f13.net

Linky (http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=412)


Not sure this deserves it own thread, but the WAR herald think's it's a big deal and this is the graveyard, so hey ho.

Anyway, some random dude on the vault is reporting (http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/109217745/p1/?24) that the exp for capturing a Battlefield objective is 2900.  Fantastic, normally I'd think he's trolling but that value is so low, it's just got to be true.

Confirmed

T2 Battlefield Objective capture yields 560 Experience.

That's five-hundred sixty.

I guess if you count killing off the NPC guards, you'd get a total of about ~1200 Experience.

I logged in for a little bit last night and took several BO's and the most xp I got for it was like 1400 in T3.  I don't remember the exact number, but I don't think it was even as high as 2900.  This was around 8pm EST.

Either way, a pretty laughable chunk of xp.  Though having rested and getting ~1500 xp per rvr kill was nice during the witching pq (for the first kill anyway).  Should be that high for every kill.

Yeah sorry should have made it clear, the 2900 is apparently for T4.  There might be a 2nd tick for defending for a few minutes as well.  So the choice is get a group together, grab a BO for a few thousand or do a couple of scenarios and get 20-30k.  I wonder which is going to be more popular.  :awesome_for_real:

Baby steps remember , baby steps and band-aids before trying anything drastic

Doesn't matter if the wound is deep and bleeding profusely , band-aids should be tried first


(and I realize they cannot make sweeping changes without testing/time , but something as simple as this should have been obvious - Tier 4 should be something like 10k minimum , you have to wait 15 mins at least so its not like 10k would be all that much)

It's a mystery!  I was having the most fun I'd had in the game in a long time doing the witching thinger last night.  Waiting for the quest to reset we were taking BO's and Keeps and having all sorts of good rvr fun.  That is, until the opposition actually started to mount a defense and people literally said in /wb "Qing for scenarios, we don't get anything for this".  After 3/4 of the warband dropped out we fell apart and had to go back to black fire to see if we could find a group of people again. 

When we got back our keep was getting attacked and we were inches from zone control people said they were not going to defend because "they don't get influence for defending".  After telling them about the small influence you get for defending (along with the inf you get from killing people) they promptly said they could get that much in 3 minutes of TA and left the wb.  Right there is your state of the game.

/facepalm

2900?

I think their DB guy missed a decimal point.

I think their DB guy missed 2 decimal points.

FUCK

I WANT IT BRANDED INTO MMOG DESIGNERS SKULLS

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LEVELING FAST ENOUGH

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

2900 is a joke and an insult.
29,000 would get people into oRvR zones, but honestly, I fear it's too late. The game is one patch away from getting removed from my computer.

That's funny.  2900.  At the very least they should think to themselves "does this give more xp than if you spent the same amount of time killing random mobs in PvE?", if the answer is no then you've done something terribly, terribly wrong.  You would get more xp for killing two or three challenging con mobs than capturing a tier four BO.  Laughable.

I have to bring it up, but if you "level" to fast, doesn't that make the "Content/depth/things to do" pool more shallow? Wouldn't we not see tons of people talking about how "Easy" and shallow it is? I realize that this is somewhat of a unique situation, with the design of this game, and a second set of "levels" going from 40 to 80, but all in the same areas. I guess it would up the replay ability of levels 1-40, due to the fact you would miss a ton of things in a greatly increased leveling curve. But i am asking in a more generic since, not just for warhammer.

Comment on this and the previous post.

They've set a leveling speed via scenarios.  Let's call this max leveling speed.   oRvR activities should approach max leveling speed.

This might not be fast enough for some but at least it makes sense.

That's hilarious. 2900xp for a T4 BO. My R14 BW get's that for a single easy quest. He gets 4x that for a 8 minute scenario. WTF are they thinking.

If BO's were harder.. I mean ALOT harder then it would be worth more xp.. but it doesn't even take 6 people to flip a BO.  Same thing with keeps.. people are bragging they are taking them down in 6 man groups.  12 people make it cake, more then that well.. overkill. 

