Return of Reckoning

This was originally a reply to Vipevox, Pahakukka and Stink in this thread, but I decided to make it into it's own post due to the length and slight shift of topic.

Allow me to speak my mind despite not being involved with the solo scene in the game. I do not think that chasing after solos as a warband is a behavioral issue tied to the age of the players. That problem, as well as blobbing up on every opportunity and even the gradual escalation of the smallscale scene from solo, duo or 3mans to 6man+ all can be attributed to the same issue; the game simply no longer cultivates individual player skill.

Put yourself in the shoes of a brand new player:
You started the game 2 months ago. Your experience in T1 was somewhat fun although you didn't really figure out anything about the game or your class because most fights you engaged in were warcamp camping and back and forths as a warband/mass of players. You then entered T2. At first you decided to try scenarios which now popped a lot more frequently than in T1, but you kept getting your face bashed in (due to lacking gearing and class mechanical knowledge and also by solo queuing). So you gave up on scenarios. Then you tried to solo in RvR as you'd done in Tier 1. Same result, you kept getting your teeth kicked in regardless of if you were following the blob or if you tried to solo away from it. In both cases you were easy pickings for the blob, premades or even other enemy soloers due to lacking in gearing, mechanical and also proper positioning knowledge.

At that point you either:
a) give up and quit the game because you are no longer having fun, or
b) try joining orvr warbands
If you get lucky and the warbands don't instakick you via the autoband addon, then you finally get a chance to "enjoy" the game. At least compared to what you had been doing thus far. In general this gameplay involves losing and wiping against any competent opposition, but there are still some ways for such warbands to have some fun:

• Winning against other competent warbands by outnumbering them (blobbing)

• Winning against other pug warbands on their own (harder to do because they too will be blobbing)

• Winning against other smaller groups on their own (this includes chasing down anything between solos and 6mans)

• PvDooring zones

The later might not seem fun at all for veterans but, in the eyes of a new player who's been mistreated by the game as a whole, it can be both a "campaign win" and a way to get their gear progression going (which most likely has been underwhelming thus far).

You finally hit T4 and are no longer instakicked from most warbands. If you are adventurous enough you try scenarios again to see if anything's changed. To your surprise, things are even worse here. Instead of 1 win out of 10 while solo queuing, you now can maybe win 1 in 20. You give up on scenarios and try your luck in warbands. You either keep staying in pugwarbands who never kick you, or attempt to join serious warbands but the moment they inspect your gear you are either getting booted from that warband or at best they link to you a guide on how to improve your gear afterwards.
For the portion of the players who make that step, it's time to abandon PvP for a while and grind Dungeons to gear up. PvE while pugging is a hellscape, but somehow you can stomach it and get through it. You now have the gear to compete with everyone at the lakes but you are still lacking the mechanical knowledge for your class and a lot of other fundamental stuff for the game.

So here comes the big question: What can you do now to improve as a player?

A lucky few new players will join a very organized guild that will invest time in them and try to improve them as players. The rest will be stuck as a pug or join a somewhat organized guild that will expect the player to perform (in their warbands) without investing much in them.

In reality, there are only minimal guilds willing to actually invest the time needed to fully train a new player. Most competent guilds either try to recruit players already showing potential or accept them on a trial basis where players are expected to swim or sink. This leaves the majority of the guilds in a situation where if they openly recruit people, they get so many new members that they cannot train them all unless they want to invest a ton of time for players who themselves are unsure if they want to continue playing the game after a few weeks time. This process is grueling for a guild and can take a toll in the mental health of people who help or want to help new players (from my experience at least).

Once again: For the majority of the new players who keep giving the game a chance, how do they improve?

The answer is simple. You either spend 500 hours in orvr and improve at a snail's pace in a warband setting, or you never improve at all.
And if you never improve yourself, you unfortunately cannot find much fun in PvP besides beating on easy or outnumbered targets.

