone down WLs power, perhaps by making pounce a 20s CD.
3. Bring SH up to SW level. Currently a SH crits for what a SW hits non-crit. A couple of ways to do this would be to improve the SH pet to be as strong as WL or allow SH to reach SW levels of weapon skill.
4. Give AM/Shaman a penetration buff so they can land AP drain.
5. Reduce DoK melee damage.
6. Fix the Warband issues with range and player health so healers can heal properly again.

1. Planned. It was removed for Lord testings. Keep in mind we will think about Fortresses and a fast draw won't be a good solution.

2.3.4.5 > Thats a Balance question and i'm not the best placed to answer on this. All i konw is that we are not all mighty and we can't do anything just because it is needed or asked ( read my previous post).

6. Afaik it is done since last patch.

[mogt]

@ Yaliskah i agreed with our points, you wrote the truth,many people people dont know, how many work is behind the scenes. and many players think, "oh that is warhammer and it is same game from live", and the people dont see big button on the top left side its called alpha server, that is sad, the people must know, what is means, and important thing is, we can are cery happy, that we can play this game. and the devs, do their best that we can play,and the next important thing is, the devs, do this here in their freetime, bit the xrying players, dont see that or want to hear that. the crying people they can leave this project. that is my opinion, the playstyle is very good, if you want better gear then you must do for this gear, on live it was" you must do less, then you get the best gear", and that is false, but the problem is why the people cry is following, they want go the easiest way for get the gear, , many players want as eg conqueror gear, but they want nothing to do for that and that is false

[Grobbok]

You are fighting, sieging, killing an enemy, but there is no bigger goal, no true campaign

Endless fighting sometimes is boring, but part of the same and there are alternatives like SCs, PvE, Gunbad, PQs, yadayada... there will be more PvE content plus fortresses coming, just takes time.

Next thing is that this game here, as on live, have a strange system of rewards: you can fight for 3-4 or more hours and get nothing (coz enemy took keep, or you must end the game) or you just staying on a flag and do nothing to get rewards.

You do not lose contribution and loot when logging out, just when xrealming. Plus consider this:
https://wiki.returnofreckoning.com/inde ... ntribution
I am RvR-leveling several toons and very rarely didn't get bag.

So maybe this things and many more (like "magic of WL" ) forced people to leave the server.

While blaming one carreer is pointless and just not true, there are issues with the class. I stopped playing mine when it used to get too much easymode though.

it's sad, but you totally not understand my point
looks like you and me are playing is a different game

[nat3s]

1. Bring back draw timers.
2. Tone down WLs power, perhaps by making pounce a 20s CD.
3. Bring SH up to SW level. Currently a SH crits for what a SW hits non-crit. A couple of ways to do this would be to improve the SH pet to be as strong as WL or allow SH to reach SW levels of weapon skill.
4. Give AM/Shaman a penetration buff so they can land AP drain.
5. Reduce DoK melee damage.
6. Fix the Warband issues with range and player health so healers can heal properly again.

1. Planned. It was removed for Lord testings. Keep in mind we will think about Fortresses and a fast draw won't be a good solution.

2.3.4.5 > Thats a Balance question and i'm not the best placed to answer on this. All i konw is that we are not all mighty and we can't do anything just because it is needed or asked ( read my previous post).

6. Afaik it is done since last patch.

That's good news on 1 and 6, nice work. Got me logging in again!!

[Arbich]

Good points Yaliskah, but I don´t agree with all of them (you can´t make everyone happy all the time )

I don´t think XRealm is that bad. Its actually quite nice to switch sides, if its boring on your side. Maybe some relatively short lockout times might be a good idea. I know, not possible atm. Multi-Accounts to avoid lockout times blabla. But making Xrealming to restrictive will piss people off. Different people have different experiences, bit the same like xrealm-chat, which was imo one of the better additions of this server.

About the balance changes, why not aks community in advance about planned balance changes? This people actually play the game and might know what impact proposed changes might have. And you would also make the community responsible for actual changes. Torquemadra posted a long text about planned WE changes a few days ago, I don´t understand why he removed it shortly afterwards.
Also there was a balance team in the past (I remember .ab ex WP/DoK changes were tested by some players in advance), is it still active? I don´t know what classes you devs play. I only sometimes see Natherul as deftard-BG running around in oRVR and slowly but surely dying (no offense, as long as you have fun ).

About you devs as a bunch of assholes. This is vastly exaggerated and I don´t like the certaintly in this statement. But sometimes (which make it somewhat unpredictable) some devs/gms act unusually. This is a server where people from different cultures/backgrounds play together, so it might be somewhat hard for some people to adapt to the bevaviour of this server. I personally don´t experience this behaviour in the community where I live.

Not much you can do about the other points you mentioned. Telling you to work faster/harder to invent new things and stop the boredom might sound a bit ungrateful.

Still thankful that you made this server possible.