And boehoe it’ll turn you into a chicken ? go explore when you are at that level, period.

Unflagged, the player from a higher tier can still indirectly PvP you. You are fighting in a keep, he strolls in, past you and your guild because you can’t attack unflagged PCs, and takes out the keep lord. There goes the keep you were trying to defend.

Or you are trying to do a PQ, he strolls up and heals/buffs the flagged enemy players that ran up with him, while they attack you.

Simply shutting off their ability to flag doesn’t solve the problem.

The closest to a viable solution is a reverse bolster, drag the uptier player down to the level of the content. Remove any skills his new level doesn’t allow, downgrade his gear, etc. Even that has problems, and to be honest, is more work than Mythic should be doing to support a very small subset of the playerbase. I’d much rather have those same resources working on bug fixes and new content for the entire playerbase.

I can only imagine that is why they left the chicken in, because otherwise it would basically break the game. It would be trivial for a bunch of 40s to go take a t2 keep. Most others wouldn’t bother to defend it and probably just stay in t4. Unless, as you point out, it’s the “non competative” guilds fighting it out with their 40s in the lower tiers.

I don’t know, it seems to me if you want ffa or full pvp all the time you need a game that’s based on that concept. WAR is based on tiers of equal level opponents fighting, which could not be more different, even though it’s pvp.

I actually liked the earlier version, rvr everywhere, but you can’t even go 1 level down. i was considering having an alt on an open with that rule, but not the way they made it now.

As the above reasons show, at least in WoW, there are many possible reasons for going to lower level content, that are not related to ganking. While I am sure WAR is very different and probably the exact same reasons don’t apply, it would seem to me that Cyndre has a valid point – by restricting this, Mythic will be restricting at least some of their players. Not restricting just ganking, but restricting valid activities, such as doing lower-level quests for fun (or faction rep, if that exists in WAR), farming mats for professions/AH, etc.

It looks to me as if either: this is a poor decision on the part of Mythic, or – WAR is a much poorer game compared to WoW (AH/professions/faction-rep not as developed). I’ll say however that since I haven’t played WAR I don’t know for certain if this is true – maybe WAR simply has found clever ways to let players get what they need without going to lower level areas…

Area capture in lower levels rolls over into higher levels. If your side ‘owns’ a zone at Tier 1 a portion of points rolls into the WAR effort in T2, a little in T3, and even some in T4. Allowing players to go back unchickened into earlier tiers completely and utterly marginalizes the point of the game – that you can help out your realm from the minute you roll your character. This is well represented and controlled in the Core ruleset.

In the Open ruleset, its just silly. Now, you have to send one of your R40 RR80’s solo into T2 to take and hold the Battlefield Objectives so you can work towards the city siege. It will only take 1 as the content is trivialized. Now the other side has to send 1 too. Wait, need reinforcements – better send more! This will happen in all tiers across all pairings.

So now, your uber top levels are babysitting one-shottable mobs for the WAR effort instead of fighting with comprable characters in a truely challenging setting. Not only that, but level appropriate characters in the content can’t participate meaningfully in any sort of way. So you just ruined both the top end players game and the level appropriate players game at the same time to cater to a dillusioned principle of ‘Open PvP’.

Best way it should have been done, is to not allow you to go back to tiers. You have to stay in your level appropriate tier, but take away the flagging mechanic to begin with. So EVERY area in t2, if you are in that area, you are flagged. You try to go to t1, you chicken. I do agree that it is silly that if you run into a PQ area you can’t fight your enemies, I’m not debating that. The fact that the Open ruleset completely undermines the objective of the way the game was designed is poor vision. Forcing characters to have to move back tiers to defend people who can’t defend themselves may be fun for the ganking crowd, but I am pretty sure even an intelligent ganker will end up getting bored of the sheer stupidity and lack of challenge of it all while upper level characters are fighting over meaningful objectives while they hit the ‘1′ key wasting their time with the lowbies.

To each his own, I suppose.