WAR Beta Update Part 1 – grrrr

I had another post planned for this morning but when I stumbled upon this post on the WAR Herald yesterday I could not resist the urge to post immediately.  James Nichols (EAMythic Community Coordinator) made a post on the WAR Herald titled War Beta Update Part 1.  In the rather lengthy update James cut and pastes a snippet of text prepared by many of the teams working on WAR.  If you want to read the entire article heres the link.  I’m going to highlight the areas that I feel require some insight, thought, and dissection.

Phase one of our improvements to open world RvR is under way, with changes to PvP flagging up first. Players can now PvP flag themselves, although the regular rules apply for removing the flag. Guards (and some other NPCs) in the Chapter hubs will PvP flag any enemy player foolish enough to engage them in combat. We’ve also added more guards to the warcamp entrances across all pairings and tiers. Still in progress are changes to the battlefield objectives, but we aren’t quite ready to share those details yet.

-RvR Team

Wait… what the…. flagging?  I had to reread this a dozen times to make sure that I actually saw the word “Flag” in there.  I’ll openly admit that I’m not in beta and have absolutely no idea what the reference to warcamps and chapter hubs means but my jaw is still on the floor after reading that there will be PvP flagging.  Where will the flagging be?  I’m direly seeking clarification.  Is this referring to PvE areas?  Some people are under the impression that it simply means while I’m hunting bears in the safety of my PvE area I can flag myself and if an enemy comes by he can gank me.  Hold the phone – why would I ever do that?  And secondly I was under the impression that, like DAOC, the PvE areas restricted access to enemy races.  Didn’t Games Workshop tell Mythic that there should be no neutral areas?  If I have correctly assumed that it means PvE area flagging then some of the spirit of the game just died.  Mortal enemies – Greenskins and Dwarves – could potentially stand next to each other and not be able to attack because one of them doesn’t have his flag on.

Now taking this to the extreme I can put on my tinfoil hat and go all doomsday by interpreting the flags will be in RvR areas and that it will be like WoW was in the early days where unless you flagged yourself you could run around untouched.  Basically meaning that the only true pvp would occur in Battlegrounds.  IF this is the direction WAR is taking then I’ll jump on the bandwagon with the cynics and join the chorus of “Wtf – WoW Much?”…

Hopefully Mythic you rethink the idea of flagging and go with your original statement that WAR is Everywhere.

Next is a topic that you should recognize from reading our blog here.  Loot binding.  How has Mythic decided to work it?:

One of the things we have been working hard on is player trading. I can’t wait to see it once the UI team has had a chance to reskin it. Player trading works just like you would imagine. Right clicking on a friend brings up a list of actions, with Trade now being one of them. Now you can trade off all those boots!

With trading, however, comes the question of binding. Trading is really, really good if loot doesn’t have any binding restrictions. So the next step was to “tag” all our items as Bind on Equip (BoE), Bind on Pickup (BoP), or “no binding”. Quest items, Influence Rewards, Renown store items have all been made BoP.

-Item Team

So far so good.  I’m glad that the renown store items are BoP (I assume these are purchased with renown earned in PvP so they are essentually status symbols for being higher up in PvP).  Quest rewards and influence rewards are also BoP – that’s good.  Now it’s time to start hoping and praying again that BoE items are done well.  I hope that there will be few BoE’s.  Too much binding means that instead of gearing everyone up for the war against the enemy realm you’re worried about having loot.  It takes the focus away from the realm and places it on the individual which defeats realm pride and what I thought was the purpose of the game.  So until I hear more I won’t pass judgement.

Okay, that was basically the the important stuff.  The rest is interesting but was nothing new.  Hopefully (there’s that word again) Mythic thinks a few rounds ahead and doesn’t cut off their nose to spite their face.  For whatever reasons you’re considering PvP flagging please rethink them or clarify with the community.  I certainly do not want to flag myself or wait for someone else to flag and I can bet neither do the majority of WAR fans.

  • In SWG, a player could go covert (hide his faction), but that only made sense because any race could join any faction. If a covert player attacked an NPC of the oppposite faction, his cover was blown and players of the opposite faction could attack. That’s what the comment about WAR guards sounds like.

    But in a game all about faction warfare which is hard-tied to the races, PvP flagging doesn’t make any sense. I agree that flagging takes away some of the magic. I planned on spending considerable time adventuring in PvE areas, but taking away the possibility of PvP at any moment seems to go against the heart of WAR.

  • OK I played Alpha a year ago at the DAOC round table, and how the flaging worked was you start the game with your flag off, the zone is then split into pve and pvp areas, if you enter the pvp zone your flag gets switched to Attack Me, when you cross the line back into a pve area anywere in the zone, there are mabs of how the ones are split up all over the place, then your flag after a certain amount of time goes back to off, but you can have it set to stay on so that if you find other people in the PVE zone then you two may be able to fight. This is to prevent ganking without having to put a physical barrier between races PVE areas and really its a war, the enemy will be in your area.

    Now its also important to remember that the higher level zones you enter the less PVE area there is for you to be safe in and more RvR area. But the game is also designed so that if a person choses they never have to enter a RvR zone they can PvE all the way to the highest level.

    Halii

  • […] The update has a small snippet of news from several of the different teams, including RvR, Public Quests, Items, Cities, and Combat & Careers.  The one piece that has generated the most buzz, questions, concerns, and panic in some cases is the piece from the RvR team of “pvp flagging”.  This was first brought to my attention by Keen with two different posts on the subject which are great. […]

  • […] It wasn’t too long ago that James Nichols (Mythic CC) gave us a little preview of what each team was working on – you might recall that this was the beta update that started the entire pvp flagging feud.   Reading Paul’s impressions of the presentations we have yet to hear about though is interesting because he says the RvR team had “loads of new ideas and great thinking”…   Just don’t let them continue their train of thought on the flags Paul!  Out of all of these presentations the “clever” Public Quest presentation is the one that most interests me.  The public quests sound, to me, like they’re going to be extremely fun. […]