The downfall of Scenarios has consistently stripped the playerbase of the best self-improvement tool the game had to offer for players who do not have the proper support of a guild/community. Go back into the previous paragraphs and try to think what would happen if that fictional new player started experimenting with their full toolkit in scenarios, trying to figure out their way around terrain strategically and also playing against fewer and varied enemy careers (which they can no longer treat as an individual blob and have to examine and counter on a per-class basis). Imagine also if they could keep experimenting like this for longer, instead of using scenarios as the optimal method to "skip" mid-tier by EXPing as fast as they can out of there.
Speaking my personal experience, Scenarios is where I learnt how to properly play the game. And that started even back on Live where I was playing with 0 addons (and I suspect a big portion of the new players are in the same situation too). It was a gradual process of course and I kept queuing even after hitting level 40 in ROR too.

I call it a "downfall" of the scenario system, not just because of the non-existent matchmaking system but also because Scenarios as a whole have come to be scorned by the community.
If you don't believe me, open Killboard and find a new player in your guild that hit rr80 and compare how many scenarios they've played compared to an rr80 veteran of your guild. In my case, I compared my rr 84 main toon with an rr 85 guildie who has played the game for around 2 years now. According to the killboard I have 1328 scs played while he has 379 (250% more in my case)...
The same can be said for City basically, only that that content is even more prohibitive to solo queuing players.

For our present situation, since it's harder to break old habits and rebuild your foundations compared to having a proper start from the beginning, the damage already starts from T1 and midtier. Even introducing a perfect scenario system today would take a long time to help the existing playerbase.
Regardless, if we want to see the damage undone and stop the further degradation of skill in ROR, the next best possible time to have a scenario rework would be today.

Speaking of today, what is the latest update we have on the Scenario rework system?
The scenario system rework was first announced back in the 25th August 2023 Developer Update, almost 2 years ago from today.
About 1 year after that, via a discord message we got confirmation from Max Hayman, the lead developer of ROR, that the team was indeed working on the scenario system rework.
Next update we got was about 5 days ago, again in ROR discord, where Emissary the Community Manager confirmed that the Scenario system rework is still in progress, that the system rewrite is happening in C# and that the topic of Matchmaking is still being discussed in team meetings.
Logically, this means that the Matchmaking system is still not finalized after 2 years since the first announcement, even on paper (ignoring the coding challenges).


In my eyes, having a working and fair Scenario system should be the number 1 development priority for the game since it directly influences the average player skill/quality (which in turn affects most if not all multiplayer aspects of the game). On his last message on the topic, Emissary mentioned that he'd request a Developer Update for this topic so we might get more news on it soon, however the fact of the matter is that we need a change as soon as possible if we want things to improve for the game as a whole. And as I wrote above, it will be a slow "recovery" process. Since a large portion of the playerbase has been noticing this downward trajectory over the last year(s), time is of the essense to try and reverse the situation.


Thanks for reading thus far and feel free to comment and write what you think about this topic.

Great Post! as a long-term player on this server, I completely agree. A scenario rework is badly needed and would help many people, including myself to this day. You are probably one of the most helpful if not the most helpful person on this server. You are appreciated.

Good post.

+ 1

It needs to happen as soon as possible because the game is degrading in quality day to day and there unfortunately exists a point of no return in my opinion - that will also affect any future made changes to RvR or Small-scale.

Great post.

I'll add some thoughts later

No lesser was expected from you. Amazing post. Share and support ideas, claims and conclusions.

I agree but scenario mode problems are even deeper. Scens become so harsh and unforgiving that even ppl with quite experience and game knowledge stop playing them. Along with that rewards from orvr are so over tuned (or scen rewards under tuned) that there is no point queuing at all so scen pool is going tinner and tinner. Same 2-3premades farming same 20ish pug players.

Your pov is from new players and pugs but there is big problem with not so experienced and good premades which get punish so hard by latest scen rules that when they face strong premade they got demolish and shortly disband since there is 0 comeback mechanics.

