PVP Update 1

[Okkie]

I´ve spent first 4 years out of my 5 years in AoC on PvP servers, got PvP 10 char for ages now.. what about you, ooh mighty forum warrior?

He played about 1 or 2 years.

Most of us played about 2-3 years on and off.

So most of us have about 1 pvp 10 few pvp 5-6s. After 2-4years of playing.

Imagine you only have 1 T4 geared out character and few t1-3 characters after 3-5Years of playing??

[Aell]

how can you expect FC to fix stuff, if you can´t even get your facts right, eh?

I'm ignoring the rest of this epeen because it's the usual drivel, but the way to fix stuff is with stats. First, however, you must make certain that your stats cover a wide enough base.

The way to fix minis is to institute a league table of best players, teams, healers, etc. Visible to players so that they want to compete for it. That way, you get a broad spread of players taking part which gives a statistically significant sample size.

Then you look at your stats. And you say "It seems that Conqs outkill other classes 3-1. That looks like it might be a balance issue".

And then you say "can everyone who plays a HoX really be that bad, or is HoX underpowered?"

And then you say "rangers get a lot of kills. Especially from TTS. Maybe we should get rid of that. And those ranged CCs are clearly adding to the issue, so we'll move all CCs back to melee".

And in this way, just by allowing players to see who's the best and baddest - and incidentally, this would also end the forum-warrior crap which can only be a bonus - you have a continual and ongoing handle on exactly balanced the game really is.

[Mathieulombardi]

Imagine if PvErs can only get Relics from Raids and no gear drop.

Imagine if Raids have a 1 relic limit per raid.

Imagine if the relic is only a 50% chance drop rate.

Imagine if Raid Gear have to be bought from vendor with 2 different tokens needed. 1 being bori.

Imagine if Raid gear dungeon gear cannot be worn unless you reach PVE super level 5-10 which takes nearly years to obtain even if you bought all the gear with relics/money/tokens.

Imagine if 6mans do not drop gear and have to be bought.

Imagine if 6mans can only drop 1 rare per 8 hours and there are only 5 dungeons available.

imagine if this game was 1.4

I'm Canadian, we don't have any imagination.

[nuadar]

I'm ignoring the rest of this epeen because it's the usual drivel, but the way to fix stuff is with stats. First, however, you must make certain that your stats cover a wide enough base.

The way to fix minis is to institute a league table of best players, teams, healers, etc. Visible to players so that they want to compete for it. That way, you get a broad spread of players taking part which gives a statistically significant sample size.

Then you look at your stats. And you say "It seems that Conqs outkill other classes 3-1. That looks like it might be a balance issue".

And then you say "can everyone who plays a HoX really be that bad, or is HoX underpowered?"

And then you say "rangers get a lot of kills. Especially from TTS. Maybe we should get rid of that. And those ranged CCs are clearly adding to the issue, so we'll move all CCs back to melee".

And in this way, just by allowing players to see who's the best and baddest - and incidentally, this would also end the forum-warrior crap which can only be a bonus - you have a continual and ongoing handle on exactly balanced the game really is.

As always you have pretty amazing ideas and ways to resolve this, yet I don't think it's feasible for funcom to even try this.

Lets ignore all unmanagable code and poorly written pieces of the game...even after that you face quite large issues if you try to implement systems suggested by you - Which metrics should we use? How to properly implement new code into old one? How to make sure it doesn't just break after few weeks like guild renown does? How to make sure that when players actually see conqs, PoMs and rangers dominate every given metric, they won't just straight up quit? Would it in the end actually make any difference if we try to add this? Won't players just leave before it's finished, leaving us with no way to reclaim money we invested into fixing?

And that's just adding global statistics where players could compete...after that you need to look into balance of classes which are all in various states of development, some horribly outdated, some new, some with half of their tools completely broken. AA system adds completely new layer of mess on top of that as you don't just need to balance AAs to other AAs, but also to tools of class itself. All that while keeping PvE players happy by pushing new dungeons and adding new gear.

This is while only big companies succeed in MMOs these days(and many time snot even those)...it's way too much mess and requires way too much money and time + comes with horrible risk of stupid customers and oversaturated market.

[Scaevacas]

Imagine if PvErs can only get Relics from Raids and no gear drop.

