PvMP Update and Changes

[jeffryl]

There are 1:3 posts is talking about reverting old Ettenmoors map (with old positions, with no backdoors, with 5th plains op)

Nonsense. New map is really great.The game is more smoother than previously.

[Snowlock]

That notwithstanding, I fully agree with the sentiment that PvE should not be required to participate in PvP (other than whatever PvE is required to reach the level cap).

Hi Ush, hey no offense but I hope SSG doesn't agree. There's a couple different things going on here. We have to take into account the dead servers that need a spark and their populations aren't pvp oriented and will need some kind of incentive to get them going. You have to consider low pop servers too where even if the pvp is still existing on life support, in order to keep it that way you have to give players something to do when the opponent isn't actually out there. And then you need to diversify the action around the map, and the only way to do that is with objectives. In any war, simulation or otherwise the objective isn't to kill your enemy, its to accomplish a goal: Blow up a bridge, sack the capitol, etc. Killing the soldiers is the meta of accomplishing the goal. Its the same in the moors. Without objectives, we camp respawns because that's the meta for gaining points for gaining rank.

[ConsistentRager]

Hi Ush, hey no offense but I hope SSG doesn't agree. There's a couple different things going on here. We have to take into account the dead servers that need a spark and their populations aren't pvp oriented and will need some kind of incentive to get them going. You have to consider low pop servers too where even if the pvp is still existing on life support, in order to keep it that way you have to give players something to do when the opponent isn't actually out there. And then you need to diversify the action around the map, and the only way to do that is with objectives. In any war, simulation or otherwise the objective isn't to kill your enemy, its to accomplish a goal: Blow up a bridge, sack the capitol, etc. Killing the soldiers is the meta of accomplishing the goal. Its the same in the moors. Without objectives, we camp respawns because that's the meta for gaining points for gaining rank.

this might be your personal objective. But for the group of people i play with, we dont log on with the intent "lets take the map" that is just somethign that happens as we play. We log on with the intention lets get kills. if someone wanted to pve they should go do instances. the moors is not and should not and has never been designed around questing.

[Constrictions]

Hello all, I’m Fants (aka. Fantus) and I’ve been working part time on PvMP for the past year. In the past, I was on the world building team from Moria -> Rohan and I’ve returned to work on getting PvMP in a better state.

We understand that there are a lot of issues with PvMP in general, but the goal of these changes isn’t to fix everything all at once. We are trying to slowly right the ship in terms of balance and accessibility, while addressing longstanding issues.

The main goal of this update is to level up everything to the new level cap, create viable PvMP gear for freeps that is not PvE centric, and work on quality-of-life changes. In addition to the PvMP changes, there are several statting changes we are still working on - because of this we are planning on pushing the Bullroarer PvMP preview feedback to next week, likely 10/28. All of these changes are slated to go live with the Gundabad Expansion, though the higher level gear will be gated until the equivalent PvE content releases.


Audacity Rework:
Audacity was reworked to both provide more significant bonuses and to make it a soft requirement for PvMP.
We want to move away from having players required to do high end raiding to attain PvMP viable gear.
At the other end of the spectrum, we don't want PvMP gear to be best in slot across the board for PvE, so this is where Audacity comes in.

-Legacy gear will retain its audacity, but it will be suboptimal
-25 Ranks of Audacity added (now 50, from 25)
-Damage bonus is now multiplicative instead of additive, so it will increase all damage
-Damage bonus now scales from 2% to 50% at ranks 25 to 50 (was 1% to 25%, from 1 to 25)
-Incoming Damage reduction now decreased only at rank 25+
-CC duration reduction scales to -60% by rank 31 (was rank 25)
-Monsters are able to purchase audacity up to rank 50 (was 25)

PvMP Gear:
We are introducing several new gearsets to be released in line with PvE content.
These may be purchased from the respective armor quartermasters in Glan Vraig.
Most pieces will have lower stats overall than a PvE ilevel equivalent, however the audacity damage bonus should make up for this.
The base sets are intentionally not itemized perfectly, however higher tier sets have more optimal statting.
The first set is purchasable with Gold, with the higher sets purchased with commendations.
These sets all have audacity on them, the baseline set has 25.
In addition, there is also now audacity jewelry.
PvMP Rank cloaks have been updated to level 140. If you have already purchased a rank cloak, it should automatically update.

PvMP Essences:
There is a new type of essence, called Essences of War, which are PvMP exclusive.
These may be purchased from the Coldfells Quartermaster in Glan Vraig.
These may only be slotted in PvMP gear and can be bought rather cheaply for commendations.
These will be released in waves with PvE content and will be Rank gated.

