Player rewards are a tricky subject in WAR. As we have seen, how players are rewarded can have unintended consequences. Back when influence was introduced, the goal was to give more reason to fight over BO's, Keeps and to kill your fellow player. In reality, it just led to keep/bo swapping as players avoided combat.
Fast forward to today. Tokens were recently introduced and have led to another unintended consequence. Players are now flipping zones without making any attempt at the fortress. the reason for this (well, one of the reasons) is the reward ratio between zones and fortresses.
Capturing a zone is nearly as rewarding as capturing a fortress. A zone gives you renown, medallions and a Conqueror Crest (Tier 4). Capturing a fortress gives you the same, plus a loot roll for a bag. Since only 10% (estimate) of players who participate in the capture of the fort will receive a bag, it is not really an incentive. So the ratio is pretty even.
Fortresses are difficult to attack and not really that fun due to their static nature. Also, opening one up for attack will in some cases send your opponents to defend while you finish locking another zone.
With a close reward ratio and the poor fortress fight, zone flipping has become the method of choice. One way to help the situation would be to make the reward ratio a bit larger. For example, it should take 5 zone captures to get the rewards from 1 successful fortress siege. Maybe then when the keep is open for attack it will be worth taking.
I really do not envy Mythic. They have the best of intentions with these systems, but they underestimate the modern players thirst for loot. Loot is just a representation of accomplishment which I suspect they don't get enough of offline.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Reward Ratio
7 comments:
Sometimes this gets even worse.. I saw a zone lock of Reikland, but noone attacked the fortress. All attackers moved to another zone, while some defenders waited for the attack..
Sometimes I ask myself if the people really want to RvR in this game..or just zerg around and get some points, be it tokens, renown, what so ever..without any challenge.
But surely after everyone has got their Zone gear, they will move on to greater things...?
I agree fortress captures need to provide a bigger carrot especially for those not winning a gold bag.
On Dark Crag people laugh at Fort loot since most are strutting around in better gear already since they invade IC twice a day without even trying.
It is all about renown farming these days so you can wear the Warlord gear. Luckily on Dark Crag you are able to go to Tier 3 without being a chicken so it gives you 3 more zone lock renown ticks.
You can actually just live in Warcamps and never fight, and get thousands of renown a day if you know which zones are locking. Most of the time we will have 3-5 warbands in the zone fighting, and 2-3 just sitting in the warcamp for the free renown.
if you havent participated in the zone lock by helping with a BO, keep, 10+ kills or scenario I dont see why people deserve the zone lock bonuses.
As with most of these issues, Mythic will address it.
I would have to agree with zizlak. I am not sure a lot of the people are playing the right game for them.
@Glen: because Mythic assume, on good faith, that players who didn't kill anyone are people who are a) defending postern b) acting as scout or c) doing other things that in general help with zone lock.
I am sure in their minds the horrible action of sitting there doing nothing did not occur to them.
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