Could Chaos and Epic ever merge populations?

[Brunwulf 470]

You can't just merge two servers, and hope it fixes all your problems.

There are many underlining issues that need to be fixed first before any major changes are done.

[Fawkes 1,567]

I had written out a long response explaining why this would be catastrophic (most likely with Epic players getting the raw end of the deal), but then I got angry and deleted it and so I'll just say this: there are too many people with a vested interest shouting about this from the rooftops and making it seem more legitimate/wanted than it actually is. It seriously came out of nowhere and now we're talking about it as if it were years in the making. It's the same manufactured controversy that got Elevation wiped and got all manner of balance-killing hotfixes hastily thrown into the game, causing many of the problems we're still trying to deal with today.

 

On a side note, in the last year or so we've seen what happens when Chaos culture merges with Epic culture. Even if you were to figure out a fair way to transfer skills and items, the two cultures are not compatible and that alone would kill off a good chunk of the Epic population post-merge.

[Pingpong 1,070]

This is like that idea to merge PVE and PVP play styles and hope that people don't abuse the rules too much huh?

[Snoo 280]

18 hours ago, Pingpong said:

This is like that idea to merge PVE and PVP play styles and hope that people don't abuse the rules too much huh?

People will complain about the above however  Merging a pvp server with a pvp server is a lot different to opening up a pve server to pvpers.  So I think the above is not all that relevant. People will  scream about the other server : "but its got skill gain bonuses"  or but "we did the skilling the hard way" and whilst all this is going on the pvp communities will continue to decline to such an extent the last 50 people in the game will still be unable to agree on this particular topic.

 

FFS - merge the servers, put up with the moans and do wurm a favor and stop with this split realm crap.

 

Or.. listen to the 30%ish people (like Rolf said in the last major poll) and deny the other people who want to play and be 1 server or just don't care,  and slowly continue to bleed players. 

 

TLDR: a bunch of text. 

 

 

 

[Klaa 4,872]

Besides trying to integrate two different skillgain systems, which could be done any number of ways... its just math.

 

The underlying problem with such a merger is the playerbases, which fundamentally rejected each other when Epic went live to begin with. Though, there were players who hopped back and forth, including myself. Even volunteered as a CA on JK-H until I found Epic's politics rather dull. Not to mention time constraints in RL, so focused on Chaos more.

 

Granted there's been shifts since then. For example many players who went Epic thinking it would fix all the old issues ended up quitting. Personally they simply brought the old "issues" with them.

[Lancelot 765]

I do not think any merger of chaos and epic will resolve the issues that pvp on both servers have, it will only make them manifest.

[Carmichael 688]

Pristine and release weren't supposed to be merged. People said no and people said yes. Now nobody cares. Do the same thing for the merge and once again in a few months time nobody will care about it

[Propheteer 7,139]

On 3/15/2016 at 11:24 AM, Fireflyb said:

Therefore, the only possible way you could justify combining the PvP clusters is if the introduction of a single cluster/server came with very drastic changes to mechanics affecting the incentives for PvP and for interaction between players on a PvP server.

 

 

 

 

 

the last time a real drastic meaningful change was made for the better was before 2011, if that gives you any idea how long the population will be waiting with this rate of decline.

 

most others between then and now have been knee-jerk changes with little to no basis that have resulted in what we have today.

 

@Lancelot I can't quote your post for some reason, so...

 

I don't think it will solve anything, but it will help with PvP stagnation, having more players is very helpful in that scenario. Having more players also makes the glaring balance issues not as bad. But when your playerbase is quitting rapidly (take a look at Epic), and the developers have a history of very slow, very buggy, very reactionary changes to PvP (or none at all), how do you expect people to stick around long enough to see the new changes implemented? (I will admit i hear things are different now, but I don't know.)

 

On 3/15/2016 at 1:00 PM, Pingpong said:

This is like that idea to merge PVE and PVP play styles and hope that people don't abuse the rules too much huh?

 

Not necessarily. The PvP community is actually very small, a lot of people jumped ship to Epic for all of these ideas that were either a. never released or b. never finished, and a large portion of the epic playerbase hailed from wild because it is the older PvP server.

 

As a prime example, did you know the Demigod system didn't even work until like roughly a year ago? (maybe a year and a half, someone will have to correct me on this.)  Thats still a recent implementation and even then it's still not fully fleshed out, each new god is riddled with bugs when they are released and the players themselves that achieved demigod status have little to no impact on the game other than name.

 

The valrei system still bugs that were reported years and years ago, like 1/3rd of the time where a god will keep all the items, win the scenario and some cases give out an item ingame to whoever was lucky enough to do one mission to get him to move.

