Is it the players’ fault this time?

I just had a thought. I think one of the reasons why there is a lack of interest in the T1-T3 rvr areas. I think people are saying “I’m just passing through to the next tier anyways why should I care?”

It looks like you are arguing that players should leave Scenarios, even though they are perceived* (reality doesn’t matter, perception is the issue) to be the most efficient way to level.
Players will, as a rule, follow the path of least resistance. If the goal is leveling – which it presumably is – then whatever does that fastest and easiest, is where you’ll find people.
This isn’t an ‘accessibility’ issue. No matter how easy or hard the options are, most players will most of the time choose the easiest option. In EQ, would people have camped spawns for hours/nights on end if there was another option? Some perhaps, but not many. The difficultly isn’t the issue, it is the difficulty relative to other in-game options.
This is a balance issue, and that goes to the developer. If there are multiple method to provide the same advancement, they’d darn well better be perceived* as equal.

Well I hear ya Keen..but to be honest im one of the “I want it now” crowd. Its not that the pve isn’t engaging, its not that the rvr is poorly done or in any way a fault of the game itself. The problem is ive done it all before. Ive taken my characters to lvl 60 in eq, 50 in eq2, 60 in WOW, 65 in shadowbane and I have several 50s in DAOC. Im tired of leveling characters and a change of venue hasn’t dampered that feeling one bit. Ive done it before, played to the top of the tier and Im sick of it. I feel like ive paid my dues and nobody wants to start over no matter what the change of scenery provides.

Now having ranted about that I will also say WAR has the potential to be the best rvr/pvp game out there. Everything is in place for epic sieges and rampaging battles that take effort, skill and time to see through. I just dont think you will see a big influx of rvr untill most everyone is lvl 40 and only then if its faster to lvl your renown in rvr than in the scenerios. If scenerios will level renown faster then thats where the majority are going to be and thats that.
Its like the multitudes of scenerios that are available right now. Why mourkain Temple and Tor Anrcc the only 2 played for the most part? Because they are the most bang for the buck and thats all there is to it. You can get much more exp and renown playing these 2 scenerios than the others per time spent so thats where people que up to play.

I am lvl 28 on my highest character have played since launch and I get in 3 or 4 hours per night playing. Honestly the leveling seems slow and getting slower. Ive done both pve quests, pq’s and enough scenerios to keep my rvr rank about equall with my pve rank.
I LOVE rvr..but until the rewards for keeping/taking/owning a keep make it worth my while its just not happening.

For one the cost of keep ownership is just short of impossible to maintain. I hear this is what they intended..keeps cant be owned for extended periods of time. I have no idea why they would implement such a policy. Thats what made DAOC awesome! The time spent trying to own a keep, building it up and hanging on to it defending it night after night was the most fun I ever had in any game ive ever played. Its a shame WAR has it in place so you cant hang on to a keep very long. You wont lose it to an enemy, but to the game mechanics that make it all but impossible to maintain ownership.

/rant off

As someone who loved open world RvR in both DAoC (Emain Mecha) and WoW (Southshore/Tarren Mill), this really does make me sad. But when you think about it, MMOs are about advancing your character. If you want RvR just for the fun and glory of it, then you really have to take things like levels, xp, most loot and stuff out of it.

WAR should have been made as a kind of mega Team Fortress 2 with persistent characters. Wouldn’t that have been FAR closer to the tabletop game?

Making it an MMO meant making it like WoW. Levels. Loot. XP. Quests. It’s not the player’s fault that they are playing it like WoW.

I definitely think scenarios are the problem. You can say the players are at fault and that is true, but Mythic shouldn’t have made scenarios the most rewarding thing in the game (speaking of a time to reward basis). So the fault lies with the players and developers.

Limited number of scenarios per day, massive buffs to rewards available outside of scenarios, or servers that don’t have scenarios at all are all decent solutions in my mind.

I chose not to subscribe to WAR due to the empty game world. I’m open to coming back some day, but not until it is actually an active RVR game.

