T4 and loot bags and zergs, oh my. (Wall of Text warning)

Grotnob

Fledgling Freddie
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Oct 28, 2008
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154
I'm on fairly regularly, and now I've hit T4 with another toon, I'm noticing Mythic's overall gameplan is going to cost them subscriptions;

They're trying to cram an increasingly large portion of the population into a comparatively very small place (T4). In an ideal world, Mythic/Goa don't want R40s leaving, and they also want to encourage lower ranks to get to T4, because that's apparently where the "real game" begins. This means there's more people coming in to T4 than are going out.

This is going to cause problems with how they assign loot from keeptakes and such, because the more people are fighting over a zone, the bigger the zerg needs to be in order to take a keep. This also means the bigger the zerg you're with, the smaller the chance of getting a loot bag worth the effort.

There really is not much point attacking keeps unless you roll them in seconds with four warbands, because if you aren't in, done and gone in about 5 minutes at primetime, you're going to have a couple of warbands in defence to contend with. Whilst this isn't so much of a problem for a zerg, it's sure as hell a problem for a warband, which is all the number of bags you get from a keeptake is really accounting for.

This gets even funnier if they ever get round to fixing the contribution system so that it actually takes account of relative contribution; Who's going to contribute more to a keeptake? A R40 RR4x+ in full Darkpromise (or Order equivalent) that's only going to sell or shard the Annihilator pieces, or a R36 RR35 in levelling greens and the odd blue/purple who actually needs and will wear the Annihilator set pieces?

I've not seen anything in 1.2 that's going to address these issues. Perhaps I missed something. Maybe the Darkness Falls thingy will ease the strain on T4 for a while, but once the big boys are done dry-humping the instance for loot, they'll be back in the ORvR lakes again, and ofc they're going to want to keep the instance in their realm's hands, so the zerging of keeps will continue ad nauseam.

I'm rapidly approaching the nauseam stage already.

I do sort of have a half-baked solution to the loot bag distribution issue arising from necessary zerging;

Multiple loot rolls.

So say you've got 96 people rolling a keep. Under the current system you've got a very small chance of getting a gold bag.

What if when more than say a warband and a half are attacking, the game were to divide the number of attacking players into roughly equal groups not exceeding 24, irrespective of existing warband membership, and assign them to a "loot group"?

Each loot group would then get it's own allocation of bags to roll on, meaning no matter how big the zerg, you're only ever going to be rolling against up to 23 other individuals. If the loot groups are smaller than 24, the number of bags available to that group is depleted accordingly so that everyone ends up with roughly the same increased chance of getting a gold bag.

I know the suggestion's not without it's flaws, (not least the additional calculations the server needs to do whenever a keep's taken, and the increased chance for bugs and errors to creep in as a result,) but I think it bears some consideration. As it is, T4's going slowly but inexorably downhill, and strongly favours the Darkpromise brigade at the expense of those just joining the tier.
 

eksdee

FH is my second home
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while i agree that the contribution system is a mess, it isn't the only way to acquire gear. city instance combined take 1 hour or less, lost vale takes 1.5-2 hours. in general you should get maybe 1-2 pieces per lockout timer of the dungeons unless you're really unlucky (at least when you start) and with the changes to loot drops in 1.2, even more chance to get useful stuff.

also, it is more than feasible to break off from the zerg and take keeps in a less populated zone, thus upping your chance for loot exponentially.

regardless of whether you enjoy large scale fighting over small scale or whatever, i think one of the huge problems with war at the moment is the tendancy for the entire population of tier 4 to merry-go-round around the zones, taking keeps until a lock is imminent where it usually ends in one camping the other's warcamp. the more people that start to break off in their own groups/warbands, the more tactics come into the rvr gameplay and thus (at least as far as i see it) the more fun.

please don't see this as me taking a swipe at 'zergers' because it isn't, i enjoy large scale fights as much as small scale, i just don't enjoy wb v bos/keeps as 'rvr' and can't fathom why anyone else does.
 

DocWolfe

Part of the furniture
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Maybe the number of bags should be proportional to the number of contributing people, with a random thrown in variable.
 

Reno

One of Freddy's beloved
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Maybe the number of bags should be proportional to the number of contributing people, with a random thrown in variable.
Only encourages bigger zergs to do the PVE merry-go-round.
A base number ofbags ( less than now) that increases sharply with the numbers of defenders would be more effective.

Danita
 

Mr_Grumpy

Fledgling Freddie
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Nov 7, 2008
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Bags and their rank/colour should be based on how many renown points were *shed*/ gained in order to take keep.

Take empty keep , get a green bag.Take a keep defended by4 warbands and taking 45 mins and get purple etc

Or like above have it rise by number of defenders. Either way i play WAR not to pve end game etc and thats what happens atm.

Now if they could only fix keep entry points and stop the *wall of steel* block at top of ramp it would be great.

Why didnt they just use keep take system from daoc with some spit 'n polish? :)
 

Tetley

Fledgling Freddie
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Nov 30, 2005
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I think the original post was right when saying the system needs amending a bit. Giving out the number of rewards proportional to the numbers both attacking and defending is a reasonable way to alter it. Possibly making the loot, like annihilator armour, tradeable so that the high level players with full armour can pass on their wins to guildmates or others would help.

