WAR contribution system idea

I'm not a huge fan of the current WAR scenario contribution system for a few reasons. Each class isn't rewarded equally for its efforts (i.e. DPS gets more renown than tanks), and there is very little incentive to carry out the objectives of the scenario (ie. defending a flag). There is also the problem of splitting renown equally throughout the group regardless of contribution, which has lead to the solo grouping issue. It's a delicate issue, as a lot of people feel that all renown gained should be split amongst the group, whereas others believe that players should only be rewarded for their individual effort. Personally I believe there needs to be a combination of both. Players should be encouraged to play as a team, as well as be recognised for individual contribution.

Instead of just talking the talk, I thought I have a go at walking the walk and actually designing how I think the WAR scenario contribution system should work:

My system design would be broken down into two sections, Individual (not split with group mates) and Group rewards.

Individual:
Base Renown Gain:
There would be three possible ways to gain renown: damage dealt, damage received and healing performed. Each class would only be able to use two of the of the three renown gain methods. Unlike the current system, damage dealt would rewarded instantaneously instead of when a kill is performed (like how healing works currently). Damage received (designed for tanks) would also be rewarded instantaneously. You could not gain renown for self inflicted damage (ie. falling or backfire) or for healing yourself. The amount of renown gained would depend on the class co-efficient. Below is table showing the class co-efficient for each renown gain method:

Class	Dmg Dealt	Dmg Taken	Healing
Chosen and Knight of the Blazing Sun	0.55	0.45
Black Orc and Swordmaster	0.50	0.50
Ironbreaker and Blackguard	0.50	0.50
Squig Herder and The White Lion	0.40	0.60
Witch Hunter and Witch Elf	0.35	0.65
Maruader and Shadow Warrior	0.45	0.55
Dwarven Engineer and Chaos Magus	0.35	0.65
Bright Wizard and Sorceress	0.30	0.70
Warrior Priest and Disciple of Khaine	0.50		0.50
Goblin Shaman and High Elf Archmage	0.55		0.45
Rune Priest and Zealot	0.60		0.40

To calculate the renown gained you take the base figure (ie. 1000 dmg = 10 renown) and multiply it by the co-effient for that class (i.e. Bright Wizard: 10 renown * 0.3 = 3 renown). So as a Bright Wizard, you would receive 3 renown for every 1000 damage that you do. The base figures for each gain method would look something like:

Method	Amount	Renown Gain
Damage dealt	1000	10
Damage recieved	1000	15
Healing performed	1000	10

The idea of the co-efficient is that your class is rewarded at a higher rate for performing tasks that are more difficult. For example, the Witch Elf/Witch Hunter are rewarded at a higher rate for receiving damage, because it is riskier for them to do so. At the end of the day, all classes should receive the same renown for doing what they are good at. The co-efficient for each class would obviously be tweaked through trial and error to iron out any balance issues.

Diminishing Returns:
Each renown gain method would have diminished returns if used on or received from the same player over time. When the player dies, the diminished return is reset.

Objective Incentives:
Each scenario would provide incentives for performing or helping to perform certain objectives. For example healing a flag runner or killing an enemy flag runner. The incentives would vary depending on the scenario.

Group:
Winning the scenario:
This would work in the same fashion that it does at the moment. If your team wins the scenario, you get a renown bonus (i.e 600 RP).

Kills
This is where the bulk of your renown gain will come from. When you or a member of your group performs a kill, you and every other member of your group will receive 5 renown for each group member alive. If all six group members are alive, each member of the group will receive 30 renown. This provides an incentive to form large groups as well as staying alive and resurrecting. Only players that are alive receive renown. The amount of renown received per kill would increase with each tier.

Kill bonuses:
When an enemy performs a kill, the renown gained for killing them is the base amount plus 5 for each kill that they have performed. For example if your foe has killed 4 players before you kill them and all six of your group members are alive, you all receive 30 + (4 * 5) = 50 renown.

Kill rampages:
For each successive kill that your group makes without a single member dying the renown gain per kill increases by 5. For example (6 members): First kill = 30 renown each, second kill = 35 renown each, third = 40, etc...

Note: All values used in the above examples are arbitrary and would require actual game research to determine their proper values.

Summary:
I think this kind of contribution system would reward each class equally, as well as encourage team co-operation. Bonuses would be rewarded to teams that work well together, as well as to individuals that put in extra effort.

"I NEED HEALING!"

Last night I took a Witch Hunter for a spin and aside from the no self heal, it was a bunch of fun. Up to now I've mostly been playing hybrid healer classes in WAR (Archmage and Warrior Priest), and throwing heals around in between dropping Witch Elves (my favorite). I had no idea how much it sux when you can't heal yourself!... and it sux even more when you fall back with 5% health hoping a healer will notice you, only to be picked off 10 seconds later by a passing tank... It almost made me want to stop playing a Witch Hunter altogether :(

Instead of ranting about it, I decided to come up with a possible solution:

All classes (including the ones with healing) are given a "I NEED HEALING!" button that lights up when your character's health drops below a certain threshold (i.e. 40%). When you press the button, a big red flashing arrow appears above your head and can only be seen by players with healing skills within range. When your health is taken above the threshold, the arrow disappears.

