f13.net

I know it's supposed to be all doom and gloom in here, but I actually still enjoy the game and see some real potential for playing it long term.

In the meantime, tomorrow night begins Witching Night! For once, one of these event type thingies has actually piqued my interest as they're going to be in ORvR zones. Nice!

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=405

This is the best part:



(http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/herald/images/liveevents/2008WitchingNight_03s.jpg)(http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/herald/images/liveevents/2008WitchingNight_04s.jpg)(http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/herald/images/liveevents/2008WitchingNight_05s.jpg)(http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/herald/images/liveevents/2008WitchingNight_06s.jpg)

Link to full description. (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/liveevents/2008WitchingNight.php)

They'll make you catass for anything these days.

I took it as they are using the entire event as a way to get the RvR ball rolling. (one of may ways i hope).

I think this is the part that the comment was directed toward.

It's definitely the right direction to take. Had this been just another generic PvE PQ, the complaints here would have abounded about an RvR game being too PvE centric.

If anything, I'm looking forward to seeing them merge their PQ and RvR concepts even more, and even eventually coming out with PQs that end with giving your RvR group a bit of a bonus (like mounted NPC soliders charging the front lines, etc). Combine this with some good RvR kill influence rewards and RvR zone based kill/rescue quests with highly desirable loot and you're going to see RvR start to take off.

There's some very epic fail here.

This:

plus this:

How many PQ's on average do you have to grind to hit Elite again, usually?  And if you're having to pvp to hold the event to get the influence, what do you think the odds are ANYONE is actually going to get that mask, with a few hours in between respawn?  It's almost like Mythic doesn't want anyone actually having fun in this event.

Interesting idea. However, Mythic seems to think they can just throw some random items out in the oRvR pools and people will suddenly go out there. It'll probably work, but christ.

Here is a fucking novel idea, make keep lords drop the masks? Do something with BOs? Maybe have hostel enemy mobs spawn and charge a BO as soon as its taken?

This just stinks of shitty design. "lets just put some PQs out in the open rvr pools with long respawn times with the rewards being some random masks, that's sure to get the RvR players out!"

I have mental images of orcs dancing to YMCA.

I was thinking the Techno Twins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUfONVpMn4Q)

Truthfully, the reason they don't do this (and imo the reason they aren't pimping open rvr/keep sieges) is because right now the engine flat out can't handle large scale rvr.  The client performs poorly in a 50v50 fight even on a bleeding edge gaming machine let alone an average gaming machine.  You think people are pissed now, wait until they start doing sieges regularly and start seeing war turn into a powerpoint presentation. 

The bash Mythic threads are here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15042.0), here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14972.0), here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15100.0) and here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15076.0).

Can't we have one single positive one?  :why_so_serious:

You're right and I thought about it as soon as I threw that post out... couldn't delete it though.  Sorry about that.

I agree.  I'm actually enjoying the game more now.  New server and guild has helped. 

I'll be damned if I'm gonna grind PQs for some damned mask though.

Didn't you know?  War is everywhere ...

I'm more interested in the other 1.0.4 goodies.  XP boost and maybe some class balancing please.

I think most of the class balancing is still a ways off, the only things likely to change are the egregious bits like the chaotic rift stuff.  (Speaking of which, can someone tell me why they're focusing on chaotic rift and not electromagnet?  Don't they both function the same way?)

1.  Nerf destro first as their numbers are much higher.
2.  Wait til hordes of people switch to order
3.  Nerf order
4.  Balance achieved

 :uhrr:

Supposedly electromagnet was working the way rift is now working. I've heard reports that what James says in the post below is wrong but I haven't seen it for myself so here is the link.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2349187#post2349187

My god I want to like and keep playing this game , I enjoy events like this ,

But for fuck sake why put in the "HOURS between PQ's"

WTF , so if you login for a few hours each night you MIGHT be able to catch ONE of these ?

Who in the hell comes up with such stupid ideas as that ?

This is pretty similar to Mythic's behavior in DAoC

1) Buff a class with new abilities until it becomes overpowered. 
2) This class becomes the flavor of the month and everyone starts playing one as their new main
3) Allow enough of the new class to become involved in the endgame that it causes a stir in the playerbase
4) Buff a new class
5) Go to point 2)

Fuck it. I give up.

Yeah. I thought it was a good move on mythic part , and sounded kinda fun too. The ghosts thing intrigues me too, i hear you can get the loot from them as well.

Just stop reading all forums if you want to enjoy a game :)

I still got love for the game. If not for the masks and junk this will be a good excuse to get some people out in the lakes. I for one am excited.

