Warning: This is an opinionated, biased rant. 🙂
Jobildo’s post got some excellent comments and in turn got me to thinking about scenarios and why I resist them as much as I do.
And the answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: I’m not paying $15/month to play Team Fortress with some RPG trappings. I’m paying to play a Massively Multiplayer game with a persistent world. Call of Duty 4 allows me to play missions over and over on the same handful of maps while leveling up a character and guess what? It doesn’t cost me a penny once I’ve bought the game.
For people who sit in a warcamp and grind scenarios, there is really no need for a persistent world. A lobby would do just as well, wouldn’t it? A lobby would require vastly fewer server resources and would’ve cost orders of magnitude less to develop.
Essentially, this is battle.net.
It feels stupid for me to pay a monthly fee to, in part, support the infrastructure for a world that no one wants to use.
And I’m kind of dubious that after ranking through 40 levels in scenarios, people are suddenly going to go into OpenRvR (erm, that assumes that T4 scenarios exist…I honestly am not sure if they do)! More likely they’ll either leave the game or keep grinding scenarios until they hit 80 renown, and then leave.
What I’d like to see is all the scenario grinders funneled off to one server, and all the OpenRvRers gathered together into another server. The grinders shouldn’t have to pay $15/month to play, either, but that’s a side point. The OpenRvR Server shouldn’t even offer scenarios.
What irks me is that, yeah, it’s hard to find OpenRvR even on high population servers. Why? Because everyone is grinding scenarios while commenting that OpenRvR isn’t fun because no one does it. Curiously, I wonder if there isn’t MORE OpenRvR on less populated servers with longer wait times for scenario queues. I plan to find out.
I understand people want to get to cap as fast as they can. That’s why the gold sellers also offer leveling services. Grinding scenarios isn’t the fastest and easiest way to cap: paying someone to level your character is. But I don’t see anyone openly suggesting this is the best way to go about it. Why not? If all that matters is getting to 40 as fast as possible, why not just buy your way there?
If you really enjoy running scenarios, then this rant isn’t really directed at you. Enjoy the game, though why you pay a monthly fee to do in this game what you could do for free in any of a multitude of others is beyond me.
But I’m seeing people expressing opinions along the lines of “I don’t really like standing around grinding scenarios but there’s nothing else to do.” Well you sir/madame, are part of the problem. Get out of the damned queue and get out and start exploring the world! Yeah, it might be quiet at first, but if people on both sides of the battle just opted to not grind scenarios for one night and head to the RvR Lakes, there’d be *plenty* to do!!
OK, end rant.
Whew, I feel better getting that off my chest.
And Mythic, for the love of all that is holy, stop sticking us in a friggin’ scenario queue every damned time we move into an RvR Lake. You’re just fanning the flames doing that, tempting people to leave!!!
OK now I’m REALLY done this time.
Now you’re talkin’ like me!
I’m confident that Mythic will find a fix for the current trend of spamming scenario queues, but I’m hoping a solution comes sooner rather than later.
If Mythic opened up a server where scenarios were restricted in some sense, and allowed transfers, I’d honestly be tempted to move us and CoW there… but wouldn’t because of how much work we’ve put in on Averheim.
So while they’re toying with that idea (check the VN boards), I really hope that’s not their only solution. The real solution would be to add diminishing returns to scenarios, and boost the incentives one gets for Open RvR. Make a person who enters an RvR lake auto-join any open group also in that lake that has a spot open. Make it worthwhile, and the players will flock to it.
Make the renown gear past tier one ONLY attainable in keeps too. Get the merchants out of Sigmar’s Hammer in Altdorf.
These are the kinds of things that need done to get Open RvR back on track and prominent from Tiers 1 to 3.
Do we have any sense of how big an issue this is overall? I know its huge on Order/Averheim, but do servers with lower populations have the same issue?
I’m rolling Destruction on Ostermark (??) mostly because a friend of mine just moved there, and partially to see if its all scenarios, all the time on a Medium pop server (as an alt, I’m not leaving Averheim)!
