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Open RvR Update
Mythic Entertainment's Mark Jacobs has posted an informative overview of upcoming improvements to Warhammer Online's Open RvR system with the addition of an RvR Influence system, changes to the map system, new RvR incentives for players and guilds, and more.
Folks,
Over the last few months I’ve spoken about our continued focus on improving our open RvR systems. While we have taken some major steps in the last month, we believe that there is much more we can do to encourage people to take part in oRvR throughout the entire evolution of their character(s). Over the next few months we have some very exciting changes and additions taking place. Please note that as always, this does not represent everything that either we are doing or thinking about doing, just what we, as of now, plan on adding to WAR.
We have a number of major initiatives planned for oRvR in WAR. Please keep in mind that these changes/systems apply to oRvR only and not to scenarios. This is not all we are working on but these do reflect the majority of oRvR additions that we are currently working on/planning for the next few months.
First, we have created an RvR Influence system. This system is designed to reward our oRvR players with lots of new stuff that you can only get through oRvR. This will be a complimentary system to our PQ Influence system. This system is already implemented in 1.1 and is scheduled to go LIVE along with that version in December.
Second, we want to improve the visibility that players have into oRvR and make it easier for players to get involved in the action quickly and easily. We have a number of wide-ranging changes going into our map and travel systems to allow players to better understand the state of oRvR in our game and also allow them to get to the action faster. We have already taken one step with putting a Rally Master in each Warcamp but we will also add the ability for people to have a second bind point to make it even easier for players to move around the maps. We will also make it easily for players to see where players from their Realm are engaging in oRvR, a Campaign HUD for all tiers and other improvements We will also improve Tier-wide messaging about what is going on in Battlefield Objectives and Keeps. Other additions include changes to the UI, in-game manual improvements, map enhancements, and a few other changes.
Third, we want to provide greater incentives to players to participate in oRvR. In order to accomplish this we will be adding additional layers to the questing system of oRvR including the addition of Keep Quests, “Daily Event Quests”, Chained RvR Missions, improve the initial Tome Unlocks and other oRvR-oriented Events. We will also improve our BO itemization. Our goal is to provide players with even more incentive for participating in oRvR than we have already.
Fourth, we want to encourage guilds to take and control keeps, and we will continue our work on adding better rewards for Guilds who own Keeps as well as the addition of a system of Keep upgrades. This system will be added to the game in several stages beginning in the late winter.
Finally, we will begin work on a global oRvR “Fame” system that will be tied directly to the Tome of Knowledge which will provide more rewards, titles, experience, etc. for participating and being successful in oRvR. This system will provide even more incentives for people to participate in oRvR than the current systems and one that fits nicely both with the ToK’s concept as “This is your life” as well as an additional advancement and reward system.
Please keep in mind that these additions are subject to change and given the nature of these changes/improvements, they will not go LIVE until we have thoroughly tested them. However, these are crucial improvements to WAR and are being treated as such by the team.
Finally, I want to close this out with a brief explanation about the role that we believe that oRvR should play in WAR. It’s really as simple as this, oRvR should be a major focus for leveling, item gain, etc. in WAR. Some of the systems are already in place and in Tier 4, oRvR is alive and well. On other Tiers, however, oRvR is not being engaged in as often as we had hoped when we launched WAR. Our goal is to ensure that oRvR is the place where players can level the fastest, get the best items and overall, have a great time while doing it. It is supposed to be riskier, more challenging but ultimately, more rewarding than any other place within WAR. What is outlined in this letter are some of the ways we plan on making this happen over the next few months and beyond.
As always, we thank you for your patronage and support. We won’t let you down.
Mark Jacobs
VP/GM Mythic Entertainment
Read the letter at it's original source here.
Sounds great, i guess. Might re-activate my account after the holidays. One thing that bothers me though, the amount of times the word "easy" was used. Sounds like he's turning into a Blizzard employee. =(
THIS WAS SAID: First, we have created an RvR Influence system. This system is designed to reward our oRvR players with lots of new stuff that you can only get through oRvR. This will be a complimentary system to our PQ Influence system. This system is already implemented in 1.1 and is scheduled to go LIVE along with that version in December.
