Improving T4 - My two cents

[cronius77]

I been staying out of the conversations here mostly but been lurking awhile but this thread seriously is to the point of laughter from both staff and players alike. I know everyone here wants what's best for the game but all I'm reading in this thread from both devs and players alike is "we want to force you to play a certain way" I get this is a private server but if people keep reading stupid stuff like taking this away or that or basically insulting people who play differently than what this vision is they will leave. You can say all you want also let em all go and then you have maybe 100 or 200 dedicated players who eventually quit for lack of fights. Hell by the time I play at NA eastern time of night it's dead already.

You can't set back and tell people not to zerge if that's what they want to do , you can put in as many obstacles as you wish and all it's going to do is piss off everyone and create extra drama. There is a reason this game was canned and failed and I think most here have some rose tinted glasses on what warhammer was. I was there at the beginning rain of fire trains wiping out warbands, bugs galore, and a staff that didn't give a **** about losing players left and right , that's what was live during release and why after 6 months mythic was laying off. Hell I still have 3 mythic devs I'm friends with on my facebook I still talk to about warhammer who-btw read these forums and play here once in awhile.

You guys are trying to fix a doomed game with so many design flaws that it's not even funny and you are expecting you can correct human behavior in the process. You hit a little over 1200 players online at peak times that by no means is some huge number of players. Do not piss off half of them by making your own design decisions based on personal preferences to favor busting up zerges or forcing fights etc. The best solution you can make here sincerely is to take this game to a patch level where 80 was the high not 100 and insane gear stats and pocket items and fix the myriad of mythic bugs that was in live during the time period. People come back to play warhammer for nostalgia not for some insane custom experience , it's why I did and most of the people I play with but it honestly is turning into some custom agenda experience based entirely on a few staff members personal preferences instead of what the community in general wants.

I'm not trying to insult anyone here this is all personal opinion of course but this is the general way myself and a few friends see it to the point it's starting to be a turn off playing here. I know the devs do work very hard and want this thing to succeed but let the community solve this sort of issue and let guild leaders step up. I mean come on what are you going to do if a mega alliance forms here like on servers like ostermark had at release ? You going to ban them or put in things to make them not be a guild group or alliance group? That would drive away players fast to. And I think in the end most here just want to have good fights period, some just want to gear up and be more dominant which is why they zerge now.

[mursie]

I do unfortunately think, the latest patch to rvr has been somewhat detrimental to the game.

Prior to the change, the zones were being pushed and flipped constantly. To me, this means the incentives for keep takes and zone locks were working. Were they a bit to lucrative? probably. And a scaleback could be done. Perhaps 1/3/5 medals per zone as you march from one end to the other within a zone. And perhaps only 1 gold bag at an empty keep vs. multiple at a defended one. But still - zones and keeps were properly incentivized as people were marching through the zones to cap.

What wasn't working - was proper incentives for defense. People weren't defending. This is the where the efforts to revamp the system, imo, should have been directed. What can be done to make journeys into the lakes as the underdog a lucrative thing? Some suggestions, like scaling medal drops based on the AAO buff size were commented on. I think this could work. Further, medals awarded at a keep defense as time progresses (i.e. the longer you stall the enemy the more medals accrue - like 1 every 5 mins of defense) also could work.

BUt the key was - incentivize the defenders... the attackers incentives are working.

Imo, the current system patch did neither. Not only did it not incentive the defenders, it destroyed the incentives for the attackers. Now, at least with respect to NA, there are no zone flips or keep captures taking place. There is only small scale skirmishes occurring in praag. I find this unfortunate because the other zones have so much incredible landscape and opportunities to offer. Yet they aren't being used because for many players there is no purpose.

Even during the euro prime time on sunday, the fights were basically just relegated to major blob against major blob in praag. No real push to capture keeps or zones (although order did flip praag a few times).

I hope this is reviewed. Some suggestions:

Make a 50/50/50 racial quest for each pairing. Tie 5 medals to it. This would incentive players to go and skirmsh in each pairing to complete this repeatable pairing quest.

Return incentives for attackers on keeps/zones. Just reduce the rate of acquisition. 1/3/5 medals for zone locks... or even 1/2/3. whatever. Just make it something so that it has purpose. Make keep takes give 1 gold bag for empty defense. More as it is defended.

Most importantly - make defenders incentives worth doing. medals increased with aao buff. medals acquired over time while in keep defense. Maybe even a gold bag chest drop if a defense is successful at restoring a door.

