On RvR Lakes

I was reading Gaara's entry on his meeting with other bloggers with Mythic and the suggestion came up on there being interesting areas of interest in the pve area while the rvr lakes only had small uninteresting buildings or a "pile of rocks" to defend.

Its been a long time since i've played WAR and have forgotten about the server types and have heard there are very few left. I remember there being a PVP type of server where you could attack an enemy whether he was flagged or not. Mythic did a fantastic job in pathing the player through pve where the player would rarely meet up with an opposing faction unless they were specifically exploring and looking for trouble. As an explorer by heart, I always feared for my virtual life while in the enemy territory. Mythic didn't do a good enough job in creating a stealth class like Trion did with Rift, but that didn't stop me from going to each part of the map looking for tome unlocks!

It would be great if the maps, questing and pathing could direct players in every tier to bump into and encourage skirmishes and not be specifically in the RVR area. I always found the RVR area to be a bit too sterile; too empty, too far apart, nothing truly interesting in them except those special scrolls for (what else?) tome unlocks. To make the whole map the RVR lake; where what you do contributes to the warfront. Possibly doing a quest, pushes npc friendlies closer to the enemy towns. Similar to Rift, the ability to destroy the Rift crystal, overrun and convert the town into your control. There would be a warcamp which has no possibility to take over, with max level npcs, and many seige defending weapons.

Pushing the warfront forward, will unlock new pve and pvp quests at each town. Each quest will be unique because the town used to be a player town for a specific faction. The warfront is pushed via pve quests, pvp quests, rvr control, scenarios, skimishes and public quests. The strength of the defenders of the town is based on the progress of those indicators. But as you get closer to the enemy's warcamp, the stronger their defences get, even if you are dominating in each facet. There should be special currency like Rift currency (planarite) that will be granted from all forms of participation, where with reputation (elf/orc/chaos) will grant special items the players will be able to buy. If people are concentrating on a certain task (that they might find is most efficient), Mythic can create Live Events to move it in a different direction.

As before, if you don't belong to a lower level tier, you will turn into a chicken, providing a nice target for the lowbies. The rewards should be good for a realm (elf/orc/chaos) that you are dominating in to encourage defence instead of zerging to a different realm. Zerging should also be minimized in this way b/c domination in one or two areas (rvr control and say scenarios) is not enough and the defending towns will still be rather strong.

These warfronts will not only be a direct line which is rather boring, but a matrix, allowing different venues of attack; if a town is too well defended, the wargroup can go attack a weaker town. And though this can be done, once again, this will make the other defending towns stronger and require more participation (questing, public questing) first, to weaken the defenders.

Mythic can still raise WAR from the ashes and soar like a powerful phoenix and make the game more engaging. It won't be easy (or cheap), but nothing worth it ever is!