Yeah, this should be interesting at least.  I'll even hop on my archmage and see if ulthuan can manage to get together some people in an rvr lake for a change.

At the least, T1 should be kicking on skull throne.

Would have to agree. Perhaps this event is being used to test if it is viable to get people into the RvR lakes more? After the event ends, it wouldn't surprise me to see them replace it with a similar concept if it is successful, and perhaps tie it in to the VP reward system to help lock down a zone. Gonna go and check it out, see if I can grab a mask.

It's so fucking easy... if you want people playing in RvR, just have enemy players drop the best available gear as loot.  xp and reknown won't even matter if players know that they can gear up to a competitive level just by participating in RvR.  Given current itemization, maybe this isn't so easy...

On top of that...the big pretty button that wisks you away to scenarios, make it wisk you away to oRVR areas. When I have half an hour and want some PvP action, I press that button and go where it takes me.

Or have that in addition to the PQs! People need something to do while waiting for that long-ass respawn!  :why_so_serious:

Yep I see no point in giving timers to it. I mean, fuck there was this Bastion Stairs boss that drop set gear. But it hardly drops the right classes. We can farm it easy in 15 mins, but why put 24 hour lockout ? I don't see the point at all in lock out timers. Of all the ideas from WoW they copied, they had to copy this shit.

Come back and tell us how it plays when you have to wait hours between Witch Nite PQs.

Off the top of my head, here is what will happen:

 - smart players will set their rally point to the warcamp closest to the Witch Night PQ RvR area; also, this might see the areas the PQ is located in experience more RvR than usual before time because they'll make the PQ a bit easier for that side

 - some players will come to the zones to see if the PQ has popped / will pop; there might be a bit of RvR, but I think more players will skirt around the edges

 - the PQ pops; calls go out across the zones; players crash the zone to take part - let's hope WAR's technical issues when large groups of players gather has been overstated

 - the PQ kicks off and each stage, depending on its objectives, probably doesn't take too long to complete due to the number of players; of course, if stage 1 is "kill 500 ghosts", that might take a while

 - the side with the fewer people is going to lose hard, because the opposing side can afford to send skirmishers to disrupt them AND keep doing the PQ, or even wipe their opponents off the map to make it easier for the larger side

 - players who just want the items are out of luck due to 1) RvR combat and 2) the large number of players taking part in the event won't match well with a PQ random loot bag system (hopefully everyone gets something for taking part in the Witching Night PQ, but I won't hold my breath on this)

 - the second the PQ ends, a lot of players will head out of RvR territory because there is no point hanging around for a few random hours for it to pop again; alternatively they die in RvR and use that as quick travel out of RvR

 - the PQ won't take as long to do as Mythic thinks it will; expect to see the length of time between Witching Night PQs reduced

So how does Mythic think a rarely occurring event where you can get rare loot in a centralised location is going to go in terms of player numbers in one area?

At this point there's only five fucking people online in primetime on most servers anyway.  What's the risk?

Now come on.

I'll be there on Ironfist tomorrow night and I expect it will be fun. The timer is brain dead 2003 stupid, but I think the quest will bring out people to orvr, at least focus them on a zone, and should make for some fun skirmishes.

I was in a 2 hour skirmish 2 nights ago in Troll Country that was a blast, and all because destruction wanted to take an objective.  We beat them back finally.  Of course the sad fact is how little xp and renown I earned for 2 hours of constant healing and rezzing.

From what i read, all that loot above drops from the PQ's, ORvR, Keep lords, ghosts, and "Witches".

It has not been overstated at all. We had a decent sized warband trying to take keeps last night, and frankly, the minute Destro showed up, the keep taking was all over. FPS dropped, and of course, it takes all of about 2-3 people playing defense to totally fuck up a keep take.

To be fair, the order guys running the raid were total clownshoes.  Taking a keep needs coordination without a zerg.  You don't beat down the doors, hundle up in the middle of the stairs and go "So guys whats the plan?" with destro breathing down your neck.  We deserved to lose and we did.

Rumor has it that first stage of quest is to kill 100 players.

Give Mythic credit for trying, I'm going to be playing around this thing tonight.

Oh no doubt. I was sitting on the stairs watching some idiots trying to pull the Hero room down on the stairs, then watching as the Destro players kept coming up the stairs to pick us off a few at a time thinking "Why are we still sitting here pulling our puds?"

I'm quite surprised that noone mentioned the fact that they seem to have dumped the PQs for these events in a Destruction-locked zone (Caledor), smack in the middle of 2 Destruction-locked BOs, with a couple of Destruction-locked keeps nearby. 

