SI novelty factor wearing off already?

[Cernos]

Am I alone in finding the novelty factor of SI already wearing off?

All that new PvE content with SI is very impressive eye candy, no denying it, but it does diddly squat for the endgame. Ok, we have a few extra classes to spice things up, but it's still going to be the same old routine of chasing each other round that postage stamp sized piece of grass that is Emain (with diversions to Odins and Hadrians for 'variety'). Same old mile gate and PK camping, same old zergs, same old keeps to take and retake (when anyone can be bothered). Doesn't much matter if you're one of the old classes, or one of the spangly new classes, it's the same old repetitive endgame.

Mythic missed a big opportunity with SI to bring more variety and purpose to the end game and failed hugely. When the novelty of SI wears off we'll all be left wondering why we're still all crammed into the same old handful of RvR zones with no new RvR challenges, just the same old zergs to either join or avoid [delete according to preference].

Mythic opted for the short term gain of expansion pack revenue and expect us all to be satisfied with trying out our new alts (the new 15-19 battleground is surely an admission of this). But they badly need to address the endgame if they want to keep people playing and paying for any lenth of time. I certainly won't be playing in 6 months (or maybe even 3 months) time if nothing is done to expand and improve the endgame. And yes, I bought SI and I've lapped up the eye candy like everyone else but I'm beginning to feel you can't polish a turd.

Cernos

 

[Glyph_mid]

I remember seeing this post from efour when duels came out...

 

[Mikal]

To me the novelty factor is definitely not wearing off. I made a savage and I thouroughly enjoy playing him.

Yes I can see if rvr at lvl 50 is the only thing you want, then SI might become boring really fast, but then this game might not even be the right one for you. rvr at 50 is only a small part of this game, even if it is the endgame. Alot of people enjoy killing monsters, do raids in the big dungeons, explore new lands and roleplay alot more than they do rvr, or at least equally.

 

[old.Gromnir]

The way I see it ... the ones making it a novelty is the ones that keep doing it. I know its been said before and all that crap but if its a chance of scene you want go fight somewhere else: Other Frontier zone, Frontier Cave, Darkness Falls, or maybe do a .... Relic raid!!!

SI is not as much about RvR as some you "I only play to kill my friends" would like it too be. SI is about team work and PvE, its about putting togeather a bunch of highlevels and do raids. Ofcourse that might be worth nothing if all you want it the next RealmRank.

So all I can say is "Lose some win some", I like SI for its PvE factor and for its new classes, hell I love the engien.

RvR never was teh leet uber kulling n00bs thing for me.

 

[liste]

personally, i think its the best thing that ever happened to this game.

the new monster AI and the difficulty in the PvE areas, makes PvE alot more challenging.

It gives room for alot more Realm-wide cooporation, since lots of things require more people than most small-medium guilds can produce.

In a few patches, the Diablo 2 drops will really be worth hunting for, and gives back a greatly missed PvE factor.

The new engine has made everything prettier, smoother and faster (a few people seem to have lots of problems, which is ofc bad, but as a whole it does wonders)

The variety of classes has been greatly improved with the new 'funky' pet classes specifically.

True, it has not brought serious changes to RvR except the engine, but it was never claimed to be a RvR expansion, so that really doesnt bother me. For me, the improved PvE means that RvR will never get boring, because i have something else to do if i need a break from it.



2 Thumbs up! Waay up!

 

[cHodAX]

The RvR aspect now needs looking at by Mythic, from a PvE standpoint SI is superb. The comments about the lack of RvR zones rings very true, they need to create some neutral RvR areas that give your realm an advantage if they control them. Much more thought needs to be given to these areas than was given to the existing zones. Milegates should be non-existant and numerous entrance/exits need to be created from the portal keeps so that the combat able to keep rolling instead of the World War One senario we constantly end up with these days. Milegate standoffs have thier place but the same old thing every night isn't good for the game.

 

[Xtro]

RvR became stale a long time ago for me. With the advent of SC/alch this just added to the feeling that those who farm cash = win rather than skill based PvP. Add to this the zergs and...you get the idea.

