Welcome back to the Ettenmoors!

[BimBamBom]

Where do you think I started in my return?

I get it. You're reacting to initial numbers. That's perfect. That's what we need. We need feedback, but it needs to be constructive. If you don't think I'm playing, that's fine.

I hadn't played PvMP in years...getting back in was like diving into Finnish Lakes after a sauna. I'm making adjustments and looking for feedback. Let's row in the same direction and a host of other colloquial sayings.

You are getting your feedback from the wrong sources.
If you are going through with these ridiculous changes I read on the OP (and watched testing on random Youtube clips) you might as well pull the plug right now.
It is bad enough that my tribe of +70 members (once the strongest and largest on Evernight) ALL disappeared together with +30 friends because of the frustration and decline of pvmp with every update on creep side. Now you are going to make it even worse for creeps. I would not be surprised if the real agenda is to kill pmvp once and for all in this 'update' disguise.

[pinlu]

This isnt a huge change but said i would put it here :

Yellow hunter Triple trap is unmitigated, meaning it will nuke any creep through mitigations.This also means that when changes happen that they will still do this.

See exhibit A : https://streamable.com/77y7e3


See exhibit B : https://streamable.com/jd5io1


Another thing i noticed that is with the incoming damage reduction from freep audacity, there is still a strong buildup from many classes : Brawler being a good example, captain another. Would there be any possibility of reworking this so it rewards a different value instead? (x mitigation rating instead for example)

[SingularityNow]

You are getting your feedback from the wrong sources.
If you are going through with these ridiculous changes I read on the OP (and watched testing on random Youtube clips) you might as well pull the plug right now.
It is bad enough that my tribe of +70 members (once the strongest and largest on Evernight) ALL disappeared together with +30 friends because of the frustration and decline of pvmp with every update on creep side. Now you are going to make it even worse for creeps. I would not be surprised if the real agenda is to kill pmvp once and for all in this 'update' disguise.

He is definitely building on what came before in terms of Fantus's work. But Fantus's work was strongly informed by the fight clubbers; not the folks who spend tons of time in the 'Moors in open world play. These were high ranked players whose main concern was parity with the freeps. You can understand their point of view. If everything else is equal: the setting, typically an agreed upon neutral space, the numbers on each side, the make up of the teams, and the rank vs gear level, then the only determining factor is skill. They want to measure their skill against equals. Can't blame them for that. That's why they wanted the pvp gear, to flatten the gear curve so their agreed upon opponents were downshifted in power to match theirs. And that's what they got too.

But what did it do to the moors? They presumably had their fight clubs, then they quit because that's not sustainably interesting pvp in LOTRO. It's fun for like a week, then you've figured out if you're good, or their good, and it's over. There's nothing to punch up against; the freeps they're fighting can't get better gear. And it's the same for the freeps, they can't go out to the pve world to improve. So those guys then quit and leave the balance they asked for for the rest of us to deal with. Which is horrible.

Every freep is difficult to kill for creeps under R8. There are no easy ones anymore. And because of the freep success rate there are tons of them. Creep leaders quit, and the ones that remain only take mid to high ranks. Creeps can't advance because questing is a death sentence; you can't even map to GTR these days, it is literally trapped right on your spawn point by hunters in stealth waiting. You are stuck leaching points at Grams off high ranks in an attempt to rank at least until R5 before someone will even consider taking you in a raid; and thats if you're lucky enough to be out when a leader is out which is fairly rare.

That's current state, at least on Ark.

Now we are increasing the grind on the majority of the creeps. We are increasing the threshold for them to be taken into raids - before it was just, what rank are you, now it will be how much audacity do you have. And we still are dealing with Freeps who are wearing gear that means they are automatically ahead of everyone that is under r8. Why? Because all they have to buy is gear, where creeps have to buy skills and corruptions and get maps too!

And none of this addresses the true form of pvp that is currently in shambles: Raid vs Raid. There are no incentives for leaders to lead. There are no incentives for players to help lowbies. There are no objectives to fight over. There are no mechanics to deal with number disparity. There are no incentives to discourage spawn point fight farms. There are no reasons/goals to be a continual player. PVP is really fun when it works well. How is this update injecting any fun into current state?

