f13.net

Bastions, Sigmars, etc is all required to get full sets of anything above annihilator gear. The dungeons are simply too time consuming, not very fun, and the gear drops don't make any sense whatsoever. We spent hours running Sigmars again last night and out of the drops, 50% of the loot that dropped was not usable by a single class in our groups. The time it takes to run these dungeon instances, the utter randomness of the gear that drops there, and the fact that these items are virtually required is just crazy for a game that advertised itself as a "PVP" game while also stating that you could progress your character through PVP only.

Problems:

1. War is still "Nowhere"
You have to find PVP first in order to get 1-2 basic pieces of most sets, and this isn't easy even with the changes. The recent keep changes don't reward defenders, Keep PQ reward rolls make absolutely no sense as random PUG's can win 1st place by wandering in at the last second, and anything short of a gold bag is basically crap. What we see is people playing musical keeps by trying to switch up keep caps for gold bags, and rarely do people stay and fight.

2. PVE is required for full Greater Wards
Forced participation in boring dungeons, loot rewards that don't even reward all the classes in your group, trash mobs that are frustratingly difficult just to make the dungeon run last longer, and stupid lockout timers. I don't think most people will be willing to put up with all the PVE progression required to gear up enough to survive major pushes in end game RVR. After a couple of Sigmar runs, I personally want to go hang myself rather than run through that shit again and see half the loot rewards go to classes that aren't even present in the group.

3. Lockout Timers
As I mentioned in item 2, lockout timers don't really make a lot of sense. Its just a cockblock move to slow people down. Due to the shortage of available healers on Order (because they suck to play while destructo healers are fun), you have to recycle your healers until they are brain dead from boredom in order to be able to outfit any decent sized guild.

4. Bind on Pickup
Hell if someone finds something that could be used by another guild member, they should be able to get the loot and send it to them. I think Bind on Equip (BOE) is fair, but bind on pickup just just another cockblock on top of lock out timers that's on top of the boring dungeon that's on top of loot rewards that don't make sense.

We all talked about the advanced Armor sets earlier, but after having gone through some of the progression to actually get them I don't know why Mythic can't just let lesser ward gear be "good enough" to be competitive in all mob related NPC encounters. I can't imagine leveling an ALT in this game and having to go through this shit twice, and I honestly don't know if I'll even make it through gearing up my first character while facing this massive cockblock train.

WotlK might not have eaten War's lunch as bad, but many people are thinking 1.1 is going to be the savior patch while also solving the grind, gear, pvp rewards issues too. If it under delivers, they should just make plans for 10 live servers because I don't see core PVP audiences continuing to put up with little RVR, shitty rewards, a shitty grind, and then a shitty series of these dungeon runs for greater ward gear. They are better off just playing WoW because the PVE is better, the rewards are more consistent, and there's at least a population there to interact with.

Yes, I'm pretty frustrated with this game right now!

Rest assured, playing a Zealot is ridiculously boring shit. You can stack all the int you want, you won't kill mobs as fast as a blorc, chosen or ib. Great design right there  :oh_i_see:

You had to play it to figure that out?

credibility-- imo, :grin:

Even though it sounded horrible as written on that Mythic grab bag, the description doesn't do justice to the horror and tedium that is the real thing as played out in the game. I have never seen an advertised "PVP" game get it this wrong since Arenanet pulled a fast one on the PVP audience shortly before release, and forced people into 600+ hour grinds to get their characters PVP ready. The majority of their PVP population died out over the course of a year, but these days an MMO has a much shorter attention span from customers.

Anyway I was curious why people have been rolling alts once they hit T4, and after seeing this ridiculous grind in action I no longer question the logic. T4 needs to be thrown out, and the game seems to shine best from T1-T4 because it can be played by casuals and hardcores alike without all the cockblocks.

Uh, yeah.  I won't be getting any of those sets, you can be guaranteed that.

WOTLK will be going on my computer and hopefully fun.  Otherwise, off to EVE again full time in preparation for something else. 

Maybe Fallout 3 will be fun.

Fallout 3 is fun, but it isn't Fallout.

WAR isn't fun, and also isn't Warhammer. Or WoW. Or anything, really...

Uh huh, my friend joined my guild got his casual play to 35 and wondered can he even get to Bastion stairs. Nope. People are too busy ninja keeping to care. Even those who did demanded he at least farmed his own influence to unlock the instances because they were burned out after 2 weeks of doing it.

