Hello, this is one of the GameSages of the other server, and this is what one of our members had to say about the PvP and the changes. Just wanted to see if there could be some discussion on this subject .

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Posted by deadsprite, Yesterday, at 16:03

So, over the past few eras the population of pvpers has been constantly dropping. After thinking about it, lets go over a few of the changes that doesn't really encourage people to pvp alot. I'll start with some of the obvious to this era especially:

Battle Rating:
This era in particular the BR seems to GREATLY boost ones pvp lvl higher than what it should be based on research. (this is opposed to last eras where BR only slightly boosted it.) A Good example will be my alt (raunchyterran) and Sentior. both have comparable research, similar followers in the buildings and traits are only slightly different. The wins are darn near the same but the BATTLE RATING is considerably different since i was only defending land and sentior is seeking a BR. What happens is sentior gets boosted into the double digits while i'm sitting back almost 1/3 to 1/2 his lvl. This will not encourage new gamers who decided to pvp a little later on to seek a BR nor will it favor the BR seeking since the people with a battle rating will be constantly fighting each other (and almost excluded from the occasion dueling ground person since they will need to maintain that battle rating to not drop like a rock after 14 days) and the non battle rating seeking will be little mini medal gatherers since ... especially right now 6 or 7 of the top 10 medal holders on the ladder are not on the battle rating ladder in the top ten or even in the top 20. which will be fine, but if the goal is to later award medals to people ... will the top 3 people in battle rating not get a medal again? and then, who will start to fight solely for medals and who will fight solely for battle rating. (one helps your cv, the other doesn't)



Rewards:
Now, back in the closed beta, the rewards where huge for doing pvp. You could use your shard bonus, get a big wad of shards (in the triple digits), and get a trophy for your cv. Now you get a small wad of shards in the range of 5 shards to 130 shards (the most i ever got from pvp now) and the shard bonus can not be used. Also now that there are 2 types of pvp ... you still have no beneficial reward other than holding land (for a small +5% if you hold all 6 lands and a chance at getting charm ingredients from your gardens) or from seeking a BR pvp other than trophies for sorcery or a Battle rating which has (in effect) divine composition of 14 days if you will. so really, since fighting is only to gain and hold the land you will see alot less exchanging of land once the CV's lvls start to spread out past the 3rd week. The exception to this will be the pvp bosses. Now based on this weeks maintnence it went as follows: cv's before the maintnence secure the land around the pvp boss. then shortly after maintence the CV rushes the boss in an attempt at gaining the rewards. Lots of fighting ensues until the boss is defeated ... then nothing ... no more fighting ... everything goes back to normal. no more pvp the day.

Opponents:
There is a distinct lack of people willing to pvp. No suprize since there are a lack of benefits to pvp other than the chance to get on the ladder for either battle rating or medals. This really is for people beyond lvl 15-20 in pvp ... since beyond that there aren't many who strive for the higher lvls. Lockpick has PVP events all the time that range from not losing durability on gear for a week while you pvp to giving rewards to people who successfully achieve a certain Battle rating. We have no such events. Nothing to encourage people to pvp other than a change of pace. pretty much anything is better than nothing at all.

Bugs:
We still have some rather annoying bugs (from closed beta mind you) that relate to pvp. Others can explain these better than I can, so here it goes. on a couple of the maps when trying to take a Victory Location or Tactical Location ... your units freeze when walking towards it ... it becomes difficult to take, and you are at a disadvantage from the game basically screwing you over. there are others from the game still crashing, to fake level fighting to multiple others, but if someone wants to explain some better, do so.

I know there are other things that don't help pvp ... but i'm tired and others can add to this. My suggestion is to NOT butcher pvp and make it beneficial again for people to pvp. Seems like lockpick is fixing the problems to their pvp problems and only creating new ones for us. oh well ...

One of the other members, Sentior, had this to say
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Although both types of PvP are beneficial to your CV, (BattleRating bonus and territory bonus + gatherers), I do agree that there are far too little rewards for Ranked fights. For fights on the islands, there is virtually no points, unless you want medals.

