The problem with WoE

As someone who enjoys a bit of PVP every once in a while, WoE1 and WoE2 each week are a fun bit of gameplay I often look forward to. As time goes on though I’m realizing there are some serious inherent issues with WoE as a whole. Would love to hear others take on this especially my suggested fixes and especially especially if you don’t WoE currently. 

Anyway, I’ve split this into sections so please feel free to comment on any particular part.

TLDR: No one WoEs since there is no reward at all, gameplay is tired, it’s too long, most of the castles are empty, other players are too strong, and it costs way too much to even start to catch up, but a couple tweaks and it could be great again for everyone!

High barrier of entry for people wanting to try:

Damage taken is very high due to iRO having lower damage reduction on WoE maps compared to other servers, which is made worse by our mix of OCP/Kachua gear making our players considerably stronger than anyone on those other servers. Anecdotally I hear from most players that they only can enjoy being in fights if they have 90%+ demihuman resistance gear (for me I feel squishy below 97%!). Recent OCP and Kachua have helped immensely in giving more options for resistances but those items are still expensive. Also even if the players have those items it’d cost too much to decard their gear multiple times a week from their PvM setup to a PvP setup.

High barrier fix:

With the damage in the millions from every skill it may be time to reexamine the reduction % applied to the WoE maps. 

Beyond that to make preparing for PvP less expensive three things can be done: 

First greatly reduce or remove the cost of decarding - I expand on this idea below. 

Second, add versions of popular equipment to the cash shop as rental items like they do on thRO and we do to a limited extent for WoE TE. 

Third, offer more options for useful consumables in the cash shop or bought with zeny. Additionally it would be very helpful if the event consumables stopped being deleted when the events end as they can be very helpful for WoE.

Bad incentives:

Currently WoE only provides a random reward to just one character who is leading the guild which holds the castle. There is no personal incentive for anyone else in the guild to participate in the mode. That lack of reward is made worse by how extremely expensive it is to equip for and prepare consumable items for woe each week. Additionally with no change to the rules or other overhaul to WoE people who tried it 5-10 years ago have no reason to come back and try it again.

Bad incentives fix:

Each player needs to be given something, anything, for their time spent in this game mode. This could be a guild wide benefit like access to special NPCs or tokens given out for a limited time at the end of WoE.

Length:

While the modes last for two hours the only time that matters is the final three to five minutes.

Length Fix:

Cut the duration to 1 hour to keep it consistent with TE, or potentially even less. That still gives plenty of time to attempt whatever plan of attack you spent the week coming up with but doesn’t waste everyone’s time while defending.

Alternatively if we’re getting crazy, keep it at two hours total on Wed/Sat but have it swap modes after one hour (Wednesday WoE1 at 4-5pm and WoE2 at 5-6pm then on Saturday WoE2 at 4-5pm and WoE1 at 5-6pm). This forces guild to be more active, allows timing attacks and other strategy/play making while groups swap areas, and who wouldn’t like having more castles to fight over.

Hard to find a fight:

At the moment not enough people attend either WoE 1 or 2 for it to be possible for there to be more than 2-5 people in every castle since there are too many active castles. Most fights end up being very small like 1v5 or 2v3 and you almost never see more than 5-6 people on screen at a time.

Hard to find a fight fix:

Either reduce the number of castles or encourage players to focus on one target which likely has some additional generally useful reward.

Bringing it all together/My Ideal solution:

WoE 1&2 remain on the same day and the same start time but last for 60 minutes. Damage reduction on WoE maps is increased by at least 5% and maybe even as much as 20% more. The number of castles and loot from treasure boxes would stay the same but an additional reward would be added to one castle per week which would get a NPC added in the emperium room to warp you to a free decarding NPC. The NPC changes which castle they appear in each week but every WoE the focus of the fights should be that castle. Additionally every castle would have an NPC which provides tokens to members of the winning guild but they only have 2-3 min to grab the reward before the npc goes away. These tokens can be exchanged for WoE healing items or traded in very large quantities for things like a Kafra Blossom Card or a Kachua Key.

Would love some feedback and if this sounds good or you think it wouldn't work at all please let me know! Thanks everyone!