I think the loot system is bugged though. Earlier this week my 40 BW reached a keep as the inner gate went down. I had no involvement at all other than running through both open gates, up the ramp, and getting off just a couple of hits on the Lord. I was then shown as 2nd in the list before the 'random' roll of dice. How?? I had done almost nothing.

It is a pity that we dont have a third realm, as in DAOC. On a night where we know order is in the majority, or chaos, it would introduce uncertainty which we now do not have, not knowing if the third realms players will turn up at a siege and, if so, who will they attack? That would be so much better. It's a mistake by Mythic not to have done it but I suppose it's a wasted whine since it is too late now.
 

NicGOA

English WAR Community Manager
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Nov 6, 2008
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Thanks for that Wall of Text. You raise some valid points!
 

Mr_Grumpy

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Would love a third realm tbh and i would love to hope that there one day will be. I am sure the lore lets this be possible (beastmen, mutants, skaven,chaos dwarves, woodelves, lizardmen, men from Estalia, Araby, Kislev and Tilia etc to name a few)

Would really mix it up i think.Id personally like to see some villages in rvr settings. Chaos attacks villagers and order defends em etc. Order attacks Choas settlement and so on.
 

rynnor

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Only encourages bigger zergs to do the PVE merry-go-round.
A base number ofbags ( less than now) that increases sharply with the numbers of defenders would be more effective.

Danita

Precisely! Offering more loot just encourages the constant cycling of keeps - if you key rewards to the number of defenders they might have to work for rewards.
 

Grotnob

Fledgling Freddie
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Possibly making the loot, like annihilator armour, tradeable so that the high level players with full armour can pass on their wins to guildmates or others would help.

...Or the ability to pass on the roll, yeah. I think taking BoP out of the game entirely would solve multiple issues, even if they then made it so formerly BoP items aren't tradeable on the auction house.

Or, you can't buy them from auction or have them mailed/traded to you until you've got enough "influence" from a particular instance, so you still need to grind the instances a number of times to get and wear the gear you need. (Thanks to Mabs for that idea.)
 

eksdee

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i can't remember if it was posted here or somewhere else but i remember someone saying something which imo would be the perfect solution for bop and the general idiocy of the way 'random' drops are calculated (aka, 90% of the drops you get in lost vale being for classes not on the raid) and it's a system already in the game: broken/repairable items. so say for instance you kill n'kari, which is the boss that drops chest pieces; she drops 1 chest piece, which is repairable into the dark promise item of whichever class repairs it. so 4 of the 6 people on the raid need the item as they don't have the chest yet and then the one that wins the roll repairs it into their chest piece.

the desire for this comes from doing lost vale every single time the lockout timer is up since forever (and much longer for most of my guild since i took a break) and only one of us having full dark promise up to now which in a game where there was supposed to be 'minimal' pve, seems a little ludicrous to me.
 

Shagrat

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rvr at rank40 is pretty crap already tbh. Most of the time its just 2 massive zergs chasing each around the various maps.

I cant really see it improving with the way the game is set out atm, more people hit 40, more zerging in the zones.

disappointing really, and god knows why they didnt take the pretty good keep designs and siege warfare from daoc and tweak it up for War. Instead we get crap cookie cutter keeps with single points of access which just promote zerging again to get the keep captured.

:(
 

TheBinarySurfer

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not least the additional calculations the server needs to do whenever a keep's taken, and the increased chance for bugs and errors to creep in as a result
Compared to the truly mind boggling number of instructions a server farm is doing per second, an extra few hundred thousand overall to do some loot rolls once per 30 mins (average keep turnaround time) isnt going to break the bank or create huge slowdowns.

I like it - good idea. It's either that or the token system and i'm not a fan of that idea anymore after thinking it through a bit.
 

TheBinarySurfer

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Instead we get crap cookie cutter keeps with single points of access which just promote zerging again to get the keep captured.

:(
Thats an issue i'm finding now - there was a full warband of RR60 darkpromise geared destruction out the other day, holding off 3-4 warbands of order comfortably due to the bottleneck on the keep stairs. Our warbands were mostly 35+ but they still wiped the floor with us due to being able to stack massive dps and cc on our only approach route.

They really need to bring in siege ladders imo (say allow one person to climb per 10 secs per ladder, maximum of 4 ladders (and have ladder pads much like oil/ram pads) per keep and suddenly you have another way in (this would require a sealed lord room admittedly ala daoc) or onto the BM's at least.

Order could have seige ladders, destro could have catapults like the movie ;)
 

Boggy

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Aug 10, 2004
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I've a slightly different view on the loot issue - I think loot needs to be either massively cheapened (i.e. give it to much increased numbers of people) or just removed entirely from RvR.

Incentivising RvR with loot twists the game. You get people doing it for the wrong reason and looking at the results the wrong way (a brilliant battle could be soured by loot discussions). RvR should be its own reward - it's either fun enough for people to play for the hell of it, or it's failed.

I do agree about the zerginess of the keep battles. I'd say it applies to WAR oRvR in general and at the moment is one of the biggest things preventing RvR being very enjoyable. Fun RvR is about skirmishing, tactical inventiveness and fairly even battles. It's not about two zergs standing off sparring for ages until one outnumbers the other sufficiently to roll them. But that's what WAR is at the moment inside keeps and outside keeps, in every tier.
 

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