heRO SvN Update

[Nidsrule]

GM-Ayu Wrote:Problem with battleground isn't strictly related to the equips.

Your last wall of text was dedicated to describing how one of the assassin BG weapons was better than a carded infiltrator. Then you turn around and say that isn't the main issue. So, what's the real problem then?

GM-Ayu Wrote:Basically, if you have battleground equipments, rarely do you have to hunt for an actual equipment because often they suffice if not beat a "natural carded" weapon.

What is the problem with that? People participating in battlegrounds aren't going to simply go from a set of +4 PvM based gears to a full set of BG gears. Anyone serious about participating in BG's will at least have tried to gear up for WoE and PvP in general. Otherwise, they can look forward to getting steamrolled. Oh and before you start making claims that this is imbalanced from the point of view of new players because they won't have much hope in catching up with "older players". BG's reward both the winning and losing side, so although they will have to put up with getting thrashed to get their gears, they will still eventually end up with the gears they want.

This sense of releasing updates only to appease newer players is redundant. heRO no longer has an issue with attracting new players, but from my point of view it has a serious issue with keeping older players interested. Simply ruling in favor of the interests of new players' is in no way going to help heRO's already lacking PvP environment.

GM-Ayu Wrote:The problem isn't so much with "oh no it got better" but it's more related to the point of player mentality too. Let's say that we give out hydra cards as a prize. From my analysis, that's honestly fine cause the default BG weapons have built in hydra (in a fashion where it's definitely top of the line and not a "wasted hydra") anyway so it's basically the same. However I doubt the results from players will be overly accepted, and most likely we'll end up with polarized activity: those who believe that pvp is undernourished in RO and that BG is a great fix to the situation by giving a reward for pvp, and those who thinks that pvm is once again the one being thrashed upon ("why's PvP the be all/end all of all things, what about <insert another aspect of RO here>", if they get ultimate top tier prizes why can't we get something of equal value for doing such-and-such". BG has a problem of making a server more polarized of "PvP players" against "PvM players" even more than it does now: why can BG reward end game equipment for their needs, but say how come big pvm events don't reward end game mvp needs?

What the hell. Everything about RO, outside of WoE and the very very rare times that the pvp room is active is either about being afk/wasting time talking about nothing in town or participating in PvM. One of the biggest aspects of the SvN update (which for some odd reason isn't even being released first thing anyway) is yet another PvM aspect of the game in the Satan Morroc maps/Dimensional Gorge. Every aspect of gearing a character, at this point, involves some form of PvM.

Then we have heRO's PvP scene. The only real custom aspect that tried to address PvP have been ToH (takes far too much time and only occurs once a month) and the sporadic attempts at hosting GM hosted PvP events did not work. That's not to say I don't appreciate the attempt to promote more PvP events but they didn't work.

So, I'm not convinced of the whole "striking a balance" thing. There is no balance what so ever when it comes to PvP and PvM in RO. Battlegrounds was Gravity's attempt to fix this balance (at least in my opinion) and it works quite well. It's aimed at higher level players, you know, the kind of players who have spent most of their time on RO in a PvM environment trying to level/gear up, so that these players can have another avenue of gearing their chars once they are sick of the same old PvM environment.

GM-Ayu Wrote:Basically, if you have battleground equipments, rarely do you have to hunt for an actual equipment because often they suffice if not beat a "natural carded" weapon.

Once again we get back to this point. The logic behind the bolded statement ONLY applies to the weapons. The battlegrounds armors are all slotted and would require yet another set of PvP based cards (marc, ray, noxious, thara blah blah blah). So you continue by showing one of the Katars as an example. Why no comparisons between the other weapons? Although it provides what some might see as an unnecessary boost to the damage output of a SinX, the other weapons provide (in some cases) much needed buffs to classes.

Case in point, the Clown/Gypsy weapons. Although they in no way make Arrow Vulcan overpowered, they do make it tickle a bit more than it generally does. Same goes for some of the other classes, who's skills become a joke against a target with high defense. The real bonus for these classes lies in their armor sets from BG. Clown and Gypsy in particular receive some very nice buffs which might for once have people playing a gypsy for WoE (clowns on the other hand are a given).

Anyway, which ever reason you have chosen to back in opposition of battlegrounds being implemented (and they seem to be very different views/excuses), I can't say I agree with either being decent reasons for with holding such a major upgrade to RO's PvP environment. I hope you guys at least have something in the works to improve heRO's PvP environment; you can only kill so many mavkas/hillwinds/necros/kasa/blahblahblah before it gets old and tiresome.

RE: Imbalanced teams.

This gets balanced out to a certain degree through both sides at least winning something each round. Sure people might get bad runs of being on the losing side but they'll still have their runs of being on the opposite end as well. I'd still live with the idea of imbalanced teams over having no BGs at all.