It's just inconceivable that they could possibly be so stupid as to not place it in the contested middle zone (Dragonwake), which would make sense, y'know, rather than smack in the middle of one side's territory.. well, maybe not that inconceivable, given their history.

As it is, Destruction players are on their home turf, with friendly keeps, heros and champs around the corner all the time to retreat to if the going gets tough, and Order are in enemy territory, having to dodge said mobs - which is fair, because Order has the huge zerg force to overpower the underpopulated Destr...oh wait, no, fail again.

Heh, they can't even do a live event properly.

Well, this event is officially fucking gay, as well as unfair to some.

Been doing it on 2 different servers, one as order one as destruction. In both cases the process was exactly the same. One side has 1/4 the numbers the other side does, lag is so bad the smaller side can't kill anyone before they get slaughters due to sheer firepower from ranged classes, they get pushed back to their warcamp, then get camped, and the smaller side eventually says "This is fucking pointless and unfun, fix the fucking lag." and then goes off to quest or queue.

Really, the fix for open RvR is to take it out of the fucking game at this point until T4.

Also, fuck whoever took that mask I want and attached it to this baby-killing clusterfuck.

So do you prefer scenarios where the sides are equal?  Seriously, here's the zerg vs scenario crap again, which one is it?  How would you balance the population without locking out one side somehow?

Lag or performance?

How about not putting the PQ smack in the fucking middle of the enemy land's zerg?

I mean, I could almost understand them sticking it in Reikland.. but no, even that would be unfair to Destruction, zerg or no.. but CALEDOR?  In the enemy homeland, where they not only get population advantages but home territory advantages (unattackable NPC heros and champs all over to retreat behind or pull people to) as well?   I'd really like to know who at Mythic came up with that idea.

EDIT:  This is only a problem in T4.  T1-3, the event takes place in Contested areas, unfortunately for the players in T4, the PQs are placed right in the heart of the Destro zerg.

::ack::

The lag is terrible.

Scenarios all the way. The game would be much better off with absolutely no Open RvR until level cap. So many of the issues of this game stem from sub-40 oRvR and trying to force people to do it. It was an good idea, but at this point it's inarguable that the reality of it is unwowrkable. Seriously, it's like Mythic took everything they learned through mistakes with DAoC and decided that the problem was they just didn't force the concept on players hamfistedly enough.

Also, double super-fuck whoever planned this shit. The area that spawn the fucking ghosts and stuff for T2 is within shooting distance of Felde. What the fucking fuck?

Sub-T4 Open RvR is the only Open RvR that's currently fun.  It sure isn't fun at 40, it's a clusterfuck of a mess, so I would disagree with not being able to do the fun stuff during the only times where it's actually fun.  My alts have a blast doing RvR in Saphery, Avelorn, etc.

So there you have it.

Scenarios all the way or Open RvR all the way is why the game is broken.  :)   Easy job Mythic has.

Witching night (morning?) has been brilliant on Wolfenburg thusfar.  Order put together half a warband, headed out to the objective and proceeded to beat superior Destro numbers for a few hours.  If they'd've had mini PvP PQs scattered in ever RvR lake the game would have loads more people still playing after the free month - this sort of thing is a lot of fun.

If every objective or keep were a PQ similar to this event PQ, I'm sure more folks would fight in the lakes, rather than in scenarios.  Also, 6 purple bags 1 gold bag are dropping per win...why the FUCK don't Keep Lords drop that loot?

Bloodletter Mask:

(http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/6350/khaelademonxh7.jpg)

Where is the RVR PQ for this in t3? Anyone know?

T3, West of the warcamps in Black Fire Pass just before the Brewery objective.

All three tiers are the same PQ.  Kill 100 enemy players then kill a ++Hero wight.  The wight is extremely weak for a hero mob.

T4, Caledor, between two objectives, south of the Destro warcamp, Northeast of the Order warcamp.
T2, Troll country, near the Destro warcamp.
T1, Chrace outside of warcamps, large flagged area.

Note all Objectives and Keeps are flagged for their own PQs so kills outside of the flagged Witching Night PQs don't count toward the total.

Anyone know the actual respawn time of the PQ's now that they are live ? Did they actually make them "hours" ?

As in if I get online at 7, and see it ended recently there's no chance of trying it out that night  , or is maybe something more reasonable like one hour (which I still dont see the point of)

They respawn in 1 minute 30 seconds.  We took 6 straight wins before I logged out, it moves very quickly.

Also, there's a fantastic way to grief the side that wins the PQ by doing a final rush as their chest drops.  As long as they're in combat they're unable to loot the chest.  We had Destro attempt this on the completion that I won a gold bag, fortunately we beat them back and I managed to loot the bag with scant seconds to spare.

