Rick and I have been having a bit of a (civil) brawl over at his blog. The topic is PvE in Warhammer. The nice thing about a back and forth with a smart, lucid guy like Rick is that it gets you to thinking.
My basic “problem” with PvE right now is basically lack of population doing it. Running the solo quests isn’t a problem, but doing group-based quests (essentially, Public Quests) can be really hit or miss insofar as finding other people interested in joining forces.
Anyway, jumping right in, and I don’t claim any of these as original ideas; I’m sure other, smarter people have already considered them.
1) Summoning Stones and a PQ Queue: Scenarios are popular (in part) because they’re convenient. What if Mythic put in a PQ Queue? You click a button to enter a queue for some or all PQs in your level range, then you go about your business. Once there are enough people in queue for a PQ, everyone gets teleported to a Summoning Stone near that PQ area, already grouped up and ready to fight. PQ’s wouldn’t be instanced; you could still get to them the old-fashioned way. This would just be an alternate and convenient method of getting into a PQ group without having to run back and forth across the world looking for groups.
2) Checking Open Groups from the map: How would it be if you could open the map, hover over a region and get a list of all the Open Groups active in that region? You could then join one of those groups and head to them. One of the frustrations now is that you might be in Region A, lonely and unloved, while there’s a Warband pwning PQs in Region B and you’d never know about it. This idea would require more Flight Masters though. As it is now, by the time you get to another region the Open Group might have broken up. (This idea could also help LakeRvR.)
3) Checking for Open Groups while in a group: So you’ve been there. You’re in a group, you’ve run a PQ a few times. You want to go to another PQ. But is anyone doing it? How do you check? You can’t. You have to quit the group you’re in, look, then if you come up empty, rejoin the group and keep grinding the current PQ. This idea is more a convenience than anything, but when three or four people want to do another PQ it’d be nice if you could just say, in the current Open Group, “Hey, I see there’s a group of 5 doing the next PQ over. We could switch over to that.”
So there you have it, my contribution to the idea gene pool. Rick’s point is that the only thing wrong with PvE is that people aren’t organized. I agree with him to a certain extent. Presumably people *are* out there somewhere doing it. They’re just not responding in /region chat and they’re in Open Groups that I can’t see from where I am.
Last night I logged in to find a Warband of 2 full groups doing a PQ. I quickly joined them, finished the current ‘run’ and then we did another. And then the group dissolved. Where’d they all go? Unknown. Three of us moved to another PQ in the same chapter and the rest of the night was spent calling out over /region for helpers, and not getting any bites. Maybe everyone had gone to another Pairing? Maybe everyone had logged off? There’s just no easy way to tell, given the tools we currently have.
Witching Night begins tonight, which is gonna mix PvE with LakeRvR, and I’m excited to see what impact that has on doing pure PvE PQs.
Feel free to add to the GroupThink by listing your ideas to help PvE in the comments below.
queueing for pq’s would be a great addition, as would queueing for random siege battle groups or something.
Although I can see what your aiming for with queuing for other aspects off the game but isn’t that also counteractive to having a populated world. the issues raised with scenarios and how we as well just be a in a lobby and queue for mini-games would all apply. It also funnels people into only the ‘popular’ mini games. So every one would be at the same PQ rather then spreading out and finding others while doing regular quests. Nordenwatch anyone?
The map ideas are a nice one though… how about if not open groups maybe a population spread overlay on the map so you could see at a glance where the population is currently concentrated in a zone.
A lot of these issues are also server population level issues. The really busy servers do not suffer as much, nor do the sides with a large population advantage. It is quite an issue though. I tend to feel that there is just too much land space early on in the game. Too much break down of the population, first in server by choice of side, then into racial pairings. On launch days , yeah things were like a shopping mall at Christmas, but it might have been better to take a page from what they did with the cities and had the racial starter chapters funnel into a more common tier 1/tier 2 zoning , that had more love and development done on it like our two cities. Then branch out near the end of tier two into different battlefronts. As they add in our missing classes and cities they could also bring in some new starter regions along with them to flesh out the racial story lines and background.
Anyway , as I’d said before.. I love this game but I am also probably more disappointed with it then any other as it could have been and should have been so much more. Especially with the time they added to development.
Yeah, I kind of touched on 1) a little on blog too. Most people are harping on how PQs and RvR lakes are underused because of Scenarios give better XP/Renown, and the reaction has been mostly to increase XP rates in PVE and RvR. However, I think one of the main reason people are grinding Scenarios is the convenience factor of just hitting “Join All” and popping into them as they appear. There need to be better travel options for PQs (especially the ones not immediately next to the chapter camp) and to warcamps. Summoning Stones might be an option (but it could trivialize overworld travel, and in an RvR game, that is part of the danger – though not so much on Core servers). I was thinking some form of overland travel where you were still attackable but moved much faster than mounts.
I know I’ve ignored many call to arms at times because I was too far from a flight master or anyone else. The last few chapters in Ostland were a grind for me since there was NO ONE around and the flight master was in the next zone over, so it was very inconvenient to join anyone else in the other racial areas or RvR lakes or anywhere.
I’ve made a similar suggestion a little while ago too, so naturally I agree. People can harp on about immersion all they want, but at the end of the day if I can’t find people to play with most of the time, I just don’t want to play at all. How’s that for immersion.