Title: T4 node war changes were implemented poorly

Family Name: HeartKing

Region (NA/EU): NA

Every guild on the NA servers only plays on caps now because the devs smooshed all the T4 uncapped nodes on 75 and 100 mans on 6/8 of the available nodes. People might have 150 players in their alliances, but people have lives and therefore most guilds can only pull 50 or so people for node wars. The exception to this might be ChoNation or Digital but this even furthers my point: having one guild able to reliably cap while the other is down 25-50 people makes for a horrific slaughter that is completely one-sided. The player base isn't big enough to sustain those node war sizes and people don't want to fight on t4s if they know they're going to be at a player disadvantage so no fight ever occurs.

The alternative is capped nodes and t3s and t2s are so disgustingly bad as a melee character invalidating a majority of the classes. The amount of evasion and damage reduction you have compared to how much ap and accuracy you have is whack and favors ranged classes (which are already the strongest types of classes on a node war). You cannot take chip damage or you die. You cannot get back attacked or you die. You cannot get PA because of the DR caps so you die. Another issue with caps is not all characters are created equally. For example, awakened hash can't reach the 20% accuracy rate cap safely in a ball fight and has no accuracy on his skills so he just experiences horrible damage. Classes such as sage has a 20% accuracy as a skill modifier and also on top of that has an 18% evasion shred so he just nukes everyone anyways. So to put this into perspective: The highly unprotected melee character is doing less damage and taking more damage than the character who gets a protected mid-ranged/high aoe skill every time they use rift chain on cooldown. Make it make sense.

In addition to the inability to have enough guild that cap t4 node wars and horrific imbalance caps directly cause, I highly recommend you switch every (yes I mean every) single t4 node into 50 mans or lower. The reasons for this is because:
1. The game runs like hot garbage when more than 200 are in the same load chunk and has horrible framerates. Also, the game struggles to calculate what is happening server-side and starts lagging to a point where it becomes unplayable.
2. People feel more impactful when there are fewer people around them making it more enjoyable for the individuals.
3. When groups of people start clumping up and forming a ball, range damage and massive AoEs become the only form of viable damage. Caster's protected area/heals/shai buffs/feeding zerkers become disgustingly strong and unfun to play against or conform to. There are 48 different specs you can play in this game and about 8 are meta on 100-man caps. That's just sad.

People with less gear can still have their capped nodes, just please let us geared players have our node wars back too. Thanks for reading it means a lot and I know for a fact all of the guild Crawling Chaos and the alliance Dentus feels the same way. The easy bandaid fix that could be done is just to make every day have a second t4 50 man but then you run into segmenting your player base again like the previous node war system caused and we definitely don't want that either.

Also, centralize the servers already like J said he would during the ball. ty <3

want an easy fix that's not bandaid? remove t2 and t3 gear caps, problem solved

your fix doesn't solve any issues, just creates more

I agree with your frustration at the lack of uncapped gear options and dislike for capped contnet, I also realise NA will have a different meta and guild size distribution, but your solution is to remove any option for larger raids to be able to NW at all? Even if you lack larger guilds on NA, that would make no sense on principle to the current system. 

Other potential solutions to your problem:

- Distribute the nodes better (Sunday doesn't need x3 larger scale T4 nodes, could be one larger and one medium and then take a T4 and place it on another popular war day)

- Uncap gear restriction on T3 with them as a medium option on most popular war days. There are still ample capped options without T3 (this is assuming you stick at current approach rather than suggested AoS style systems for capped NWs so even more so wouldn't need as many capped tiers)

- Make rewards differentiate between tiers and node number cap so it's worth scaling up the system

- Remove 150 alliance system (revert back to 100man limit so equal size opportunity to guilds) so better chance of players distributed into more projects and so that % attendance matters more to those who wish to push activity at higher scales. 

Other points to your post:

- Server performance is a separate discussion that everyone would love to improve regardless of the scale preference.

