World PvP preview [WoW]

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by Zierain

Stuff

You do two point systems.

The first being linear, yeah. This would net you most of your 'phat pvp' gear.

The second being weekly competition. Standing 1 gets Rank 1, Standings 2-4 get Rank 2, Standings 5-10 get Rank 3, etc...on down. This ladder gives you various 'gimic' abilities and items that may or may not only be usable in battlegrounds.

Some quick examples might be Rank 10 people get battle standards. Rank 7's get a spring type ability for their mount. Rank 5's get officer grenades (no engineering requirement). Rank 4 get the ability to "Rally Cry" which is a 5 minute cooldown AE 5 second stun/fear/snare/root immunity for allies (BG's only). Rank 2's get an aura of battle similar to that of AV generals, only activatable in BG's. Rank 1's can call in airstrikes that will only harm enemy PC's but can be used in world pvp. Etc...etc...

Anyways...

As for world pvp...

Step 1) Allow faction defection, population balance occurs as if by magic.

Step 2) Get rid of diminishing returns on honor. Rez timer is more then enough to keep collaberation under control. People with rez effects are worth no honor.

Step 3) Give guards high hp/ac, elite range, but very low damage like hitting for 10-20 against cloth with a 3 second swing delay. They should be a nuisance to keep attackers from resting, not a deteriment to keep them from bothering to attack.

Step 4) Get rid of DK's. Killing a quest NPC triggers "Elite reinforcements" to arrive in 1 minute via windwider and guard the NPC's upon respawn.

Step 5) Add a commander to each town. Commander is more powerful then regular guards. Commander uses ranged attacks with a 20 yard range, a sort of small safety net in the middle of a town for newbs to hide from gankers but not powerful enough to stop a determined pvp force.

Step 6) Let's face it, TM-SS is -the- outdoor pvp zone. Might as well just scrap half the fucking quests there. Plenty of contestable objects there for the making. Control of the tower near silverpine gives your faction +10% mount speed while in hillsbrad. Control of the tower near TM increases damage by 10%. Control of the syndacate tower gives increased stealth detection. And I'm just getting warmed up...

[Nikkohung You]

Originally Posted by Cad

15-16 million is out of hand. For a single player playing a few hours a day 5 days a week, you can make perhaps 150k honor for 20-25 hours investment if you win 50-60% of your games.

That'd be like 100 weeks or almost 2 years to hit rank 14 at that rate. Perhaps 4-5 million is more in line.

Blackhand horde side requires 590k honor per week for HWL...

[Zierain]

Yea, i know a lot of people that pull 300-400k a week, and these guys arent even the hardcore guys.

If it was 4-5 million, i know one person that would have gotten HWL in that system in 4 weeks.

As Zehn said, throw in 2 point systems. A linear progression (Just says your Faction Rank 14 in this one, no title) and you get your items. Possible to expand, to add new items as gear improves, and there is no decay.

Other point system, that gives you your Titles (Grand Marshal, Commander) could just be exactly like it is, whatever, have decay. Easier grind then it is now tho, please, as the rewards wouldnt be as good as the items you get for getting Faction Rank.

Titles give access to other things, to make people want them. Things like (in upcoming world pvp) abilities to command / order NPC guards/soldiers in towers, set up positions of NPC's, etc. Place fortress guards, set their abilities, etc. Just interesting things like that. As well as the ability to claim a tower/fortress (Soandso has defended his tower against the Horde! messages ftw).

I dunno, im just tossing out random crap /shrug

[Samflam]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

You do two point systems.

The first being linear, yeah. This would net you most of your 'phat pvp' gear.

The second being weekly competition. Standing 1 gets Rank 1, Standings 2-4 get Rank 2, Standings 5-10 get Rank 3, etc...on down. This ladder gives you various 'gimic' abilities and items that may or may not only be usable in battlegrounds.

Some quick examples might be Rank 10 people get battle standards. Rank 7's get a spring type ability for their mount. Rank 5's get officer grenades (no engineering requirement). Rank 4 get the ability to "Rally Cry" which is a 5 minute cooldown AE 5 second stun/fear/snare/root immunity for allies (BG's only). Rank 2's get an aura of battle similar to that of AV generals, only activatable in BG's. Rank 1's can call in airstrikes that will only harm enemy PC's but can be used in world pvp. Etc...etc...

That's a great idea.

[Cad]

Originally Posted by Zierain

Yea, i know a lot of people that pull 300-400k a week, and these guys arent even the hardcore guys.

If it was 4-5 million, i know one person that would have gotten HWL in that system in 4 weeks.

Design the system around the people who are current shift-playing 24 hours a day 7 days a week and you'll make it totally inaccessible to normal players..

oh wait thats what we have now.

I don't give a shit if ultra hardcores can hit rank 14 in 4 weeks. I want to be able to hit it in a few months (3? 4?) of daily pvp for a few hours.

[Bison]

Originally Posted by Cad

Design the system around the people who are current shift-playing 24 hours a day 7 days a week and you'll make it totally inaccessible to normal players..

oh wait thats what we have now.

I don't give a shit if ultra hardcores can hit rank 14 in 4 weeks. I want to be able to hit it in a few months (3? 4?) of daily pvp for a few hours.

