The new player experience in a nutshell

[iPeriphery]

All those session crap "MMO"s really spoiled people.
You're not supposed to be equal to veterans from start, you gradually learn aspects of game and gradually rise in power. Stop asking for handouts and basically full sov gear from start.
Play only one character and you will be surprised how fast you will skip all the way to 40 lvl.

You're delusional. Some people even if they are new are way way more skilled than BIS geared veterans and only get sh1t on because the veteran is gear carried. Skillsets and mechanics learned from other games can carry over to another game easily. Regardless of the game some people will always be more skilled than others; that is just reality.

This game has less than 1k Players on the majority of the time. Keep that childish mindset and ignore the real issues and see how long this small playerbase game actually keeps on going. Death of a Thousand Cuts. That is it's future as it stands. Get some perspective and stop being so condescending. This is supposed to be a PVP game where you PVP 24/7. Skill should ALWAYS take precedent over gear.

I guarantee you the majority of the playerbase are gear carried or zerg carried bots that would get absolutely obliterated in a real small scale PVP scenerio where you actually have to use your brain and get punished for poor positioning and lack of game knowledge. (Especially since this is the case in most MMO's if not most PVP games)

The only way this game survives is if the gear gap is closed and the individual player's Skill and Knowledge levels are the only thing that determines which player is the better player.

if you take away gear disparity the game will "actually" die. because why would anyone invest time into a long term project without getting any sort of progression out of it. If you are that type of player you would be looking towards titles like League of Legends, Fortnite, Indie games or FPS in general to get your quick dopamine gaming fix and log off again. Look at GW2 sPvP...that stuff is super lame. Also believe it or not but most people do not aim towards playing super sweaty small scale content. Just log on, get in a warband smash some heads in and log off again. And after doing that for a while you get super powerful...wich feels nice and yes they will still get crushed in 6v6, but that's as you said "reality" and how life goes. There is always a bigger fish

Nah, that's completely the most BS copium I've ever heard.

I've literally played every single MMO that's come out in the past 20 years and the only ones that have a PVP scene that has survived are the ones that it is easy to catch up in gear with and give you an experience while you're getting your gear where you don't feel like an absolutely useless punching bag.

Ranked in this game is already basically dead because you can only compete with a premade BIS group if you want a chance to win so I don't see your point at all seeing as how RANKED is supposed to be the progression in any PVP game. There's a reason why in WoW Arena every season people still keep trying to get to Gladiator even after playing for 15+ years.

Gear progression isn't supposed to be the only "Meaningful" progression. Especially in a PVP game, Gear shouldn't matter that much at all; There's a reason why T1 is so popular.

This game gives the illusion of a level playing field PVP experience where you can have fun right away during T1, just to rugpull you as soon as you hit 16 (and then again at 40) which leaves a horribly bad taste in new players mouths which is why in the 10 years of this server's existence and you hardly have close to 1k ish concurrent players.

Sorry to point out the harsh reality but this game is already practically dead as it stands. I only say what I say because I genuinely care about this game.

Player skill level progression in general is and always should be the true progression in a PVP game. That's the point of competition.

Having the base line level of the average player get higher because there are more players in general that stick around long enough to "gitgud" will mean better more engaging fights FOR EVERYONE that are challenging instead of just straight ROFLSTOMPING the other side due to UNGABUNGA I GOT BIGGER BALL GROUP (or higher gear).

Closing the gear gap if not completely negating it will increase the games longevity and population massively due to actually being able to get to the end game gear point at a reasonable time.

This is clearly the ONLY thing that will
A. Retain the current player base and stop it from bleeding out like it currently is.
B. Grow the current player base and make the majority of new players stay past T1 because people will stop quitting after they realize it's just simply not worth the grind when there are way better games to play for PVP where you can actually be relevant in a reasonable time period instead of being a literal sandbag piece of cannon fodder.

Removing the gear gap benefits EVERYONE. If you don't have a steady stream of new players then your population dies and you have nobody to play against and then the game actually dies completely.

