Thursday, October 16, 2008

Why bribe players away from your strengths?

One of the major critques of Warhammer is that players are mostly doing scenarios repeatedly, to the exclusion of all the other content in the game. Some of this is a quality issue - as Scott Jennings puts it, "PVE isn't all that" - but there's a deeper problem at the heart of this discussion: incentives.

Jobildo has a great series going examining the incentives behind Warhammer content, namely Public Quests and world RVR. Tweaking the rewards is a far better approach to the problem than making no-scenario servers.

The fundamental issue is that reknown is only available in RVR, but RVR also offers regular exp and gear. Mythic can tweak the numbers for the next few months, but there is no solution to this issue. The only other source for reknown is world RVR, and it doesn't matter where Mythic sets the dial on that curve unless they can solve population imbalance. Meanwhile, they don't want to take an RVR game and force players to spend more time on PVE content (either by nerfing scenario exp or via greatly increasing PQ exp). They're marketing to PVP players who don't want to do PVE content, and, at any rate, boosting exp in PVE content would just encourage players to level to the cap and worry about reknown when they get there (in the process missing the best part of the game in the low-end scenarios).

Honestly, the best solution may be not to mess with things. It's too late to completely redesign the game's progression system, so they might as well stick to their strengths. The best part of the game are the scenarios, so I don't see why it makes sense to work so hard at getting people to leave them.

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