I'm not trying to blast Orion, I don't want to offend him or anyone. But the Fantus update was so unfun, and how does adding to it or building off it increase the fun pvp is supposed to be? And don't tell me "getting one shotted by someone in raid gear isn't fun". That's bs because the minute we one or two shot someone, that's super fun. All of these percentages and numbers that you need a math degree to understand isn't any fun, I want to get the heck out of grams.

[Brolad]

He is definitely building on what came before in terms of Fantus's work. But Fantus's work was strongly informed by the fight clubbers;

Now we are increasing the grind on the majority of the creeps. We are increasing the threshold for them to be taken into raids - before it was just, what rank are you, now it will be how much audacity do you have. And we still are dealing with Freeps who are wearing gear that means they are automatically ahead of everyone that is under r8. Why? Because all they have to buy is gear, where creeps have to buy skills and corruptions and get maps too!

If the changes were implemented in accordance with the wishes of the people you're blaming for the changes' current form, the commendations grind would be much lighter, power difference between differently ranked creeps would be much smaller and some consumables would instead be incorporated into creep base stats. But it's obvious that you can't process written feedback and audio feedback, so no idea what might work. Perhaps we can try to draw it for you next time?

[SingularityNow]

If the changes were implemented in accordance with the wishes of the people you're blaming for the changes' current form, the commendations grind would be much lighter, power difference between differently ranked creeps would be much smaller and some consumables would instead be incorporated into creep base stats. But it's obvious that you can't process written feedback and audio feedback, so no idea what might work. Perhaps we can try to draw it for you next time?

Troll.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

He is definitely building on what came before in terms of Fantus's work. But Fantus's work was strongly informed by the fight clubbers; not the folks who spend tons of time in the 'Moors in open world play.

aaaaaaannnnd this is the point of the thread where the entire conversation devolves into a poo-flinging fest of who "real" pvpers are.... its all squabbling from here on out.

thread over.

[Pequen]

Orion is a systems designer. The majority of the conversation should probably be on what design features PVMP should have.

We are wasting a lot of his time talking about class balance to be honest. Everyone knows class balance isnt perfect. Games like wow and league of legends throw insane amounts of money and employees at pvp balance and they still have people complain about class balance. They'll do the best they can but I cant see any productivity coming from complaining about balance.

If class balance is the only thing you want out of this thread you will probably be pretty dissapointed....

[SingularityNow]

aaaaaaannnnd this is the point of the thread where the entire conversation devolves into a poo-flinging fest of who "real" pvpers are.... its all squabbling from here on out.

thread over.

I'm not trying to blast Orion, I don't want to offend him or anyone.

But Fantus's work was strongly informed by the fight clubbers; not the folks who spend tons of time in the 'Moors in open world play. These were high ranked players whose main concern was parity with the freeps. You can understand their point of view. If everything else is equal: the setting, typically an agreed upon neutral space, the numbers on each side, the make up of the teams, and the rank vs gear level, then the only determining factor is skill. They want to measure their skill against equals. Can't blame them for that.

This is just like it was before. Shouting down the people who actually play this game. Ya'll need to stop it.

[MasterSilver]

I continue to believe that audacity is and has always been the wrong direction for the ettenmoors. If it was so wonderful, pvmp would be in a better place. This is in part why they had to make getting the first 24 ranks so easy, because playing in the ettenmoors is essentially gated by audacity. Players love incentives. And they love to be able to keep their hard earned work. Having to lug around even more gear to pvmp is not desirable. Remember how when the cap first came out people flooded the moors to the BiS gear and essences. That isn't a bad thing. The moors gear can start of BiS and then fall off. The set bonuses should be specific to pvmp. So raid gear is better for raiding and pvmp gear better for pvmp, but they both should be able to do the job. I remember when I could just go to the moors with whatever gear I had as a break from pve content. It was nice. Every time the devs have decided they don't want players to play a certain way quality of life in game has gotten worse. Audacity is just another one of those things that keeps good players that raid out of the moors. And for people that pvmp most of the time, they can't bring their hard earned gear on raids either. If you want to separate games make to separate games, otherwise kill audacity and allow players to use what they win/earn/grind anywhere in Middle Earth. It just takes a little more fore thought and testing by devs to make it happen.

[WeirdJedi]

Orion is a systems designer. The majority of the conversation should probably be on what design features PVMP should have.