Is the xp too low still? Yes.. but 29k?  Seriously... if you want to level that fast just hire a goldfarmer to level for you.  This game already has a fast leveling curve.  If all you want to do is scenario in T4 and ORvR I can see it being slow, but there is no lack of XP out there.  Most of the stuff gives 10-13k xp payouts and they are fast.  I did all of Empire and the last are of dwarf to supplement my RvR and Scenarios and made it to 40 easily.

But what if all we want to do is RvR? Why is it bad that 6 people can quickly get 10 - 13k when you can easily get it solo? So your saying it's ok that a quest gives you 10-13k and it's fast but it's not ok that a BO would give that much or more? Keep in mind travel time and the fact that if they were worth that much people would fight over them. You know. War and all. Your logic, it does not work.

Umm.. I did say that it needs to be more.. I was laughing at the 29k number that was thrown out by Schild. 

Reading comprehension ftw.

If all you want to do is PvP in a game where over half of the server doesn't want to come out and RvR, thats the problem.. saying you all can't level cuz the xp isn't available is trash.  I made it to 40/rr 35 doing quests and pvp.  If you want to level fast you do everything the game gives available to you.. not just what you want to do.

But you don't explain why 29k is laughable. How's it going to hurt anything? By making more people RvR? Oh fuck no! Can't have that. I'm glad you enjoy the quests - I think they're stupid. If I can't level at an acceptable pace in RvR, I'll quit. So will a lot of people. That's good for the game!  :roll:

For a normal PvE game yes. But this is more about the battles you could at times when the levels themselves don't matter.

At minimum you should have lightning-fast to the tier cap even if you make the tier cap level itself harder to get through. They're halfway there already by having everyone below it leveled up to the soft cap for the Scenario session.

They've made the common mistake in thinking that PvPers and PvEers one audience and that on different days they'll log in wanting different things. That is true in a wider sim with something approaching a real economy and actual different things to do. But for a strictly linear game without any real economy to speak of, PvP is about fighting in PvP battles. That WAR includes XP for PvP should have meant they focused all their attention on that alone. But I suspect a combination of misunderstanding WoW's appeal (for not having grok'd it) and being stymied by WH IP requirements compelled them to spend far too much time rolling in a storyline nobody gives a crap about.

At some point they'll either recognize that they really should only have four levels (one per tier) or a progression that is the same from 31-40 as it is from 1-10, or they'll end up only able to ply their relatively small DAoC-like audience with /level commands and experimental content packs.

You look at the cause though, the actual cause, not some made up impression of how you though early EQ1 players played or something else as old. WHY don't people RvR? This question has been answered so often they should have patched it in in June. No magical bandaid overlay is going to get around the systemic application required.

BOs are hard to take if they are defended.  They are currently never defended because the rewards suck.  In tier 4 you get 950xp when you take it, then another 950xp when you secure it.  Their Keep rewards are 900xp in T3.

This falls into "what the fuck?" categories.  A serious slap in the face who wants to do open RvR.

You cannot take each BO more than once every 30 minutes at maximum turnover.  You take it, then you have to wait 15 minutes for it to become vulnerable, then your enemy takes it, then it takes another 15 minutes before you can take it back.  Give large rewards to get people out there and it will thrive.  They will become difficult to take when they are defended.

Flipping BO's is not RvR... its PvE in an RvR zone.  People only care that they get flipped so that they can flip it back and get the reknown.  Now imagine if they bumped that to some extreme xp bonus as well.  Order flips and destro doesn't attack them because they want to flip for the xp/reknown and back and forth it goes.  Same thing goes with keeps.  Because at this point no one is going to be able to take a city yet anyway.  Although at the keep defense the other day I did notice alot of players with warded gear already, so it is getting closer.

What they really need to do is bump up the xp/reknown for player kills more.  Give us more of an incentive to defend keeps and B.O.'s.  Hell make it so that if you kill players in the B.O. or Keep areas you get an additional 50% bonus, and lower the kill repetition penalties.