MY THOUGHTS: PQ's will now be completely useless and a waste of time. I don't know why they even put PvE in the game, it should be entirely RvR, because there is nothing worthwhile to be doing in PvE that will receive better rewards and xp - or even on par - than RvR.
While I am a fan of WAR I must say that things have taken a definite turn for the worse since launch. The huge ORVR battles that were the norm throughout beta are a rarity in live. What ORVR there is quickly turns into a very boring and unappealing game of keep tag. The game was closer to balance a month before release and some of the decisions at mythic to turn the game into a loot grind akin to wow have really turned me off and im really not sure that I am going to be able to justify my paying to play this for too much longer.
I think there are plenty of wonderful PVE rewards in the game , as there should be. You should be able to choose what you want to do , not be force into PVP or PVE. There should be great rewards for both and rewards that you can only get by either doing PVP or PVE. Personally, I think the announced additions sound great.
I agree that these ideas sound like a great idea. However, I still want more to do in the game. You don't ALWAYS want to fight the opposite faction. In order to make the game totally immersive, I would say that it needs some other side-games and such. Every game has some variety and while the focus is to be fun oRvR, they should still give the choice of doing something else.
It's good that more is going to be done to encourage RvR. I have a lvl 30 zealot and a lvl 20 squig herder and have only ever managed to join a warband for a keep siege battle three times in the whole time I've been playing. There are clearly insufficient incentives for people to bother at the moment. Unless someone takes it upon themselves to organise a warband and to keep spamming regional chat to get others to join, it just doesn't happen.
Having said that, I can't understand people who are anti PvE and scenarios. To my mind, it's the variety of the game that makes it fun to play. Better RvR would be good but not at the expense of fun PvE and scenarios. Everything has its place and it's great to have choices.
Not that any of this matters much to me at the moment . I'm back playing LotRO for the first time in a year and had forgotten just how much there is to do there compared with the other games I've played since. My new Rune Keeper is likely to keep me busy for the next couple of months so I may drop WAR for now. It's definitely likely to be one of the few games where I've dropped my subscription and gone back to it later though.
Mythic has such a huge disconnect from the pvp/rvr scene its unbelievable.
HELLO, its not the fame thats the problem, its the whole design of rvr offered in Warhammer, Its pathetic.
Its liner and static. Static siege pads, knock on the door kill the keep lord wash rince and repeat. Its boring and repetitive.
The keep will always be there, you cant destroy one or build anything on the keep except siege engines that are poorly implemented, and most times have blocked view from its perspective overlooking the field. The dmg is pathetic on them.
Siege once and thats how it is for the rest. boring.
There is no WAR in Warhammer. Unless you change the core design of the rvr in Warhammer, nothing you do is going to work. The foundation is built poorly.
It doesnt matter what i type, they wont listen... Its like a deaf and a blind person trying to play i spy...
Thank god Darkfall is so close to release.. There will be war there for sure. And no stupid lvling system..
I think they pretty much addressed everything about RvR without actually addressing the problem. The problem isn't that there's not enough rewards and goodies for doing RvR. There's RvR gear sets with some good blues (some are better than others..). You don't need to have tangible rewards in a faction-based game that's supposed to be about PvP and crushing the opposition. You were going to do PvP anyway because this is at its heart a PvP game; the real fun is there and everyone knows it.
The root of the problem with oRvR is that there's no reason to defend anything. You get a measly 100 renown every so often for defending a keep. Aside from tangible rewards, taking a keep doesn't do anything really in the global context. In DAoC, taking keeps was how you ended up taking relics from the opposing faction. Relics were powerful and worth taking or defending. In tier 4, you'll see more defense going on than other tiers as the opposition moves into striking distance because nobody wants their city to get taken, nobody wants the enemy to push the front and gain an advantage. It's a battle for pride. Making all keep takes matter in a global or tier-based context towards some sort of goal would go a long way towards making oRvR more vibrant at all levels. Only when losing a keep actually hurts or matters at all levels will people consistently want to defend them. Adding more rewards in is a band-aid at best, and a reason for someone to participate for a while.. mostly to sit around and get rewards.
