f13.net

This is a standing offer. I want to fight you, whoever you are. Fucking bareknuckle. In the street.

I'll even fight in nothing but boxers and you can wear steel toed boots and have knuckledusters or a bladed weapon of your choice.

I want to fucking chew part of your face off.

That is all.

This is your opponent.

(http://www.lovesanimals.com/images/animals/monkey/funny_monkey.jpg)

Funny, I made a comment in game about them being retarded apes.

Someone didn't participate in beta much?   :grin:

Sorry... cheap shot on my part.  I'm just saying that I'm having a REALLY hard time continuing in this game.  The endgame is fun, but I'm really tired of the "YOU MUST BE THIS TALL" in order to get to the fun that exists beyond the first tier.

I'm not in T4 yet, but T3 scenarios are cool in my opinion.  I'll rank em:

1.  Doomfist Crater (awesome).
2.  Temple of Isha
3a. Talabec Dam
3b. Black Fire Basin
4. Tor Arnoc
5.  High Pass Pass Cemetery (Never Popped for me)

Doomfist is pure win though.  Small area, and just complete havok.

Doomfist so far for me has been one of those scenarios where group cohesion makes or breaks it. You can kind of get along in the others with a semi-uncoordinated group, but in Doomfist, if people don't work together, it's a disaster from start to finish.

i want to smack the genius who decided that:  if altdorf is under assault and you are under T4  you have no way to access your bank. 

if you are T4 there is reikland which has the refuge camp.  but hey all you poor fuckers who haven't hit T4 yet, you have no way to access any sort of bank.. you know that place that you store things... like maybe the gear you just fucking grinded up to meet the lvl/renown specs and now can't use....Raaaaah :angryfist:

What about a server without scenarios at all?

From a MJ post on vnboreds:



Link! (http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/108947743/p1/?273)


Now aside from the obviously disturbing fact that Mark Jacobs feels his base ought to be a community of old and out of touch mouthbreathers I'm curious about how this would work out.  I'm actually kind of interested in the idea since I hate the scenario grind and I've been playing the game to see ORvR content (without much luck).  But it seems a little drastic.

More than likely, if they go with a no-scenario server and it's relatively populated, I'll roll my Destro alts there.  Not having that side of the game where people POOF all the time will be interesting.  I suspect PQs will become a larger source of one's XP gains and orvr will be very, very interesting.  I like it.

Why would he run that vote at IGN and not Warhammer Alliance?

GodDAMNIT, MARK.

The correct answer is "Diminshing number of scenarions as the Tiers increase (73 votes)" btw.

And the correct number is:

3, 3, 2, 1.

All of them death matches in varying environments just to get you ready for oPVP and the endgame, and the 1 tier 4 one has 24 people per side.

This objective bullshit has got to fucking go.

It's stupid to be even talking about this publicly at this stage. I'm fucking shocked. Yeah, the system needs tweaking, hell i'd rather do RvR than scenarios myself. But "HAI GUYZ LET'S ASK VN WAT THAY THINK AND SEGMANT OUR BASE MOAR!!" is a bad approach.

That's gay.. fix all the servers don't make more new types.

Add more scenarios or replace some of the current ones with deathmatch type runs.  End scenarios at level 39 leaving the main RvR to battlefields and keeps.  Allow "debolstering" so that you can take your level 40 and go to a t3 area, get knocked down to like level 31 and allow them into the RvR areas.  Give us all the classes that were cut and put them back in game.

No, there should be no "adding" of scenarios. They need to just start over and have much less. Too much dead weight with level layouts designed by people who call themselves "designers." No doubt they're denizens of Bolgia 10 in the 8th Ring of Hell.

The current scenarios don't really train crappy players to be good and they also don't typify how the endgame PVP will end up.

Why isn't a scenario where one team starts in a fortress and another team has to break in and kill some person or claim the keep or something? How hard would that have been?

Scenario design here is just crap.

Edited: Added a bit, clarified.

I think this is the wrong approach. What they need to do is incentivize the open-world RvR. The mass of players will do whatever delivers the most efficient risk/reward ratio. The game knows when you're in a keep or at an objective--so boost the rate of XP and Renown gain by 3X or 4X when you are, boost what you get for taking an objective, boost the quality of renown gear so that not having access to it is a very bad thing, and so on. Then they don't need another server type or anything complicated like that.

Incentivizing it right now means re-working the entire system. Until you're 40, there's really NO reason to go get keeps unless you're totally grinding for set gear. And even then, Good luck >_<.

