I liked most of NF keep sieges. Even though it didn't happen as often as i would of liked. But now it is almost non existent and getting to one while its being sieged is difficult and defending is even harder, as the shape of them kinda suck. But if there was away to get more to seige, other then just opening DF, it could possibley be better. But the real problem with RVR is emain is being used too much for the majority of rvr at 50. No one ever wants to switch to Odin or Hadrian, unless its for a mission or keeps for DF. Few soloers will go there, but often you can go there and find no one. There needs to be some kind of incentive to get the majority of rvr to move around in diffrient zones, now and then. Then hib will not be the ones suffering from suprise attacks while they are on a horse to RvR in emain. Giving everyone a chance to port to rvr. And if rvr changes between each zone, often enough. ( Not like every hour, but like tied to who ones DF ) then after awhile, people will go into any zone, as there is likely hood there will be people in it.

And the buff change could encourage more visables to run solo. Not worrying on how much money they blew on buffs , just to die by a grp, or an enemy who out buffed them with pots and charges.

Blue, I can tell you this: If relic guards behaved like they did on live when you took more and more keeps, you'd see our guild capturing all hibby keeps each time we go after the relic at 10 PM PST. We don't like knocking on doors for 200 rps, but one night we were bored, took them all and went to the relic keep to be surprised - ....100% guard count.

Blue wrote:Interesting thing here, now its the keep fights which are the most interesting thing for some in DAoC. In NF I got repeatedly told that keep sieges suck and are not important at all. There are always two sides and different roles of players with different needs. We can't make it right for everyone.

Because people who liked NF keeps had nothing bad to say about it, and people who said keep sieges in NF suck will say the same now because they simply don't like keep sieges. Now people who liked keep sieges lost that and are complaining about it and that's not the same group of people you heard complaining during NF.

I personally don't like keep sieges in neither OF nor NF and participated in very few on uthgard but still from both attackers' and defenders' point of view NF keeps and siege weapons were far better in design making keep sieges a lot more dynamic.

Disdain wrote:Truth

Blue, NF keep sieges were fun for the people who are actually interested in that part of DAoC. The keeps were better designed, there were more ways to attack, more ways to defend, and the war-map was great for those of us who play during off-peak times. I'm not saying they were never boring, or frustrating. They were just better than what we have now.

I guarantee you the people who hate NF sieges also hate OF sieges. They will hate that aspect of the game no matter what you do, but since sieges aren't a mandatory part of RvR why should you even listen to them? Focus on the people who actually utilize this part of your server.

I also liked NF keep fights.

You could always get a siegetower and a ram and get some action quick. One Alb keep burning and you had 1-2 fg albs coming soon to defend/retake

Think a warmap with burning keeps under atatck would help alot. Or some message.

All this bring back NF talk...imo here are some changes that would work great in OF frontier setting that I hope a staff member reads but probably won't:

1) give an option to port to certain keeps of your realm by waiting on the pad also, unless the keep is under siege. This works well because there is still a wait time rather than instant, yet this promotes keep defense because people don't have to port to the realm, and then run alllll the way out there and find the keep taken some 10 minutes ago. This solution also gives hibs a way to port to emain without having to suffer from a broken horse route system.

2) FIX that issue of claiming keeps and lowering the number of guards at the relic. This would be absolutely huge in my opinion because i KNOW for a fact that there would tons of casual rvr guilds that take keeps just for the guard tasks. This motivation combined with limiting the guards at the relic would give more motivation, and people would actually start to freak out of they were missing 3 or so keeps to the same realm.

3) A warmap which shows which keeps are under siege. This is just plainly obvious, most people have no clue which keeps are currently under siege, there needs to be some way to tell when our precious keeps in our precious homelands need immediate defense!

ALSO to all those staff members who get offended by forum ranters: How would you feel in our position? Asking for changes for certain issues that aren't even custom fixes, and seeing no response time and time again. When we look at the changelog, it's all meaningless things like quest fixes. The main priorities should be completing the classes and fixing things that just seem completely off, like slam range, the interupt code, block rates etc. My druid will block a tank 4 times in a row just by facing him, and this happens very often. I know many of the staff members work very hard, and it hard to criticize people who do this in their spare time. But the players feel neglected when there ARE things in the changelog finally updated but seemingly none of those are things of any high priority towards the server has a whole.