Here's to hoping they actually listened then, and that it's not a bug they're going to fix in an hour or two.

Since when have they fixed any bug in a timely fashoin? Hell, I hope it's a bug, that means it'll last a helluva lot longer.

I was in keep defense where Destro was able pull the keep lord to the first floor and kill him. Boo!  But we were able to hold the lord room long enough after that they couldn't loot their bags before the reset.  Yay!

Either they listened to the concerns about a timer doing nothing but keeping people from having fun in it while it lasts , or they slipped up and put it in extremely bugged

Bets ?

Normally, I'd bet on bugged, but in this specific case, I saw Andy_Mythic actively browsing this thread yesterday, so there's still some hope.  They also stealth changed how long the event was going to last somewhere in the last 24 hours.  It was originally going to run through Sunday, now it's through Wednesday, unless I'm remembering incorrectly

I'm sure it's a bug.

No I remember reading somewhere it was running through Sunday also , if it now says Wed that changed also

Yeah the crashes are fun too!

EDIT: Being said, I played my T2 BW in this for about 1/2 hour and it was a hoot. My T3 SM is less effective, but probably because this is the first PvP game I've played a tank in, but if we could have these kind of battles way more it would be good.

Are you using a Greatsword or a S&B?  I've got a T4 Swordmaster that I absolutely love playing.  The trick to offensive tanks is stacking Disrupt and Strength so you can shrug off magic and deal substantial damage.

Sword and Board. I'm fine in small battles/keeps but in 50vs50 RVR it's not very comfortable. OTOH that is precisely where I feel best on my BW.

I hereby accept my title as Honorary Mythic Developer and look forward to this forum becoming the officially unofficial WAR forums.

I've got a wall of text ready that will tell you exactly how to save WAR for when you come back, Jacobs.  :grin:

I'm willing to bet against them taking positive design cues of any sort from here. In fact, history shows that they read the forums at f13 and decide "ohoho, now we know what will really piss them off, let's do that".

OR, they word the herald very badly, and its at least an hour from when the PQ STARTS, not finishes as some believed.. That, and combined with how long it takes to the stages of the PQ (kill 100 players), that no one noticed an hour has passed.

I think many people overreacted because of the wording in the herald.

Well what the hell do we know at f13?  We're self-proclaimed elitists, right?  I read it on WHA. 

Yeah, Sword and Board is definitely the way to go, but we have virtually no place in a keep siege.  Although there is a trick to getting top contribution as a tank.  Make sure you put down both rams or at least man both of them, if you can't; beat on the door the entire time.  The way contribution works toward an objective seems to compare your effectiveness on a single event, and if you only take part in that single event, it thinks you were king badass and gives you extremely high renown.

The past 5 or so keep sieges I've taken part in I've dropped both rams, manned them, haven't even touched the Champ/Hero mob at the top and garnered top contribution.  It's stupid, but it's effective.

The end game keep siege format is absolutely dominated by RDPS, to the point that it's unfun for virtually everyone else.  They really need to implement some meaningful siege weaponry and make keep attack and defense fun, rather than an exercise in futility if either side has a substantial population advantage.

I'm starting to sound like a Mythic apologist and it's making me ill, I need to stop posting.

Expect a few hours to pass after a Witching Night Public Quest is completed before you'll be able to try it again.
- herald.

Doesn't leave much room for misunderstanding, but what we are hearing is that this simply isn't the case. 

Perhaps the Herald was wrong?  Perhaps someone politely pointed out that this was yet another pointless cockblock and they ninja fixed it?

I'm assuming that's the case.  This is the first thing they've done even marginally right to encourage oRvR.  It would take a level of ineptitude yet undisplayed by the Devs to shit all over the first positive addition to the game thusfar.

That being said, I'd be wholly unsurprised if it were hotfixed (with the rampant ctds and agonizing load times introduced by the same patch remaining).

I played it tonight, logged on around 7 and just missed it, camped destro till 930 (CST) when it started again, good fight for exactly 7 minutes (time to kill 100 players) then run to the hero mob, which only half of the warband made it to, killed the 'boss' in less than 90 seconds.

So to sum up, wait 2 and a half hours for 8 minutes of fun. repeat

It feels as if they said "oh no, everyone would have fun and enjoy this too much if we had it pop every 15 minutes, how can we make it so people won't like it or have fun?"

They failed hard with the special PQ.

1) It requires the losing team to keep coming out and die.  On my server they just quit and hide in their base so no one can complete it.
2) NPCs and heroes killing players in the zone count.  So destruction is just camping by their NPCs when they do come out.
3) It takes forever to reset.

I take it, it was hot fixed?