I'm not even sure Open world RvR should've been available prior to tier 3, and then have no scenarios at tier 4. Really there's lots of solutions that may or may not work and we could probably ramble off hundreds, but as it stands:

Tier 3 & 4 suck.
The scenarios were designed by dimwits.
A decent bit of class specific rare+ gear needs to be reitemized (most of it, that is).
Need real reasons to participate in RvR.

At the moment, the biggest problem across all 4 tiers I think is simply that due to the number of RvR lakes, the number of scenarios, PQs, etc - finding those random groups for massive fun are... well... unlikely.

I can't help but think how much better this game would be if there weren't levels. 

All we want to do is rvr - all the grind does is separate players.

If by reworking the entire system you mean, +XP and better loot in open RvR...then sure.  It's easy as shit pie to give incentive for people to do anything in a diku based MMORPG.  That's why people like making them...people are very predictable and basically do what you should expect them to do.  So to make open RvR more relevant...give people better loot and xp in open RvR.  I agree that there's too much land mass and this is a problem this game is going to have until the majority of players get into T4.  But the map works pretty well.  I was having no problems whatsoever finding open RvR action last night, and it was probably the most fun I've had in this game up to this point.

I think you're wrong about things pre-T4 schild.  The scenarios are fine in T3.  Except for CTF, that's obviously pretty borked in this game.  I don't want to play a scenario to have some strategic campfest where one team attacks and another defends.  That doesn't sound fun in a PUG at all, and it's too similar to open RvR.  Scenarios should be quake-style with basic objectives, a minimum of not-fighting, and basic strategy.  One of the best scenarios is Temple of Isha because it cuts out all of the crap.  Scenarios should be as different as possible from open RvR simply to diversify play experience and please different kinds of players.  I'm certainly ok with scenarios being less and less important as you level however, with scenarios at T4 being much less important than open RvR.  I think scenarios should have just been 3-3-3-3.  I wouldn't want only 1 scenario in t4, because forcing your players to play the exact same scenario for the eternity of their character's life is a bad, bad idea.

It might be a "bad, bad idea" but uhhhhhh

6 scenarios (8 if they open up Caledor Woods and that other elfy one), tons of open RvR lakes (TONS), a shitload of keeps, and the final city areas?

That's just way too much shit, the easiest place to cut down is scenarios.

This. Double plus this. I love the scenarios, but really, Morelag Temple is so farmable it KILLS all the other RVR/Scenario play for that tier. And I'm quite sure it's like that in other tiers as well. The T1 open RVR was fun as fuck in the Chaos/Empire area but it absolutely died in t2. I've yet to see more than 2 groups at once on either side of t2 RVR, but damn if Mourkain Temple doesn't pop every five fucking seconds.

And why the fuck would you make a whole new server type to FURTHER imbalance the populations? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING? Goddamnit, this shit isn't that hard to figure out. Pull some DAoC lessons - make the scenarios cross-server, but only in the least popular ones for each tier (i.e. if Tor Anroc is constantly popping, do the others). And schild's suggestion of a keep taking scenario is perfect. Hell, they did that in DAoC as well, and it was the most fun battleground on the server.

This game would basically be perfect if they hadn't wasted 2 years creating a 40 level pve grind nobody wants, a big empty world nobody uses, a million fucking items everyone hates, and just had everything scenario based, with a chat lobby.

Right now it seems to me like Dark Age of Team Fortress would be just about perfect. Give up cap the flag, actual deathmatches, fortress attack/defense scenarios, all that shit. And let us skip all the crap we need to do to get to the fun. Fuck customer retention grind mechanisms, I'd play that game forever.

Fury did well.

Fury's game play was total shit, in addition to being an empty wankfest. At least WAR's mechanics are decent though flawed.

Instead of more server types, how about fewer servers that can hold more players? That's the biggest problem with WAR - large world, lots of content, players spread so thinly that unless you are playing prime time good luck finding anything but scenarios (which work because they warp players into them - it's why scenarios work and RvR is dead). This will change when more players hit the top tier, of course... god help those newbie players when the end-game becomes the only show in town.

So: more players per server type, thanks.

Ideally, this would help. But seeing as the game already has enough lag related problems, it would probably just make a bunch of other issues even worse, and combining server hardware wouldn't just be a matter of plugging some network cables between boxes. They'd probably have to do some serious work to allow for a doubled world capacity.

And I don't see where you're getting the idea that things will sort out at level 40. Tier 4 has the highest number of scenarios, the highest number of zones, and the largest percentage of rvr lake. If we're already seeing the problem with most people being too spread out in tier 2+3, with 1 and 4 mostly empty, then it's going to be even worse when a large portion are in t4. It isn't like everyone will be in t4 in a month or two, as people are constantly rolling alts. WOTLK releasing next month isn't going to help.

