Friday, July 20, 2012

LoTRO brings the PvP

Long ago, before the days of Warhammer Online, I used to play Lord of the Rings Online.  In fact, most of my time was spent in their world pvp area ( Ettenmoors ).  I had a great time too, but there was always a problem.  LoTRO is a PvE game at heart.  PvP will always be an afterthought, so I went looking for a game where PvP was the focus.

Life goes on in LoTRO and they are making some pretty big changes to the Moors in the Riders of Rohan expansion.  The Dev Diary discussing the changes is pretty big, so go read through it if you want to take up some time.

The changes can be boiled down to a single statement:  In order to get your rewards someone has to die.

It's a simple statement, but a powerful one.  No longer will take objectives give the player any kind of reward.  Instead, they will grant buffs to the holding side which increase the rewards from killing other players.

The downside to this philosophy is population balance.  If that is out of whack, there will not be enough enemies to kill, or you'll be too outnumbered to get enough kills.

I do think it is the way to go though, there is not much worse than seeing objectives flipped and players hop to the other side and repeat.