DEV DIARY - March 2016

[Pixie126]

I do not remember a poll about what version of live was the best. Personally, I and my husband hated the resource carrier crap. I went through and looked at some of the old patch information and found that what we preferred was approximately 1.3.6. They just instituted AAO, dropped PQ's out of the Victory Point meter, got appearance customization and other stuffs.
This was pretty much my favorite point.
As for armor and weapons, I always liked being able to get what I needed. In tier 4 my main was not wearing a full set of anything. She had a mixture of sets (including Dark Promise) to max out the stats I wanted. I was one of the people that had to be dragged into scenarios by my guild. Not my thing. Was I jealous of the shiny weapons you could get from them. Sure. But, no way was I going to try to win the hundreds of scenarios to get a new shiny.

This is only my two cents. I want to end by thanking the staff for all the hard work to bring this project to life and keep it trundling along.
Thank you!

[Jaycub]

Is there anyway to implement resource carriers without making them integral to success in ORvR? Make them kind of an optional side thing that can in some cases turn the tide but not necessary to overall success?

Same goes for scenario contribution to the T4 campaign.

I think people dismiss ideas or past mechanics too quickly without thinking of ways to reimplement them without being cancerous. Small little details and things that add depth to ORvR can be a good thing, as long as they don't completely hinder the flow of things like resource carriers and scenarios used to do on live.

[peterthepan3]

How will the Devs handle RvR-balance in Tier 4? Will it be decided by the most outspoken players? By the average player's opinion? By the Devs? Or do we have some kind of "expects" hidden somewhere?

If you're referring to class balance discussions, those will be done in the (existing) career balance forums, according to the rules laid out there. Those will start shortly after T4 is launched. If you're referring to balancing an RvR campaign system, I would say the capture mechanics and rewards would have to scale based on the size of each faction and the number of players logged on at any time. There's no hard plans there.

I was referring to Tier 4 Class balance in RvR. I'm sorry, I should have been more specific, and I know it's not your area. The reason I ask, is simply because I fear that it's gonna be only one or the other, of the options, I mentioned:

If you do strawpolls, for example, the average player is gonna have a big say in the balance, since they consist of the majority of the playerbase, and therefore would be the largest part of the votes.
If you base it on the one's on the forums that posts the most, or scream the loudest, then you encourage that kind of behavior. Communication is of course important, but I fear this behavior might surface when the balance discussions starts.

I guess what I'm actually trying to ask is: Do you want to balance the game after the highest "skill-cap"? Or an average skill-cap? I know it's all suppose to be decided on the balance forum, but by the end of the day it is players and Devs talking, like in all other threads.
At some point, a decision must be taken on the policy of the balance. Do you have any visions with the class balance?

Hopefully higher. Game is easy enough as it is lol!

Gj devs

[Tiggo]

Is there anyway to implement resource carriers without making them integral to success in ORvR? Make them kind of an optional side thing that can in some cases turn the tide but not necessary to overall success?

Same goes for scenario contribution to the T4 campaign.

I think people dismiss ideas or past mechanics too quickly without thinking of ways to reimplement them without being cancerous. Small little details and things that add depth to ORvR can be a good thing, as long as they don't completely hinder the flow of things like resource carriers and scenarios used to do on live.

IF ressource carriers, they should be human not npc! Let people get ressources to the keep. Good job for tanks e.g.

[saupreusse]

resource carriers..... duuuuuuuhh. I remember this time was my least favourite war time. they were a reason why i quit for several months.
But if the biggest part of the community likes them? so be it.
(but they were really horrible) *cries in german*

[Genisaurus]

I do not remember a poll about what version of live was the best.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

To everyone, thank you for your compliments and feedback! In the future these videos will be appearing on the official RoR channel, so to those of you whom have subscribed to mine, I would advise also subscribing to our official one.

Is there anyway to implement resource carriers without making them integral to success in ORvR? Make them kind of an optional side thing that can in some cases turn the tide but not necessary to overall success?

Very probably. It'll be something we look at more post-T4-release. While I do feel that basing the entire RvR campaign around a series of escort missions is bad design, the carriers did do an amazing job of making sure people paid attention to, and defended BOs. That's something we want to encourage, because it helps break up a zerg and requires a non-zero amount of communication.

[Azarael]

Is there anyway to implement resource carriers without making them integral to success in ORvR? Make them kind of an optional side thing that can in some cases turn the tide but not necessary to overall success?

Same goes for scenario contribution to the T4 campaign.

I think people dismiss ideas or past mechanics too quickly without thinking of ways to reimplement them without being cancerous. Small little details and things that add depth to ORvR can be a good thing, as long as they don't completely hinder the flow of things like resource carriers and scenarios used to do on live.

Genisaurus has alluded to differing opinions in the staff, and I am one of the people with a strong opinion about RvR - that opinion being that it needs substantial reworks. I'm thinking of both RTS games and Savage / Savage 2 when it comes to basic design.

So I guess what I'm telling you is that I both support ideas like that and reject every existing version of RvR.

[Shadowgurke]

Genisaurus has alluded to differing opinions in the staff, and I am one of the people with a strong opinion about RvR - that opinion being that it needs substantial reworks. I'm thinking of both RTS games and Savage / Savage 2 when it comes to basic design.

Playerside basebuilding? Or are we talking about the players hitting the mine for ressources?

[Azarael]

I'm talking pretty much everything. Savage 2 in my opinion did a lot of things right - commanders, minimap with FoW, resource-based gameplay both for players and for the team as a whole, map control basis, group-based gameplay, fun combat, siege, fortifications and forward bases. It takes all the elements of old-style warfare and reduces them to fit a smaller playercount. Warhammer SHOULD have been designed in the same way (but for more players) but because the RvR was such an afterthought, it wasn't. Behold the result - there simply isn't enough depth there to add any kind of fun, and some of the flaws even serve to reduce depth (zerging, keep chokepoints).

As RTSes go, another inspiration would be Relic's RTSes, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War. Both of them use control point / area control mechanics to create battlefronts, more so in the case of CoH than DoW.

The fundamental point, I think, is to push towards a more deep, strategic version of RvR, and to do that, you need to draw influences from strategy games.

[Genisaurus]

Genisaurus has alluded to differing opinions in the staff, and I am one of the people with a strong opinion about RvR - that opinion being that it needs substantial reworks. I'm thinking of both RTS games and Savage / Savage 2 when it comes to basic design.

Playerside basebuilding? Or are we talking about the players hitting the mine for ressources?

One idea that has come up involved using BOs to generate "requisition" points that could be spent faction-wide in a zone in RvR on a variety of things. Foremost would be siege weaponry, but perhaps also upgrades to keeps (in the absence of the ability to let/require guilds to do this) or fortifications to those BOs, or repairs to keeps, etc.