Once you get past the first few islands, mostly you are left alone if you leave others alone, since there is nothing to gain from fighting one another on the islands. (Exluding the PvP boss)

About the Duelling Grounds system, i like how it randomizes our opponent slightly. However, at higher levels, there will be next to no opponents. Also, i dislike how the play screen still shows up. If that part was removed, noone would get a chance to DC from a player if they do not wish to fight that specific player. (They still can disconnect once the game started of course, but then the winner atleast gets the rewards).

For the rewards, it's simply showable if you compare PvE and PvP. In several parts of the game, they are named equally. You also have different levels for both. Yet, you can pretty much get by without doing any PvP, but without doing PvE, you don't get far. Personally, i believe Soul Shard bonusses SHOULD be useable in PvP, and it should actually be worth it to fight one another.

I seek battle. Where is it? =(

From the PvP event I see a lot more fighting going on. Item duration is protected, greatly increased medical output, and rewards of gear really gives people a reason to fight.

In my opinion, the loss of units is one of the most discouraging aspects of PvP -- specifically within the first few days of the game.

Though there does need to be penalties with PvP that much I can understand, otherwise quite a bit of harrassing can go on. Overall, however, with a good medical building these days (for better or for worse), you can PvP without the loss of units.

I have to say, we haven't had PvP events over where we're at so I'm not really sure the effect that that would have over there.

Perhaps this could go into the ideas part, but a lot of people here are asking for a dualing grounds "island", that is, a 1-50 PvP island where it would act as a lobby, while this would remain random, this would allow people to see who could possibly be in range in the PvP Dueling grounds.

There used to be such an island but it was changed to represent the final levels of PvP.

Even after all of the feedback PvP is unpopular simply due to punishments. Regardless of how effective crafting becomes even with the new improved market access for all taking damage to items is a punishment that isn't needed for PvP. It costs Tribute to repair items and a lot of people do not have tribute to carry out repairs, if you're well into PvP the last thing you want to do is grind PvE missions for army equipment.

The game is still biased toward Tribute users and Organised CVs. This is their money maker so yes it should have a priority but punishing your entire pvp populace simply for playing is and always will be, unacceptable. Don't get me wrong you should be able to do damage to the enemies ability to continue fighting but it should not cost them tribute to recuperate strength.

Then there is the concept of balance, there is almost no balance between a 4 era Player using a Fully Tribute Army compared to a fresh player without Tribute. There is little balance between a 4 era Premium player and a fresh player with no traits. If it's a 4 era, premium, tribute user...the fight is already won against most others.

I believe the developers are too afraid of a rewarding PvP system being abused and so we're not yet getting worthwhile benefits for playing ranked. PvP requires the largest input and should grant the biggest rewards but due to the potential of abusing a high reward system it's something that needs handling with care.

yeah people should be more intrested in pvp but giving better rewards is just one of the things that should be improved.

more equel fights encourage people also and that could be acomplished by making the pvp rating more depended on battle rating

Last I checked, BR does have quite an affect depending out the output of tp =P

Pretty interesting posts above.

My inputs about it as a non tribute user.

PVP rewards:
I don't think increasing them will bring many people into PvP - except if it becomes more interesting than PvE to win soul shards - it can switch people from DG to land fighting and vice-versa though.
PvE is taking most of my time and I barely manage to use all my soul shard bonus. CV quests also increase the time spent in PvE thus letting less room for PvP fights.
Increasing PvP rewards will probably just be good for good CVs with old players, like the world boss rewards giving more than 300% loot bonus to a few CVS...

Disconnection:
There should be a way to prevent people avoiding fights. Either by finding a better way to match players - so that both players could hope for a win in each match - or punishing people who engage fights and lose/disconnect it - although punishment would reduce PvP activity.
Preventing disconnection or not showing name won't work in my opinion. Currently I generally leave fights at the beginning with "esc+y" when I can't win. Of course it gives medals and win to opponent but that's not really fun especially when I do it several times in a row to reach attack limit then claim lands without winning a single match...

