[Implementation Feedback] RvR design

[Buran]

This video was recorded at the opening event on Thursday. Coordination was among three WBs. There were WBs of Invasion, Beavers and open WB (RL - Morgry).

We are ready to make thing together!

Spoiler:

https://youtu.be/VjPhBegfgf0

[dur3al]

Can I just call it here?
Please remove siege weapons from the game. Its no point in trying to "break the zerg" when the final objective (Keep take) requires you to go through a hall-way choke point where everyone is grouped up together!

Please don't mention using posterns because its just dumb.

I've said it many times, you will always have zerg issues if the final battle is around the keep.

[Saccara]

Its always funny to fight against you guys, but the tunnel szene shows exactly why cannons shouldnt be in the game.

really, you put effort in trying different specs, wb composition, training, communication and everything else just to get your WB destroyed in 2 hits. there is no honor or skill in this... two lvl1 players with one finger each can do that. actually i never saw a situation where a cannon breaks a funnel. its simply just annoying for attackers and on the fields...

not complaining about you buran, but in my opinion thats one of the many design flaws with this new system.

so, i hope you record more videos and show the longer fights also, where we kicked your asses would be nice to see some of the long headwall fights from another perspective...

[Azarael]

And your suggestions for breaking up zerg are...?

If you say nothing, I will go with a damage nerf combined with a higher CD and the following effects divided racially:

- Stagger 0s-10s or 15s depending on target count, standard immunity
- Knockback, power varies from nothing to viable depending on target count, standard immunity
- Pin, reducing speed and ranged damage taken, depending on target count

Remember that we're still waiting on the ability to add siege towers. This will never be a complete implementation until we have it.

I'm leaning more towards stagger implementations in future zerg breakup ideas - both siege-based and player-based.

[Saccara]

And your suggestions for breaking up zerg are...?

personally, i never had a problem with zergs. i really love to fighting bigger numbers. we still do this every warband day. also i understand the zerg as a reasonable way to do something in special situations.
at least at a siege it becomes automaticly a zerg, cause everyone wants to paricipate in it.

same for funnels... they still work and as a attacker i find it always great to break the defense with good gameplay. sure, you cant break every funnel but who said you should win every keep attack? i know, i know, most people hate funnels. boring to hold, hard to attack. but they are still a propriate way to hold a keep. escpecially if you are the underdog...


i have only a problem with the cannons cause they dont require anything. you havent even to know which class you actually play. just press one button and destroy whole organized wbs with it. especially for organized wbs who are looking for unequal and good fights it becomes very annoying. loosing is no problem, but this way it has nothing to do with playing this game...
we saw this today in our wb at cw. guess who had most of the kills...
trust me, no one was happy to be forced to play this cannon game, too.

another point is that you cannot control who is with you. this is annoying enough with collision (which should be ingame) but even more if the cannons hits you harder just because someone follows you.

for me personal another aspect is important... due to cannons and the insane range of engies you made sorcs/bws nearly useless in sieges. hitting something on the wall... try to get there. oil, rams and cannons are not really attackable anymore. aoeing the door was first removed and is not required anymore. during a heavy keep fight this means... stand and defend the cannons. same for undefendet keeps. nothing to do, nothing attackable. this **** cannons doing my job



the best and only way to split the zerg is to have more then one zone! so you can split the enemy and also act as a big zerg. whatever the situation needs. tactical freedom, which is not in the current system. with city sieges back in the game this becomes a important tactical aspect, because the defending realm have to decide if they focus on one zone or try to hold another as well. more freedoms means in this case also that there a alot of usefull scenarios for small groups aswelll, which will shrink the amount of wbs down again.


another thing are this short bo timers. they lost their tacticial aspect. no need to hold them. if you loose one, come back in a few minutes. they are not required to attack, so just play the rescource game until you can buy enough siege weapons. to reach this goal, the best and only way (during primetime) is to run as a big blob in a circle.
not very funny to be honest, because this can take hours. a map like kv becomes a real pain with this rescource system, because both sides run as a blob and rank their keeps.


multible zones and longer bo timers where in the game for a reason. also the point that they are required to attack. another good point was to force the attacker to hold them also for a zone flip, so you could even with a smaller or good group defend a zone until reinforcement arrives.


so, i am aware of the massive destro dominance in the past, but this times are gone. no need for cannons anymore, in my opinion.
just let people spread out in different zones and give bos a more important role again and the "problem" is gone.
fixing xrealm would also help a bit, even if i dont see this as the main prob atm. the numbers are quite equal for most of the time i play.


this are just my two cents and just a few of the things i see as a problem. dont get me wrong. i like the fact that is harder to get keeps, really! i also think its good to force the realm to organize, but there is still a lot of work to do, to make this new rvr better playable with bigger numbers. you can see it by yourself... most of the zone flips happen now outside of eu primetime. not a big deal atm, but again... as soon as cities are in the game, people will get angry if the never able to see it


so at the end, you have a lot of action going on, but its very static and boring gameplay. no tactical moves... just circle until you get bored and start an attack (whatever rank a keep has) or one side logs out....
would be way more funny to organize around different zones instead as running circles with a blob. some more progress (zone flips) would be nice. but not too much to lock the city all the time. maybe make the end zone keeps harder to prevent this.

