My experience and review of RoR

[Coocooclock]

I wish the game was more solo friendly, because at the current state this game will only draw dedicated people with no daytime business
to attend to.

With all due respect could you define what you mean by "solo friendly"? Because to me, players are not solo unless you are able to:

Hold 2 battlefield objectives alone
Run all the boxes to level your keep alone
Spawn a ram and cannons alone
Take them to enemy keep alone
Knockdown both keep doors alone
Kill the keep lord alone
Capture the keep and all flags alone
All of this while defending yourself from enemies even if its 1 or 2 wbs. You must be alone!

Now if you can do all of that alone then i will happily call you a solo player. But until then you have to recognize that others are out there and the reason that you get renown points for capturing a keep or a zone. It is because others were helping. You did not do it alone. So to say your a solo player when really others helped you get this renown points seems inconsiderate and disrespectful.

Anyone can be in a 1vs1 fight and kill an enemy player. Even i can. But that doesn't mean i gloat about it or try and label myself as a solo player. That is just an ego that some players have.

[Gorezog]

The current ORVR setup is pure trash, literally the worst iteration of what realm war went through on live but it was something that functions which was the main concern at the time it was put in.

Its trash but it functions and its better than nothing.

Problem is people are lazy, sheep like and dont like change so while I am sure the developers know the realm war setup is garbage personified to change it takes a vision, drive and lots of work. Then after all that work you just know the forums will be filled with people whining about having to do something else differently be it guarding an objective or whatever.

Im sure it will change eventually but it will take someone with a passion for making it and thick enough skin to ride out the waves of whine from the lazy blobbers.

[Wuhh]

It's an old story but the scenario queue needs some help.
The people who want to play in teams of 6 are farming pug opposition by choice too easily. This is a way to drive away new players who don't have the experience or gear to play in a way they can enjoy, like some can when scenarios are going the surrender at 11min without doubt. The weekend event becomes something negative for the newer people who do not have the friend/guild base to grow into a part of such a team if they want to.

Surely it is time to make the event scenario pop under the discordant queue random selection rules on a weekend? Forget any matchmaking comments, or anything else for now, just do that and see how the feeling of new players and soloers improves for weekend events. Making a dedicated solo queue for event wouldn't work well probably.

Orvr is another story, harder to suggest a simple change. But we can already see that groups of all sizes can enjoy orvr depending on the team and what their playstyle would be. The campaign flows fairly well, it doesn't seem to stall so easily and end in 18hour stalemate in 1 zone. But people do like changes for fun improvement. Testing new orvr mechanics as part of an event is a way to try some of the more creative ideas.

I played live and since 2017 I think, so I have enjoyed many variations on the game.

[Culexus]

The same problem always arises with the solo argument. Solo players expect to experience the game the way it was intended to be experienced, with coordinated groups with 2/2/2 group setups, but expect that to happen while they, and everyone around them, is playing their own solo game. Since that doesn't happen, they get mad at the game for not providing them with good content, rather than looking at their own actions and adjusting them.

This is a sandbox game, players make the content. Groups and warbands don't function without someone leading them and the players knowing their role and following. If nobody is leading, there's nothing for solo players to do. Like it or not, solo players are completely reliant on others to provide them with good PvP content, just as others are reliant on them. This is why joining an active guild is one of the best pieces of advice a new player can receive. If a player doesn't want to join a guild as they don't want the commitment, simply joining discord warbands/groups when they are up is a good substitute. No need to talk, just listen. If someone is looking for members for a scenario group /5, join it. The amount of players that continue to get farmed solo queuing scenarios whilst someone is unable to fill a scenario party is /5 is astounding, and happens every week.

To experience what this game has to offer a player has to engage in group content and play as a group. If a player only plays the game solo in open warbands/ scs they're more than likely going to think the game sucks and leave, without ever having experience what the game can offer and why it's so loved by so many. That's not to say OP doesn't have a point and the team shouldn't implement changes to help, but the main content of the game will always be player-driven, and no amount of changes by the devs can change that.

[ShadowWar]

Solo and small scale is the essence of this game.

Hard disagree. The entire design of the game is large scale combat. Keep sieges, territory control, etc... I don't know what world anyone would get an idea like this from actually playing the game.

And I agree the most fun aspect of playing. Now we have the blob, which is, in my opinion, the least fun aspect of the game. I mean come on, anyone can blob.

Now we have opinion with a side of derision, but at least you admit it's opinion.

Very few games do open world, large scale PvP well. It's the main distinguishing aspect of this game that sets it apart from others.

I do believe the devs could, and have done things to help make it more interesting. For example, being able to retake a keep after it flips is something that was never in live, and it forces the blob to break up. Forcing ownership of 3 BOs at flip also allows for small scale, decentralized warfare.

[Hazmy]

A couple of WB Leaders, Guild Masters and players were having a similar discussion recently on a Guild Discord, regarding blobbing, the state of RvR and low quality gameplay getting worse and worse - players only looking for easy rewards.

I'd like to quote Only's response that the majority of us agreed about what might be causing the current terrible trend of RvR and the server:

I think the downfall of scenarios is why the current player quality is drastically worse.
I learned how to play the game in scenarios. And even if I was losing hard sometimes, the different maps and different matchups were always motivating me to keep going. Especially with the old duo quo and how fun that was.

New players lack that. At best they join a warband and are expected to click some AOE buttons to win. Can't become better like that.

I believe the lack of Scenarios and a fix for its matchmaking is causing a much bigger issue for the server than anyone is remotely realizing, and it is a snowball effect that keeps touching all aspects of RoR.

