f13.net

Grab Bag highlights.


Which is nice, but I'm telling you now - no way in hell I'm playing a warrior priest. Or a dark-elf-rior-priest (see below). Healers on the front line with the riff raff - how very uncivilised.


In other news, it turns out Zealots are Chaos Rune Priests.


So, my guesses for the elf caster careers....

Dark elf-rior priest   :  healer/melee
Dark elf-gineer        : short range aoe dps caster
High elf-haman       :  healer/ranged dps
High elf herder       :  ranged dps/pets

You see what I did there?

Links for those that want to see the extraneous data...

http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/newsletterCentral/archives/Feb2007.html
http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/community/grabBag/grabBag_feb2007.php
http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/gameInfo/armiesofWAR/CareersDesignCommentary6.php

And the Goblin shaman won't have much Waagh sitting back and just healing.  It seems to fit. I like the Smite Cleric play style so this all sounds good.  I still disagree that pure support can't be made to work, but hey.

I forsee organized guilds coming from DAoC and perhaps even WoW and making life miserable for the uninitiated. 

Who offer PL services to level characters in 24 hours?

/runs

Seriously, I agree. The unitiated are going to get steamrolled early on, in beta. This'll either drive people to coordinate, which'll most likely mean VoIP and insularity by that nature alone, or piss people off so much WAR's chances at a million subs dimishes even before launch.

I hope that it causes new folks to run in packs.  It would make the game a lot more interesting.  If Mythic has learned anything it's that players haven't been properly rewarded for larger scale coordination and true realm vs. realm combat.  If War degenerates to skirmishes much the same way that DAoC has, then I don't see this game being nearly as successful as it's capable of being.

Your powers of foresight stagger the mind.

I can finally rest at ease knowing that you approve.

I think its going to be the opposite.  People are going to re-roll when they hit R4 to avoid the organized groups.

But really it is lossless PvP that people can walk out of the PvP areas at will, its not going to that harsh. Probably a level of harshness between a WoW PvE and WoW PvP.  Rallos Zek it is not.

But doing everything to make sure causal PvPers have chance to play and win is something I wholehearted agree with since that's exactly what I am.  Mythic is throwing a lot money away if they don't address this issue.  But given many of the other design decisions, I think they know this.

This goes back to some of the thing I stated in the Things WAR must do thread.

1)The game must have native voice - for people in your group at the very least. Period, there is no way it can avoid it and be even a half ass player conflict game.

2) Minimize or completely negate the ability for guild groups, premades, gank squads, whatever to dominate PUGS. People aren't going to adapt, improvise, and grow to compete on the same level as people who've done PvP/RvR together for the last 6 years. They're going to go do something fun. Namely everything that not the game they put out.

These two things are mandatory and are more important game features than having more races than Orcs and Dwarves at release. If either of these is not implemented, the game will have a decent release and then die off to subsistence numbers.

By my definition of pure support, you at least have the dwarf rune priest and chaos rune priest, who appear to be relatively pure buff/debuff/heal characters - they sound a lot like the way CoH defenders play.

A short term buff or debuff is as much of a support play as a heal in my book.

It looks like each side will have effectively a Paladin, a Smite Cleric, and what looks like a CoH style defender.

Smite Cleric and Paladin have always been popular archetypes, and CoH defenders are the best support model I've ever played, so the general shape of things looks ok.


For me, the big disappointment in WAR design so far has been that RvR systems seem to be leaning toward forcing small group vs small group confrontation. I don't see any way to stop pre-mades dominating in that structure.

It looks like even the city siege is instance-raid based.

The single best thing for casual players in DAoC RvR were the wild and ragged open pvp sieges. Uneven sides, and large sides were a big part of what made it feel natural, open, and what gave noobs a opportunity to win some of the time (the other thing that helped was having 3 realms ofc, but that's another thread).

Everything described *so far* points to top end guilds simply locking PUGs and new players out.

I don't have an issue with some use of instanced scenarios (not least to act as a sink that removes gank groups from open RvR), but to make instanced scenarios the core of 'real' RvR seems to turn the game into Guild Wars with fixed sides. In Daoc even a noob will get dragged into a relic defence or relic raid. Fixed numbers on each side of an instance will lead to gank guilds demanding pre-made access to dominate the top end of the game.