I can't even begin to count the number of times I've just sat around queued for Scenerios doing absolutely nothing for 20+ Minutes at a time because their is no RVR going on and apparently nobody queuing SC's either LMAO. That indicates a small and dying playerbase. How many new players do you think would be insane or patient enough like me to sit around for that when they could just go play another game or do literally anything else instead????

If you truly gave a singular f(_)ck about this game like I do, you would put your bias aside and look at the reality that has been played out time and time again, not only in this game, but multiple other failed MMO's.

I've played my fair share of MOBA's, Battle Royales, Shooters, etc. But the one thing that always draws me back to MMO's that those games do not have is the combat, world, and feeling of class fantasy. I don't give a fk about those types of games PVP experience. MMO's Are the GOATTTTT! I fakin LOVE me a good MMO.

This game has a ton of potential and quite literally yesterday gotten a large amount of views about it through Nixxiom's YouTube video (which is currently sitting at 16k Views and rising).

The time is NOW to do something about it and capitilize on all the views this game has gotten in just 2025 alone. People are STARVING for a good MMO. They will likely not get that until Ashes of Creation finally releases in 2099 :^)

Time is of the essence, and this is the last shot for this game TBH. Either do something or watch it die a "Death of A Thousand Cuts".

[leftayparxoun]

We have 800ppl peak, new players leave in drowes.

While people might be coming and going, the overall population has been at a healthy 1.3 to 1.4k peak for at least 3 months now. And with a ~700 to 800 average across all timezones.

[iPeriphery]

We have 800ppl peak, new players leave in drowes.

While people might be coming and going, the overall population has been at a healthy 1.3 to 1.4k peak for at least 3 months now. And with a ~700 to 800 average across all timezones.

While that may be nice that in the past 3 months it's 1.3-1.4k peak, that still isn't jack squat. Most random ass WoW Private servers have 3k+ players at any given time and there are literally THOUSANDS of those so I don't see how your point is relevant at all since it doesn't negate the truth of the matter that is trying to be addressed here.

There is an actual problem. Choosing to ignore it doesn't do anything to benefit you in any way shape or form if you actually enjoy playing this game and care about it to any degree at all.

If we as a community fail to speak out about it, nothing will be done and the game WILL die.

Will our complaints fall upon deaf ears?

Well.... that is very highly likely to be the case, as this is something that is observable hundreds of times in multiple other games time and time again.

But nonetheless we choose to speak out anyway because sitting here doing nothing doesn't solve a damn thing either.

[leftayparxoun]

While people might be coming and going, the overall population has been at a healthy 1.3 to 1.4k peak for at least 3 months now. And with a ~700 to 800 average across all timezones.

While that may be nice that in the past 3 months it's 1.3-1.4k peak, that still isn't jack squat. Most random ass WoW Private servers have 3k+ players at any given time and there are literally THOUSANDS of those so I don't see how your point is relevant at all since it doesn't negate the truth of the matter that is trying to be addressed here.

If you ask most warband leaders in the game, they will tell you that if an active zone has more than 200-300 people per side in it, the orvr gameplay becomes unplayable/unenjoyable. So with that in mind, even if the pop were to always spread out evenly in the 3 orvr zones, having e.g. 1500 people in rvr would be detrimental to the overall fun (at least that's how I see it). Reaching 1500 rvr pop is of course not something achievable now, since you'll at most see 700 people in the lakes at the highest rvr peaks (usually around 60% of the online pop plays rvr at any given time from my experience).

There is also the networking/lag issue at play here too. Keep/Fort sieges with 300 or more people at the same spot often result in massive disconnects from both sides. And fps losses of course.

In any case, even if we disregard the above issues, the fact of the mater is that the current max pop is neither 800 nor is it dwindling massively as claimed by the person I replied to. If anything we're at a high point compared to the last 2 years (at least pop-wise).

There is an actual problem. Choosing to ignore it doesn't do anything to benefit you in any way shape or form if you actually enjoy playing this game and care about it to any degree at all.

