Return of Reckoning

City instances are dominated by a few guilds on both Destro. and Order. These guilds, with their dedicated core players are dictating the entirety of City instances. Forum and in game chat about classes are now heavily informed by a 'meta'. This meta means players looking to play class X that lay outside that model, are actively dissuaded from playing said classes and told they will not be accepted by warbands. All city instance warbands, beyond the core dominating guilds, are caught in a cycle of trying to match the perceived meta, creating an atmosphere or self fulfilling prophecy of class exclusion. Further, all other City instance warbands spend their time trying to guess when the dominant guilds will in fact queue in the hope to avoid them. If they are unlucky enough to end up opposite the dominating guilds, many will simply die once in a given stage and then stay in the spawn. I do not believe this is healthy for the game.

I suggest, as can be seen with scenarios, there should be premade and PUG City instances. I assume a few City instances can be set aside for premades so, the dominate guilds can test their metal against their like minded opposites. The rest of City instances would operate off of a PUG model, perhaps individual queuing.

My main classes are part of the desired meta and so have played as part of the dominant guild City warbands as well as in PUGS. The PUG model is actually more enjoyable as the other is simply a foregone conclusion that feels akin to camping a spawn area in other games.

Imagine if all battles were fought so fairly.

City instances aren't for pugging. If you do, expect to die.

Get coordinated. Join a guild. Make yourself valuable, or enjoy the long slow painful road of pugging for scraps. This isn't T1 anymore.

Amazing, the same issues that plagued retail are here.

Agreed with the city PUG idea. Like it or not — PUG is a well-represented way of playing this game and bashing it can't be justified. More than that, from what I've seen in MMOs in general, most people tend to form groups to actually lower the resistance e.g. to get an advantage over PUGs rather that fight other premades.

It's easy to say "join a guild", "get a premade" but it's always a ton of hassle due to voice comm coordination and the requirement to show up on certain hours. PUG is all I can afford being an adult guy with a family. And I don't expect to have rewards on par with premades.

P.S. I'm not sure it hasn't been done yet but since I came back only recently, I wanted to ask if there are any plans to divide the rank 40 scenarios into a couple of brackets based on renown. I mean there's a steady flow of new guys apparently vs a rather heavy amount of older guys with every gear piece imaginable in their bags

Make pug city, give them maybe 10% of the reward, matching their efforts

I'm part of a guild and we typically run cities when they're online, but we don't require members to be active when every city is running. There are always lots of people in /5 looking for more players to join discord and simply listen to their calls whilst playing through cities so you don't need super tryhard voice communications to win matches.

There are already some issues with the queue system if one side is more populated when a city runs, for example, I managed a Destru push for a good 8-9 hours to a 5* Altdorf, at 5AM my time when the city popped, only 15 instances spawned due to not as many Order players queuing, which meant my WB along with a handful of others never got a queue pop.

Splitting the queue to PUGs and Pre-mades would make it even harder to get into groups. It would also require premades to have a full 24 rather than a 6, or 12, or 18 man group.

Personally, I'm with wargrimnir, if you're not expecting to have the rewards on par with premades, then the crests for losing the matches should be enough compensation for fighting against premades.

If you want to keep on par with premade teams in regards to the rewards, then you should be playing in premades to win the cities.

Panodil wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:30 pmMake pug city, give them maybe 10% of the reward, matching their efforts

Oh, that is helpful. Punish people for actually wanting to enjoy playing a video game.

Cities are end-game content. And should reward coordination and preparation. I've both pugged cities, joined 12 mans, and gone in with a premade from some of the better destro guilds. You can always find some group willing to take you, though the very best might be more restrictive on classes and/or gear.

Kaelang wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:33 pm...if you're not expecting to have the rewards on par with premades, then the crests for losing the matches should be enough compensation for fighting against premades.

The crest reward for losing any stage of a City instance is already set at one. How much lower do you want that to go?

Martok wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:42 pm

Kaelang wrote: ↑Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:33 pm...if you're not expecting to have the rewards on par with premades, then the crests for losing the matches should be enough compensation for fighting against premades.

The crest reward for losing any stage of a City instance is already set at one. How much lower do you want that to go?

I don't - I was replying to the person above me who stated 'And I don't expect to have rewards on par with premades.'.