And then Bloodwrought & Bilerot came and it became a 6 man ivory tower. I personally had to fight for healers in guild. I used the F word a couple of times in guild chat when my party healer PM me and said 'That other tanks wants me to go Bloodwrought instead, said Bastion sucks'.
They're fucking loot whores and hate WoW cause melee gets owned by magic was their usual defence. It's quite pathetic having to go around people's back in guild chat just to assemble 2 healers, 2 tanks , 2 dps for a nightly run, not that it's fun. But keep exchanging got old real quick. And I'm just running down my subs.

Now half the guild rank 40s non-loot whores are missing cause they can't take the musical keep routines and the static PVE grind. And they still  blamed Lich King for it.  :uhrr:

Is that why people kept asking me what my influence currently was when I was in Bastion stairs?  You need a set level to access certain areas?  I kept thinking, "stop asking me that, the purple influence rewards are shit so who cares?".

To respond to Waylander, you guys play on the opposite side to the US Destruction goons right?  If so, you should know that they can't even work up enough energy to troll Hades properly and that's not a good sign, especially if you are expecting a defended city fight once you have geared up.  From looking at the combined goon forums, the US Order goon guild is almost dead & EU Order goons went from over 300 individuals to about 6 online at peak times.

In my guild, we're not really running Bastion's at the moment, but I do still hear calls for Gunbad runs from the poor sods still doing tier 3. Same mechanic, and of course it splits the available people, as those who are on the third wing have no real motivation to help those on the first wing, over and above 'be nice to your guildies'. Always with the splitting-people-into-too-many-different-groups problem.

I'm kinda done I guess - I've just hit 40 recently, and been working on RR - it now appears that as I progress, actual player kills contribute less and less RR points, meaning I have to get on the PvE keep-swapping 'avoid engaging other players at all costs' grind if I want to go forward. I guess I was slow to figure that out. I'd be ok with just doing scenarios as a minigame to keep me interested until the next big thing comes along, but no mechanic for full premades (+matching and cross-server scenarios), and the apparent disincentive to PvP at high RR is boring me.

The Goons have pretty much died off as a force, and their vaunted 1,200 members rolled snake eyes for longevity.  I don't know what Mythic is basing their server transfers on, but just because we have a lot of Destruction players on Azazel doesn't mean people are playing them. We did have an influx of Destruction recently since we were a destination server, but basically Destruction on our server simply can't put up a sustained fight.

So we waste all this time getting ward gear, Destruction gives up after we cap a zone, and then we watch our Victory Points decay while we sit in queues or defend keeps that never get sieged.

All of this is interconnected unfortunately. You have to face a horrid level grind starting in T3, you have to grind for regular gear starting in T3, starting in T4 you have to start grinding for lesser ward gear, then due to a lack of PVP you have to grind dungeons for greater ward gear in T4, face dumb lockouts of those dungeons in T4, spend 3+ hours  a pop running those T4 dungeons where half the drops end up being for classes not even in your group, and at the end of the day you can't gain anyway because the other faction can sit on their ass while Victory Point decay prevents anyone from locking a zone.

No wonder people roll ALT's or quit once they get into T4 and realize the bait and switch that Mythic has pulled.

You know better than that, you don't have to.  Quit, it's the only way of showing them it's unacceptable.

I have to agree.  This is not the pvp game we were all looking for.  Leaving is the only way to pass that message along. 

I'm still holding out hope that they drop the ward armor set bs. I really do. I think they're committed now which means I'll probably play very little in T4. Which probably means very little in general eventually. I just don't have the patience for what appears to be a raid in disquise.

Also, they need to figure out a way to reward defenders, both in scenarios and keeps. Rather that is a slow but steady renown point gain while you stay near the objective or what I don't know. Heck, make it a slow but steady renown thing and if you hold off attackers for X amount of time you get a chest, just like attackers do.

Adding rewards and incentives for defenders is an easy concept to do. Shit, you can already detect when invaders are in the zone/near the keep/attacking the keep. Detect any defenders within a certain radius of the keep/BO, give them RP just for being in that radius (and not AFK), and give them mad bonus points for any kills/damage on enemy players.

The concept is simple, and had someone thought about it while they were building the RVR lakes, it probably would have been fairly simple to add. Now, who the fuck knows? The way they are asshatting the reward structure of oRVR play, I get the feeling most of the things they'd need to do would require massive changes to the code.