SI was the sole reason I reactivated my account. The PvE is now superb and it really feels like you are "adventuring" again which is what I enjoy.

I sympathise as I think RvR must have suffered - after speaking with quite a few friends we are all agreed that whenever we hear something in /as like "1fg of hibs at svasud gates" etc we think "and?" and carry on exploring all the new areas and having fun. It makes it worse that Mids don't even have any relics so there's even less reason to care.

Right now the thought of going to Emain etc just makes me want to deactivate my account. I always preferred small skirmishes anyway.

The bottom line is that the RvR zones feel like part of a different game now, one that I don't ever particularly want to go back to.

 

[old.Trine Aquavit]

I think Cernos' point is valid. While the new PvE is undoubtably nice it was a missed opportunity that the expansion didn't do anything for RvR - the cornerstone on which the game is built. The truth is there are already better PvE games out there (EQ has soooo much more PvE content, and its PvE game is fundamentaly the same style as DAOCs). Adding more PvE content hasn't changed that.

There isn't a MMORPG out there that has better large-scale PvP than DAOC, though, and with almost everyone having at least one full RvR-capable character it's a shame they haven't provided more RvR content.

Still, despite this, it is a nice expansion. It'll keep the interest going for a while longer, I guess, though I think the population might well drop off significantly before the next expansion.

 

[old.Gromnir]

RvR the way I remember it.

In the beginning it was emain, a little here and a little there, but it was emain. then we moved on it was till emain, then came BG's people went to BG1-2-3 now its jusr BG1, then its emain, then came DF along with it came the zerg in DF and the zerg in emain, and with SI people are still doing emain.

So if poeple got a new ... say neutral rvr zone where they could take keeps or strongholds to gain bonus, the way I see it they would be zerged the first 2 weeks and then its emain. No one is going for the Relics anymore, so insted they do emain.

Its always emain, we fostered up a generation of powerleveled n00bs in midgard that wanted level 50 RvR and they now have it, and where do they do it ... Emain!

So RvR is Emain == a tad boring in the end right ?

Win some lose some, what can mythic do to chance the way people think, not much the way I see it ... because its always going to be in emain.

 

[Xtro]

I agree Gromnir, at the end of the day people cannot be forced to RvR outside Emain and like sheep they keep on going.

 

[trigali]

Emain is popular RvR because it offers a right mix of places to hide and large, opened battlefields.

Look at places like Sauvage, where visibility is so low, it's much less zerg-friendly.

One way to make Emain less attractive would be to change the surroundings a bit: more trees, rocks and obstacle to make worse visibility.

Also, populate it with more lvl 50+ mobs, as in Odin's. I mean I konw of only 2 places in Emain where mobs con yellow to red at 50, whereas Odin's is littered with them.

 

[monkeynutter]

plus some of the new quests seem bit more intresting, less go find monster wait 10hours then slay it when it pops at midnight.
did one last night where you get 3 scrolls,to read you use as if a spell, clever use of item to make quest more involved then you have to go off and do 3 tasks think its a lv33 quest so i was able to solo it but not the normal run of the mill quest, one part you have to go to this place and hide while 2 others have a secret meeting then when you go where they were you find some papers for example. Plus even though its just grass and trees lot of the time the new areas dont feel like your walking in camelot with new rocks, and do look like they are all new areas. As someone said the new ai is intresting, had a spell caster follow me cast then run off when i went towards him, being armsman i shot him but was intresting to see, although i did have a bear run off on me once in old version when much lower level, i was down to about 10% life when i agro a bear since was going to die anyway i turned round and hit it, intead of fighting and one hiting me it ran off.

 

[old.Gromnir]

Like monkeynutter say the new AI is more fun, pulling an archer only to have it run too the middle of its camp and shot arrows at you. Or little things that when you pull them make a hugh dog thing jump at you from its hinding.

