Return of Reckoning

It's getting boring to write it again and again, but the game does not revolve around single player, nor around roflstomp-6man-BiS-elite-gank-squads.

Most solo players fail to look out of their close-minded box. The biggest number of players are a colorfull mix of players grouped together from guilds/alliances/lfg-channel. Most of them are not ranked-worth combinations of gear/setup/players and not even a 6 man group, it's a mix of 3, 4 ,5 or 6 (and thanks to these incredible good last patch even 2) people, some in endgear, some in low gear, some of them play daily, some of them are only there once in a while.

This discussions every week or more often just mirror the opinions of a small bunch of people and get to much attention from the devs.

All the argumentation around "booohooo the new players" is just there to cover your egos.

New people need guilds, new people need help to get into their classes, new people need some bonus for gears maybe. What new poeple don't need is more content pushing them in your "We want to play solo no matter what"-bubble. Because thats not what this game is about.

Edit: There is no special reward for Weekend Warfront, nothing you get what you can't get from somewhere else.

The rules should be simple:

Everyone can get everything! If you want it real quick, get yourself into a position where you can play ranked! You want it in a reasonable time, make some friends! You want to play solo, well, take your time!

I don't get all this negativity around weekly solo sc idea. This will be just another game mode for all those who are not satisfied with current system. Don't like it? Just don't participate and focus on former solution. More options to play the game is always positive.

Everdin wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 1:12 pm It's getting boring to write it again and again, but the game does not revolve around single player, nor around roflstomp-6man-BiS-elite-gank-squads.

Most solo players fail to look out of their close-minded box. The biggest number of players are a colorfull mix of players grouped together from guilds/alliances/lfg-channel. Most of them are not ranked-worth combinations of gear/setup/players and not even a 6 man group, it's a mix of 3, 4 ,5 or 6 (and thanks to these incredible good last patch even 2) people, some in endgear, some in low gear, some of them play daily, some of them are only there once in a while.

This discussions every week or more often just mirror the opinions of a small bunch of people and get to much attention from the devs.

All the argumentation around "booohooo the new players" is just there to cover your egos.

New people need guilds, new people need help to get into their classes, new people need some bonus for gears maybe. What new poeple don't need is more content pushing them in your "We want to play solo no matter what"-bubble. Because thats not what this game is about.

Edit: There is no special reward for Weekend Warfront, nothing you get what you can't get from somewhere else.

The rules should be simple:

Everyone can get everything! If you want it real quick, get yourself into a position where you can play ranked! You want it in a reasonable time, make some friends! You want to play solo, well, take your time!

This!
Couldnt say it more clear without unnecessary details. Kudos

Brakh wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 1:43 pm I don't get all this negativity around weekly solo sc idea. This will be just another game mode for all those who are not satisfied with current system. Don't like it? Just don't participate and focus on former solution. More options to play the game is always positive.

Because there is literally no point to split a very very narrow and little population EVEN further. I do love SCs, i play them all in all possible variants and i want them to pop. Such experiments are incredibly dangerous and waste of precious devs time.

Rapzel wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 7:13 am

zoccolo wrote: Tue Mar 14, 2023 9:49 pm There used to be a private server on which you could play a glorious MMORPG for free ... One day, for reasons we are not going to investigate, the casual player base began to decline.

Why are you not going to investigate that? Because AFAIK the reason why Uthgard died was because of it's atrocious grind, "strange" choices when it came to RNG design, the realm lock, lack of additional content, and a server wipe.

zoccolo wrote: Tue Mar 14, 2023 9:49 pm It dropped so much that today the server has a handful of active players, despite being even more perfect in stability and bugs.

Even the Uthgard devs admit that it's not bug free.

zoccolo wrote: Tue Mar 14, 2023 9:49 pm As many have already said, the only resource a game needs is players, and especially new players who join. The how to do it I don't know, but to see that many of us still don't get it and push in a direction that is definitely against it pisses me off, because in the end you will be the only ones left, you will end up in Emain doing 8vs8 and taking turns logging characters from other realms if people are missing.

So new players will en masse leave the game, due to there not existing a solo weekend scenario queue?
Forget the fact that they get tossed into RvR T4 at rank 16.
Forget the blob mentality that exist among "RvR" players who group up and stack 3-4 wbs on each other.
Forget the stagnated meta, where no balance change has been made in literal years.
Forget the misalignment in players wishes and devs' visions.
Forget the lack of quality guides that explain the game to new players.
It's those 6 mans that plays one scenario from friday to sunday that will ultimately kill the population.

