I’m sure this has been beaten to death of late, but Mark Jacobs recently posted his latest Open RvR Update over at the Warhammer Herald, and as the 1.06 patch is set to go live tomorrow, I had a few thoughts to toss over the wall and into the arena on the matter.
First and foremost, I’ll preface this by saying that I’m relatively new to Tier 4 RvR — I’ve only been in T4 for a couple of weeks and my Warrior Priest is still in the mid-30s, as we speak. I’m basing my comments on what I’ve seen of T4 so far, and my previous experience from prior tiers, in addition to other games I’ve played of the same ilk (namely Dark Age of Camelot.) While DAOC was in no way perfect, and featured a host of class and realm imbalances that made many aspects of the game a complete pain in the arse to play (well, coming from Midgard, at least), WAR is its spiritual successor and seems to have inherited a lot of the same players.
Finally, I’m a big fan of WAR’s PvP and RvR implementations, but constructive feedback is always a good thing. Nothing’s perfect and WAR definitely has room for improvement in what Mythic seems to consider their primary way of enjoying the game. Since WAR’s population is apparently shrinking, and WoTLK’s launch has temporarily distracted a lot of players (many of whom, I believe, will likely return to WAR after they realize that WoTLK is more of the same…) it seems pivotal for Mythic to address some of the outstanding issues with oRvR as quickly as possible.
Flaws in today’s oRvR
Let’s attack this problem directly, shall we? I’ve put together a list of issues that I think most people are familiar with. Some of these may sound like positives and not negatives, but I think some of the intentional features currently in the game are contributing to the problems we’re seeing in open RvR.
- No sense of realm pride.
This is likely a side-effect of any number of the other issues I list below, so there’s no clear-cut solution here. Still, it’s a critical problem, especially when Mythic’s last game, DAOC, had a huge sense of realm pride that doesn’t seem to have transitioned over to WAR thus far. Of course, getting some of the other issues fixed up may help shore up realm pride, too. - Players need better incentives to RvR.
PvP influence rewards may help out here, as well as the “fame” rewards that Mark is suggesting in his post. Right now, between the lack of rewards in keep defense, and the fact that contribution calculations during keep captures appear to be random, leading to undeserving or AFK folks getting rewards, and leaving many others high and dry. Players are still funneling into the consistency of scenarios, which on its own would be fine, but in a game where the end-game is oRvR, it’s having a negative impact. Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy scenarios as much as the next guy — but when people are still in them when they’re RR35+ and getting zilch for renown, with solo healers and BWs and lowbies getting 4-5x more renown in the same scenarios, they should really be out in oRvR instead. - Too many Open RvR zones and objectives.
I realize I look like a douche complaining about the game having too many areas to fight (oh noes!), but the main effect of having so many RvR lakes in T4 (and even in the lower tiers, to a lesser extent) is that players are spread too thin, and zerg fights become common as people don’t generally want to run solo between. Zergs tend to roll smaller groups in a hurry, and scare off smaller-scale RvR, and then end up camping warcamp entrances so no one can leave. Warbands do organize to fight each other, but unless there’s a good leader and an alliance channel to communicate on presently, they fall apart at the slightest sign of defense. - Lag and crashes in large battles.
While I haven’t experienced the “WAR is unplayable” syndrome some others have dealt with, I’ve had client crashes in the middle of keep attacks and defenses, had massive lag in specific situations (large keep lord battles with lots of spells being cast, courtyard keep gate attacks), and I run a pretty decent box at home (Core 2 Duo E8400, nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS, etc.) Bad RAM caused me some grief a month or so ago, but once I sorted that out, the only problem I have now is large-battle lag, which seems commonplace. I don’t know if I’d say it makes the game completely unplayable, but it definitely detracts from the experience, and I can see it pushing people into closed-off scenario play instead of keep battles if they have slower/older hardware, which seems to contravene Mythic’s oRvR plans. - No incentive to defend keeps or hold battlefield objectives.
I read a great blog post about this somewhere that I haven’t been able to dig up a link for (yet). In the meantime, I’m realy hoping that Mark’s suggested changes for this issue will come to fruition sooner, rather than later:“Fourth, we want to encourage guilds to take and control keeps, and we will continue our work on adding better rewards for Guilds who own Keeps as well as the addition of a system of Keep upgrades. This system will be added to the game in several stages beginning in the late winter.”
- Too many scenarios in T3 & T4.
Again, I’m complaining about too much content. Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem if Mythic were to merge servers or pool scenario queues, but right now, the sheer volume of scenarios in T4 is enough to detract from oRvR significantly — there are six that are readily available, including the supposedly temporary Reikland Factory scenario, and another bunch that I suppose unlock depending on the realm war status, and I haven’t even seen in my “join scenario queue” list yet. On servers with low or medium population at prime-time (which is most of them, right now), this is watering down the already thin pool of potential oRvR participants significantly. And if there’s a lot of oRvR happening for whatever reason, the scenario queues take forever. This probably wasn’t a problem shortly after launch, but with server populations as they currently stand, it’s definitely an issue. - It’s too easy to get back in the fight.
I’ve seen this mentioned all over the place, as well, but with warcamps so close to the fight, even if you don’t happen to get a rez on the battlefield, a dead player can jump back into the action very quickly. One thing to note here about DAOC was that if you died, and couldn’t get rezzed, you’d be back at your portal keep waiting for the rather long port cycle pretty damn quickly. Getting back into the fight took a while, which (IMO) enhanced strategies and really made running all the way to Hadrian’s Wall or Mount Collory in a stealth group to camp the portal keep road a lot more entertaining, exciting… and scary, since if you died without a healer nearby, you had a seriously long run back. - Population imbalance.
