Five reasons why empty BOs giving rewards is better for ORvR

[simtex]

Are we talking about the live game or the RoR ? If it's the second case, then I, for one, don't remember that. What I do remember is warbands locking BO's and taking undefended keeps during hours with very low population. At peak times, it was very rare to see a warband leaving a big battle to lock an empty zone. It happened, but it was too rare to be considered as a problem.
And in the end, I never understood why it's only the attackers to blame when they lock an empty zone. I mean, the enemy realm is there, let them make a warband and fight back.

Are you kidding me? Why do you think they wiped the Annihilator gear? Zones were locking every 10 minutes. In very few cases you would have keep defenses and even more rarely with success. You are in denial if you think there were great fights going on.

I am not "blaming" the attackers, it's just that the system was abused.

They can **** around and change RvR system all they want, but you cant change the common players nature. They want free keeps, fast gear progression(remember this is annhilator, lowest t4 pvp set - well barely t4 set). Instead they remove rewards from doing objectives, make zones uncappable in any other time that EU peak. Reward for capping empty keep and zone should be lower yes but it still needs to be there or RvR will not happen in other times that CET.

Or we can stick to SC's and ping pong back and forth from warcamps.

[Bozzax]

Reward for capping empty keep and zone should be lower yes but it still needs to be there or RvR will not happen in other times that CET.

Give devs some time to fine tune the siege weaps, oil and rams so zone captures and keep takes occur around the clock.

Capture rewards like we had on LIVE and later on ROR is the root cause of zerging and x-realming. I don't ever want that back.

If however they ever consider it (which I hope they don't) capture rewards should be divided on the number of rewarded players (medallion rolls and everything) and scaled down. Pref such capture rewards should always be a reward pool that was filled from relevant kills in context with a very low starting value.

Not like the old broken zergfriendly variant where everybody got a flat amount. Going back to that would be just as broken as having PQs where all get a gold bag every run.

Long term I think it is key that blobing around in empty zones gives the least RvR progression of all activities you can do to discourage from doing it

[punkindonuts]

Sadly we all know that most players won't do something for nothing and you can never implement a solution that would work for everyone.

my suggestion would be dependent on the overall plan for the game, is it going to stop at 40/40 or are we eventually going to get to 40/80?

if the plan is to get to 40/80 then i would suggest adding in epic weapons vendors that allow the players to purchase new weapons every 5 or 10 RR over 40 all the way up to 80. The weapons can be bought using medallions starting at 250+ medallions and then at increasing cost each time.

The medallions can be won by capping BO's Keeps and zone locks, 1x for each capture with no effort and then 5x or 10x for each capture that involve a proper fight, it will be a grind but would be quicker if players played the game as intended and fought each other to lock the zones.

[Azarael]

What about ego-stroking as a reward? In addition to whatever changes you guys are bringing to us next for RvR have a T4 ORvR leaderboard on the website. Each action such as a kill, taking undefended objective/keeps, taking contested objective/keep, and successful defense of objective/keep gives varying points. Obviously weight towards the things we would like to see happen.

Have the leaderboard reset and update once a week. The top ten players from each faction each week get displayed as a server announcement to people when they first log in for that week. Have a separate leaderboard that runs for like 2 months. The longer duration leaderboard causes statues (or named NPCs) to be displayed in capital cities and warcamps near the flightmasters.

People tend to love such things and it works in other games to keep people playing and competing long after they reach max armor for the game.

So far, this and the proposal for active zone thresholds are the only solutions I've seen that address the problem in any way.

A lot of you are addressing XP/RP/Inf/medallions... as did I to begin with. The problem is that all of these elements have an end. Unless there's something in the RvR system that actually sustains it in the absence of things to grind (i.e. it's fun for its own sake), people will stop RvRing. I will admit that this issue is causing me a lot of stress. Understand that it's hard enough to create a system that deals with RvR under populated conditions, without having to then worry about people refusing to enter the lakes to begin with.