Bugfixes:
-Fixed an issue where Monster Players could sneak into Glan Vraig
-Fixed an issue where Gaergoth could be pulled into a state where he couldn't attack
-Increased most Monster Player melee skills to have a 5.2m range, to be on equal footing with Free People.
-Fixed several stuck spots, and line of sight issues around Glan Vraig and Gramsfoot

Will the cloaks rewarded to freeps who got to rank 10 before Oct 31st 2011 be getting scaled?

These were meant to be a reward signalling long-time veterans, and we were told the stats would scale with rank. However, they never scaled with level and very quickly became obsolete.

[Snowlock]

this might be your personal objective. But for the group of people i play with, we dont log on with the intent "lets take the map" that is just somethign that happens as we play. We log on with the intention lets get kills.

I know. I think where the moors are currently is because SSG and Turbine before it have created a map that caters to this playstyle. Some players like yourself may seek to fight club, but the general population doesn't. And they will drift to GV or Grams with the flow if they don't have something better to do.

[ConsistentRager]

I know. I think where the moors are currently is because SSG and Turbine before it have created a map that caters to this playstyle. Some players like yourself may seek to fight club, but the general population doesn't. And they will drift to GV or Grams with the flow if they don't have something better to do.

Correct me if im wrong but but i assume u mean "fight club" as in organized 6v6s or 1v1s, which happens to be the most dedicated pvpers. Either way i mainly do those things because I do not feel like staring at one shotters or a backdoor for hours on end because that is where the action revolves around currently. The general population comes out to kill people on the other team. they do not drift to gv or grams naturally. they do that now because the hotspots are the back doors. If we look in the past prior to 85, people were not mainly at gv or grams they were at Old OC and EC. Because the map was designed to have those places as the hot spots. Delete back doors and add old OC and EC to their original positions and give them relevant npcs and the center of the action changes. it has nothing to do with quests.

[Constrictions]

A lot of these changes look good.

I would recommend thinking about where and how LI's should be considered to fit into the PvMP system.

Ideally I think we should be able to gain traceries via commendations. However, I am sympathetic with others who think LI's should be restricted entirely from PvMP as this will make it easier to balance - particularly if it will be intensive to upkeep.



Moving forward from all of these sorts of considerations, in future I strongly recommend that you revisit some of the map and map mechanic changes that were made previously. In particular,

- Orc Camp and Elf Camp

- Lug Rez

These map changes devastated the flow and ebb of PvMP. It used to be we had a nice run from Glan vrag->Tirith Rhaw->Elf Camp-> Tol Ascaren -> Orc Camp-> Lugazug -> Grams, but since the rez and camp changes that has turned into Glan Vrag -> Tirith Rhaw, then straight to Lugazug -> Grams.

Before this change, players were asking for more incentive to visit the west and south-western most parts of the map, and the northern parts of the map - particularly to encourage small group and fellowship fights. This change didn't do that; all it did was hollow out any action from the middle of the map (Tol Ascaren) which is where the focal point of action was always meant to be.

Outposts sort of helped give some incentive to visit these other parts of the map. The Delving change was pretty good in my opinion, but I think keep backdoors also need a complete rethink.

The removal of Hotspots were also a tragedy for open field raid fights. Hotspots helped give an open field location for a faction to retreat to mid-fight to try and even the odds, or stall their getting defeated/crushed.

Then there is the issue of session play - a boon for an underwhelming force to get an incredibly overpowered character to dramatically even the odds. These have been completely dysfunctional for almost their entire existence since Isengard launched.


I also think that a big imistake was made with the renown/infamy reward system discouraging individuals from playing solo or in small groups; making there be effectively no benefit from being solo or in small groups extremely disincentivised people from solo, small group or fellowship play, and encouraged mass zerg-ranged, tab target heal tagging playstyles, which is extremely boring for everyone.



Seeing you here, I think I will compile a thread of things I think are important on these subjects soon.

[Fants_SSG]

The region is divided up into "server blocks" of identical size that handle all data within the block. when passing from one block to another, character data is handed off from the old block to the new block. The borders of these blocks are static and unchanged since Moors release, and are at this point well known by the majority of the historic playerbase. ...

Sorry, I was under the impression that these were actual stuck locations, and not server boundaries. We can certainly take a look at it moving the boundaries to less important locations, but it's unlikely we will be able to resolve these issues entirely.

[Snowlock]

If we look in the past prior to 85, people were not mainly at gv or grams they were at Old OC and EC. Because the map was designed to have those places as the hot spots. Delete back doors and add old OC and EC to their original positions and give them relevant npcs and the center of the action changes. it has nothing to do with quests.