The sad thing is they already do this in DAoC.  RPs are awarded for defending towers and keeps.

How many gamers in how many different games have held out in this hope?

If you're not having fun, don't reward them for something which might happen.  If you are having fun, then it's okay to hope and wait in the mean time.

So true.

This isn't just an Order specific problem. Our Destruction healers are dropping fast. One re-rolled a Chosen after hitting the 30's as a DoK, if that's any indication of how broken DoK is at higher levels. The proposed HoT changes are also causing a great number of our healers to rethink their class choice. Destruction healers are not any more fun to play at T4 than Order healers. Several of our Lost Vale runs have been canceled due to having zero healers available.

Is ward gear significantly more stupid than the eternal benchmark : pistol damage not stacking with rifle damage? No.

In fact, is ward gear more stupid than gear which you have to level, and levelling it takes about the same time as the last 5 actual levels of the game, and you can only level the gear by killing one specific mob? I think not.


Ward gear is pretty damn stupid, but it is not even the most stupid thing Mythic have ever done. MMOG designers are idiots, film at eleven.

Although most are quick to blast the ward system, and also being that I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of video games, I have to ask what would have been a better response to the problem wards attempt to solve: how do you create a challenge/end game in a PvP environment which cannot be trivialized by simply bringing along more and more players?

From what I gather, things like King and sub-bosses (the best name I can garnish at the moment for them) are open PQ's once a city is successfully invaded (accessed sequentially I would imagine). If that is the case, what would a "good" system look like that would still allow for a challenge to be created which cannot be alleviated by simply zerging the boss(es)? Is making these encounters entirely instanced the appropriate response? Instancing seems like a simple response, until you add the requirement of "public battles without the need to be in an end-game guild to experience everything."

I'm not attempting to challenge anyone or what has been said here, but I'd like to know what other people were perhaps expecting for an end-game ladder mechanic.

Nothing to see.

LOL at melee healers in PvP.

I wished they would have had something like this in place in DAOC. We tried to get them to figure out a way so the relic guards would scale in difficulty based on the number of defenders versus attackers, but... in the end it worked out fairly well because Relics swapped hands fairly regularly (on most servers).

It would be nice in WAR, but probably very difficult to implement.

Just, no.

As this is Realm vs Realm, you're going to get groups fighting against groups. The last thing you want is a warband of 12 getting wiped by a group of 6, just because more of their side happened to be logged on, or in the zone. People would quit just as fast over that shit.

Solve the reasons for realm imbalances, and motivate the underdog with extra rewards, sure.

But don't fuck with the PvP. Consistency or nothing.

Nothing to see.

So a side is outnumbered and their city gets taken. That's how it WORKS in war (sorry for the cheese but its true)

There are so many things in place to make everything fair that its sickening. Part of DAoC was having a massive force come and take your relics. Oh well, it sucks but everyone dealt with it. Everyone died/left, you rebuilt your door and formulated how you would get your relic back.

In warhammer, there is SUCH a focus on cities (dungeons, quests, leveling them up, PQs, ect ect.) that Mythic is FORCED to highly control how you take them. Players (I guess, I wouldn't really care if the other side organized and took my city) were in such a massive uproar on the forums when their city got attacked a month after release that they had to put some highly controlling method to attacking cities in place. That is how it works and it is never going to change. Mythic put way too much work in cities and everything in them that they simply can't have anyone show up and help out (like DAoC relics), only the most dedicated zerg guilds that farmed armor sets will ever see it.

Unless Mythic fixes their buggy dungeons and make the armor sets about 10x easier to get and do something about the dumbfuck zone control, causal players are never going to see anything other than serpents passage and open RvR skirmishes. Players are going to get fucking sick of that and quit.

Their end-game plans and over emphasis on the cities have made sure causal players get fucked the hardest. Frankly. Mythic has created such a huge issue with the game that I don't see them fixing it without changing shit around in a huge way. How do they fix scenarios, make people do open RvR for fun and enjoyment, not for gold bags? How do they fix itemization? Class balance? Weapon/Armor crafting? Empty PQs? Level grind? broken PvE dungeons? Ect. ect. ect.

The King is an instanced fight. 24 players max.

