Return of Reckoning

With the recent hotfix, all Soldier's Medallions and Devastator gear has been removed from the server, and keep takes will no longer drop Medallions. Until a solution for the current issue is found, this will remain the case.

I have noticed that this has caused severe dissatisfaction on the Destruction faction. Let me outline the reasons for the wipe:

1) I was greeted today by the ticker showing a faction ratio of 70% Destruction to 30% Order, and some are saying that it was even worse than that at times. We have not had such a massive faction imbalance for a prolonged period of time in this server's history.
2) It became clear that, knowing that this situation was abnormal and a chance to acquire easy medallions, players had been farming keeps for hours on end.
3) We will, as we have in the past (see the early T2 purple gear wipe) correct for our mistakes in order to prevent severe faction imbalance. The turnaround time for this wipe has been much less than 24 hours from the time at which Soldier's Medallions were implemented, and yet we were already seeing players equipped with 3 pieces of Devastator. Common sense is to be used when dealing with situations like this.

This project remains far short of the standards you may experience from a professional game, and the developers will make mistakes. Please bear in mind that our mistakes do not entitle us to be abused and do not wipe out our previous contributions to the server. Actions will always be taken to remove gains which were unintentionally fast.

Probably the best you could do in that kind of situation.

(I play destro, had 3 pieces of devastor and still think it was a good decision.)

Good job, that was the right decision to make.

Good décision, and you did a good works, humans can make mistake

Nicely done, was kinda annoying to see that much of destru just zerging zones without enough resistence just to farm that crappy gear.

Right now, I think it was a good decision to go to bed at midnight and not go for the circle raiding.

Thank you for enlightening us, Azarael.

But with that being said, I don't approve of removing medallions and/or gear, when people have farmed for hours and hours on end for it. I know it's an alpha and you have the right to do it, and all that. But that doesn't make it a good solution that will be taken well. Some people are really pissed about this, and I don't blame them. I would be, too.
For me, a better solution would probably have been to give Order some medallions instead, to even it out somehow (QQ Order gets free gear). Punishing people for their hard work is almost never the answer. Especially when, as you said it yourself, it's not the player's fault, it's the system's.

I don't understand how you could implement such big changes and then not observe how it was going. There were no devs online all the time I was online yesterday, and from what I heard from other people, there weren't the rest of the day either (Don't know if this is actually true, I hope not).

But I'm happy to see that measures are being taken to try and fix the chaos that was going on in the ORvR lakes.

The solution is simple

Make deva gear drop from kills or increase the frequency of soldier meads ls on kills
Open the zones to 2 out of 3

You want rvr? You want fights? Then encourage that, not keep farming


I anticipated something like this last night but you shouldn't go wiping stuff every time thier is a population imbalance and it was a domino effect that occurred from the current rvr system where destro got thier stuff toghter and pushed out in elf and Ordo was help less and switched sides and so 50 became 60 then 70

We all know t3 is comming, deva is not end game gear, you don't have to make it that difficult to obtain tbt

I'd like to briefly address another argument that's been coming up:

Some have been suggesting that this wipe has been done to target the Destruction faction, because they happened to be winning yesterday, whereas Order has (they say) been winning RvR for the past 3 weeks. This is untrue and the reason is simple:

Even if Order had won every RvR engagement overall for the past 3 weeks, the benefit they received from it would not represent a tiny fraction of the benefit gained from last night's keep farming.

The wipe didn't come because one faction was dominating. The wipe didn't come because Destro were accomplishing something. The wipe came because a recent change to the system, which made winning RvR more desirable, exposed a terminal flaw, and it would have happened regardless of whether that winning faction were Order or Destruction.

Irrespective of what some people believe about me and my allegiances because I'm known to play Order, the last thing I need is for the Destruction faction to have any grievances, justified or not:

- A weak Destruction faction is no fun, whether that's because Destruction are being actively oppressed or because nobody wants to play Destruction because "Order are preferred by the devs"
- Any issues with either faction in terms of PvP or RvR just mean work for me to do.

I'm also not the only developer, and the staff isn't aligned to any one faction. If I truly were biased, I would have been dealt with long before now.

Good work Azarael nice decision keep up the good work man