It’s so boring and unexciting when you see the mistakes coming from 100 miles away.

This is what I said:

2 October: So let me state this bluntly: the game, in particular endgame big objectives, risks to become “hide and seek” events where Destruction and Order take turns at the bag of loot. Without any incentive for defense the game risks to be more rewarding for avoiding each other than to fight.

Shortcut to victory.

15 October: Handing out a lot of points for just conquering a keep, instead, encourages the factions to just trade the objective instead of fighting for it. It teaches them to AVOID the fight to maximize the reward.

24 October: I’ve read players in Tier 4 reporting that the factions are avoiding each other in order to farm Keep Lords and have a chance at very rare drops. If Mythic executes their plan of rewarding more and more the objectives and not the fight, this problem will worsen considerably and we are looking at a future patch that will break the game even more than how it is now. That’s the next step.

That was indeed the next step (not just one case, I’ve read similar complaints on F13 as well) and I guess we aren’t even done yet.
Quick edit: more threads are starting to appear.

Mythic is doing baby steps in regard to open RvR. Baby steps that go in the wrong direction and are encouraging enemy players to avoid each other. So much for “war everywhere”.

Since I’m filled with deja-vu, I’ll be quick: PvP design should reward activity, not avoidance. This means that “the carrot” should be where the fun is: in the fight. In order to obtain this you need to provide a convergence, build a critical mass of players, and then put the carrot right there. The carrot should be proportional to the activity. No activity = no carrot.

I’ll repost my proposal adapted for Warhammer that achieves exactly that:

– Players take a Battlefield Objective (or keep) and cap it (worth nothing for now). Guilds can put a banner on the BO and stack benefits.
– For the time the BO is being actively defended (meaning there are real players in its proximity) it “blinks” on the map for all the players in the zone, for both factions. So that all players know that there’s activity there.
– All the kills (both defenders and attackers) that happen within a decently wide radius from the BO starts to be worth more points (XP, renown). A bonus that should be slightly higher for defenders, to encourage defense.
– For all the kills that defenders manage, some points go into a “bounty pool” in the BO. The more kills, the more this pool increases. I’d also make the BO generate some of these points even if no one is around, so that if left untouched for a lot of hours it actually start to be worth something anyway.
– This means that the longer it takes to conquer the BO, the biggest is going to be the reward, as it increases with the time and makes the prize progressively juicier.
– In order to “collect” these points the attackers need to conquer the objective themselves and “cash” the reward.

This has mainly three effects:
1- The BO works like a magnet, like a natural convergence since the direct kills are worth a lot more when they are closer to the objective. This makes the players know where to go and the action is focused on a smaller area (those who played Planetside know what I mean). This reduces the problem of RvR lakes being too dispersive.
2- The bounty points increase over time, so growing to a level that will likely motivate the other faction to take action. It will also move the “hot” RvR area around instead of repeating what happened with “Emain” in DAoC. It puts variety in the system.
3- It avoids exploits and disruptive behaviors. Points in this system come from direct kills. Handing out a lot of points for just conquering a keep, instead, encourages the factions to just trade the objective instead of fighting for it. It teaches them to AVOID the fight to maximize the reward (we saw some of this in WoW). My system instead focuses on the fight itself. It motivates it and makes sure it is rewarding since it promotes and rewards the activity.

—
That was my proposal and is still valid today. To make it work, though, there are two important prerequisites that should be patched NOW:
1- Add flight masters between ALL warcamps and ALL chapter PvE hubs. If this takes time to implement, add temporary teleports.
2- Reduce the diminishing returns in open RvR from the actual ten minutes to TWO.

What I think is that Keep Lords should NEVER drop gear. There are already renown gear vendors whose purpose is exactly that. Warhammer RvR design is already a convoluted patchwork of elements, it doesn’t need more complication.

I still wish Warhammer would be enormously successful. I still think that a lot can be done to improve it and make it great. But the reason why this *won’t* happen (and we’ve seen plenty of demonstrations of this) is because of its cockblock, and that cockblock is too egocentric to step back for the good of the game:

Tomorrow WotLK launches. I care zero and won’t play it, but if Warhammer loses players it deserves it.

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.

EDIT:
Some spontaneous proofs.
Further proofs.

Okay, this last one, then I’ll try to mind my own business. But it’s just too easy and fun to not do it.

Mark Jacobs: However, to say that we are not paying attention, don’t care or the ever-popular “I quit now” simply makes it less likely that we will continue to post and interact here.

GOOD RIDDANCE!

I wonder where he wants to bring his bag of candies next. F13 already slapped his face (and his ego) too many times for him to have the courage to go back there. Warhammer Alliance is a cesspool alike the Vault. Where will he go, I wonder? He must feel so unloved right now, poor boy.

In other news the “Combat n Careers” patch buffed Bright Wizard damage (especially DoTs) and nerfed healing. My class, Ironbreaker, was also hit with the nerfbat.

“Love to all classes” is the stupidest myth in game design. When you boost damage across the board the result is that the fights are over in less time. When you then also nerf healing the result is obviously much worse. Especially since healing needed a boost instead of a nerf from tier 2 onward as healers couldn’t keep anyone alive. Add the fact they they also nerfed root abilities, that, while usually a good idea, is another nerf to a defensive skill, and you can imagine that the whole system has been shoved heavily toward the offensive side, making combat more deadly and sudden, and removing that little bit of strategy there was. If you think this is what was necessary, good for you.

Just a glance at those patch notes and even one like me, who usually restrains to comment class balance, can see that they aren’t even in the right direction. Not only they are doing too much, all at once, late and prioritizing the wrong things, but they even move in the wrong direction.

Just to be clear and demonstrate that I don’t simply criticize no matter what, this is what I wrote a month and half ago in regard to class balance:

For the first time in many years I felt powerful in PvP. Yesterday I tanked two other players that outleveled me, alone. I didn’t even use all the aces in my sleeve. Is this the way it should be or should I expect the nerfbat coming? I play in scenarios and have the time to ACTUALLY SEE WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. I can REACT TO COMBAT. It’s paced perfectly. This opposed to, say, WoW. Where the combat is fucking ridiculous and I can be dead in a matter of seconds in a cloud of stupid graphic effects while I can’t even control my character because of CC, with my tank. Here fighting takes time and is not too twitchy.

In Warhammer, from the little experience I have, it seems they got the “feel” right. Now I hope that while they work to also have the “numbers” right, they won’t fuck the rest.

Even in my first preview of the game I praised the combat system because it got right one of the most important aspect: the pacing. The classes were unbalanced, but the “feel” and pacing was right (and this was also the reason why I don’t think class balance is a priority). They needed to tweak numbers, tone down some ridiculous skills that were overused and exploited, and boost some classes (like pet classes) that lacked a real role and efficiency.

Now, do you know what happens when you boost the damage and nerf healing of all classes across the board? That you fuck the pacing. Exactly what they did.