Hotfix 21/08/16

[Morbidmind]

I know one of the people affected was semi-legitimate as I've been running around ganking people with them in lakes with AOO for a while now. However with that said, **** that guy, great work devs.

[drmordread]

It's simple, really: staying in a safe location, spamming mouse click 1 and one-shotting people who can't see you, and raking in tons of kills which grant you xp/rr/inf does not involve any skill whatsoever - nor is there any 'risk vs reward' mechanic.

And yet it so KEYYYY and so IMPORTANT, and SO NEEDED.... for fast keep takes (before enemy can organize) as well as for holding off enemy at the keeps long enough for more people to come, or help greatly in defending a keep against a zerg with a small wb.

So tell me, how do you replace such a key ingredient?

Also, how different and "skillful" is it to gank solo players with a six man? Personally, I see that as a no skill, no risk, situation. Same with some ranged dps, or dps AM/Shamie ....

Your whole, no skill whatsoever is just your LEEtism showing through. What is skill? You dont have a clue. You are just jealous that a solo player can get more rr than you in your group ganking lowbies.

And for the record, there is a lot of skill required to use an AoE siege weapon. A skill that very few people have. You need to "guess" where the enemy is...adjust for wind (which will change in middle of a salvo), so no, it is not easy, and yes, it is harder than lazying around in a 6 man or WB.

And what about people that just afk at a keep siege? Do nothing, but make RR.

Skill ... is a relative term and you obviously do not have a clue.

[GodlessCrom]

It's simple, really: staying in a safe location, spamming mouse click 1 and one-shotting people who can't see you, and raking in tons of kills which grant you xp/rr/inf does not involve any skill whatsoever - nor is there any 'risk vs reward' mechanic.

And yet it so KEYYYY and so IMPORTANT, and SO NEEDED.... for fast keep takes (before enemy can organize) as well as for holding off enemy at the keeps long enough for more people to come, or help greatly in defending a keep against a zerg with a small wb.

So tell me, how do you replace such a key ingredient?

Also, how different and "skillful" is it to gank solo players with a six man? Personally, I see that as a no skill, no risk, situation. Same with some ranged dps, or dps AM/Shamie ....

Your whole, no skill whatsoever is just your LEEtism showing through. What is skill? You dont have a clue. You are just jealous that a solo player can get more rr than you in your group ganking lowbies.

And for the record, there is a lot of skill required to use an AoE siege weapon. A skill that very few people have. You need to "guess" where the enemy is...adjust for wind (which will change in middle of a salvo), so no, it is not easy, and yes, it is harder than lazying around in a 6 man or WB.

And what about people that just afk at a keep siege? Do nothing, but make RR.

Skill ... is a relative term and you obviously do not have a clue.

Guess? Really? Siege weapons are easy to aim in this game. It's not CS:GO, you're not snap-shotting someone .2 seconds after seeing them with an AWP. Whatever skill is involved is very minor, compared to the skill involved with actually playing a class in RvR.

Heymate can speak for himself, but I guarantee his skill at the game goes beyond ganking lowbies with his guildmates, so you're barking up the wrong tree there. I wouldn't choose this hill to die on personally, especially since of all the "leet" (jesus, the 90s flashback) players to pick on, Heymate is a relatively helpful and nice one.

[Twyxx]

Oh boy...

[catholicism198]

@ Dread
Sorry but spamming an ae cannons does NOT require any skill. This game, in general, does not require much skill...
As for the ae cannon, all you have to do is aim once and then spam click the "fire" button- no need to readjust. The wind doesn't change if you don't move the siege weapon.

[Krima]

Farming with aoe balista, canon etc:

Right hand: click click, adjust wind with mouse scroll
Left hand: beer
profit.

skill ? i could teach my 5 years old how to play the canon lol.

Ty devs again for the nerf...

[Cimba]

When will people learn.. Investing a huge amount of time into grinding anything at this point is just worthless. People endlessly farming gold, and renown, you should expect that it could be wiped at any moment. Play the game and have fun, if fun for you is endlessly grinding then dont get upset when something like this happens.

A valid point but in this instance they didnt invest a huge amount of time in anything they sat on a aoe siege weapon and farmed renown at a exploitative rate that literally everyone knew was off kilter.

A couple of people in the low 50s may have done it legit and lost some rr and for that we are sorry but the vast majority 50+ knowingly used a broken exploit and as dumb as people like to pretend they are when it suits their purpose a good rule of thumb is if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

So these guys were indeed exploiting! I hope you are providing the game masters with the necessary evidence to ban them... after all expoliting is forbidden under the ToS.

[Danielle]

When will people learn.. Investing a huge amount of time into grinding anything at this point is just worthless. People endlessly farming gold, and renown, you should expect that it could be wiped at any moment. Play the game and have fun, if fun for you is endlessly grinding then dont get upset when something like this happens.

A valid point but in this instance they didnt invest a huge amount of time in anything they sat on a aoe siege weapon and farmed renown at a exploitative rate that literally everyone knew was off kilter.

