Mythic announced their Halloween even today which will run from October 29 until November 2. This time of year is when many mmorpgs have events in-game to celebrate the various holidays and, as usual, the event offers some form of aesthetic goodies for the player. The Witching Night as they call it will offer players the chance to get various masks, capes, and other goodies usable at all levels by all races.
There’s one interesting bit of information here that really catches my interest. To obtain these items you must participate in the public quests placed in the RvR lakes. It’s not the most covert method of drawing players out of the shadows (or scenarios) and bringing them into the RvR lakes but at this point I’ll take it and I’m sure many of you out there will agree. I think this Halloween event is going to be the perfect opportunity to test the waters for future changes in the game. Mythic obviously needs a means of drawing players into the RvR lakes to promote O-RvR and the players obviously want incentives.  If this is any indication, and I really believe it is, then we can expect that Mythic is listening and ready to take action. I expect that, if all goes well with this little Halloween event, Mythic will add permanent PQ fictures to the RvR lakes with rewards enticing enough to matter. Combine this with the already-on-the-way RvR Influence system and there’s lots of potential
I’m looking forward to the RvR action starting tomorrow! My goal is to take all my characters to the RvR lakes and get them their goodies. Hopefully it won’t be too difficult a process. Tomorrow is also the 1.0.4 patch which, according to the tidbits of info out there, holds some fixes for RvR. *crosses fingers*
Hell yea, Mythic just turned off the T.V., so let’s get outside and do some killin’!!! Great job.
Thanks for the mask pictures!
oh, and Woooooooooo!!! I mean… Waaaaaaaaaaa… (gh)!!
Now there’s some RvR motivation I can approve of. =)
In my opinion it is a plus to see this happen but they still need more incentive to RvR in the actual world and not in scenarios. Personally I wish they would just not allow players to even do scenarios once they hit max level. It would not only force players to RvR to gain their renown ranks but would be an easy solution to a problem that made me stop playing the game for the time being.
One thing that raises warning bells to me is them stressing the rarity of the masks. It’s all very well to show us the pics and make us want them, but if we’re going to end up waiting for them to drop at a low rate and getting into a need/greed squabble, things will get ugly fast.
5 days overall time also seems a little short for PQs that will take 2-3 hours to reset.
Call me spoiled, but I’m used to holiday events that take at least a little longer – like a week, if not more. LOTRO festivals are at least a week, with celebratory drops over a month, if I recall. Guild Wars does around a week of events, with a month’s turn-in grace period. CoX pretty much has fortnight to month-long holidays/special events.
Well, we’ll see how it turns out. I’ve already psyched myself into assuming that I might only see one or two RvR PQs at best, and no masks or capes, since I can only play one full day during that period.
Just tell me where to get that elf mask, and I’m there.
However, if, in order to get it, I must grind grind grind or be subject to the whims of luck and/or hardcore players, I will be forced to send Mythic hatemail.
[…] others have hypothesized (before I could get around to it), I believe they are using Witching Night […]
This could have been so great but alas it just ended up being a pretty huge letdown. Repeated the PQ twice and I had enough. Why?
1) Stage I objective was to kill 100 enemy players. Wow, original. So guess what happens? Everyone forms up into two big groups and just have a stand off all day with kills here and there. Boring. If one side does too well then you risk the other side retreating completing for a while (which happened when I left). I mean we got so desperate we were even going out solo to try to lure some of them out of their war camp. Boring, boring, boring. Place the PQ objectives throughout the map or tie them to the existing battlefield objectives in some way. Get people moving about and interacting with the RVR zone. Can you imagine if our side had decided to hold up in the keeps we owned in the zone (we owned both). The enemy wouldn’t have come out at all.
2) The PQ drop reward I got was just a piece of armor. No idea what it looks like because I can’t use it yet. I hope it has a halloween look to it otherwise what’s the big deal?
3) Influence rewards pretty much require you to play the whole day to get them all. No thanks. Again if the PQ had been more interesting than kill 100 players, I’d probably still be playing right now. Oh and Stage 2 was to kill a huge undead skeleton. Our group dropped it in like 10 seconds. Hehe, keep lords take longer to drop and require more coordination.
Noooooooooooooooooooooo! Say it ain’t so!
All they had to do was put the same type of PQ like the one in Dwarfs/WartSkins where both sides have to pass through a hole in the wall. That PQ in an RvR lake would be Amazing.
Thanks for the warning so when I log in tonight I won’t be crushed.
I sat in a deserted tier three RvR zone with a warband of other dudes wanting to do the event. The event never started. Good game Mythic.
Yeah the event PQ in Caledor was a huge disappointment. 100 players can go quickly but Destruction wanted to stay in the OB there (in a locked zone) where we couldnt do anything. Than once we reached 90/100 they all left so we couldn’t complete it. Lame.
The ‘kill zone’ for the event PQ was way too small also making it difficult to complete. Some reworking could be a fun thing but for thier first attempt at a holiday event was a no-go here.
Ugh I can’t believe Mythic went with a kill 100 players zergfest with the first stage. Way to point out the worst part of RvR.
I couldn’t think of a quicker way to convince players that RvR = dull. =/
Is Mark Jacobs convinced that RvR is perfectly tuned and they just needs players to show up? With an event like this, they’ll see diminishing returns on the players that participate next time.
The problem I see with, with open rvr, is the fact that Destro outnumber Order 3:1. Order are expected to compete in a pq with this imbalance? Order do not stand a chance vs. Destro, so they leave instead of feeding the opposition a ton of xp/renown/rewards.
Mythic may have to implement a buff to the faction that is outnumbered, in open rvr zones, in order to make it more of a competition. Players will not participate in open rvr if they feel like cannon fodder.
The Good – we had several hours of non-scenario RvR last night and a good portion of that wasn’t related to the PQ, it was fighting for the sake of fighting. Cool! That’s what Warhammer is supposed to be about right? The Renown was good, the Exp was ok
The Bad – The first time we completed State 2 there was a huge warband of Destro still fighting us, so only one player made it to the chest to pick up his/her reward. The rest of us could have made it if it wasn’t for the very low time limit on the chest.
We also had to continually tell our warband members to stop pushing towards Bugmans because the kills didn’t count for teh PQ.
I agree with your good Rorik. We had amazing RvR in many tiers all day long yesterday. This definitely enticed people to come out and play even when the PQ wasn’t active.
“We had amazing RvR in many tiers all day long yesterday.”
All day long? From morning to evening? I’m finding the Open RVR in WAR to be pretty much only a “Prime Time” thing (i.e. evenings and weekends). I mean I’ve been quite effective in rallying warbands together in the evening when lots of people are on (as per the email I sent you) but during the day, even around lunch time (PST), it’s next to impossible (even with 30+ people in the area I’m in). I mean when I get the chance to play Open RVR, it’s amazing but if I can only do it during peak times or weekends, it just makes it all the more frustrating.
That’s part of the problem with level-based MMOs though, you get this fractionation occurring all over the place (i.e. levels, tiers, maps, etc) versus a FPS / simulation type game (i.e. Warbirds) where the game’s population can move wherever the combat is at (usually just separating to attack at different fronts). I mean I sometimes they wish had a specific Open RVR warband grouping option that was accessible from all three race areas in the same tier, so someone could easily see where an RVR warband was situated and join up with it, no matter which realm they were in. I mean an RVR warband differs from a PQ or PVE warband in that it objective is to wage war wherever it can, so it needs to be able to rally people from wherever as well.
@Nollind Whachell: I’ve been wishing for some changes to the open group listings too, it would be nice especially for RvR for groups to be able to list their intent.