I have said all this before though.

I'm a long-term DAOC player, currently re-upped until Warhammer comes out.  A few thoughts for you...

• Agreed, voice chat needs to be tightly integrated into the game.  It's the single biggest annoying barrier between casuals and hardcores for RvR in DAOC.  Personally I'd prefer to somehow ban voice chat, because I find it nothing but an annoying necessity -- groups won't take you without it.  So if it must exist, build it in.
• Go back to root causes, and analyze why pre-made groups have such overwhelming superiority in DAOC.  I'd say there are 2 key factors... 
   1. The DAOC realm ability tree is too deep, encouraging players to catass their way to Rank 13 or whatever, spending years to do so.  An arbitrary cap such as rank 5 would have encouraged less catassing, more skill.  You want to reward achievement, but not create player-gods who utterly destroy those who cannot devote months of /played time.
    2.  Eliminate all easy-mode features such as the DAOC "/assist" macro, which take the brainpower out of group coordination.  And use collison detection to force players to spread out.  It's annoying as hell to see a pile of 6 tanks all merged into a single blob, chain /assisting each other, destroying other players in 0.0002 seconds.  If you're on the receiving end, it tends to induce cancellation.
• And as others have said here, create a system of RvR objectives diverse enough to force players to spread out.  I don't even mind the instanced RvR idea, but there need to be a wide variety of such instances and objectives.  With enough variety, you will find that the uber guilds cannot be everywhere at once.  They will tend to congregate wherever the fattest loot/biggest prestige is to be earned.  Fine, give them their playgrounds, and make sure there are plenty of other sandboxes for the rest of us.   It's fine if those sandboxes are slightly less rewarding than the ones favored by the uber groups, so long as there is FUN to be had, and the ubers are not allowed to gain massive, overwhelming superiority.
• One more thought about the uber guilds...  What I loved about early DAOC RvR was the feeling of teamwork.  The uber guilds would stop their 8v8 and be a big part of a relic raid, for example.  In Warhammer, do *everything possible* to encourage that goal of making the entire "realm" feel united in an objective, with the hardcore players doing certain specialized roles, and the casuals doing other important roles.  Everybody needs to feel important, that's the root of fun in an online world.  Spread the glory!

Couple of things.

First off, realm abilities are a red herring. Gank groups dominated before they were even patched in. Lets be clear, you can't have an interesting and deep dikumud where the most organised squad don't win the vast majority of the time. The only way to prevent organised squad dominance is either through random group formation or by designing the game principally for very large scale battles (in the order of 50 v 50 large). Both of these introduce other problems.

Second thing, collision detection as implemented in WAR doesn't stop stacking. Only enemy collisions are turned on, ally collisions are not detected. If Ally coillision is on then you are trapped into obvious greifing problems.

I'm not doubting this is true, but can you provide your source for this?

So to continue the discussion of WoW vs. WAR in the AoC thread, but in a better place...

It's not any game can defeat any game.  And even if anyone game could manage to put a serious dent in WoW, Blizzard would still be rolling in moneyhats.  The question is more like can WAR tap into the same vein that caused WoW balloon to proportions that until then were considered unreasonable?

We tend to talk about day 90 issues like VOIP and hyper-competitive guilds, but I feel WoW's much vaulted "polish" is more about day 0 and day 1 issues.  Does everyone would be interested in the game know about the game? Can they they get it working on their machine without any hassles? Can they grok the game enough to find something fun to do?  Does it generate enough excitement that they tell their friends?  This is the snowball rolling down hill WAR needs to make to follow WoW.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=228636#228636

So.. anyone following this game closely? I'm looking for you to point me to any hints ANYWHERE about how the game will actually, y'know, play.   

It sounds interesting, it looks kind of nifty, but then I remember DAoC and say, "Fuck it."   I really just couldn't get into that game at all, and I was much more jazzed about it.

I follow the game pretty closely. I played it at Gencon and did a small writeup about it located here (http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7144). Okay I follow the game pretty religiously, but still manage to not let my hopes get up.

