Well, in response to all this doom and bloody gloom:

Rvr in uthgard has got a lot better! There were enemy groups out all day yesterday, and 3/4 enemy groups still logged on at like 2 am lol.

I solo on my bm sometimes, and i can't believe all you people whinging on "omg i cant solo" of course you can! .. solo/small man action is not dead - it is played mostly at offpeak hours, when there are no full groups roaming to spank them.

To people wanting to solo /small man at primetime: talk to a few of your other whingy mates that like to solo/small man - and build a fullgroup!!compete!! stop being so negative and scared xD if more of you got together and ran about trying to spank things, in all realms, you wouldnt have this problem.

and to all the casual players, who don't neccessarily have developed pvp skills: If there are well organised guildgroups that have advantages in realm rank and play style, build up a 12 man or something! im sure it would be funner on both sides, casual's having more chance of winning, and the organised groups facing a harder challenge than just steamrolling in 10 secs.

I want to add that in my opinion the porter ceremony is a good thing for casual players who don't run in skilled groups yet. The porter helps to build a random zerg where casual player can find their place inbetween. If they run out solo they are food like it would be when taking instant ports. Give new level 50 players a chance to participate and don't call them adders. The new ones populate the RvR so don't blame them for participating and trying to have fun. Its still balanced if 12-16 unskilled randoms fight a high RR group.

Blue wrote:Its still balanced if 12-16 unskilled randoms fight a high RR group.

While this is true, it is extremely rare for those randoms to actually do that because they all hide in BGs where they can do the exact same only without the need for a 10-16 slot group.

This makes them simply go to BGs instead of end-RvR.


If you reward people to xp to 50 and play there instead of roll a toon, level it to 30 and stay in BGs till 49 just to start over again, you will get more action in OF than in BGs. Currently however, that's not the case. In general the BG population is pretty much double or triple the OF population... And no, not all of them are playing their first character. I'd say at least 50% of them already have a character near 50 or even 50 and ready for OF. As long as easy BG action is available you won't see them in OF, since BGs are more PuG, time and effort friendly.

I'm not saying there's no action in OF, I'm saying the action could be doubled by having a setting where OF is the main RvR zone, even for PuGs, instead of nowadays the BGs, which are the actual cause of such a low end RvR population. Especially since they offer a way better casual RvR player environment. Even though OF does not have the instant ports you have in BGs, this isn't the main issue. The real problem is that Emain is not PuG friendly enough and that the alternative (BGs) is WAY too rewarding and easy.


Having the classic BGs would be a serious improvement since they are capped rather quickly, end at lvl 35 (if you want to RvR with full character strength, OF is the place) and also start sooner, which makes it more of a suitable RvR break for the ones leveling to 50. Combine this with serious OF xp boni, camp and respawn improvements and you will have an insane OF population boost. Even though new 50s will lack RRs, this will only make it more likely for them to team up in zergs.

I think BGs should be used to give a taste of RvR to xpers and give you the opportunity to get the basic XP RAs such as MCL instead of offering a completely viable alternative for end RvR, which it does now.

Instead of this, and I mean no insult, insane suggestion to remove Thid, you should think WHY people prefer Thidranki to OF, and FIX Old Frontiers, instead removing the only part of why some people still play here.

I am telling you right now, in all honesty and without trying to make it sound like a threat or something: if you removed Thid you would not see more RvR. You would see a huge number of people quitting the server forever.

While an evil, "I-told-you-so" part of me would love to see this because it would make the staff realize just how many people are doing nothing RvR-wise atm, the rational part of me shivers at the thought.

Fixing the faults of OF by screwing up everything else is not, never has been and never will be the answer.

Nymeros wrote:I call it "The Uthgard paradox".

Rofl.

Nymeros wrote:Fixing the faults of OF by screwing up everything else is not, never has been and never will be the answer.

Agreed.

I just resumed playing my lvl 50 reaver in RvR, and I must admit that I'm very inclined to do something else with that enormous amounts of time I waste in doing it.

