I wrote about this a week ago, but further information has been released in the latest Warhammer Online grab-bag from Mythic:
Zone control is based on several pools, each of which is worth a percentage. Together, these pools tally up to 100%. Every time a player is killed, a quest is finished, or a scenario is completed (win or lose), this contributes points towards zone control. Battlefield objectives (BOs) and Keeps are binary. This means that once you own a BO or a keep, you have a chunk of zone control points that don’t go away unless the enemy takes it from you.
Most everyone these days looks at the map, discovers that they own all the BOs and Keeps, and thinks that’s all that’s needed to capture a zone. This assumption is false! In order to control a zone, players also need to win Scenarios associated with that zone, do quests, and kill players in that zone. Zone Control is all about total dominance in everything involved with a Zone. You must push on all fronts!
Before anyone thinks they can get around giving the enemy points by not going to fight, we have a safeguard that grants points to the realm which is queuing, in case the other realm decides not to queue — Defend By Not Defending is what we call it. It takes longer for those points to accumulate, but if one realm decides not to queue for a Scenario in contested zones, the other Realm will get points towards zone control. This is similar to the forfeit rule in sports. Also note that points earned from queuing only gives points if you have enough players to launch 1 Scenario, not 50. This means that if Destruction has 500 players queued for a Scenario that requires 18 players to launch, they’re only getting credit for 18 players. This is to ensure that over populated Queues don’t get anything extra for having 500 in the queue or just 18.
BO’s and Keeps provide the same amount of control for both realms, in other words, if order owns a keep or BO, they get the same amount of control as Destruction does when they own them. Battlefield Objectives offer less control than Keeps. When a Keep is captured, the Zone Control bar will show much more movement than when a BO is captured.
Prior Zone control is a direct correlation to the points you get for the higher Tiers. For example, if Order owns 50% of Tier 3 in HE vs. DE, then 50% of that Prior Zone pool is carried over. If Order took over Tier 3 completely, they would not get 100% of the Prior Zone pool; they would simply get as many points as they have earned in that lower tier. The lower tiers don’t cap out at 65% either. Players can keep pumping points into the lower Tiers to get up to 90%+ ownership, which results in owning 90%+ of the Prior Zone control pool for higher Tiers.
Finally, points degrade over time in all of the pools except for the points contributed by BO and Keeps ownership simply because they are either owned or not owned by a realm. The reason that points degrade is to ensure that a stalemate doesn’t occur over long periods of point gains.
Now let’s look at a few situations:
The Zone control bar is pretty even between Order and Destruction, but Destruction owns all the BOs and Keeps in a zone. This means that Order is doing very well in Scenarios. Destruction needs to step it up in Scenarios to flip the zone.|
The Zone control bar is empty on Destruction, about half way for Order, and Order owns all the Keeps and BOs in a zone. This means that no one is fighting in Scenarios in that zone. Order needs to queue up and fight or Destruction needs to queue up and take BOs/Keeps to flip the zone.
The Zone control bar is about ¼ full for both Order and Destruction and BOs and Keeps are split 50/50. Usually this means that no one is fighting in Scenarios in that zone, or killing anyone in that zone at all.
So the long and short of it all? Fight on all fronts! Take BOs and Keeps, fight in Scenarios, kill players in open field…it all counts!
As I have mentioned before, on some servers, including my own, scenarios in the higher tiers simply do not happen. (This does mean we have a whole lot more open RvR than other servers. However, what this article seems to be saying to me is that without scenarios (or at least one side having enough people signed up to launch a scenario), that it is impossible for either side to take control of a zone. As each source of victory points has it’s own discrete cap, it just doesn’t seem possible. Without knowing the exact maths it’s hard to be certain, but that looks like what is being said.
Also this means, under the no-contest rule implemented in 1.0.4, that on servers where one side has enough to launch a scenario, and the other side does not, only the larger side can EVER take control of a zone. Doesn’t matter how good the smaller side is.
As I’ve said many times before, requiring 18 on each side for t3 scenarios is unreasonable. Reducing that requirement would go a long way to seeing scenarios launch on the lower population servers which are otherwise perfectly viable.
In any case (on servers that do have scenarios), I don’t want to have to leave to go play arena games in a pocket dimension during a pitched battle. I’m not against scenarios. They’re a lot of fun, and a great source of renown and xp. As currently implemented they should be left out of the zone control equation entirely.