Oh, PLEASE Garthilk!  Your hopes are so up, you'd think they were on Viagra!  Admit it.   :wink:

Regarding the above comments about voice chat, I was happy to read today Mark's post from back in January about his reversal on the issue.  He has always been a long-standing opponent of integrated voice chat so I'm curious to hear more from him in the future about what led him to his change of heart.

My personal thoughts on the subject are that it will bring more good than harm.  There are certainly some issues that will have to be dealt with, CS cost of addressing abusive behavior in voice chat seems high on the list, but overall I think it will be a great tool to add a level of fun to the game.  Those of you who have RvR'd with a group all using voice chat can attest to the fun it adds by adding to that sense of coordination, like you're part of a team all working together.  Interfacing through text just slows down that process and detracts from the fun part.  Typing isn't fun - fighting is fun.  I can easily talk and fight simultaneously but I can't type and fight without taking my attention away from the fun of fighting.

I hope to see this becoming more and more an integrated function in MMO's across a variety of platforms and genres.  It would be even better for a modern or sci-fi game where you don't have the concern of wrapping your mind around the fact that the elven maiden has an obviously male voice.  Though that really never became a problem for anyone that I ever met in DDO, and it's common there to group with men who are playing female avatars.


Shannon

Someone please tell me what you people are imagining when you clammour about native voice chat in a MMO.  With some actual details not just [fairytale]"you know there would be voice chat, and suddenly scrub PUG's would not get smashT by org. groups"[/fairytale]

-Thx.

Easier integration of PUGs into a group. It's really annoying to ask people if they have vent and then get them to download it, and then half the time they can't get it to work anyway. In PVP we insisted, but in instance groups we just said "fuck it" and just had the 2-3 of us in vent making and dealing with the PUGs not knowing wtf to do because it was all explained in vent.

Also, does anyone know just exactly what they mean by:


Does that mean an Oceanic server located in the region or just that we'll see boxes on the shelf or the "Oceanic preferred" that Blizz did? If it means a server actually here I'll buy 6-12 months of subscription nomatter what. Hell I'd play Vanguard if it had an actual Oceanic server.

You guys need to listen to Eldaec more, he's the only person in this thread talking any kind of sense.

My points on native chat are threefold:

1.  Most of us hate listening to these people in text form, you want me to be forced into a voice group with randoms because I joined a pvp zone for some casual ownage?  How the hell are you going to protect people from the fucking anonymous asshattery the internet is known and loved for?  Fuck how many people will voice-grief others.  Rendering this amazing piece of balance-tech even more worthless then it ever was in your theorycrafting.

The easiest solution would be some sort of ranking system where only people with good rank can actually broadcast voice, but then its just the 12yr-olds who farm rank talking and you still hate it.

Or how about we add not only native voice but also some kind voice-chat karma system to police the people who are sexual harassing other gamers or spewing racial slurs (you know they will be come the fuck on).  People tell me my posts are too pie in the sky, give me a fucking break.

Best case scenario the game has voice chat built in, you can create channels and other people can join them.  But it never assigns you to one automatically.  So now you join a battle, you have to spam asking for the name/pw of the voice chat channel.  Might it help sometimes?  Sure.  It might even strengthen community and lead to the formation of some kind of middle-class of pvp'ers between the hardcore and the scrubs.  But really if you want to pretend this is going to even any playing fields...

Its not.

2.  Read Eldaec's posts, he says:


I say, QFFT.

3.  Seriously, stop talking about PUG's standing on even footing versus Org. groups.  It will never happen, the same way you and your work buddies from the neighborhood rec center are never going to beat a WNBA team in basketball...

Either we've got unrestricted world pvp where gank groups become way less effective because they can be zerged, ambushed, pulled to guards, avoided or ganked themselves when caught on their own.  Not that they wont still kill joe blow bluebie 20 times to one but at least he knows he will get those occasional tastes of sweet revenge.  In WoW the only way the top 5v5 arena teams lose to a bunch of scrubs is if they get a dc, and I've seen way too many ss's and posts about 4v5 wins to even count on that.  They will dominate structured "sport"-pvp, because they play the game of pvp in a more serious fashion and typically are just better players (chicken meet egg).