It was too good to be true.  :oh_i_see:

So is the verdict another failed attempt to bolster open RVR?

If it was indeed hotfixed that goes down as the single most fucking retarded hotfix in the history of MMO gaming, hands fucking down.  I'm just glad I got my Gold bag when the event was till, you know, fun.  Maybe it'll add .1 cents value to my eventual attempt to sell a dead account from a dying game.

Having just looked at the Alliance topics on Witching Night, a lot of players are having the same issues.

Also, if you do manage to win, the 'losing' side's tactic is to kill players (which means they will have to run back, which will probably take more than 2 minutes) and just generally block the chest so players can't get their loot bags. And then there are low population servers where it is very difficult to get enough players into the RvR zone to even try for the PQ.

... I'm seeing a lot of design decisions that seem to exist because all the heretics were burned and only those who didn't rock the vision got to work on the title. Did no-one question how people would play this kind of RvR experience?

Disappointing, at least on my server in tier 2.  It's being totally ignored.  Went to the spot and ran around for awhile, nobody there...  Came back at various points during the night, and the progress was still at the exact same numbers.  If they'd setup a little camp of NPCs from each side fighting each other that you could also kill to advance it, things might be ok, but as it was there was nothing I could do. :(

I attempted this in T2 on my server last night.

The problem I saw was that PQ was only triggered in the very middle of the RvR lake. Destruction would only fight us right outside their warcamp, or from one of the BO's where they had NPC's backing them up. When we captured the BO's and Keep they just stopped coming out to fight. and because none of it was in the area where the PQ triggers, we never got the chance to advance it.

So, PQ in RvR lake brings people out, and because the other side denies them advancement, they take BO's and Keeps instead.

It half-ass works.

I don't know, I had a good time yesterday in the PQ area

We squared off against Order, won, then they came back and pushed us back, and later we returned the favour and completed the PQ. Also, you can loot the chest from any distance as long as you can see it so no one should be able to "block" it from you

They should have made the entire RvR zone the PQ area though, otherwise I have no complaints.

I love how everyone's judging this event as if it were being officially added to the game as a "oRvR fix."

It's nothing but a glorified beta test for whats to come. Don't like it? Express some constructive criticism.

The T1 area was dead until 3-4PM central on Phoenix Throne. I would say it was a pretty good success. We had scouts calling out enemy positions (reminded me of DAoC quite a bit) and overall was fun. I could see it being a lot more addicting if the influence rewards were changed along the lines of normal PQs -- except better.

Some of this has been stated. But areas that need improvement:
- Can't progress PQ from BOs etc
- Need to extend PQ to both sides of the Tier
- Upgrade the loot, make stage 2 boss harder?
- Add more repeatable quests

i just hate where it is.

it's just these narrow pathes with narrow bridges for a shit ton of people.....

Awesome.  So all my bitching about losing a purple bag in Gunbad because we wiped after finishing the PQ, but loot isn't automatically rewarded, was relavent.

Clownshoes. Really.

So I got involved in the T3 version of this last night. Great big 4-group warband against probably an equal amount of Destro. Here's what happened.

NPC kills on players affect the score - so the order players just stay outside their warcamp and lure the Destro within range of the warcamp's NPC's and cannons. The enging chokes like a Tijuana hooker on a donkey cock when this many people are around throwing out GOBBOODLYASSTONS of particle effects. Seriously, the particle effects? TOO FUCKING MUCH. You need to be able to selectively shut that shit off. Even on fastest framerate, there are still too goddamn many sparklies. And the only way to cut down the performance lag is to turn them all off, at which point you really don't have any clue if you are damaging your opponent or not. Don't forget that all that texture swapping and loading causes a fantastically bad memory leak. 2 hours into playing, and my framerate is a slidedshow even in the warcamp away from other players. FIX THE FUCKING ENGINE.

Kill 100 players, then run to a spot beside Bugman's Brewery where the Festering Great Unclean One (big giant booger with claws and teeth and eyes) spawns. He drops in less than 2 minutes. Seriously. He's a Lord level, and it's harder to kill a fucking Hero Keep Lord than it is this walking nose goblin. Oh, don't worry about getting any loot if you aren't RDPS because you probably won't win. And if you do win but die? Forget about it, Destro will camp the chest and kill you on the way back if you can manage to get there in the INSANELY SHORT time frame.

