f13.net

... and it's from a contest that took place before the game went live!  Details: http://www.road-to-war.com/

So, now the winning team (Destruction has much higher numbers, and on almost all servers, controls ALL Tier 2 and Tier 3 keeps, barring the occasional half-hour exception) has been given an additional incentive for new players to sign up with them.

Lets review the good things Destruction has going for it:
1) Players new to the game are more likely to pick Destruction, because they're more likely to have been recruited to play the game by a friend who plays destruction.
   - This is a standard snowball effect that the larger side automatically has going for it.  This also takes precedence over any other factors (if you have a friend who got you to play the game, you're playing with your friend.  Exceptions to this are very rare).
2) Players new to the game are more likely to pick Destruction, because they're more likely to prefer winning to losing.
   - While the population imbalance doesn't affect fixed-size Scenarios, it does affect open-world PvP, which seems to be what endgame is focused on.  It's obvious that, while there are exceptions, *most* people prefer winning to losing.
3) Players new to the game are more likely to pick Destruction, because they will gain benefits to the rate at which they improve their character.
   - As far as I understand it, city rank is more than an e-peen thing.  You get access to higher level crafting supplies, and, I believe, a benefit to the rate at which you acquire renown.  This is in addition to the fact that, because Destruction controls nearly all zones on all servers, they get a big bonus to influence, renown, and merchant prices (because they're winning).

Lets review the bad things Destruction has going for it:
1) From what I've learned, on full servers, Destruction players have a long queue time in order to log into the game, because of "population caps."  Order players do not have this issue.
   - While this is an incentive for new players to pick order (assuming they have no friends who already play Destruction, nearly ensuring they'll play Destruction), it is an even greater incentive for Destruction players to become frustrated, and either become furious forum posters, or just unsub, which hurts the game as a whole by hurting Mythic's bottom line.
2) Destruction has long queue times to get into PvP Scenarios.
   - This sucks for them, so they need to level either through the awful PvE experience (Starting as late as Tier 3, you *will* run out of level-appropriate quests, even if you do all of them in all three quest areas, which means you *must* grind lineage/EQ-style if you want to level through PvE), OR the Destruction players will roam the RvR areas looking for people to kill, which means that Destruction has an even higher number of players available for the open-world RvR combat, which further solidifies their dominance in this very important area of game play.


So, Mythic, rather than trying to stem this game-injuring flood of players joining Destruction by incentivizing players to join Order, has decided to incentivize players to join Destruction.  And they did it because of a website contest that took place before the game went live.  Smart!

That online game, was in fact, the epitome of bullshit.

What did it involve, do you know?  All I learned from browsing Warhammeralliance.com forums was that it was 'heavily exploited'.

(Also: Dear god, where on Mythic's site are the patch notes?)

I signed up and couldn't figure it out.

Patch notes?

I think Paul Barnett once said "Fuck your patch notes."

There was no real game, it was a marketing tool.

You created your account and you get gold each day you log in.  You get gold for each person you refer to the game.  You get gold for finding widgets people could insert into their websites (heads of characters), and finally you get gold for doing their little surveys about what class you thought was best etc (pretty stupid as I'm sure most people that had signed up weren't even playing the closed beta).  There where a couple of other activities you could get gold for all mainly involving promoting the game on your website.

The small shred of a game involved using your gold to 'buy out' another region, which basically meant I think if everyone from one region put more gold into another region than all the people there had, you conquered that region.  That part was somewhat confusing.

I signed up for destruction originally on that site.

:(

Not that it would have mattered anyways.

EDIT: Just realized it was Sean that started this thread.

</care>







<3

You forgot to get mad at the fact that the main reason Destruction won the Road-to-War thing was because of people exploiting with multiple accounts.


 :oh_i_see:

The whole thing was designed to be exploited with multiple accounts, There would have been a fair bit of Order fudging as well.

whatever, i play destruction and shortly after launch the city de-levelled because no one had had levelled up enough to do city tasks and keep it.

Big pile of QQ, stupid stunties.

That's odd, given that the cities didn't get leveled up until yesterday afternoon.

I never really bothered to figure it out since it just looked like a marketing tool, but I found it funny when I checked it a few weeks ago that every state was overwhelmingly destro except for Utah.

Never underestimate the Mormons.

they may have gained another level yesterday but i've already seen my city hit level two and go back down to 1, so now it's 2 again? ya...yay. im not worried, no one is actively levelling cities yet, it'll be level one next week again

Yeah, Inevitable City on my server gained and lost a level before that free level even took effect.

There was a Destro guy just down the street from me he in South FL. I thought about smiting his home with empty beer bottles, but decided to drink more beer instead.

The other day, just after the servers were taken down for an hour, the Inevitable City on Ulthuan went from rank 2 to rank 5. A while later it deranked. I would imagine that during that time, several people took advantage of the city structures being highly ranked to buy some nice things.

The level 5 thing happened on my server too and on Warhammer Alliance others mentioned it. I suspect it was some kind of "Test" of leveling or something.

Like Schild I really want them to implement some feedback on the cities besides "you contributed to raising your cities rank!"

Great! And? How much? And how much more does it need?

Oh, and one nice thing about my server, we're low-med pop but Order and Destruction are about equal. In fact, Order usually owns all the Tier 2 keeps. I'm not in Tier 3 yet so can't comment about them.

Yes, feedback needed. Plus, what exactly happens when a city levels up? And how can it be deleveled, if possible?

We went on a "Level Altdorf" guild night one evening.  It was one of the most frustrating evenings we have had in the game as a guild.  The whole system is a bit screwy right now.  We ran the one PQ we could find in the city.  I only call it a PQ because it had "stages".  But, no influence, no "city points", no... nothing except "You have helped level the city!".

From what I hear Level 2 Altdorf gives us access to guild halls... which is the main reason we want it.

The custard pie is on a 5min timer, it fly's tho the air and covers your target's head in white custard. Pretty nifty, all I did was register on the site and got free lewts for taking my email address ;)

There's 3 PQs.

On Averheim > Destruction the Inevitable City is 3 star. I've seen nothing different there compared to 1 star. The lone tier 1-2ish PQ I've found there resets every 30 minutes. Nothing special on vendors...so I'm wondering what we're supposed to see/experience as the city levels up. I was hoping to see significant differences for each star...

At city lvl 2:
There's the plagued dead by the docks which starts a PQ that is around lvl 10 mobs.
There's the pub brawl by the docks which seems to be lvl 20 mobs.
There's the bank robbery near the guild bank which I can't seem to find any info on. 

There's also supposedly six more PQs that will open at different ranks of the city.