Saturday 27 June 2009

Should Land of the Dead be open ALL the time? Or should it be this, or that...

"Should Land of the Dead be open ALL the time?" is a question that lots of people are asking.

At the moment the oRvR and scenario scene in vanilla Tier 4 zones has almost totally dried up. Zones are being locked without any enemy to kill, they're all off hitting skeletons. No surprise there, people were always going to want to spend time in Land of the Dead when it came out, there's a load of cool things to go see.


But how long until the novelty wears off?


Until it does, it looks like the vanilla Tier 4 campaign will remain a predominantly PvE experience and Land of the Dead has already proven to be as much (if not more) about PvE as it is PvP. Short dramatic bursts of PvP followed by PvE.


When undefended cities' star ratings plumment and players realise they're not gaining much renown in LotD, will they be naturally drawn back to fighting in the RvR lakes of Tier 4? I hope so, otherwise the current back and forth access to LotD could prove to be more of a hinderance to RvR than a reason for it. It will probably be a while before we see how this will work out, but should LotD prove to prevent RvR, then Mythic may have to consider leaving the gates open.


A fully RvR enabled zone, with constant access available. Masses of fighting whenever you want! No more tumbleweed tiers! Sounds great eh?

Ahhh... but then would that mean the PvE content would become utterly impossible due to constant attacks by the enemy? Would we have one giant clusterfuck of every player in one zone? Oh bugger...


It's all very easy for us bloggers and forum posters to criticise Mythic and come up with our own amazing solutions (something I'm obviously guilty of), but in reality evolving a live RvR themed MMO game to find that perfect balance between PvP and PvE must be a total nightmare. Maybe our ideas would work, but maybe they'd do even more damage and we're too naive to realise.

Not that knowing that will stop us thinking we know best. Just like when watching the football... I know that we should be playing a 4-4-2, why can't that twat of a manager see it? It's obvious.

7 comments:

  1. I completely agree. Of course, maybe there are a tad improvements that can go in, like allowing "some" respawns even when control flipped, but then I am being exactly what you describes :P

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  2. I have the same idea as you. Just open it 24/7.

    The rest of the game would be barren because everyone would just hang out there most likely. It would still have the same problems of one faction camping the other factions warcamp, and zerg vs zerg. I don't know what really the answer is, but something needs to be done. Luckily on Dark Crag we still push zones, forts, and cities since LotD, but on most servers I don't see that happening with the ZD timers.

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  3. I don't think you can say "most server" doesn't have it. Darklands, an Oceanic server with low population, still got quite a few large fights in the main campaign in T3 and T4.
    I always disliked the doom and gloom and the danger of self-fulfilling phopecy - people THINK they won't get RvR so they don't log in. I think we really need some kind of "fight finder" outside the game, so people don't have to bother to log in.

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  4. It seemed on Norn yesterday that people were starting to decide they wanted to fight in the RvR campaign again. Not the full on fighting of before LotD, but perhaps the start.

    After all the only reason there is less RvR is because players are choosing to PvE in LotD. They just need to choose to RvR again.

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  5. Hey Bootae, started to see some fighting in normal tier 4. Think sum people have decided to go do normal rvr again. Hows your server now?

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  6. Opening the LotD 24/7 would not change RvR in a positive way. It's not the mechanic of the LotD that prevents RvR, it's the greed and narrow sight of the players...
    No one is forcing all the players into LotD.

    Too often I see the question for a carrot for doing some RvR.. and I start to wonder if those who ask such things understand the fun of RvR. It's not about items and bling-bling..

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  7. On badlands, old World RvR has picked up a good amount in the last couple days.

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