Return of Reckoning

Hello,

RoR has over the years seen many many changes, little tweeks, adjustments and full overhauls.
One area of the game which has been the red line throughout every game system, have especially changed since the Live days of AoR release with the Victory Point system where lower tiers, PQs, associated scenarios, kills, and battleobjectives all were required to be dominated for zonelocks to happen and the campaign moving on.
Later iterations on both AoR & RoR have changed the game towards are less hardcore concept for the main replay loop. But here comes my question and topic for this thread:

"Have the Campaign become too meaningless and no longer serve as the main motivator?"

A few RoR changes that I personally think either directly, or indirectly took importance away from the Campaign are the following:
- Scheduled Citysieges absolutely disconnected the Crown Jewel of the Campaign, from the actual Campaign. Very very few players care about winning a fortress for the sake of their realm's campaign status, and instead it is more so seen for a kill-farm oppotunity, avenue to action-on-demand, or personal progression. (Direct impact)

- Removing the Carrot from Citysieges to make them sought after, unique, and important. (Direct impact)

- Ranked gamemode allowed you to fight your own realm in endgame. Ever since we create our level 1 characters we are told by cutscenes, gamemechanics, promotional videos about this is an RvR game where you fight on two factions against the enemy realm. But due to lifesupport attempt, Ranked was allowed to break this foundation and removing immersion of what we are even fighting for - and against. (indirect impact)

Now, some of these are honestly too late to reverse and I do understand the arguments of why these changes happend wether I agree or disagree with them.
For example the part where players would "throw" fortresses to allow their capital to get besieged, so they could get Sove gear. Yeah, thats not exactly a good example of how realmpride is at is peak
And now that the changes with scheduled cities, detached almost fully from the campaign, and unified warcrests are implimented we cant really go back to how things were or that would be unfair on new players coming in having to catch up. So the damage is done, lets look forward

I would urge and love for the RoR tealm to prioritize making RvR and the Campaign especially the main focus of 2026, pretty please!
We could really do with some systems that realisticly understand how BiS endgame guilds, warbands, 6mans will probably never be the biggest of the campaign heroes and die to hold a box nor a flag. But if the game had rvr systems and a campaign where majority of the new players, progression players and brutally honest the "food" for the veterans, are incentivized to play the game systems by holding flags, playing for the zones, coordinating sieges. Then you shift the playground landscape and therefor also the Veteran kill succesmessurement by moving the action.

I and others have posted plenty of ideas over the years, and I do hear that the RvR team is working on making their job easier for the future, which is all great!
But....
Can we please, please, please see a massive effort push where all the available hands(coders, ideamakers, community, CMs, polls etc) comes together in 2026 and really makes a push to put the Campaign back into RoR, and we move away from the Kill messurement endgame. Because all this does, is bread and teach the next waves and "generation" of players coming in. So I urge you, RoR team, please address the RvR & Campaign with modern systems. Well, that is. If YOU actually still want to brand RoR a campaign RvR game..

There is very little to this game other than kill farm atm. Even the keep sieges are pretty much avoided. As 80% of them are actually just waiting for the door to go down, either playing the click on time minigame or just chatting away while others do it.

Fortresses might even do more harm than good for the game atm, as when captured they lock the pairing so the remaining ones will be utterly overcrowded. With luck its ostland where you can nearly shoot with cannons from camp to camp . The zones mostly progress only after other side loses their org WB's and aao tips to 100%+

You know that majority of players don't even want to play City Sieges, no matter if they are scheluded or not? At this point, even if sieges would be end of campaign, people wouldn't care, unless you force them to care by adding new BiS that drops only there OR be completly reworked.

People want fun content, CS never was fun for majority of players, thats why during prime time you see only 2 instances of CS, while lakes remain crowded. It's easy to force people back to care about CS... but first, please - make them enjoyable for majority of playerbase.

Just compare CS to LOTD. Always crowded, despite rewards being easy to get in just two runs.

game is campaign no more since most of community just log in to zerg then logoff and developers removed any meaning to make campaign from the game in the first place.

wonshot wrote: Wed Dec 24, 2025 5:15 am - Ranked gamemode allowed you to fight your own realm in endgame. Ever since we create our level 1 characters we are told by cutscenes, gamemechanics,

I can understand and respect the effort to highlight issues within RvR and the campaign. However, I strongly disagree with bringing Ranked into this discussion — the comparison simply does not hold.

