“Hi, everyone. I’m Nick, and I’m on lockout. I haven’t been in <dungeon> in two days. And I really… really need that last Sentinel piece to finish off my set.”
That’s just about the same level of frustration most of us feel with Warhammer Online’s dungeon lockout timers. And hell, I’ve only been 40 for a week and a half. Imagine how someone feels after a couple of months of repeating this process. Not looking too promising, is it?
What’s the deal with these things? There’s really no use for them. Lockouts are a thinly veiled mechanism to prevent players already at rank 40 from advancing through meager end-game PvE content too quickly. Hey, I’m not a dungeon fan in general, and I couldn’t stand the raiding cycle in World of Warcraft, but at least I could understand the logic behind having lockouts in massive, 25 to 40-player raid encounters. What I don’t get is the progressively longer lockouts on what are effectively 1-party dungeons. In some spots, with a solid group, you can even 4- or 5-man dungeon bosses in many of these instances, be it the Sigmar Crypts or the Warpblade Tunnels, both of which drop ”Tier 5″ (Greater Ward) gear in Altdorf. The Inevitable City has its equivalents in the Bilerot Burrow and the Bloodwrought Enclave, for what it’s worth, although I don’t have a character on Destuction high enough in rank to visit either.
All four of these dungeons, unlike their predecessor, Bastion Stair, have 72 hour lockout timers. Bastion Stair had a 24-hour timer, if I recall correctly. Want to run Lost Vale? Be prepared for a five-day lockout afterwards.
What does this mean to you? It means you can’t run these dungeons again until your timer is up. So you have to wait, forcibly biding your time doing oRvR, which can be nearly as tedious if the players decide they’d rather farm renown from undefended objectives than engage each other in (gasp!) actual combat on the battlefield. It also means that there just isn’t enough PvE content to provide viable gear alternatives to the drops from these dungeons, since only these dungeons provide the wards you’ll need to progress further up the chain, and you can blow through both the Crypts and Tunnels in a few hours with a solid group.
Worse yet, if you happen to have a party member crash out or leave due to an emergency, like we had happen today, and you’re past the first boss of the instance, you’re basically shit out of luck. You can’t bring anyone new into the party, and without the additional firepower, completing the dungeon is very difficult, or in some cases altogether impossible. We managed to get through to the twin Arch Lectors in the Crypts this evening with five people, but that specific pair of bosses is very difficult to beat without having equal DPS on each boss. We tried them three or four times, to no avail, though we managed to get them to 35-40% before one of them went nuts and killed our healers. If we had been able to bring an extra man in, we could have easily finished the job.
To top it all off, we only had a single Sentinel piece drop that was actually usable by any of the group members that were present. The rest were bind-on-equip drops (belts) that were automatically thrown into guild vaults or on the auction house, or were bind-on-pickup items that got salvaged, or vendored. Worthless crap, really. One of our tanks had been running the Crypts and Tunnels for two solid months, whenever his timers ran out, and was still missing pieces to complete his set. And this is the easier set to get — on a server where Order is significantly outnumbered, the Conqueror set (the parallel PvP Greater Ward set) is not only a difficult set to obtain, since it requires high renown rank to use, but it also only drops from fortress bosses, which on Skull Throne (Order) don’t come up very often. The odds at this point are looking like slim and none.
Instead, we were not only unable to complete the dungeon, but we were also locked out of the place for the next three days. I’m not sure how that benefits anyone, and it’s definitely not making players any sweeter on WAR’s already weak end-game PvE setup.
My suggestion to Mythic: if you’re going to institute completely arbitrary dungeon lockout timers, at least guarantee that items will drop that the party will need. If I knew that I’d have a chance to get something at the end of that three days, and not just find another near-complete set of Sentinel Witch Hunter gear (like I did the other night… on my Warrior Priest), I’d be a lot more tolerant of the lockouts. As it stands, I only get a chance to run these things once every few days at best, and when I do, the entire group often comes out unhappy. That’s not exactly motivating anyone to play your game, and we all know know that there’s no reason it couldn’t be made a little more palatable to the players. Something to think about.
4 comments
I don’t mind the lock outs but I am completely frustrated with the drop rates.
Lets face it, it isn’t fun to go into a dungeon and get nothing when you have party members who need something from every boss.