[Aethilmar]

A couple of WB Leaders, Guild Masters and players were having a similar discussion recently on a Guild Discord, regarding blobbing, the state of RvR and low quality gameplay getting worse and worse - players only looking for easy rewards.

I'd like to quote Only's response that the majority of us agreed about what might be causing the current terrible trend of RvR and the server:

I think the downfall of scenarios is why the current player quality is drastically worse.
I learned how to play the game in scenarios. And even if I was losing hard sometimes, the different maps and different matchups were always motivating me to keep going. Especially with the old duo quo and how fun that was.

New players lack that. At best they join a warband and are expected to click some AOE buttons to win. Can't become better like that.

I believe the lack of Scenarios and a fix for its matchmaking is causing a much bigger issue for the server than anyone is remotely realizing, and it is a snowball effect that keeps touching all aspects of RoR.

+1

Although I still don't think matchmaking is the problem with scenarios. There used to be more of a balance between kill-kill-kill scenarios and objective-based scenarios. Changing this was a deliberate decision and where there used to be scenarios where you could "compete" by focusing on objectives now you basically have to fight no matter how badly outclassed you are. Adding to this are things like removing spawn guards and adding barriers to force the action when you are clearly outmatch and it removes almost all incentive to put up a fight. This, more than "bad matchmaking" is not newbie friendly.

And this "reward the kill" design pilosophy is directly related to the "reward the blob" mentality for zones. The difficulty level for playing the outnumered side scales exponentially with the population difference but the rewards (or penalties if you on zerg side) only scale linearly. This naturally incentives zerg play because it is trivally easy to get twice the rewards (or more) compared to someone who is trying to put up some resistance on the underdog side. And since "a kill is a kill" you just blob up and spam AOE to get your rewards.

[Reivren27]

Solo and small scale is the essence of this game.

Hard disagree. The entire design of the game is large scale combat. Keep sieges, territory control, etc... I don't know what world anyone would get an idea like this from actually playing the game.

And I agree the most fun aspect of playing. Now we have the blob, which is, in my opinion, the least fun aspect of the game. I mean come on, anyone can blob.

Now we have opinion with a side of derision, but at least you admit it's opinion.

Very few games do open world, large scale PvP well. It's the main distinguishing aspect of this game that sets it apart from others.

I do believe the devs could, and have done things to help make it more interesting. For example, being able to retake a keep after it flips is something that was never in live, and it forces the blob to break up. Forcing ownership of 3 BOs at flip also allows for small scale, decentralized warfare.

Alas, but here are the most boring sieges of all the mmorpgs that exist and rvr as a whole is banal and has absolutely no depth.

[Zalgor]

Scenarios

Something that's become increasingly prevalent in scenarios is people complaining about "doing PvE" if you split up on objectives. I have never experienced that kind of mentality in other similar games that have "battleground" type content. I enjoy scenarios that encourage you to split up on different objectives, so the action is spread out a bit. It's good to have a healthy mix of scenarios of course, some that are more focused on fighting in one spot. Right now people often just ignore objectives, so many scenarios become a fight in one spot often leading to a slaughter with one side quickly giving up. I can't remember this kind of mentality being a thing in WAR either previously.

Personally I think kills are rewarded far too much in scenarios and is what leads to this kind of mentality of just wanting to fight in one spot, while ignoring objectives. I believe winning scenarios should be the main goal and the main source of rewards, getting kills helps you greatly in achieving the goal of winning but shouldn't be rewarded so heavily. Another issue is that many scenarios are one-sided, which isn't fun even if you are on the winning side, in my opinion. From what I understand the devs are working on a solution to make scenarios more evenly matched.

I think scenarios could reward more renown than they do currently, while leveling up at least. If you want a high renown rank when reaching lvl 40, you need to do a lot of ORvR while leveling in my experience.

ORvR

It's good that ORvR offers a place for new - or less skilled/geared/organised - players to earn rewards. It would be great if it could be made more fun than the current state of blob warfare of course. It's problematic that if both factions are evenly matched then defending a keep is much easier than sieging and taking a keep. A third faction would of course be a great solution, so the two underdogs could join forces against the dominant faction but I doubt that is realistic on this server. Having the action spread out more in the RvR zones would be great and ideally catering to solo, small scale and warband play at the same time.

I believe it is very important that ORvR remains a good source of rewards for new - or less skilled/geared/organised - players however. If more tryhard, high skill content is added, it shouldn't be at the expense of the previously mentioned players.

[Estufa]

I found out two years ago that this server exists and made an account. Being a long time Warhammer fan and having worked some time with minis for Games Workshop in my youth I had no choice. I've had extensive experience with mmo's and always enjoyed competion the most.

Having aprox 1 h per day and a few more for weekends I find it extremely tough to find any kind of skill based pvp. It's always the same story about numbers and "Get a Warband going". Most warbands just wait and wait and wait, until I feel like I'm at the local tax office. Other times it's simply pub stomping galore. Scenarios used to be what I enjoyed the most at launch, because there were so many in line I met different teams every match. SC's are simply an exploit for those that have a lot get more than a lot. The dungeons are as hard as watching paint dry.

The current meta seems to be all about chasing away new players and new ideas. I love the idea of you maintaining the game, but remember it was made in its original state for a lot more concurrent players than what we have now.

I wish the game was more solo friendly, because at the current state this game will only draw dedicated people with no daytime business
to attend to.

At least—considering the one hour a day of play time—you can get bis gear in... a year?