Why defend if the the rewards are so good that you are actually out there flipping them?  You take a B.O. then move on to the other ones, I've never seen one actual B.O. defense and I've been in the rvr zones alot.. especially now that I'm 40 there is nothing else for me to do besides that and farm Bastion/Lost Vale/Sigmars.

Doesn't matter if you are out there flipping them.  After a flip there is a minimum of 30 minutes before you can flip that same one again.  If 2-3 groups are going this on each side you are going to run out of points to take extremely fast.  Throw in some reasonable rewards for defending a point (a flat XP reward for each kill in the vicinity of a point) and you'll have reason to fight (mainly because all the points you can take are on cooldown.)

You want a big reward to lure people out, even if they are alone and flipping points.  Get enough people just out there to farm and other people will come to fight them.

At the very minimum the reward for taking a point should be equal to the reward for 500 points in a scenario.  Then keeps need to be worth something huge.  Scenarios are the standard for leveling everything should be measures in how long it takes vs a scenario and how rewarding it is.

If you have to constantly dole out more and more items, PQs, experience, and whatever the fuck else to get people to do RvR, maybe Mythic should just fix fucking RvR so people do it to have fun, not because of some carrot dangling over BOs and Keeps?

It seems the only reason people do anything in games is for a reward. Its fucking stupid. I remember the battlegrounds in DAoC. People loved those things because they were FUN. Hell, players loved them so much that they finally got Mythic to allow players to turn off experience/RP gains in them so they wouldn't cap out. People stayed in them because they were FUN. Not because the keep lord dropped some dumbass item, or because you got experience for taking them (You did, you got a TON of experience for taking it, like nearly a level, but you only got the reward once)

I don't see people saying "MAN! Tor Anroc kicks ass! I wish I could just do this for weeks on end and not be forced to move on because of leveling out/rping out!"

Anything to stop two groups from just flipping them back and forth for hours? That happened in Planetside when base captures were by far the biggest xp award.

It's a two step thing, if they do really want people to ORVR then the rewards for attacking have to be on par with other activities.  Otherwise people will just level via scenarios and quests until they get bored and quit.  They do need rewards for defending as well, otherwise as you said, players will just avoid each other for captures, but there's not much point talking about defensive rewards when they clearly aren't serious about putting decent rewards for attacking in.

All this is so obvious it shouldn't need to be constantly repeated.  It's like the first couple of weeks when people bitched about T2 players having mounts in some scenarios, the obvious solution would have been to give mounts as a reward at rank 22 instead of rank 20.  This is hardly mentioned any more, it never really bothered me but I bet it still bothers new players.

They don't appear to factor in normal player behaviour at all, like with the new PQ's, it's caught them by surprise that players on the losing side would try to stop the winners from collecting their rewards from the PQ chests.

The fundamental problem with this game is that they make xp matter.  Rewards and skills should come from reknown and not xp.  In DAoC, RP's were the driving force for player participation in PvP and these were the primary drive of the player power curve.  Eventually bounty points were added for gear and pots.  Outside of BG's, the xp bar was meaningless... as it should be in a pvp title.

This is the exact current situation with Keeps.  Destro always owns the all T3 keeps.  Destro continually tries to stop us taking any keeps.   Over and over they zerg us even though its in their best interest to ignore us so they can flip them back.  At least descent rewards, I have some hope of convincing people to come out and cap BOs.  Right now it is against their best interest to do so.

They basically fixed this in PS, oh, you can flip them with one or two guys, but now all XP is based on kills and activity in the SOI (Sphere of influence), so, no action, no XP, lots of action, lots of XP when the base flips. This would be part of that bucket thing i had thrown out in some thread somewhere.

Apparently they learned nothing from DAoC (pause for shock and awe).  They implemented a mechanic where a keep take xp/rps were dependant on how long it took and how many people were involved.  Rapid turnover between a few people would give almost nothing.  Long, drawn-out battles could pay handsomely. 