A couple of people in the low 50s may have done it legit and lost some rr and for that we are sorry but the vast majority 50+ knowingly used a broken exploit and as dumb as people like to pretend they are when it suits their purpose a good rule of thumb is if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

The whole exploration of this issue and how the developers word their responses around it is what irritates me the most about this issue. You basically paint everybody at RR50+ as an exploiting bastard and me as the chief villain, with no evidence whatsoever to back up your assertions, while in the meantime on every other platform scoffing at unsupported accusations.

All the proof you needed were rumours and the fact that some people were 'known' for using siege together with the assertion that such RR was 'impossible' to achieve without abusing siege. Since this impossibility argument is something that is being recycled here regularly, let me remind you again that according to the calculations (If you are actually interested see my earlier post for the math) I've done it would have been possible to be RR60+ or even more just with regulard non-+siege renown and AAO. Further proved by Svarz who wasn't even playing in the first few weeks after RR40 was raised and was already RR58-60 without abusing siege or Teefz who was 60 who also didn't abuse siege (afaik, at least they weren't 'known' for it).

Siege gave too much renown of that there is no doubt. But using it was never labelled as an exploit by anyone nor did anyone get warned. You say it was broken since the release of t4? It was broken in every other tier before that as well! I gained full Empire influence using one Hellblaster at one keep siege in t3. Why wasn't that a problem!? Siege gave too many rewards because these were assigned according to damage done in the same way as for every other kill in the game. However, because it's too easy to deal massive damage and kill people with siege it gave too many rewards. Fair enough, that's very true and needed to be changed, but it was never ever using an in-game bug to take advantage. It was using an arguably flawed legitimate in-game mechanic. Therefore I resent labelling the people who used it exploiters, because nearly everybody used some siege during this period. Next you will call people exploiters for killing each other in keeps. You know a solo kill with 400% aao inside a keep is like 5k-6k renown right? That's one reason I won't bother to get more renown again; because there are legitimate in-game mechanics that WILL cause people to gain renown at a rate you consider MUST BE exploitative.

If you said people gained too much RR and we don't want the power curve to increase too fast as the reason we apologize we didn't know ppl would gain so much renown so fast - fair enough
If you did a time-stamp roll back - fair enough
If you did a complete renown wipe - fair enough

But targeting 30 specific people without specific evidence is unfair - all you have are your speculations and rumours. Speculations which I've debunked; rumours I can do nothing about, but I will say again the only thing the top 30 players on renown had in common was a lot of playtime and a lot of kills. Some used a lot of siege before renown was removed from it - LIKE ME! Some used none at all! But even I don't know how much renown I've gained from using siege compared to the percentage I got from solo roaming. I've gained 600k since the server came back up with pretty much no AAO using no siege at all. If you had data on this it would be really cool and you would have proof for your move, but you don't you base it on a wrong speculation and rumours about which players used siege. And of course it's going to be the RR50+ players who are remembered for using the most siege, because they played the most time on one character - they spent the most time doing anything at all really!

There were a bunch of people who set RR50 as their target (again no naming and shaming, however amongst them some devs - exploiters according to you and how you are exploring this issue - regular players and good devs in my experience) and used the hell out of siege to get there. Good that those people who exploited siege to get renown ranks between 40-50 or level alts do not lose anything because only the people above RR50 are being unjustly targeted by this, because only they MUST BE exploiters.

Anyone could have easily 'abused' the hell out of siege getting 5-6 characters to RR45-50 by alting a lot. Now they are laughing out loud. It's only the people who used the same character that are getting targeted by this for no real reason.

So you're making an unfair move, because you don't have access to information to make it fair. Pretty much you're going for the lesser evil, of making removing a lot of legitimately earned, but broken renown from siege, together with legitimately earned unbroken renown from kills. Alright I might get that. Plus you have other reasons like power gaps expanding too fast, again fair enough. I would still be salty, but if you actually come forward and say it's that way - fair enough.

But singling out the players with most renown and publicly calling them exploiters and asking other players to blame them over the issue that is from my point of view absolutely mind-blowingly unacceptable, especially when you actually have no evidence bar rumours that a larger percentage of their renown earned is due to siege than other in-game activities compared to the regular population. Also given that the siege rewards were not an exploited bug - they were simply a used/abused legitimate in-game mechanic (pre-nerf).

I get it this is your house, your server, your rules. But if it continues like this with publicly encouraging people to blame players over a lesser evil move made by yourselves, rather than actually taking responsibility for your own moves, don't be surprised if some of the guests don't want to pay a visit again.

[Nurwar]

Let's introduce PvP season on ROR ?
- Explain rules before doing that, make a referent topic on it to be clear to everyone ;
- First player to achieve idk may be RR80 is granted to a special epic loot or skin or title ;
- Find a scalled trick to grant every players for their RR achievement based on their investissement ;
- Wipe RR of anyone and start again to RR40 with new challenge and new rewards according to rules ;
- Start again, etc...

[Nekkma]

The whole exploration of this issue and how the developers word their responses around it is what irritates me the most about this issue. You basically paint everybody at RR50+ as an exploiting bastard and me as the chief villain, with no evidence whatsoever to back up your assertions, while in the meantime on every other platform scoffing at unsupported accusations.

This is a good point that I agree with. The posts from management in this thread express different explanations/justifications which make it more difficult to understand the reason behind this.