And another thing….I fully agree with @Tipa. Warhammer should have ditched the ‘WoW-ness’ they attempted to achieve and allowed the players to focus on the RVR goodness.

It’s never the players fault.

Given 2 paths to the same objective, the majority of people will take the easiest path. This is a basic tenant of game design (of any design, really). Games that fail to acknowledge that this is the case will fail, as Warhammer is currently failing.

There is currently no incentive to take or defend keeps. People want to get better, the fastest way to do that is scenarios. You can’t blame people for wanting all their abilities or to move on to new content.

Mythic and EA want to make an insanely popular game. Look at WoW… one of the most insanely popular games. You can’t expect them not to want to mimic that. Apparently, they’ve even gone with a tiered-gear system now.

WoW may not appeal to many of us anymore, but it still appeals to many millions, and EA/Mythic want a chunk of those millions. It appeals because of accessibility.

Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely want them to buff the heck out of ORvR, making scenarios meaningless. Who the hell wants the focus of the game to be on sandboxed RvR? I’d be one of the first to transfer to a non-scenario server if my guild would come along with.

I always wondered how big the world would have had to been for them to take a page from SWG before it got the deathblow of the skill system patch, attackable player buildings/camps. Would certainly give a reason to be in RVR, your guild’s warcamp is there…

When there is an option to buy a chocolate bar for 50 cents instead of a dollar, wouldn’t you take it? The options are there yes, but people tend to gravitate towards what OTHER people gravitate. Warhammer has many choices and people tend to say “Ok, I see that I can do ORVR but scenarios can bump my renown faster, so why the hell should I do it?”. I do the same thing, even though I wish that scenarios were minimal, or even gone to once have that feeling of realm pride. Hillsbrad again pl0x.

I despised the scenarios ever since I heard they were going to be a part of WAR. It is major reason why I never subscribed after beta. Open RvR is what I missed most about DAoC and what I had hoped would be the best part of WAR but I knew scenarios would help to kill that idea.

Instancing such as arenas an scenarios are the devil in disguise especially because of the rewards (including the instant-action). If I were designing a game I would have insta-action open RvR and the only time people would be in an arena/scenario would be for a ranked or ladder system that had no practical reward for the general game.

Did you forget for a moment that you’re playing a mumorpug? Most people will always flock to the most efficient option for character progression. This tendency is radically enhanced by how grindy WAR is once you hit T3, where progression of any sort slows to a crawl.

It’s up to the developers to fix this, basically by increasing the rewards for PvP in the RvR lakes and by making leveling less painful in general.

That said, I actually like the scenarios, since they 1) prevent sheer numbers from determining the outcome and 2) allow you to get into the action right away.

I do scenarios because I enjoy scenarios. As it is, they are the only way I can easily be guaranteed of some fun PvP action, quickly. The alternative is to wander around barren wastelands hoping that people will show up. And I have to hope that even if there are enemies, I am not too heavily outnumbered or I will just be killed.

I’ve really only done RvR a handful of times. Once I was in a warband fighting against another warband and that was fun. Another couple of times it was me and another guy against a warband, and I had to either run away or die. Another time I was in a warband and there were only one or two enemies. Another time it was me against two other people. I ran away and almost escaped but they managed to catch up and kill me without my being able to do anything about it. Of all those scenarios (no pun intended) only the first was fun.

Ty Keen. Yes I would reroll on a no-scenario server. Sign me up. The game might actually have people in it.

I love Thegreenskin’s idea of a server ruleset without scenarios.

I was hoping to level an Alt by doing only Open RvR. Right now i dont think that is possible.

Not only are the RvR lakes empty most of the time, but i find that the PvE zones are pretty empty. They feel like pre-60 zones after TBC came out. But we are 1month after release ;/

I miss thidranki,

~Higgs
30 Black Orc – Ironfist

I’d roll on a scenario-less server also. I like the scenarios well enough, but I’d rather have a game world with people in it, rather than the entire Warhammer world feeling like a lobby for pvp scenarios.