Bits of feedback I heard from Discord

• We need Herosria WoE mode!
  • I fully agree. Getting a new mode would breathe life into all the versions of WoE.
• Won't guilds just ally each other or have everyone join one mega guild to sell the decard service?
  • It certainly is possible with so few people participating that everyone piles into one guild or some sort of alliance might happen but if WoE gets large enough again that won't really be realistic since there are limits to how large guilds and alliances can be.
• Should the decard npc be limited to certain gear?
  • Well maybe having only gear with player resist on it being eligible for the decard would be a good compromise to lowering the barriers of entry for WoE but I think being able to sell the service of decarding anything will make people want to fight more for that castle.
• WoE Kafra healing shouldn't need VIP and have no zeny cost.
  • Another change I completely agree with. This would let people help more at the entrance to castles even without using pots and I'd still keep VIP on myself for the extremely helpful castle warping option.
• Even guild leaders don't like the rewards currently since the random nature means they can't depend on drops to supply others. "Then it'd be like ~80 of each type per day, would at least supply like a dozen people in a week instead of 2 peoples worth of pots."
  • I thought this was a great point, and if the castle additionally always gave one of each box instead of the random items then it'd be much more meaningful of a reward.
• Guild dungeons are supposed to be a reward as well but no longer provide any benefit.
  • This content was so outdated I hadn't even remembered to mention it! lol But an update to the dungeons or the addition of an exclusive memorial dungeon would be welcome as well, especially if it were a permanent Corridor of Phantoms style map or a new version of a memorial dungeon like Central Laboratory. Another good suggestion I heard was to add more MVP spawns (10+ on random timers) that can appear in guild dungeons as well so people have a reason to go more than once every 36 hours. 
     

Edited by Ralen, 04 July 2024 - 02:01 AM.

Totally agree with Ralen here. WoE was such a big chunk of iRO back in the days. Was playing fairly consistently until the WoE population became a little unbearable and after burning consumables and time/zeny - decided WoE was no longer worth my weekend/effort. 

But after reading Ralen's suggestions - if we could make the incentives more relevant to the majority player base we could revive WoE's popularity. Most players are more interested in PvM, so if we can get PvM type rewards/incentives (e.g. VIP, Kachua keys, OCP, Timmy tokens... etc.) we should be able to bring in more players to WoE. 

Introducing some OCP/Kachua items that benefit WoE would be nice too. 

something simple you can do, update the mvp respawn timers in the guild dungeons and add 10 mvps in there lol. or just have a gm manually spawn bbs in there every few hours haha. that would attract more people.

i like LittleBurgers pvm type rewards/incentives, do a corridor of phantom, but guild dungeon style (just day dreaming)

The problem with WOE are OCPS/Kachues/MVPs.

Totally agree with Ralen here. WoE was such a big chunk of iRO back in the days. Was playing fairly consistently until the WoE population became a little unbearable and after burning consumables and time/zeny - decided WoE was no longer worth my weekend/effort. 

 

But after reading Ralen's suggestions - if we could make the incentives more relevant to the majority player base we could revive WoE's popularity. Most players are more interested in PvM, so if we can get PvM type rewards/incentives (e.g. VIP, Kachua keys, OCP, Timmy tokens... etc.) we should be able to bring in more players to WoE. 

 

Introducing some OCP/Kachua items that benefit WoE would be nice too. 

Glad to hear you agree! Everything I'm hearing is it seems to most people the costs in zeny really is too high and that more than anything is keeping new people or even those who used to participate from even trying to do anything since it is all a zeny sink and what little rewards there are end up distributed so unevenly. 

something simple you can do, update the mvp respawn timers in the guild dungeons and add 10 mvps in there lol. or just have a gm manually spawn bbs in there every few hours haha. that would attract more people.

i like LittleBurgers pvm type rewards/incentives, do a corridor of phantom, but guild dungeon style (just day dreaming)

I do like the idea of making guild dungeons more active/have any reason to get in there. Actually got bored a few times last week and checked the guild dungeon a couple times and all the MVPs were up each time! So even with more MVPs I'm not sure if that'd be a good incentive although if there were more than just the one MVP people would make a point of making the trip. Who knows 

The problem with WOE are OCPS/Kachues/MVPs.

Not sure the gear itself is the problem just how our WoE doesn't limit things. My understanding for WoE on JRO/KRO is that while they mostly have the same gears, they have things like player resistance % is capped at 95%. On IRO because we lack a cap on resists, for example, we have Sura/Inquisitor mostly impervious to anything an average player or someone still trying to make a full PVP equipment set would be trying to do to them. Additionally those servers reduce damage more across the board so a skill that hits for 100k here would be like 25k on KRO. So with us missing both those things it makes ditching the huge bonuses from OCP makes more sense and I see your point that it is more than a little unbalanced at the moment. So not sure they have a game designer able to spare some thought on rebalancing things but I think a couple tweaks and then we could keep our OCPs and hard earned MVPs to make our characters stand out.

So to sum it up my stance is that anyone should be able to invest more and then be able to do better in WoE, this is an MMO after all and using your past work for future success is a core part of why many people play games like this and it doesn't make sense to remove that from the PVP side of things. 

Anyway thanks everyone for the feedback so far and I'd love to hear from more people if there are more thoughts on the matter. 

Edited by Ralen, 16 July 2024 - 08:44 AM.

Agree with some of the reasons that are already mentioned above. But I'll just write again from my and my friend's opinion in regard to WoE (I will limit this to WoE TE since we assume this is the more balanced version).

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We believe that players vs players mode (whether PvP or WoE, which has clearer objective) is definitely more entertaining and fun in almost any game, including RO. Especially when you reach a level that already has very steep EXP curve (let's say 240+), PvM became a very boring activity. Same with farming/doing instance.