[Buran]

2Azarael:
Zerg has strengths and weaknesses. It is to hard to lead, usually it is slow, not together in the same times. And the AAO for defenders. And all of premades know it and like it. The main problem of people - is organization to different structures. You can, for example, break the zerg with canons, but u can not organize each person. This is gameplay for players here and Thank you for the opportunities that has a player on this server.

[Teefz]

Its always funny to fight against you guys, but the tunnel szene shows exactly why cannons shouldnt be in the game.

really, you put effort in trying different specs, wb composition, training, communication and everything else just to get your WB destroyed in 2 hits. there is no honor or skill in this... two lvl1 players with one finger each can do that. actually i never saw a situation where a cannon breaks a funnel. its simply just annoying for attackers and on the fields...

not complaining about you buran, but in my opinion thats one of the many design flaws with this new system.

so, i hope you record more videos and show the longer fights also, where we kicked your asses would be nice to see some of the long headwall fights from another perspective...

I'm going to have to agree and hope that cannons will one day not be apart of orvr. I'll compromise and accept cannons at keeps and keeps only - flashback to siege pads and thats it. These cannons despite of the goal being: giving the defenders a fighting chance, they completely as Saccara pointed out destroy EU primetime in my honest opinion. If we look at the server status and the action in the zone the past few days, the following is occuring:

1. PPL are getting smashed by 1buttonwonder cannons as soon as there is too many in one place. Not only at keeps, but as the video linked shows it happens in certain places around the world where a funnel or some sort of it is possible.
2. The one zone only results in EU primetime usually turns in to endless bo swapping despite of one faction having enough stars(cannons) to potentially break trough the zone. Just look at last night in CW. Phalanx + zergsurfers are trying to fight off orderzerg. Orderzerg has 5 stars, destro has 2. Orderzerg sits on Everchosen. - I know this is not necessarily the systems fault, but people use the system to their advantage and always will. Why didn't they attack? Because they wanted to de-rank the destro keep further? - Maybe they didn't attack because why would they? At the potential sight of sitting at a keep for X minutes getting AoE'ed to oblivion by cannons, while having to fight off zerg and premades just to end up getting funneled and ultimately end up losing to many people both inside and outside warband to random cannon AOE.
3. Outside of primetime the defenders/underdogs have a bigger chance of ninja resources/bos and gather enough stars to have enough cannons to hold off the zerg, which is usually 2,3 or more stars and therefore have access to even more cannons - it just ends up punishing the defenders more that actually hurting the attackers. It is all over before it even began.

And your suggestions for breaking up zerg are...?

If you say nothing, I will go with a damage nerf combined with a higher CD and the following effects divided racially:

- Stagger 0s-10s or 15s depending on target count, standard immunity
- Knockback, power varies from nothing to viable depending on target count, standard immunity
- Pin, reducing speed and ranged damage taken, depending on target count

Remember that we're still waiting on the ability to add siege towers. This will never be a complete implementation until we have it.

I'm leaning more towards stagger implementations in future zerg breakup ideas - both siege-based and player-based.

With the fear of my head being chopped off, is it a total no go opening up more zones at a time again? That would be one of my suggestion towards "fixing the issue", at least until the game reaches realm lockout timers. I am well aware off that the one zone only was implemented to stop people from dodging fights and stop taking empty zones and reaping the rewards - which if I remember correctly was totally nerfed anyway - rewards reduced, no bags etc. Having said that though, I still think and hope WAR is about a warfront in multiple areas at a time. Because in my mind, even if people swap zones, they obv. bring action to a new zone automatically. If we use the example from CW from above: If order/destro had to option to also level/had to worry about Black Crag/Caledor, this would give people(wb leaders, premade, pugs) the option of forcing people to fight elsewhere or potentially push the fight back. Then there is the flipside of the coin -> what if people then don't bother going and just stay in CW and just let the other faction take it? Well then that is their problem - if they wanna have a "EPIC last keep def" in one pairing, let them. They lost a pairing and in the future lost a vital part of the campaign towards potentially sieging the enemy city. That is what WAR is about. Tactics n' S#&%.

[ballnazor]

The zerg was never a massive problem, the only time it rolled over people was when there was no organized WB's on either side online. I havent really played since the cannon changes since RvR is a **** mess and its not fun to play at all. The constant problem of order hiding in their keep with AAO is mentality and nothing you can fix with gameplay changes. If i ask from another perspective, how has activity changes after we switched to cannonhammer? Are more people coming back because they think it fixed zerg "problems" or did more people quit because they think its a waste of time? I dont see the point of making a "perfect" RvR system if its not fun and no one plays.

