Previously on RO1 Renewal the Castle List was cut by 20% and although it happened before my time on the production team it is my understanding that didn't really force more fights. Instead, made it so less real estate needed to be defended by large guilds to lock others out of particular realms, made loot more boring as every castle became very much the same in regards to what dropped, and allowed guilds to focus all efforts on single castles in order to complete godly sets. Meaning they didn't have to move from castle to castle to gather pieces.
That is not to say it didn't have some benefits in terms of player density, just it isn't going to force players to fight who do not wish to fight. Reducing Castles is very much a stick mechanism to encouraging fights. I believe we need to invest in carrots to get the results desired.
Ultimately that is the goal, to encourage users to fight. One mechanism I would like to discuss to encourage this is rewarding based on the econ of the castle when broken, in a manner similar to the old WPS seasons. Or perhaps there can be some other mechanism that encourages guild encounters of the WoE variety. But this isn't the time to go into greater discussions on that, it should be reserved for the discussion topic.
DISCLAIMER: Before anyone panics this just my thoughts on the subject. Not a set path for the servers of RO1 or RESTART. Each game will have discussions on the topic of PVP in general and WoE in particular, and my team will approach these subjects with an open mind about what the servers desire,
I imagine 20% wasn't enough. I know 20% here wouldn't do anything but i don't know what the population was like when they tried this on renewal.
We don't have large guilds here that cover multiple castles, we have one guild that camps a castle every woe, another guild that attacks them and that's it so this scenario doesn't exactly apply here.
Loot being boring i don't understand either, my suggestion was there is 1 agit in each city. That single agit would have the combined loot tables of the agits from that particular city. No drops are missing from the equation to create this problem you mention.
No one is moving from castle to castle either. It's literally one guild that is camping the easiest to defend castle in the game.
I mean why would some of them want to fight when they can login the last 10min, break an unguarded emp and collect loot all week? It requires no effort and produces OCAs. If the only method of obtaining these OCAs requires fighting they will either do it or not get the reward. The current system is awful where people just login last 10min to collect ocas.
There aren't enough guilds/groups to have a reward based on econ breaking. No one defends anything for econ to develop aside from one castle. There simply aren't enough players to cover so many castles. This solution could be nice IF we had 4 total agit to counter a camping meta where no one wants to leave their castles but as i said we have one guild defending one single agit and that's it.
I would like the motivation to be strictly reward based but with this small of a population you literally can't compel them to do more than login for 10min, walk through empty castle n break to collect loot. Making it require more than that is the only way to incite pvp battles. If you put rewards behind breaking emps it does nothing to solve the problem and if you put rewards behind defending you just end up with no one leaving their castles. Less castles with combined loot tables = more people in the same area trying to break the same emps which is precisely what we need.
The other thing to consider is, if WOE isn't for these people ninjaing empty castles at the end then why do they deserve rewards at all? 4 total agits would mean the small group that is there for the actual purpose of woe can have fun battles the entire duration of woe instead of the last 30-45min being nothing but a scramble to rotate break empty emperiums. Atleast we would get to enjoy woe for what it's supposed to be and rewards would be going to people that are actually there to PvP.
Edited by Wyndor, 25 September 2018 - 09:57 PM.