Experience Enhancements - Phase IV

[veredus]

There are fixes though and upping it to 500 exp for a t2 BO ain't it.

Seen lots of good ideas already. For attacking base exp on activity, lots of activity lots of exp. For defending someone mentioned a flat rate for kills inside the BO area. Both of those ideas seem reasonable to me.

[Arthur_Parker]

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

Fuck no, you don't decide not to fix a major problem that's flat out broken because your fix introduces a new lesser problem.  War is everywhere remember?  If ORVR isn't worth fixing then just what is?

[tazelbain]

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?

The same is true for keeps and people still defend keeps.  The most important thing is getting bodies into the lakes.  Maybe the optimal thing is 2 warbands to ignore each other and flip BOs.  But it won't take long before the warbands start bumping heads and start killing each other.  Giving large xp rewards may not be an elegant way, but it will be get bodies into lakes.

[eldaec]

Make BOs defendable in some way, and make them very relevant to the process of taking a keep - then load the xp/renown/reward/recognition into the keep take.

imo.

I could claim credit for this brilliant insight, but actually, I'm just looking at what daoc did. A great many of the RvR problems in WAR could be fixed by just looking at what daoc did. The way dev teams refuse to learn from other company's games is silly, the way they refuse to learn from their own is depressing.

[Khaldun]

I agree that anything which got people to 40 is a good idea, and so a massive increase in XP for BO flipping, kills in RvR lakes, everything is good. I'm just saying that if you're trying to incentivize people to get out and go to WAR, it can't stop there--but that maybe the problem is partly with the *need* to incentivize everything in this particular way.

[HaemishM]

The only reason you need to offer incentives in RVR is because scenarios already offer massive incentives to PVP, combined with an incredible ease of use compared to RVR and a level playing field. The two activities just don't compare, so when RVR takes more time to get to, more effort to organize and in the end, doesn't reward with anywhere near the same level, people only want to do scenarios. If scenarios offered nothing, there'd probably be no incentive to do them over RVR other than the ease and level playing field.

We're talking about upping the incentives for RVR because you can't nerf scenarios.

[Typhon]

So make taking the BOs a bit more involved then killing the crew and clicking the flag.  I don't know why they don't use the existing PQ technology to encourage POI oRvR.  It makes it clear what you are supposed to do at any given point in time (I guess the current Witching Hour may be the first steps toward doing just that).

Phase 1
Side A owns BO 1.
Side B engages the NPC at the BO and kills them all.  Side B clicks on the flag and we progress to Phase 2.
Side B gets some exp and renown

Phase 2
Side B must now defend their flag against waves of NPCs.  Phase 2 NPCs includes healer NPCs who also heal Side A players (so that NPCs aren't completely useless).
The successful side gets a chest and locks the BO for 15 minutes.

In addition to that, give some reward for simply holding POIs in oRvR areas (a trickle of renown or experience over time to anyone who is actively at their keyboard in the oRvR area).

[GoodIdea]

It's a step in the right direction, unfortunately, for taking a BO it should be more like 20K experience at least, for a keep it should be at least 50K XP, maybe more.

2K is nothing, but at least they are (somewhat) listening. They need to increase that by a lot.

[Lantyssa]

I could claim credit for this brilliant insight, but actually, I'm just looking at what daoc did. A great many of the RvR problems in WAR could be fixed by just looking at what daoc did. The way dev teams refuse to learn from other their own company's  game is silly, the way they refuse to learn from their own is depressing.

FIFY

While I agree not looking at other companies' games is stupid, they couldn't be bothered to look down the freakin' hall.

[tazelbain]

Adding more pve to rvr

Please no.  NPCs have already created the situation that its impossible to take a defended keep without a massive zerg.  We should be looking at ways to get npc out of RvR or at least get the npc under player control.

[WindupAtheist]

XP from killing players should be the best means of leveling, with PVE on the side for people who play at weird hours or are behind the population curve. (You can increase PVE XP as the game ages, depending on how much low-level activity there is, to let people catch up to the crowd faster.) Then make the NPC dudes in the castles or whatever drop tokens you can trade in for phat loot.

Have battlegrounds (or whatever) but instead of normal XP have sport PVP kills give enough rested XP to make your next few world PVP kills worth double. Everyone will want to do them because, hey free rested XP, but staying in battlegrounds forever won't do you any good.

Or something? I don't know. Anything would sound better than the confusing system they seem to have in place. I've been reading this forum for a little while now and I still don't understand how the game works.

