Is reward model driving current population inbalance

[nebelwerfer]

I say Bring back the old bag system that only gave massive gold bags to the sweatist tryhards in the game or the occational lucker. That made good loot rare and cool to have, in other words stale long drawnout zonelocks was worth fighting for.

Being the top contributor showed everyone your massive epeen

New system of rvr welfare bags is so lame, honestly. Weak dopamine hits.

Someone wiser than me said to have warlord as rvr set in goldbags, something in fort and something in city. Seemed cool to me
/rant over

[Paxsanarion]

All of these changes are completely pointless, because nobody wants to play order atm.

And why would they, when you have 2-4 organized warbands holding hands and abusing completely broken pulls on the opposing side?

Only people that can even try to put up a fight against that is the highly geared xrealm guilds.

Never have I see EU prime so lop-sided.

This has been my experience during EU prime also

[wonshot]

The proposed solutions have pretty much all been attempted in RoR history i think.

Malus where the overpopulated side were getting 1 rp, was a system where you punish the realmloyalists for logging onto their main realm, which from time to time happend to be massively outnumbering. Not healthy.
With local AAO, it could work though.

Scheduled cities took Citycities, the crownjewel of the Campaign, out of the equation. The days of strategic forts, double zone pushes, decoy forts etc. are all gone. Now its a narrow A to B campaign feeling, where City is pretty much excluded as a different evennumbers gamemode in scenario style.

One of the issues with oRvR is that it "feels" without purpose while housing every playstyle.
You want to stack several of the same classes and hide on hills and in keeps, go for it.
You wanna form steal groups and gank soloers, go for it.
You want to creat the biggest player deathball of all time and feel mighty leading it, go for it.
You want to run with just your guild warband and look for other warbands, go for it.
etc.

The rewards from oRvR in the past there were only X amount of goldbags handed out after a zonelock, this system got changed as it was deemed too hardcore and created too big advantage in progression for organized players and pugs couldnt progress.
Then bonus bagrolls were added, warcrest unified etc etc. Now you can progress as fast as you put in effort, but its garenteed atleast.
But when the Campaign got meaningless we now endup with Playstyle vs Playstyle in the maps, mixed with different timezones, different populations and realmimballances all under the same roof.

What I personally think needs to happen, is that oRvR needs to become meaningful again if we are to keep playing a game with the main replayloop being a campaign. Because right now its doesnt feel like a campaign, its pointless which map is open right now. Theres no value in capping a zone and pushing the campaign instead its just little pause breaks for momentum shifts of people logging in and out, with rewards being handed out in the halftime.

Incentives should promote playerbehavior, such as showing up defending from outside of EU primetime for destro.
Just as order pugs should see more incentive to form organized warbands in EU prime and fight the outnumbering organized effort from destro in LOTD and orvr.
Battleobjectives giving an accumulated tick after a fight on them concludes with crest + rp tick for the winning side, could be cool.
Battleobjectives being tied to the keep-siege ramming could be cool to spread the action out during a siege.
Battleobjectives being equal 1:1 and all four BOs needed after a keeplord has fallen, to extend that phase of a zone could promote more roaming and fierce fighting instead of zone forfiet mentality. Yes zones need to conclude but these maps were designed to include all 4 bos in TM for example

Rewards are as easy as they've ever been on RoR. But the game also seem to have stired away from the campaign model while still pretending to be campaign driven. Take scenarios for example majority of players dont play to win them anymore, they use them as action on demand to farm kills. As the rewards for winning with 500points are easily offset from killing and farming players.

[Paxsanarion]

The proposed solutions have pretty much all been attempted in RoR history i think.

Malus where the overpopulated side were getting 1 rp, was a system where you punish the realmloyalists for logging onto their main realm, which from time to time happend to be massively outnumbering. Not healthy.
With local AAO, it could work though.