So the PQ is over after 2 stages (YAY?) and it doesn't reset for about an hour. WHY? I guess to incentivize us to do RVR and take objectives and keeps in the meantime. So we do. We take all the BO's and assault the Keep. We succeed in the keep assault, kill the Lord and I die. All our healers are dead too, BTW, so I can't get a rez. I now have THIRTY FUCKING SECONDS to run like a bat out of hell out of the warcamp to the keep to try to claim my reward by slamming my dick on the chest. /facepalm What the fuck were you thinking? I just pissed away the only tangible reward out of the whole keep thing (the exp. and renown were pretty subpar for the amount I need to level) because you had to make me click on the fucking chest. Why do I have to click on the chest, for flavor? NO, YOU JACKASSES, GIVE ME MY SHINEY. I cannot imagine in what fevered dream this was a good idea.

Oh and the Keep Lord fight? FUCKING SLIDESHOW. Your engine cannot handle it, PERIOD. Too many particle effects, too many idiotic NPC's running around and resetting themselves to keep people from single-pulling mobs. During the keep takes, we fought maybe 5 PC's tops. The rest is a fucking PVE raid. Keep Lords are not the solution to the 3AM Solo raid problem. They are a horrible horrible kludge.

Then the PQ resets and it's back to luring Destro players into NPC cannon fire.

The only kudos you get is for attracting people into the RVR areas finally. See what happens when you put tangible rewards out there? Now just up the oRVR experience gain about 4-5 times, make renown gear drops that are bought in keeps actually worth a shit and FIX THE FUCKING ENGINE. You might then have a decent RVR game.

They really , REALLY need an option to turn off graphics/options to a lower setting on the fly -

Lineage 2 had a hotkey that you could use as you approached packed towns or a castle siege that let you shift to a lower res/effects options on the fly

It didn't crash or take anytime to reload , just a quick half second catch maybe as it reset to all the lower options , you could then change back on the fly

There's an option you can set so that you only see spell effects on your Warband, Group, or only your Self.  There was a similar option in DAoC.  I'm not saying their engine doesn't suck, but taking advantage of this option should help a ton.

Only problem is those options are useless for me. As a Witch Hunter I need to see effects on 2 things - myself and my target. Everyone else can go fuck off. As a healer, I'm sure you'd need to see effects on warband/party and yourself, and that's it. I really really need the option to see the effects that I put on my target, but not on my warband. The engine doesn't let me do that. Hell, even if it was just self and enemy, that'd be fine.

I had a great time last night in both t2 and t3. Wanted to quote this reply because I agree strongly. The event might not have worked for everyone and definitely needs some changes but I like the direction.

My suggestions which I am sure need more refining:
-Instead of one area of the RvR zone that is often messed up because it is either close to a zone boundary, close to a warcamp, or giving an advantage to one side or the other because of location, make it the entire RvR zone.
-Don't confine it to just one of the RvR zones for the tier (unless going to get rid of the other ones because they will not be used). I suggest constantly rotating it between the RvR zones. Instead of it being a timed event the trigger would be the PQ ending in other zone of the same tier. This and first suggestion will also help with the lag.
-Make the boss scale dependant on the number of people either that did the first step or are in the RvR zone when boss spawns. Boss was not lasting more than 20 seconds (which made it pretty hard to also get the other things that only spawn in the RvR zone when boss is alive). However if this was a permanent feature then should be completable when have only 10 people instead of 100. Should be done for all PQs.
-As with all PQs the number of bags and level of bags need to adjust with the number of participants.

I don't think this mechanic was well known prior to this event.

Also, it can be hard to click on the chest with knock backs / attacks coming your way or clicking on it accurately among a horde of opponents who are all sending things your way. Especially if lag kicks in.

An unknown proportion of players are doing this event for the loot bags. Winning the event, but being denied the loot bag because you got zerg rushed by oppoents just looking to deny your spoils is a frustrating thing.

That's kinda the point of it being an RvR event rathe than a PvE event though.

The mentality is "You may have taken our city, but we already burned the houses and killed the women: enjoy!"

Yeah I was a tank in this keep raid, good fucking luck being useful at all with the framerate and the mass amount of KB/KD.

Still, I had fun for the most part. Can't fucking believe they hotfixed the respawn though, that's just massively idiotic.

I now see the beauty of no official boards for Mythic

If they had them there would be paying customers asking why they decided to stupidly but in a timer to make sure you dont have too much fun

Without them they can simply never have to give an answer to a direct question


Just logged in to my server and where last night before the hotfix there was tons of constant action around the PQ area , ghost town again now

Ah ha, here it is, straight from the Herald:

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=418

The Witching Hour: Instances of this Public Quest will no longer reset instantly following a successful completion.

Bug officially stomped... go team...  er... wait... no... :mob:

I like how that was the last patch note.

Also: there isn't an :awesome_for_real: big enough for how awesome that decision is.