Also keep in mind that one of the reasons you're not seeing so much rvr is that a lot of Order is going to go out of their way to avoid it due to pop imbalances that don't exist in scenarios.

I'd really like larger servers, but if they had servers without scenarios the world might feel more populated anyway so it's a good first step.  As to adding new servers possibly making even more low pop deserted servers, I don't know why they couldn't convert a few of those.  We're only a couple weeks into the game, I don't think there's a huge concern with ruining server communities just yet.  And you could offer free transfers off for those people (and a lot of those people on low pop servers would love to have that).

I think I'm going to right up a larger post for this soon but I think the biggest issue that encompasses all the little thing is that mythic gave this game a lot of width but not enough depth. Lot's of time was spent on making hundreds of similar quests, of making huge landscapes that end up feeling barren while it seems like there could be more classes, more professions, more cities and just fine tuning the stuff that people liked most.

Another thought on incentivizing RvR: renown-merchant consumables that are cheap and well worth having. Again, part of the problem is that if your faction loses all access to keeps past T2, that doesn't seem like such a big deal. You want to make it a big deal without saddling one side with a feedback-loop accelerating disadvantage.

---

As far as T3 scenarios, since I've now had a chance to play quite a few of them? Black Fire Basin is an epic fail design. 95% of the time both factions just turtle up and the score comes down to which side had one or two fewer deaths in the occasional bouts of combat that took place. The scenarios that work are the ones that either put escalating pressure on the side with an advantage (holding a flag or murderball) or that force teams to work continuously hard to hold an area against waves of enemy assaults that come relatively quickly.

The tier 1 and tier 2 scenarios are pretty good. In tier 3 only a couple appeal to me. The crater and tor anroc are fun. Who ever designed blackfire basin needs to be punched in the nuts. The map is WAY to big for the amount of players even with mounts it takes way way way to long to mount an attack on the flag and the defenders come back so much faster than a respawn can it usually winds up with both sides turtling up hoping enough stupid people get bored and try for the flag.

While I enjoy the crater both that and the temple of isha suffer from a huge problem. Both of them are cap one flag and hold it as long as you can matches. The problem is I have never seen a team win that did not get the flag first. The advantage to taking and holding the flag especially with all the knock backs in tier three make it damn near impossible to come back and win if you don't get the node first.

Its kinda sad when you know which team will win within about the first 30 seconds to minute of the bg and yet you know that bg will go the full 15 minutes without a damn thing you can do to change the outcome.

Yeah, if you don't have a very well-organized team on Vent, you're not getting Isha or Doomfist back if the other guys get on the flag in any significant numbers.

Any defend-the-flag scenario should bring automatic, escalating pressure against the team that holds it for more than 2 minutes, ratcheting up each minute. DOTs against the owning team, NPC mobs spawning on them, something.

Tor Anroc made me a better golfer.

Even improving the ORvR there's still the issue about it being pointless.
2 days ago we got our first keep. For several gold / hour you'd expect *something* to happen. Nope, some tiny thing here, half the castle graphics did not work (helloooo this is a RvR game, everything about it should work with priority over other candy) and other bugs. The guild rank did not budge, the renown did not move. Basically what did we got this thing for?
Until taking a keep is just for the "feeling" of conquer, the wowjunkies won't get off their precious scenarios, even at 40.

750,000 subs or boxes bought
55 servers

That is around 13,500 peeps per server if spread evenly.

That seems a bit low to me, considering that a percentage of the boxes bought won't renew and then you factor in the differences between servers.  So what they likely ended up with is about 5-7 "full" servers-  not sure what their capacity is, and a shitton of west Texas desert servers.

Presumably because you stopped playing MMOs and got out on the fairway.

The 40 level grind and big empty world are there to attempt to make sure that in 6 months the only people playing the game aren't you and everyone else who's excited because they have a new top-level playground since DAoC is stale.  If you want new players and growth in your PvP player base, you have to train them.  You may find the 40 levels and the amount of time it takes to get through that excessive.  I assure you the people for whom the first 10 levels are insufficient to understand "Kill the goddamn healers/casters first!" are not in the same boat.  If you want them to eventually have any chance of offering good opposition/backup when you're playing, you have to have the structure in place to train them how to play.

How can you train them?  It's not like EvE were you can stick them in a Griffin, throw on a webber and a warp disrupter, and have them tag along.

While I can agree that fury was an extra crappy game, I think your reasoning is way off.

no pvp game, designed seriously should have incremented power advances at the "EPIC BOSS RAIDING HERO WITH FLAMING SWORD OF EVEN MORE EPIC OWNAGE" levels, which is what WAR has and coincidentally failing partly because...

oh and Goreschach if you segregated your playerbase by win/loss ratio (something that Fury of course didn't) than I'm 100% sure you won't need 40 levels.

