Life changes and so does RoR, my daily game time has gone from a solid 6-8 hours a day to a measly 0-2, and RoR has in the same period greatly reduced "baseline" renown gain in favour of kill based.
These two factors combined have impacted my enjoyment of the game, to a point where I could not be bothered to log in as often.
I came back for the 2X week and finally I felt that old sense of progression again, which in turn made me wonder how long (in game) it takes to reach 80.
DATA & METHOD & REASONING
Spoiler:
1. Rested Renown
This is the biggest win you could possibly do. All functions of Rested XP is mirrored (except it does stop at R40)
Currently Rested XP punishes casuals/low play time by under levelling RR, when the whole point of it is to encourage taking breaks and coming back, it's also only relevant for about 25% of a character's journey to 80.
Rested Renown will:
a. combat the ill effects of Rested XP.
b. give an ongoing incentive to come back and not overplay, that's always active.
c. encourage alting for those that play a lot
d. Reduce overall time needed to R80 (potentially by half for those with low play time)
e. make the Guild Halls as a hub/logout area slightly more valuable
At this point, you don't have to do more, but there's still other things to address..
The gap between winning and losing is too big, this is mainly due to rewards being tied so heavily to kills, this leads to extreme situations where the dominating side gets 50-100X MORE than the losing side.
This gives the winning side incentive to farm the others for kills while dragging out the SC as much as possible, and gives the losing side incentive to avoid fights and surrender as fast as possible.
And is incredibly, insanely unfriendly to new players and a waste of time for those hardened to it... in a game with ZERO matchmaking...
2. SC renown updates
a. 100 renown per minute is baseline
b. top contribution now gives 1k, 2nd 750, 3rd 500, 4th 250
c. no surrender gives 500
d. capping BOs gives 250
e. all renown from kills on both sides is pooled and divided out at the end. A 0-500 win will give a 30-70 split, a 499-500 will give a 49.9-50.1 split.
Yes, this means you can do 30-0 kills and get less renown than the enemy if you actually lose the sc 200-500.
I appreciate that changes were made to encourage fighting (BO removal/chaining), but please go back to ranked. I've provided solutions for making ranked great again previously (link below).
3. RvR renown updates
same as SC, RvR suffers now from missing a baseline progression and has similarly gone from 40-50% from kills to 70-80%, this means unless you are actively killing (winning), which means any pugs or undergeared wbs that usually get stomped, end up feeling like a waste of time.
So bring back BO defence ticks (the ones you'd get for running near BOs) and include a crest or two with them.
I don't really mind the nerfs to boxes and keep/fort/zone locks, especially if Rested Renown gets implemented, but a 20% increase wouldn't hurt.
Before going on to the next idea, I just want to explain the issue with having a big gap between winning and losing;
if you have a lot of play time each day, you are very unlikely not to experience both win and loss, averaging out to a decent experience (maybe even great with valleys and peaks)
but if all you have is an hour or two, chances are you will be stuck in the valley and feel like you just wasted your time.
Progression IS the content/carrot (more so than the odd dungeon or sc that gets released once a year), so to balance out these ~100% renown increase, a final set changes:
4. New Game +
A Renown RESET Vendor will be made available in the capital.
Here you can set your renown back to 1 in exchange for a special voucher(s).
a. you get 1 voucher approx every 8M renown, this turns out to be R80,90,95 and 100, so if you want you to go above 80 or already are, you can keep going.
b. The voucher can be exchanged for various goods:
2500 war crests
Trophies that gives 20% exp, inf or renown
Trophies that increase or reduce your model size by 5%.
Stat exchange trophies -10 wounds, +1% crit. And cosmetics.
c. titles for each reset
d. either the voucher or the items should be BoA (and not necessarily BoE), if the Voucher is BoA you could transfer crests (certain classes are a lot more crest hungry than others, so not a bad way of doing it)
I'm not decided on if CR should be reset too, leaning on NOT, as it would introduce twinks to low tiers, but probably either is fine.
The vendor would need a pop up warning and maybe like having to type in "Reset My Renown".
But however it gets implemented, players now have an option to go back to level for progression if they get to R80 too fast.
5. 2X Event adjustments
To counteract these renown buffs 2X Events going forward will be for Crests and Influence (no longer include Renown or XP).
6. Crests updates
I also believe that crest gain should be upped by 25-50% across the board, as most classes can spend 50-80k crests to be fully unlocked (yes, 10-20k is enough for one BIS set, but that already takes the same time as getting 80 ranks)
Won't go into details here, but simply adding more crests sinks should be enough.
New armour sets that changes/allows different playstyles, expensive consumables, cosmetics, etc.
previous suggestions for crests sinks (armour sets):
viewtopic.php?t=47721
previous suggestions for crests increases:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=50268
7. Alternatively..
If you don't want any of these changes, maybe after R50 reduce renown required to R80 by half.
Either way, any or all of these changes would be a very welcome addition, especially as you start playing around with abilities again, potentially breaking loved specs that people have spent years on.
Alright, thanks for reading and considering if you made it this far.