[Slyfeind]

I wish there was no PvP in this game. It confuses me and makes me not want to play it, so I just do solo quests, and those aren't very good because this game is supposed to be about PvP.

[Typhon]

Adding more pve to rvr

Please no.  NPCs have already created situation that its impossible to take a defended keep without a massive zerg.  We should be looking at ways to get npc out of RvR or at least get the npc under player control.

I'm not trying to add PvE, I'm trying to toss ideas out that will allow for PvP that is entertaining for both attackers and defenders in non-symmetrical scenarios.  Given the reality of imbalanced servers, and the lack of any decent solutions for assuring that servers magically become balanced, I think the way to help resolve the issue is to allow for fun conflicts that are unbalanced.

That said, I failed to mention that the size of the NPC force should be scaled based upon the number of defenders in the area.

Also, I think that there should be some immediate reward for defending as it tends to be a thankless task in these types of games.

I don't think that simply making taking BOs worth something people obviously want solves the issue, because of the scenario where players just avoid eachother in order to optimize getting the benefits from taking a BOs (where victory is mostly assured).

Edit: added for clarity

[tolakram]

- Servers are bracketed into tiers.

- Each tier might, at best, contain 500 players, 250 on each side.

- During any time of the day 50 people on each side might want to RvR.

- Experience is reduced when a player has already been killed.

- It doesn't take very long for all 50 players to be killed at least once.

That's not hard to predict, shouldn't take long to observe, and the fact Mythic has done nothing to fix it is very very telling, in my opinion.  I didn't know who was behind all the wrong headed design decisions in DAoC, but now it seems obvious.

[Zupa]

Don't panic! 

Sometimes people just fight for fun, not for xp / renown / gear. 

I spent a few hours last night running around troll country / Ostland on the Anlec server fighting a large Order force.  The battles happened around the keeps and BOs, were constant and fluid and fun.  Neither side had a massive advantage, each side was successful in taking keeps and objectives, the game itself was running properly and everything just seemed right.

Unfortunately none of us got anything much out of it other than the fun of killing the opposition and taking on a mass of dozens of enemy players.  Despite this i'm pretty sure everyone involved was having a good time.  It actually seemed like people weren't queing for scenarios because they were too busy having fun in open RvR.

This type of thing gives me some hope that this game will eventually be what I want it to be, there will be fighting in the streets, in the keeps and in the cities.  I don't know if the witching hour event had anything to do with the turn out, or if it was just the fact that it was sunday afternoon and there were lots of people online.

A few little band-aids here and there could make this happen more often, and they have been mentioned countless times.   A bunch of small things like reducing the renown reduction for recently killed players, a little bit more XP for taking objectives and keeps, a scenario-comparable renown reward for taking keeps... none of this stuff would take a massive amount of work to implement, none of it would break the game, and it fits in with the baby steps approach that Mythic are going on about.

My only fear is that they piss off and alienate too many people before implementing the right changes, and the game dies before it realises its full potential, but I had enough fun last night that I will keep playing for some time yet.

[Hindenburg]

Actually, they should panic.

Their refusal to panic is what's allowing them to keep making these retarded decisions.

The thing that's killing WAR if this keeps going isn't primarily bugs, but administrative decisions. Very bad administrative decisions that might have a place in 2004, but do not belong to 2008.

[UnSub]

Very bad administrative top level design decisions that might have a place in 2004, but do not belong to 2008.

This. I wouldn't call it admin, but I do keep wondering who came up with the design, who signed them off and who implemented them with no-one raising the potential problems with them. Even internal testing must have indicated something was amiss, or could go amiss.

How did WAR release with so many glaring design flaws? And it's not EA's fault, because a whole heap of these issues come straight from Mythic to the player.

[Zupa]

Actually, they should panic.
...

My bad, that was ambiguous.  I meant for the fanboys and still playing optimists to not panic.

Surely Mythic are already panicing and working their little asses off to save this game.

You are panicing right MJ?  If not now is a great time to start.

[Jherad]

OK, so  but -

I can't get over the differences between t4 in beta and live.

I've heard lots of arguments about how x hundred different design decisions have caused the problems, but honestly, those problems largely weren't in beta. People were flipping zones, running scenarios, PQs, solo quests AND participating in Open RvR on what was sometimes a dead server, but it worked. I leveled 31 to 40 very quickly, whilst still making time for everything else. As I didn't feel any pressure to grind, it didn't seem to matter that ORvR gave little XP.

