Every time I spend some time looking at what’s happening with Warhammer I find more and more proofs of game design incompetence.
Beside the latest, blatant, “People who really want to do Open RvR, though, were falling behind PvE and scenario players in terms of gear” and Mark Jacobs’ “avoiding other factions in a RvR/PvP game are always tough to solve even if you could only level through RvR/Pvp since many players/groups tend to always want to have an edge on the other group”, now we have this upcoming change to BOs and keeps that mirrors exactly what I was saying: they do not get it, and so keep making things WORSE.
Since players loved to swap BOs and keeps quickly to get points, you know what will happen next patch?
That you’ll have to SIT in a BO for half an hour, and a keep for TWO HOURS in order to get the points/loot. Awesome. I’m sure players will love this.
The REAL problem here is that they are handing points for PvE (NPC guards) objectives. Players learn this and learn that if points come from killing NPCs then fighting real players is just an hindrance. So they go killing NPCs and avoid fighting each other since this maximizes the reward.
Instead of fixing this system and link the ORVR rewards to RVR activity (as is reasonable to do if they had a clue) they double all the timers in the game, so that it’s not possible anymore to swap quickly the objectives. But, since the rewards STILL come from PvE, the only effect is that now you’ll sit idle waiting for a timer to run to zero and the bag of loot to open to you.
If you are a kind of player who enjoys this kind of gameplay then I’m glad for you.
This game isn’t flawed in production value or because Mythic isn’t working hard enough. This game is flawed because they don’t get the basics of game design, and four months down the road they still haven’t understood problems that the majority of players noticed all along.
You can work as hard you can, but if the direction is all wrong nothing good will ever come out of it. That’s Mythic’s path.
P.S.
And to demonstrate that I base my critics on concrete motivations and not bias, I’ll also say that making ORvR authoritative over Scenarios is a step in the right direction (meaning that if you control a zone in ORvR you’ll control the zone in the campaign as well, no matter the results in the Scenarios).