Hypothesis: There are far more players interested in RvR on Destruction than Order.
Expected outcomes: Order scenario queues are trivial, while Destruction scenario queues are lengthy. Open-world RvR will be dominated by Destruction. At lower tiers, when scenarios are the dominant method of gaining renown, Order will have an advantage; they will have more practice in each scenario and RvR generally, along with higher renown rank. Leveling will be faster on Order, if you use scenarios to level. In the long run, Destruction will dominate most servers in tier 4, because they will have more active players in RvR in the open world.
Data point: I spent more than an hour in a queue on Destruction, perhaps two hours, without getting into a scenario. I have never waited five minutes on the Order side. After waiting the one to two hours on Destruction, I switched to order, ran seven to ten scenarios in quick succession, and gained two levels.
Corollary: There may be more people interested in Destruction generally. It is the evil faction, really evil not just Horde, and it is a naturally attractive element to the hardcore PvP population in a game that promotes itself as the PvP alternative to WoW. Carebears are more likely to want to be pretty elves with white lions than heavily scarred goblins with biologically improbably squigs.
: Zubon
I am really disappointed lower tier world RvR was not made more important or rewarding. I mean, asides from just having fun, which has proven time and time again that fun is not enough reason to draw players in, open RvR in lower tiers just isn’t all that rewarding compared to other options.
In all honesty, I’ve been getting burnt out on all the PQ and scenario grinding (yes, it’s sad to say it feels like grinding) and just want some damned massive open ended fights! That’s what drew me to the game and all I can hope for right now is that T4 open RvR will be better.
It’s going to come down to how Tier 4 is played. If it’s a pure numbers game, then the side that sets up a 3 am raid to take all key objectives will win the day. If it’s a situation where one faction can undo a day’s work in an evening, people will be complaining.
We can posit all we want about how Tier 4 is going to be, but we just don’t know yet. Personally, I think that the massive numbers on Destruction is going to be a problem instead of a boon just because it will be harder to log on coordinated attacks because of queue problems.
Our of curiousity what server did you do this on?
I’ve been playing around with different characters and trying out different servers. Server pop is going to have a huge impact on this as well. the only way you’re really going to be able to test this theory is if you played order and destruction on the same server.
Yesterday I was playing my destruction character on Bretonnia and was able to get into Senarios every 15 minutes or so. More if I got out of the Green skin area and went to where the dark elves are. Then it was basically as soon as I got out of a senario another was ready.
I started an Order character on 2 different servers and was waiting 30 minutes – 2 hours for a senario. I ended up jumping around on many different servers before I found one that had a good number of people on at the time I play and was able to get into senarios in a reasonable amount of time.
Just something to think about …
Hmmm, not sure I agree with all of your assumptions Zubon…
On my server, my guild chose to roll Order at the very last minutes for a challange in RvR and to play the underdogs. The top 3-4 guilds on Order are comprised of very serious RvR players, and we have been capping keeps and BOs all over the map.
In organized PvP we crush the destruction. The flip side is, that when we are not acytivly out RvR raiding, destruction typically holds all cap points on the map. I expect that Order will control more than half the map at T4 on my server simply due to more organization and skill in the top raid guilds.
I think people should just relax and wait to see how things turn out. Usually things work themselves out.
I’d say this is a pretty good observation and conclusion.
Order seems to have the upper hand in Scenarios currently on the servers I’ve tried, much of it due to the variety of classes regardless of zone, while Destruction queues get filled with the few classes specific to that area (IE: Greenskins, you’ll see a lot of Squig Herders and Orcs go up against very diverse Order teams).
And on the flip side, as you point out, where unlimited zergs are allowed, Destruction rules the day.
The only questions for me are:
1. Will Tier 4 be better balanced since it’s deeper and wider?
2. Will the whole thing flip as players re-roll Order for easier Renown from Scenarios?
nerrollus, Casualties of WAR plays Order on Averheim and Destruction on Thorgrim.
I do expect there to be server variances. I am more interested in general trends here, not the individual servers that are dominated by guilds x, y, and z. If those variances are significant enough, however, they can be very meaningful. If one devoted guild can flip the balance, the imbalance is not too severe.
heh, I think we need some more time to go by before we can say. Its only been a couple days. People will roll to whichever side they think has the upper hand.
p.s. (what’s so biologically improbable about squigs? Oh, never mind :P)
I agree with your initial assessment. However, I think matters will tend to equilibriate in time – the first couple of months are likely the worst it’s going to be. Many people frustrated playing destruction will switch to another server and try order.
I didn’t foresee these problems and just went order for the underdog challenge. I’m glad I did because I like doing the scenarios, though I may regret it when progressing into open RvR later.
I’m just wanted to point out your data point isn’t going to reflect a true trend unless you were taking data for both sides on the same server. As I pointed out, my own experiences have been the complete oposite of yours. It’s very likely that the balance is going to be different based on which server you play on. This morning I deleted my destruction character and started an order character on the same server to join some friends and the queue times for order are much, much longer than the queue times for destruction.
I’m going to agree with the opinion that the blance will eventually balance out as the game matures and the population influx from release levels out. Didn’t Mythic say that they have a system in place to help ensure the population doesn’t get too far out of whack on a server?
Yeah. Here on Badlands, Destruction doesn’t own a keep or node for more than about an hour before order takes it and keeps it. Currently in t3, theres not a single rvr objective that isn’t controlled by order. Guess I’m playing on bizarro server.
I don’t remember where I read/heard it, but someone said the same theory was out there for World of Warcraft when it was in beta. Horde had most of the population and there were concerns that Alliance was always going to be out-popped on the live servers. However, from what I hear, that’s the complete opposite… Alliance tends to out-pop Horde. Generally people just prefer to be the “good guys” and the pretty elves over the scared and war-torn orcs.
So far, so good.
I’ve spent much of today in T4 sceanrios. This evening has been really brutal – not won Serpents once all day. There is a level imbalance with Destro having more 40 than order playing ( not sure if this is true globally but in scenarios it is). There also seems to be an imbalance of clases which added to the level imbalance has been giving destro the edge all weekend.
There appear to be far fewer order tanks and, to some degree, order healers. With the apparent level imbalance this means that Order have a hill to climb to win.
The long term impact is more disturbing. Currently Destro are getting up to 20k xp and 2-4k renown a scenario. This means that on joining t4 they are likely to level 2-4 times faster than Order which will mean that the imbalance will take longer to even out.
Also, this means that the grind to the top renown level will also be similarly imbalanced assuming that renown rewards and skills upgrade them quicker.
I do wonder if this will cause Order players to switch or leave?
Mythic are trying to even this using xp and renown bonuses on some servers, but if your’e not on one of these then prepare for an uphill struggle.
I would like to see the statistics for the servers , Order, Destro , Avg level time etc.
I think this would highlight what is really happening.