The other thing raising my blood pressure is the “double drops.” It is outrageous for a boss to drop two of the same item! How often will that be a benefit.
Yeah, I hear you.
You’re right — the drop rates are godawful and if something does drop, more often than not, it’s something no one in your group needs. I figure if they’re going to have these artificial restrictions to progressing through the dungeon/gear ranks, they need to at least throw us a bone.
Either reduce/remove the lockouts, or fix up the drops and don’t let the bosses drop useless loot (or bug out repeatedly, which has been happening often of late.) It’d be nice to at least get something *someone* could use if they’re going to make the drops all BoP.
This is a really nicely written up post but i have to say to me at least the conclusion of it clashes slightly with your earlier “The Vicious Cycle” post.
Lockout timers are there to prevent the worse excess’s of gear grinding. If all these dungeons had a 1 day reset, people would grind them hideously.
The 1st step of removing the idea of grinding from games is stop rewarding people for doing it.
Imagine how much worse Battle Objective farming would be if there was no timer before they could be recapped.
That said the ward system currently can force people who are on the loosing side of RvR to shift towards PvE as a way to gear up. But the obvious disadvantage is if PvE becomes too attractive people will loose any incentive to fight back at all & the RvR will become even less attractive.
I also think random drops is a idea long long passed its time, if your gonna have a ’set’ item drop make it a BoP token which can be took to a npc & changed into whichever classes gear is required.
The Ward system has in many ways made the fetishism of Tier Sets even worse in WaR than it was in WoW.
I think what needs to be fixed is the way the ward system works, the nature of RvR has been significantly improved by the introduction of influence rewards but there is still room for improvement in discouraging keep trading.
anyways your posts are always a good read even if i don’t agree with every one of them. Hope by the time you get your engi to t4 Mythic have found solutions which encourage lots of lovely RvR and less grinding & keep swapping
Note: I think you’ve also given me a idea for a midweek blog post :)try and pop by on Wednesday and give me a little feedback
Ahh, but we have to play the hand we’re dealt… err, the game we’re given, right? :)
I concur that my conclusion in this case is slightly off from my desires from my earlier "the vicious cycle" post, but you have to consider that if you want to play the best RvR game on the market right now, WAR is it. In that case, we have to settle for an imperfect end-game that still requires the whole gear grind we’re used to from pretty much every other MMO out there. I’m not saying it’s perfect — far from it — but I doubt Mythic is likely to revamp their entire post-40 progression right now. If that’s the case, we should really focus on improving the endgame as much as possible, but I think baby steps help a lot here.
From my perspective, the lockouts are also really in place because (a) there’s very little post-rank-40 PvE content aside from Tome unlocks, the odd Lair, crafting (which is insufferably painful in this game, aside from scavenging), and the handful of dungeons I’ve already discussed, and (b) the want us to RvR. That’s truly what they’re after, and I see the lockouts as a forcible measure to get us out of PvE dungeons and into the intended endgame. Yes, they’re reducing the grind, but lockouts are a symptom and not the root cause here. There’s nothing wrong with wanting us to RvR; I just find the whole lockout thing artificial; it leaves a bad taste in your mind and really reminds you that you’re playing a game, losing the whole immersion of being in a dungeon.
Every time I think of immersion these days, I think of Age of Conan’s first 20 levels. Those really pulled me back to my early days of playing RPGs in the 80s and 90s and it was refreshing to see it back in the game.
But honestly, if they’re going to focus on trying to push us out of PvE and onto the battlefield (which is all well and good), they really shouldn’t focus so much on creating barriers to entry (like wards) that are *much* easier to obtain in PvE but are required to progress in the city siege arena. That’s where the frustration kicks in. And this post was mainly about frustration and not so much about logic. ;)
And hey, thanks for your comments. Like everyone else out there, I appreciate a good debate and I don’t always agree with the authors of the blogs I read, although I enjoy many of them tremendously. Tobold would be a perfect example of this; I disagree with a lot of what he writes, but he’s always insightful and always pushes the boundaries of what I think about the games that I play, and he covers a lot of games that I’d never touch, but enjoy hearing about nonetheless.
Cheers, and I’ll be checking your blog on Wednesday. :)
-nick