Warhammer Online: Open RvR Revisited
Recently, I've been craving a little PvP action. Having been mostly playing Final Fantasy XI on my free time during the past few months, you can see why I would. Clearly, World of Warcraft was not an option; I dreaded the thought of ever laying my eyes upon Warsong Gulch again. Yet, for some reason, I was drawn back to Warhammer Online. I was curious as to what had happened to the ORvR lakes. You know, those places you went to when you wanted to do those scouting quests they give you in the warcamp before queueing for the next scenario? I had heard several changes had been put into place to make ORvR more appealing. Seeing as I had a 6 month subscription to Warhammer Online that was still active, I decided: what the hell? I already paid for it, I might as well see what they've added to the game.
You've no doubt read around MMOCrunch already, from posts made by Mike that several servers had been completely closed off. It saddens me to say that while this is a great step to keep the player base to high-population servers(I use the term loosely), instead of low-population servers it does little to solve the imbalance problem some servers experience. Volkmar, for example, suffers from a lack of Destruction(Tier 4). This makes the RvR experience for both sides very unpleasant. Destruction complains that Order only wins because they have greater numbers, and Order complains that Destruction never shows up to fight because of that reason. When Destruction players read about these problems, they are further discouraged from playing on that server, and so the problem seems to never fix itself. But, I digress. We are here to talk about ORvR! More importantly, non-T4 ORvR. Why should anyone care? Call me old-fashioned, but I like the journey to be as enjoyable as the destination. Much to my surprise, it seems many others feel the same way, recently.
It may be difficult to see exactly what's going on in the image above, but it's very clear what I'm trying to show. I started a new character, a Knight of the Blazing Sun, and no sooner had I stepped out to the ORvR area that I let out a loud high-school-girl-esque yelp of glee. To those with a keen eye, it may seem like an imbalanced fight. There's roughly 50 million order killing a single Choppa. This was near the entrance to our warcamp, though. You don't really see many Destruction characters venture that far. In this particular case, the fight was at Festenplatz, where Destruction awaited with inferior numbers, but still managed to put up an amazing fight. So how did Mythic achieve this? How did they convince people to stop queueing for Nordenwatch and get out to the ORvR lakes to fight? Well, the same way any game developer gets players to do anything in their game: they add a grind to it. Every ORvR lake has an influence bar now, and whenever you kill a player, capture or defend an objective, you get influence. The rewards are amazing for the level they are available at. Tier 1 offers an almost complete set of blue armor, weapons, and rings. Tier 2 offers purple items, etc. The grind for these items is not as long as you would expect. For example, Tier 1 has a total influence requirement of about 3.3k INF to reach Elite. If you have two warbands, one Order and one Destruction constantly killing and taking/defending objectives from each other(which is not a rare sight these days, even in Tier 1), you can reach full influence in a couple of hours.
Some concerns:
One of the first things I noticed when I created my new character and hopped back into the game was the Rally Call function. The first time I got one of those, I got up from my chair, and stood straight as I valiantly declared: "My brothers need my help, I must answer their call for reinforcements!" When I got there, though, it was nothing more than a skirmish between a couple of Order and a few Destruction at the Harvest Shrine. Angered, and hurt that my role-playing act had been in vain, I promptly returned to questing. I later learned that these rally calls are automatically issued by the server, roughly every hour or so. Why? There are very few times when these rally calls will actually yield any amount of people, and a lot of times, it's just a way to facilitate travel to the nearest warcamp. I can't see any real solutions to the problem, but then again I can't really see the purpose they were intended to serve, either. Everyone who wants to RvR is already at the warcamp in a warband or in the RvR lake itself; they're not out questing. If someone's doing PQs, it's because that's what they want to do; the likelihood that they will answer a rally call is very slim.
| The keep contribution system is still very random and unreliable. Not to mention, it's always the same loot(non-T4). Why is that bad? Because people can get a gold bag more than once. For example, I've gotten two gold bags from keep sieges in Tier 2. I was happy the first time, because I got a pretty good set piece from it. I was not so happy the second time, because my choice was either the same set piece, some crafting items, or some silver. It's not so much that I didn't have any other loot to choose from(although that may have been nice), it's that I took someone else's gold bag, and pulled out silver from it. Someone who really needed their chest set piece would have made better use of it. The game is in desperate need of a "pass" function, both for keeps and PQs. Allow players to set their preferences for what kind of bags they want to roll on. I'd be afraid to keep doing keep sieges on my knight with my friends if one of them hasn't gotten a gold bag and I get a third. This effectively prevents me from playing with my friends.
There's still little incentive to attacking a heavily defended keep. In most cases, a warband that's attacking a heavily-defended keep will give up after one try. The INF and XP you get from killing a few people inside their own keep is nothing compared to how much they got for wiping the entire warband. Not to mention, they will get "ticks" of influence everytime they defend the keep from an attack(which translates to: everytime a player dies near the keep). One possible solution could be to add "ticks" for sieging a keep. The longer you continue to assault a heavily-defended keep, the more influence both sides will get. In order for this to count, however, the warband must make considerable progress in taking the keep. If it's just one destruction and order player killing each other near the keep, it shouldn't count. Progress could be measured in several ways: amount of players killed during siege, damage dealt to the door or siege engines on the walls, etc. Overall, I am quite happy with the changes made to ORvR lakes. While I'm still leveling up my new character and getting into Tier 3 now, so far the journey has been enjoyable. By defending keeps and turning in the "kill 15 players" quest there, I've been able to actually obtain a level or two this way. Leveling through ORvR is possible, although not as fast as questing, doing scenarios, or combining the two. Hopefully, they continue to provide changes to improve this area of the game. I, personally, can't wait to see what the next 6 months will bring to the game. |