Is RoR realisticly still a campaign game?

[gersy]

It's crazy how some people can misconstrue any information given, no matter how well or obviously presented. I won't reply individually, because most of the replies aren't worth that, but rather make a final, blanket statement.

It wasn't my intent with my post to say that the older systems were better in all ways. It was merely my intent to highlight the ripple effects of past changes and how they have affected the game both directly and indirectly - whether someone has perceived it to do so or not.

It is clear that the game has stemmed in an incredibly different direction than it was originally intended, largely due to 2 or 3 major changes. As I stated in my original post there has been a clearly visible degradation of both community elements (guilds, alliances, smallman teams, overall coordination/organized) and the skill floor/ceiling of almost all players especially newer players. This degradation is directly caused by unified currency, the lessening of importance of the game campaign and the reward structure combined.

Creating a server wide environment where players are no longer encouraged to engage in baseline elements of the genre, game itself and franchise was, in my opinion, a questionable decision. Making things "easier" can be fine but if it comes at the cost of future enjoyment of many and the exodus of a near entire portion of the player base (being those who quit or take extended breaks due to the game not being competitive or skill based anymore) then it is not worth it.

It created a pug/blob paradise. Some may claim to enjoy this but in reality most often I find those same players making complaints about the game consistently. I believe the overall sentiment gathered from reading these forums, official discord, my own friend groups and their guilds and other sources (both casual and competitive players) is that the state of most game systems like campaign, city and SCs is and has been very poor for a while now.

It was also not my intent to call for some reversion to previous systems. Obviously it is impossible to go back on unified currency. Merely to take some inspiration from them for the future to attempt to create a healthier environment for the game going forward. It is important to learn from the past so you do not repeat the same mistakes. It is not, however, impossible to rework existing game systems for the betterment of all players.

Give players a reason to play the game outside of logging in and joining an unorganized blob and spamming 2 keybinds. A reason to coordinate, group up, make friends, learn and improve. Those elements are the core of the genre and the game itself. Elements which are mostly lost at this point.

[Blorke]

It created a pug/blob paradise. Some may claim to enjoy this but in reality most often I find those same players making complaints about the game consistently. I believe the overall sentiment gathered from reading these forums, official discord, my own friend groups and their guilds and other sources (both casual and competitive players) is that the state of most game systems like campaign, city and SCs is and has been very poor for a while now.

I fully agree with you that city sieges are practically dead and scenarios were in a bad spot for almost as long as this server is up, at this point we can actually see the rework of matchmaking system being done and hopefully implemented within the next months (fingers crossed). With that being said, I dont want to further discuss SCs, atleast not before the new matchmaking is up, there will be enough time to do so and who knows if city sieges will also profit from the new matchmaking system and some additional reworks, with or without unique rewards. I'd rather take LoTD as a campaing, because you have to actually do something if you want to participate in it by getting enough expedition ressources and there is still the unreleased tyrant set waiting somewhere in the distant future hopefully.

The blob situation on the other hand is a different beast. It has to be tackled long before discussing what campaign this game needs. First you would need to take a closer look on lockout timers. I think the timer ultimately does more harm than good. It's either reducing it to maybe 30min or completely removing it. Give the players a free choice to switch a lá "hey, your faction starts having much, much more numbers, you can stay an get your easy kills BUT crest are heavily reduced, RR/inf is heavily reduced and your chances for bag rolls are next to zero" or "switch now to the underdog and get a nice buff for crests, RR/inf and bag rolls". What we see with timers in its current rendition is that the blob is constantly migrating from one faction to the other as a whole. It like having traffic lights be on red for 1 1/2 hrs, all the cars are starting to pile up and as soon as it goes to green, you have a big tide being unleashed all at ones. Something that was made to regulate now just causes more chaos by clogging up the streets, if you get my point.

It was also not my intent to call for some reversion to previous systems. Obviously it is impossible to go back on unified currency. Merely to take some inspiration from them for the future to attempt to create a healthier environment for the game going forward. It is important to learn from the past so you do not repeat the same mistakes. It is not, however, impossible to rework existing game systems for the betterment of all players.