We are wasting a lot of his time talking about class balance to be honest. Everyone knows class balance isnt perfect. Games like wow and league of legends throw insane amounts of money and employees at pvp balance and they still have people complain about class balance. They'll do the best they can but I cant see any productivity coming from complaining about balance.

If class balance is the only thing you want out of this thread you will probably be pretty dissapointed....

I'd be glad to throw my suggestions out there, but I don't have the level of experience everyone else has. The things I like about the Ettenmoors is rather an unpopular opinion. I don't even like League of Legends, but I'd like to try to have something akin to their battlefield. This means making certain elements formidable like the troll & ranger transformations or those you help in the assist quests. I honestly would like to see more non-player action. This way, those that are less powerful can help out in other ways by focusing on quests and objectives. Even something as simple as "well if you gather this much material, we will gain armor" or "if you feed our troops, there will be more of us that will appear at camp" can be interesting.

[Pequen]

I'd be glad to throw my suggestions out there, but I don't have the level of experience everyone else has. The things I like about the Ettenmoors is rather an unpopular opinion. I don't even like League of Legends, but I'd like to try to have something akin to their battlefield. This means making certain elements formidable like the troll & ranger transformations or those you help in the assist quests. I honestly would like to see more non-player action. This way, those that are less powerful can help out in other ways by focusing on quests and objectives. Even something as simple as "well if you gather this much material, we will gain armor" or "if you feed our troops, there will be more of us that will appear at camp" can be interesting.

This sounds amazing. We used to have more stuff like this. Would love to see more. Being able to contribute to the war as a solo player is a fantastic idea.

[SSG_Orion]

No reason to devolve, name call, undercut, undermine, or anything else of the sort.

Keep it civil, this is discourse.

[Ameranth]

Several people have commented that they want autoflips and maps to be removed. Doing either change would be a mistake.


Maps:

PVP absolutely requires an asymmetric movement system in order to work. Giving both sides the same movement modes would lead to stalemates. If both sides used identical movement modes then the two sides would wind up staring at eachother, with the weaker side always moving away just as fast as the other could advance, and neither side committing unless they thought they had the advantage.

Currently, freeps have tactical movement. No creep can catch them when they're mounted, nor can any creep escape from them. Barring fixed locations that must be defended, they control whether or not a fight happens so it's always on their terms. Unless they're dismounted they retain this advantage even in combat so can still escape if ambushed, while a creep who is engaged immediately loses their run speed buff.

Creeps have strategic movement. They can rapidly respond to a sighting or feint and reposition, but with a limited and very predictable selection of places to appear. They also have a very limited number of uses, and can quickly find themselves with half the group unable to map, forcing the entire raid to withdraw and regroup elsewhere. Maps may be strong, but they have limits that are hit very quickly. If anything, creeps need one more map of each type to fill in gaps in the coverage, perhaps on a meta deed for having all the crude/poor/good maps. Some existing map locations should be moved as well.


Autoflips:

Autoflips are essential to the moors. Low rank players are completely helpless and need to rank up and gather comms before they can fight other players. This requires questing. Questing is also essential even for veteran players on smaller servers. On those servers quests are a significant supplement to the ren/inf/comms gained from small group fights.

Without autoflips to make quests available new players would be severely limited in what quests they could do, since they're completely reliant on having someone else flip keeps for them. If all the keeps belong to the other side and there's no group from their side out, they're completely out of luck. They'll have to leave the moors and come back another time, hoping there's keeps on their side by then.

Autoflips also provide fluidity to the moors, by adding/removing safe locations to use as rally points. Without them the map becomes static, with them threats can appear behind the lines.

However, having a keep autoflip as soon as you leave it is very annoying and a common occurence (and easy to trigger if you know how), so I propose the following rules:
1 - No location can auto if there's combat happening within it's boundaries. This also applies to attached locations, so TA won't auto if EC/OC are under attack. Too often I've had An nearly dead when TA flips and he despawns in mid fight. That's also happened with outposts.
2 - No location can auto within 30 minutes of the last time it switched sides for any reason. Possibly 1 hour.
3 - No location can auto twice in a row. Some other location needs to have autoed in between. Keeps and OP would have seperate tracks for this.
4 - No autoflip can happen within 30 minutes of the last autoflip. Keeps and OP would have seperate timers for this as well.
5 - A keep can't auto unless that side already controls 3+ keeps. Autos won't flip the entire map one color, at worst they'll take a side down to 2 keeps before flipping one back later. Similarly, the DOF will not auto an OP if the controlling side has less OP than the other side.