In before someone calls me a griefer...   :roll:

*added, this info on the CD front, taken from MMORPG (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/loadFeature/1125/gameID/239)


 

I wasn't talking about pure PUGs though, someone else will have to champion that idea because I don't believe PUGs can ever compete unless they outnumber. I was talking about it being helpful to the semi-organised groups (generally an organised group with a couple stragglers for numbers) that can compete with a little luck or a heaping of skill against full organised groups if they can get everyone on voip.

Hi Hoax,

I don't think anyone's saying that voice chat is the holy grail of gaming and that it will turn the lowly noob into someone on par with the leet killah.  At least, that's not what I'm saying.   :lol:

As I see it, below are some of the ways that voice chat could enhance the game:

• Reduce barrier of entry by replacing command-line interface (/say "Hello") with a more intuitive combination of verbal and graphical UI
• Enhance fun of combat by allowing customers to concentrate on playing instead of typing
• Enhance community cohesion and reduce griefing by removing a layer of anonymity (not saying it will cure asshatism, but may help to reduce it)
• Reduce the disparity between the haves and have-nots by empowering all groups with the ability to communicate in real-time, not just those with dedicated Vent servers up 24/7

Those are the ones that spring to mind off the top of my head.  You're welcome to disagree with any or all of them, but I think each has merit and taken together as a whole they are a strong argument for integrating voice chat functionality into the game.


Shannon

On the topic of voice chat, I love voice chat. With guildies. In a guild with tight standards as to who can join. But every time I join up on say a random Counter-Strike server there's always some random 12 year old who loves to talk. Most of the time I can delude myself into thinking that people under 16 don't play games, but that illusion is shattered with PuG voice chat. I would prefer to keep that illusion.

Voice chat while it's certainly technically possible still has the same hurdles as it always did. The second you add it as a feature, it becomes required and anyone not using it, is suddenly disadvantaged. You don't want to build that kind of divide into your product. Not to mention of course the other issues brought up previously, like moderation, etc.

Well that sucks.  As we used to say in Shadowbane...

STACK!

I don't want to hear the horrible, squeaky voices of the boys I pick up.

However, if because of enemy collision detection, the melee stack can only reach the enemy main tank, then I don't care.

And so long as they don't wuss out on aoe and make it only affect a maximum of 3 players or whatever then stacking isn't really a concern anyhow.

I take it you didn't play SB.  Having one tactic that works better than all others makes for boring combat.

Unless they figure out some brilliant new code, Having an AOE affect more than say 10 people will probably make the server cry. 

You know what sucks about voice-chat?  Capture and editing, for one, and multi-channels, for two.

The text interface lets the player capture text, scroll back, see the guy's name, report him, and it's easy to screen-shot and POST the convo on a variety of boards.  To try to do the same with voice-chat, they would have to integrate a pretty good sound editing program with the game, one that would allow rewinding, that would keep tags of who speaks along with the sound, and cut/paste/etc.  Plus, posting the mp3 stream on any web or forum site should be as easy as cutting and pasting text, which it isn't.

Multi-channels, nobody in my group can tell when I've sent a private whisper to someone else, and/or what other channels I'm in.  With voice chat, either my microphone would mute itself as I switch it from the group to the private person, or like with vent/TS, I'd physically have to leave the channel and go join some private convo channel, to talk privately.

A sound stream is a lot more difficult to manipulate and replicate than text.

I played daoc.

One of many games where aoe effects ruled out stacking and the server didn't cry.

Also, as I said, stacking will likely leave everyone blocked by the enemy main tank because of enemy collision.

I don't understand what you are saying here.   

Erm, mute them? Really, Half Life has pretty much dealt with voice support and random assholes from the interweb randomly joining your gaming experience. They don't need to reinvent the wheel. Just emmulate Half Life - which is a perfect example of why having native voice support is neccessary even though it's not going to make everyone l33t. Usually someone just saying "They're coming from the left" is enough to stop an asspounding.

Agreed. I personally don't like voicechat at all. I like a nice "comfortable distance" between me and other players, and text provides that. Listening to people speak is just plain annoying. Why do I want to listen to a bunch of random people talking when I play a game? 90% of people I've heard on voice either sound like they just hit puberty or are just annoying twits in general. Fuck that, I'd like to keep my interaction with other players in a little corner of the screen where I can read or ignore them at my leisure.