[Haojin]

Hey Azarael, here's my two cents about RVR, i'll make it short:

1-AoE Cannons:
Main idea of AoE cannon is : Countering Zerging . The idea is good on the paper but it can't perform well because:

a-Zerger side can use AoE cannons also, and they can use more aoe cannons than underdog, which makes countering zerg almost impossible.
You can check the video below, it's from 17.11.2016-KV [ example starts at 5:30 ]

Spoiler:

https://youtu.be/VjPhBegfgf0?t=339

Suggestion 1: If one of the realm got AAO (maybe u can set it above %40), dominant side shouldn't use AoE cannons.
Suggestion 2: If both sides got equal numbers, both sides shouldn't use AoE cannons at all. [ This will cause old scholl funneling, check suggestion 3 ]
Suggestion 3: If outer door is down and attacker side got more stars than defender side [maybe 2], population check will disable. So attacker side got access to use AoE cannons for breaking funnel.


b1-AoE cannons suppose to break funnels. When the things comes to siege, the new system encourages funneling if defender side got AoE cannons. You can counter my argument with "keep BO's covered and don't let them level up their keep" but it's too hard to decrease keep rank while many players online. I remember a day we worked like 3-4 hours to decrease keep rank 5 to 1.

b2- And there is another problem with sieges, AoE cannons can destroy AoE cannons. If you want to take down the funnel, you need to come closer to keep which means, you're in defender AoE cannon range = Insta dead attacker aoe cannons.

Suggestion 4: AoE cannons should only hit players. Actually you can set siege weapons like rock-paper-scissors : AoE cannon can only hit player - ST cannon can only hit AoE cannon and ram.


2-Community Issues

a-Main problem of RVR "mostly" community related ( both old and new system ). Most of RVR players are casuals and they dont want to take initiative and they don't know what they gonna do ( Protecting BO's, Gathering Resources, Bringing Siege ect). If you want to see fully working RVR system, both realms needs practice.

Suggestion 5: Maybe you can set some GM's for weekly RVR events [maybe 2 day in a week] .
Example:viewtopic.php?f=19&t=14599

The whole new system is strange for everyone, learning with fun will stop whining i hope.

b- The whole RVR system is all about attacking or defending. What if both sides prefers defending keeps or meaningless skirmish between warcamps ? RVR motivation will be lost [Example: Porn Factory not making warbands anymore. ]

Suggestion 6: If one sides keep hits level X, they have to hit enemies outer door in every X minutes, otherwise high level keep loses all rank and gives the stars opposite realm. This may encourage people to attack than defend.

[Azarael]

personally, i never had a problem with zergs. i really love to fighting bigger numbers. we still do this every warband day. also i understand the zerg as a reasonable way to do something in special situations.
at least at a siege it becomes automaticly a zerg, cause everyone wants to paricipate in it.

same for funnels... they still work and as a attacker i find it always great to break the defense with good gameplay. sure, you cant break every funnel but who said you should win every keep attack? i know, i know, most people hate funnels. boring to hold, hard to attack. but they are still a propriate way to hold a keep. escpecially if you are the underdog...

Zerg versus zerg is a laggy, spammy, tactically and strategically restricted mess. You're probably about to tell me that current cannons are no better. They're probably not. Experimentation.

Funnels? Siege towers. I'm pretty much writing keep sieges off until we have client control, because without siege towers they are going to be **** and there is not a damn thing I can do about that. Funnelling is an absolute joke, no wonder this game died.

the best and only way to split the zerg is to have more then one zone! so you can split the enemy and also act as a big zerg. whatever the situation needs. tactical freedom, which is not in the current system. with city sieges back in the game this becomes a important tactical aspect, because the defending realm have to decide if they focus on one zone or try to hold another as well. more freedoms means in this case also that there a alot of usefull scenarios for small groups aswelll, which will shrink the amount of wbs down again.

People keep saying this and it shows a lack of foresight.

We have what, 300 players at best in T4?

Tell me - what's going to happen if this server reaches 4000 players, and we have 900 players in T4, or more? Then each zone is going to have 300 players in it. What are you going to do then?

This is why I'm not even considering this until someone can tell me why this problem will not manifest again.

another thing are this short bo timers. they lost their tacticial aspect. no need to hold them. if you loose one, come back in a few minutes. they are not required to attack, so just play the rescource game until you can buy enough siege weapons. to reach this goal, the best and only way (during primetime) is to run as a big blob in a circle.
not very funny to be honest, because this can take hours. a map like kv becomes a real pain with this rescource system, because both sides run as a blob and rank their keeps.

The BO timers are so short because of what happened when they were long, which is exactly the same thing that's happening now - BO-go-round. Only one or two BOs would be contestable at a time, which would lead to a zerg forming up and rushing the open BO or BOs in sequence. How does that one get solved?

The only way that's going to work is a Victory Point-type implementation, in which you cannot advance your rank unless you control more BOs than the enemy does.