In addition, remove the 10 turn ins per flip cap on oil/ore quests in TR and Lug, and oil/ore/blades/kindling in TA.

[Melank]

Is it possible to restrict LIs for Freeps?

It may be easier to balance Freeps against Creeps if Freeps didn't have weapons with 499 levels and 12 tracery slots with 4 tiers of traceries plus enhancement runes.


Keeping it simple with regular weapons for Freeps will make it easier to balance Freeps against Creeps in any given time or future patch.

And it will also lead Freeps to learn new playstyles in PvMP without all the LI bonuses for skill and cooldown reductions.

Keep LIs for PvE only please.

[Seattle2k11]

Adding this new audacity will have the same bunch of rank-farmers out getting the top amount of audacity, while the rest of us slow quest or raid our way to the higher amounts. I saw it when the new audacity gear came out. They were farming right in the open. The same thing will happen. I would like to see some way of stopping the rank-farming first. A couple of places are up on the hill above that new arena, the other is close to the Isendeep OP. I am sure there are other places also, anyplace where there are no NPCs to interfere.

[XPICTO]

Is it possible to restrict LIs for Freeps?

It may be easier to balance Freeps against Creeps if Freeps didn't have weapons with 499 levels and 12 tracery slots with 4 tiers of traceries plus enhancement runes.


Keeping it simple with regular weapons for Freeps will make it easier to balance Freeps against Creeps in any given time or future patch.

And it will also lead Freeps to learn new playstyles in PvMP without all the LI bonuses for skill and cooldown reductions.

Keep LIs for PvE only please.

I have been asking for this ever since LI revamp. Keep it simple, keep all based on stats and balancing will be much easier than now.

[XPICTO]

Nothing planned right now. I'm not a fan of the scaling as it is but there are no cycles to dedicate to a change at the moment.

How about allow scaled freeps get access to pvp gear? Currently they cannot barter or use and this makes them completely useless.

[XPICTO]

Adding this new audacity will have the same bunch of rank-farmers out getting the top amount of audacity, while the rest of us slow quest or raid our way to the higher amounts. I saw it when the new audacity gear came out. They were farming right in the open. The same thing will happen. I would like to see some way of stopping the rank-farming first. A couple of places are up on the hill above that new arena, the other is close to the Isendeep OP. I am sure there are other places also, anyplace where there are no NPCs to interfere.

Rank farming has always been there and most likely will not stop. But speaking about grinding audacity - all I wanna do is log in, get a couple of kills, get killed a couple of times and thats it. I dont like the idea to invest weeks per character to get max audacity again and I would rather stop playing.

[LabadalofDorlomin]

No reason to devolve, name call, undercut, undermine, or anything else of the sort.

Keep it civil, this is discourse.

Hey Orion,

I have kind of bit my tongue but it seems now may the best time to talk instead of to far after the fact. (and I hope that this isn't in any way taken personally or of any of the above)

It was a great boost of hope for the uniqueness of Pvmp and somehow it gaining its former glory when you returned and actively took an interest in making this place better. You have some interesting ideas and obviously the insight of how to get to the bottom and manage things within the code. We all as previous posters have said thank you very much from this.

However, even though the line of communication has had the door opened, it seems that there is possibly far to much noise from other things happening on your side. We can hear you and pretty much everything that you are saying but you seem to be only catching the odd word from us and trying to piece together something that may indeed make sense to you even though you have been out of game for many many years. There is a scenario that worries me which can be explained thus:

4 people rent a flat. They all decide to redecorate the common area. So, because nobody can lead by taking in everybody considerations and make the decision they decide to put it to a vote. Each person has a 1st and 2nd choice of colour. After all have cast their vote and the result is in it seems that the carrying vote was for a colour that 2 people voted commonly as their second choice. !! The point of the story is that everybody gets what nobody really wanted.

