If people don't want to go to 50 RvR, they won't do it. Doesn't matter if there's BGs or not. Take away the BGs and they'll just quit. End RvR being more desirable and supportive of the population is the way to go about solving the problem, certainly not attempting to force players to do something they don't want to.

I don't think anybody actually enjoys twinking out characters and then rerolling at 4L2, it just goes to show how much they dislike the End Rvr (Or how much they simply love the BGs)

The game should eaisly be able to support both BGs and endgame. The problem is that reaching 50 does not yield better gameplay than could be provided at an earlier level, it's significantly less enjoyable for most players. Is the solution to take away gameplay that players actually do enjoy? I really hope not.

Top goal in my opinion would be to make the endgame more attractive, especially to those who are just getting started in the frontiers. It's of course a complicated issue, but there are certainly many ideas that have yet to be tried.

One of the issues is that it takes up to 4L2 to even start in endgame RvR. You rarely would find someone lower than that. On live there was a better mix of low and high ranked players due to the limitations of BG's. This alone stretches the time to start in endgame RvR unnecessary longer. Another point for Uthgard is, that its rather easy to level up chars over and over.

Blue wrote:As long as Uthgard exists I hear the same arguments about endgame RvR. It really comes down to players behaviour in the end. It was that way in NF Emain, its was that way in NF Agramon (without xp spots), its similar that way in OF but in fact a bit less pronounced than before. Lookup old threads and you will find the same discussion over and over. Theres some serious design problem on Uthgard and I think BG's play a major role in that.

Not really, after some tweaks NF + agramon was pretty good (removal of central keep, instant teleports to agramon). Agramon has had lots of action and towers changed owners all the time. Then you said there's too much action, that uthgard is not a "fast food" server, removed the teleport camps and rvr only went downhill after that. Adding teleport to agramon (with very flawed design where one nearby enemy could block an entire realm from teleporting) back again didn't get uthgard rvr back on it's feet. Replacing NF with OF only made it worse by splitting rvr into 3 huge zones instead of having everything in just one (when nayru said the staff doesn't want to split up rvr ), poorly designed keeps not even worth defending and whatever else that has been said a thousand times already in the past year.

And you're wrong about "easy leveling" on uthgard, it's not that easy. It would be if powerleveling functioned properly, but it doesn't. It still takes far too much time to be called easy. I'm not saying it's hard but you make it sound like 1-2-3 poof I'm lvl 30 brae time.

Yes Agramon with all that stuff got better because it replicated what BG's are.

Ok, so what it boils down to is to identify what RvR @ 50 can offer that BGs cannot.

The issue there is that some of the things that made RvR so great for many people, back on live servers, were the large-scale fights over keeps or just to bash each others head in. But this doesn't happen here. Keep fights are uninteresting, zerg is frowned upon by the few players that actually play Endgame RvR, and PUGs that could form the nucleus for a zerg get stomped by setgroups - yet don't find any other players to gang up with.

Some custom-adjustment to increase interest in doing non-8v8s-related, zerg-y RvR activities could potentially help to rectify that issue; something that is clearly not offered by BGs. Be it great bonuses for defending as well as raiding keeps, big boosts for holding relics, etc. But then you are back to the issue that players on Uth seldom have realm pride and may just join the realm that has to upper hand right now. Also, custom solutions are generally rejected, so waddaya gonna do. I think you could increase the population of 8vs8 players by making it easier to get to the action, but you would not be getting to the root of the problem, which is to mobilize all those other players that are perhaps more interested in a less competitive playstyle (i.e. zerging, keep fights etc).

There must be something which Mythic made different in OF. (XP bonuses around keeps, better guard AI, better balanced relic handling, whatever bugs they didnt have compared to Uth...).

I would like to have the differences identified.

Blue wrote:Yes Agramon with all that stuff got better because it replicated what BG's are.

Yup and what BG's are is better than current frontiers for any kind of rvr with the exception of 8v8 which is rare in actual battlegrounds and lets face it's the least favored form of rvr by the staff (actually the only form of rvr that's not supported).

Blue wrote:There must be something which Mythic made different in OF. (XP bonuses around keeps, better guard AI, better balanced relic handling, whatever bugs they didnt have compared to Uth...).

I would like to have the differences identified.

What they did was release a whole new game. That's the only big difference. New game, thousands of clueless newbies testing the area. In order to copy something old, outdated and inadequate and try to make it good again you'd either need drastic customization or false advertisement.

Blue wrote:There must be something which Mythic made different in OF. (XP bonuses around keeps, better guard AI, better balanced relic handling, whatever bugs they didnt have compared to Uth...).

Like Lemonjelly said simply copying it won't work. There was a constant high pop, 2k-3k ppl, who just went out because it was fresh and fun. Really I don't think I cared two bits about guard AI or relic bugs or whatever.
You have to adapt to what THIS server needs. We will never have 2k players and with 600-800 people online you can't realistically expect more than half of that to be in OF. There's levelling, crafting, gear,...

Btw I'm pretty sure BG-hugging is no Uth specific problem. Unless I'm terribly mistaken the lvl 20-24 BG was always crowded on my server. As a matter of fact people still do it on live, Thidranki still popular there.

Blue wrote:There must be something which Mythic made different in OF. (XP bonuses around keeps, better guard AI, better balanced relic handling, whatever bugs they didnt have compared to Uth...).

I would like to have the differences identified.