PvP events:
It's rather nice especially the non gear durability loss. I fight more at that moment. Otherwise I fight in PvP without any gears except the ones found against PvE boss and that's quite an handicap

Island for all:
I would really like to see it. Especially if it doesn't bring ingame rewards but provides an entertaining and fair PvP.
It would be the standard multiplayer mode in RTS:
For instance by giving each player the possibility to pick his race then have the whole technology trees for pvp and pve unlocked. Gears/abilities could be picked in the same pool by each opponent...

Player gap:
This is increasing over eras, it's normal to reward people which played/paid more in my opinion. But that also prevents new players to compete with old CVs and old players, making the game less atractive for them.

Well, on the Aeria Games version, we have no such thing as a premium member, so the only difference is traits or the occasional gear we have to buy straight out of pocket. we also have a market which is open to everyone so the advantages you guys have on the dreamlords.com version are not the same as ours since everyone is pretty even after 2 full eras and even a newbie can take on someone with all the traits he can buy if the newbie knows how to play. Instead .. our pvp which is also your pvp ... hurts the players who do pvp since there are no rewards/benefits save for what i listed (and ktcaop copied here). Since Aeria Games is also dependant on the changes being made by lockpick, we have no control over the fact that half the game play (pvp) is being butchered for the sake of fixing things on a server we don't have access to, nor do we have those potential problems. As much as I hate to say it, there needs to be a lack of changes to the aeriagames.com version, or to change it so there are 2 sets of changes. I can tell you right now, that the shards gained from the fights are a huge thing on the aeriagames.com version. Since we don't gain tribute like you guys, have to buy all our extra traits, and we can use the market openly ... crafting and equipment become more needed, as well as shards make the game go round for gnosis. Killing the game you liscensed out the distribution rights to (in an attempt to keep the original viable) isn't smart business since the prices were set so high that it costs around $2 us currency for just one extra trait, and a full set of lvl 1 dreamlord gear costs around $17.50 us currency (lvl 4 is around $35) and it only lasts for 30 days. as opposed to the estimated monthly cost of you guys which is around $25 and you guys freely gain tribute which gets you those things and more for free. Sorry, i just don't see lockpick treating it's other version as anything more than the step child you don't like.

I just can't let that last one slip without a comment. We love working with Aeria Games and there is no way we would intentionally treat your server worse than ours. We don't spend time in game on that server as we do here but that is a different story.

When it comes to pricing and premium Aeria games decides everything that has to do with tribute/premium etc on your end. We do not. They want all their games to be without any sort of subscription which is a choice they make and we abide by. The reason you can't gain tribute/aeria points (which btw is a really small amount over here) in game over at Aeria is that it would affect the other games as well as you use Aeria Points as your only currency in all games. They have a full portal of games and our game has to fit their total model. They have millions of gamers in their community and in my eyes they are one of the absolute best communities for free mmo games.

When it comes to your comment about "butchering pvp" which I assume is in remark to us placing DG into the game and not allowing you to pick your fights there are a few things that you should think of:

1) The biggest threat to any niche game is not gaining player base. The mechanics of the game allowed a behavior of the experienced players to "stay small" and beat new players to a pulp. New players who just wanted to try out capturing territories etc. There is no way I will accept that our game encourage this by mechanics. DG has been introduced and we will (as you may read in other posts) keep on working on making this work better for the sake of eliminating newbie bashing. This is/was a global problem on all servers.

2) If all players who wanted to PvP would be more willing to actually press that DG button there would be more PvP there, pretty simple. The incentives are not there to bash people on islands anymore. But instead we still see people wanting to "pick their fights" on the islands over risking meeting the top players. This leaves the DG empty thus we need to work on getting a new matching algorithm based on something else. Perhaps a pure BR rating.

What we as developers can do is work on incentives and trying to establish a game balance (in probably THE game in the world that is most difficult to balance with intra/inter era factors) in such a way that the playing field is rather balanced when taking into account all factors. We can introduce a few game mechanic blocks as well but I am more for working with incentives than enforcing a behavior.
What players need to do is to give us feedback on the incentives & balance and adapt their strategies to play the game in such a way that it benefits them.