Scheduled cities took Citycities, the crownjewel of the Campaign, out of the equation. The days of strategic forts, double zone pushes, decoy forts etc. are all gone. Now its a narrow A to B campaign feeling, where City is pretty much excluded as a different evennumbers gamemode in scenario style.

One of the issues with oRvR is that it "feels" without purpose while housing every playstyle.
You want to stack several of the same classes and hide on hills and in keeps, go for it.
You wanna form steal groups and gank soloers, go for it.
You want to creat the biggest player deathball of all time and feel mighty leading it, go for it.
You want to run with just your guild warband and look for other warbands, go for it.
etc.

The rewards from oRvR in the past there were only X amount of goldbags handed out after a zonelock, this system got changed as it was deemed too hardcore and created too big advantage in progression for organized players and pugs couldnt progress.
Then bonus bagrolls were added, warcrest unified etc etc. Now you can progress as fast as you put in effort, but its garenteed atleast.
But when the Campaign got meaningless we now endup with Playstyle vs Playstyle in the maps, mixed with different timezones, different populations and realmimballances all under the same roof.

What I personally think needs to happen, is that oRvR needs to become meaningful again if we are to keep playing a game with the main replayloop being a campaign. Because right now its doesnt feel like a campaign, its pointless which map is open right now. Theres no value in capping a zone and pushing the campaign instead its just little pause breaks for momentum shifts of people logging in and out, with rewards being handed out in the halftime.

Incentives should promote playerbehavior, such as showing up defending from outside of EU primetime for destro.
Just as order pugs should see more incentive to form organized warbands in EU prime and fight the outnumbering organized effort from destro in LOTD and orvr.
Battleobjectives giving an accumulated tick after a fight on them concludes with crest + rp tick for the winning side, could be cool.
Battleobjectives being tied to the keep-siege ramming could be cool to spread the action out during a siege.
Battleobjectives being equal 1:1 and all four BOs needed after a keeplord has fallen, to extend that phase of a zone could promote more roaming and fierce fighting instead of zone forfiet mentality. Yes zones need to conclude but these maps were designed to include all 4 bos in TM for example

Rewards are as easy as they've ever been on RoR. But the game also seem to have stired away from the campaign model while still pretending to be campaign driven. Take scenarios for example majority of players dont play to win them anymore, they use them as action on demand to farm kills. As the rewards for winning with 500points are easily offset from killing and farming players.

Well said, it seems what I have experienced during EU prime as an order player is I suppose, larger number of order players, but less organized while the destruction players may be outnumbered, but they are much better organized in general. There are times when order can have organized warbands during EU prime, but this typically seems to be less and less common. Lately. I certainly agree with making progressing the campaign much more meaningful than it is now.

[Zxul]

Rewards are as easy as they've ever been on RoR.

There are two problems however:

1. There is a big gap for most specs, where after getting to 40 you get a base setup of pve + 3 or so conq/dom, or if pushed harder 3 vanq/oppr- if those are even better than +conq/dom, and then you are stack with it till sov.

2. Several specs don't even have any endgame set- for example toughness for a lot of classes. As an example, taking toughness magus, last set with toughness set bonus is invader- however since the toughness bonuses in invader individual parts are minor, realistically toughness magus endgame set includes 2 annil parts, at rr80+.
Easy to get- sure, very easy. However not having any real upgrade after lvl 35 even at rr80+ isn't really encouraging.

[Tisaya]

I'd say the biggest factor that makes people blob was the removal of anti-zerg measures, especially on keeps. Oil is barely a speed bump. Artillery is practically useless during def, Lord isn't a threat, getting into keep itself is extremely hard to nigh impossible, depending on the map. No wonder people don't show up for defs - your chance for a successful def is zero, it's unlikely that you will even get any rewards from it, as rewards for oil kills were removed as well. You will have a much higher chance for reward joining a blob and attacking a keep, even an empty one, than mustering a hopeless def.

Remember when a good party could hold a keep against a disorganised WB, at least for a while?

[Evilspinnre]

I think we are getting lots of comments from people who play at different times.