Or, rather than removing scenarios, what about actually placing them in the game world? Plunk them in part of an appropriate RvR zone and make players actually run into the swirly zone thing to queue. Since they’d be in the rvr area and waiting for a queue to pop, hopefully players would run out and rvr for a while. I don’t know, maybe that’s too optimistic, players would probably just pick one scenario per tier and everyone would go there and camp the entrance until the scenario popped.

Sigh.

Limit the number of scenarios? Like only two or so in a tier can be active at once? Sure, if people want to wait five hours for their turn, cool, but maybe they could do something else while waiting?

Or take any particular thing to do, and lower the rewards incrementally as it is run, so any specific scenario gradually becomes worthless if it’s run too much. Have a window so you can see what are the most rewarding things for you to do at your tier. Oh look, full rewards for the PQs and Open RvR over there! This unpopular scenario still has decent rewards, but THIS one is worthless :/ better head out and do some of those PQs!

Or just remove levels and tiers so most content is available to everyone.

I was really enjoying this post until you started hating on Guild Wars. Shame on you.

I like Tipa’s idea of diminishing rewards for over-use and an interface to show what’s currently productive and what isn’t. Rather than just a penalty for things that are over-used, I’d like to see bonuses for things that are underused as well. So every given activity has a baseline reward value. As one activity is overused it decreases in value, while another one that isn’t touched at all (say, PQs) increases in value. Thus you can keep the penalties on over-used content fairly minor and still create a considerable incentive to do something else. If you can get double xp for Chapter 9 PQs and PQ mobs, or 50% xp for T2 scenarios and scenario players, you certainly COULD keep doing the scenario, but the PQ will be far more productive, luring the min/maxers out from the cave.

The easy solution is to remove renown in scenarios. Scenarios should be used as a method to level for xp but not to farm renown, leave that for open rvr. I am surprised Mythic has not done this yet especially for T4.

“However, since the opportunities are there to do BOTH scenarios AND open-rvr and players are ONLY doing scenarios because it is the perceived “easy route” then it’s absolutely their fault.”

The fallacy here is equating opportunities with outcomes which are fundamentally disparate at the moment. The existence of the opportunities and the incentives they provide informs player perception. Creating and managing that perception is Mythic’s job. That’s absolutely a consequence of design.

I wish peeps played differently and were differently motivated toward open RvR also, but if there’s a modest pile of carrots next to me and another pile of carrots WAY over there, unless someone convinces me that its worth it to go WAY over there and that the pile of carrots is MUCH bigger and no one is going to whack me with a stick, I’m going to just grab the pile of carrots right here thank you very much.

PvE is too few carrots, too far away compared to scenarios as is open RvR as well ATM.

Its hugely naive on Mythic’s part to think people would behave any other way. They always have and always do.

Diminishing returns, or buffing alternatives, etc. all amounts to rebalancing the incentives away from scenarios.

At this point, I’d totally reroll on a scenario-less server provided that some more love was given to PvE and open RvR.

@Grak: Great point on the death debuff which is borked as well. Scenario debuff = 0, PvP debuff = 3 min, PvE debuff = 15 min which sucks if you get killed by an NPC in a keep rather than another player…

” * Continue increasing the reward for Open-rvr and lower the rewards for scenarios
* Institute a randomized scenario system where players can not choose which scenario they queue for
* Add that RvR influence system NOW – aka ASAP – and DO NOT let scenarios contribute to it.
* Make scenarios further contingent upon open-world RvR. Find some way to make them dependent on people actually going into RvR lakes and fighting.
* Make holding a keep more rewarding.
* Make the battle objectives worth taking and worth defending – they’re beautiful and some of them provide an awesome area to fight – entice people to come to them.
* Fix the balance issues, bugs, and obvious exploits.”

My name is Lumio and I approve this message.

I would love an Open RVR/No Scenario server. I’m one of those guys that explores some of the great environments in WAR and thinks “this would be a fun place for a battle…” and yet no one is around. No reason for people to be there.