Posting from a crap cell but I have to say theres no way I am doing 7 more levels of Tor Anoc. Ill just level alts.

You don't, the devs do.  By parcelling out abilities at a rate that the players get very comfortable with the abilities before they get new ones.  By throwing them into simple scenarios first ("Stand here and fight!" in T1, "Divide into an offensive and defensive force, protect and fight" in at least some of T2, "Figure out how to be mobile while fighting on multiple fronts" in T3, etc.).  All of this takes time for an honest-to-god new player to assimilate, and that is why you can't grind easily to L40 in a day of play time.  I suspect there are ancillary reasons for stuff like the PvE, not the least of which is to try to grab previous PvE only players with decent to good PvE and hope they'll convert to RvR through the low barriers to entry.  But it all serves an additional purpose other than simply frustrating people who want to be 40 already just to get to the real "meat" of the game.  There simply aren't enough of the latter type of players, really, to make WAR much bigger than DAoC, because the market hasn't been grown substantially for RvR style combat by any other game out there.

Guild Wars did phenomenal and is still the only game of that style to offer a solid competitive PvP experience I have ever played.  Fury failed because its designers were incompetent and jumped into a genre they had no experience in and ignored all advice from people who knew what they were talking about.  All Fury had to do was release a mediocre game to steal a player base, they release a spectacular failure instead.

Anyways, on scenario design... could you punch him a few times for me to?

Great Scenarios:
Nordwatch
Gates of Ekrund

Good Scenarios:
Mourkain Temple
Lost Temple

The rest have tons of glaring issue that need to be addressed.   Some are near impossible to complete the objective with pugs, others it is flat out impossible to complete the objective if the other team isn't afk (Talabec Dam), mechanics are glitchy (capping the Shrines at Highpass will cancel if anyone in your group does or takes damage, Tor does this too a lot with the bauble), and others are downright imbalanced (destro gets to the bauble faster in Tor, Lost temple sees order to the center first every time.)

People are herded into the most rewarding scenarios because some are incredibly low scoring and are usually blow outs for one side.  Good scenarios end 500 to 300 in your average game.  Every scenarios scoring needs to be altered to mirror this.  People like higher scoring games because they are more rewarding.

The core game of WAR is fun and interesting, but it really feels like someone punched it in the balls on release day and it never recovered.

Scenarios need a huge overhaul for the long term success of this game.  However, they are one of the few things that sort of works right so they are back burner.  If scenarios are missing an arm, Open RvR and PvE took a bullet to the head.


I know this will sound crazy, but Tor really is the best map in T3.  The map itself has so many issues, the lava fills everyone with boiling rage, and I hate whoever designed Tor with a burning passion.  However, the murderball mechanic is still the best one.

In Doomfist and Temple it tends to be a one sided blow out.  You go and fight for the center, if you wipe you go and try one more time.  At this point unless your team is demonstrating good longevity and proving to have incredibly close fights scoring many kills you are best off leaving.  If your team gets wiped frequently you score no points, the kills you do get give meager rewards, and you are best off leaving and getting another match.  Murderball usually ends up rewarding the losing team just enough to keep them going and is the best scenario when you are joining solo or with small groups and realize the idiots are out in force on your side.

Now if Doomfist or Temple was changed so you scored more points for killing when you didn't have the center, but the points for killing while you had the center was also increased it would be great.  The matches would end a bit faster and with a 500-200 or 500-300 score instead of the 500-20 blowouts that discourage teams from queuing again.

This might sound odd, but WAR has almost left me wanting to reinstall Guild Wars again.

HAH. I FORGOT GUILD WARS HAD PVP.

That's hilarious.

You're enjoying this entirely too much.  :uhrr:

Yeah, but then you'll play a GvG and realize the competition all left, the metagame is shifted to builds that are extremely boring, and the game is a shell of its former self.  Even with its flaws, I still see A.net as the only real hope for a decent PvP oriented game with Guild Wars 2.  They seem to only people who get the "people prefer to be killing each other, not grinding in preparation for killing each other" concept.

You never got to pvp because you never stopped bitching that their wasn't diablo-style loot.

I have 2 max characters in Guild Wars. And I did PVP. I just didn't remember.

No. No. No. No. No. No.

Tor Anroc is the lcd scenario design for retarded monkeys who like to push their own orgasm button. It is SHIT. The lava combined with knockback just makes it worse. You might as well just make one big island in a sea of lava and spawn everyone into that one little island for all the strategy that is involved in Tor. FUCK A BUNCH OF TOR ANROC.

The Dam scenario, which I've managed to get to pop all of once, is still my favorite from T3.

