Lockout system, loyalty & the realm

[wonshot]

Hello,

With the recent patch changing the behavior of the lockout I think it highlighted both player's true behavior up against the fantasy. But also underlined some issues we can still improve on to find the most "fair" lockout system for the server. It will likely never be fully perfect due to how many different situations it can affect. Below ill try to mention the different situations involved in when a lockout is affecting players in picking a side, just so we are on the same page in the debate:

- Both sides have even AAO or realm-population as shown on the frontpage (I personally like AAO better as a metric)
- One realm has slightly more numbers advantage in the rvr lakes but the fighting is even due to more organization on the other side
- Both realms are fully even in numbers and organization
- One side is so massively ahead in numbers and/or organization that the losing realm's players are logging out.

This is where we might not all agree in which direction lockouts should work, because we come from different playstyles and levels of succes.
Personally I think the lockout should attempt to fix for example if EU primetime is happening and the guilds are not communicating which side they will build on, and we end up with 3 organized guild warbands on one side, against just one on the other side because some warband has just disbanded or w/e.
This could be fixed by the players communicating, but lets be honest, its not happening.
If in that example a guild is willing to swap over from a 3v1 situation to make it a 2v2 then I think that should be encouraged even though that might create a stalemate in the campaign as organized keep defences are very difficult to defeat and the incentive is not enough for warbands to tryhard for that atm (campaigh issue and isolated issue)
However on the other end of the spectrum, having a steamrolling warband that "farms" so hard one side that they run out of canonfodder should probably not (?) be allowed to freely farm first one side, and then log over and farm the other. Again some of this could be solved with a campaign making said strong guild staying on their side and keep pushing the campaign instead of just chasing kills on both sides.

My suggestion to find a sorta balanced middleground would be the following:
- Current lockout system but with the penalty removed whenever you swap over to a 5% population imballance or fight in an 40% or higher AAO zone. (aao can technically be manipulated by going into pve and letting aao change, so im not sure if server pop is a better metric)
- Lockouts dont count in T1 and Scenarios.
- Realm-lock starts when you earn renown from playerkills. Not from objective ticks and especially not from logging in to an offline zonelock reward. They do not refresh and only start a 90min timer after the first pvp rp reward.

Lotalty:
- A new command added /loyal
You sign up as a loyal soldier to your realm. And all objective rewards are increased by 1% per month you stay loyal to your realm. Including orvr inf, warcrest and rp from objectives only upto 10%. If you sign off not being loyal anymore with the /notloyal a 7 day timer before you can declare your loyalty to either realm again and it resets your current loyalty procentages.

T4 chat
Is now restricted to crownusers or guild assigned "guild-captain" like it was on Live.

Final words and goal:
I hope those that do enjoy realmpride would enjoy the extra reward incentive and lean more into social bounding for succes and building guilds and communities to overcome hardtimes, while those that are both-realmcabable can enjoy AAO and help balance out the action with this version. The loyalty system can be expanded on or made differently but I feel its a good counter system to lockouts and crossrealming (logging the otherside to balance. Not winnerjoining where someone is on the losing realm and logs the other side to easymode.) Winnerjoining needs to be more restricted than crossrealming imo. Not everone will agree with that, and thats fine. My own version of crossrealming is playing sessions on a "main" realm. Last 3 weeks ive been destro only. Some weekends i play one armor potion at a time on either side during Weekend warfronts. But I never really swap realm during a zone-lifespan. We all crossrealm differently, I think thats fine but winnerjoining is both a lame excause and the target for my suggestion for a lockout system, granted it will allow more for the hardcarries who only goes for rvr kill stacking to be more free to balance out the action and stall the campaign. But again thats an issue the campaign should fix to be more appealing than farming kills.

[mryay]

Thanks for starting this post Bombling.

My take on this:
- I agree there is a problem with the lockout timers given the server population on both side at a given time.
- We should incentivize realm pride and penalize realm change for the sake of "being on the winning side", without penalizing the guilds that just want to have fun and challenge.

So, a suggestion:
- Gain +5% XP, RP, Golds, Token per consecutive weeks played for the same realm.
- On Realm change start with -50% XP, Golds, RP, Token earned. Ramp up to +10% per day on the same realm. With this, you start gaining at normal rates after 5 consecutives days of loyalty.

OR

Add Realm Loyalty Tokens that give access to exclusive temporary consumables (talismans, liniments, pots), and fashions items. Hard to earn obviously, but increased earning rate the more you stay on the same realm.

/Swizz

[Natherul]

...
- Current lockout system but with the penalty removed whenever you swap over to a 5% population imballance or fight in an 40% or higher AAO zone. (aao can technically be manipulated by going into pve and letting aao change, so im not sure if server pop is a better metric)
- Lockouts dont count in T1 and Scenarios.
- Realm-lock starts when you earn renown from playerkills. Not from objective ticks and especially not from logging in to an offline zonelock reward. They do not refresh and only start a 90min timer after the first pvp rp reward.
...

Lockout happening in Scenarios is a bug that should be fix pending. It was never intended to happen in Scenarios or non RvR content.

[kpihuss]

Bombling, every time I read your posts I fall a little more in love with you

Jokes aside, the message you posted is great.

It would be nice if those of us who are Realm priders got some kind of bonus, although the simple fact of keeping our honor clean is already enough for that

Regarding what you mentioned, the only contribution I would make is that the game should prevent players from joining a faction that is overpopulated by more than 5%, unless they have /loyal active.

This would prevent cross-realming just to join the winning side.

[Aethilmar]

Your suggestion seem generally reasonable, but honestly the most important part is at the end where you talk about fixing the campaign gameplay loop.