This is a toughie. Destruction currently has much higher population than Order (on the order of 30% more players, and at least on my server, significantly more L40s.) It can be argued that Destruction has some pretty appealing classes (having played a significant amount on both sides, I’d agree that at least in looks, Destro has an advantage here… if not necessarily in abilities.) How will Mythic look at balancing population other than funneling people into one realm on one server or another? Will the take the WoW approach of designing better looking, more attractive classes for the realm that has less members? We’ll see.
Ideas and potential solutions
Many of the changes coming up in the next couple of major patches (primarily in 1.1) that Mark Jacobs discussed in his oRvR update post strike me as a your typical “throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks” approach. While some of it sounds reasonable and logical and makes sense to implement ASAP (RvR influence and rewards, primarily), a few concepts sound like a shot in the dark that may or may not have any impact on gameplay. Adding keep quests, chained RvR missions, and “daily event” quests may do some good, as long as they’re properly implemented. If they all fall into the “kill 10 rats” category, I don’t think it’s going to help a whole lot.
Now, I’m by no means a game developer, but as a player with a sound understanding of game theory and software development on the whole, I think there are a few ways to address the problems that currently stand out from what I’d generally a entertaining and overall highly engaging RvR game.
- Introduce rewards for keep defense.
Looks like Mythic already has a handle on this one, as per Mark’s post on the Herald. Let’s see if it helps. - Create an RvR dungeon… or an oRvR-controlled dungeon.
Keen had a great post about this one a few weeks ago: introduce a Darkness Falls-like RvR-controlled dungeon. Let the two sides fight it out for control over a dungeon where both PvEers and PvPers can enjoy themselves for a few hours, a day, or however long their realm retains control. On that note, as I’m not really aware of what’s available in T4 completely just yet, I’m not sure if there are any dungeons in the RvR lakes where RvR fights could occur (similar to the Hall of the Corrupt, the RvR frontier dungeon in old-school DAOC.) Anyone able to fill me in on whether these exist in T4 or not? - Rotating rewards, or regular renown gear refreshes.
Similar to the way the arena circuit works in WoW (at least, what I know of it, having quit the game a while back), there should be a rewards cycle where each quarter, or even month, players can vie for time-sensitive rewards that are then rotated out or refreshed as the “season” progresses. Team or guild arenas (and related rewards) would also appeal to me, though I think it would probably conflict with the whole oRvR concept a little. - Make it a little tougher to get back into a fight.
As per my point above, I don’t mind it being easy to get around in WAR’s (tedious, monotonous, yawn-inducing) PvE, but it really needs to be a little harder to get back into a large battle in oRvR. Right now, with the warcamps distributed the way they are, you’re lucky if you can kill off a warband without half of them coming back within a minute or two. This creates massive, never-ending stalemates (as evidenced by the Witching Hour live event’s RvR quests), as was so beautifully illustrated by Snafzg of TheGreenskin. How is that fun? It’s not. People just stand around, afraid to be the first to rush the other side’s front lines and feed them renown. Make it tougher to get into the fight, and the battles will almost automatically become much more critical and strategy will come more into play than it does now. - Remember DAOC relic keeps?
I remember the realm-wide announcements drawing players of all levels (that’s another problem in WAR — restricting end-game oRvR fights to only T4 players is problematic, but I’ll save that for a separate post) out to defend their realm’s relic keeps in DAOC. The major alliances on each server would have counter-zergs and defenses organized in the blink of an eye, and the benefits of owning a relic keep were almost secondary to the shame of losing all of your relics to one of the opposing realms. Again, having three realms probably contributed a lot here, as there was rarely an underdog for long, and relics switched hands regularly. Having something physical and tangible like a relic to run around with and defend — not just rapidly changing zone control numbers on your minimap — was a ton of fun, and something I miss from the old days. - Merge a few underpopulated servers.
As far as I’ve heard, Mark Jacobs and Mythic consider this a sign of weakness in an MMO. I agree on one front, but there is a logic to it as well that can’t be denied. If the existing systems to funnel users out of low-populations aren’t working, this may be a more sensible option. It’s not really as drastic as it sounds, and it may help in turning around players who are leaving the game due to unpopulated servers and the lack of desire to reroll or to copy to a completely new server. - Introduce multi-server queues for scenarios.
It’s not that tough to create scenario queues that are pooled amongst a cluster of servers. They did it in DAOC, and Blizzard has done it with WoW. This would at least alleviate some of the imbalances and delays in scenarios popping and having painfully long queues, even if it doesn’t resolve oRvR issues. - How about introducing a third realm?
Let’s get crazy. It worked in DAOC. It definitely breaks up the monotony of a two-sided fight. So why not?
I think that’s a pretty solid starting point for Mythic to work with. Obviously, I don’t have a clue as to the feasibility of implementing some of these (well, a third realm would probably be a major undertaking, I would think), but some of the possible changes seem like logical steps in retaining players and making existing players happy about sticking with the game long-term.
Do you have any other suggestions for what WAR could change to improve Open RvR? I’d love to hear what you all have to think.
Image credit: grraniml on Flickr.