If we as a community fail to speak out about it, nothing will be done and the game WILL die.

Will our complaints fall upon deaf ears? Very highly likely as this is something that is observable hundreds of times in multiple other games time and time again.

But nonetheless we choose to speak out anyway because sitting here doing nothing doesn't solve a damn thing either.

And it is good that people speak out about things they find wrong in the game. The devs have stated many times that they read the forums, so who knows. But keep in mind that suggestions such as these have been ongoing for a long time now. And with pop numbers being at a nice level and slowly rising, I would assume dev motivation to make drastic changes such as the ones proposed here should be at an all time low.

Also keep in mind that while people might appreciate the competitive aspects of this game a lot, there is still a large portion of the population and (from my understanding of it) of the dev team that prefers to view this game as a Sandbox.

[Stimpz]

Spoiler:

You're delusional. Some people even if they are new are way way more skilled than BIS geared veterans and only get sh1t on because the veteran is gear carried. Skillsets and mechanics learned from other games can carry over to another game easily. Regardless of the game some people will always be more skilled than others; that is just reality.

This game has less than 1k Players on the majority of the time. Keep that childish mindset and ignore the real issues and see how long this small playerbase game actually keeps on going. Death of a Thousand Cuts. That is it's future as it stands. Get some perspective and stop being so condescending. This is supposed to be a PVP game where you PVP 24/7. Skill should ALWAYS take precedent over gear.

I guarantee you the majority of the playerbase are gear carried or zerg carried bots that would get absolutely obliterated in a real small scale PVP scenerio where you actually have to use your brain and get punished for poor positioning and lack of game knowledge. (Especially since this is the case in most MMO's if not most PVP games)

The only way this game survives is if the gear gap is closed and the individual player's Skill and Knowledge levels are the only thing that determines which player is the better player.

if you take away gear disparity the game will "actually" die. because why would anyone invest time into a long term project without getting any sort of progression out of it. If you are that type of player you would be looking towards titles like League of Legends, Fortnite, Indie games or FPS in general to get your quick dopamine gaming fix and log off again. Look at GW2 sPvP...that stuff is super lame. Also believe it or not but most people do not aim towards playing super sweaty small scale content. Just log on, get in a warband smash some heads in and log off again. And after doing that for a while you get super powerful...wich feels nice and yes they will still get crushed in 6v6, but that's as you said "reality" and how life goes. There is always a bigger fish

Nah, that's completely the most BS copium I've ever heard.

I've literally played every single MMO that's come out in the past 20 years and the only ones that have a PVP scene that has survived are the ones that it is easy to catch up in gear with and give you an experience while you're getting your gear where you don't feel like an absolutely useless punching bag.

Ranked in this game is already basically dead because you can only compete with a premade BIS group if you want a chance to win so I don't see your point at all seeing as how RANKED is supposed to be the progression in any PVP game. There's a reason why in WoW Arena every season people still keep trying to get to Gladiator even after playing for 15+ years.

Gear progression isn't supposed to be the only "Meaningful" progression. Especially in a PVP game, Gear shouldn't matter that much at all; There's a reason why T1 is so popular.

This game gives the illusion of a level playing field PVP experience where you can have fun right away during T1, just to rugpull you as soon as you hit 16 (and then again at 40) which leaves a horribly bad taste in new players mouths which is why in the 10 years of this server's existence and you hardly have close to 1k ish concurrent players.

Sorry to point out the harsh reality but this game is already practically dead as it stands. I only say what I say because I genuinely care about this game.

Player skill level progression in general is and always should be the true progression in a PVP game. That's the point of competition.

Having the base line level of the average player get higher because there are more players in general that stick around long enough to "gitgud" will mean better more engaging fights FOR EVERYONE that are challenging instead of just straight ROFLSTOMPING the other side due to UNGABUNGA I GOT BIGGER BALL GROUP (or higher gear).

Closing the gear gap if not completely negating it will increase the games longevity and population massively due to actually being able to get to the end game gear point at a reasonable time.

