One quick comment on the latest Grab Bag and the zone control mechanic (I’m trying to divert my attention away from the game).
I’ll avoid to waste time to post some kind of armchair designer proposal but I want to point out what’s wrong in the overall approach. If you want the RvR to pivot around zone control, then the players need to be able to parse it correctly. It needs to be a transparent mechanic that players can use and plan strategy upon (in DAoC the relic raids involved strategy because a realm had to guess the way the other realm would react and where it would be).
This problem is not dissimilar to Mythic’s bad habit with slash commands. In order to know and use slash commands you need to read guides and memorize them. They aren’t intuitive. In the same way a player who wants to engage in RvR should NOT be required to read a page of text on the Herald to understand the way zone control works. This knowledge needs to be delivered in the game, not outside of it.
The second mistake is that these mechanics need to be simpler and easy to parse, so that they can be evaluated and “used”. Here Mythic is repeating a similar mistake Blizzard did with its PvP. First with the Honor system, then the Arena rating, the rules are too opaque, too convoluted. Zone control in Warhammer needs to follow simple rules. The progress bar needs to deliver all the infos and the players’ actions need to be reflected tangibly.
Show numbers. The zone control bar is useless if its interpretation is arbitrary. Show how many points are fixed and relying on oRvR, shows how many points go in the scenarios, show how many in PvE. The only reason to keep these numbers hidden would bee because Mythic isn’t convinced of the mechanic and so doesn’t want to disclose it to the players.
Simplify the mechanics so that they aren’t convoluted, show the numbers so that the players can see how they are contributing and change the zone control bar so that it shows usable data and not just some arbitrary value open to interpretation.