Guys, thanks. Happy to see some healthy discussion here. I just want to say this is all in the spirit of constructive feedback for the devs. Because of these issues, I believe the RvR population is reduced, which ends up creating a downward spiral in server population, as people who are dissatisfied with the end-game RvR leave and go elsewhere.

Astealoth perfectly summed up my feelings towards buffs:

Astealoth wrote:i wont play in the frontiers because the keeps are senselessly bad and the only other thing to do is camp and burn buffs on my sb until 3 ranger find me or run in a circle between mmg and breifine with a pug who probably gonna get run down by 3 fg who got a stealth crew stalking them to add on everything.

Remove time/gold/"buff vs unbuff" penalties from RvR and you will see alot more players in the Frontiers.

Voloxy wrote:Guys, thanks. Happy to see some healthy discussion here. I just want to say this is all in the spirit of constructive feedback for the devs. Because of these issues, I believe the RvR population is reduced, which ends up creating a downward spiral in server population, as people who are dissatisfied with the end-game RvR leave and go elsewhere.

Astealoth perfectly summed up my feelings towards buffs:

Astealoth wrote:i wont play in the frontiers because the keeps are senselessly bad and the only other thing to do is camp and burn buffs on my sb until 3 ranger find me or run in a circle between mmg and breifine with a pug who probably gonna get run down by 3 fg who got a stealth crew stalking them to add on everything.

Remove time/gold/"buff vs unbuff" penalties from RvR and you will see alot more players in the Frontiers.

IMO, if you are fully buffing all the time, you're only doing it to yourself. Plus, with the gold rewards, it should be pretty cheap to keep buffs up if you get a kill every once in awhile. Granted I dont play at European prime time, but my buddy to keeps fully buffed all the time on a reaver knows full well he is only doing it to himself.

Also, removing any sort of 'penalty' as you say is devaluing in game mechanics. _Yes_ buffs are valuable. Yes, potions are good. That is the point.

Astealoth is saying that he solos but is frustrated he gets overrun? Welcome to classic DAOC, imo. Its the life of a stealther!

lightb wrote:
IMO, if you are fully buffing all the time, you're only doing it to yourself. Plus, with the gold rewards, it should be pretty cheap to keep buffs up if you get a kill every once in awhile. Granted I dont play at European prime time, but my buddy to keeps fully buffed all the time on a reaver knows full well he is only doing it to himself.

People fully buff because it is necessary to compete. An assassin with AF charge, str/con pot, and con pot can probably tank 30% more damage than an unbuffed assassin. For an evade 7 class that is a significant advantage. It's ridiculous to kill a solo enemy and see 5-7 lines of green text below his death spam. Not many people have the time to farm the plats to pay for that kind of buffing, and killing a few enemies does not make up for the cost.

It creates an imbalance between people who have the free time to spend hours farming money for pots and charges, and people who just want to get out and play with a toon they've already spent months leveling and equipping.

How is that any different from people who spent extra $$ a month for a buff bot on live?

Thats why i believe a limit to how many pot/charge buffs you can run at one time, should be limited. One pot and One charge of there choice, and raise those timers to 20min, instead of 10min. And that doesnt include the DA one as that is only 30sec. This way people will need to choose what is importent to them. I also suggest increase the value of base pot and spec pot values to lvl 30 values, to make up for the limit.

Being 1 charge and one pot, they can be casted instently, and last 20min. So if someone dies right away, or dont see anyone for awhile, it is less of a hassel.

The only reason people currently run with a min of 4+ pot/charge buffs, is because there enemy is most likely doing the same. Limit one, limit them all. There is no reason for someone to run like 6 bonus buffs to fight. There is no skill in those buffs, and they do make a diffirence for a fight. Its like a low rank, killing low lvls to gain RRs, then at high Rank, solos same level enemys. They got a high rank behind them, but they didnt earn it, so when facing someone with equal rank or even lower rank, they get killed earyer. There is no skill learned by doing so. One buffs because others have the extra buffs also. Or one buffs, hoping it will make them stronger then there class was designed out of the box.