This is clearly the ONLY thing that will
A. Retain the current player base and stop it from bleeding out like it currently is.
B. Grow the current player base and make the majority of new players stay past T1 because people will stop quitting after they realize it's just simply not worth the grind when there are way better games to play for PVP where you can actually be relevant in a reasonable time period instead of being a literal sandbag piece of cannon fodder.

Removing the gear gap benefits EVERYONE. If you don't have a steady stream of new players then your population dies and you have nobody to play against and then the game actually dies completely.

I can't even begin to count the number of times I've just sat around queued for Scenerios doing absolutely nothing for 20+ Minutes at a time because their is no RVR going on and apparently nobody queuing SC's either LMAO. That indicates a small and dying playerbase. How many new players do you think would be insane or patient enough like me to sit around for that when they could just go play another game or do literally anything else instead????

If you truly gave a singular f(_)ck about this game like I do, you would put your bias aside and look at the reality that has been played out time and time again, not only in this game, but multiple other failed MMO's.

I've played my fair share of MOBA's, Battle Royales, Shooters, etc. But the one thing that always draws me back to MMO's that those games do not have is the combat, world, and feeling of class fantasy. I don't give a fk about those types of games PVP experience. MMO's Are the GOATTTTT! I fakin LOVE me a good MMO.

This game has a ton of potential and quite literally yesterday gotten a large amount of views about it through Nixxiom's YouTube video (which is currently sitting at 16k Views and rising).

The time is NOW to do something about it and capitilize on all the views this game has gotten in just 2025 alone. People are STARVING for a good MMO. They will likely not get that until Ashes of Creation finally releases in 2099 :^)

Time is of the essence, and this is the last shot for this game TBH. Either do something or watch it die a "Death of A Thousand Cuts".

We are in year 11 of "the server is dying."

[Ragnaroek93]

We have 800ppl peak, new players leave in drowes.

While people might be coming and going, the overall population has been at a healthy 1.3 to 1.4k peak for at least 3 months now. And with a ~700 to 800 average across all timezones.

The amount of players would most likely be higher if the game wouldn't actively bully new players out of the game. And 1,3k peak players on weekends is ok for a private server but it's not like that some more would hurt in any way - you'd have a larger playerbase outside of prime time and the community would be more robust to other MMO releases. For example when MOP classic releases I could imagine very well that the playerbase will drop to an unhealthy low amount, even if it's just temporary until people come back.

The time is NOW to do something about it and capitilize on all the views this game has gotten in just 2025 alone. People are STARVING for a good MMO. They will likely not get that until Ashes of Creation finally releases in 2099 :^)

Wouldn't hold my breath for AoC to be fair :S Their CEO made a lot of money with "cancer curing" juice, is known as a huge gaming whale in Archage, released an RTM ingame store before anything else, puts time exclusive items into it (before the game is even released and the amount of stuff which you can buy in it exceeds the WoW store by orders of magnitude), released a battle royale as test instead of anything game related and wants 120$ for an alpha access. Even if I want to like the game everything so far tells me that they're trying to scam us and even if you give them the benefit of the doubt the game has been in developement for almost 10 years now, so even in the best case the game is in developement hell. I personally doubt that the game will even fully release and think it ends up more like Star Citizen. Nor does the game has an established franchise behind it like Warhammer or Warcraft which will make it even harder.

But regarding RoR I agree, the game is currently getting a lot of momentum and right NOW would be the right time to capitalize on it. Especially because there are several solutions to this issue and all of them are so simple, fixing it would be nowhere close to the scale of all the dungeons and raids which they've released over the last year. And nobody is saying that they need to remove the progression entirely, just drastically lower the item level gap between the sets and everything would be fine. Having almost 30 ilvl difference between conq and sov is ridiculous and everyone who ever played WoW arena knows how ridiculous such a high item level gap is.

[Templa]

While that may be nice that in the past 3 months it's 1.3-1.4k peak, that still isn't jack squat. Most random ass WoW Private servers have 3k+ players at any given time and there are literally THOUSANDS of those so I don't see how your point is relevant at all since it doesn't negate the truth of the matter that is trying to be addressed here.