I know what you meant, don't worry. But still I have to disagree, because the unified currency has not made the game easier. It made the leveling and gearing process of more alts much easier and less tedious which, in the end, gave players more purpose in the long run by having more archtypes available.

Give players a reason to play the game outside of logging in and joining an unorganized blob and spamming 2 keybinds. A reason to coordinate, group up, make friends, learn and improve. Those elements are the core of the genre and the game itself. Elements which are mostly lost at this point.

Those reasons are still in here. I don't know if you are still on a break or just came from one, but you can still do all those things you deem non existant and I really don't know where you get this impression from that everyone™ just logs to spam two buttons and call it a day, but based on your argument that "players making complaints" (probably the same handful of usual suspects with a preference to be overly dramatic when things don't go their way) the majority are still making friends, group up in various grp sizes and coordinate together while having actual fun doing so, even if they happen to be on the losing side. Can you believe that? While I don't want to discredit your opinion or the opinion of your friends you play and talk with, but they are not the whole player base.

[MaxHayman]

Hey,

Just to let you know we will be reading the feedback and suggestions in this topic for some future plans to do with the campaign. The feedback is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Max

[Pahakukka]

I want to add, that this evenings shadowland was horrible nightmare slugfest between keep and unicorn UNTIL ram was spawned, keep captured and then it still took good part of hour of fighting between BO's, coordinating warbands and holding keep which was fun exciting and felt purposeful. In the end order was maybe a second late with their recapture and zone locked as they wiped our keep holders. We need the rvr to feel more like this, and less single minded tug-o-war between camps. even tho there was the zerg elements, they had purpose and goals.

We were there as 5-man and I felt that we actively participated to zonelock by capping BO's and preventing ninja capping where our WBs were figting elsewhere

this was maybe around 9pm onwards eu time Dec 26th if someone wants to pull some stats out of it, or look at heatmaps or whatever.

[leondre25]

The blobbing we see now is the same blobbing we had back then. I’m primarily a pug player because I can’t be bothered to play at scheduled times. People blob now because it’s the most efficient way to progress. Pugs blobbed back then too, often using RDPS to leech rewards from organized warbands. And then those same pugs would get farmed in cities, assuming you were even in a timezone that allowed you to participate.

The current situation is healthier overall, but less fun for highly coordinated players. For everyone else, it’s basically always been the same. We never had that level of coordination, and we never had the “big city” payoff to look forward to. It was just blob gameplay then, and it still is now.

To me, the real issue is that coordinated groups are bored and need something meaningful to do. Bringing cities back to their old state isn’t the solution. Personally, I don’t want a system where you have to log in during work hours or fall behind on progression entirely.

Is there a solution somewhere? Yeah, I think there probably is. But the old campaign absolutely sucked! for me, at least. I’m only speaking for myself.

we should start looking at how zones play out. maybe more measures to break blobs? then from there we should look at the greater/wider campaign.

[Fey]

Just speaking as a veteran player whose guild has all quit playing, the LotD fights appeal to me more than the city sieges. Back in the day when my guild could run a strong six man plus a few others, city was a viable option. We had some really, really fun fights. Over time the city siege became stomp or be stomped as smaller guild groups became fewer giving way to PuGs. I haven't done one in years. LotD on the other hand is the epic open world rvr that appeals to me as a seasoned pug.

The final few city sieges I participated in were just C@ncer: as an 80+ with an organized WB, or a pug nobody.

I'm not sure what my point is exactly, other than to say I will likely never play another city siege ever. On the other hand I will look out for and join the LotD events.

[wtfprogram]

Once upon a time i saw a region take over 24 hours to be captured. I wasn't online that long but i logged out and then came back to play about 12 hours later and a friend said the fight is still for the same place as yesterday. And then i played mostly scenarios for a few hours and i when i respawned back into orvr the fighting was still in the same region. I prefer scenarios anyday to campaign. The campaign takes too long thereby

[Hecksa]

I think the topic here has got a little scrambled, so to begin I'll start with the question that Bombling asked:

"Have the Campaign become too meaningless and no longer serve as the main motivator?"

I think we can all admit that very few players are primarily motivated to fight by "winning the campaign".