Well, it's not what I was expecting exactly (they explained roughly how it was going to work before the game launched), but my "ideal setup" for a game like this would be to have three seperate "endgames".  One would be focused on PvE and would be the generic "raid4loot" instance progression style game.  One would maybe be a "scenario" endgame, something like WoWs arena system (though you'd need to allow premade groups for that to be viable).  And the stuff with cities and territorial control would be the "open RvR" endgame.  But you wouldn't have to do raiding to get gear to city raid, and you wouldn't have to do scenarios to flip zones, that kind of thing.

Ideally, for me, the whole "city raiding" aspect of the game would have been like the falling action.  In short, it wouldn't be much of a challenge.  You've already won, already broken their defenders, now it's time to run in, burn their houses and take their shit.  The challenge would be in getting there, but once you've arrived, you've basically won.  More "rampaging and pillaging," less "now we have to fight the really strong guys".

Your memory might be a bit altered.  You forgot to use words like boycott, re-roll, and broken.   You are also apparently forgetting all the 2AM raids used to take back relics and the uproar that caused.  On Galahad (Alb) I led a raid of 25 people that took every hib keep during prime time Friday night because the hibs were boycotting due to population issues (and something about bad mushrooms).

By all means criticize WAR but don't pretend the fix is easy.

That sentence I bolded? No. Just no. Ward gear is already raid style loot bs and it's caused an uproar. If they do what you suggest here I'd believe they have essentially lied about this being an rvr game.

They didn't necessarily lie, it is simply that Mythic's vision of RvR is a little different than simply PvP.  The way I understand it RvR encompasses everything that you can do, ie it all contributes to the Victory Points.  They should have simply made a PVP focused game, instead of trying to balance in some PVE action.  In fact, they could have gotten rid of PVE altogether, since this apparently will be a niche game.

RvR isn't PvP. PvP is but a part of it.

I agree about getting rid of PvE, but at this point it's fairly evident they have no clue how populations scale and how to balance against proper coordination. It's fairly obvious that the QA team wasn't equippeed and the design team is running around like a chicken freshly beheaded. Not to mention the entire company seems to have it's priorities entirely out of wack. Sure, they may have pioneered the whole "RvR" thing, but they're not gonna be the ones to take it to the next level. Shame, really, because right now the game is suffering from flaws we simply should not be seeing in 2008.

Also, it shouldn't have been a niche game. Period.

I'm not going to wall-of-text here (although the game deserves it), but this game just sucks all the way around.  Most of the reasons it sucks are due to the moronically simply combat system which is overlaid onto a zone control system that even Stephen Hawking couldn't understand. 

Even the PvP sucks for some reason.  To really and truly fix this game I am afraid they would have to have a "redo" and completely start over. 

You don't make your end game encounters based on NPC's in a PVP game. If players aren't around or willing to defend their home city, suck it up under the thumb of oppression. For fuck's sake, make the end game encounter involving captuing a goddamn relic, just don't make it killing an NPC.

The key to capturing relics in DAoC was partly to keep up with the rate of NPC spawns while simultaneously killing enemies.  The NPC's were added to make the attackers slightly disadvantaged during the encounter.  The same was true of keep takes.  I'm guessing the WAR mechanics are founded on those old holdovers.

On Azazel no. Well, most servers.

It's hard to get set pieces because Destro is doing absolutely nothing on our server. They need more server consolidations because I was running open rvr and scenarios the other night and I kept seeing the same 12 destro players only... like they were the only ones on the entire server. Sad. Lich King kicked the s*** out of our server population. Or at least it's helping.

The contribution system is borked btw. It's done by random number generation when you login. It's already been proven on Warhammeralliance. After capturing maybe 40 keeps in one day, we proved it as well and observed the same thing.



I don't mind the wards, but they should have made it either easier (or possible) to attack fortresses and get conqueror's gear. I don't know anyone with more than the boots and often not even then.

You're right though, lesser wards should do something...

I haven't done warpblade or sigmars, to be honest I have the problem of no tanks being available. I'm a healer and I can't find a group for either. Sigh.


3. Lockout Timers
Lockout timers are fine, if it weren't there it would make grinding gear from pve much easier than rvr. Well, getting gear from pve IS much better because no one has Conquerors right now because fort sieges and zone control is broken beyond words.