Imagine if Raids have a 1 relic limit per raid.

Imagine if the relic is only a 50% chance drop rate.

Imagine if Raid Gear have to be bought from vendor with 2 different tokens needed. 1 being bori.

Imagine if Raid gear dungeon gear cannot be worn unless you reach PVE super level 5-10 which takes nearly years to obtain even if you bought all the gear with relics/money/tokens.

Imagine if 6mans do not drop gear and have to be bought.

Imagine if 6mans can only drop 1 rare per 8 hours and there are only 5 dungeons available.

imagine if this game was 1.4

Imagine if you could only do 1 type of mini game per week.

[Derled]

Imagine if you could only do 1 type of mini game per week.

we are doing only hV anyway because br,js is crap

[Aell]

Lets ignore all unmanagable code and poorly written pieces of the game...even after that you face quite large issues if you try to implement systems suggested by you - Which metrics should we use? How to properly implement new code into old one? How to make sure it doesn't just break after few weeks like guild renown does? How to make sure that when players actually see conqs, PoMs and rangers dominate every given metric, they won't just straight up quit? Would it in the end actually make any difference if we try to add this? Won't players just leave before it's finished, leaving us with no way to reclaim money we invested into fixing?

I think that's interesting and thanks for pointing it out. Regardless of whether or not players get to see the results of any statistical analysis, there has to be such an analysis.

The reason I say it should be public is because you need to remove the aspect of the self-selecting group from the equation, meaning that if people only mini with conqs, the only thing you know is that conq is OP for minis.

For example, in 1.04, DT was horrendously, hopeless gimped. The only class anywhere near so hopeless in real terms was the Bow ranger (although this was often overlooked because the stats were skewed by crossbow rangers).

By showing the league tables, you would have given DTs an opportunity to prove their case in terms which couldn't really be argued. We know that dev team uses a balance spreadsheet on which the on-paper theoretical utility of abilities is assigned an arbitrary value and the various total values per class are compared. The live real data would have told the team that their arbitrary values were wrong and this is great data to have.

We all agree that a game is better if it's balanced (except for PvE baddies who won't fight unless they have the perfect team makeup and T4 gear throughout, but those used to be a minority).

The devs also agree that the game is better if balanced. However, they're not just going to listen to the biggest whiners (unless they are Silirrion) because those people might just suck. But actual data from a significant statistical sample is pretty convincing.

[SamHam]

What you say is actualy a pretty good idea, and though it might be a nightmare to implement, doing SOMETHING would be an awesome start. Face it, there's a lot of pvpers in this game - although many are lost due to the idle state of pvp in this game. I do both and although I think the pve instances are pretty brilliantly made, it's all AI. PvP, on the other hand... Now there's a basket full of surprising gameplay
And it would be awesome to finaly see some conq brute abilities changed/balanced and carnage... Well. Dps vs survivability ratio on that one is pretty far off the orbit

[Suctum]

You can get more tokens and badges much faster now than 2 years ago. If you win one of every game and get the blessing badge you can get up to 9 badges every 6 hours. If you shift-click fast enough you can probably pick up 20-50+ tokens during that time.

The problem I see is not with mini game progression, but how much pvp experience one needs to get per level after pvp 7. The leveling thresholds are stupid. If there is any complaint to be made it's that to get to pvp 8-10 takes way too much experience for the payoff, which is gear only 5% better than mini game gear-and you will have more than a full set of that before you hit pvp 7.1.

Another thing they need to look at is pvp outside minis, the pvp experience you get for world kills is complete crap. Again, if they lowered the leveling experience requirements this would not be a big deal.

It took me about 2.5 years to get pvp 10, and that's probably a 90% mini to 10% bori ratio, playing off and on with a year break.

PvP armor has not really been updated since the bori release, so remember that your grinding for armor that's over 2 years old and in no way current.

Or you can just join a t4 raiding guild and get close to a full set of better armor in 90 days or less.

[Mathieulombardi]

Who's logging in every 8 hours to mini just to farm tokens and pvp. I thought we still had rl.

we are doing only hV anyway because br,js is crap

Nobody ever played it before they made tokens from the rest a thing. Then the pvp "update" made br queue where hv used to be....