“… and people STILL queue up for scenarios because it’s the “I want it, and I want it now” attitude.”

Not even close to the mark, sorry. I do a fair bit of oRvRing. I have an alt that levels up just from PvP, and I stayed up way too late last night taking a keep. I was running around today in oRvR, defended a keep, took objectives, tried and failed to take a keep. Not bad, pretty fun. And about as far from the norm as you get.

oRvR is _empty_. Or, if you find someone, they run or they outnumber you, so you have to run. Its almost _never_ this fantasy world you seem to believe in, where good clean fights swirl madly, tactics and strategy abound and no one ever zergs.

Scenarios work because they are fast – no wandering aimlessly in empty RvR area, forlornly looking for a fight that isn’t a ganks. Scenarios work because they have basic balance – numbers, which you _never_ find in oRvR. Scenarios work because they have decent rewards – loot drops, cash drops, exp and renown. oRvR has crap rewards. Scenarios work because despite having 24 people fighting in the same small area, I don’t suffer any slowdown or lag, whereas in oRvR with _fewer_ people I always lag. In large oRvR fights I can count on CTDs – and there goes my chance at a bag if we actually take the keep. Scenarios work because oddly enough, they are Fun. Fun. Let me repeat that, Fun. And that’s why people play the game, right? Fun?

Fix those imbalances, and you will get more people in oRvR, but you will _never_ get everyone out of the scenarios. Not everyone enjoys oRvR and that’s just the way its going to be.

” * Continue increasing the reward for Open-rvr and lower the rewards for scenarios”

No. See above. Increase, yes, nerf? No.

” * Institute a randomized scenario system where players can not choose which scenario they queue for”

No. I’m supposed to be punished for enjoying part of the game? Your way or the highway?

” * Add that RvR influence system NOW – aka ASAP – and DO NOT let scenarios contribute to it.”

Booya, agree 110%

” * Make scenarios further contingent upon open-world RvR. Find some way to make them dependent on people actually going into RvR lakes and fighting.”

No. Why should my fun be dependent on something I want nothing to do with? Thats the reaction this would get. Not a good way to keep subscribers. Stop punishing people for having fun.

” * Make holding a keep more rewarding.”

Amen. And make DEFENDING a keep rewarding.

” * Make the battle objectives worth taking and worth defending – they’re beautiful and some of them provide an awesome area to fight – entice people to come to them.”

Agree.

” * Fix the balance issues, bugs, and obvious exploits.”

A-fricking-men.

Make oRvR as rewarding, as enjoyable and as accessable as scenarios, and you’ll have more people doing it. For now, I go where the FUN is, and I suspect a lot of people in scenarios are doing the same thing. Just because we aren’t playing the game the way you want us to doesn’t mean we are ‘going for the easy route’ or being lazy or shortsighted. Claims of that nature are shortsighted and lazy.

—
The outcomes are no longer fundamentally disparate in favor of scenarios though potshot. They’ve made EXP in open-world RvR far more rewarding than scenarios now.
—

This is wrong, unfortunately. If it was true you would be correct, but scenarios offer steady XP and RP with no reduction from killing the same player multiple times. If you have 20 people defending a keep and they’ve all been killed once then eventually the XP and RP drops to nothing (exploit prevention code).

We know people respond to rewards, and we know this is not an FPS but an RPG where people expect to make progress, so it should be no surprise that people gravitate to places that provide them the most bang for the buck.

It’s a design issue, it’s not the players fault.

Funny that you post this a day after I crit Darkfalls forum with a wall of text about the state of todays mmorpg. Anyways you seem to see what I have seen but I have different theorys as of why this happened. I invite you to have a look at it here http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=75990 . Anyways I’m taking a break from WAR atm leaving my lvl 34 and 33 characters idle due largely in part to what you said combined with what I state in my post. I’m about to toss all my eggs in Darkfalls basket because if pulled off correctly that game will be the next big thing.

