gersy wrote: Wed Dec 24, 2025 6:55 pm
"Is RoR realisticly still a campaign game?"
No.
The biggest mistakes were
unified currency and
scheduled city.
Unified currency maybe "cleaned" up some things and made the game a bit more "simple" in the short term but in the long term had extremely negative effect on the game.
Why were these changes harmful?
Because there was initially a
ladder system with gearing, designed properly by actual game devs. You had specific sources of gear and currencies associated with it. Conq from zone lock, vanq from keep, inv from fort, wl/sov from city (as well as oppressor and weapons from SCs). As far as I remember, and can tell from skimming 10+ year ago posts from old forums etc, this is how it was. Further in RoR we had tri/vic only from ranked which continued this ladder system and that was a positive thing for a while because it encouraged learning, improving and playing properly to earn some nice rewards.
Why was the original campaign design and reward structure better than what we have now?
Because it gave a clear set of "goals" for players and set in stone upgrade paths and because it gave a reason to engage in core game systems. Perhaps even more importantly overall it helped to
grow community elements that are necessary for an mmo. It's especially paramount in the game such as this, where the
formation of guilds, alliances, 6-12 man teams and to some extent faction "pride" were all meant to be important at the foundational level. This is because if you wanted to earn the best gear, you needed to coordinate with other players and work together to achieve goals at every level of gameplay. This is the essence of the genre (we are playing an mmorpg, not single player rpg in case some of you forgot) and was a core tenant of the original design philosophy, being a realm vs realm game with heavy teamplay and faction elements.
The entirety of the tug of war, push and pull, capturing and holding enemy lands or winning back your own, the broad campaign mechanic which is so unique to this game and what makes it truly special now lies dead now because there is largely no point in engaging with most of it. This is due to it not having strong enough rewards. Why push for a keep when I can sit in blob and spam aoe for bis gear? Same goes for fort and for city, as well as for scenarios.
If you wanted to succeed and to deck yourself out in the best gear you were, by clever design, encouraged to play with others.
Forming bonds, comradery, team play, organization, coordination and on the flipside strong rivalries with certain opponents which gave another reason to put in the extra effort to win. However since the ruination of the campaign, removal of individual currencies and acquisition methods for gear and destruction of SCs/ranked in importance, what we saw was instead has been a
slow and steady degradation of both gameplay and community.
Guilds began to disband or lose large amounts of members, skilled veteran players quit because there was no more competition, coordination and player skill fell off a cliff to the abysmal state it is in now. Game became and continues to be a largely uncoordinated blob fest full of players who mostly don't have a clue what they are doing or why they are doing it.
To put it simply; the ability to purchase the best gear in the game (warlord, sovereign, tri, vic) with a currency that is able to be earned at level 1 (war crests) was a huge error. It enabled players to become bis without learning almost anything about the game. No longer are you strongly encouraged to group up, create guilds, form alliances, make friends, team up and try your hardest to win. The reward structure has been completely broken in favor of some casual pandering and it's very clear that it has backfired tremendously. Now you just load up the game, log on your choppa, join a 3-warband pug blob and spam 3 buttons with 10 fps. All of this without a semblance of skill or a clue and you are rewarded with bis gear for doing so if you do it long enough.
It's no wonder the forums, advice chat, discords, etc. are always full of outlandish complaints and misinformation when you create an environment where, in a pvp game of all things, players are almost actively discouraged from improving due to the game mechanics not requiring it of them.
There are no carrots anymore, just sticks. Don't mistake my meaning here, this is not an onslaught against more casual players or those without a lot of time/desire to improve. I love RoR and I am thankful for what the devs do and continue to do and I think many of the recent changes are steps in the right direction. Still it remains that there are some glaring issues such as campaign and reward structure that need to be re-examined for the health of the game.
It is paramount for the success of the game that the unique gameplay elements that WAR brings are better maintained and improved with a clear intent to emphasize community and individual growth rather than promoting stagnation. Reinforce your strengths and take some inspiration from the older designs when the game flourished. For years no other game can compete with the unique ideas of WAR such as the robust campaign and rvr mechanics, as well as other game systems like scenarios. It is also imperative that the reward structure is somehow repaired and brought back to a state where players are encouraged to engage in more content than brawling in Praag's middle BO to earn their next piece of loot.