Quests are another pool of victory points, but what if I’ve done them all in that zone? And anyway, why should I have to go fiddle around with PvE content in order to attain an RvR goal? If I’m doing that, I’m not in the RvR areas any more where I want to be. For the sake of pure PvE players, I am not completely against quests getting you some bonus points, but they should not be essential to gaining zone control.
Killing Players is another source of Victory points. This one is still vulnerable to the losing side withdrawing from the field to deny points. In any case, most of the time kills on both sides are not going to be vastly uneven. Sadly, the risk that my death would help the enemy get control of the zone is a discouragement to me trying to fight, unless the odds are in my favour. (We saw exactly this behaviour in the recent Witching Hours PQ.) Because of this I would remove this source of victory points altogether. We already fight for the objectives. Risk should not be deincentivised.
Prior Zone Control granting victory points is not something I have a huge problem with in theory. In practise, under the current rules, it means that there is a source of victory points for tier 3 that is entirely outside my ability to influence as Osgard. If I go to tier 2, I will turn into a chicken. If I have a tier 2 alt and load them up, that means I’m no longer available for fighting (or scenario queueing) in tier 3. It also means that I’m having to play a character other than my favourite one. Do I have to have a character in each tier in order to fully be able to affect my own tier, and do I have to keep making more characters every time one levels out of the tier?
Until higher tier characters can fight in the lower tier zones (Obviously de-powering us to the point that we’re on an equal footing with the normal residents of that tier. Or heck, make us slightly weaker than them. I’d be OK with that.), I can’t support this source of victory points. Also I’m always left wondering what happens when the lower tiers are all but deserted, and there are no longer any victory points bubbling up from below.
Conclusion.
The only source of victory points I support at the moment (I daresay there are other ways to get points that would work that no-ones thought of yet.) is the taking and holding of objectives and keeps. It needs to be possible for Open RvR to be sufficient to take control of a zone. I would suggest that the longer you hold an objective or keep, the more points it be worth (the amount would be capped, but controlling all of them for sufficent time would lead to zone control). That simple system would do everything needed to add urgency and excitement to Open RvR.
It just feels to me like the dev team is confused as to its goals. Are there two different teams working at cross-purposes, I wonder? Either they are trying to encourage open-world RvR, or they are not. I would appreciate it if they would make up their minds, and inform us of their decision.
The winds of chaos have swirled and swooshed through the Old World, and none of us will be left untouched.
These update notes are fairly huge, and every class has been altered. Without numbers, it will be hard to judge exactly what the effect will be, so I encourage everybody to get onto the public test servers, once they materialise, in order to provide Mythic with quality feedback.
Let’s see what has become of us: Continue reading Warhammer Online 1.0.5 patch notes. The Class rebalance is upon us.
So, yesterday, a group of us decided to have another go at the Witching Hours Public Quest in Black Fire Pass.
We fought like demons, destroying wave after wave of Destruction players, and once our total got to about 60, other members of the faction started turning up, so we formed a warband.
Unfortunately, many of these new arrivals didn’t seem to really understand what the hell they were doing (in spite of being repeatedly told), and kept attacking the Keep, forcing our foes to go defend it. Kills anywhere near the Keep do not count towards the PQ, so this was completely useless to the original goal of the warband, and meant we took far longer to get the necessary kills than we would have otherwise.
By about half past midnight, we got to 97 kills, to destructions total of 67. At this point, destruction decided to retire from the field. It took us two hours to get the last 3 kills. As soon as we did, and the demon appeared, lo and behold there were destruction everywhere again. A completely pointless and mean-spirited waste of everyone’s time, because gods forbid a member of the opposing faction should get a neat-looking red mask. It is also a funless tactic that the PQ’s designers should have foreseen, and compensated for.
We killed the demon, and this is what we saw.
Out of our entire warband, only one of us was considered to have contributed enough to even get a roll on the bags. It was not even someone who had been there from the start, though he’s a good lad, and was perfectly deserving of getting a roll, just not the only roll. If ever there was proof that the way Public Quests score contribution is completely fubared, this is it.
We spent over 7 hours on this, including a lot of extremely boring standing around waiting for destruction to stop delaying. This bag roll was the final insult for the day, and a lot of us went off to bed feeling rather let down by the whole affair.
I have placed a complaint with the CSR, though I strongly doubt they will do anything to compensate us.
We (as a server) have been managing one or two completions of this PQ a day, so by the end of the event, maybe ten tier 3 characters spread across both sides will have gotten their hands on the Mask of the Bloodletter. Does it need to be that rare? Would it have been so terrible to put one in the green bags, instead of only the gold?
