Vacation in Altdorf

I'm so terrible about timely news. I was going to post this the day after it happened but my server was beset by "OMG Destro exploits!" drama after the keep lords bugged on us and leaped downstairs. Not willing to "gloat" while people were still hot under the collar I waited until Order took a fortress a few days ago and the lord bugged on -them-. I now do not feel bad.

So a day after Order hit the Inevitable City and I was shocked at the lack of fun of it all Destro dragged themselves out of inactivity and spent six teen hours pushing for Altdorf. And I got to see, for the very first time, what a truelly organized force can do in T4. Organization in ORvR is like the difference between a pick up group and a pre-made in scenerios. It was incredably fun. My warband was a bit of a "swing group", set to bounce between the southern BOs and keeps defending as needed. We managed to keep Order on a total lock down in Reikland for the hour and half the domination timers needed and it was pure fun.

So both forts fell and we got to contest Atldorf. I was ready for my PC to sieze up and die here since the only time I'd been to Altdorf on an alt I could hardly move. But pleasantly, it wasn't that bad. What was bad was  ... it was the same exact damn PQ that we did in the Inevitable City. I couldn't believe it. It was the same burn things/capture BOs/face a lord that no one can kill set up. It was a lot more fun from the offensive side though.

We were also once again beset by the same disconnect and que bugs as before. We started out in relativly balanced numbers but as people d/ced and no one was able to get back in things swung the other way and we ended up being spawn camped. We also weren't able to find these fabled PvE PQs so no one in my instance saw a single bag after all that work.

Needless to say, it all needs work. I was pleased and not too suprised to see that reworking of the city based endgame was mentioned in the State of the Game. It needs several things in my opinion to work better. In spandy list format!

• Smaller numbers. We only get half of the city to fight in and putting 80+ people there makes it very zergy. It's not really that much bigger than an average scenerio, less numbers would make it more fun ... as is almost always the case in my opinion. Perhaps 24 vs 24. 48 vs 48 is just too many in that small a space
• Rework the PQ so that it doesn't require superior wards to finish. The whole idea of throwing a lord mob that must be killed into the middle of 48 defenders with little to no way to set up any sort of defense to block them while we beat the NPC down seems silly.  
• Clear indication of what needs to be done to lock the city. As was the case in ORvR at the start, no one seems to have any idea what needs to be done to lock the zone. From my experience defending it seems very much to lean toward scenerios. Order rocked us in the scenerios with pre-mades and we lost the city. I have no idea why we didn't manage to lock the city ourselves.
• Make the ques work properly. Both times, defensive and offense, I was in a half empty instance with more than a warband waiting at the city gates wanted to get in and help. Both times I had members of my warband unable to get back into our instance even though count showed that we had empty room.
• Never remove defenders from the zone. Currently, once the city is locked all defenders remain inside the city until they die. Once they're all dead it's the offenders turn to PvE. While I'd enjoy the chance to roam around Altdorf and do PvE things there should always be at least a section of the city that has better rewards and a constant stream of players wanting to beat the crap out of you. Perhaps set gear should only come from the RvR area of the city while the rest remains for the fun "sack and loot" prize. 

My first tastes of the RvR "endgame"

Phoenix Throne saw it's first ever contested city last night and if you'd told me back in November that it would the Inevitable City that fell first I'd have called you nuts. 

We all know I'm not much of an RvRer but that I am an insane RPer. Given that, I can not think of anything more out of character and immersion breaking than not being smack dab in the middle of the front lines when things looked as dire as they did a few days ago. It started off with Fell Landing, something that always gets my dark elf behind in gear to defend (though I rarely make it before the population caps, thank you five minutes load screens of doom). So when I heard the call and I happened to be in Caledor I booked it. Fell Landing ... fell. First time Order had ever taken a fortress and I could tell just based on the numbers they were fielding and the way they were playing that chances were very good that things were going to be ugly.