However, there are some reasons that may discourage new players (or even existing players) to participate. Based on our opinion, some of these are as follows.

1. Don't know where to start and find information

Some players can even barely catch up with gearing their PvM setup. But at least for PvM, there are some guides and videos available to help them choosing the optimal gears for each build. That is not the same with WoE. There are very little information out there that help players building their gears for WoE. Many content creators also usually hide their WoE set up when they upload videos. With little information available, players don't know what gears to pick. As a simple example, new players don't know how to stack their equipment to get enough demi-human reduction. There are no database that has this filter. Same thing when they are trying to build an optimum offensive or balanced build (what gears/shadow/costume/cards to pick).

This doesn't mean we expect the current active players to tell us everything. If at least we have some database with proper filters, or if there are lists of gears that we can extract this information from, we will have a better idea in building our gears.

2. Cost of building WoE gears

Some of us actually wouldn't mind spend a reasonable amount of resource for building specifically WoE gears, which would be very different than PvM gear (especially for WoE TE), unless it's extremely expensive (which will definitely discourage new players to even start).  A new OCP/Kachua bringing some of WoE gears that are still relevant today would be welcomed.

However, given reason no. 1 above, we don't know how much it would cost to build a WoE set up for our characters since we don't know what gears to pick.

3. Regular cost of participating in WoE

We expect regular participation wouldn't cost too much for new players (who may not have all necessary resources stock-piled).

- Consumables (ygg, pot/slim, speed pot, etc.). It would be nice if WoE reward players/guilds even for just participating (at least some of these consumables)

- Card desocketing (?) - some people say the cost of decarding is significant although we are not so sure if this problem would still persist if we exclude MVP cards (refer to reason no 4 below) - usually it's the MVP cards that are used back and forth. If this is still a problem, then maybe create another NPC that gives free desocketing service for equipment lvl 99 and below (that maybe also only available at certain period of time).

- Other cost (?)

4. OP items, in particular MVP cards, and balancing

We agree with some other people's opinion on the exclusion of all MVP cards from WoE TE. It discourages some people to even try to compete because they feel like some people are immortal (defensively) and/or lethal (one-shot). We are aware that MVP may not be the only reason, but facing somebody with Tao, Sarah, Hatii, or people with Gioia, PQS, FBH, etc. would make it feels like we compete on different playing fields.

We understand that some people worked (hard?) to earn their MVP cards. but it would be nice if we have a WoE version that completely exclude them. Maybe the standard WoE and non-MVP WoE are played every other week, so players can choose when to participate.

For now, I do not include OCP/Kachua items, since many of them are accessible to new players (at relatively more "reasonable" cost). But if these also create problems for some players, then we don't mind the exclusion of these gears as well (in the no-MVP WoE week).

Of course exclusion of MVP cards is not everything. There are also other things that can be done in parallel to balance WoE as mentioned by other people above.

5. Guild Recruitment

Of course all of these wouldn't matter if they are not part of a guild. Many of new players prefer joining an existing guild since they usually only play by themselves or with small group of friends. However, there are only so few guilds (and rarely) actively recruiting members for WoE TE. But again, some players may not be attracted to the current WoE because of reasons mentioned above. But maybe if they are solved (a more new-comer friendly WoE), there would be more people encouraged to try WoE TE.

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Again as mentioned earlier in this comment, many of us new players only like a different environment and the player vs player vibe, because PvM can easily get boring quickly. We are not looking for very big rewards (exclusive OP items, god items, etc.) from WoE. Of course some of the current active players may feel differently and want big things to establish superiority (sorry not trying to offend), but this is not the case for new players (at least in my group). We just play the game to enjoy it.

Best of luck and big shout out to people who try to revive WoE.

Edited by 1957240624220343550, 16 July 2024 - 03:06 PM.

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4. OP items, in particular MVP cards, and balancing

We agree with some other people's opinion on the exclusion of all MVP cards from WoE TE. It discourages some people to even try to compete because they feel like some people are immortal (defensively) and/or lethal (one-shot). We are aware that MVP may not be the only reason, but facing somebody with Tao, Sarah, Hatii, or people with Gioia, PQS, FBH, etc. would make it feels like we compete on different playing fields.

We understand that some people worked (hard?) to earn their MVP cards. but it would be nice if we have a WoE version that completely exclude them. Maybe the standard WoE and non-MVP WoE are played every other week, so players can choose when to participate.

For now, I do not include OCP/Kachua items, since many of them are accessible to new players (at relatively more "reasonable" cost). But if these also create problems for some players, then we don't mind the exclusion of these gears as well (in the no-MVP WoE week).

 

Of course exclusion of MVP cards is not everything. There are also other things that can be done in parallel to balance WoE as mentioned by other people above.

 

Second this one.

Let all it be skills in potting speed (lol), gear switching, and teamwork. No fun seeing 1-vs-the-world WoE.

Edited by LunaticMetal, 11 August 2024 - 03:09 PM.