Server differences. You need strong guilds on either side with people who will rally the casual PUGs to action in Open RvR. Big zergy numbers don’t hurt either.

The very nature of T2 and T3 keeps and BOs means that there’s always going to be a bit of turn-taking, and snake heads eating tails (to pull in an analogy from Kill Ten Rats.)

That’s PvP for you, after losing a few times, the losers aren’t going to stick around for more – at most, they’ll change tactics, but likely they’ll find it a good time to take a break until a better window of opportunity opens.

The trick is that you need enough players and a few good leaders on each side to dangle enough victory carrots to offset the morale damage of the losses.

Otherwise people will try RvR, get terribly disheartened if they lose miserably (and everyone loses at some point in PvP), and then stop going into the lakes for good. Vicious cycle.

Ultimately it comes down to motivation via morale and other emotional factors. You can put the tastiest, most desirable external motivating carrot in the RvR lake, but if people don’t feel like they have a chance of getting it, they won’t bother – they’ll just think it’s a useless waste of their time.

Elder Beta testers no doubt had a great time because there was enough intrinsic motivation to go to war, to attack each other, and what not. I’d guess they were also more dedicated and sold on RvR as fun.

Jeromai said it best imo. Good leaders on both sides – rvr happens. At least in this player’s experience.

Sadly, WAR’s is a flawed system. Fair and open RVR will not and cannot work. If the action weren’t taking place in scenarios, it would be battle of the zergs, á la LOTRO.

“Most people don’t know what real RvR is like”…

Maybe not. Or maybe they do know. Because after all, open RvR more often than not ends in one side just zerging the other down by numbers.

I play scenarios to get at least a few even/close fights, I don’t get that in open RvR. Win or lose, it’s because of numbers.

This applies especially to T3, where the fun usually ends with six lvl 40 stepping down to roflstomp a group of keep-sieging lvl 28’s.

So in short, yes, it’s the players fault for not wanting to be endlessly slaughtered (or easymode winning without point) in the open RvR lakes.

Two things are keeping people away from Open RvR.
1) New chicken system in Open RvR servers. Imagine as a new Rank 21, with 15 of your friends you go to RvR lake to attack a keep, and four Rank 40s come and kick you all in the face.
It’s no fun.

2) People can’t see damage meters in Open RvR and go “HAHA i did 100k damage I O.W.N”

Forgive me if what I’m about to say has been said before . . . I didn’t read all 65 previous posts. I understand that ORvR in T1, T2, and T3. But when everyone is T4, wouldn’t there be more ORvR?

Here’s my question. What is there to do at Rank 40 other than city sieges? I remember a previous post by Keen that talked about “endgames.” Although I am immensely enjoying WAR and its focus in RvR, if city sieges and some miscellaneous quests and dungeon runs are all that is at Rank 40, I think this may be a problem. Maybe raiding a city is fun once or twice, but if that is all there is to WAR and there is no ORvR, WAR may have a short shelf-life indeed.

even with 100% increase… in opn rvr it will not happen…

the only way to make open rvr viable and fun..
is to follow the scenario way..
I want to go to the battlefield when I want it when I feel like it… and when I know there will be others…

so a que to form a group.. then to spawn to the open rvr and spawn back to where I was before…

most players are not going to walk 10 min towards open rvr and 10 min back (in the hope a battle is in the open rvr)
to finisfh of there personal quest to get some items… and to enjoy some others in npc bashing…

so scenario’s are now a very welcome change in playing from quests…

also alot of players do not want to get zerged.. which they feel will happen once they enter the rvr zone….

I personally think you may be wrong here, yes scenario has its fault but think of the bigger picture of Open World RvR and the griefing it will bring with it.

At least in scenarios, it’s a balance field of similar number of people in a controlled environment battling in a somewhat “fair” environment.

In Open RvR there is no controlled space, anyone can kill anyone any time, even if its totally unfair. You can’t force people to go one on one, therefore there is a chance of griefing in these cases. Not everyone has a guild or play with a large group of players every day.