There is an actual problem. Choosing to ignore it doesn't do anything to benefit you in any way shape or form if you actually enjoy playing this game and care about it to any degree at all.

If we as a community fail to speak out about it, nothing will be done and the game WILL die.

Will our complaints fall upon deaf ears?

Well.... that is very highly likely to be the case, as this is something that is observable hundreds of times in multiple other games time and time again.

But nonetheless we choose to speak out anyway because sitting here doing nothing doesn't solve a damn thing either.

As far as i know WoW servers are capped at 1200 ppl on one "shard"... also you will never meet more than 500 ppl in a zone in WoW because servers will simply crash or you have literally 5 fps because the engine can't handle that form of content (Which is not bad, because the game was not designed around massive open world battles). I played WoW since Burning Crusade, I played Warhammer AoR from 2008-2009 and am on this server for more than 9 years now. ofc with several breaks. If i play retail WoW with cross server matchmaking and i queue on a european server for a dungeon as DPS i wait about 20 minutes during peak hours. the later it get's the longer the queue times get. i actually checked yesterday and had as a lvl 16 dps a queue for over an hour. while pvp was over 4 hours. so there you have your comparison. I see you are new and full of energy. which is good, don't mistake me. but RoR has a small development team and tends to take their time and only releases stuff once they are sure about it. So it does not matter if a big youtuber, streamer or god personally makes a video about Warhammer RoR, if development needs to be faster...STEP UP...Do it yourself. writing doesn't help, whatever you are writing has be said dozens of times while the complete opposite and everything in between has been said as well.

It's important to cater to new players yes. but taking away from a "classic" MMORPG which will NEVER exist in this type again (unless you can emulate your own lil warhammer ror game in your gaming capsule with AI bots you can't distinguish from humans in the future) does not fix anything. Warhammer RoR is a niche game, PvP and especially in MMOs is niche. As far as i see it you get rewarded for the playtime you choose to invest in this game. Unlike WoW or any other big MMORPG on the market. You can simply cash in 100s or 1000s of €/$ buy half your BiS gear and start smashing away.
The gear progression for RoR got a lot easier with the rework of the "Armory Wards" unlocks. You can save your war crests starting from T1 buy gear from vendors, do City dungeon at lvl 17 and gear your character in PvE up to Bloodlord/Hunters Vale. Only healers who want to heal via a willpower oriented playstyle have to get Vanquisher. Which should be easily obtainable once you hit lvl 40 if you level while doing RvR, SCs and a bit of PvE here and there. There are a lot of guides and resources spread all over several Discords, forums and the wiki. If you want to help new players, do it like so many before you did. Build a guild with the emphasis on teaching new players the ropes and put in effort to make literature more publicly or easier available.

Let me tell you how i level up if i feel like it.
Disclaimer: I will very rarely play solo. I am almost ALWAYS premade because i am not sadistic enough as to go through the pain of being a pug
T1:
1-16: i spam SCs while 2-6 man roaming with premades
T2:
17-1x: Run sacellum or sewers until full keepers set
1x-32: i spam SCs while 2-6 man roaming with premades
32: i do gunbad until i have full redeye set, also i am building a beastlord group to accept quests and beat the bosses (Set is equippable once lvl 40)
32-39:i spam SCs while 2-6 man roaming with premades
T4:
At this point i will be something like
40/50-60: equip my Beastlord run BB/Tunnels, complete the 1st inf milestone and get a nice weapon for most classes > BS > HV
with BS and HV sets you have very solid Tank and DPS sets to play in smallscale. If you want to be a def tank you will have to buy Invader and than buy warlord/sov/triumph mix. Same goes for "willpower" healers, just that you can get away with Vanquisher, which is cheaper and imho a great set due to resource management benefits.
If you struggle with finding groups, join Guilds or PvE Discords. If you can't find em ask in chat. People usually are very helpful, which is another benefit you only get if you have a small community.