Panchos wrote:All this bring back NF talk...imo here are some changes that would work great in OF frontier setting that I hope a staff member reads but probably won't:

1) give an option to port to certain keeps of your realm by waiting on the pad also, unless the keep is under siege. This works well because there is still a wait time rather than instant, yet this promotes keep defense because people don't have to port to the realm, and then run alllll the way out there and find the keep taken some 10 minutes ago. This solution also gives hibs a way to port to emain without having to suffer from a broken horse route system.

2) FIX that issue of claiming keeps and lowering the number of guards at the relic. This would be absolutely huge in my opinion because i KNOW for a fact that there would tons of casual rvr guilds that take keeps just for the guard tasks. This motivation combined with limiting the guards at the relic would give more motivation, and people would actually start to freak out of they were missing 3 or so keeps to the same realm.

3) A warmap which shows which keeps are under siege. This is just plainly obvious, most people have no clue which keeps are currently under siege, there needs to be some way to tell when our precious keeps in our precious homelands need immediate defense!

this are three really good points in my opinion.
2) would be even just a fix to make it livelike.
1) is the best solution for ports to keeps and (and therefore a solution for the hibs to get closer to emain) i read here so far.
3) would be a custom change, but why not. A warmap would help a lot to increase keep fights.

I also think those ideas would really make OF more attractive for ALL kind of players. Actually the main problem of OF zone is about time:

Knowing that X keep is under siege by a fg, if you want to defend it you have to form a group if you have none, bring your group to portal keep if you have one, wait for port, take the horse route ... I might forgot some but anyway, there's a lot of reason that when you finally reach the keep, it already belong to enemy and that fg is already gone cleaning df. Or you might have been lucky and then you travelled/ported for 20 minutes to have your 5 minutes fight.

Also that 1) have already been discussed some month ago:

http://uthgard.net/index.php?option=com_jfusion&Itemid=53&lang=en&jfile=viewtopic.php&f=32&t=19760

NO SINGLE ONE custom (or livelike) change in OF will bring back the feeling and gameplay from NF.
* OF never can be attractive like NF.
* you can change what you want.. OF stays OF!
* In OF you CANT reach all kind of players regardless all written changes.
* its an complete different rvr system.
* only change would help is going back to NF. Then you can reach all kind of players.

Topaz wrote:NO SINGLE ONE custom (or livelike) change in OF will bring back the feeling and gameplay from NF.
* OF never can be attractive like NF.
* you can change what you want.. OF stays OF!
* In OF you CANT reach all kind of players regardless all written changes.
* its an complete different rvr system.
* only change would help is going back to NF. Then you can reach all kind of players.

Sorry, but I like the maps in OF. Way more than those NF maps that were designed with no soul. I would thumb up any system that provides OF maps and NF keeps, or anything similar.

My opinion about OF on Uthgard is that it's imbalanced because of the lack of populations :
-On live, keeps were most often claimed, and the news of a siege did spread really fast. On uth, not so much
-On live, there were constantly be groups roaming. You didn't have to set up a defense against smaller attacks, because there were always at least 2-3 groups availlable to prevent keepraids if asked. There were also way more solos, stealthers etc in every frontier zone, which gave informations about what was going on and who was taking the keeps, and which slightly delayed the keep fall.
-On live, in the OF period, people did spend lots of efforts to upgrade the keep doors. Back then, I remember that the only hibernian keep not to have doors at 8-10 was Crauchon (this one was a lost cause ^^). Therefore, keeps didn't fall in 5 minutes.

All those points can't happen on Uth, simply because 800 people are not enough to have enough guilds, running groups and so on.

What I would recommend would be :
-Move keep attack messages from guilds to broad (or something in those lines)
-Increase keep doors duration by a large amount, so that defenders can hope to come in time or/and add in NF keeps instead of OF keeps.
-Make keep upgrade easier.

pyrale wrote:Sorry, but I like the maps in OF. Way more than those NF maps that were designed with no soul.

gingers>idiots who like putting elevations every 500 units.