EU primetime - equal numbers if not more order but you cant find them in the lakes as they are sitting waiting for a siege

Every other hour of the day - PvDoor train from order taking empty keeps.

In EU prime time dropping the rr and crest gain from scens and increasing it in the lakes and getting rid of bag rolls on keeps would mean more order may look to actually fight.

At other times there doesnt appear to be a way of stopping the Order PvDoor train as its been in full flow since scheduled cities came in.

Unfortunately during EU primetime I've seen some destro guilds/alliances running around with 36+ all the same discord, giving order warbands no choice but to sit in keep or blob up. I think this mentality does far more to damage RvR than anything else.

[Rapzel]

I'd say the biggest factor that makes people blob was the removal of anti-zerg measures, especially on keeps. Oil is barely a speed bump. Artillery is practically useless during def, Lord isn't a threat, getting into keep itself is extremely hard to nigh impossible, depending on the map. No wonder people don't show up for defs - your chance for a successful def is zero, it's unlikely that you will even get any rewards from it, as rewards for oil kills were removed as well. You will have a much higher chance for reward joining a blob and attacking a keep, even an empty one, than mustering a hopeless def.

Remember when a good party could hold a keep against a disorganised WB, at least for a while?

One warband can easily hold against two in keep, but it requires more effort than just letting the opposing faction lock the zone, so where is the incentive to defend a keep?
In particular if you can speedrun to the next fort and gain even more crests, it becomes quite obvious why this part of the model doesn't work.

AFAIK the only reason organised wbs do defend is to spite the opposing WBs and deny them bags. Those keep and fort defenses are golden though for the discord and forum PvP

[lumpi33]

I think we are getting lots of comments from people who play at different times.

EU primetime - equal numbers if not more order but you cant find them in the lakes as they are sitting waiting for a siege

Every other hour of the day - PvDoor train from order taking empty keeps.

In EU prime time dropping the rr and crest gain from scens and increasing it in the lakes and getting rid of bag rolls on keeps would mean more order may look to actually fight.

At other times there doesnt appear to be a way of stopping the Order PvDoor train as its been in full flow since scheduled cities came in.

Unfortunately during EU primetime I've seen some destro guilds/alliances running around with 36+ all the same discord, giving order warbands no choice but to sit in keep or blob up. I think this mentality does far more to damage RvR than anything else.

Funny that you are mentioning that Evil. It was your 2wb+ blob that was literally destroying pvp for hundreds of players this sunday prime in praag. For hours.

People couldn't even leave the warcamp. You were non stop roaming near the order warcamp, killing everything that tried to go out with a very abusive tactic. Push, kill, fall back, let people come out, mSH m2 snare, rush in, mara aoe knock down, gtdc spam, burst everyone down in seconds, leave a few minutes and do it again.

It's one thing when premades are strong, but what your premade and buddies were doing was on another level. It is abusive to the maximum and game breaking. Hundreds of people had to suffer from that game play. You and your buddies destroyed the pvp evening of a ton of players. That had nothing to do with just playing premade and having fun. That was abusive to the maximum.

It's at the point were devs have to step in and nerf the power of premade warbands. What these premades are doing is basically "bombing" people with melee aoe. "Bombing" and "Pulling" people into that was nerfed long ago for exactly that reason. Yet for melee blobs they don't mind. For years now. At the same time nerfing every counter play, like rdps aoe into the ground.

Melee aoe bombing, pulling and premade survivability in general need a hard nerf. I don't see that happening with the proposed ability overhaul. There are some fixes to pulls and melee aoe but not to premade survivability. Without nerfing survivability they will keep doing the same with classes like bombing/infernal wave sorcs and mSHs. What is order going to be using after the melee aoe nerf? BWs without infernal wave? Engis without magical damage? Sws without mSH beast mode? WLs without aoe kd? Slayers without chop fasta and pulls? Lol. Well played destro, well played.

[Vri]

No matter the change, you are still left with the root issue. The player base. We will do almost anything.