If i check the scen history of my characters, my oldest rr80 got tons of scens (2600) prolly even leveled to 80 via scens while the newest 80 barely 800 and that is while i do run at premades and farm pugs

I'm grateful to the heads of Jemp who log in when the game is healthy and pull blob to walk and use only 1 skill...

Very good points - I spend 80% of my time solo roaming on my 2 characters which are both around RR65 and here my experience of the game:


Progression:

1-40 is quite fun - I won significantly over 50% of my SCs queuing solo on my AM and around 50/50 on my WE. You mostly don't face premades. Solo RvR is completely unplayable even with blue talismans. A SoV geared player has so much more stats that he probably would win a 1v1 with him pressing every second GCD.

RR40-60: congrats you are now probably RR45 in conq and still insanely underpowered - but now you are weak in SCs and RvR + SCs are premades stomping pugs. I think this is where most people who dont want to play in warbands zerging over the map are quitting. I only joined a pug warband twice and well thats an experience in itself - I think even a RR45 BW can make more renown soloing than that.

PvE:

Incase of a friend the reason to quit was funnily the PvE dungeons he couldnt be bothered to do and I must admit also found finding groups for them super annoying. I would be really curious how much of the playersbase actually enjoys doing PvE. I think the reason to play RoR is RvR and PvP - if I wanted to play a PvE MMORPG I would just play WoW M+ and raiding.

Gear gap:

The current gear gap is insane - I compared my stats in 5 vanq + 2 sentinel + 2 beastlord to a SoV + triumph WE and I still miss: 2k hp, 7% crit, 15% parry, 15% critdamage, quite some armor and toughness/iniative.

Grouping Meta:

Well I tend to win most 1v1s on both my WE and AM - the problem nobody wants to fight 1v1 or even numbers - 90% of RoR players dont engage in about even fights: I cant count how often I found a similiar number of players staring at each other with both sides not willing to engage. One could think this is a full loot game. And here I am losing my 20s 1v1 against Solater - I will for sure win the next .

Would be cool if they would add a system checking the fighting numbers and add a local AAO - so if you fight 10v1 the renown gets divided by 10 and then split by the 10 people making it worthless.

I can't count how many 6 man premades are roaming in basically dead zones chasing solo/duo players over the whole map - I dont know what the gameplay appeal of this is - but it must be there.

I know in a RvR game there will always be times where you don't find fun fights, but funnily the instanced ones aren't better: SCs/ranked are in a dire state and should be the number #1 priority-

Scenario ideas:

1. Nobody seems to queue for discordant SCs as these basically give no weekly rewards - I'm curious why?

2. Maybe the easiest way to fix this would be to make ranked premades only and normal SCs solo duo queue - maybe even crossfaction with an MMR system trying to balance healer and tanks to create close and fun SCs.

3. Objectives need to give also some kind of reward not only kills. And why are flags faster captured in many SCs and RvR by more people. This literally incetivizes not splitting up.

I hope the devs come up with a good way to fix it .

+1 as well.

My $0.02 (again) are the queue system is the least of the problems with scenarios. The folks working on them previously had a "hard core" approach to SCs that moved that made them into murder box simulators. This was, I suspect, a by-product of the ranked scene.

The original designers of the game had the right idea and the current custodians need to revert the changes from recent years.

1. Bring back all camp guards to make spawn camping potentially dangerous for the opponent. Also reward the team for guard kills. Yeah there will be some "rope-a-dope" players but it still promoted some kind of fighting at least.
2. Remove any barriers that might still exist. I honestly don't know if they are still there on things like Serpent's Passage as it was so bad I stopped doing that one months ago.
3. Revert the flag cap changes to Thunder Valley and Blood of the Black Cairn. Originally these SCs were, in particular, newbie friendly and it was possible for an out-matched side to score points if the other team refused to split up their uber six man.

Bottom line is stop listening to the "elite" PUG farmers who "just want a fight" and focus back on making SCs fun and approachable for all players. There will still be stomps but, in my experience, folks want to fight as long as they have some opportunity to make progress/score points.