Now before we go any further, the idea is to provide identification assistance to the healers and not be a constant pain in the ass. So to prevent players from annoying the hell out of healers, there would be a few rules:

1. The button can only be pressed once for each drop below the threshold.
2. Healers can turn off being able to see arrows. A small 'eye' icon next to their portrait will indicate if they have the function turned on or not.
3. Healers gain additional renown for helping players that have activated their "I NEED HEALING!" button. This provides an incentive to respond.

I think that having a "I NEED HEALING!" button would provide an extra layer of tactic and strategy to WAR battles, as well as giving melee dps classes a chance. It would also assist in identifying low health players in other groups. I know I'd use it ;)

Catch-up mode

I read an interesting article recently about motivating players. Zoso points out that it never works out in practice to reward people based on individual performance, because it's just too hard to gauge accurately.

Did you kill 10 guys solo in Nordenwatch? Well, that's great, but maybe you're a bit of a scrub since you were actually not near any shrines and not contributing to the capture and therefore the victory. Unless those guys happened to be on their way from one shrine to the other, and you stopped them from getting there. In which case you're not a scrub, you're a total pro.

How can the game differentiate such a situation? Well, it can't. This is one advantage of handing out an identical reward to every player on the winning side (and a smaller reward to every player on the losing side). Over a large number of matches played, the best players will get rewarded the most, the worst players the least, and it will all work out brilliantly. Except, as Zoso quite rightly points out, that some games are a bit of a landslide because your team sucks very badly. You know, those games that end 500-20. If you only reward the win and not individual stats such as heals/damage, people will just give up and try to lose faster to get to the next game. That sucks.

Ever played a racing game? I was playing Need For Speed on PS2 the other day against my girlfriend. Due to the fact that I suck royally at racing games and because she doesn't, I'm not ashamed to say that I was being whooped good and proper. I spent an impressive amount of time racing the wrong way and attempting to turn around. She won the race easily, but somehow she never really got that far ahead.... thanks to my faithful co-pilot, catch-up mode.

Basically, in many racing games, players who are falling too far behind get to go *faster*. This is a neat game mechanic, since

a) It prevents you from giving up if you stack on the first corner
b) If the other person really is better than you, once you catch up they'll just pull away from you again, so it's not unfair to the leader

Catch-up mode would remove that "meh, next game" problem in scenarios, by keeping the game close and interesting. This would allow a "all winners get the same reward" system to work, which would stop individual rambo's from running around improving their personal score with no regard for the actual team.

Although of course with such a system, I'd still like to see a ladder ranking at the end like we do currently, since I like to stroke my e-peen as much as the next guy.

Randomize the Scenarios

Here's the problem, everyone is playing the same scenario map for each tier because said scenario is the 'most fun' or the 'most rewarding' or both. Mythic took a step in the right direction by allowing players to queue for all tier related scenarios in one button press. Unfortunately it still doesn't solve the problem of a particular scenario getting more attention than the others.

My solution is simple: there is one button. You click it and it enters you into the scenario queue. When enough people are in the queue on both sides, a scenario map is automatically picked at random. If you don't like the map, you are allowed to leave, but doing so gives you one 'rage point'. If you get three 'rage points' you have to wait ten minutes before you are allowed to queue for scenarios again. Rage points disappear after 30 mins or so. Kind of like Guild Wars Random Arenas.

This ensures that all scenarios get an even rotation and there isn't a huge problem with rage quitters.

Let us find each other

Anyone who has played or read anything about WAR in the last few weeks knows that the game features moments of truly epic fun separated by long periods of intense boredom / grinding.

This has been blamed on the the far greater rewards from doing scenarios compared to "open world" content such as keep sieges and PQ's, which means that people focus mainly on competing in scenarios and so hardly ever see the more innovative side of WAR.

This is true, however it's not the only reason scenarios are dominating the gameplay. The other reason is that it's just much simpler to find people to play scenarios with thanks to the handy UI/pairing feature.

Take open RvR for example. Let's say you look at your map and see that an enemy keep is under attack, so you decide to go help. You have to march to a town 2-3 minutes from the nearest flight master. Once there, you're not guaranteed of
a) any PvP at all, since it's guarded by NPC's
b) any more than one ally to help you anyway, since other people who may want to keep siege have no idea how many other people want to keep siege. Sometimes even this one ally has nicked off by the time you get there.

What a waste of time! You go off back to scenarios or something. Five minutes later, unbeknownst to you enough other people accidentally wander past and form a group, and end up taking the keep. Sucks to be you don't it?

