Observations from returning player

[galaxgal]

Hi guys. I played RoR back in 2020/2021 (don't remember which exactly), took a break, and came back.
I'm a casual PuG player who has played for ~2 weeks since returning.
I'm not allergic to group play but am often solo due to wanting to play on my own time and form pick up groups.

There are more good times than bad times since I enjoy WAR and RoR in general but it definitely feels like some friction points have gotten worse than I remember.
I don't want to just be negative, so I'll put down both things I've liked and disliked.

The good:
-Community (at least on Destro) has been very chill and enjoyable to hang out with. It might be different in peoples' private discords. But the public community has been fine. Much better than expected for a game of this type.
-I've played WE, Chosen, and Zealot at "low levels" of T1/mid-tier play. All of the classes feel good at this level, and even with the gap it seems bolster is doing its job in SC's and RvR encounters. Yes, healers feel overtuned, but that's about it and it's not insurmountable.
-I don't hate the PvE experience. It's something to do in between open WB's or waiting for queues to pop. Sacellum was fun too. Even if PvE is unpopular, I appreciate the fixes here because it makes the whole game feel more 'complete'.

Pain Points:
-SC matchmaking. This is the biggest one. Discordant skirmish pops very rarely and tends to make wildly skewed team comps. Midtier and T1 sc's are slow because of "the meta" to keep RR above CR and even doing well at SC's doesn't accomplish that. So everyone ends up queueing all scenarios to get action faster anyway. I can't even begin to list the # of noncompetitive behaviors that follow from this, like the instant surrender that wastes your time or people AFK in their spawn because they don't like their team. New/returning players who encounter this are going to think the game is dead and be turned off, because this is the easiest form of play to enter alone and often peoples' first introduction to the "PvP/RvR" element.

Even if making a good matchmaker is too many man-hours with the rebalance going on, I think that there are many improvements that could be made to the incentive structure to T1/Midtier SC's to encourage more people to join and give an honest try. Even bumping the RP gains so that people obsessing about Renown Rank stop avoiding the queue altogether would be nice.

-Low-CR/RR RvR. It's very painful, even if the difference between bolster and true max level with 'average' RR gear is overstated you will still get side-eyed as a low level player, end up in the tail of your WB, and get focus fired first by the enemy WB. Not being able to do smallman is whatever, that's always going to be for elite players with higher gear levels. I don't think the level of efficiency with which high-RR players are singling out low-CR combatants was expected, so maybe masking enemy players as looking like the max level for their tier might help mitigate this. You can still recognize a lower level player by their gear ETC in high skill situations.

-The entry to T2 is very confusing and overwhelming. I basically needed a wiki open to find the right gear sets, how keep mechanics work today, etc. There is no easy fix for this, so it's probably just a longterm thing to consider.

In Summary, while I don't have any strong negative feelings about the direction of the project, the skill rework, or the balance changes, I hope that the project can look at these pain points in the lower-tier RvR experience at some point. The progress toward implementing missing features for the Alpha has been nice, and I appreciate the balancing act that takes when the server also has an active hardcore community demanding new features or balance.

Finally, it's the nature of RvR games to eventually boil down to an elite over time, but taking steps to liven up the lower tiers a bit can help mitigate that.

[Rotgut]

-SC matchmaking.

Before the start of Ability Rework, Devs did a live stream and one topic was about reworking SCs matchmaking system. But that was back in August and the team doesn't have enough volunteer programmers, so its gonna take a while. The point being that yeah, the Devs are aware and agree with you.

The CR/RR meta thing is just misguided, people don't understand how big of a powerspike you get on your way to bis. You don't have to be afraid of fighting bis enemies if you are in pre-bis, the difference between bis and pre-bis is minimal. But you wanna get to bis eventually, and you need renown for that, which T4 SCs give you more of, so it will take you longer to get to Sov if you just stick to oRvR in midtier.

You don't need "a higher RR", you need to reach a specific target depending on your class.

Most DPS need 4 pieces of Vanq. Thats their biggest powerspike. So RR57
SnB Tanks can go Full Conq into Full Sov, thats rr45 i believe.
Healers (specially now that HV is out) do great with PvE gear, your renown doesn't matter much.

-Low-CR/RR RvR

You can hide people's ranks if you want, older players will still be able to tell simply from how you position yourself. Hell i don't look at people's ranks honestly, after a little over a year of playing this game, you get fast at reacting to people that are gonna be an easy kill based on how they are playing. Despite being a PvP MMO where gear does matter - i'm not saying that it doesn't - skill stills matter a lot. I've been leveling a Shammy lately and he is r32, i out-healed all other Healers two different times in a 2/2/2 pugband (shout out to Zorbaxx, the best dude in this server) despite being the lowest lvl healer there, and i wasn't dying outside of full wipes. But there were people that would die every single engagement no matter what. I'm not a great player, i just bothered to talk to better people and a had enough time to practice - that's all you need.

