Sometimes Blizzard really looks like a bunch of tards. While reading the patch notes I put something for granted but it seems that it wasn’t. The new item decay on death is still applied even if you go PvP (-10% for each death).
Basically if you try to PvP you’ll have to stop every half an hour or less because your equipment is unusable. So you have to run back to a city and spend your money to fix your stuff.
I was expecting incentives for PvP, instead they applied an absurd, forced and damn boring timesink, because you have to leave the zone and go back to a town (it interrupts the gameplay), and a moneysink.
Even on DAoC they learnt after years that PvP should give you money so that you are able to choose it as an alternative advancement path. Instead here they going in the opposite direction, transforming the PvP into a burden that you’ll try to avoid the best you can.
There’s no PVP honor system implemented yet, right? So at the moment the griefers are screaming in delight at the prospect of forcing money loss from PVP.
It’s pretty humorous, a friend of mine asked to check this game out tonight being a fan of warcraft in the past, he was very curious through namebrand only(the guy is completely ignorant to the whole MMO structure and design stuff)
Even knowing this wasn’t an RTS, he assumed it would still feature the typical trappings of the older games. When I began discussing my character, he immediately querried if it was possible to just be an actual peon grunt, ya know…fortifying castles, building personalized forts, repairing the damage from major sieges and such, all the while dishing snarky remarks in between.
I -actually- paused for a second completely stunned and thought it would have been a really fucking cool idea. So much that I felt a wave of discouragement come over me as I had to begin lecturing about level grinding, spawn zones, mob agro, fed-ex tasks, etc…
The dissent grew when he asked to see what a normal mission entails…flipping through my little black log of outstanding quests revealed a whole lot of ‘kill x goons and report back to y’ stuff that would in no way be interesting to a spectactor. The instance zones are multi-hour jaunts that are unfeasible to just tour(as cool as they are), and boy did I feel petty and shameful when I jokingly avoided the quest routine by showing off how pretty those griffon taxi rides are…
I do really love the game, but man it can be a hard sell even without PVP issues.
Interesting stuff BDGE, it’s easy to imagine that everyone knows what’s going on and it looking at WoW/EQ2/etc through the same telescope as the rest of us.
I know people who love Star Wars for just the crafting aspects, same for DAoC.
The item decay thing is not one of my favorite mechanics that’s for sure. In any game. What effect it will have on PvP is hard to say, though. Most PvP happens in places very close to towns/settlements with merchants capable of repairing. And every player has a hearthstone that (albeit with a 60 minute cooldown) can teleport them to an inn. So I suspect the main effect will be to slow down the fight cycle. Coupled with the other change to item decay/death–i.e., if you use the spirit healer rather than retrieving your corpse, you suffer 100% item decay on all items–what you’ll likely see is people who are ganked and have little chance of redressing the situation taking the 100% penalty and immediately repairing in town. That will turn the death penalty into a monetary penalty, though how much of one remains to be seen.
Otherwise it’ll be a somewhat slower version of the old death cycle: get killed, run back for corpse, rez, run away/recall to town, repair, return. I agree though that there is mucho room for griefing here, in forcing people into the 100% item decay and consequent repair bills.
It also looks like Battlegrouns (instanced PvP) won’t make it into the release version, which is a shame.
Decay? How utterly stupid. Why not just implement looting? At least that way, the winner is able to recoup what he lost earlier.
I always thought UO’s PvP system was remarkably fun. I mean, if people don’t want to PvP, why don’t they just include a “pussy” or “schoolmarm” server for that demographic?
The problem here is that “PvP” is a misnomer. It’s something between PvP and RvR (DAOC’s faction-based consensual PvP system). It’s not intended to be free for all PvP. What it is intended to be is still a bit fuzzy though. It is clearly not Blizzard’s intent to create a UO style PvP situation, yet they are not moving clearly towards a pure consensual approach either. On the one hand the say they are against griefing and on the other they do little to implement a structure that controls it. So it’s in a bit of a flux at the moment.