It's true, look how long it took people to get as far as they have into raid dungeons mere weeks after they have come out? Expecting the bleeding edge gamers, whether raiders or PvP'ers to have the phat lewtz as soon as humanly possible is expected in this day and age. Even more so in WoW.

[xilsharn]

Originally Posted by Zierain

Yea, i know a lot of people that pull 300-400k a week, and these guys arent even the hardcore guys.

If it was 4-5 million, i know one person that would have gotten HWL in that system in 4 weeks.

As Zehn said, throw in 2 point systems. A linear progression (Just says your Faction Rank 14 in this one, no title) and you get your items. Possible to expand, to add new items as gear improves, and there is no decay.

Other point system, that gives you your Titles (Grand Marshal, Commander) could just be exactly like it is, whatever, have decay. Easier grind then it is now tho, please, as the rewards wouldnt be as good as the items you get for getting Faction Rank.

Titles give access to other things, to make people want them. Things like (in upcoming world pvp) abilities to command / order NPC guards/soldiers in towers, set up positions of NPC's, etc. Place fortress guards, set their abilities, etc. Just interesting things like that. As well as the ability to claim a tower/fortress (Soandso has defended his tower against the Horde! messages ftw).

I dunno, im just tossing out random crap /shrug

The battlefield command shit is garbage. All it's going to do is create bickering and squabbling during battles by the various people capable of calling down airstrikes/whatever. Planetside has shown that this concept needs some work. Unlss you're going to let 25 commander-level dudes call in airstrikes simultaneously. Yeah you can limit it but then you're going to get airstrike spams. All this fancy-pants battlefield azeroth shit will go down the tubes as people just grind up their PVP rank to get the best gear then find another character to play or a PVE guild to join.

[Rythonn]

Originally Posted by xilsharn

All this fancy-pants battlefield azeroth shit will go down the tubes as people just grind up their PVP rank to get the best gear then find another character to play or a PVE guild to join.

Isn't that what we do now?

[Olio]

It should probably take a casual two years to hit max pvp rank since that's how long you want to keep them entertained between expansions.

Olio

[Caz]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

You can't compare PvP models like that. It's similar to saying Shadowbane's model didn't work when one of the other, major reasons was the sb.exe error, not the PvP.

Sullon Zek failed because EQ PvP was entirely too gear oriented and in PoP and Luclin it was incredibly easy to cockblock people.

I DO agree that one reason PvP WoW servers outnumber PvE is the lack of a serious penalty to death, though.

Agree with the Shadowbane comment. I was one of the few people who actually enjoyed the game; and if it wouldn't have been for all the bugs, I probably would've hung around a bit longer.

EQ PvP was too gear dependent, but WoW seems to be progressing down that same path at a much faster pace.

[Caz]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

Doing away with the honor grind, entirely, would be the other thing as people would once again go across the world and be dicks by blockading instance entrances more and just attacking everywhere (oh, the days when Chillwind Point was besieged in WPL..)...but then I don't know how you would award the armor/weapons.

Just open up the rank 1-10 rewards to questable bounty missions, that can't be completed with BG kills. It could be as simple as, kill 25 members of the oppossing faction within a +1/-1 range of your level. Who knows, but what's currently being reported seems forking gay.

I know some people complain that they have to "earn" their rewards via PvE, but I could really give a shit if people could just quest for some of the current PvP armor like we can for the .5 crap. Essentially, you'd be promoting more active PvP in just about any zone where there were people in or around your level range.

[Itzena]

As for the rank/points/time played breakdown, well Blizzard does have a lot of pvp ranking data now (or at least they ought to) - put it all into a bell curve chart, chuck the outliers, split the ranks for the majority.

And how about adding some ladders/tables/whatever as well - 'Most Honour this Week/Month/Year/All Time, Most Elves Killed this week/month/etc, Most Flags Captured, Most PvP Deaths, blah, blah'. Custom titles and toys (i.e. recoloured versions of the PvP weapons/tabards/etc. with a few changes here and there) for the table toppers to keep the weekly drive going.

[Thoruk]

All of these ideas make way too much sense to ever be implemented.

[Abalieno]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

And you can't say "We'll solve swapping kills elsewhere." You have to deal with it head on if there are any rewards.

This problem is partially solved.

Swapping kills happen easily in BGs because of the lack of persistence.

What's the purpose of PvP? The personal power, because the instanced battle is faked, with no consequence.

And so the player dodge the fake battle and trade honor points or faction instead.

In my idea the hotspots are shared and persistent. So it's a kind of conquest system spread through a few zones. Trading the hotspot bounty pool would mean make agreements with ALL the players participating in the enemy faction. Which, frankly, is unlikely. Then wait a few hours and repeat.

Since the bounty points pool grows with each player's death, the system somewhat requires to participate. It's a shared goal, with some persistence and where points come from direct kills.

"Trading kills" wouldn't be so much more convenient than actually playing the game. And that's really the best solution you can have. It's based on a real fight, instead of a flag that needs to be brought from a point to another and that gets reset as the BG is closed.

I also have concrete ideas to partially address the PvP factional balance. I'll write about this later if someone cares.

[muninn]

You guys talking about the linear system in parallel with the current honor grind do realize you're idea is already implemented right? You're talking about battleground faction, just with different rewards.