I'm just stupified.

It's so true.  Nor have they learned from any other games.  They keep talking about WoW but they no idea how WoW means to MMOs.

I can kill 5 mobs in 2 minutes and make more exp than that. Its still not worth anyone's time unless they are done leveling and just need renown. Keeps yield 3k exp, and I can kill 10 mobs in 4 minutes to make that instead of 30+ minutes dealing with a Keep.

If they are going to make these changes, they have to be serious about it. Giving shitty exp is a slap in the face to any serious player, and it just makes them want to hit the cancel subscription button or continue to sit out RVR until they are max level for that Tier.

I would refer you to the Paul Barnett interview in which he prided himself on not having a clue about the competition.  It would mess with his 'creativity'.

Unfortunately, they forgot that to compete one needs to be aware of the product they're competing against.  Oops.

This 'LOOK, NOW YOU GET 12 XP FOR A TWO HOUR KEEP SIEGE' reminds me of exactly the same problem in DAOC. At launch RvR didn't grant xp, until after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, Mythic deigned RvR worthy of trivial amounts of xp, and the players did sigh.

Eventually the RvR xp was ramped up a lot, but only in the post-ToA 'Quick!-Remove-the-grind-everyone-hates-it!' days of daoc. I assumed that Mythic had finally figured out that they needed to allow for the organisational overhead of RvR in xp rewards. Seems not.

Funny how quickly we got there with WAR.

I think folks have identified why just upping the XP for flipping a BO is a bad idea.

Look, the problem with most MMOGs as they are presently implemented is that they treat players as pure utility-maximizers and design accordingly. Over time, a lot of players have thus been trained to think in purest and most efficient ways about maximizing accumulation of reward in relation to labor expended.

So suppose you buff the experience and RP reward for BO flipping by 10X what Mythic has already contemplated. What incentive have you just constructed, now that BO flipping is equivalent in reward to scenarios?

You've constructed an incentive to flip uncontested BOs and avoid contested ones. If the reward is only available on successful flipping, then any serious contestation of a BO makes it no longer worthwhile to keep trying--that will eat up too much time and make the reward/labor ratio unfavorable.

At the same time, if you don't get any reward for simply defending a BO from being flipped, there is no incentive to contest.

In fact, the perfect maximization if XP for flipping is massively buffed for everyone is: NEVER contest a BO. Let the other side flip it, wait for it to become contestable, then go flip it back. The other side wants you to flip it back so that they can flip it again in turn.  And in short order, you'll have everyone howling again about how boring flipping BOs has become.

The trick is to find an incentive that narrowly and specifically rewards players for creating the largest possible group that they can muster to battle other groups of players with some kind of objective lying in the balance. Let's not underestimate just how hard that is. If you simply massively buff the XP and RP you get for killing other players within an RvR lake, then that might actually be a disincentive to the faction that can put fewer people in the field--if you show up and routinely get 1 kill for every 3 the other side gets, the other side gets constantly stronger and stronger and you get steadily weaker, further tilting that ratio in a bad direction. So the smart play in that context is to never show up except and unless you can field overwhelming force. (This is very much like real-world war, but that's the point: in real-world war you want to defeat your enemies as totally as possible; in a game, you want to have fun as much as possible. Different objectives.)  If you give people a massive XP and RP buff simply for showing up whether they are getting killed or killing, then players will rightly complain that this makes trying to win or achieve objectives pointless, and just promotes stupid zergfest battles.

The problem in a way is with the underlying use of XP and RP to incentivize player behavior. You can get a pretty good game of soccer going in the real-world if you have some motivated players on either side who just want to have some fun, even if there are no other intrinsic rewards for winning or playing hard. (On the other hand, if you're on a team that always, perpetually loses, you tend to quit eventually.) MMOG devs might want to ask, "What might motivate people if NOT utility-maximizing? Why else do people play games and have fun playing them?"