And how long do you think you and your buddies from work would pay $15 a month to be cherry picked as opponents by an NBA team everytime you go to the gym, and the only interaction you have with them is they stick their ass in your face at the end of the game and then run off to see if another office team has shown up to play?

Unrestricted world PvP is a dead concept. The very, very best thing you can hope for with it is a niche game as successful as EVE. The arena system in WoW is fine, as it's really a small subset of a subset within the main game - though they really need to set up a 1v1 ladder. For world PvP in WAR, they're going to need to find a way of minimizing gank groups ability to affect pugs, newbies, the undergeared, and people who otherwise "suck". If they have to go so far as to instance every area that's PvP and split them into "Enter as a group" and "Enter as solo or pair" and keep them separate, then that's what they're going to have to do. Their choices are mitigating against gank squads or having a much, much, much smaller playerbase than they could have otherwise.

Seriously the difference is, if you have two hands you can "compete" in video game sports. You wont be the best, but this isn't the NBA or the NFL you dont need to be a freak of nature to not get run over.


Probably true but the very, very best thing you can hope for is a game where the pvp is so lame people who care about pvp dont play it so your constituents -players who get their shit shoved in so badly in online pvp that they cry and /quit- can play Hello Kitty Tactics Online in peace.

I feel the majority of people aren't so stupid as to be upset that in a competition between two people the person who has spent more time practicing and who take the competition more seriously will most often win.  As long as the sport itself is fun and they aren't loosing due to exploits, cheats or game balance issues they are ok with loosing to more serious players.  If that wasn't the case WoW wouldn't have the amount of people involved in the BG's, Arenas and pvp servers that it does.

Dont worry though you will get your kid glove treatment, I heard WoW wants to give every item a point value and try to auto-match teams with comparable gear levels accordingly.  Guess what, someone will still win and someone will still loose.  People will still cry about something and many will threaten to quit while a tiny number actually will.  Who fucking cares.  Get over it.  This pity party about casual pvp'er rights is fucking amazingly stupid.

If you care enough to get this bent out of shape about loosing instead of crying about how games should force people to not suck more, you should look at why your getting smashT and correct what I think is a purely personal problem.

My time in PS has convinced me it is still is an issue.  I am sure that I could over the course of a year I could get good enough that I wouldn't be completely worthless.  But it wouldn't be a fun year. 

If I am a tank, and I am trying to protect my support, then that is much easier if the other team is all standing on the same point. Because

a) I can stand in the way.

b) My aoe effects will likely decimate them.

c) My allies aoe effects will likely decimate them.

___________________________________________

Regarding gank groups vs random groups, I really don't think you ever can the change the fact that gank groups will win when these groups meet, and I'm not totally convinced you don't *want* the organised group to win.

All you can do is minimise the number of times that completely mismatched groups run into each other in a straightforward headon battle, and recognise that simply putting 6 players on each side is not the same thing as ensuring a level playing field. The issue isn't that your pub football team gets beaten by Brazil, the issue is that they shouldn't end up playing each other every week.

It mostly takes care of itself in open RvR, because average players outnumber gank groups, and because large, uneven sides swallow up the effect of gank groups, at the same time as emphasising the role of community leaders who bring random players in rather than excluding them.

In instanced group v group RvR it's harder, Mythic have suggested they may take account of RvRxp and relative gear disparities when setting up the NPC support. Tbh, I suspect rules like this will just end up getting gamed, strengthening the organised groups further. On high population servers you can probably try to match similar RvRxp groups; but if you go so far as build groups randomly, then players will feel that the result is being determined by who gets the most balanced group, and you prevent friends and guilds of all skill levels from playing together, which is surely a bad thing. And worse, I can see the realm message boards now full of nonsense about how low RvRxp players/guilds should not join random_team_instance_01 because it 'hurts the realm'. This is not like Alterac Valley where the outcome doesn't really matter.

