Changelog 06/11/16

[Azarael]

[Open RvR Tier 2-4]

Battlefield Objectives

- The lock timer when a contested objective is reclaimed now matches the lock timer for when it is captured by the assaulting realm, rather than being a fixed 5 minutes.
- Fixed a bug causing Battlefield Objectives not to respawn supplies if the supplies were captured or reset while the objective was contested.

Keeps

- Fixed a bug causing a keep to tick safe if no ram was being used on it.
- The player thresholds for ranking up a keep in T2 and T3 have been halved.

Rams

- The durability of rams has been further increased.
- If a ram is deployed within 25ft of an enemy keep door, it will automatically position itself to strike the door.
- T2 and T3 rams no longer require a certain guild rank.

Supplies

- Returning supplies now gives a fixed amount of renown in addition to the variable component.

Artillery

- The damage inflicted by AoE cannons is now additionally linked to the internal relative population factor. AoE cannons used by a realm with a numerical advantage will inflict 10% less damage for every 10% that the realm outnumbers the opposing realm by, and those used by an outnumbered realm will inflict 10% more for every 10% that the realm is outnumbered by. The maximum bonus and reduction are +50% and -50%.

- AoE cannons will now consider up to 60 enemies within 60ft of the strike point for the purpose of determining damage and number of stacks of snare to apply, rather than up to 6 (then 10) enemies within 15ft of the current enemy for whom damage was being calculated. This means that the damage inflicted to each player struck will be the same, and that if not enough players are in the area, high damage cannot be dealt.

The base damage range (450-1360) and strike radius (40ft) of an AoE cannon remain the same as they were. The 60ft radius is ONLY for determining the damage and debuff values for the attack on players within the 40ft damage radius.

- The snare debuff will apply with multiple stacks if the population is too dense and will not apply at all if less than 30 players were within the 60ft radius. This value is modified by the artillery scaler mentioned above, so artillery weapons used by an outnumbering realm will have higher snare thresholds.

Please bear in mind that due to the nature of this check, I cannot test it well offline. If something goes wrong, do not panic.

[Razielhell]

[Open RvR Tier 2-4]
Keeps

- The player thresholds for ranking up a keep in T2 and T3 have been halved.

Cool! Thanks for the Patch.Time to test!

[Haojin]

Az, new morale "calculation checks" causing a lot of lag. Anything will be done about it ?

Thank you very much for the efforts.

[Daknallbomb]

he sad soomthing about that the morale calc cecks dont make the lags dont remember in wich thread

[Razielhell]

There are a thousand and one things that are more intensive for the emulator than a couple of additions, multiplications and divisions per player per second. The "players in range" element simply checks a value that is incremented or decremented when a player becomes "visible" or ceases to be visible - and the visibility / range mechanics, of course, existed before. So yeah, it's not that.

[blaqwar]

[Open RvR Tier 2-4]
Keeps

- Fixed a bug causing a keep to tick safe if no ram was being used on it.
- The player thresholds for ranking up a keep in T2 and T3 have been halved.

Rams

- The durability of rams has been further increased.
- If a ram is deployed within 25ft of an enemy keep door, it will automatically position itself to strike the door.
- T2 and T3 rams no longer require a certain guild rank.

The ram was a bit tricky to work with and any mistakes were difficult to remedy. Amazing changes, thank you.

[Razid1987]

Thank you for another patch in quick succession. It's really nice that you keep on tweeking the system, especially so often.

I would however like to mention that I'm not the biggest fan of the system. My personal preference is, of course, irrelevant in the great scheme of things, but I'm sad to say that I yet to hear from many who actually really likes it. I appreciate that you want to have siege weapons in a siege-game - It makes sense, and I can see why you'd want it.
However, I'm just simply worried that the fundamentals of having to man a cannon, just isn't very fun. Not because the mechanics aren't fun necessarily, but because the players didn't select "Cannoniere" as their class, when they created their character. The system indirectly forces some amount of players to not play their class, when attacking, or defending, a keep. Or if the cannons are too powerful, this would also mean that cannons would be used all throughout the zone, on top of just at the keep (As we saw the first few days), which would ultimately force some players to man those cannons all the time.

Secondly, I've heard that some people think it's a bad idea to put too much emphasis on the keeps themselves, when it comes to locking a zone. While I'm sure that's not the only alternative to the current system, it is at least a possible alternative. Having tried to lock a single zone for 3 days in a row now, spending an average of about 7 hours each evening (For a total of roughly 21 hours) and still failing, I can safely say that being unable to lock a zone, simply because you can't take the keep, is very demotivating.
I'm aware that the system isn't final and that the tweeking is an on going process, but as of right now, it seems to me near impossible to take a keep, when the numbers in the zone are even remotely close to being even, on both sides. This strikes me as a bit odd, because this basically just means that if players can't win when the numbers are even, people are just going to x-realm and then win that way, essentially by outnumbering the enemy, and I would like to think that we don't want people to x-realm, and actually want to encourage players to fight on even odds. So having a system where it's extremely difficult to win offensively with even odds, just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As of right now, it's simply too difficult to:

1) Push enemy players behind the gate, and;
2) Put up your own cannons and shoot back, and;
3) Take down the oil, and then bring the ram to the gate and get the door down
4) While also defending the BOs and/or preventing resources from entering the keep, through posterns.