Haem, the guy also likes Mourkain.  There's no accounting for taste. 

In this crazy world there probably exists such a thing as taste accountants. But they probably aren't on the Internet.

I honestly think that most of the scenarios are over-designed. As an example Talabec Dam: It's damned-near impossible to cap, but I've won the game with 500 a couple times. This requires tactical thinking and a level of organization you don't very often get in pugs. You need to tie up and/or CC the enemy force away from the cap point, without killing them for long enough to cap. Of course, no one does this and it turns into a 12v12 arena battle in the center. Couple that with being required to pug and...

It reinforces the fact that most people are just two-legged cows who can't get their heads out of their own asses for long enough to think objectively.

The scenarios that do the best for pugs are the ones that require zero thought: Tor (KILL THE GUY WITH THE THING), Isha and Doomfist (TURTLE! TURTLE! TURTLE). All the rest of them, while they have the potential to be well-played and awesome scenarios, are just victim to being to subtle/requiring too much actual thought to complete.

edit: I'm a horrible typist.

Murderball is a simple format, generally very action packed, and always a high scoring game.  When you are tossed into a scenario with a bunch of unorganized players who don't have a clue what is going on it works very well.  Talabec requires you to run a ball in on a short timer to a goal and then go through a six second cap process that requires no enemy to be within 100 feet for it to be successful.  Any competent team can prevent caps with 2-3 players.  Murderball also usually ends with the losing team scoring at least 200 points unless it is a complete blow out.  Furthermore, it one of the only scenario types where the objective is also the most rewarding way to play.  So half your team doesn't ignore the objective.

These scenarios are played with disorganized players.  How well a scenario plays with a bad players in it significantly impacts how well it does.  Tor plays better with bad players than the others.  The map itself needs a lot of work, but it is one of the better T3 maps.

Simplistic with the most rewards doesn't make a scenario good. It makes it horribly repetative and boring. Murderball has no style or skill involved in it at all. It's a bunch of monkeys trying to fuck a football. Once in a while it's fine, but it dominates the game because the players are dps-heavy slobbering idiots chasing the quickest shineh! A scenario without an objective is not a scenario. Hell, a game without an objective isn't a game.

Murderball has NO OBJECTIVE. Killing is not an objective, it's the byproduct of attacking/defending/holding the objective. Otherwise, Murderball is just as stupid as WoW Arenas in terms of pvp.

You have gone off the deep end.  Having won games without our side holding the murder ball I can tell for sure: killing is one of the objectives.

I don't think you get what I'm talking about. Mass slaughter may be the goal of the scenario, but it is not a pvp objective. Killing is pvp. PvP is always about killing. That doesn't change in any scenario. What is supposed to change is the objectives. Take this hill, defend this castle, own these territories, capture these flags, find this item, etc.

I'm inclined to agree. Unfortunately, murderball is the most successful because it takes the least thought to play. This is further exacerbated by the fact that scenarios with goals very often score very lowly, because no one actually attempts to succeed at them. The clear winner of losing in WAR thus far is capture the flag. I can win Black Fire Basin and get 1/10 the reward I can get from losing a Tor. of course players are going to funnel the scenarios that reward them most.

From what I understand, scenarios provide a bonus for winning by achieving 500 points as opposed to just having a higher score when the timer ends. Perhaps an increase to this bonus is warranted? Except for murderball...

Why does every scenario have to have deep strategy?  Sometimes I just want to log in and kill the other team in the most direct, simplest and expedient way possible.  Tor Anroc gives me that opportunity.  I wish some of the other scenarios would pop more often but that doesn't in itself make TA bad.

Forced PUG scenarios + having complex (more than brainless) tactical advantages just doesn't work together.  In most of these 'objective' scenarios, especially Talabec Dam, you have a couple people going in any direction, and most of the Bright Wizards hanging out in random strategic locations solo cherrypicking any wandering strays on the enemy team for the phat XP.

You can't expect, and will rarely get, cohesive teamwork from a PUG, and you can't win the map by yourself (again, in Dam, with a 6 second cap, teamwork is almost required), so I find it much less frustrating to just pound the shit out of the enemy in a Tor Anroc or Mourkhain Temple than queue up for Talabec Dam or Phoenix Gate with a pickup group - even with a 6-man premade, you still have 6 people who will more than likely be retards on your team.  For extra fun, I like to let the enemy keep the murderball with my premade, but keep killing the person on the enemy team who picks it up, for the sweet 75 point bonus or whatever it is, and let them think they are awesome for picking it up again and again so fast.  Game tends to go quick that way, too.

Hence why Nordenwatch is so popular with the masses.  Seems most others like it that way too.

