Experience Enhancements - Phase IV

[Arthur_Parker]

Linky

As the battle for the Warhammer world rages on, we continue to listen to your feedback and look for ways to improve the game. Among our highest priorities is making RvR as rewarding an experience as possible, and with that in mind, we are pleased to announce Phase IV of our ongoing Experience Enhancements. Today, as you may have read in the 1.0.4 Patch Notes, we have made the following changes to experience rewards:

•    The successful capture of an enemy battlefield objective now rewards the capturing players with experience.
•    In response to player feedback, the amount of renown earned from healing players has been increased.

We hope you’ll find that these changes make Realm vs. Realm combat that much more enticing, and we look forward to making your Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning experience even better!

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

Anyway, some random dude on the vault is reporting that the exp for capturing a Battlefield objective is 2900.  Fantastic, normally I'd think he's trolling but that value is so low, it's just got to be true.

[Beltaine]

Confirmed

T2 Battlefield Objective capture yields 560 Experience.

That's five-hundred sixty.

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

[Geki]

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

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

[Arthur_Parker]

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

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

[khaine]

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

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

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

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


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

[Geki]

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

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

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

/facepalm

[HaemishM]

2900?

I think their DB guy missed a decimal point.

[schild]

I think their DB guy missed 2 decimal points.

FUCK

I WANT IT BRANDED INTO MMOG DESIGNERS SKULLS

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LEVELING FAST ENOUGH

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

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

[Miasma]

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

[Mrbloodworth]

I think their DB guy missed 2 decimal points.

FUCK

I WANT IT BRANDED INTO MMOG DESIGNERS SKULLS

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LEVELING FAST ENOUGH

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

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

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

[tolakram]

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

Comment on this and the previous post.

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

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

[squirrel]

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

[Evildrider]

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

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

[squirrel]

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

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

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

[Evildrider]

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

Reading comprehension ftw.

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

[squirrel]

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

Reading comprehension ftw.

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

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

[Venkman]

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

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

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

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

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

If all you want to do is PvP in a game where over half of the server doesn't want to come out and RvR, thats the problem..

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

[Warskull]

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

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

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

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

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

[Evildrider]

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

Reading comprehension ftw.

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

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

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

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

[Evildrider]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Warskull]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[waffel]

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

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

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

[shiznitz]

Linky

As the battle for the Warhammer world rages on, we continue to listen to your feedback and look for ways to improve the game. Among our highest priorities is making RvR as rewarding an experience as possible, and with that in mind, we are pleased to announce Phase IV of our ongoing Experience Enhancements. Today, as you may have read in the 1.0.4 Patch Notes, we have made the following changes to experience rewards:

•    The successful capture of an enemy battlefield objective now rewards the capturing players with experience.
•    In response to player feedback, the amount of renown earned from healing players has been increased.

We hope you’ll find that these changes make Realm vs. Realm combat that much more enticing, and we look forward to making your Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning experience even better!

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

Anyway, some random dude on the vault is reporting that the exp for capturing a Battlefield objective is 2900.  Fantastic, normally I'd think he's trolling but that value is so low, it's just got to be true.

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

[Arthur_Parker]

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

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

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

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

[Nebu]

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

[tazelbain]

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

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

[Mrbloodworth]

Linky

As the battle for the Warhammer world rages on, we continue to listen to your feedback and look for ways to improve the game. Among our highest priorities is making RvR as rewarding an experience as possible, and with that in mind, we are pleased to announce Phase IV of our ongoing Experience Enhancements. Today, as you may have read in the 1.0.4 Patch Notes, we have made the following changes to experience rewards:

•    The successful capture of an enemy battlefield objective now rewards the capturing players with experience.
•    In response to player feedback, the amount of renown earned from healing players has been increased.

We hope you’ll find that these changes make Realm vs. Realm combat that much more enticing, and we look forward to making your Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning experience even better!

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

Anyway, some random dude on the vault is reporting that the exp for capturing a Battlefield objective is 2900.  Fantastic, normally I'd think he's trolling but that value is so low, it's just got to be true.

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

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

[Nebu]

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

I'm just stupified.

[tazelbain]

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

[waylander]

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

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

[Lantyssa]

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

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

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

[eldaec]

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

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

[schild]

post-ToA 'Quick!-Remove-the-grind-everyone-hates-it!' days of daoc.

Funny how quickly we got there with WAR.

[Khaldun]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Nebu]

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