Who has the zerg?
After reading this post over at Tobold’s I had to write my own opinion/assumption on the subject, which is all either of us are doing, making assumptions. What prompted me to write about this, apart from Tobold’s blog, was that I’d actually had a similar discussion with Kyrana only yesterday.
Tobold makes the assumption that because Destruction is more popular and has longer queues to get in; that casual players who can’t be bothered waiting will just roll Order, while the hardcore players who have hours to play will wait out the queue. On his server, Destruction appears to dominate RvR.
I, on the other hand, have a different opinion, and a different experience. See, on my server, Destruction gets trounced in the Open RvR areas and Keep sieges. The scenarios I’ve been in as a guild have usually led to victory, but again, PuG scenarios are more often than not disastrous. And I have to contend with queues to log in as Destruction. So why is this different?
I play on Phoenix Throne, the NA Core Roleplay server, and I think this is what’s so different. I don’t know if there is a queue to log in as Order, but there always seem to be more Order players when we try to assault or defend a Keep. Attacking a tier 2 Keep with a full warband soon ends up in our slaughter as two warbands of Order turn up to defend.
So I question whether there are more Order players than Destruction. Or perhaps the hardcore RvR guilds rolled on the Order side while the majority of roleplayers created Destruction toons. And roleplayers are reluctant to use Ventrilo or other voice communications. My guild, which is a RP guild, has a Vent server, and yet we get the same seven or eight people using it, out of a guild roster of over 50 members. We do well in scenarios because five of us will be on Vent, but when we had a warband of 12 we still only had five on Vent. Roleplay guilds tend to be smaller also, with people wanting to maintain a more personal guild, where the hardcore RvR guilds may have 100’s of members. So it’s unlikely you will face a warband of roleplayers, which might need to comprise three or four different guilds, where all the players are using Vent.
Both of us experience queues, and yet both of us have different experiences.
Guilds and The Daedalus Project »
Comments
Comment from Kyrana
Time: October 10, 2008, 12:56 pm
Last night is a perfect example. It was a relatively quiet night in our guild–we only had about 15 people on, spread across 3 Tiers, so it ended up being me and two other guildies in a group doing RvR scenarios. (Caliga had to work *shakes fist* so I was missing my personal healer) Two of the three of us were on vent…and it was ugly. Basically, PUGs in the three different scenarios we tried. Out of about 5 battles, only 2 were remotely close. There was no organization, no real communication in the /scenario chat. For example–I actually managed to capture the flag in Phoenix Gate and ran it all the way back to the place to plant the flag. I found no one on Destruction’s side defending our flag, and consequently was killed standing there by the two Order guys who’d chased my chain-mail bikini clad rear all the way back. /facepalm
Well, it was my fault. I should have sent out the shout for help during my run back, but I was frantically sprinting and hitting my new anti-snare spell (*cuddles her new anti-snare spell*) and couldn’t really type. The second time this happened, I managed to squawk out something resembling: HLEP AT OUR FLAG INC and managed to plant the flag and get the points.
We still lost.
I think it’s a combination of many factors. It’s not that RPers aren’t good at RvR. Lots of them are. It’s just that smaller rp guilds don’t have the members to get large parties together without alliances. RPers generally don’t like vent because it breaks “immersion” (and might give away that the hawt dark elf chick is really a dude), and yeah–I think the more avid RvR guys on our server want to be heros for some reason. Go figure.
Comment from Openedge1
Time: October 10, 2008, 8:43 am
All I can say…
RP servers RULEZ, you all Droolz!
Sorry, did not mean to regress there.
Most games I have played have been on the RP server, and it does seem that people want to play “Heroes”, not “Villains” there.
Maybe WoW or EQ2 is the only place it can vary….yet in EQ2 it does not matter as there is no distinction, as Evil can team with Good.
This is an interesting Hypothesis. This may need further research on other games..
Cheers.