Here's what I've learned from CoH/V events: rolling, limited time events work. Players will hang around in the area waiting for things to happen if they know it is a short wait. If it's a long wait, then stuff it, there are other things to do and I'll wait until someone else tells me about it happening.

Witching Night is only up for 5 days and apparently lasts for less than 10 minutes when the first stage pops, then has a cool down of an hour (or more). People won't be happy in hanging around in an RvR area for an hour or more waiting for a PQ to pop, especially on low population servers. If the idea is to encourage players to RvR constantly, then have the PQ up, with its extra rewards, on a very regular basis. Let a player log in, make their way to the area and find the battle raging, not both sides hanging out the warcamp doing scenarios while the odd scout checks to see if the PQ is up or not.

Also: while it might be RvR, it doesn't excuse the design decision that lets players block the rare-ish, limited time rewards from players who have earned them. It's a dumb idea like corpse looting would be a dumb idea - the player has earned the item, so let them have it. Especially since death can pop a player too far away to get the reward before it resets, so if you die during the PQ, there is a good chance you are going to miss out on the rewards too.

And that is why this is more Fail on their part.  Getting people to enjoy RvR is great.  Stealing their golden loot bag out from under them is going to make customers tell them to piss off.

I have to say, that the event last night in troll country, PISSED ME OFF. And i can usually find the bright side of anything (Ask schild), Congrats mythic.

Why would you place a PQ in the middle of the two war camps just STEPS away? Why IN GODS NAME (Choose one) Would you place said PQ, right there, Next to a BATTLE OBJECTIVE WHERE THE BATTLE OBJECTIVES SOI (sphere of influence) CANCELS OUT THE PUBLIC QUESTS?

We must have killed about 300 people last night (on both sides) but guess what, THEY DIDN'T COUNT COCKFAGS!

Suck ma balls.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v521/NicWester/map-1.jpg)


I spent about two hours of my life on this last night, and won absolutely nothing, NOTHING.



I feel better.

Other than that, Performance was good on high (with atleast30 per side and environment), lag was not there, other than that god dam server line being right in the middle of the RvR lake.

The really sad part is, all this does is encourage the "exploit early, exploit often" crowd.  The only people who actually realistically had a shot at finishing this event, had to do it before they fixed this.  Now that it's done and over with, most people's window for actually getting the kills they need is nearly non-existant.  It's back to being right place, right time, with the right number of people again.

And I won't even get into how retarded the influence grind is, and how group unfriendly it is.

I've played this on two servers now, both tier 2.

BACK THE FUCK UP!

Sorry but this is a player issue, we had idiots fighting them as they came out of the warcamp, even aggroing the guards.  How the hell can you be expected to make a decent game when players are this fucking stupid?

Please excuse my french.

Blaming players for poor implementation?  Please to be explaining. 


The playerbase is made from your PAYING CUSTOMERS.  If you don't want them doing stupid shit, out think them and design your game in a way that the opportunity to do something stupid is small.

I don't see the design issue.  You have a blue bar for influence, you get blue scrolly things when you get influence for killing a player in the zone.  Each warcamp is out of the zone and there is a dead area in front of the warcamp that appears to be equal to the aggro range of the guards, maybe a little bigger.  It's a public quest, a public quest has a zone of 'influence'.

I believe the quest is placed where it is to make it easily accessible because of all the damn bitching about the time it takes to get anywhere.

Sorry but we could bitch about every damn thing, but in my opinion some just aren't valid.

Regardless of a design change, do you really think moving it further away from warcamps would help?  You'd still have kills outside the PQ area because people would continue to rush forward.   /shrug

Maybe the concept for witching night was good, but the implementation (on my server) is failsauce. Before making special events etc, fix your game.

People were killing people before they could even make it into the area of influence (Order was camping the destro warcamp). And when Order had more guys, Destruction didn't even want to attempt to rvr (and I don't blame them). So you have 20-40 guys just sitting around for hours, lol. Well, I didn't sit around, but a lot of people did, and it's completely killed open rvr, PQs, and even scenarios somewhat on my server. So the last few nights, NOTHING was happenning on the entire server.

I'm glad this event helped on some servers but it definitely didn't on mine, and probably not on other servers with an imbalanced T4 population.

I was excited when I first heard about the event, but now I just wish they spent their time... I don't know... maybe fixing all of the broken stats on our Annihilator and Conqueror gear? How long would it take to fix it? How pathetic is having weapon skill and a +50 initiative bonus on my Archmage's PVP set? They don't have to fix every stat on every piece of gear, but the least they should do is fix our PVP gear sets.