There are some in the beta who have been asking for a no holds barred FFA PvP server. They are a small minority, and it’s unclear but unlikely whether Blizzard will have such a server (and certainly not at launch). Of the rest of the PvP’ers, it seems most like the HvA factional stuff but are looking for some mechanic to regulate, reward, and govern the combat.
The 10% durability loss on death is a good thing and I’m glad they added it. Otherwise you get the situation we had in darkshore the other night where about 100 horde players came in and disrupted the zone and we couldn’t drive them back no matter how many times we killed them - they just kept respawning. This makes it so that if your town (and darkshore is allied territory) is under siege - you can mount a defense that can physically make the enemy leave after a while. This was previously impossible.
The 10% durability loss on death is a good thing and I’m glad they added it. Otherwise you get the situation we had in darkshore the other night where about 100 horde players came in and disrupted the zone and we couldn’t drive them back no matter how many times we killed them - they just kept respawning. This makes it so that if your town (and darkshore is allied territory) is under siege - you can mount a defense that can physically make the enemy leave after a while. This was previously impossible.
That seems to be one of the goals of the policy. It might work too. Unfortunately, it also makes the other side of the coin possible, the groups of high levels ganking lower levels and forcing them to take 100% item decay penalties. Supposedly the full honor system will help address this, if it ever shows up.
No one likes item decay. They do need some mechanism for sucking money out of the economy though. I don’t know if item decay will be enough.
I’ll give you an example. There was a dagger at the auction house, about a level 40-50 dagger, and I wanted it. In a normal economy it might sell for 10-20g. I paid 75g for it just because I had tons of gold to spend.
That was in beta. Think how much money players will have after a year in the game? That same dagger might go for 250g then. It effectively shuts out new players at the auction house. Level 60 players will even be scooping up low level items at inflated prices for alts.
I don’t know if any MMO has really solved this problem.
I don’t know if any MMO has really solved this problem.
Not that I’ve seen, no. In DAOC the biggest sinks are crafting and housing. Mostly that’s dominated by guilds though, and there is little shortage of plat. My guild has chapters on three servers right now, but might be consolidating or shrinking some when WoW goes live. So on one server the guildmaster (who is fleeing to WoW) is stockpiling 100 plat in the guild house pay box to keep the house going in its present form for a couple of years. If we junk the second story we have like nine years of pre-paid rent stored up. No real shortage of money…
WoW is going to add housing at some point and hero advancement, both of which will take money I’m sure. All that does is lengthen the time until a player is just accumulating more and more cash, though. They’ll probably add boats too. I wouldn’t be surprised to see hero mounts either.
I don’t know if I’d ever buy a house, even. I hate the way DAoC does it. They’re in a separate zone so I see no real advantage to them, other than storage I suppose. UO was more interesting because the houses are in the actual game world. That created other problems though.
Strictly from a PvE perspective, I do not appreciate the new death penalty. Before I could go out and kill myself over and over and over again, if I so chose, and the only cost to me was running from the graveyard to my body as many times as I felt like it.
Now, everytime I die equates to money out of pocket. It’s a death tax. It’s not a trivial sum, either; I killed myself and took the Spirit Healer hit to see how bad the damage would be. 40 sp at level 20 isn’t really a lot in the grand scheme of things but it is still a tidy sum.
But I’m not really entirely clear on whether I’m objecting to the death penalty consisting of any money at all, or if the amount of money demanded is simply too much. I think the former, but the PvP issues are definitely a concern.
Usually this is where I’d start talking about my brilliant idea to fix it but I simply don’t have one at this point. Also, I need to go kill some ogre guy.
I don’t know if I’d ever buy a house, even. I hate the way DAoC does it. They’re in a separate zone so I see no real advantage to them, other than storage I suppose. UO was more interesting because the houses are in the actual game world. That created other problems though.
The ony real purpose beyond vanity for houses in DAOC is as you note storage, plus the consignment merchants, which are the number one source of income for high level players. You farm, you consign, you profit. Can’t have a CM without a house.
This was part of the reason I stopped playing DAOC a while ago, because all of the houses on my server were bought, and my guild didn’t let anyone but officers touch the consignment merchant on the guild house. i was effectively denied this potential income stream, and if I would advertise items in broadcast I would get told to STFU and stop spamming…
FFXI and WoW do this way better in that there’s one place where everyone can go and do all of this, without a ton of running around and without a massive cash outlay just to participate (assuming you didn’t miss the boat in the first place).
