Improving AAO
Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2020 1:23 pm
"The pendulum swings" is what's been said of the population imbalance between our two realms. Wait a few weeks and pendulum shifts the other way. Whether it's cross-realming, flavor-of-the-month or just a bad night, it seems to only take about 20% AAO to start a tilting shift in the population numbers. One realm all but abandons the field after losing a single zone! (I'm implicating both sides in this; don't forget we're all humans after all.)
Against All Odds is a wonderful mechanic that I remember being really impressed with when I first saw it. But is it enough? Is the promise of a little more renown if you win enough to encourage the distraught, underpopulated realm back to the field?
It seems not.*
So here's my suggestion: how about a catch-up mechanic for a realm that loses a zone, any zone. Apply it across it all tiers, all zones, even forts, (but not cities, I've got a suggestion for cities here). I call it
Our Finest Hour / Our Foul Hate: Cooldown: 5 minutes; Range: 5 ft; Duration: 1 hour (This buff is given to all players currently RvR flagged in a zone that locks for the other realm. Like a Rune or Mark, you gain the ability to cast a spell that does the following:) If you're in an RvR area, you summon a champion to fight for your realm. The champion disappears after 60 seconds or when it dies. Each stack of OFH reduces the cooldown by 30 seconds and resets the duration. The champion is specific to your race and tier.
The champions should have player-like names and appearances, selected at random from a pool, so they are difficult but not impossible (with experience) to distinguish them from regular players. They escort the player who summoned them, acting like a pet, for their duration. Like pets, they're not especially difficult to kill but they represent a fraction of attention the enemy realm has to assign to them given their damage can't be ignored. Enough players on one realm coordinating their OFH could use them as fodder before a counter-attack. It's a way of adding population without adding population.
The important thing to remember is that it's only given to a losing player who was physically in the zone when it was lost, so the assumption is that they're playing catch-up. It also means that if you see your realm is about to lose a zone, you're incentivized to show up and try to defend it. I can't overstate how important that aspect is. I understand it would be difficult to code -I'm not a coder- and this isn't the final draft of the idea. I just wanted to put it out there to get feedback.
*- Without comparing the total online numbers in a tier to the numbers from SoR and to some sort of IP comparison to check for cross-realming, it's impossible for me to know where these players are. The fact that the numbers are a swinging pendulum is a bigger issue than any single mechanic can address in the long-term. Therefore, this post attempts to address the immediate issue of "I have an hour to play a game and I don't wanna play a game where I'm getting face-rolled for an hour". The best long-term solution (adding a 3rd faction) isn't possible, I don't think.
Against All Odds is a wonderful mechanic that I remember being really impressed with when I first saw it. But is it enough? Is the promise of a little more renown if you win enough to encourage the distraught, underpopulated realm back to the field?
It seems not.*
So here's my suggestion: how about a catch-up mechanic for a realm that loses a zone, any zone. Apply it across it all tiers, all zones, even forts, (but not cities, I've got a suggestion for cities here). I call it
Our Finest Hour / Our Foul Hate: Cooldown: 5 minutes; Range: 5 ft; Duration: 1 hour (This buff is given to all players currently RvR flagged in a zone that locks for the other realm. Like a Rune or Mark, you gain the ability to cast a spell that does the following:) If you're in an RvR area, you summon a champion to fight for your realm. The champion disappears after 60 seconds or when it dies. Each stack of OFH reduces the cooldown by 30 seconds and resets the duration. The champion is specific to your race and tier.
The champions should have player-like names and appearances, selected at random from a pool, so they are difficult but not impossible (with experience) to distinguish them from regular players. They escort the player who summoned them, acting like a pet, for their duration. Like pets, they're not especially difficult to kill but they represent a fraction of attention the enemy realm has to assign to them given their damage can't be ignored. Enough players on one realm coordinating their OFH could use them as fodder before a counter-attack. It's a way of adding population without adding population.
The important thing to remember is that it's only given to a losing player who was physically in the zone when it was lost, so the assumption is that they're playing catch-up. It also means that if you see your realm is about to lose a zone, you're incentivized to show up and try to defend it. I can't overstate how important that aspect is. I understand it would be difficult to code -I'm not a coder- and this isn't the final draft of the idea. I just wanted to put it out there to get feedback.
*- Without comparing the total online numbers in a tier to the numbers from SoR and to some sort of IP comparison to check for cross-realming, it's impossible for me to know where these players are. The fact that the numbers are a swinging pendulum is a bigger issue than any single mechanic can address in the long-term. Therefore, this post attempts to address the immediate issue of "I have an hour to play a game and I don't wanna play a game where I'm getting face-rolled for an hour". The best long-term solution (adding a 3rd faction) isn't possible, I don't think.