 

[Fagane]

I would like to see a compleet city in the RvR zones. So you get street fights, walking over the roofs and through shops. As big as Camelot or so. Ofcourse who owns the keep in the city controls the city, so the "random" pop guards and patrols in the city are of that realm. It would need to be to big to hold by 1 guild the city, and no warnings when a gate gets breached (except mybe the keep).

Imagine Mids in the keep, Hibs breachng one gate and on the other side the Albs doing the same. Not even always sure what the other is doing. Or several gates in control by other realms.....

There should be a nice reward for having the keep (or most gates) like an item you can only buy when in controll of the city and is a component of alchemy or spellcrafting...

Fagane

 

[Old Nicodemus]

Originally posted by Fagane
I would like to see a compleet city in the RvR zones. So you get street fights, walking over the roofs and through shops. As big as Camelot or so. Ofcourse who owns the keep in the city controls the city, so the "random" pop guards and patrols in the city are of that realm. It would need to be to big to hold by 1 guild the city, and no warnings when a gate gets breached (except mybe the keep).

Imagine Mids in the keep, Hibs breachng one gate and on the other side the Albs doing the same. Not even always sure what the other is doing. Or several gates in control by other realms.....

There should be a nice reward for having the keep (or most gates) like an item you can only buy when in controll of the city and is a component of alchemy or spellcrafting...

Fagane

A good idea Fagane... however to make it more interesting make it an Alliance reward. That way alliances fight to gain control of it instead of the guilds.

We have enough for the guilds.. but something new for the alliance would be interesting.

Nicodemus
Spiritgimp

 

[Cernos]

I'm certainly not saying SI isn't good. The new zones, classes and monster AI are excellent, they're well executed. I'm enjoying exploring with everyone else and have been on several large dungeon raids and will go on more. But in between and after that I'll want to get back to RvR and it's then that I find it's the same old stale game.

We badly need at least one, preferably more, neutral RvR zones.

DF failed as a successful RvR zone because of the way access is controlled, so everyone just zergs through the place to the entrances. Free flowing RvR is inhibited by all the aggro mobs.

The new frontier dungeons have failed as successful RvR zones because they are too linear and encourage entrance camping (again). Also full of aggro mobs (again).

Battlegrounds are fun, but we don't need more battlegrounds (only Thid sees any action anyway).

We need a neutral RvR zone, free of too many aggro mobs, with a variety of portal points and entrance places (to prevent being able to reliably camp a portal), no choke points like milegates. Some smaller structures to capture and defend (small forts, outposts, towers etc) which give minor powers to those who hold them. This zone should be larger than Emain, with a good variety of terrain.

I hope Mythic realise they need to add this sort of thing in the next expansion pack, if not sooner, because I know I'm not alone in preferring RvR over PvE (not that I don't enjoy some aspects of PvE, I just prefer RvR).

And yes, if such a neutral zone is added it might either replace Emain, or not manage to rival Emain. But at least it would give us some choice, especially if all realms have equal access (which isn't true of Emain, Odins, Hadrians where one realm always has to make more effort to get there).

Cernos

 

[old.Gromnir]

Originally posted by Fagane
I would like to see a compleet city in the RvR zones. So you get street fights, walking over the roofs and through shops. As big as Camelot or so. Ofcourse who owns the keep in the city controls the city, so the "random" pop guards and patrols in the city are of that realm. It would need to be to big to hold by 1 guild the city, and no warnings when a gate gets breached (except mybe the keep).

Imagine Mids in the keep, Hibs breachng one gate and on the other side the Albs doing the same. Not even always sure what the other is doing. Or several gates in control by other realms.....

There should be a nice reward for having the keep (or most gates) like an item you can only buy when in controll of the city and is a component of alchemy or spellcrafting...

