Some people dread the juggernaught of EA eating up more and more small(-ish) studios for fear of ruining all that is holy. For the sake of WAR, I see this only as a blessing. Bioware has some of my favorite games under their belt, and a new vision for the production of WAR is pretty obviously needed. Mark Jacobs brought life to WAR, and FINALLY got it released as a major triple A MMO that we all know and love today. He also had his own personal touches on a couple aspects of the game that have been really hard to swallow. Crafting being the thing I’m talking about. He gimped it so badly time after time, and horribly limited the wide scope of things that could be done to the point that when anyone does crafting we get either a potion or a talisman.

Look, I want more bodies on the battlefield. There’s a ton of players, casual and hardcore, that took one look at our crafting system and never looked back. There’s another ton that gave it some time, and ultimately couldn’t deal with it. Mark tried to downplay the importance of crafting in an RvR focused game, but ultimately it closed off avenues of potential playerbase. Wanna get people involved in the fighting instead of grinding it out in Altdorf? Make the BEST crafting gear come from high RR players in OPEN RvR and make it BoP always need on use. Just like in WoW, except our focus is PvP instead of PvE. That’s what people came to expect from WAR, a mirror version of WoW with LESS PvE importance, and a more persistant world with the danger of getting sacked every few hours.

Persistance is something that Bioware has gotten a lot better over the years. Let me paint a picture for what I think they could pull off. Now, I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on the blog before, but it’s always been a tickling fancy of mine. Perhaps this is something that Bioware could pull off. There’s always been an irritation that I’ve had in that we can capture only capital cities, forts, and BO’s temporarily. The prior being pretty sweet, but the two former being slightly meh. When a zone flips, it’s always possible for the winning side to rush in with high morale and crush the defenders (with notably lower morale), and quickly take subsequent zones. When this happens I always feel like something is being left behind. Namely, the enemy warcamps and towns. Of course, R55 Champions tell us to bugger off with big 30,000 point smackings of pain and relatively light suffering. Is this WAR??

When a zone flips, and the battle “moves on to the next location” the R55 Champions should really get their asses in gear if they want to defend their territory. This way, the winners of the current zone can go ahead and lock down the opposing PvE side by destroying their camps, and looting the leftover bodies. Also giving the losing force MUCH MORE INCENTIVE to fighting back, and further opportunity and time to quickly snatch the zone they were just put into. Much like the Conflict PQ’s in previous Dwarf/Greenskin pairings, make the Warcamp a 30m conflict one-chance PQ, where the defenders have a chance to push the attackers back into the lake and hold their ground. Or let the attackers fight off a balanced force of Champs/Players (one spawning/despawning on entry/leave), with a number of key Hero’s to be killed to finish. Let’s see : Quartermaster, Flight Master, Healer, Quest Givers, and a Warcamp Lord. Stage one would be killing 100 players/guards, stage two would be the 8-ish Hero unique mobs, and stage three would be the WC Lord. At the end of it all drop a fat-lewt bag with (gasp) Conqueror Gear! Conq gear is by far the hardest to attain, as a capital city run can yield upwards of 5-8 pieces of Invader gear, but only two forts with Conq fall per city run. More ways to get it (a crazy hard T4 conflict PQ), the better.

Do you all see the madness in this? With the attackers in control of PvE, they cannot level any further without pushing zones short of being in some real danger. Turn captured zones into full RvR for the opposing realm, and they’ll think twice about venturing into them. Omg, real consequences for not defending our territory?! Madness! Omg, we can get Conq bags by BURNING THEIR WARCAMPS TO THE GROUND!? That sounds MUCH more like it, bring it on!

Ray Muzyka, you’re more than welcome to enter the Waaagh, and make these things happen. I dare you.