Thank you for all the continues work you guys are doing to keep this game alive, and alive it really is even this far into the season. Great work!
A few concerns/observations from someone who almost exclusively forms and roams 8man.
Currently the skirmish zone does not leave much room for underpopulated realms. At primetime and often offtime hours, there is nothing to gain from roaming the skirmish zone if you are playing on an underpopulated realm. And while overall population may be somewhat balanced (assumption) you will often see 1 realm be overwhelmingly represented in the skirmish zone.
Adding Behe/Extinction/Scout/Marauder encounters to every realm at all times was a good way to give groups an alternative to the skirmish tasks however 200rp per encounter does not really encourage going for those. Yes you have to include the 250rp you receive from handing the supplies in but this requires having a tower/keep nearby to hand them in to.
That again often requires alot of time and luck being able to get one, often high level, tower cracked open with a ram before being able to send out golems. And if you managed to do it without the zerg dunking on you, there is likely another KOTH on the horizon that you got to take part in to get the streak buff and the tower will be again in enemy hands after that.
Reality seems to be that you want to play the skirmish zone as an 8man so just doing Encounters in your homeland to be able to hand in the supplies when it is not the skirmish zone is not really happening.
You will still miss out on the rp bonus streak buff which is extremely difficult to obtain in KOTH at EU primetime at this point and impossible to obtain from the chest as an underpopulated realm in the skirmish zone.
Before skirmish was added, you as an 8man were actually participating in the "realm war" by doing supply encounters and raiding towers that you opened up using the Golems. Unfortunately this is not a rewarding option anymore currently. You won't get your streak buff and encounters simply feel like a waste of time if you get less rp from them than killing a solo with an 8man.
Now this doesn't apply to the Scout and Marauder encounters however the overall rp gain seems bad also because often the 2 encounters that spawn in 1 zone require alot of traveling + additional traveling for the supplies. The main issue remains to be not being able to obtain the streak buff in a timely manner unless you're playing in the "overpopulated" realm.
Thats why my suggestions would be:
- Add a third encounter to Odins/Emain/Hadrians
- Grant a rp buff stack for completing an Arena and for taking part in 8 encounters (Behe, Scouts etc.) in the skirmish zone.
- Grant 500 rp per successful encounter
- Make the streak buff effect every player and bot kill, in and outside of KOTH
- Have the duration of the 2 skirmishes be 30min instead of 15min, leave koth at 15min and make it full rps + potential 100% from buff level 5
- Send out Arena invites at minute 5, 15, 25 of each Skirmish
- Spawn a chest at minute 15 of each Skirmish
- Increase Obol gain for all Skirmish activities (10 Obols for Shady, 10 for Deserters, 10 for a fair fight, 5 for Behe, Scouts etc). Increase Keys to 50 and Regen Barrels to 100 Obols
- Add RP reward item to Obol merchant at the value of 25rp per Obol
- Add 1 mob to the extinction camps that have 9/10 14/15 etc. I understand that the idea is to increase the time spend on one place to have a higher chance of enemy encounter but with only 3 missions up the same time this will naturally happen if groups are doing the encounters. It feels forced and unnecessary. Rather make it more mobs than having to wait a respawn duration to kill a single additional mob
Alot of suggestions include and will result in an increased rp gain. The reason I believe this is a good thing is that there is no end to this game and there for people gaining more rps does not have any downsides in my opinion. Im not sure if there is a single person that stopped playing DAoC because they felt like they had too much rps on all of their toons.
This doesnt mean you should have "livelike" rp gain where, from what i heared, you can get rank 1 to 11 in a week on certain events. But it should always feel like you are making decent progress if you are successful at any given activity in the RvR zone and for some of them this currently isn't the case.
Thanks for reading/considering
*friendly ask: Remove the KOTH location East Pennine Mountains and Add one North of Sursbroke instead or relocated some of the aggro mobs in East Pennine Mtns