Fagane

Nice thinking, thumbs up! - now you go and mail that to mythic or i'll do it and put my name on it

 

[Edlina]

Have to agree somewhat, that it adds some nice things, but you can only do raids ever so often, and far from every night. About the pve I've been quite dissappointed, thought it would be more challenging, I soloed every new mob there is, even in the highest zone. Granted, I had to solo some reds, did some named red ones too, but it's been quite dissappointing having to go into the dungeons to even find a mob I couldn't kill solo. Granted though, wardens are some of the best soloers in the game (in pve), but killing named redcons or low purples without use of IP and that being the highest the zones have to offer, was a bit dissappointing.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

I've deliberately not gone running around the new areas with a level 50 char. I'm levelling my bonedancer (bugged to hell, an utterly unfinished char class but still fun) and checking out the new areas as it gets to the appropriate level. Usually do one level in Mid for a fast level and to rediscover old hunting grounds then one in SI for an exploring level.

Unwrapping it slowly and enjoying it as it were

Biggest chuckle for me in SI so far:

Mammoths run away if you try to go near them, which makes them awkward to pull. However, if you want to pull them with a DoT you want them nice and far away. So I discovered I could send my pets to chase them away then at optimum distance cast the DoT. Between the DoT and the pets smacking away the efalumps are nearly dead by the time they get back to me. Marvelous

 

[Ragnarok1978]

Pretty much all points have been covered so far, but I still wanna chip in.

Yes, end-game is supposed to be RvR but RvR'ing for the "casual" gamer is non-excistent now other than in battlegrounds.

Why? SCing and uber items now mean a whole lot more than they used to. You won't get the uber items if you don't go on the hunts for them, and you won't get a decent SCed suit unless you farm or craft like a madman.

The casual gamer started turning away from RvR and DAoC as a whole. Mythic tried to keep the subscription number from dropping by making new kinds of servers while they started work on the expansion.

There's allways been complaints about lack of debth in the game for those that go for other things than RvR, so it's only natural that they focussed on that considoring the huge amount of tweaks that had been put into RvR and how it works, compared to 1 shared dungeon (DF) and an "epic" zone in each realm which is nothing more than an exp farming zone, nothing epic about it really. There's a dragon yes, oh my, that's real epic

With SI they close to double the amount of zones available for players to go to, they added a few new classes and races to make people interested in exploring these zones with smaller toons than their 50s, as well as take their 50s to the new dungeons.

I am very happy about the expansion, takes my frustration about which poor direction RvR has gone away for a while as I focus on the new zones and new classes, making me "thirsty" for RvR again sometime in the future. And it has made the game alot more fun to play, no red FPS when running 80 men thru trollheim, and no forcing relogs due to graphic bugs every 2 hrs.

 

[Aeternus]

Personaly what im waiting/hoping for is that there will be a real RVR server. where you can invade the other realm... not meaningless emain trips hour after hour that serves no real purpose but to increase your rp value.

 

[Alisha]

Make friends, they stop the novelty wearing off
Can never get bored of them (unless they are really boring friends!)



-Kiri

 

[Desdecado-Seven]

I think SI has added some good value to the game, But endgame is now a game of those that have, and those that have not. Solo RvR Is dead, they even quote that in the back of the SI booklet too more or less. If you have 2xpcs (or illegal software) and a buff bot and SC gear, and a few realm ranks (like 5) then u are in the Rvr game, you are a 'have'.

If you dont 'you are a have not' and basically a victim waiting to be killed, unless ofcourse u have 23 friends with you...in which case you 'have a zerg'.

I would like to see some number entry challenge zones. here is what I am thinking.

The 30, sends a 'guild message' to sacred nut, declares a 'battle' and sets it to 16 player's per side. Sacred nut agrees, sets a time. At said time both guilds can port into zone for say 1 hour. and slug it out. Maybe spicly theres a BG style keep to take. Bascially its allowing some control back over the end game.