We held Black Crag by the skin of our teeth for an hour or two. I will admit here also that we held it stupidly. Menkara refered to most of the defending force as "un trained rabble". There were attempts by several members of my alliance, Black Blood Pact, to organize but it was like herding cats. Again based on the numbers fielded and the way we were playing I knew things weren't likely to go well. Black Crag fell and Butcher's Pass soon after.

This it where the failure started. Incomming Pull has a run down of what happened at the city that's probably better written and less wordy than mine so feel free to skip my rambling and scamper over there. I would not blame you.

For six months now the population of Phoenix Throne has been working toward cities. From the early days of multiple weekly Destro pushes for fortresses met with zone crash after zone crash to the population shift after the Avelorn transfers leading to daily fort defenses for Destro the point has always been to see this legendary, mysterious end game.

Well I saw it. At least part of it and here is the secret ...

It's a PQ and most of it is PvE.

I know right? Blasphemy you say! I remember reading about the dynamics of city capture, of burning buildings and rampant looting of houses and thinking how freaking awesome it sounded. I had visions of pure chaos in the streets of the cities, masses of people and the feel of a city under seige. What I got was a slight change in the look of the city (The runic glowies on the walls turned from blue to red), NPCs disappeared and freaking barrels were burning as if the chaos touched hobbos of the Inevitable City had stepped out to pee and left them there. There was one central PQ taking up the Apex, Temple and Monolith, the front half of the city. Objectives including holding two flags, killing the oposite side and either making those hobo fires or putting them out depending on the side. My warband was very on and we managed to win the PQ three times but the mobs and the difficulty of the lord that needed to be killed in stage two meant that we never actually got past that stage. (Lord required Dark Promise level wards to tank, more than two at least and there was no reason for all of the invading force not to be piled on top of the lord. Said lord was also tethered and could not be fought anywhere but within a small radius.)

Here's where the bugs started. Members of my warband qued up for the scenerio tied to the city and entered when it popped. Scenerios were unablanced (24 vs 4 for example) but didn't close properly and once they finally did gave victory points to the invaders for their win. When the players exited the scenerio instead of rejoining us all in our instance of the city they ended up outside. Trying to reenter told them that all instances were full and they should join the que, which they did. With the scenerio mess up, the usual DCs and CTDs that happen in mass RvR toward the end of the two hours my warband had twindled to about one and half or two groups actually in the city. And yet dozens were standing around outside the city being told the instances were full and to wait. Why? Because apparently there's a bug that incorrectly tells you that if you happen to be grouped. Had they dropped party and tried to join solo they could have chosen their instance and hopped right back in. 

Order took the city in the end and out of the both sides two pieces of gear dropped, both on Order side and both from the PvE only PQs that they aparently have on their side that don't show up on our map. One piece also happened to go to a base rank 32. We're talking RR 50+ gear here. And after the city was locked? Order continued to PvE inside the city for several ours while we sat and twiddled our thumbs.

All in all, it was extrememly lack luster, not terribly fun and buggy. I was left feeling a bit like, if this is the end game ...what have we been working toward all these months? The daily RvR battle is a while lot more fun than the cities.  The ORvR lake PQs for the Bitter Rivals event are more fun than the one in the city. 

Powah to da greeeeeeen.

After saying in my last post that I would be okay if there was little to no CC in the game I've had a chance to experience something very close to that over the past few days and I've had a total freaking blast.

Choppa and slayer are very low CC classes. They each get a low level snare and a mid-level short duration knockdown. Slayers I think have a moral ability knock down as well. Bored a few nights ago I elected to check out choppa and ended up instead rolling a shaman on the test server as that's what I'll be playing with Calintz's choppa and I wanted to see how shaman works at level 18. It was, as said, a blast. 