A simple briefing screen during load times would be great. I had people asking me in guild chat 'Why are we losing although we're holding to the murder ball?'  :uhrr:

Nordenwatch is a lot of killing, but there is some work involved in turning a loss into a win.  It's a map I'd like to see played at higher Tiers.  (Dunno if it would work, but I think it could be interesting.)  Murderball, if you can get your team to focus on the glowing guy, you're done.

Maybe he plays a melee class?  Phoenix Gate and Stonetroll Crossing both blow for melee.  Trying to hit a guy running past with a flag is hard to do with the wonky position reporting in this game, it's impossible for you to catch up (you can sprint, but then you won't have the AP to do anything even if you can somehow get the server and client to agree on where he is), and none of your moves work if the guy is more than five feet away.  You're basically stuck trailing behind the runner spamming "Toss Axe" and hoping one of his escorts doesn't snare you.  At least in Mourkain the carrier has to stop running away when he gets back to his spawn.

Because if that's an option, it closes ALL other options. People will flock to the easiest goddamn things on earth. That doesn't make it fun, it makes for total burnout. That's bad for business.

What you need is a way to encourage action across all territories without emphasizing one. They have failed in epic fashion in this regard. Take a cue from WoW with the token system, ie - have a quest that requires victories in all scenarios to get good xp rather than just one. Can you imagine if you got a 15k xp reward from winning all the scenarios at a tier? That would motivate quite a few people.

Yes they need to spread usage of all the scenarios, That still doesn't mean that the murderball concept and Tor Anroc specifically are bad scenarios, all the people with a bug up there arse about TA simply cos they wish the other scenarios would open up more should remember that.

I keep thinking of some sort of inbuilt map change deal like a counterstrike server rather than porting back to the world between each scenario and re queuing would be interesting but would probably take a lot to implement and people would probably complain it takes people out of the game world too much.  A quest for completion of all the tier scenarios with rewards at least 7x what you get for the 2 Tor Anroc turn-ins should be a relatively easy thing to stick in.

That's a bit different than what I'm referring to (which is teaching new players how to play the game), but I definitely agree.  There is actually a briefing screen of sorts for the scenarios but it's variably timed and doesn't explain the mechanics very well.  (I do believe that since launch they've also changed the murderball mechanics.  It used to be in Mourkain that if destro got the ball and held it, no matter how many people we killed, they won.  Now we can win if they turtle too much and send 2/3 of their ranks to die at our feet.  Especially if a couple of forced drops of the ball occur, regardless of whether they get it back again or not.)

Brilliant idea for any scenario's loading screen.   :drill:

There should be a tome unlock for each scenario with an in depth explanation.  They tell you the objective and exactly how many points each action is worth.

Murderball matches are the MMOG equivalent of Retard Orgies, a lot of drooling morons running around humping anything that doesn't cause them immediate physical pain.

I disagree with you, but what makes a "good" scenario and a "bad" scenario is a matter of personal taste. Some people enjoy mindless slaugher. Some people enjoy taking numerous objectives. Some enjoy high strategy, and some don't want to think about it. Some like grouping, others just PUG it out. I tend to favor grouping, strategic, objective scenarios. Why? Because in those situations, I know that you can actually play well and win. Your pvp "skill" such that it is, can have a positive effect on the outcome. Different attacks and feignts mean that the games are changing and different. You can adapt as the other player adapts.

Others like carnage. They don't care, they want to stick something. These contests do not amuse me as much because it's horribly repetative and unchanging. This is what Tor caters. I think it's a bad scenario. I understand others don't. However, I think you can still get the "I want to kill things" jolly in other places without Tor existing.

A game type doesn't have to be complex to be good.  CTF in this game is terrible as is Bombing Run.  The objects take far too much coordination to complete.  Murderball may be brain dead easy, but it functions.  These other scenarios don't even function.

In Talabec, it is impossible to cap vs a decent team.  The best strategies to win are either camp the center, ignore the ball, and win on kills or camp your objective if they have the ball, prevent them from capping (easy since 2-3 interrupts will run the carrier out of time), and again win on kills.  The best way to win that map is to ignore the objective.

In CTF you need a highly organized team to control both flags.  Just getting the enemy flag isn't enough.  You have make sure your flag is in the base.  Couple this with the fact that you are lucky to have 3 people who know what is going on and you are screwed.  These matches are either one team being all premades and the other all pugs and the matching ending in a blow out, or a 80-30 stalemate with one flag cap all match.

Couple this with the fact that you are not rewarded for participating in the objectives, only by killing, and you have usually 1 person in a match even bothering with the objective because they get more by camping the enemy in the spawn.  I have had numerous times where I am the only one who bothers to go get the flag, they proceed to camp the enemy in their base, and they can't be bothered to go and kill the lone flagged hiding on a hill so no one scored or we lose when a lone witch elf ganks me and the rest of the team ignores the flag.