Do better, Mythic. Holiday events are supposed to be fun, not frustrating and disappointing.
Update: It’s Monday afternoon, and I spoke to a CSR a little earlier. As usual, they were very polite, but could do nothing to actually help. They told me that there has been a hotfix to fix the issues we encountered, and that we should try again. Of course, the event ends today.
I would have liked my warband to be compensated for what we lost. As it is, the chances of me finding people who want to put themselves through that PQ again are pretty darn slim.
A comment I made in the post before this one deserves some explanation. This is what I was referring to, from an interview with Paul Barnett.
“I was in charge of hiding all the crazy things around the world for people to find,” Paul confirmed. “I can safely say that no one has come anywhere near finding even two percent of them. There are years and years of finding all the nonsensical gags that are hidden within the game!”
There are two possibilities.
A. Large amounts of content was created that is so impossibly hard to find, that 98% of it has been completely invisible to even the most hardcore player, 2 months after release. This is apparently a good thing, as it allows the developers to think how jolly clever they are in hiding it. I disagree. Content that is that hard to find may as well not exist, and was a complete waste of development time that could have been used to flesh out the parts of the game that normal people do in fact experience. It was especially useless in persuading people to stay on after their first month.
In fact, how does Paul even know that “no one has come anywhere near finding even two percent of them”. Did they not only waste dev time creating this stuff, but then also spend time creating some method to track how many of them we’d found?
B. That the claims are untrue, or at best, wildly exaggerated. This may seem an unkind suggestion, but I have been here before. When EQ2 was released, one of the races that was supposed to be in the game was the Froglok, but upon trying to choose that race you would be confronted by this sight:
The depths of the deceit can be seen in a post I did back at that time. Suffice it to say, the race did not in fact exist in a playable form, and the suggestion we could find and unlock them was not true. A great many people wasted a whole lot of time trying to find something that did not exist. I did, uncharacteristically for me, eventually forgive them and go back, mostly because deep down I do love Everquest 2.
My point is, when an MMO developer says that something is in the game, but we, the players, just haven’t been smart enough to find it yet, I am filled with suspicion. It is true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it’s a whole lot easier to say something exists than to make it so. It is a great delaying tactic.
So we have a choice between A) An awful display of time-management, wasting precious developer resources that could have been used to improve the game in tangible ways, or B) A claim designed to make us think that something exists, when it does not.
I do not know whether A or B is correct, but I find neither possibility particularly admirable. I am genuinely perplexed that anyone would be boasting about it. Or perhaps I’m just a cynical old bastard who doesn’t understand.
There has been a rash of Warhammer bloggers leaving Warhammer recently.
I didn’t beta WAR. I didn’t even really follow it at all. I was perfectly happy playing EQ2 again, after the debacle that was AoC, when I started getting emails from friends to come along when WAR came out, and I agreed. Basically what this means is that I did not spend months or years thinking about how awesome a game it was going to be.
I only played WoW for about a month, when it launched, so my thinking is more or less unaffected by it. I don’t love or hate WoW. I simply don’t care much about it, or use it as a benchmark.
I had no expectations to be dashed. What I’ve found is that Warhammer is a basically stable game, with notable strengths and flaws. I may write a lot more about the flaws, as I perceive them, than I do about the strengths. That’s natural, as I desire to draw attention to problems, so they can be rectified. Drawing attention to WAR’s many strengths is the job of Mythic’s marketing department.
WAR is a game that, like Pirates of the Burning Sea, relies heavily on having a critical mass of players. and this is not the case on my server, but I hold out hope that this will be sorted out, one way or another. Currently I am enjoying Warhammer Online, mostly due to the RvR, and I will continue to play it. I will also continue to complain loudly when I think things could be done better. Such is my nature, and we’re basically stuck with that.
The sense of betrayal that many bloggers are giving voice to at the moment is understandable. To an extent, Mythic has themselves to blame by talking a lot of hyped up tosh over the last couple of years (and it still continues. I simply don’t believe that 2% claim.), but that seems to be how all MMO promotion works these days. I’ve been there myself, on a number of occasions, but I think at present, emotion is taking too great a role. and the bar is being placed unfairly high.
Warhammer Online’s Witching Night is upon us! I posted a few days ago that I was worried it might be excessively hard to get our hands on these fun fluff item rewards. How is it turning out?