You need some kind of asymmetry (such as population, average warband renown/gear differences, strategic surprise, etc) to progress the campaign because of the very narrow mechanic for advancement i.e. you generally cannot take a keep that is defended by an equal force. From that perspective, having folks swap over or stack a side to make it less balanced is a good thing.

Unfortunately this is turbo-charged by the unequal reward distribution for being on the AAO side i.e. the difficulty of getting kills in AAO changes exponentially (my estimate) compared to the linear increase/decrease in rewards.

While those fundamental reward/progress issues remain, there is no point in worrying about whether or not folks are swapping back and forth to follow the win.

[derKleineKerl]

Yeah reward the players with two Accounts. ^^

I dont really gets this rewarding people for playing only one side and punish guilds who are playing on both sides. With either less exp and so on or people want to lvl their alt and dont want to lose the 10% exp, rr currency.....

Why not just allow people to insta switch and without any penalty to the underdog side If the aoo is really high?

But what ever because of all this blobing and wc farming i care less and less about the underdog side and If i am stuck on one side because of a bonus reward ... their is always some lvl 16 box runner to kill or to just log off If its to boring. I mean stay for like 1 year on one side and than swap as a guild to the other side and repeat.

[Fey]

This one is tricky. Personally I don't swap sides. I don't really know why exactly, but I haven't rvr'd on destro in over a year. Loyalty rewards sounds good, but I wouldn't want to disincentivize organized guilds from swapping to even out a fight. I think the question is, how often does that happen?

The other solution is just organized guilds posting on discord their schedules for warband night. Something like Jempire posting that they will be running their regularly scheduled warbands this week on Tuesday and Friday, or whatever.

Something like weekly PuG nite would be a boon to the server. Anyone in sov will get booted and/or a tentacle pie to the face.

[Emissary]

Hello,

With the recent patch changing the behavior of the lockout I think it highlighted both player's true behavior up against the fantasy. But also underlined some issues we can still improve on to find the most "fair" lockout system for the server. It will likely never be fully perfect due to how many different situations it can affect. Below ill try to mention the different situations involved in when a lockout is affecting players in picking a side, just so we are on the same page in the debate:

- Both sides have even AAO or realm-population as shown on the frontpage (I personally like AAO better as a metric)
- One realm has slightly more numbers advantage in the rvr lakes but the fighting is even due to more organization on the other side
- Both realms are fully even in numbers and organization
- One side is so massively ahead in numbers and/or organization that the losing realm's players are logging out.

This is where we might not all agree in which direction lockouts should work, because we come from different playstyles and levels of succes.
Personally I think the lockout should attempt to fix for example if EU primetime is happening and the guilds are not communicating which side they will build on, and we end up with 3 organized guild warbands on one side, against just one on the other side because some warband has just disbanded or w/e.
This could be fixed by the players communicating, but lets be honest, its not happening.
If in that example a guild is willing to swap over from a 3v1 situation to make it a 2v2 then I think that should be encouraged even though that might create a stalemate in the campaign as organized keep defences are very difficult to defeat and the incentive is not enough for warbands to tryhard for that atm (campaigh issue and isolated issue)
However on the other end of the spectrum, having a steamrolling warband that "farms" so hard one side that they run out of canonfodder should probably not (?) be allowed to freely farm first one side, and then log over and farm the other. Again some of this could be solved with a campaign making said strong guild staying on their side and keep pushing the campaign instead of just chasing kills on both sides.

My suggestion to find a sorta balanced middleground would be the following:
- Current lockout system but with the penalty removed whenever you swap over to a 5% population imballance or fight in an 40% or higher AAO zone. (aao can technically be manipulated by going into pve and letting aao change, so im not sure if server pop is a better metric)
- Lockouts dont count in T1 and Scenarios.
- Realm-lock starts when you earn renown from playerkills. Not from objective ticks and especially not from logging in to an offline zonelock reward. They do not refresh and only start a 90min timer after the first pvp rp reward.

Lotalty:
- A new command added /loyal
You sign up as a loyal soldier to your realm. And all objective rewards are increased by 1% per month you stay loyal to your realm. Including orvr inf, warcrest and rp from objectives only upto 10%. If you sign off not being loyal anymore with the /notloyal a 7 day timer before you can declare your loyalty to either realm again and it resets your current loyalty procentages.

T4 chat
Is now restricted to crownusers or guild assigned "guild-captain" like it was on Live.

Final words and goal:
I hope those that do enjoy realmpride would enjoy the extra reward incentive and lean more into social bounding for succes and building guilds and communities to overcome hardtimes, while those that are both-realmcabable can enjoy AAO and help balance out the action with this version. The loyalty system can be expanded on or made differently but I feel its a good counter system to lockouts and crossrealming (logging the otherside to balance. Not winnerjoining where someone is on the losing realm and logs the other side to easymode.) Winnerjoining needs to be more restricted than crossrealming imo. Not everone will agree with that, and thats fine. My own version of crossrealming is playing sessions on a "main" realm. Last 3 weeks ive been destro only. Some weekends i play one armor potion at a time on either side during Weekend warfronts. But I never really swap realm during a zone-lifespan. We all crossrealm differently, I think thats fine but winnerjoining is both a lame excause and the target for my suggestion for a lockout system, granted it will allow more for the hardcarries who only goes for rvr kill stacking to be more free to balance out the action and stall the campaign. But again thats an issue the campaign should fix to be more appealing than farming kills.

Wait until the next patch their will be a few changes to the lockout. Regarding my personal opinion though, this lockout system proved what I have always said, the guilds that say they would switch sides to balance the lakes no matter what were not telling the truth. We will see after the next patch if the changes cause them to do just that.