I'm sure the beta to live XP tweaks (IE. adding the good old grind) is more than a little to blame for many of the problems facing the game now. Not just the obvious 'I don't like grinding' ones.

You can't just flip a switch just before go-live day 'OK, we're coming out of beta now, time to slow down the gameplay', and expect it not to have knock-on effects.

[Sophismata]

Even internal testing must have indicated something was amiss, or could go amiss.

Maybe they were afraid to point out something was wrong with The Vision? Five-star drive, three-star ability and all that...

"If you don't love The Product, we'll have to hire someone that does..."

[waylander]

Even internal testing must have indicated something was amiss, or could go amiss.

Maybe they were afraid to point out something was wrong with The Vision? Five-star drive, three-star ability and all that...

"If you don't love The Product, we'll have to hire someone that does..."

No its called a "locked thread" when dissent was voiced.

[Shatter]

I re-rolled on Friday when my guild decided to move from SoC to Gorfang, this was phase 2.  I went from a server that had 0 scenarios in 8 hours to new games every minute which was a massive difference.  I got from rank 1 to rank 18 and RR17 on almost strictly PvP(scenarios) in about 20-25 hours total play time from Friday to Monday.  Everyone in the guild transferred over and had a great weekend of PvP which is how it should of been on our previous server which basically died population wise.  Overall the transfer process was fast, worked well and it's like a different game :)  Very happy they did these transfers.

[Nebu]

I re-rolled on Friday when my guild decided to move from SoC to Gorfang, this was phase 2.  I went from a server that had 0 scenarios in 8 hours to new games every minute which was a massive difference.  I got from rank 1 to rank 18 and RR17 on almost strictly PvP(scenarios) in about 20-25 hours total play time from Friday to Monday.  Everyone in the guild transferred over and had a great weekend of PvP which is how it should of been on our previous server which basically died population wise.  Overall the transfer process was fast, worked well and it's like a different game :)  Very happy they did these transfers.

I have a feeling that Mythic will need to continually offer transfers as players bleed.  Until they obtain stable subscriber numbers, churn will alter the game flow more than we're used to seeing.  The real weakness in the design of WAR is that success depends heavily on not only player numbers, but player density in a given level range.  It's going to be a tough thing to maintain.  Re-leveling alts just isn't going to be fun when people are already at the cap and this will kill retention for those that a) tire of their class or b) discover after the grind to the endgame that they would rather be playing another class or c) that the guild group wants to optimize forcing one of their team to reroll.

[ghost]

Yeah, this game is much, much better when you have the appropriate population.  On Monolith the Witching Hour PQ is pretty much up all the time, with 30-40 people duking it out. 

There are still problems, however:   

1.  Order has basically no hope of ever taking a keep and keeping it due to the massive server faction imbalance issues.

2.  The exp and RR you get from ORvR is still so far below what you get in scenarios.  I mean a LOT lower. 

3.  Exp and RR don't scale.  I don't know if this is what the devs wanted, but as it is, if you get behind on RR you will never catch up.  This means that if you do any PVE at all you will have a discrepancy that basically you can't catch up from, except by maybe keeps but you get some exp from that too. 

4.  ORvR as with the witching hour public quest is, well, frankly it is just a grind and a bore.  It turns into a ranged DPS extravaganza with the random incursion of black orcs/chosen or the corresponding order tanks.  There are huge changes needed here, and I'm not sure what they can do.  I mean, charging in and randomly killing in these huge zergs is not what I envisioned.  Maybe it is what Mythic wanted, but man it just isn't cool.

So all this being said, I am actually having more fun now on the larger server.  Hopefully Mythic will do the right thing and shut down about half of the existing servers and do something to make melee DPS more fun.  I'm giving it six months. 

[Sophismata]

It might be worth noting that oRvR can work, but it's impossible in a PUG. All tank careers get Hold the Line, which gives themselves and those behind them massive protection from ranged DPS.

Ideally, you'll have three tanks charge in front, with the MDPS following up behind and your RDPS flanking the enemy. This will allow your melee to hit the enemy lines barely scratched - it's just not going to happen without serious co-ordination.

[Bismallah]

"1.  Order has basically no hope of ever taking a keep and keeping it due to the massive server faction imbalance issues."

I saw this at login, Monolith was FULL with a queue (was low, around 25) for Destruction and MED for Order, that would totally suck for anyone that was on Order pre-transfer. You just inherited an ass whoopin' congratulations!