WAR has frequently designed its systems to be about spontaneous community. These design changes are in keeping with what they've done previously, but they don't provide the reason to care that people really want. oRvR will be just a big PQ, experience giveaway and loot jamboree. What my friends and others in my guild would really like is for there to be a reason beyond sheer pride or loot for taking or defending something -- something that builds community and is so important that when someone IMs you and says "ORDER IS ON THE LAST KEEP IN PRAAG!" you drop whatever you were doing and join the WAR.
No mention at all about the dozens upon dozens of Low pop servers. Frankly, that's the biggest blow to RvR.
I'd like to see a few things.
-remove siege pads, they limit siege and are horribly placed.
-make siege useful (other than a ram.) At least give siege a knockback factor or something...at least it would be fun to knock people off of the walls (pesky casters.)
- Add open world dungeons in rvr land that factions could fight over/in.
- add mobs and epic mobs in rvr lands to fight. (increased exp/loot) to give people something to do while waiting for people to show up and fight.
- make owning a keep useful. Give an exp boost or something to guild members that own a keep, or an option to upgrade keep defenses, etc. and so on.
- Figure out a way to make rvr lakes bigger, they are so small right now that all fights take place at the keep or at the warcamps.
- Add a reason and room for small group fighting rather than just supporting zerg warfare.
First an aside, there've been so many people whining about low pop servers and in the same breath complaining about migration. I understand people holding either view but get confused by those that seem to hold both. how does that work? hopefully more low pop servers will be offered the opportunity to migrate to med pop servers. if you then choose to remain with friends fine but please accept a choice has been made.
This announcement seems great news. I loved ORvR. Went to fight order on a med pop server to get killed and hopefully get a hundred order as well in the recent halloween event. Nobody there. Went back to select scens. One immediately popped for our trio. We basically switched from waiting in Org in WoW to waiting in a deserted battlefield in WAR for scens to pop.
I don't really blame people though. I spent a few evening attempting to capture T2 keeps. Sometimes we succeeded but often were repelled. One thing that was guaranteed not to happen was that we gained much xp. Glad to see that's being adjusted and this can only be good news. I am about to cancel my subscription and explore northrend but it's nice to know that it'll be worth retrying in a couple of months. Looks like i'll be back.
Finally a whine. Now I know this is a team game but I just wish they'd rebalance healer renown. I realise that lotsa healing doesn't equal a good healer. Popping group heals on tanks while the rest die does not make a good healer and I know of people who seemed to be renown grinding that way. But to be so dependent on other's kills where destro regularly pop with one healer to order's four and get no renown meant I re-rolled sorcerer. assuming i am not the only one to reroll this has worsened a problem for order.
Maybe its to encourage people to roll order? I don't know. Just seems to imbalance in favour of pre-mades the already unlevel playing field a little too much. Maybe I'm just a whining casual and should just shut up but I'd liked the fact the lower level fights did not relate to gear so much and gave new players a chance.
seems to me too little too late, at least for EU servers that don't have transfers and are empty now. By the time these changes hit live, most likely there will be even less players left so it won't matter any more. I hope I am wrong...
Daily quests.. thats new.. oh wait. And yet more rank style grinding... must be the answer to everything.
Everything else sounds ok, But I still think there needs to be less Keeps to help concentrate the RVR. Might check it out if they do a "come back ot war for 10days free" type of trial.
This is how I think RVR should work
lvl1 = flightmaster, no vendors,no NPCs, no keep bosses
lvl 2 = same as lvl, 2 defensive pads, basic venders, some NPC defenders
lvl 3 = same as lvl 3, 2 additional defence pads, special vendors, more NPC's, KEEP boss
With each lvl the area around the keep expands with more ramparts and NPC's
Just an idea.