I once had this experience with a guild, we went on a rampage of all BO’s and Keeps from one scenario to the other, and each player we see, get’s instantly mauled over by more than 30 players. I felt pity on those players, I had to disband from their seemingly mindless zerging or keeps and other players, because I pity those that tried to fight back against this horde of ours.

Its always easy to be on the winning side, but if you were the player that were being griefed, what will you say then? Will you give up on this game entirely ?

I play in the casulties of War guild on avenheim. The RVR for t3 seems fine when I’m on, mostly late evenings. I would say at least 3 out of 5 days someone is defending or sieging a keep. Its fun to jump in but to see it through to conclusion isn’t all that much fun. Mostly people quit when they die a few times because it takes to much time to run back. Or the opposing faction has the area blocked so single players die over and over which isnt fun either. Scenerios provide a easy way to get some pvp in with a conclusion and good rewards. It isn’t ruining the game for me and I would imagine in t4 to be doing much more RVR since I think it matters more at that point. The game is young still lets see how it is when the servers are mature.

BTW for all those people saying Scenarios are a fair fight. Far from it, at least not the way they are working now, when you can join a Scenario with no healers on your team or your team is 80% lower level tier players versus the opposing team which is all upper tier players.

I mean ask yourself how many Scenarios have you played where the battle was very close, fighting tooth and nail? Now ask yourself how many Scenarios you were in where one side dominated (500/100) or obliterated (500/10) the other team?

For the thirty or so Scenarios I’ve played, at least 80% of them have been the latter. Actually I find when I play Open RVR, I find the odds much more balanced, even when one team outnumbers the other. That’s because in Open RVR you tend to be using tactics much more so (i.e. keep defense, siege engine usage, etc) to balance the odds. Again it’s why I pretty much stay away from Scenarios now because I actually prefer a “fair” fight. 🙂

I am going to echo #37 Galaji, this post sounds like “My Fun is the One True Fun”.

Some people like to kill other people. That’s only possible if there are reasonable odds of success (sometimes long odds are reasonable, but that’s the gambler psychology talking). Scenarios, for better or worse, are the closest you are going to get to a fair fight. At minimum, each side has the same number of people.

Open RvR is entirely different. If you have the same number of people and you’re all standing in a field, it’s largely just masturbation with a bunch of pretty lights. Healers are doing their thing, ranged sits there nuking the crap out of each other only to pause briefly to light up the melee that is foolish enough to try to cross the killing fields. It’s the Revolutionary war all over again, but with DoTs. Keep sieges and defense are impossible with equal numbers, so may the best zerg win.

Finally, there is a certain amount of “meh” involved in lower level RvR. 40 is where it all takes on the appearance of “fair” again… everyone has all of their spells, then the only remaining imbalance is numbers.

I agree there are still obvious systemic flaws that need to be fixed, and motivations can be better addressed. “Open RvR”, whatever that means, is still a fundamentally flawed system.

You have some valid points Keen and I agree with you for the most part. However, why would anyone want to RvR in the zones when they are IMPOSSIBLE to capture?

Ever since the hotfix from Mythic that made zones harder to capture, I have not seen one T4 zone captured on the Volkmar server. My guild has grinded out PQs in Praag for hours while all of the RvR objectives and keeps are ours and the zone is never captured.

Now I don’t like to point fingers so I’ll just say this: Make the zones easier to capture, if all the objectives are ours we should be taking control of the zone or be very close to taking it. Also, why do you have to PvE(PQ grind) in order to continue RvR(capture zone and move to the next)?

My suggestion would be to link ORvR success into Scenarios. Make it so that in order to queue for scenarios in a particular zone your faction needs to control the keep. Also lock out the respective zone’s scenario quests. This way you can still do scenarios however you lose out on the extra experience and gold from the quests.