No, this specific matter is not the cause of anything. I took the opportunity of the discussion to express my idea about the system, not about a specific detail. There are many aspects, some you point out yourself in your response (and of these some I agree with) that determine the reduction of the playerbase.

The reasons why Uthgard lost its players has no relevance to this discussion, what matters is the effect of losing them, namely: gameover. You know when they say history repeats itself. We are not in this bad situation now, but we have lost a share of our playerbase and the newcomers have not replaced those who left. Let's say we can still save ourselves, as long as we learn something from what happened there.

The solo option, although it cannot solve the problem, moves in the direction that could enlarge the number and contain defections, which is to offer newcomers, or those with less experience, a chance to play without being farmed mercilessly. So I see it as positive

So my point is that right now the most important work to do as a community and as a dev is to increase the playerbase by any means possible.

note: regarding the level of bug-free, Uthgard was just fine, the dream of perfection they followed, and still follow, has nothing to do with playability, bugs were there, but they were not devastating in the big system ... that of 500 players per faction logged in. Now its 50 players are certainly more demanding.

zoccolo wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 9:41 pm No, this specific matter is not the cause of anything. I took the opportunity of the discussion to express my idea about the system, not about a specific detail. There are many aspects, some you point out yourself in your response (and of these some I agree with) that determine the reduction of the playerbase.

The reasons why Uthgard lost its players has no relevance to this discussion, what matters is the effect of losing them, namely: gameover. You know when they say history repeats itself. We are not in this bad situation now, but we have lost a share of our playerbase and the newcomers have not replaced those who left. Let's say we can still save ourselves, as long as we learn something from what happened there.

The solo option, although it cannot solve the problem, moves in the direction that could enlarge the number and contain defections, which is to offer newcomers, or those with less experience, a chance to play without being farmed mercilessly. So I see it as positive

So my point is that right now the most important work to do as a community and as a dev is to increase the playerbase by any means possible.

note: regarding the level of bug-free, Uthgard was just fine, the dream of perfection they followed, and still follow, has nothing to do with playability, bugs were there, but they were not devastating in the big system ... that of 500 players per faction logged in. Now its 50 players are certainly more demanding.

You paint a picture of Uthgard being the perfect MMO experience, it was from that and even though you may have rose tinted glasses looking back at it, not everyone does. I want to provide another perspective, that Uthgard didn't die just because the casuals left, or that the devs behaved in a certain way.
There were several problems in Uthgard's strategy, building a server that replicates one specific moment in time has never worked, if classic wow fails to keep its players without adding new content a private DaoC shard will not make it, in particular if does not implement a lot of the modern QoL features.

If the population of Uthgard, or the Uthgard server does not have any relevance in this discussion, then why did you bring that server up as an example? People have said that RoR population will die for the last 5 years, yet it sustains. Instead the challengers that have wished to dethrone RoR have struggled to retain its player base. RoR has been up for almost 10 years now, something must be done right.

I understand that solo players struggle in the weekend scenario, I understand that it feels demoralizing to fight against a prepared 6 man with 5 other bozos.
At the same time a split between solo and group in this setting would from my observations divide the population even more.

One of the new features that have been develop for RoR that keeps being seen as a failure is solo ranked. Solo ranked gave a large renown bonus, tons of crests which allowed for quick gearing of your characters, it's literally what some of the solo heroes dream of. Moreover everyone was allowed to join solo, on whatever career they wanted, and the matches used a match maker to form 2/2/2. This experiment lead to "trolling and toxicity", better players rose to the top others kept losing their ranked games, people began to join out of spite for certain players in the community just to ruin matches, and to counteract this MMR brackets were introduced. Ranked became the place where better players farmed the same players that they had always farmed, and the skill gap between players in the community became glaringly obvious.
What is it that stops the Solo weekend SC to become just this? If the solo players hypothesis of us 6 man players sole reason for playing, is to just boost our own ego, why would we form 6 mans and not farm the same players in this solo weekend sc?
I have not seen a single solution proposed on how to counteract the 6 mans from solo queuing weekend SC, or the really good players farm the players that still click their skills.
People complained about duos in discordant SC, now I do not propose that devs duo queue from discordant because of the massive amount of crying from solo heroes and I hope that the devs have a good plan here to solve this, but what I would rather point out is the impact that a duo may have on the outcome of a SC, these instanced SCs is where skill and team play is really required.
Finally I would like to point out that if the 6 man groups and solo players were completely divided and they found some way to not allow 6 man players to end up in the same team the pool of players in the SCs would be lower than it is right now.
You want more players yet this suggestion would just add barriers between said players.

