1761

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an army or class that was removed for release put back in about the same time as WoTLK.

That is my biggest pet peeve bug right now. I hate that it won’t remember that I want the damn thing hidden. My 2nd biggest irritation: It won’t remember I want timestamps on in chat.

Yea… I wonder about that. Did they have other intentions for being a chicken and then just nuke them? I’ve been a chicken several times now and I can’t do jack… but according to the published earnable titles it seems like I should be able to kill as a chicken:

Killed 5 chickens as a chicken - The Blue-Ribbon Chicken
Killed 50 chickens as a chicken - The Topflight Chicken
Killed 100 chickens as a chicken - The Champion Chicken
Killed 1,000 chickens as a chicken - The Super Chicken
Killed 5,000 chickens as a chicken - The Prime Chicken
Killed 5 chickens, not as a chicken - The Fowl Finisher
Killed 50 chickens, not as a chicken - The Fowl Frier
Killed 100 chickens, not as a chicken - The Fowl Stomper
Killed 1,000 chickens, not as a chicken - The Fowl Waster
Killed 5,000 chickens, not as a chicken - The Fowl Annihilator
Killed 5 players as a chicken - The Strength Of Poultry
Killed 50 players as a chicken - The Vigor Of Poultry
Killed 100 players as a chicken - The Power Of Poultry
Killed 1,000 players as a chicken - The Prowess Of Poultry
Killed 5,000 players as a chicken - The Might Of Poultry

Maybe you guys have had different experiences as a chicken, but all I can do is jump and squawk which I think would make it very hard to even kill 1 player or chicken.

I agree 100%

1762

I think chickens can auto-attack, doing one point of damage each peck.

1763

Interesting thought on PQs: http://www.nerfbat.com/2008/09/11/public-quests-are-antisocial/

Not sure I agree 100%, but he has a point.

1764

Couple things they could do to fix this:

  1. Halve the amount of influence required to max out in all tiers. Suddenly influence maxing isn’t a good reason to do the PQs because that silly little bar fills so fast.

  2. Double amount of equipment in each bag. So you get a green bag, it comes with two greens for you to choose between. You get a blue bag, two blues two greens.

  3. Now that there are two loot drops you can grab from each bag, one should be random and one fixed. So, you’ll always know that you get at least one piece of useful loot, and you’ll also have a chance of getting an unexpected shiny – encouraging people to repeat PQs and keeping the population up at all of them. I get that the idea of a fixed green drop is to encourage people to move from PQ to PQ, but that just straight up isn’t working. And the rewards for scenarios are faster and more frequent, so nobody bothers. So up tha lootz!

  4. Everyone who stuck around from first part to last in t2+ gets a green loot bag. Fullstop, no questions asked. Everyone who sticks around from first part to last in t1 gets a white bag. You have to contribute at least minimally (just like you do now to get a shot at a roll), but everyone should get loots. Why? Because in RvR you know that raising your rank guarantees you some nifty renown gear, and there’s also a good chance of drops during the scenario. You’re guaranteed fat loot. Same with raising your influence. So why group with strangers for a chance at loot if it’ll just slow down the accretion of guaranteed loot?

  5. At the very least the chance of blue and better bag drops needs to be increased. At best, a blue bag or better would be guaranteed for the #1 contributor, with a chance for even #s 2 and 3. I’ve gotten maybe two blue bags in the course of play, and both those times were with Wanderers in a dungeon. I’ve only seen a couple in PQs. Conversely, I’ve seen (and gotten) tons of blue drops in scenarios – they’re almost constant! And the max rewards for influence are always a blue drop – encouraging grindy farming rather than grouped play.

  6. All the fixed PQ loot drops should be shown in the Tome – like, if you get a blue bag this green and that blue item are guaranteed to show up. That information should be at my fingertips so that I can decide if I want to spend the extra time doing a harder PQ for the better loot. Right now, since people only have info on what they get for maxing influence, they see no reason to actually DO PQs, because screw it they’re guaranteed nice loot just by filling the blue bar.