Shouldn't the whole point of WAR be to wage war?  You do this meaningfully at level 40.  This makes the journey from 1-40 little more than a tutorial.  Making it anything else just shows your playerbase that you're capable of keeping them from the fun by introducing a variety of cockblocks.  Now, if they made 1-40 as fun as 1-11, I'm sure that noone would be bitching about the 1-40 game.  Sadly, they didn't. 

There are fixes though and upping it to 500 exp for a t2 BO ain't it.

Seen lots of good ideas already. For attacking base exp on activity, lots of activity lots of exp. For defending someone mentioned a flat rate for kills inside the BO area. Both of those ideas seem reasonable to me.

Fuck no, you don't decide not to fix a major problem that's flat out broken because your fix introduces a new lesser problem.  War is everywhere remember?  If ORVR isn't worth fixing then just what is?

The same is true for keeps and people still defend keeps.  The most important thing is getting bodies into the lakes.  Maybe the optimal thing is 2 warbands to ignore each other and flip BOs.  But it won't take long before the warbands start bumping heads and start killing each other.  Giving large xp rewards may not be an elegant way, but it will be get bodies into lakes.

Make BOs defendable in some way, and make them very relevant to the process of taking a keep - then load the xp/renown/reward/recognition into the keep take.

imo.

I could claim credit for this brilliant insight, but actually, I'm just looking at what daoc did. A great many of the RvR problems in WAR could be fixed by just looking at what daoc did. The way dev teams refuse to learn from other company's games is silly, the way they refuse to learn from their own is depressing.

I agree that anything which got people to 40 is a good idea, and so a massive increase in XP for BO flipping, kills in RvR lakes, everything is good. I'm just saying that if you're trying to incentivize people to get out and go to WAR, it can't stop there--but that maybe the problem is partly with the *need* to incentivize everything in this particular way.

The only reason you need to offer incentives in RVR is because scenarios already offer massive incentives to PVP, combined with an incredible ease of use compared to RVR and a level playing field. The two activities just don't compare, so when RVR takes more time to get to, more effort to organize and in the end, doesn't reward with anywhere near the same level, people only want to do scenarios. If scenarios offered nothing, there'd probably be no incentive to do them over RVR other than the ease and level playing field.

We're talking about upping the incentives for RVR because you can't nerf scenarios.

So make taking the BOs a bit more involved then killing the crew and clicking the flag.  I don't know why they don't use the existing PQ technology to encourage POI oRvR.  It makes it clear what you are supposed to do at any given point in time (I guess the current Witching Hour may be the first steps toward doing just that).

Phase 1
Side A owns BO 1.
Side B engages the NPC at the BO and kills them all.  Side B clicks on the flag and we progress to Phase 2.
Side B gets some exp and renown

Phase 2
Side B must now defend their flag against waves of NPCs.  Phase 2 NPCs includes healer NPCs who also heal Side A players (so that NPCs aren't completely useless).
The successful side gets a chest and locks the BO for 15 minutes.

In addition to that, give some reward for simply holding POIs in oRvR areas (a trickle of renown or experience over time to anyone who is actively at their keyboard in the oRvR area).

It's a step in the right direction, unfortunately, for taking a BO it should be more like 20K experience at least, for a keep it should be at least 50K XP, maybe more.

2K is nothing, but at least they are (somewhat) listening. They need to increase that by a lot.

FIFY

While I agree not looking at other companies' games is stupid, they couldn't be bothered to look down the freakin' hall.

Please no.  NPCs have already created the situation that its impossible to take a defended keep without a massive zerg.  We should be looking at ways to get npc out of RvR or at least get the npc under player control.

XP from killing players should be the best means of leveling, with PVE on the side for people who play at weird hours or are behind the population curve. (You can increase PVE XP as the game ages, depending on how much low-level activity there is, to let people catch up to the crowd faster.) Then make the NPC dudes in the castles or whatever drop tokens you can trade in for phat loot.