I spent 6 hours yesterday only to get 10% on 3l9.
It went like this: spam /lfg channel for half an hour.
Get a grp started, another half an hour.
Do 2 runs (if I'm lucky), only to have the whole grp disband because we got rolled by a mid grp without even killing one of them.
Then I'm back to spamming my lfg macro every minute for another half an hour...

If this is endgame RvR on Uthagard, then I want no part in it.
In NF I could at least go run with 2-3 friends and actually win some fights, and have...guess what...FUN wile doing it.

I know the faults of OF. I know why people play BGs.

BGs have a PuG friendly environment, have the option to go out with a char that has had NO form of templating whatsoever, instant action, easy to find grps.

OF has a PuG hostile environment, impossible to do anything without a good template, has a bigger time sink on top of that, making losing (due to skill/teamplay/RR/equipment/setup) even worse. This actually makes all those factors MUCH more important than in BGs since you will not only lose a battle if your face a stronger opponent, you will lose a LOT of time resulting in less fun.



Question is: how do you 'fix' this? How do you make end RvR more attracting than BG RvR for all those casual RvR players?

Either you make BG RvR less attractive or you make end RvR more attractive. I see both as an option, but of course the ideal would be to make end RvR more attractive to create a decent solution. A combination of both however might work even better.


PS: This problem is not created by OF, it's been here all along, even with NF. However, OF has definately emphasized it by increasing the price of a lost fight, which hurts the casual RvR player the most, making him search RvR in other places. Since the zones that aren't crowded with setgrps / high RR grps are empty, they move to BGs. For the same reason (no real option to do casual end RvR outside the setgroups' territory), this problem also existed in NF/Agra. Of course, in Agramon, getting rolled by such a group wasn't as demotivating as it is in OF.

@braxis as Zarkor said

that is not a fault by OF, but by the community

agreed that some might be even more demotivated to go to rvr due to port timers, however this is not the true reason for it in the first place


this is a community problem (however I am not saying that the staff doesn't have a way of fixing this as I believe they do)

example of fixing:

odins - bonus rp/bp for killing in a grp with 4 or less people
hadrians - bonus to rp/bp for being over RR6
emain - bonus rp/bp for being under RR6

all zones - bonus rp/bp for being close to a keep


this would tell every single play style something about where they should look for some evenly minded persons

odins = solo/smallman
hadrians = high RR set grps 8v8 kinda style
emain - low rr casual playstyle

then maybe instead of seing: /broad TY FOR HELPING! FFS!
we will see: /broad please go to emain and respec the playstyle we like as we respect yours by not going to emain

Zarkor wrote:I know the faults of OF. I know why people play BGs.

BGs have a PuG friendly environment, have the option to go out with a char that has had NO form of templating whatsoever, instant action, easy to find grps.

OF has a PuG hostile environment, impossible to do anything without a good template, has a bigger time sink on top of that, making losing (due to skill/teamplay/RR/equipment/setup) even worse. This actually makes all those factors MUCH more important than in BGs since you will not only lose a battle if your face a stronger opponent, you will lose a LOT of time resulting in less fun.



Question is: how do you 'fix' this? How do you make end RvR more attracting than BG RvR for all those casual RvR players?

Either you make BG RvR less attractive or you make end RvR more attractive. I see both as an option, but of course the ideal would be to make end RvR more attractive to create a decent solution. A combination of both however might work even better.


PS: This problem is not created by OF, it's been here all along, even with NF. However, OF has definately emphasized it by increasing the price of a lost fight, which hurts the casual RvR player the most, making him search RvR in other places. Since the zones that aren't crowded with setgrps / high RR grps are empty, they move to BGs. For the same reason (no real option to do casual end RvR outside the setgroups' territory), this problem also existed in NF/Agra. Of course, in Agramon, getting rolled by such a group wasn't as demotivating as it is in OF.

You can fix it two ways: Go back to NF, or customize OF. There is no middle ground.

And of course NF also had the mentality problems, I'll be the last to say it was perfect, but honestly, the only time so many people were dissatisfied with NF was when the instaporters were removed (a change I was even in favor of!) And, as Runis here said, most of the people against OF would now take NF even without the instaport.