Okay, I've read a lot of threads in here about BGs, end-game RvR and such. There's plenty of people crying about OF and plenty of players saying that it's good. My guess is that the differences from Uth to what live was are these:

1. Player skill level: When the first people went out in the frontiers on live they were clueless, noone paid attention to adding or anything else so there was no whining. But it all changed slowly with...

2. Player gear, setting up groups and such: Epic armor was actually EPIC in those times and top of the gear, it made the difference between noobs and leets for a long time. The concept of groups was begining to form so there were no good setups.

3. Radar: When the first 8v8 groups were first rolling they would settle to camping milegates and other hotzones for rps. After a while, radar came out and the leet groups became truely leet. Having the advantage it brought, they could now avoid or bomb the zergs and fight each other in remote areas. So the fun was still there for them, while zergs could take keeps, raid relics or whatever.

This was live DAoC in its classic times. On Uth it's like this:

1. Player skill level: The players here are well too familiar with game mechanics, skills, spells and tactics.

2. Player gear, setting up groups and such: There are templates here and well known setups for the groups to be effective.

3. Radar: There is no radar on Uth (none that I've noticed while running 8v8). This has its ups and downs. The up is that there isn't a lot of cheating going on thankfully, the down is that 8-man groups get zerged a lot so they simple quit for the evening or their members leave for other games (my case for example).

From my point of view, these are the reasons that keep and will keep Uthgard from evening being classic live-like. So, Blue, you and the rest of the staff shouldn't aim to be like it was in the old days. But to be an awesome server with what you have right now.

Yes but we can only try. If it depends on community it can still fail regardless of what we do. What you said is true. We have very experienced players while back in the day everyone was more or less a noob and not that organized.

Blue wrote:We have very experienced players while back in the day everyone was more or less a noob and not that organized.

Pretty close to the epiphany that not everything from 10 years back can be applied to Uthgard and actually work.

Blue wrote:Yes but we can only try. If it depends on community it can still fail regardless of what we do. What you said is true. We have very experienced players while back in the day everyone was more or less a noob and not that organized.

Which explains why people randomly went out in the frontiers way before level 50. They just wanted to do "some" RvR and thus joined the zerg or built their own smallman group to roam with and hopefully kill whatever they find.

This is also what does not work on Uthgard, leading to the need for a real incentive for non50 players today, who are facing almost solely optimised and organised enemies (if any at all). So first off there must actually be action for these players, secondly they must be able to find a group relatively easy and thirdly they need some form of improved character progression as a reward for taking the risks they are so that it actually becomes worth it.

I remember we had some idea long long before when Presto still was here to protect <50 players from getting killed over and over by giving a heavy penalty on RP the larger the RR/Level gap was.

This means if a RR8 player kills a level 49 player with RR2 he would get so less RP that it wouldnt even worth to look for that fight. This could lead to sub RvR inside of OF for certain Levelranges and RR's. Like having BG scenarios inside OF itself.

An extreme idea was to give no RP or any reward at all for kills under your level IF the low level player did not attack first.

In Agramon we had even another idea to calculate how imbalanced the fight was and give penalties or bonuses. Like if you won 8:2 you will have a bit penalty and if 2:8 wins they will get a bigger RP bonus for that risk they took.

Blue wrote:I remember we had some idea long long before when Presto still was here to protect <50 players from getting killed over and over by giving a heavy penalty on RP the larger the RR/Level gap was.

This means if a RR8 player kills a level 49 player with RR2 he would get so less RP that it wouldnt even worth to look for that fight. This could lead to sub RvR inside of OF for certain Levelranges and RR's. Like having BG scenarios inside OF itself.

An extreme idea was to give no RP or any reward at all for kills under your level IF the low level player did not attack first.

In Agramon we had even another idea to calculate how imbalanced the fight was and give penalties or bonuses. Like if you won 8:2 you will have a bit penalty and if 2:8 wins they will get a bigger RP bonus for that risk they took.

Not a bad idea but very hard to implement afaik.

If you can just manage to get enough players in OF, there will be killable targets for everyone, making getting killed yourself not as bad as it is now where most lower players don't have any killable targets running around anyway, which they find out after getting rolled a couple of times before it makes them log.

Well first off I am new and would like to thank you guys for putting this server together it has been fun getting to go back to the MMO that started it all for me and have been enjoying it everyday since I have found out about you guys.

I think the idea that Blue mentioned about bonuses for killing higher RRs would be excellent (even though it is a bit selfish for me to say since soon I will be hitting Emain up and would like the increase in RPs :p). I have yet to go out into OF other then to level a bit in Uppland but from the reading the forum posts it seems that RvR is void of players and like someone mentioned earlier the only way that you would be able to fix that is to put more incentives to draw people out. For instance, boost xp in all RvR zones by 75%-100% and that will bring out the levelers which in turn brings out the vultures ( lower RR people looking for easy RPs) which would in turn bring out people to hunt them and eventually draw out a larger portion of the population.

Having never been in OF I am curious about the "poorly designed keeps" people keep mentioning and why it is so bad. They seem ok to me except missing the cool little towers from NF.

Easy 4 step process to bring everyone out:
1. The idea blue posted a little bit ago
2. Increase XP gain in OF
3. Make travel to the RvR zones faster by adding the port system to port to keeps your realms own unless they are under attack
4. Some sort of warmap so that people can know which keep is currentyl under attack and thus where the action is.