I RvRed more in the past two nights on the test server than I have in the past two months on live. It's simple, there's no cheap tricks (Except the few engineers that the slayers seem to bring, hello disable) .  It's just "Heres da boyz, deres da gits. Time ta smash." And I've noticed a hell of a lot more teamwork come out of it than I've ever seen on the live servers. If a shaman is getting hit there are suddenly four or five big choppas or a random black orc physically surrounding him and pushing the dwarves away. Honestly, as if they cordinated it. It's a beautiful thing to find yourself suddenly in the middle of a giant green box, protected not from crowd control abilties but good old fashion collison physics and teamwork. 

There was also a tactic I like to call "the first aid run". When you create a level 18 greenskeen on PTS you're dropped already geared and ready to go into the Marshes of Madness warcamp so naturally the Marshes RvR lakes is hoping, constantly. The keep there has a bridge that links the plateu the keep is on to the main road creating a nice little bottleneck if order chooses to take that route (which... they have almost always done.)

What happens with no other cordination is the members of the giant green wall form up fantastically on the bridge with slayers washing against them. The healy gits (shaman) stand at the end of the bridge. When a choppa finds himself at low health he turns and runs back toward the shaman, his place in the wall instantly filled by another choppa. The hurt orc is spotted, spam healed and usually turns on his heel before he even reaches us and is back in the fray while passing another hurt orc on his way to Mork's First Aid Station.  It made me laugh out loud several times to watch every orc there doing it and how well it worked, like a brilliant moment of unplanned teamwork.

Save a random ironbreaker managing to throw all the orcs off the bridge and rush the healers the only way to break that set up is for a group of slayers to come up the side of the hill, from behind and wipe out the shaman before the orcs can save us. It would be a very simple tactic, and effective, if they'd use it. But for some reason they haven't yet, they just keep bouncing off the green wall. 

Yesterday we also got a chance to take back the keep while it was playing host to a slayer convention. A new feature of 1.2 is that you can not take down a keep door without a ram. If you're ram-less and relying on regular abilities the door stays at 1% and refuses to break. Makes freaking sense to me, who ever heard of knocking down a six inch slab of a wood with a knife? The ram doesn't have to be up at the time the door goes down, but a ram has to have damaged the door at some point for it fall. We had our ram out until the slayers managed to gather enough excess grease from their mohawks to fill the oil cauldron. We took down the rest of the door with shaman spells, choppa axe throwing and random kamakazee choppa bashing. Once we got in it was a gloreous push. There were no bright wizards to single handedly wipe us all out with AoEs, only one or two engineers, a ton of slayers and a few runepriests hiding in the back. We took the keep on pure "throw as much green as it as you can" tactics. Choppas charged, choppas died, choppas rezed and choppa charged again. It was very touch and go, especially when the respawned slayers nearly took us from the floor. But we actually managed to take it and it was fantastic fun. Little Turnip the Shaman even got a gold bag out of it. 

My question is, why doesn't/can't this simple fun exist on the fully classed live servers? Is it as I guess an issue of CC and ranged damage dominating the full game? Is it a question of the prevelant zerg mentalities of WAR that state if you can't win bring twenty more friends? Or is it just because greenskins are that awesome?

A plea

We interupt this regularly schedule blog for a public service announcement.

If you happen to play Destruction on Phoenix Throne, or have just been toying with the idea of rolling destro there. Please... for the love of Khaine, roll a healer. If you have a healer from T1 to T3 that you haven't played in a while... dust it off. You will be loved and adored.

This message brought you by a bakers dozen of scenerios with 3 Runepriests, 2 Arcmages vs. 1 DoK. Thank you.

I offer visual proof. This is the norm for T3 scenerios the past week or so on both my DoK and my sorceress, it has also for me been the norm in T1. As Menkara today after about three hours of scenerio runs I had two... TWO scenerios where I wasn't the only healer on destro.

Death of a Carebear

I had a very well worded, poignant post about the state of ORvR in WAR written in my head. But then I stopped to make the best damn spagetti I've ever had and totally forgot it.

