Poisitve stuff:
this will be short, but they are great ideas.
T2/T3/T4 merging:
this was really good / smart to revive the game.
I remember some evenings in May / June / July where it was a timewaste to play this game since there was simply no one to fight in this game, or looking for enemies consumed the majority of time.
Finance War / Keep Claiming / Integration of Guilds into the Wareffort.
Mavellous. Great Idea.
Perhabs the payout needs some tweaking but I know your post is more to understand as a sneak peek.
Anyway, not that this will perhabs even add cohesion internally to the existing guilds and alliances, perhabs even to the realm.
Implemented Changes:
So I played the System now for aprox 8 hours+ with a force size of 1 up to 7 guild intern.
I will edit this post once I've done 2 WB sessions.
Since so many patches hit the server it's hard to keep track of everything. This is a resumee / feedback of the last 2 evenings EU prime.
Stallment:
If not one side has a heavy numbers or quality advantage the zone goes almost forever.
New BO design:
They've become even more pointless than before.
If you are outnumbered heavily they are just a afk hub. ("hi@" DW some minutes ago).
When I was solo in Talabec / Highpass I griefed the enemy (pugs) by idling tower.
Once someone spammed the famous pick up group battlecry "INC!", I moved my green solo ass to the highest point, waited there and retook the BO single handedly. I pulled that 2x times off until I got catched by the "fun"police. There are also some other lulzy hide and seek spots where you can pull that off on other BOs, but why share the cheese. (eg. for proof Tala @Feitens lock wall with entrance which leads to keep, DW drop dragon plateau, jump the pillar with the dragons nesting there, scout movement, drop once everybody gone).
Next thing: playing NPC is even less fun than killing the NPCs which usually were there to guard the BO.
Other thing: afking on a BO grants (shitty) renown.
I usually ended up with a tick of aprox 120 rr when I tapped and captured a BO.
Atm. it grants 8rr if you play the zone proactively, means not afking there.
that's 15 times less rr per BO. Why should I stand there when I can just proactively search an enemy, kill him and get even for a lowlevel char 35rr (4times the amount).
This design helps (at the moment) nobody I think.
I see the bigger picture in your dev diary, a major overhaul, but atm. everything feels a bit broken.
reading the stuff and hoping for a better time "once everything is perfect" doesn't really help right now.
Just to leave my opinion cause I doubt there will be a roll back, since you all sound pretty confident in that system:
At this point I liked the halfed locktimers best. They promoted proactive playing and added a bit of speed to the zones. Surely even that was arguable, and probably not everybodies darling, it's just my opinion.
*Placeholder*
when playing the next warband on sunday (because the patch hit inbetween our warband days) we will see how much we play the BO game as guild. I rather doubt it will play a even or bigger role as before (which was even before close to 0 if we have not the task to flip a zone back). Rather mass kill people and lock the zone by that fact and casually riding by, than standing with 24 ppl or 2x12 or 4x6 on a BO.
and to be realistic: the last two options are out of every reasonable argumentation because it weakens that playsstyle ofc.
Anti Zerg Mechanic aka. multiparing opening:
Dragon Wake just proofed that there is no zergsplitting or what so ever.
While DW was up, there was also Praag open (4 destro vs. 1 Order) and TM (12 Destro vs. 4 Order).
Praag got locked without any reward while DW was under attack.
The other warband days, which already had merged tiers played like giant deathballs with us leading the charge / getting followed without even wanting it. I remember that I read /2 which sounded like that: "guess we follow TUP for now*."
*now means in this case from 20:00h - 22:30h zone lock @ caledor.
I don't think that the majortiy does anything else. or that order pugs do anything else. it's atm just the nature of the game and you can't hate the players for it to use the most promising path.
Same rules apply as I've written somewhere else:
Smaller groups follow larger groups. (to get cover)
pug warbands follow guild warbands. (to "help securing kills" lul)
smallscale groups do a mix of everything / which is the most promising for there own grp. (atm. follow the zerg and man up or flank and killing loners is a much better reward than playing BO guardsman)
Since the game is atm purely incentive and carrot driven and the campaign has no meaning the zerg will just not split, since the best chances for rewards are were the crowd is.
In this certain example: DW = more players = more oppurunities to kill + guranteed ticks from lock (and keep) + toke progression by quests (even though you can't hand in right now) and lock.
Once DW keep got taken "losers" / destro afk'd out @ mm. zerg came mm. took it. wc zerging started. 8 minutes later zone was taken. well I guess at least short and without much struggle.
So shortresumee / possible solution for this:
make an incentive to play multiple zones.
since fortress / city is out of the race, there is something needed.
even when just the multipairing is open the zones are close to unplayable for some people (lag/crash).
besides that, it's not such big fun to have this "zergfest" as a permanent RvR.
It leads perhabs to cool scenes like "running in caledor" but it's a bit tiresome to play, no matter which force size.
Portals:
tbh. they are a bit of whatever.
options are nice, but even the riding time in DW is so short which that much players in the zone.
we used it one time to take a shortcut to get faster to keep and help funneling.
deployment for a 6 man is 36 seconds if nobody else is using it, and there were other people using it, so at that point you can consider almost to ride normally. right now I see it only working for solo / duo / triple stack. but as I said, they don't have much of an impact besides perhabs pugs waisting recources.
perhabs it gets more usefull once a real zerg split mechanic is in place.
Anyway, looking forward to the guild changes, they sound really prmosing, same as perhabs some general RvR changes as solid ranks, sieges, keeps and so on.
Short Edit at the end:
I know this all sounds a bit like "QQ". It isn't, it's just feedback.
I know that everybody on the dev team works there ass off and spends far more time in coding than me in playing.
so keep up the work! shout outs to Yaliskah, Natherul and Hargrim for the superior communication while pushing the limits!