- You don't need to max out the number cap to participate in a node? If more guilds drop together on a node, there will be options for the fight among different strengths and sizes. XvX or player politics being a part of the game made for far more entertaining fight distribution than game restrictions that too often result in dodging or predictable outcomes. You argue people have lives so that's why you want only lower caps, but isn't it far worse if the game would then actively deny guilds who have more players wanting to play? 

I think he's speaking about number of players allowed in war, not gear caps. 

Problem: Dead days and splitting the player base: not enough players to support 100 mans and 100 mans are bad content due to server stability issues, horrible performance, and spamming of the same 8 classes.

"- Make rewards differentiate between tiers and node number cap so it's worth scaling up the system"

Wouldnt fix anything there would still be 1 sided fights where people can't cap 75 or 100 mans. The incentive isn't the issue. The number of players is the issue.

"- Uncap gear restriction on T3 with them as a medium option on most popular war days. There are still ample capped options without T3 (this is assuming you stick at current approach rather than suggested AoS style systems for capped NWs so even more so wouldn't need as many capped tiers)"

Splits the play base really hard.

"- Remove 150 alliance system (revert back to 100man limit so equal size opportunity to guilds) so better chance of players distributed into more projects and so that % attendance matters more to those who wish to push activity at higher scales. "

This would work too I like this. But doesn't solve the issue I am speaking about. There will still be guilds that can pull damn near 100 people and guilds that can barely pull 50.

"- Server performance is a separate discussion that everyone would love to improve regardless of the scale preference."

PA will never fix server performance, get your head out of the clouds. I wish they would too but I've long given up on that. It's better to suggest solutions that work around the system they have rather than tell them to do something they literally never will do.

"- You don't need to max out the number cap to participate in a node? If more guilds drop together on a node, there will be options for the fight among different strengths and sizes. XvX or player politics being a part of the game made for far more entertaining fight distribution than game restrictions that too often result in dodging or predictable outcomes. You argue people have lives so that's why you want only lower caps, but isn't it far worse if the game would then actively deny guilds who have more players wanting to play? "

As per my original post: having one guild able to reliably cap while the other is down 25-50 people makes for a horrific slaughter that is completely one-sided. More people would be able to play if the caps were lower because there would actually be a fight rather than a dead node. No one is going to organize 3 guilds to run it down into ChoNation for 45 minutes. It isn't fun.

People do need cap nodes just to get introduced into node wars and t1's are trash can setups that don't help. But I do wish this was possible. My solution was something that was already in the game and was the most popular form of node war content. But they got rid of it for most days for some reason.

Good thing PA again showed how much they care about player feedback.

Oh..

wait...

They ignored every feedback and forced this cap nonsense on us.

I think capped content has a place in the game. I think t1 and t2 content should be capped. t3 and t4 uncapped.  One of the reasons that capped content sucks so bad is because it does not really put everyone on an equal playing field. Shitterguild and cho might have the same stat caps, but that just means cho has more flexibility to drop or swap pieces looking for uncapped bonuses such as special damage modifiers and hp above t1. Furthermore these players are making some of the best money in the game and are mostly just warring for content, so they run food and elixir rotations where most casual guilds aernt interested in running 300m in consumes every single war.

The caps simply need work. Classes shouldnt be losing their own delf buffs due to stat caps (succ nova and hash are huge losers here) The amount of defensive stats vs offensive stats is hugely out of proportion. For gods sakes put a cap on special attack qualifiers.

Increse the number of nodes. Noone wants to fight cho and digital every goddamn day. Maybe even multiply the rewards and add lockouts so you get a bigger return for winning but you can only win one war in each tier per week. That way the sharks are fished out of the pool and put in bigger ponds early in the week so smaller guilds can experience the content without being farmed for clips by siegies.

I dont think rewards need changing revert back to old amount of nodes is their best option rn, right now it bad

I think node wars should be some of the most profitable content in the game. This is endgame content, and arguably the content the game was originally devised to be based around. Noone cares about winning a war and getting 150 mil in a reward chest. even early game players are making at least twice that much per hour.

Node wars can last up to two hours. Most players in the game grinding are earning minimum 500 mil. I dont see any reason why nodewars cant just give you 2 billion silver as a reward. Only one reward per tier per week.