[Ragnaroek93]

As far as i know WoW servers are capped at 1200 ppl on one "shard"... also you will never meet more than 500 ppl in a zone in WoW because servers will simply crash or you have literally 5 fps because the engine can't handle that form of content (Which is not bad, because the game was not designed around massive open world battles). I played WoW since Burning Crusade, I played Warhammer AoR from 2008-2009 and am on this server for more than 9 years now. ofc with several breaks. If i play retail WoW with cross server matchmaking and i queue on a european server for a dungeon as DPS i wait about 20 minutes during peak hours. the later it get's the longer the queue times get. i actually checked yesterday and had as a lvl 16 dps a queue for over an hour. while pvp was over 4 hours. so there you have your comparison. I see you are new and full of energy. which is good, don't mistake me. but RoR has a small development team and tends to take their time and only releases stuff once they are sure about it. So it does not matter if a big youtuber, streamer or god personally makes a video about Warhammer RoR, if development needs to be faster...STEP UP...Do it yourself. writing doesn't help, whatever you are writing has be said dozens of times while the complete opposite and everything in between has been said as well.

WoW not having this type of RvR PvP which RoR has is RoR's biggest strength and they should capitalize on that. Only ESO has some similar RvR PvP but that game is a trainwreck where PvP is literally unplayable during prime time because of performance issues (and ESO's combat sucks on top of that lol).
The queue is long because there's a shortage of healers and tanks. You'll have this in RoR as well, it's much harder to get into both PvP and PvE groups if you're a dps. And RoR scenario also only was long on my destro alt, on my main (order) it was also very fast, their queue is probably shorter because there are less order players queuing.
Well... I kinda was full energy but it's all gone now after reaching 40 and realising the amount of grind which I have to do in order to be competitive (and lets be honest here, vanq set with RR60 is already quite a lot of work and the set isn't good either). And playing PvE in order to have an advantage in PvP is extremely unpopular among PvP players. This was the case in the BfA expansion from WoW and it was one of worst received expansions of all time. Blizzard being extremely stubborn didn't help either but even they backtracked after the massive backlash and opposition which they received. Maybe it's enough for you and for other new players, for me it certainly wasn't enough to keep me playing (haven't logged into the game since a week now).
4h PvP queue is because literally nobody queues for bgs at level 16. Max level ranked queues are almost instant, except for the soloq modes if you're a dps - on healer these are instant as well.
I'd bet that nobody in the developement team would let me (or any other forum user) just change their codebase to be fair, for good reason. And giving feedback of why you stopped playing IS valueable, much more valueable than just quitting quietly. If you only take feedback from people who are playing you'll end up with data that's heavily affected by survivorship bias.

Teaching new players probably isn't worth it because how many of them will stick around as things are currently? Why would anybody bother to go through all that trouble?

I was nowhere close to rr50-60 when reaching level 40 and I did only scenarios and RvR roaming lol.

[saupreusse]

It always depends heavily on when you're playing and what class you're playing. On my DPS AM leveling was a breezenand i got rr60 within my 2 weeks of sick leave with around 48hours of playtime. I also easily had all the crests for the invader ward before i even needed it. I thing vanq is already a pretty decent set, thats why I promote making it accessible at rr45, to minimize power creep a bit.

[tefnaht]

X years ago was a problem, to get sov gear you have to get access to City Siege(CS) and win it. To start CS - one side have to fully lock 2 from 3 T4 directions, thats happens from time to time, but in a random time(mostly not in EU primetime and it's mine timezone). After than form premade WB where half of dps classes was banned. Be lucky to enter into a CS mirror and finally win in mirror. Get sov for non hardcore player with no 18h every day to play was a task for year.

Devs changed grind gear system and CS - now every week you have an option to participate in CS if fixed time and to gear up this content is optional. People less attracted to make full zone locks and go to CS, but now every class with every playstyle has access to top gear and eventually will get it.

It was an end-game problem, here topic about mid-game problem. Probably devs will make solution like "unified war crests" when no one on forum doesn't think about, but ask for class balance on CS.