This obsession over those maps reminds of TF2 where PuG players would always want to play 2Fort because it was CTF.  In reality 2Fort was an inferior map that usually stalemated and most players ignore the objective and just played it as death match anyway.  That is exactly what I see almost every time in CTF and Bombing run, players ignoring the objective, the 2-3 guys trying to complete it being unable to because it is too difficult without a coordinated team, and it eventually devolving into death match with the few people who know whats going on having their spirits broken by the hordes of wild noobs.

CTF and Bombing run in this game could be good, but right now they just fail.  They need to be high scoring maps with encouragement to complete the objective.

The way to do this for Bombing run:
1) Completing the Objective needs to give the carrier an exp/renown bonus and all players near the objective when it is capped a bonus (although lesser.)
2) The objective needs to be converted into a goal, a circle of light on the ground.  If you walk into the goal with the bomb, you score.  There is no interrupting it, if he is there, they score.
3) The bomb would in turn slow the player down more so it becomes a game of chasing, stopping, and preventing.
4) The bomb needs a better "explode" method.  Have it start doing ticks of damage like the Tor bauble after a set period of time.  It can ramp up much faster, but a hidden timer that just randomly kills you isn't good.
5) After a cap start a timer, the bomb respawns when the timer hits 0.  This timer should be prominently displayed so people know exactly how long they have to get back.
6) Points per cap should probably increase.
7) Bonus exp/renown for killing the guy with the explosives
8) Up the value for killing enough so the loser walks away with a little something (but they still lose.)

I am thinking something like 3 points a kill, 10 a carrier kill, and 100-200 a cap.

The way to do this for CTF:
1) Capping the flag needs to give the carrier exp/renown and all players assisting exp/renown (although lesser).
2) The carrier should be worth minimum 100% extra exp/renown.  People should want to kill that guy.
3) Remove the requirement for your flag to be in base to cap
4) Add a small snare effect to the flag
5) Up the value of capping the flag a bit.

This should swing the games more towards cat and mouse chases.  The games takes place while running the objective.  It would also make these higher scoring maps.  Higher scoring maps are more rewarding and encourage people to queue for them.  People don't avoid Talabec and Black Fire Basin because they are too stupid to go to other maps.  They avoid them for the same reason the avoid ORvR they are maps that involve no scoring and thus get you no exp.  The only way you score in these maps is if you enter with a premade and blow out the other team.

The addition of some sort of "Assault"/Keep Siege Scenario while droping shit like Tor (one skill should not dominate a whole game), Black Fire (too big), etc, would probably really fix the whole thing. People loved Assault in UT. Scenarios as training exercises is a great idea, and would make a fuck ton more sense than "kill the dude with the thing".

Put the scenarios on a rotation (like most FPS servers,) keeping people from farming the same shitfest over and over and keep rewards from scenarios on a lower level than ORVR, and we should have a solid PVP system.

You say this like it's a bad thing.  Sometimes a little indiscriminate carnage is fun.  Surely you're not going to make some sort of claim that when the ten-ton gorilla in the field is WoW, long, complex in-depth thought is (or should) somehow be the standard for MMO content.

Besides which, I don't see a whole lot changing until they solve the fundamental problem of flag/resource guarding being inherently unrewarding.  If I'm playing PG (or any other CTF scenario) it's actually in my best interest to just try to go full offense.  Sure I may (and probably will, being order side and all) lose more, but at least I don't spend 15 fucking minutes playing "Hands off my goodies!" for less reward than I'd get in 5 if I just threw myself into their opposing force and soaked up the occasional incidental kill and the associated XP and RP that go with it.

This isn't a warhammer failing, btw.  It's an inherent failing of the format:  CTF penalizes non-aggression and requires someone to play that role to be effective at the same time.  If the only goal is to win or lose the scenario, that's one thing.  But in almost every game out there this isn't the case.  Perhaps if they put a multiplier on enemy-force kills near your own flag (and only your own flag, opposite-side flag camping without capturing is bad enough as it is) it would work better.

That's also the fundamental problem with this idea of capturing/taking keeps as a scenario objective.  In oRVR where more people can come at whim it's somewhat fun to be defending, because you feel like you're accomplishing something.  In a scenario it would suck to be the randomly chosen defender, because you sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for the action to come to you.  (That said, 3 vs. 1 keep takes with "fixed" keep lords as in-game NPCs would be a decent scenario because it gives a way to balance scenarios against the inherent asymmetry of the sides.  Only have 1/2 the order that you do destruction?  Well, then they're defenders and they plus the keep lords are reasonably well suited against 12-18 destro guys.)