So this will be less poignant, but from a happier viewpoint since I am now full of pasta. 

The past few days have been a roller coaster when it comes to RvR. I've seen the lows, times when I'm so angry at my teammates that I mention to my guild "I almost wish I were Order, just so I could beat the shit out of our allies." And times where... well, we didn't exactly rise to occasion cause I did have to leave one WB (but managed not to call them cowards this time. IC I swear! >.>) but I did have the most fun, challenging and longest lasting RvR battle that I've had since the week after launch. 

So lets start with the lows. A few nights ago in a rare moment of activity Sevren (the smexy pokey witch elf) decided to take part in some keep taking in Dragonwake. It was a fairly mundane, boring run. The sort I've come to expect of ORvR, we took the first keep with no oposition. Hum drum, we claimed a few BOs on our way to the second. Took the second again with little to no oposition. At this point the WB leader declares that we're moving on to Chaos lands. That came at the exact moment that I spotted a group of five or so Order on the outside walls. Being me, I immediately put the word out and stealthed at the bottom of the stairs upward. I stood and watched a dozen people pour out of the doors without a care in the world but two or three others came with me. The order group was obvious organized and balanced in classes and pretty flately owned our hodge podge of DPS in the face. The most amazing (but not so really) thing happened. 

Destruction didn't give a crap. Order continued to pour in through our already open doors, I warned my group that there was enough there to take the keep back. The response was "Who cares, let them take it. Means more loot when we come back through to reclaim".  I and a few members of WB reacted less than friendly, calling them out for avoiding a fight. There was a few minutes of arguement before the WB leader finally spoke up and said, "Ok, Let's forget CoF. Move on to Chaos lands." I saw red, promptly told them "Forget cowards." dropped WB and went back to attempt to at least take out a few while order tramped all over our newly claimed keep. They took it of course, didn't even have to drop a ram. I ended up logging off. I don't get angry during PvP any more, I use to, but I don't any longer. If a member of Order takes me down, good for them. If I run into a group of them, my fault for not paying attention to where I am. How do you fight the conflict avoiding, shiney carrot seeking tendancies of your own side? 

Fast forward to last night. 1.1 brings in the RvR influence rewards. They are, absofreakinglutely awesome. Serious, Sevren's purple set has so much +crit chance that I almost feel sorry for Order. I ended up however, on my low t3 alt (20, just barely. but she's a healer! Deal with it) fighting in Avelorn. And I had a BLAST. Order was really kicking butt, in fact they could have claimed Ghrond's but elected not to. Instead they just stood on the bottom floor and let us come to them. They were very much there for the fight and I LOVED it. It was back and forth for nearly four hours. Things only really trickled off because everyone needed to go to bed. I heard things like "Doesn't Order have to go to work in the morning? Ugh!" a half dozen times in regional. Beaten by bedtimes, feh. It was as a whole, exactly what WAR is suppose to be ... war. And yet, in the middle of the tug of war my warband wanted to play musical keeps again. At this point we'd never lost Ghrond's and had taken a chance after pushing Order back to dash south in Saphrey to take The Well. Apparently, even when Order is still there, still fighting, still pushing and in vast numbers it STILL means that it's time to move on. "Going to Chaos now." my WB leader says. My leveling partner ask, "Why would you leave when there's a fight still raging here?" The answer was of course "More loot." I polietly told them no thanks and found another WB.

I'm ok with it. While they're fighting NPCs and singing kum by ya I had the most fun, intense, long lasting keep defence battle I've ever seen and I really got to push my limits as a healer. It was a beautiful moment. I've PvPed very rarely with my DoK and I really only squeeked by on years of prior healing experience as I frantically tried to keep up with the damage. I'll take that to the Tour de Keep Lord Smashing any day.

