Return of Reckoning

Add influence to rvr kill quests - I bet you'd have some people wanting to get kills!!!!

Shadowgurke wrote:

Dalgrimar wrote: This system does encourage fighting tho?

Does it? It encourages taking BOs. Empty BOs. So people will just tap all 4 BOs and switch zones and we are back to zone trading.

It was a question

Azarael wrote:This is what I'd like to call the pioneer problem. You need an incentive to get into the lakes to fight. The problem with giving BO rewards is that this doesn't incentivize people to fight, it incentivizes them to farm BOs for free stuff. This is not something we would like to see.

The challenge set before you all, and I freely admit that this isn't something we fully resolved in the next RvR system, is to come up with incentives or penalties, of any kind, which encourage players to enter the RvR zone - either of their own accord, or in response to another realm's attack. It goes without saying that this would be trivially simple to do with ideal conditions (one account per player, realm lock) in that you would first set an active threshold for zones (number of players present on one side before BOs would give rewards), prevent players from activating another zone barring exceptional circumstances of population, and then punish players with low to no RvR participation relative to total playtime if a zone was lost, thus allowing full rewards for any take provided enough players were actually available and refusing combat to fight, pity rewards for losing, and preventing the enemy from simply deciding to take another zone's BOs.

That is a punishment based element, however. What I'm mainly interested in is valid gameplay design for RvR lakes which handles lower population and encourages more players to join, and I wish anyone seriously considering this good luck when this system cannot be purely reward-based given that R40/RR40 players with full Annihilator will have no need of rewards.

Az, thanks for the post. I have often wondered if a more simple solution would be viable. Like a "daily quest". I dont know if this is possible to add to the game or not, but some sort of "capture 3-5 BOs" daily quest that rewards gold or influence or something. Only repeatable once per day... This seems like it would give motivation for people to log in and go to the lakes to do BOs to get this quest done, which hopefully would then kick off RvR.

I agree 100%, you dont want to just reward people for trading BOs all day long. Another possible idea is what if BOs provided a "buff" that increases influence/renown/Exp gain on RvR kills by 100% for 10-15 minutes or something. So its not a direct "free-nown/free-fluence" like it was before, but the buff would be a big incentive to cap BOs.

I was talking to a friend about the RvR system. I know you dislike the idea of BO locks... I know another aspect of BOs that everyone hates is the 3 minutes to lock timer. I have often wondered what if you reversed this.... What if BOs didnt take 3 minutes to lock, but rather capped and instantly locked for 3:00. After that 3:00 lock timer was up, the BO would be open however at that point (after the 3:00 lock) the Hero/NPCs spawn to act as defense.

Then it would require some coding but I think it would be great if as soon as one of those NPCs were attacked, the message of the BO being under attack would appear and it would be "on fire". So now you have a lock timer allowing you to move to another BO, but no 3 minute wait, meaning the BOs will be much lass daunting to capture several to start the keep take.

I think this type of system creates a place for all kinds of players. Roamers - who will be around for BO takes to get their buff. 6 man parties - to effectively roam and play some "defense" and then the Warband who can easily get a keep take started.

It also creates opportunity on defense to go and cap these BOs and be a thorn in the side of the WBs. It would force some pretty dynamic play. Just a thought...

I think simple is always better and I think you would agree. People just need SOMETHING to get the RvR started. BO capping used to be what started it as people felt they earned something. I think a daily quest or even a significant "buff" after capping a BO could be incentive to go into the lakes. Heck you could even add influence to the Kill Quests or EVEN add the requirement of "capture a BO" to the kill quest as a way to combine the two and create incentive to do RVR.

Even something temporary for the interim?
for example, a daily quest in each pairing (elf, dwarf, and human) like 'Take x BOs/X keeps' which would reward you with x inf/renown/xp/whatever/a guaranteed bag of sorts (maybe mehhh on that one)

to be fair people need to realise its not the be-all end-all of rvr systems that is currently implemented, and have some patience. the amount of rubbish people are spouting in /3 and /6 pertaining to the temporary rvr system needs to pipe down.

Azarael wrote:This is what I'd like to call the pioneer problem. You need an incentive to get into the lakes to fight. The problem with giving BO rewards is that this doesn't incentivize people to fight, it incentivizes them to farm BOs for free stuff. This is not something we would like to see.

The challenge set before you all, and I freely admit that this isn't something we fully resolved in the next RvR system, is to come up with incentives or penalties, of any kind, which encourage players to enter the RvR zone - either of their own accord, or in response to another realm's attack. It goes without saying that this would be trivially simple to do with ideal conditions (one account per player, realm lock) in that you would first set an active threshold for zones (number of players present on one side before BOs would give rewards), prevent players from activating another zone barring exceptional circumstances of population, and then punish players with low to no RvR participation relative to total playtime if a zone was lost, thus allowing full rewards for any take provided enough players were actually available and refusing combat to fight, pity rewards for losing, and preventing the enemy from simply deciding to take another zone's BOs.

That is a punishment based element, however. What I'm mainly interested in is valid gameplay design for RvR lakes which handles lower population and encourages more players to join, and I wish anyone seriously considering this good luck when this system cannot be purely reward-based given that R40/RR40 players with full Annihilator will have no need of rewards.

