madrocks wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 5:02 pm
Kaelang wrote: ↑Thu Jun 17, 2021 12:13 pm
Thank you for the answer Kael, I am aware of your role and you are doing a great job.
I am also well aware of how deep rooted the problem is by now.
My guild and me have actively tried to change player mentatily in the past, day by day. We consumed so much time into it, not even funny. I've grown and thrown my reputation for this as well.
The frustration is not coming from nowhere, I get misunderstood on a daily basis since I've no filter what so ever, don't tollerate useless button smashing, lack of situational awareness and most of all easy mode playstyle meaning crossrealming to the more organized realm of the day.
On to your questions and, oh boy! Good luck reading this.
You suggested that the changes to balance and meta ruined oRvR. Are you suggesting then that the core gameplay of oRvR, keeps / forts / cities etc is fine - it's balance that is causing it to stagnate?
The balance changes are inevitably connected to the core gameplay and how it plays out but of course they are not
the only problem why orvr is in this state.
The core of the gameplay is fine to a certain extend, there is some serious tweaking neceserry. Down below in the "ordered" list is more of about those mechanic tweakings.
Orvr participation like the good old conquerer times - as Detangler points out is not there anymore (outside of player events), because obviously everyone wants BiS as fast as possible. That's only through many orvr bags + city.
The one way or the other they will get their city. By either throwing or riding the bandwagon on the overpopulated realm.
Orvr is losing it's taste because there is no reward for just "priding" around as a realm.
As example: the killquestst are not giving Royals, they provide that questionable currecy, seals of the paragon, that gives us access to gear that will not be used and weapons that can't be traded to better versions or a RR % increase potion that is legit pointless after rr 80. Am I wrong?
There is also this royal shards, 5 to 1 trade is ridiculosly high. Ja, ja, it's BiS slot gear but this is to high.
Trust me, I've extensively tested this and the progress is way to slow. Like meaningless slow unless you solo play. And you know what I do, I log in and run an organized warband to provide content and I try to go for kills more then for a siege for later on explained reasons.
It's so meaningless slow that it makes more sense for a gear oriented player to flip on the overpopulated side, just tag along in an open warband and get a roll, fort and then city, wich they might lose but still have a chance of a bag. In the end it was winning all the way before, right?
It's not that complicated to understand the root of this mindset.
If you aren't bored to death by the obvious yet. I will point more feedback down below, you can chose to keep reading that textwall or not. I am at a point where I don't care if someone listens, like an old veteran giving you an endless storytime.
1. Fashion of the month is a thing, meaning: when one realm gets nerfed and the other gets buffed, the weak minded go and play the stronger one. In the end they want to win, and since zerg surfing is rewarding, gg ez. This changes staff did to destro can't be done in a moment like this, not to mention that they were in part wrong and in part way to strong.
2. Removing tools that help smaller groups to overcome the bigger groups hurts the orvr and makes parts of the core gameplay obsolete/unplayable.
I understand that it would not make a difference when oraganized warbands clash on each other in 3vs1 ratio.
But that is not the reality, warbands are in all kind of states most of the time.
Some of the once so called "Pug Killer" abilities/tactics/classes in a state they were, were also the bread and butter to carry the pugs or offer an alternate gameplay.
I mean, the way orvr is played now is not pug killing?
3. Warband management, there is no working Warband Assistant fuction. I really don't understand how this is not been the first thing to be fixed, hacked, whatever you do there.
I mean a healthy warband - a well composed warband, is the absolute basic of orvr.
There is no way balance will ever work out when warbands are kept unchecked and open.
There is no way to get good new leaders when there is nobody fuctioning as an assistant.
You can remove and enable all kind of abilities/mechanics, it will never matter with half assed warbands attempting a siege or go to fort.
A warband leader can't do everything, they burn out, unless they just feed the opposing realm day by day with open nonsense.
The avarage organized pug leader lasts 3 month they told me when I started leading.
Kicking people to compose a better class synergy leads to hate tells of all kinds. I mean I have a red pepper over my screen by now to counter all the malocchios this people have given me. There is a reason why I use autoband when leading the pugs, it is slightly flawed because it doesn't check what tank/dps/heal type it should keep or kick, but it's a big improvement neverless, at least it send an automatic tell to people why they got kicked. Imagine they still send a **** tell..
I also don't understand why a private warband is not displayed to everyone as private so they have to send a tell to enter but are still aware that there is a warband in range.
There is also no way to remove the pugs from this game, some people just don't want to run with discord and join a dedicated guild.
On to the keeps..
5. The postern door
I can have a good warband on a postern door with good aoe DPS and I will gank 100+ people swarming it.
Why is that? Because of how the poster door works, right?
