Feedback: Smallscale PvP

[Aluviya]

Death of rankeds really showed that people don't want competitiveness, they just want to stomp those who don't have ability to form const group.

death of ranked meant
1) devs are clueless on how balance classes efffectively because if you were not the FOTM class you were simply stomped
2) competitive did not give anything super worth the farm
3) most ppl are just braindead on life support and prefeer to zerg mindlessly. just look the guilds on the server. most are garbage alt parking guilds.
4) if you see now the game killed all aspects of the game except for zerg: cities are worthless, they give same stuff of rvr in tier 2 areas for example. Unifying the marks was biggest mistake of server.
5) classes were stripped bare each patch for smallscale because "game is balance in rvr" which is so stupid as statement which i wish not to even comment.

I don't think saying ranked died because the community simply “didn't want competitiveness” is fair. That is far too generalised.

I would especially point out the fifth argument, and add that I still doubt the “main” content of the game should simply be equated with ORvR. The main content is **PvP**, and PvP comes in different forms. Yet over the years, it feels like more and more of the competitive and strategic aspects that define PvP have been weakened, while large-scale ORvR — where numbers often matter more than quality of play — remained the dominant reference point, especially when it came to class balance.

With that said, I am not claiming that the current balance team only looks at ORvR. But small-scale balance was pushed into the background for a very long time, and ranked — being one of the few environments where balance really mattered — **suffered heavily from this for several seasons.** There were periods where certain classes or setups were clearly too dominant and remained that way for far too long, and others where your setup mattered more than the actual quality of your gameplay. That caused a lot of frustration, both for veterans and for newer players who genuinely wanted to get into ranked.

At the same time, ranked exposed some of the same mentality we increasingly see in scenarios today: little communication, little willingness to learn, and often more interest in getting the gear than actually improving. There were exceptions, of course, and some of those who genuinely tried to learn and improve throughout the ranked seasons became remarkable allies and opponents that I still remember today.

With ranked gone, I would go as far as saying that one of the last genuinely high-level competitive environments disappeared with it. For some veterans, that also meant losing one of the few remaining things worth striving for beyond simply accumulating more gear or currency.

I absolutely agree that the game needs better accessibility for newer players. But I cannot repeat this often enough: **the incentives have to be set differently.** Turning scenarios increasingly into PvE-style objective runs is not the answer. “If you cannot beat them, just avoid the fight and run the objective” might appeal to some people, but in many scenarios that simply ends with the enemy denying further caps anyway because nobody is supporting the player carrying the flag.

I can absolutely see why accessibility matters, especially in an ageing MMORPG community where people have jobs, families and less free time. But accessibility should not mean removing most of the obstacles that actually force people to learn the game. RoR is already a difficult game to master in that regard: there are countless abilities, class interactions, matchups, positioning decisions and strategies that you simply do not learn overnight. Many of the obstacles people now regard as inconvenient were also **learning moments** that forced players to communicate, adapt and improve.

If you remove too much friction, you eventually also remove part of what gave people a reason to **improve, organise, compete and keep playing.**

[borc1]

unironically the times before gcd/rampage nerf were best balance wise. it wasnt perfect but there was something for everyone. current day balance is dog **** and they just keep digging the hole with every patch

[Vance]

Scenarios should be deathmatches. Easy, simple, strait forward, and everyone is by auto on the same objective.
First team that gets to 20 kills wins. if its tie at the end of the timer with no 20 kills then the reward is split.

That is actually an interesting approach. That would also encourage to heal, protect and keep the "randoms" in the off group alive.
Would love to see this in one random scenario as a test. I mean, you can still keep the PvE element for now, but add the mechanic as a test.