Perhaps the problem is that the current RvR system just isn't fun in and of itself. That's certainly why you don't find me in RvR - I'm both anti-zerg and anti-PvDoor, and all the rewards you can give will never change that, so there is nothing of interest to me as long as RvR plays the way it does now and did in T2/T3. If that's the case, it would behoove us to make it fun first. This is why I said I'm looking for gameplay elements and mechanics.

[Bozzax]

We had a 100% working solution back in the 90s on MUDs that kept ppl playing for decades (PVE and PVP).

1. Remove renown rank cap
2. Each RR above 80 costs same as RR 80 (or more)
3. Each RR above 80 grants another renown point to spend on renown abilities

Most importantly ....
No gear unlocks except visual, no hidden levels, no tactics, no specialisation points and add some cool stuff for 80+

Make the highest X players of each class slightly larger (80 buff),
Exclusive dyes at 85, 90, 95, 100 etc that lowbies can't get
Exclusive armour and weapon visuals
Exclusive mounts again visuals
Exclusive pets (bears and jesters ,..)
Exclusive trophies (lowbies can have the un cool ones)
Statues of class leaders

It is as much removing fair on lowbies as it is adding them 80+ so remove all cool looking armnor/weapon models below RR80

Add the ol MUD ".list players (class optional)" command that listed all players sorted by rank descending ofc.
(LOL 21 years later http://www.3k.org/wholist.php people still online ... simply amazing considering that top notch ui)

Done!

People will play forever for bragging rights, visuals, a few extra renown points and purple numbers.

[sanii]

We had a 100% working solution back in the 90s on MUDs that kept ppl playing for decades (PVE and PVP).

The main issue right now wasn't the fact that people are getting decked out and not having any reason to play , it is just that rvr in the state it was 2-3 days ago ( It has gotten better at this point tho) was basically unplayable due to bugs, overturned keeps and a bad reward/incentive system for which there still isn't a good solution.


My personal suggestion for this is that BOs should not be click/lockable but rather behave like the objectives in scenarios - that is to be in a constant state of contest (Reikland Factory/Nordenwatch). You would need to up the actuall time cap the flag but it will at least force people to stay/defend an objective instead of just cap and forget , a side effect of it is also that you can't just zerg 1 objective and move the the next , but in order to ensure a keep take you will need to at least leave some defense . I am not sure if anyone else has already suggested something like this and there are alot of details associated with such a system that could be fine tuned but i would love to hear some opinions on it.

We had a 100% working solution back in the 90s on MUDs that kept ppl playing for decades (PVE and PVP).

1. Remove renown rank cap
2. Each RR above 80 costs same as RR 80 (or more)
3. Each RR above 80 grants another renown point to spend on renown abilities

I usually was always a fan of the open ended approach of MUDs but this is more for the longevity of the game ONCE the actual game play gets nailed in regards to rvr.

And to add to your idea, if its an issue of balance if it gives you renown points , you could always have a separate counter that works similarly to renown , doesn't have a cap and gives you very minor bonuses to your stats for each level of it ( ex.: lvl 1 gives you +1 to wounds , level 2 gives you +1 to initiative , level 3 gives you +1 to toughness etc. according to your main stats).

And if even that makes people who play less feel in any way at a disadvantage you can always reward lower ranked players with a significantly higher gains when they kill someone who is above them.Even having a different counter between rvr and scenarios is possible with each having their own titles/vanity associated with it.

[Ramasee]

We can remove the door from the equation entirely.

Remove the recapture and lock timers on BFOs. Enemy keep cannot be assaulted until your faction owns all four BFOs for 15 minutes. Every time you lose a BFO this timer resets. (or regains a few minutes?). After the 15 minute timer, all BFOs lock and a server wide announcement in t# chat happens that a keep is open to attack. 5-8 minutes later, the enemy keeps doors disappear and the keep is open to attack for 30minutes.

(Timers were guesses)

The resetting timer would hopefully split up the zerg since a small group could ninja a BFO that is undefended since they no longer lock. The time between lock and keep take is to give the enemy time to get to keep defense. Removing the doors gets rid of some of the more boring aspects of siege play in their current state, the keeps designs still give the defenders ample advantage.