In the end, it all rests on the shoulders of the staff.

Nymeros wrote:You can fix it two ways: Go back to NF, or customize OF. There is no middle ground.

And of course NF also had the mentality problems, I'll be the last to say it was perfect, but honestly, the only time so many people were dissatisfied with NF was when the instaporters were removed (a change I was even in favor of!) And, as Runis here said, most of the people against OF would now take NF even without the instaport.

In the end, it all rests on the shoulders of the staff.

"Most of the people against OF" is most likely the solo/smallman community, which is still completely neglected in the current implementation of OF. I agree that there is still a serious need for changes there.

In general though, how would you customise OF to handle the mentality problems then? Or any other problems?



Edit: @Nixian, I think the problem would be that the higher RR groups will lack enemies that way and feel strongly attracted to roaming easy-RPs-Emain instead of waiting 30 minutes for a fight in Hadrians. There's at most 5 active guild groups on uthgard: Vanquish, Anguish, KT, Rare, Cppt. That's hardly enough when they're all online, let alone if not.

Zarkor wrote:

Nymeros wrote:You can fix it two ways: Go back to NF, or customize OF. There is no middle ground.

And of course NF also had the mentality problems, I'll be the last to say it was perfect, but honestly, the only time so many people were dissatisfied with NF was when the instaporters were removed (a change I was even in favor of!) And, as Runis here said, most of the people against OF would now take NF even without the instaport.

In the end, it all rests on the shoulders of the staff.

"Most of the people against OF" is most likely the solo/smallman community, which is still completely neglected in the current implementation of OF. I agree that there is still a serious need for changes there.

In general though, how would you customise OF to handle the mentality problems then? Or any other problems?

personally I would do what I wrote a few posts up but agreed - its hard to costumise to compensate for community issues

Zarkor wrote:"Most of the people against OF" is most likely the solo/smallman community, which is still completely neglected in the current implementation of OF. I agree that there is still a serious need for changes there.

In general though, how would you customise OF to handle the mentality problems then? Or any other problems?

Well, if I HAD to customize OF and not simply go back to NF, I'd do most of the things we all talked about in the previous threads:

Secondary port after 30sec, somehow shortening the port timers (this would also include a workaround to get Hib to Emain faster), designating Odins as a solo zone, horse routes maybe...


There is no shortage of good suggestions (as you should know as many of them are yours ), it's just that the staff is very reluctant to take action and change anything for some reason. =|

And then people get frustrated and try anything to improve things a bit and we get talk about removing Thid, IRC RvR info and such. I'm generalizing intentionally, but you know what I mean.

Nymeros wrote:It's just that the staff is very reluctant to take action and change anything for some reason. =|

This is probably the worst problem our RvR is experiencing now. Yes, there is a mentality problem, sure, but that doesn't get solved without any incentives to change the mentality (ie staff intervention).

The biggest reason for them to be so reluctant to take action is probably because they simply do not feel and experience the problems current OF brings as much as the community does...



What's so annoying about all this though is that the community can't do anything about it, making things go nowhere at all.

Want 2 news ideas?

-Put all named of epic zones (dartmoor/llynn barfog for alb) in frontiers.So if you need stuff or want to farm,you need to go there.That way peoples will move away from gates to roam on thoses spots and solo/small grp can cross thoses damn gates and try to have some fun.

-Nerf realm keep's gards (CS/DL/SF) and permit realm invasion with a malus RP on grey killing.

Zarkor, it's obvious from Blue's comments that the staff are brainstorming this issue. I enjoy reading your ideas for ways to correct RvR imbalance, but I don't think it's fair to the accuse a volunteer team of doing nothing.

There needs to be more incentive to take and defend keeps. Not just a one time reward for killing the keep lord, but passive bonuses that benefit the entire realm. I don't mean Relic-type bonuses, but perhaps passive bonuses to RP/BP gain.

Perhaps the staff could implement a keep siege task that stacks with other group-tasks?