But it doesn't have to be like this. What if, like scenarios:

Every single group based activity in the game has a simple UI feature to aid grouping with every player on the server, regardless of their location, who might be interested in that activity.

My suggestion: Expand that little scenario button next to the minimap. When people click on it, they receive the following info:

Declare your interest in one of these activities to find other players to group with!

1) Scenarios
- UI box turns into current scenario options, works as current

2) Open RvR
- Players can choose any keep/node in any tier that they have visited before. Locations never visited, and those not able to be captured (due to changing hands recently) are grayed out. Locations that would result in "chickenification" have a chicken icon.
- Players can choose to form a group that will try to claim the objective.
- Alternately, players can choose "notify me" to be automatically invited when another group forms in this way and when an open group not formed this way begins the objective. A "join now or join later" dialogue box similar to the join scenario interface is given, in case people don't want to join the group right away.
- Players selecting the "notify me" option can specify how big they want the party to be before they're notified. Eg you might want to be notified only if there's more than 10 people signed up, or you might say blow it, notify if even one other person wants to play. If nobody has volunteered to form the party but your desired number of players is reached, the game asks you to form the party.
- Players don't have to click on every single option they're interested in being notified about. There are checkboxes so that you could, for example, join all in a particular tier, or all in the dwarf/greenskin pairing, or only keep sieges in tiers 3 and 4, or only tier 2 defense nodes, etc etc.
- Hovering over each location / "choose all" checkbox will tell you how many of your allies are queued up to do the same, and how many are already in a group doing the same thing (with right-click functionality to join existing groups).
- There is a separate tab for offense and defense. For defense, you can select to be notified when zero other people are in a group, which will give you a dialogue box the moment the objective comes under attack (again, regardless of which tier you're in).

3) Dungeons

4) PQ's

5) Regular Q's
- Rinse and repeat for all these from point 2. The general focus should be no matter where you are, no matter what you're doing, you can put your name down to get involved in whatever interests you. When enough players do the same, you'll know right away.

Please Mythic, I know there are other players online wanting to do the same things that I do. Help us find each other.

Target calling in WAR

I've read a lot of posts and articles about suggestions to make WAR a better game, but the one suggestion I haven't seen mentioned is target calling. Target calling was an extremely popular function in Guild Wars, which allowed any party member to notify all other party members of the enemy that they are targeting. When a target is called, the mini map is pinged to the location of the target informing all other group members where to look. A line of text is added to the chat window saying: "Player x is targeting player y" and a small target icon appears next to the player that called the target allowing other players who click it and lock on. It was possibly the most used mechanic during combat in Guild Wars.

So whats so important about calling targets and why will WAR benefit from it? Target calling is essential for spiking down individual foes, as well as advertising weak or low health targets to the rest of your group. Good leaders can guide inexperienced players through priority targets, as well as direct group movements around the map. Given that WAR is heavily based on PvP, I'm amazed that Mythic didn't integrate a target calling feature into the game.

To take it one step further, it would be nice to have some smarts behind the target calls as well. Eg:

• "Player x is targeting Player y, who is holding the flag!"
• "Player x is targeting player y, who is below half health!"
• "Player x is targeting player y, who is nearly dead!"

I think target calling would be extremely helpful in scenarios, where groups are often made up of randoms. It would bring some order to the chaos and provide extra depth to the tactics required to play the game.

NEED, GREED, Pain in the ASS!

How many times have you been burnt by the annoying little game mechanic called 'Need, Greed, Pass' (NGP)? It's been one too many for me and frankly I'm pissed off. Back in the days when I played WoW, there was nothing worse than having some idiot clicking need on a item that they couldn't even use. Especially when I had been grinding for over a month to get the item. Unfortunately WAR has copied the NGP mechanic over from WoW and now I have to deal with it all over again!!!

NGP is a great example of bad game design. It relies on the trust and competency of gamers not to abuse it in order for it to function as intended. Works okay if you know the people you are playing with, but not so much in PUG groups. Did someone say 'open grouping'? Oh gee.. whoops.. I really hope Mythic saw that coming...

Until Mythic fix or remove NGP I will be joining the every growing group of people abusing this mechanic by always clicking 'Need'. Now why would I join the people I hate so much? Many reasons:

1. No items I have encountered in WAR so far are 'bind on pickup', which means even if I can't use the item, I can sell it on Auction House and make money from it.
2. Items I can't sell on Auction House can always be used for Magical Salvaging.
3. There is a chance that I can give the item to an alternate character.
4. In RvR or scenarios, I don't have time to determine if I need an item when I've got 3 Chaos Marauders on my ass. Pfft - 'Need'.
5. If everyone clicks 'Need' then everyone has an equal and fair chance of getting the item.
6. The more a broken mechanic is abused, the more chance there is of it being fixed.

Honestly, I don't care if the carebears hate me, they should be blaming Mythic for coping a mechanic without putting prior thought into what affect it would have in their new 'open grouping' dynamic.