People keep saying that Mythic needs to do something to make ORvR more inticing. I think at this point that they've done just about all they can do. At some point, it becomes the the community's fault for not taking part. Honestly, I've been a "carebear" for six years of MMO gaming while playing things like EVE and Lineage2. I was under the impression that the PvPers were blood thirsty, always looking for a fight, always eager to "ruin my fun" by blowing me up while I'm trying to level. Come on now, WAR is currently only proving my long standing point that most of the fun people find in PvP is griefing. If it's concentual, you all would rather avoid it completely? Or is it honestly that people need the carrot? You can't get a gold bag by killing Order, so why should you stay and have fun if it doesn't mean phat loots for you? 

RvR weenies.

Yesterday's Heavy Metal task was to kill 15 people in open RvR. This is of course, an awesome idea. I enjoy open RvR, there's just some key elements to it that keep my lazy butt from doing it very often (1: Lag 2: Lag 3: Travel time). But when I logged on in Eaitain I was happy to see an open warband of about twelve people which my boyfriend and I promptly joined and took off for Dragonwake.  

 Dragonwake didn't seem much going on, or rather, I showed up too late to see much going on but the group decided to head for Kadrin Valley since it was unlocked and had tasty looking blue on the map. When we got there scouts reported that Order had just flipped the last BO and was heading for the southern keep so off we went. 

At this point, there are thirteen of us. We set up our seige weapons on the first wall, set the fire under the oil and were waiting when Order arrived.   Remember now, there were thirteen of us. Taking a headcount as they arrived I counted at least 18, most likely a few more. The battle over the door was pretty fun. Against the norm they actually brought their own ballistas and managed to destroy the ones we'd set up against them promptly. There was an awesome five minutes of fighting over the oil as two or three bright wizards nuke it to pieces and four of us constantly repaired it and lobbed it at their heads. Conversation on our side was to the tune of "Do we have enough to hold them off?" "They seem pretty organized" etc.  

First door goes down and we all fall back to the keep. At this point we start putting out calls to the rest of the zone to come help but Order has such a lockdown on the postern door that no one can get in and the handful that went out to try to chase them away ended up dead in seconds. As it becomes clear that the door is going to be falling soon I left my post at the top of the keep, taking another quick head count of the front and back door before falling back to the keep lord room.  

The count by my eye almost exactly even. We had 18 people, Order had 19-20 people. Chances are that in fact they had a few more since I can clearly see how many people destro has but it's hard to count two doors as people are running about. Conversation on our side continues along the lines of "Can we do this?" We quickly organize a tactic. We have two chosen and a black orc as well as several sorcerers. The plan is simple but beautiful, the tanks block the top of the ramp with their big beefy tankness, the sorceres nuke like maniacs and hope that a BW doesn't get them in sight and the healers keep them alive. (What was I doing you ask? Oh, I'm a MDPS. I sit on my thumbs.)  

Order breaks through the door and rushes in! Tense moment! Conversation on our side is reassurance "Be patient, just stay still. They'll rush us any moment, be ready." So we follow orders and wait... and wait a bit more. It becomes clear that Order is waiting on -us- to get impatient and come down to them. They finally send up a scout who throws himself at the tanks, blows up and promptly gets raised. Alright! Scout means action soon. Then something funny happens. 

Nothing.

  That's right folks, after roughly an hour and a half of back and forth skin of your teeth battle over the doors, on equal or greater footing with destruction, Order finds themselves unwilling to gather their courage, come up with a tactic and come for what they came for. They all freaking left without setting foot on the ramp. When we finally got that they were chickening out we ran down the ramp to find one lone Iron Breaker standing his ground and ready to take us on. Poor guy, he must have hated his team mates but I'd like to shake his hand.   

After this display of what tactical defense looks like we fully expected to see Order at their keep to the north when we left to claim it. Did we? Of course not, not an ever loving soul was there. One of our members stated "Pfft, if they're going to be this lame I'm going to bed." And so I logged out with 8/15. (After taking all of Praag without seeing a soul.)