There are four masks you can get.
The Leather Mask of the Gobbo has been duly gained. It drops quite often from restless spirits, and is tradeable. This is good, as it means that everyone is pretty much assured one of the masks at least. I got enough for all my alts while trying to fill my influence bar.
The Delicate Silver Mask is gained by filling in your influence bar for the event. So far Osgard has gotten his cloak as the medium influence reward, but this is certainly doable. I don’t think you’ll be getting the influence from killing players in the PQ, unless you’re extremely lucky, as the influence you get is tiny and the bar doesn’t move. Your best bet is to find some restless spirits, and sit down to kill hundreds of them. Not especially entertaining, which is why Osgard’s only up to the cloak. He will summon up the mental fortitude (I am very grinding averse) to finish that off before the end of the event.
On a positive note, I would like to say that the cloaks are pretty darn cool. So is the basic reward, though it is a shame that it was given only five charges, instead of having infinite charges with a cooldown. Looking spooky is hardly an unbalancing ability, and having charges means that folks are always reluctant to use it, and it’ll end up getting stuck in the bank and forgotten about.
Osgard decided to get his spirits by beating up old women and smashing their cauldrons, which brings forth a few restless spirits. He did that instead of finding a faster, spirit-only, spawn-spot, as there are tome unlocks for slaying the crones, so he might as well kill two birds with one (high velocity) stone.
Osgard used this cauldron spot in Chrace, but there are a number of other locations scattered about the world.
The Gaping Skull Mask is dropped by enemy players in RvR. I have yet to see a single one drop, so I’m not rating Osgard’s chances in his scenario-free tier. If I’m lucky I might be able to find one with a tier 2 character, and pass it up to him, as it seems tradeable.
The Mask of the Bloodletter comes in the gold bag for winning the opposed PQ. So to get a Mask of the Bloodletter you have to:
- Kill 100 players before the other side kills 100 players, under conditions I will describe in a moment. Do this before the PQ resets back down to zero kills on each side for no apparent reason.
- Kill the Witching Lord. Or let the other side kill it, if they’re going to be daft.
- Roll well enough, against probably a lot of competition, to get the gold bag.
- Within 2 minutes, get to the the magic chest, and loot your bag while under enemy fire
My server has managed one completion of the PQ so far in tier 3. There are a lot of problems with it. Even if fixed, I think we can safely say that we ain’t going to be seeing a lot of Mask’s of the Bloodletter.
Primarily, it seems that Keeps and Battlefield objectives use a similar system to PQs, and cannot overlap. So if you are anywhere near a keep or objective, your kills will not count towards the PQs. As BO and Keeps are the natural places that fighting will gravitate towards, this is pretty unhelpful. Black Fire Pass has Bugman’s Brewery smack in the middle of it, and it is all too easy to end up too close to it. Warhammer technology needs to be improved to the point where these things can overlap.
The other area that combat with gravitate to, especially if you can’t use the former areas, is the warcamps. This was mental agony, as I saw our forces, time and again, walk over to the enemy NPC guards and be killed. This would, of course, grant the enemy another kill towards their tally. Unfortunately, too many of our team seemed to be getting their LOLs that way. “LOLs” is not a word I would normally use, but I very much wanted to use the above post title. Usually I would just call them “witless”, and be done with it.
After Destruction beat us in stage one, the Witching Lord appeared at Bugman’s pub, which we held. I have no screenshots, as I was too busy yelling at people not to attack it. All too soon, we had killed it, completing the PQ for Destruction. The roll took place, I am told, but no-one has the faintest idea where chest turned up, so none of them managed to get their hands on the reward bags. I would strongly suggest that the chest appear in the camp of the winning warband, rather than some mysterious contested area.
With all the difficulties, we only managed that single completion of the PQ.
Anyways, that is the state of play after day 1 of the Witching Night on Makaisson. We’ll be having another try at this PQ today, hopefully with less of a display of ineptitude. I’m fairly satisfied with the event, as it goes. With us still being in the second month after launch, I would not have wanted to see too many developer resources poured into temporary content at this stage. I have no doubt that this will all be back again next year with more polish, more features, and more atmosphere.
Yes, I’m grumpy at the moment. That is because Mythic keep making bizarre design decisions that seem to fly in the face of reality. Also, I need caffeine.