[Azarael]

@cronius: If you think the aim of putting in all this work was to recreate Warhammer exactly as it was, with all the flaws that killed it, then you're sadly mistaken. I've heard the nostalgia argument before, and if that's what floats your boat, that's fine. But don't presume to speak for everyone with it. I for one am not interested in a flawed experience, and I'm even less interested in being forced to support the existence of one because it's what the live game was and some people think that's actually desirable. There's simply no way that rewards will be handed out for doing nothing, and a vocal minority of people complaining about that won't change anything.

@mursie: Please read my signature. We already know what we're going to do. We just don't have the power to do it yet.

[mursie]

@mursie: Please read my signature. We already know what we're going to do. We just don't have the power to do it yet.

I understand your signature. And I understand if the direction is to wait until such power is obtainable to implement your own vision. However, in the interim of that, I am only discussing feedback on the state of rvr as I see it now and some suggestions on how to band-aid that state.

Please note - I fully understand if the direction with regards to my interim suggestions is to ignore and maintain current course. I'm only offering my feedback and suggestions and expect nothing with regards to that.

Good luck.

[Azarael]

Yeah, I'm not sure what to do about it myself. Present RvR is awful, no denying it, and I don't know how long it will take for us to be ready.

[Genisaurus]

I do unfortunately think, the latest patch to rvr has been somewhat detrimental to the game.

Prior to the change, the zones were being pushed and flipped constantly. To me, this means the incentives for keep takes and zone locks were working. Were they a bit to lucrative? probably. And a scaleback could be done. Perhaps 1/3/5 medals per zone as you march from one end to the other within a zone. And perhaps only 1 gold bag at an empty keep vs. multiple at a defended one. But still - zones and keeps were properly incentivized as people were marching through the zones to cap.

What wasn't working - was proper incentives for defense. People weren't defending. This is the where the efforts to revamp the system, imo, should have been directed. What can be done to make journeys into the lakes as the underdog a lucrative thing? Some suggestions, like scaling medal drops based on the AAO buff size were commented on. I think this could work. Further, medals awarded at a keep defense as time progresses (i.e. the longer you stall the enemy the more medals accrue - like 1 every 5 mins of defense) also could work.

BUt the key was - incentivize the defenders... the attackers incentives are working.

Imo, the current system patch did neither. Not only did it not incentive the defenders, it destroyed the incentives for the attackers. Now, at least with respect to NA, there are no zone flips or keep captures taking place. There is only small scale skirmishes occurring in praag. I find this unfortunate because the other zones have so much incredible landscape and opportunities to offer. Yet they aren't being used because for many players there is no purpose.

Even during the euro prime time on sunday, the fights were basically just relegated to major blob against major blob in praag. No real push to capture keeps or zones (although order did flip praag a few times).

I hope this is reviewed. Some suggestions:

Make a 50/50/50 racial quest for each pairing. Tie 5 medals to it. This would incentive players to go and skirmsh in each pairing to complete this repeatable pairing quest.

Return incentives for attackers on keeps/zones. Just reduce the rate of acquisition. 1/3/5 medals for zone locks... or even 1/2/3. whatever. Just make it something so that it has purpose. Make keep takes give 1 gold bag for empty defense. More as it is defended.

Most importantly - make defenders incentives worth doing. medals increased with aao buff. medals acquired over time while in keep defense. Maybe even a gold bag chest drop if a defense is successful at restoring a door.

Keep defenses have awarded gold chests for several patches now, so long as a certain number of attackers were killed in the radius of a keep. Unfortunately, it was discovered recently that the area that was considered "inside the radius" of the keep was incredibly small - in many cases, not even reaching from the keep lord to the outer wall of the keep. This was fixed in the May 14th patch. Additionally, the number of killed attackers required to trigger the defense roll was lowered slightly.

One of the biggest problems, I will admit, is the whole ram situation. There are two problems here: first, siege weaponry can only be set up within the aforementioned "area" of a keep. Until recently, this meant that rams were subject to the above problem. This was fixed, but now the second issue is more apparent - the position where a ram spawns is calculated as an offset from the position of the oil. This is one of those things that seemed like a brilliant and elegant solution at the time, but the geometry of every keep is just too different for a calculation to be reliable. Instead, I am currently working on re-writing this system to just use hard-coded coordinates for ram placement at every keep. Additionally, I'm going to see if I can force-feed the ram a door to target, because it sometimes seems unable to find one on its own. These things will take a day or two.

I expect that once the differences in difficulty between attacking and defending a keep are balanced out, people will be more willing to attack (and defend) keeps once again. Once that is the case we can look at adjusting incentives, but at some point we need to be able to put the whole thing down so we can move on to rewriting RvR from scratch.

Implementing and fixing the current system is more my job. I agree the system is pretty borked at the moment, but it's a work in progress.