The good news is that I got two pieces of Annihilator's, head and shoulders. The bad news is that I lost a bit of faith in humanity. 

Open RvR Update Repost

A straight copy paste because it was lost off the front page of the herald already and is too awesome not to point out:

"Folks,

   Over the last few months I’ve spoken about our continued focus on improving our open RvR systems.  While we have taken some major steps in the last month, we believe that there is much more we can do to encourage people to take part in oRvR throughout the entire evolution of their character(s).  Over the next few months we have some very exciting changes and additions taking place.  Please note that as always, this does not represent everything that either we are doing or thinking about doing, just what we, as of now, plan on adding to WAR. 

   We have a number of major initiatives planned for oRvR in WAR.  Please keep in mind that these changes/systems apply to oRvR only and not to scenarios.  This is not all we are working on but these do reflect the majority of oRvR additions that we are currently working on/planning for the next few months.

   First, we have created an RvR Influence system.  This system is designed to reward our oRvR players with lots of new stuff that you can only get through oRvR.  This will be a complimentary system to our PQ Influence system.  This system is already implemented in 1.1 and is scheduled to go LIVE along with that version in December.   

   Second, we want to improve the visibility that players have into oRvR and make it easier for players to get involved in the action quickly and easily.   We have a number of wide-ranging changes going into our map and travel systems to allow players to better understand the state of oRvR in our game and also allow them to get to the action faster.  We have already taken one step with putting a Rally Master in each Warcamp but we will also add the ability for people to have a second bind point to make it even easier for players to move around the maps.  We will also make it easily for players to see where players from their Realm are engaging in oRvR, a Campaign HUD for all tiers and other improvements We will also improve Tier-wide messaging about what is going on in Battlefield Objectives and Keeps.  Other additions include changes to the UI, in-game manual improvements, map enhancements, and a few other changes.

   Third, we want to provide greater incentives to players to participate in oRvR.  In order to accomplish this we will be adding additional layers to the questing system of oRvR including the addition of Keep Quests, “Daily Event Quests”, Chained RvR Missions, improve the initial Tome Unlocks and other oRvR-oriented Events.  We will also improve our BO itemization.  Our goal is to provide players with even more incentive for participating in oRvR than we have already. 

   Fourth, we want to encourage guilds to take and control keeps, and we will continue our work on adding better rewards for Guilds who own Keeps as well as the addition of a system of Keep upgrades. This system will be added to the game in several stages beginning in the late winter.

   Finally, we will begin work on a global oRvR “Fame” system that will be tied directly to the Tome of Knowledge which will provide more rewards, titles, experience, etc. for participating and being successful in oRvR.    This system will provide even more incentives for people to participate in oRvR than the current systems and one that fits nicely both with the ToK’s concept as “This is your life” as well as an additional advancement and reward system.

   Please keep in mind that these additions are subject to change and given the nature of these changes/improvements, they will not go LIVE until we have thoroughly tested them.  However, these are crucial improvements to WAR and are being treated as such by the team.

    Finally, I want to close this out with a brief explanation about the role that we believe that oRvR should play in WAR.  It’s really as simple as this, oRvR should be a major focus for leveling, item gain, etc. in WAR.  Some of the systems are already in place and in Tier 4, oRvR is alive and well.  On other Tiers, however, oRvR is not being engaged in as often as we had hoped when we launched WAR.  Our goal is to ensure that oRvR is the place where players can level the fastest, get the best items and overall, have a great time while doing it.  It is supposed to be riskier, more challenging but ultimately, more rewarding than any other place within WAR.  What is outlined in this letter are some of the ways we plan on making this happen over the next few months and beyond. 

    As always, we thank you for your patronage and support.  We won’t let you down.

Mark Jacobs

VP/GM Mythic Entertainment"

All I can says is: Freck yeah. And also, I serious need more ram and a new video card before all this stuff makes me want to do ORvR 70% more than I do currently.