You’re wrong. Competing at the level of a talented group requires resources that are beyond the means of the overwhelming majority of players. whether those resources are time, a guild, voice, or practice is irrelevant. Without any one of them the process falls apart and game balance with it.


Actually, the very, very best thing I can hope for is a fun, challenging, and rewarding game for players of all skill levels, at all times of the day, and at all server populations. Which is a goal that what I’m saying supports. Saying that large group battles evens things out is fine from 1700-2300, but then you’ve got a broken game for the rest of the day or whenever a particular side dips below XX percentage points of  population below the other ones. And the people you’re talking about don’t care about PvP to begin with. They care about ganking people they know have no chance against them. They’re the CAL players who join a pub Counterstrike server and play until the server is dead. They’re the people who group ganked lone miners in UO. They’re the people who are currently exploiting queue mechanics to cherry-pick BGs against PUGs in WoW. Skilled players, players interested in becoming better, and players interested in the health and growth of a game’s community should have no complaints about fair matching. The players interested only in easy kills to compensate for their own real-life shortcoming always seem to take attempts at removing their sheep as a personal attack and react as such. Pretty much like what you’re doing now.


Players don’t need to be upset to decide that it’s just not fun or worth it and hit a cancel button. You’d be better off if they got upset about it, as it would mean they had some sort of investment in the process, as opposed to getting rolled on day one of release by SUPERGUILDPREMADERGROUP simply because they’ve played together since EQ and were in the beta for WAR. It great they’ve been together that long and all, and that they play together with such precision. But so what? Mythic isn’t developing MySpace Online, and letting guilds trample over people on day one isn’t going to help retention or word of mouth. I can see the scene in the office the next Monday: “Man, I got endlessly r4p3d this weekend in this new MMO that came out! I couldn’t stay alive long enough with 20 of them using vent to focus fire on me, but it’s cool because they’ve played together as a group for eight years, had a year headstart in the beta, and  play as a group 8 hours each night. I’m going to keep playing because I know in a couple of years I’ll be able to step foot outside a safe zone and survive long enough in a group to get better.” Who wouldn’t want to play that?


I know you won’t remember this because you’re a community n00b and all, but I’m the guy here who argued constantly during WoW’s beta that they were wrong in focusing exclusively on PvE and tacking on weak PvP as an afterthought, and that PvP was going to end up being the bulk of their player’s end-game activity so it’s what they should balance for. That being said, WoW PvP is sad, even in it’s current state. Any of the battlegrounds you choose to name has one side playing almost exclusively because they need the marks fro it for gear, then they’ll never return to it. I find it odd that the least universally despised BG is the one that doesn’t allow joining as a group, and the ones that people universally avoid except to get marks are the ones dominated by premades queue surfing. Also, winning or losing a WoW BG is irrelevant to the rest of the game, as opposed to WAR where it directly affects everyone playing each and every time.


See, here’s the part where you’re really missing the point. I don’t want even playing grounds because I suck. I don’t – I’ve excelled at every game I’ve played and have the records with the various clans I’ve been in and the servers I play on to prove it. I’m happy with my PUG performance in WoW, even against premades. And I’m not even going to bother going into The Bobs and what they were about since you’d obviously draw the completely wrong conclusions anyways. I have confidence in myself as a person and confidence in my skill and my ability to learn and grow as a player. I don’t need a real-life ego boost from “shoving the sh** in” of someone who couldn’t beat me 1 on 1, let alone 1 on me and 7 people I play with every night.  I want level playing fields for the challenge. It’s the same reason why I stopped plying TFC on pub servers, then CS, then DoD, and why when I play NS I’ll only play as a gorge and still get more kills than half my team just using web and spit. I want the challenge of throwing myself against a human opponent of roughly equal skill, maybe more, maybe less. What’s the point of PvP if the people you’re fighting aren’t even as challenging as the AI?  It’s not fun for them on the receiving end and it’s not for the person giving it if they’ve matured emotionally past age 8. Rather than me going of to play Hello Kitty Tactics Adventure, why don’t you go set up some green army men an blow them up with firecrackers. You’d totally wtfpwncakes and have a really great K/D ratio.

Oh goodie lets play the Sr. Bruce game!  Hey bob, fuck you but I'll play...