I think calling it the pioneer problem is quite fitting. I would suggest that setting active thresholds for BOs to give rewards and then implementing a punishment for not participating in RvR is not a trivially simple solution.
First of all, you would have to define participation. Is that being physically in the RvR lake, is it taking a BO, is it getting kills?

Any of these is susceptible to being misused. People could sit in the keep and contribute very little in terms of active PvP if physical presence is the definition. If kills or taking objectives are the definition, then you are going to be punishing players that attempted to participate, get kills and take objectives, but weren't able to succeed. I don't think that's good as you really only want to be punishing non-participation, not unsuccessful participation.

Additionally, it also discourages playing the game. Don't log on, if your realm is losing. People already do that automatically, no need to emphasize it further. It is also further complicated by people being able to play both realms as you pointed out.

I think by definition, as we are calling it the pioneer problem, the first person/group to walk into the RvR lake has to have an essentially PvE objective in mind. Because the pioneer is the first one in, there is no way they can be expecting the enemy to be there. They can expect the enemy to react to them, once they challenge that PvE objective, but the PvE objective has to exist in the first place for the pioneer to come in.

Now clearly, as you have mentioned you don't want to reward people for taking PvE objectives in RvR, you want them to fight. I 100% agree with you that fighting should be the main focus of RvR. My suggestion is that this can be done by a degree of emphasis. Simply put, player kills, taking & defending BOs with player kills will give comparatively much better rewards than taking them without resistance. However, the PvE objective with some rewards has to exist in the first place, for the first group/person to come into the RvR lake.

I can also put it another way. There will always be a large number of MMORPG players and groups that are focused on achieving things with their character, getting experience, gear etc.. These players are already enabled by being able to do pure PvE in Return of Reckoning if they want to avoid PvP. They can go and do PQs and obtain gear and experience that way. Therefore if you feel uncomfortable with players being able to get rewards by doing PvE in PvE, why does it bother you that they will get PvE rewards from RvR?

Perhaps the issue is, that people are getting the same type of reward for PvE as for killing players: influence and renown. It seems unfitting, that someone should receive this reward, for empty BOs, that should be reserved for participation in PvP. Personally I don't feel strongly about this (I am fine with giving symbolic influence and renown for taking empty BOs to encourage participation), but I understand why others would. I think you can argue that by participating and taking empty BOs they are taking a risk of being killed by other players, which already substantially differentiates it from PvE, so they deserve a PvP reward.

If you don't feel comfortable with the above argument, there is another way to tackle things. The solution then becomes, that if one simply doesn't want to give a lesser scaled reward of the same type, to give a reward of a different type. Taking empty BOs could give experience and a token to buy that particular tiers PvE gear - PvE rewards only. That way it doesn't give the same rewards as PvP, it gives the same rewards as PvE, which it essentially is. The only issue then becomes to make taking BOs a similar difficulty to participating in PQs. If the reward is small enough; eg.: one PvE set token for a BO + 5000 experience, then I would argue it's of similar difficulty. Either that, or BO taking can be made harder to potentially adjust for better PvE rewards. There is also a number of other PvE rewards that can be given (gold & other PvE items).

Players who will log in on character's with full gear and renown rank clearly do so purely with the aim to just kill other players. They will then require people playing alts or new players to go for the PvE objectives. It could also work with increasing the renown cap, and giving scaled down renown for empty BOs.

Going to BO's is indeed a good thing for RvR, but why is another.
It will be good now, when PvP rewards are given from fighting there.
It's exactly about why shouldn't players flow from one warcamp to another, without higher gains at the BO, then players will just go to the Warcamp.
I say the BO's need to be more important for RvR - and not only for just taking the Keep.

Miss the old system.. as a WE i dont see any action anymore..
Im playing from brazil (different time zone, lot less players) there just no RVR for me.. I cant gank players anymore.. before I could do that anytime.

My Suggestion:

It has been in Live before.(and possibly earlier tiers but it kinda sucked because they were 1 zone and more famable.)

Bos should give little to no rewards, however upon the zone flip you are rewarded with a decent tick of renown/inf/xp. I feel this was the most satisfying and made me stay in a zone/gather wb for keep etc, and makes it much less 'farmable'. It works because it increases the value of both BOs and Keep takes.

Thoughts?

I think taking Bo's atleast undefended ones should give no reward or at most a very very small one.

if it gives enough reward to make it worth running around and taking empty Bo's and keeps thats undefended. there will most likely be a lot of bo/zone swapping with none or very little fighting involved. where you have warbands avoiding contact and insted focusing on taking empty objectives and zones rather than fight the other faction.

Personally i find that extremly boring. and i would not even call it rvr or pvp, it becomes just another pve farming with some occasional small pvp skirmish encounters

Shadowgurke wrote:It's crazy. We had a system that rewarded BO participation a month ago. And it did not promote fighting. And entire zergs just camped empty BOs for the rewards. Do you not remember that?

Are we talking about the live game or the RoR ? If it's the second case, then I, for one, don't remember that. What I do remember is warbands locking BO's and taking undefended keeps during hours with very low population. At peak times, it was very rare to see a warband leaving a big battle to lock an empty zone. It happened, but it was too rare to be considered as a problem.
And in the end, I never understood why it's only the attackers to blame when they lock an empty zone. I mean, the enemy realm is there, let them make a warband and fight back.

As for the OP, the changes just landed they won't stay too long anyway. I believe that criticism and suggestions should be made after we try the new features to help the devs towards their next step.