But at least there’s no hate nor arguing.

There are two other frequent and well known problems in Warhammer Online that I think my old proposal would address nicely.

Problem 1: Warbands camping Warcamps
This is a frequent situation that players should be accustomed to. Beside trading keeps to quickly collect loot, the other popular form of RvR is “sieging” the enemy warcamp while staying outside the range of the guards. This because the respawn timers are short and so they provide a continuous stream of enemies to kill, so points. The situation partially bandaided with diminishing returns (making recently killed players worth fewer points).

Problem 2: Players throwing themselves at the enemy and respawning over and over
This is a similar problem to the once above, but from a different perspective. The players are disappointed because with constantly respawning enemy players it is kind of pointless to kill them and battles become simply a matter of attrition. This situation makes players suggest all kinds of foul solutions, like longer travel times or respawn timers. In DAoC one example of these foul solutions was to make players wait for 20 minutes on a pad waiting for a port to the frontier zones.

How to solve or at least improve Open RvR in these situations? Long term this can be done with a strategic layer to the battle that is currently missing from the game (making players care more about the campaign than the single skirmish), but since this is a complex solution and the game is nowhere close to make it possible, I’ll go with the simpler fixes.

The first problem is entirely solvable by rewarding players to fight around the objectives. If these rewards existed then it wouldn’t be convenient for anyone to siege the spawn points. the players would stay around BOs and Keeps and fight there. More details about this idea can be found again here.

The second problem can be consistently reduced, without doing more damage, by using another of my old proposals. You revert the approach. Instead of punishing players if they die, you reward those who survive. You make a new rule so that the more players you kill without dying, the more points you earn, increasing a bonus.

At the same time you also make these “hero” players who survive for long like “preys”. In the same way they build a bonus for killing players, they also start to be worth more points progressively, so becoming very enticing targets for the enemy. There should also be some kind of visual recognition so that enemy players would spot easily these “special” players and hunt them. The details of this kind of “visual cues” should be discussed with Mythic’s art team.

This is what I’d do.

P.S.
While I think those two changes alone would be enough to make a much better game, there’s also one other aspect that should go in:
– Make BOs linked to the keeps, so that the more BOs you have under your faction control, the weaker are the defenses of the keep and much easier the siege. Keeps should be very hard to conquer if the enemy doesn’t hold any BO, and very easy if it holds them all before the siege to the keep. This would also start to shape some kind of strategical layer.