/rant

So make the PQ area larger, or make some kind of visible border around it.  I was leading a warband in Troll Country on Wednesday, after we putzed around doing keeps for about an hour or so, I asked if anyone wanted to do the holiday PQ.  At least a half dozen people responded with something like "sure, where is it" despite the fact that we'd been running in and out of it all day.  You can't see this thing unless you're staring at your influence bar.  There's no clear delineation of where the borders of the thing are, it's scrunched right up against the damn zone line, and there's all kinds of stupid "That one doesn't count" areas which make no sense (like the nearby BO).  We ended up getting maybe two "valid" kills, because (understandably) Order didn't want to charge a zerg, and any time we tried to lure them out by attacking something that mattered (a Keep or a BO) the kills we got didn't count.

As long as it takes to delete the shit and implement something better.

Like a lot of things in WAR, the idea of the Witching Night PQ was great. It's the implementation that seemed to ignore any knowledge of how players will behave or what they want from such an event.

I really think it is a big turn off for players to potentially win the rarely-occurring WN PQ, only to lose out on getting a loot bag because the other side camps the loot drop process. Imagine that, for the first time, you get a gold bag, only for you to be dotted or killed or otherwise status-effected out of getting it. And then being several hours away from even possibly getting another one. Yeah, frustration.

Some people think that since the event is RvR then the players involved should accept this as part of the game. But it was just a stupid design idea to put the reward chest that you have to click on and can be interrupted when doing so in the middle of a large battlefield.

Aside: oh, awesome, you can get a WN PQ loot bag when you are a chicken (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2468747). Excellent.

We have one Halloween hot fix for everyone tonight:

Quests & Public Quests

    * The Witching Hour: The loot chest that appears when players complete this Live Event Public Quest will now appear in the victors’ warcamp, and will remain there for ten minutes. This ensures that all victorious players who have a right to claim loot from the chest will be able to do so.

...

This is the first one of these changes I can't find an obvious flaw in. 10 minutes should be plenty of time to get back, or you could take the death express to get there quicker.

Sooo... Mythic gets this right with about a day to go before they plan to pull the event?

This event is very likely nothing more than a live test for whatever rvr enhacements they've got cooking, im glad they are getting the kinks out now while it doesn't really matter.

How does screwing up the first live event of your new major MMO that wants to retain all those paying customers who now play on the servers not really matter? Jacobs is right in this being a marathon, not a sprint, but the starting section of a marathon can determine how it ends, too.

You might be surprised what matters to some people.  Many of us like 'useless' trinkets from special events.  Without the trinkets, there tends to not be a lot of nostalgia.  Without nostalgia, a game won't be as sticky.

Exactly, plus if I have to miss out on an event because of work or family or even just because I don't think it would be fun to do I'd much rather the award be something completely meaningless in game.  Cool hat, title or trinket is just fine, putting + anything on them just makes them mandatory and pisses me off because of it.

I think this event was a failure.  Not just because of the stuff already mentioned but because they were very tight fist with the holiday items. It an incredible amout of work to get a useless mask.  I guess the upside is that it was less of a failure than normal rvr.

True. I tried to compete in these a few times. I was in the same area, then the number disappeared so I couldnt keep track. Got dropped, lagged out, I dunno what happened but I got almost no Influence for it all in the end. I did get a crap ton of Gobbo masks and a couple of the Gaping Skull whatever they were called so I'm good.

If you all need an extra Gobbo masks I have some on Magnus (my alt server, should you be there as well)

people in my guild went apeshit for this event..  which left me  :headscratch:

I know I wasn't exactly blown away by the event, myself, either.  The RvR component was usually dead; either the other side outnumbered us 4:1 or we outnumbered them 4:1 and the underrepresented side wandered off after about five minutes of RDPS jousting.  The PvE component was pretty lame; just kill a million of these monsters for a reward.  I like that you can mail the potion to your alts (minus ten points for not showing the correct number of charges left on it, though), too.  The fact that level 8 monsters gave the same influence as level 18 monsters was a bit wacky, though.

And looking over at the WoW forums, where they're talking about some kind of plague that turns players into the undead and lets them infect each other, overrunning towns and cities with zombie hordes, while I'm sitting here in WAR killing three witches over and over to grind rep inf, I'm not really feeling that this was a great event.

Yeah, was hilarious to see people turn and start fighting one another. Of course it was a little frustrating when they ganked the AH/Bank/whatever but meh, respawns are quick.

But hey, I got a dozen Gobbo masks!?

Apparently, the PQ's were not the best spot, as the cauldron of witches around the world dropped the items rather consistently.

So did Scenarios, Nordenwatch would drop the blue 'gaping skull' mask at least every third game.

I have 5 of them and I never did a single witching hour PQ