They were at EC because An was at EC and the creeps came there for the quest, the freeps came there to stop them and the creeps who didn't need the quest came there to kill the freeps. With the arrival of the store, An stopped being so important and people just went there as a matter of habit, but the heart of it was a quest that brought everyone there.

[Fants_SSG]

It is very nice to hear that the vision for PvMP is to move away from players being required to do high-end PvE raiding to attain viable PvMP gear. I would like to hear you go one step further, and say that in every case PvE gear will be categorically bad for PvMP compared to the best PvMP gear.

Regarding PvMP gear being BiS. Would the best solution not be to make it impossible to use outside of PvP zones (if that is viable)? Alternatively, what about giving the gear some sort of effect which applies a crippling debuff to the wearer if you aren't in the Ettenmoors or Osgiliath? I'm not sure what the best approach would be, but it's really much of a muchness if PvMP gear is worse than PvE gear that shouldn't be a problem anymore with Monster Players split off from NPC scaling, as we can just be balanced based on whatever the current PvMP itemisation is.

We don't really have tech to limit gearing options based on location. There are cases where we can do things similar with usage (like potions) but not with equipped gear. The reality is that some PvE gear will have to remain, as we don't have a solution yet to things like LI's, but I think that's something we would like to tackle in the future.

These changes seem alright, but what is the cost of audacity ranks on Creep to go from 1 to 25, and then 25 to 50? Also, a 2% to 50% damage increase from rank 25 to 50 seems quite high? What is the cost of the best PvMP gear pieces?

Still working on the costing of MP side. 50% damage does seem high, but we are trying to bring the TTK down, and that number may shift if it gets too out of hand. The Freep gear isn't cheap, but I think it's more reasonable than what was charged in the past. There is also an upgrade barter in place as well, so you can upgrade everything from T2 onwards with commendations.
Current Costing of Gear

Again, seem alright. Do the PvMP cloaks also give Audacity? Are any of the Audacity ranks applied as a set bonus such that players will be required to wear all pieces in the set to get the Audacity?

This is the one item that doesn't have any audacity, but it has really good vitality and mitigation. There are no set bonuses.

Do the baseline PvMP sets have essence slots? I am concerned less experienced players may stat their gear incorrectly which will warp/skew their experience in PvMP towards claims of the game being unbalanced when in reality they are not slotting their gear correctly.

The base line sets (purchased with gold) do not have slots.

[ConsistentRager]

We don't really have tech to limit gearing options based on location. There are cases where we can do things similar with usage (like potions) but not with equipped gear. The reality is that some PvE gear will have to remain, as we don't have a solution yet to things like LI's, but I think that's something we would like to tackle in the future.

Still working on the costing of MP side. 50% damage does seem high, but we are trying to bring the TTK down, and that number may shift if it gets too out of hand. The Freep gear isn't cheap, but I think it's more reasonable than what was charged in the past. There is also an upgrade barter in place as well, so you can upgrade everything from T2 onwards with commendations.
Current Costing of Gear



This is the one item that doesn't have any audacity, but it has really good vitality and mitigation. There are no set bonuses.



The base line sets (purchased with gold) do not have slots.

For the image you posted. is that the t1 set of freep gear and then t2 upgrade cost? Sorry i may have missed something. and I assume that is commendations not gold right?

[Fants_SSG]

Will the cloaks rewarded to freeps who got to rank 10 before Oct 31st 2011 be getting scaled?

These were meant to be a reward signalling long-time veterans, and we were told the stats would scale with rank. However, they never scaled with level and very quickly became obsolete.

I'm unsure of the cloaks you're referring to, or the significance of that date. The rank cloaks that were updated have been in the game since release, and have been pretty useless since Moria.

[Fants_SSG]

For the image you posted. is that the t1 set of freep gear and then t2 upgrade cost? Sorry i may have missed something. and I assume that is commendations not gold right?

The T1 set is purchased with gold. The image is the costing for T2-T5 and is with commendations. The T1 set is not upgradeable.

[???????]

Additionally, you can make maintaining the balance in the moors much easier for yourselves if you just made it impossible to use PVE gear/weapons etc. in the moors.

Currently, the damage/health we have at the end of an expansion is 3-5x more than what we have at the start.

Cheers,
Ben

No need to invent. It cannot increase the damage so much in 1 patch. The maximum that it increases by 10-15%. Now it has grown by an average of 50% due to the new legendary weapon.