One thing I think SI did fail to deliver on was reasonable risk/reward for smaller guilds. SIDI is good if you can field 6FG, what if best you can arrange is 2FG? Being a small social friendly guild of casual players should not exclude you from play. I know you can allie, and all that, but it would have again been nice to have some challenging areas that locked down based on numbers, or spawned parallel versions so that smaller groups could have the epic style challenge....and to be honest arranging 6FG is a right royal pain in the ass

 

[Cernos]

Nice idea Descado. At face value something like that might work nicely. Problem is, it'd probably get hogged by the 'uber/elite' guilds to duel each other. Smaller guilds and unguilded players wouldn't get much of a look in. Ideally there need to be zones which are limited to only xFG of players per realm being able to port there at the same time, and some sort of timer system on porting back to prevent certain guilds or groups hogging access. Hard to implement, but not impossible if Mythic put their minds to it.

 

[hangianix]

Still no SI in Hungary, so SI novelty factor not wearing off to me.

But I understood Cernos and some other ppl dissapointment in question of SI. They need to improve post lvl50 things, mostly the RvR bit of it.

I would like to see an arena, where you can "rent" for x gp a lvl 50 RR3 character with epic and DF items for 30 mins or so. It would be a kind of lvl 50 BG thing, but not for your real characters. Tbh I hate xping, but I'd like to try another lvl 50 chars in RvR at least once - wizard, infi, scout etc. The chance I will get lvl 50 from those is 0.

This idea won't solve the problem of the crowded RvR places, and probably after 2-3 weeks (or sooner) this arena will be empty, 'cause the players can't achieve anything in it (honestly almost the same as PvE after 50 before SI...), only play for fun...

 

[eccho]

Fair enough comment, personally I prefer PvE for some reason <shudders> but some more RvR zones would be welcome especially if you could buy tickets for them BG style, the RvR aspect is what a lot of folk buy the game for and it is marketed as such so wouldnt hurt to add a bit more diversity in that area .

 

[lairiodd]

Personaly what im waiting/hoping for is that there will be a real RVR server. where you can invade the other realm

A much better way of doing that is to have more rvr zones.

So imagine the pk's in emain, hadrians and odins are converted into border keeps with a portal pad and also a keep lord and are capturable ( harder than normal keeps ... maybe the level of the keep if 5 + whatever the guild controlling it is). Then on the other side of those pk's is more rvr zones. So you have something like rvr regions which are basically multiple rvr zones that are defended by multiple border keeps.

So a region where one realm owns all the border keeps and all the normal keeps would effectively be like any other part of that realm, where enemies couldnt enter. With the current bk's having the same invincible guards as now.

Make it so you can only port to border keeps which are under friendly control and maybe also bk's which are protecting a friendly region. This means that you can effective port to "the front" . It would also mean that one side could start pushing back the enemy and regions would fall to the advancing army. This would mean it wouldnt be alway emain where the battle was going on ( in fact probably unless hibernia was being seriously hammered emain would be a safe zone protected by bk's).

You would have to give some benefit to realms for owning regions.
a) rps granted for capturing keeps and even more for capturing bks
b) dungeons (maybe even copy + paste ones) that you can only access if the region is completely under friendly control
c) boost to guild rps gained for holding a keep the further away the keep is from the home land ( like now where claiming a keep in another frontier gives more grps per hour)
d) direct bonus to rps the further away from the homeland that you kill the enemy ( dont really think this would be a good idea )
e) more territory automatically means more places to exp

This problem with any system of rewards is that it causes a powerful get more powerful problem. So some possible balancing mechanisms

a) portal times increase the further away from the homeland you want to port to. Like maybe at full range you are only ported every second port to the nearer border keeps
b) Direct "Homeland knowledge" bonus to damage/defense the closer you are to your homeland
c) exp bonus if you are consistantly behind to encourage people to join the realm
d) buffed npc guards ( as they are the elite last line of defense )
e) easier access to equipment ... maybe siege equipment is less expensive and more available the closer you are to the homeland.

The big advantage of having the defenders buffed up somehow is that a balance should be met where as you are pushed back you find it easier to defend

Also, by having a system of bk's it should still keep the number of "active" rvr zone small enough so that you can still find people to kill while allowing the overall frontline to move.

 

[living]

WHINE!

if u dont like emain then dont go there.. just as many to kill in FS or uppland.