Bombling makes a bunch of valid points explaining this - I won't reiterate them - and I'm with him, right up until this:

I would urge and love for the RoR tealm to prioritize making RvR and the Campaign especially the main focus of 2026, pretty please!

I think this is subtly and very slightly the wrong direction.

Before I go into detail, I think there's a real risk I might be just playing word games with Bombling's point here, so, just to be certain, I want to ask what we mean by "Campaign".

By "Campaign", do you specifically mean a "grand" campaign, where progression from one zone to another is important? Where the desire to achieve this zone-to-zone progression is the core motivation and core source of reward / gearing, which is supposed to drive player behaviour in a positive direction?

If so, I worry that we create a lot of developer effort just revert back to the problems we had before. We're a worldwide, single server, and the reality of the different time zones and so on is that it's very difficult to create a meaningful "progression" that will enable people of all timezones - be they high or low pop - to have fun and get involved in all aspects of the game. It's also difficult to create fair and equitable reward for the outnumbered faction. I'm not against working towards a campaign that can deliver all of that slowly, over time but I think we should aim smaller first.

If not, do you more generically mean "A reason driving players to create interesting gameplay"? If so, I agree that this is where focus should fall.

Either way, I think the question I think we should be asking is "What's the easiest way (in terms of development effort) to improve the core RvR gameplay experience?"

Could a renewed "grand" campaign (as I have defined it) be the answer to that question? I don't think so. It's possible that we could improve the RvR experience that way, but I think it's likely to involve a lot of up-front development effort, and also likely to be a big single release that can't really be broken up into several parts, so we can't really fail-fast and try a different direction. So, it's a lot of effort, and a big risk with a big chance of failure.

Instead, I think we should focus on doing things that drive player behaviour on a per-map level. Some kind of way to easily and dynamically create...events...that could spawn with different effects...at various points..in the lakes...

Ok, obviously I'm talking about the events system, which I'm a big fan of. I believe it has a lot of potential to improve gameplay, if it goes in the right direction.

How could the events system help? Well, first of all we need to define the problem in a little more detail.

What is the good gameplay I think we are all mostly looking for? I'm glad you asked. I believe RvR players want regular, large scale fights which:

- Are generally reasonably balanced, or at least mostly are winnable - or at least if they aren't, it's because they- the player - made a mistake
- Fairly often become "fully committed", meaning everyone is 100% engaged and not daintily prodding in and out carefully looking for a retreat option if the battle starts turning against them. In other words, one side or the other is entirely or almost entirely wiped at the end.
- Are varied in location, purpose, outcome etc. So you might have fights where you are holding on to a BO trying to keep it until a timer ticks down, or where you are trying to retake a keep, or one where you're ambushing a larger force coming past you, or where you are being ambushed and have to react and get to a good position to respond before you're wiped, etc etc.

If anyone thinks I've missed something important here, or I'm way off base, I'd be interested to hear, but I feel like these are fairly generic ideals that most people coming to RvR are hoping for. Some players might have more expectations, but, I feel like these few concepts are relatively uncontroversial and universal.

At the very least, I make the claim that if everyone were experiencing fights like I describe in RvR every evening, there would not be nearly so much discontent with RvR gameplay, and we could then maybe consider adding campaign-like features on top (or maybe something entirely different, like weekly RvR seasons with rewards handed out based on number of "events won" or suchlike...I'm getting away from the main point here).

So, back to the question - how can the events system help achieve the goals I specified? Well, let's come up with some events that could generate each of the points:

- Balanced Fights
Events can resolve this in multiple ways. There are obvious options like buffing the weaker side, or adding NPCs. However, I think there are also more interesting ideas like creating an event where two simultaneous "defence" locations pop up for the more populated side, a decent distance from each other. They have to commit to either defending one (therefore giving up the opportunity to fully "win" the event) or split their forces, causing each point to be more capturable.

- Fully Committed Fights
The reason fights become "fully committed" is because players consider fighting to the death has a purpose. Back-and-forth in Praag means nothing - why would I throw my life away to hold this BO, when both keeps have been on 2 stars for hours with no realistic prospect of ranking up, and even if they did, no realistic prospect of successfully taking the keep? With events, we have the opportunity to create situations where holding strong and being wiped might cause you to win an event where pulling back would have meant losing. For example, a timed defence - prevent the enemy capturing this randomly-spawned object that takes 10 seconds to capture, for 2 minutes. Other events that could generate this kind of fight include escort-type quests (diving in to kill the escorted character/player carrying the object, even if you all wipe, is still an event win, so you get rewarded). There's more ideas but this post is already so long. I should probably write some stuff in the event suggestions thread sometime...

