My experience trying to play this god awful game

[Alfa1986]

Was it EA who decided on the two-faction system, thus causing population inbalances on almost every server? Or the "ward" system which required sheer luck to actually progress through content (PVE set pieces dropping in dungeons for classes that weren't even in the dungeon... amazing. Needing keep gold bags for a chance of progression... amazing)? Or the utterly horrific class balance and AOE damage that was fixed far too late into the game's life (playing on EU where bomb warbands reigned supreme was an experience)? Those issues and the server lag were the main reasons I remember people quitting the game over. Was it was EA execs who designed the amazingly well balanced and universally praised RR100 armour sets too (lol Warpforged slayers soloing lower-level parties thanks to that proc)?

I'm sure EA pulling resources off WAR for whatever (SWTOR?) hurt the game, but let's not trick ourselves into believing that Mythic didn't **** the bed repeatedly with some of the design decisions for WAR. And it's not like Mark Jacobs has issues with overpromising or delivering projects on time or anything...

What was wrong with the two faction system? And how else can the rvr-style game format be implemented? 3-4 fractions? It would be an even bigger mess.
If you remember, it was very difficult to get the rvr set above conq on release, since the pieces from the sets fell only from gold bags from the forts/ city stages. PVE sets were a good alternative, and they were assembled faster even with the absolutely ugly random system of dropping items from bosses in the dungeons. The only thing that can be blamed on the designers is the ill-conceived huge pve areas in each zone, which, after reaching level 40, become useless, non active and empty.

3 factions works fine - if one gets too big then the others gang up on it. It already worked in DAOC which is why people confused when WAR went to a 2 faction system as it's not like Warhammer is short on factions. It's also the system used for Planetside, GW2's open world pvp (at least it was - no idea how it works now but initially servers were grouped together in blocks of 3 to fight each other), and so on. And yes PVE sets were an alternative, but again this relied on having a 1 in 12 chance of getting a drop because the set piece could be for a class not in your own party. Very frustrating to do dungeon runs trying to get up a party/guild and have runs - with lockouts - where nobody in the party was able to progress. My IB was stuck on 4/5 pieces of one of the wards for faaaaaar to long as I just could not get the chest to drop from anywhere. Many guildies were also stuck due to bad RNG on loot drops. I'm fine having random drops, but there needs to be a fall-back system for continued bad luck (much like ROR's dungeon quests).

And yes the empty PVE zones was another big waste of resources. I used to play on an Open RVR server so it provided some distraction to go roaming and look for fights out of the main lakes but after a while the fights just became random ganks and boring. Shame as some of the PVE areas look really cool too.

I have no idea how it could have been organized in that system that was presented. then it was better to make not three factions, but 6, by race, and each race would be by itself with its own capital where the forts are now located. races could forge alliances among themselves, and attack other alliances and races). that would be really more interesting.

[Onigokko0101]

This. EA was the cause for rushed release and unplayable oRvR lag wasting the 1 million subs on release. EA always kills games.

Was it EA who decided on the two-faction system, thus causing population inbalances on almost every server? Or the "ward" system which required sheer luck to actually progress through content (PVE set pieces dropping in dungeons for classes that weren't even in the dungeon... amazing. Needing keep gold bags for a chance of progression... amazing)? Or the utterly horrific class balance and AOE damage that was fixed far too late into the game's life (playing on EU where bomb warbands reigned supreme was an experience)? Those issues and the server lag were the main reasons I remember people quitting the game over. Was it was EA execs who designed the amazingly well balanced and universally praised RR100 armour sets too (lol Warpforged slayers soloing lower-level parties thanks to that proc)?

I'm sure EA pulling resources off WAR for whatever (SWTOR?) hurt the game, but let's not trick ourselves into believing that Mythic didn't **** the bed repeatedly with some of the design decisions for WAR. And it's not like Mark Jacobs has issues with overpromising or delivering projects on time or anything...

A lot of it was EA, yes. There is a whole youtube video on it, having trouble finding it though.

Maybe not a lot of the stuff after release, but pre-release to release had a ton of issues because of EA.