[galaxgal]

I agree with you overall. RE: The CR/RR I thing I think it's more a matter of, unfortunately, the player psychology has evolved to be that way, so I think it will be healthy (and mostly harmless) if the game evolves with it. Something as simple as slightly nerfing CR gains and slightly bumping RR gains in lowtier (1/2+3) SC's probably wouldn't have as much of a strain as a full queue redesign which is why I suggested it.

I think ultimately you're right that good players will be able to tell noobs like me from our poor positioning.
I confess it's more of a psychological thing - if bolstered players are 100% sure it's not just their CR getting them owned, they're more likely to 'stick'.

In any case even if my original post sounds kind of negative, I do want to stress that it's not meant to be apocalyptic.
I haven't quit over any of these and don't plan to, for instance - they're just thoughts I had rolling through the early levels so far.

I also wanted to touch on xrealming too but honestly it feels like a touchy subject and a kind of thing that people who've been in far deeper probably have more experience on. So I didn't want to wade into that. I do wish there were more 'realm pride' incentives (not just a penalty for cross-logging) like account bonuses or even some cool cosmetics. But that's more of a 'feature request' than a 'fix' and thus more complicated of a discussion.

[Hazmy]

Hi there!

We know about a lot of the things you have written about, and we're already working on solutions to address them, such as better Scenario Matchmaking, a better Mid-Tier Experience or just having more useful resources around to help the transition from being a new/returning player to a regular player at us.

Threads like yours though definitely help us see the frustrations of a newer player, so thank you very much for the feedback. We are still a small Team but we'll do our best to improve as many of the project's sore points as possible!

[Rotgut]

I agree with you overall. RE: The CR/RR I thing I think it's more a matter of, unfortunately, the player psychology has evolved to be that way, so I think it will be healthy (and mostly harmless) if the game evolves with it. Something as simple as slightly nerfing CR gains and slightly bumping RR gains in lowtier (1/2+3) SC's probably wouldn't have as much of a strain as a full queue redesign which is why I suggested it.

I think you're on to something actually, we should start looking at easier solutions that don't require a lot of time from Devs. Instead of trying to change everybody's mind so less people stick to this "don't do midtier SCs cuz of CR/RR", just buff RR gain and nerf XP. Just a tiny bit. That will probably be enough to deal with the people that never queue cuz of that. It can only help.

I also wanted to touch on xrealming too but honestly it feels like a touchy subject and a kind of thing that people who've been in far deeper probably have more experience on.

If your idea about xrealming comes from ingame chat where people blame an influx of players for Keep Sieges on xrealming, then that is wrong. Problem isn't xrealming, the problem is that content in this game is created by players and that should be made easier. Making an overflow for a keep take/defense where u don't get to actually lead is easy, so more people do it, and that creates content for all the people that were online but outside the RvR lakes. But making and managing a proper pugband (it has to be 2/2/2, it has to have a communicative leader, it has to have group management) is hard, so less people do it, and thus less content is provided for the player base.

[galaxgal]

If your idea about xrealming comes from ingame chat where people blame an influx of players for Keep Sieges on xrealming, then that is wrong. Problem isn't xrealming, the problem is that content in this game is created by players and that should be made easier. Making an overflow for a keep take/defense where u don't get to actually lead is easy, so more people do it, and that creates content for all the people that were online but outside the RvR lakes. But making and managing a proper pugband (it has to be 2/2/2, it has to have a communicative leader, it has to have group management) is hard, so less people do it, and thus less content is provided for the player base.

I've seen cases that are both and the way you put it is right more often than not, like 95/100 times, but realm priders always sound very demoralized since when your fave side is overpop, it is easy to feel like it's 'your fault' or 'selfish' for not hopping to the other side to try and make things more interesting, yet when your side is underpop, it can feel like you're just punishing yourself for not hopping to the winning team. Now imagine you're working toward an 'I got 60 RR worth of RP without leaving Order and all I got was this lousy T-shirt' type of reward, that type of player might be more inclined to both enthusiastically enjoy the easy times and put up with the hard times.

One of the reasons I didn't want to get into it though - is that it seems to go against the current vision (trying to incentivize even factions at any cost via RR/XP penalties) and might have negative social knock-ons with how the current player base plays. For instance, say a prominent player normally likes hopping realm to try and reinforce the underpopulated realm, but he's also a completionist and really wants that T-shirt. So it makes population balance worse in exchange for a benefit that's purely emotional. So may or may not be worth it and like I said, takes away from what I felt were more concrete ideas.