Campaign Adjustments
Tier 4 zones now require fewer scenario victory points to be captured. The mechanics of capturing a zone have not changed however. Zones which have no scenario opposition can still be captured if players join the queue for scenarios based on that Zone. Victory points towards zone control will be granted if a realm has enough players in the queue to launch the scenario and the other realm doesn’t. If players in those queues join a launched scenario or leave the queue, the victory points towards zone control will be forfeit.
In other words, using “Join All†to queue for all available scenarios is still the fastest way to get into a scenario, but joining the scenarios in a specific zone will have the greatest impact on control of that zone, and by extension the greatest impact on the campaign in that pairing.
Wooh, woh!!! Stop right there! If one faction has enough people queueing up for a scenario, and the other faction does not, the faction with the most queuers gets victory points?
Are you insane? Do you understand that on many servers, one faction or another simply cannot muster enough people for a scenario in certain tiers. On my server we have never had a tier 3 scenario. I don’t know which faction, maybe it’s both, does not have enough players signing up. But, Mythic, it was you who decided the minimum number of players needed to launch a scenario, and set it so high. How are we going to balance the populations if you explicitly go around rewarding the higher pop faction?
Not only that, but you are forcing people who care about the overall war to sign up for scenarios, even if they’ed rather do Open RvR. If they don’t, there is a risk of allowing the enemy a free victory. You have been saying that you want to move people out of scenarios, into open RvR, but this will have precisely the opposite effect.
If the higher numbered faction, on low pop servers, is going to be receiving a constant stream of extra victory points from failed scenario launchings, that makes a complete mockery of the war. The lower population sides are already having enough trouble in open PvP. Now you want to make it so that they auto-fail scenarios?
I was really hoping for a scenario fix in 1.04. One that would have allowed me to actually play in a tier 3 scenario. Maybe a scenario randomiser so that in tiers that do have scenarios happening, we don’t keep doing the same one. Instead, I hear that I may be going to be punished for Mythic’s own bad scenario launching design that won’t let me play. That annoys me.
Here’s my proposed fix. First, only grant victory points for scenarios that actually take place, as happens now.
Next, figure out how many people each side has signed up for a scenario. Launch a scenario with equal numbers on each side. Use the blasted Nordenwatch map if you think the tier 3 maps are too big for the number of players available. If Nordenwatch is too big, make a map for smaller numbers. But, and this is what I care about, LAUNCH A SCENARIO!!!! Let us fight! I’ll fight one on one in a cardboard box if that is all you have time to design. That is preferable to our opponents just being given free victory points.
Update: Hello to Book of Grudges, and Tobold readers!!! Some more thoughts.
The supporters of this change seem to be convinced, when they want a scenario and it doesn’t launch, that it’s because of some sinister plan by the enemy trying to deny them victory points. They are trying to suggest that the opposing faction is so organised, so dedicated, so of one mind, that none of them sign up, even though scenarios are fun and grant good rewards.
That is one possible explanation, but I can think of a lot of simpler ones.
1. Population being low.
2. The requirements for launching a scenario being too high. I spoke to a CSR this week and he told me that the tier 3 scenarios need 18 people on each side.
3. That there is something wrong with the way scenario launching works. I especially suspect this with regards to how it decides which scenario to launch when everyone hit the join all button. Also, if everyone hits “join all” but one single person picks a specific scenario, presumably that would be the one you would get every time, as it would reach the launch criteria soonest.
4. That it is far fiddlier to sign up for a scenario than it needs to be. Why can’t I sign up for a tier 3 scenario when I’m in a tier 2 area? Or when I’m in Altdorf? And if I do get into a scenario, or if I crash, I have to travel back to the specific tier in order to sign up again? Ridiculous! Before you start punishing our realm for not signing up for scenarios in sufficient numbers, hows about you remove all the pointless barriers to signing up?
Update 2: And hello to Kill 10 Rats readers!
The human mind is wired to find patterns everywhere. Often we ascribe intent and purpose to these patterns. That is how superstitions begin, and I believe that in a similar way, people are assuming that the enemy faction is responsible for the scenario situation, when it is simply an artifact of a poorly designed system. Unfortunately, this patch note appears to be attempting to resolve a superstition, a mere illusion, instead of fixing the very real problems with scenario launching that lie at its root.
Anyhows, the the rest of the 1.0.4 Warhammer Online Patch Notes continue below. There’s nothing else in them I feel strongly about either way, apart from the Witching event that I’ve already written about, and am looking forward to.
Continue reading Scenario Insanity in Warhammer 1.0.4
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