Pitfalls of this is that it becomes near impossible to take a zone if there are even numbers on each side. (Might not be a bad thing though) It removes the purpose of outer and inner door designs of keeps in t3/t4. Results in a 25min to capture zone timer if the enemy doesn't defend. People do not like to defend uncontested objectives.

[Akalukz]

Could possibly streamline the zone capping.

For Nuetral Zones (IE Praag) you could cap any bfo at any time, 15 min timers on each one, all four must be owned to seige a keep, once all 4 are owned, a lock timer of 30 mins is placed on all BFO.

If Destro pushes into Riekland, the must capture BFO's in a somewhat order. Starting with North BFO first, then either of the middle ones (to add some freedom) then southern most BFO.

[Grimspire]

A lot of the reasons the game becomes so zerg oriented is due to the locking mechanics themselves of, well, everything. The RvR system puts you on rails. It's a system of this:

You must go to this zone. You cannot do anything in the other zones yet.
You must take this BO. This BO is now locked.
Take this keep. Now go to this keep.
Great. You've taken the zone. Now go to this zone.

And so on and so forth. You've got to open things up and give players more freedom. As I said in my previous post, all of your major rewards should come from killing players in open world RvR. BO's and Keeps should simply be a means to doing that act more efficiently. So let's expand on what I was saying further.

As other posters stated before, Renown ranks should basically have no cap. And the higher you go, it should get exponentially harder to attain a new rank. However, the best gear in the game should be able to be worn at a relatively low rank. We don't want it ridiculously hard for new players/characters to be competitive. The extra renown points as well as new RvR titles should be enough incentive alone to keep people going after new ranks. Not to mention the prestige of people actually knowing what rank you are. Speaking of that...

Leaderboards! Someone else said it. This is a must. These are a staple of all things PvP. But there should be more than one. Total Renown rank. Average Renown per week. Average renown per kill (are they zerging all the time or do they fight greater numbers and higher rank people a lot?) Different leaderboards means even Average Joe can get on a board on a good week even though he's far from the highest rank person in total.

All 3 zones in a single pairing are unlocked, i.e. you can go do whatever you want in Chaos Wastes, Praag, or Reikland at any time. All BO's are unlocked all the time. All keeps are unlocked all the time. BO's should require some time to take by using PvE guards that have to be killed before you can flip the BO. Once it's flipped, new guards spawn for your faction. You can use the Health Pool of the guards to scale how quickly a BO should be able to be taken. BO's assist keep attackers. Just don't make them affect keep doors. I believe keep door health should stay static for the most part.

All keeps can be taken at any time. You can use the Health Pool of the guards to scale how quickly a keep should be able to be taken. Not the keep door! People hate PvDoor. Doors should have a static health pool (large enough to make a defense possible) and only upgradeable a bit by the guild that owns the keep. Keep doors also do not regenerate health, ever! This way if attackers want to pull off to get more BO's, they can do that without losing progress. Each keep your faction owns grants a buff to renown gain and potentially other bonuses.

Keeps have to be super rewarding without actually rewarding you (counter intuitive I know). They must be very lucrative to own, but they shouldn't actually progress your character. Only the act of fighting other players should do that.

And finally winning a pairing. After one faction accumulates a certain amount of Renown (keep it hidden), they win the zone. It would be a very, very high amount obviously. After all, this is what the entire faction is accumulating. This does a couple of things. First, it makes it so everyone who participates in RvR is contributing to the greater goal of claiming victory in a pairing. Second, it puts emphasis on the actual act of keep taking. Remember how we said keeps held will increase your renown gained per kill? If Order isn't killing as many people as Destro, but they are better at holding keeps, they may just win the pairing anyway because they are gaining more renown for every kill they make.

Bonus: Every held keep increases PvE exp gain for your faction in that pairing. PvE players will gravitate to the pairing whose RvR lake is open just like PvP players will, thus consolidating your player base all around.

[FourLeafClover]

Add influence to rvr kill quests - I bet you'd have some people wanting to get kills!!!!

Why not do this? Probably already been considered by the team though :p Seems so simple an idea. Why not tokens as well? hehe