Have battlegrounds (or whatever) but instead of normal XP have sport PVP kills give enough rested XP to make your next few world PVP kills worth double. Everyone will want to do them because, hey free rested XP, but staying in battlegrounds forever won't do you any good.

Or something? I don't know. Anything would sound better than the confusing system they seem to have in place. I've been reading this forum for a little while now and I still don't understand how the game works.

I wish there was no PvP in this game. It confuses me and makes me not want to play it, so I just do solo quests, and those aren't very good because this game is supposed to be about PvP.

I'm not trying to add PvE, I'm trying to toss ideas out that will allow for PvP that is entertaining for both attackers and defenders in non-symmetrical scenarios.  Given the reality of imbalanced servers, and the lack of any decent solutions for assuring that servers magically become balanced, I think the way to help resolve the issue is to allow for fun conflicts that are unbalanced.

That said, I failed to mention that the size of the NPC force should be scaled based upon the number of defenders in the area.

Also, I think that there should be some immediate reward for defending as it tends to be a thankless task in these types of games.

I don't think that simply making taking BOs worth something people obviously want solves the issue, because of the scenario where players just avoid eachother in order to optimize getting the benefits from taking a BOs (where victory is mostly assured).

Edit: added for clarity

- Servers are bracketed into tiers.

- Each tier might, at best, contain 500 players, 250 on each side.

- During any time of the day 50 people on each side might want to RvR.

- Experience is reduced when a player has already been killed.

- It doesn't take very long for all 50 players to be killed at least once.

That's not hard to predict, shouldn't take long to observe, and the fact Mythic has done nothing to fix it is very very telling, in my opinion.  I didn't know who was behind all the wrong headed design decisions in DAoC, but now it seems obvious.

Don't panic! 

Sometimes people just fight for fun, not for xp / renown / gear. 

I spent a few hours last night running around troll country / Ostland on the Anlec server fighting a large Order force.  The battles happened around the keeps and BOs, were constant and fluid and fun.  Neither side had a massive advantage, each side was successful in taking keeps and objectives, the game itself was running properly and everything just seemed right.

Unfortunately none of us got anything much out of it other than the fun of killing the opposition and taking on a mass of dozens of enemy players.  Despite this i'm pretty sure everyone involved was having a good time.  It actually seemed like people weren't queing for scenarios because they were too busy having fun in open RvR.

This type of thing gives me some hope that this game will eventually be what I want it to be, there will be fighting in the streets, in the keeps and in the cities.  I don't know if the witching hour event had anything to do with the turn out, or if it was just the fact that it was sunday afternoon and there were lots of people online.

A few little band-aids here and there could make this happen more often, and they have been mentioned countless times.   A bunch of small things like reducing the renown reduction for recently killed players, a little bit more XP for taking objectives and keeps, a scenario-comparable renown reward for taking keeps... none of this stuff would take a massive amount of work to implement, none of it would break the game, and it fits in with the baby steps approach that Mythic are going on about.

My only fear is that they piss off and alienate too many people before implementing the right changes, and the game dies before it realises its full potential, but I had enough fun last night that I will keep playing for some time yet.

Actually, they should panic.

Their refusal to panic is what's allowing them to keep making these retarded decisions.

The thing that's killing WAR if this keeps going isn't primarily bugs, but administrative decisions. Very bad administrative decisions that might have a place in 2004, but do not belong to 2008.

This. I wouldn't call it admin, but I do keep wondering who came up with the design, who signed them off and who implemented them with no-one raising the potential problems with them. Even internal testing must have indicated something was amiss, or could go amiss.

How did WAR release with so many glaring design flaws? And it's not EA's fault, because a whole heap of these issues come straight from Mythic to the player.

My bad, that was ambiguous.  I meant for the fanboys and still playing optimists to not panic.

Surely Mythic are already panicing and working their little asses off to save this game.

You are panicing right MJ?  If not now is a great time to start.