Just pretend that "***" represents a bunch of nested annoying quotes for each section of bob's and my posts.

Competing at the level of a talented group requires too much resources point:
-time:  I'm sorry people who play more will often play better, time to some extent does equal skill.  Welcome to life it isn't fair?
-guild:  If you can't get a guild that is a personal problem, dont cry to the game devs.
-voice: Installing and understanding simple freeware is hard mommy!?  In the words of people fed up with whiny anonymous bitches everywhere "cry more n00b"
-practice:  Again, people who put more time into being good at something, will usually be better.  Wtf...

This is not game balance, you are distorting game balance so badly to prove your "omg hardcore players r teh suq" argument its fucking disgusting.

***

Actually the open pvp argument is Eldaec's point and its the only good one raised in this thread.  Like Eldaec I dont see open pvp as a solution as much as an alleviation or alternative to "sport pvp".  The problem with sport pvp is that you are going to get your ass handed to you by the people who play it like a sport.  If you are some weekend warrior who plays the MMO 10hrs a week and only spends two of those pvp'ing.  Reality paging bob: this is not a balance issue, this is called the way competition works.  I've been trying to make that point sorry it didn't get through to you.

At least I've made some points using WoW to illustrate player trends, people everywhere are playing WoW where org. groups DOMINATE all pvp but the sporadic to nonexistent world pvp that nobody cares about enough to try to dominate and possibly AV which is such a shite BG that most pvp'ers never touch it.

Go read my post in the WoW forum about the armory for my thoughts on how WoW proves that many pvp'ers seem to care quite a bit about higher levels of competition using early Arena competition trends as a model.

Also thanks for not actually calling me a griefer there bud I appreciate it.

***   

Here's one I got from f13 for this third diatribe.  Show me on the doll where the bad pvp men touched you.

***

Well I may be a forum noob but I also dont give enough of a fuck about you to track your posting habits I guess I'm not a hardcore f13 poster or something... 

***

Look, I like competition too and I'm sure you are le awesome at every game you play.  Good for you.  But your suggestions and demands suck.  Its not that I disagree with your goals.  Native voice will not change shit, or at least I've yet to hear a good set of implementation ideas for it.  If you want to advocate for increased competition you can only ask for stronger player/groups to be matched with each other more.  You can't pull up bad players by their boostraps.  Some people will always be the bottom of the totem poll.  They dont care enough not to be and as long as they are having fun playing that isn't a problem.

*added an "enough of"*

Well at least this thread gave me an idea for where Bob got his name from.

But without some new game mechanic to tell you who the higher ranked people are, only people who take the game more seriously actually learn who are the more serious players.  For everyone who takes pvp as something fun to do now and then, getting stomped by groups without any clear understanding of why you got stomped isn't fun.

Blizzard got the WoW money hats because for a large number of people WoW plays like a game, not like a job.  WAR will generate the WoW money hats only if WAR PvP plays like a game (not like a job) for a large number of people.

Using FPS as an example, think about how FPS game makers put in the "random assign" option.  If they could, they probably put in a "make sides even" option, which would attempt to distribute players between the teams based upon player ability so that the match-ups would be optimally challenging.  Of course servers can be setup to not have those options enabled.  With MMO FPS there currently is no "random assign" option.

I think bob is saying that to reach a broader audience, some sort of segregation between casual and hardcore needs to be built into the game.  If it isn't, then the game becomes hardcore by default, and the money hats never come.

So I guess I'm having a hard time figuring out why you think bob is a douche-bag?

This is great in an FPS where sides are flexible, and each match has no consequence outside of that match. In RvR you can't transfer an Orc to the Dwarf side.

That said I don't think anyone is actively arguing against a mechanism that attempts to match by RvRxp or even gear.

But I don't think it will have much effect. RvRxp and gear isn't nearly as good an indicator of team organisation as people might think. And on typical MMOG size servers I'm not convinced you have sufficient population to support much matching anyway (also Mark Jacobs has come out and said he thinks dramatic increases in server sizes would be innappropriate for community reasons).

On top of that, people will find ways to game the rules. You'll see high end guilds consistently submitting teams with a certain proportion of low RvRxp alts etc.