You know it, you click it and everyone else that clicks lands on the same spot. Your stacking with bodyblock leads to disaster.
Solution to that would be to remove the door once the outer/inner has fallen and with a keep not being 4/3 stars.
You know, open postern like in fort, but AFTER the main gate is broken OR add a couple more random spawn points around that postern would keep the postern mechanic unique to campaign keeps.
6. The critical mass on a funnel
That brings us back to the balance changes I pointed out. The critical mass is to strong because of the increased aoe cap on specific abilities.
Some abilities and their procs are just overperforming and can't be countered properly as certain classes are in a safe space, almost unreachable.
7. The random oil and overall siege spawn
A good oil spawn is part of the defense. I've witnessed one to many times some random gobbo runnin up and dropping oil at 5% of the door just to screw over the entire realm.
Obvious sabotage by a stunty in disguise.
Overhelming forces can be tamed with coordinated artillery, but when every schmock just spawns an aoe cannon and then abbandons it or just shoots on the masses uncoordinated it's a waste of ammo and a waste of time to the ones trying to coordinate a proper defense.
Its also a waste of time fo those running boxes to repair the door and supply ammunition.
Solution could be if a keep is claimed by a guild ONLY the owners should be able to spawn siege. That would force interaction of the guild with the realm. It's an mmo, it's all about interaction with the other player that shouldn't involve breaking their legs because they are throwing the keep indirectly due to their nonsense or directly because they want to force a fort/city by sabotage.
8. Keep Ruins
There is the rare case of a ruin to be retaken and the opposing realm kept out, obviously because the defending realm got their **** together.
There must be a way to reward this efford and repair the keep, like all 4 BOs and keep ruin flag for 2 minutes as an example.
9. The value of the BOs during an active siege
With the respawn changes, keeps got more interesting, a defender has to be more dedicated and aware of possible decoy sieges.
The introduction of the flight master connected with the keep is great, too.
It does actually give the BOs during the siege an important meaning: you can still get troops in whith the box-flightmaster mechanic while the enemy is covering the postern.
Small scale teams should cover the BOs during a siege to enable/stop troops to get in.
So with a bit of creativity there is still room for small scale parties to be meaningful in the orvr lakes and find content.
A slight increase of the repair amount of the door per box would force atackers also to focus more on the BOs and therefore split the zerg.
But this mechanic is still being tricked or simply skipped on certain maps, there are some keeps in the campaign that need some invisible walls on the pve borderzones because players can still enter an outer postern without being flagged. I see this as an exploit, I can point them out to you if necessary.
10. Ram
The ram. I am really happy you made that healing ability work. Not that I supported this ram jump suicide manouvers because they were legit mechanic abuse, but the ram HP must be lowered just a bit, so the attacker is forced to heal it if the defender decides to bring high risk on attacking it.
Still awake? On to forts shall we?
11. 5 minutes preparetion time
This is really bad. I mean REALLY bad.. it used to be 15mins and the warbands that participated in the fort were SPOTLESS. Proper 8/8/8. Not some half assed open trash with 2 heals and 3 tanks that dares to complain in /1 after the inevitable loss.
People were well aware and present, they had their bio break and could explain their wives/husbands why they have to waste another 50 minutes in the game before dinner.
Tactics could be explained in region chat etc. I mean it's a fort, not some random keep in Barak Varr.
12. The manticores/wyvern/gyrocopters for upper flor push
A m a z i n g. Pair this with the skaven globe and its ggwp. There needs to be tweaking though.
First of all, bringing a warband on the upper level in the fort means removing that warband from the main force. Thats already a huge risk/push delay.
Having the manticores dropping one randomly all over the upper levels is bad too, they should either drop the attackers only on the 4th floor or there should be more manticores, like 9.
Cities.. yeah. Well I never liked this concept because it's this fake rng Q and fastest progress to BiS only supports the actual trashy state of the orvr campaign.
You either meet some solo q pugs/random open wb stuff or you meet a hard counter with stacked classes to what you fielded. So it's stomp or get stomped, or if you have a proper guild like FMJ you meet a good counter. Thats super rare.
I rather enjoy ostland and have a unnecessary slower BiS progress or I would rather play deathroll vs Mrmoneybagz.
See city how you rolled it out is basically a scenario with 3 stages, if it would have been 6m Q only that then gets formed into a warband, then you would have true rng and give the randoms also more of a chance and probably really good fights or chat drama. Both great.
It would most likely also encourage people to play more scenarios outside of the event just to be prepared for endgame content.
Anyway, if you truly want to balance out the classes and then the game you need to get at least 48 people on a separate testserver and test things out under optimal and suboptimal conditions.
This cityscore/sc score/streamer opinion nonsense can't be you measuring bar, you are better then this.