I think you should play it before you make any proclamations. People were Gungho about Vanguard, Gungho about Conan, Gungho about Warhammer.
Players have become their own worst enemy in creatng these impossible expectations only to find out that the reality can be quite different.
Darkfall "May" bring a better war system and though it doesn't have leveling systems I'm sure it has some sort of system for advancing your character. So you are still going to have to deal with that.
As far as Warhammer goes, I think the problem is not just "not enough carrots" but also players have no direct incentive to take a keep.
What they could have done was have it so that not only do you get some rewards, it also makes it difficult for the losing faction to "do something". Not sure if it's a negative to xp or increased prices, etc. But there has to be something where if the loser doesn't take the keep he is going to be slightly inconvenienced.
However, there then needs to be a system where the longer one holds a keep the more difficult it is for them to keep the "keep". Otherwise you can have one side that is so powerful there is no way to break it and then the opposing team will just give up and quit.
For some reason it works very well in Lineage 2 but the sieges are only once every two weeks. There are of course the fortress battles which you can take every few hours but those have an odd implementation where the winner eventually gets kicked out after a few days regardless if they can be ousted.
Greeting fellow ASC friend
now to Mark Jacob topic, I think this annoucment is great, great news. It is what Warhammer needs. Good things are in motion, although I can see some of you still have to reply negativly to good news
.
Ive been playing WAR for about a month now, and I think the first and most important fix to the "no oRvR in lower tiers" problem would big a bunch of big fat server merges. THEN start working on optimizing the maps, xp etc.. There is no oRvR because there ARENT ENOUGH PPL IN THE FREAKING ZONES.
Quotes from Mark:
Our goal is to ensure that oRvR is the place where players can level the fastest, get the best items and overall, have a great time while doing it.
Finally, we will begin work on a global oRvR “Fame” system that will be tied directly to the Tome of Knowledge which will provide more rewards, titles, experience, etc. for participating and being successful in oRvR.
Free server moves have been available for weeks now.
I will repeat myself over and over again until Mythic prove me wrong: With every patch they are announcing, they are IMHO (!) addressing exactly the right things. I like to bitch about things in WAR as well, but I am hopeful for the future, because to my mind Mythic has been extraordinarily receptive to feedback from players, so far.
In the US not in Europe.
In the US not in Europe.
They are available in Europe as well since Monday, get your facts right. Sure, not all servers have them so far but more stages of free character moves are planned. Get those negative pads out of your eyes and stop being pessimistic about every single thing.
There are more than enough people for good RvR in pretty much all tiers on the server I play on. The problem is that people don't see doing RvR as a priority outside of tier4 because its not great experience and they just want to level up. Once somebody lights the tinderbox by taking a keep or two, you start seeing people coming out of the woodwork to help take or defend the other keeps. They need more fires around the tinderbox, and they need it to light much faster.. people see oRvR going on and respond with "eh" because they'd rather be leveling. My experience in T4 has been that people start valuing oRvR highly.
During a tier 4 fortress take attempt, basically all of tier 4 was lagging out because of the 100+ vs. 100+ battle going on in Order's fortress. It's not that the people aren't there, they're just not motivated to participate.
The objectives also need to have a major impact on the RvR lake. A faction should want at least half of them before they go assaulting the keep. Right now you can just skip them and its no big deal. The keep take should not be about repelling them in the Keep Lord's room, either. The typical defense scenario is: sit in the keep lord's room and use the NPCs to back you up while you snipe at the enemy and wait for the gates to come back.
I completely agree, and i wanted to add. Remember, 2 years after development started mythic anounced that they were introducing keeps because the players complained the there was not enough to do in Open RVR. That is 1 year after release.
It's just stupid, they planed to make a RVR centred game with no open RvR?
I dont understand why everyones bitching that nothings being done when this letter is telling you what is being done to improve the oRvR, over PvE and scenarios, because thats what WAR is all about. The game has been out for almost 3 months, give it time. If you don't like PvP, don't play WAR.