Maybe scenarios need to accrue exp from some baseline. So a Scenario is worth X experience to start, then as it goes ‘unplayed’ that value starts to increase. That way on lower population servers, there’s incentive TO play them (kind of like a state lottery…when the jackpot gets bigger more people make an effort to play) but on high population servers, the “jackpot” stays low since scenarios are played almost constantly…
I was just thinking the same thing, instead of just waiting for mythic we should do something, and challenge Destruction on Averheim for control of either the t2 or t3 lake (or both at once) one of these nights, like friday.
Control of all the objectives and keeps for an hour would be a good goal. Longer would be too hard, Actually I don’t expect either side to be able to.
I put a post up on the Order forum of the CoW site.
That renown vendors at Sigmar’s Hammer comment is actually very, very important. Back in beta when (as far as I know) Sigmar’s Hammer didn’t exist, getting to an Order-held keep of the right tier was a real adventure! And getting the gear felt like an achievement.
The downside of that, of course, is that given the current trends, Destruction would have zero problems getting gear and Order would have a horrible time, leading to a further imbalance in equipment and frustration on the Order side. Maybe.
Scenarios are new to me because I left WoW before battlegrounds really got interesting or anything more than a 3-hour queue, and I haven’t played any of those single-player games. As such, I find scenarios a lot of fun (and frustration) but I hate feeling like the best way to level is to do them over… and over… and over. So I don’t, but most people will take the path of least resistance, and why shouldn’t they? It’s their $15 a month.
Rather then see them taken out entirely, I’d prefer to see the gains from them restricted in some way. That said, if it came to a choice between 100% scenario servers (as is the case on Averheim) and the no-scenario other extreme, I’d pick the latter in a heartbeat. The path of least resistance isn’t often the best.
I’ve been asking around, and this problem doesn’t seem to be game-wide. On a lot of servers Scenarios pop much less often so people don’t just stand around waiting for them.
So maybe the solution for me is to re-roll on another server for a while? But that’s a decision for another day when I’m less grumpy.
“most people will take the path of least resistance, and why shouldn’t they? It’s their $15 a month.”
I of course mostly agree with you and mostly I was ranting 🙂 ; we all pay our money and should play the way we want to play. The problem is that the numbers are skewed…folks come to a high population server not realizing that its pretty much just the scenarios that are high population.
I’d just like to see diminishing returns added to doing scenarios often (and not just the higher your level the less you gain as is now), like the amount of XP and renown you get from doing them goes down each time you them in the course of 24 hours.
Then it can reset the next day, for all I care. I’d just like to see less people standing in one spot waiting for queues. 😛
I also am firmly of the belief that PQs and Open RvR need additional XP and other incentives to lure people back to them.
I completely agree that something heeds to be done to take the focus away from the Scenarios. But on the flip side, I’ve had more fun this week with the game by queuing up scenarios while questing, more fun than I had the first three weeks the game was out.
I have honestly thought of trying out an Open RvR server just to see if things are different RvR wise.
This issue was raised in beta several times. It was so damn annoying when you’d have a decent Open RvR battle going and suddenly half the participants would vanish as a scenario popped. Mythic ,in closed beta, never seemed in favour of lessening the predominance of scenarios. In fact you may recall originally there were no keeps and no intention to have them. It was only after repeated comments that there was nothing to do in Open RvR and no point to it that they came around and brought in the Keeps at all. That later expanded to fortresses and became a significant part of the campaign. Even now though the Keeps and later fortresses , although impressive in stature are still not very functional or effective. Only one small entry point funneling the entire fight down to the doors for each wall, then the ramps to the Lord. Not even the embellishments that broadened the fighting in DAoC with climb points and then in New Frontiers being able to knock down walls and create breaches. Love those aspects or hate em they made the keep siege more lively and spread the fight out along the walls so more could be involved. When Keeps were introduced there were several attempts by testers to offer suggestions and threads discussing ways to make them more prominent, more dynamic add all sorts of nice things into the Open RvR areas. Some inspirational ideas that were all quickly put down and closed off as being off focus and feedback was not allowed.
I can only hope they do pay attention to what happens though for although scenarios may be ruling now. The same crowd that is all queue queue pew pew is also the same crowd that will just as easily go back to WOW when the expansion arrives and queue queue pew pew there.
oh also on this:
“And Mythic, for the love of all that is holy, stop sticking us in a friggin’ scenario queue every damned time we move into an RvR Lake”
There is a setting in your options to turn off auto queuing. A blessing!