So how about this idea? Holding an Objective or Keep in a zone gives Victory Points over time instead of instantly? Holding all Objectives and Keep for 24 hours give you enough points to capture the zone, and even if the other side recaptures things the points will still remain, they will just slowly go the other way.
As the zone gain VP over time all people in the zone will also gain renown and experience. This make people stay to defend and the battle and it’s just as important for others to take up the torch when you log off as when you captured the things in the first place. Killing enemies in range of Objectives and Keeps give extra renown and experience.
This also removes the possibility of capturing zone in the middle of the night. You could still do it and capture the objectives, but the zone still won’t be captured until the points have slowly trickled in.
Dune Messiah
Elminster in Myth Drannor
Congratulations. You spent about 20 minutes thinking on it and came up with a better concept than the current implementation! :)
I would like to add two more ideas to it from a comment on my site:
1) Add crafting vendors to keeps that improve over time. For every hour you hold a keep, the quality of the items will improve by 10-15 tradeskill, starting at a decent base (e.g., 50). Therefore, after holding a keep for 4 hours, your vendor will sell items up to level 110 (15/hour + base). By hour 8, 170 tradeskill. And so on… Give members of the guild/alliance who are holding the keep a discount on prices.
2) Decrease the cost of claiming keeps. If the maintenance cost was 1 to 3 gold per hour, it would become much more affordable. At the moment, only the richest of the zerg guilds can afford it.
I think your idea is absolutely brilliant. I really hate that they force us into scenarios and PvE especially to help move the zone control meter along. It’s a pretty blatant attempt at forcing us into timesinks. Once everyone is rank 40, why the hell would they want to do PQs for hours on end? It’s stupid.
I think a lot of people are coming to the same conclusion here.
Absolutely agree with everything you said - here’s another twist to consider:
Captured keeps could ‘level up’ over time, similar to capital cities.
For example, a newly captured keep is in ‘bronze’ status, and earns a small amount of VP per hour.
After 12 hours, the keep levels up to ’silver’ status, and now generates a significantly higher amount of VP.
After 48 hours, the keep is now in ‘gold’ status, and generates a massive amount of VP.
As the defended keep is levelling up:
- the quality of renown gear available at that keep increases
- XP and renown bonuses are continuously generated by the keep and bestowed to players of the defending realm
- the quality of loot drops available for attackers increases
- the difficulty of NPC defenders increases
My point is this: the longer a keep is held, the more strategically important it becomes to knock off, thus a single keep can become the focal point for both defenders and attackers.
A single high-level keep would not be enough to flip a zone, but it would mean that not every objective/keep would need to be captured in order to win.
What do you think?
Here are some more ideas:
1) Triple Renown for Open RVR
2) Allow level 40’s in there own scenarios …level 28-39 competing for renown and xp. Since all level 40’s care about is renown.
30 Disable zone control by winning scenarios; only allow PQ’s and Open RVR to influence the meter.
It sucks we had a keep held for 1 1/2 hours and since we don’t have an alliance and we had to sleep (we are a small guild) it wasnt defended and we lost it. We also only have 187 gold so we can’t hold it for long it could bankrupt us. We need a reason to stay and defend and make it worth other peoples time to help us defend it. The only xp we got was when the keep was attack ..its just not worth it. We actually had a guild have the nerve to ask us to remove our banner so they could place their and they would defend it.
Another thought. I never played DaoC, but it seems like one the main advantages was that people (of all levels?) got tokens to turn in for pretty good gear. Why not also have enemy players (and mobs) drop tokens when killed in the RvR lakes. You could turn these in for the high-level armor sets, rather than (or in addition to) the Keep Lord PQ system. You could even put in some tiered token system, with higher rank (or better- renown rank) players droping rarer/more valuable tokens. And then you could set it up set it up so that you could also get the highest armor sets (or a new equivalent set) by, say killing X renown rank 80 players, or Y guildleaders, or whatever. Or maybe only have the best tokens drop when you kill a player in their city (so that people still want to get to the siege part). You could put the some mobs and PQs out in the lake which dropped the tokens as well (but at a slower rate), so people would have even more reason to be out and about even if the other team isn’t there.
I think a oRvR system with
- leveled keeps and vendors that give slow but continuous RP boosts
- increased XP and renown gains when killing enemy PCs close to keeps
- a token system which allows players to get the high-level armor sets purely through RvR
would probably be a big improvement.