This does a couple things. First with a concentrated effort one side can lock the opposing faction out of scenarios and force them to come out and battle. Secondly if there are only certain zones open it’ll encourage different scenarios if people wish to capitalize on the scenario quests.

You could also put the keep possession on timer so that it will switch to the opposing side every few hours or so. This would allow both sides to attack and defend.

I think this method along with upping the returns from ORvR, the game will become a lot more enjoyable and competitive.

If Scenarios give better rewards for less effort than ORvR, that is a flaw in the game design. You can’t blame the players for being efficient.

If Scenarios give lesser rewards for less effort, then the game design is working as intended. The original post seems to suggest the former, but it sounds like that’s not really the case.

If the issue is truly with the people and not the game design, then you’re just bumping up against human nature. Some people will do the easy thing because it’s easy. Some people will do the hard thing because it’s hard. Others will do whatever gets them the best reward in the least amount of time. You make it sound like a bad thing, but it’s just population variance.

To make a long comment short, ditto on the “My Fun is the One True Fun” critique.

It is bad game design, plain and simple.

Something has gone seriously wrong when my leveling options at level 25 consist of 4 million games of Tor Anroc versus questing solo in a deserted world, pitting my skills against some of the stupidest NPCs ever coded, without even the possibility of getting ganked to spice things up. On my server the only way you could get ganked is if you presented yourself half dead at the opposing factions Tor Anroc quest giver.

Neither of these leveling options are my idea of fun and I suspect this sentiment is shared by a good proportion of the player base. We came to Warhammer for the promise of mass RvR, keep seiges and drowning our opponents in boiling oil. I really doubt any of us we hoping for a second, dull unpaid job that we could do in the evenings after work.

Given that the game isn’t actually fun most of the time, you can hardly blame players for simply gritting their teeth and levelling in the fastest way possible, clinging vainly to the hope that things might pick up at 40.

When it actually occurs, the RvR is a whole lot of fun. How did Mythic manage to turn the game into a dull grind-fest? And what will my already low pop server look like come November 13?

Maybe most people just prefer BG style PvP when given the choice?

The funny thing is that the same GITMN (Give It To Me Now) douchebags that push for the Arena in WOW, that here are funneling like sheep into the Scenarios.

It’s the same slaptards that whine in the warhammeralliance forums about “WE WANT 6vs6 SCENARIOS!” (aka, WHArena).

I can’t even believe you’re that dense, Keen, to think that it’s the “players’ fault” for depopulating RvR. Really?

Here’s the fix:
– Create a “Portal Master” at every tier warcamp.
– Allow players to summon themselves to the portal master of the tier they are in, at any time, from anywhere (in the tier).
– Allow said players to be able to talk to the portal master again, summoning them back to the exact same spot they were when they summoned to the portal master.

I think it’s pretty silly to rail against an imaginary group of whiners who ‘want everything given to them now’, for the changes happening in MMO culture. Different people want different things out of different games.

I find myself most nights logging out of WAR, frustrated, and playing Guild Wars. Not because I want everything given to me right away, but because I’m sick of having nothing to work towards except a meaningless grind for gear and ranks.

In Guild Wars, I may have all my items and gear unlocked, but I could play daily for the next 5 years and probably never touch the skill cap for some classes. The skill curve is intoxicating in its breadth and depth, and the reward that comes from successfully playing a challengin skill bar is far more fulfilling than getting a virtual piece of equipment to wear – to me, at least.

On the other hand, I *want* my WAR time to be about big, knock-down, drag out fights in open terrain. But everyone’s spread out trying once again to grind through levels to get to the actual game part. And I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like I’ve achieved something when after grinding for hundreds of hours I’m finally given core abilities that my class needs to stay alive – that just feels like a bunch of filler was added to keep me busy.

I do not want everything given to me – I just don’t want the one thing I want – the real, rank 40 large scale WAR – hidden behind hundreds of hours of something I have no interest in. And I want all the tools I need to play well and on an even footing with everyone else given to me from the start – leave things like skill, knowledge, and bragging rights to be worked for over months of play.