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A lengthy consideration on Ryzom's status as a PVPer

Most of the points stated by the author are valid and have been discussed many times both in this forum and in Ideas section.

Only to me PvP stagnation has nothing or very little to do with community disapproval.

Motivation for PvP can be either a reward or the PvP process itself, or both. Let's evaluate what do we have in Ryzom.

Rewards:

1) A shield, a skirt and a pick for tagged PvP. Good enough, but it's just a handful compared to PvP rewards in other games, i. e. faction stuff in Eve. To people who got used to PvP shops with say 50 entries, this looks like a joke. A bad one.

2) SN stuff for fights over supernodes. Seems OK to me.

3) OP stuff for wins in OP battles. Quality varies from utter trash (I'm looking at you, greslin!) to quite useful things. Some prestige too - i. e. an established guild have to own an OP, and better a good one.

That's it. Once you have collected PvP shop items, supreme/vedice/maga/tekorn/boosted gear, and your guild owns an OP - you are done with PvP for rewards. There are no more levels, like looting, or fighting over territories, or defending something that you have built, like a castle. This sort of motivation is over. What is left is

Process:

1) Variety of playstyles, or let's call them archetypes is scarce - you can either be a nuker, healer or debuffer, heavy or light melee, or a gunner. There is little to none difference between OA or DA caster, or between warrior with a pike and warrior with an axe. Compare that to many different classes in games like DAoC, Lineage or Anarchy Online, or 200+ combat ships in Eve.

2) Variety of actions is also scarce. Half of them is either irrelevant or plain useless in PvP. Same goes for spells.

3) Preparation for PvP - feel free to argue that, but to me PvP in Ryzom is very gear-centered. Gear comes first, random numbers second, player's skill third. Combining stanzas could be a game of itself, but doesn't add much, because see # 2.

3) The process of PvP itself is repetetive and monotonous - hit action, shoot enchant, hit aura, repeat, watch your and opponent's HP bars go down. Very exciting.

4) Outposts - the author has already stated it: sheer numbers win, there is no way for a small guild or alliance to claim an OP on their own, apart from attacks against inactive guilds. Due to OP materials being imbalanced there is only a few popular OP's getting declared all the time. It's always Westgrove/Ginti/Loria/Woodburns like a carousel, throw in BB or EI and you are done. Fighting on the same landscapes doesn't add to variety.

Resuming: an active PvP player can get all the rewards approximately within a year of playing, and get bored with the process even earlier. Once they done with both PvP motivations they quit. Hence the stagnation as the number of incoming new PvP players seems lesser, than the number of bored vets quitting for good. Again, they quit not because of "disapproval" (like they care if their playstyle is approved or not) but because they have no motivations to stay and other MMO's offer much more to them.

What can be done about that? In my opinion - stuffing PvP shopes with new gear, weapons and materials; rebalance of old stanzas and adding new ones; rebalance or revamp of OP mechanics; rebalance of OP materials. That's the minimum, I'm not even talking about next level of rewards. Sounds good, but not with current dev team (no offense here) and not in current state of the game. So the answer is "nothing".

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