Ranked has nothing to do with ORvR or the campaign. From a long-term perspective, it is one of the most sensible solutions RoR has. When population is low, Ranked still provides fights, which in my view should be the core idea of this game — far more important than any “realm hero” mentality.

Every veteran I know — including you — plays both factions. In a game with heavily oscillating population numbers, full realm commitment is neither realistic nor healthy, especially when certain content only functions if players are willing to log in and fight against the odds. Ranked’s idea of pooling players who simply want to fight helps keep people engaged instead of logging off or quitting.

Ranked has arguably been harmed far more by constant class-balance complaints and ORvR-centered design decisions than by anything Ranked itself has ever caused. It is optional content, yet those claiming ORvR to be the “main content” have ironically done significant damage to a mode that was once relatively balanced — often without actively playing it themselves. This has long been a recurring theme: criticism of Ranked frequently comes from players with little to no actual experience in the mode.

Ranked does not replace ORvR, nor does it compete with the campaign. Ironically, it has largely become dead content due to community perception and narrative — and your post may even serve as an example of that. The real issues with the campaign lie elsewhere, and using Ranked as a scapegoat only distracts from addressing the actual problems.

Short version: If we want to have a serious discussion about the state and relevance of the campaign, it should be done clearly and separately from Ranked.

Fully agree with you on this.

If we really want this to have meaning, we need a true endgame, and that means bringing City Sieges back to their original purpose and design.

In Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, City Sieges were never meant to be just another instanced scenario. They were the culmination of the entire RvR campaign, the final objective after long, coordinated realm-wide efforts. Capturing zones, pushing the frontlines, and winning battles across the map all led to one decisive moment: the assault on the enemy capital, not an appointment for the Dr. at 2000hrs on any given day, no thats not how an unexpected siege should feel like.

Originally, City Sieges felt different because:
They were strategic and persistent, not isolated matches.
They involved multiple stages (outer defenses, gates, inner city, and finally the king).
They blended large-scale PvP with meaningful PvE, including city public quests and unique encounters inside the capital.

What we have now — City Sieges functioning essentially as structured scenarios — may be balanced and accessible, but they lack the weight, scale, and sense of consequence that made the original system memorable. Winning a scenario feels good in the moment, but it doesn’t feel like you’ve helped your realm conquer the enemy’s heartland.

Considering the solid work being done on PvE lately and the positive results it’s producing, this feels like the perfect opportunity to revisit that original vision. Reintroducing city public quests during sieges, multi-phase objectives, and a clearer link between the open RvR campaign and the final city assault would go a long way toward restoring that epic feeling and off course for more than 24vs24, wide open for everyone crazy enough to join.

In short, if we want the endgame to matter again, City Sieges need to stop being just another scenario and return to what they were meant to be:
a realm-wide effort, a payoff for sustained RvR, and a truly epic event that defines victory in Warhammer Online.

While the 2 fort win = city attack mechanic was active, people complained about constant city attacks.
Now that we have 2 more cities, that should no longer be a problem.

The only problem left, is that if your WB can not beat the enemy WB in the first fight in a city, it will be a 90% loss to you. There is no tactical play possible. You clash, you loose, they stand infront of the barrier and you can not go out.
Most of the time people abandon the WB after the first lost fight and go wander around the town to kindle some boxes or straight out leave, making it even more unrealistic to turn the fight.

And all that doe to the fact that there is not even a reward worth the time you invest into the whole thing. Standing around for Queue (minutes). Standing in town building partys (minutes). Smashing 2 cannons (minutes). Clashing into enemy at center cannon(seconds)
Option A: Win and do the other BOs + stage 2 + stage 3 (30 min that feel like 1 hour)
Option B: Loose and stand behind barrier for what feels like 1,5 hours

And then at the End you get? Badumtsssssssss
Nothing!
- Less crest then you could have got in a WB zerging.
- Gold Bags weirdly go to those who went on city Sightseeing tour while those who fought get white bags.
- Loot inside Bags is not even determent by your renown, but a fixed set you mostly already stopped wearing 20 to 30 renown ranks before coming to that city.

Congratulation you participated in the so called End game content. Have a bag of mid game stuff and then please leave


At least give faction that successfully attacked/defended a realm wide rr/crest bonus for 2 days

"Is RoR realisticly still a campaign game?" No.

The biggest mistakes were unified currency and scheduled city.

Unified currency maybe "cleaned" up some things and made the game a bit more "simple" in the short term but in the long term had extremely negative effect on the game.

Why were these changes harmful?