4. Bind on Pickup
This is fine as well, the problem is not being able to get the gear through rvr.


I've created an alt, do you know why? Because T1 and T2 are fun. The RVR zones are still way too big (runs are too long... 10 minute runs??) and there are too many, but it is still fun. Plus, zone control of T2 and T3 factors far too much into zone control for T4, it's almost a requirement.

I really want this game to work, because I think the premise of the game is great, the artwork is great, a lot of core features are also really good. But I'm only going to wait another month and if it's not fixed in the new year I'm leaving. Hope they make it fun by then.

Oh, I remember some crazy things. People getting mad, people refusing to defend, people crying on the forums. Its like that with every game.

Hell, I remember being in IRC a lot with people from all over our server (pellinor) and at about 3am a mid PM'd me (I was playing hib) and said to come out to alb land because they had knocked down the relic keep doors but couldn't pick up the relic because they didn't have their own (or something to that effect, my memory is fuzzy) so they needed me to show up, pick up the relic, and die with it so they could then pick it up. Long story short, I ran out there, mids didn't attack me, I picked up the relic and died with it and they were able to pick it up and take it. Had they not had a skald with them, I would have taken it and ran with my chanter.

Regardless, it was fun and caused quite an uproar in the forums with nobody knowing how mids got it without having their own. The beans were spilled, people yelled at hibs helping mids, mids claimed it was BS in the first place and albs should have defended, albs said "whatever" and ended up getting their relics back within a week. It was awesome because people were banded together, FOR THEIR REALM, fighting the other realms NOT BECAUSE OF GOLD BAGS, OR FAT LOOT, or any of that. Getting RPs and simply killing the enemy was enough. Its a shame no gamers are about that anymore.

Well sure, that's the obvious "throw at the wall" answer, but it doesn't address the challenge of how to provide a ladder of difficulty to allow for additional content and an ongoing progression system. Players only ever get so tough, and you can't exactly add "new" players with an update that pose a different challenge (like you would add more raids in PvE games, or potentially different king encounters eventually here). Are you saying basically something akin to a timesink-like FPS ladder would simply be the best system?

Overall, on the topic of relics its certainly simple to bash, but if we don't have any other good ideas, who are we to judge? I'm still looking for a response to the problem which is better than Mythic's.

I'm not suggesting that they shift focus from PvP to PvE, but that they keep the playstyles segregated.  The big problem I have with ward gear is not that it's in the game, but that it essentially is the endgame, or is required to participate in it.  That's basically all you do when you get to 40.  The existance of grindy PvE doesn't bug me; the requirement to do it to PvP does.

To be clear, I'm not cheering for a WoW style progression, where higher tier gear is universally better than anything a more casual player could ever get.  The nice thing about ward gear (and that's a phrase I don't get to use much) as I understand it is that you can have a raid style progression without the people at the top being more powerful in PvP than the people at the bottom.  Keep the actual stats similar and just give them better "wards" or whatever.  That way, you can keep the PvP playfield level while still giving players "better" gear to aim for.

Didn't they say, going back a bit, that the best gear in the game would be obtained through killing the King?

Edit:

Not sure how much stock to put into a prima games guide, but:

http://www.primagames.com/catalog/promo_image/9780761559276_1123.pdf

How about dragons that scale their massive aoe blasts according to the number of people in the room, so they can only be killed by relatively small numbers of people able to follow basic instructions?

They could even be the only regular source of items that allow you to respec your character, the dragon could drop say, 30 of the buggers and Dragon raiders could start a whole respec economy.



Thank you for playing "Solve WAR Design Problems by Taking a Quick Glance at what DAoC Did". Please come again soon.



Practically all MMOGs have plenty of examples of raid mobs killed by strategy rather than numbers.

Yes, actually. See the problem with games like this is that they feel the need to add an infinite progression system onto games that should be based on people bashing the shit out of other people. They (in this case, Mythic) think players won't play for long periods if there isn't a treadmill to climb. Only the large number of successful FPS games completely disprove that theory. Not only are those games PVP-only games (thinking of things like Battlefield 2/2142) that have a progression system, they still have players playing years after release. Yes, those games are free to play (but hey, they still somehow made money).

Additional content? How about all the bajillion other races Games Workshop has in the lore. How about new maps/scenarios, new battlegrounds, new weapons and gear to unlock?