There's just too much going on - You can't be everywhere at the same time, and you also have to do all of this while being bombarded from the walls. Besides that, if you loose your cannons etc, you have to get new ones from all the way back at your own keep, at the other end of the zone. I'm aware that the system tries to stop zerging, but the problem is that this mainly only affects the attackers, and hardly even the defenders, because of the build-in cannons on the walls, as well as siege equipment only being deployable at your own keep. On top of this, even pugs, or hell, even low level chars can defend the keep with the cannons, while the organised guilds from the defending faction can just run around in the zone, retake BOs, and protect carriers.
The defenders should have an advantage, but it just feels like too much of an advantage at the moment. You could even make the case that the walls and NPCs themselves is enough advantage. I'm not sure that is the case, though.

Thirdly, the system punishes you for zerging. This is obvious, but what we can confirm in our guild with the last few days, is that you can't rely on pugs - Like, at all. If you hold the siege and ask the pugs in the chat, to bring more siege equipment, you're lucky if you even get an answer. So what that essentially means is that, if you're the only organised guild around in the zone (As it feels like we have been the last few days), you're screwed. That group of players have to do all the things I mentioned above. And if you try and split up the warband to try to get new cannons, stop a carrier, or defend a BO, and what not, what happens is that the defenders just take a quick look at the outside of their keeps walls, and instead of the 50+ players with red names they saw standing there a moment ago, now there are only about 30 to 40. What do they do? They charge out and break the siege, the system detects that the keep door is no longer under attack, and it auto repairs the doors back to full. Rinse and repeat.

This was a lot more than I originally intended to write, but seems I had more on my mind that I thought. But anyway, this is just some feedback (I hope it wasn't too negative) - The system isn't final, so I just thought I would share some of my concerns and experiences with it so far. Hope it can help

And thanks again for the patch.

[Azarael]

Solid feedback, thank you.

Next raft of changes:

- BO lock timers will increase slightly. With a large population, the lock timer increases from 2 minutes to 3.
- Fixed an issue in which keep doors would heal to full when the keep ticked safe without consuming any resources. Only destroyed doors had any cost.
- Rebalanced the damage input for a ram:

• Cannons will inflict less damage unless the ram has not yet been deployed. Thus to use cannons effectively against a ram, it will be necessary to use them before the ram is set up.
• Artillery will inflict significantly less damage (-90%). The setting was entirely wrong, and this was allowing the defense to destroy a ram using safe artillery positioned in a location that the attack could not reach.
• Physical ranged fire is blocked.
• Resistance-based ranged fire continues to deal poor damage.
• Melee damage is significantly increased.

- The refire rate of cannons of all types is now linked to the keep rank versus the supply cap. If a keep has more cannons active than its current rank should allow, the fire rate of the cannons will be slowed. This should prevent the issue in which the attack has starved the keep of resources, but the keep remains very difficult to take because of stacked cannons within.

I am looking into allowing siege to be deployed from the warcamp as well as the keep.

In general I am trying to move off attacking siege as much as I can (i.e. within reason). Your first point was made within our internal chat yesterday, with regard to players wishing to play their classes rather than siege, and it is accepted. When we have the ability to implement siege towers, I would like to replace the concept of artillery breaking funnels with siege towers.

[Razid1987]

Brilliant - Looking forward to it!

Siege towers sound pretty damn awesome. Are they already in the game files from live, but were just never implemented?

[DokB]

It might be worth looking at some of the cannon positions for some keeps, the Hell Cannons and Tri-Barrel Cannons at Zimmerons Keep in Chaos Wastes for instance. If the best time to damage rams with artillery is when they are approaching the keep and not yet deployed, the cannons need to have line of sight to the keeps approach. With the Tri-Barrels it's not so much an issue, while you cannot see over the lip of the battlements it spawns on, you can still use the map marker to guess where you are going to hit.

Unfortunately the Hell Cannons when turned to face the approach to the keep, the chaos gods in all their wisdom decided to line the battlements with line of sight blocking spikes!
I noticed the position for where the Hell Cannons spawn on Zimmerons aren’t centred on the circular turret station like the Tri-Barrels are.
This is probably a non-issue for many keeps because if I remember correctly most are positioned quite well and give good line of sight for destro. This might just be a singular case with the Hell Cannons at Zimmeron’s hold.