Because there was initially a ladder system with gearing, designed properly by actual game devs. You had specific sources of gear and currencies associated with it. Conq from zone lock, vanq from keep, inv from fort, wl/sov from city (as well as oppressor and weapons from SCs). As far as I remember, and can tell from skimming 10+ year ago posts from old forums etc, this is how it was. Further in RoR we had tri/vic only from ranked which continued this ladder system and that was a positive thing for a while because it encouraged learning, improving and playing properly to earn some nice rewards.

Why was the original campaign design and reward structure better than what we have now?

Because it gave a clear set of "goals" for players and set in stone upgrade paths and because it gave a reason to engage in core game systems. Perhaps even more importantly overall it helped to grow community elements that are necessary for an mmo. It's especially paramount in the game such as this, where the formation of guilds, alliances, 6-12 man teams and to some extent faction "pride" were all meant to be important at the foundational level. This is because if you wanted to earn the best gear, you needed to coordinate with other players and work together to achieve goals at every level of gameplay. This is the essence of the genre (we are playing an mmorpg, not single player rpg in case some of you forgot) and was a core tenant of the original design philosophy, being a realm vs realm game with heavy teamplay and faction elements. The entirety of the tug of war, push and pull, capturing and holding enemy lands or winning back your own, the broad campaign mechanic which is so unique to this game and what makes it truly special now lies dead now because there is largely no point in engaging with most of it. This is due to it not having strong enough rewards. Why push for a keep when I can sit in blob and spam aoe for bis gear? Same goes for fort and for city, as well as for scenarios.

If you wanted to succeed and to deck yourself out in the best gear you were, by clever design, encouraged to play with others. Forming bonds, comradery, team play, organization, coordination and on the flipside strong rivalries with certain opponents which gave another reason to put in the extra effort to win. However since the ruination of the campaign, removal of individual currencies and acquisition methods for gear and destruction of SCs/ranked in importance, what we saw was instead has been a slow and steady degradation of both gameplay and community. Guilds began to disband or lose large amounts of members, skilled veteran players quit because there was no more competition, coordination and player skill fell off a cliff to the abysmal state it is in now. Game became and continues to be a largely uncoordinated blob fest full of players who mostly don't have a clue what they are doing or why they are doing it.

To put it simply; the ability to purchase the best gear in the game (warlord, sovereign, tri, vic) with a currency that is able to be earned at level 1 (war crests) was a huge error. It enabled players to become bis without learning almost anything about the game. No longer are you strongly encouraged to group up, create guilds, form alliances, make friends, team up and try your hardest to win. The reward structure has been completely broken in favor of some casual pandering and it's very clear that it has backfired tremendously. Now you just load up the game, log on your choppa, join a 3-warband pug blob and spam 3 buttons with 10 fps. All of this without a semblance of skill or a clue and you are rewarded with bis gear for doing so if you do it long enough.

It's no wonder the forums, advice chat, discords, etc. are always full of outlandish complaints and misinformation when you create an environment where, in a pvp game of all things, players are almost actively discouraged from improving due to the game mechanics not requiring it of them. There are no carrots anymore, just sticks. Don't mistake my meaning here, this is not an onslaught against more casual players or those without a lot of time/desire to improve. I love RoR and I am thankful for what the devs do and continue to do and I think many of the recent changes are steps in the right direction. Still it remains that there are some glaring issues such as campaign and reward structure that need to be re-examined for the health of the game.

It is paramount for the success of the game that the unique gameplay elements that WAR brings are better maintained and improved with a clear intent to emphasize community and individual growth rather than promoting stagnation. Reinforce your strengths and take some inspiration from the older designs when the game flourished. For years no other game can compete with the unique ideas of WAR such as the robust campaign and rvr mechanics, as well as other game systems like scenarios. It is also imperative that the reward structure is somehow repaired and brought back to a state where players are encouraged to engage in more content than brawling in Praag's middle BO to earn their next piece of loot.

This happens when the only price for , locks ,forts and citys are warcrests.

No chance to get anything special.

Who wants to be farmed as a pug vs 24 premade?

There should be exclusive "prices" to get from city, maybe sovereing would be ok

Pesteavino wrote: Wed Dec 24, 2025 7:53 pm This happens when the only price for , locks ,forts and citys are warcrests.

No chance to get anything special.

Who wants to be farmed as a pug vs 24 premade?

There should be exclusive "prices" to get from city, maybe sovereing would be ok

Awful idea, especially now when most toons are already BiS.
I'd rather add talisman slot to Sov ring that can be sloted only by talismans obtained from City. Nothing superior, but should motivate people to participate.