Unfortunately there seems to be more bad stuff in this latest patch, judging from what I’ve seen on the boards. I haven’t been in to play much with the new patch.
One thing is that resurrection sickness is now 30 minutes. That’s right, one full half-hour. Apparently that’s if you get a player rez; rezzing from the Spirit Healer doles out a sickness time scaled to your level. From the beginning the game’s approach to player rezzing has been bizarre to say the least, making it so undesirable that unless you are in an instance you’d be an idiot to accept a player rez. Now, this 30 minute diminuition of ability, combined with the recent disabling of rez in combat, means officially that resurrection is the least useful thing any healing class can do.
Combat rezzing is a vital part of PvP in DAOC I know, and in WoW many times I’ve been in battles where timely combat rezzing by Paladins or Priests has meant the difference between winning and losing. It’s the mark of a good healer that they can ninja rez and get you into the fight. Now apparently that’s gone; you die, you die. In addition to this making party wipes vastly more likely (combined with the nerfing of soulstones last patch), it will further push the Priest class into a pseudo-mage with marginally better melee. Already combat healing is pretty lame given the poor monitoring tools and poor CC available (and the nerf this patch to Warriors’ taunting skills as well) , so the reason to have a Priest really is to minimize downtime and add back up nukage and dottage.
Some high level warriors have also been blasting the changes in Taunt, which apparently make instances dreadfully hard because Warriors can no longer hold agro at all. Whether this is true or not I don’t know first hand but I’ve yet to see any dissent, and usually claims like this get at least some opposition.
And on a lesser but weird note, high end Paladin armor for female paladins, as shown by some screenies posted in the WoW forums, looks like Boris Valejo got loose in the Blizzard art room. There have been many complaints already about the Lineage 2-style armor designs for female characters in WoW, but these shots are even weirder–strapless, backless armor and g-strings? For high-end gear for a 60 Paladin? Odd.
Ah well we’ll have to see what happens with release. I’m not one to get too upset until I see how all this works out, and if it’s as bad as some say, it’ll probably get a fix soon enough. But it’s indicative of a certain lack of fortitude on Blizzard’s part I think–they seem to sway with the wind too often in these changes. Or if these changes ARE in line with their philosophy, that philosophy is not very clear at all.
I’ve been thinking that blizzard should have at least saved this patch for retail, that way they would have suckered me out of 50$.
But the biggest thing about this patch is that they increased the experience required to level post 30 by 25%. That is them going out of their way to increase the grind… and I won’t take that.
At this point, I have decided that I’m not buying WoW at retail, even though a week ago I was still leaning towards it. It doesn’t help that they took away everything I liked about the warrior class. Adding in death penalties… well, there’s just not much left for me in WoW.
It’s sad… but I saw the trend. From the time I started playing (Beta 3) to now, each patch has removed some of the fun, and increased some of the grind. At this point, I feel that enough fun has been removed that I’m not going to play. I will however watch patch notes once it hits retail, and if I think they’ve changed anything in a way I’d like, I’ll pick it up. But right now? Sorry Blizz. You had me but then you lost me.
Agree 100% witht he previous poster. I started playing WoW in alpha and it was non-stop fun each patch has seen it get worse and worse. This final patch may actually be the last nail in the coffin for me… I simply don’t want to level grind in these games any longer. Harsher death penalties plus longer experience times will most likely equal no purchase for me.
It’s still a fast-leveling game and the added XP requirement is offset by instances giving more XP.
I don’t like the change though since instances can be a pain in the ass.
I don’t know if there’s appreciably more grinding but it definitely looks like Blizzard wants to make the basic gameplay more difficult.
I didn’t know the rez thing was 30 minutes. Only thing I can think of is Blizzard is trying to make the instances more difficult, since those are the places where players use rez the most. A lot of the changes seem designed to make the instances more difficult, and as I noted there’s more pressure to do the instances now. I don’t know why they’ve taken this tack.