PVP MMOG's have for too long taken their cues from single-player RPG's. They are nothing more than glorified versions of old Gold Box D&D games with other players thrown in the mix. Guild Wars managed to sell 2 million copies without a subscription fee, and they obviously made enough of a profit to create a sequel. Maybe Warhammer should have gone the same route.

As for fixing what's wrong with the game as it is... it's going to require a complete redesign or it's going to require Mythic to let go of the grind. Nothing else will fix it.

I agree.  I think the best thing that Mythic could do would be remove the grind ASAP.  Playing level 1-20 is fun as hell and retention may be best served by allowing players to reroll multiple classes to the endgame.  If nothing else, this may buy Mythic the time it needs to redesign the endgame system.  DAoC bought itself a year or two by introducing the classic servers and making the 1-50 trip painless.  Never underestimate the value of rerolls.  It gives players the opportunity to play several different classes at the drop of a hat and minimizes the effect of server population problems to a degree.  If players have multiple level 40 toons, then they have the flexibility to play whichever is needed by groups.  Your ironbreaker not needed?  Bring out the archmage. 

In addition to what Haemish said, Mythic is also trapped in the thinking that there has to be winners and losers.  See Witching Event.  Instead they should have winners and "didn't win quite as much'ers".

City capture is broken at the minute as a Fortress siege crashes the server and resets the zones.  When they get it working and someone successfully attacks a city, the city loses rank and shuts off part of the high end PVE advancement.  Nothing like annoying losers even more, I'm looking forward to the threads on that if they manage to fix the PVE dungeons at around the same time Cities start to fall and they start telling people they can't enter them for a while. 

Instead they should have an extra zone open for the losing city (quick shit has hit the fan, explore the dangerous forgotten temple of Fred's aunt, use relics you find there to beat back the Chaos horde from the city, or something).

See, here is the rub on this game:  As far as I understand it, getting enough VPs to get to the city siege requires multiple zones to be under control.  So there needs to be a constant flow of progression from 1-40 at all times during the game's life, otherwise the end-game sieges will be crap or unable to be done.  So everybody is going to have to have alts if this is to happen, thus introducing extra grindiness.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the impact of Ward gear... I was under the impression that Ward gear was really unimpressive stats-wise, and that the main benefit from equipping it was that PvE mobs deal less damage to you.  Unless fighting against the mobs that require the wards, ward gear isn't that much (if any) better than a casual's gear.  If that's the case, then the arms race becomes limited to the PvE content only, which is fine with me.  The problem with the current setup is that the PvE content is interwoven with the high end PvP content so that you need the ward gear to participate.  Keep the PvE content out there as a carrot for the players to chase after, and that would be good at retaining subs, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the PvP, which it currently does.

But I'm not at the endgame yet, so maybe I'm making some bad assumptions.

Ward gear provides resists vs certain bosses and sub-bosses. As you progress into RVR beyond the Fortress Lord, you get tougher bosses and NPC's who help bolster the other sides defenses. Without the ward gear they will wtfpwn you.

Honestly, lesser ward gear isn't that bad to get. Its the greater ward stuff that shuts out the casuals and frustrates the pure PVP folks because you have to do a lot of PVE do get it, you face lockout timers, and the loot rewards always have stuff for classes not even in the party so someone always gets fucked.

The only thing RR should do for you in this game is open up beef up skills/tactics. After RR30 you should be able to wear anything in the game, renown gear should be GOOD and ITEMIZED properly, and the focus should be on pushing zones instead of grinding mobs. Make shit like sigmars and warpblade for the PVE whores, but the PVP gear should be comparable to anything found there and wearable by RR30.

Yeah, I quit at level 39 (Realm Rank 29 or 30), just couldn't face grinding scenarios to level up realm rank, just to wear pvp boots with a realm rank of 45.  Pity, because if they killed the pve grind, the increase in population would mean I'll be quite happy playing alts in pvp for 6 months till they fixed the later stuff.

But but real PvPers are only happy when making other people miserable.  Everything else is carebear.  If you aren't a sadist you are a wimp.

Ward gear is pretty much inevitable given their design. They know their engine limitations and the population imbalance were going to force them to use instances. Having put progression on one "line" stretching between the two cities with only two end-points (the two named mobs) and nothing in the pipe to extend the game once they're on farm status they needed a really aggressive brake. And they needed it to be PvE because they can control and regulate the challenge / reward there which they cannot do when the players actually have full control.