[ConsistentRager]

The T1 set is purchased with gold. The image is the costing for T2-T5 and is with commendations. The T1 set is not upgradeable.

ok thank you!

I just wanted to ask another question in terms of what your goals are for action. Is the end goal to have action focused towards 1v1s 6v6s 12v12s or multiple raid v raid. That distinction will mean a lot in terms of design and how we can help in giving ideas and feedback.

Thank you for all the responses everyone in the pvp community appreciates blue names posting in the monster play forums lol.

[Spilo]

Still working on the costing of MP side. 50% damage does seem high, but we are trying to bring the TTK down, and that number may shift if it gets too out of hand. The Freep gear isn't cheap, but I think it's more reasonable than what was charged in the past. There is also an upgrade barter in place as well, so you can upgrade everything from T2 onwards with commendations.

Would love to see TTK go down, but keep an eye on healing output on both sides (Defilers/Bears/RKs).

Worth noting as well that the current cap for mitigations for Creeps is actually pretty easy to reach with only a few mitigation corruptions, and you can still can get absolutely smashed by Freeps.

I'm a fan of the global -inc damage buff rather than another pointless buff to mitigation corruptions as IMO the strength of mitigation corruptions meant WAY too much variance in Creep frailty- historically you could run with 6 mits and you're nigh invulnerable, run with none and you're dead. Over specialization has been an issue on Creepside, and only having 12 slots means a decent balanced build is impossible. Corruptions should be small bonuses to an overall solid creep stat build.

[ENDrain]

And my last question, why you can't use "Monster Play" buff Requirement for PvMP Gear to lock it in PvE zones ?

Very good question. Why can't the most simple and intuitive solution be applied?

UPD:
I think I get it. To disallow PvE gear from PvMP locations and vice versa based on Effects, devs will have to add "Can't use with effect: Monster Play" property to ALL gear in game. Sounds like no big deal, but things like this scaled to thousands of items per thousands of characters quickly clog up database and memory space and client-server exchange.

The decision with Audacity might not be the most intuitive, but is indeed most optimal given where are SSG now and what resources they have.

[Hallandil]

The T1 set is purchased with gold. The image is the costing for T2-T5 and is with commendations. The T1 set is not upgradeable.

PvMP Gear that doesn't require earning raid-quality gear nor rank-farming in order to unlock it....




'bout damn time!

Legitimate breath of fresh air and can see some of the PvMP lurkers enjoying it.

[venyos]

Very good question. Why can't the most simple and intuitive solution be applied?

But I forgot when it was, but there was PvE gear set that uneqip in bags, when MP buff appear.
Why not do it for PvMP gear now, and you will no have restrictions for stats and slots to PvMP gear.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Sorry, I was under the impression that these were actual stuck locations, and not server boundaries. We can certainly take a look at it moving the boundaries to less important locations, but it's unlikely we will be able to resolve these issues entirely.

There is something you can easily do, although its impact will be limited: identify the nexus points where the 4 corners of server blocks join, and prevent players from running (accidentally or knowingly) massive fights through them.


You will find that several of these joints are already blocked by impassable terrain and large rocks, indicating that the OG devs may have known about this problem... but they didn't block them all, and that's where you see the most lag and crashes.


A relatively minor fix compared to the larger boundary issues stated previously, but it might help and wouldn't take that much dev time... and perhaps spruce up the moors environment a little bit.

[???????]

I know. I think where the moors are currently is because SSG and Turbine before it have created a map that caters to this playstyle. Some players like yourself may seek to fight club, but the general population doesn't. And they will drift to GV or Grams with the flow if they don't have something better to do.

I absolutely disagree. You're just talking about what you see now. It is necessary to reflect on why this did not happen before, but now it has appeared. To look for the cause, and not to talk about the effect. My position is that it happened because the camps were set up unsuccessfully. and it turned out that people just began to run in a straight line from Grem to lugazag. FROM Tirith Row to GW. Another reason why it became so, they made common honor points. Because of this, a lot of deffers appeared, who began to run after solo players and raids and just heal and get honor points for free. Because of this, many solo players just started running after each other. There used to be a lot of roamers. Because everyone wanted to earn more honor points and there was no need to create a deffler and just stand and heal. It is necessary to return the rewards for solo players and for group players, so that from 2 to 6 players receive a higher percentage of glory points, and raids are much less. for example, if you kill a solo player, you get roughly 300, depending on his rating. if three people killed a player, then all three get 150. and if six people killed the same player, then 100. And if a raid came and one player was killed from 7 to 24 players, then the reward should be minimal. 5-10. so that the desire to collect such zergs was also minimal. so that the players would cooperate in groups from 2 to 12 players at most and there would be more profit from this. and after receiving Daffy's honor points for simply healing without being in a group, and never hitting a player.