- Varied Fights
I think this one is fairly obvious. An escort event past several possible ambush locations invites ambush. A point defense event forces a defensive strategy at a possibly not-very-defensible position - forcing creative options to defend it. A capture-and-hold event where you need to grab an object and just hold onto it within a certain area for a while could lead to some entertaining gameplay too. There's just tonnes of possibilities here.

Now, for this to be fully effective, I think the target would be that we need a lot of events, and there basically needs to almost always be one or more events active in any given zone. Not all of them should seek to get the whole zone to take part, rather variety and choice should be the name of the game - forcing warband leaders to decide where their best chance for success is - in stopping the enemy succeeding in the escort quest that is about to wander past them, or maybe in going to defend that critical point that just spawned in. Or, perhaps, they can go and "start" an event of their own in some way, by visiting a BO and requesting a major supply delivery, and hence marking themselves on the map, or something.

This is a big vision, but it can be achieved incrementally, adding one event at a time and with each new event we can see if we're moving in a good direction or not.

And once we've got compelling, varied, fun engagements happening all day, every day, why not add a grand campaign on top - whether something inspired by the old system, or something entirely new?

But, I don't think that we need a "grand" campaign to have great gameplay.

TL;DR:
- We don't have a campaign that means anything much right now.
- We don't necessarily need a "grand" campaign where progressing from map-to-map matters in order to achieve more dynamic, balanced and varied RvR gameplay
- The events system lets us build toward this one event at a time, testing as we go.

[wonshot]

...it still took good part of hour of fighting between BO's, coordinating warbands and holding keep which was fun exciting and felt purposeful...

Agreed, we were there on order with some sub 40s, running a nonbalanced group and when the keeplord fell, our mindset despite our level, gear, composition the mindset automatically shifted into the "last stage of a zonelock" where the dominating side needs to spread out and hold the keepruin + 3/4BOs. Suddenly RP per hour was no longer the primery focus, gear didnt matter, and instead constantly checking State of Realm for the zone-lock timer, checking the map for the Crowns of the warband leaders, and reading region chat, while roaming and trying to contribute based on the situation and information felt so much more meaningful

(ill let that one be your indirect answer aswel, Hecksa)

But I guess what I did wonder when I made the initial question in this topic, is if others get hit by this feeling from time to time where they headed out to fight players and pvp, but suddenly a moment of the old campaigh shined through the clouds and you found yourself willing to stall out a BO capture to stall or secure a zonelock. Because if that feeling is still brilliant and out there, and more players enjoy it. Then I think the Campaign needs more attention, if it is supposed to still be the red line holding this game afloat. Else we might just play scenarios with no objectives, have no keeps in each zone and each capture point in the lakes is just a "hello here we are, come down and fight us -signal"

Basicly, give us something to die for. Currently I find it too easy to read when a fight is over and its a counterpush coming. Instanced sc/citysieges you can predict the outcome from checking the scoreboard teams before the first fight, and keepsieges are somewhat predictable aswel if you know to look for WB leaders, zonekills and aao.

Last phase of zonelocks work, lotd sorta work. The solution is somewhere in figureing out why those situations are still the only pieces of the campaign where us players forget to play selfish.

PS: im also hopefuly for the Random-event potential. But as I talked with Nath about, I personally found myself making suggestions to fix orvr more so than creating fun event ideas when i first gave suggestions. And imho Random-event system is not supposed to fix the flaws on oRvR, aao, BOs, zonelocks. Those systems just need to improve. And then Random events can change up stalemates, as I think they serve a better target like that.

[Hecksa]

Then - as I thought - our goals are aligned, we just see slightly differently whether priority should initially fall on the events system or the core oRvR systems.

Mercifully my understanding is that the event system has been deliberately made so that more people can get involved with it without requiring C# devs time, so...perhaps we don't have to choose?