In many ways, it is like these threads, you ask for opinion in the first instance and then pick out things first that do not seem to be the logical first steps. We all understand that resource including your time is finite and this makes it more important to make the space a place that we all want to enjoy. Otherwise like the analogy above we end up being in a space that makes us all uncomfortable the difference being we can leave this house if it doesn't work for us.

Now I know it isn't a perfect analogy because you are trying to take control and factor in somewhat our opinions but it seems we have already fallen back to the old days of this is a vision written by someone with early knowledge and clouded by or restricted by other team members who have zero experience and look on this space as a possible resource cash cow and therefore is already doomed somewhat and just by making the space free to all isn't going to last for long when folks realise how poorly the area works and therefore creates more unsavoury play styles like the first time you made ReaveR free to play.

I have confidence in your abilities to address this but you really need to be more dialogue before implementing. I know you sat and listened to a thread for some months but much of what was asked for has been overlooked for now.

Please do not see this as a completely poor critique of your work because we know you have a timeline in your head but I guess for us all to engage and to attract old foes back, you need to talk to us fully and frankly and enter dialogue fully. The old Turbine days of this is what you are getting - period should not be returned to.

Peace.

[Askelin]

*cut for space*

A great point tbh.
Orion has other modes of communication that cuts through the radio chatter of players who aren't really big on PvMP but still want to give their takes on the forums about it. So to use your analogy, when painting that wall, you hopefully won't get the neighbour who lives across the street coming in and saying "no this colour is wrong!"
And this sort of work actually requires feedback from players unlike some updates which the changes are already mostly set in stone and just serve as early access. Orion understands this. I thoroughly encourage people to make use of the bullroarer subforum, he does read it even if it's not the only method of gaining feedback for this sort of thing.

The propositions from https://forums.lotro.com/forums/show...s-Monster-Play were suggestions brought up and agreed on from the discord Fantus set up while he had a crack at PvMP last year. He wasn't left with no idea on what people want and he seems to know what to look for with feedback now. And from what I've seen, feedback is working!

[CaerArianrhod]

again did some fights with my reaver

What do you want to say with the video?
That you are winning against opponents who have terribly bad movement abilities for PVP?
But anyway: you are really good

[SSG_Orion]

Several people have commented that they want autoflips and maps to be removed. Doing either change would be a mistake.


Maps:

PVP absolutely requires an asymmetric movement system in order to work. Giving both sides the same movement modes would lead to stalemates. If both sides used identical movement modes then the two sides would wind up staring at eachother, with the weaker side always moving away just as fast as the other could advance, and neither side committing unless they thought they had the advantage.

Currently, freeps have tactical movement. No creep can catch them when they're mounted, nor can any creep escape from them. Barring fixed locations that must be defended, they control whether or not a fight happens so it's always on their terms. Unless they're dismounted they retain this advantage even in combat so can still escape if ambushed, while a creep who is engaged immediately loses their run speed buff.

Creeps have strategic movement. They can rapidly respond to a sighting or feint and reposition, but with a limited and very predictable selection of places to appear. They also have a very limited number of uses, and can quickly find themselves with half the group unable to map, forcing the entire raid to withdraw and regroup elsewhere. Maps may be strong, but they have limits that are hit very quickly. If anything, creeps need one more map of each type to fill in gaps in the coverage, perhaps on a meta deed for having all the crude/poor/good maps. Some existing map locations should be moved as well.

Until there is a better solution available there are no plans to remove maps.

Autoflips:

Autoflips are essential to the moors. Low rank players are completely helpless and need to rank up and gather comms before they can fight other players. This requires questing. Questing is also essential even for veteran players on smaller servers. On those servers quests are a significant supplement to the ren/inf/comms gained from small group fights.

Without autoflips to make quests available new players would be severely limited in what quests they could do, since they're completely reliant on having someone else flip keeps for them. If all the keeps belong to the other side and there's no group from their side out, they're completely out of luck. They'll have to leave the moors and come back another time, hoping there's keeps on their side by then.

Autoflips also provide fluidity to the moors, by adding/removing safe locations to use as rally points. Without them the map becomes static, with them threats can appear behind the lines.