[galrodan]

They were at EC because An was at EC and the creeps came there for the quest, the freeps came there to stop them and the creeps who didn't need the quest came there to kill the freeps. With the arrival of the store, An stopped being so important and people just went there as a matter of habit, but the heart of it was a quest that brought everyone there.

As someone who played a lot of creepside before the map change. The An quest was at most a little added bonus you'd complete a couple of times a week/once per day. After that, the fights would remain around EC with everyone already having completed the quest. The people I played with at the time also never stated that they went there for the quest. The action happened around that area because of the way the map layout was designed. EC/TA/OC (and the bridges) were 5 strongholds close together with different strengths that complimented the flow of battle between themselves. People like those shuffles more than the current one because they didn't just end with a backdoor or the one-shot line. The old shuffles didn't have these 'breaking points' in a fight so you could chase your opponent into their stronghold even if it meant you'd be at a disadvantage once inside. The shuffles back then ended when 1 side won and the other lost. Which you can argue feels bad for 1 side but I'd argue that having shuffles with no losers and no winners is even worse. It feels like that to me at least. I'd rather have a hard reset on a fight you're never going to win anyways than escaping into a bd only to then map out or not re-engage.

Edit: I don't know if you need to completely remove backdoors to get back to these types of fights as it was not the specific locations of old EC that made fights good but the 'properties' those areas had. So in theory you could put these properties in any place on the map and have better quality fights. With that said I'm not against removing backdoors either but perhaps making them have an induction and only be useable out of combat is enough to recreate these properties.

Mulatic
R14 Reaver
Arkenstone

[Hallandil]

We don't really have tech to limit gearing options based on location. There are cases where we can do things similar with usage (like potions) but not with equipped gear. The reality is that some PvE gear will have to remain, as we don't have a solution yet to things like LI's, but I think that's something we would like to tackle in the future.

Still working on the costing of MP side. 50% damage does seem high, but we are trying to bring the TTK down, and that number may shift if it gets too out of hand. The Freep gear isn't cheap, but I think it's more reasonable than what was charged in the past. There is also an upgrade barter in place as well, so you can upgrade everything from T2 onwards with commendations.
Current Costing of Gear

The base line sets (purchased with gold) do not have slots. That makes the reasoning behind not making scaling sets even less of a valid argument to be honest

The issue with legendary servers is that none of these changes will actually occur, as all the new gear and loot is cap level content. If we did decide to support PvMP on legendary servers, it would be a sub-optimal experience, as it would be double the effort to make any meaningful changes.

And with this, you've already lost me.

Yet another example of an update to the game being restricted to the level range of upcoming content. A quality of life upgrade is a complete waste of time if it occurs in a vacuum.

The Ettenmoors already scales players to "Maximum Level" - I'm not demanding that extra work be done to Legendary Servers - but HOW IN HELL?!? non-capstone players on Arkenstone/Evernight for example be expected to access Audacity? Yes, it is ridiculously easy to rush to the level cap in LOTRO, but it still shows bad design discipline in the process.

--- If not, then why even have the scale-up? What would be the point?

Before someone interjects with "It means more work to make gear" - The game already has infrastructure in place to provide players with scaling gear based off only a handful of base item templates.

Bababooey:




----

Edit: Really frustrating that the available of items and systems is dismissed as "It would not be the best", the problem is you're sacrificing player choice and variety for a clean-cut gameplay loop that might be the "Middle-Earth Gold Standard" but has the replayability shelf-life of milk exposed to Lobelia's face.

[Snowlock]

I'm unsure of the cloaks you're referring to, or the significance of that date. The rank cloaks that were updated have been in the game since release, and have been pretty useless since Moria.

These were pvp cloaks added after the rank cloaks. The stats were supposed to scale with you as you ranked. I've got one called the Hooded Cloak of the Agile Warrior. Pretty sure they were added during a revamp under Kelsan circa 2011.

[Hallandil]

These were pvp cloaks added after the rank cloaks. The stats were supposed to scale with you as you ranked. I've got one called the Hooded Cloak of the Agile Warrior. Pretty sure they were added during a revamp under Kelsan circa 2011.

They were likely made obsolete (removed from vendors are omitted from future handover plans / gameplay details) around the same time as Shimmering Stones and Bright Stones got converted to Commendations.

Anyone who still had them kept the item- but developer support and knowledge of their existence went out the door with revolving staff rotations under Warner Brothers in 2012-2014.