PSA: I want to fistfight whoever designed the T4 and T3 scenarios.

[Maegril]

Murderball has NO OBJECTIVE.

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.

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.)

[Nebu]

Sometimes a little indiscriminate carnage is fun. 

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.   

[Maegril]

Sometimes a little indiscriminate carnage is fun. 

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.)

[mol]

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.

[Maegril]

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.)

[mol]

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.

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.

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.)

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

double posting and "Sir.Bruceing" abound.

[Nebu]

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.