Edited March 17, 2016 by Propheteer

[Wilczan 2,048]

 

• Epic players keep their home servers effort, nothing is reset
• Chaos players keep their map effort, nothing is reset
• Elevation is gone (possible refund for traders / deed / PMK founding costs)
• Chaos kingdoms are PMK after reset, now they can decide if they stay PMK or join one of three Kingdom presets
• Epic players can join Kingdom presets on Chaos or one of the existing PMK
• Three kingdom starting towns added to the Chaos map, on west, east and southern shores
• Converting of people stats as was said earlier
• Name change possibility for players with the same or similar names or one-time change for all players

 

[Dairuka 888]

12 hours ago, Propheteer said:

The PvP community is actually very small

 

I'll say.

[Fawkes 1,567]

I'd like to see the poll results broken down by server. Chaos probably wouldn't lose too much so naturally they'll be more inclined to say yes, but we shouldn't put one server's fate in the hands of people who don't even live on that server. It'd be like Freedom voting to close down Chaos to help boost the Freedom population.

[SeeD 117]

Why not send chaos to the epic cluster? The map needs a reset anyways, simply whatever skill is higher (freedom vs epic copy) stays

[Wargasm 1,928]

I don't think NOT merging Chaos and Epic is the reason for all the PvP stagnation.  It's actually three other things:

 

1.  Broken artifacts (broken as in OP)

2.  The informers relay thing.

3.  Instant Karma-teleporting

 

None of these three things are fixed by merging Chaos and Epic.  A map reset of Chaos (or Epic) won't fix any of these three things.  There are fundamental changes needing to be addressed to PvP before we even consider merging or resetting any maps.  I'm not saying these are the only three issues, but rather being among other necessary changes.  Supposedly, Retro knows what the issues are, and I can only hope that they have half a brain enough to filter out the KvK BS and actually balance PvP.

 

I will also agree with the others that have said that there is no change that would please everyone.  No matter how you connect/disconnect existing servers, the biggest hangup is Epic players losing their deeds and Freedom players being unhappy about the skill disparity.

[Caveman 86]

The population the entire epic cluster is extremely low, and chaos isn't much better. The whole pvp system needs a revamp. New continents, remove one kingdom; seriously does anyone play MR? and chaos and epic need to be merged. Flame on, but you know I'm right.

[Alexgopen 2,376]

16 minutes ago, Caveman said:

The population the entire epic cluster is extremely low, and chaos isn't much better. The whole pvp system needs a revamp. New continents, remove one kingdom; seriously does anyone play MR? and chaos and epic need to be merged. Flame on, but you know I'm right.

 

Missed you bud 

[Eltaran 79]

In most PvP games that have two factions people are constantly complaining that everything was better in DAoC with three factions... why would that be different here? Just because of the population?

 

With two factions you quickly get to the point of the smaller one standing no chance as games tend to have a lot of winning team joiners

 

[Redd 4,281]

On 3/19/2016 at 7:47 PM, Wargasm said:

1.  Broken artifacts (broken as in OP)

 

This is my trigger, so i'll reply.

 

What in the world makes you think artifacts are a reason for PvP stagnation? They arent even used in PvP any more BECAUSE they are useless. How can you even so much as claim they are a reason for stagnation (due to them being OP) when they arent even used right now for the complete opposite reason. If you're going to try push an agenda with information you've made up, at least make it so that your argument makes sense.

[polarbear 284]

From most people have said in the past... The biggest problem which is only solved by some trickery coding is the skill gain. One uses the old system and the other uses a curve. The only way to merge is to put in the code per player ID of some sort to allow each individual player to keep his/her skill gain mechanic and each new player on the "new" pvp server would get to either choose or set it to one or the other type of skill gain. (The problem you run into even doing all this, is that some players have toons that have skill both on the epic cluster and on freedom cluster.) I'm sure most of this has been said before in this thread somewhere. 

[Wargasm 1,928]

10 hours ago, Redd said:

 

This is my trigger, so i'll reply.

 

What in the world makes you think artifacts are a reason for PvP stagnation? They arent even used in PvP any more BECAUSE they are useless. How can you even so much as claim they are a reason for stagnation (due to them being OP) when they arent even used right now for the complete opposite reason. If you're going to try push an agenda with information you've made up, at least make it so that your argument makes sense.

 

Being able to locate souls despite wearing nolocate is useless?  Mmmmk.

Orb of doom is useless?  Mmmmmmk.

 

The only reason you think they're "useless" is because they sit on some alt somewhere because you don't want to lose them.  Which furthers my point.  If they are so useless, why do you care about them so much?

 

[Egard 3,369]

On Epic we use the scepter of accession and scale of libila constantly pretty strong artifacts. I can hit shield of the gone players for 30 damage with scepter and it's one handed.