So maybe a few of you guys follow me on Twitter, probably not. Well, like 5 of you do. Anyway, I don’t pass judgement, Twitter is what it is and most people couldn’t be bothered with it. However, if you DO follow me or the likes of @werit @vn_cydoc @siberwulf or @cpodemayo you might have noticed a bit of frothing this afternoon.

First off, this stemmed from the recent patch that removed the ability to purchase RvR gear with medallions, and sell it for gold. Apparently you could make something in the range of 45g for each Invader broken all the way down to Decimator gear. One Invader crest, 45g, 100 Invader Crests, 4500g. Okay, I can see where that might be a problem, no biggie.

Connect the dots now, what can you buy with unused RvR currency at the moment? Well, there’s a set for each tier and crest. Then you have heal/ap potions. Once you’re all set on your gear it’s really just coming down to heal/ap potions. That’s a LOT of crests sitting around fairly useless. I figure across all my toons I have a couple thousand Officer medallions in equivalency that I have unused.

Another line to another dot. 1.3.4 is bringing us RvR weaponry. This has already been confirmed in various places across the internets. Unfortunately it’s also bringing us RvR weapon currency. The question is why, and so far the answer has been to start a level playing field for all players. Now, a lot of players are concerned about the premade vs pug scenario matches. Since the Weapon Currency will mainly be gained from RvR, it’s not really promoting much of a level playing field at all. The premades will quickly earn their weapons anyway, and will be right on top of the game with the best that these weapons offer us. As far as we know at the moment, there isn’t any real changes coming to scenarios that is going to remedy this situation.

To be honest, I could care less that premades are beating pugs silly. It’s their damn job.

However, to say that a new currency is needed to create a level playing field is just silly, especially when the playing field involves RvR. Land of the Dead scarabs? Yeah, fine, that made sense. Those are from PvE, you don’t kill people to get them, although during the live event you sure could (and guess who did all the killing? premades!). The point I’m getting at is simply that there is NO LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. The haves and have-nots are going to be seperated as far as the game allows these discrepancies. The haves will have the BEST weapons, armor, accessories, pocket items, potions, talismans, liniments, and abilities. The have-nots will… uh… not, for the most part. So why beat around the bush? Are you so deluded that this is going to change anything? 

This is simply a brand-new grind. Thanks for that. We all love grinding our fingers to the bone. At least we can kill people in the process… well, at least some of us can, like the ones that aren’t having problems killing people in the first place. Look, just get rid of the Weapon currency and stick to the RvR currency that we have all accumulated over time. Do the haves get it faster than the have-nots? Well yeah, but they were going to get it faster anyway. It’s the same playing field all around, with less grind. Which is a good thing!

Yanno, for a conversation lasting 20 tweets or so, this was all rolling around in my head. Now onto the meat of the matter.

Since we’re introducing more stuff that people will want to spend their hard-earned RvR currency on anyways, you might want to go with things on the lower end of the scale to pad your options a little bit. If you make weapons scale in power with a range of 500-1000 medallions, there should really be a lower end that buffers some of that savings away. Things that are consumable, or wear off over time. Things like +20 stat talismans, r200 crafting ingredients (blue seeds! zomg!), r200 talisman/apothecary containers, maybe some weapons or armor normally found at PQ’s, tons of stuff! Fill in the bottom end of a vendor with gear and it’ll make reaching that top end so much harder! 

 Here’s the thing that makes it all beautiful, randomize the loot list over time. Ok, well this leads into the other part of the equation. Where are you going to put these vendors? In my mind, they belong out on the battlefields. Skaven scavenger merchant caravans! Picking clean the bodies of the fallen, there would be one roaming Skaven merchant with a pair of Rat Ogres pulling his cart of goods. Neutral to both sides and a fan of violence! See, the thing is these merchants wouldn’t want to roam around in an active battlefield. That’d just be suicide getting caught between two blood thirsty tyranid swarms of raging warriors. Oh no, these merchants would be in the other six RvR lakes just begging for small group on group confrontation. Or rather, ganking.

I’ve always been a big fan of ganking, even though I’m quite horrible at it.

This is the beauty of the thing. Each time a zone flips, in either direction, the merchant would be displaced. The zone coming out of contention would get a new merchant with a fresh loot table and probably a bit of skirmishing over who gets to sample his wares first. How cool is that? Haven’t you ever been in the middle of fighting over a zone when it flipped to watch the battlefield go empty immediately? It’s frustrating! 

Also, for the people working at Mythic, the hardest part of the implementation would be coding the randomizer for when zones flip for a couple dozen different loot tables. The great part is that since it’s in RvR, dead enemy players could be wearing gear from anywhere in the world! Fill loot tables to your hearts content! Aside from that it should just be 9 copies of the same merchant, pathing across the RvR lake like the good ol’ cultivating mobs do in the PvE areas. Look, your dev team is undeniably shrunk. Making small things like this goes a loooong way to bringing something new to the game. Do something like this with every patch, just something small and interesting that is persistent and draws in a bit of RvR. It’s not the scale of huge live events and dungeons, but it’s something players will look to when they’re tired of the options presented to them. People LIKE options.

So, to sum up. Two things.

1. Leave RvR rewards to the already implemented RvR currency.
2. Introduce roaming RvR scavenger merchants to inactive lakes.
3. ????
4. Profit!