OK, so  :dead_horse: but -

I can't get over the differences between t4 in beta and live.

I've heard lots of arguments about how x hundred different design decisions have caused the problems, but honestly, those problems largely weren't in beta. People were flipping zones, running scenarios, PQs, solo quests AND participating in Open RvR on what was sometimes a dead server, but it worked. I leveled 31 to 40 very quickly, whilst still making time for everything else. As I didn't feel any pressure to grind, it didn't seem to matter that ORvR gave little XP.

I'm sure the beta to live XP tweaks (IE. adding the good old grind) is more than a little to blame for many of the problems facing the game now. Not just the obvious 'I don't like grinding' ones.

You can't just flip a switch just before go-live day 'OK, we're coming out of beta now, time to slow down the gameplay', and expect it not to have knock-on effects.

Maybe they were afraid to point out something was wrong with The Vision? Five-star drive, three-star ability and all that...

"If you don't love The Product, we'll have to hire someone that does..."

No its called a "locked thread" when dissent was voiced.

I re-rolled on Friday when my guild decided to move from SoC to Gorfang, this was phase 2.  I went from a server that had 0 scenarios in 8 hours to new games every minute which was a massive difference.  I got from rank 1 to rank 18 and RR17 on almost strictly PvP(scenarios) in about 20-25 hours total play time from Friday to Monday.  Everyone in the guild transferred over and had a great weekend of PvP which is how it should of been on our previous server which basically died population wise.  Overall the transfer process was fast, worked well and it's like a different game :)  Very happy they did these transfers.

I have a feeling that Mythic will need to continually offer transfers as players bleed.  Until they obtain stable subscriber numbers, churn will alter the game flow more than we're used to seeing.  The real weakness in the design of WAR is that success depends heavily on not only player numbers, but player density in a given level range.  It's going to be a tough thing to maintain.  Re-leveling alts just isn't going to be fun when people are already at the cap and this will kill retention for those that a) tire of their class or b) discover after the grind to the endgame that they would rather be playing another class or c) that the guild group wants to optimize forcing one of their team to reroll.

Yeah, this game is much, much better when you have the appropriate population.  On Monolith the Witching Hour PQ is pretty much up all the time, with 30-40 people duking it out. 

There are still problems, however:   

1.  Order has basically no hope of ever taking a keep and keeping it due to the massive server faction imbalance issues.

2.  The exp and RR you get from ORvR is still so far below what you get in scenarios.  I mean a LOT lower. 

3.  Exp and RR don't scale.  I don't know if this is what the devs wanted, but as it is, if you get behind on RR you will never catch up.  This means that if you do any PVE at all you will have a discrepancy that basically you can't catch up from, except by maybe keeps but you get some exp from that too. 

4.  ORvR as with the witching hour public quest is, well, frankly it is just a grind and a bore.  It turns into a ranged DPS extravaganza with the random incursion of black orcs/chosen or the corresponding order tanks.  There are huge changes needed here, and I'm not sure what they can do.  I mean, charging in and randomly killing in these huge zergs is not what I envisioned.  Maybe it is what Mythic wanted, but man it just isn't cool.

So all this being said, I am actually having more fun now on the larger server.  Hopefully Mythic will do the right thing and shut down about half of the existing servers and do something to make melee DPS more fun.  I'm giving it six months. 

It might be worth noting that oRvR can work, but it's impossible in a PUG. All tank careers get Hold the Line, which gives themselves and those behind them massive protection from ranged DPS.

Ideally, you'll have three tanks charge in front, with the MDPS following up behind and your RDPS flanking the enemy. This will allow your melee to hit the enemy lines barely scratched - it's just not going to happen without serious co-ordination.

"1.  Order has basically no hope of ever taking a keep and keeping it due to the massive server faction imbalance issues."

I saw this at login, Monolith was FULL with a queue (was low, around 25) for Destruction and MED for Order, that would totally suck for anyone that was on Order pre-transfer. You just inherited an ass whoopin' congratulations!