However, having a keep autoflip as soon as you leave it is very annoying and a common occurence (and easy to trigger if you know how), so I propose the following rules:
1 - No location can auto if there's combat happening within it's boundaries. This also applies to attached locations, so TA won't auto if EC/OC are under attack. Too often I've had An nearly dead when TA flips and he despawns in mid fight. That's also happened with outposts.
2 - No location can auto within 30 minutes of the last time it switched sides for any reason. Possibly 1 hour.
3 - No location can auto twice in a row. Some other location needs to have autoed in between. Keeps and OP would have seperate tracks for this.
4 - No autoflip can happen within 30 minutes of the last autoflip. Keeps and OP would have seperate timers for this as well.
5 - A keep can't auto unless that side already controls 3+ keeps. Autos won't flip the entire map one color, at worst they'll take a side down to 2 keeps before flipping one back later. Similarly, the DOF will not auto an OP if the controlling side has less OP than the other side.

In addition, remove the 10 turn ins per flip cap on oil/ore quests in TR and Lug, and oil/ore/blades/kindling in TA.

The autoflip is a bug not a feature. I am trying to track down the reasons. I believe that I have found the source of the problem, but I need to do some more validation and there is no clear timeline on a fix.

[Saruman_Of_Numbers]

Until there is a better solution available there are no plans to remove maps.




The autoflip is a bug not a feature. I am trying to track down the reasons. I believe that I have found the source of the problem, but I need to do some more validation and there is no clear timeline on a fix.

Maps are the bane of any good action. when you can insta-port into any fight anywhere upon an OOC callout, you get the unlivable "map in zergs" on any server/timezone where there's a large population. The solution is to just give creeps some kind of parity for movement speed (just literally make March a mount clone).


"Hey you want to roam in small group?"
"nah no point, we'll just get map-in zerged"

"Hey you want to roam in small group?
"nah no point, any fight with the freeps will just get called out and map-in zerged"


Its one of those factors that leads to everyone balling up in a big lagout shuffle... the futility of escaping into smaller action because the big action will always hunt you down / ruin your fights for easy points.


Also: no one likes autoflips. no one.

[Ameranth]

The autoflip is a bug not a feature. I am trying to track down the reasons. I believe that I have found the source of the problem, but I need to do some more validation and there is no clear timeline on a fix.

If it helps narrow it down, it seems to be related to the keep NPCs despawning. My assumption was always that the CG/Tyrant disappearing made the game decide they'd been killed and flip the keep. During quiet times when there's almost nobody in the moors, we can flip keeps just by running past them to spawn and despawn the NPCs. It's not guaranteed, but it works often enough that it's something we regularly try if we need to pick up/turn in a quest.

However, not every server is Arkenstone with a full raid online 24/7 able to flip keeps in minutes. If this was a bug I firmly believe it should be made into a feature, just with rules to make it less random and annoying. Otherwise it will drastically slow down the ability to rank up on smaller servers as keeps stay one color for days at a time.

[Ameranth]

Maps are the bane of any good action. when you can insta-port into any fight anywhere upon an OOC callout, you get the unlivable "map in zergs" on any server/timezone where there's a large population. The solution is to just give creeps some kind of parity for movement speed (just literally make March a mount clone).


"Hey you want to roam in small group?"
"nah no point, we'll just get map-in zerged"

"Hey you want to roam in small group?
"nah no point, any fight with the freeps will just get called out and map-in zerged"


Its one of those factors that leads to everyone balling up in a big lagout shuffle... the futility of escaping into smaller action because the big action will always hunt you down / ruin your fights for easy points.

"Hey you want to roam in small group?"
"nah, no point, the freeps will just ride us down in the open"

Making March the same speed as a horse still won't be equal, because creeps lose March as soon as they're in combat. You'd need to change the code so all freeps are automatically dismounted the instant they're engaged in combat, and just imagine the outrage from that. You could make it even by removing maps, horses, and March, but now everyone is pissed because of how long it takes to get anywhere.

Also, see my note above about the stalemate that making both sides move the same would cause.

Also: no one likes autoflips. no one.

Perhaps on your server that's true. On mine they're something people sigh about when they happen just after flipping a keep, but wish for when they need to turn in a quest. Not all servers are the same, making rules to fit just one will harm PVP on the others.

If you really want to get rid of autoflips, then quest NPCs need to be moved outside of the keeps so they're always available. Alternatively they could have different locations based on which side owns the control point, like in Annuminas.