In short their core design doesn't actually seem remotely well suited to their stated goal and it's little surprise players are reacting negatively. Ward armor is more a symptom of their design failure than a cause.

WAR doesn't have any "real PvPers", RVR with no cross realm communication, no item drop on death, no death penalty, chicken mechanic, 17,340 PVE quests, character levels, inability to kill people on your own "side".  All the "real PvPers" are posting about how hardcore they will be in DArkfall.

Fix'd  :why_so_serious:

One of the biggest selling points of DaoC RvR, was the fact you didn't have to ever interact with "Real PvP'ers". People really do enjoy killing other players without actually making their play experience miserable.

I'll be interested to see if they get rid of the chicken mechanic entirely for the Asian version , I cannot see Lineage style gamers putting up with that mechanic

Ah good point.

I honestly wish they'd get rid of it completely. Would it be so impossible to replace it with either a damage scaler (i.e. a 40 can't one-shot a 1 but a group of 1's could possibly take down a 40) or just use a level restriction a la original EQ? And get rid of Tiers. With a damage scaler, your population wouldn't be so segregated and there might be hope of some fun RvR.

No, they can't, because that would make some semblance of sense.  It might get players playing together.  Think of the horrors that would create!

Anyone remember the bonehead justification Mythic had for not putting side kicking in?  :oh_i_see:

Fuck that, just cut the xp to level by 70% and let everyone into 4th tier. Scaling takes too much programming time.

No, what was it?

No mmog development team has ever explained why they didn't put sidekicking in.

But they don't have to explain, because wow doesn't have it either.

Nothing to see.

You're probably not that far off. If they don't merge, the die-hards will talk to their guilds and just re-roll on those servers that are at least Med/Med during peak to salvage whatever they have left of a guild before they go too far down the path of no return. Seriously, it's not like they put more then a couple months work into anything and by MMO standards that's nothing. And who knows, maybe folks wait for reduction in XP patches or some other wild incentives for folks to re-sub and use that opportunity to move servers for good.

Yeah but when you take into consideration that you've got to level yourself, your guild, and farm up to greater ward gear all over again the prospect of rerolling is very unappealing. Its easier just to cancel, and play an FPS or something until the next game.

I flat out asked them about sidekicking at the Baltimore Games Day during a Q&A session and they ducked the question.

At some point in time the developers at Mythic should all have been sitting around the table chatting about creative direction and came to the startling conclusion that they need neither levels nor gear for the type of gameplay they want to encourage.  Except possibly as a way of slowly introducing the character into the game (gating advanced content via levels) and customizing characters (career path type stuff and gear).  Evidently this never happened, which is why I'm quite pleased with my decision to wait until the jury returned with a verdict on the state of the game.

Also, encouraging alts is the way to go for any future game developer, as it effectively multiplies the amount of content in your game world.  Subsequently, actively rewarding your players for deciding to make another character may be a prudent decision.  Especially if you do so in a manner that encourages players to roll an alt early in the game so that the player can sample multiple classes and find something they will become attached to, and/or give them incentive to roll an alt when they reach max level and thus break up their plunge into "end-game" content with some of the less grindy early content.

Lastly, gear treadmills tend to ruin games where people are supposed to be on a relatively equal footing.  This point should be self-evident and need no further elaboration.

EDIT: To make this not such a massive fucking derail I'd like to tie this in with the theme of the thread and say that Mythic had no clue how to build a game that had enough player concentration to make pvp a natural order of things.

You are assuming content must be gated by level.

There is no obvious reason for this to be so.


But even if you do gate by level, you can easily sidekick around the problem.

Players need time and direction to learn what their buttons do, especially if it isn't something that comes intuitively (tanking, for instance).  Levels provide a decent mechanic to pace characters so that they stick to easy tasks in more forgiving locations and have time to add new abilities to their repertoire.  It doesn't necessarily have to be levels, but they are the standard MMO fare and people accept them.

Ideally for a pvp game you would want the level grind to be short, we're talking two days short here (maybe less, maybe more, depends on how many buttons you give each class).  You would want to lavish a lot of attention on these zones so that the players get a proper impression of how things work, then you would want to shuffle them off to the main game, perhaps with an interlude in a highly protected pvp sandbox so that they could test out their stuff without being at serious risk from other players.  Then you would shunt them off to the 90% of the rest of the game world.

