Monday, June 29, 2009

Return of the Producers Letter: Part 1

Mythic posted Part 3 of their Producer Letter series. Trilogies seem to be still in vogue. It contains the normal prerequisites that an official letter must have. Commitment, support, recap yada, yada, yada.

Combat and Careers. Many of the changes we saw in the short lived jumbo 1.3 patch will be making a comeback. Tears will be raining down like a Monsoon. Listen to the bass go.... sorry, got sidetracked. This time they will implement them piecemeal though. Excellent idea as you may see not all the changes are necessary.

One thing I don't understand is Mythic's seemingly love affair with the KNOCKDOWN, not back. They want to put the Knockback and root on the same immunity timer. A while back they increased the knockback immunity timer, but did not touch (or say they touched) the knockdown timer.

Knockdown's are the worst type of crowd control, as you cannot do anything. Knockback's save as many people as they get killed. Yet it never seems to bear the brunt of Mythics balancing. By all means keep taking away the non-lethal ways my Engineer can defend himself, but leave all those AoE knockdowns in play.

AM/Shaman/Zealot/RP will all be getting some attention, in a good way. Marauders and White Lions were not so lucky.

End Game. It seems the next major effort for the dev team will be to improve the city siege. This has been a long time coming. As it stands now, the contested phase (the first one) is the only time when PvP is involved with the end game. That wouldn't be so bad if it was actually fun, but it is not.

The PQ that spawns will now be optional. Instead, each side will be required to hold 3/4 objectives in order to win the stage. But, if they kill the PQ boss, they win too. While that is nice, will players just try to find an undefended instance so that they can farm the PQ? Sounds like something players would do. Also, while one side is defending the 3 objectives, the enemy can just go beat the PQ boss for a win. I'm not 100% sure this hybrid system will have the desired effect.

The 2nd phase of the city siege is having RvR added to it as well. I have never actually seen this phase, but I do believe it was just 2 PvE encounters. It sounds like the contested phase will continue on, but the winners can choose to go do the PvE instances. Will that leave enough population for the attackers to fight on the streets?

The third and final phase, the King, is mostly remaining the same. Except that the previous phases will remain active with RvR. If the defenders win the first-phase, they will shorten the time that the attacker has to take down the King. This is an interesting idea.

Population is my big concern. Lets say it is 100 vs 100 and the attackers win. 30 of them go off to do the higher level content (Stage 2 and 3), now it is 70 - 100. That doesn't sound very fun for those 70 who remain. The defenders will enjoy it as the 70 vacate the zone and they can farm the PQ. The folks who may have gotten to the king will be disappointed that they have no time with him as the PQ is being farmed. These are just arbitrary numbers, but you get the idea.

This has run on long enough for one post, more to come later.

2 comments:

I think the implementation of a domination mode into the city seige is a good idea. It worked well until Lotd arrived.

On the stage 3, to be able to have an impact on the time available to the other side, could be interesting, as long as its communicated to the players that they effected the outcome. In big words - Destruction Time On King Reduced By 5 Mins, or whatever time it is.

The question I do have, is can Destruction get those 5 minutes back. I am not sure that they should. Unless Destruction deny Order, then the kings take down time could be significantly reduced. Neither do I think you should be able to take the time down below say 50%.

ps - Swap Destruction for Order and vice versa.

I like the general idea, but when those folks go off to do that content, what happens to the people RvR'ing? The defenders have no where else to go, so it is a one way loss.

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