Sometimes... yes.  ALL THE TIME?  I agree with Haemish.

The problem in the release build was that they gave a huge incentive to people to just churn through the most dumbed down scenarios in order to get the fastest ding gratz possible.  This is shitty implementation.   

Well, I don't think it's entirely that they "gave" the incentive to folks.  It's more a consequence of incentivizing kills, which is a far easier thing to do than coming up with a bulletproof method of incentivizing, say, guarding the flag in a CTF match.  Some of the scenarios (like Doomfist) seem to have the right idea with just balance tweaking needed, but I'm at a loss for a sane method to incentivize something like flag guarding (a necessary part of capture the flag) without leading into the problems you have currently of nobody wanting to do it because it's more rewarding to be out there killing people.  Keeps have the same issue, even with the RP ticking that you get for defense.  It's just flat out easier to incentivize an active process than a passive one, because the passive incentives are easier to abuse.

If the game is going to devolve due to design choices, I'd rather it devolve into a free-for-all scrum than into people huddling around and soaking up incentives from doing nothing.  At least there's some fun to be had in the former.  There's none in the latter.  (One reason that I despise Phoenix Gate on my guys; there's some bizarre tendency for destruction on Phoenix Throne to put up an 80 point lead and then turtle, which is not only strategically boring but also unrewarding.)

That's really the point, though. The game should never devolve to a turtle. That's simply a bad design.

The fact is that I will get more renown and XP from losing a Doomfist Crater than I will from winning Blackfire Basin. This is due to the fact that BFB games are typically low-scoring and low-kill because everyone is so focused on the WIN that both sides turtle. Not fun. Walking away with 100 renown and 2000 xp from a win when I can get 1000 and 10,000 from a Doomfist loss will of course incentivize people to play the game that results is more benefit to them. That means no one plays anything else. Which gets really boring.

Honestly, I am starting to think that kills in scenarios should give nothing. Make the only source of XP and renown objectives and winning. Then people will perhaps start to see that these are what really matter.

That's not the solution.  At that point if you don't expect that you can win, you're better off just simply not queuing.  That's death for scenarios in general, as WAR is trying to be a casual friendly RvR game, so you NEED random people coming together to do scenarios.  But penalizing a lack of organization and group work is antithetical to this.  Especially inasmuch as there seems to be no queuing algorithm to actually put decent groups into place.  No matter how good we are, when we queue up as 5 BW, 3 WH, a SW, a WL and an engineer, we're going to lose unless destro is similarly skewed.  I've done scenarios with one WP as the sole healer and no tanks.  It sucks.

There may be long term solutions, but at this point I'd say that one scenario that's fun for some time beats 3 that aren't ever fun.  And to get 3 or 6 or however many that are fun all the time is a lot harder of a problem than folks seem to be making it out to be.  Unless someone out there wants to propose a method for incentivizing the execution of good strategy regardless of success or suggest methodologies to enable guerrilla warfare in the game.  (The former for situations of "Okay, we formed up, we ran with healers and tanks, we had the DPS hit the flanks and they still didn't cave.  We killed some of them, they killed more of us, it was a good fight, and we got NOTHING."  The latter for the aforementioned asymmetric groupings.)

Fair enough. My thought was that you would reward the loss as well as the win. From what I understand when a scenario ends today each side is given a renown bonus. The winners receive the number of points scored and losers receive a fraction of their points scored. I hear you that queuing imbalanced groups sucks -- it was so bad for my guild that I eventually rerolled Zealot  so we'd have a healer -- but I think that's a different issue entirely and is somewhat addressed by the fact that you have to pug scenarios, to some extent. Of course, pulling 2 pre-made groups really sucks.


Again, you never want to give nothing. You want to encourage people to play the game, rather than just zerging the opposing side or sitting uselessly in their bases with their thumbs up their asses. Winning Black Fire Basin 10 to 16 after 15 minutes.

Long term, I think a fundamental redesign of scenarios needs to occur. Murderball's great and all, but something more RvR-ish would be ideal. I get the feeling the folks at Mythic thought MORE is better and that was the way to beat WoW bgs, but all they really did was make a lot of mediocre scenarios when they could have made 5 truly awesome ones.

double posting and "Sir.Bruceing" abound.

In DAoC the BG's just had towers and keeps.  That was enough to fight over or not fight over.  Players wanted to get the abilities that pvp allowed.  WAR could get rid of the whole level BS and have skill tree abilities bought using reknown ranks and much of this would be solved.  Yes, the reknown system would be the new RR system, but it would eliminate the need to fill two xp bars.