There is a discord server up that allows for new players to join and play 6vs6, it's heavily moderated and events for 6vs6 are set up. The number of group ranked games during this pre-season is higher than before, so it seems to be working. Initiatives like these are what creates a community, a community survives and can even thrive. 3000 solo players do not create a community, nor do they add any value to any community. I believe we need to focus on community events, and give the information to new players on what experience they can expect at rank 40, and how to make this an enjoyable voyage.

Rapzel wrote: Wed Mar 15, 2023 11:24 pm There is a discord server up that allows for new players to join and play 6vs6, it's heavily moderated and events for 6vs6 are set up. The number of group ranked games during this pre-season is higher than before, so it seems to be working. Initiatives like these are what creates a community, a community survives and can even thrive. 3000 solo players do not create a community, nor do they add any value to any community. I believe we need to focus on community events, and give the information to new players on what experience they can expect at rank 40, and how to make this an enjoyable voyage.

Exactly! I believe that way more focus on community events is what may actually save situation, since 2016 i dont recall such success actually, at the moment its going amazing. Indeed group ranked as active as it was never before and i think the reasons are a) strict rules set beforehand b) heavy moderation c) decentralized structure. Also its important that people are rotating and swapping places to balance the teams basically on a move. I believe such thing become possible only after learning from all experience of how dev's ranked thing go. Its great to see community organize itself and just actually thrive on a matter.
Such mass events for groups of people with different aims, people, interests, purposes would benefit the game way better than doing another useless "solo bubble" system decision that is doomed to fail ultra hard.
One remark about 6v6 discord tho. There is FAQ and it clearly says that nobody expects new players there, you need to be BiS or pretty close to, so you wont ruin everyone's else experience. New to 6v6 scene players are welcome to try out themselves but players are expected to perform of course.

Theorycrafting of what could the event for new players be, i'd start with what would benefit them most. Assuming this game is absolutely newbie unfriendly simply by design in comparison to modern PvP MMOs i believe that most benefitting would be is to show them how real end game top tier PvP is played in various game modes on practice. And here comes the unreal, to make it actually happen they need to like get a brief of what they are expected to do and a spot in fully optimized roam group, 6men, WB or whatever that is lead by experienced leader. But i cant see anything like this happening, its much a painful burden for any group to do that. Especially as a community driven event tbf...
Here is a piece of my personal experience with a little bit of background info - my playtime is absolutely unrealible, irl, stuff, so i struggle very hard to attend anything that has set date&time and i do try to use very low activity i may afford with greatest effect, so i rarely help anyone new or play with new people. but few years ago i was kinda triggered reading /g chat with new folk whinning that this game is unplayable and he cant win SC's, me and the other guild member lazily typed that "oh its more complicated then just order/destro being better" but new folk didnt stop to a point that he rally us both to form midtier 6 men for new folk to show him how SC can actually be played. Person instantly changed his viewpoints, never saw more whinning and person is still playing.

Magusar wrote: Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:15 pm In time to time im coming to forum and reading topics like this.
"Sweety premades", "They wanna farm only pugs", "Abusers","Exp for new players" etc.
And its make me laughing, but my face hurts from smiling already.

It doesn't make me laugh. I just stopped playing months ago and now waiting for upcoming class changes to see if they will be viable for soo play. And it seems like there are a many players like me. Not ones that are waiting for changes but ones that stopped playing.

Shanell wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 10:14 am

Magusar wrote: Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:15 pm In time to time im coming to forum and reading topics like this.
"Sweety premades", "They wanna farm only pugs", "Abusers","Exp for new players" etc.
And its make me laughing, but my face hurts from smiling already.

It doesn't make me laugh. I just stopped playing months ago and now waiting for upcoming class changes to see if they will be viable for soo play. And it seems like there are a many players like me. Not ones that are waiting for changes but ones that stopped playing.

That change already happened. It is called discordant SC. It is 100% pug now.

I have a question - what premade you should create to fight destro melee train premades if you are not a slayer? Or WL. Not even a hatman. You are, for example, SW.

Avernus wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:32 am I have a question - what premade you should create to fight destro melee train premades if you are not a slayer? Or WL. Not even a hatman. You are, for example, SW.

- Knight/IB or SM/WL/aSW/RP/AM or WP (can be S/B)
- Knight/WL/BW/SW/RP/AM or WP (Book)
- Knight/BW or SW or Eng/BW/SW/RP/AM or WP (S/B perma-guarded or Book)

Vanquisher is enough for all this classes