  7. Improve the local chat channels (and the chat channels in general). If people could communicate effectively over the zone, they’d be more likely to group because they’d know which PQs are active and need people. Right now, anonymous Witch Hunter #1138 (ha!) is just a competitor, not a fellow human being. If I send hir a tell, s/he’s probably not going to reply. Even better would be an interface that listed specifically who was at each PQ, their group, and how far along it was.

7b) There also needs to be an interface for grouping for scenarios, because the random joining is getting us nowhere. But that’s kind of beside the point.

1765

The author cries PQ’s are anti-social and throughout his diatribe he promotes, not only anti-social behavior, but being a complete jerk to your side. Sure, you can be jerk in any game for personal advancement (the same holds true in real life), but you can also have fun, help others, and level maybe 1% slower than the jerk?

The one part of WarH I’m hoping they change is ALLOWING higher level players to take part in lower tier content. What do they expect to happen to all the RVR keeps and objectives once everyone is max level? Complete abandonment? Or, pray everyone plays alts? I don’t get it.

A simple start would be to use the reverse bolstering mentioned above, or just let high ranked players plunder the lower ranks, as long as lower levels can do something to higher ranks so they can put up a fight or gang up and kill a higher level. I never liked games where higher level characters are immune to lower level character. A band of lowbies should be able to at least give a maxed out char a challenge.

EDIT: I meant allowing higher level players to take part in lower tier content

1766

Taking keeps in LOTRO was not impossible with other players around. You simply have to have numerical superiority to take a keep. Trolls and rangers help a bit when you don’t have the numbers, but aren’t necessary.

1767

You can already do this, more or less. Just look at the list of open groups and see which ones are in PQs (this is identified), and estimate which one they are in based on the distance. Although I’d prefer it if there was some way to tell where they actually are. The problem, then, is that people often don’t bother grouping up, so you can’t tell exactly how many people are at a PQ. I think that’s the real problem. Maybe they could give some trivial exp reward for grouping up in a PQ, just to provide that extra little bit of incentive?

1768

Yes, that article was pretty dumb. The loot you can get from completing PQs can be quite good. And the thing about the tank letting his healer die for some sort of personal advantage was absurd. I haven’t played a tank for more than a few levels, but won’t a tank who is fighting a champion mob without a healer just die? Or maybe that is not until the hero mobs.

To me, the fun thing about PQs is that they are an odd combination of working together and competing. On one hand, you won’t be able to finish it unless you all work together, but at the same time you are trying to outdo everybody else. It creates a very frantic feeling as you are dashing around trying to kill things are quickly as possible. That plus the randomness makes it feel like a madcap game show.

The fundamental problem with PQs is that they don’t work unless there are enough people, but who is going to sit around in a dead PQs? Well, besides the author of that article who thinks it is awesome to kill 100 spites by himself. So if they just say how many people are at a PQ, nobody will ever do a PQ. But if they don’t say, then it is hard to figure out which ones are active.

I also have some complaints about individual PQs. The ones with an initial phase that requires picking up items off the ground are obnoxious. I really would rather be doing something else with my time than watching a progress bar go up.

Second, some are really far away from the nearest respawn. This isn’t too much of a problem, except for the fact that if you die in the last phase, you aren’t going to be able to get back in time to claim your reward. I do like the giant glowing chest, as it adds to the gameshow feel, but they really need to just give you the damned bag you win if you don’t get to the loot chest in time. Maybe they could make the loot bags quest items so you can’t run out of space, though that could be confusing for people until they figure it out. But even ignoring that, spending most of your time running back from the respawn is annoying.

1769

Also, one of my favorite features in WAR that doesn’t get mentioned enough: those red circles on maps that tell you roughly where the quest location is! These are really awesome for three reasons:

  1. The obvious one is that you don’t spend a huge amount of time trying to figure out exactly what the overworked quest description writer meant when they said that you had to go past the ruins on the hill. WoW and LotRO almost require the use of external sites to find many of the quest locations. Right now on Qt3, in the LotRO thread, people are complaining about not being able to find a couple of quest locations, quest locations I also had trouble finding.