Simple question ,

Has any mmorpg dev every said what the negative is behind having a fast xps curve that would allow casuals to have two or three max level classes and hardcore pretty much all of them ?

In a game like this especially , with so many classes and two sides where you could play each side on different servers , what is the logical reason behind not making xps requirements low enough where you could continually reroll and progress through the tiers and try out a lot of the classes ?

How does a heavy grind/curve help in any way ? Why would it be "bad" if by doing just the quests in your own racial area that you could get to  40 relatively easy ?

Seems like it would help solve part of the problem of having people in all the tiers and also just make it more fun overall

The grind is to slow player progress for whatever reason.  (sometimes the grind is just how it goes when the game is low on PVE content, but still has levels e.g. Shadowbane)  I can't tell in WAR's case, if the grind was added to try and garner more sub fees, or if it was added to allow more dev/patch time for T3/T4 areas.

Ideally, you'd think that a service would want players to resubscribe because they were enjoying themselves, and pay their fees for persistence/storage/patches.  I think sometimes player enjoyment gets lost in the $ scramble, and "subscribe by any means" takes over.  Which is short-sighted.  Happy players bring friends.

If a game is overall fun, the grind is not noticed.  (or is it that fun games, don't have true grinds?)  Maybe rather, the grind is what you do during periods of little to no content (or unfun) while leveling.  We kind of fuck ourselves as players too, by choosing repetitive, efficient xp per hour activities, instead of the *fun* path.

Though in WAR's case, there's not enough content to avoid the scenario/PQ grind in T3+

The negative impact would be that these games by their nature are finite. There's only so many places to go and so many foozles to kill and so many lootz to be had. The devs don't want the playerbase churning through content so fast that they will have seen everything in a month or two. Problem is, most players will zoom through the content no matter what, get to the end and say 'What now?'. Then they get bored and go try something different. There's nothing to keep them enamored with the product unless new content is continually introduced. The trick would be to have less of a focus on what is in the world and more of a focus on what can I do with what is there. Or just rip out all the messy bits and have Unreal Warhammer Tournament Craft where it doesn't matter how well or how poorly you do as the Matrix will just reset at some point and you can try to do better the next time.

I'd like to see a system kind of like Guild Wars skill collection and limited slots in the field (maybe more than eight and some passives, but some limit for balance), and a lack of levels.  You can go out into the world to collect skills by doing quests, beating up elites, gathering renown, or what have you.  Some are easy to get, some will have you wandering the world.  The content is there for fun, and does give you some advancement, but you can pick and choose or go about randomly.

Think of WAR where everyone is more or less "rank 40" from the start, but they doing things for skill collection.  Renown rank could be spent for skills (wasn't that what they originally told us?), or you could do some quests with the deeper into the world you got being the harder to acquire skills.  Maybe even loot skills from enemies.  Would it work?

I dunno, but levels and the absolute need to raise them to have a hope against your competition seems like that sort of system would be an improvement to me.

This alone made me consider writing a long post apologizing to Cevik.  I seriously underestimated Mythic's tendencies to shoot themselves in the foot.  PvE cockblock?  in 2008?  Screw that i'm playing TF2/Fallout.

I'd love to see a system like this as well.  Sadly, I think balance problems would render the idea meaningless. You'd eventually see the elite using very similar power sets or combinations of sets with other players that min-max performance.  Then the X powers players have to choose from really get boiled down to 10 or 12.  The idea is workable but would take a lot of planning and tweaking.

shiiit.  forgot about him.  awkward.

The only excuse I've ever seen devs say is that once people hit the level cap, they leave. Althought, really, this is not the case in a lot of instances, especially when there is PVP.

Someone should tell them to have a look at WoWs sub numbers.

Get to the level cap and you realize several things immediately:

1) There's too much pve in my pvp zone.

2) Killing people of lower RR, but of nearly identical power nets you 1 rp.

3) There's no incentive for having a WAR.  It's a property exchange.   

Hell, you don't have to get to the cap to see this... it just gets more angering when you get there and realize it more clearly.

Sigmar's run last night was the first for me since the last patch. We had a good group so a 2+ hour run only gook an hour and 10 minutes. The sad part is that 5 pieces of gear dropped for witch hunters and shadow warrriors, and we had neither in the group.

Is it too much to ask that the dam rewards drop something for each class in a party or what?

Yes, yes it is :awesome_for_real:

Very valid points.