  2. The more subtle thing is that it turns the map into a spatially oriented quest log! In most MMOs, I have to go through the quest log, tediously reading every quest to figure out which ones are grouped together, often taking notes. But no more! Now you just look at your map and you can see where all of the quests are. WAR has almost obsoleted the traditional quest log. I say almost because sometimes the little mouse over description fails to mention the guy you have to kill to get the item you need for the quest, and of course it is nice to be able to go back and read the flavor descriptions for your entertainment.

  3. This is related to the other two, but I really enjoy that I no longer have to memorize the made-up geography of whatever fantasy land I am in. Where is Barad Gul? Is that the same as Barad Gur? Is that even in this zone? Where is Mordok’s Redoubt? On and on, a stream of nonsense places I have to memorize in order to be able to figure out what I am supposed to do. But in WAR, this is no more! What is the name of this mountain? Who knows, and who cares. It is just a red circle on my map to the northeast of that camp. I can think of things in terms of where they are located, and not have to deal with the extra indirection of some name a quest designer made up at 2 in the morning in crunch time.

1770

Mouse over the group in the Open Party browser for a second – the tooltip will tell you.

1771

Great, thanks! Still, I assume this is just the name of the PQ? As I said in my previous post, I prefer to not have to learn the name of anything. ;)

1772

For PQs, it’ll give you the name and the chapter.

1773

The keeps are pretty decidely defensive, especially the leash to full mechanic. The stairs are just brutal with collision, 3 tanks abreast can lock it down, and their ranged can easily sit in an unholy circle around your only entrance. It can be possible for a tough melee to slip through and get past the stairway, but no healer can run that gauntlet and live, so anyone who does slip thru is a dead man, to the mobs alone even if the players completely ignore him.

It’s just way too much of a choke, and the views on the stairwell are very awkward.

1774

There’s an even better solution.

They were so “brilliant” to invent reverse kill collectors, then they should have taken the concept and ran with it.

Imho, all repeatable RvR quests should be redone with the same model. The game tracks automatically everything you do, and when you happen to pass near a warcamp you go to the NPC and collect the reward.

Without ever worrying or losing progress.

1775

Or they could just fold the quest rewards into the reward you get for finishing the scenario (and killing people in the scenario, for the various kill X people quests). Though I think it is a good idea to have non-repeatable versions of these quests that can be picked up, just to get people into the scenarios.

1776

Well AT LEAST the kill ‘x’ enemies type of quest would still work for open RvR.

You know, for those who actually hope it will exist in the game. Someday in the far, far future.

1777

Well, again, they can just roll those bonuses into the reward you get for kills. I suppose it feels like more of an incentive if you have some quest to complete.

1778

The real issue is that you guys aren’t getting the point of those quests. They aren’t functioning as xp/cash gain, they’re functioning as anchors.

See, the idea behind them is that they provide both a real and a psychological reason to stay at or near the war camp. Otherwise people doing scenarios would also be able to get the full rewards of the scenario along with the full rewards of pve at the same time. This keeps them in a circle centered on the war camp whose radius travel time is a maximum of half the time spent waiting between scenarios, thereby forcing them to either specialize or give up some of the rewards of one or the other game style.

Check your map, you’ll find that PQ locations with the best rewards in a given tier are generally clustered fairly far from both the war camp and the renown merchants/trainers for that tier.

1779

It would be the most horrid design decision ever.

Why I need to be anchored to a warcamp if I like to mix PvP with PvE? It’s actually an incentive to forget that this game has options outside scenarios. Scenarios Online.

P.S.
Patch notes for 1.0.2 are up and there’s nothing in the way of most important issues. Some servers get +20% bonuses and you can queue for three scenarios at once. And fixes the alliances.

Beside that, not much.

1780

The SC quest rewards are really good at T1 below level 9 or so. By T2, people start skipping them because the xp reward really isn’t that great. By T3, you have even less incentive taking these quests and filling up your quest journal. You get about 12k XP in the SC and you get 2k XP from the quest. So arguing about the placement of these mostly useless quests seems pointless.